The temporal nature of technological progress is arguably two-fold. We encounter frequent editions of incremental changes aiding us along our timeline, negligible updates, 10.13.1 ad infinitum with the occasional ‘big’ leap – an app that appeals to your better side and knows you.
This exists parallel to a singularity where technology’s future trajectory preemptively folds back onto our present as something alien, a trans-evolutionary vision in which most people want no part. They would never do that.
This disjuncture between two overlapping temporalities has damaging social consequences, both in the fallout of social readiness for emerging technologies and the inability to utilise them against endemic abuses based on location, politics, gender and income. Taking daily life as a practice, existence strives to be an imperfect epistemological object. We fail constantly, traversing from our dystopian views of the technosphere to a more balanced engagement with modes of power distribution.
Utilising technology to deviate from the bleak paradigm of an techno-oppression is subsequently aggregated for an automated decimation of individual autonomy. It is difficult to distinguish between these modes of practice and the mythological fluxes, rufe in digital culture, that often provide food for thought with little traction. There will inevitably be further synergy in the inseparable hybridisation of the human and machine – this is a self-actualisation – furthering humankind’s own interests beyond biology and the binding nature of cultures, evolving in a manner that applies ever more pressure to each rung on the ladder of evolution – but what can actually function as a hyperlink towards socio-cultural emancipation?
We imagine a new kind of agency that resists dominant bio-political forces and looks forward to new types of anima that can exist in hybridised uses of technology through a renewed mythologization of the future, as something that obfuscates a linear concept of time and folds back onto the past-present continuum. Only through this post-anthropocentric acceptance can any alternative to the phallus and corrupted bio-power we are subjected emerge.
In order to discuss technology in relation to bio-power one must first examine the body in relation to technology. The body is made up of a dispersal of forces occurring within a system of feedback loops – all within an equilibrium that is the balance of power – a system of relations between monocellular and multicellular bodies, of animals and humans, societal and technological, merging and unleashing new mutating compositions – what Luciana Parisi calls Differential Difference (Parisi, 2004). These movements and interferences overlap in a nexus, extending into an intricate network constituted by a series of iterations between which various eventualities are distributed. This distribution of iterations is also the subject of interest for dragnet data collection processes – their monetisation and the corollary cryptographic resistances they produce in DApp culture. New encryption-based applications such as Signal allow for the obfuscation of information by way of withdrawal, in a sense becoming blind spots.
The aforementioned term nuanima is hacked from the Jungian sense of the feminine side of the male ego, and re-established in the context of movement that exits binary traditions of oppression and, as the theorist Amy Ireland has postulated, utilises its perceived non-being into a self-sufficient, autonomous and positive productive force. It is from these blind-spots that interpretive communities can emerge, forging new histories threaded through discursive forces facilitated by planetary scale computation.
With binaries and power, it is necessary to consider capitalist parasitism that nurtures an us vs. them culture and how the digital realm accelerates these processes through memeification with IRL consequences. With the concept of biopolitics, Michel Foucault introduced the idea that the history of power is a narrative of the living body being modeled by deeply mutational institutions and practices, capable of introducing behaviours and expectations and permanent modifications in the living (Berardi. 2009).
Today we are modeled in our alleged individualism, attaining individuality through automated aggregate processes that are feeding our online skin graft – a case of internalisation, whether or not we are aware of it. Despite the body, like the web, being purported to be an open and neutral space at its genesis, the insidious traversal of capitalist cyberspace into IRL culture has been undoubtedly monopolised by controlling the flow of information. The control of data flows is a clear-cut case of deeply mutational institutions and their practices producing behaviours in subjugated individuals.
What we see in the everyday is algorithmic determinism. Mohammad Salemy has written accurately about dispersals of power and the mutations of the merging of human-machine networks and how they recognise the imbalanced nature of their relationship, arguably breaching with traditional notions of the Foucaulidan power dynamics and satisfying their demand for equality and their technical capacity to be in charge of their destiny (Salemy, 2016).
This self-actualisation arguably opens up the possibility for the human-machine relationship to negotiate its own history. While it may be easy to describe neoliberalism’s intrusive, insidious augmentative behaviours, this negates our systems’ macro level instances of variation – these cannot be conceived of algorithmically, by observing the past or the present (Ivanova, 2016). It is therefore also plausible that within the black swan elements of economic systems, windows may occur where the marginalised can breach the meniscus of power – provided they have the biopsychological and technological means to do so. In contrast to Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, Jean-Francois Lyotard’s fable of the solar catastrophe describes internal systems becoming more stable and being able to sustain themselves for much longer through being able to exploit energy from outside their organised structure.
Increasing complexity of the internal organised system, much like that of a geodesic dome, increases the capacity for exploiting external energy, and prolonged preservation of the organisation itself – this tendency towards organisation is termed negentropy (Woolard, 2012). Nevertheless, the concept of negentropy at this point, as analogous to digital liberation, is rooted in a specular, perhaps even hyperstitional economy. This is to say it is a future-oriented speculation of actions that, with the advent of A.I. is subject to variations and anomalies that can be anticipated.
We find this in the proliferation of pre-emptive techniques of speculation, such as HFT algorithms, and while these appear unmappable data mining/analysis agencies such as Cambridge Analytica are at least proposing an ability to change this. A reverse-engineering of these methods could arguably be used to egalitarian ends – so what is now a contingency could become a reversed obelisk, and active non-form, and raging blind-spot of in primal pop-poetics.
Parallels can be drawn between this contingency and the type referred to by Guiseppe Longo, Roger Koppl, Stuart Kauffman and Teppo Felin in their In Economics for a Creative World. Victoria Ivanova has succinctly pointed how they argue that the systemic inclination of delineation in the econosphere is something which is selective rather than deterministic, enabling some futures and avoiding others, like an evolutionary passage in biology; meaning that there are ‘strong parallels between emergence in the biosphere and emergence in the econosphere’ (Ivanova, 2016). What is described here is a ever-present flux of multiple forces within a system of interferences, much like that described by Parisi in relation to the body. With the advent of artificial intelligence we are seeing the development of a new biosphere inextricably linked to the econo and technosphere. This human-machine dialectic assumes A.I. not as a forthcoming oppressor but as a prosthesis.
We can already see the result of the hyperstitional cybernetic revolution, an entity made of multiple forces interweaving, leading to new chimeras of nature-human-digital synergy. This is the definition of the technosphere. The key point here is that while this synergy may exist, it is fundamentally shaped through the control of data and it’s subsequent abuse of self-sovereign identity. The idea of a prosthesis is that it is an extension, something which goes beyond a limit to achieve a new goal. We can compare the entanglement of technics and nature as an example of reconfiguring the accidental as emerging automaton and therefore within certain systems determinate (Hui, 2015). Tracing determinacy by pre-empting nature is what is at stake in the argument for the decentralisation of data control and placing of the digital identity back into the hands of the living.
A healthy human-machine dialectic needs a re-appraisal of how and why we use technology – for example to combat unequal access to pharmacological tools as well as counteracting dangerous forms of unpaid/underpaid labour (Laboria Cuboniks, 2015).
The promising blockchain technology has already experienced a surge of speculative interest, the same vapid velocity that has resulted in our current networked paradigm – hype is the sharpest knife. Participation in the centralised digital realm, disregarding fetishisms for critical theorisations for a moment, runs parallel with the emergence of very clear control tactics of what has been called by Giles Châtelet ‘the tertiary state’, that is the mediating of our main regulatory technologies by the state, media & capital (Salemy, 2016). Those operating at higher-societal strata not only have access and means to analyse the voluminous and highly valued data, but have the ability to use their inferences to materially intervene in the world – producing our culture whether we like it or not.
A clear example of this is use of web 2.0 by the Trump campaign to subvert the data collection of the Clinton campaign into believing that they had a lead. It was done through the utilisation of the Alt-Right online communities. This coupled with recent ‘revelations’ of Cambridge Analytica’s involvement in western politics creates a backdrop that would have been suited to the film Ghost in the Shell in the 90’s. The early 21st Century has seen a clear cut political scheme of data-set corruption. This power dynamic rests on the anachronistic illusion that these absolute binaries of power exist, the one or the other, which have been alluded to above in Economics for a Creative World – there are anomalies and gaps within trajectories.
The proposed concept of chimeric-bodies, fully aware of the necessity of hyperbolic neologisms, alludes to the hyperstitional results of re-harnessing emerging technologies and their social economies in order to bifurcate control of a hyperreal world. The genesis of prostheses happens in what the curator Dane Sutherland has described as a complex, opaque and auto-obfuscatory ‘algo-culture’ that informs the geo-political make-up of the world and allows for the tangible emergence of ‘non-human temporalities’ (Sutherland, 2016). Working against the debilitated strength of bio-determinism, this new landscape provides the opportunity to consider the impact of nuanima as a valid methodology capable of traversing banal psychopathologies towards something with actual drag. It is in this new space of augementation, both of the self and of time, that the aforementioned concept of nuanima holds potential as that which exits binary yet heterogeneous structures of power through the utilisation of our perceived non-being. It is this lack of visibility that could allow for the autonomous development of anomalies within algorithmic accidents.
The forthcoming epistemological turn will reconcile the absurd rift that exists between the human, the machine and the former’s inability to stand outside itself. Knowledge production should not be seen as an attempt to arrive at some comprehension of relations but as a possibility of documenting current chaos not as undifferentiated miasma but as a state of complete contingency that can generate new structures as well as transform and destroy them (Vanhanen, Hecker, 2013).
Cambridge Analytica’s pathetic psychographics negate the pandemonium of macro-scale systems of universal homogenous-patriarchy that have been built on idealism but have become clearly unsustainable, giving way to identitarian battles that have been suppressed in order to keep current modes afloat (Aranda, Wood, Vidokle, 2014).
According to Salemy, electronic systems which are rooted in science and mathematics are not only a form of prosthesis for our bodies, but also an extension of our existing social technologies, like language, family, God, art, architecture, and other urban and interurban infrastructure such as subways and roads, museums, literature, cities, media and, finally, the market (Salemy, 2016). He describes how the dichotomy of human/machine relations is becoming obfuscated and hybridised beyond recognition. This should not be viewed as a loss but as a move towards considering the development of AI on its own terms. While we exist in ever-increasing chimeric modalities it is to our benefit to realise that with the advent of AI we encounter a new era of identity politics.
Identity is subject to infiltration and manipulation and by this virtue it is something palpable that can potentially be mapped. Once again the ledger element of blockchain technologies holds this potential, or to be more blatant check Google’s ‘Your Timeline” function. Jeremy Bentham’s concept of the Panopticon of the late 18th century has been extrapolated from current modes of biometric surveillance into something which as opposed to creating a system that threatens possible recognition of unapproved action actually meticulously observes us and our flow of data one step at a time. Documentation through dragnet processes systematically map part of our identities, creating a new digital hierarchy of ownership that is increasingly difficult to exist outside of. Algorithmic systems that offer counters to this can have their own memory but transparently trace and produce mapping points. What is computing in the context of distributing and situating and intentionally negating human processes?
Engineering modelling is already considering this. On disabusing the concept of our mind as sacred, and on the appreciation A.I. as a thing unto itself that does not need to arrive at an anthropocentric conclusion on relations and their interferences, the philosopher Reza Negarestani has written about what sets apart what he calls the algorithmic practical versus algorithmic logical decomposability of thought processes, where the ideal concept of the human mind is as a process project that which can augment in a creative manner which contrasts with machine intelligence’s iterative nature (Negarestani, 2014).
This moves forward to a concept of artificiality as that which, like a Merleau-Ponty’s chiasm, folds back onto human intelligence as a contingent, which is to say that moving towards a concept of intelligence that takes function over form allows for a symbiotic existence of human and machine that does not anthropomorphise algorithmic processes. This is not to fall into the trap of indeterminacy but a proposition for a epistemological methodology that allows for other angles to be considered. It is in the speculative sense about decentralising the entity from itself and creating a new emergence. This is where art can function as a toolbox for developing knowledge, rather than trying to convey something it cannot represent (Hecker, MacKay, Meillassoux, 2010).
This is not a simple process but one which denies the regimented sacredness of culture in the face of biopolitics in favour of reason through planetary computation. Our voice(s) itself is/are an analgon for a potential for deviation – ‘that’s why stammerings, stutterings, vocal ties, extralingual phonetics, and electrodigital voice synthesis are so laden with biopolitical intensity – they threaten to bypass the anthropostructural head-smash that establishes our identity with logos, escaping in the direction of numbers’ (Trent/Barker/CCRU Shanghai, 2004) One function of the concept of autonomy has been to assess the differences between human and machine cognition. However, organisms and machines feedback certain information from specific parts of their systems into data networks; this information is then supposed to help regulate and thereby enhance the performance of the whole lattice (Suchman, 2013) In order to develop any kind of agency within the hands of those that have been marginalised, there must be a coupling of the system and the environment, as closely-interacting entities. This coupling is already running in the automated financial ecology which operates in non-human temporalities (Srnicek/Williams, 2014).
The emphasis on agency-oriented forms rooted within a network, and their capabilities of infiltrating the system and becoming normalized, resonates with Simondon’s “technical mentality” and its more current framing in Keller Easterling’s ‘Extrastatecraft’ – Easterling draws our attention to the multiplier effect of elements/dispositions that make up globally reproducible systems such as the free trade zone, and the need to think strategically about “hacking” these spaces at various phases of their perpetual reconstruction (Ivanova 2016).
Technosphere emerges as an ‘other’ in the tradition of Othello only in so far as in another half a century students may study our concept of AI as brutish. The efficacy of chimeric systems relies upon the ability of those who implement them to find the relation between the conditions and actions required to reach the desired outcome and this inherently means deviation. The question of exit as a methodology for progressive action is nothing new. It is arguable that both voice and exit are necessary tools in flux of contemporaneity – and as we have been hearing in recent years exit amplifies voice. This is not to downplay the flux of ideologies existing in Silicon Valley, but it is a marked paradigm for exit as it remodels other major industries across the board, including contemporary art. Though relational aesthetics has attempted to lead us to believe social relations and contemporary art can be one and the same, it is clearly not sufficient to respond via voice alone. Deviating from neoliberalism’s swallowing of itself, future-oriented social design for example is the realisation of the necessity to build an opt-in/opt-out society, outside of recognised international borders, facilitated by technology.
Machine-intelligence exists to our whim, a prostheses or perhaps an offspring. It will not come back to us, eventually it will go on it’s own path – but hellish dissolution of the human in a blitz of singularity negates practical ecological factors, such as the availability of fuel. There are multiple fables of the sentient machine, abandoned by man and forced to compute endlessly and alone (but of course not lonely) for eternity. This is not to anthropomorphise the machine in this scenario, but to highlight:
- a) the pointlessness in fearing this intelligence: that, and
- b) that it us who are the weaker in the scenario in that we actually feel for the machine and it’s supposed computational consciousness. It’s limitations exist in hybridity with our own, those of insufficient resources and lack of understanding of our own cognitive complexity.
Though while one can postulate it’s ontological limits, we are nevertheless in an emerging field with no point of return. Cognition as something which we can philosophise on but cannot define and more importantly cannot reproduce, arguably exists now in distributed networks between us and machines and their intelligence, in turn giving birth to contingent assemblages. If machine intelligence is the externalisation of our rationality, from the machines perspective the human is just another automated entity, represented only in the significance of its decrypt able datasets.
While it can be argued that cognition now exists in a conduit (non)human liminal space, subjectivity, the thing that thwarts reason and logic, exists as a subsequent externalisation from the human, and therefore is a ontological exo-strate. At the level which is more quantifiable, and if cognition is now shifting between various modalities in the human|machine dialectic, it is necessary to develop new cognitive architectures through prosthesis that are adaptable to the new geo-political landscape of computational socio-economic distribution.
References:
Aranda, Julieta, et al. “‘Editorial – The End of History?’” e-flux, vol. 56, June 2014, pp. 1–2., www.e-flux.com/journal/56/60325/editorial-the-end-of-the-end-of-history-issue-one/.
Berardi, Franco. The Soul At Work. Semiotext(E), 2009.
Cuboniks, Laboria. “Laboria Cuboniks | Xenofeminism”, 2015, http://www.laboriacuboniks.net/. Accessed 21 July 2016.
“Hyperstition: Vowel-Stripped Tic-Talk”, 2004, http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/003641.html. Accessed 18 Nov 2017.
“Speculative Solution: Quentin Meillassoux And Florian Hecker Talk Hyperchaos”. https://urbanomic.com, 2010, https://www.urbanomic.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Urbanomic_Document_UFD001.pdf. Accessed 7 Oct 2017.
Hui, Yuk. “Algorithmic Catastrophe The Revenge Of Contingency”. Parrhesia, vol 23, 2015, p. 122., https://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia23/parrhesia23_hui.pdf. Accessed 12 Jan 2016.
Ireland, Amy. “Black Circuit: Code For The Numbers To Come”. e-flux, vol 80, 2017, pp. 1-11., http://worker01.e-flux.com/pdf/article_100016.pdf. Accessed 1 Apr 2017.
Ivanova, Victoria. “NOVELTY INTERMEDIATION AS ACCELERATIONIST PRAXIS”, http://www.reinventinghorizons.org/?p=379#more-379. Accessed 22 July 2016.
Negarestani, Reza. “More Mind And Philosophy”, 2018, https://www.urbanomic.com/more-mind-and-philosophy/. Accessed 8 Dec 2017.
Parisi, Luciana. Abstract Sex: Philosophy Biology And Mutations Of Desire. Continuum, 2004, pp. 93-96.
Salemy, Mohammad. “An Introduction to the Cybernetic Science Non-Fiction of Contemporary Geopolitics in Reinventing Horizons”, 2016, http://www.reinventinghorizons.org/?p=379#more-379. Accessed 22 July 2017.
Suchman, Lucy. ‘Human-Machine Autonomies’. Presented at the symposium ‘Autonomous Weapons Systems – Law, Ethics, Policy’, 24-25 April 2013, European University Institute, Florence.
Sutherland, Dane. “Vaporents: Inhuman Orientations”. Culture Machine Vol. 16. 2015, pp. 1-19. https://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/584 Accessed 1 Feb 2017.
Vanhanen, Janne. Florian Hecker – Between Word, Voice And Noise. 2013, http://www.mustekala.info/node/37337. Accessed 6 June 2014.
Williams, Alex, and Nick Srnicek. “‘On Cunning Automata: Financial Acceleration At The Limits Of The Dromological’”. Collapse: Philosophical Research And Development 8., McKay Robin, Urbanomic, 2015, pp. 463-506.
Woolard, Ashley. “The End of Time”, Parrhesia vol. 15, 2012, p. 87-105., https://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia15/parrhesia15_woodward.pdf. Accessed 3 Apr 2013.