Don't Praise the Machine: AI and the Destruction of Three Ecologies

 

I was asked to speak at an AI and Ethics panel at my university. What follows is the outline that I am using for my talk.

Boiling Frogbooks: Education's Past and Future

Portrait of the author as a Hampshire Student

I graduated from Hampshire College. Not only that, but I credit Hampshire for much of my early education. It is for this reason that I have followed the news about its current troubles very closely. Hampshire's troubles, and the possibility that the college could close, feel not just like the future being cancelled but the present as well. It is like watching one's very own condition of possibility disappear. I felt the same way about the elimination of the Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture program at Binghamton University. It is like that scene in Looper where the character in the future is literally dissected by the past. 

Not Even Gun Control Will Save Us Now: Notes on the Psycho-Sociology of Mass Killing

Image from The Onion

The events are both all too familiar, all too common, a mass shooting at some university, school, or public place, but at the same time they are each singular, a different person, a different town. (War might be the way history teaches Americans geography, but mass shootings are the domestic version. Columbine, Sandy Hook, and Aurora, these are towns that are known for the horrors that have happened there). Always the seemingly interminable wait for the ethnicity and motives to be revealed. It takes only hours, but it is interminable because it determines the political fallout, will it be called terrorism, or will it fade into the generic terror of day to day life in America. The singularity of the events, of the different motives or malady determining the actions, would seem to preclude any general theory. Yet, the very fact that they have become so familiar, defining a particular phenomena of modern life, demands theorization. 

"The Only Thing That We Have In Common Is The Illusion of Being Together"*: Connecting with Don Jon

Joseph Gordon Levitt's first film, Don Jon is a surprisingly perplexing film. On the one hand it is one of the first mainstream films in the US to deal with internet porn, but, at the same time, it is not about porn, or even an addiction to porn. Its aspiration is use pornography as an allegory for something, but for what?

We are all Neoliberals: Dardot and Laval's La Nouvelle Raison du Monde

Neoliberalism has become an increasingly popular word in contemporary critical thought and philosophy. Its popularity has come at a cost, however, as the meaning of the word has been reduced to a few vague inclinations about the truly bad kind of capitalism held together by invocations of competition, markets, and individualism. It has become what Althusser called a descriptive theory at best, and, at worse, a way to speak about capitalism without speaking about capitalism. In the worse case it became the name for a kind of nostalgia for an earlier kinder and gentler capitalism, one that we could get back to as soon as the full impact of the recession was felt and people started really paying attention to Paul Krugman. 

Hitchcock in the Age of Psychopharmacology and Finance: On Side Effects

Steven Soderbergh is a somewhat mercurial director. He more or less started "independent film" with Sex, Lies, and Videotape in 1989, but then went on to spend subsequent decades making everything from Julia Robert's star vehicles to a two part epic about Che Guevara. Soderbergh seemed to be at times deliberately avoiding the trappings of the auteur to cultivate the idea of a jack of all trades that shifted from the bloated star vehicles of Ocean's Eleven to the intentional obscurity of Bubble, adapting everything from Elmore Leonard to Franz Kafka in between.

After the Future(s): On Looper

"The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language."--Karl Marx

"Time travel has not yet been invented. But thirty years from now, it will have been," is the opening narration that sets up Rian Johnson's Looper. The movie is set in 2044, a time before the invention of time travel but after its effects. It is a movie with two futures, neither particularly good. Time travel, it appears, was no sooner invented than it was outlawed. It is only used by criminal syndicates some thirty years in the (second) future, where it is apparently easier to send a man back in time than it is dispose of a body. 

After Alienation: Activity and Passivity in Work and Consumption

Debates about alienation with respect to Marx tend to focus on its philosophical underpinning, its humanism and essentialism. This is perhaps due to the immense influence of Althusser. Philosophically Althusser was right in turning our attention away from the half worked out notebooks on alienation, burdened by various anxieties of influence, and towards Capital, towards exploitation and the value form. However, their is an affective dimension to alienation as well, and part of its appeal, its long history in the works of the Frankfurt School, existentialism, punk rock and comic books, has to do with the way it captured a particular sensibility, a particular structure of feeling. This particular feeling appears to have been on the wane for quite sometime.

The Politics of Composition: A Few Thoughts on Occupy Wall Street

Photo from Maximum RocknRoll's Facebook feed 

Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s After the Future opens with a question, a question that defines the current political moment. As he writes: 

Bending the Stick: The Returns of Political Economy and Philosophical Anthropology Into Philosophy

Paolo Virno writes the following:

“What is involved here is the conceptualization of the field of immediate coincidence between production and ethics, structure and superstructure, between the revolution of labor process and the revolution of sentiments, between technology and emotional tonality, between material development and culture. By confining ourselves narrowly to this dichotomy, however, we fatally renew the metaphysical split between “lower” and higher, animal and rational, body and soul—and it makes little difference if we boast of our pretensions to historical materialism. If we fail to perceive the points of identity between labor practices and modes of life, we will comprehend nothing of the changes taking place in present-day production and misunderstand a great deal about the forms of contemporary culture.”

Virno’s idea of the immediate coincidence between affects and economics not only characterizes his own work, or much of it (some of the recent work is focused more on the problem of philosophical anthropology, which is perhaps already alluded to in the quote above), but several other works in philosophy. These works stem from two central conditions: First, a breakdown of a certain version of Marxism for which the relationship between production and ethics always passed through the necessary mediations of the base and superstructure, law and politics, hence the immediacy. Second, as the quote above suggests, this change is also brought about by the transformation of capitalism itself, a transformation that Virno will later qualify according to the centrality of the very question of the human in the production process: the increasing importance of not just language and thought, but of human flexibility and neoteny in post-Fordist capitalism. As Virno argues the current regime of labor with its combined demands of professionalization and precariousness results in a model of labor which is not so much about particular skills, talents, and knowledge, but the capacity to acquire skills, knowledge, etc. We sell species being, not the alienation from species being. “Human nature returns to the centre of attention not because we are finally dealing with biology rather than history, but because the biological prerogatives of the human animal have acquired undeniable historical relevance in the current productive process.”

I am interested in both this return to philosophical anthropology, to a speculation of the fundamentals of human existence, and political economy, to an unmediated examination of the economy in terms of its effects. In the last decades of the last millennium, both of these things were forbidden: economism and humanism were epithets to avoid at all costs. What interests me about this recent turn, not just in the work of Virno, but others, is not so much the return of the repressed, but this idea of an immediate coincidence. of a combination (or is it a dialectic) in which the human is displaced by its immediate entry into the economic and the economic is understand as constitutive of the human. Immanence is perhaps the key to not overcoming the old taboos, but understanding the present.

Moreover, to cite Stiegler, who I will be discussing in a minute, the retreat from political economy by philosophy has been coupled with a retreat in engagement at the level of politics. I would add to this that similar perils confront any philosophy that leaves the anthropological terrain, which is distinct from anthropology or humanism. This terrain covers that highly ambivalent intersection of culture and nature that constitutes human life, what Virno calls historico-natural and Balibar calls anthropological difference. I am thinking here of the long night of “social construction” in which the only thing that one could say about anything, desire, labor, identity, language, etc., was that it was socially constructed, contingent not necessary. This important emphasis on construction crashed upon the shores of its unexamined ontology (everything is socially constructed) and its non-existent politics (we should construct things differently…or better)

All of this is a preamble of sorts for a review of two of Franco Berardi’s recently translated works (The Soul at Work and Precarious Rhapsody) and Bernard Stiegler’s Pour une nouvelle critique de l’economie. They are connected by this theme, and the much more contingent fact that I just happened to read them at the same time.

To begin with Stiegler, an intersection of interests (primarily Simondon) has drawn me to read some of Stiegler’s works, the translated books and a few of the shorter books in French. I remain ambivalent, however, and not ready to dive in. When it comes to Stiegler, diving in really is diving in: he seems to come up with multi book series the way the rest of us come up with shows to watch on DVD. There is a little of a bad infinity to these writings as they gravitate around the same these and ideas. Anyway I was curious enough of his attempt to take on the economy that I read his new book (at least it was his new book, he probably finished something else by the time I wrote this blog post).


Stiegler approaches the economy through some of the central themes of his work: individuation, borrowed in part from Simondon, and his general idea of grammatization (the word he uses in this book), which is to say the exteriorization of memory, in tools, writing, and devices, which is constitutive of history and humanity as such. As Stiegler argues, such grammatization is a condition of proletarianization: workers can only be reduced to simple abstract labor power if the machine can take on their specific memory.(The term grammatization, my awkward and literal translation, obviously has its origins in Derrida’a trace, but like all of Stiegler’s concepts it is fundamentally eclectic: drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the inscribing socius.) This is also where the new dimension of the critique comes into play, Stiegler criticizes Marx for not taking into account consumption. Consumption is another kind of proletarianization, a loss of subjectivity and individuation. Just as the machine at work takes on the subjectivity of the worker, the memory and knowledge, the machines at home, in consumption, does the same. Proletarianization becomes a general condition, distinct from pauperization.

As I have noted previously, Stiegler’s critique seems to overlook the activity in modern consumption. However, his critique, which focuses on the economy as a phenomenon of subjectivity and belief has some merit. Drawing on the concept of externality, he argues that we lack the positive externalities, education and sociality, that make it possible to combat the negative externalities of capital. The subjectivity that capital produces is incapable of combating its effects, and ultimately even of sustaining it.

Franco “Bifo” Berardi belongs to the same generation as such thinkers as Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno, but with the exception of his piece on the semiotext(e) collection on Autonomia, much of his work has not been translated into English. This has all changed rather abruptly with the recent publication of The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy and Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the pathologies of the post-alpha generation. The first book is a necessary update to the concept of alienation: a word that is as unavoidable as it is discredited, as well as an attempt to situate the Italian Marxist tradition within the larger context of the Frankfurt School and French Thought. With respect to the first aspect the book points out a positive dimension of alienation, alienation as the basis of refusal, in the thought of Tronti, juxtaposing his work with Marcuse as two very different reflections on the same period. As Bifo writes about this positive dimension: “Alienation is then considered not as the loss of human authenticity, but as an estrangement from capitalistic interest, and therefore as a necessary condition for the construction—in a space estranged from and hostile to labor relations—of an ultimately human relationship.” Thus, inserting a necessary political dimension into the debate on alienation.

The real difference with respect to alienation, the real reason that it has fallen out of favor, is not political, but historical, concerning the change of the economy. Alienation corresponded to the Fordist economy, to a production process in which information and communication flowed only in one direction, in which work imposed a mute necessity on laboring bodies. This has fundamentally changed, and with it the situation of the soul in work. This new situation cannot be accurately captured by alienation. Bifo’s work has the benefit of underscore the political and economic transformations underlying the theoretical shifts from alienation to the production of subjectivity. It is not a matter of a change of trends, but a change of the real conditions. The new work process does not so much alienate subjectivity, but produces it. The worker is not excluded from the production process, but brought into it, compelled to communicate and compete with all of their being. Alienation and the old pathologies will not describe this situation.



Precarious Rhapsody is the most concerned with this shift and the new pathologies. New pathologies brought about by the shift to semio-capitalism, capitalism of signs. As Bifo writes:

“Semio-capital is in a crisis of overproduction, but the form of this crisis is not only economic but also psychopathic. Semio-capital, in fact, is not about the production of material goods, but about the production of psychic stimulation. The mental environment is saturated by signs that create a sort of continuous excitation, a permanent electrocution, which leads the individual mind as well as the collective mind to a state of collapse.”

Much of Bifo’s analysis comes close to Stiegler, his “post-alpha generation” refers to a generation that learns more words from machines than their others, which justifies my review of the two together. Bifo even shares some of Stiegler’s faults, tending toward an apocalyptic understanding of this shift. Bifo like Stiegler sees a loss of sensitivity and attentiveness to others in the digital world, connect it to a particular pathological incident (the Virginia Tech Shooting). Stiegler and Bifo overlap in an apocalyptic tone of sorts. However, such limitations of their pronouncements shouldn’t overshadow their strength. This strength is most clearly pronounced in Bifo who uses the term compositionism to define Italian workerism: the reference is not just to class composition, but to all of the technical, economic, cultural, and political dimensions that make up the conjuncture.

We must think together the new pathologies of the present, ADD and depression; the new technologies, social networks; the new regimes of regulation, neoliberal deregulation; and the new productive classes; the cogitariat, if we are to make any sense of the present. The old categories, and taboos, cannot restrict this, humanism, economism, etc. all must be reexamined.

Sooner or Later Everyone Jumps the Shark: Parting Remarks on Dollhouse

The phrase “jump the shark” has come and gone as a snarky fundamental term of television criticism. Initially, it was used to refer to a show that had exhausted its premise and desperately devised some new element, an adorable cousin or a new career as a stuntman, in order to restore some life to the show. It is in that initial context that the term became the basis for a website, and later a book, before it became a term applied to everything and anything.

The program Dollhouse has most definitely jumped the shark, but oddly so in that it seems to have been conceived to do so from the beginning. As I wrote earlier, the show began as a creepy high tech version of Charlie’s Angels; became a political/corporate thriller, with shades of Manchurian Candidate; and ended with the end of the world as we knew it, borrowing heavily from Philip K. Dick and The Matrix along the way. (I say seems because the show was canceled halfway through its second season. It is possible that the apocalyptic ending was a last ditch way to conclude the show, and a great one at that, why not take the world with you.) What is frustrating about this, and may have led to the show’s demise, is that unlike most instances of “jumping the shark” the show it became was much more interesting than the show that began.

What interests me about the show is the link, the continuity, between these different genres. At the level of plot the transitions are made possible by the show’s technology, a device that makes it possible to upload or download any personality including, knowledge, skills, and memories, effectively rendering people into walking iphones with many “apps” to choose from. At the beginning of the show this technology is cumbersome, requiring people, “the dolls” or actives, to sit in a chair, but it eventually goes viral, making it possible to reprogram people at a distance. That is what connects the shows premise to its conclusion at the level of plot, but I am more interested in how the show functions at the level of the apocalyptic imaginary. What is it, besides the standard Frankenstein parable, which makes this a vision of the apocalypse?

As it has been noted elsewhere the show’s initial premise can easily be interpreted to be about exploitation. The dolls are ridiculously expensive prostitutes. They are not simply that, however, they are also the dream employees of capitalism. Skill, habits, and personalities can be uploaded and dumped. Moreover, these capacities can be developed without costly and difficult externalities, no need for schools, for research, or for urban spaces. (Although it is neverly entirely clear where they get the memories and skills of an anti-terrorism expert or dominatrix, if such knowledge is every paid for or if it is part of some high tech digital commons). When the “dolls” are not working they are the very picture of docility. They spend their days as relatively mindless drones practicing yoga, indulging in various creative pursuits, and eating healthy meals. Their dollhouse is modeled after a spa or the latest resort hotel: it is the dream of contemporary relaxation rendered as prison.

The dolls can be easily read as allegories of Paolo Virno’s interpretation of the general intellect. The term general intellect comes from the following passage in Marx:

“Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are the products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge objectified [vergegenständlichte Wissenskraft]. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it.”

Virno stresses that the centrality of the general intellect in the production process entails a fundamental shift in not just the structure of work but its emotional tonality as well. The general intellect has to be distinguished from the regime of abstract labor, in which the focus was on the commensurability between different types of labor, different laboring, subjects, which were rendered interchangeable. The exploitation of labor power presupposed equality as a real abstraction. This changes as knowledge, science and intellect comes to forefront of the production process. These different forms of knowledge are incommensurable. “They are not units of measure, but rather are the measureless presuppositions of heterogeneous operative possibilities.” With respect to the first “real abstraction,” abstract labor, there was always a contradiction between the ideal of equality and the reality of exploitation. The general intellect is defined not only by incommensurable forms of knowledge but also by the need for workers to constantly shift from one to another, as new jobs demand new skills and knowledges. There is no equivalence, no ground of comparison, between these different activities and skills.

Virno argues that this constant and groundless shifting produces a flexible kind of cynicism. “Cynics reach the point where they entrust their self-affirmation precisely to the multiplication (and fluidification) of hierarchies and inequalities which the unexpected centrality of production knowledge seems to entail.” The “dolls” are not even cynical because they never have to deal with incommensurability of the different types of knowledge. They never have to confront the contradiction between the affective demands of a care worker and a security worker because they are “wiped” clean each time. To quote Franco Berardi, “The worker does not exist any more as a person. He is just the interchangeable producer of microfragments of recombinant semiosis which enters into the continuous flux of the network.”

In the first season the show offers two personifications of this loss of self in the form of two anomalous characters, two dolls who cannot be wiped. They accumulate the knowledge and personalities of multiple lifetimes, becoming legion as the bible would say. The first, Alpha, loses any sense of empathy or morality, becoming a bad reading of Nietzsche's übermensch. While the second, Echo, the shows heroine, becomes the personification of the multitude, the general intellect as superhero. In the second season this loss of self is socialized, extended across all of society. The show offers an immediate image of this in terms of individuals who walk around with a necklace of “memory sticks” (the little flash drives that have become the talismans of the immaterial laborer). On these sticks are not just powerpoint presentations or term papers, but subjective capabilities, from weapons skills to mercy. All these images, and the fears and fantasies they embody, seem like various ways to cognitively map the otherwise disorienting present, which places the power of knowledge objectified not just at the center of the production process but in all of our laps.

Form matches content in this case. “Jumping the shark” is nothing other than a drastic shift in operative paradigms, a new operating system, new job, or job description. The modern cultural forms of reboots and mash-ups (zombies with Jane Austen, and so on) seems strikingly appropriate to an economy of precarity and shifts in careers. The cultural logic of late capitalism may have been pastiche and irony, but the logic of real subsumption is the mash-up.

The situation of the Dollhouse also intersects with the situation of the informatization of production in its very layout. On the bottom floor are the dolls, confined in cells and waiting to be reprogrammed with the next set of instructions. They are the ultimate machine, utterly reprogrammable; or rather, they are the brain as machine, its fundamental plasticity and neoteny put to work: they are permanent children. On the floors above are their programmers, who work in an environment reminiscent of stories of tech start-ups before the dot-com bust: informal dress and a ready supply of snack foods and games. While the dolls are completely confined, the programmers are not only free but they constantly draw from a reservoir of knowledge that is freely available: flows of knowledge that depend on confinement in order to function. (Bittorrent sites coexistence with prison like compounds producing ipods.) Above the programmers is the CEO’s office, modern wood interiors and a stocked bar. Security traverses the entire structure.

This is at least how things appear as the outset, but as the show progresses it becomes more and more clear that this vertical model, itself a kind of panopticon, is permeated by horizontal flows of power. The real power does not move from top to bottom, at least not exactly. As I wrote earlier, the dolls only appear to be at the bottom of the hierarchy, they are actually apparatuses for the capture of the dreams and fantasies of the people on the outside. This was at least the second phase of the show, Dollhouse 2.0, in which everyone and anyone could be a doll, a programmed individual, or working under the influence of a doll. It was an image of complete control; not the complete control of the dollhouse compound, which operated through the rather crude technologies of surveillance cameras but a more flexible form of control (in Deleuze’s sense) that operated on memories, desires, and fantasies. As the technology progresses, however, even this control falls apart and the final version of the show, Dollhouse 3.0, suggests a future in which the ability to reprogram anyone and everyone with ease leads to a breakdown of society.

There is thus a certain sense in which Dollhouse presents a new version of the apocalypse, one that is explicitly technological and political rather than ecological. Thus, breaking with the pattern of contemporary popular culture where the apocalypse is either ecological or sublime, unexplained. In Dollhouse the apocalypse is brought about by the excess of information over subjectivity. This is the apocalyptic vision shared by such thinkers as Bernard Stiegler who point to a breakdown of the basic conditions of subjectivation brought about by the speed of communication and new technologies. To quote Berardi again, “The great majority of humanity is subjected to the invasion of the video-electronic flux, and suffers the superimposition of digital code over the codes of recognition and of identification of reality that permeate organic cultures.” Or, to put all of this in a more mundane context, it is the nightmare scenario of various columnists and pundits who predict a fragmented blogosphere of various subcultures (tea baggers, 9/11 conspiracy believers, etc.) who are entirely programmed by their specific media. However, this vision of the apocalypse is also very old, with all of the trappings of the Mad Max films, shoulder pads and a massive armored truck. Thus, in the end, revealing how stilted our imagination of the new actually is. Or, perhaps we are more programmed than we would like to think.