b2o: boundary 2 online

  • Artificial Intelligence as Alien Intelligence

    Artificial Intelligence as Alien Intelligence

    By Dale Carrico
    ~

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

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

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

    alien planet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    In his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud notoriously proposed that

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

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

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

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  • Something About the Digital

    Something About the Digital

    By Alexander R. Galloway
    ~

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    _____

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

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  • Network Pessimism

    Network Pessimism

    By Alexander R. Galloway
    ~

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

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

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

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

    *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    _____

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

    Back to the essay
    _____

    Notes

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

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

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

    By Zachary Loeb
    ~

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Works Cited

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


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

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  • The Reticular Fallacy

    The Reticular Fallacy

    By Alexander R. Galloway
    ~

    We live in an age of heterogenous anarchism. Contingency is king. Fluidity and flux win over solidity and stasis. Becoming has replaced being. Rhizomes are better than trees. To be political today, one must laud horizontality. Anti-essentialism and anti-foundationalism are the order of the day. Call it “vulgar ’68-ism.” The principles of social upheaval, so associated with the new social movements in and around 1968, have succeed in becoming the very bedrock of society at the new millennium.

    But there’s a flaw in this narrative, or at least a part of the story that strategically remains untold. The “reticular fallacy” can be broken down into two key assumptions. The first is an assumption about the nature of sovereignty and power. The second is an assumption about history and historical change. Consider them both in turn.

    (1) First, under the reticular fallacy, sovereignty and power are defined in terms of verticality, centralization, essence, foundation, or rigid creeds of whatever kind (viz. dogma, be it sacred or secular). Thus the sovereign is the one who is centralized, who stands at the top of a vertical order of command, who rests on an essentialist ideology in order to retain command, who asserts, dogmatically, unchangeable facts about his own essence and the essence of nature. This is the model of kings and queens, but also egos and individuals. It is what Barthes means by author in his influential essay “Death of the Author,” or Foucault in his “What is an Author?” This is the model of the Prince, so often invoked in political theory, or the Father invoked in psycho-analytic theory. In Derrida, the model appears as logos, that is, the special way or order of word, speech, and reason. Likewise, arkhe: a term that means both beginning and command. The arkhe is the thing that begins, and in so doing issues an order or command to guide whatever issues from such a beginning. Or as Rancière so succinctly put it in his Hatred of Democracy, the arkhe is both “commandment and commencement.” These are some of the many aspects of sovereignty and power as defined in terms of verticality, centralization, essence, and foundation.

    (2) The second assumption of the reticular fallacy is that, given the elimination of such dogmatic verticality, there will follow an elimination of sovereignty as such. In other words, if the aforementioned sovereign power should crumble or fall, for whatever reason, the very nature of command and organization will also vanish. Under this second assumption, the structure of sovereignty and the structure of organization become coterminous, superimposed in such a way that the shape of organization assumes the identical shape of sovereignty. Sovereign power is vertical, hence organization is vertical; sovereign power is centralized, hence organization is centralized; sovereign power is essentialist, hence organization, and so on. Here we see the claims of, let’s call it, “naïve” anarchism (the non-arkhe, or non foundation), which assumes that repressive force lies in the hands of the bosses, the rulers, or the hierarchy per se, and thus after the elimination of such hierarchy, life will revert so a more direct form of social interaction. (I say this not to smear anarchism in general, and will often wish to defend a form of anarcho-syndicalism.) At the same time, consider the case of bourgeois liberalism, which asserts the rule of law and constitutional right as a way to mitigate the excesses of both royal fiat and popular caprice.

    reticular connective tissue
    source: imgkid.com

    We name this the “reticular” fallacy because, during the late Twentieth Century and accelerating at the turn of the millennium with new media technologies, the chief agent driving the kind of historical change described in the above two assumptions was the network or rhizome, the structure of horizontal distribution described so well in Deleuze and Guattari. The change is evident in many different corners of society and culture. Consider mass media: the uni-directional broadcast media of the 1920s or ’30s gradually gave way to multi-directional distributed media of the 1990s. Or consider the mode of production, and the shift from a Fordist model rooted in massification, centralization, and standardization, to a post-Fordist model reliant more on horizontality, distribution, and heterogeneous customization. Consider even the changes in theories of the subject, shifting as they have from a more essentialist model of the integral ego, however fraught by the volatility of the unconscious, to an anti-essentialist model of the distributed subject, be it postmodernism’s “schizophrenic” subject or the kind of networked brain described by today’s most advanced medical researchers.

    Why is this a fallacy? What is wrong about the above scenario? The problem isn’t so much with the historical narrative. The problem lies in an unwillingness to derive an alternative form of sovereignty appropriate for the new rhizomatic societies. Opponents of the reticular fallacy claim, in other words, that horizontality, distributed networks, anti-essentialism, etc., have their own forms of organization and control, and indeed should be analyzed accordingly. In the past I’ve used the concept of “protocol” to describe such a scenario as it exists in digital media infrastructure. Others have used different concepts to describe it in different contexts. On the whole, though, opponents of the reticular fallacy have not effectively made their case, myself included. The notion that rhizomatic structures are corrosive of power and sovereignty is still the dominant narrative today, evident across both popular and academic discourses. From talk of the “Twitter revolution” during the Arab Spring, to the ideologies of “disruption” and “flexibility” common in corporate management speak, to the putative egalitarianism of blog-based journalism, to the growing popularity of the Deleuzian and Latourian schools in philosophy and theory: all of these reveal the contemporary assumption that networks are somehow different from sovereignty, organization, and control.

    To summarize, the reticular fallacy refers to the following argument: since power and organization are defined in terms of verticality, centralization, essence, and foundation, the elimination of such things will prompt a general mollification if not elimination of power and organization as such. Such an argument is false because it doesn’t take into account the fact that power and organization may inhabit any number of structural forms. Centralized verticality is only one form of organization. The distributed network is simply a different form of organization, one with its own special brand of management and control.

    Consider the kind of methods and concepts still popular in critical theory today: contingency, heterogeneity, anti-essentialism, anti-foundationalism, anarchism, chaos, plasticity, flux, fluidity, horizontality, flexibility. Such concepts are often praised and deployed in theories of the subject, analyses of society and culture, even descriptions of ontology and metaphysics. The reticular fallacy does not invalidate such concepts. But it does put them in question. We can not assume that such concepts are merely descriptive or neutrally empirical. Given the way in which horizontality, flexibility, and contingency are sewn into the mode of production, such “descriptive” claims are at best mirrors of the economic infrastructure and at worse ideologically suspect. At the same time, we can not simply assume that such concepts are, by nature, politically or ethically desirable in themselves. Rather, we ought to reverse the line of inquiry. The many qualities of rhizomatic systems should be understood not as the pure and innocent laws of a newer and more just society, but as the basic tendencies and conventional rules of protocological control.


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

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  • A Conversation on the Secular Public

    A Conversation on the Secular Public

    image003

    b2 contributors Stathis Gourgouris and Etienne Balibar meet at Columbia University on 21 October 2013 for a conversation on the secular public, in light of their recent work: Gourgouris’s Lessons in Secular Criticism and Balibar’s Saeculum: culture, religion, idéologie.