b2o: boundary 2 online

Reviews and analysis of scholarly books about digital technology and culture, as well as of articles, legal proceedings, videos, social media, digital humanities projects, and other emerging digital forms, offered from a humanist perspective, in which our primary intellectual commitment is to the deeply embedded texts, figures, themes, and politics that constitute human culture, regardless of the medium in which they occur.

  • Artificial Intelligence as Alien Intelligence

    Artificial Intelligence as Alien Intelligence

    By Dale Carrico
    ~

    Science fiction is a genre of literature in which artifacts and techniques humans devise as exemplary expressions of our intelligence result in problems that perplex our intelligence or even bring it into existential crisis. It is scarcely surprising that a genre so preoccupied with the status and scope of intelligence would provide endless variations on the conceits of either the construction of artificial intelligences or contact with alien intelligences.

    Of course, both the making of artificial intelligence and making contact with alien intelligence are organized efforts to which many humans are actually devoted, and not simply imaginative sites in which writers spin their allegories and exhibit their symptoms. It is interesting that after generations of failure the practical efforts to construct artificial intelligence or contact alien intelligence have often shunted their adherents to the margins of scientific consensus and invested these efforts with the coloration of scientific subcultures: While computer science and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence both remain legitimate fields of research, both AI and aliens also attract subcultural enthusiasms and resonate with cultic theology, each attracts its consumer fandoms and public Cons, each has its True Believers and even its UFO cults and Robot cults at the extremities.

    Champions of artificial intelligence in particular have coped in many ways with the serial failure of their project to achieve its desired end (which is not to deny that the project has borne fruit) whatever the confidence with which generation after generation of these champions have insisted that desired end is near. Some have turned to more modest computational ambitions, making useful software or mischievous algorithms in which sad vestiges of the older dreams can still be seen to cling. Some are simply stubborn dead-enders for Good Old Fashioned AI‘s expected eventual and even imminent vindication, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. And still others have doubled down, distracting attention from the failures and problems bedeviling AI discourse simply by raising its pitch and stakes, no longer promising that artificial intelligence is around the corner but warning that artificial super-intelligence is coming soon to end human history.

    alien planet

    Another strategy for coping with the failure of artificial intelligence on its conventional terms has assumed a higher profile among its champions lately, drawing support for the real plausibility of one science-fictional conceit — construction of artificial intelligence — by appealing to another science-fictional conceit, contact with alien intelligence. This rhetorical gambit has often been conjoined to the compensation of failed AI with its hyperbolic amplification into super-AI which I have already mentioned, and it is in that context that I have written about it before myself. But in a piece published a few days ago in The New York Times, “Outing A.I.: Beyond the Turing Test,” Benjamin Bratton, a professor of visual arts at U.C. San Diego and Director of a design think-tank, has elaborated a comparatively sophisticated case for treating artificial intelligence as alien intelligence with which we can productively grapple. Near the conclusion of his piece Bratton declares that “Musk, Gates and Hawking made headlines by speaking to the dangers that A.I. may pose. Their points are important, but I fear were largely misunderstood by many readers.” Of course these figures made their headlines by making the arguments about super-intelligence I have already rejected, and mentioning them seems to indicate Bratton’s sympathy with their gambit and even suggests that his argument aims to help us to understand them better on their own terms. Nevertheless, I take Bratton’s argument seriously not because of but in spite of this connection. Ultimately, Bratton makes a case for understanding AI as alien that does not depend on the deranging hyperbole and marketing of robocalypse or robo-rapture for its force.

    In the piece, Bratton claims “Our popular conception of artificial intelligence is distorted by an anthropocentric fallacy.” The point is, of course, well taken, and the litany he rehearses to illustrate it is enormously familiar by now as he proceeds to survey popular images from Kubrick’s HAL to Jonze’s Her and to document public deliberation about the significance of computation articulated through such imagery as the “rise of the machines” in the Terminator franchise or the need for Asimov’s famous fictional “Three Laws of Robotics.” It is easy — and may nonetheless be quite important — to agree with Bratton’s observation that our computational/media devices lack cruel intentions and are not susceptible to Asimovian consciences, and hence thinking about the threats and promises and meanings of these devices through such frames and figures is not particularly helpful to us even though we habitually recur to them by now. As I say, it would be easy and important to agree with such a claim, but Bratton’s proposal is in fact somewhat a different one:

    [A] mature A.I. is not necessarily a humanlike intelligence, or one that is at our disposal. If we look for A.I. in the wrong ways, it may emerge in forms that are needlessly difficult to recognize, amplifying its risks and retarding its benefits. This is not just a concern for the future. A.I. is already out of the lab and deep into the fabric of things. “Soft A.I.,” such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon recommendation engines, along with infrastructural A.I., such as high-speed algorithmic trading, smart vehicles and industrial robotics, are increasingly a part of everyday life.

    Here the serial failure of the program of artificial intelligence is redeemed simply by declaring victory. Bratton demonstrates that crying uncle does not preclude one from still crying wolf. It’s not that Siri is some sickly premonition of the AI-daydream still endlessly deferred, but that it represents the real rise of what robot cultist Hans Moravec once promised would be our “mind children” but here and now as elfen aliens with an intelligence unto themselves. It’s not that calling a dumb car a “smart” car is simply a hilarious bit of obvious marketing hyperbole, but represents the recognition of a new order of intelligent machines among us. Rather than criticize the way we may be “amplifying its risks and retarding its benefits” by reading computation through the inapt lens of intelligence at all, he proposes that we should resist holding machine intelligence to the standards that have hitherto defined it for fear of making its recognition “too difficult.”

    The kernel of legitimacy in Bratton’s inquiry is its recognition that “intelligence is notoriously difficult to define and human intelligence simply can’t exhaust the possibilities.” To deny these modest reminders is to indulge in what he calls “the pretentious folklore” of anthropocentrism. I agree that anthropocentrism in our attributions of intelligence has facilitated great violence and exploitation in the world, denying the dignity and standing of Cetaceans and Great Apes, but has also facilitated racist, sexist, xenophobic travesties by denigrating humans as beastly and unintelligent objects at the disposal of “intelligent” masters. “Some philosophers write about the possible ethical ‘rights’ of A.I. as sentient entities, but,” Bratton is quick to insist, “that’s not my point here.” Given his insistence that the “advent of robust inhuman A.I.” will force a “reality-based” “disenchantment” to “abolish the false centrality and absolute specialness of human thought and species-being” which he blames in his concluding paragraph with providing “theological and legislative comfort to chattel slavery” it is not entirely clear to me that emancipating artificial aliens is not finally among the stakes that move his argument whatever his protestations to the contrary. But one can forgive him for not dwelling on such concerns: the denial of an intelligence and sensitivity provoking responsiveness and demanding responsibilities in us all to women, people of color, foreigners, children, the different, the suffering, nonhuman animals compels defensive and evasive circumlocutions that are simply not needed to deny intelligence and standing to an abacus or a desk lamp. It is one thing to warn of the anthropocentric fallacy but another to indulge in the pathetic fallacy.

    Bratton insists to the contrary that his primary concern is that anthropocentrism skews our assessment of real risks and benefits. “Unfortunately, the popular conception of A.I., at least as depicted in countless movies, games and books, still seems to assume that humanlike characteristics (anger, jealousy, confusion, avarice, pride, desire, not to mention cold alienation) are the most important ones to be on the lookout for.” And of course he is right. The champions of AI have been more than complicit in this popular conception, eager to attract attention and funds for their project among technoscientific illiterates drawn to such dramatic narratives. But we are distracted from the real risks of computation so long as we expect risks to arise from a machinic malevolence that has never been on offer nor even in the offing. Writes Bratton: “Perhaps what we really fear, even more than a Big Machine that wants to kill us, is one that sees us as irrelevant. Worse than being seen as an enemy is not being seen at all.”

    But surely the inevitable question posed by Bratton’s disenchanting expose at this point should be: Why, once we have set aside the pretentious folklore of machines with diabolical malevolence, do we not set aside as no less pretentiously folkloric the attribution of diabolical indifference to machines? Why, once we have set aside the delusive confusion of machine behavior with (actual or eventual) human intelligence, do we not set aside as no less delusive the confusion of machine behavior with intelligence altogether? There is no question were a gigantic bulldozer with an incapacitated driver to swerve from a construction site onto a crowded city thoroughfare this would represent a considerable threat, but however tempting it might be in the fraught moment or reflective aftermath poetically to invest that bulldozer with either agency or intellect it is clear that nothing would be gained in the practical comprehension of the threat it poses by so doing. It is no more helpful now in an epoch of Greenhouse storms than it was for pre-scientific storytellers to invest thunder and whirlwinds with intelligence. Although Bratton makes great play over the need to overcome folkloric anthropocentrism in our figuration of and deliberation over computation, mystifying agencies and mythical personages linger on in his accounting however he insists on the alienness of “their” intelligence.

    Bratton warns us about the “infrastructural A.I.” of high-speed financial trading algorithms, Google and Amazon search algorithms, “smart” vehicles (and no doubt weaponized drones and autonomous weapons systems would count among these), and corporate-military profiling programs that oppress us with surveillance and harass us with targeted ads. I share all of these concerns, of course, but personally insist that our critical engagement with infrastructural coding is profoundly undermined when it is invested with insinuations of autonomous intelligence. In “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” Walter Benjamin pointed out that when philosophers talk about the historical force of art they do so with the prejudices of philosophers: they tend to write about those narrative and visual forms of art that might seem argumentative in allegorical and iconic forms that appear analogous to the concentrated modes of thought demanded by philosophy itself. Benjamin proposed that perhaps the more diffuse and distracted ways we are shaped in our assumptions and aspirations by the durable affordances and constraints of the made world of architecture and agriculture might turn out to drive history as much or even more than the pet artforms of philosophers do. Lawrence Lessig made much the same point when he declared at the turn of the millennium that “Code Is Law.”

    It is well known that special interests with rich patrons shape the legislative process and sometimes even explicitly craft legislation word for word in ways that benefit them to the cost and risk of majorities. It is hard to see how our assessment of this ongoing crime and danger would be helped and not hindered by pretending legislation is an autonomous force exhibiting an alien intelligence, rather than a constellation of practices, norms, laws, institutions, ritual and material artifice, the legacy of the historical play of intelligent actors and the site for the ongoing contention of intelligent actors here and now. To figure legislation as a beast or alien with a will of its own would amount to a fetishistic displacement of intelligence away from the actual actors actually responsible for the forms that legislation actually takes. It is easy to see why such a displacement is attractive: it profitably abets the abuses of majorities by minorities while it absolves majorities from conscious complicity in the terms of their own exploitation by laws made, after all, in our names. But while these consoling fantasies have an obvious allure this hardly justifies our endorsement of them.

    I have already written in the past about those who want to propose, as Bratton seems inclined to do in the present, that the collapse of global finance in 2008 represented the working of inscrutable artificial intelligences facilitating rapid transactions and supporting novel financial instruments of what was called by Long Boom digerati the “new economy.” I wrote:

    It is not computers and programs and autonomous techno-agents who are the protagonists of the still unfolding crime of predatory plutocratic wealth-concentration and anti-democratizing austerity. The villains of this bloodsoaked epic are the bankers and auditors and captured-regulators and neoliberal ministers who employed these programs and instruments for parochial gain and who then exonerated and rationalized and still enable their crimes. Our financial markets are not so complex we no longer understand them. In fact everybody knows exactly what is going on. Everybody understands everything. Fraudsters [are] engaged in very conventional, very recognizable, very straightforward but unprecedentedly massive acts of fraud and theft under the cover of lies.

    I have already written in the past about those who want to propose, as Bratton seems inclined to do in the present, that our discomfiture in the setting of ubiquitous algorithmic mediation results from an autonomous force over which humans intentions are secondary considerations. I wrote:

    [W]hat imaginary scene is being conjured up in this exculpatory rhetoric in which inadvertent cruelty is ‘coming from code’ as opposed to coming from actual persons? Aren’t coders actual persons, for example? … [O]f course I know what [is] mean[t by the insistence…] that none of this was ‘a deliberate assault.’ But it occurs to me that it requires the least imaginable measure of thought on the part of those actually responsible for this code to recognize that the cruelty of [one user’s] confrontation with their algorithm was the inevitable at least occasional result for no small number of the human beings who use Facebook and who live lives that attest to suffering, defeat, humiliation, and loss as well as to parties and promotions and vacations… What if the conspicuousness of [this] experience of algorithmic cruelty indicates less an exceptional circumstance than the clarifying exposure of a more general failure, a more ubiquitous cruelty? … We all joke about the ridiculous substitutions performed by autocorrect functions, or the laughable recommendations that follow from the odd purchase of a book from Amazon or an outing from Groupon. We should joke, but don’t, when people treat a word cloud as an analysis of a speech or an essay. We don’t joke so much when a credit score substitutes for the judgment whether a citizen deserves the chance to become a homeowner or start a small business, or when a Big Data profile substitutes for the judgment whether a citizen should become a heat signature for a drone committing extrajudicial murder in all of our names. [An] experience of algorithmic cruelty [may be] extraordinary, but that does not mean it cannot also be a window onto an experience of algorithmic cruelty that is ordinary. The question whether we might still ‘opt out’ from the ordinary cruelty of algorithmic mediation is not a design question at all, but an urgent political one.

    I have already written in the past about those who want to propose, as Bratton seems inclined to do in the present, that so-called Killer Robots are a threat that must be engaged by resisting or banning “them” in their alterity rather than by assigning moral and criminal responsibility on those who code, manufacture, fund, and deploy them. I wrote:

    Well-meaning opponents of war atrocities and engines of war would do well to think how tech companies stand to benefit from military contracts for ‘smarter’ software and bleeding-edge gizmos when terrorized and technoscientifically illiterate majorities and public officials take SillyCon Valley’s warnings seriously about our ‘complacency’ in the face of truly autonomous weapons and artificial super-intelligence that do not exist. It is crucial that necessary regulation and even banning of dangerous ‘autonomous weapons’ proceeds in a way that does not abet the mis-attribution of agency, and hence accountability, to devices. Every ‘autonomous’ weapons system expresses and mediates decisions by responsible humans usually all too eager to disavow the blood on their hands. Every legitimate fear of ‘killer robots’ is best addressed by making their coders, designers, manufacturers, officials, and operators accountable for criminal and unethical tools and uses of tools… There simply is no such thing as a smart bomb. Every bomb is stupid. There is no such thing as an autonomous weapon. Every weapon is deployed. The only killer robots that actually exist are human beings waging and profiting from war.

    “Arguably,” argues Bratton, “the Anthropocene itself is due less to technology run amok than to the humanist legacy that understands the world as having been given for our needs and created in our image. We hear this in the words of thought leaders who evangelize the superiority of a world where machines are subservient to the needs and wishes of humanity… This is the sentiment — this philosophy of technology exactly — that is the basic algorithm of the Anthropocenic predicament, and consenting to it would also foreclose adequate encounters with A.I.” The Anthropocene in this formulation names the emergence of environmental or planetary consciousness, an emergence sometimes coupled to the global circulation of the image of the fragility and interdependence of the whole earth as seen by humans from outer space. It is the recognition that the world in which we evolved to flourish might be impacted by our collective actions in ways that threaten us all. Notice, by the way, that multiculture and historical struggle are figured as just another “algorithm” here.

    I do not agree that planetary catastrophe inevitably followed from the conception of the earth as a gift besetting us to sustain us, indeed this premise understood in terms of stewardship or commonwealth would go far in correcting and preventing such careless destruction in my opinion. It is the false and facile (indeed infantile) conception of a finite world somehow equal to infinite human desires that has landed us and keeps us delusive ignoramuses lodged in this genocidal and suicidal predicament. Certainly I agree with Bratton that it would be wrong to attribute the waste and pollution and depletion of our common resources by extractive-industrial-consumer societies indifferent to ecosystemic limits to “technology run amok.” The problem of so saying is not that to do so disrespects “technology” — as presumably in his view no longer treating machines as properly “subservient to the needs and wishes of humanity” would more wholesomely respect “technology,” whatever that is supposed to mean — since of course technology does not exist in this general or abstract way to be respected or disrespected.

    The reality at hand is that humans are running amok in ways that are facilitated and mediated by certain technologies. What is demanded in this moment by our predicament is the clear-eyed assessment of the long-term costs, risks, and benefits of technoscientific interventions into finite ecosystems to the actual diversity of their stakeholders and the distribution of these costs, risks, and benefits in an equitable way. Quite a lot of unsustainable extractive and industrial production as well as mass consumption and waste would be rendered unprofitable and unappealing were its costs and risks widely recognized and equitably distributed. Such an understanding suggests that what is wanted is to insist on the culpability and situation of actually intelligent human actors, mediated and facilitated as they are in enormously complicated and demanding ways by technique and artifice. The last thing we need to do is invest technology-in-general or environmental-forces with alien intelligence or agency apart from ourselves.

    I am beginning to wonder whether the unavoidable and in many ways humbling recognition (unavoidable not least because of environmental catastrophe and global neoliberal precarization) that human agency emerges out of enormously complex and dynamic ensembles of interdependent/prostheticized actors gives rise to compensatory investments of some artifacts — especially digital networks, weapons of mass destruction, pandemic diseases, environmental forces — with the sovereign aspect of agency we no longer believe in for ourselves? It is strangely consoling to pretend our technologies in some fancied monolithic construal represent the rise of “alien intelligences,” even threatening ones, other than and apart from ourselves, not least because our own intelligence is an alienated one and prostheticized through and through. Consider the indispensability of pedagogical techniques of rote memorization, the metaphorization and narrativization of rhetoric in songs and stories and craft, the technique of the memory palace, the technologies of writing and reading, the articulation of metabolism and duration by timepieces, the shaping of both the body and its bearing by habit and by athletic training, the lifelong interplay of infrastructure and consciousness: all human intellect is already technique. All culture is prosthetic and all prostheses are culture.

    Bratton wants to narrate as a kind of progressive enlightenment the mystification he recommends that would invest computation with alien intelligence and agency while at once divesting intelligent human actors, coders, funders, users of computation of responsibility for the violations and abuses of other humans enabled and mediated by that computation. This investment with intelligence and divestment of responsibility he likens to the Copernican Revolution in which humans sustained the momentary humiliation of realizing that they were not the center of the universe but received in exchange the eventual compensation of incredible powers of prediction and control. One might wonder whether the exchange of the faith that humanity was the apple of God’s eye for a new technoscientific faith in which we aspired toward godlike powers ourselves was really so much a humiliation as the exchange of one megalomania for another. But what I want to recall by way of conclusion instead is that the trope of a Copernican humiliation of the intelligent human subject is already quite a familiar one:

    In his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud notoriously proposed that

    In the course of centuries the naive self-love of men has had to submit to two major blows at the hands of science. The first was when they learnt that our earth was not the center of the universe but only a tiny fragment of a cosmic system of scarcely imaginable vastness. This is associated in our minds with the name of Copernicus… The second blow fell when biological research de­stroyed man’s supposedly privileged place in creation and proved his descent from the animal kingdom and his ineradicable animal nature. This revaluation has been accomplished in our own days by Darwin… though not without the most violent contemporary opposition. But human megalomania will have suffered its third and most wounding blow from the psychological research of the present time which seeks to prove to the ego that it is not even master in its own house, but must content itself with scanty information of what is going on un­consciously in the mind.

    However we may feel about psychoanalysis as a pseudo-scientific enterprise that did more therapeutic harm than good, Freud’s works considered instead as contributions to moral philosophy and cultural theory have few modern equals. The idea that human consciousness is split from the beginning as the very condition of its constitution, the creative if self-destructive result of an impulse of rational self-preservation beset by the overabundant irrationality of humanity and history, imposed a modesty incomparably more demanding than Bratton’s wan proposal in the same name. Indeed, to the extent that the irrational drives of the dynamic unconscious are often figured as a brute machinic automatism, one is tempted to suggest that Bratton’s modest proposal of alien artifactual intelligence is a fetishistic disavowal of the greater modesty demanded by the alienating recognition of the stratification of human intelligence by unconscious forces (and his moniker a symptomatic citation). What is striking about the language of psychoanalysis is the way it has been taken up to provide resources for imaginative empathy across the gulf of differences: whether in the extraordinary work of recent generations of feminist, queer, and postcolonial scholars re-orienting the project of the conspicuously sexist, heterosexist, cissexist, racist, imperialist, bourgeois thinker who was Freud to emancipatory ends, or in the stunning leaps in which Freud identified with neurotic others through psychoanalytic reading, going so far as to find in the paranoid system-building of the psychotic Dr. Schreber an exemplar of human science and civilization and a mirror in which he could see reflected both himself and psychoanalysis itself. Freud’s Copernican humiliation opened up new possibilities of responsiveness in difference out of which could be built urgently necessary responsibilities otherwise. I worry that Bratton’s Copernican modesty opens up new occasions for techno-fetishistic fables of history and disavowals of responsibility for its actual human protagonists.
    _____

    Dale Carrico is a member of the visiting faculty at the San Francisco Art Institute as well as a lecturer in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley from which he received his PhD in 2005. His work focuses on the politics of science and technology, especially peer-to-peer formations and global development discourse and is informed by a commitment to democratic socialism (or social democracy, if that freaks you out less), environmental justice critique, and queer theory. He is a persistent critic of futurological discourses, especially on his Amor Mundi blog, on which an earlier version of this post first appeared.

    Back to the essay

  • Something About the Digital

    Something About the Digital

    By Alexander R. Galloway
    ~

    (This catalog essay was written in 2011 for the exhibition “Chaos as Usual,” curated by Hanne Mugaas at the Bergen Kunsthall in Norway. Artists in the exhibition included Philip Kwame Apagya, Ann Craven, Liz Deschenes, Thomas Julier [in collaboration with Cédric Eisenring and Kaspar Mueller], Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied, Takeshi Murata, Seth Price, and Antek Walczak.)

    There is something about the digital. Most people aren’t quite sure what it is. Or what they feel about it. But something.

    In 2001 Lev Manovich said it was a language. For Steven Shaviro, the issue is being connected. Others talk about “cyber” this and “cyber” that. Is the Internet about the search (John Battelle)? Or is it rather, even more primordially, about the information (James Gleick)? Whatever it is, something is afoot.

    What is this something? Given the times in which we live, it is ironic that this term is so rarely defined and even more rarely defined correctly. But the definition is simple: the digital means the one divides into two.

    Digital doesn’t mean machine. It doesn’t mean virtual reality. It doesn’t even mean the computer – there are analog computers after all, like grandfather clocks or slide rules. Digital means the digits: the fingers and toes. And since most of us have a discrete number of fingers and toes, the digital has come to mean, by extension, any mode of representation rooted in individually separate and distinct units. So the natural numbers (1, 2, 3, …) are aptly labeled “digital” because they are separate and distinct, but the arc of a bird in flight is not because it is smooth and continuous. A reel of celluloid film is correctly called “digital” because it contains distinct breaks between each frame, but the photographic frames themselves are not because they record continuously variable chromatic intensities.

    We must stop believing the myth, then, about the digital future versus the analog past. For the digital died its first death in the continuous calculus of Newton and Leibniz, and the curvilinear revolution of the Baroque that came with it. And the digital has suffered a thousand blows since, from the swirling vortexes of nineteenth-century thermodynamics, to the chaos theory of recent decades. The switch from analog computing to digital computing in the middle twentieth century is but a single battle in the multi-millennial skirmish within western culture between the unary and the binary, proportion and distinction, curves and jumps, integration and division – in short, over when and how the one divides into two.

    What would it mean to say that a work of art divides into two? Or to put it another way, what would art look like if it began to meditate on the one dividing into two? I think this is the only way we can truly begin to think about “digital art.” And because of this we shall leave Photoshop, and iMovie, and the Internet and all the digital tools behind us, because interrogating them will not nearly begin to address these questions. Instead look to Ann Craven’s paintings. Or look to the delightful conversation sparked here between Philip Kwame Apagya and Liz Deschenes. Or look to the work of Thomas Julier, even to a piece of his not included in the show, “Architecture Reflecting in Architecture” (2010, made with Cedric Eisenring), which depicts a rectilinear cityscape reflected inside the mirror skins of skyscrapers, just like Saul Bass’s famous title sequence in North By Northwest (1959).

    DSC_0002__560
    Liz Deschenes, “Green Screen 4” (2001)

    All of these works deal with the question of twoness. But it is twoness only in a very particular sense. This is not the twoness of the doppelganger of the romantic period, or the twoness of the “split mind” of the schizophrenic, and neither is it the twoness of the self/other distinction that so forcefully animated culture and philosophy during the twentieth century, particularly in cultural anthropology and then later in poststructuralism. Rather we see here a twoness of the material, a digitization at the level of the aesthetic regime itself.

    Consider the call and response heard across the works featured here by Apagya and Deschenes. At the most superficial level, one might observe that these are works about superimposition, about compositing. Apagya’s photographs exploit one of the oldest and most useful tricks of picture making: superimpose one layer on top of another layer in order to produce a picture. Painters do this all the time of course, and very early on it became a mainstay of photographic technique (even if it often remained relegated to mere “trick” photography), evident in photomontage, spirit photography, and even the side-by-side compositing techniques of the carte de visite popularized by André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri in the 1850s. Recall too that the cinema has made productive use of superimposition, adopting the technique with great facility from the theater and its painted scrims and moving backdrops. (Perhaps the best illustration of this comes at the end of A Night at the Opera [1935], when Harpo Marx goes on a lunatic rampage through the flyloft during the opera’s performance, raising and lowering painted backdrops to great comic effect.) So the more “modern” cinematic techniques of, first, rear screen projection, and then later chromakey (known commonly as the “green screen” or “blue screen” effect), are but a reiteration of the much longer legacy of compositing in image making.

    Deschenes’ “Green Screen #4” points to this broad aesthetic history, as it empties out the content of the image, forcing us to acknowledge the suppressed color itself – in this case green, but any color will work. Hence Deschenes gives us nothing but a pure background, a pure something.

    Allowed to curve gracefully off the wall onto the floor, the green color field resembles the “sweep wall” used commonly in portraiture or fashion photography whenever an artist wishes to erase the lines and shadows of the studio environment. “Green Screen #4” is thus the antithesis of what has remained for many years the signal art work about video chromakey, Peter Campus’ “Three Transitions” (1973). Whereas Campus attempted to draw attention to the visual and spatial paradoxes made possible by chromakey, and even in so doing was forced to hide the effect inside the jittery gaps between images, Deschenes by contrast feels no such anxiety, presenting us with the medium itself, minus any “content” necessary to fuel it, minus the powerful mise en abyme of the Campus video, and so too minus Campus’ mirthless autobiographical staging. If Campus ultimately resolves the relationship between images through a version of montage, Deschenes offers something more like a “divorced digitality” in which no two images are brought into relation at all, only the minimal substrate remains, without input or output.

    The sweep wall is evident too in Apagya’s images, only of a different sort, as the artifice of the various backgrounds – in a nod not so much to fantasy as to kitsch – both fuses with and separates from the foreground subject. Yet what might ultimately unite the works by Apagya and Deschenes is not so much the compositing technique, but a more general reference, albeit oblique but nevertheless crucial, to the fact that such techniques are today entirely quotidian, entirely usual. These are everyday folk techniques through and through. One needs only a web cam and simple software to perform chromakey compositing on a computer, just as one might go to the county fair and have one’s portrait superimposed on the body of a cartoon character.

    What I’m trying to stress here is that there is nothing particularly “technological” about digitality. All that is required is a division from one to two – and by extension from two to three and beyond to the multiple. This is why I see layering as so important, for it spotlights an internal separation within the image. Apagya’s settings are digital, therefore, simply by virtue of the fact that he addresses our eye toward two incompatible aesthetic zones existing within the image. The artifice of a painted backdrop, and the pose of a person in a portrait.

    Certainly the digital computer is “digital” by virtue of being binary, which is to say by virtue of encoding and processing numbers at the lowest levels using base-two mathematics. But that is only the most prosaic and obvious exhibit of its digitality. For the computer is “digital” too in its atomization of the universe, into, for example, a million Facebook profiles, all equally separate and discrete. Or likewise “digital” too in the computer interface itself which splits things irretrievably into cursor and content, window and file, or even, as we see commonly in video games, into heads-up-display and playable world. The one divides into two.

    So when clusters of repetition appear across Ann Craven’s paintings, or the iterative layers of the “copy” of the “reconstruction” in the video here by Thomas Julier and Cédric Eisenring, or the accumulations of images that proliferate in Olia Lialina and Dragon Espenschied’s “Comparative History of Classic Animated GIFs and Glitter Graphics” [2007] (a small snapshot of what they have assembled in their spectacular book from 2009 titled Digital Folklore), or elsewhere in works like Oliver Laric’s clipart videos (“787 Cliparts” [2006] and “2000 Cliparts” [2010]), we should not simply recall the famous meditations on copies and repetitions, from Walter Benjamin in 1936 to Gilles Deleuze in 1968, but also a larger backdrop that evokes the very cleavages emanating from western metaphysics itself from Plato onward. For this same metaphysics of division is always already a digital metaphysics as it forever differentiates between subject and object, Being and being, essence and instance, or original and repetition. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that we see here such vivid aesthetic meditations on that same cleavage, whether or not a computer was involved.

    Another perspective on the same question would be to think about appropriation. There is a common way of talking about Internet art that goes roughly as follows: the beginning of net art in the middle to late 1990s was mostly “modernist” in that it tended to reflect back on the possibilities of the new medium, building an aesthetic from the material affordances of code, screen, browser, and jpeg, just as modernists in painting or literature built their own aesthetic style from a reflection on the specific affordances of line, color, tone, or timbre; whereas the second phase of net art, coinciding with “Web 2.0” technologies like blogging and video sharing sites, is altogether more “postmodern” in that it tends to co-opt existing material into recombinant appropriations and remixes. If something like the “WebStalker” web browser or the Jodi.org homepage are emblematic of the first period, then John Michael Boling’s “Guitar Solo Threeway,” Brody Condon’s “Without Sun,” or the Nasty Nets web surfing club, now sadly defunct, are emblematic of the second period.

    I’m not entirely unsatisfied by such a periodization, even if it tends to confuse as many things as it clarifies – not entirely unsatisfied because it indicates that appropriation too is a technique of digitality. As Martin Heidegger signals, by way of his notoriously enigmatic concept Ereignis, western thought and culture was always a process in which a proper relationship of belonging is established in a world, and so too appropriation establishes new relationships of belonging between objects and their contexts, between artists and materials, and between viewers and works of art. (Such is the definition of appropriation after all: to establish a belonging.) This is what I mean when I say that appropriation is a technique of digitality: it calls out a distinction in the object from “where it was prior” to “where it is now,” simply by removing that object from one context of belonging and separating it out into another. That these two contexts are merely different – that something has changed – is evidence enough of the digitality of appropriation. Even when the act of appropriation does not reduplicate the object or rely on multiple sources, as with the artistic ready-made, it still inaugurates a “twoness” in the appropriated object, an asterisk appended to the art work denoting that something is different.

    TMu_Cyborg_2011_18-1024x682
    Takeshi Murata, “Cyborg” (2011)

    Perhaps this is why Takeshi Murata continues his exploration of the multiplicities at the core of digital aesthetics by returning to that age old format, the still life. Is not the still life itself a kind of appropriation, in that it brings together various objects into a relationship of belonging: fig and fowl in the Dutch masters, or here the various detritus of contemporary cyber culture, from cult films to iPhones?

    Because appropriation brings things together it must grapple with a fundamental question. Whatever is brought together must form a relation. These various things must sit side-by-side with each other. Hence one might speak of any grouping of objects in terms of their “parallel” nature, that is to say, in terms of the way in which they maintain their multiple identities in parallel.

    But let us dwell for a moment longer on these agglomerations of things, and in particular their “parallel” composition. By parallel I mean the way in which digital media tend to segregate and divide art into multiple, separate channels. These parallel channels may be quite manifest, as in the separate video feeds that make up the aforementioned “Guitar Solo Threeway,” or they may issue from the lowest levels of the medium, as when video compression codecs divide the moving image into small blocks of pixels that move and morph semi-autonomously within the frame. In fact I have found it useful to speak of this in terms of the “parallel image” in order to differentiate today’s media making from that of a century ago, which Friedrich Kittler and others have chosen to label “serial” after the serial sequences of the film strip, or the rat-ta-tat-tat of a typewriter.

    Thus films like Tatjana Marusic’s “The Memory of a Landscape” (2004) or Takeshi Murata’s “Monster Movie” (2005) are genuinely digital films, for they show parallelity in inscription. Each individual block in the video compression scheme has its own autonomy and is able to write to the screen in parallel with all the other blocks. These are quite literally, then, “multichannel” videos – we might even take a cue from online gaming circles and label them “massively multichannel” videos. They are multichannel not because they require multiple monitors, but because each individual block or “channel” within the image acts as an individual micro video feed. Each color block is its own channel. Thus, the video compression scheme illustrates, through metonymy, how pixel images work in general, and, as I suggest, it also illustrates the larger currents of digitality, for it shows that these images, in order to create “an” image must first proliferate the division of sub-images, which themselves ultimately coalesce into something resembling a whole. In other words, in order to create a “one” they must first bifurcate the single image source into two or more separate images.

    The digital image is thus a cellular and discrete image, consisting of separate channels multiplexed in tandem or triplicate or, greater, into nine, twelve, twenty-four, one hundred, or indeed into a massively parallel image of a virtually infinite visuality.

    For me this generates a more appealing explanation for why art and culture has, over the last several decades, developed a growing anxiety over copies, repetitions, simulations, appropriations, reenactments – you name it. It is common to attribute such anxiety to a generalized disenchantment permeating modern life: our culture has lost its aura and can no longer discern an original from a copy due to endless proliferations of simulation. Such an assessment is only partially correct. I say only partially because I am skeptical of the romantic nostalgia that often fuels such pronouncements. For who can demonstrate with certainty that the past carried with it a greater sense of aesthetic integrity, a greater unity in art? Yet the assessment begins to adopt a modicum of sense if we consider it from a different point of view, from the perspective of a generalized digitality. For if we define the digital as “the one dividing into two,” then it would be fitting to witness works of art that proliferate these same dualities and multiplicities. In other words, even if there was a “pure” aesthetic origin it was a digital origin to begin with. And thus one needn’t fret over it having infected our so-called contemporary sensibilities.

    Instead it is important not to be blinded by the technology. But rather to determine that, within a generalized digitality, there must be some kind of differential at play. There must be something different, and without such a differential it is impossible to say that something is something (rather than something else, or indeed rather than nothing). The one must divide into something else. Nothing less and nothing more is required, only a generic difference. And this is our first insight into the “something” of the digital.

    _____

    Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programer working on issues in philosophy, technology, and theories of mediation. Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, he is author of several books and dozens of articles on digital media and critical theory, including Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (MIT, 2006), Gaming: Essays in Algorithmic Culture (University of Minnesota, 2006); The Interface Effect (Polity, 2012), and most recently Laruelle: Against the Digital (University of Minnesota, 2014), reviewed here in 2014. Galloway has recently been writing brief notes on media and digital culture and theory at his blog, on which this post first appeared.

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  • Cultivating Reform and Revolution

    Cultivating Reform and Revolution

    The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism (Duke University Press, 2013)a review of William E. Connolly, The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism (Duke University Press, 2013)
    by Zachary Loeb
    ~

    Mountains and rivers, skyscrapers and dams – the world is filled with objects and structures that appear sturdy. Glancing upwards at a skyscraper, or mountain, a person may know that these obelisks will not remain eternally unchanged, but in the moment of the glance we maintain a certain casual confidence that they are not about to crumble suddenly. Yet skyscrapers collapse, mountains erode, rivers run dry or change course, and dams crack under the pressure of the waters they hold. Even equipped with this knowledge it is still tempting to view such structures as enduringly solid. Perhaps the residents of Lisbon, in November of 1755, had a similar faith in the sturdiness of the city they had built, a faith that was shattered in an earthquake – and aftershocks – that demonstrated all too terribly the fragility at the core of all physical things.

    The Lisbon earthquake, along with its cultural reverberations, provides the point of entry for William E. Connolly’s discussion of neoliberalism, ecology, activism, and the deceptive solidness of the world in his book The Fragility of Things. Beyond its relevance as an example of the natural tremors that can reduce the built world into rubble, the Lisbon earthquake provides Connolly (the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at the Johns Hopkins University), a vantage point from which to mark out and critique a Panglossian worldview he sees as prominent in contemporary society. No doubt, were Voltaire’s Pangloss alive today, he could find ready employment as an apologist for neoliberalism (perhaps as one of Silicon Valley’s evangelists). Like Panglossian philosophy, neoliberalism “acknowledges many evils and treats them as necessary effects” (6).

    Though the world has changed significantly since the mid-18th century during which Voltaire wrote, humanity remains assaulted by events that demonstrate the world’s fragility. Connolly councils against the withdrawal to which the protagonists of Candide finally consign themselves while taking up the famous trope Voltaire develops for that withdrawal; today we “cultivate our gardens” in a world in which the future of all gardens is uncertain. Under the specter of climate catastrophe, “to cultivate our gardens today means to engage the multiform relations late capitalism bears to the entire planet” (6). Connolly argues for an “ethic of cultivation” that can show “both how fragile the ethical life is and how important it is to cultivate it” (17). “Cultivation,” as developed in The Fragility of Things, stands in opposition to withdrawal. Instead it entails serious, ethically guided, activist engagement with the world – for us to recognize the fragility of natural, and human-made, systems (Connolly uses the term “force-fields”) and to act to protect this “fragility” instead of celebrating neoliberal risks that render the already precarious all the more tenuous.

    Connolly argues that when natural disasters strike, and often in their wake set off rippling cascades of additional catastrophes, they exemplify the “spontaneous order” so beloved by neoliberal economics. Under neoliberalism, the market is treated as though it embodies a uniquely omniscient, self-organizing and self-guiding principle. Yet the economic system is not the only one that can be described this way: “open systems periodically interact in ways that support, amplify, or destabilize one another” (25). Even in the so-called Anthropocene era the ecosystem, much to humanity’s chagrin, can still demonstrate creative and unpredictable potentialities. Nevertheless, the ideological core of neoliberalism relies upon celebrating the market’s self-organizing capabilities whilst ignoring the similar capabilities of governments, the public sphere, or the natural world. The ascendancy of neoliberalism runs parallel with an increase in fragility as economic inequality widens and as neoliberalism treats the ecosystem as just another profit source. Fragility is everywhere today, and though the cracks are becoming increasingly visible, it is still given – in Connolly’s estimation – less attention than is its due, even in “radical theory.” On this issue Connolly wonders if perhaps “radical theorists,” and conceivably radical activists, “fear that coming to terms with fragility would undercut the political militancy needed to respond to it?” (32). Yet Connolly sees no choice but to “respond,” envisioning a revitalized Left that can take action with a mixture of advocacy for immediate reforms while simultaneously building towards systemic solutions.

    Critically engaging with the thought of core neoliberal thinker and “spontaneous order” advocate Friedrich Hayek, Connolly demonstrates the way in which neoliberal ideology has been inculcated throughout society, even and especially amongst those whose lives have been made more fragile by neoliberalism: “a neoliberal economy cannot sustain itself unless it is supported by a self-conscious ideology internalized by most participants that celebrates the virtues of market individualism, market autonomy and a minimal state” (58). An army of Panglossian commentators must be deployed to remind the wary watchers that everything is for the best. That a high level of state intervention may be required to bolster and disseminate this ideology, and prop up neoliberalism, is wholly justified in a system that recognizes only neoliberalism as a source for creative self-organizing processes, indeed “sometimes you get the impression that ‘entrepreneurs’ are the sole paradigms of creativity in the Hayekian world” (66). Resisting neoliberalism, for Connolly, requires remembering the sources of creativity that occur outside of a market context and seeing how these other systems demonstrate self-organizing capacities.

    Within neoliberalism the market is treated as the ethical good, but Connolly works to counter this with “an ethic of cultivation” which works not only against neoliberalism but against certain elements of Kant’s philosophy. In Connolly’s estimation Kantian ethics provide some of the ideological shoring up for neoliberalism, as at times “Kant both prefigures some existential demands unconsciously folded into contemporary neoliberalism and reveals how precarious they in fact are. For he makes them postulates” (117). Connolly sees a certain similarity between the social conditioning that Kant saw as necessary for preparing the young to “obey moral law” and the ideological conditioning that trains people for life under neoliberalism – what is shared is a process by which a self-organizing system must counter people’s own self-organizing potential by organizing their reactions. Furthermore “the intensity of cultural desires to invest hopes in the images of self-regulating interest within markets and/or divine providence wards off acknowledgment of the fragility of things” (118). Connolly’s “ethic of cultivation” appears as a corrective to this ethic of inculcation – it features “an element of tragic possibility within it” (133) which is the essential confrontation with the “fragility” that may act as a catalyst for a new radical activism.

    In the face of impending doom neoliberalism will once more have an opportunity to demonstrate its creativity even as this very creativity will have reverberations that will potentially unleash further disasters. Facing the possible catastrophe means that “we may need to recraft the long debate between secular, linear, and deterministic images of the world on the one hand and divinely touched, voluntarist, providential, and/or punitive images on the other” (149). Creativity, and the potential for creativity, is once more essential – as it is the creativity in multiple self-organizing systems that has created the world, for better or worse, around us today. Bringing his earlier discussions of Kant into conversation with the thought of Whitehead and Nietzsche, Connolly further considers the place of creative processes in shaping and reshaping the world. Nietzsche, in particular, provides Connolly with a way to emphasize the dispersion of creativity by removing the province of creativity from the control of God to treat it as something naturally recurring across various “force-fields.” A different demand thus takes shape wherein “we need to slow down and divert human intrusions into various planetary force fields, even as we speed up efforts to reconstitute the identities, spiritualities, consumption practices, market faiths, and state policies entangled with them” (172) though neoliberalism knows but one speed: faster.

    An odd dissonance occurs at present wherein people are confronted with the seeming triumph of neoliberal capitalism (one can hear the echoes of “there is no alternative”) and the warnings pointing to the fragility of things. In this context, for Connolly, withdrawal is irresponsible, it would be to “cultivate a garden” when what is needed is an “ethic of cultivation.” Neoliberal capitalism has trained people to accept the strictures of its ideology, but now is a time when different roles are needed; it is a time to become “role experimentalists” (187). Such experiments may take a variety of forms that run the gamut from “reformist” to “revolutionary” and back again, but the process of such experimentation can break the training of neoliberalism and demonstrate other ways of living, interacting, being and having. Connolly does not put forth a simple solution for the challenges facing humanity, instead he emphasizes how recognizing the “fragility of things” allows for people to come to terms with these challenges. After all, it may be that neoliberalism only appears so solid because we have forgotten that it is not actually a naturally occurring mountain but a human built pyramid – and our backs are its foundation.

    * * *

    In the “First Interlude,” on page 45, Connolly poses a question that haunts the remainder of The Fragility of Things, the question – asked in the midst of a brief discussion of the 2011 Lars von Trier film Melancholia – is, “How do you prepare for the end of the world?” It is the sort of disarming and discomforting question that in its cold honesty forces readers to face a conclusion they may not want to consider. It is a question that evokes the deceptively simple acronym FRED (Facing the Reality of Extinction and Doom). And yet there is something refreshing in the question – many have heard the recommendations about what must be done to halt climate catastrophe, but how many believe these steps will be taken? Indeed, even though Connolly claims “we need to slow down” there are also those who, to the contrary, insist that what is needed is even greater acceleration. Granted, Connolly does not pose this question on the first page of his book, and had he done so The Fragility of Things could have easily appeared as a dismissible dirge. Wisely, Connolly recognizes that “a therapist, a priest, or a philosopher might stutter over such questions. Even Pangloss might hesitate” (45); one of the core strengths of The Fragility of Things is that it does not “stutter over such questions” but realizes that such questions require an honest reckoning. Which includes being willing to ask “How do you prepare for the end of the world?”

    William Connolly’s The Fragility of Things is both ethically and intellectually rigorous, demanding readers perceive the “fragility” of the world around them even as it lays out the ways in which the world around them derives its stability from making that very fragility invisible. Though it may seem that there are relatively simple concerns at the core of The Fragility of Things Connolly never succumbs to simplistic argumentation – preferring the fine-toothed complexity that allows moments of fragility to be fully understood. The tone and style of The Fragility of Things feels as though it assumes its readership will consist primarily of academics, activists, and those who see themselves as both. It is a book that wastes no time trying to convince its reader that “climate change is real” or “neoliberalism is making things worse,” and the book is more easily understood if a reader begins with at least a basic acquaintance with the thought of Hayek, Kant, Whitehead, and Nietzsche. Even if not every reader of The Fragility of Things has dwelled for hours upon the question of “How do you prepare for the end of the world?” the book seems to expect that this question lurks somewhere in the subconscious of the reader.

    Amidst Connolly’s discussions of ethics, fragility and neoliberalism, he devotes much of the book to arguing for the need for a revitalized, active, and committed Left – one that would conceivably do more than hold large marches and then disappear. While Connolly cautions against “giving up” on electoral politics he does evince a distrust for US party politics; to the extent that Connolly appears to be a democrat it is a democrat with a lowercase d. Drawing inspiration from the wave of protests in and around 2011 Connolly expresses the need for a multi-issue, broadly supported, international (and internationalist) Left that can organize effectively to win small-scale local reforms while building the power to truly challenge the grip of neoliberalism. The goal, as Connolly envisions it, is to eventually “mobilize enough collective energy to launch a general strike simultaneously in several countries in the near future” even as Connolly remains cognizant of threats that “the emergence of a neofascist or mafia-type capitalism” can pose (39). Connolly’s focus on the, often slow, “traditional” activist strategies of organizing should not be overlooked, as his focus on mobilizing large numbers of people acts as a retort to a utopian belief that “technology will fix everything.” The “general strike” as the democratic response once electoral democracy has gone awry is a theme that Connolly concludes with as he calls for his readership to take part in helping to bring together “a set of interacting minorities in several countries for the time when we coalesce around a general strike launched in several states simultaneously” (195). Connolly emphasizes the types of localized activism and action that are also necessary, but “the general strike” is iconic as the way to challenge neoliberalism. In emphasizing the “the general strike” Connolly stakes out a position in which people have an obligation to actively challenge existing neoliberalism, waiting for capitalism to collapse due to its own contradictions (and trying to accelerate these contradictions) does not appear as a viable tactic.

    All of which raises something of prickly question for The Fragility of Things: which element of the book strikes the reader as more outlandish, the question of how to prepare for the end of the world, or the prospect of a renewed Left launching “a general strike…in the near future”? This question is not asked idly or as provocation; and the goal here is in no way to traffic in Leftist apocalyptic romanticism. Yet experience in current activism and organizing does not necessarily imbue one with great confidence in the prospect of a city-wide general strike (in the US) to say nothing of an international one. Activists may be acutely aware of the creative potentials and challenges faced by repressed communities, precarious labor, the ecosystem, and so forth – but these same activists are aware of the solidity of militarized police forces, a reactionary culture industry, and neoliberal dominance. Current, committed, activists’ awareness of the challenges they face makes it seem rather odd that Connolly suggests that radical theorists have ignored “fragility.” Indeed many radical thinkers, or at least some (Grace Lee Boggs and Franco “Bifo” Berardi, to name just two) seem to have warned consistently of “fragility” – even if they do not always use that exact term. Nevertheless, here the challenge may not be the Sisyphean work of activism but the rather cynical answer many, non-activists, give to the question of “How does one prepare for the end of the world?” That answer? Download some new apps, binge watch a few shows, enjoy the sci-fi cool of the latest gadget, and otherwise eat, drink and be merry because we’ll invent something to solve tomorrow’s problems next week. Neoliberalism has trained people well.

    That answer, however, is the type that Connolly seems to find untenable, and his apparent hope in The Fragility of Things is that most readers will also find this answer unacceptable. Thus Connolly’s “ethic of cultivation” returns and shows its value again. “Our lives are messages” (185) Connolly writes and thus the actions that an individual takes to defend “fragility” and oppose neoliberalism act as a demonstration to others that different ways of being are possible.

    What The Fragility of Things makes clear is that an “ethic of cultivation” is not a one-off event but an ongoing process – cultivating a garden, after all, is something that takes time. Some gardens require years of cultivation before they start to bear fruit.

    _____

    Zachary Loeb is a writer, activist, librarian, and terrible accordion player. He earned his MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, and is currently working towards an MA in the Media, Culture, and Communications department at NYU. His research areas include media refusal and resistance to technology, ethical implications of technology, infrastructure and e-waste, as well as the intersection of library science with the STS field. Using the moniker “The Luddbrarian,” Loeb writes at the blog Librarian Shipwreck. He is a frequent contributor to The b2 Review Digital Studies section.

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  • Trickster Makes This Web: The Ambiguous Politics of Anonymous

    Trickster Makes This Web: The Ambiguous Politics of Anonymous

    Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy
    a review of Gabriella Coleman, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (Verso, 2014)
    by Gavin Mueller
    ~

    Gabriella Coleman’s Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy (HHWS) tackles a difficult and pressing subject: the amorphous hacker organization Anonymous. The book is not a strictly academic work. Rather, it unfolds as a rather lively history of a subculture of geeks, peppered with snippets of cultural theory and autobiographical portions. As someone interested in a more sustained theoretical exposition of Anonymous’s organizing and politics, I was a bit disappointed, though Coleman has opted for a more readable style. In fact, this is the book’s best asset. However, while containing a number of insights of interest to the general reader, the book ultimately falters as an assessment of Anonymous’s political orientation, or the state of hacker politics in general.

    Coleman begins with a discussion of online trolling, a common antagonistic online cultural practice; many Anons cut their troll teeth at the notorious 4chan message board. Trolling aims to create “lulz,” a kind of digital schadenfreude produced by pranks, insults and misrepresentations. According to Coleman, the lulz are “a form of cultural differentiation and a tool or weapon used to attack, humiliate, and defame” rooted in the use of “inside jokes” of those steeped in the codes of Internet culture (32). Coleman argues that the lulz has a deeper significance: they “puncture the consensus around our politics and ethics, our social lives and our aesthetic sensibilities.” But trolling can be better understood through an offline frame of reference: hazing. Trolling is a means by which geeks have historically policed the boundaries of the subcultural corners of the Internet. If you can survive the epithets and obscene pictures, you might be able to hang. That trolling often takes the form of misogynist, racist and homophobic language is unsurprising: early Net culture was predominantly white and male, a demographic fact which overdetermines the shape of resentment towards “newbies” (or in 4chan’s unapologetically offensive argot, “newfags”). The lulz is joy that builds community, but almost always at someone else’s expense.

    Coleman, drawing upon her background as an anthropologist, conceptualizes the troll as an instantiation of the trickster archetype which recurs throughout mythology and folklore. Tricksters, she argues, like trolls and Anonymous, are liminal figures who defy norms and revel in causing chaos. This kind of application of theory is a common technique in cultural studies, where seemingly apolitical or even anti-social transgressions, like punk rock or skateboarding, can be politicized with a dash of Bakhtin or de Certeau. Here it creates difficulties. There is one major difference between the spider spirit Anansi and Coleman’s main informant on trolling, the white supremacist hacker weev: Anansi is fictional, while weev is a real person who writes op-eds for neo-Nazi websites. The trickster archetype, a concept crafted for comparative structural analysis of mythology, does little to explain the actually existing social practice of trolling. Instead it renders it more complicated, ambiguous, and uncertain. These difficulties are compounded as the analysis moves to Anonymous. Anonymous doesn’t merely enact a submerged politics via style or symbols. It engages in explicitly political projects, complete with manifestos, though Coleman continues to return to transgression as one of its salient features.

    The trolls of 4chan, from which Anonymous emerged, developed a culture of compulsory anonymity. In part, this was technological: unlike other message boards and social media, posting on 4chan requires no lasting profile, no consistent presence. But there was also a cultural element to this. Identifying oneself is strongly discouraged in the community. Fittingly, its major trolling weapon is doxing: revealing personal information to facilitate further harassment offline (prank calls, death threats, embarrassment in front of employers). As Whitney Phillips argues, online trolling often acts as a kind of media critique: by enforcing anonymity and rejecting fame or notoriety, Anons oppose the now-dominant dynamics of social media and personal branding which have colonized much of the web, and threaten their cherished subcultural practices, which are more adequately enshrined in formats such as image boards and IRC. In this way, Anonymous deploys technological means to thwart the dominant social practices of technology, a kind of wired Luddism. Such practices proliferate in the communities of the computer underground, which is steeped in an omnipresent prelapsarian nostalgia since at least the “eternal September” of the early 1990s.

    HHWS’s overarching narrative is the emergence of Anonymous out of the cesspits of 4chan and into political consciousness: trolling for justice instead of lulz. The compulsory anonymity of 4chan, in part, determined Anonymous’s organizational form: Anonymous lacks formal membership, instead formed from entirely ad hoc affiliations. The brand itself can be selectively deployed or disavowed, leading to much argumentation and confusion. Coleman provides an insider perspective on how actions are launched: there is debate, occasionally a rough consensus, and then activity, though several times individuals opt to begin an action, dragging along a number of other participants of varying degrees of reluctance. Tactics are formalized in an experimental, impromptu way. In this, I recognized the way actions formed in the Occupy encampments. Anonymous, as Coleman shows, was an early Occupy Wall Street booster, and her analysis highlights the connection between the Occupy form and the networked forms of sociality exemplified by Anonymous. After reading Coleman’s account, I am much more convinced of Anonymous’s importance to the movement. Likewise, many criticisms of Occupy could also be levelled at Anonymous; Coleman cites Jo Freeman’s “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” as one candidate.

    If Anonymous can be said to have a coherent political vision, it is one rooted in civil liberties, particularly freedom of speech and opposition censorship efforts. Indeed, Coleman earns the trust of several hackers by her affiliation with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, nominally the digital equivalent to the ACLU (though some object to this parallel, due in part to EFF’s strong ties to industry). Geek politics, from Anonymous to Wikileaks to the Pirate Bay, are a weaponized form of the mantra “information wants to be free.” Anonymous’s causes seem fit these concerns perfectly: Scientology’s litigious means of protecting its secrets provoked its wrath, as did the voluntary withdrawal of services to Wikileaks by PayPal and Mastercard, and the Bay Area Rapid Transit police’s blacking out of cell phone signals to scuttle a protest.

    I’ve referred to Anonymous as geeks rather than hackers deliberately. Hackers — skilled individuals who can break into protected systems — participate in Anonymous, but many of the Anons pulled from 4chan are merely pranksters with above-average knowledge of the Internet and computing. This gets the organization in quite a bit of trouble when it engages in the political tactic of most interest to Coleman, the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. A DDoS floods a website with requests, overwhelming its servers. This technique has captured the imaginations of a number of scholars, including Coleman, with its resemblance to offline direct action like pickets and occupations. However, the AnonOps organizers falsely claimed that their DDoS app, the Low-Orbit Ion Cannon, ensured user anonymity, leading to a number of Anons facing serious criminal charges. Coleman curiously places the blame for this startling breach of operational security on journalists writing about AnonOps, rather on the organizers themselves. Furthermore, many DDoS attacks, including those launched by Anonymous, have relied on botnets, which draw power from hundreds of hijacked computers, bears little resemblance to any kind of democratic initiative. Of course, this isn’t to say that the harsh punishments meted out to Anons under the auspices of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act are warranted, but that political tactics must be subjected to scrutiny.

    Coleman argues that Anonymous outgrew its narrow civil libertarian agenda with its involvement in the Arab Spring: “No longer was the group bound to Internet-y issues like censorship and file-sharing” (148). However, by her own account, it is opposition to censorship which truly animates the group. The #OpTunisia manifesto (Anonymous names its actions with the prefix “Op,” for operations, along with the ubiquitous Twitter-based hashtag) states plainly, “Any organization involved in censorship will be targeted” (ibid). Anons were especially animated by the complete shut-off of the Internet in Tunisia and Egypt, actions which shattered the notion of the Internet as a space controlled by geeks, not governments. Anonymous operations launched against corporations did not oppose capitalist exploitation but fought corporate restrictions on online conduct. These are laudable goals, but also limited ones, and are often compatible with Silicon Valley companies, as illustrated by the Google-friendly anti-SOPA/PIPA protests.

    Coleman is eager to distance Anonymous from the libertarian philosophies rife in geek and hacker circles, but its politics are rarely incompatible with such a perspective. The most recent Guy Fawkes Day protest I witnessed in Washington, D.C., full of mask-wearing Anons, displayed a number of slogans emerging from the Ron Paul camp, “End the Fed” prominent among them. There is no accounting for this in HHWS. It is clear that political differences among Anons exists, and that any analysis must be nuanced. But Coleman’s description of this nuance ultimately doesn’t delineate the political positions within the group and how they coalesce, opting to elide these differences in favor of a more protean focus on “transgression.” In this way, she is able to provide a conceptual coherence for Anonymous, albeit at the expense of a detailed examination of the actual politics of its members. In the final analysis, “Anonymous became a generalized symbol for dissent, a medium to channel deep disenchantment… basically, with anything” (399).

    As political concerns overtake the lulz, Anonymous wavers as smaller militant hacker crews LulzSec and AntiSec take the fore, doxing white hat security executives, leaking documents, and defacing websites. This frustrates Coleman: “Anonymous had been exciting to me for a specific reason: it was the largest and most populist disruptive grassroots movement the Internet had, up to that time, fomented. But it felt, suddenly like AnonOps/Anonymous was slipping into a more familiar state of hacker-vanguardism” (302). Yet it is at this moment that Coleman offers a revealing account of hacker ideology: its alignment with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. From 4chan’s trolls scoffing at morality and decency, to hackers disregarding technical and legal restraints to accessing information, to the collective’s general rejection any standard form of accountability, Anonymous truly seems to posit itself as beyond good and evil. Coleman herself confesses to being “overtly romantic” as she supplies alibis for the group’s moral and strategic failures (it is, after all, incredibly difficult for an ethnographer to criticize her informants). But Nietzsche was a profoundly undemocratic thinker, whose avowed elitism should cast more of a disturbing shadow over the progressive potentials behind hacker groups than it does for Coleman, who embraces the ability of hackers to “cast off — at least momentarily — the shackles of normativity and attain greatness” (275). Coleman’s previous work on free software programmers convincingly makes the case for a Nietzschean current running through hacker culture; I am considerably more skeptical than she is about the liberal democratic viewpoint this engenders.

    Ultimately, Coleman concludes that Anonymous cannot work as a substitute for existing organizations, but that its tactics should be taken up by other political formations: “The urgent question is how to promote cross-pollination” between Anonymous and more formalized structures (374). This may be warranted, but there needs to be a fuller accounting of the drawbacks to Anonymous. Because anyone can fly its flag, and because its actions are guided by talented and charismatic individuals working in secret, Anonymous is ripe for infiltration. Historically, hackers have proven to be easy for law enforcement and corporations to co-opt, not the least because of the ferocious rivalries amongst hackers themselves. Tactics are also ambiguous. A DDoS can be used by anti-corporate activists, or by corporations against their rivals and enemies. Document dumps can ruin a diplomatic initiative, or a woman’s social life. Public square occupations can be used to advocate for democracy, or as a platform for anti-democratic coups. Currently, a lot of the same geek energy behind Anonymous has been devoted to the misogynist vendetta GamerGate (in a Reddit AMA, Coleman adopted a diplomatic tone, referring to GamerGate as “a damn Gordian knot”). Without a steady sense of Anonymous’s actual political commitments, outside of free speech, it is difficult to do much more than marvel at the novelty of their media presence (which wears thinner with each overwrought communique). With Hoaxer, Hacker, Whistleblower, Spy, Coleman has offered a readable account of recent hacker history, but I remain unconvinced of Anonymous’s political potential.

    _____

    Gavin Mueller (@gavinsaywhat) is a PhD candidate in cultural studies at George Mason University, and an editor at Jacobin and Viewpoint Magazine.

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  • Is the Network a Brain?

    Is the Network a Brain?

    Pickering, Cybernetic Braina review of Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (University of Chicago Press, 2011)
    by Jonathan Goodwin
    ~

    Evgeny Morozov’s recent New Yorker article about Project Cybersyn in Allende’s Chile caused some controversy when critics accused Morozov of not fully acknowledging his sources. One of those sources was sociologist of science Andrew Pickering’s The Cybernetic Brain. Morozov is quoted as finding Pickering’s book “awful.” It’s unlikely that Morozov meant “awful” in the sense of “awe-inspiring,” but that was closer to my reaction after reading Pickering’s 500+ pp. work on the British tradition in cybernetics. This tradition was less militarist and more artistic, among other qualities, in Pickering’s account, than is popularly understood. I found myself greatly intrigued—if not awed—by the alternate future that his subtitle and final chapter announces. Cybernetics is now a largely forgotten dead-end in science. And the British tradition that Pickering describes had relatively little influence within cybernetics itself. So what is important about it now, and what is the nature of this other future that Pickering sketches?

    The major figures of this book, which proceeds with overviews of their careers, views, and accomplishments, are Grey Walter, Ross Ashby, Gregory Bateson, R. D. Laing, Stafford Beer, and Gordon Pask. Stuart Kauffman’s and Stephen Wolfram’s work on complexity theory also makes an appearance.[1] Laing and Bateson’s relevance may not be immediately clear. Pickering’s interest in them derives from their extension of cybernetic ideas to the emerging technologies of the self in the 1960s. Both Bateson and Laing approached schizophrenia as an adaptation to the increasing “double-binds” of Western culture, and both looked to Eastern spiritual traditions and chemical methods of consciousness-alteration as potential treatments. The Bateson and Laing material makes the most direct reference to the connection between the cybernetic tradition and the “Californian Ideology” that animates much Silicon Valley thinking. Stewart Brand was influenced by Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind (183), for example. Pickering identifies Northern California as the site where cybernetics migrated into the counterculture. As a technology of control, it is arguable that this countercultural migration has become part of the ruling ideology of the present moment. Pickering recognizes this but seems to concede that the inherent topicality would detract from the focus of his work. It is a facet that would be of interest to the readers of this “Digital Studies” section of The b2 Review, however, and I will thus return to it at the end of this review.

    Pickering’s path to Bateson and Laing originates with Grey Walter’s and Ross Ashby’s pursuit of cybernetic models of the brain. Computational models of the brain, though originally informed by cybernetic research, quickly replaced it in Pickering’s account (62). He asks why computational models of the brain quickly gathered so much cultural interest. Rodney Brooks’s robots, with their more embodied approach, Pickering argues, are in the tradition of Walter’s tortoises and outside the symbolic tradition of artificial intelligence. I find it noteworthy that the neurological underpinnings of early cybernetics were so strongly influenced by behaviorism. Computationalist approaches, associated by Pickering with the establishment or “royal” science, here, were intellectually formed by an attack on behaviorism. Pickering even addresses this point obliquely, when he wonders why literary scholars had not noticed that the octopus in Gravity’s Rainbow was apparently named “Grigori” in homage to Gregory Bateson (439n13).[2] I think one reason this hasn’t been noticed is that it’s much more likely that the name was random but for its Slavic form, which is clearly in the same pattern of references to Russian behaviorist psychology that informs Pynchon’s novel. An offshoot of behaviorism inspiring a countercultural movement devoted to freedom and experimentation seems peculiar.

    One of Pickering’s key insights into this alternate tradition of cybernetics is that its science is performative. Rather than being as theory-laden as are the strictly computationalist approaches, cybernetic science often studied complex systems as assemblages whose interactions generated novel insights. Contrast this epistemology to what critics point to as the frequent invocation of the Duhem-Quine thesis by Noam Chomsky.[3] For Pickering, Ross Ashby’s version of cybernetics was a “supremely general and protean science” (147). As it developed, the brain lost its central place and cybernetics became a “freestanding general science” (147). As I mentioned, the chapter on Ashby closes with a consideration of the complexity science of Stuart Kauffman and Stephen Wolfram. That Kauffman and Wolfram largely have worked outside mainstream academic institutions is important for Pickering.[4] Christopher Alexander’s pattern language in architecture is a third example. Pickering mentions that Alexander’s concept was influential in some areas of computer science; the notion of “object-oriented programming” is sometimes considered to have been influenced by Alexander’s ideas.

    I mention this connection because many of the alternate traditions in cybernetics have become mainstream influences in contemporary digital culture. It is difficult to imagine Laing and Bateson’s alternative therapeutic ideas having any resonance in that culture, however. The doctrine that “selves are endlessly complex and endlessly explorable” (211) is sometimes proposed as something the internet facilitates, but the inevitable result of anonymity and pseudonymity in internet discourse is the enframing of hierarchical relations. I realize this point may sound controversial to those with a more benign or optimistic view of digital culture. That this countercultural strand of cybernetic practice has clear parallels with much digital libertarian rhetoric is hard to dispute. Again, Pickering is not concerned in the book with tracing these contemporary parallels. I mention them because of my own interest and this venue’s presumed interest in the subject.

    The progression that begins with some variety of conventional rationalism, extends through a career in cybernetics, and ends in some variety of mysticism is seen with almost all of the figures that Pickering profiles in The Cybernetic Brain. Perhaps the clearest example—and most fascinating in general—is that of Stafford Beer. Philip Mirowski’s review of Pickering’s book refers to Beer as “a slightly wackier Herbert Simon.” Pickering enjoys recounting the adventures of the wizard of Prang, a work that Beer composed after he had moved to a remote Welsh village and renounced many of the world’s pleasures. Beer’s involvement in Project Cybersyn makes him perhaps the most well-known of the figures profiled in this book.[5] What perhaps fascinate Pickering more than anything else in Beer’s work is the concept of viability. From early in his career, Beer advocated for upwardly viable management strategies. The firm would not need a brain, in his model, “it would react to changing circumstances; it would grow and evolve like an organism or species, all without any human intervention at all” (225). Mirowski’s review compares Beer to Friedrich Hayek and accuses Pickering of refusing to engage with this seemingly obvious intellectual affinity.[6] Beer’s intuitions in this area led him to experiment with biological and ecological computing; Pickering surmises that Douglas Adams’s superintelligent mice derived from Beer’s murine experiments in this area (241).

    In a review of a recent translation of Stanislaw Lem’s Summa Technologiae, Pickering mentions that natural adaptive systems being like brains and being able to be utilized for intelligence amplification is the most “amazing idea in the history of cybernetics” (247).[7] Despite its association with the dreaded “synergy” (the original “syn” of Project Cybersyn), Beer’s viable system model never became a management fad (256). Alexander Galloway has recently written here about the “reticular fallacy,” the notion that de-centralized forms of organization are necessarily less repressive than are centralized or hierachical forms. Beer’s viable system model proposes an emergent and non-hierarchical management system that would increase the general “eudemony” (general well-being, another of Beer’s not-quite original neologisms [272]). Beer’s turn towards Tantric mysticism seems somehow inevitable in Pickering’s narrative of his career. The syntegric icosahedron, one of Beer’s late baroque flourishes, reminded me quite a bit of a Paul Laffoley painting. Syntegration as a concept takes reticularity to a level of mysticism rarely achieved by digital utopians. Pickering concludes the chapter on Beer with a discussion of his influence on Brian Eno’s ambient music.

    Laffoley, "The Orgone Motor"
    Paul Laffoley, “The Orgone Motor” (1981). Image source: paullaffoley.net.

    The discussion of Eno chides him for not reading Gordon Pask’s explicitly aesthetic cybernetics (308). Pask is the final cybernetician of Pickering’s study and perhaps the most eccentric. Pickering describes him as a model for Patrick Troughton’s Dr. Who (475n3), and his synaesthetic work in cybernetics with projects like the Musicolor are explicitly theatrical. A theatrical performance that directly incorporates audience feedback into the production, not just at the level of applause or hiss, but in audience interest in a particular character—a kind of choose-your-own adventure theater—was planned with Joan Littlewood (348-49). Pask’s work in interface design has been identified as an influence on hypertext (464n17). A great deal of the chapter on Pask involves his influence on British countercultural arts and architecture movements in the 1960s. Mirowski’s review shortly notes that even the anti-establishment Gordon Pask was funded by the Office of Naval Research for fifteen years (194). Mirowski also accuses Pickering of ignoring the computer as the emblematic cultural artifact of the cybernetic worldview (195). Pask is the strongest example offered of an alternate future of computation and social organization, but it is difficult to imagine his cybernetic present.

    The final chapter of Pickering’s book is entitled “Sketches of Another Future.” What is called “maker culture” combined with the “internet of things” might lead some prognosticators to imagine an increasingly cybernetic digital future. Cybernetic, that is, not in the sense of increasing what Mirowski refers to as the neoliberal “background noise of modern culture” but as a “challenge to the hegemony of modernity” (393). Before reading Pickering’s book, I would have regarded such a prediction with skepticism. I still do, but Pickering has argued that an alternate—and more optimistic—perspective is worth taking seriously.

    _____

    Jonathan Goodwin is Associate Professor of English at the University of Louisiana, Lafayette. He is working on a book about cultural representations of statistics and probability in the twentieth century.

    Back to the essay

    _____

    [1] Wolfram was born in England, though he has lived in the United States since the 1970s. Pickering taught at the University of Illinois while this book was being written, and he mentions having several interviews with Wolfram, whose company Wolfram Research is based in Champaign, Illinois (457n73). Pickering’s discussion of Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science is largely neutral; for a more skeptical view, see Cosma Shalizi’s review.

    [2] Bateson experimented with octopuses, as Pickering describes. Whether Pynchon knew about this, however, remains doubtful. Pickering’s note may also be somewhat facetious.

    [3] See the interview with George Lakoff in Ideology and Linguistic Theory: Noam Chomsky and the Deep Structure Debates, ed. Geoffrey J. Huck and John A. Goldsmith (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 115. Lakoff’s account of Chomsky’s philosophical justification for his linguistic theories is tendentious; I mention it here because of the strong contrast, even in caricature, with the performative quality of the cybernetic research Pickering describes. (1999).

    [4] Though it is difficult to think of the Santa Fe Institute this way now.

    [5] For a detailed cultural history of Project Cybersyn, see Eden Medina, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (MIT Press, 2011). Medina notes that Beer formed the word “algedonic” from two words meaning “pain” and “pleasure,” but the OED notes an example in the same sense from 1894. This citation does not rule out independent coinage, of course. Curiously enough, John Fowles uses the term in The Magus (1966), where it could have easily been derived from Beer.

    [6] Hayek’s name appears neither in the index nor the reference list. It does seem a curious omission in the broader intellectual context of cybernetics.

    [7] Though there is a reference to Lem’s fiction in an endnote (427n25), Summa Technologiae, a visionary exploration of cybernetic philosophy dating from the early 1960s, does not appear in Pickering’s work. A complete English translation only recently appeared, and I know of no evidence that Pickering’s principal figures were influenced by Lem at all. The book, as Pickering’s review acknowledges, is astonishingly prescient and highly recommended for anyone interested in the culture of cybernetics.

  • Network Pessimism

    Network Pessimism

    By Alexander R. Galloway
    ~

    I’ve been thinking a lot about pessimism recently. Eugene Thacker has been deep in this material for some time already. In fact he has a new, lengthy manuscript on pessimism called Infinite Resignation, which is a bit of departure from his other books in terms of tone and structure. I’ve read it and it’s excellent. Definitely “the worst” he’s ever written! Following the style of other treatises from the history of philosophical pessimism–Leopardi, Cioran, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and others–the bulk of the book is written in short aphorisms. It’s very poetic language, and some sections are driven by his own memories and meditations, all in an attempt to plumb the deepest, darkest corners of the worst the universe has to offer.

    Meanwhile, the worst can’t stay hidden. Pessimism has made it to prime time, to NPR, and even right-wing media. Despite all this attention, Eugene seems to have little interest in showing his manuscript to publishers. A true pessimist! Not to worry, I’m sure the book will see the light of day eventually. Or should I say dead of night? When it does, the book is sure to sadden, discourage, and generally worsen the lives of Thacker fans everywhere.

    Interestingly pessimism also appears in a number of other authors and fields. I’m thinking, for instance, of critical race theory and the concept of Afro-pessimism. The work of Fred Moten and Frank B. Wilderson, III is particularly interesting in that regard. Likewise queer theory has often wrestled with pessimism, be it the “no future” debates around reproductive futurity, or what Anna Conlan has simply labeled “homo-pessimism,” that is, the way in which the “persistent association of homosexuality with death and oppression contributes to a negative stereotype of LGBTQ lives as unhappy and unhealthy.”[1]

    In his review of my new book, Andrew Culp made reference to how some of this material has influenced me. I’ll be posting more on Moten and these other themes in the future, but let me here describe, in very general terms, how the concept of pessimism might apply to contemporary digital media.

    *

    A previous post was devoted to the reticular fallacy, defined as the false assumption that the erosion of hierarchical organization leads to an erosion of organization as such. Here I’d like to address the related question of reticular pessimism or, more simply, network pessimism.

    Network pessimism relies on two basic assumptions: (1) “everything is a network”; (2) “the best response to networks is more networks.”

    Who says everything is a network? Everyone, it seems. In philosophy, Bruno Latour: ontology is a network. In literary studies, Franco Moretti: Hamlet is a network. In the military, Donald Rumsfeld: the battlefield is a network. (But so too our enemies are networks: the terror network.) Art, architecture, managerial literature, computer science, neuroscience, and many other fields–all have shifted prominently in recent years toward a network model. Most important, however, is the contemporary economy and the mode of production. Today’s most advanced companies are essentially network companies. Google monetizes the shape of networks (in part via clustering algorithms). Facebook has rewritten subjectivity and social interaction along the lines of canalized and discretized network services. The list goes on and on. Thus I characterize the first assumption — “everything is a network” — as a kind of network fundamentalism. It claims that whatever exists in the world appears naturally in the form of a system, an ecology, an assemblage, in short, as a network.

    Ladies and gentlemen, behold the good news, postmodernism is definitively over! We have a new grand récit. As metanarrative, the network will guide us into a new Dark Age.

    If the first assumption expresses a positive dogma or creed, the second is more negative or nihilistic. The second assumption — that the best response to networks is more networks — is also evident in all manner of social and political life today. Eugene and I described this phenomena at greater length in The Exploit, but consider a few different examples from contemporary debates… In military theory: network-centric warfare is the best response to terror networks. In Deleuzian philosophy: the rhizome is the best response to schizophrenic multiplicity. In autonomist Marxism: the multitude is the best response to empire. In the environmental movement: ecologies and systems are the best response to the systemic colonization of nature. In computer science: distributed architectures are the best response to bottlenecks in connectivity. In economics: heterogenous “economies of scope” are the best response to the distributed nature of the “long tail.”

    To be sure, there are many sites today where networks still confront power centers. The point is not to deny the continuing existence of massified, centralized sovereignty. But at the same time it’s important to contextualize such confrontations within a larger ideological structure, one that inoculates the network form and recasts it as the exclusive site of liberation, deviation, political maturation, complex thinking, and indeed the very living of life itself.

    Why label this a pessimism? For the same reasons that queer theory and critical race theory are grappling with pessimism: Is alterity a death sentence? Is this as good as it gets? Is this all there is? Can we imagine a parallel universe different from this one? (Although the pro-pessimism camp would likely state it in the reverse: We must destabilize and annihilate all normative descriptions of the “good.” This world isn’t good, and hooray for that!)

    So what’s the problem? Why should we be concerned about network pessimism? Let me state clearly so there’s no misunderstanding, pessimism isn’t the problem here. Likewise, networks are not the problem. (Let no one label me “anti network” nor “anti pessimism” — in fact I’m not even sure what either of those positions would mean.) The issue, as I see it, is that network pessimism deploys and sustains a specific dogma, confining both networks and pessimism to a single, narrow ideological position. It’s this narrow-mindedness that should be questioned.

    Specifically I can see three basic problems with network pessimism, the problem of presentism, the problem of ideology, and the problem of the event.

    The problem of presentism refers to the way in which networks and network thinking are, by design, allergic to historicization. This exhibits itself in a number of different ways. Networks arrive on the scene at the proverbial “end of history” (and they do so precisely because they help end this history). Ecological and systems-oriented thinking, while admittedly always temporal by nature, gained popularity as a kind of solution to the problems of diachrony. Space and landscape take the place of time and history. As Fredric Jameson has noted, the “spatial turn” of postmodernity goes hand in hand with a denigration of the “temporal moment” of previous intellectual movements.

    man machines buy fritz kahn
    Fritz Kahn, “Der Mensch als Industriepalast (Man as Industrial Palace)” (Stuttgart, 1926). Image source: NIH

    From Hegel’s history to Luhmann’s systems. From Einstein’s general relativity to Riemann’s complex surfaces. From phenomenology to assemblage theory. From the “time image” of cinema to the “database image” of the internet. From the old mantra always historicize to the new mantra always connect.

    During the age of clockwork, the universe was thought to be a huge mechanism, with the heavens rotating according to the music of the spheres. When the steam engine was the source of newfound power, the world suddenly became a dynamo of untold thermodynamic force. After full-fledged industrialization, the body became a factory. Technologies and infrastructures are seductive metaphors. So it’s no surprise (and no coincidence) that today, in the age of the network, a new template imprints itself on everything in sight. In other words, the assumption “everything is a network” gradually falls apart into a kind of tautology of presentism. “Everything right now is a network…because everything right now has been already defined as a network.”

    This leads to the problem of ideology. Again we’re faced with an existential challenge, because network technologies were largely invented as a non-ideological or extra-ideological structure. When writing Protocol I interviewed some of the computer scientists responsible for the basic internet protocols and most of them reported that they “have no ideology” when designing networks, that they are merely interested in “code that works” and “systems that are efficient and robust.” In sociology and philosophy of science, figures like Bruno Latour routinely describe their work as “post-critical,” merely focused on the direct mechanisms of network organization. Hence ideology as a problem to be forgotten or subsumed: networks are specifically conceived and designed as those things that both are non-ideological in their conception (we just want to “get things done”), but also post-ideological in their architecture (in that they acknowledge and co-opt the very terms of previous ideological debates, things like heterogeneity, difference, agency, and subject formation).

    The problem of the event indicates a crisis for the very concept of events themselves. Here the work of Alain Badiou is invaluable. Network architectures are the perfect instantiation of what Badiou derisively labels “democratic materialism,” that is, a world in which there are “only bodies and languages.” In Badiou’s terms, if networks are the natural state of the situation and there is no way to deviate from nature, then there is no event, and hence no possibility for truth. Networks appear, then, as the consummate “being without event.”

    What could be worse? If networks are designed to accommodate massive levels of contingency — as with the famous Robustness Principle — then they are also exceptionally adept at warding off “uncontrollable” change wherever it might arise. If everything is a network, then there’s no escape, there’s no possibility for the event.

    Jameson writes as much in The Seeds of Time when he says that it is easier to imagine the end of the earth and the end of nature than it is to imagine the ends of capitalism. Network pessimism, in other words, is really a kind of network defeatism in that it makes networks the alpha and omega of our world. It’s easier to imagine the end of that world than it is to discard the network metaphor and imagine a kind of non-world in which networks are no longer dominant.

    In sum, we shouldn’t give in to network pessimism. We shouldn’t subscribe to the strong claim that everything is a network. (Nor should we subscribe to the softer claim, that networks are merely the most common, popular, or natural architecture for today’s world.) Further, we shouldn’t think that networks are the best response to networks. Instead we must ask the hard questions. What is the political fate of networks? Did heterogeneity and systematicity survive the Twentieth Century? If so, at what cost? What would a non-net look like? And does thinking have a future without the network as guide?

    _____

    Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programer working on issues in philosophy, technology, and theories of mediation. Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, he is author of several books and dozens of articles on digital media and critical theory, including Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization (MIT, 2006), Gaming: Essays in Algorithmic Culture (University of Minnesota, 2006); The Interface Effect (Polity, 2012), and most recently Laruelle: Against the Digital (University of Minnesota, 2014), reviewed here in 2014. Galloway has recently been writing brief notes on media and digital culture and theory at his blog, on which this post first appeared.

    Back to the essay
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    Notes

    [1] Anna Conlan, “Representing Possibility: Mourning, Memorial, and Queer Museology,” in Gender, Sexuality and Museums, ed. Amy K. Levin (London: Routledge, 2010). 253-263.

  • Flat Theory

    Flat Theory

    By David M. Berry
    ~

    The world is flat.[1] 6Or perhaps better, the world is increasingly “layers.” Certainly the augmediated imaginaries of the major technology companies are now structured around a post-retina vision of mediation made possible and informed by the digital transformations ushered in by mobile technologies – whether smartphones, wearables, beacons or nearables – an internet of places and things. These imaginaries provide a sense of place, as well as sense for management, of the complex real-time streams of information and data broken into shards and fragments of narrative, visual culture, social media and messaging. Turned into software, they reorder and re-present information, decisions and judgment, amplifying the sense and senses of (neoliberal) individuality whilst reconfiguring what it means to be a node in the network of post digital capitalism.  These new imaginaries serve as abstractions of abstractions, ideologies of ideologies, a prosthesis to create a sense of coherence and intelligibility in highly particulate computational capitalism (Berry 2014). To explore the experimentation of the programming industries in relation to this it is useful to explore the design thinking and material abstractions that are becoming hegemonic at the level of the interface.

    Two new competing computational interface paradigms are now deployed in the latest version of Apple and Google’s operating systems, but more notably as regulatory structures to guide the design and strategy related to corporate policy. The first is “flat design” which has been introduced by Apple through iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite as a refresh of the aging operating systems’ human computer interface guidelines, essentially stripping the operating system of historical baggage related to techniques of design that disguised the limitations of a previous generation of technology, both in terms of screen but also processor capacity. It is important to note, however, that Apple avoids talking about “flat design” as its design methodology, preferring to talk through its platforms specificity, that is about iOS’ design or OS X’s design. The second is “material design” which was introduced by Google into its Android L, now Lollipop, operating system and which also sought to bring some sense of coherence to a multiplicity of Android devices, interfaces, OEMs and design strategies. More generally “flat design” is “the term given to the style of design in which elements lose any type of stylistic characters that make them appear as though they lift off the page” (Turner 2014). As Apple argues, one should “reconsider visual indicators of physicality and realism” and think of the user interface as “play[ing] a supporting role”, that is that techniques of mediation through the user interface should aim to provide a new kind of computational realism that presents “content” as ontologically prior to, or separate from its container in the interface (Apple 2014). This is in contrast to “rich design,” which has been described as “adding design ornaments such as bevels, reflections, drop shadows, and gradients” (Turner 2014).

    color_family_a_2xI want to explore these two main paradigms – and to a lesser extent the flat-design methodology represented in Windows 7 and the, since renamed, Metro interface – through a notion of a comprehensive attempt by both Apple and Google to produce a rich and diverse umwelt, or ecology, linked through what what Apple calls “aesthetic integrity” (Apple 2014). This is both a response to their growing landscape of devices, platforms, systems, apps and policies, but also to provide some sense of operational strategy in relation to computational imaginaries. Essentially, both approaches share an axiomatic approach to conceptualizing the building of a system of thought, in other words, a primitivist predisposition which draws from both a neo-Euclidian model of geons (for Apple), but also a notion of intrinsic value or neo-materialist formulations of essential characteristics (for Google). That is, they encapsulate a version of what I am calling here flat theory. Both of these companies are trying to deal with the problematic of multiplicities in computation, and the requirement that multiple data streams, notifications and practices have to be combined and managed within the limited geography of the screen. In other words, both approaches attempt to create what we might call aggregate interfaces by combining techniques of layout, montage and collage onto computational surfaces (Berry 2014: 70).

    The “flat turn” has not happened in a vacuum, however, and is the result of a new generation of computational hardware, smart silicon design and retina screen technologies. This was driven in large part by the mobile device revolution which has not only transformed the taken-for-granted assumptions of historical computer interface design paradigms (e.g. WIMP) but also the subject position of the user, particularly structured through the Xerox/Apple notion of single-click functional design of the interface. Indeed, one of the striking features of the new paradigm of flat design, is that it is a design philosophy about multiplicity and multi-event. The flat turn is therefore about modulation, not about enclosure, as such, indeed it is a truly processual form that constantly shifts and changes, and in many ways acts as a signpost for the future interfaces of real-time algorithmic and adaptive surfaces and experiences. The structure of control for the flat design interfaces is following that of the control society, is “short-term and [with] rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit” (Deleuze 1992). To paraphrase Deleuze: Humans are no longer in enclosures, certainly, but everywhere humans are in layers.

    manipulation_2x

    Apple uses a series of concepts to link its notion of flat design which include, aesthetic integrity, consistency, direct manipulation, feedback, metaphors, and user control (Apple 2014). Reinforcing the haptic experience of this new flat user interface has been described as building on the experience of “touching glass” to develop the “first post-Retina (Display) UI (user interface)” (Cava 2013). This is the notion of layered transparency, or better, layers of glass upon which the interface elements are painted through a logical internal structure of Z-axis layers. This laminate structure enables meaning to be conveyed through the organization of the Z-axis, both in terms of content, but also to place it within a process or the user interface system itself.

    Google, similarly, has reorganized it computational imaginary around a flattened layered paradigm of representation through the notion of material design. Matias Duarte, Google’s Vice President of Design and a Chilean computer interface designer, declared that this approach uses the notion that it “is a sufficiently advanced form of paper as to be indistinguishable from magic” (Bohn 2014). But magic which has constraints and affordances built into it, “if there were no constraints, it’s not design — it’s art” Google claims (see Interactive Material Design) (Bohn 2014). Indeed, Google argues that the “material metaphor is the unifying theory of a rationalized space and a system of motion”, further arguing:

    The fundamentals of light, surface, and movement are key to conveying how objects move, interact, and exist in space and in relation to each other. Realistic lighting shows seams, divides space, and indicates moving parts… Motion respects and reinforces the user as the prime mover… [and together] They create hierarchy, meaning, and focus (Google 2014).

    This notion of materiality is a weird materiality in as much as Google “steadfastly refuse to name the new fictional material, a decision that simultaneously gives them more flexibility and adds a level of metaphysical mysticism to the substance. That’s also important because while this material follows some physical rules, it doesn’t create the “trap” of skeuomorphism. The material isn’t a one-to-one imitation of physical paper, but instead it’s ‘magical’” (Bohn 2014). Google emphasises this connection, arguing that “in material design, every pixel drawn by an application resides on a sheet of paper. Paper has a flat background color and can be sized to serve a variety of purposes. A typical layout is composed of multiple sheets of paper” (Google Layout, 2014). The stress on material affordances, paper for Google and glass for Apple are crucial to understanding their respective stances in relation to flat design philosophy.[2]

    • Glass (Apple): Translucency, transparency, opaqueness, limpidity and pellucidity.
    • Paper (Google): Opaque, cards, slides, surfaces, tangibility, texture, lighted, casting shadows.
    Paradigmatic Substances for Materiality

    In contrast to the layers of glass paper-notes-templatethat inform the logics of transparency, opaqueness and translucency of Apple’s flat design, Google uses the notion of remediated “paper” as a digital material, that is this “material environment is a 3D space, which means all objects have x, y, and z dimensions. The z-axis is perpendicularly aligned to the plane of the display, with the positive z-axis extending towards the viewer.  Every sheet of material occupies a single position along the z-axis and has a standard 1dp thickness” (Google 2014). One might think then of Apple as painting on layers of glass, and Google as thin paper objects (material) placed upon background paper. However a key difference lies in the use of light and shadow in Google’s notion which enables the light source, located in a similar position to the user of the interface, to cast shadows of the material objects onto the objects and sheets of paper that lie beneath them (see Jitkoff 2014). Nonetheless, a laminate structure is key to the representational grammar that constitutes both of these platforms.

    armin_hofmann_2
    Armin Hofmann, head of the graphic design department at the Schule für Gestaltung Basel (Basel School of Design) and was instrumental in developing the graphic design style known as the Swiss Style. Designs from 1958 and 1959.

    Interestingly, both design strategies emerge from an engagement with and reconfiguration of the principles of design that draw from the Swiss style (sometimes called the International Typographic Style) in design (Ashghar 2014, Turner 2014).[3] This approach emerged in the 1940s, and

    mainly focused on the use of grids, sans-serif typography, and clean hierarchy of content and layout. During the 40’s and 50’s, Swiss design often included a combination of a very large photograph with simple and minimal typography (Turner 2014).

    The design grammar of the Swiss style has been combined with minimalism and the principle of “responsive design”, that is that the materiality and specificity of the device should be responsive to the interface and context being displayed. Minimalism is a “term used in the 20th century, in particular from the 1960s, to describe a style characterized by an impersonal austerity, plain geometric configurations and industrially processed materials” (MoMA 2014).

    img-robert-morris-1_125225955286
    Robert Morris: Untitled (Scatter Piece), 1968-69, felt, steel, lead, zinc, copper, aluminum, brass, dimensions variable; at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York. Photo Genevieve Hanson. All works © 2010 Robert Morris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

    Robert Morris, one of the principle artists of Minimalism, and author of the influential Notes on Sculpture used “simple, regular and irregular polyhedrons. Influenced by theories in psychology and phenomenology” which he argued “established in the mind of the beholder ‘strong gestalt sensation’, whereby form and shape could be grasped intuitively” (MoMA 2014).[4]

    The implications of these two competing world-views are far-reaching in that much of the worlds initial contact, or touch points, for data services, real-time streams and computational power is increasingly through the platforms controlled by these two companies. However, they are also deeply influential across the programming industries, and we see alternatives and multiple reconfigurations in relation to the challenge raised by the “flattened” design paradigms. That is, they both represent, if only in potentia, a situation of a power relation and through this an ideological veneer on computation more generally. Further, with the proliferation of computational devices – and the screenic imaginary associated with them in the contemporary computational condition – there appears a new logic which lies behind, justifies and legitimates these design methodologies.

    It seems to me that these new flat design philosophies, in the broad sense, produce an order in precepts and concepts in order to give meaning and purpose not only in the interactions with computational platforms, but also more widely in terms of everyday life. Flat design and material design are competing philosophies that offer alternative patterns of both creation and interpretation, which are meant to have not only interface design implications, but more broadly in the ordering of concepts and ideas, the practices and the experience of computational technologies broadly conceived. Another way to put this could be to think about these moves as being a computational founding, the generation of, or argument for, an axial framework for building, reconfiguration and preservation.

    Indeed, flat design provides and more importantly serves, as a translational or metaphorical heuristic for both re-presenting the computational, but also teaches consumers and users how to use and manipulate new complex computational systems and stacks. In other words, in a striking visual technique flat design communicates the vertical structure of the computational stack, on which the Stack corporations are themselves constituted. But also begins to move beyond the specificity of the device as privileged site of a computational interface interaction from beginning to end. For example, interface techniques are abstracted away from the specificity of the device, for example through Apple’s “handoff” continuity framework which also potentially changes reading and writing practices in interesting ways and new use-cases for wearables and nearables.

    These new interface paradigms, introduced by the flat turn, have very interesting possibilities for the application of interface criticism, through unpacking and exploring the major trends and practices of the Stacks, that is, the major technology companies. I think that further than this, the notion of layers are instrumental in mediating the experience of an increasingly algorithmic society (e.g. think dashboards, personal information systems, quantified self, etc.), and as such provide an interpretative frame for a world of computational patterns but also a constituting grammar for building these systems in the first place. There is an element in which the notion of the postdigital may also be a useful way into thinking about the question of the link between art, computation and design given here (see Berry and Dieter, forthcoming) but also the importance of notions of materiality for the conceptualization deployed by designers working within both the flat design and material design paradigms – whether of paper, glass, or some other “material” substance.[5]
    _____

    David M. Berry is Reader in the School of Media, Film and Music at the University of Sussex. He writes widely on computation and the digital and blogs at Stunlaw. He is the author of Critical Theory and the Digital, The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age , Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source, editor of Understanding Digital Humanities and co-editor of Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation And Design. He is also a Director of the Sussex Humanities Lab.

    Back to the essay
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    Notes

    [1] Many thanks to Michael Dieter and Søren Pold for the discussion which inspired this post.

    [2] The choice of paper and glass as the founding metaphors for the flat design philosophies of Google and Apple raise interesting questions for the way in which these companies articulate the remediation of other media forms, such as books, magazines, newspapers, music, television and film, etc. Indeed, the very idea of “publication” and the material carrier for the notion of publication is informed by the materiality, even if only a notional affordance given by this conceptualization. It would be interesting to see how the book is remediated through each of the design philosophies that inform both companies, for example.

    [3] One is struck by the posters produced in the Swiss style which date to the 1950s and 60s but which today remind one of the mobile device screens of the 21st Century.

    [4] There is also some interesting links to be explored between the Superflat style and postmodern art movement, founded by the artist Takashi Murakami, which is influenced by manga and anime, both in terms of the aesthetic but also in relation to the cultural moment in which “flatness” is linked to “shallow emptiness.”

    [5] There is some interesting work to be done in thinking about the non-visual aspects of flat theory, such as the increasing use of APIs, such as the RESTful api, but also sound interfaces that use “flat” sound to indicate spatiality in terms of interface or interaction design. There are also interesting implications for the design thinking implicit in the Apple Watch, and the Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality platforms of Oculus Rift, Microsoft HoloLens, Meta and Magic Leap.

    Bibliography
  • What Drives Automation?

    What Drives Automation?

    glass-cagea review of Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us (W.W. Norton, 2014)
    by Mike Bulajewski
    ~

    Debates about digital technology are often presented in terms of stark polar opposites: on one side, cyber-utopians who champion the new and the cutting edge, and on the other, cyber-skeptics who hold on to obsolete technology. The framing is one-dimensional in the general sense that it is superficial, but also in a more precise and mathematical sense that it implicitly treats the development of technology as linear. Relative to the present, there are only two possible positions and two possible directions to move; one can be either for or against, ahead or behind.[1]

    Although often invoked as a prelude to transcending the division and offering a balanced assessment, in describing the dispute in these pro or con terms one has already betrayed one’s orientation, tilting the field against the critical voice by assigning it an untenable position. Criticizing a new technology is misconstrued as a simple defense of the old technology or of no technology, which turns legitimate criticism into mere conservative fustiness, a refusal to adapt and a failure to accept change.

    Few critics of technology match these descriptions, and those who do, like the anarcho-primitivists who claim to be horrified by contemporary technology, nonetheless accede to the basic framework set by technological apologists. The two sides disagree only on the preferred direction of travel, making this brand of criticism more pro-technology than it first appears. One should not forget that the high-tech futurism of Silicon Valley is supplemented by the balancing counterweight of countercultural primitivism, with Burning Man expeditions, technology-free Waldorf schools for children of tech workers, spouses who embrace premodern New Age beliefs, romantic agrarianism, and restorative digital detox retreats featuring yoga and meditation. The diametric opposition between pro- and anti-technology is internal to the technology industry, perhaps a symptom of the repression of genuine debate about the merits of its products.

    ***

    Nicholas Carr’s most recent book, The Glass Cage: Automation and Us, is a critique of the use of automation and a warning of its human consequences, but to conclude, as some reviewers have, that he is against automation or against technology as such is to fall prey to this one-dimensional fallacy.[2]

    The book considers the use of automation in areas like medicine, architecture, finance, manufacturing and law, but it begins with an example that’s closer to home for most of us: driving a car. Transportation and wayfinding are minor themes throughout the book, and with Google and large automobile manufacturers promising to put self-driving cars on the street within a decade, the impact of automation in this area may soon be felt in our daily lives like never before. Early in the book, we are introduced to problems that human factors engineers working with airline autopilot systems have discovered and may be forewarnings of a future of the unchecked automating of transportation.

    Carr discusses automation bias—the tendency for operators to assume the system is correct and external signals that contradict it are wrong—and the closely related problem of automation complacency, which occurs when operators assume the system is infallible and so abandon their supervisory role. These problems have been linked to major air disasters and are behind less-catastrophic events like oblivious drivers blindly following their navigation systems into nearby lakes or down flights of stairs.

    The chapter dedicated to deskilling is certain to raise the ire of skeptical readers because it begins with an account of the negative impact of GPS technology on Inuit hunters who live in the remote northern reaches of Canada. As GPS devices proliferated, hunters lost what a tribal elder describes as “the wisdom and knowledge of the Inuit”: premodern wayfinding methods that rely on natural phenomena like wind, stars, tides and snowdrifts to navigate. Inuit wayfinding skills are truly impressive. The anthropologist Claudio Aporta reports traveling with a hunter across twenty square kilometers of flat featureless land as he located seven fox traps that he had never seen before, set by his uncle twenty five years prior. These talents have been eroded as Inuit hunters have adopted GPS devices that seem to do the job equally well, but have the unexpected side effect of increasing injuries and deaths as hunters succumb to equipment malfunctions and the twin perils of automation complacency and bias.

    Laboring under the misconceptions of the one-dimensional fallacy, it would be natural to take this as a smoking gun of Carr’s alleged anti-technology perspective and privileging of the premodern, but the closing sentences of the chapter point us away from that conclusion:

    We ignore the ways that software programs and automated systems might be reconfigured so as not to weaken our grasp on the world but to strengthen it. For, as human factors researchers and other experts on automation have found, there are ways to break the glass cage without losing the many benefits computers grant us. (151)

    These words segue into the following chapter, where Carr identifies the dominant philosophy that designs automation technologies to inadvertently produce problems that he identified earlier: technology-centered automation. This approach to design is distrustful of humans, perhaps even misanthropic. It views us as weak, inefficient, unreliable and error-prone, and seeks to minimize our involvement in the work to be done. It institutes a division of labor between human and machine that gives the bulk of the work over to the machine, only seeking human input in anomalous situations. This philosophy is behind modern autopilot systems that hand off control to human pilots for only a few minutes in a flight.

    The fundamental argument of the book is that this design philosophy can lead to undesirable consequences. Carr seeks an alternative he calls human-centered automation, an approach that ensures the human operator remains engaged and alert. Autopilot systems designed with this philosophy might return manual control to the pilots at irregular intervals to ensure they remain vigilant and practice their flying skills. It could provide tactile feedback of its operations so that pilots are involved in a visceral way rather than passively monitoring screens. Decision support systems like those used in healthcare could take a secondary role of reviewing and critiquing a decision made by a doctor made rather than the other way around.

    The Glass Cage calls for a fundamental shift in how we understand error. Under the current regime, an error is an inefficiency or an inconvenience, to be avoided at all costs. As defined by Carr, a human-centered approach to design treats error differently, viewing it as an opportunity for learning. He illustrates this with a personal experience of repeatedly failing a difficult mission in the video game Red Dead Redemption, and points to the satisfaction of finally winning a difficult game as an example of what is lost when technology is designed to be too easy. He offers video games as a model for the kinds of technologies he would like to see: tools that engage us in difficult challenges, that encourage us to develop expertise and to experience flow states.

    But Carr has an idiosyncratic definition of human-centered design which becomes apparent when he counterposes his position against the prominent design consultant Peter Merholz. Echoing premises almost universally adopted by designers, Merholz calls for simple, frictionless interfaces and devices that don’t require a great deal of skill, memorization or effort to operate. Carr objects that that eliminates learning, skill building and mental engagement—perhaps a valid criticism, but it’s strange to suggest that this reflects a misanthropic technology-centered approach.

    A frequently invoked maxim of human-centered design is that technology should adapt to people, rather than people adapting to technology. In practice, the primary consideration is helping the user achieve his or her goal as efficiently and effectively as possible, removing unnecessary obstacles and delays that stand in the way. Carr argues for the value of challenges, difficulties and demands placed on users to learn and hone skills, all of which fall under the prohibited category of people adapting to technology.

    In his example of playing Red Dead Redemption, Carr prizes the repeated failure and frustration before finally succeeding at the game. From the lens of human-centered design, that kind of experience is seen as a very serious problem that should be eliminated quickly, which is probably why this kind of design is rarely employed at game studios. In fact, it doesn’t really make sense to think of a game player as having a goal, at least not from the traditional human-centered standpoint. The driver of a car has a goal: to get from point A to point B; a Facebook user wants to share pictures with friends; the user of a word processor wants to write a document; and so on. As designers, we want to make these tasks easy, efficient and frictionless. The most obvious way of framing game play is to say that the player’s goal is to complete the game. We would then proceed to remove all obstacles, frustrations, challenges and opportunities for error that stand in the way so that they may accomplish this goal more efficiently, and then there would be nothing left for them to do. We would have ruined the game.

    This is not necessarily the result of a misanthropic preference for technology over humanity, though it may be. It is also the likely outcome of a perfectly sincere and humanistic belief that we shouldn’t inconvenience the user with difficulties that stand in the way of their goal. As human factors researcher David Woods puts it, “The road to technology-centered systems is paved with human-centered intentions,”[3] a phrasing which suggests that these two philosophies aren’t quite as distinct as Carr would have us believe.

    Carr’s vision of human-centered design differs markedly from contemporary design practice, which stresses convenience, simplicity, efficiency for the user and ease of use. In calling for less simplicity and convenience, he is in effect critical of really existing human-centeredness, and that troubles any reading of The Glass Cage that views it a book about restoring our humanity in a world driven mad by machines.

    It might be better described as a book about restoring one conception of humanity in a world driven mad by another. It is possible to argue that the difference between the two appears in psychoanalytic theory as the difference between drive and desire. The user engages with a technology in order to achieve a goal because they perceive themselves as lacking something. Through the use of this tool, they believe they can regain it and fill in this lack. It follows that designers ought to help the user achieve their goal—to reach their desire—as quickly and efficiently as possible because this will satisfy them and make them happy.

    But the insight of psychoanalysis is that lack is ontological and irreducible, it cannot be filled in any permanent way because any concrete lack we experience is in fact metonymic for a constitutive lack of being. As a result, as desiring subjects we are caught in an endless loop of seeking out that object of desire, feeling disappointed when we find it because it didn’t fulfill our fantasies and then finding a new object to chase. The alternative is to shift from desire to drive, turning this failure into a triumph. Slavoj Žižek describes drive as follows: “the very failure to reach its goal, the repetition of this failure, the endless circulation around the object, generates a satisfaction of its own.”[4]

    This satisfaction is perhaps what Carr aims at when he celebrates the frustrations and challenges of video games and of work in general. That video games can’t be made more efficient without ruining them indicates that what players really want is for their goal to be thwarted, evoking the psychoanalytic maxim that summarizes the difference between desire and drive: from the missing/lost object, to loss itself as an object. This point is by no means tangential. Early on, Carr introduces the concept of miswanting, defined as the tendency to desire what we don’t really want and won’t make us happy—in this case, leisure and ease over work and challenge. Psychoanalysts holds that all human wanting (within the register of desire) is miswanting. Through fantasy, we imagine an illusory fullness or completeness of which actual experience always falls short.[5]

    Carr’s revaluation of challenge, effort and, ultimately, dissatisfaction cannot represent a correction of the error of miswanting­–of rediscovering the true source of pleasure and happiness in work. Instead, it radicalizes the error: we should learn to derive a kind of satisfaction from our failure to enjoy. Or, in the final chapter, as Carr says of the farmer in Robert Frost’s poem Mowing, who is hard at work and yet far from the demands of productivity: “He’s not seeking some greater truth beyond the work. The work is the truth.”

    ***

    Nicholas Carr has a track record of provoking designers to rethink their assumptions. With The Shallows, along with other authors making related arguments, he influenced software developers to create a new class of tools that cut off the internet, eliminate notifications or block social media web sites to help us concentrate. Starting with OS X Lion in 2011, Apple began offering a full screen mode that hides distracting interface elements and background windows from inactive applications.

    What transformative effects could The Glass Cage have on the way software is designed? The book certainly offers compelling reasons to question whether ease of use should always be paramount. Advocates for simplicity are rarely challenged, but they may now find themselves facing unexpected objections. Software could become more challenging and difficult to use—not in the sense of a recalcitrant WiFi router that emits incomprehensible error codes, but more like a game. Designers might draw inspiration from video games, perhaps looking to classics like the first level of Super Mario Brothers, a masterpiece of level design that teaches the fundamental rules of the game without ever requiring the player to read the manual or step through a tutorial.

    Everywhere that automation now reigns, new possibilities announce themselves. A spell checker might stop to teach spelling rules, or make a game out of letting the user take a shot at correcting mistakes it has detected. What if there was a GPS navigation device that enhanced our sense of spatial awareness rather than eroding it, that engaged our attention on to the road rather than let us tune out. Could we build an app that helps drivers maintain good their skills by challenging them to adopt safer and more fuel-efficient driving techniques?

    Carr points out that the preference for easy-to-use technologies that reduce users’ engagement is partly a consequence of economic interests and cost reduction policies that profit from the deskilling and reduction of the workforce, and these aren’t dislodged simply by pressing for new design philosophies. But to his credit, Carr has written two best-selling books aimed at the general interest reader on the fairly obscure topic of human-computer interaction. User experience designers working in the technology industry often face an uphill battle in trying to build human-centered products (however that is defined). When these matters attract public attention and debate, it makes their job a little easier.

    _____

    Mike Bulajewski (@mrteacup) is a user experience designer with a Master’s degree from University of Washington’s Human Centered Design and Engineering program. He writes about technology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, design, ideology & Slavoj Žižek at MrTeacup.org. He has previously written about the Spike Jonze film Her for The b2 Review Digital Studies section.

    Back to the essay

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    [1] Differences between individual technologies are ignored and replaced by the monolithic master category of Technology. Jonah Lehrer’s review of Nicholas Carr’s 2010 book The Shallows in the New York Times exemplifies such thinking. Lehrer finds contradictory evidence against Carr’s argument that the internet is weakening our mental faculties in scientific studies that attribute cognitive improvements to playing video games, a non sequitur which gains meaning only by subsuming these two very different technologies under a single general category of Technology. Evgeny Morozov is one of the sharpest critics of this tendency. Here one is reminded of his retort in his article “Ghosts in the Machine” (2013): “That dentistry has been beneficial to civilization tells us very little about the wonders of data-mining.”

    [2] There are a range of possible causes for this constrictive linear geometry: a tendency to see a progressive narrative of history; a consumerist notion of agency which only allows shoppers to either upgrade or stick with what they have; or the oft-cited binary logic of digital technology. One may speculate about the influence of the popular technology marketing book by Geoffrey A. Moore, Crossing the Chasm (2014) whose titular chasm is the gap between the elite group of innovators and early adopters—the avant-garde—and the recalcitrant masses bringing up the rear who must be persuaded to sign on to their vision.

    [3] David D. Woods and David Tinapple (1999). “W3: Watching Human Factors Watch People at Work.” Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (1999).

    [4] Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (2006), 63.

    [5] The cultural and political implications of this shift are explored at length in Todd McGowan’s two books The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment (2003) and Enjoying What We Don’t Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis (2013).

  • Frank Pasquale — To Replace or Respect: Futurology as if People Mattered

    Frank Pasquale — To Replace or Respect: Futurology as if People Mattered

    a review of Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies (W.W. Norton, 2014)

    by Frank Pasquale

    ~

    Business futurism is a grim discipline. Workers must either adapt to the new economic realities, or be replaced by software. There is a “race between education and technology,” as two of Harvard’s most liberal economists insist. Managers should replace labor with machines that require neither breaks nor sick leave. Superstar talents can win outsize rewards in the new digital economy, as they now enjoy global reach, but they will replace thousands or millions of also-rans. Whatever can be automated, will be, as competitive pressures make fairly paid labor a luxury.

    Thankfully, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee’s The Second Machine Age (2MA)  downplays these zero-sum tropes. Brynjolffson & McAfee (B&M) argue that the question of distribution of the gains from automation is just as important as the competitions for dominance it accelerates. 2MA invites readers to consider how societies will decide what type of bounty from automation they want, and what is wanted first.  The standard, supposedly neutral economic response (“whatever the people demand, via consumer sovereignty”) is unconvincing. As inequality accelerates, the top 5% (of income earners) do 35% of the consumption. The top 1% is responsible for an even more disproportionate share of investment. Its richest members can just as easily decide to accelerate the automation of the wealth defense industry as they can allocate money to robotic construction, transportation, or mining.

    A humane agenda for automation would prioritize innovations that complement (jobs that ought to be) fulfilling vocations, and substitute machines for dangerous or degrading work. Robotic meat-cutters make sense; robot day care is something to be far more cautious about. Most importantly, retarding automation that controls, stigmatizes, and cheats innocent people, or sets up arms races with zero productive gains, should be a much bigger part of public discussions of the role of machines and software in ordering human affairs.

    2MA may set the stage for such a human-centered automation agenda. Its diagnosis of the problem of rapid automation (described in Part I below) is compelling. Its normative principles (II) are eclectic and often humane. But its policy vision (III) is not up to the challenge of channeling and sequencing automation. This review offers an alternative, while acknowledging the prescience and insight of B&M’s work.

    I. Automation’s Discontents

    For B&M, the acceleration of automation ranks with the development of agriculture, or the industrial revolution, as one of the “big stories” of human history (10-12). They offer an account of the “bounty and spread” to come from automation. “Bounty” refers to the increasing “volume, variety, and velocity” of any imaginable service or good, thanks to its digital reproduction or simulation (via, say, 3-D printing or robots). “Spread” is “ever-bigger differences among people in economic success” that they believe to be just as much an “economic consequence” of automation as bounty.[1]

    2MA briskly describes various human workers recently replaced by computers.  The poor souls who once penned corporate earnings reports for newspapers? Some are now replaced by Narrative Science, which seamlessly integrates new data into ready-made templates (35). Concierges should watch out for Siri (65). Forecasters of all kinds (weather, home sales, stock prices) are being shoved aside by the verdicts of “big data” (68). “Quirky,” a startup, raised $90 million by splitting the work of making products between a “crowd” that “votes on submissions, conducts research, suggest improvements, names and brands products, and drives sales” (87), and Quirky itself, which “handles engineering, manufacturing, and distribution.” 3D printing might even disintermediate firms like Quirky (36).

    In short, 2MA presents a kaleidoscope of automation realities and opportunities. B&M skillfully describe the many ways automation both increases the “size of the pie,” economically, and concentrates the resulting bounty among the talented, the lucky, and the ruthless. B&M emphasize that automation is creeping up the value chain, potentially substituting machines for workers paid better than the average.

    What’s missing from the book are the new wave of conflicts that would arise if those at very top of the value chain (or, less charitably, the rent and tribute chain) were to be replaced by robots and algorithms. When BART workers went on strike, Silicon Valley worthies threatened to replace them with robots. But one could just as easily call for the venture capitalists to be replaced with algorithms. Indeed, one venture capital firm added an algorithm to its board in 2013.  Travis Kalanick, the CEO of Uber, responded to a question on driver wage demands by bringing up the prospect of robotic drivers. But given Uber’s multiple legal and PR fails in 2014, a robot would probably would have done a better job running the company than Kalanick.

    That’s not “crazy talk” of communistic visions along the lines of Marx’s “expropriate the expropriators,” or Chile’s failed Cybersyn.[2]  Thiel Fellow and computer programming prodigy Vitaly Bukherin has stated that automation of the top management functions at firms like Uber and AirBnB would be “trivially easy.”[3] Automating the automators may sound like a fantasy, but it is a natural outgrowth of mantras (e.g., “maximize shareholder value”) that are commonplaces among the corporate elite. To attract and retain the support of investors, a firm must obtain certain results, and the short-run paths to attaining them (such as cutting wages, or financial engineering) are increasingly narrow.  And in today’s investment environment of rampant short-termism, the short is often the only term there is.

    In the long run, a secure firm can tolerate experiments. Little wonder, then, that the largest firm at the cutting edge of automation—Google—has a secure near-monopoly in search advertising in numerous markets. As Peter Thiel points out in his recent From Zero to One, today’s capitalism rewards the best monopolist, not the best competitor. Indeed, even the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division appeared to agree with Thiel in its 1995 guidelines on antitrust enforcement in innovation markets. It viewed intellectual property as a good monopoly, the rightful reward to innovators for developing a uniquely effective process or product. And its partner in federal antitrust enforcement, the Federal Trade Commission, has been remarkably quiescent in response to emerging data monopolies.

    II. Propertizing Data

    For B&M, intellectual property—or, at least, the returns accruing to intellectual insight or labor—plays a critical role in legitimating inequalities arising out of advanced technologies.  They argue that “in the future, ideas will be the real scarce inputs in the world—scarcer than both labor and capital—and the few who provide good ideas will reap huge rewards.”[4] But many of the leading examples of profitable automation are not “ideas” per se, or even particularly ingenious algorithms. They are brute force feats of pattern recognition: for example, Google’s studying past patterns of clicks to see what search results, and what ads, are personalized to delight and persuade each of its hundreds of millions of users. The critical advantage there is the data, not the skill in working with it.[5] Google will demur, but if they were really confident, they’d license the data to other firms, confident that others couldn’t best their algorithmic prowess.  They don’t, because the data is their critical, self-reinforcing advantage. It is a commonplace in big data literatures to say that the more data one has, the more valuable any piece of it becomes—something Googlers would agree with, as long as antitrust authorities aren’t within earshot.

    As sensors become more powerful and ubiquitous, feats of automated service provision and manufacture become more easily imaginable.  The Baxter robot, for example, merely needs to have a trainer show it how to move in order to ape the trainer’s own job. (One is reminded of the stories of US workers flying to India to train their replacements how to do their job, back in the day when outsourcing was the threat du jour to U.S. living standards.)

    how to train a robot
    How to train a Baxter robot. Image source: Inc. 

    From direct physical interaction with a robot, it is a short step to, say, programmed holographic or data-driven programming.  For example, a surveillance camera on a worker could, after a period of days, months, or years, potentially record every movement or statement of the worker, and replicate it, in response to whatever stimuli led to the prior movements or statements of the worker.

    B&M appear to assume that such data will be owned by the corporations that monitor their own workers.  For example, McDonalds could train a camera on every cook and cashier, then download the contents into robotic replicas. But it’s just as easy to imagine a legal regime where, say, workers’ rights to the data describing their movements would be their property, and firms would need to negotiate to purchase the rights to it.  If dance movements can be copyrighted, so too can the sweeps and wipes of a janitor. Consider, too, that the extraordinary advances in translation accomplished by programs like Google Translate are in part based on translations by humans of United Nations’ documents released into the public domain.[6] Had the translators’ work not been covered by “work-made-for-hire” or similar doctrines, they might well have kept their copyrights, and shared in the bounty now enjoyed by Google.[7]

    Of course, the creativity of translation may be greater than that displayed by a janitor or cashier. Copyright purists might thus reason that the merger doctrine denies copyrightability to the one best way (or small suite of ways) of doing something, since the idea of the movement and its expression cannot be separated. Grant that, and one could still imagine privacy laws giving workers the right to negotiate over how, and how pervasively, they are watched. There are myriad legal regimes governing, in minute detail, how information flows and who has control over it.

    I do not mean to appropriate here Jaron Lanier’s ideas about micropayments, promising as they may be in areas like music or journalism. A CEO could find some critical mass of stockers or cooks or cashiers to mimic even if those at 99% of stores demanded royalties for the work (of) being watched. But the flexibility of legal regimes of credit, control, and compensation is under-recognized. Living in a world where employers can simply record everything their employees do, or Google can simply copy every website that fails to adopt “robots.txt” protection, is not inevitable. Indeed, according to renowned intellectual property scholar Oren Bracha, Google had to “stand copyright on its head” to win that default.[8]

    Thus B&M are wise to acknowledge the contestability of value in the contemporary economy.  For example, they build on the work of MIT economists Daron Acemoglu and David Autor to demonstrate that “skill biased technical change” is a misleading moniker for trends in wage levels.  The “tasks that machines can do better than humans” are not always “low-skill” ones (139). There is a fair amount of play in the joints in the sequencing of automation: sometimes highly skilled workers get replaced before those with a less complex and difficult-to-learn repertoire of abilities.  B&M also show that the bounty predictably achieved via automation could compensate the “losers” (of jobs or other functions in society) in the transition to a more fully computerized society. By seriously considering the possibility of a basic income (232), they evince a moral sensibility light years ahead of the “devil-take-the-hindmost” school of cyberlibertarianism.

    III. Proposals for Reform

    Unfortunately, some of B&M’s other ideas for addressing the possibility of mass unemployment in the wake of automation are less than convincing.  They praise platforms like Lyft for providing new opportunities for work (244), perhaps forgetting that, earlier in the book, they described the imminent arrival of the self-driving car (14-15). Of course, one can imagine decades of tiered driving, where the wealthy get self-driving cars first, and car-less masses turn to the scrambling drivers of Uber and Lyft to catch rides. But such a future seems more likely to end in a deflationary spiral than  sustainable growth and equitable distribution of purchasing power. Like the generation traumatized by the Great Depression, millions subjected to reverse auctions for their labor power, forced to price themselves ever lower to beat back the bids of the technologically unemployed, are not going to be in a mood to spend. Learned helplessness, retrenchment, and miserliness are just as likely a consequence as buoyant “re-skilling” and self-reinvention.

    Thus B&M’s optimism about what they call the “peer economy” of platform-arranged production is unconvincing.  A premier platform of digital labor matching—Amazon’s Mechanical Turk—has occasionally driven down the wage for “human intelligence tasks” to a penny each. Scholars like Trebor Scholz and Miriam Cherry have discussed the sociological and legal implications of platforms that try to disclaim all responsibility for labor law or other regulations. Lilly Irani’s important review of 2MA shows just how corrosive platform capitalism has become. “With workers hidden in the technology, programmers can treat [them] like bits of code and continue to think of themselves as builders, not managers,” she observes in a cutting aside on the self-image of many “maker” enthusiasts.

    The “sharing economy” is a glidepath to precarity, accelerating the same fate for labor in general as “music sharing services” sealed for most musicians. The lived experience of many “TaskRabbits,” which B&M boast about using to make charts for their book, cautions against reliance on disintermediation as a key to opportunity in the new digital economy. Sarah Kessler describes making $1.94 an hour labeling images for a researcher who put the task for bid on Mturk.  The median active TaskRabbit in her neighborhood made $120 a week; Kessler cleared $11 an hour on her best day.

    Resistance is building, and may create fairer terms online.  For example, Irani has helped develop a “Turkopticon” to help Turkers rate and rank employers on the site. Both Scholz and Mike Konczal have proposed worker cooperatives as feasible alternatives to Uber, offering drivers both a fairer share of revenues, and more say in their conditions of work. But for now, the peer economy, as organized by Silicon Valley and start-ups, is not an encouraging alternative to traditional employment. It may, in fact, be worse.

    Therefore, I hope B&M are serious when they say “Wild Ideas [are] Welcomed” (245), and mention the following:

    • Provide vouchers for basic necessities. . . .
    • Create a national mutual fund distributing the ownership of capital widely and perhaps inalienably, providing a dividend stream to all citizens and assuring the capital returns do not become too highly concentrated.
    • Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps to clean up the environment, build infrastructure.

    Speaking of the non-automatable, we could add the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to the CCC suggestion above.  Revalue the arts properly, and the transition may even add to GDP.

    Soyer, Artists on the WPA
    Moses Soyer, “Artists on WPA” (1935). Image source: Smithsonian American Art Museum

    Unfortunately, B&M distance themselves from the ideas, saying, “we include them not necessarily to endorse them, but instead to spur further thinking about what kinds of interventions will be necessary as machines continue to race ahead” (246).  That is problematic, on at least two levels.

    First, a sophisticated discussion of capital should be at the core of an account of automation,  not its periphery. The authors are right to call for greater investment in education, infrastructure, and basic services, but they need a more sophisticated account of how that is to be arranged in an era when capital is extraordinarily concentrated, its owners have power over the political process, and most show little to no interest in long-term investment in the skills and abilities of the 99%. Even the purchasing power of the vast majority of consumers is of little import to those who can live off lightly taxed capital gains.

    Second, assuming that “machines continue to race ahead” is a dodge, a refusal to name the responsible parties running the machines.  Someone is designing and purchasing algorithms and robots. Illah Reza Nourbaksh’s Robot Futures suggests another metaphor:

    Today most nonspecialists have little say in charting the role that robots will play in our lives.  We are simply watching a new version of Star Wars scripted by research and business interests in real time, except that this script will become our actual world. . . . Familiar devices will become more aware, more interactive and more proactive; and entirely new robot creatures will share our spaces, public and private, physical and digital. . . .Eventually, we will need to read what they write, we will have to interact with them to conduct our business transactions, and we will often mediate our friendships through them.  We will even compete with them in sports, at jobs, and in business. [9]

    Nourbaksh nudges us closer to the truth, focusing on the competitive angle. But the “we” he describes is also inaccurate. There is a group that will never have to “compete” with robots at jobs or in business—rentiers. Too many of them are narrowly focused on how quickly they can replace needy workers with undemanding machines.

    For the rest of us, another question concerning automation is more appropriate: how much can we be stuck with? A black-card-toting bigshot will get the white glove treatment from AmEx; the rest are shunted into automated phone trees. An algorithm determines the shifts of retail and restaurant workers, oblivious to their needs for rest, a living wage, or time with their families.  Automated security guards, police, and prison guards are on the horizon. And for many of the “expelled,” the homines sacres, automation is a matter of life and death: drone technology can keep small planes on their tracks for hours, days, months—as long as it takes to execute orders.

    B&M focus on “brilliant technologies,” rather than the brutal or bumbling instances of automation.  It is fun to imagine a souped-up Roomba making the drudgery of housecleaning a thing of the past.  But domestic robots have been around since 2000, and the median wage-earner in the U.S. does not appear to be on a fast track to a Jetsons-style life of ease.[10] They are just as likely to be targeted by the algorithms of the everyday, as they are to be helped by them. Mysterious scoring systems routinely stigmatize persons, without them even knowing. They reflect the dark side of automation—and we are in the dark about them, given the protections that trade secrecy law affords their developers.

    IV. Conclusion

    Debates about robots and the workers “struggling to keep up” with them are becoming stereotyped and stale. There is the standard economic narrative of “skill-biased technical change,” which acts more as a tautological, post hoc, retrodictive, just-so story than a coherent explanation of how wages are actually shifting. There is cyberlibertarian cornucopianism, as Google’s Ray Kurzweil and Eric Schmidt promise there is nothing to fear from an automated future. There is dystopianism, whether intended as a self-preventing prophecy, or entertainment. Each side tends to talk past the other, taking for granted assumptions and values that its putative interlocutors reject out of hand.

    Set amidst this grim field, 2MA is a clear advance. B&M are attuned to possibilities for the near and far future, and write about each in accessible and insightful ways.  The authors of The Second Machine Age claim even more for it, billing it as a guide to epochal change in our economy. But it is better understood as the kind of “big idea” book that can name a social problem, underscore its magnitude, and still dodge the elaboration of solutions controversial enough to scare off celebrity blurbers.

    One of 2MA’s blurbers, Clayton Christensen, offers a backhanded compliment that exposes the core weakness of the book. “[L]earners and teachers alike are in a perpetual mode of catching up with what is possible. [The Second Machine Age] frames a future that is genuinely exciting!” gushes Christensen, eager to fold automation into his grand theory of disruption. Such a future may be exciting for someone like Christensen, a millionaire many times over who won’t lack for food, medical care, or housing if his forays fail. But most people do not want to be in “perpetually catching up” mode. They want secure and stable employment, a roof over their heads, decent health care and schooling, and some other accoutrements of middle class life. Meaning is found outside the economic sphere.

    Automation could help stabilize and cheapen the supply of necessities, giving more persons the time and space to enjoy pursuits of their own choosing. Or it could accelerate arms races of various kinds: for money, political power, armaments, spying, stock trading. As long as purchasing power alone—whether of persons or corporations—drives the scope and pace of automation, there is little hope that the “brilliant technologies” B&M describe will reliably lighten burdens that the average person experiences. They may just as easily entrench already great divides.

    All too often, the automation literature is focused on replacing humans, rather than respecting their hopes, duties, and aspirations. A central task of educators, managers, and business leaders should be finding ways to complement a workforce’s existing skills, rather than sweeping that workforce aside. That does not simply mean creating workers with skill sets that better “plug into” the needs of machines, but also, doing the opposite: creating machines that better enhance and respect the abilities and needs of workers.  That would be a “machine age” welcoming for all, rather than one calibrated to reflect and extend the power of machine owners.

    _____

    Frank Pasquale (@FrankPasquale) is a Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law. His recent book, The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms that Control Money and Information (Harvard University Press, 2015), develops a social theory of reputation, search, and finance.  He blogs regularly at Concurring Opinions. He has received a commission from Triple Canopy to write and present on the political economy of automation. He is a member of the Council for Big Data, Ethics, and Society, and an Affiliate Fellow of Yale Law School’s Information Society Project. He is a frequent contributor to The b2 Review Digital Studies section.

    Back to the essay
    _____

    [1] One can quibble with the idea of automation as necessarily entailing “bounty”—as Yves Smith has repeatedly demonstrated, computer systems can just as easily “crapify” a process once managed well by humans. Nor is “spread” a necessary consequence of automation; well-distributed tools could well counteract it. It is merely a predictable consequence, given current finance and business norms and laws.

    [2] For a definition of “crazy talk,” see Neil Postman, Stupid Talk, Crazy Talk: How We Defeat Ourselves by the Way We Talk and What to Do About It (Delacorte, 1976). For Postman, “stupid talk” can be corrected via facts, whereas “crazy talk” “establishes different purposes and functions than the ones we normally expect.” If we accept the premise of labor as a cost to be minimized, what better to cut than the compensation of the highest paid persons?

    [3] Conversation with Sam Frank at the Swiss Institute, Dec. 16, 2014, sponsored by Triple Canopy.

    [4] In Brynjolfsson, McAfee, and Michael Spence, “New World Order: Labor, Capital, and Ideas in the Power Law Economy,” an article promoting the book. Unfortunately, as with most statements in this vein, B&M&S give us little idea how to identify a “good idea” other than one that “reap[s] huge rewards”—a tautology all too common in economic and business writing.

    [5] Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society (Harvard University Press, 2015).

    [6] Programs, both in the sense of particular software regimes, and the program of human and technical efforts to collect and analyze the translations that were the critical data enabling the writing of the software programs behind Google Translate.

    [9] Illah Reza Nourbaksh, Robot Futures (MIT Press, 2013), pp. xix-xx.

    [10] Erwin Prassler and Kazuhiro Kosuge, “Domestic Robotics,” in Bruno Siciliano and Oussama Khatib, eds., Springer Handbook of Robotics (Springer, 2008), p. 1258.

  • Warding Off General Ludd: The Absurdity of “The Luddite Awards”

    Warding Off General Ludd: The Absurdity of “The Luddite Awards”

    By Zachary Loeb
    ~

    Of all the dangers looming over humanity no threat is greater than that posed by the Luddites.

    If the previous sentence seems absurdly hyperbolic, know that it only seems that way because it is, in fact, quite ludicrous. It has been over two hundred years since the historic Luddites rose up against “machinery hurtful to commonality,” but as their leader the myth enrobed General Ludd was never apprehended there are always those who fear that General Ludd is still out there, waiting with sledge hammer at the ready. True, there have been some activist attempts to revive the spirit of the Luddites (such as the neo-Luddites of the late 1980s and 1990s) – but in the midst of a society enthralled by (and in thrall to) smart phones, start-ups, and large tech companies – to see Luddites lurking in every shadow is a sign of either ideology, paranoia, or both.

    Yet, such an amusing mixture of unabashed pro-technology ideology and anxiety at the possibility of any criticism of technology is on full display in the inaugural “Luddite Awards” presented by The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF). Whereas the historic Luddites needed sturdy hammers, and other such implements, to engage in machine breaking the ITIF seems to believe that the technology of today is much more fragile – it can be smashed into nothingness simply by criticism or even skepticism. As their name suggests, the ITIF is a think tank committed to the celebration of, and advocating for, technological innovation in its many forms. Thus it should not be surprising that a group committed to technological innovation would be wary of what it perceives as a growing chorus of “neo-Ludditism” that it imagines is planning to pull the plug on innovation. Therefore the ITIF has seen fit to present dishonorable “Luddite Awards” to groups it has deemed insufficiently enamored with innovation, these groups include (amongst others): The Vermont Legislature, The French Government, the organization Free Press, the National Rifle Association, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The ITIF “Luddite Awards” may mark the first time that any group has accused the Electronic Frontier Foundation of being a secret harbor for neo-Ludditism.

    luddite
    Unknown artist, “The Leader of the Luddites,” engraving, 1812 (image source: Wikipedia)

    The full report on “The 2014 ITIF Luddite Awards,” written by the ITIF’s president Robert D. Atkinson, presents the current state of technological innovation as being dangerously precarious. Though technological innovation is currently supplying people with all manner of devices, the ITIF warns against a growing movement born of neo-Ludditism that will aim to put a stop to further innovation. Today’s neo-Ludditism, in the estimation of the ITIF is distinct from the historic Luddites, and yet the goal of “ideological Ludditism” is still “to ‘smash’ today’s technology.” Granted, adherents of neo-Ludditism are not raiding factories with hammers, instead they are to be found teaching at universities, writing columns in major newspapers, disparaging technology in the media, and otherwise attempting to block the forward movement of progress. According to the ITIF (note the word “all”):

    “what is behind all ideological Ludditism is the general longing for a simpler life from the past—a life with fewer electronics, chemicals, molecules, machines, etc.” (ITIF, 3)

    Though the chorus of Ludditisim has, in the ITIF’s reckoning, grown to an unacceptable volume of late, the foundation is quick to emphasize that Ludditism is nothing new. What is new, as the ITIF puts it, is that these nefarious Luddite views have, apparently, moved from the margins and infected the larger public discourse around technology. A diverse array of figures and groups from figures like environmentalist Bill McKibben, conservative thinker James Pethokoukis, economist Paul Krugman, writers for Smithsonian Magazine, to foundations like Free Press, the EFF and the NRA – are all tarred with the epithet “Luddite.”The neo-Luddites, according to ITIF, issue warnings against unmitigated acceptance of innovation when they bring up environmental concerns, mention the possibility of jobs being displaced by technology, write somewhat approvingly of the historic Luddites, or advocate for Net Neutrality.

    While the ITIF holds to the popular, if historically inaccurate, definition of Luddite as “one who resists technological change,” their awards make clear that the ITIF would like to add to this definition the words “or even mildly opposes any technological innovation.” The ten groups awarded “Luddite Awards” are a mixture of non-profit public advocacy organizations and various governments – though the ITIF report seems to revel in attacking Bill McKibben he was not deemed worthy of an award (maybe next year). The awardees include: the NRA for opposing smart guns, The Vermont legislature for requiring the labeling of GMOS, Free Press’s support of net neutrality which is deemed as an affront to “smarter broadband networks,” news reports which “claim that ‘robots are killing jobs,” the EFF is cited as it “opposes Health IT,” and various governments in several states are reprimanded for “cracking down” on companies like Airbnb, Uber and Lyft. The ten recipients of Luddite awards may be quite surprised to find that they have been deemed adherents of neo-Ludditism, but in the view of the ITIF the actions these groups have taken indicate that General Ludd is slyly guiding their moves. Though the Luddite Awards may have a somewhat silly feeling, the ITIF cautions that the threat is serious, as the report ominously concludes:

    “But while we can’t stop the Luddites from engaging in their anti-progress, anti-innovation activities, we can recognize them for what they are: actions and ideas that are profoundly anti-progress, that if followed would mean a our children [sic] will live lives as adults nowhere near as good as the lives they could live if we instead embraced, rather than fought innovation.” (ITIF, 19)

    Credit is due to the ITIF for their ideological consistency. In putting together their list of recipients for the inaugural “Luddite Awards” – the foundation demonstrates that they are fully committed to technological innovation and they are unflagging in their support of that cause. Nevertheless, while the awards (and in particular the report accompanying the awards) may be internally ideologically consistent it is also a work of dubious historical scholarship, comical neoliberal paranoia, and evinces a profound anti-democratic tendency. Though the ITIF awards aim to target what it perceives as “neo-Ludditism” even a cursory glance at their awardees makes it abundantly clear that what the organization actually opposes is any attempt to regulate technology undertaken by a government, or advocated for by a public interest group. Even in a country as regulation averse as the contemporary United States it is still safer to defame Luddites than to simply state that you reject regulation. The ITIF carefully cloaks its ideology in the aura of terms with positive connotations such as “innovation,” “progress,” and “freedom” but these terms are only so much fresh paint over the same “free market” ideology that only values innovation, progress and freedom when they are in the service of neoliberal economic policies. Nowhere does the ITIF engage seriously with the questions of “who profits from this innovation?” “who benefits from this progress?” “is this ‘freedom’ equally distributed or does it reinforce existing inequities?” – the terms are used as ideological sledgehammers far blunter than any tool the Luddites ever used. This raw ideology is on perfect display in the very opening line of the award announcement, which reads:

    “Technological innovation is the wellspring of human progress, bringing higher standards of living, improved health, a cleaner environment, increased access to information and many other benefits.” (ITIF, 1)

    One can only applaud the ITIF for so clearly laying out their ideology at the outset, and one can only raise a skeptical eyebrow at this obvious case of the logical fallacy of Begging the Question. To claim that “technological innovation is the wellspring of human progress” is an assumption that demands proof, it is not a conclusion in and of itself. While arguments can certainly be made to support this assumption there is little in the ITIF report that suggests the ITIF is willing to engage in the type of critical reflection, which would be necessary for successfully supporting this argument (though, to be fair, the ITIF has published many other reports some of which may better lay out this claim). The further conclusions that such innovation brings “higher standards of living, improved health, a cleaner environment” and so forth are further assumptions that require proof – and in the process of demonstrating this proof one is forced (if engaging in honest argumentation) to recognize the validity of competing claims. Particularly as many of the “benefits” ITIF seeks to celebrate do not accrue evenly. True, an argument can be made that technological innovation has an important role to play in ushering in a “cleaner environment” – but tell that to somebody who lives next to an e-waste dump where mountains of the now obsolete detritus of “technological innovation” leach toxins into the soil. The ITIF report is filled with such pleasant sounding “common sense” technological assumptions that have been, at the very least, rendered highly problematic by serious works of inquiry and scholarship in the field of the history of technology. As classic works in the scholarly literature of the Science and Technology Studies field, such as Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s More Work for Mother, make clear “technological innovation” does not always live up to its claims. Granted, it is easy to imagine that the ITIF would offer a retort that simply dismisses all such scholarship as tainted by neo-Ludditism. Yet recognizing that not all “innovation” is a pure blessing does not represent a rejection of “innovation” as such – it just recognize that “innovation” is only one amongst many competing values a society must try to balance.

    Instead of engaging with critics of “technological innovation” in good faith, the ITIF jumps from one logical fallacy to another, trading circular reasoning for attacking the advocate. The author of the ITIF report seems to delight in pillorying Bill McKibben but also aims its barbs at scholars like David Noble and Neil Postman for exposing impressionable college aged minds to their “neo-Luddite” biases. That the ITIF seems unconcerned with business schools, start-up culture, and a “culture industry” that inculcates an adoration for “technological innovation” to the same “impressionable minds” is, obviously, not commented upon. However, if a foundation is attempting to argue that universities are currently a hotbed of “neo-Ludditism” than it is questionable why the ITIF should choose to signal out two professors for special invective who are both deceased – Postman died in 2003 and David Noble died in 2010.

    It almost seems as if the ITIF report cites serious humanistic critics of “technological innovation” as a way to make it seem as though it has actually wrestled with the thought of such individuals. After all, the ITIF report deigns to mention two of the most prominent thinkers in the theoretical legacy of the critique of technology, Lewis Mumford and Jacques Ellul, but it only mentions them in order to dismiss them out of hand. The irony, naturally, is that thinkers like Mumford and Ellul (to say nothing of Postman and Noble) would have not been surprised in the least by the ITIF report as their critiques of technology also included a recognition of the ways that the dominant forces in technological society (be it in the form of Ellul’s “Technique” or Mumford’s “megamachine”) depended upon the ideological fealty of those who saw their own best interests as aligning with that of the new technological regimes of power. Indeed, the ideological celebrants of technology have become a sort of new priesthood for the religion of technology, though as Mumford quipped in Art and Technics:

    “If you fall in love with a machine there is something wrong with your love-life. If you worship a machine there is something wrong with your religion.” (Art and Technics, 81)

    Trade out the word “machine” in the above quotation with “technological innovation” and it applies perfectly to the ITIF awards document. And yet, playful gibes aside, there are many more (many, many more) barbs that one can imagine Mumford directing at the ITIF. As Mumford wrote in The Pentagon of Power:

    “Consistently the agents of the megamachine act as if their only responsibility were to the power system itself. The interests and demands of the populations subjected to the megamachine are not only unheeded but deliberately flouted.” (The Pentagon of Power, 271)

    The ITIF “Luddite Awards” are a pure demonstration of this deliberate flouting of “the interests and demands of the populations” who find themselves always on the receiving end of “technological innovation.” For the ITIF report shows an almost startling disregard for the concerns of “everyday people” and though the ITIF is a proudly nonpartisan organization the report demonstrates a disturbingly anti-democratic tendency. That the group does not lean heavily toward Democrats or Republicans only demonstrates the degree to which both parties eat from the same neoliberal trough – routinely filled with fresh ideological slop by think tanks like ITIF. Groups that advocate in the interest of their supporters in the public sphere (such as Free Press, the EFF, and the NRA {yes, even them}) are treated as interlopers worthy of mockery for having the audacity to raise concerns; similarly elected governmental bodies are berated for daring to pass timid regulations. The shape of the “ideal society” that one detects in the ITIF report is one wherein “technological innovation” knows no limits, and encounters no opposition, even if these limits are relatively weak regulations or simply citizens daring to voice a contrary opinion – consequences be damned! On the high-speed societal train of “technological innovation” the ITIF confuses a few groups asking for a slight reduction of speed with groups threatening to derail the train.

    Thus the key problem of the ITIF “Luddite Awards” emerges – and it is not simply that the ITIF continues to use Luddite as an epithet – it is that the ITIF seems willfully ignorant of any ethical imperatives other than a broadly defined love of “technological innovation.” In handing out “Luddite Awards” the ITIF reveals that it recognizes “technological innovation” as the crowning example of “the good.” It is not simply one “good” amongst many that must carefully compromise with other values (such as privacy, environmental concerns, labor issues, and so forth), rather it is the definitive and ultimate case of “the good.” This is not to claim that “technological innovation” is not amongst values that represent “the good,” but it is not the only value – treating it as such lead to confusing (to borrow a formulation from Lewis Mumford) “the goods life with the good life.” By fully privileging “technological innovation” the ITIF treats other values and ethical claims as if they are to be discarded – the philosopher Hans Jonas’s The Imperative of Responsibility (which advocated for a cautious approach to technological innovation that emphasized the potential risks inherent in new technologies) is therefore tossed out the window to be replaced by “the imperative of innovation” along with a stack of business books and perhaps an Ayn Rand novel, or two, for good measure.

    Indeed, responsibility for the negative impacts of innovation is shrugged off in the ITIF awards, even as many of the awardees (such as the various governments) wrestle with the responsibility that tech companies seem to so happily flaunt. The disrupters hate being disrupted. Furthermore, as should come as no surprise, the ITIF report maintains an aura that smells strongly of colonialism and disregard for the difficulties faced by those who are “disrupted” by “technological innovation.” The ITIF may want to reprimand organizations for trying to gently slow (which is not the same as stopping) certain forms of “technological innovation,” but the report has nothing to say about those who work mining the coltan that powers so many innovative devices, no concern for the factory workers who assemble these devices, and – of course – nothing to say about e-waste. Evidently to think such things are worthy of concern, to even raise the issue of consequences, is a sign of Ludditism. The ITIF holds out the promise of “better days ahead” and shows no concern for those whose lives must be trampled upon in the process. Granted, it is easy to ignore such issues when you work for a think tank in Washington DC and not as a coltan miner, a device assembler, a resident near an e-waste dump, or an individual whose job has just been automated.

    The ITIF “Luddite Awards” are yet another installment of the tech world/business press game of “Who’s Afraid of General Ludd” in which the group shouting the word “Luddite” at all opponents reveals that it has a less nuanced understanding of technology than was had by the historic Luddites. After all, the Luddites were not opposed to technology as such, nor were they opposed to “technological innovation,” rather, as E.P. Thompson describes in The Making of the English Working Class:

    “What was at issue was the ‘freedom’ of the capitalist to destroy the customs of the trade, whether by new machinery, by the factory-system, or by unrestricted competition, beating-down wages, undercutting his rivals, and undermining standards of craftsmanship…They saw laissez faire, not as freedom but as ‘foul Imposition”. They could see no ‘natural law’ by which one man, or a few men, could engage in practices which brought manifest injury to their fellows.” (Thompson, 548)

    What is at issue in the “Luddite Awards” is the “freedom” of “technological innovators” (the same-old “capitalists”) to force their priorities upon everybody else – and while the ITIF may want to applaud such “freedom” it is clear that they do not intend to extend such freedom to the rest of the population. The fear that can be detected in the ITIF “Luddite Awards” is not ultimately directed at the award recipients, but at an aspect of the historic Luddites that the report seems keen on forgetting: namely, that the Luddites organized a mass movement that enjoyed incredible popular support – which was why it was ultimately the military (not “seeing the light” of “technological innovation”) that was required to bring the Luddite uprisings to a halt. While it is questionable whether many of the recipients of “Luddite Awards” will view the award as an honor, the term “Luddite” can only be seen as a fantastic compliment when it is used as a synonym for a person (or group) that dares to be concerned with ethical and democratic values other than a simple fanatical allegiance to “technological innovation.” Indeed, what the ITIF “Luddite Awards” demonstrate is the continuing veracity of the philosopher Günther Anders statement, in the second volume of The Obsolescence of Man, that:

    “In this situation, it is no use to brandish scornful words like ‘Luddites’. If there is anything that deserves scorn it is, to the contrary, today’s scornful use of the term, ‘Luddite’ since this scorn…is currently more obsolete than the allegedly obsolete Luddism.” (Anders, Introduction – Section 7)

    After all, as Anders might have reminded the people at ITIF: gas chambers, depleted uranium shells, and nuclear weapons are also “technological innovations.”

    Works Cited

    • Anders, Günther. The Obsolescence of Man: Volume II – On the Destruction of Life in the Epoch of the Third Industrial Revolution. (translated by Josep Monter Pérez, Pre-Textos, Valencia, 2011). Available online: here.
    • Atkinson, Robert D. The 2014 Luddite Awards. January 2015.
    • Mumford, Lewis. The Myth of the Machine, volume 2 – The Pentagon of Power. New York: Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970.
    • Mumford, Lewis. Art and Technics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
    • Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage Books, 1966.
    • Not cited but worth a look – Eric Hobsbawm’s classic article “The Machine Breakers.”


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    Zachary Loeb is a writer, activist, librarian, and terrible accordion player. He earned his MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, and is currently working towards an MA in the Media, Culture, and Communications department at NYU. His research areas include media refusal and resistance to technology, ethical implications of technology, alternative forms of technology, and libraries as models of resistance. Using the moniker “The Luddbrarian,” Loeb writes at the blog LibrarianShipwreck, where this post first appeared. He is a frequent contributor to The b2 Review Digital Studies section.

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