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  • Dan DiPiero — Reparation as Damage (Review of Patricia Stuelke’s The Ruse of Repair)

    Dan DiPiero — Reparation as Damage (Review of Patricia Stuelke’s The Ruse of Repair)

    a review of Patricia Stuelke’s The Ruse of Repair (Duke University Press, 2021)

    by Dan DiPiero

    Patricia Stuelke’s The Ruse of Repair: US Neoliberal Empire and the Turn from Critique is a rigorous polemic that targets the so-called “reparative turn” in US humanities scholarship, represented in the book most of all through Eve Sedgwick’s 1997 essay, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading” (Sedgwick 1997). Early on, Stuelke establishes the target of her critique by reading Sedgwick’s famous call for reparative reading as not only damaging but also deeply historical—that is, tied to and often inadvertently resonating with the very neoliberal order from which it seeks to escape.

    To define the reparative turn, Stuelke traces Sedgwick’s characterization of paranoid critique—understood as an overlapping posture across critical theory—as pointless in a context where racial capitalism’s violences are obvious to everyone: “Why bother exposing the ruses of power,” Sedgwick famously asks, “in a country where, at any given moment, 40 percent of young black men are enmeshed in the penal system?” (in Stuelke 2021, 5). In response to the apparent uselessness of the critical gesture, the reparative turn moves away from “paranoid” analyses of power, viewing these as “not only passé, but mean and condescending too, in [their] willingness to dismiss pleasure, beauty, and the comfort of ‘amelioration’” (2021, 5).

    Stuelke’s project is less to deconstruct the reparative turn (although Ruse does this) and more to historicize it, offering a “movement genealogy” of a sensibility that is not exclusive to, even as it influences, the academy (2021, 16). To do this, Stuelke interrogates “a broader sensibility…that had by the mid-1990s been congealing for quite some time” (13) and which emerges in conversation with neoliberal political “experimentation” in the global south, particularly Latin America, during the 1980s. As Stuelke writes:

    These scenes of US imperialist violence and transnational anti-imperialist struggle were sites where the reparative emerged as a consoling mode for responding to state and racial capitalist violence, for accepting such violence as known or intransigent to the power of critique, enabling the paring back of visions for social transformation (16).

    In other words, focusing on practices of self-care, joy in a world that would deprive it, and solidarity across difference, may be in their own ways radical methods; but they also often serve to inadvertently “cleav[e] anti-imperialist orientations from anticapitalist commitments” (23) by turning the gaze inward, in the process becoming entangled with “emerging logics of privatization, communal downsizing, and the selective incorporation of racial difference and indigeneity that characterized the solidifying neoliberal regime” (23).

    Perhaps most importantly and most controversially, Stuelke suggests that reparative reading has a nefarious temptation built into it: regardless of whatever good it may or may not accomplish, reparative reading makes us feel better as both readers and writers, imagining a world in which pleasure conflates itself with justice. That is, if feeling better is ethically, philosophically, or theoretically laudable, then it becomes OK or even desirable to pursue good feelings. This not only alleviates us from the burden of ceaseless critique (read here as pessimism, hopelessness, etc.), but also grants us the illusion that this relief is somehow more productive than remaining critical of the world. At worst, this “feel-good fix” only facilitates the continued dominance of white settler subjects insofar as it allows them to continue doing what they do “while allowing [them] to not feel so bad about it” (10). More than anything, Stuelke wants readers to “interrogate that feeling” (30).

    One of the most notable and convincing aspects of the study is Stuelke’s insistence on the historical particularity of the conjuncture that produces reparative reading in conversation with the spread of neoliberal policies and their ideological constructions. And yet, the critique Ruse constructs is instructive beyond the disciplines with which it most consistently engages. In its insistence on the harms or elisions that reparative reading facilitates, it also resonates with recent work by Xine Yao (2021) and Eva H. Giraud (2019), who have taken up critiques of affect studies and entanglement theories, respectively. Although these three projects are quite distinct, insofar as affect and relationality share common scholarly and ethical implications, we might group these texts under a framework that Yao references as an “antisocial” turn in affect studies, which insists on the importance of turning away from being-in-common—from pleasure, from connection—in order to probe the limitations of such investments, which have received disproportionate attention since the turn to repair.

    Without venturing too far afield—and without succumbing to the temptation to conflate affect, entanglement, and repair—it is nevertheless the case that both affect and entanglement often serve as methods for reparative reading. In such studies, “turn[s] to feeling and care” function as “ends in themselves” as well as “limit points of possible actions” (Stuelke 2021, 9). Similarly, in What Comes After Entanglement? Giraud critiques the limitations of various entanglement theories, noting how a focus on what is connected together elides that which is inevitably excluded, and pointing to “A small, but critically important, interdisciplinary body of scholarship” that “has called for greater recognition of the undesirable nature of certain forms of relation and the need (in certain contexts) to preserve distance, alterity, and separatedness” (Giraud 2019, 9-10).

    This focus on exclusion or distance is mirrored in Yao’s work in Disaffected: “In contradistinction to the insistence on affect in relation to attachments and porousness, we need to acknowledge the affective importance of detachments and boundaries” (Yao 2021, 28). For each author, then, “exclusion, disengagement, and separation can be necessary or even beneficial: indeed, they are often central to ethical decision-making and activist practice” because “Relationality is not inherently good” (Thompson in Thompson and Hagood 2021, 75). This connects to Stuelke’s observation that “reparative investments often emerge…as the aftermath and reprise of the sentimental,” that limited but comforting affect that appears to connect across difference while masking its own power imbalances (Stuelke 2021, 25).

    Stuelke’s first chapter, “Freedom to Want,” examines “the Freudeian logics of queer feminist anti-imperialist critique” as well as the “sex-radical feminist movement infrastructure and institutions in which they were imbricated” as these relate to spreading imperial neoliberalism. This is done through readings of several case studies, including, to give one prominent example, Kate Millett’s memoir Going to Iran. The key scene that Stuelke analyzes takes place at the airport, where Millett recounts the sight of hundreds of veiled Iranian women in patently racist and Orientalizing language, revealing the imperialist viewpoint through which her feminism operates and providing an early illustration of how feminism and neoliberalism can become productively linked.

    In particular, Millett writes that the women were “…like death, like fate, like everything alien. Foreign, dangerous, unfriendly…” (Millett 1982, 79) and later juxtaposes this encounter with a view of two “tarts” who appear, the “real outlaws” dressed in high heels and painted nails. Importantly, in this passage, the “tart and her sailor man” embrace and twirl and kiss in a display of “beautiful outrageousness.” Thus, the Westernized, apparently sexually uninhibited figures in the airport represent “a different mode of revolutionary subjectivity, one that trades armed struggle for dancing in the streets, and equates heterosexual femme camp with revolutionary agency” (Stuelke 2021, 48). This scene succinctly stages what we might consider the quintessential formulation that Ruse observes: the performance or perception of (one’s own) personal/expressive/sexual freedom stands in for freedom in general, where “one’s own” can reference literal personal desires or else those originating in and limited to the imaginary of the global north. For Stuelke,

    What emerges here is an affinity between a sex-radical feminist anti-imperialism that equates national self-determination with individual sexual expression and the privatizing deregulatory ethos of a neoliberal state whose vision of empire is organized increasingly through the allegedly free choices of its deregulated, unprotected subjects (2021, 53).

    The second chapter, “Debt Work,” makes clear how the Reagan administration’s move to manipulate Caribbean nations through the control of debt relied on the construction of a revisionist discourse that did not promise modernity as much as it updated such colonial logics to suggest a “shared hemispheric past,” flattening the “power imbalances of history such that the perpetrators of the violence of slavery and segregation, of settler colonialism and imperialism, become indistinguishable from the victims” (86-87).

    While apparently far removed from this discourse, according to Stuelke, Paule Marshall’s 1983 novel Praisesong for the Widow connects to and resonates with this neoliberal discourse insofar as it constructs Grenada as a “lost utopia of black authenticity, devoid of revolutionary agenda or socialist program” and thus “imagines Grenada as Regan does” (92). The connection here lies in how both Regan and Marshall depoliticize Grenada, albeit by different means: whereas Marshall effaces political context by casting Grenada as a kind of blank slate, the US overtly whitewashed, erased, and propagandized out of existence the Marxist revolutionary trajectory of the People’s Revolutionary Government (PRG) as an extension of its military invasion of the country—just a handful of months after Praisesong’s publication.

    Marshall’s “black feminist reparative vision” is therefore and obviously not the same thing as the US’s financial, military, and ideological violence in Grenada. On this point, Stuelke writes that

    The resonances between black diasporic feminist literature and the US state’s reparative visions of the Caribbean do not mean that the Reagan administration and US black feminists reimagined the Caribbean for the same purpose, or from equal positions of power; nor do they suggest a monolithic black feminist relation to revolutionary Grenada (74-75).

    As an example of alternative Black feminist relations to the Caribbean, Stuelke highlights (implicitly praising) Angela Davis and Fanny Haughton’s focus on Grenada as a context in which community and reciprocity among Black people could flourish. But as we can see with her critique of Marshall, Stuelke’s object in this chapter is instead “a different US black feminist imaginary…one that characterized the Caribbean as a timeless matrilineal paradise offering the possibility of communal care and personal renaissance through the forging of black diasporic connection” (75).

    Despite taking care not to indict US Black feminism writ-large, this chapter nevertheless presents a problem insofar as the work it critiques is not sufficiently distinguished from the other case studies that Ruse takes up. In other words, while there are clearly differences between Black feminist writing on the Caribbean during this period, are there not also differences between the Black feminist work studied in chapter 2 and the white feminism explored in chapter 1? That both of these movements become equally grouped under the banner of “repair” is a point of difficulty one might have with Stuelke’s book, and one to which I will return. Throughout, there is no clear sense of why these particular case studies are important to interrogate as opposed to any other, why it is necessary to include (for example) the Black feminist work in chapter 2 while declining to address any differences that might matter among examples.

    Nevertheless, the critique of “Debt Work” is deeply effective on the whole, particularly when it comes to the analysis of US ideological and actual warfare: the inclusion of two pages from the comic book Grenada: Rescued from Rape and Slavery—“most likely commissioned by the CIA” and circulated throughout the country—proves compelling testimony of what efforts to construct a neoliberal world order looked and felt like during the long 1980s. When combined with the wide variety of examples Stuelke invokes—including airline and other advertising aimed at US-based tourists—the ideological framework of neoliberalism, and repair as a response, come fully into view.

    Chapter 3, “Solidarity as Settler Absolution,” takes up “Central America solidarity” movements as manifested in both fiction and activist discourse, showing how reparative solidarity relied on the “sympathetic” colonial viewpoint, thus strengthening rather than undermining the US government’s neoliberal violence.[1] After comparatively reading several examples, including (notably) the Witness for Peace organization, Stuelke surmises:

    Over and over again, the energies of activists, both real and represented, become invested not so much in the exposure of the truth of US violence in Central America as in the depressive (and perhaps clinically depressed) desire for reparation. The sanctuary activists moved enough by Central Americans’ “horrible horrible stories” to take them into their homes and attempt to fashion them into US families, the guilt-stricken Witness for Peace delegates who proffered their prayers in exchange for Nicaraguan forgiveness, all evinced that very “guilty empathetic view of the other” and impulse to “assemble or repair” that Sedgwick describes (2021, 146-147).

    Chapter 4, “Veteran Diversity,” shifts toward considering literary discourses around the Vietnam War, focusing in particular on what Stuelke calls “MFA program fiction.” Noting the “centrality of the Vietnam War to US literary program fiction” (153) in the 1980s, Stuelke writes that work such as Lorrie Moore’s Anagrams and Tobias Wolff’s “Solider’s Joy” revise the Vietnam War retroactively, “nostalgically envision[ing] war time” as a means of symbolizing and reflecting on “indescribable ideas like faith, love, and community” (181). In such stories, the Vietnam War becomes a metaphor and a vehicle for grappling with neoliberalism, not in order to critique it but to exhume possibilities for living differently under its watch. In a particularly comprehensive concluding line, Stuelke writes that Wolff’s short story “In the Garden of the North American Martyrs”

    culminates in the call to ‘turn from power to love,’ an imperative that marks MFA program Vietnam War veteran fiction’s part in instigating the reparative turn: the current impulse to imagine freedom from the constraints of neoliberalism by turning away from ideology critique to the balm of compensatory attachments that always threaten to find solace in US settler colonial and imperialist histories and futures (2021, 187).

    The fifth chapter, “Invasion Love Plots,” departs from the other four insofar as its main object concerns the playlist blasted into Panamanian communities by the US military during their 1989 invasion, in conjunction with “mortar attacks, fired rockets,” and “over four hundred bombs” (194). Beyond the obvious sonic warfare involved in blaring disorienting music, Stuelke argues that the curation of this particular playlist functions ideologically:

    The invasion’s acoustic brutality was designed to produce chaos that could then be resolved by the love-gone-wrong plots on the soldiers’ playlist; the requested songs offered scenarios of romantic repudiation and transformation that figured as ordinary and desirable the impending enforcement of austerity and entrepreneurial aspiration (2021, 193).

    This is a complex argument, which explores multiple socio-political functions of music as it is taken up in different contexts, as well as the different stakes involved in the use of different genres and bands. Ultimately, there are at least two dominant functions the chapter traces: 1) use of breakup rock as an expression of white male aggrievement, buttressed by US military force; as well as 2) the deployment, neutralization, and cooption of “paranoid” music that critiques imperial violence, rendering it not so much apolitical as weaponized against people of color outside the US.

    The shift in Chapter 5 to sound and music is an effective illustration of just how widespread and multifaceted the reparative impulse has become, even as the shift complicates a clear understanding of what repair is. Stuelke’s late turn to the auditory poses challenges insofar as it again introduces a series of differences that go unaddressed: what should readers make, for instance, of the soothing and palliative quality of so much reparative writing studied throughout Ruse when compared to the violent, annihilative affect of weaponized sound? Even in a project dedicated to tracing a common reparative sensibility among diverse examples, a word on the differences that emerge along the way feels, to me, both necessary and absent. Still, the shift toward sound is fascinating. It also continues to help connect Ruse to other disciplines, including the field of critical improvisation studies, in which one regularly encounters a reparative tendency.[2]

    Indeed, improvisation studies’ general orientation toward the reparative has been a central concern in my own work, which interrogates this progressive or utopian strain of thinking, one primarily concerned with how improvisation can function as a mode of activity that (almost) inherently fosters empathy, connection across difference, interdependence, and other ostensibly desirable social outcomes.[3] Insofar as improvisation has been understood to facilitate such outcomes in creative settings (music performance, theater, and so on), progressive improvisation scholarship explores how improvisation’s lessons might be transposed onto social and political scenes as well, moving from artistic activities into other spheres in order to imagine how to live differently.

    In this way, improvisation functions not only as an analog to “entanglement,” “sympathy,” and “collaboration”; it also becomes the means by which we might facilitate or generate these latter terms intentionally, based on the assumption that pursuing such goals is or should be desirable for progressive academics. But not unlike Stuelke’s analyses, I have suggested that a closer look at improvisation discourse reveals a kind of colonizing impulse, what Vijay Iyer has identified as a “rehabilitative gesture” (2019) which, while not entirely synonymous, starts to sound (and feel) a lot like repair. That is, analyzing how improvisation fosters community and empathetic connection not only overlooks the kinds of exclusions and exceptions that Giraud, Yao, and Iyer all in their own ways emphasize; it also instrumentalizes people’s social experiences in a way that can feel ameliorative—as if improvisation itself becomes the goal, rather than the thing that’s already happening anyway, in response to people’s contingent, often difficult circumstances.

    In contrast to the most dominant studies in the field, I have insisted that it is incumbent upon scholars to take improvisation’s close affinity with and weaponization by neoliberalism as seriously as they do any instances of emancipatory potential or co-creative possibility. When improvisation can be equally used to describe the necessary hustle of Uber drivers, Doordash deliverers, and other contingent, “essential” workers strung out during the pandemic and left to fend for themselves; when Derek Chauvin’s trial attorney can attempt to justify racist murder through recourse to improvisation;[4] when improvisation is the characteristic framework through which popular discourse tries to grapple with the actions of a fascist President,[5] we are losing something through a one-sided focus on improvisation’s ostensibly benevolent potentiality, which is another way of saying that we are ignoring those instances when improvisation appears as a destructive, indeed co-constitutive feature of racial capitalist violence.

    This is why I find The Ruse of Repair deeply valuable: it charts and historicizes a widespread impulse, identifying not only the contexts through which it emerges, but also and importantly, its limitations as an academic enterprise. Ruse resonates with my critique of progressive improvisation studies, which in my view do more to mask the operation of power than anything, and which therefore distort an accurate understanding of both social relations and improvisation itself. Critiques of the reparative impulse are necessary and helpful for more fully understanding instances where the pursuit of pleasure, connection, empathy, and shared affects inhibits study. Such critiques might also push back against the argument that empathy and connection constitute either real solutions or else the best ones for which we can reasonably hope.

    Finally, for as much time Ruse spends detailing the reparative turn, “repair” nevertheless remains perplexingly ill-defined in the book—not in the strict sense of a concept or a sensibility (this is established thoroughly and early) but rather as a body of scholarship. While the introduction names Sedgwick as a kind of representative foil against which Ruse struggles, other scholars deploying a reparative perspective are scarce throughout. In other words, while Ruse traces the literary and cultural sensibilities informing the reparative turn in a way that is rather groundbreaking, it never quite gets to the turn itself—the reparative scholarship it ostensibly takes as its target. The back copy of the book, for example, cites “literary and queer studies scholars” who have “eschewed Marxist and Foucauldian critique”—but where are these scholars in Stuelke’s book? Indeed, who are they? In its extensive study of literary, discursive, and musical case studies, Ruse oddly leaves out any discussion of the scholarship that such cases are supposed to have informed, thus displacing a clear understanding of the ultimate stakes involved in the project. This deferral makes Stuelke’s enterprise feel more like a straw-man argument than I think it is, given that the book is otherwise deeply compelling. The force of the argument is blunted insofar as readers are left imagining the kind of scholarship Stuelke seeks to indict, leaving room for all kinds of ambiguity.

    What I mean by ambiguity here is not just a desire to know the object of critique more specifically; rather, it seems to me that, if repair is a sensibility that emerges in a particular historical moment, it is also one that can appear and recede even within the same works of scholarship. What are we to make, for example, of the many studies in contemporary theory that offer reparative possibilities while also critiquing?[6] By the time we reach Stuelke’s conclusion, which makes a point of declining any “resistant possibility and escape from complicity” (218), are we to understand any scholarship that offers an analysis of how people find hope, imagine new worlds, or carve space as reparative, regardless of how thoroughly neoliberal racial capitalism is critiqued along the way? The implied “repair vs paranoia” binary is all the more pervasive for its not being directly addressed. Black studies and queer of color critique remain areas with particularly complex postures toward both paranoid and reparative modes. And while it may be the case that criticizing/ acknowledging the violence of neoliberal capital is not equivalent to analyzing it, the absence of Stuelke’s own position on this matter only exacerbates the potential for confusion.

    Nevertheless, in its principle aim to offer a genealogy of repair—and more besides—The Ruse of Repair succeeds brilliantly. It is sharp, uncompromising, and sure to be valuable across the humanities as we continue to grapple with not only neoliberalism’s apparent bottomlessness, but also the ways in which humanities scholarship may contribute to, rather than ameliorating, such depths.

    _____

    Dan DiPiero is a musician, Lecturer of Comparative Studies at the Ohio State University, and Adjunct Professor of Music at Capital University. He currently co-chairs the Music and Sound Studies Working Group at the Cultural Studies Association, and hosts the Public Cultural Studies podcast. Dan’s first book, Contingent Encounters: Improvisation in Music and Everyday Life is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press.

    Back to the essay

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    Notes

    [1] As Yao points out, sympathy as we know it is a colonial relationship. To trace it, Yao locates a paradigmatic example in Adam Smith’s enlightenment discourse, Theory of Moral Sentiments. After at first formulating sympathy as a benevolent and universal capacity, Yao observes that Smith then drops pretense, dividing humanity along two axes: the “civilized nations” who can feel, and the “rude and barbarous nations” who cannot. As Yao writes, the notion of the “savage” developed during and through the colonial era “is the ultimate figure of unfeeling: he ‘expects no sympathy from those around him, and disdains, on that account, to expose himself, by allowing the least weakness to escape him’” (in Yao 2021). Hence the capacity for sympathy as it has existed in the Western imaginary is conceived from the beginning a capacity exclusive to Western societies themselves. In other words, the “sympathy” we are supposed to foster or develop for marginalized people is de-facto a white sympathy, a request for white feelings to be extended to those who have it worse off, as if this increased understanding or shared sentiment will help remedy the situation. As Yao writes, to adopt this perspective is to consistently center whiteness in the proposed solution to a problem caused by whiteness. As Stuelke writes, this reinforces rather than weakening the socio-political forces causing harm in the global south, insofar as sympathy engenders the illusion of helping, making those extending sympathy feel better, as if they are helping, and thus facilitating their doing nothing beyond what is precisely unhelpful. For Yao, the appropriate response to such a consistent re-centering of white sentiments is to refuse sympathy altogether, to turn antisocially away.

    [2]  A prominent example of such a tendency can be seen in the “Improvisation, Community, and Social Practice” series at Duke University Press, which “advocate[s] musical improvisation as a crucial model for political, cultural, and ethical dialogue and action—for imagining and creating alternative ways of knowing and being in the world.” (See https://www.dukeupress.edu/books/browse/by-series/series-detail?IdNumber=2880420.) This instrumentalization of improvisation, I suggest, is not unlike neoliberal/corporate invocations of the term, as for example with the Applied Improvisation Network, which “draws lessons from the arts (e.g. comedy, jazz and theater) and utilizes them for non-theatrical or non-performance applications.” (See https://www.appliedimprovisationnetwork.org/.)

    [3] See DiPiero forthcoming.

    [4] See Adrian Florido, 2021, “Totally Unnecessary’: MPD Senior Officer Testifies Regarding Chauvin’s Use Of Force,” NPR (April 2). https://www.npr.org/2021/04/02/983925049/-totally-unnecessary-mpd-senior-officer-testifies-regarding-chauvins-use-of-forc.

    [5] For one of at least a dozen prominent examples, see David A. Graham, 2017, “Trump’s Dangerous Love of Improvisation,” The Atlantic (August 9). https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/get-on-board-the-trump-trane/536379/.

    [6] From my position in music and cultural studies, I would characterize for example Carolyn Pedwell’s Revolutionary Routines, Monica Huerta’s Magical Habits, Anthony Reed’s Soundworks, Robin James’ The Sonic Episteme, Kara Keeling’s Queer Times, Black Futures, Jayna Brown’s Black Utopias, and James Gordon Williams’ Crossing Bar Lines as a small sampling of scholarship that seems to balance the paranoid/critical and the reparative to some degree. Ultimately, however, I am left to guess at my own evaluations, since Stuelke leaves no clear means by which to identify one or the other mode of scholarship. Additionally, it seems to me that “mode” is really the relevant term here: rather than discussing reparative or paranoid scholarship full-stop, what we are or should be really talking about are tendencies rather than any writ-large categorization.

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    Works Cited

    • DiPiero, Dan. Forthcoming. Contingent Encounters: Improvisation in Music and Everyday Life. University of Michigan Press.
    • Giraud, Eva H. 2019. What Comes after Entanglement? Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion. Duke University Press.
    • Huerta, Monica. 2021. Magical Habits. Duke University Press.
    • Iyer, Vijay. 2019. “Beneath Improvisation.” In The Oxford Handbook of Critical Concepts in Music Theory, edited by Alexander Rehding and Steven Rings. http://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190454746.013.35.
    • James, Robin. 2019. The Sonic Episteme: Acoustic Resonance, Neoliberalism, and Biopolitics. Duke University Press.
    • Keeling, Kara. 2019. Queer Times, Black Futures. New York University Press.
    • Millett, Kate. 1982. Going to Iran. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan.
    • Pedwell, Carolyn. 2021. Revolutionary Routines: The Habits of Social Transformation. McGill-Queen’s University Press.
    • Reed, Anthony. 2021. Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production. Duke University Press.
    • Sedgwick, Eve. 1997. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Introduction Is about You.” In Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, edited by Eve Sedgwick, 1-37. Duke University Press.
    • Stuelke, Patricia. 2021. The Ruse of Repair: US Neoliberal Empire and the Turn from Critique. Duke University Press.
    • Thompson, Marie and Mack Hagood. 2021. “Tinnitus, Exclusion, Relationality (Beyond Normate Phenomenology).” Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry vol. 2, no.3 (2021): 66-81.
    • Williams, James Gordon. 2021. Crossing Bar Lines: The Politics and Practices of Black Musical Space. University Press of Mississippi.
    • Yao, Xine. 2021. Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America. Duke University Press.
  • Alexander R. Galloway — Big Bro (Review of Wendy Hui Kyun Chun, Discriminating Data Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition)

    Alexander R. Galloway — Big Bro (Review of Wendy Hui Kyun Chun, Discriminating Data Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition)

    a review of Wendy Hui Kyun Chun, Discriminating Data Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition (MIT Press, 2021)

    by Alexander R. Galloway

    I remember snickering when Chris Anderson announced “The End of Theory” in 2008. Writing in Wired magazine, Anderson claimed that the structure of knowledge had inverted. It wasn’t that models and principles revealed the facts of the world, but the reverse, that the data of the world spoke their truth unassisted. Given that data were already correlated, Anderson argued, what mattered was to extract existing structures of meaning, not to pursue some deeper cause. Anderson’s simple conclusion was that “correlation supersedes causation…correlation is enough.”

    This hypothesis — that correlation is enough — is the thorny little nexus at the heart of Wendy Chun’s new book, Discriminating Data. Chun’s topic is data analytics, a hard target that she tackles with technical sophistication and rhetorical flair. Focusing on data-driven tech like social media, search, consumer tracking, AI, and many other things, her task is to exhume the prehistory of correlation, and to show that the new epistemology of correlation is not liberating at all, but instead a kind of curse recalling the worst ghosts of the modern age. As Chun concludes, even amid the precarious fluidity of hyper-capitalism, power operates through likeness, similarity, and correlated identity.

    While interleaved with a number of divergent polemics throughout, the book focuses on four main themes: correlation, discrimination, authentication, and recognition. Chun deals with these four as general problems in society and culture, but also interestingly as specific scientific techniques. For instance correlation has a particular mathematical meaning, as well as a philosophical one. Discrimination is a social pathology but it’s also integral to discrete rationality. I appreciated Chun’s attention to details large and small; she’s writing about big ideas — essence, identity, love and hate, what does it mean to live together? — but she’s also engaging directly with statistics, probability, clustering algorithms, and all the minutia of data science.

    In crude terms, Chun rejects the — how best to call it — the “anarcho-materialist” turn in theory, typified by someone like Gilles Deleuze, where disciplinary power gave way to distributed rhizomes, schizophrenic subjects, and irrepressible lines of flight. Chun’s theory of power isn’t so much about tessellated tapestries of desiring machines as it is the more strictly structuralist concerns of norm and discipline, sovereign and subject, dominant and subdominant. Big tech is the mechanism through which power operates today, Chun argues. And today’s power is racist, misogynist, repressive, and exclusionary. Power doesn’t incite desire so much as stifle and discipline it. In other words George Orwell’s old grey-state villain, Big Brother, never vanished. He just migrated into a new villain, Big Bro, embodied by tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page.

    But what are the origins of this new kind of data-driven power? The reader learns that correlation and homophily, or “the notion that birds of a feather naturally flock together” (23), not only subtend contemporary social media platforms like Facebook, but were in fact originally developed by eugenicists like Francis Galton and Karl Pearson. “British eugenicists developed correlation and linear regression” (59), Chun notes dryly, before reminding us that these two techniques are at the core of today’s data science. “When correlation works, it does so by making the present and future coincide with a highly curated past” (52). Or as she puts it insightfully elsewhere, data science doesn’t so much anticipate the future, but predict the past.

    If correlation (pairing two or more pieces of data) is the first step of this new epistemological regime, it is quickly followed by some additional steps. After correlation comes discrimination, where correlated data are separated from other data (and indeed internally separated from themselves). This entails the introduction of a norm. Discriminated data are not simply data that have been paired, but measurements plotted along an axis of comparison. One data point may fall within a normal distribution, while another strays outside the norm within a zone of anomaly. Here Chun focuses on “homophily” (love of the same), writing that homophily “introduces normativity within a supposedly nonnormative system” (96).

    The third and fourth moments in Chun’s structural condition, tagged as “authenticity” and “recognition,” complete the narrative. Once groups are defined via discrimination, they are authenticated as a positive group identity, then ultimately recognized, or we could say self-recognized, by reversing the outward-facing discriminatory force into an inward-facing act of identification. It’s a complex libidinal economy that Chun patiently elaborates over four long chapters, linking these structural moments to specific technologies and techniques such as Bayes’ theorem, clustering algorithms, and facial recognition technology.

    A number of potential paths emerge in the wake of Chun’s work on correlation, which we will briefly mention in passing. One path would be toward Shane Denson’s recent volume, Discorrelated Images, on the loss of correlated experience in media aesthetics. Another would be to collide Chun’s critique of correlation in data science with Quentin Meillassoux’s critique of correlation in philosophy, notwithstanding the significant differences between their two projects.

    Correlation, discrimination, authentication, and recognition are the manifest contents of the book as it unfolds page by page. At the same time Chun puts forward a few meta arguments that span the text as a whole. The first is about difference and the second is about history. In both, Chun reveals herself as a metaphysician and moralist of the highest order.

    First Chun picks up a refrain familiar to feminism and anti-racist theory, that of erasure, forgetting, and ignorance. Marginalized people are erased from the archive; women are silenced; a subject’s embodiment is ignored. Chun offers an appealing catch phrase for this operation, “hopeful ignorance.” Many people in power hope that by ignoring difference they can overcome it. Or as Chun puts it, they “assume that the best way to fight abuse and oppression is by ignoring difference and discrimination” (2). Indeed this posture has been central to political liberalism for a long time, in for instance John Rawls’ derivation of justice via a “veil of ignorance.” For Chun the attempt to find an unmarked category of subjectivity — through that frequently contested pronoun “we” — will perforce erase and exclude those structurally denied access to the universal. “[John Perry] Barlow’s ‘we’ erased so many people,” Chun noted in dismay. “McLuhan’s ‘we’ excludes most of humanity” (9, 15). This is the primary crime for Chun, forgetting or ignoring the racialized and gendered body. (In her last book, Updating to Remain the Same, Chun reprinted a parody of a well-known New Yorker cartoon bearing the caption “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” The posture of ignorance, of “nobody knowing,” was thoroughly critiqued by Chun in that book, even as it continues to be defended by liberals).

    Yet if the first crime against difference is to forget the mark, the second crime is to enforce it, to mince and chop people into segregated groups. After all, data is designed to discriminate, as Chun takes the better part of her book to elaborate. These are engines of difference and it’s no coincidence that Charles Babbage called his early calculating machine a “Difference Engine.” Data is designed to segregate, to cluster, to group, to split and mark people into micro identities. We might label this “bad” difference. Bad difference is when the naturally occurring multiplicity of the world is canalized into clans and cliques, leveraged for the machinations of power rather than the real experience of people.

    To complete the triad, Chun has proposed a kind of “good” difference. For Chun authentic life is rooted in difference, often found through marginalized experience. Her muse is “a world that resonates with and in difference” (3). She writes about “the needs and concerns of black women” (49). She attends to “those whom the archive seeks to forget” (237). Good difference is intersectional. Good difference attends to identity politics and the complexities of collective experience.

    Bad, bad, good — this is a triad, but not a dialectical one. Begin with 1) the bad tech posture of ignoring difference; followed by 2) the worse tech posture of specifying difference in granular detail; contrasted with 3) a good life that “resonates with and in difference.” I say “not dialectical” because the triad documents difference changing position rather than the position of difference changing (to paraphrase Catherine Malabou from her book on Changing Difference). Is bad difference resolved by good difference? How to tell the difference? For this reason I suggest we consider Discriminating Data as a moral tale — although I suspect Chun would balk at that adjective — because everything hinges on a difference between the good and the bad.

    Chun’s argument about good and bad difference is related to an argument about history, revealed through what she terms the “Transgressive Hypothesis.” I was captivated by this section of the book. It connects to a number of debates happening today in both theory and culture at large. Her argument about history has two distinct waves, and, following the contradictory convolutions of history, the second wave reverses and inverts the first.

    Loosely inspired by Michel Foucault’s Repressive Hypothesis, Chun’s Transgressive Hypothesis initially describes a shift in society and culture roughly coinciding with the Baby Boom generation in the late Twentieth Century. Let’s call it the 1968 mindset. Reacting to the oppressions of patriarchy, the grey-state threats of centralized bureaucracy, and the totalitarian menace of “Nazi eugenics and Stalinism,” liberation was found through “‘authentic transgression’” via “individualism and rebellion” (76). This was the time of the alternative, of the outsider, of the nonconformist, of the anti-authoritarian, the time of “thinking different.” Here being “alt” meant being left, albeit a new kind of left.

    Chun summons a familiar reference to make her point: the Apple Macintosh advertisement from 1984 directed by Ridley Scott, in which a scary Big Brother is dethroned by a colorful lady jogger brandishing a sledge hammer. “Resist, resist, resist,” was how Chun put the mantra. “To transgress…was to be free” (76). Join the resistance, unplug, blow your mind on red pills. Indeed the existential choice from The Matrix — blue pill for a life of slavery mollified by ignorance, red pill for enlightenment and militancy tempered by mortal danger — acts as a refrain throughout Chun’s book. In sum the Transgressive Hypothesis “equated democracy with nonnormative structures and behaviors” (76). To live a good life was to transgress.

    But this all changed in 1984, or thereabouts. Chun describes a “reverse hegemony” — a lovely phrase that she uses only twice — where “complaints against the ‘mainstream’ have become ‘mainstreamed’” (242). Power operates through reverse hegemony, she claims, “The point is never to be a ‘normie’ even as you form a norm” (34). These are the consequences of the rise of neoliberalism, fake corporate multiculturalism, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher but even more so Bill Clinton and Tony Blaire. Think postfordism and postmodernism. Think long tails and the multiplicity of the digital economy. Think woke-washing at CIA and Spike Lee shilling cryptocurrency. Think Hypernormalization, New Spirit of Capitalism, Theory of the Young Girl, To Live and Think Like Pigs. Complaints against the mainstream have become mainstreamed. And if power today has shifted “left,” then — Reverse Hegemony Brain go brrr — resistance to power shifts “right.” A generation ago the Q Shaman would have been a leftwing nut nattering about the Kennedy assassination. But today he’s a right wing nut (alas still nattering about the Kennedy assassination).

    “Red pill toxicity” (29) is how Chun characterizes the responses to this new topsy-turvy world of reverse hegemony. (To be sure, she’s only the latest critic weighing in on the history of the present; other well-known accounts include Angela Nagle’s 2017 book Kill All Normies, and Mark Fisher’s notorious 2013 essay “Exiting the Vampire Castle.”) And if libs, hippies, and anarchists had become the new dominant, the election of Donald Trump showed that “populism, paranoia, polarization” (77) could also reemerge as a kind of throwback to the worst political ideologies of the Twentieth Century. With Trump the revolutions of history — ironically, unstoppably — return to where they began, in “the totalitarian world view” (77).

    In other words these self-styled rebels never actually disrupted anything, according to Chun. At best they used disruption as a kind of ideological distraction for the same kinds of disciplinary management structures that have existed since time immemorial. And if Foucault showed that nineteenth-century repression also entailed an incitement to discourse, Chun describes how twentieth-century transgression also entailed a novel form of management. Before it was “you thought you were repressed but in fact you’re endlessly sublating and expressing.” Now it’s “you thought you were a rebel but disruption is a standard tactic of the Professional Managerial Class.” Or as Jacques Lacan said in response to some young agitators in his seminar, vous voulez un maître, vous l’aurez. Slavoj Žižek’s rendering, slightly embellished, best captures the gist: “As hysterics, you demand a new master. You will get it!

    I doubt Chun would embrace the word “hysteric,” a term indelibly marked by misogyny, but I wish she would, since hysteria is crucial to her Transgressive Hypothesis. In psychoanalysis, the hysteric is the one who refuses authority, endlessly and irrationally. And bless them for that; we need more hysterics in these dark times. Yet the lesson from Lacan and Žižek is not so much that the hysteric will conjure up a new master out of thin air. In a certain sense, the lesson is the reverse, that the Big Other doesn’t exist, that Big Brother himself is a kind of hysteric, that power is the very power that refuses power.

    This position makes sense, but not completely. As a recovering Deleuzian, I am indelibly marked by a kind of antinomian political theory that defines power as already heterogenous, unlawful, multiple, anarchic, and material. However I am also persuaded by Chun’s more classical posture, where power is a question of sovereign fiat, homogeneity, the central and the singular, the violence of the arche, which works through enclosure, normalization, and discipline. Faced with this type of power, Chun’s conclusion is, if I can compress a hefty book into a single writ, that difference will save us from normalization. In other words, while Chun is critical of the Transgressive Hypothesis, she ends up favoring the Big-Brother theory of power, where authentic alternatives escape repressive norms.

    I’ll admit it’s a seductive story. Who doesn’t want to believe in outsiders and heroes winning against oppressive villains? And the story is especially appropriate for the themes of Discriminating Data: data science of course entails norms and deviations; but also, in a less obvious way, data science inherits the old anxieties of skeptical empiricism, where the desire to make a general claim is always undercut by an inability to ground generality.

    Yet I suspect her political posture relies a bit too heavily on the first half of the Transgressive Hypothesis, the 1984 narrative of difference contra norm, even as she acknowledges the second half of the narrative where difference became a revanchist weapon for big tech (to say nothing of difference as a bonafide management style). This leads to some interesting inconsistencies. For instance Chun notes that Apple’s 1984 hammer thrower is a white woman disrupting an audience of white men. But she doesn’t say much else about her being a woman, or about the rainbow flag that ends the commercial. The Transgressive Hypothesis might be the quintessential tech bro narrative but it’s also the narrative of feminism, queerness, and the new left more generally. Chun avoids claiming that feminism failed; but she’s also savvy enough to avoid saying that it succeeded. And if Sadie Plant once wrote that “cybernetics is feminization,” for Chun it’s not so clear. According to Chun the cybernetic age of computers, data, and ubiquitous networks still orients around structures of normalization: masculine, white, straight, affluent and able-bodied. Resistant to such regimes of normativity, Chun must nevertheless invent a way to resist those who were resisting normativity.

    Regardless, for Chun the conclusion is clear: these hysterics got their new master. If not immediately they got it eventually, via the advent of Web 2.0 and the new kind of data-centric capitalism invented in the early 2000s. Correlation isn’t enough — and that’s the reason why. Correlation means the forming of a general relation, if only the most minimal generality of two paired data points. And, worse, correlation’s generality will always derive from past power and organization rather than from a reimagining of the present. Hence correlation for Chun is a type of structural pessimism, in that it will necessarily erase and exclude those denied access to the general relation.

    Characterized by a narrative poignancy and an attention to the ideological conditions of everyday life, Chun highlights alternative relations that could hopefully replace the pessimism of correlation. Such alternatives might take the form of a “potential history” or a “critical fabulation,” phrases borrowed from Ariella Azoulay and Saidiya Hartman, respectively. For Azoulay potential history means to “‘give an account of diverse worlds that persist’”; for Hartman, critical fabulation means “to see beyond numbers and sources” (79). A slim offering covering a few pages, nevertheless these references to Azoulay and Hartman indicate an appealing alternative for Chun, and she ends her book where it began, with an eloquent call to acknowledge “a world that resonates with and in difference.”

    _____

    Alexander R. Galloway is a writer and computer programmer 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), Laruelle: Against the Digital (University of Minnesota, 2014), and most recently, Uncomputable: Play and Politics in the Long Digital Age (Verso, 2021).

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  • Hannah Zeavin — Glasses for the Voice (Review of Jonathan Sterne, Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment)

    Hannah Zeavin — Glasses for the Voice (Review of Jonathan Sterne, Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment)

    a review of Jonathan Sterne, Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment (Duke UP, 2022)

    by Hannah Zeavin

    Somewhere between 500,000 and over 1 million Americans, and many more people worldwide, are now living with some form of post-viral symptomatology from COVID-19—or “Long COVID.” In a pandemic first and pervasively represented by elderly death or “mild” cases no worse than the flu, there are, in reality, three true outcomes after contracting the virus, one of which includes long-term illness, impairment, and disability. These “long haulers” are discovering what disability activists have long known and fought against: accommodation and access are not readily forthcoming, insurance is a nightmare, and people of color and women are much less likely to have their symptoms taken seriously enough to lead to a medical diagnosis. And medical diagnosis, if received, is fraught, too. If 1 in 4 Americans is already disabled, we have been and continue to be living through what some are calling a mass disabling event, akin to a war. This situation is not limited to the circulation of a virus and its aftermath in individual persons and bodies; it extends to the conditions past and present that have produced its lethality: capitalism and its attendants, including medical redlining, environmental racism, settler-colonialism.

    Jonathan Sterne’s Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment arrives then just in time to complicate that history via the experience of impairment (as well as its kin experiences and identities, illness and disability). As Sterne writes, “The semantic ambiguity among impairment, disability, and illness remains a constitutive feature of all three categories. They move through the same space and bump into one another, sometimes overlapping, sometimes repelling. All three are conditioned by a divergence from medical or social norms. All three are conditioned by an ideology of ability and a preference for ability and health.” Sterne’s book doesn’t just map the experiences of impairment, he also troubles the binary of disabled and able body/mind. By thinking about impairment and faculties, Sterne upends our received notion that we, somehow, are in control of our senses (or our minds, our limbs). Instead, some forms of impairment are accepted, even become norms, while others present as problems. Sterne’s book is about many kinds of impairment, and their intersections in subjects who are understood to be normative nonetheless or even because they’re impaired; what we think of as normal (gradual hearing loss as we work, listen to music, age) versus what is marked off as different and constitutes an unquestioned disability (e.g., childhood deafness following viral illness).

    Early in the book, Sterne quotes the disability studies adage, “you will someday join us.” This definitive book is also Sterne’s personal story of living in the matrixes of illness, impairment, and disability, in the materiality of their experience as well as the cultures that contain and produce those experiences. Rather than presenting a work at the end of learning, deleting all the traces of theorization up until the point of arrival, Sterne fully tells the story of how he “joined”: from study groups to blog posts, across changes in understanding and bodily experience. Diminished Faculties therefore provides a rigorous, moving account of the experience of the normal and the pathological, the accounted-for body both disabled and abled, and the one shoved to the margins. Sterne also offers his reader the account of impairment via a political phenomenology grounded in his own story while moving slowly and responsibly beyond it to reconceive impairment theory as a theory of labor, of media, and fundamentally, of political experience.

    Sterne is a preeminent voice in Media Studies, and the author of The Audible Past (Duke UP, 2003) and MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Duke UP, 2012). Diminished Faculties is his first book in nearly a decade, the third in a series of works that have shaped and reshaped sound studies, and the first to center his own history.

    While in this way, Diminished Faculties is moving beyond his previous books to auto-theory, If The Audible Past begins with the “Hello” of the telephone, Diminished Faculties takes on another, amplified greeting. In 2009, Sterne was diagnosed with an aggressive case of thyroid cancer; the surgery to remove his tumor (the size of a pomegranate, as demonstrated in a drawing from S. Lochlann Jain) paralyzed one of his two vocal cords. Normal vocal cord functioning looks like, as Sterne puts it elsewhere “a monkey crashing cymbals”; a normative voice depends on that coordinated cooperation between halves. And as he tells us, his voice may sound better, whatever that really means, to his listener (smokey and rich) on one of his worst days. But Sterne also talks for a living—teaching and delivering research-and his voice blows out, he gets exhausted. As Sterne began vocal therapy, he started to use a personal amplification device that hangs from his neck, which he has termed his “dork-o-phone.” Staying with the example of what gets made visible as impairment, Sterne tells the story of someone coming to a house party, pointing to his chest and saying, “What the fuck is that?” Sterne replies: “Glasses for my voice.” This book tries, in part, to account for this importunate reaction, reconciling a moment of surprise or frustration or intolerance with the fact that impairment is everywhere, and tracking what that reaction does to the subject who is marked as other. As Sterne writes, “Think of all the moving parts in that scenario: a subject whose body cannot match its will; but also auditors struggling to align themselves with whatever techniques the speaker is using. Everyone is trying; nobody is quite succeeding.”

    This is one way of naming the book’s method: “think of all the moving parts.” Each of its chapters weaves disability studies, auto-theory, history of science, and media history, turning the levels up or down on any particular input and frame. Diminished Faculties ushers the reader through these interlinked hermeneutics toward a redescription of impairment in the long 20th century.

    The first chapter, “Degrees of Muteness,” offers a deep consideration of the uses of phenomenology, and its methods for describing experience, centered on Sterne’s diagnosis, surgery, and its aftermath. As Sterne writes, “this book begins with consciousness of unconsciousness (or is it unconsciousness of consciousness?)” Here he also introduces a media theory of acquired impairment, arguing that, “the concept of impairment is itself also a media concept. The contemporary concept of normal hearing emerged out of the idea of communication impairments and from a very specific time and place.” He moves from this study of a phenomenology of impairment into its deployment, to consider his own voice, or voices v (spoken, amplified, written, authorial). Via his personal amplification device, which he has named the “dork-o-phone,” Sterne takes this object to think with to give us a history and experience of assistive technology and design as it interacts with other infrastructures.

    Sterne then moves from political phenomenology to breaking the normative form of a book by inserting the written guide for an imaginary exhibition “In Search of New Vocalities.” The exhibition is accessible, designed for bodies coming from places imaginary and real, an act of care in the scene of art going, if only in the mind. The tone of the book shifts once more for the concluding two chapters towards something more familiar from Sterne’s earlier books, here centered more squarely in STS and Disability studies.

    Chapter four is a theorization of Sterne’s identification of “aural scarification” and what he calls normal impairments. In this chapter, Sterne joins recent accounts of the built environment—and here he focuses on our sonic environment—that argue that disability itself reveals aspects of society that hurt everyone, however unevenly. Sara Hendren’s What Can a Body Do? (Riverhead, 2020) shows how the curb on the sidewalk, for example, makes city infrastructures impassable for wheelchair users—but also say, mothers pushing strollers, travelers with suitcases, skateboarders and so on. Add a curb cut and suddenly movement is much more possible in urban spaces for many—not just the conventionally disabled. On the other hand, sometimes access for disabled users is granted almost by accident. Sterne provides another example: closed captioning. Initially, closed captioning was resisted by major broadcast networks precisely because it was expensive and obtrusive—and would only help a small minority. Then other spaces changed and hearing users needed to be able to see what they would otherwise listen to, in airport bars, in hospital waiting rooms, at the gym. Suddenly, D/deaf users got the captions they needed—but only because abled users wanted the same technology. Sterne calls this “crip washing”; the scholar and critic Mara Mills calls this an “assistive pretext.”

    Sterne adds to this account that we live in a physical world that is in fact designed for people who are a little bit hearing impaired. Our entire infrastructure is loud: airplanes, bathroom hand dryers, music, whether live or in ear buds. Sterne shows that it is better not to hear perfectly and we hear less well because we interact with this environment; being alive leads to impairment even if we start without it (“you will someday join us”). Throughout Diminished Faculties, Sterne troubles the binary of disabled and abled body/mind by putting disability into a constellation with impairment and illness. By thinking about impairment and faculties, Sterne argues that some forms of impairment are accepted, even become norms, while others are marked as problems, which separates it as a term even as it overlaps with disability. What then is an impairment if we expect it, if it is normal, and it can be disappeared through design? Why are other impairments made visible through these same processes? Considering impairment and disability as a norm is a revision that Sterne requires of his reader, broadening our working understanding of the built environment.

    The concluding chapter of the book offers a deft theory and history of fatigue and rest. Opening with theorizations of how we manage fatigue in relation to labor, from Taylorism to energy quantified by “spoons” as theorized by Christine Miserandino, Sterne moves his account of fatigue through and beyond a depletion model. He asks whether we can think of fatigue as something other than a loss, a depletion of energy? He argues that rather than a lack of energy, fatigue is a presence. Sterne reminds his reader throughout that fatigue is so difficult to capture phenomenologically precisely because if it is too overtly present, he couldn’t write it down, if not present enough, he could not articulate the experience of fatigue from within. In this moment, Sterne returns to political phenomenology—including its limits. There are certain experiences, extreme fatigue being one of them—that are sometimes simply not accessible in the moment of writing.

    Impairment and fatigue are both concepts from media and the mediation of the body in society, and here are richly positioned within a history of technology and from disability studies. The two commingle, as Sterne deftly shows, to produce our lived experience of body in situ. Along the way, Sterne gives us additional experiences: an account of himself, an exhibition, and a theory to use (and a manual for how we might do it), turn to account, and even dispose of. Diminished Faculties is a lyric, genre-bending book, that is forcefully argued, rendered beautifully, and will open the path for further research. It is deeply generous both to reader and future scholar, as Sterne’s work always is. But additionally, this is a book that so many have needed, and need now, a way of situating the present emergency in a much longer, political history.

    _____

    Hannah Zeavin teaches in the History and English Departments at UC Berkeley. She is the author of The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy (2021, MIT Press). Other work is forthcoming or out from differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Dissent, The Guardian, n+1, Technology & Culture, and elsewhere.

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  • Amit R. Baishya — Passions of the Political (Review of Anustup Basu’s Hindutva as Political Monotheism)

    Amit R. Baishya — Passions of the Political (Review of Anustup Basu’s Hindutva as Political Monotheism)

    a review of Anustup Basu, Hindutva as Political Monotheism (Duke, 2020)

    by Amit R. Baishya

    This article was peer-reviewed by the boundary 2 Editorial Collective.

    “In studying its (Hindutva as political monotheism) long genesis, my objective is not to advance toward a prognostic reading of the present…My purpose will instead be to explore, with some degree of speculation, the ground of the present.”

    (Anustup Basu, Hindutva as Political Monotheism, 10)

    The sentences above are crucial for approaching the novelty of Anustup Basu’s approach in his monograph Hindutva as Political Monotheism. Studies of Hindutva usually focus on its historical geneses, its sociological impact, and its anthropological dimensions.[1] Basu’s monograph is a path-breaking attempt to trace its genealogy as a political monotheism. This effort, he says, is not “a presentist elaboration of what we are witnessing now, but a deep search of its (Hindutva’s) historical origins” (2). The key analytical optic he deploys to understand Hindutva as a political monotheism, as an ideology that seeks a “unifying ethnocultural consistency rather than a theological unity,” and as “a monotheme of religiosity rather than religion itself” are the works of the hard-right thinker and one-time Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt (5). Schmitt’s theses on the concept of the political assists Basu in drawing out a “tacit monotheistic imperative in European organic theories of religious and ethnocentric nationhood” that he explores in detail in his first chapter (5). This monotheistic impulse utilizes the colonial epistemological category of “Hinduism” to invent it as a “jealous” political and national identity that eventually colonizes the apparatus of the post-colonial state. In an introduction and four subsequent chapters, Basu traces the development of this monotheistic impulse as a literary and cultural project in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to its eventual replacement by “Hindutva 2.0”—an advertised and informational experience of urban modernity—in the contemporary period. Basu does not conduct this inquiry by presenting a chronological narrative of the development of core Hindutva ideas; rather, the word “speculation” in the epigraph above signals his eclectic and creative juxtaposition of multiple primary sources to trace a genealogy of Hindutva as a political monotheism.

    Hindutva as Political Monotheism (henceforth Hindutva) locates the search for a fully developed political monotheism in India in relation to two dimensions of inquiry. The first is the colonial epistemological invention of “Hinduism,” the larger arcs of modernity in India, and the drafting and implementation of post-colonial India’s constitution in 1950. The second places the contemporary rise of Hindutva within the broader global crisis of liberalism and the concomitant rise of ethic-national chauvinisms. Two conceptual terms serve as touchstones in the four chapters. The first is axiomatic that is derived from William Connolly’s work on American evangelical-capitalism in Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (2008). The axiomatic, Basu writes, is a “singular religious passion that does not necessarily depend on theological consistency” (5). This observation connects with his argument broached earlier that Hindutva is more about religiosity than about religion per se. He further specifies that the axiomatic is “a techno-social regime of governmentality than simply a theologico-pastoral formation” (5). The second term is parabasis, which he draws from Gayatri Spivak’s Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999). This term emerges from classical Greek theater and refers to the duration in the play when the actors leave the stage, and the chorus addresses the audience. Basu deploys parabasis to explore the “historical roots of a relatively recent voice of a wider urban consensus beyond usual suspects such as the ardent disciple of (M.S.) Golwalkar or the angry foot soldier of (Narendra) Modi” (9).[2] This urban consensual voice, while constituted by dissonant timbres, converges in crucial aspects to consolidate and sustain “the increasing metropolitan revision of regional eccentricities and the fervor for security and techno-financial growth” (10). The genealogical precedents and rise to prominence of this “electronic Hindu political monotheism,” which surpasses the older impasses of print capitalism, is the central knowledge-object Basu focuses on in Hindutva.

    Chapter One—“Questions Concerning the Hindu Political”—lays the theoretical foundations by elaborating some key concepts from Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political (2007) and Political Theology (2006). The key extension that he makes to Schmitt’s vitalistic conceptualization of the political as the realm defined by the friend-enemy antagonism is by reading it as a “fundamentally monotheistic calling” and not via the German thinker’s observation that all secular concepts are at their base sublimated religious ones (14). This austere notion of the political is a “mythopoetic automaton” that enables the imagination of a unified people and the state only after having “categorically distinguished the believer from the infidel” (14). This “passion” is monotheistic by “secular transposition, because it has to be a singular impelling of devotion to the nation and the state” (14). In the colonial/post-colonial Indian context, this monotheism is conceived by the Hindu right as constitutively Hindu, an axiomatic that is then opposed to rival monotheistic axiomatics like Islam and, to a lesser extent, Christianity. A fiction of a primordial, prepolitical Hindu India is, thus, disseminated which has supposedly survived and persisted despite Islamic, and later, British colonization of what is now a nation-state.

    Basu states that he isn’t interested in an “instrumental” reading of the Indian context in Schmittian terms (23). Schmitt’s theorizations are not used as a mechanical explanatory model applied to the Indian context; rather, his “sparse” invocation is useful in highlighting three important themes of particular pertinence to nation-thinking and imaginaries of sovereignty: “the modern understanding of religion, the romance of the past, and the concomitant monotheistic imperative of political theology” (14).  Basu is interested in mining the connection between Schmitt’s notion of the political and Hindutva for three specific reasons. First, there has been a consistent monotheistic impulse in the discursive invention of “Hinduism” from the nineteenth century onwards. The Abrahamic cast endowed to Hinduism from that period paves the way for its consolidation as a political and nationalist identity that desires the state form. Second, Hindu nationalism is thoroughly Eurocentric and Orientalist at its core, a fact underscored rather risibly, as reported in the news portal The Wire (2021), in a recent revision to the history curriculum of Delhi University where the Mughal emperor Babur’s entry into India is termed “invasion” while the East India Company’s rule is couched under the more benign term “territorial expansion.” Third, when Hindu nationalism became institutionalized as a political movement in the 1920s and 30s, it was directly influenced by European fascisms and Herderian romantic-organicist formulations (17). But what makes Schmitt particularly relevant to Basu’s project is his identification of the passion of “jealousy” as the core of the monotheistic distinction between friend and enemy in the realm of the political. This passion facilitates the imagination of a Hindu India as “an organic whole rather than an associational pact” and is often summoned to judge the contrarian pressures of regionalism or to condemn secularism and federalism in the Indian context (151).

    Let us tarry with some of the distinctive features of Basu’s reading of the passion of “jealousy” in Schmitt awhile. In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt argues that the friend-enemy distinction is the central antagonism in the political sphere. Given Basu’s focus on “grounds,” it is crucial to note the way he distinguishes Schmitt’s friend-enemy antagonism and its relation to sovereign decisionism from the Hobbesian model of decisionism. Hobbes begins from the contractualist fiction and not the primordial time-space that precedes the contract. In contrast, for Schmitt, this primordial is the settlement of the question of friend and enemy. Thus, the friend-enemy antagonism and its settlement prior to social contracts or associations constitutes the very grounds of the political. Basu writes:

    The political is decided by a primal pathology prior to self-conscious peopleness; it…has to be an already-there organic unity. It cannot be associational or contractual precisely because it must express a singular and undivided will before reason and talk can proceed. Schmitt’s political theology therefore necessarily defines the bearer of the political as a monotheistic congregation, jealous of any apostates, pagans or heretics in its midst. (18)

    The passion of jealousy points us towards the chilling imperative that a war for extermination between both parties is possible at any time. The purpose of the state is to respond to this fear at every step. When the juridical resources of the state cannot fulfil this expectation, a “secular miracle” is called for—the exception.[3] This sovereign decision can either be a war against “internal” enemies or a “perpetual civil war as an index of relentless determination or purification” (18). The chilling imperatives of Hindutva as political monotheism, which can be conducted both as a war on internal enemies and a permanent civil war, echo these Schmittian postulations.

    Chapter Two (“The Hindu Nation as Organism”) is the core of Hindutva. This chapter juxtaposes philosopher Bimal Krishna Matilal’s work on Indic “little traditions” with modern Hindutva’s organismic invented “grand” tradition that attempts to subsume a massive plurality of identities via a “unifying ethnocultural consistency rather than a theological unity” (5). Basu deploys Aamir Mufti’s Enlightenment in the Colony (2007) to caution that there is no “pristine truth of pluralism” to contrast with the pristine truth of monotheism—both desires are sullied by the colonial modern. They gesture to a lost excess beyond the organizing frames of colonial taxonomies. But what is missing, Basu writes, in Hindutva discourses is the “critical admission of irony and amnesiac mourning—an understanding of the bygone as necessary fiction with a phantom aspect…” (34). This differentiates Hindutva’s monotheistic search for lost origins from the double consciousness that marks scholars like Matilal, Mufti, and, indeed, works like Hindutva itself.

    In contrast to Hindutva’s modernist desire for a theistic unity and consistency in line with the Abrahamic traditions, Matilal’s works on “little traditions” show that while the numerous South Asian scriptural traditions have “involved themselves with logic and epistemology, religious duties and rituals, metaphysics and soteriology,” they have hardly ever “furnished a constitutive moral worldview” (38). This seeming lack of a constitutive, coherent moral worldview and a massive polyphony of voices within what is called the Hindu tradition has led many Western thinkers to posit that “Indian religion was inseparable from Indian mythology” (Hegel) or that there was “no concept of morality in Sanskrit” (Max Weber) (39-41). To make Hinduism “necessarily Brahminical and resolutely monolingual,” as Hindutva attempts to do, would involve the negation of the dynamic osmosis among the tremendous babble of “little traditions” into a “manufactured and jealous ‘Epic of Traditions’…in order to institute a masculine, Savarna national morality robbed of all errant and queering energies” (41). This is a project still in the making, but one which has become more prominent and public in recent times.

    The other insuperable bottleneck that Hindutva faces is that of caste. While Hindutva discourse insists on the “original Varna as a recognition of merit over birth,” the questions of Jati and Varna are always complicated by plural traditions that are “artisanal, ecological, and based on everyday customs and pieties” (44-6). The problem here lies in Hindutva’s uncritical adoption of the Western anthropological category of religion itself. As Basu says, quoting Matilal: “‘The social reality [called] religion did not exist in ancient or classical India’—at least in a core, etymological root sense of the word, as reliq, or that which binds and relegates” (47). Responding to this absence, Hinduism is invented as a monotheism and as resolutely monolingual by Hindutva. The valorization of Brahminical theodicy in this monolingual reformulation is a manifestation of the desperate desire of Hindutva historicism to respond to and rectify the purported lack posited by the Orientalizing gaze of the big colonizing Other.

    The tour de force in this chapter is Basu’s analysis of the “pieties” of Hindutva discourse and the problems it encounters in endowing the nation an organismic cast. For Hindutva thinkers like MS Golwalkar and Deen Dayal Upadhyay, the Hindu nation in its essence is paradoxically predicated on “terrestrial homogeneity as well as cosmogonic inequity” (32). Once this promised Hindu punyabhumi (consecrated land) is achieved via the revival of Hindu virtue:

    …this nation, in its perfection, will be marked by a balanced metabolism of natural caste patrimony and a principled docility of the lower orders. Citizenship shall be defined by selfless service and sacrifice, not by individual rights and interests. The state here can only be an organic expression of an originary Brahminical peace; it may not be a profane artifice to ward off a natural state of (caste) war. (32)

    This invocation of Brahminical peace and caste war leads directly to Basu’s fascinating consideration of Hindutva’s “primal origin myth” and evocation of “deep time” that he conducts via an elaboration of four themes: “Time and Origins,” “Race and Law,” “Territory, Imaginative Geography, Identity,” and “Language, Countermemory, and Culture.” I won’t go into the details of each theme but will explicate Basu’s theorization of Hindutva “deep time” through a contrast with an interesting moment in a well-known South Asian fictional text. Nirmal, a central character in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2006), tries to explain how he will attempt to communicate the vastness of geological timescales to a group of rural children in Bengal:

    It’s not just the goddesses—there’s a lot more in common between myth and geology. Look at the size of their heroes, how immense they are—heavenly deities on the one hand, and on the other the titanic stirrings of the earth itself—both equally otherworldly, equally remote from us…And then, of course, there is the scale of time—yugas and epochs, Kaliyug and the Quaternary. And yet—mind this!—in both, these vast durations are telescoped in such a way as to permit the telling of a story. (150)

    Nirmal’s homology between myth and geology shows how the vastness of geological time is conceptualized by different epistemological formations in varied yet comparable ways. As the medievalist Jeffrey J. Cohen (2015) writes—“Every historical period works with the conceptual tools it inherits but is never bound by that heritage to the replication of that which is already known” (83). Nirmal seems to intuitively understand the connection between such different epistemological attempts at comprehending the vastness of temporal scales. He uses this understanding and tries to channel it creatively towards a pedagogical goal—how to make his students grasp the vastness of the temporal scales of geohistory.

    Is the Hindutva homology, or rather the erasure of the gap between myth and history the same as what Nirmal institutes between myth and geology? Time, as Basu says, in its Hindu-Aryan naissance “is geological” (49). Basu succinctly distinguishes imaginaries of temporal scale in Puranic cosmologies and the way Hindutva banalizes them for statist ends. Deep time in Puranic texts is not quantifiable in literal terms, and function as “pure magnitudes to invoke fear, shame and reverence…” (51). Such pure magnitudes create an “existential distance between humans of the present and the Dharmic exemplum” (52). Time-reckoning in the ancient era could simultaneously exist as cyclical in terms of cosmology and linear in terms of the moment of the here and now. The problem with Hindutva thinking lies in “making the two identical, and then vectorizing the whole thing in terms of statist mythography” (52). The complexities of the temporal imaginaries that so invigorate Nirmal to help his students encounter questions of geological scale is rerouted via colonial historiography by Hindutva discourse into “coarse positivisms of rise and fall” (53).  Invocations of deep time in Hindutva discourse is not a contention with different timescales, but a negation of timeliness and metric history, as for example in Golwalkar’s rhetorical flourish that Hindus ruled India for ten thousand years before a “foreigner” set foot in it (54-5). Metric time and history are conceptualized as a form of rupture. The original period of Hindu glory cannot be located within temporal frameworks; instead, history begins with a curving towards Kaliyuga (end times). Secular history is a fall from a myth of origins, while the myth of the golden Hindu past exists in a time before time.

    This conceptualization of deep time before historical time proper is also imagined as a period of Brahminical peace. The invocation of a mythic past in terms of Varna is necessary for Hindutva because it is predicated “in the form of a Jati revenge against Islam, not Jati parity within Hinduism” (56). The monotheme of a jealous Hindu identity ranged against rival axiomatics can only be consolidated by “foreclosing the emergence of countermemories and competing fictions of Jati identity” (56). Deploying Michel Foucault’s ideas on race war from Society must be Defended (2003), Basu argues that for this Hindu monotheme to emerge and to anticipate a possible future when this essence is restored, the link between history and caste-war must be actively denied or forgotten:

    No matter how far back one goes, profane historical knowledge does not present nature, right, order, or peace for Hindutva. Hindutva’s historicism is therefore founded on an idealism that knowledge and truth belong to the order of Brahminical peace; that they cannot belong to the side of violence, miscegenation, and relentless caste war. (62)

    Besides the potential extermination of the enemy and forgetting of caste war, this narrative of Hindu redemption is predicated on the concurrent remembering of an ideal Hindu subject that is “apparently different from the profane, modern one, yet one that is lost in an ever-receding past that in itself cannot be viewed other than through the prism of the modern” (86). This ideal Hindu subject, simultaneously ancient and modern, must be reinstated as sovereign among the plurality of identities in the subcontinent. This is one of the core elements of the Hindutva project.

    Chapter Three—“The Indian Monotheism”—moves away from Hindutva discourse to an analysis of “normative Hinduism,” a secularized, albeit Hinduized, sensus communis that has been the bedrock of the post-colonial nation-state. This discourse of “soft” Hinduness ranges across a spectrum from “benign to sharp.” It also oscillates between a patronizing benevolence towards Islam and a paranoid hauteur directed towards the jealous monotheism of Hindutva (124). In recent decades, Basu writes, this “apparently benign Hinduness has increased its powers as a psychological parabasis for a majoritarian nation” (88).  Chapter Three looks at “discursive antecedents” in the “broader nineteenth-century Indological identification of ‘Hinduism’ and the discourses of Hindu reform, Hindu anthropology, jurisprudence, and history” (7). This “benign” discursive trajectory of a Hindu monotheme has increasingly been replaced with “ritualized pathological expressions” (88). The fact that benign Hinduness and ritualized pathological Hindutva are often substitutable with each other reveal that they are secret sharers drawing from the same wellspring of the Hindu monotheme.

    In terms of specifics, “The Indian Monotheism” considers a broad “constellation of moments”—the Vedantic reform of Raja Rammohan Roy, the literary moment of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan’s universalization of the caste question, and the “pacific paternalism” of M.K. Gandhi (146).  Crucial to this discursive project of a “monothematic Hindu becoming in anticipation of the nation-state” is the furnishing of “imagined communities and personages with a subjectivity and a historical agency pertinent to the overall invention of a Hindu past” (147). This occurred in several ways—the elevation of neo-Vedantic monism as a counter to the messy facts of polytheism in Hindu practices (evident, for instance, in the literary interventions of Roy), the institutionalization of the Bhagawad Gita as the holy book of the Hindu people (a reading very prominent in Bankim), and the portrayal of figures like Rama and Krishna as prophetic personages greater than Christ or the Buddha. In each case, the development of the Hindu monotheme necessitated arguments with colonial Reason and the subsumption of ambiguous and scattered elements within the ambit of “antiquarian or monumental” histories that corresponded to nationalistic desires (147). All these moments of argumentation had major differences with Hindutva—for instance, Rammohan Roy’s Hindu monism as universal religion bypassed the passion of jealousy altogether, while Radhakrishnan’s pragmatic defense of Varna differs from the theologico-cosmogonic cast that Hindutva ideologues like Golwalkar posited. What unites them though is the deep desire for a quintessentially Hindu-Indian axiomatic.

    The discussion of the trajectory from Roy to Radhakrishnan is bookended by Hegel’s philosophical critique of the Gita on the one hand and B.R. Ambedkar’s critique of Hinduism on the other. Hegel’s 1827 civilizational diagnosis that the “absence of a monotheistic esprit de corps” in the Gita compromises the nation’s “security in a world of lordship and bondage,” serves as a foil for the intellectual ripostes by Rammohan Roy and Bankim (101). Much more interesting though is Basu’s discussion of Ambedkar’s Jacobin critique of Hinduism. I will highlight one aspect of Ambedkar’s radical critique of Hindu monotheism through a contrast with Radhakrishnan. For Radhakrishnan, caste became a means to contain race conflict in India. The genius of the Indian caste system, for Radhakrishnan, was the prevention and containment of race war (which was supposedly common in all societies) via a process of harmonization rather than the alternatives of enslavement or extermination (129). Caste, thus, is presented as not ontologically unique to Indian society. According to Radhakrishnan, it is a feature of all societies. It is just that it happened to be a practical and harmonious way to stave off race war perfected in the Indian context.  This universalization of the caste question and its specific flowering in Indian climes produced a “democracy of spirit,” although it was not amenable to the accumulation of wealth or political power (129).

    Ambedkar, Basu says, rejects the “naturalistic, race-based exoneration” of caste in the Gandhi-Radhakrishnan trajectory of Hindu reformism. The caste imaginary’s strict adherence to notions of purity and endogamous marriage went against a phenomenology of biological race—a fair-skinned lower caste person would still be ostracized while a dark-skinned Brahmin would not (136). From a political economic perspective, caste was not division of labor, but “a calibrated division of laborers” that could not be encompassed by economism alone (137). The essence of caste does not depend on a naturalistic explanation but is a “sublimation in time” (137). It shifts and mutates in a historical field “pertaining to shifts in custom, culture, production, theology, or the aesthetics of self-making” (137). Caste discrimination was a disciplinary framework that combines “a libidinal economy of desire with a political one of interest” (140). This notion of disciplining the caste other is fundamentally inimical to the idea of democracy that Ambedkar draws from his teacher John Dewey—“…a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience” (142). The problem with Indian nationalism, suffused by reformism of the Gandhi-Radhakrishnan type, is that it short-circuited social revolution in favor of a political one (143). In doing so, “soft” Hinduism suffused with the “lure of temperate Brahminism” became the raison d’etre of the post-colonial state. This constituted the “parabasis of the new Hindu normal” whose affective power rendered the “Indian constitutional revolution passive by foreclosing a constitutional morality” (145). Hegemonic Indian nationalism viewed the spiritual work of the nation as already complete millennia ago—all that was necessary was reform and revival (149). Rare exceptions like Ambedkar and Rabindranath Tagore, whom Basu considers briefly at the end of this chapter, went against the grain of this Hindu-normative common sense.

    Chapter Four—“Hindutva 2.0 as Advertised Monotheism”—considers Hindutva monotheism from the other end of the temporal spectrum: “in terms of millennial mutations in the era of information and globalization” (7). This chapter is a return to familiar turf for readers familiar with Basu’s earlier work on film and media cultures. The two key conceptual terms in this chapter—“Hindutva 2.0” and “advertised modernization”—fuses the analysis of contemporary media ecologies with considerations of affect. Thus, the assemblage of Hindutva 2.0 presumes a “neuropolis of populations” and sustains itself on “industrialized instincts of jealousy and anxiety” (166). As a mediatized phenomenon, predicated on the rapid proliferation of cellphones, the internet and digital technology, it does not depend on some of the established avenues of modernity like newspapers, books or university spaces. It is not dependent on “traditional” orders like shakhas or temples either. Instead, it works “primarily by way of loose, fungible distributions of affect, spectacle and…the substance of the advertised” (158). In an age of Whatsapp forwards, or what is colloquially called the “Whatsapp University,” it hollows out historical consciousness and reduces it to the syncopated form of a meme or a short message that can be forwarded virally. Hindutva 2.0 also establishes new synergies between “being Hindu and neoliberalism, one taking place on a plane of marketable desires and terrors” (158). In doing so, it spreads both soft and hard versions of the Hindu normal across the entire digital spectrum.

    The other key term—advertised modernization—draws on trajectories of affect studies that point towards “a neuropolitics of the twenty-first century in which multidirectional stimulations, attention spans, diversions, ennui, or boredom become potent political factors” (180). “Advertised” is a conceptual metaphor which goes beyond questions of truth and falsehood; instead, it renders “an innocuous ‘take away,’ a ‘feel good’ sensation, or in some cases, a consumable fear” (180). In such an advertised scenario, which is also necessarily majoritarian, there is “no narrative obligation to truth or closure”; rather, it is the affect it evokes and the sense of belonging it creates to a particular brand that counts (180). Probably its most well-known global manifestation in recent times is the “pure gesture” of the Trumpian lie. As is obvious, most of what Trump (or Modi) utter in public can be debunked with minimal fact-checking; yet, for the devout Trump or Modi follower, they operate as “pure gestures advertising a new covenant between tradition and modernity, rather than as dialectical matters of an Aristotleian politics aimed at virtue…” (181). The Trumpian statement itself may be outrageously false, but it comes straight from the heart for legions of acolytes.

    The Trump-Modi performatives also thrive in a changed scenario of the advertisement. The older model of the fifteen to thirty second advertisement emerging from “vertical models of mass culture” is passé. What has taken its place is an “order of convergence marked by nondirectional flows between platforms, instant audience migrations, and corporate cooperation” (181). In this changed scenario, political campaigning itself becomes interactive and is constituted by feedback loops and the processing of data that occur 24/7—consider here, for instance, the use of holograms and selfies during Modi’s 2014 campaign. The political personality becomes a brand that proliferates across a wide mediaverse circumnavigating a multidirectional circuit of affect. Branding, in Basu’s words, “becomes a matter of controlled chaos, leveraged in order to achieve critical densities of affect, recall value, or regularities of reference” (182). In this altered mediascape, the monotheme of Hindutva does not operate through a straightforward invocation of jealousy against the infidel; instead, congregations of believers coalesce in “virtual affinity spaces” that cut across older divides of city and country.

    Basu also provides a contrast between two different historical constellations to outline the specificity of Hindutva 2.0. This contrast is set up through his discussion of the journalist Akshaya Mukul’s book Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (2015) at the beginning of the chapter. Mukul’s fascinating book received a fillip when he came across the “Poddar papers,” a massive archive of correspondence, pamphlets and manuscripts by, on or written to Hanuman Prasad Poddar, who along with Jaydayal Goyandka founded the Gita Press in Gorakhpur in 1923. Mukul writes:

    As Gita Press stands within striking distance of a century, the only organization that may be said to parallel its success is the Bible Society. No other publishing house in India has marketed religion so successfully. (430)

    Through cheap editions of Hindu religious texts in multiple languages, its Hindi monthly Kalyan (first published in 1927) and its English avatar Kalyana-Kalpataru (first published in 1934), Gita Press made deep inroads throughout India, even into Hindu homes that wouldn’t identify necessarily with Hindutva. Espousing conservative upper caste-Hindu values and functioning as a foot-soldier of the Sangh Parivar, despite its claims that it maintains a safe distance from politics, Gita Press also managed to get a wide spectrum of notable figures of varying ideological proclivities, ranging from Golwalkar to Gandhi, to write for Kalyan. The notable absentee unsurprisingly was Ambedkar, a figure Kalyan was scathingly critical of.  Often deploying what Basu calls a “paranoid style” (155), Gita Press at various times has also effectively deployed the language of hate and insular religious identity.

    While Gita Press is still influential, Basu extensively discusses Mukul’s book to show how Hindutva 2.0 is a massive shift in amplitude in the era of new media forms and the neoliberal order. This is especially evident with the rise of Narendra Modi as a media phenomenon—a process that demonstrated “the advertised realignment of tradition and modernity” for a “virtual Hindu congregation” (182). In this new distributional matrix of information, the divergent energies constituting the virtual Hindu congregation could touch the “Brahminical sensible” [a term Basu reworks from Jacques Ranciere’s idea of the distribution of the sensible from Dissensus (2015)] at various points without being subsumed within a monolingual Hindutva discourse. Basu concretizes the difference between Hindutva 2.0 and the older model of print capitalism thus:

    That older revivalist discourse, as have seen in the case of Gita Press…struggled to subsume the modern disciplines and the physical sciences into an apex Hindu vision. It had to world the caste question afresh in an altered universe of rights, freedoms and irreverent democratic tempers. It attempted, at every turn, to reconcile mythology with history, science and realism, or theodicy with justice. Such discursive efforts—rarely sublime, often ludicrous—have had a long history and continue to this day. However, in this new ecology, they acquire fresh powers of particularization and shooting through. (183)

    The neuropolitical dimension in this new informational ecology enables the collapse of traditional distinctions between city and country and epistemologies like Vedic cosmogony and astrophysics. The public this ecology subsumes can react in a variety of ways within the frame of this Hindu normativity—ranging from indulgence to outright dismissal, from neurosis to humor. But the key difference between this moment and the “traditional” print capitalist one, as Basu says, is that “it can bravely ‘touch upon,’ without obligation, many matters that traditional Hindu nationalist discourse has either avoided or approached gingerly” (183).

    In a broader spectrum of culture, advertised modernity is also evident in the shifts in the fantasy machine of Bollywood in the era of neoliberalization. Basu’s earlier work on the “geo-televisual aesthetic” (2010) is particularly relevant here in mapping these shifts.[4] On the one hand, post-1990 Bollywood films are marked by the gradual disappearance of the rural sphere, the poor, Dalit or Muslim character, and an obliteration of what film scholar Ranjani Mazumdar (2007) calls, the presence of the street; on the other hand, we notice the gradual rise to prominence of what Mazumdar calls the “lifestyle mythology” of the urban elite (143). Basu argues in Hindutva that advertised modernization operates at “the level of colors, saturations, textures, magical transportations, luminosities, and sonorous resonances” by which the “new, urban Hindu elite…[presents]…its life and aspirations as artwork” (191-2).  Vedic and Puranic cosmologies exist side by side with a muscular patriotism and an open (and opulent) celebration of right-wing mythologies as in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s controversial film Padmavat (2018).

    The underside of this glossy normative Hindu advertised fantasy is the proliferation of gritty, stylish films usually about Bombay’s underbelly. The “encounter” film—which revels in vigilante justice and extrajudicial killing meted out to characters from the underworld—has become a sub-genre in its own right. Basu reads it as a symptom of a persisting fascination with sovereign decisionism and of vigilante violence (especially against Muslims and Dalits, phenomena that spill from reel to real life) in the Indian context. A good example here would be Shimit Amin’s 2004 noir film Ab Tak Chappan (Till Now Fifty-six), which valorizes the life of the “encounter specialist” of the Mumbai Police Force, Daya Nayak. The title refers to the “encounter score” of fifty-six extrajudicial killings that Nayak purportedly participated in.

    This acceptance of extrajudicial violence, of course, is not a new phenomenon in Indian public life as the long and controversial histories of legal instruments like the AFSPA (Armed Forces Special Powers Act) and TADA (Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act) easily illustrates. What the contemporary “encounter” film does though is to stage the majoritarian desire for sovereign decisionism with a “cool” dressing of the gritty, seductive style of noir. At the level of cultural fantasy, the proliferation of such films signals two things. First, it “presents a metropolitan caste Hindu existence as the only form of life worth living” (199). Islam enters this cultural fantasy only when assimilated into “an overall civic religiosity of the (Hinduized) market” as in the celebration of figures like former President APJ Abdul Kalam or the three superstar Khans—Shahrukh, Aamir and Salman—of Bollywood (199). Otherwise, the Muslim is completely othered. Second, such fantasies also present the “urban caste Hindu existence as the only secure form of life worth living” (200). In this variation of the fantasy, the Muslim becomes the security threat against which society must be defended. As Basu writes, this “perception of Islam as an absolutist ethics is important for the cult of the encounter because it authorizes the state to respond with fearful symmetry and an instant theodicy of its own” (200). The bleed between reel and real could not be more chilling than this.

    No account of the urban Indian fascination with sovereign decisionism can be complete without reference to the current Prime Minister Narendra Modi. In one respect, Modi represents the open vocalization of certain desires that lay immanent before 2014: the fascination with a strong leader, alternative history scenarios where Vallabhbhai Patel or Subhash Chandra Bose led India instead of the “soft” Nehru, and the long-standing admiration for Hitler’s works in many middle-class Indian homes. Basu’s focus, however, is only incrementally with the personality of Modi and more with the images projected of Modi as a media phenomenon. What interests Basu is how the new “congregational plane” of advertised modernization “animated by instantaneous and wide dissemination” effectively negated an old truism about India as a coalition at the altar of Modi’s charismatic aura. At another level, this proliferating form of advertised modernization also brought together two elite urban population categories that had hitherto remained apart. Basu calls these two population subsets the Gentoo (the colonial term for “Hindu” that draws on the Portuguese gentio—pagan) and the Dehat (the Hindi term for rustic). The Gentoo is the technocratic elite enamored with neoliberal development. Within this category there is a spectrum of possibilities: the Gentoo wedded to hard Hindutva, the Gentoo who imagined the metropolitan good life as indistinguishable from Hinduness, and finally, the secular-neoliberal who conditionally supported Modi’s economic “reform” persona without going the whole hog with his cultural nationalist project. The Dehat, on the other hand, was the vernacular elite that emerged from the rich farming and privileged caste groups.

    Before 2014, at best only a provisional and uneasy Gentoo-Dehat coalition could be imagined. The media phenomenon that Modi became from around 2006 onwards with the celebration of the mythologized “Gujarat model of development” brought these two subsets together on the congregational plane. For the Gentoo especially, “Modi was a Dehat who could talk the talk of the Chicago boys and talk it well” (173). The public personality of Modi that was projected coalesced the images of the neoliberal messiah who would turbocharge the Gentoo model of development, the “strong” and decisive Hindu leader who would not compromise on national security against internal and external enemies, and the “saintly” man of sewa (service) who rose above petty politicking and remained untouched by the profanity of corruption. This could not have happened without the new media ecology that was “marked by speedy informational flows and feedback loops independent of traditional institutions of news and veracity” and where “one could freely disperse affects and expressions without disciplinary enunciation or narrative form” (170). In short, Hindutva 2.0 as advertised monotheism.

    Hindutva is an eclectic and multidimensional work that makes major interventions in multiple knowledge-fields like media and cinema studies, religious studies, postcolonial studies, South Asian studies, studies of nationalism and affect studies. Readers of Carl Schmitt can also deploy Basu’s reading of “jealousy” to read the mutation of the German thinker’s later work such as his theorization of the “absolute enemy” in The Theory of the Partisan (2007). Schmitt’s work, written in the wake of guerrilla movements and anticolonial revolutions during the Cold War period, prefigures how the contemporary juridical category of the “terrorist” envisaged as a figure relegated outside the sphere of the law, follows the tracks of earlier legal categorizations like “pirate” or “guerrilla.” Schmitt’s underlying argument that the contemporary partisan (or “terrorist”) is no longer an enemy, but a “satanic pursuer” who attempts to create ex nihilo (quoted in Ulmen 2007, xviii), would be useful to analyze via Basu’s categories of the passion of jealousy and its relation to the primordial settlement of the political.

    Moreover, while anchored strongly in the Indian context, Hindutva also has global relevance. While analyses of phenomena like the Trumpian lie clearly illustrates the broad reach of Basu’s work, his conclusion clearly shows how the insights of Hindutva can be utilized to contend with our current global conjuncture. I highlight one passage from the conclusion as an illustration:

    In a world dominated by a cartel of international banks, a transnational plutocracy, and North Atlantic military powers and their constable states, the nation is no longer the seat of those two immense themes of the liberal tradition: self-determination and the rights of the people. Yet paradoxically, and perhaps precisely because of this, the nation has to be defined as a progressively more insular cosmology of justice. It has to be relentlessly purified and made to close in upon itself; the country has to be at once achieved and repeatedly taken back. (206)

    This paradoxical movement of simultaneous achievement and the repeated taking back of the spectral nation is not limited to Hindutva 2.0 and the rise of Narendra Modi alone. With proper contextualization, these insights can also apply to Trumpian America, Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Duterte’s Philippines, Orban’s Hungary, Putin’s Russia and Erdogan’s Turkey among others. Indeed, as Basu writes, twenty-first century “fascism is about focalizing…intense localisms and threading them into a nationalist politics of rage and revenge banks” (206). The strongman (and it is usually a man, with Marine Le Pen one of the exceptions) is he who cuts through the patina of incessant talk (what Schmitt in an earlier Fascist conjuncture criticized about procedural liberalism) by monopolizing widespread public skepticism about corruption and about information culture. He promises to replenish the masculinity of the nation by simplifying discourse and identifying the enemy clearly.

    That said, I advance one critique of Hindutva from my own location as a scholar of the borderland region of Northeast India. While I grant that Northeast India isn’t the focus of Hindutva, there is a missed opportunity here for framing a more complicated account of the political in the South Asian context. In the first chapter, Basu writes that the specter of the concentration camp “hovers around the National Register of Citizens (NRC) project that the present Hindu nationalist government in India has reactivated in the Indian northeastern state of Assam” (19). I do not disagree that the ruling BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) has weaponized the NRC as a pan-Indian phenomenon, and that detention centers are a grim reality in Assam today. But the word “reactivated” above, to use Basu’s own terms against himself, seems to make Hindutva the only player in town in Assam (204). The BJP is a relative late entrant into the NRC process. The genealogy of the NRC predates the BJP becoming a major player in this borderland state and has to be located in the complex politics of what the political essayist Sanjib Baruah in In the Name of the Nation (2020) calls a “settlement frontier” of the erstwhile colonial state (47-75). As Ornit Shani (2018) writes in her book on the creation of independent India’s first set of electoral rolls:

    In Assam…ethno nationalist attitudes manifested particularly towards the non-Assamese ‘floating population,’ many of whom are Bengali speaking Hindus from East Pakistan. Local authorities expressed a view of membership from a state that was defined by a descent group and delimited to ‘children of the soil,’ who were eligible to have full rights. Thus, ethno nationalist conceptions were not necessarily on the basis of religion. (72)

    This long history shapes the institutionalization of the NRC as a discriminatory citizenship regime. These facts show that the grounds of the political in such borderland contexts are not exclusively determined by religious binaries and its attendant passion of jealousy familiar to scholars of mainland South Asia.

    To be sure, there have been synergies between ethnonationalism and Hindutva in recent times. But the completion of the NRC process also reveals the faultlines between Hindutva and ethnonationalist politics. When the NRC was published in 2019, for instance, the BJP was disappointed that many Hindus were included in the list. They have recently promised a new, updated NRC. This faultline between Hindutva and ethnonationalism has hardened with the implementation of the CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) in December 2019 which proposes to give citizenship to Hindu refugees, even though the BJP went on to win a majority in the state elections in 2021. None of these complexities are however mentioned in Basu’s account. In fact, in footnote twenty-five of Chapter One, the only source Basu cites about the NRC is an NPR report. He also writes in that same footnote that after “lying dormant for decades, it (the NRC) became politically relevant once more after Modi came to power” (213). Anyone familiar with Assam’s political scenario would be quick to point out that this discourse has not been dormant in the region at all, and that while Modi’s coming to power may have made it visible to mainstream Indian political discourse, the Northeastern borderlands have long been wrestling with this issue prior to 2014. In comparison to the eclectic historical and theoretical sketch of Hindutva, one is left wishing for a more complex rendering of the political in a borderland space such as Assam in this portion of Basu’s book.

    By way of a conclusion and drawing further from my own location in Northeast Indian studies, I initiate a brief conversation between Basu’s book and another major book on Hindutva that was published recently: Arkotong Longkumer’s ethnographic study The Greater India Experiment (2021). Hindutva is essentially correct, I think, in drawing a genealogy of an urban Hindu normativity. But what about Hindutva’s spread in locales beyond the Gentoo-Dehat urbanscape, especially in places that have been to a large extent inimical to the idea of India such as the borderland Northeastern region?  In his fascinating discussion of Hindutva worldings in the Northeastern region, Longkumer shows how within the larger monotheme of Hindu religiosity that Basu identifies, actual Hindutva practices are defined by shape-shifting and flexible positionalities as it tries to draw the divergent cosmologies of “tribal” religions within its fold. Of particular interest here is how Hindutva actors in Northeast India deploy the language of global indigeneity, polytheism and paganism to show connections between indigenous religions in the region and Hinduism. For instance, Longkumer writes that a 2005 BJP party document titled “Evolution of the BJP,” draws on the works of anthropologists on local and global aspects of indigeneity to argue that:

    …paganism relates, crucially, to local gods and ancestors of the land based on ideas of polytheism…In summing up the basic overlap between paganism and Hinduism, the BJP text says: ‘In a sense at the basic level Hinduism is a pagan religion. As Paganism allows for evolution Hinduism too allows for evolution. Since Paganism is belief in many Gods there is generally no fight over Gods. This is the greatest virtue of Polytheism…Once Hinduism is expressed along these lines, then, it has the potential to relate with other native traditions that are intimately connected to land. (115-16)

    While Hindutva proselytization in Northeast India is still an ongoing and contested process, such sentiments about polytheism are often invoked by Hindutva activists on the field to contest the animosity that monotheistic faiths like Christianity display against “pagan” and animist belief systems. An urban Hindu monotheme that has become dominant with advertised modernity and a flexible deployment of polytheism as a proselytizing strategy in the borderlands—these are two torn halves that do not constitute a whole, but gesture towards a larger and still developing story of why Hindutva has become the dominant political discourse in India today.

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    Amit R. Baishya is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Contemporary Literature from Northeast India: Deathworlds, Terror and Survival (Routledge, 2018) and the co-editor of Northeast India: A Place of Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2017), Postcolonial Animalities (Routledge, 2019), and a special issue of the journal Postcolonial Studies titled “Planetary Solidarities: Postcolonial Theory, the Anthropocene and the Nonhuman” (2021-22).

    Back to the essay

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    Notes

    [1] For examples, see Jaffrelot (1995); Hansen (1999); Vanaik (2017).

    [2] M.S. Golwalkar (1906-73) was a prominent early ideologue of the RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), the apex body in what is called the “Sangh Parivar.”

    [3] Schmitt’s views on the connection between exception and miracles comes out most clearly in his reading of Chapter 37 of Hobbes’ Leviathan in The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (1996). Schmitt says—“A miracle is what the sovereign state authority commands its subjects to believe to be a miracle; but also—and here the irony is especially acute—the reverse: Miracles cease when the state forbids them” (55).

    [4] Basu defines the geo-televisual as a cinematic idiom that emerged from the mid-90s onwards and which cannibalized and combined heterogenous elements (MTV, video games, international travel, spiritualism et al) in a “fungible yet sensuous style—one that begins to operate at the level of the tissue and the nerve” (7). We notice an early intimation of the neuropolitical here.

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    Works Cited

    • Amin, Shimit. 2004. Ab Tak Chappan. Mumbai: K Sera Sera, Varma Productions.
    • Baruah, Sanjib. 2020. In the Name of the Nation: India and its Northeast. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
    • Basu, Anustup. 2010. Bollywood in the Age of New Media: The Geo-Televisual Aesthetic. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
    • Bhansali, Sanjay Leela. 2018. Padmaavat. Mumbai: Viacom 18 Motion Pictures.
    • Cohen, Jeffrey J. 2015. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. Minneapolis: University of      Minnesota Press.
    • Connolly, William E. 2008. Christianity and Capitalism, American Style. Durham: Duke University Press.
    • Foucault, Michel. 2003. Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76. Translated David Macey. New York: Picador.
    • Author. 2010. “Title” In Editor, ed. Title. Volume: Issue (Month). Place: Publisher. Pages.
    • Ghosh, Amitav. 2006. The Hungry Tide: A Novel. Boston, MA: Mariner Books.
    • Hansen, Thomas Blom. 1999. The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern India. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
    • Hobbes, Thomas. 1997. Leviathan. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.
    • Jaffrelot, Christophe. 1995. The Hindu Nationalist Movement in India. New York: Columbia University Press.
    • Longkumer, Arkotong. 2021. The Greater India Experiment: Hindutva and the Northeast. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
    • Mazumdar, Ranjani. 2007. Bombay Cinema: An Archive of the City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
    • Mufti, Aamir R. 2007. Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
    • Mukul, Akshaya. 2015. Gita Press and the Making of Modern India. New Delhi: Harper Collins.
    • Ranciere, Jacques. 2015. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. Translated Steve Corcoran. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
    • Schmitt, Carl. 2005. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty.     Translated George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
    • —.2007. The Concept of the Political (Expanded Edition). Translated George Schwab. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
    • —. 1996. The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol. Translated George Schwab. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.
    • —. 2007. The Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the    Political. Translated George Ulmen. New York: Telos Press.
    • Shani, Ornit. 2018. How India Became Democratic: Citizenship and the Making of the UniversalnFranchise. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
    • Spivak, Gayatri C. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
    • “UGC’s New Draft History Syllabus Plays Up Mythology, Faces Allegations of Saffronisation.” The Wire, March 23, 2021. https://thewire.in/education/ugcs-new-draft-history-syllabus-plays-up-mythology-faces-allegations-of-saffronisation.
    • Ulmen, G.L. 2007. “Translator’s Introduction.” The Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political. New York: Telos Press, ix-xxi.
    • Vanaik, Achin. 2017. The Rise of Hindu Authoritarianism: Secular Claims, Communal Realities. London: Verso.
  • Sue Curry Jansen and Jeff Pooley — Neither Artificial nor Intelligent (review of Crawford, Atlas of AI, and Pasquale, New Laws of Robotics)

    Sue Curry Jansen and Jeff Pooley — Neither Artificial nor Intelligent (review of Crawford, Atlas of AI, and Pasquale, New Laws of Robotics)

    a review of Kate Crawford, Atlas of AI Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence (Yale UP, 2021) and Frank Pasquale, New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI (Harvard UP, 2021)

    by Sue Curry Jansen and Jeff Pooley

    Artificial intelligence (AI) is a Faustian dream. Conceived in the future tense, its most ardent AI visionaries seek to create an enhanced form of intelligence that far surpasses the capacities of human brains. AI promises to transcend the messiness of embodiment, the biases of human cognition, and the limitations of mortality. Entering its eighth decade, AI is largely a science fiction, despite recent advances in machine learning. Yet it has captured the public imagination since its inception, and acquired potent ideological cache. Robots have become AI’s humanoid faces, as well as icons of popular culture: cast as helpful companions or agents of the apocalypse.

    The transcendent vision of artificial intelligence has educated, informed, and inspired generations of scientists, military strategists, policy makers, entrepreneurs, writers, artists, filmmakers, and marketers. However, apologists have also frequently invoked AI’s authority to mystify, intimidate, and silence resistance to its vision, teleology, and deployments. Where, for example, the threat of automation once triggered labor activism, rallying opposition to an esoteric branch of computer science research that few non-specialists understand is a rhetorical non-starter. So is campaigning for alternatives to smart apps, homes, cars, cities, borders, and bombs.

    Two remarkable new books, Kate Crawford’s The Atlas of AI and Frank Pasquale’s New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI, provide provocative critical assessments of artificial intelligence in clear, accessible, and engaging prose. Both books have titles that could discourage novices, but they are, in fact, excellent primers for non-specialists on what is at stake in the current ascendency of AI science and ideology—especially if read in tandem.

    Crawford’s thesis—“AI is neither artificial nor intelligent”—cuts through the sci-fi hype to radically reground AI power-knowledge in material reality. Beginning with its environmental impact on planet Earth, her narrative proceeds vertically to demystify AI’s ways of seeing—its epistemology, methodology, and applications—and then to examine the roles of labor, ideology, the state, and power in the AI enterprise. She concludes with a coda on space and the astronautical illusions of digital billionaires. Pasquale takes a more horizontal approach, surveying AI in health care, education, media, law, policy, economics, war, and other domains. His attention is on the practical present—on the ethical dilemmas posed by current and near-future deployments of AI. His through line is that human judgment, backed by policy, should steer AI toward human ends.

    Despite these differences, Crawford and Pasquale converge on several critical points. First, they agree that AI models are skewed by economic and engineering values to the exclusion of other forms of knowledge and wisdom. Second, both endorse greater transparency and accountability in artificial intelligence design and practices. Third, they agree that AI datasets are skewed: Crawford focuses on how the use of natural language datasets, no matter how large, reproduce the biases of the populations they are drawn from, while Pasquale attends to designs that promote addictive engagement to optimize ad revenue. Fourth, both cite the residual effects of AI’s military origins on its logic, values, and rhetoric. Fifth, Crawford and Pasquale both recognize that AI’s futurist hype tends to obscure the real-world political and economic interests behind the screens—the market fundamentalism that models the world as an assembly line. Sixth, both emphasize the embodiment of intelligence, which encompasses tacit and muscle knowledge that cannot be fully extracted and abstracted by artificial intelligence modelers. Seventh, they both view artificial intelligence as a form of data-driven behaviorism, in the stimulus-response sense. Eighth, they acknowledge that AI and economic experts claim priority for their own views—a position they both reject.

    Crawford literally travels the world to map the topologies of computation, beginning in the lithium mines of Nevada, on to Silicon Valley, Indonesia, Malaysia, China, and Mongolia, and ending under personal surveillance outside of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin suborbital launch facility in West Texas. Demonstrating that AI is anything but artificial, she documents the physical toll it extracts from the environment. Contra the industry’s earth-friendly PR and marketing, the myth of clean tech and metaphors like ‘the Cloud,’ Crawford points out that AI systems are built upon consuming finite resources that required billions of years to take form: “we are extracting Earth’s geological history to serve a split second of contemporary technological time, building devices like the Amazon Echo and iPhone that are often designed to last only a few years.” And the Cloud itself leaves behind a gigantic carbon footprint. AI data mining is not only dependent on human miners of rare minerals, but also on human labor functioning within a “registry of power” that is unequal and exploitive— where “many valuable automated systems feature a combination of underpaid digital piece workers and customers taking on unpaid tasks to make systems function,” all the while under constant surveillance.

    While there is a deskilling of human labor, there are also what Crawford calls Potemkin AI systems, which only work because of hidden human labor—Bezos himself calls such systems “artificial artificial intelligence.” AI often doesn’t work as well as the humans it replaces, as, for example, in automated telephone consumer service lines. But Crawford reminds us that AI systems scale up: customers ‘on hold’ replace legions of customer service workers in large organizations. Profits trump service. Her chapters on data and classification strip away the scientistic mystification of AI and Big Data. AI’s methodology is simply data at scale, and it is data that is biased at inception because it is collected indiscriminately, as size, not substance, counts. A dataset extracted and abstracted from a society secured in systemic racism will, for example, produce racist results. The increasing convergence of state and corporate surveillance not only undermines individual privacy, but also makes state actors reliant on technologies that they cannot fully understand as machine learning transforms them. In effect, Crawford argues, states have made a “devil’s bargain” with tech companies that they cannot control. These technologies, developed for command-and-control military and policing functions, increasingly erode the dialogic and dialectic nature of democratic commons.

    AI began as a highly subsidized public project in the early days of the Cold War. Crawford demonstrates, however, that it has been “relentlessly privatized to produce enormous financial gains for the tiny minority at the top of the extraction pyramid.” In collaboration with Alex Campolo, Crawford has described AI’s epistemological flattening of complexity as “enchanted determinism,” whereby “AI systems are seen as enchanted, beyond the known world, yet deterministic in that they discover patterns that can be applied with predictive certainty to everyday life.”[1] In some deep learning systems, even the engineers who create these systems cannot interpret them. Yet, they cannot dismiss them either. In such cases, “enchanted determinism acquires an almost theological quality,” which tends to place it beyond critique of both technological utopians as well as dystopians.

    Pasquale, for his part, examines the ethics of AI as currently deployed and often circumvented in several contexts: medicine, education, media, law, military, and the political economy of automation, in each case in relation to human wisdom. His basic premise is that “we now have the means to channel technologies of automation, rather than being captured or transformed by them.” Like Crawford, then, he recommends exercising a resistant form of agency. Pasquale’s focus is on robots as automated systems. His rhetorical point of departure is a critique and revision of Isaac Asimov’s highly influential “laws of robotics,” developed in a 1942 short story—more than a decade before AI was officially launched in 1956. Because the world and law-making is far more complex than a short story, Pasquale finds Asimov’s laws ambiguous and difficult to apply, and proposes four new ones, which become the basis of his arguments throughout the book. They are:

    1. Robotic systems and AI should complement professionals, not replace them.
    2. Robotic systems and AI should not counterfeit humanity.
    3. Robotic systems and AI should not intensify zero-sum arms races.
    4. Robotic systems and AI must always indicate the identity of their creator(s), controller(s), and owner(s).

    ‘Laws’ entail regulation, which Pasquale endorses to promote four corresponding values: complementarity, authenticity, cooperation, and attribution. The four laws’ deployment depends on a critical distinction that Pasquale draws between technologies that replace people and those that assist us in doing our jobs better. Classic definitions of AI have sought to create computers that “can sense, think, and act like humans.” Pasquale endorses an “Intelligence Augmentation” (IA) alternative. This is a crucial shift in emphasis; it is Pasquale’s own version of AI refusal.

    He acknowledges that, in the current economy, “there are economic laws that tilt the scale toward AI and against IA.” In his view, deployment of robots may, however, offer an opportunity for humanistic intervention in AI’s hegemony, because the presence of robots, unlike phones, tablets, or sensors, is physically intrusive. They are there for a purpose, which we may accept or reject at our peril, but find hard to ignore. Robots are being developed to enter fields that are already highly regulated, which offers an opportunity to shape their use in ways that conform to established legal standards of privacy and consumer protection. Pasquale is an advocate for building humane (IA) values within the technology, before robots are released into the wild.

    In each of his topical chapters, he explains how robots and other AI systems designed to advance the values of complementarity, authenticity, cooperation, and attribution might enhance human existence and community. Some chapters stand out, as particularly insightful, including those on “automated media,” human judgment, and the political economy of automation. One of Pasquale’s chapters addresses important terrain that Crawford does not consider, medicine. Given past abuses by medical researchers in exploiting and/or ignoring race and gender, they may be especially sensitive and receptive to an IA intervention, despite the formidable economic forces stacked against it. Pasquale shows, for example, how IA has amplified diagnostics in dermatology through pattern recognition, providing insight into what distinguishes malignant from benign moles.

    In our view, Pasquale’s closing chapter endorsing human wisdom, as opposed to AI, displays multiple examples of the former. But some of their impact is blunted by more diffuse discussions of literature and art, valuable though those practices may be in counter-balancing the instrumental values of economics and engineering. Nonetheless, Pasquale’s argument is an eloquent tribute to a “human form of life that is fragile, embodied in mortal flesh, time-delimited, and irreproducible in silico.”

    The two books, read together, amount to a critique of AI ideology. Pasquale and Crawford write about the stuff that phrases like “artificial intelligence” and “machine learning” refer to, but their main concern is the mystique surrounding the words themselves. Crawford is especially articulate on this theme. She shows that, as an idea, AI is self-warranting. Floating above the undersea cables and rare-earth mines—ethereal and cloud-like—the discourse makes its compelling case for the future. Her work is to cut through the cloud cover, to reveal the mines and cables.

    So the idea of AI justifies even as it obscures. What Crawford and Pasquale draw out is that AI is a way of seeing the world—a lay epistemology. When we see the world through the lens of AI, we see extraction-ready data. We see countable aggregates everywhere we look. We’re always peering ahead, predicting the future with machinist probabalism. It’s the view from Palo Alto that feels like a god’s eye view. From up there, the continents look patterned and classification-ready. Earth-bound disorder is flattened into clear signal. What AI sees, in Crawford’s phrase, is a “Linnaean order of machine-readable tables.” It is, in Pasquale’s view, an engineering mindset that prizes efficiency over human judgment.

    At the same time, as both authors show, the AI lens refracts the Cold War national security state that underwrote the technology for decades. Seeing like an AI means locating targets, assets, and anomalies. Crawford calls it a “covert philosophy of en masse infrastructural command and control,” a martial worldview etched in code.

    As Kenneth Burke observed, every way of seeing is also a way of not seeing. What AI can’t see is also its raw material: human complexity and difference. There is, in AI, a logic of commensurability—a reduction of messy and power-laden social life into “computable sameness.” So there is a connection, as both Crawford and Pasquale observe, between extraction and abstraction. The activity of everyday life is extracted into datasets that, in their bloodless tabulation, abstract away their origins. Like Marx’s workers, we are then confronted by the alienated product of our “labor”—interviewed or consoled or policed by AIs that we helped build.

    Crawford and Pasquale’s excellent books offer sharp and complementary critiques of the AI fog. Where they differ is in their calls to action. Pasquale, in line with his mezzo-level focus on specific domains like education, is the reformist. His aim is to persuade a policy community that he’s part of—to clear space between do-nothing optimists and fatalist doom-sayers. At core he hopes to use law and expertise to rein in AI and robotics—with the aim to deploy AI much more conscientiously, under human control and for human ends.

    Crawford is more radical. She sees AI as a machine for boosting the power of the already powerful. She is skeptical of the movement for AI “ethics,” as insufficient at best and veering toward exculpatory window-dressing. The Atlas of AI ends with a call for a “renewed politics of refusal,” predicated on a just and solidaristic vision of the future.

    It would be easy to exaggerate Crawford and Pasquale’s differences, which reflect their projects’ scope and intended audience more than any disagreement of substance. Their shared call is to see AI for what it is. Left to follow its current course, the ideology of AI will reinforce the bars on the “iron cage” that sociologist Max Weber foresaw a century ago: incarcerating us in systems of power dedicated to efficiency, calculation, and control.

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    Sue Curry Jansen is Professor of Media & Communication at Muhlenberg College, in Allentown, PA. Jeff Pooley is Professor of Media & Communication at Muhlenberg, and director of mediastudies.press, a scholar-led publisher. Their co-authored essay on Shoshanna Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism—a review of the book’s reviews—recently appeared in New Media & Society.

    Back to the essay

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    Notes

    [1] Crawford acknowledges the collaboration with Campolo, her research assistant, in developing this concept and the chapter on affect, generally.

  • Zachary Loeb — Specters of Ludd (Review of Gavin Mueller, Breaking Things at Work)

    Zachary Loeb — Specters of Ludd (Review of Gavin Mueller, Breaking Things at Work)

    a review of Gavin Mueller, Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Were Right about Why You Hate Your Job (Verso, 2021)

    by Zachary Loeb

    A specter is haunting technological society—the specter of Luddism.

    Granted, as is so often the case with hauntings, reactions to this specter are divided: there are some who are frightened, others who scoff at the very idea of it, quite a few dream about designing high-tech gadgets with which to conclusively bust this ghost so that it can bother us no more, and still others are convinced that this specter is trying to tell us something important if only we are willing to listen. And though there are plenty of people who have taken to scoffing derisively whenever the presence of General Ludd is felt, there would be no need to issue those epithetic guffaws if they were truly directed at nothing. The dominant forces of technological society have been trying to exorcize this spirit, but instead of banishing this ghost they only seem to be summoning it.

    The problem with spectral Luddism is that one can feel its presence without necessarily understanding what it means. When one encounters Luddism in the world today it still tends to be as either a term of self-deprecation used to describe why someone has an old smartphone, or as an insult that is hurled at anyone who dares question “the good news” presented by the high priests of technology. With Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Were Right About Why You Hate Your Job, Gavin Mueller challenges those prevailing attitudes and ideas about Luddism, instead articulating a perspective on Luddism that finds in it a vital analysis with which to respond to techno-capitalism. Luddism, in Mueller’s argument, is not simply a term to describe a specific group of workers at the turn of the 19th century, rather Luddism can be seen in workers’ struggles across centuries.

    At core, Breaking Things at Work is less of a history of Luddism, and more of a manifesto. Historic movements and theorists are thoughtfully engaged with throughout the volume, but this is consistently in service of making an argument about how we should be responding to technology in the present. While contemporary books about technology (even ones that advance a critical attitude) have a tendency to carefully couch any criticism in neatly worded expressions of love for technology, Mueller’s book is refreshing in the forthrightness with which he expresses the view that “technology often plays a detrimental role in working life, and in struggles for a better one” (4). In clearly setting out the particular politics of his book, Mueller makes his goal clear: “to make Marxists into Luddites” and “to turn people critical of technology into Marxists” (5). This is no small challenge, as Mueller notes that “historically Marxists have not been critical of technology” (4) on the one hand, and that “much of contemporary technological criticism comes from a  place of romantic humanism” (6) on the other hand. For Mueller “the problem of technology is its role in capitalism” (7), but the way in which many of these technologies have been designed to advance capitalism’s goals makes it questionable whether all of these machines can necessarily be repurposed. Basing his analysis on a history of class struggle, Mueller is not so much setting out to tell workers what to do, as much as he is putting a name on something that workers are already doing.

    Mueller begins the first chapter of his book by explaining who the actual Luddites were and providing some more details to explain the tactics for which they became legendary. As skilled craft workers in early 19th century England, the historic Luddites saw firsthand how the introduction of new machines resulted in their own impoverishment. Though the Luddites would become famous for breaking machines, it was a tactic they turned to only after their appeals to parliament to protect their trades went ignored. With broad popular support, the Luddites donned the anonymizing mask of General Ludd, and took up arms in their own defense. Contrary to the popular myth in which the Luddites smashed every machine out of a fit of wild hatred, the historic record shows that the Luddites were quite focused in their targets, picking workshops and factories where the new machines had been used as an excuse to lower wages. Luddism did not die out in its moment because the tactics were seen as pointless, rather the movement came to an end at the muzzle of a gun, as troops were deployed to quell the uprising—with many of the captured Luddites being either hanged or transported. Nevertheless, this was certainly not the last time that machine-breaking was taken up as a tactic: not long after the Luddite risings the Swing Riots were even more effective in their targeting of machinery. And, furthermore, as Mueller makes clear throughout his book, the tactic of seeing the machine as a site for resistance continues to this day.

    Perhaps the key takeaway from the historic Luddites is not that they smashed machines, but that they identified machinery as a site of political struggle. They did not take hammers to stocking frames out of a particular hatred for these contraptions; rather they took hammers to stocking frames as a way of targeting the owners of those stocking frames. These struggles, in which groups of workers came together with community support, demonstrate how the Luddite’s various tactics served as “practices of political composition” (16, italics in original text) whereby the Luddites came to see themselves as workers with shared interests that were in opposition to the interests of their employers. The Luddites were not to be assuaged by appeals to the idea of progress, or lurid fantasies of a high-tech utopia, they could see the technological changes playing out in real time in front of them, and what they could see there was not a distant future of plenty, but an immediate future of immiseration. The Luddites were not fools, quite the contrary: they saw exactly what the new machines meant for themselves and their communities, and so they decided to do something about it.

    Despite the popular support the Luddites enjoyed in their own communities, and the extent to which machine-breaking remained a common tactic even after the Luddite risings had been repressed, already in the 19th century more optimistic attitudes towards technology were ascendant. Mueller detects some of this optimism in Karl Marx, noting that “there is evidence for a technophilic Marx” (19), yet Mueller pushes back against the common assumption that Marx was a technological determinist. While recognizing that Marx (and Engels) had made some less than generous comments about the Luddites, Mueller emphasizes Marx’s attention to the real struggles of workers against capitalism and notes that “the struggles against machines were the struggles against the society that utilized them” (24, italics in original text). And the frequency with which machines were becoming targets of worker’s ire in the 19th century demonstrates the way in which workers saw the machines not as neutral tools but as instruments of the factory owners’ power. While defenders of mass machinery may point to the abundance such machines create, some figures like William Morris pushed back on these promises of abundance by noting that such machinery sapped any pleasure out of the act of laboring while the abundance was just a share in shoddy goods. In Marx and Morris, as well as in the actual struggles of workers, Mueller points to the importance of technology becoming recognized as a site of political struggle—emphasizing that in worker’s resistance to technology can be found “a more liberatory politics of work and technology” (29).

    That the 19th century was home to the most renowned fight against technology, does not mean that these struggles (be they physical or philosophical) ended with the arrival of the 20th century. While much is often made of the “scientific management” of Frederick W. Taylor, less is often said of the ways in which workers resisted this system that turned them into living cogs—and even less is usually said of the strike at the Watertown Arsenal wherein (quite unlike the case of the Luddites) Congress sided with the workers (and their union). Nevertheless, the Taylorist viewpoint that “capitalist technologies like scientific management” were “an objective way to improve productivity and therefore the condition of workers” (35) was a viewpoint shared by a not inconsiderable number of socialists in those years. Within the international left of the early 20th century, debates about the meaning of machinery were heated: some like Karl Kautsky took a deterministic stance that developments in capitalist production methods were paving the way for communism; others like the IWW activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn cheered the tactic of workers sabotaging their machines; still others like Thorstein Veblen dreamed of a technocratic society overseen by benevolent engineers; various Bolsheviks argued about the deployment of Taylorist techniques in the new Soviet state; and standing at the edge of the fascist abyss Walter Benjamin gestured towards a politics that does not praise speed but searches desperately for an emergency brake.

    While the direction of debates about technology in the early 20th century were significantly disrupted by the Second World War (just as they had been upended by the First World War), in the aftermath of Auschwitz and Hiroshima debates about technology and work only intensified. Automation represented a new hope to business owners even as it represented a new threat to workers, as automation could sap the power of agitated workers while centralizing further control in the hands of management. Importantly, automation was not simply accepted by workers, and Mueller notes “on the vanguard of opposing automation were those often marginalized by the official workers’ movement—women and African Americans” (63). Opposition to automation often took the form of “wildcat strikes” with union leaders failing to keep pace with the radicalism and fury of their members. In this period of post-war tumult, left-wing thinkers ranging from Raya Dunayevskaya to Herbert Marcuse to Shulamith Firestone articulated a spectrum of different responses to the promises and perils of automation—yet even as they theorized: workers in mines, factories, and at the docks continued to strike against what the introduction of automation meant for their lives. Simultaneously, automation became a topic of interest, and debate, within the social movements of the time, with automation being viewed by those movements as threat and hope.

    Lurking in the background of many of the discussions around automation was the spread of computers. As increasing numbers of people became aware of them, computers quickly conjured both adoration and dread—they were a frequent target of student activists in the 1960s and 1970s, even as elements of the counterculture (such as Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog) were enthusiastic about computers. Businesses were quick to adopt computers, and these machines often accelerated the automation of workplaces (while opening up new types of work to the threat of being automated). Yet the rise of the computer also gave rise to a new sort of figure, “the hacker” whose very technological expertise positioned them to challenge computerized capitalism. Though the “politics of hackers are complicated,” Mueller emphasizes that they are often some of technology’s “most critical users, and they regularly deploy their skills to subvert measures by corporations to rationalize and control computer user behavior. They are often Luddites to the core” (105). Not uniformly uncritical celebrants of technology, many hackers turn their intimate knowledge of computers into a way of knowing where best to strike—even as they champion initiatives such as free software, peer-to-peer sharing, and tools for avoiding surveillance.

    Yet as computers have infiltrated nearly every space and moment, it is not only hackers who find themselves regularly interacting with these machines. The omnipresence of computers creates a situation wherein “work seeps into every nook and cranny of human existence via capitalist technologies, accompanied by the erosion of wages and free time” (119) as more and more of our activities become fodder for corporate recommendation algorithms we find ourselves endlessly working for Facebook and Google even as we respond to work emails at 1 a.m. Despite the promises of digital plenty, computing technologies (broadly defined) seem to be giving rise to an increasing sense of frustration, and though there are some who advocate for an anodyne “tech humanism,” it may well be that “the strategy of refusal pursued by the industrial workers of old might be a more promising technique against the depression engines of social media” (122).

    Breaking Things at Work concludes with a call for the radical left to “put forth a decelerationist politics: a politics of slowing down change, undermining technological progress, and limiting capital’s rapacity, while developing organization and cultivating militancy” (127-128). Such a politics entails not a rejection of progress, but a critical reexamination of what it is that is actually meant when the word “progress” is bandied about, as too often what progress stands for is “the progress of elites at the expense of the rest of us” (128). Putting forth such a politics does not require creating something entirely new, but rather recognizing that the elements of just such a politics can be seen repeatedly in worker’s movements and social movements.

    In putting forth a clear definition of “Luddism,” Mueller highlights that Luddism “emphasizes autonomy” by seeking to put control back into the hands of the people actually doing the work, “views technology not as neutral but as a site of struggle,” “rejects production for production’s sake,” “can generalize” into a strategy for mass action, and is “antagonistic” taking a firm stance in clear opposition to capitalism and capitalist technology. In the increasing frustration with social media, in the growing environmental calls for “degrowth,” and in the cracks showing in the golden calf of technology, the space is opening for a politics that takes up the hammer of Luddism. Recognizing as it does so, that a hammer can be used not just to smash things that need to be broken, a hammer can also be used to build something different.

    *

    One of the factors that makes Luddism so appealing more than two centuries later is that it is an ideology that still calls out to be developed. The historic Luddites were undoubtedly real people, with real worries, and real thoughts on the tactics that they were deploying—and yet the historic Luddites did not leave any manifestoes or books of their own writing behind. What remains from the Luddites are primarily the letters they sent and snatches of songs in which they were immortalized (which have been helpfully collected in Kevin Binfield’s 2015 Writings of the Luddites). And though one can begin to cobble together a philosophy of technology from reading through those letters, the work of explaining exactly what it is that Luddism means has been a task that has largely fallen to others. Granted, part of what made the Luddites successful in their time was that the mask of General Ludd could be picked up and worn by many individuals, all of whom could claim to be General Ludd (or his representative).

    With Breaking Things at Work, Gavin Mueller has crafted a vital contribution to Luddism, and what makes this book especially important is the way in which it furthers Luddism in a variety of ways. On one level, Mueller’s book provides a solid introduction and overview to Luddite thinking and tactics throughout the ages, which makes the book a useful retort to those who act as though the historic Luddites were the only workers who ever dared oppose machinery. Yet Mueller makes it clear from the outset of his book that he is not primarily interested in writing a history, rather his book has a clear political goal as well—he wishes to raise the banner of General Ludd and encourage others to march behind this standard. Thus, Mueller’s book is simultaneously an account of Luddism’s past, while also an appeal for Luddism’s future. And while Mueller provides a thoughtful consideration of many past figures and movements that have dallied with Luddism, his book concludes with a clear articulation of what a present day Luddism might look like. For those who call themselves Luddites, or those who would call themselves Luddites, Mueller provides a historically grounded but present focused account of what it meant, and what it can mean, to be a Luddite.

    The clarity with which Mueller defines Luddism in Breaking Things at Work places the book into a genuine debate as to how exactly Luddism should be defined. And this is a debate that Mueller’s book engages with in a particularly provocative way considering how his book is both a scholarly account and an activist manifesto. Writing about the Luddites tends to fall into several camps: works that provide a fairly straightforward historical account of who the original Luddites were and what they literally did (this genre includes works like E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class, and Kevin Binfield’s Writings of the Luddites); works that treat Luddism as an idea and a philosophy that is not exclusive to the historic Luddites (this genre includes works like Nicols Fox’s Against the Machine, and Matt Tierney’s Dismantlings), works that emphasize that the tactic of machine-breaking was not practiced exclusively by the Luddites (this genre includes works like Eric Hobsbawm and Geogre Rudé’s Captain Swing, and David Noble’s Progress Without People),  and works that draw lines (good or bad) from Luddism to later activist practices (this genre includes approving works like Kirkpatrick Sale’s Rebels Against the Future, and disapproving works like Steven Jones’s Against Technology). Mueller’s Breaking Things at Work  does not fit neatly into any single one of those categories: the Marxist analysis makes the book pair nicely with Thompson’s book, the engagement with radical theorists makes the book pair nicely with Tierney’s book, the treatment of machine-breaking as a common tactic makes the book pair nicely with Noble’s book, and the call to arms places the book into debate with books by the likes of Sale and Jones.

    All of which is to say, the meaning of Luddism remains contested terrain. And even though many of technology’s celebrants remain content to use Luddite as an insult, those who would proudly wear the mask of General Ludd are not themselves all in agreement about exactly what this means.

    Mueller has written a wonderfully provocative book, and it is one in which he does not attempt to hide his own opinion behind two dozen carefully composed distractions. Instead, Mueller is quite clear “to be a good Marxist is to also be a Luddite” (5), and this is a point that leads directly into his goal of turning Marxists into Luddites and making Marxists out of those who are critical of technology. And in his engagement with Marx, Mueller tangles with the perceptions of Marx as technophilic, engages with a variety of Marxist thinkers who fall into a range of camps, all while trying “to be faithful to Marxism’s heretical side, its unofficial channels and para-academic spaces” (vii). And all the while Mueller endeavors to keep his book grounded as a contribution to real struggles around technology in the world today. Considering Mueller’s clear statement of his own position it is likely that some will level their critiques at the book’s Marxism, and still others might critique the book for not being sufficiently Marxist. And as is always the case with books that situate their critique within a particular radical tradition it seems inevitable that some will wonder why their favorite thinker is not included (or does not receive more attention), even as others will wonder why other branches from the tree of the radical left are missing. (Mueller does not spend much time on anarchist thinkers).

    Overall, the question of whether this book will turn its Marxist readers into Luddites, and its technologically critical readers into Marxists is one that can only be answered by each reader themselves. For what Mueller’s book presents is an argument, and the way in which a reader nods along or argues back is likely to be heavily influenced by the way they personally define Luddism. And Mueller is not the first to try to rally people beneath the Luddite’s standard.

    In 1990, Chellis Glendinning published her “Notes Towards a Neo-Luddite Manifesto” in the pages of the Utne Reader. Furiously lamenting the ways in which societies were struggling under the onslaught of new technologies, her manifesto was a call to take up oppositional arms. While taking on the mantle of “Neo-Luddite,” the manifesto articulated a Luddism (or Neo-Luddism) that was defined by three principles: “1. Neo-Luddites are not anti-technology,” “2. All technologies are political,” and “3. The personal view of technology is dangerously limited.” Based on these principles, Glendinning’s manifesto laid out a program that included the dismantling of a range of “destructive” technologies (including genetic engineering technologies and computer technologies), pushed for the search for “new technological forms” that would be “for the benefit of life on Earth,” and this in turn was couched in a call for “Western technological societies” to develop a “life-enhancing worldview.” The manifesto drew on the technological criticism of Lewis Mumford, on Langdon Winner’s call for “epistemological Luddism,” and on the uncompromising stance towards technologies deemed destructive typified by Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments For the Elimination of Television.

    The Neo-Luddites are more noteworthy for their attempt to reclaim and redefine Luddism than they are for their success in actually creating a movement. Indeed, the lasting legacy of Neo-Luddism is not that of a vital social movement that fought for (and continues to fight for) the principles Glendinning put forth, but instead about half a bookshelf worth of books with “Neo-Luddite” somewhere in their title. There are certainly critiques to be leveled at the Neo-Luddites, but when revisiting Glendinning’s manifesto it is also worth placing it in the moment at which it emerged. The backdrop for Breaking Things at Work is one in which most readers will be accustomed to seemingly omnipresent computing technologies, climate exacerbated disasters, and a world in which the wealth of tech billionaires grows massively by the minute. By contrast, the backdrop for Glendinning’s manifesto was a moment in which personal computers had not yet achieved ubiquity (no one was carrying the Internet around in their pocket), climate change still seemed like a distant threat, and Mark Zuckerberg was still a child. It is impossible to say whether or not Glendinning’s manifesto, had it been heeded, could have prevented us from getting into our present morass, but preventing us from winding up where we are now certainly seems to have been one of Glendinning’s goals. At the very least, Glendinning and the Neo-Luddites (as well as the thinkers upon whom they drew) are a reminder that the spirit of General Ludd was circulating before you could Google “Luddism.”

    There are many parallels between the stances outlined by Glendinning and those outlined by Mueller. Though it seems that the key space of conflict between the two is around the question of dismantling. Glendinning and the Neo-Luddites were not subtle in their calls for dismantling certain technologies, whereas Mueller is considerably more nuanced in this respect. Here attempts to define Luddism find themselves butting against the degree to which Luddism is destined to always be associated (for better or worse) with the actual breaking of machines. The naming of entire classes of technology that need to be dismantled may appear like indiscriminate smashing, while calls for careful reevaluation of technologies may appear more like thoughtful disassembly. Yet the underlying question for Luddism remains: are certain technologies irredeemable? Are there technologies that we can remake in a different image, or will those technologies only reshape us in their own image? And if the answer is that these technologies cannot be reshaped, than are there some technologies that we need to break before they can finish breaking us, even if we often find ourselves enjoying some of the benefits of those technologies?

    Writing of the reactions from a range of 1960s social movements to the technological changes they were seeing playing out, Mueller notes that the particular technology that evoked “both fear and fascination” was none other than “the computer” (91). This point leads into what is perhaps the most troubling and challenging element of Mueller’s account, as he goes on to argue that hackers and some of their projects (like free software) fit within the legacy of Luddism. I imagine that many hackers will not be too pleased to see themselves described as Luddites, just as I imagine that many self-professed Luddites will scoff at the idea that using bitcoins to buy drugs on the dark web is a Luddite pursuit. Yet the idea that those most familiar with a technology may know exactly where to strike certainly has some noteworthy resonances with the historic Luddites.

    And yet the matter of hackers and “high tech Luddism”  raises a much broader question, one that the left has been trying to answer for quite some time, and perhaps the key question for any attempt to formulate a Luddite politics in this moment: what are we to make of the computer? Is the computer (and computing technologies, broadly defined) the offspring of the military-industrial-academic complex with logics of control, surveillance, and dominance so deeply ingrained that it ultimately winds up bending all users to that logic? Despite those origins, are computing technologies something which can be seized upon to allow us to reconfigure ourselves into new sorts of beings (cyborgs, perhaps) to break out of the very categories that capitalism tries to sort us into? Have computers fundamentally altered what it means to be human?  Is the computer (and the Internet) simply something that has become so big and so widespread that the best we can hope for is to increase our knowledge of it so that we can perform sabotage strikes while playing in the dark corners? Are computers the “master’s tools”?

    Considering that computer technologies were amongst those that the Neo-Luddites called to be dismantled, it seems pretty clear where they came down on this question. Yet contemporary discussions on the left around computers, a discussion in which Breaking Things at Work is certainly making an intervention, is quite a bit more divided as to what is to be done with and about computers. At several junctures in his book, Mueller notes that attitudes of technological optimism are starting to break down, yet if you survey the books dealing with technology published by the left-wing publisher Verso Books (which is the publisher of Breaking Things at Work) it is clear that a hopeful attitude towards technology is still present in much of the left. Certainly, there are arguments about the way that tech companies are screwing things up, commentary on the environmental costs of the hunger for high-tech gadgets, and paeans for how the Internet could be different—but it often feels that leftist commentaries blast Silicon Valley for what it has done to computers and the Internet so that the readers of such books can continue believing that the problems with computers and the Internet is what capitalism has done to them rather than suggest that these are capitalist tools through and through.

    Is the problem that the train we are on is taking us somewhere we don’t want to go, so we need to slow down so that we can switch tracks? Or is the problem the train itself and we need to hit the emergency brake so that we can get off? To those who have grown accustomed to the comforts of being on board the train, the idea of getting off of it might be a scary thought, it might feel preferable to fight for a more equitable distribution of resources aboard the train, or to fight to seize control of the engine car. Besides, the idea of actually getting off the train seems like little more than a fantasy—it will be hard enough just to get it to reduce its speed. Yet the question remains as to whether the problem is the direction we’re going in, or if the problem is the direction we’re going in and the technology that is taking us in that direction.

    Here it is essential to return to an important fact about the historic Luddites: they were waging their campaign against the introduction of machinery in the moment of those machines’ newness. The machines they attacked had not yet become common, and the moment of negotiation as to what these machines would mean and how they would be deployed was still in flux. When technologies are new they provide a fertile space for resistance, in their moment of freshness they have not yet become taken for granted, previous lifeways have not been forgotten, the skills that were necessary prior to the introduction of the new machine remain vital, and the broader society has not become pleasantly accustomed to their share of machine generated plenitude. Unfortunately, once a technology has become fully incorporated into a workplace (or a society) resistance becomes more and more challenging. While Mueller evocatively captures the long history of workers resisting the introduction of new technologies, these cases show a consistent tendency for this resistance to take place most strongly at the point of the new technology’s introduction. The major challenge becomes what to do when the technology has ceased being new, and when the reliance on that technology has become so total that it becomes almost impossible to imagine turning it off.

    After all, it’s easy to say that “computers are the problem” but at this point it’s easier to imagine the end of capitalism than it is to imagine the end of computers. And besides, many of those who would be quite happy to see capitalism come to an end quite like their computerized doodads and would be distressed if they couldn’t scroll social media on the subway, stream music, go shopping at 2 a.m., play video games, have video calls with distant family, or write overly lengthy book reviews and then post them online. One of the major challenges for technological criticism today is the simple fact that the critics are also reliant on these gadgets, and many of the critics quite like some things about some of those gadgets. In this technological climate, where the idea of truly banishing certain technologies seems fantastical, feelings of dissatisfaction often wind up getting channeled in the direction of appeals to personal responsibility. As though an individual deciding that they will abstain from going on social media on the weekend will somehow be a sufficient response to social media eating the world. This is the way in which a massive social problem winds up being reduced to telling people that they really just need to turn off notifications on their phones.

    What makes Breaking Things at Work, and its definition of Luddism, vital is the way in which Mueller eschews such appeals to minor lifestyle tweaks. As Mueller makes clear the significance of the Luddites is not that they broke machines, but that they saw machines as a site of political struggle, and the thing we need to learn from them today is that machinery still must be a site of political struggle. Turning off notifications, following people with different politics, trying to spend a day a week offline—while these actions can be useful on an individual level, they are not a sufficient response to the ways that technology challenges us today. In a moment wherein so many of the proclamations from Silicon Valley are treated as though they are inevitable, Luddism functions as a powerful retort and as a useful reminder that the people most invested in the belief that you cannot resist capitalist technologies are the people who are most terrified that people might resist those technologies.

    In one of the most infamous of the surviving Luddite letters, “the General of the Army of Redressers,” Ned Ludd writes: “We will never lay down our Arms. The House of Commons passes an Act to put down all Machinery hurtful to Commonality, and repeal that to hang Frame Breakers. But We. We petition no more that won’t do fighting must.” These were militant words from a militant movement, but the idea that there is such a thing as “Machinery hurtful to Commonality” and that such machinery needs to be opposed remains clear two hundred years later.

    There is a specter haunting technological society—the specter of Luddism. And as Mueller makes clear in Breaking Things at Work that specter is becoming more corporeal by the moment.

    _____

    Zachary Loeb earned his MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, an MA from the Media, Culture, and Communications department at NYU, and is currently a PhD candidate in the History and Sociology of Science department at the University of Pennsylvania. Loeb works at the intersection of the history of technology and disaster studies, and his research focusses on the ways that complex technological systems amplify risk, as well as the history of technological doom-saying. He is working on a dissertation on Y2K. Loeb writes at the blog Librarianshipwreck, and is a frequent contributor to The b2o Review Digital Studies section.

    Back to the essay

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    Works Cited

     

  • Tamara Kneese — Our Silicon Valley, Ourselves

    Tamara Kneese — Our Silicon Valley, Ourselves

    a review of Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley; Joanne McNeil, Lurking; Ellen Ullman, Life in Code; Wendy Liu, Abolish Silicon Valley; Ben Tarnoff and Moira Weigel, eds., Voices from the Valley; Mary Beth Meehan and Fred Turner, Seeing Silicon Valley

    by Tamara Kneese

    “Fuck all that. I have no theory. I’ve only got a story to tell.”
    – Elizabeth Freeman, “Without You, I’m Not Necessarily Nothing”

    ~

    Everyone’s eager to mine Silicon Valley for its hidden stories. In the past several years, women in or adjacent to the tech industry have published memoirs about their time there, ensconcing macrolevel critiques of Big Tech within intimate storytelling. Examples include Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley, Joanne McNeil’s Lurking, Ellen Ullman’s Life in Code, Susan Fowler’s Whistleblower, and Wendy Liu’s Abolish Silicon Valley, to name just a handful.[1] At the same time, recent edited volumes curate workers’ everyday lives in the ideological and geographical space that is Silicon Valley, seeking to expose the deep structural inequalities embedded in the tech industry and its reaches in the surrounding region. Examples of this trend include Ben Tarnoff and Moira Weigel’s Voices from the Valley and Mary Beth Meehan and Fred Turner’s Seeing Silicon Valley, along with tech journalists’ reporting on unfair labor practices and subsequent labor organizing efforts. In both cases, personal accounts of the tech industry’s effects constitute their own form of currency.

    What’s interesting about the juxtaposition of women’s first-hand accounts and collected worker interviews is how the first could fit within the much derided and feminized “personal essay” genre while the latter is more explicitly tied to the Marxist tradition of using workers’ perspectives as an organizing catalyst, i.e. through the process of empirical cataloging and self-reflection known as workers’ inquiry.[2] In this review essay, I consider these two seemingly unrelated trends in tandem. What role can personal stories play in sparking collective movements, and does presentation matter?

    *

    Memoirs of life with tech provide a glimpse of the ways that personal experiences—the good, the bad, and the ugly—are mediated by information technologies themselves as well as through their cascading effects on workplaces and social worlds. They provide an antidote to early cyberlibertarian screeds, imbued with dreams of escaping fleshly, earthly drudgery, like John Perry Barlow’s “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”: “Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion.” But in femme accounts of life in code, embodiment is inescapable. As much as the sterile efficiencies of automation would do away with the body’s messiness, the body rears its head with a vengeance. In a short post, one startup co-founder, Tracy Young, recounts attempting to neutralize her feminine coded body with plain clothes and a stoic demeanor, persevering through pregnancy, childbirth, and painful breastfeeding, and eventually hiding her miscarriage from her colleagues. Young reveals these details to point to the need for structural changes within the tech industry, which is still male-dominated, especially in the upper rungs. But for Young, capitalism is not the problem. Tech is redeemable through DEI initiatives that might better accommodate women’s bodies and needs. On the other end of the spectrum, pregnant Amazon warehouse workers suffer miscarriages when their managers refuse to follow doctors’ recommendations and compel pregnant workers to lift heavy boxes or prevent them from taking bathroom and water breaks. These experiences lie on disparate ends of the scale, but reflect the larger problems of patriarchy and racial capitalism in tech and beyond. It is unclear if this sliver of common ground can hope to bridge such a gulf of privilege.

    Sexual harassment, workplace misogyny, pregnancy discrimination: these grievances come up again and again within femme tech memoirs, even the ones that don’t at face value seem political. At first glance, Joanne McNeil’s Lurking: How a Person Became a User is not at all about labor. Her memoir is to some extent a celebration of the early internet, at times falling into the trap of nostalgia—the pleasure of the internet being “a place,” and the greater degree of flexibility and play afforded by usernames as opposed to real names policies. “Once I spoke freely and shared my dreams with strangers. Then the real world fastened itself to my digital life…My idle youth online largely—thankfully—evaporated in the sun, but more recent-ish old posts breeze along, colliding with and confusing new image of myself that I try to construct” (McNeil 2020, 8-9). Building on earlier feminist critiques of techno-utopian libertarianism, such as Paulina Borsook’s Cyberselfish (2000), in McNeil’s estimation, the early web allowed people to be lurkers, rather than users, even if the disembodied libertarian imaginaries attached to cyberspace never panned out. With coerced participation and the alignment of actual identities with online profiles, the shift to “the user” reflects the enclosure of the web and the growth of tech corporations, monetization, and ad tech. The beauty of being a lurker was the space to work out the self in relation to communities and to bear witness to these experimental relationships. As McNeil puts it, in her discussion of Friendster, “What happened between <form> and </form> was self-portraiture” (McNeil 2020, 90). McNeil references the many early internet communities, like Echo, LatinoLink, and Café los Negroes, which helped queer, Black, and Latinx relationships flourish in connection with locally situated subcultures.

    In a brief moment, while reflecting on the New York media world built around websites like Gawker, McNeil ties platformization to her experiences as a journalist, a producer of knowledge about the tech industry: “A few years ago, when I was a contractor at a traffic-driven online magazine, I complained to a technologist friend about the pressure I was under to deliver page view above a certain threshold” (McNeil 2020, 138). McNeil, who comes from a working class background, has had in adulthood the kind of work experiences Silicon Valley tends to make invisible, including call center work and work as a receptionist. As a journalist, even as a contractor, she was expected to amass thousands of Twitter followers. Because she lacked a large following, she relied on the publication itself to promote her work. She was eventually let go from the job. “My influence, or lack thereof, impacted my livelihood” (McNeil 2020, 139). This simply stated phrase reveals how McNeil’s critique of Big Tech is ultimately not only about users’ free labor and the extraction of profit from social relationships, but about how platform metrics are making people’s jobs worse.

    Labor practices emerge in McNeil’s narrative at several other points, in reference to Google’s internal caste system and the endemic problem of sexual harassment within the industry. In a discussion of Andrew Norman Wilson’s influential Workers Leaving the Googleplex video (2011), which made clear to viewers the sharp divisions within the Google workforce, McNeil notes that Google still needs these blue-collar workers, like janitors, security guards, and cafeteria staff, even if the company has rendered them largely invisible. But what is the purpose of making these so-called hidden laborers of tech visible, and for whom are they being rendered visible in the first place?[3] If you have ever been on a tech campus, you can’t miss ‘em. They’re right fucking there! If the hierarchies within tech are now more popularly acknowledged, then what? And are McNeil’s experiences as a white-collar tech journalist at all related to these other people’s stories, which often provide the scaffolding for tech reporters’ narratives?

    *

    Other tech memoirs more concretely focus on navigating tech workplaces from a femme perspective. Long-form attention to the matter creates more space for self-reflection and recognition on the part of the reader. In 2016, Anna Wiener’s n+1 essay, “Uncanny Valley,” went viral because it hit a nerve. Wiener presented an overtly gendered story—about body anxiety and tenuous friendship—told through one woman’s time in the world of startups before the majority of the public had caught wind of the downside of digital platforms and their stranglehold on life, work, and politics. Later, Wiener would write a monograph-length version of the story with the same title, detailing her experiences as a “non-technical” woman in tech: “I’d never been in a room with so few women, so much money, and so many people chomping at the bit to get a taste” (Wiener 2020, 61). In conversation with computer science academics and engineers, her skepticism about the feasibility of self-driving cars isn’t taken seriously because she is a woman who works in customer support. Wiener describes herself as being taken in by the promises and material culture of the industry: a certain cashmere sweater and overall look, wellness tinctures, EDM, and Burning Man at the same time she navigates taxicab gropings on work trips and inappropriate comments about “sensual” Jewish women at the office. Given the Protestant Work Ethic-tinged individualism of her workplace, she offers little in the way of solidarity. When her friend Noah is fired after writing a terse memo, she and the rest of the workers at the startup fail to stand up to their boss. She laments, “Maybe we never were a family. We knew we had never been a family,” questioning the common myth that corporations are like kin (Wiener 2020, 113). Near the end of her memoir, Wiener wrestles with the fact that GamerGate, and later the election of Trump, do not bring the reckoning she once thought was coming. The tech industry continues on as before.

    Wiener is in many respects reminiscent of another erudite, Jewish, New York City-to-San Francisco transplant, Ellen Ullman. Ullman published an account of her life as a woman programmer, Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents, in 1997, amid the dotcom boom, when tech criticism was less fashionable. Ullman writes about “tantric, algorithmic” (1997, 49) sex with a fellow programmer and the erotics of coding itself, flirting with the romance novel genre. She critiques the sexism and user-disregard in tech (she is building a system for AIDS patients and their providers, but the programmers are rarely confronted with the fleshly existence of their end-users). Her background as a communist, along with her guilt about her awkward class position as an owner and landlord of a building in the Wall Street district, also comes through in the memoir: At one point, she quips “And who was Karl Marx but the original technophile?” (Ullman 1997, 29). Ullman presciently sees remote, contracted tech workers, including globally situated call center works, as canaries in the coal mine. As she puts it, “In this sense, we virtual workers are everyone’s future. We wander from job to job, and now it’s hard for anyone to stay put anymore. Our job commitments are contractual, contingent, impermanent, and this model of insecure life is spreading outward from us” (Ullman 1997, 146). Even for a privileged techie like Ullman, the supposedly hidden global underclass of tech was not so hidden after all.

    Ullman’s Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology, a collection of essays published twenty years later in 2017, reflects a growing desire to view the world of startups, major tech companies, and life in the Bay Area through the lens of women’s unique experiences. A 1998 essay included in Life in Code reveals Ullman’s distrust of what the internet might become: “I fear for the world the internet is creating. Before the advent of the Web, if you wanted to sustain a belief in far-fetched ideas, you had to go out into the desert, or live on a compound in the mountains, or move from one badly furnished room to another in a series of safe houses” (Ullman 2017, 89). Ullman at various points refers to the toxic dynamics of technoculture, the way that engineers make offhand sexist, racist remarks during their workplace interactions. In other words, critics like Ullman had been around for decades, but  her voice, and voices like hers, carried more weight in 2017 than in 1997. Following in Ullman’s footsteps, Wiener’s contribution came at just the right time.

    I appreciate Sharrona Pearl’s excellent review of Wiener’s Uncanny Valley in this publication, and her critique of the book’s political intentions (or lack thereof) and privileged perspective. When it comes to accounts of the self as political forces, Emma Goldman’s Living My Life it is not. But some larger questions remain: why did so many readers find Wiener’s personal narrative compelling, and how might we relate its popularity to a larger cultural shift in how stories about technology are told?

    Another woman’s memoir of a life in tech offers one possible answer. Wendy Liu started as a computer science major at a prestigious university, worked as a Google intern, and co-founded a startup, not an uncommon trajectory for a particular class of tech worker. Her candid memoir of her transformation from tech evangelist to socialist tech critic, Abolish Silicon Valley, references Wiener’s “Uncanny Valley” essay. Wiener’s account resonated with Liu, even as a software engineer who viewed herself as separate from the non-technical women around her— the marketers, program managers, and technical writers. Liu is open about the ways that ideologies around meritocracy and individual success color her trajectory: she viewed Gamergate as an opportunity to test out her company’s tech capabilities and idolized men like Elon Musk and Paul Graham. Hard work always pays off and working 80 hours a week is a means to an end. Sometimes you have to dance with the devil: for example, Liu’s startup at one point considers working for the Republican Party. Despite her seeming belief in the tech industry’s alignment with the social good, Liu has doubts. When Liu first encounters Wiener’s essay, she wryly notes that she thought n+1 might be a tech magazine, given its math-y name. Once she reads it, “The words cut like a knife through my gradually waning hopes, and I wanted to sink into an ocean of this writing” (Liu 2020, 111). Liu goes on to read hundreds of leftist books and undergo a political awakening in London. While Wiener’s memoir is intensely personal, not overtly about a collective politics, it still ignites something in Liu’s consciousness, becoming enfolded into her own account of her disillusionment with the tech industry and capitalism as a whole. Liu also refers to Tech Against Trump, published by Logic Magazine in 2017, which featured “stories from fellow tech workers who were startled into caring about politics because of Trump” (Liu 2020, 150). Liu was not alone in her awakening, and it was first-hand accounts by fellow tech workers who got her and many others to question their relationship to the system.

    Indeed, before Liu published her abolitionist memoir, she published a short essay for a UK-based Marxist publication, Notes from Below, titled “Silicon Inquiry,” applying the time-honored Marxist practice of workers’ inquiry to her own experiences as a white-collar coder. She writes, “I’ve lost my faith in the industry, and with it, any desire to remain within it. All the perks in the world can’t make up for what tech has become: morally destitute, mired in egotism and self-delusion, an aborted promise of what it could have been. Now that I realise this, I can’t go back.” She describes her trajectory from 12-year-old tinkerer, to computer science major, to Google intern, where she begins to sense that something is wrong and unfulfilling about her work: “In Marxist terms, I was alienated from my labour: forced to think about a problem I didn’t personally have a stake in, in a very typically corporate environment that drained all the motivation out of me.” When she turns away from Google to enter the world of startups, she is trapped by the ideology of faking it until you make it. They work long hours, technically for themselves, but without achieving anything tangible. Liu begins to notice the marginalized workers who comprise a major part of the tech industry, not only ride-hail drivers and delivery workers, but the cafeteria staff and janitors who work on tech campuses. The bifurcated workforce makes it difficult for workers to organize; the ones at the top are loyal to management, while those at the bottom of the hierarchy are afraid of losing their jobs if they speak out.

    Towards the end of her memoir, Liu describes joining a picket line of largely Chinese-American women who are cleaners for Marriott Hotels. This action is happening at the same time as the 2018 Google Walkout, during which white-collar tech workers organized against sexual harassment and subsequent retaliation at the company. Liu draws a connection between both kinds of workers, protesting in the same general place: “On the surface, you would think Google engineers and Marriott hotel cleaners couldn’t be more different. And yet, one key component of the hotel workers’ union dispute was the prevalence of sexual harassment in the workplace…The specifics might be different, but the same underlying problems existed at both companies” (Liu 2020, 158). She sees that TVCs (temps, vendors, and contractors) share grievances with their full-time counterparts, especially when it comes to issues over visas, sexual harassment, and entrenched racism. The trick for organizers is to inspire a sense of solidarity and connection among workers who, on the surface, have little in common. Liu explicitly connects the experiences of more white-collar tech workers like herself and marginalized workers within the tech industry and beyond. Her memoir is not merely a personal reflection, but a call to action–individual refusal, like deleting Facebook or Uber, is not sufficient, and transforming the tech industry is necessarily a collective endeavor. Her abolitionist memoir connects tech journalism’s use of workplace grievances and a first-hand account from the coder class, finding common ground in the hopes of sparking structural change. Memoirs like these may act as a kind of connective tissue, bridging disparate experiences of life in and through technology.

    *

    Another approach to personal accounts of tech takes a different tack: Rather than one long-form, first-hand account, cobble together many perspectives to get a sense of contrasts and potential spaces of overlap. Collections of workers’ perspectives have a long leftist history. For decades, anarchists, socialists, and other social reformers have gathered oral histories and published these personal accounts as part of a larger political project (see: Avrich 1995; Buhle and Kelley 1989; Kaplan and Shapiro 1998; Lynd and Lynd 1973). Two new edited collections focus on aggregated workers’ stories to highlight the diversity of people who live and work in Silicon Valley, from Iranian-American Google engineers to Mexican-American food truck owners. The concept of “Silicon Valley,” like “tech industry,” tends to obscure the lived experiences of ordinary individuals, reflecting more of a fantasy than a real place.

    Mary Beth Meehan and Fred Turner’s Seeing Silicon Valley follows the leftist photography tradition (think Lewis Hine or Dorothea Lange) of capturing working class people in their everyday struggles. Based on a six-week Airbnb stay in the area, Meehan’s images are arresting, spotlighting the disparity within Santa Clara Valley through a humanistic lens, while Turner’s historically-informed introduction and short essays provide a narrative through which to read the images. Silicon Valley is “a mirror of America itself. In that sense, it really is a city on a hill for our time” (Meehan and Turner 2021, 8). Through their presentation of life and work in Silicon Valley, Turner and Meehan push back against stereotypical, ahistorical visions of what Silicon Valley is. As Turner puts it, “The workers of Silicon Valley rarely look like the men idealized in its lore” (Meehan and Turner 2021, 7). Turner’s introduction critiques the rampant economic and racial inequality that exists in the Valley, and the United States as a whole, which bears out in the later vignettes. Unhoused people, some of whom work for major tech companies in Mountain View, live in vans despite having degrees from Stanford. People are living with the repercussions of superfund sites, hazardous jobs, and displacement. Several interviewees reference union campaigns, such as organizing around workplace injuries at the Tesla plant or contract security guards unionizing at Facebook, and their stories are accompanied by images of Silicon Valley Rising protest signs from an action in San Jose. Aside from an occasional direct quote, the narratives about the workers are truncated and editorialized. As the title would indicate, the book is above all a visual representation of life in Silicon Valley as a window into contemporary life in the US. Saturated colors and glossy pages make for a perfect coffee table object and one can imagine the images and text at home in a gallery space. To some degree, it is a stealth operation, and the book’s aesthetic qualities bely the sometimes difficult stories contained within, but the book’s intended audience is more academic than revolutionary. Who at this point doesn’t believe that there are poor people in “Silicon Valley,” or that “tech labor” obscures what is more often than not racialized, gendered, embodied, and precarious forms of work?

    A second volume takes a different approach, focusing instead on the stories of individual tech workers. Ben Tarnoff and Moira Weigel, co-founders of Logic Magazine, co-edited Voices from the Valley as part of their larger Logic brand’s partnership series with FSG Originals. The sharply packaged volume includes anonymous accounts from venture capitalist bros as well as from subcontracted massage workers, rendering visible the “people behind the platform” in a secretive industry full of NDAs (Tarnoff and Weigel 2020, 3). As the book’s title suggests, the interviews are edited back-and-forths with a wide range of workers within the industry, emphasizing their unique perspectives. The subtitle promises “Tech Workers Talk About What They Do—And How They Do It.” This is a clear nod to Studs Terkel’s 1974 epic collection of over one hundred workers’ stories, Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, in which he similarly categorizes them according to job description, from gravedigger to flight attendant. Terkel frames each interview and provides a description of their living conditions or other personal details, but for the most part, the workers speak on their own terms. In Tarnoff and Weigel’s contribution, we as readers hear from workers directly, although we do catch a glimpse of the interview prompts that drove the conversations. The editors also provide short essays introducing each “voice,” contextualizing their position. Workers’ voices are there, to be sure, but they are also trimmed to match Logic’s aesthetic. Reviews of the book, even in leftist magazines like Jacobin, tend to focus as much on the (admittedly formidable) husband and wife editor duo as they do on the stories of the workers themselves. Even so, Tarnoff and Weigel emphasize the political salience of their project in their introduction, arguing that “Silicon Valley is now everywhere” (2020, 7) as “tech is a layer of every industry” (2020, 8). They end their introduction with a call to the reader to “Speak, whoever you are. Your voice is in the Valley, too” (Tarnoff and Weigel 2020, 8).

    As in Meehan and Turner’s visually oriented book, Tarnoff and Weigel’s interviews point to the ways that badge color as class marker, along with gender, immigration status, disability, and race, affect people’s experiences on the job. Much like Meehan and Turner’s intervention, the book gives equal space to the most elite voices as it does to those on the margins, spanning the entire breadth of the tech industry. There are scattered examples of activism, like white collar organizing campaigns against Google’s Dragonfly and other #TechWontBuiltIt manifestations. At one point, the individual known as “The Cook” names Tech Workers Coalition. TWC volunteers were “computer techie hacker cool” and showed up to meetings or even union negotiations in solidarity with their subcontracted coworkers. The Cook notes that TWC thinks “everybody working for a tech company should be part of that company, in one sense or another” (Tarnoff and Weigel 2020, 68). There is an asterisk with a shorthand description of TWC, which has become something of a floating signifier of the tech workers’ movement. The international tech workers labor movement encompasses not only white collar coders, but gig and warehouse workers, who are absent here. With only seven interviews included, the volume cannot address every perspective. Because the interviews with workers are abbreviated and punctuated by punchy subheadings, it can be hard to tell whose voices are really being heard. Is it the workers of Silicon Valley, or is it the editors? As with Meehan and Turner’s effort, the end result is largely a view from above, not within. Which isn’t to say there isn’t a place for this kind of aggregation, or that it can’t connect to organizing efforts, but is this volume more of a political work than Wiener’s or Ullman’s memoirs?

    In other interviews, workers reveal gendered workplace discrimination and other grievances that might prompt collective action. The person identified as “The Technical Writer” describes being terminated from her job after her boss suspects her pregnancy. (He eliminates the position instead of directly firing her, making it harder for her to prove pregnancy discrimination). She decides not to pursue a lawsuit because, as she puts it, “Tech is actually kind of a small industry. You don’t want to be the woman who’s not easy to work with” (Tarnoff and Weigel 2020, 46). After being terminated, she finds work as a remote contractor, which allows her to earn an income while caring for her newborn and other young child. She describes the systemic misogyny in tech that leads to women in non-technical roles being seen as less valuable and maternity leave factoring into women’s lower salaries. But she laments the way that tech journalism tends to portray women as the objects, not the subjects of stories, turning them into victims and focusing narratives on bad actors like James Damore, who penned the infamous Google memo against diversity in tech. Sensationalized stories of harassment and discrimination are meant to tug at the heartstrings, but workers’ agency is often missing in these narratives. In another striking interview, “The Massage Therapist,” who is a subcontracted worker within a large tech campus environment, says that despite beleaguered cafeteria workers needing massages more than coders, she was prohibited from treating anyone who wasn’t a full-time employee. The young women working there seemed sad and too stressed to make time for their massages.

    These personal but minor insights are often missing from popular narratives or journalistic accounts and so their value is readily apparent. The question then becomes, how do both personal memoirs and these shorter, aggregated collections of stories translate into changing collective class consciousness? What happens after the hidden stories of Silicon Valley are revealed? Is an awareness of mutual fuckedness enough to form a coalition?[4]

    *

    A first step might be to recognize the political power of the personal essay or memoir, rather than discounting the genre as a whole. Critiques of the personal essay are certainly not new; Virginia Woolf herself decried the genre’s “unclothed egoism.” Writing for The New Yorker in 2017, Jia Tolentino marked the death of the personal essay. For a time, the personal essay was everywhere: sites like The Awl, Jezebel, The Hairpin, and The Toast centered women’s stories of body horror, sex, work, pain, adversity, and, sometimes, rape. In an instant, the personal essay was apparently over, just as white supremacy and misogyny seemed to be on the rise. With the rise of Trumpism and the related techlash, personal stories were replaced with more concretely political takes. Personal essays are despised largely because they are written by and for women. Tolentino traces some of the anti-personal essay discourse to Emily Gould’s big personal reveal in The New York Times Magazine, foregrounding her perspective as a woman on the internet in the age of Gawker. In 2020 essay in The Cut revisiting her Gawker shame and fame, Gould writes, “What the job did have, and what made me blind to everything it didn’t, was exposure. Every person who read the site knew my name, and in 2007, that was a lot of people. They emailed me and chatted with me and commented at me. Overnight, I had thousands of new friends and enemies, and at first that felt exhilarating, like being at a party all the time.” Gould describes her humiliation when a video of her fellating a plastic dildo at work goes viral on YouTube, likely uploaded by her boss, Nick Denton. After watching the infamous 2016 Presidential Debate, when Donald Trump creepily hovered behind Hillary Clinton, Gould’s body registers recognition, prompting a visit to her gynecologist, who tells her that her body is responding to past trauma:

    I once believed that the truth would set us free — specifically, that women’s first-person writing would “create more truth” around itself. This is what I believed when I published my first book, a memoir. And I must have still believed it when I began publishing other women’s books, too. I believed that I would become free from shame by normalizing what happened to me, by naming it and encouraging others to name it too. How, then, to explain why, at the exact same moment when first-person art by women is more culturally ascendant and embraced than it has ever been in my lifetime, the most rapacious, damaging forms of structural sexism are also on the rise?

    Gould has understandably lost her faith in women’s stories, no matter how much attention they receive, overturning structural sexism. But what if the personal essay is, in fact, a site of praxis? Wiener, McNeil, Liu, and Ullman’s contributions are, to various extents, political works because they highlight experiences that are so often missing from mainstream tech narratives. Their power derives from their long-form personal accounts, which touch not only on work but on relationships, family, personal histories. Just as much as the more overtly political edited volumes or oral histories, individual perspectives also align with the Marxist practice of workers’ inquiry. Liu’s memoir, in particular, brings this connection to light. What stories are seen as true workers’ inquiry, part of leftist praxis, and which are deemed too personal, or too femme, to be truly political? When it comes to gathering and publishing workers’ stories, who is doing the collecting and for what purpose? As theorists like Nancy Fraser (2013) caution, too often feminist storytelling under the guise of empowerment, even in cases like the Google Walkout, can be enfolded back into neoliberalism. For instance, the cries of “This is what Googley looks like!” heard during the protest reinforced the company’s hallmark metric of belonging even as it reinterpreted it.

    As Asad Haider and Salar Mohandesi note in their detailed history of workers’ inquiry for Viewpoint Magazine, Marx’s original vision for worker’s inquiry was never quite executed. His was a very empirical project, involving 101 questions about shop conditions, descriptions of fellow workers, and strikes or other organizing activities. Marx’s point was that organizers must look to the working class itself to change their own working conditions. Workers’ inquiry is a process of recognition, whereby reading someone else’s account of their grievances leads to a kind of mutual understanding. Over time and in different geographic contexts, from France and Italy to the United States, workers’ inquiry has entailed different approaches and end goals. Beyond the industrial factory worker, Black feminist socialists like Selma James gathered women’s experiences: “A Woman’s Place discussed the role of housework, the value of reproductive labor, and the organizations autonomously invented by women in the course of their struggle.” The politics of attribution were tricky, and there were often tensions between academic research and political action. James published her account under a pen name. At other times, multi-authored and co-edited works were portrayed as one person’s memoir. But the point was to take the singular experience and to have it extend outward into the collective. As Haider and Mohandesi put it,

    If, however, the objective is to build class consciousness, then the distortions of the narrative form are not problems at all. They might actually be quite necessary. With these narratives, the tension in Marx’s workers’ inquiry – between a research tool on the one hand, and a form of agitation on the other – is largely resolved by subordinating the former to the latter, transforming inquiry into a means to the end of consciousness-building.

    The personal has always been political. Few would argue that Audre Lorde’s deeply personal Cancer Journals is not also a political work. And Peter Kropotkin’s memoir accounting for his revolutionary life begins with his memory of his mother’s death. The consciousness raising and knowledge-sharing of 1970s feminist projects like Our Bodies, Ourselves, the queer liberation movement, disability activism, and the Black Power movement related individual experiences to broader social justice struggles. Oral histories accounting for the individual lives of ethnic minority leftists in the US, like Paul Avrich’s Anarchist Voices, Judy Kaplan and Linn Shapiro’s Red Diapers, and Michael Keith Honey’s Black Workers Remember, perform a similar kind of work. If Voices from the Valley and Seeing Silicon Valley are potentially valuable as political tools, then first person accounts of life in tech should be seen as another fist in the same fight. There is an undeniable power attached to hearing workers’ stories in their own words and movements can emerge from the unlikeliest sources.

    EDIT (8/6/2021): a sentence was added to correctly describe Joanne McNeil’s background and work history.
    _____

    Tamara Kneese is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Director of Gender and Sexualities Studies at the University of San Francisco. Her first book on digital death care practices, Death Glitch, is forthcoming with Yale University Press. She is also the co-editor of The New Death (forthcoming Spring 2022, School for Advanced Research/University of New Mexico Press).

    Back to the essay

    _____

    Notes

    [1] I would include Kate Losse’s early, biting critique The Boy Kings, published in 2012, in this category. Losse was Facebook employee #51 and exposed the ways that nontechnical women, even those with PhDs, were marginalized by Zuckerberg and others in the company.

    [2] Workers’ inquiry combines research with organizing, constituting a process by which workers themselves produce knowledge about their own circumstances and use that knowledge as part of their labor organizing.

    [3] Noopur Raval (2021) questions the “invisibility” narratives within popular tech criticism, including Voices from the Valley and Seeing Silicon Valley, arguing that ghost laborers are not so ghostly to those living in the Global South.

    [4] With apologies to Fred Moton. See The Undercommons (2013).
    _____

    Works Cited

    • Paul Avrich. Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.
    • Paulina Borsook. Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech. New York: Public Affairs, 2000.
    • Paul Buhle and Robin D. G. Kelley. “The Oral History of the Left in the United States: A Survey and Interpretation.” The Journal of American History 76, no. 2 (1989): 537-50. doi:10.2307/1907991.
    • Susan Fowler, Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber. New York: Penguin Books, 2020.
    • Nancy Fraser. Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis. New York: Verso, 2013.
    • Emma Goldman. Living My Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1931.
    • Emily Gould. “Exposed.” The New York Times Magazine, May 25, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/magazine/25internet-t.html.
    • Emily Gould. “Replaying My Shame.” The Cut, February 26, 2020. https://www.thecut.com/2020/02/emily-gould-gawker-shame.html
    • Asad Haider and Salar Mohandesi. “Workers’ Inquiry: A Genealogy.” Viewpoint Magazine, September 27, 2013, https://viewpointmag.com/2013/09/27/workers-inquiry-a-genealogy/.
    • Michael Keith Honey. Black Workers Remember: An Oral History of Segregation, Unionism, and the Freedom Struggle. Oakland: University of California Press, 2002.
    • Judy Kaplan and Linn Shapiro. Red Diapers: Growing Up in the Communist Left. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1998.
    • Peter Kropotkin. Memoirs of a Revolutionist. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1899.
    • Wendy Liu. Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology from Capitalism. London: Repeater Books, 2020.
    • Wendy Liu. “Silicon Inquiry.” Notes From Below, January 29, 2018, https://notesfrombelow.org/article/silicon-inquiry.
    • Audre Lorde. The Cancer Journals. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1980.
    • Katherine Losse. The Boy Kings: A Journey Into the Heart of the Social Network. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012.
    • Alice Lynd and Robert Staughton Lynd. Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working-Class Organizers. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973.
      Joanne McNeil. Lurking: How a Person Became a User. New York: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.
    • Mary Beth Meehan and Fred Turner. Seeing Silicon Valley: Life Inside a Fraying America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021.
    • Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions, 2013.
    • Noopur Raval. “Interrupting Invisbility in a Global World.” ACM Interactions. July/August, 2021, https://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/july-august-2021/interrupting-invisibility-in-a-global-world.
    • Ben Tarnoff and Moira Weigel. Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk about What They Do—and How They Do It. New York: FSG Originals x Logic, 2020.
    • Studs Terkel. Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. New York: Pantheon Books, 1974.
    • Jia Tolentino. “The Personal-Essay Boom is Over.” The New Yorker, May 18, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/jia-tolentino/the-personal-essay-boom-is-over.
    • Ellen Ullman. Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents.  New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997.
    • Ellen Ullman. Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology. New York: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.
    • Anna Wiener. “Uncanny Valley.” n+1, Spring 2016: Slow Burn, https://nplusonemag.com/issue-25/on-the-fringe/uncanny-valley/.
    • Anna Wiener. Uncanny Valley: A Memoir. New York: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.
  • Sharrona Pearl — In the Shadow of the Valley (Review of Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley)

    Sharrona Pearl — In the Shadow of the Valley (Review of Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley)

    a review of Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley: A Memoir (Macmillan, 2020)

    by Sharrona Pearl

    ~

    Uncanny Valley, the latest, very well-publicized memoir of Silicon Valley apostasy, is, for sure, a great read.  Anna Wiener writes beautiful words that become sentences that become beautiful paragraphs and beautiful chapters.  The descriptions are finely wrought, and if not quite cinematic than very, very visceral.  While it is a wry and tense and sometimes stressful story, it’s also exactly what it says it is: a memoir.  It’s the story of her experiences.  It captures a zeitgeist – beautifully, and with nuance and verve and life. It highlights contradictions and complications and confusions: hers, but also of Silicon Valley culture itself.  It muses upon them, and worries them, and worries over them.  But it doesn’t analyze them and it certainly doesn’t solve them, even if you get the sense that Wiener would quite like to do so.  That’s okay.  Solving the problems exposed by Silicon Valley tech culture and tech capitalism is quite a big ask.

    Wiener’s memoir tells the story of her accidental immersion into, and gradual (too gradual?) estrangement from, essentially, Big Tech.  A newly minted graduate from a prestigious small liberal arts college (of course), Wiener was living in Brooklyn (of course) while working as an underpaid assistant in a small literary agency (of course.) “Privileged and downwardly mobile,” as she puts it, Wiener was just about getting by with some extra help from her parents, embracing being perpetually broke as she party-hopped and engaged in some light drug use while rolling her eyes at all the IKEA furniture.  In as clear a portrait of Brooklyn as anything could be, Wiener’s friends spent 2013 making sourdough bread near artisan chocolate shops while talking on their ironic flip phones.  World-weary at 24, Wiener decides to shake things up and applies for a job at a Manhattan-based ebook startup.  It’s still about books, she rationalizes, so the startup part is almost beside the point.  Or maybe, because it’s still about books, the tech itself can be used for good.  Of course, neither of these things turn out to be true for either this startup, or tech itself.  Wiener quickly discovers (and so do her bosses) that she’s just not the right fit.  So she applies for another tech job instead.  This time in the Bay Area.  Why not?  She’d gotten a heady dose of the optimism and opportunity of startup culture, and they offered her a great salary.  It was a good decision, a smart and responsible and exciting decision, even as she was sad to leave the books behind.  But honestly, she’d done that the second she joined the first startup.  And in a way, the entire memoir is Wiener figuring that out.

    Maybe Wiener’s privilege (alongside generational resources and whiteness) is living in a world where you don’t have to worry about Silicon Valley even as it permeates everything.  She and her friends were being willfully ignorant in Brooklyn; it turns out, as Wiener deftly shows us, you can be willfully ignorant from the heart of Silicon Valley too.  Wiener lands a job at one startup and then, at some point, takes a pay cut to work at another whose culture is a better fit.  “Culture” does a lot of work here to elide sexism, harassment, surveillance, and violation of privacy.  To put it another way: bad stuff is going on around Wiener, at the very companies she works for, and she doesn’t really notice or pay attention…so we shouldn’t either.  Even though she narrates these numerous and terrible violations clearly and explicitly, we don’t exactly clock them because they aren’t a surprise.  We already knew.  We don’t care.  Or we already did the caring part and we’ve moved on.

    If 2013 feels both too early and too late for sourdough (weren’t people making bread in the 1950s because they had to?  And in 2020 because of COVID?) that’s a bit like the book itself.  Surely the moment for Silicon Valley Seduction and Cessation was the early 2000s?  And surely our disillusionment from the surveillance of Big Tech and the loss of privacy didn’t happen until after 2016? (Well, if you pay attention to the timeline in the book, that’s when it happened for Wiener too).  I was there for the bubble in the early aughts.  How could anyone not know what to expect?  Which isn’t to say that this memoir isn’t a gripping and illustrative mise-en-scène.  It’s just that in the era of Coded Bias and Virginia Eubanks and Safiya Noble and Meredith Broussard and Ruha Benjamin and Shoshana Zuboff… didn’t we already know that Big Tech was Bad?  When Wiener has her big reveal in learning from her partner Noah that “we worked in a surveillance company,” it’s more like: well, duh.  (Does it count as whistleblowing if it isn’t a secret?)

    But maybe that wasn’t actually the big reveal of the book.  Maybe the point was that Wiener did already know, she just didn’t quite realize how seductive power is, how pervasive an all-encompassing a culture can be, and how easy distinctions between good and bad don’t do much for us in the totalizing world of tech.  She wants to break that all down for us.  The memoir is kind of Tech Tales for Lit Critics, which is distinct from Tech for Dummies ™ because maybe the critics are the smart ones in the end.  The story is for “us;” Wiener’s tribe of smart and idealistic and disaffected humanists.  (Truly us, right dear readers?)  She makes it clear that even as she works alongside and with an army of engineers, there is always an us and them.  (Maybe partly because really, she works for the engineers, and no matter what the company says everyone knows what the hierarchy is.)  The “us” are the skeptics and the “them” are the cult believers except that, as her weird affectation of never naming any tech firms (“an online superstore; a ride-hailing app; a home-sharing platform; the social network everyone loves to hate,”) we are all in the cult in some way, even if we (“we”) – in Wiener’s Brooklyn tribe forever no matter where we live – half-heartedly protest. (For context: I’m not on Facebook and I don’t own a cell phone but PLEASE follow me on twitter @sharronapearl).

    Wiener uses this “NDA language” throughout the memoir.  At first it’s endearing – imagine a world in which we aren’t constantly name-checking Amazon and AirBnB.  Then its addicting – when I was grocery shopping I began to think of my local Sprouts as “a West-Coast transplant fresh produce store.”  Finally, it’s annoying – just say Uber, for heaven’s sake!  But maybe there’s a method to it: these labels makes the ubiquity of these platforms all the more clear, and forces us to confront just how very integrated into our lives they all are.  We are no different from Wiener; we all benefit from surveillance.

    Sometimes the memoir feels a bit like stunt journalism, the tech take on The Year of Living Biblically or Running the Books.  There’s a sense from the outset that Wiener is thinking “I’ll take the job, and if I hate it I can always write about it.”  And indeed she did, and indeed she does, now working as the tech and start-up correspondent for The New Yorker.  (Read her articles: they’re terrific.)  But that’s not at all a bad thing: she tells her story well, with self-awareness and liveliness and a lot of patience in her sometimes ironic and snarky tone.  It’s exactly what it we imagine it to be when we see how the sausage is made: a little gross, a lot upsetting, and still really quite interesting.

    If Wiener feels a bit old before her time (she’s in her mid-twenties during her time in tech, and constantly lamenting how much younger all her bosses are) it’s both a function of Silicon Valley culture and its veneration of young male cowboys, and her own affectations.  Is any Brooklyn millennial ever really young?  Only when it’s too late.  As a non-engineer and a woman, Wiener is quite clear that for Silicon Valley, her time has passed.  Here is when she is at her most relatable in some ways: we have all been outsiders, and certainly many of would be in that setting.  At the same time, at 44 with three kids, I feel a bit like telling this sweet summer child to take her time.  And that much more will happen to her than already has.  Is that condescending?  The tone brings it out in me.  And maybe I’m also a little jealous: I could do with having made a lot of money in my 20s on the road to disillusionment with power and sexism and privilege and surveillance.  It’s better – maybe – than going down that road without making a lot of money and getting to live in San Francisco.  If, in the end, I’m not quite sure what the point of her big questions are, it’s still a hell of a good story.  I’m waiting for the movie version on “the streaming app that produces original content and doesn’t release its data.”

    _____

    Sharrona Pearl (@SharronaPearl) is a historian and theorist of the body and face.  She has written many articles and two monographs: About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Harvard University Press, 2010) and Face/On: Face Transplants and the Ethics of the Other (University of Chicago Press, 2017). She is Associate Professor of Medical Ethics at Drexel University.

    Back to the essay

  • Richard Hill —  In Everything, Freedom for Whom? (Review of Laura DeNardis, The Internet in Everything: Freedom and Security in a World with No Off Switch)

    Richard Hill — In Everything, Freedom for Whom? (Review of Laura DeNardis, The Internet in Everything: Freedom and Security in a World with No Off Switch)

    a review of Laura DeNardis, The Internet in Everything: Freedom and Security in a World with No Off Switch (Yale University Press, 2020)

    by Richard Hill

    ~

    This highly readable book by a respected mainstream scholar (DeNardis is a well-known Internet governance scholar; she a professor in the School of Communication at American University and the author of The Global War for Internet Governance and other books) documents and confirms what a portion of civil society has been saying for some time: use of Internet has become pervasive and it is so deeply embedded in so many business and private processes that it can no longer be treated as neutral technology whose governance is delegated to private companies, especially not when the companies in question have dominant market power.

    As the author puts the matter (3): “The Internet is no longer merely a communications system connecting people and information. It is a control system connecting vehicles, wearable devices, home appliances, drones, medical equipment, currency, and every conceivable industry sector. Cyberspace now completely and often imperceptibly permeates offline spaces, blurring boundaries between material and virtual worlds. This transformation of the Internet from a communication network between people to a control network embedded directly into the physical world may be even more consequential than the shift from an industrial society to a digital information society.”

    The stakes of the Internet of Things (IoT) (which a respected technologist has referred to as the Internet of Trash) are high; as the author states (4): “The stakes of cybersecurity rise as Internet outages are no longer about losing access to communication and content but about losing day-to-day functioning in the real world, from the ability to drive a car to accessing medical care. Internet-connected objects bring privacy concerns into intimate spheres of human existence far beyond the already invasive data-gathering practices of Facebook, Google, and other content intermediaries”

    The author explains clearly, in non-technical language, key technological aspects (such as security) that are matters of concern. Because, citing Janet Abbate (132): “technical decisions can have far-reaching economic and social consequences, altering the balance of power between competing businesses or nations and constraining the freedom of users.” Standardization can have very significant effects. Yet (147): “In practice, the individuals involved in standards setting have been affiliated with corporations with a stake in the outcome of deliberations. Participation, while open, requires technical expertise and, often, funding to meaningfully engage.”

    The author also explains why it is inevitable that states will take an increasing interest in the governance of the Internet (7): “Technology policy must, in the contemporary context, anticipate and address future questions of accountability, risk, and who is responsible for outages, security updates, and reliability.”

    Although the book does not explicitly mention it (but there is an implicit reference at (216)), this is not surprising in light of the historical interest of states and empires in communications, the way in which policies of the United States regarding the Internet have favored its geo-economic and geo-political goals, in particular the interests of its large private companies that dominate the information and communications technology (ICT) sector worldwide, and the way in which United States has deliberately used a human rights discourse to promote policies that further those geo-economic and geo-political interests.

    As the author puts the matter (182, echoing others: “Powerful forces have an interest in keeping conceptions of freedom rooted in the free flow of content. It preserves revenue structures of private ordering and fuels the surveillance state.” However, “The free flow of information rests on a system of private surveillance capitalism in which possibilities for individual privacy are becoming increasingly tenuous. Governments then co-opt this infrastructure and associated data to enact surveillance and exert power over citizens. Tensions between openness and enclosure are high, with private companies increasingly using proprietary technologies, rather than those based on open standards, for anticompetitive means. Trade-secrecy-protected, and therefore invisible, algorithms make decisions that have direct effects on human freedom. Governments increasingly tamper with global infrastructure – such as local DNS redirection – for censorship.”  In this context, see also this excellent discussion of the dangerous consequences of the current dominance by a handful of companies.

    One wonders whether the situation might have been better if there had been greater government involvement all along. For example, as the author correctly notes (157): “A significant problem of Internet governance is the infinite-regress question of how to certify the authority that in turn certifies an online site.” In the original X.509 concept, there was no infinite-regress: the ultimate certification authority would have been an entity controlled by, or at least licensed by, a national government.

    The book focuses on IoT and the public interest, taking to task Internet governance systems and norms. Those who are not yet familiar with the issues, and their root causes, will be able to understand them and how to deal with them. As the book well explains, policymakers are not yet adequately addressing IoT issues; instead, there is a focus on “content” and social media governance issues rather than the emerging, possibly existential, consequences of the forthcoming IoT disruption. While many experts in Internet matters will find much familiar material, even they will benefit from the author’s novel approach.

    The author has addressed many issues in her numerous articles and books, mostly relating to infrastructure and the layers below content, as does this valuable book. However, in my view, the most important emerging issue of Internet governance is the economic value of data and its distribution (see for example the Annex of this submission and here, here and here.) Hopefully the author will tackle those subjects in the future.

    The author approvingly notes that Morozov has criticized (181) “two approaches: cyber-utopian views that the Internet can vanquish authoritarianism, and Internet-centrism that pushes technological solutions without regard to context.” She correctly notes (183) that “The goal of restoring, or preserving, a free and open Internet (backward-looking idealization) should be replaced with the objective of progressively moving closer to freedom (forward-looking).” While the book does explain (Chapter 6) that “free and open Internet” has been used as an agenda to further certain political and economic interests, I would have welcomed a more robust criticism of how that past idealization got us into the dangerous predicament that the book so well describes. The author asks (115): “A critical question is what provides the legitimacy for this privatization of governance”. I would reply “nothing, look at the mess, which is so well described in the book.”

    For example, the author posits (92): “Many chapters of Internet innovation have proceeded well without heavy regulatory constraints.” This is certainly true if “well” is intended to mean “have grown fast”; however, as the book well documents, it is not true if “well” is intended to mean “safely and deliberately”. As the author states (94): “From the Challenger space shuttle explosion to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, the history of technological success is the history of technological failure.” Yes, and those failures, in particular for the cited examples, are due to engineering or operational mistakes. I posit that the same holds for the Internet issues that the book so clearly highlights.

    The author recognizes that (181) “The majority of human Internet users are not in the United States or even in so-called Western countries”, yet the book struck me as being US-centric, to the point of sometimes appearing biased. For example, by never adding “alleged” to references of Russian interference with US elections or cyber-espionage; by adding “alleged” to references of certain US actions; by not mentioning supposed or acknowledged instances of US cyber-activities other than the Snowden revelations; by stating (211) “Energy-grid sensors in the United States should not be easily accessible in Russia” when the converse is also the case. And by positing (88): “One historical feature, and now limitation, of privacy advocacy is that it approaches this area as an individual problem rather than a global economic and political problem.” Non-US advocates have consistently approached this area from the global perspective, see for example here, here and here.

    ***

    Chapter 1 reminds us that, at present, more objects are interconnected than are people, and explains how this results in all companies becoming, in sense, Internet companies, with the consequence that the (17): “embedding of network sensors and actuators into the physical world has transformed the design and governance of cyber infrastructure into one of the most consequential geopolitical issues of the twenty-first century.” As the author correctly notes (18): “Technical points of control are not neutral – they are sites of struggle over values and power arenas for mediating competing interests.” And (19): “the design of technical standards is political.” And (52): “Architectural constraints create political constraints.”

    Chapter 2 explains how the so-called Internet of Things is more accurately described as a set of cyber-physical systems or “network of everything” that is resulting in (28): “the fundamental integration of material-world systems and digital systems.” And it explains how that integration shapes new policy concerns, in particular with respect to privacy and security (38): “Cybersecurity no longer protects content and data only. It also protects food security and consumer safety.” (Market failures resulting in the current inadequate level of cybersecurity are well explained in the ISOC’s Global Internet Report 2016.)

    Chapter 3 explains how cyber-physical systems will pose an increasing threat to privacy. For example (60): “Privacy complications emerging in embedded toys underscore how all companies are now tech companies that gather and process digital data, not just content intermediaries such as Google but toy companies such as Mattel.” The author joins others in noting (61) that: “In the digital realm generally, it is an understatement to say that privacy is not going well.” As the author correctly notes (61): “Transparency and notice to consumers about data gathering and sharing practices should represent absolute minimal standards of practice. But even this minimal standard is difficult to attain.” I would have added that it is difficult to attain only because of the misguided neo-liberal policies that are still being pursued by the US and its allies, and that perpetuate the current business model of (61): “giving away free services in exchange for data-collection-driven targeted advertising” (for an in-depth discussion of this business model, see here). The author joins others in noting that (62): “This private surveillance is also what has enabled massive government surveillance of citizens”. And that (64):” This revenue model based on online advertising is only sustainable via the constant collection and accrual of personal information.” She notes that (84): “The collection of data via a constant feedback loop of sensors and actuators is part of the service itself.” And that (85): “Notice and choice are already problematic concepts, even when it is feasible to provide notice and gain consent, but they often do not apply at all to the Internet of things.”

    While it is true that traditional notice and consent may be difficult to implement for IoT, I would argue that we need to develop new methods to allow users to control their data meaningfully, and I believe that the author would agree that we don’t want IoT to become another tool for surveillance capitalism. According to the author (84): “Public policy has to realistically acknowledge that much social and economic good emanates from this constant data collection.” In my view, this has to be qualified: the examples given in the book don’t require the kind of pervasive data trading that exists at present. Yes, we need data collection, but not data exploitation as currently practiced. And indeed the author herself makes that point: it is indispensable to move towards the collection of only the data that are (88) “necessary for innovation and operational efficiency”. As she correctly notes (91), data minimization is a core tenet of the European Union’s GDPR.

    The chapter includes a good introduction of the current Internet economic model. While most of us acquiesce at least to some degree to that business model I would dispute the author’s assertion that (62): “it a cultural shift in what counts as the private sphere”, for the reasons explained in detail by Harcourt. Nor would I agree that (64): “It has also changed the norms of what counts as privacy.” Indeed, the EU’s GDPR and related developments elsewhere indicate that the norms imposed by the current business model are not well accepted outside the USA. The author herself refers to developments in the USA (82), the “Fair Information Practice Principles (FIPPs)”; I would have preferred a reference to the COE Convention 108.

    The author asks, I presume rhetorically, whether (65): “voluntary corporate measures suffice for protecting privacy”. The author correctly wonders whether, given the nature of IoT devices and their limited human interfaces (65): “traditional approaches such as notice, disclosure, and consumer choice even apply in cyber-physical systems”. That is, privacy problems are even more challenging to address. Yet, offline law applies equally online only, so I believe that we need to find ways to map the traditional approaches to IoT. As the author correctly says (84): “The question of what can and should be done faces inherent challenges” and conflicting values may need to be balanced; however, I don’t think that I can agree that (84): “In the realm of content control, one person’s privacy is another person’s censorship.”

    The author correctly states (88): “Especially in the cyber-physical arena, privacy has broad public purposes, in the same way as freedom of expression is not only about individual rights but also about public power and democratic stability.” See in this respect GDPR Recital 4.

    Chapter 4 explains well how insufficient cybersecurity is creating significant risks for systems that were traditionally not much affected by cyberthreats, that is, how what was previously referred to as the “physical world” is now inextricably tied to the cyberworld. As the book says, citing Bruce Schneier (106): “your security on the Internet depends on the security of millions of Internet-enabled devices, designed and sold by companies you’ve never heard of to consumers who don’t care about your security.” As the author says (109): “IoT devices are vulnerable, and this is a market failure, a political failure, and a technical failure.” (The market failures are well explained here).

    The chapter reminds us that cyberattacks have taken place and might turn into cyberwar; it also reminds us that some cyberattacks have been carried out using malware that had been stockpiled by the US government and that had leaked. The author outlines the debate involving (99): “the question of when governments should notify manufacturers and the public of vulnerabilities they detect, versus stockpiling knowledge of these vulnerabilities and exploits based on these bugs for cyber offense.” In my view, there is little to be debated: as the President of Microsoft said (cited at (123)), governments should agree not to stockpile vulnerabilities and immediately to notify them; further reasons are found in (125); for concrete proposals, see here.

    The author reminds us that (118): “Liability is an area in need of regulatory clarity.” This is reinforced at (225). As the author notes (120): “Those who purchase and install systems have a responsibility to be aware of the product’s privacy and security policies.” This is true, but it can be difficult or impossible in practice for consumers to have sufficient awareness. We expect people to check the pressure of the tires on their cars; we don’t expect them to check the engineering specifications of the brakes: manufacturers are liable for the engineering.

    The author also notes that (118): “the tradition, generally, has been immunity from liability for Internet intermediaries.” This is also discussed at (170). And, citing Jack Balkin (219): “The largest owners of private infrastructure are so powerful that we might even regard them as special-purpose sovereigns. They engage in perpetual struggles for power for control of digital networks with nation states, who, in turn, want to control and co-opt these powerful players.” As the author notes, there are some calls to move away from that tradition, see for example here, in particular because (221): “ Much of the power of private intermediaries emanates from massive data collection and monetization practices that underpin business models based on interactive advertising.” I disagree with the author when she posits that (223): “shifting to content-intermediary liability would create a disincentive to innovation and risk.” On the contrary, it might unlock the current non-competitive situation.

    The author asks, I trust rhetorically (121): “To what extent should back doors be built into cyber-physical system and device encryption for law enforcement access in light of the enormous consequences of security problems”. The answer is well known to anyone who understands the technical and policy issues: never (see also here and here). As the book puts the matter (126): “Without various types of encryption, there would be no digital commerce, no online financial systems, and no prospect whatsoever for private communications.”

    Chapter 5 explains why interoperability is at the heart of networks and how it has been evolving as the Internet moves away from being just a communications infrastructure, towards the infrastructure needed to conduct most all human activities. As the author correctly notes (145): “companies sometimes have an interest in proprietary specifications for anticompetitive effects and to lock in customer bases.” And (158): “social media platforms are, in some ways, closer to the proprietary online systems of the 1990s in which users of one online service could not communicate with users on other systems.” (A proposed solution to that issue can be found here). But it is worse that that (145): “intellectual property rights within connected objects enable manufacturers to control the flow of data and the autonomy and rights of individuals even after an object is purchased outright.” It would have been nice if the author had referenced the extensive criticism of the TRIPS agreements, which agreements are mentioned in the book (146).

    Chapter 6 reviews the “free and open Internet” mantra and reminds us that Internet freedom aspirations articulated by the US (164) “on the surface, comport with U.S. First Amendment traditions, the objective of maintaining the dominance of U.S. multinational tech companies, and a host of foreign-policy interventions contingent on spreading democratic values and attenuating the power of authoritarian regimes. Discourses around Internet freedom have served a variety of interests.” Indeed, as shown by Powers and Jabolonski, they have been deliberately used to promote US interests.

    Regarding Net Neutrality, as the author explains (177): “The complexity of the issue is far greater than it is often simplistically portrayed in the media and by policymakers.”

    The author correctly notes that (177) multistakeholder governance is a fetishized ideal. And that (167): “a … globally influential Internet freedom formulation views multistakeholder governance models as a mechanism for democratic ideals in cyberspace.” That view has been disputed, including by the author herself. I regret that, in addition to works she cites, she did not also cite her 2013 paper on the topic and other literature on multistakeholder governance in general (see the Annex of this submission to an ITU group), in particular that it has been criticized as being generally not fit for purpose.

    The chapter gives a good example of a novel cyber-physical speech issue (184): “Is a 3D-Printed Gun a Speech Right?”

    Chapter 7 summarizes the situation and makes recommendations. These have largely been covered above. But it worth repeating some key points (199): “Based on the insufficient state of privacy, security, and interoperability in the IoT, as well as the implications for human safety and societal stability, the prevailing philosophy of a private-sector-led governance structure has to be on the table for debate.” In particular because (199): “local objects are a global Internet governance concern”.

    The chapter also includes a good critique of those who believe that there are some sort of “invariant” architectural principles for the Internet that should guide policies. As the author correctly notes (210): “Setting aside global norm heterogeneity and just focusing on Western democracies, architectural principles are not fixed. Neither should they be fixed. … New architectural principles are needed to coincide with the demands of the contemporary moment.”

    Chapter 8 reminds us that the world has always changed, in particular due to the development of new technologies, and that this is what is happening now (215): “The diffusion of digital technologies into the material world represents a major societal transformation.” And (213): “Another sea change is that Internet governance has become a critical global political concern.” It includes a good discussion of the intermediary liability issues, as summarized above. And reinforces points made above, for example (227): “Voluntary industry self-regulation is inadequate in itself because there is not always an endogenous incentive structure to naturally induce strong security measures.”

    ***

    The author has written extensively on many topics not covered in depth in this book. People who are not familiar with her work might take certain statements in the book out of context and interpret them in ways with which I would not agree. For the sake of clarity, I comment below on some of those statements. This is not meant to be criticism of the book, or the author, but rather my interpretation of certain topics.

    According to the author (40): “Theft of intellectual property – such as trade secrets and industry patents – is a significant economic policy concern.” (The same point is made at (215)). I would argue, on the contrary, that the current intellectual property regime is far too strict and has become dysfunctional, as shown by the under-production of COVID vaccines. While the author uses the term “piracy” to refer to digitally-enabled copyright infringement, it is important to recall that piracy is a grave violent crime, whereas copyright infringement is an entirely different, non-violent crime.

    The author correctly notes (53) that: “The goal of preserving a ‘universal’ Internet with shared, open standards has always been present in Internet policy and design communities.” However, I would argue that that goal was related to the communications infrastructure (layers 1-5 of the OSI model), and not to the topics dealt with in the book. Indeed, as the book well explains (135), there is a clear trend towards proprietary, non-shared solutions for the cyber-physical infrastructure and the applications that it supports.

    The author states (54): “The need for massive pools of globally unique identifiers for embedded systems should provide an incentive for IPv6”. This is a correct, but a non-specialist may fail to understand the distinction between addresses (such as IP address) that identify a place to which information should be sent; and names, that uniquely identify an object or entity regardless of location. In that context, an IP address can be viewed as a temporary identifier of an object. The same caveat applies later (193): “A common name and number space is another defining historical characteristic of the Internet. Every device connected to the Internet, traditionally, has had a globally unique IP address.”

    The author states (66): “government surveillance primarily occurs via government requests to the private sector to disclose data”. My understanding of the Snowden revelations is different: the US government has its own extensive and pervasive data collection capabilities, quite independently of the private sector’s capabilities.

    According to the author, anonymous speech and behavior on the Internet were facilitated by (77): “Making unique Internet identifiers logical (software defined) rather than physical (linked to specific hardware)”. Again, a non-specialist may be induced in error. As the author well knows (having written authoritatively on the subject), it was only the shortage of IPv4 addresses that resulted in DHCP and widespread NATting; the original idea was that IP addresses would be statically device-specific; but they are addresses, not names, so they cannot be hard-coded, otherwise you couldn’t move the device to another location/network.

    The author posits regarding privacy (91): “Like most areas of Internet governance, it is a multistakeholder problem requiring multistakeholder solutions.” As already noted, the author has analyzed multistakeholder processes, their strengths and shortcoming, and the book explains clearly why the private sector has little interest in promoting privacy (as the author says (92): “In many ways, market incentives discourage privacy practices”), and given the visible failure of the Internet’s multistakeholder model to address fully the priorities set forth in the 2005 WGIG report: administration of the DNS root zone files and systems; Internet interconnection costs; security; and spam.

    A mention of ENISA (which is cited in elsewhere in the book) would have been welcome in the catalog of policy proposals for securing systems (110).

    The author notes (142): “ITU historically provides telecommunication specifications in areas such as Internet telephony.” Non specialists may not be aware of the fact that the key term here is “such as”: historically, the ITU did far more, and continues to do more, albeit not much in the specific area of Internet telephony.

    According to the author (148): “Similar to W3C specifications, IETF standards are freely published and historically unconstrained by intellectual property rights.” This is not quite correct. IETF has a RAND policy, whereas W3C does not.

    The author states that (153): “The original design of the Internet was itself a radical rethinking of existing architecture.” That is an overstatement: the Internet was an evolution of previous architectures.

    According to the author (156): “Blockchain already underlies a variety of mainstream financial and industrial service implementations.” She does not provide a reference for this statement, which I  (and others) find dubious, in particular with respect to the qualifier “mainstream”.

    The author states that IETF engineers (166): “created traditions of bottom-up technical design.” I believe that it would be more accurate to say that the IETF built on and reinforced such traditions, because, since the 19th century, most international standards were designed by bottom-up collaboration of engineers.

    The author posits that (166): “the goal of many standards is to extract royalties via underlying patents”. This may be true for de facto standards, but it is not true for international standards, since IEC, IETF, ISO, and ITU all have RAND policies.

    With respect to the WGIG (178), the non-specialist may not be aware that it was convened by consensus of the UN Member States, and that it addressed many issues other than the management and administration of Internet domain names and addresses, for example security and spam. Most of the issues are still open.

    Regarding the 2012 WCIT (182), what happened was considerably more complex than the short (US-centric) mention in the book.

    According to the author (201): “Data localization requirements, local DNS redirection, and associated calls for Internet sovereignty as an ideological competitor to the multistakeholder model of Internet governance do not match the way cross-border technology works in practice.” This appears to me to contradict the points well made elsewhere in the book to the effect that technology should not blindly drive policies. As already noted, the book (because of its focus) does not discuss the complex economic issues related to data. I don’t think that data localization, which merits a serious economic discussion, should be dismissed summarily as being incompatible with current technology, when in my view it is not. In this context, it is important to stress the counter-productive effects of e-commerce proposals being negotiated, in secret, in trade negotiations (see also here and here). The author does not mention them, no doubt because they are outside the main scope of the book, but perhaps also because they are sufficiently secret that she is not aware of them.

    The author refers to cryptocurrencies (206). It would have been nice if she had also referred to criticism of cryptocurrencies, see for example here.

    ***

    Again, these quibbles are not meant to detract in any way from the value of the book, which explains clearly, insightfully, and forcefully why things are changing and why we cannot continue to pretend that government interventions are not needed. In summary, I would highly recommend this book, in particular to policy-makers.

    _____

    Richard Hill is President of the Association for Proper internet Governance, and was formerly a senior official at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). He has been involved in internet governance issues since the inception of the internet and is now an activist in that area, speaking, publishing, and contributing to discussions in various forums. Among other works he is the author of The New International Telecommunication Regulations and the Internet: A Commentary and Legislative History (Springer, 2014). He writes frequently about internet governance issues for The b2o Review Digital Studies magazine.

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  • Zachary Loeb — Burn It All (Review of Mullaney, Peters, Hicks and Philip, eds., Your Computer Is on Fire)

    Zachary Loeb — Burn It All (Review of Mullaney, Peters, Hicks and Philip, eds., Your Computer Is on Fire)

    a review of Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks and Kavita Philip, eds., Your Computer Is on Fire (MIT Press, 2021)

    by Zachary Loeb

    ~

    It often feels as though contemporary discussions about computers have perfected the art of talking around, but not specifically about, computers. Almost every week there is a new story about Facebook’s malfeasance, but usually such stories say little about the actual technologies without which such conduct could not have happened. Stories proliferate about the unquenchable hunger for energy that cryptocurrency mining represents, but the computers eating up that power are usually deemed less interesting than the currency being mined. Debates continue about just how much AI can really accomplish and just how soon it will be able to accomplish even more, but the public conversation winds up conjuring images of gleaming terminators marching across a skull-strewn wasteland instead of rows of servers humming in an undisclosed location. From Zoom to dancing robots, from Amazon to the latest Apple Event, from misinformation campaigns to activist hashtags—we find ourselves constantly talking about computers, and yet seldom talking about computers.

    All of the aforementioned specifics are important to talk about. If anything, we need to be talking more about Facebook’s malfeasance, the energy consumption of cryptocurrencies, the hype versus the realities of AI, Zoom, dancing robots, Amazon, misinformation campaigns, and so forth. But we also need to go deeper. Case in point, though it was a very unpopular position to take for many years, it is now a fairly safe position to say that “Facebook is a problem;” however, it still remains a much less acceptable position to suggest that “computers are a problem.” At a moment in which it has become glaringly obvious that tech companies have politics, there still remains a common sentiment that computers are neutral. And thus such a view can comfortably disparage Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos and Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg for the ways in which they have warped the potential of computing, while still holding out hope that computing can be a wonderful emancipatory tool if it can just be put in better hands.

    But what if computers are themselves, at least part of, the problem? What if some of our present technological problems have their roots deep in the history of computing, and not just in the dorm room where Mark Zuckerberg first put together FaceSmash?

    These are the sorts of troubling and provocative questions with which the essential new book Your Computer Is on Fire engages. It is a volume that recognizes that when we talk about computers, we need to actually talk about computers. A vital intervention into contemporary discussions about technology, this book wastes no energy on carefully worded declarations of fealty to computers and the Internet, there’s a reason why the book is not titled Your Computer Might Be on Fire but Your Computer Is on Fire.

    The editors of the volume are quite upfront about the confrontational stance of the volume, Thomas Mullaney opens the book by declaring that “Humankind can no longer afford to be lulled into complacency by narratives of techno-utopianism or technoneutrality” (4). This is a point that Mullaney drives home as he notes that “the time for equivocation is over” before emphasizing that despite its at moments woebegone tonality, the volume is not “crafted as a call of despair but as a call to arms” (8). While the book sets out to offer a robust critique of computers, Mar Hicks highlights that the editors and contributors of the book shall do this in a historically grounded way, which includes a vital awareness that “there are almost always red flags and warning signs before a disaster, if one cares to look” (14). Though unfortunately many of those who attempted to sound the alarm about the potential hazards of computing were either ignored or derided as technophobes. Where Mullaney had described the book as “a call to arms,” Hicks describes what sorts of actions this call may entail: “we have to support workers, vote for regulation, and protest (or support those protesting) widespread harms like racist violence” (23). And though the focus is on collective action, Hicks does not diminish the significance of individual ethical acts, noting powerfully (in words that may be particularly pointed at those who work for the big tech companies): “Don’t spend your life as a conscientious cog in a terribly broken system” (24).

    Your Computer Is on Fire begins like a political manifesto; as the volume proceeds the contributors maintain the sense of righteous fury. In addition to introductions and conclusions, the book is divided into three sections: “Nothing is Virtual” wherein contributors cut through the airy talking points to bring ideas about computing back to the ground; “This is an Emergency” sounds the alarm on many of the currently unfolding crises in and around computing; and “Where Will the Fire Spread” turns a prescient gaze towards trajectories to be mindful of in the swiftly approaching future. Hicks notes, “to shape the future, look to the past” (24), and this is a prompt that the contributors take up with gusto as they carefully demonstrate how the outlines of our high-tech society were drawn long before Google became a verb.

    Drawing attention to the physicality of the Cloud, Nathan Ensmenger begins the “Nothing is Virtual” section by working to resituate “the history of computing within the history of industrialization” (35). Arguing that “The Cloud is a Factory,” Ensmenger digs beneath the seeming immateriality of the Cloud metaphor to extricate the human labor, human agendas, and environmental costs that get elided when “the Cloud” gets bandied about. The role of the human worker hiding behind the high-tech curtain is further investigated by Sarah Roberts, who explores how many of the high-tech solutions that purport to use AI to fix everything, are relying on the labor of human beings sitting in front of computers. As Roberts evocatively describes it, the “solutionist disposition toward AI everywhere is aspirational at its core” (66), and this desire for easy technological solutions covers up challenging social realities. While the Internet is often hailed as an American invention, Benjamin Peters discusses the US ARPANET alongside the ultimately unsuccessful network attempts of the Soviet OGAS and Chile’s Cybersyn, in order to show how “every network history begins with a history of the wider word” (81), and to demonstrate that networks have not developed by “circumventing power hierarchies” but by embedding themselves into those hierarchies (88). Breaking through the emancipatory hype surrounding the Internet, Kavita Philip explores the ways in which the Internet materially and ideologically reifies colonial logics, of dominance and control, demonstrating how “the infrastructural internet, and our cultural stories about it, are mutually constitutive.” (110). Mitali Thakor brings the volume’s first part to a close, with a consideration of how the digital age is “dominated by the feeling of paranoia” (120), by discussing the development and deployment of sophisticated surveillance technologies (in this case, for the detection of child pornography).

    “Electronic computing technology has long been an abstraction of political power into machine form” (137), these lines from Mar Hicks eloquently capture the leitmotif that plays throughout the chapters that make up the second part of the volume. Hicks’ comment comes from an exploration of the sexism that has long been “a feature, not a bug” (135) of the computing sector, with particular consideration of the ways in which sexist hiring and firing practices undermined the development of England’s computing sector. Further exploring how the sexism of today’s tech sector has roots in the development of the tech sector, Corinna Schlombs looks to the history of IBM to consider how that company suppressed efforts by workers to organize by framing the company as a family—albeit one wherein father still knew best. The biases built into voice recognition technologies (such as Siri) are delved into by Halcyon Lawrence who draws attention to the way that these technologies are biased towards those with accents, a reflection of the lack of diversity amongst those who design these technologies. In discussing robots, Safiya Umoja Noble explains how “Robots are the dreams of their designers, catering to the imaginaries we hold about who should do what in our societies” (202), and thus these robots reinscribe particular viewpoints and biases even as their creators claim they are creating robots for good. Shifting away from the flashiest gadgets of high-tech society, Andrea Stanton considers the cultural logics and biases embedded in word processing software that treat the demands of languages that are not written left to write as somehow aberrant. Considering how much of computer usage involves playing games, Noah Wardrip-Fruin argues that the limited set of video game logics keeps games from being about very much—a shooter is a shooter regardless of whether you are gunning down demons in hell or fanatics in a flooded ruin dense with metaphors.

    Oftentimes hiring more diverse candidates is hailed as the solution to the tech sector’s sexism and racism, but as Janet Abbate notes in the first chapter of the “Where Will the Fire Spread?” section, this approach generally attempts to force different groups to fit into Silicon Valley’s warped view of what attributes make for a good programmer. Abbate contends that equal representation will not be enough “until computer work is equally meaningful for groups who do not necessarily share the values and priorities that currently dominate Silicon Valley” (266). While computers do things to society, they also perform specific technical functions, and Ben Allen comments on source code to show the power that programmers have to insert nearly undetectable hacks into the systems they create. Returning to the question of code as empowerment, Sreela Sarkar discusses a skills training class held in Seelampur (near New Delhi), to show that “instead of equalizing disparities, IT-enabled globalization has created and further heightened divisions of class, caste, gender, religion, etc.” (308). Turning towards infrastructure, Paul Edwards considers how the speed with which platforms have developed to become infrastructure has been much swifter than the speed with which older infrastructural systems were developed, which he explores by highlighting three examples in various African contexts (FidoNet, M-Pesa, and Free Basiscs). And Thomas Mullaney closes out the third section with a consideration of the way that the QWERTY keyboard gave rise to pushback and creative solutions from those who sought to type in non-Latin scripts.

    Just as two of the editors began the book with a call to arms, so too the other two editors close the book with a similar rallying cry. In assessing the chapters that had come before, Kavita Philip emphasizes that the volume has chosen “complex, contradictory, contingent explanations over just-so stories.” (364) The contributors, and editors, have worked with great care to make it clear that the current state of computers was not inevitable—that things currently are the way they are does not mean they had to be that way, or that they cannot be changed. Eschewing simplistic solutions, Philip notes that language, history, and politics truly matter to our conversations about computing, and that as we seek for the way ahead we must be cognizant of all of them. In the book’s final piece, Benjamin Peters sets the computer fire against the backdrop of anthropogenic climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic, noting the odd juxtaposition between the progress narratives that surround technology and the ways in which “the world of human suffering has never so clearly appeared on the brink of ruin” (378). Pushing back against a simple desire to turn things off, Peters notes that “we cannot return the unasked for gifts of new media and computing” (380). Though the book has clearly been about computers, truly wrestling with the matters must force us to reflect on what it is that we really talk about when we talk about computers, and it turns out that “the question of life becomes how do not I but we live now?” (380)

    It is a challenging question, and it provides a fitting end to a book that challenges many of the dominant public narratives surrounding computers. And though the book has emphasized repeatedly how important it is to really talk about computers, this final question powers down the computer to force us to look at our own reflection in the mirrored surface of the computer screen.

    Yes, the book is about computers, but more than that it is about what it has meant to live with these devices—and what it might mean to live differently with them in the future.

    *

    With the creation of Your Computer Is on Fire the editors (Hicks, Mullaney, Peters, and Philip) have achieved an impressive feat. The volume is timely, provocative, wonderfully researched, filled with devastating insights, and composed in such a way as to make the contents accessible to a broad audience. It might seem a bit hyperbolic to suggest that anyone who has used a computer in the last week should read this book, but anyone who has used a computer in the last week should read this book. Scholars will benefit from the richly researched analysis, students will enjoy the forthright tone of the chapters, and anyone who uses computers will come away from the book with a clearer sense of the way in which these discussions matter for them and the world in which they live.

    For what this book accomplishes so spectacularly is to make it clear that when we think about computers and society it isn’t sufficient to just think about Facebook or facial recognition software or computer skills courses—we need to actually think about computers. We need to think about the history of computers, we need to think about the material aspects of computers, we need to think about the (oft-unseen) human labor that surrounds computers, we need to think about the language we use to discuss computers, and we need to think about the political values embedded in these machines and the political moments out of which these machines emerged. And yet, even as we shift our gaze to look at computers more critically, the contributors to Your Computer Is on Fire continually remind the reader that when we are thinking about computers we need to be thinking about deeper questions than just those about machines, we need to be considering what kind of technological world we want to live in. And moreover we need to be thinking about who is included and who is excluded when the word “we” is tossed about casually.

    Your Computer Is on Fire is simultaneously a book that will make you think, and a good book to think with. In other words, it is precisely the type of volume that is so desperately needed right now.

    The book derives much of its power from the willingness on the parts of the contributors to write in a declarative style. In this book criticisms are not carefully couched behind three layers of praise for Silicon Valley, and odes of affection for smartphones, rather the contributors stand firm in declaring that there are real problems (with historical roots) and that we are not going to be able to address them by pledging fealty to the companies that have so consistently shown a disregard for the broader world. This tone results in too many wonderful turns of phrase and incendiary remarks to be able to list all of them here, but the broad discussion around computers would be greatly enhanced with more comments like Janet Abbate’s “We have Black Girls Code, but we don’t have ‘White Boys Collaborate’ or ‘White Boys Learn Respect.’ Why not, if we want to nurture the full set of skills needed in computing?” (263) While critics of technology often find themselves having to argue from a defensive position, Your Computer Is on Fire is a book that almost gleefully goes on the offense.

    It almost seems like a disservice to the breadth of contributions to the volume to try to sum up its core message in a few lines, or to attempt to neatly capture the key takeaways in a few sentences. Nevertheless, insofar as the book has a clear undergirding position, beyond the titular idea, it is the one eloquently captured by Mar Hicks thusly:

    High technology is often a screen for propping up idealistic progress narratives while simultaneously torpedoing meaningful social reform with subtle and systemic sexism, classism, and racism…The computer revolution was not a revolution in any true sense: it left social and political hierarchies untouched, at times even strengthening them and heightening inequalities. (152)

    And this is the matter with which each contributor wrestles, as they break apart the “idealistic progress narratives” to reveal the ways that computers have time and again strengthened the already existing power structures…even if many people get to enjoy new shiny gadgets along the way.

    Your Computer Is on Fire is a jarring assessment of the current state of our computer dependent societies, and how they came to be the way they are; however, in considering this new book it is worth bearing in mind that it is not the first volume to try to capture the state of computers in a moment in time. That we find ourselves in the present position, is unfortunately a testament to decades of unheeded warnings.

    One of the objectives that is taken up throughout Your Computer Is on Fire is to counter the techno-utopian ideology that never so much dies as much as it shifts into the hands of some new would-be techno-savior wearing a crown of 1s and 0s. However, even as the mantle of techno-savior shifts from Mark Zuckerberg to Elon Musk, it seems that we may be in a moment when fewer people are willing to uncritically accept the idea that technological progress is synonymous with social progress. Though, if we are being frank, adoring faith in technology remains the dominant sentiment (at least in the US). Furthermore, this isn’t the first moment when a growing distrust and dissatisfaction with technological forces has risen, nor is this the first time that scholars have sought to speak out. Therefore, even as Your Computer is on Fire provides fantastic accounts of the history of computing, it is worthwhile to consider where this new vital volume fits within the history of critiques of computing. Or, to frame this slightly differently, in what ways is the 21st century critique of computing, different from the 20th century critique of computing?

    In 1979 the MIT Press published the edited volume The Computer Age: A Twenty Year View. Edited by Michael Dertouzos and Joel Moses, that book brought together a variety of influential figures from the early history of computing including J.C.R. Licklider, Herbert Simon, Marvin Minsky, and many others. The book was an overwhelmingly optimistic affair, and though the contributors anticipated that the mass uptake of computers would lead to some disruptions, they imagined that all of these changes would ultimately be for the best. Granted, the book was not without a critical voice. The computer scientist turned critic, Joseph Weizenbaum was afforded a chapter in a quarantined “Critiques” section from which to cast doubts on the utopian hopes that had filled the rest of the volume. And though Weizenbaum’s criticisms were presented, the book’s introduction politely scoffed at his woebegone outlook, and Weizenbaum’s chapter was followed by not one but two barbed responses, which ensured that his critical voice was not given the last word. Any attempt to assess The Computer Age at this point will likely say as much about the person doing the assessing as about the volume itself, and yet it would take a real commitment to only seeing the positive sides of computers to deny that the volume’s disparaged critic was one of its most prescient contributors.

    If The Computer Age can be seen as a reflection of the state of discourse surrounding computers in 1979, than Your Computer Is on Fire is a blazing demonstration of how greatly those discussions have changed by 2021. This is not to suggest that the techno-utopian mindset that so infused The Computer Age no longer exists. Alas, far from it.

    As the contributors to Your Computer Is on Fire make clear repeatedly, much of the present discussion around computing is dominated by hype and hopes. And a consideration of those conversations in the second half of the twentieth century reveals that hype and hope were dominant forces then as well. Granted, for much of that period (arguably until the mid-1980s and not really taking off until the 1990s), computers remained technologies with which most people had relatively little direct interaction. The mammoth machines of the 1960s and 1970s were not all top-secret (though some certainly were), but when social critics warned about computers in the 50s, 60s, and 70s they were not describing machines that had become ubiquitous—even if they warned that those machines would eventually become so. Thus, when Lewis Mumford warned in 1956, that:

    In creating the thinking machine, man has made the last step in submission to mechanization; and his final abdication before this product of his own ingenuity has given him a new object of worship: a cybernetic god. (Mumford, 173)

    It is somewhat understandable that his warning would be met with rolled eyes and impatient scoffs. For “the thinking machine” at that point remained isolated enough from most people’s daily lives that the idea that this was “a new object of worship” seemed almost absurd. Though he continued issuing dire predictions about computers, by 1970 when Mumford wrote of the development of “computer dominated society” this warning could still be dismissed as absurd hyperbole. And when Mumford’s friend, the aforementioned Joseph Weizenbaum, laid out a blistering critique of computers and the “artificial intelligentsia” in 1976 those warnings were still somewhat muddled as the computer remained largely out of sight and out of mind for large parts of society. Of course, these critics recognized that this “cybernetic god” had not as of yet become the new dominant faith, but they issued such warnings out of a sense that this was the direction in which things were developing.

    Already by the 1980s it was apparent to many scholars and critics that, despite the hype and revolutionary lingo, computers were primarily retrenching existing power relations while elevating the authority of a variety of new companies. And this gave rise to heated debates about how (and if) these technologies could be reclaimed and repurposed—Donna Haraway’s classic Cyborg Manifesto emerged out of those debates. By the time of 1990’s “Neo-Luddite Manifesto,” wherein Chellis Glendinning pointed to “computer technologies” as one of the types of technologies the Neo-Luddites were calling to be dismantled, the computer was becoming less and less an abstraction and more and more a feature of many people’s daily work lives. Though there is not space here to fully develop this argument, it may well be that the 1990s represent the decade in which many people found themselves suddenly in a “computer dominated society.”  Indeed, though Y2K is unfortunately often remembered as something of a hoax today, delving back into what was written about that crisis as it was unfolding makes it clear that in many sectors Y2K was the moment when people were forced to fully reckon with how quickly and how deeply they had become highly reliant on complex computerized systems. And, of course, much of what we know about the history of computing in those decades of the twentieth century we owe to the phenomenal research that has been done by many of the scholars who have contributed chapters to Your Computer Is on Fire.

    While Your Computer Is on Fire provides essential analyses of events from the twentieth century, as a critique it is very much a reflection of the twenty-first century. It is a volume that represents a moment in which critics are no longer warning “hey, watch out, or these computers might be on fire in the future” but in which critics can now confidently state “your computer is on fire.” In 1956 it could seem hyperbolic to suggest that computers would become “a new object of worship,” by 2021 such faith is on full display. In 1970 it was possible to warn of the threat of “computer dominated society,” by 2021 that “computer dominated society” has truly arrived. In the 1980s it could be argued that computers were reinforcing dominant power relations, in 2021 this is no longer a particularly controversial position. And perhaps most importantly, in 1990 it could still be suggested that computer technologies should be dismantled, but by 2021 the idea of dismantling these technologies that have become so interwoven in our daily lives seems dangerous, absurd, and unwanted. Your Computer Is on Fire is in many ways an acknowledgement that we are now living in the type of society about which many of the twentieth century’s technological critics warned. In the book’s final conclusion, Benjamin Peters pushes back against “Luddite self-righteousness” to note that “I can opt out of social networks; many others cannot” (377), and it is the emergence of this moment wherein the ability to “opt out” has itself become a privilege is precisely the sort of danger about which so many of the last century’s critics were so concerned.

    To look back at critiques of computers made throughout the twentieth century is in many ways a fairly depressing activity. For it reveals that many of those who were scorned as “doom mongers” had a fairly good sense of what computers would mean for the world. Certainly, some will continue to mock such figures for their humanism or borderline romanticism, but they were writing and living in a moment when the idea of living without a smartphone had not yet become unthinkable. As the contributors to this essential volume make clear, Your Computer Is on Fire, and yet too many of us still seem to believe that we are wearing asbestos gloves, and that if we suppress the flames of Facebook we will be able to safely warm our toes on our burning laptop.

    What Your Computer Is on Fire achieves so masterfully is to remind its readers that the wired up society in which they live was not inevitable, and what comes next is not inevitable either. And to remind them that if we are going to talk about what computers have wrought, we need to actually talk about computers. And yet the book is also a discomforting testament to a state of affairs wherein most of us simply do not have the option of swearing off computers. They fill our homes, they fill our societies, they fill our language, and they fill our imaginations. Thus, in dealing with this fire a first important step is to admit that there is a fire, and to stop absentmindedly pouring gasoline on everything. As Mar Hicks notes:

    Techno-optimist narratives surrounding high-technology and the public good—ones that assume technology is somehow inherently progressive—rely on historical fictions and blind spots that tend to overlook how large technological systems perpetuate structures of dominance and power already in place. (137)

    And as Kavita Philip describes:

    it is some combination of our addiction to the excitement of invention, with our enjoyment of individualized sophistications of a technological society, that has brought us to the brink of ruin even while illuminating our lives and enhancing the possibilities of collective agency. (365)

    Historically rich, provocatively written, engaging and engaged, Your Computer Is on Fire is a powerful reminder that when it is properly controlled fire can be useful, but when fire is allowed to rage out of control it turns everything it touches to ash. This book is not only a must read, but a must wrestle with, a must think with, and a must remember. After all, the “your” in the book’s title refers to you.

    Yes, you.

    _____

    Zachary Loeb earned his MSIS from the University of Texas at Austin, an MA from the Media, Culture, and Communications department at NYU, and is currently a PhD candidate in the History and Sociology of Science department at the University of Pennsylvania. Loeb works at the intersection of the history of technology and disaster studies, and his research focusses on the ways that complex technological systems amplify risk, as well as the history of technological doom-saying. He is working on a dissertation on Y2K. Loeb writes at the blog Librarianshipwreck, and is a frequent contributor to The b2o Review Digital Studies section.

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    Works Cited

    • Lewis Mumford. The Transformations of Man. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1956.