“There’s something to be said for the thought exercise of imagining where the commodity form, left to accelerate according to its own one-track mind, would end up. Its replacement of recalcitrant labor by capital would become absolute, making labor obsolete, like a vestigial organ. If only there were enough energy and resources left. It might even make not only labor but the ruling class obsolete. A whole planet ticking over via silicon encrusting bits! But this is only a thought exercise, a fatal strategy in theory. In practice there’s not enough planet left to entertain such an idea. Besides: technology may have agency but it isn’t absolute. It is pressed this way and that by competing class interests. Even when it seems like alternate paths to the future are foreclosed, there’s always struggle, internal differentiation. There’s always points that can be prized open.”

As an update to the last post, Limn has published a fascinating political history of data mining methods:

The history of statistical methods has always been plagued by a tension between the aims of pure knowledge and social criticism on the one hand, and practical application in the fields of social governance or commerce on the other. This being said, Benzecri’s data analysis and more recent methods of data mining cover the entire spectrum, from the most radical criticism up to and including political and commercial endeavors. It is also another and more serious way to pose that naïve question of the 1970s: is correspondence analysis leftist or rightist?

Alain Desrosières, Mapping the Social World: From Aggregates to Individuals

The unintentional hilarity of well-meaning scientism:

“Even in one-shot interactions, humans are not as selfish as theory suggests,” write physicist-sociologist Dirk Helbing and colleagues. “A large body of experimental and field evidence indicates that people genuinely care about each other.”

Gets me all the time.

“Digital humanists are not even cool.”
“The German forest became the archetype for imposing on disorderly nature the neatly arranged constructs of science. Practical goals had encouraged mathematical utilitarianism, which seemed, in turn, to promote geometric perfection as the outward sign of the well-managed forest; in turn the rationally ordered arrangements of trees offered new possibilities for controlling nature. The tendency was toward regimentation, in the strict sense of the word. The forest trees were drawn up into serried, uniform ranks, as it were, to be measured, counted off, felled, and replaced by a new rank and file of lookalike conscripts. As an army, it was also designed hierarchically from above to fulfill a unique purpose and to be at the disposition of a single commander. At the limit, the forest itself would not even have to be seen; it could be “read” accurately from the tables and maps in the forester’s office.”
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State

A few more words on Ray Kurzweil.

His whole teleological (if not chiliastic) argument for the inevitable coming of the singularity rests on his idiosyncratic interpretation of Moore’s Law, the often-cited 1965 observation by engineer Gordon E. Moore that semiconductor capacity doubles roughly every two years leading to an exponential increase in computing power over the last few decades.

In Kurzweil’s hands this observation turns into the Law of Accelerating Returns, positing an unstoppable exponential increase in technological ‘progress.’ Graphs of exponential functions make for compelling visual arguments, and it comes as no surprise, then, that even as distinguished a sociologist as Anthony Giddens would refer to Kurzweil’s futurological vision when talking about humanity’s challenges in the 21st century.

Interestingly, one of the most substantive engagements with Moore’s Law comes from the most unexpected of places, namely critical accounting theory (wherein ‘critical’ stands for asking what people in organisations actually do rather than accepting the normative ideal taught in the business school).

In their 2007 paper on capital budgeting in the US  semiconductor industry, Peter Miller and Ted O’Leary effectively argue that Moore’s Law needs to be understood as performative. Rather than expressing some sort of natural tendency of semiconductor development, Moore’s Law partakes in the construction of the reality it purports to describe.

In the 1980s the US were lagging behind Japan in the semiconductor field. Moore’s Law formulated an imperative spelt out and operationalised within technology roadmaps that guided a concerted effort by government agencies, research institutions and private business each of which had to make budgeting decisions according to their specific rationalities. As a  ‘mediating instrument,’ the Law linked science and economy by

shaping the fundamental expectations of an entire set of industries about increases in the power and complexity of semiconductor devices, and the timing of these increases.

Simply put, the Law acted as an argument for making certain capital allocation decisions appear more plausible than others in the context of the American interest in maintaining geopolitical leadership through technological advantage. Moore’s Law, then, was as much a description of technological change as it became operative in facilitating this very change as an effect of a historically specific, complex assemblage of material and human agencies. Thus, the current trajectory of technological change is no destiny but rather open to a reconfiguration of the agencies that bring it about.

While this might not come as too huge a surprise to those who followed the recent pragmatic and performative turns in social theory, the detailed analysis by Miller and O’Leary provides a powerful antidote against the impoverished account by Kurzweil and his followers. To Kurzweil, exponentially increasing computing power is no less than an expression of a general evolutionary tendency wherein the increasing fitness of organisms (itself a gross oversimplification) is lumped together with technological change leading eventually to the supercession of organism-based intelligence by artificial intelligence. His is a crudely biologistic determinism that absolves us of the responsibility to question the politico-economic dimension of current technological developments and completely neglects the historical contingencies affecting science and technology as social phenomena.

But I guess it helps filling the coffers of his church

Philosopher of mind Colin McGinn reviews Ray Kurzweil’s new book on the prospects of building an artificial brain (and thus artificial intelligence):

Here then is my overall assessment of this book: interesting in places, fairly readable, moderately informative, but wildly overstated.

That is a rather polite assessment. But even more interesting is what McGinn has to say about the computational metaphor in contemporary neuroscience:

Even in sober neuroscience textbooks we are routinely told that bits of the brain “process information,” “send signals,” and “receive messages”—as if this were as uncontroversial as electrical and chemical processes occurring in the brain. We need to scrutinize such talk with care. Why exactly is it thought that the brain can be described in these ways? It is a collection of biological cells like any bodily organ, much like the liver or the heart, which are not apt to be described in informational terms.

Which is precisely what Lily Kay’s and Katherine Hayles’ work implied all along: we are not walking information processors but fleshy, embodied beings. The computational metaphor is nothing but a metaphor, and it may even turn out to hinder our better understanding of how brain is related to mind. Deal with it, transhumanists. 

“Alarmed by the passage of the new law against sodomy, Whyte wrote to Stalin directly, offering a case for why homosexuality should not be outlawed in a Communist society. In the letter, Whyte relies on a combination of Marxist-Leninist theory and scientific theories of “constitutional homosexuality”; he uses himself as an example of a homosexual who is also a good Communist. Stalin read Whyte’s letter, marked it with the words “an idiot and a degenerate,” and had it archived.”
“People wanted these things, they must do, or the shops wouldn’t be selling them - and yet Patrick was so far from wanting any of them for himself that he felt it wasn’t the things for sale which were useless, but he himself. Either the things or the person looking at them were in the wrong place; but the things so clearly belonged here that it must be the person who was lost and redundant.”
John Lanchester, Capital

Sci-fi action short featuring detective Foucault and the Bentham grid. Hilarious.

Tech-happy speculative capitalism: that awkward moment when you can’t tell whether this is about a real company or just a cheesy video game promotion.

“The politician forever balances information, funding, threats, kindness, politeness, loyalty, disloyalty, and the perpetual search for ways and means. In this respect the politician is the model for every sort of actor. To declare oneself untainted by strife between conflicting forces is to deny that one is an actant. Yet there are only actants, forever lost in friendships and duels. Any attempt to see actants as the reducible puppets of deeper structures is doomed to fail. The balance of force makes some actants stronger than others, but miniature trickster objects turn the tide without warning: a pebble can destroy an empire if the Emperor chokes at dinner. Forces are real, and real tigers are stronger than paper ones, but everything is negotiable. There is no pre-established harmony among the actants in the world, but only a post-established harmony. The current order of things is the result of a long history of negotiations and midnight raids of one actant against the weak points of others. It takes work to subordinate serfs to the Czar or equations to a theory. The world could have been otherwise. But neither is there merely a random play of chance, since the Tartar hordes do not vanish from the Middle East with a wave of the hand. Harmony is a result, not a guiding principle.”
Graham Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics
The contemporary art inflation as visualised by Lev Manovich’s cultural analytics lab. Reminds me of a recent study by art sociologist Séverine Marguin on Berlin’s Projekträume, i.e. artist-run spaces, which have seen similar exponential growth.

The contemporary art inflation as visualised by Lev Manovich’s cultural analytics lab. Reminds me of a recent study by art sociologist Séverine Marguin on Berlin’s Projekträume, i.e. artist-run spaces, which have seen similar exponential growth.