boundary 2

Tag: Srnicek and Williams

  • R. Joshua Scannell — Architectures of Managerial Triumphalism (Review of Benjamin Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty)

    R. Joshua Scannell — Architectures of Managerial Triumphalism (Review of Benjamin Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty)

    A review of Benjamin Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (MIT Press Press, 2016)

    by R. Joshua Scannell

    The Stack

    Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty is an often brilliant and regularly exasperating book. It is a diagnosis of the epochal changes in the relations between software, sovereignty, climate, and capital that underwrite the contemporary condition of digital capitalism and geopolitics.  Anybody who is interested in thinking through the imbrication of digital technology with governance ought to read The Stack. There are many arguments that are useful or interesting. But reading it is an endeavor. Sprawling out across 502 densely packed pages, The Stack is nominally a “design brief” for the future. I don’t know that I understand that characterization, no matter how many times I read this tome.

    The Stack is chockablock with schematic abstractions. They make sense intuitively or cumulatively without ever clearly coming into focus. This seems to be a deliberate strategy. Early in the book, Bratton describes The Stack–the titular “accidental megastructure” of “planetary computation” that has effectively broken and redesigned, well, everything–as “a blur.” He claims that

    Only a blur provides an accurate picture of what is going on now and to come…Our description of a system in advance of its appearance maps what we can see but cannot articulate, on the one hand, versus what we know to articulate but cannot yet see, on the other. (14)

    This is also an accurate description of the prevailing sensation one feels working through the text. As Ian Bogost wrote in his review of The Stack for Critical Inquiry, reading the book feels “intense—meandering and severe but also stimulating and surprising. After a while, it was also a bit overwhelming. I’ll take the blame for that—I am not necessarily built for Bratton’s level and volume of scholarly intensity.” I agree on all fronts.

    Bratton’s inarguable premise is that the various computational technologies that collectively define the early decades of the 21st century—smart grids, cloud platforms, mobile apps, smart cities, the Internet of Things, automation—are not analytically separable. They are often literally interconnected but, more to the point, they combine to produce a governing architecture that has subsumed older calculative technologies like the nation state, the liberal subject, the human, and the natural. Bratton calls this “accidental megastructure” The Stack.

    Bratton argues that The Stack is composed of six “layers,” the earth, the cloud, the city, the address, the interface, and the user. They all indicate more or less what one might expect, but with a counterintuitive (and often Speculative Realist) twist. The earth is the earth but is also a calculation machine. The cloud is “the cloud” but as a chthonic structure of distributed networks and nodal points that reorganize sovereign power and body forth quasi-feudal corporate sovereignties. The City is, well, cities, but not necessarily territorially bounded, formally recognized, or composed of human users. Users are also usually not human. They’re just as often robots or AI scripts. Really they can be anything that works up and down the layers, interacting with platforms (which can be governments) and routed through addresses (which are “every ‘thing’ that can be computed” including “individual units of life, loaded shipping containers, mobile devices, locations of datum in databases, input and output events and enveloped entities of all size and character” [192], etc.).

    Each layer is richly thought through and described, though it’s often unclear whether the “layer” in question is “real” or a useful conceptual envelope or both or neither. That distinction is generally untenable, and Bratton would almost certainly reject the dichotomy between the “real” and the “metaphorical.” But it isn’t irrelevant for this project. He argues early on that, contra Marxist thought that understands the state metaphorically as a machine, The Stack is a “machine-as-the-state.” That’s both metaphorical and not. There really are machines that exert sovereign power, and there are plenty of humans in state apparatuses that work for machines. But there aren’t, really, machines that are states. Right?

    Moments like these, when The Stack’s concepts productively destabilize given categories (like the state) that have never been coherent enough to justify their power are when the book is at its most compelling. And many of the counterintuitive moves that Bratton makes start and end with real, important insights. For instance, the insistence on the absolute materiality, and the absolute earthiness of The Stack and all of its operations leads Bratton to a thoroughgoing and categorical rejection of the prevailing “idiot language” that frames digital technology as though it exists in a literal “cloud,” or some sort of ethereal “virtual” that is not coincident with the “real” world. Instead, in The Stack, every point of contact between every layer is a material event that transduces and transforms everything else. To this end, he inverts Latour’s famous dictum that there is no global, only local. Instead, The Stack as planetary megastructure means that there is only global. The local is a dead letter. This is an anthropocene geography in which an electron, somewhere, is always firing because a fossil fuel is burning somewhere else. But it is also a post-anthropocene geography because humans are not The Stack’s primary users. The planet itself is a calculation machine, and it is agnostic about human life. So, there is a hybrid sovereignty: The Stack is a “nomos of the earth” in which humans are an afterthought.

    A Design for What?

    Bratton is at his conceptual best when he is at his weirdest. Cyclonopedic (Negarestani 2008) passages in which the planet slowly morphs into something like HP Lovecraft and HR Geiger’s imaginations fucking in a Peter Thiel fever dream are much more interesting (read: horrifying) than the often perfunctory “real life” examples from “real world” geopolitical trauma, like “The First Sino-Google War of 2009.” But this leads to one of the most obvious shortcomings of the text. It is supposedly a “design brief,” but it’s not clear what or who it is a design brief for.

    For Bratton, design

    means the structuring of the world in reaction to an accelerated decay and in projective anticipation of a condition that is now only the ghostliest of a virtual present tense. This is a design for accommodating (or refusing to accommodate) the post-whatever-is-melting-into-air and prototyping for pre-what-comes-next: a strategic, groping navigation (however helpless) of the punctuations that bridge between these two. (354)

    Design, then, and not theory, because Bratton’s Stack is a speculative document. Given the bewildering and potentially apocalyptic conditions of the present, he wants to extrapolate outwards. What are the heterotopias-to-come? What are the constraints? What are the possibilities? Sounding a familiar frustration with the strictures of academic labor, he argues that this moment requires something more than diagnosis and critique. Rather,

    the process by which sovereignty is made more plural becomes a matter of producing more than discoursing: more about pushing, pulling, clicking, eating, modeling, stacking, prototyping, subtracting, regulating, restoring, optimizing, leaving alone, splicing, gardening and evacuating than about reading, examining, insisting, rethinking, reminding, knowing full-well, enacting, finding problematic, and urging. (303)

    No doubt. And, not that I don’t share the frustration, but I wonder what a highly technical, 500-page diagnosis of the contemporary state of software and sovereignty published and distributed by an academic press and written for an academic audience is if not discoursing? It seems unlikely that it can serve as a blueprint for any actually-existing power brokers, even though its insights are tremendous. At the risk of sounding cynical, calling The Stack a “design brief” seems like a preemptive move to liberate Bratton from having to seriously engage with the different critical traditions that work to make sense of the world as it is in order to demand something better. This allows for a certain amount of intellectual play that can sometimes feel exhilarating but can just as often read as a dodge—as a way of escaping the ethical and political stakes that inhere in critique.

    That is an important elision for a text that is explicitly trying to imagine the geopolitics of the future. Bratton seems to pose The Stack from a nebulous “Left” position that is equally disdainful of the sort of “Folk Politics” that Srnicek and Williams (2015) so loathe and the accelerationist tinge of the Speculative Realists with whom he seems spiritually aligned. This sense of rootlessness sometimes works in Bratton’s favor. There are long stretches in which his cherry picking and remixing ideas from across a bewildering array of schools of thought yields real insights. But just as often, the “design brief” characterization seems to be a way out of thinking the implications of the conjuncture through to their conclusion. There is a breeziness about how Bratton poses futures-as-thought-experiments that is troubling.

    For instance, in thinking through the potential impacts of the capacity to measure planetary processes in real time, Bratton suggests that producing a sensible world is not only a process of generalizing measurement and representation. He argues that

    the sensibility of the world might be distributed or organized, made infrastructural, and activated to become part of how the landscape understands itself and narrates itself. It is not only a diagnostic image then; it is a tool for geo-politics in formation, emerging from the parametric multiplication and algorithmic conjugation of our surplus projections of worlds to come, perhaps in mimetic accordance with one explicit utopian conception or another, and perhaps not. Nevertheless, the decision between what is and is not governable may arise as much from what the model computational image cannot do as much as what it can. (301, emphasis added)

    Reading this, I wanted to know: What explicit utopian project is he thinking about? What are the implications of it going one way and not another? Why mimetic? What does the last bit about what is and is not governable mean? Or, more to the point: who and what is going to get killed if it goes one way and not another? There are a great many instances like this over the course of the book. At the precise moment where analysis might inform an understanding of where The Stack is taking us, Bratton bows out. He’s set down the stakes, and given a couple of ideas about what might happen. I guess that’s what a design brief is meant to do.

    Another example, this time concerning the necessity of geoengineering for solving what appears to be an ever-more-imminent climatic auto-apocalypse:

    The good news is that we know for certain that short-term “geoengineering” is not only possible but in a way inevitable, but how so? How and by whom does it go, and unfortunately for us the answer (perhaps) must arrive before we can properly articulate the question. For the darker scenarios, macroeconomics completes its metamorphosis into ecophagy, as the discovery of market failures becomes simultaneously the discovery of limits of planetary sinks (e.g., carbon, heat, waste, entropy, populist politics) and vice versa; The Stack becomes our dakhma. The shared condition, if there is one, is the mutual unspeakability and unrecognizability that occupies the seat once reserved for Kantian cosmopolitanism, now just a pre-event reception for a collective death that we will actually be able to witness and experience. (354, emphasis added)

    Setting aside the point that it is not at all clear to me that geoengineering is an inevitable or even appropriate (Crist 2017) way out of the anthropocene (or capitalocene? (Moore 2016)) crisis, if the answer for “how and by whom does it go” is to arrive before the question can be properly articulated, then the stack-to-come starts looking a lot like a sort of planetary dictatorship of, well of who? Google? Mark Zuckerberg? In-Q-Tel? Y Combinator? And what exactly is the “populist politics” that sits in the Latourian litany alongside carbon, heat, waste, and entropy as a full “planetary sink”? Does that mean Trump, and all the other globally ascendant right wing “populists?” Or does it mean “populist politics” in the Jonathan Chait sense that can’t differentiate between left and right and therefore sees both political projects as equally dismissible? Does populism include any politics that centers the needs and demands of the public? What are the commitments in this dichotomy? I suppose The Stack wouldn’t particularly care about these sorts of questions. But a human writing a 500-page playbook so that other humans might better understand the world-to-come might be expected to. After all, a choice between geoengineering or collective death might be what the human population of the planet is facing (and for most of the planet’s species, and for a great many of the planet’s human societies, already eliminated or dragged down the road towards it during the current mass extinction, there is no choice), but such a binary doesn’t make for much of a design spec.

    One final example, this time on what the political subject of the stack-to-come ought to look like:

    We…require, as I have laid out, a redefinition of the political subject in relation to the real operations of the User, one that is based not on homo economicus, parliamentary liberalism, poststructuralist linguistic reduction, or the will to secede into the moral safety of individual privacy and withdrawn from coercion. Instead, this definition should focus on composing and elevating sites of governance from the immediate, suturing interfacial material between subjects, in the stitches and the traces and the folds of interaction between bodies and things at a distance, congealing into different networks demanding very different kinds of platform sovereignty.

    If “poststructuralist linguistic reduction” is on the same plane as “parliamentary liberalism” or “homo economicus” as one among several prevailing ideas of the contemporary “political subject,” then I am fairly certain that we are in the realm of academic “theory” rather than geopolitical “design.” The more immediate point is that I do understand what the terms that we ought to abandon mean, and agree that they need to go. But I don’t understand what the redefined political subject looks like. Again, if this is “theory,” then that sort of hand waving is unfortunately often to be expected. But if it’s a design brief—even a speculative one—for the transforming nature of sovereignty and governance, then I would hope for some more clarity on what political subjectivity looks like in The Stack-To-Come.

    Or, and this is really the point, I want The Stack to tell me something more about how The Stack participates in the production and extractable circulation of populations marked for death and debility (Puar 2017). And I want to know what, exactly, is so conceptually radical about pointing out that human beings are not at the center of the planetary systems that are driving transformations in geopolitics and sovereignty. After all, hasn’t that been exactly the precondition for the emergence of The Stack? This accidental megastructure born out of the ruthless expansions of digitally driven capitalism is not just working to transform the relationship between “human” and sovereignty. The condition of its emergence is precisely that most planetary homo sapiens are not human, and are therefore disposable and disposited towards premature death. The Stack might be “our” dhakma, if we’re speaking generically as a sort of planetary humanism that cannot but be read as white—or, more accurately, “capacitated.” But the systematic construction of human stratification along lines of race, gender, sex, and ability as precondition for capitalist emergence freights the stack with a more ancient, and ignored, calculus: that of the logistical work that shuttles humans between bodies, cargo, and capital. It is, in other words, the product of an older planetary death machine: what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney (2013) call the “logistics in the hold” that makes The Stack hum along.

    The tenor of much of The Stack is redolent of managerial triumphalism. The possibility of apocalypse is always minimized. Bratton offers, a number of times, that he’s optimistic about the future. He is disdainful of the most stringent left critics of Silicon Valley, and he thinks that we’ll probably be able to trust to our engineers and institutions to work out The Stack’s world-destroying kinks. He sounds invested, in other words, in a rhetorical-political mode of thought that, for now, seems to have died on November 9, 2016. So it is not surprising that Bratton opens the book with an anecdote about Hillary Clinton’s vision of the future of world governance.

    The Stack begins with a reference to then-Secretary of State Clinton’s 2013 farewell address to the Council on Foreign Relations. In that speech, Clinton argued that the future of international governance requires a “new architecture for this new world, more Frank Gehry than formal Greek.” Unlike the Athenian Agora, which could be held up by “a few strong columns,” contemporary transnational politics is too complicated to rely on stolid architecture, and instead must make use of the type of modular assemblage that “at first might appear haphazard, but in fact, [is] highly intentional and sophisticated” that makes Gehry famous. Bratton interprets her argument as a “half-formed question, what is the architecture of the emergent geopolitics of this software society? What alignments, components, foundations, and apertures?” (Bratton 2016, 13).

    For Clinton, future governance must make a choice between Gehry and Agora. The Gehry future is that of the seemingly “haphazard” but “highly intentional and sophisticated” interlocking treaties, non-governmental organizations, super and supra-state technocratic actors working together to coordinate the disparate interests of states and corporations in the service of the smooth circulation of capital across a planetary logistics network. On the other side, a world order held up by “a few strong pillars”—by implication the status quo after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a transnational sovereign apparatus anchored by the United States. The glaring absence in this dichotomy is democracy—or rather its assumed subsumption into American nationalism. Clinton’s Gehry future is a system of government whose machinations are by design opaque to those that would be governed, but whose beneficence is guaranteed by the good will of the powerful. The Agora—the fountainhead of slaveholder democracy—is metaphorically reduced to its pillars, particularly the United States and NATO. Not unlike ancient Athens, it’s democracy as empire.

    There is something darkly prophetic of the collapse of the Clintonian world vision, and perversely apposite in Clinton’s rhetorical move to supplant as the proper metaphor for future government Gehry for the Agora. It is unclear why a megalomaniacal corporate starchitecture firm that robs public treasuries blind and facilitates tremendous labor exploitation ought to be the future for which the planet strives.

    For better or for worse, The Stack is a book about Clinton. As a “design brief,” it works from a set of ideas about how to understand and govern the relationship between software and sovereignty that were strongly intertwined with the Clinton-Obama political project. That means, abysmally, that it is now also about Trump. And Trump hangs synechdochally over theoretical provocations for what is to be done now that tech has killed the nation-state’s “Westphalian Loop.” This was a knotty question when the book went to press in February 2016 and Gehry seemed ascendant. Now that the Extreme Center’s (Ali 2015) project of tying neoliberal capitalism to non-democratic structures of technocratic governance appears to be collapsing across the planet, Clinton’s “half-formed question” is even knottier. If we’re living through the demise of the Westphalian nation state, then it’s sounding one hell of a murderous death rattle.

    Gehry or Agora?

    In the brief period between July 21st and November 8 2016, when the United States’ cognoscenti convinced itself that another Clinton regime was inevitable, there was a neatly ordered expectation of how “pragmatic” future governance under a prolonged Democratic regime would work. In the main, the public could look forward to another eight years sunken in a “Gehry-like” neoliberal surround subtended by the technocratic managerialism of the Democratic Party’s right edge. And, while for most of the country and planet, that arrangement didn’t portend much to look forward to, it was at least not explicitly nihilistic in its outlook. The focus on management, and on the deliberate dismantling of the nation state as the primary site of governance in favor of the mesh of transnational agencies and organizations that composed 21st century neoliberalism’s star actants meant that a number of questions about how the world would be arranged were left unsettled.

    By end of election week, that future had fractured. The unprecedented amateurishness, decrypted racism, and incomparable misogyny of the Trump campaign portended an administration that most thought couldn’t, or at the very least shouldn’t, be trusted with the enormous power of the American executive. This stood in contrast to Obama, and (perhaps to a lesser extent) to Clinton, who were assumed to be reasonable stewards. This paradoxically helps demonstrate just how much the “rule of law” and governance by administrative norms that theoretically underlie the liberal national state had already deteriorated under Obama and his immediate predecessors—a deterioration that was in many ways made feasible by the innovations of the digital technology sector. As many have pointed out, the command-and-control prerogatives that Obama claimed for the expansion of executive power depended essentially on the public perception of his personal character.

    The American people, for instance, could trust planetary drone warfare because Obama claimed to personally vet our secret kill list, and promised to be deliberate and reasonable about its targets. Of course, Obama is merely the most publicly visible part of a kill-chain that puts this discretionary power over life and death in the hands of the executive. The kill-chain is dependent on the power of, and sovereign faith in, digital surveillance and analytics technologies. Obama’s kill-chain, in short, runs on the capacities of an American warfare state—distributed at nodal points across the crust of the earth, and up its Van Allen belts—to read planetary chemical, territorial, and biopolitical fluxes and fluctuations as translatable data that can be packet switched into a binary apparatus of life and death. This is the calculus that Obama conjures when he defines those mobile data points that concatenate into human beings as as “baseball cards” that constitute a “continuing, imminent threat to the American people.” It is the work of planetary sovereignty that rationalizes and capacitates the murderous “fix” and “finish” of the drone program.

    In other words, Obama’s personal aura and eminent reasonableness legitimated an essentially unaccountable and non-localizable network of black sites and black ops (Paglen 2009, 2010) that loops backwards and forwards across the drone program’s horizontal regimes of national sovereignty and vertical regimes of cosmic sovereignty. It is, to use Clinton’s framework, a very Frank Gehry power structure. Donald Trump’s election didn’t transform these power dynamics. Instead, his personal qualities made the work of planetary computation in the service of sovereign power to kill suddenly seem dangerous or, perhaps better: unreasonable. Whether President Donald Trump would be so scrupulous as his predecessor in determining the list of humans fit for eradication was (formally speaking) a mystery, but practically a foregone conclusion. But in both presidents’ cases, the dichotomies between global and local, subject and sovereign, human and non-human that are meant to underwrite the nation state’s rights and responsibilities to act are fundamentally blurred.

    Likewise, Obama’s federal imprimatur transformed the transparently disturbing decision to pursue mass distribution of privately manufactured surveillance technology – Taser’s police-worn body cameras, for instance – as a reasonable policy response to America’s dependence on heavily armed paramilitary forces to maintain white supremacy and crush the poor. Under Obama and Eric Holder, American liberals broadly trusted that digital criminal justice technologies were crucial for building a better, more responsive, and more responsible justice system. With Jeff Sessions in charge of the Department of Justice, the idea that the technologies that Obama’s Presidential Task Force on 21st Century Policing lauded as crucial for achieving the “transparency” needed to “build community trust” between historically oppressed groups and the police remained plausible instruments of progressive reform suddenly seemed absurd. Predictive policing, ubiquitous smart camera surveillance, and quantitative risk assessments sounded less like a guarantee of civil rights and more like a guarantee of civil rights violations under a president that lauds extrajudicial police power. Trump goes out of his way to confirm these civil libertarian fears, such as when he told Long Island law enforcement that “laws are stacked against you. We’re changing those laws. In the meantime, we need judges for the simplest thing — things that you should be able to do without a judge.”

    But, perhaps more to the point, the rollout of these technologies, like the rollouts of the drone program, formalized a transformation in the mechanics of sovereign power that had long been underway. Stripped of the sales pitch and abstracted from the constitutional formalism that ordinarily sets the parameters for discussions of “public safety” technologies, what digital policing technologies do is flatten out the lived and living environment into a computational field. Police-worn body cameras quickly traverse the institutional terrain from a tool meant to secure civil rights against abusive officers into an artificially intelligent weapon that flags facial structures that match with outstanding warrants, that calculates changes in enframed bodily comportment to determine imminent threat to the officer-user, and that captures the observed social field as  data privately owned by the public safety industry’s weapons manufacturers. Sovereignty, in this case, travels up and down a Stack of interoperative calculative procedures, with state sanction and human action just another data point in the proper administration of quasi-state violence. After all, it is Axon (formerly Taser), and not a government that controls the servers that their body cams draw on to make real-time assessments of human danger. The state sanctions a human officer’s violence, but the decision-making apparatus that situates the violence is private, and inhuman. Inevitably, the drone war and carceral capitalism collapse into one another, as drones are outfitted with AI designed to identify crowd “violence” from the sky, a vertical parallax to pair with the officer-user’s body worn camera.

    Trump’s election seemed to show with a clarity that had hitherto been unavailable for many that wedding the American security apparatus’ planetary sovereignty to twenty years of unchecked libertarian technological triumphalism (even, or especially if in the service of liberal principles like disruption, innovation, efficiency, transparency, convenience, and generally “making the world a better place”) might, in fact, be dangerous. When the Clinton-Obama project collapsed, its assumption that the intertwining of private and state sector digital technologies inherently improves American democracy and economy, and increases individual safety and security looked absurd. The shock of Trump’s election, quickly and self-servingly blamed on Russian agents and Facebook, transformed Silicon Valley’s broadly shared Prometheanism into interrogations into the industry’s infrastructural corrosive toxicity, and its deleterious effect on the liberal national state.  If tech would ever come to Jesus, the end of 2016 would have had to be the moment. It did not.

    A few days after Trump won election I found myself a fly on the wall in a meeting with mid-level executives for one of the world’s largest technology companies (“The Company”). We were ostensibly brainstorming how to make The Cloud a force for “global good,” but Trump’s ascendancy and all its authoritarian implications made the supposed benefits of cloud computing—efficiency, accessibility, brain-shattering storage capacity—suddenly terrifying. Instead of setting about the dubious task of imagining how a transnational corporation’s efforts to leverage the gatekeeping power over access to the data of millions, and the private control over real-time identification technology (among other things) into heavily monetized semi-feudal quasi-sovereign power could be Globally Good, we talked about Trump.

    The Company’s reps worried that, Peter Thiel excepted, tech didn’t have anybody near enough to Trump’s miasmatic fog to sniff out the administration’s intentions. It was Clinton, after all, who saw the future in global information systems. Trump, as we were all so fond of pointing out, didn’t even use a computer. Unlike Clinton, the extent of Trump’s mania for surveillance and despotism was mysterious, if predictable. Nobody knew just how many people of color the administration had in its crosshairs, and The Company reps suggested that the tech world wasn’t sure how complicit it wanted to be in Trump’s explicitly totalitarian project. The execs extemporized on how fundamental the principles of democratic and republican government were to The Company, how committed they were to privacy, and how dangerous the present conjuncture was. As the meeting ground on, reason slowly asphyxiated on a self-evidently implausible bait hook: that it was now both the responsibility and appointed role of American capital, and particularly of the robber barons of Platform Capitalism (Srnicek 2016), to protect Americans from the fascistic grappling of American government. Silicon Valley was going to lead the #resistance against the very state surveillance and overreach that it capacitated, and The Company would lead Silicon Valley. That was the note on which the meeting adjourned.

    That’s not how things have played out. A month after that meeting, on December 14, 2016, almost all of Silicon Valley’s largest players sat down at Trump’s technology roundtable. Explaining themselves to an aghast (if credulous) public, tech’s titans argued that it was their goal to steer the new chief executive of American empire towards a maximally tractable gallimaufry of power. This argument, plus over one hundred companies’ decision to sign an amici curiae brief opposing Trump’s first attempt at a travel ban aimed at Muslims, seemed to publicly signal that Silicon Valley was prepared to #resist the most high-profile degradations of contemporary Republican government. But, in April 2017, Gizmodo inevitably reported that those same companies that appointed themselves the front line of defense against depraved executive overreach in fact quietly supported the new Republican president before he took office. The blog found that almost every major concern in the Valley donated tremendously to the Trump administration’s Presidential Inaugural Committee, which was impaneled to plan his sparsely attended inaugural parties. The Company alone donated half a million dollars. Only two tech firms donated more. It seemed an odd way to #resist.

    What struck me during the meeting was how weird it was that executives honestly believed a major transnational corporation would lead the political resistance against a president committed to the unfettered ability of American capital to do whatever it wants. What struck me afterward was how easily the boundaries between software and sovereignty blurred. The Company’s executives assumed, ad hoc, that their operation had the power to halt or severely hamper the illiberal policy priorities of government. By contrast, it’s hard to imagine mid-level General Motors executives imagining that they have the capacity or responsibility to safeguard the rights and privileges of the republic. Except in an indirect way, selling cars doesn’t have much to do with the health of state and civil society. But state and civil society is precisely what Silicon Valley has privatized, monetized, and re-sold to the public. But even “state and civil society” is not quite enough. What Silicon Valley endeavors to produce is, pace Bratton, a planetary simulation as prime mover. The goal of digital technology conglomerates is not only to streamline the formal and administrative roles and responsibilities of the state, or to recreate the mythical meeting houses of the public sphere online. Platform capital has as its target the informational infrastructure that makes living on earth seem to make sense, to be sensible. And in that context, it’s commonsensical to imagine software as sovereignty.

    And this is the bind that will return us to The Stack. After one and a half relentless years of the Trump presidency, and a ceaseless torrent of public scandals concerning tech companies’ abuse of power, the technocratic managerial optimism that underwrote Clinton’s speech has come to a grinding halt. For the time being, at least, the “seemingly haphazard yet highly intentional and sophisticated” governance structures that Clinton envisioned are not working as they have been pitched. At the same time, the cavalcade of revelations about the depths that technology companies plumb in order to extract value from a polluted public has led many to shed delusions about the ethical or progressive bona fides of an industry built on a collective devotion to Ayn Rand. Silicon Valley is happy to facilitate authoritarianism and Nazism, to drive unprecedented crises of homelessness, to systematically undermine any glimmer of dignity in human labor, to thoroughly toxify public discourse, to entrench and expand carceral capitalism so long as doing so expands the platform, attracts advertising and venture capital, and increases market valuation. As Bratton points out, that’s not a particularly Californian Ideology. It’s The Stack, both Gehry and Agora.

    _____

    R. Joshua Scannell holds a PhD in Sociology from the CUNY Graduate Center. He teaches sociology and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Hunter College, and is currently researching the political economic relations between predictive policing programs and urban informatics systems. He is the author of Cities: Unauthorized Resistance and Uncertain Sovereignty in the Urban World (Paradigm/Routledge, 2012).

    Back to the essay

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    Works Cited

    • Ali, Tariq. 2015. The Extreme Center: A Warning. London: Verso
    • Crist, Eileen. 2016. “On the Poverty of Our Nomenclature.” In Anthropocene or Capitalocene: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, edited by Jason W. Moore, 14-33. Oakland: PM Press
    • Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. 2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. Brooklyn: Autonomedia.
    • Moore, Jason W. 2016. “Anthropocene or Capitolocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism.” In Anthropocene or Capitalocene: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, edited by Jason W. Moore, 1-13. Oakland: PM Press
    • Negarestani, Reza. 2008. Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials. Melbourne: re.press
    • Paglen, Trevor. 2009. Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secrert World. Boston: Dutton Adult
    • Paglen, Trevor. 2010. Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes. Reading: Aperture Press
    • Puar, Jasbir. 2017. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. Durham: Duke University Press
    • Srnicek, Nick. 2016. Platform Capitalism. Boston: Polity Press
    • Srnicek, Nick, and Alex Williams. 2016. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. London: Verso.
  • Alexander R. Galloway — Brometheanism

    Alexander R. Galloway — Brometheanism

    By Alexander R. Galloway
    ~

    In recent months I’ve remained quiet about the speculative turn, mostly because I’m reticent to rekindle the “Internet war” that broke out a couple of years ago mostly on blogs but also in various published papers. And while I’ve taught accelerationism in my recent graduate seminars, I opted for radio silence when accelerationism first appeared on the scene through the Accelerationist Manifesto, followed later by the book Inventing the Future. Truth is I have mixed feelings about accelerationism. Part of me wants to send “comradely greetings” to a team of well-meaning fellow Marxists and leave it at that. Lord knows the left needs to stick together. Likewise there’s little I can add that people like Steven Shaviro and McKenzie Wark haven’t already written, and articulated much better than I could. But at the same time a number of difficulties remain that are increasingly hard to overlook. To begin I might simply echo Wark’s original assessment of the Accelerationist Manifesto: two cheers for accelerationism, but only two!

    What’s good about accelerationism? And what’s bad? I love the ambition and scope. Certainly the accelerationists’ willingness to challenge leftist orthodoxies is refreshing. I also like how the accelerationists demand that we take technology and science seriously. And I also agree that there are important tactical uses of accelerationist or otherwise hypertrophic interventions (Eugene Thacker and I have referred to them as exploits). Still I see accelerationism essentially as a tactic mistaken for a strategy. At the same time this kind of accelerationism is precisely what dot-com entrepreneurs want to see from the left. Further, and ultimately most important, accelerationism is paternalistic and thus suffers from the problems of elitism and ultimately reactionary politics.

    Let me explain. I’ll talk first about Srnicek and Williams’ 2015 book Inventing the Future, and then address one of the central themes fueling the accelerationist juggernaut, Prometheanism. Well written, easy to read, and exhaustively footnoted, Inventing the Future is ostensibly a follow up to the Accelerationist Manifesto, although the themes of the two texts are different and they almost never mention accelerationism in the book. (Srnicek in particular is nothing if not shrewd and agile: present at the christening of #A, we also find him on the masthead of the speculative realist reader, and today nosing in on “platform studies.” Wherever he alights next will doubtless portend future significance.) The book is vaguely similar to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Declaration from 2012 in that it tries to assess the current condition of the left while also providing a set of specific steps to be taken for the future. And while the accelerationists have garnered significantly more attention of late, mostly because it feels so fresh and new, Hardt and Negri’s is the better book (and interestingly Srnicek and Williams never cite them).

    Inventing the Future

    Inventing the Future has essentially two themes. The first consists in a series of denunciations of what they call “folk politics” defined in terms of Occupy, the Zapatistas, Tiqqun, localism, and direct democracy, ostensibly in favor of a new “hegemony” of planetary social democracy (also known as Leninism). The second theme concerns an anti-work polemic focused on the universal basic income (UBI) and shortening the work week. Indeed even as these two authors collaborate and mix their thoughts, there seem to be two books mixed together into one. This produces an interesting irony: while the first half of the book unabashedly denigrates anarchism in favor of Leninism, the second half of the book focuses on that very theme (anti-work) that has defined anarchist theory since the split in the First International, if not since time immemorial.

    What’s so wrong with “folk politics”? There are a few ways to answer this question. First the accelerationists are clearly frustrated by the failures of the left, and rightly so, a left debilitated by “apathy, melancholy and defeat” (5). There’s a demographic explanation as well. This is the cri de coeur of a younger generation seeking to move beyond what are seen as the sclerotic failures of postmodern theory with all of its “culturalist” baggage (which too often is a codeword for punks, queers, women, and people of color — more on that in a moment).

    Folk politics includes “the fetishization of local spaces, immediate actions, transient gestures, and particularisms of all kinds” (3); it privileges the “small-scale, the authentic, the traditional and the natural” (10). The following virtues help fill out the definition:

    immediacy…tactics…inherently fleeting…the past…the voluntarist and spontaneous…the small…withdrawal or exit…the everyday…feeling…the particular…the ethical…the suffering of the particular and the authenticity of the local (10-11)

    Wow, that’s a lot of good stuff to get rid of. Still, they don’t quit there, targeting horizontalism of various kinds. Radical democracy is in the crosshairs too. Anti-representational politics is out as well. All the “from below” movements, from the undercommons to the black bloc, anything that smacks of “anarchism, council communism, libertarian communism and autonomism” (26) — it’s all under indictment. This unceasing polemic culminates in the book’s most potent sentence, if not also its most ridiculous, where the authors dismiss all of the following movements in one fell swoop:

    Occupy, Spain’s 15M, student occupations, left communist insurrectionists like Tiqqun and the Invisible Committee, most forms of horizontalism, the Zapatistas…localism…slow-food (11-12)

    That scoops up a lot of people. And the reader is left to quibble over whatever principal of decision might group all these disparate factions together. But the larger point is clear: for Srnicek and Williams folk politics emerged because of an outdated Left (i.e. the abject failures of social democracy and communism) (16-), and an outmaneuvered Left (i.e. the rampant successes of neoliberalism) (19-). Thus their goal is to update the left with a new ideology, and overhaul its infrastructure allowing it to modernize and scale up to the level of the planet.

    In the second half of the book, particularly in chapters 5 and 6, Srnicek and Williams elaborate their vision for anti-work and post-work. This hinges on the concept of full automation, and they provocatively assert that “the tendencies towards automation and the replacement of human labor should be enthusiastically accelerated” (109). Yet the details are scant. What kind of tech are we talking about? We get some vague references at the outset to “Open-source designs, copyleft creativity, and 3D printing” (1), then again later to “data collection (radio-frequency identification, big data)” and so on (110). But one thing this book does not provide is an examination of the technology of modern capitalism. (Srnicek’s Platform Capitalism is an improvement thematically but not substantively: he provides an analysis of political economy, but no tech audit.) Thus Inventing the Future has a sort of Wizard of Oz problem at its core. It’s not clear what clever devices are behind the curtain, we’re just supposed to assume that they will be sufficiently communistical if we all believe hard enough.

    At the same time the authors come across as rather tone deaf on the question of labor, bemoaning above all “the misery of not being exploited,” as if exploitation is some grand prize awarded to the subaltern. Further, they fail to address adequately the two key challenges of automation, both of which have been widely discussed in political and economic theory: first that automation eliminates jobs for people who very much want and need them, leading to surplus populations, unemployment, migration, and intrenched poverty; and second that automation transforms the organic composition of labor through deskilling and proletarianization, the offshoring of menial labor, and the introduction of technical and specialist labor required to design, build, operate, and repair those seemingly “automagical” machines. In other words, under automation some people work less, but everyone works differently. Automation reduces work for some, but changes (and in fact often increases) work for others. Marx’s analysis of machines in Capital is useful here, where he addresses all of these various tendencies, from the elimination of labor and the increase in labor, to the transformation of the organic composition of labor — the last point being the most significant. (And while machines might help lubricate and increase the productive forces — not a bad thing — it’s clear that machines are absolutely not revolutionary actors for Marx. Optimistic interpretations gleaned from the Grundrisse notwithstanding, Marx defines machines essentially as large batteries for value. I have yet to find any evidence that today’s machines are any different.)

    So the devil is in the details: what kind of technology are we talking about? But perhaps more importantly, if you get rid of the “folk,” aren’t you also getting rid of the people? Srnicek and Williams try to address this in chapter 8, although I’m more convinced by Hardt and Negri’s “multitude,” Harney and Moten’s “undercommons,” or even formulations like “the part of no part” or the “inoperative community” found scattered across a variety of other texts. By the end Srnicek and Williams out themselves as reticular pessimists: let’s not specify “the proper form of organization” (162), let’s just let it happen naturally in an “ecology of organizations” (163). The irony being that we’re back to square one, and these anti-folk evangelists are hippy ecologists after all. (The reference to function over form [169] appears as a weak afterthought to help rationalize their decision, but it re-introduces the problem of techno-fetishism, this time a fetishism of the function.)

    To summarize, accelerationism presents a rich spectrum of problems. The first stems from the notion that technology/automation will save us, replete with vague references to “the latest technological developments” unencumbered by any real details. Second is the question of capitalism itself. Despite the authors’ Marxist tendencies, it’s not at all clear that accelerationism is anti-capitalist. In fact accelerationism would be better described as a form of post-capitalism, what Zizek likes to mock as “capitalism with a friendly face.” What is post-capitalism exactly? More capitalism? A modified form of capitalism? For this reason it becomes difficult to untangle accelerationism from the most visionary dreams of the business elite. Isn’t this exactly what dot-com entrepreneurs are calling for? Isn’t the avant-garde of acceleration taking place right now in Silicon Valley? This leads to a third point: accelerationism is a tactic mistaken for a strategy. Certainly accelerationist or otherwise hypertrophic methods are useful in a provisional, local, which is to say tactical way. But accelerationism is, in my view, naïve about how capitalism works at a strategic level. Capitalism wants nothing more than to accelerate. Adding to the acceleration will help capitalism not hinder it. Capitalism is this accelerating force, from primitive accumulation on up to today. (Accelerationists don’t dispute this; they just simply disagree on the moral status of capitalism.) Fourth and finally is the most important problem revealed by accelerationism, the problem of elitism and reactionary politics. Given unequal technological development, those who accelerate will necessarily do so on the backs of others who are forced to proletarianize. Thus accelerationists are faced with a kind of “internal colonialism” problem, meaning there must be a distinction made between those who accelerate and those who facilitate acceleration through their very bodies. We already know who suffers most under unequal technological acceleration, and it’s not young white male academics living in England. Thus their skepticism toward the “folk” is all too often a paternalistic skepticism toward the wants and needs of the generic population. Hence the need for accelerationists to talk glowingly about things like “engineering consent.” It’s hard to see where this actually leads. Or more to the point who leads: if not Leninists then who, technocrats? Philosopher kings?

    *

    Accelerationism gains much inspiration from the philosophy of Prometheanism. If accelerationism provides a theory of political economy, Prometheanism supplies a theory of the subject. Yet it’s not always clear what people mean by this term. In a recent lecture titled “Prometheanism and Rationalism” Peter Wolfendale defines Prometheanism in such general terms that it becomes a synonym for any number of things: history and historical change; being against fatalism and messianism; being against the aristocracy; being against Fukuyama; being for feminism; the UBI and post-capitalism; the Enlightenment and secularism; deductive logic; overcoming (perceived) natural limits; technology; “automation” (which as I’ve just indicated is the most problematic concept of them all). Even very modest and narrow definitions of Prometheanism — technology for humans to overcome natural limit — present their own problems and wind up largely deflating the sloganeering of it all. “Okay so both the hydrogen bomb and the contraceptive pill are equally Promethean? So then who adjudicates their potential uses?” And we’re left with Prometheanism as the latest YAM philosophy (Yet Another Morality).

    Still, Prometheanism has a particular vision for itself and it’s worth describing the high points. I can think of six specific qualities. (1) Prometheanism defines itself as posthuman or otherwise antihuman. (2) Prometheanism is an attempt to transcend the bounds of physical limitation. (3) Prometheanism promotes freedom, as in for instance the freedom to change the body through hormone therapy. (4) Prometheanism sees itself as politically progressive. (5) Prometheanism sees itself as being technologically savvy. (6) Prometheanism proposes to offer technical solutions to real problems.

    But is any of this true? Interestingly Bernard Stiegler provided an answer to some of these questions already in 1994, and it’s worth returning to his book from that year Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus to fill out a conversation that has, thus far, been mostly one-sided. Stiegler’s book is long and complicated, and touches on many different things including technology and the increased rationalization of life, by way of some of Stiegler’s key influences including Gilbert Simondon, André Leroi-Gourhan, and Bertrand Gille. Let me focus however on the second part of the book, where Stiegler examines the two brothers Epimetheus and Prometheus.

    A myth about powers and qualities, the fable of Epimetheus and Prometheus is recounted by the sophist Protagoras starting at line 320c in Plato’s dialogue of that name. In Stiegler’s retelling of the story, we begin with Epimetheus, who, via a “principle of compensation” governed by notions of difference and equilibrium, hands out powers and qualities to all the animals of the Earth. For instance extra speed might be endowed to the gazelle, but only by way of balanced compensation given to another animal, say a boost in strength bestowed upon the lion. Seemingly diligent in his duties, Epimetheus nevertheless tires before the job is complete, shirking his duties before arriving at humankind, who is left relatively naked without a special power or quality of its own. To compensate humankind, Prometheus absconds with “the gift of skill in the arts and fire” — “τὴν ἔντεχνον σοφίαν σὺν πυρί” — captured from Athena and Hephaestus, respectively, conferring these two gifts to humanity (Plato, “Protagoras,” 321d).

    In this way humans are defined first not via technical supplement but through an elemental fault — this is Stiegler’s lingering poststructuralism — the fault of Epimetheus. Epimetheus forgets about us, leaving us until the end, and hence “Humans only occur through their being forgotten; they only appear in disappearing” (188). But it’s more than that: a fault followed by a theft, and hence a twin fault. Humanity is the “fruit of a double fault–an act of forgetting [by Epimetheus], then of theft [by Prometheus]” (188). Humans are thus a forgotten afterthought, remedied afterward by a lucky forethought.

    “Afterthought” and “forethought” — Stiegler means these terms quite literally. Who is Epimetheus? And who is Prometheus? Greek names often have etymological if not allegorical significance, as is the case here. Both names share the root “-metheus,” cognate with manthánō [μανθάνω], which means learning, study, or cultivation of knowledge. Hence a mathitís [μαθητής] is a learner or a student. (And in fact in a very literal sense “mathematics” simply refers to the things that one learns, not to arithmetic or geometry per se.) The two brothers are thus both varieties of learners, both varieties of thinkers. The key is which variety. The key is the Epi– and the Pro-.

    “Epi carries the character of the accidentally and artificial factuality of something happening, arriving, a primordial ‘passibility,’” Stiegler explains. “Epimetheia means heritage. Heritage is always epimathesis. Epimetheia would also mean then tradition-originating in a fault that is always already there and that is nothing but technicity” (206-207). Hence Epimetheus means something like “learning on the basis of,” “thinking after,” or, more simply, or “afterthought” or “hindsight.” This is why Epimetheus forgets, why he is at fault, why he acts foolishly, because these are all the things that generate hindsight.

    Prometheus on the other hand is “foresight” or “fore-thought.” If Epimetheus means “thinking and learning on the basis of,” Prometheus means something more like “thinking and learning in anticipation of.” In this way, Prometheus comes to stand in for cleverness (but also theft), ingenuity, and thus technics as a whole.

    But is that all? Is the lesson simply to restore Epimetheus to his position next to Prometheus? To remember the Epimethean omission along with the Promethean endowment? In fact the old Greek myth isn’t quite finished, and, after initially overlooking the ending, Stiegler eventually broaches the closing section on Hermes. For even after benefiting from its Promethean supplement, humanity remains incomplete. Specifically, the gods notice that Man has a tendency toward war and political strife. Thus Hermes is tasked to implant a kind of socio-political virtue, supplementing humanity with “the qualities of respect for others [αἰδώ] and a sense of justice [δίκη]” (Plato 322c). In other words, a second supplement is necessary, only this time a supplement not rooted in the identitarian logic of heterogeneous qualities. “Another tekhnē is required,” writes Stiegler, “a tekhnē that is no longer paradoxically…the privilege of specialists” (201). This point about specialists is key — all you Leninists take note — because on Zeus’s command Hermes delivers respect and justice generically and equally across all persons, not via the “principle of compensation” based on difference and equilibrium used previously by Epimetheus to divvy up the powers and qualities of the animals. Thus while some people may have a talent for the piano, and others might be gifted in some other way, justice and respect are bestowed equally to all.

    This is why politics is always a question of the “hermeneutic community,” that is, the ad hoc translation and interpretation of real political dynamics; it comes from Hermes (201). At the same time politics also means “the community of those who have no community” because there is no adjudication of heterogenous qualities, no truth or law stipulated in advance, except for the very “conditions” of the political (those “hermeneutic conditions,” namely αἰδώ and δίκη, respect and justice).

    To summarize, the Promethean story has three moments, not one, and all three ought to be given full voice:

    1. Default of origin (being forgotten about by Epimetheus/Hindsight)
    2. Gaining technicity (fire and skills from Prometheus/Foresight)
    3. Revealing the generic (“respect for others and a sense of justice” from Hermes)

    This strikes me as a much better way to think about Prometheanism overall, better than the narrow definition of “using technology to overcome natural limits.” Recognizing all three moments, Prometheanism (if we can still call it that) entails not just technological advancement, but also insufficiency and failure, along with a political consciousness rooted in generic humanity.

    And now would be a good time to pass the baton over to the Xenofeminists, who make much better use of accelerationism than its original authors do. The Xenofeminist manifesto provides a more holistic picture of what might simply be called a “universalism from below” — yes, that very folk politics that Srnicek and Williams seek to suppress — doing justice not only to Prometheus, but to Epimetheus and Hermes as well:

    Xenofeminism understands that the viability of emancipatory abolitionist projects — the abolition of class, gender, and race — hinges on a profound reworking of the universal. The universal must be grasped as generic, which is to say, intersectional. Intersectionality is not the morcellation of collectives into a static fuzz of cross-referenced identities, but a political orientation that slices through every particular, refusing the crass pigeonholing of bodies. This is not a universal that can be imposed from above, but built from the bottom up — or, better, laterally, opening new lines of transit across an uneven landscape. This non-absolute, generic universality must guard against the facile tendency of conflation with bloated, unmarked particulars — namely Eurocentric universalism — whereby the male is mistaken for the sexless, the white for raceless, the cis for the real, and so on. Absent such a universal, the abolition of class will remain a bourgeois fantasy, the abolition of race will remain a tacit white-supremacism, and the abolition of gender will remain a thinly veiled misogyny, even — especially — when prosecuted by avowed feminists themselves. (The absurd and reckless spectacle of so many self-proclaimed ‘gender abolitionists’ campaign against trans women is proof enough of this). (0x0F)


    _____

    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), 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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