This piece was developed while participating in Matteo Pasquinelli‘s seminar, Capital as Computation & Cognition: From Babbage’s Factory to Google’s Algorithmic Governance, hosted by The New Centre for Research & Practice in March 2015… The status of robots and workers under cognitive capitalism can be likened to Searle’s Chinese Room, as noted by Srnicek and Williams when writing on… Read More »
technology
Superconversation 11: Zac Davis responds to Benjamin Bratton, “On Deprofessionalizing Surgery”
“These expanding [technological] systems and networks are the building blocks for what many perceive as simple constructions or operations like web surfing, text messaging, and social media use. More often than not, the tasks completed within these systems are, to at least some extent, automated and would take longer to explain than most people can pay attention for. This in turn has been slowly subjecting the human mechanism to radical and often rapid changes through immersion, leaving most people with the illusion that ‘having all knowledge at our fingertips’ has made humanity actually smarter.” (from Zac’s response)
The Philosophical Origins of Digitality
I think that photography is digital – if you understand photography in the classical sense – and that it has always been digital. Such a position only holds if we accept the previous definition of the digital, which has to do with subscribing to a fundamental rivenness of the world. Photography must reflect on or orient itself toward an object or toward the world. The viewer (or the camera as a ‘viewer proxy’) is already divided, or apart, or opposite from its subject. The viewer is inside the world of course, but the structure of immanence is not in effect. Rather, a structure of distance, difference, relationality predominates. If the dominant structure is distance, difference, relation, etc., it’s digital as far as I’m concerned. But that might not be a very satisfying answer!