Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Friday, August 26, 2011

Depopulation, Not Personification

Tonight on my tee vee, a multinational telecom told me their network is "living" and "breathing" and a car company told me their luxury sedan has thousands of "thoughts" per second.

I just want to say that these claims are lies. I do not think these lies are innocent, and I do not think they are innocuous. Nor do I agree that these claims are really matters of artistic license nor "romantic" sales hype nor figurative language. I think that we live in a catastrophically techno-fetishistic society that invests certain historically fraught technologies (at the moment, networks and cars are among these) with qualities of life and thought.

Part of this investment involves the suffusion of the public imaginary with futurological frames and narratives and ends which regard technologies never only as useful objects, here and now, or even as cultural signifiers (few futurologists are up to such a discussion), but see them also as stepping stones on the road to a particular tomorrow, as objects curiously straddling the present and "The Future," experienced as "more" than they are because they are seen to partake already in their aspiration in the direction of "The Future" of the futurologists.

What matters about crappy software that mis-corrects your spelling choices or recommends you purchase books you would actually abhor on the basis of past purchases is not only that these features, here and now, are bugs, but that they presumably bespeak in their thoughtlessness the thoughtfulness of superintelligent descendents to be in the imaginations of their makers, caught up as they are in the full froth of futurological fantasizing... What matters about a costly ambiguously therapeutic medical intervention whose long-term and combinatorial effects are unknown is not only what it is and what it seems to be doing, here and now, but that they presumably bespeak in their ambiguous effects the "enhancement" and immortalization of post-human therapies to come in the imaginations of their cheerleaders, caught up as they are in the full froth of futurological fantasizing...

Resonating with "The Future" futurologically fetishized artifacts disdain the present -- and presence construed as the collective forces and impacts that twine these artifacts in their making and their use and their signification in the present world, peer to peer. Those who peddle prophesy do, after all, tend to be blind. And profit-taking, no less, depends on its blindness.

Let me say the obvious very quickly, that "The Future" does not exist, and that what futurologists are going on about when they talk about "The Future" is usually just a kind of funhouse mirror amplifying parochial present-day fears and desires and norms (hence, my insistence that "All futurisms are finally retro-futurisms").

(As I said, the futurological investment of "technology" with life and thought is only part of the story. The story of such fascination, speculation, investment is a larger and older story than what I describe as the futurological. Futurological discourses and subcultures in my sense of the term (in both their mainstream and superlative forms) originates around World War II, at once in the birth of information and computer sciences and in the immediate and ongoing suffusion of public life with the norms and forms of marketing discourse -- including the rise of corporate-military think-tanks and mass-mediated political spin-doctoring -- in the making of the postwar technoscientific hegemony of the neoliberal Washington Consensus. But there are clearly older logocentric, scientistic, mechanistic, techno-triumphalist discursive formations -- not to mention magickal, mythical, and theological ones -- articulating the futurological, long predating and also including key strands of Enlightenment theory and practice and so on. This is a very long story, and much of it is a familiar one, and I think it isn't necessary to recount it here, though it might be useful to have it in the back of your mind.)

But what I want to stress here, what really struck me in hearing these commercials attributing "life" to networks and "thought" to automobiles, is that the insistent futurological celebration of living networks and thinking machines has as its primary material consequence a dis-identification with what is living and understanding and meaning in present worldly humanity, the better to identify with an unworldly "post-humanity" that does not exist.

The futurists would add does not exist… "yet." But, of course, no one knows who will come to be, while one can come to know who is here among us. This self-assured "yet" to me really testifies to the terror of the futurologists at the real contingency and uncertainty in the open futurity inhering in the presence of the diversity of stakeholders in the present world, it testifies to their hostility to what is living, breathing, thinking in the world of their peers.

I believe that futurology invests artifacts that do not live, do not breathe, do not suffer injury, do not share our world, do not understand, do not judge, do not testify to hopes or to histories with a life and a thought they do not have and in ways that render us less capable of grasping what is unique in actually living and actually thinking beings, and it does so in ways that render us inattentive to that precious uniqueness, in ways that actually obliterate differences that make a difference through their neglect of the ritual artifice of sustained attention and care that sustain these differences in their existence.

I also think that life and thought are far more fragile and more precious than the futurologists understand, and I think futurological derangements of our sense and the significance of the living and the meaning threaten them with extinction. As someone who is living and breathing and has thoughts I want to point out that this is not a trivial matter.

I am alive and your phone is not. I have thoughts but your car does not. Phones and cars do not live and think, nor will they ever, for were incidentally phone-like or car-like beings to live or to think they would not be what phones or cars actually are.

You do not know who they are, tomorrow's children, your imagination cannot compass or control who will be born into this world and our collective making of it. To pretend otherwise is not to make a prediction but to engage in a police action, it is not to open up future possibilities but to depopulate the present.

7 comments:

Summerspeaker said...

Machines become human and humans become machines. Though simplistic, this captures a key aspect of modern society and the dark side of the Enlightenment project. I recommend loving revolutionary queer community as an short-term antidote, followed by radical social transformation as soon as possible.

jimf said...

> [W]ere incidentally phone-like or car-like beings to live
> or to think they would not be what phones or cars actually are.

But they'd be **libertarian** phone-like or car-like beings,
just like the uber-rational white guys of the future who
programmed them.

And they'd probably all live on Peter Thiel's island.

------------------------------------------
'Computer center, please,' Gray
said as he settled into the seat beside Laura in the
front of the driverless car.

'You can just, like, talk to it?' Laura asked,
fumbling with her seat belt.

'Just tell it where you want to go,' he answered as
if it were the most mundane feature of his island
world. The moment Laura's buckle clacked together,
the car began its acceleration. 'Voice recognition
and synthesis are consumer functions, and they
require a surprisingly large amount of processing
capacity. But the computer is able to parse sound
waves accurately enough to recognize rudimentary
commands if spoken clearly and in English.' The
car picked up speed as it headed out of the courtyard
and turned left at the gate.

Laura sat in what would have been the driver's
seat of an American car. Her pulse quickened in
time with the rising speed of the vehicle, and she
gasped and grabbed the empty dashboard as it sped
into the black opening of the tunnel...

The car flew downhill at what had to be close to
a hundred miles per hour, veering smoothly one
way or the other at forks in the road that were
widened and banked like a concrete bobsled course.
Laura was on edge. She had no means of guessing
which way the driverless vehicle would turn, and
the result was a constant fear of impending demise. . .

'...In order for the computer to
open the door for you, it's got to know who you
are and what you're doing. To know those things,
it maintains a real-time model of the world -- who
and what everybody and everything is, and what it
is they're doing right at this very moment. It
builds that model by processing the data it receives
from its senses. Visual, auditory, thermal,
motion -- it melds all those senses together to
form a picture of the world and everything in it...'

'And you go to all that trouble just for security?
Is Gray that much of a control freak?'

'Oh, no, no, no! It's not **just** for security.
The robots use that same world model, for example,
to avoid running into things. Those Model Three
cars whip down the roads so fast because they can
see what's up ahead of them. They know if there's
a Model Six crossing the road around the next bend.
And a Six would know when to cross because they
tap into that same world model and look both ways.
That's the beauty of building and maintaining
a complete world model. There are so many
different uses for it.'

_The Society of the Mind_ by Eric L. Harry (1996)
( http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0694516422 )
------------------------------------------

Dale Carrico said...

Machines become human and humans become machines. Though simplistic, this captures a key aspect of modern society and the dark side of the Enlightenment project.

It's not simplistic, it is wrong.

Also, the reductionist confusion of living beings as meat machines, of thought as calculation, the dream of clay animated into robot slaves, aging as a disease susceptible to an elixer -- all of this is older than the Enlightenment by far, though some strands of Enlightenment (a much longer, more complex phenomenon than admitted by those who like to declare themselves "Enlightenment" champions in their evangelical sloganizing) do offer important variations on the theme.

Speaking of slogans:

I recommend loving revolutionary queer community as an short-term antidote, followed by radical social transformation as soon as possible.

What does this "recommendation" even consist of? Care to provide any details, care to offer some strategies getting us from here to there, care to suggest any actually-existing allies in the actual struggle to nudge us in the right direction? Fair warning, the details will be hard, the strategies will be perilous, and the allies will be imperfect, and the moment you offer them up some cocksure armchair revolutionary will roll their eyes at you for accommodating evil and selling out.

As you see, "ss," I'm always, always teaching.

Summerspeaker said...

The notion of dehumanizing people while humanizing technological artifacts and system expresses a key aspect of the horrors of modern life. It's a daily lived experience and resonates powerfully with Foucault's critique of the Enlightenment.

Care to provide any details, care to offer some strategies getting us from here to there, care to suggest any actually-existing allies in the actual struggle to nudge us in the right direction?

Forge personal relationships based on mutual affection and a commitment to anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, decolonization, queer liberation, feminism, and non-hierarchical organizing. Support each other emotionally, intellectually, and materially. Choose one or more of the following: fight the pigs the street, oppose institutional racism in the academy, give out free food, form a union with your coworkers, network with radical communities across the world, correspond with a political prisoner, burn migra cars when see them in your neighborhood, spread the revolutionary analysis to everyone you know.

and the moment you offer them up some cocksure armchair revolutionary will roll their eyes at you for accommodating evil and selling out

I've yet to encounter this difficulty.

Dale Carrico said...

oppose institutional racism in the academy, give out free food, form a union with your coworkers, network with radical communities across the world, correspond with a political prisoner,

These are indeed excellent things to do.

fight the pigs the street... burn migra cars when see them in your neighborhood

I don't want to get you in trouble so I won't ask if you really do these things or if you aren't just indulging in a bunch of big talk. I'll say this, though. I don't personally approve of these tactics, nor do I think that they are likely to accomplish the ends those who engage in them want (although there is a real question whether legislative reform and nonviolent civil disobedience of the kind I prefer are as reliable when they don't have the specter of such tactics to compare themselves to, so the actual political dynamic here is more complicated than some of the more sanctimonious allies on my side might care to admit here), however, if you really and for true do engage in this kind of revolutionary action then you are one of the few people who has a right in my view to declare yourself more radical than I am. Usually what I get in the Moot are armchair radicals who denigrate the slow and heartbreaking hard work of piecemeal reform and make cheap obvious shots about those of us who vote for least awful candidates in to protect the vulnerable from most awful ones -- and who don't do shit otherwise. While I don't collaborate in violent militancy (and I am not willing to say I never will only that I never have and for reasons I think are good ones) I will concede that those who do at least have a leg to stand on when they critique the inadequacy of my radicalism. I don't agree with their critique, but they have earned the right to make the critique and make me listen to it.

Dale Carrico said...

I've yet to encounter this difficulty.

Lucky you.

Summerspeaker said...

There are lots of way to fight the pigs - some of them are even legal. Unlike many of my anarchist comrades, I'm not interested in violence against people. Material inference, on the other hand, strikes me a moral imperative. It's just a matter of making it meaningful and not getting caught. Needless to say, I know better than to discuss any specifics here on the internets. But I passionately advocate throwing wrenches into the gears of the imperial machine whenever practical.