timespace coordinates: somewhere in the near future in a high tech billionaire Arctic retreat in Iceland.
Created by Brit Marling & Zal Batmanglij
Suffice it to say after Netflix killed “The OA” everyone must have eagerly waiting for news any news regarding any new production from the Brit Marling & Batmanglij duo – IMHO one of the most ambitious, consistent, and surprising actors/screenwriters/director collaborations in the Anglophone world.
In an era where franchises driven by algorithms churn more of the same, Brit and Batmanglij single-handedly introduced memorable “high-concept” SFs thrillers into the cinema world of the early 21st century. What I enjoy is that they never dispense with the emotional valences – even if they’re intelectual provocateurs (especially considering the formats). We on Timespacewarps are fans of their work and have been following it from early on (even on our previous blog entries – Planetneukoln for those who know). Starting with the startling Sound of My Voice (2011)– two documentary investigators go under cover for their scopp but instead get their certitudes checked by a charismatic cult leader (played by Brit Marling herself) allegedly coming from the future. The same intensity and emotional palette colors the doppelgänger encounters of Another Earth (2011) . Contemporary entanglements and a continuing preoccupation with under cover reporting, activism, violent action vs non-violent civil disobedience, dirty deals of corporate crime, private agencies – abound in the slick espionage SF drama The East (2013) that I totally recommend as an appetizer for the rest of their work. I think the Brit-Batmanjlij collaboration and involvement with The OA has produced so many threads, so much speculation & online debates that is makes it impossible to sum up. There is even a caricature version – where one expects non-sequiturs and portals, speaking octopuses at every step. Yes, Murder At the End of the World does not deliver in that sense, because it is a more subtle and muted beast. All that makes it impossible for me here to summarize or discuss the cult following they have garnered over the yearsbut you get the idea.
Murder at the End of the World is certainly a flawed product, but hey the had to play it safe after what happened to the OA I guess. I could go on criticizing the somehow worn-out premise (rich obnoxious guy inviting or challenging his competitors in a remote mansion), disjointed often filler storylines, masked assassins (think Ghostface but with anti-face recognition mask), claustrophobic situations, and an out-of-ordinary cast (of somehow unnerving) misfits and entrepreneurs.
It’s also a show about how technology permeates the everyday life of the super-rich – rich kids play with VR or AR environments largely outside of the purview of their parents, rings function as personal keys and insect robots are digging more underground retreats or special extreme weather suits. From the beginning, the non-linear plot moves from the present readings of a book with events about past to the past events themselves, or between a subplot in the US desert where murder after murder brings us closer to the serial killer – a cis-romance sleuthing of two young charismatic (Gen Z) hacker and a sexy artist-activist that will get famous, split up and be invited in the future by the rich tech billionaire. If this whodunit murder drama in the Arctic retreat of white expanses and majestic almost lifeless landscapes attracts you in any way, then feel free to watch.
You can also watch it just for the visual and emotional kicks this might deliver because the stark surroundings and deadly nature end up being the perfect background for various murders and medical situations (including immortality dreams of the rich). The series is not so much about conclusions, or solving the murders, but about certain obsessions, and a generalized contemporary vulnerability, of being both strong and very weak at the same time. Of being technically adept and not being able to prevent crimes from unfolding. The ending is not about the impending End of the World, but about places at the end of the world that are being colonized by the rich in their wish to decouple and insulate themselves from the troubles of a sacrificed majority. Such modulations of (climate) and emotional changes provoke strange encounters and bizarre romantic relationships (think Elon Musk and Grime), strange bedfellows compounded by omnipresent affordances, of the grid ecological terrorists (that nevertheless turn out to not be very effective). Ok, there under constant surveillance under ‘surveillance capitalism’ but watching the repetitive loops and pans of surveillance cameras is mind-numbingly boring. Murder At the End of the World makes it clear how our world is being drenched by audiovisual recording and playback technologies.
The hacker sub-genre has a certain revival with Mr. Robot, and Murder At the End of the World does put an effort to bring gender balance into the mainly manly hacker geek den. It does this credibly and excitingly in my opinion, although one would prefer more from the main hacktivist played by Marling.
If there’s also real (full automation) and productivity out there, it’s not very sure how it will benefit the rest of humanity meaning lots of mining by robot swarms up North (the new warming climate is actually profitable for the super-rich). It’s also one of the few media productions that depicts activists in a sympathetic way. Scientists turned activists in a positive light and not straight away as eco terrorists or renegades or Luddytes or anarcho primtivists.
Disappearing or not leaving digital traces is either a rich man’s ability or the ability of a hacker to delete or blur oneself and skip recordings times or hack into heavily AI-assisted environments, even if this in the end brings us no agency or no real way to change the past. Solving murders seems to be a collective procedural thing – also crowd-sourcing sleuthing to former victims or a growing online community of serial killer hunters.
I am not so convinced about the detective genre in general in the 21st century, but if murder mystery drama thriller is your thing, go for it.
This miniseries leaves more questions than it answers. I also get the sense that it is a vehicle for the major issues of today (the exterminist capitalist tendencies and the villainous libertarian billionaire ‘geniuses’ building luxury bunkers in remote areas outside of any accountability), US/CN competition over technological hegemony, fears over AI black-boxing, etc In a way it all goes against deductive reasoning in a way. It is Agatha Christie and it isn’t at the same time, because it rejects the usual sense-making mechanisms of this modernist genre – all the big mysteries seem solved, identifying and recognizing does quite work and in the end, it is a new ‘kind’ of culprit altogether (collective guilt?). And maybe transforming it into a personal family drama of a rich asshole is the best way to get people’s attention, who knows?
Feeling we are more dependable than ever on the benevolence of the rich entrepreneurs, and the unwanted tech Web3 “free” gifts, blockchain-specific technologies (DAOs, DeFi, NFTs) and uberization they are raining on top of us, while processes and algos that most of us do not understand or harness have free-range – is the larger theme here. Maybe a crime story is just the surface icy layer (everything is quite icy despite the high emotions) and maybe the drama leads us somewhere beyond the sleuthing whodunit of murdered activists. What is the most major crime story of our times? Well, we could well argue the actual murder case is the ever-worsening climate emergency. But that is eminently no mystery. No sleuthing to be done, no uncertainties, no whodunit from the future to the past, because we now know that since 1979 experts at Exxon Mobile were already warning about the warming greenhouse effect of the planet. So, nothing there to uncover in the snow. We know before long who the culprits and the denialists were.
1. Do you think that imagining the future could be the first step to contribute in manifesting it?
First, let’s not limit the power of imagination, this “capacity” to imagine to just our common use of it as only pertaining to humans, a unique human faculty or a particular ability. Just a capacity of the capacious. A fantabulous happy extension of an evolved cognition, the marked and significant difference of lionized primates, such as humans used to feel as their branch diverged from other related species.
Let’s imagine that imagination is certainly more widely found and more basic than expected – a precondition to all the other “higher” faculties regarded by many as superior or distinctive.
For me and for others it feels more and more important to be able to accept and speak for example about bacteria or non-sapient blue-green algae in these nearly frivolous, imaginative terms. There is a comics from 1979 based on ideas by Dr Timothy Leary, a Neurocomics that treats the primordial soup as an irreverent cocktail of excitable ingredients, utterly promiscuous, and imaginatively spilling over (pls check the digital version here https://timespacewarps.wordpress.com/2021/01/27/1760/ ).
Let us see how we can question our own favorite evolutionary just-so stories, stories that get constantly remade. What about a story that shows how our particular transformation was achieved historically from distantly related, non-neuronal, brainless beginnings? Let us understand, with our current brains the way of being in the world of organisms that enjoy their lives without a central nervous system.
What do you do with this “imagination” that presupposes a complete lack of imagination around itself?
It would be worthwhile investigating how we can recognize or include the manifestation of an imagination that is clearly phylogenetically and epigenetically overflowing, one that complicates the arbitrary borderlines of a standard neuro- intelligence model. A more gradual and universal one. One that would put to shame our supposed neurotypical preferences. And even as this model gets more and more untenable, it tends to slide, captivated and kidnapped, lured by the supposedly lower ‘concrescent’ reality of the world.
With this background of unequal distribution hovering around us – a (preposterous) scarcity of imagination in the history of biological life that became the main tale told by the life sciences, we have arrived at a moment of crossroads. I considered my contact with STS (Science and Technology Studies) and history of science important because it made me question the very restricted and canonical histories told by the life sciences about themselves or as transmitted by generations and generations of biology manuals.
Otherwise, we keep risking remaining conceptually blocked in our physio-chemical understanding, blindfolded by the dominance of one domain, resisting all those ideas arising out of various domains of the evolving life sciences, losing our chance to keep up with all the new discoveries being made all the time.
Some call it a “Crisis of the Imagination”. I do not know if it is a crisis or not, but it would be a mistake to attribute it by default to the human, or Germaine to the fine arts, therefore entirely and exclusively human or humanistic. A crisis is only one if it keeps mired in just coffee talk about quantum physics and string theory while forgetting about various levels of symbiosis levels, of the role played by extremophile Archeobacterial lifeforms living in impossible (for us) conditions, or about the iconic role played by Tardigrades, seen everywhere online and offline, seemingly the perfect pre-adapted for life in outer space and pop SF series such as Star Trek.
It is important to see how we get socially constrained and so strict when and if we imagine a future, a common future imagined not just by some bipedal apes. Imagination is somewhere else then, especially if it does not help us imagine another world. Imagination is an agential and tangentially unpredictable mode, actively and reactively involved in emanating, speculating, fabulating, emitting “other kinds” of worlds.
If we refer strictly to the patriarchal and systemically racist capitalism we currently participate in, one that has subjugated and exploited billions and billions of species on this planet crushing this world in its grasp, it feels more impossible or unachievable than ever to exercise our imagination. It becomes very easy to imagine why we live materially in our very own flesh and bodies the closing in of a creaking opportunity window without being able to do something about it.
Our current worldview, where other worlds have been condemned to stand on the losing side of the equation, prefers the word “unfit” – a term that puts all in the same box as maladaptive, improbable, wasteful or impossible. This strictly Adaptationist worldview is more and more maladaptive itself, and I mean here that is presupposes this fitting in as essential and unavoidable. To fit is to have to practically accept all injustices. This view justifies and rationalizes all economic and energophage inequalities, and is more and more evident and obscene by the day.
What do stromatolites dream of? What do stromatolites imagine while belching gases, not as individual cells, but as planet-wide biomass, on a grand scale collectively, contributing to a world of tomorrow under oxygenation/oxidation just a few billions of years away?
Can you identify in these bubbles of inklings of an imagination floating during a period almost impossible to imagine in human cortical terms, that made possible our ‘humaness’ that is still narrowly defined as western and whose understanding limits itself to a rusty technoscientific imaginary.
A lack of imagination that can barely communicate the vastness and scaling necessary to assess the cumulative effects of millions of exhausts pipes and changes that do not take place during millions but decades (our own lifetimes)?
Technoscience stimulated by imagination for profit is making itself responsible for the unfair mass extermination of countless species. On the other hand, it is a science that has offered as an unprecedented and vertiginous look into “deep time” and has tried to familiarize us with the hidden contribution of unknown ones. Of course, there is countless other non-modern of pre-modern examples from non-Eurocentric societies from all around the world that cherished and acknowledged this overwhelming contribution by other creatures, beings, entities, spirits.
Science is only now finally recognizing the collective work of inhuman, non- more than human (more than fungus, more than plant etc) ones, a work that produced this outer protective layer calle atmosphere. A layer where we started walking and became conscientious of late, without therefore asking ourselves who made this protecting shield that has protected us and other creatures from most of the cosmic rays or UV radiation during millions of years.
This atmospheric or climatic imagination implies the apparition of a future where free-floating cells dividing continuously got stuck to each other, never alone anymore and only sporadically and dangerously autonomous inside their larger organismic units (see for ex our current understanding of the evolution of cancer cells).
These cells, meanwhile, started showing behaviors of a vaguely coordinated organized kind, a quorum-sensing that took life to another level than mere individualities, making waving coordination into a “ciliary collective walk”.
The very first levels of organization that enabled early movements appear as a disequilibrium of hundreds of microscopic ciliated cells in a gradient field – as the movements made today by multicelullar model organism Trichoplax adhaerens, considered one of the most basal metazoans.
Our extremely complicated brains are now unable to grasp why there is no need for brains to obtain the first cellular coordination of millions of cells, yet today we definitely struggle to obtain large scale coordination in a Ministry for the Future (as per Kim Stanley Robinson), so that we can preempt a nearly inevitable situation: the climate crisis. Difficult to perceive, to conceive and start imagine this very basic advancement of tissues or differentiated cellular lines as they search their spatial-temporal momentum…
2. Does a critical-analytical perspective of the past have a constructive role in modeling the future in your view?
I am agreeing with those that say we should try to circumscribe the finitude of such a total future – a totalizing future such as the one promoted by a series like Star Trek let’s say (even if I continue watching and enjoying it!). The series was bold enough to include gigantic tardigrade-like extraterrestrial beings navigating a mycelial network that holds the galaxies together, or a character called Stamets based on actual mycologist and mushroom enthusiast Paul Stamets. On the other hand, one should embrace the possibility that one is always partial, in the sense of being part and partial whenever exploring such present possibilities and future impossibilities.
Let us keep a big warning about a future that imposes one single unchanging version of the future upon all other species and the rest of humanity.
Let say a unique future based on just such a “warp drive” invention, i.e. the impact of one invention that pushes inevitably everything into the Faster Than Light era. Yes, it is an imaginary invention, but one that directs exclusively towards a total future. This is something if not entirely problematic, then full of lacunae that are not immediately noticeable, especially when that totalization is made around a technologically privileged group or one single invention.
Maybe a philosopher would say that such an analytic or critical perspective is a direct follow-up to the post-Kantian heritage that has divided western philosophy into suburbia of the mind with separated continental traditions and analytical ones.
I am not a philosopher so I will not go into detail. I will ask those interested to ask themselves in what why does any type of future depend on something more humble than what we have taken into account, even given our lofty evolutionary position, a minor something that does not even get mentioned in those version of a totalizing future.
Here is this simple observation by Charles Mudede, writing on the Seatle Slog, about the absence of green plants on the spaceships of the United Federation of Planets (the main supranational stellar union mentioned in the ST universe). Plants, as the primary providers of energy on the planet, or at least on this planet, are completely circumvented, ignored, overlooked, etc.
One of the most symptomatic under-currents of SF was cyberpunk sub genre that gets crystallized in the 1980s during the ballistic missile race btw the East and West blocks and during the first massive wave of neoliberal restructuring. As a genre it appears at a precise place – the city of Vancouver, Canada. It is a future placed in a city where the past is not perceived as surpassed, unreachable, deleted and where layers of time coexist, where you have to make use and make do with what has existed or will exist, old or new, low tech or high tech (here taking my cues from C. Mudede).
At the same time we are now in a better position to see why the Silicon Valley Californian future is not at all somber and opaque, oppressively corporate-like in the classical cyberpunk narratives, but more like a transparently corporate habitat, inexhaustible exhausting wellness and profoundly libertarian and anti-syndicalist mood more akin to The Circle movie from 2017.
Nevertheless, the cyberpunk inheritance makes it clear why we are not just neighbors to our actual neighbors or our actual flights of imagination, but neighbors to all the crazy rich and all the business park dreams on the whole planet.
It is important to understand that this cyberpunk, initially Canadian, does not repudiate temporal layering and temporal intermingling. It does permit the persistence of a constantly perishing present, temporal complicity towards futuralism, especially when PKD’s obsolescent androids and exclusive premium robotic sheep coexist.
3 How do you see the role of contemporary culture in relation with the future?
I think I partially answered this above.
Contemporary culture is too much “culture” and this search for the eco-critical dimensions that includes laboratory cultures (as in tissue cultures or yogurt cultures) comes with very meager offerings and maybe overly defined by Danone possibilities and lack of funds for blue-sky research, with a preponderance of big tech lobbies.
From Raymond Williams we have learned how difficult it is to define culture, risking to leave out somebody, abusing and emptying this word while at the same time diminishing conflicts or inherent transformations.
It is important to see how – the future is totally decoupled from the new or the truly new, in total divergence from that future promised in genre movies, in the sense that every new thing ‘is more of the same’. This monetized future is already portioned, auctioned, packaged and sold using cryptocurrencies and complex financial instruments (the so-called fintech), some of which are actually called futures. Crypto currencies belie their underlying materiality and so manage to escape our attention because we tend to forget that they run on physical infrastructure, on computers that are sometimes fueled by leftover fossil fuel somewhere at the Polar or Arctic North like in one Canadian advert trying to attract new investments.
Even if we feel placed at the bottom end of financialization, we can take this recent campaign by the BRD bank “You are the Future” and see in what way the pressures of contemporary culture (represented by financial institutions) amplify the surrounding climatic and ecological pressures on individuals, on personal payment plans, etc. and especially on this recurrent YOU – as unitary, ethnopolitical, indebted or having to pay rate till forever.
Everything is still sadly transposed in terms of you or him, or her.
It remains to be seen how much is this going against a situation that is in no way easy to isolate, locally or individually, or how slow and after how much struggle some populations and expressions, ecologies, bodies, genders, multiplicities etc. will carve themselves a space in contemporary consciousness and attention.
I think that SF in the sense of speculating and fabulating, or as speculative fiction, fantastic or scientific speculation has this role of culturally translating for both interlocutors, exactly like a device from the SF movies that can deliver meanings almost involuntarily from one extraterrestrial language into another. No unadulterated transmission, but a transmission with twists and modifications – creatively and imperfectly translating realities that necessarily surpass the individual level, the human limits of perception, especially if dealing with social, scientific and technical transformations that are impossible to calibrate.
4. Do you think that the study of the future will have a constructive impact if it would get included in the educational curriculum?
I would definitely prefer to alternate this impeding hype, the pressing and oppressing futurological drive with other things.
Maybe it is high time to include in the school curriculum something about speculative fiction instead, going back to your first question.
Embracing futurology has to be nuanced, especially if one refers to a type of future forecasting typical of the banking sector, or the start-up kind. We should have the utmost care and reservations here, taking into account the fact that everything that has to do with prognosis and forecasting from is completely engaged in ensuring the impossibility of a common future.
Futurology as packaged by tech pundits and tech gurus is easy to find, because the world seems to be full of quite myopic visionaries, even dangerous ones, in the sense that uncertainties are nowadays packaged as manageable risks and externalized on others. We do not need more singularity salesmen, or agents of a more or less conscious optimization that touches upon everything but does not change anything fundamentally.
We should always be wary and vigilant about this futurology frustrated by the borders of this world and in search of tax evasions, off-shore futurology of neglect that has become a sort of scourge, an exercise in externalizing risks on the backs of others, offering cheap predictions on demand (*or expensive one if one takes into account the habitats and lives lost in exchange): a simple business deal dressed up as a very rudimentary SF.
First, education itself is left without a future.
All those with a degree end up without a viable future, jobless, without any pension plans and ready to fall trough the gaps of a system that prepares highly qualified people for bullshit jobs. I refer directly to those jobs discussed by the late David Graeber in his book and familiar to most of us today. Even if I don’t have such a job at the moment, the clock is ticking, and I will sure join in, because there is nothing else for me.
You do not have a future, because this is the future of work, of the learned skills turned worthless in today’s terms, of careers based on educational systems have become all a subject of speculative investments and divestment. Today at the stock exchange one can bet on the lack of future of certain careers and what one is learning and hoping to graduate in. All the unprofitable lessons, the obsolete school manuals they are based on, the slowness of re-qualification or costliness of retraining get correlated by algorithms to academic disciplines and careers with loosing odds.
At the same time, the educational systems have dealt only very late with the neurodivergent, the non-neurotypical, with minds that do not obey or coincide with what was considered standard everywhere in the past. Also, very, very late we are finally starting to see jobs that take into account the autism spectrum disorders or an educational curriculum that is more inclusive in this sense.
The way our studies are being sponsored and financed always in regard to a certain future income, of either being coupled with future “liquidity” or not, gets everyone reduced to constant payment status or the incapacity to be such a source of regular payments. It gets tied down to the incapacity to reimburse in time the debt accrued during your education years.
Not only is risk calculated so that investors or shareholders would be repaid – only then you are ‘worth it’, or incentivized, only then you become part of the “meritocratic” scheme, only and only if your future career can be monetized so that you can enjoy today a scholarship or be worth all those tuition borrowings.
Betting is not just the usual corner shop betting joint, that one is just a small picturesque neighborhood get-together. We have a much more insidious betting on the potential lack of future of a large majority of school students or of students whose education was devalued from the start, or that becomes just a reason for upping the bets.
It is easier and easier to bet on the certainty of educational failure, on the loosership of certain disciplines or the obsolescence of pedagogic systems that have spent money and time to train us humans in the past and the present. Let’s just think about such classical domains as the natural sciences, or the dwindling number of field scientists, the disenfranchised humanist or liberal arts, as well as all the vocational schools of the socialist times.
We also have today this creative sector – already the main betting horse of the new economy, on one side completely fragilized and highly dependent on applications and all manner of extra financial supplements and on the other – the poster independent sector of new, so-called smart cities. All these shrinking and polluted cities that need to reinvent themselves constantly in order to attract investors and clean their image (what happens in Timisoara “and soon in the whole country!” to rhyme in with the Revolution 1989 slogan).
Sometimes the students who can afford the costs of high theory of highly-rated teachers and interesting courses – are already from the privileged classes, those that come from rich milieus from the very start (I am saying this because of acquaintances that do this kind of teaching in Germany, so it is not just an Eastern European thing).
On the other hand, there is so much educational material online, so many videos, tutorials, fabulous YT channels – be it philosophy, transgender studies, dialectics, history of science, technology, political economy etc cultural studies, biohacking etc.
Yet it is true that one gets to them when already exhausted, bored and disillusioned.
If you do not represent an investment, a vested interest, you are suffering all sorts of consequences, mental and bodily ones.
On the other side the paradox is that nobody dictates your curriculum any longer, you can choose what and how to built up your ‘looser’ educative kit, for the very fact that such courses do not represent an investment, no winning bet, and you can maybe use this false freedom to combine the most unwieldy materials and contradictory things. For example let us imagine a course based on SF speculations about education from the future and immediate examples about educational betting or critical theory and afro pessimist thinkers.
I can tell you I am working on something that I hope will never end.
Because you specifically called it project – I will pick up on this complete mess of a word, on the fact that we already describe this way our work or this type of structure where we find ourselves no matter what.
When you say ‘project based’ you are employing the neoliberal newspeak – trying to dissimulate this type of nomadism from project to project for what it is – a complete disaster, a way to embellish and make it sound cool, while it is actually a common disease and a currently incurable one.
And I want to include here that blind tech-nomadism, of carrying your workspace, working from a distant beach, no matter if you work for NATO, for humanitarian purposes, or for the election campaign in another country, using your skills no matter what the requirements, exactly the way Cambridge Analytica did it (just one infamous case among many I guess).
Why are these things valued in this way on the job market? Why are such beach remote working positions made possible etc promoted in adverts with the promise of a fat paycheck that helps you jump planes like a DJ from country to country? Well, this is sure one of the most toxic and polluting things existing on the planet today.
I am also migrating from Bucharest to Berlin and back and have tried to keep this come n go at a minimum. Very few can afford a fixed place. Very few are employable in anything but on a project base, where and when the project season is on. These projects are a euphemism for free-lancing, a reality that hides a cynical mercenary lifestyle without illusions and without much future talk. You are good for everything and good for nothing.
This sez a lot about the type of obsolescence that these projects imposed because whenever finished or evaluated, they get sent away and behind there is not much left. Eventually, just online crumbs that you can barely match or explain or replicate.
It is a research literature that is cherishing a variety of ideas and authors, a SF that has become truly global (what did we know about Indian, Arab, Korean, pan-African SF 50 odd years ago, or even about a wider understanding of Easter European SF?).
Partly vaccinated in this way we can dive into deeper waters, catch hold of mutations, frog leaps and qualitative jumps and acknowledge their relevance for now as well as for the future.
In its short version, I spontaneously caught it on TV, during one of the Minderiads (mineriade in RO) from Bucharest in the 1990s. From the streets we received our daily screen portions of televised audio-visual TV realism. On one of those Mineriads that remain in the collective memory as brutal and violent, from a group of miners brought from the Vale Jiului coal mining towns, one turns around towards the camera and is asked by the TV crew what are his demands.
I kid you not! I want to take this minor anecdote and make into something quite serious and fundamental. In my regard – this TV fragment does not just reflect the cheesy, dunk humor and naivete of those years.
For me this quite provocative response from a young miner arriving in the Romanian capital city from the mining towns that would soon be ruined and shut down, give us a first tectonic sign that something is massively changing behind the scenes – that behind these televised events there is the transition from one industry to the next.
How does a miner from Valea Jiului, from the core fossil fuel extractive industries, from the soon to be dis-empowered miner syndicates – become a fan?
How does the fan get born from the settled soot of the working class? A fan, let us not forget, that is engrossed by a US-Canadian series about biodroids, immortalist bosses, digitization, experiments gone rogue, abandoned cities, lots of rusty iron, intelligent machines and the first decent 3D effects meant to give body to a vision of dystopic dimensions of a specific nature. A no-future, post-industrial landscape for people that had to deal not only with the post-human but also with a world of post-work. Where does the factory move, how does one consume, relax and gets fascinated by the history of one’s own disintegration, of “restructuring” and its own crumbling representation?
More importantly maybe, what does it mean to loose a world? What does it mean to live trough the disappearance of your world, and what does it mean to not find a place any longer in it?
From a working-class hero he becomes on TV a villain while watching it live on premium hour. We notice this shift, from a representative of those fundamental means of production, from a worker from a glorified industrialism branded almost overnight as polluting and unwanted but which gave him a collective bargaining power when confronting the dehumanizing mechanisms and pressures of capital, a shift that places him not in the back seat – but in front seat of an unwanted future.
How does this fan almost instantly become jobless, media literate and tele-visually integrated at the same time entangled in a cinematic or computational mode of production (to use the Jonathan Beller’s terms). He transforms and is transformed in his own main opponent, in the class enemy of the newly green-washed electronic industries that evangelize their zero emission goals.
At the same time, he is becoming a prosumer fan with a Netflix subscription plan, a fanatic of online streamed series. He is ready to binge-watch, netflix & chill and eager to influence the production of his favorite series and shape his favorite titles, ready to feel entitled, even ready to start planning and organizing the next Comicon together with Kaufland in Bucharest. This puzzle I feel I am involved in since a few years, if not from the moment I have seen this fragment on TV during the 90s immediately after the Revolution, a fragment one should revisit and think with even now.
6. How do you see your profession/your projects in the future?
I think we can regroup all these together with the above question.
As mentioned I suffer from a constant de-professionalization, I forget what I use to do or am supposed to do, and have gotten to the situation where it is very hard to explain or to justify myself in front of those that ask me what are you working on actually, how much is your salary, where do you get your income? What did you work on? What do you want to do now, or want to do in the future?
I get the feeling that I refused or allowed myself to refuse too many jobs whenever I was offered them during the heyday of easy offerings, refusing this enviable possibility to settle in a particular institution. This has eloped me, so I cannot pretend I have an overview on my own doings and goings.
Most of the people I know already have their .com or .ro or have built more or less assiduously a career, a trajectory, a fixed base, more or less engaged in the management of the self-image. What I see with me is a cemetery of projects, shipwrecked blogs etc.
One important thing is when your friends drag on you, and I start to appreciate this more and more, even as you did it now with this interview. I think this has been one of your favorite methodologies all along, even if not systematically pursued. I appreciate it when somebody tries to involve, question me without a particular end-result, because I’ve become more and more skeptical about all these self-evaluations. I am talking about the flighty untimely moment when somebody comes and tells you to come and join in, let’s meet, let’s think about it together. Even when ghostwriting, mind you, or pretending to be an AI!
This while each is streamlining and bulldozing his yellow brick road towards solitude. If everyone tries to actualize – in the current default talk, you completely start feeling incapable of ever doing something together with others, and I also include myself in this bizarre situation.
I had the luck and joy to collaborate interuptedly with you, with Sebastian Big, with Declan Clarke, with Bogdan Otaku Gorganeanu, Alexandra Croitoru, Vasile Leac, Milos Jovanovic, the early trio Nanca/Cosm/Gontz as I knew them once, Mimi Salajean, Mihai Lukasz, Sara Lehn, Nita Mocanu, Candidatura la Presedentie, Lucas Cantori, Ovek Finn, Dyslex, Philou from Come N Go (or this is his core band for me), Mabento Makunouchi, Claudiu Cobilanschi, Anca Benera, Biroul Melodramatic, Valentina Desideri, Bezna, Kavdanska & Dilmana, Manuel & Brynjar, Mircea Nicolae & Victor Plastic (as I met them), Nicu Ilfoveanu, with Alt Art, Protocol Cluj, Tamtam, ODD, Mes 56, with Mort “braindead” la Creier, Ion Dumitrescu, Alienocen Outernational, Würtembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, Nae Timotei Drob, Nicolae Comanescu, Clubul Convivialis, Cristian Darstar, Utopiana, Szilard Miklos, Florentin Tudor from Rusu & Flore, Fundatia Tranzit Sibiu si Bucuresti, Colectia Energii Regenerabile de la Fractalia and much more in what reads like some bizarre automatic writing… many more that should have probably get mentioned here.
With many more I did not collaborate directly but had the pleasure to meet, contact and enjoy their company. I cherish the rare moments I tried to curate something in the past.
I enjoyed when Mihaela Dragan invited me to talk about the Romacene and SF. I was glad that the Arhiva de Sunet came over in Drumul Taberei hood to talk about sounds from Timisoara. I enjoyed talking with students about indie horror movies, starting from the Bodrog the movie experience. I regret not organizing a cozzzmonautica at the Cuca Festival (which I still hope I will). I truly enjoyed writing about the composer Octavian Nemescu for muzica imaginara, just before he departed this world.
I felt very good being invited by Gabi P.N.E.A. to contribute to his blog Timespacewarps as a place of churning and collating and trying out ideas, sounds, perceptual trajectories & apperceptual notions, all these un-hoped for splashes in growing data pools.
More and more difficult as this conviviality becomes – this communal labor is quite improbable, as an occasion to socialize outside the social platforms towards a common task as per Feodorov dwindle down. I really enjoy this co-opting, and try not to count them or to do any rankings – always glad to return the favor, whenever I get the nerve to involve others in return.
7. What is your relation with Artificial Intelligence, or with robots?
I think I just wrote something towards this end on the blog I am contributing to with Gabi. It is a discussion starting from the recent movie by the French video clip director Seth Ickerman, a sort of age-restricted musical video clip, mostly a retro SF biopunk full of sex magick and synthwave sounds by Carpenter Brut https://timespacewarps.wordpress.com/2021/08/24/1930-blood-machines-mini-series-2019
I even have a few quite amateurish recordings uploaded on a soundclound account, a sort of plunderphonics using some linux audio software from years back https://soundcloud.com/earth-evacuation-plan/data-recovery-foundation-tapes-i-choam-corporationplanet-kaitain I think that you can hear there how my relation with what we call today AIs or robots or entities has developed, since it takes into account not only the cinematic or gaming industry examples but all the imaginary spillover all around us.
We have somehow these retrograde AIs, stuck in their virtual asistant roles that hear you, peeping on you whenever you least expect it, although under surveillance capitalism you should expect it all the time. We worry about who or what is influencing us, but we never seem to worry how we influence AIs instead, in regard of the fact that they carry a lot more agency and decisive power nowadays, deciding over the chances of many other humans, because they integrate human cultural biases almost without regulation or filtering etc. although things started changing.
For those interested, I urge them to listen these recordings on earphones and try to imagine them as part of a memory implant, residual coaching of future employees from various fictional inter-planetary corporations. More than 6 years have passed since I made this sound collage with the track name – CHOAM Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles – exactly the corporation from Frank Herbert’s Dune that takes care of mining the spice.
So you see I am interested more about these secondary aspects, those that fall off the main equation, the way in which the very attention and buzz around “Intelligence Explosion” or the “Super Intelligence X-Risk” tends to monopolize informal meetings at the Davos conferences from Switzerland (a few years ago). I am interested in the way a paradox or mere speculation about AIs feeds into the fears of certain high-ranking, ultra rational communities characterized by efficiency and singularity search. How curious that their attention is being disturbed, grabbed or invaded by a future AI hyperstition like Rocco the Basilisk?!
You said how do you relate – I am interested in the relational at in its most fragile and remote, this delicate relationality, easy to break, the way these feeble connections are sometimes the most important ones, not the stronger and stable ones.
In the theory of networks – these wispy links would be the most important ones, NOT the verified and tested ones, those links for example that bind members of a conspirative group, members of clan, a family, of a mafia, of a political class, of a clique etc but those that can literally hang almost on one single strand of hair.
Another weak strong inter-relation that suddenly came to the foreground is the non-intelligent nature, a non-intelligence, a non- smartness that is very basic and gets upcycled by capitalism and especially by this growing traveling jet set.
I refer to the simple fact that COVID virus reached out so much of the planet using previous cheap flight networks, touristic routes, carried and pulled in this race that is extremely lopsided and with differing speeds of vaccination and mutation that gave rise to resistant strains that you could never call intelligent.
8. How do you see the relation between technology and nature in the future?
I think I got a problem with this relation that gets chocked by a tunnel vision of one single technology – let say lets say the choke-hold on our imagination that some historical technologies have got on our explanatory power.
The way our descriptions have helped in mistreating or exploiting the various sub-divisions of life, or the way such technologies have been used as misguided metaphors or as outdated models that got reified and retained with quite damaging material results.
There is this insidious feeling that I can let myself being carried along by a certain easiness or frivolity following in the steps of the ex-mathematician A N Whitehead and the many that have taken his hints in various directions – such as Isabelle Stengers or Steven Shaviro among others – maybe I can even call my friend Ion Dumitrescu one of those. Of Whitehead’s lack of contempt towards the role of feelings and generosity towards the new, inherent in his thinking. I am not carried by his very elaborate “scheme”, but taken on board by his very encouraging tone that tries to think against the grain, or in spite of all the dead weight of all those philosophical orthodoxies.
There is a new appetite, towards a certain new kind of realism – a realism that is measured and balanced by debates about the world in all its aspects. It is a new courage of being part of a tangible reality not completely dissociated from the absolutely intangible and bizarre universe described by the physical sciences.
Maybe this is one of the few available ways of avoiding the strictures of replication or testability typical for scientific positivism as well as a way to get ahead of the game that has chained theoretical physics to biases and aesthetic presuppositions (like those highlighted by Sabine Hossenfelder in her provocative Lost in Math: How Beautry Leads Phyisics Astray 2018).
As an example SF should not be regarded just as a metaphor, or just exclusively a literary genre, but something direct, inevitably shared all around us, with utmost concreteness. At the same time SF offers a insistent yet vague affective palette, a literal sensor or a tool kit that can help us learn and unlearn to live with technologies, in order to multiply the experiences of another cosmotechnology.
An example would be Jeff Vandermeer (Southern Reach trilogy, or the Borne cycle). Vandermeer, just to take this well-knowns example, a relative fresh one at that – that somehow mediates and stimulates the need for an environmental posthumanism, one that has not nostalgia towards anthropocentrism, free of the residues of human exceptionalism. And this, importantly, without being misanthropic or an adorer of Gaia theory that risks falling prey to green-brown eco-fascisms as many do indeed.
His proposal – if I can call it that is to be completely immersed, co-dependent and transformational, but not in the sense of current workplace flexploitation, and at the opposite pole of domineering suprematist transhumanism that is somehow ultra-humanist and exclusivist.
I see in Vandermeer’s offer a certain critical posthumanism, pessimist and mature at the same time, but also with a lot of trust in utopian promiscuity, enriched by ambiental transhumanism and multi-species perspectives that once theorized feel more sterile and sparse than what he and others manage in their books.
Borne is for example a living weapon – biotechnology that went rogue, a feral experiment conceived as a very complex weapon that starts growing and blooming, and that seems to have a very imprecise teleology or final purpose.
Nobody knows how it got here, or nobody can trace all the necessary gene manipulations that made it possible or those pathways that stimulated its evo-development. Even its metabolism is unclear. All that does not matter because you can never take back things, at a moment when you have to learn to share the world with so many orphaned creatures, so many orphaned biotechnologies, so many banished organisms. Banished by their supposed creators or patent owners, that have long since expired and disappeared or become extinct and unrecognizable.
We have to welcome and learn to accept new refugee ecologies – that have been weaned from the measurements and quantification of the human or their initial laboratory tests (even if there they had their petri dish cradle phase), because the lab itself does not exist any longer or has fused with the entire world.
The world of Jeff Vandermeer from Borne is a world full of beings that have sprung out of the Linnean taxonomy or have left the Natural History museum behind. They are unclassified beasts of an unnatural world, exuberantly dangerous, killing you softly, tearing you to pieces gently, forlorn artificial entities. They are in search for a den wherever they can. Borne is such a found bud, one that is incredibly and attractively full of hidden fangs, a budding poisonous something that is morphing and shapeshifting when you do not look at it.
It is important to understand that it can be incredibly dangerous and at the same time very friendly and cuddly in a terrible, very unfriendly world. Arriving with tendencies and desires in tow that cannot be confused with those of the people around it, no matter how much they wish to see themselves as adoptive parents.
It is an unrecognizable world, where we cannot impose our old pastoral values of forest brotherhood as in the Romanian saying and untouched wilderness sold as România Neîmblânzită (title of a recent Romanian documentary about the supposed wilderness of Romania). Borne is the exact opposite, a preparation for an overly domesticated world that is unbound and that is transforming us almost as quick as we transform it.
We have to let go of the Greek myth that tells us about the damaging things that escaped from Pandora’s Box, because it is senseless to let ourselves be oriented by recurrent mythopoetics and vintage cosmotechnics. We should maybe follow in the lead of what Yuk Hui mentioned in his extended essay, because it is high time to cultivate and learn new things, even from the Chinese technological accounts that seem strange and unusual to many.
We have to understand what to do with such inherited myths of Western progress. What is going on with all these escaped things, with all these unfruitful things, the denied, the disavowed ones, those that left us and got dispersed around the world.
Here I refer to inventions that were never fully ours or technologies invented by others, things that where never owned even by their inventors, brought far from their point of origin, inventions that became so universal and generalized that they entered some vast general intelligence or public domain of unknown and innumerable applications. Like the Chinese magnetic compass, this magnetism is at the core of magnetic resonance visualization technologies or part of the maglev (magnetic levitation) trains such as the Shanghai Transrapid, currently the oldest such commercial maglev tech still in operation.
9. What project are you dreaming about?
Common let us try and avoid the “project” dream – because of them we cannot dream any longer, they do drag on us. Let us rather search for new modes of conviviality – new ways of living co-dependently and not dependent, traveling around ourselves with our attention ecology widening, one gracious step to be able to parse time and space together, with modes of thinking and feeling, shared passions and also a shared disappearance.
Do not overshare – but try to join with unknown friends (or well-known ones) an unknown dusk, not a well-known rising of the sun. I am reading for a few years Dhalgren by Samuel R Delaney. It is a fabulous way to get lost in the thickets of that book, providing dense vertigo, stylistically flawless, written in 1975 one year before I was born. A shelter of a book for difficult and demanding times, an amorphous bloom that is nearly impossible to keep hold on to and that nevertheless offers numerous stepping stones towards a misaligned friendship and a living in between the cracks of this world.
“When MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini discovers that facial recognition does not see dark-skinned faces accurately, she embarks on a journey to push for the first-ever U.S. legislation against bias in algorithms that impact us all.”
This is probably one of the most important documentaries to address many issues that are not any longer strictly the domain of SF. Cod Bias is definitely within the bounds of any socially inflected SF worlds u can think of. Maybe it used to be just the figment of dystopian – Cold War tinged imagination, but now it is very much part of ours. Made me actually mentally revisit theat primordial Silicon Valley 1984 promo – the ad for Apple Macintosh PC released in December 1983. Feels puzzling how this new televised technological muscle was part of a much wider and concerted Reaganite response to the -(still) Socialist East. ‘Free World’ computing as easily turned and facing off the eponymous Orwellian 1984 villain, a drab, grey, docile citizenry of the standardized monolithic solid-state, the ideological ‘other’ where a repressive & monstrous surveillance apparatus – (be it Securitate/Stasi) enforced obedience & ‘rightminding’. Only that, in retrospect, the newly competitive Silicon Valley product was a launch-pad for a much wider privacy Dragnet and much more insidious scope and certainly fancier in looks & design. Buying into a system of personal, automated & generalized consumer surveillance that also brought the pretense of neutral, un-biased coding.
Coded Bias documentary is the strongest advocacy of algorithmic justice i have seen, watched or heard of. A critical introduction to the current algo-capitalistic trends & as well as some of the ways needed to counter act AI-supported disparities & disenfranchisement. It is no mystery that you actually need people from across the board, including industry ppl (call them what u want, ex- Quants/former flash trading brokers, tech renegades, whistle-blowers, technological deserters, industry watchdogs, etc). Yes, not only EFF members, STEMs, geeks and blerds, but also people from the social housing blocks, the hood, the street corner youngsters and those with migrant-background – those that are primary targets and have been already mis-measured, data stripped and data mined and whose bodies and faces are literally the training grounds of computational modernity. Most of them, are the unwilling informants and unpaid trainers of emerging tech deployments that under-girds surveillance capitalism.
One of the most important takes from this documentary – was for me the counter-intuitive demonstration that goes against old cyberpunk sayings (paraphrasing: ‘the future is already here but it is just unequally distributed’). In the 21st c we learn time and time again, that the 1%, or 10% or the rich, powerful and wealthy are not the future’s bleeding knife- since they have mostly lived live of unfettered privacy and non data retention. They are not a tested minority, and clearly not the ones who get first unwanted access beforehand and do not suffer the effects of those things that will get distributed later one a vast scale. In fact (as one of the participants of Coded Bias points out) – the post-apocalyptic poor, the unprotected, those with previous histories of discrimination, enslavement, incarceration, abusive family background, profiling etc those already under some state of surveillance, registration and control (ID checked mostly in terms of constituting some form of risk), are the ones who suffer the blunt of these new technologies.
They are the un-glamorized testers of unequal futures, and not the privileged rich beta testers that mostly seem to opt-out of their own companies technological wonders. Accordingly, technological transformation is so important that it should not be defined just in terms of access – or left at the whim of company board members, Big Tech, Innovation hubs or ‘smart’ city planners & cheerleaders. It is not just a question of ‘users’ – since it is about the ‘used’ more than the users nowadays. It is – without nostalgia or pre-technological naivity in tow, that in spite – of these tremendous and complex planetary changes, legislation and lobbying for digital rights & accountability seems to lag behind, since both public attention and consciousnesses gets bypassed. Direct oversight and regulation or consciousness itself seems so trivial, and yet it is constantly remade into a threshold to be bypassed by the free markets & mantras hailing for ‘disruptive’ transgressions. Nonetheless, there is this incredible alliance and (as seen below) a lot of initiatives have sprung up, that espouse not just a neo-Luddite conviction, but one of tekk-savvyness, informed by the above ‘renegades’and industry insiders and/or burnouts as well, by previous historical black liberation examples as by the new empowering SF alternate histories (i see some clear signs of Wakanda there) having been written (thinking about Solomon Rivers,Nalo Hopkins and Nisi Shawl & others here) or waiting to be written in collaboration with automated text generators or not.
There is emerging calls from both government and by popular demand to at least be able to opt-out of these technologies in the US and EU (face recognition being just the most obvious case), altough I’m not sure about the vast majority of the world (which is clearly not from the Global North) or even the accelerating use & deployment of drone wars & DARPA abroad in the wake of protracted but inevitable US retreat from Afghanistan. There of course the possibility to learn how optical governance works or is put to use/abused in other parts of the world, since the West does not hold the monopoly over AI. China, in particular is an interesting divergence, since machine vision has been widely rolled out by the CCP via its social credit score, as well as being repurposed from below during the Pandemic response. SF has been historically very wary with attempts to modulate or influence behaviors such as behaviourism, to tuning or pegging controls or strong emotional responses towards a common good (Just think of swath of movies from Equilibrium 2002 to Brave New World 2020 or the new Voyagers 2021). ‘Brainwashed’, ‘the Manchurian Candidate’ etc are just a few of the inherited standard fear responses churned by both Cold War warriors, strategists, Pentagon brass and the run of the mill Hollywood movie output whenever they tried to depict or describe actual, imagined or suspected ideological traitors and US army deserters. ‘Brainwashing’ especially was made up into a sort of explain-all – to cover a whole range of ‘enemy'(past & present) responses, as the only possible logical explanation for the divergent behavior of former US troops (many of them black) who decided to opt-out of the racist US capitalist system after living as POW (during Korean War). When former army personnel decided to question, defect & live outside their bounds they must have been ‘brainwashed’, especially if they happened to be choosing Mao’s China for a while (a forgotten history detailed with tremendous wit in Julia Lowell’s fascinating book: Maoism: A Global History 2020) instead of racism back home or in the army. Change of mind and qualms about incoming orders also equals treason as we know from the case of Chelsea Elizabeth Manning or Edward Snowden.
In a rare and courageous move – The White Space (Machine/Ancestral Night duology) space opera universe of Elizabeth Bear avoids the usual ‘brainwashing’ suspicion of previous SF dystopian conventions by offering exactly what so much canonic SF eschews. It opens the possibility of a wide, non-coercive future galactic union where every human (altough the union is made by many non-sapient but sentient syster species) has the option to decide how much it alters, allows or wants to dial-down or fine-tune (what amounts to certain AI assisted ‘mindfulness’) a central nervous system evolved to automatize responses to emotional distress. Changing developmental patterns etc including universal non-coercive(!) access (called “bumping” in the novel) to what amounts to puberty blockers is not automatically a bad thing or a monstrous unnatural hybristic act(altough there’s libertarian privateers who think so in that universe like in ours)!
White Space opens up a way to modulate, discuss and deal in other ways with trauma, isolation, addiction, puberty, dysphoria, sex or gender assignment by birth etc bypassing automatic, hormonal or non-cognitive ‘habitual’ responses, being able to imaginatively limit violent behaviors at a minimum. Curbing willingly so much of what is anti-social behavior was apparently frowned upon even in that far future, but there’s room for so much more. It’s of course always important to pay attention to who decides what and when one misbehaves or when disobedience becomes accepted & when not. Of course there is a thin line, and there are those who want to skip and actively propagate opting out of the opting out. Body (non modification) extremists surely exist in that future that deem it sacrilegious to intervene or to dabble with ‘natural’ responses, while acting (on whole) quite egoistically and self-centered. In this galactic union – new forms of piratical freeports keep offshoring resources and escaping the central taxing authority, thus harboring non-mindfulness terrorism arising in response to a largely benefic mental & emotional tuning widely available. Even if coding bias into hardware based on white wetware bias is the main focus of Coded Bias, it ultimately supports a malleable wetware-hardware continuum that allows for modulation and even requires it.
Black-boxing of the operative logics of machine vision or acknowledging that machinic cognition or decisionality is essentially collaborative, not isolated, nor impervious to questioning, thus, cannot just settle for the human/nonhuman or creator/created, nonhuman/posthuman binaries. It feels very wrong, since it closes down our own sensitivity either to the same old repackaged as new, or to a newer wider & largely collaborative nonhuman ‘worldy sensiblity’ that is always risks being tipped towards whiteness and reactive toxicity if left unattended. Microsoft’s Tay 2016 chatbot that developed 24h a proclivity for hate speech is a test in case. It’s not just the simple powerful logic of trash in trash out, but of how easily this tipping point might be achieved today under trolling & targeted attacks. At the same time, one should never loose sight of other machinic bridges &conceptually as well as emotionally more progressive examples that developed as part of writing practices & modernist techniques such as automatic writing or Alan Turing’s automated Loveletter generator.
One cannot unbox anything in a straightforward way, since Shalini Kantayya’s diverse cast of protagonists and invited guests make clear that not even programmers or makers do not understand how the AI does what it does. One more thing cannot be remedied with just more data, simply more information. Even acknowledging that we can fully understand those internal processes, we can still feel trh results, see the hard facts and harsh reality whenever these AIs tend to ignore black and brown or female faces. AIs do need some deep unlearning in order to ‘re-educate'(not such a bad word) themselves and make sure they will not act out just the mathematical sums of the worst of the worst and select by default for the chosen few while deselecting everybody else.
Pushing the logic of this documentary, it is time to find out more about how decisions, ‘chance’, contingency may still be directed so as to redistribute luck on a more equal way in an increasingly unequal world economy. Economy is itself futurism served frozen & pre-cooked, and different debt ridden lives and widely different futures are being handed down, bent along pre-selected trajectories, trajectories that are being doctored (who cares if knowingly or unknowingly, intentionality is always ulterior anyway) actively make impossible the lives of a majority. A ‘pan-selectivity’ needs yo be developed that refuses yo be ‘gamed’ easily and influenced only by the influent few armed with predictive algorithms – at the tip of a capitalistic drive that actualizes every potential out there, no matter how horrific and brutal as long as it pays dividends.
Like probably any ideological formation – bias is not just invisible, it probably maybe impossible to completely eliminate, but this should not stop us trying to change it and actively imagine what’s to be done. Bias seems to work and act by being unspecified, invisibilized, left out of the loop. Again, like ideology, it is the missing mass that bends everything according to its set of preemptive expectations, almost like a constant enactment of a single, unilateral inner experience, making itself ubiquitous. Bias is not simply an apparently whimsical conceit, it is not just a pre-programmed part of the system, but something that needs to be enforced, hard-coded and programmed at every level of future decision making, at ever threshold of resistance.
Bias is made seemingly non-existent each time output and prediction is put at a premium. If if blaring, it feels like an itch you cannot scratch, because it starts to seem so intrinsic & para-systemic. Technology or AI is not neutral nor is inherently bad it gas been often said, and it is getting as bad or worse or as good as the whole context/environment allows it, or the drift promoting it keeps on pushing it, or as long as the coded ideals and values are what they are. Remember even if everything is being turned into ‘driver-less’-everything, it’s not less of driven- market economy.
We can not see it and measure it because its effects are measured on those who are made to matter less and less, on those ‘others’ that even the states, law or constitution does not seem to ‘notice’ or care for any longer. It is easier to wave bias aside, to bring undigested misconstructions on board and heap them on top of those being distributed the loosing lots, the bad seats(if any), and even if those stories just give you bad dreams, goosebumps, depression or severe need to disconnect from another’s catastrophic or already dystopian reality. So this necessitates different, collective and directed research approaches & coordinated effort to ‘black boxing’ so many current decisional processes. There’s also a different venue (not tackled in Coded Bias) – a sort of related QWERTY bias, of path dependencies whenever we have historically & incrementally built conventional (man-made) computational infrastructures. This ‘convention’ not only only stands in the way of more evolutionary – developmentally inclusive, unconventional approaches to computation & computing, but might leave out or blind us to other venues or other modes of problem solving existing or evolved (as those investigated by Andrew Adamatsky studying maze-solving slime molds). While most computation & research nowadays follows old & certainly well-tested arhitectures, it only builds upon existing & specific constraints – all too human ones we might add, moreover a very restrictive & biased account of what counts as ‘human’ (amply documented throughout Coded Bias), one that both engineering and coding seems to take as granted. ‘Worth’ – in a constantly devalorizing environment becomes constantly threatened, at the same time we should welcome the erosion of old, gendered biased and individualistic notions of singular genius(unmoved mover?) and farcical ‘great men’ through our plural AI – human interactions.
Coded Bias gets the highest marks in advocating for an A.I.X -research, attempting to build an explainable artificial intelligence, a research that should be aware of ‘artificial unintelligence'(Meredith Broussard), as well as to demands that humans hone their response-ability (Haraway), both allowing for aesthetic, epistemologic and ethical responsiveness whenever technological 21st upgrades and optimizations start pouring in.
You do not need to be a tech expert to advocate for algorithmic justice. These basic terms are a good foundation to inform your advocacy. For a more detailed breakdown of how facial recognition works, see the guide titled Facial Recognition Technologies: A Primer from the AJL. For more on surveillance, see the Community Control Over Police Surveillance: Technology 101 guide from the ACLU.
Algorithmic justice. Exposing the bias and harms from technical systems in order to safeguard the most marginalized and develop equitable, accountable, and just artificial intelligence.
Benchmark. Data set used to measure accuracy of an algorithm before it is released.
Bias. Implicit or explicit prejudices in favor of or against a person or groups of people.
Artificial intelligence (AI). The quest to give computers the ability to perform tasks that have, in the past, required human intelligence like decision making, visual perception, speech recognition, language translation, and more.
Big data. The mass collection of information about individuals who use personal technology, such as smartphones.
Biometric technology. Uses automated processes to recognize an individual through unique physical characteristics or behaviors
Black box. A system that can be viewed only through its inputs and outputs, not its internal process.
CCTV. Closed-circuit television cameras are used by institutions to record activity on and around their premises for security purposes.
Civil rights. A broad set of protections designed to prevent unfair treatment or discrimination in areas such as education, employment, housing, and more.
Code. The technical language used to write algorithms and other computer programs.
Data rights. Referring to the human right to privacy, confidentiality, and ethical use of personal information collected by governments or corporations through technology
Data set. The collection of data used to train an algorithm to make predictions.
Due process. The right not to be deprived of life, liberty, or property without proper legal proceedings, protected by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the US Constitution.
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). A data rights law in the European Union that requires technology users consent to how their data is collected and prohibits the sale of personal data.
Facial recognition. Technologies – a catchall phrase to describe a set of technologies that process imaging data to perform a range of tasks on human faces, including detecting a face, identifying a unique individual, and assessing demographic attributes like age and gender.
Machine learning. An approach to AI that provides systems the ability to learn patterns from data without being explicitly programmed.
Racism. The systematic discrimination of people of color based on their social classification of race, which disproportionately disadvantages Black and Indigenous people of color.
Recidivism risk assessment – Automated decision making system used in sentencing and probation to predict an individual’s risk of future criminal behavior based on a series of data inputs, such as zip code and past offenses.
Sexism. The systematic discrimination of women and girls based on their social categorization of sex, which intersects with racism for women and girls of color.
Social credit score. An AI system designed by the Communist Party of China that tracks and analyzes an individual’s data to assess their trustworthiness.
Surveillance. The invasive act of monitoring a population to influence its behavior, done by a government for law and order purposes or by corporations for commercial interests.
Value-added assessments. Algorithms used most commonly to evaluate teachers by measuring student performance data.
Voice recognition. An application of AI technology that interprets and carries out spoken commands and/or aims to identify an individual based on their speech patterns.
We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives–where we go to school, whether we can get a job or a loan, how much we pay for health insurance–are being made not by humans, but by machines. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules. But as mathematician and data scientist Cathy O’Neil reveals, the mathematical models being used today are unregulated and uncontestable, even when they’re wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination–propping up the lucky, punishing the downtrodden, and undermining our democracy in the process.
The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called “surveillance capitalism,” and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior.
In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth.
Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new “behavioral futures markets,” where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new “means of behavioral modification.”
The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a “Big Other” operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff’s comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled “hive” of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit–at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future.
With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future–if we let it.
A guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology and why we should never assume that computers always get it right.
In Artificial Unintelligence, Meredith Broussard argues that our collective enthusiasm for applying computer technology to every aspect of life has resulted in a tremendous amount of poorly designed systems. We are so eager to do everything digitally—hiring, driving, paying bills, even choosing romantic partners—that we have stopped demanding that our technology actually work. Broussard, a software developer and journalist, reminds us that there are fundamental limits to what we can (and should) do with technology. With this book, she offers a guide to understanding the inner workings and outer limits of technology—and issues a warning that we should never assume that computers always get things right.
Making a case against technochauvinism—the belief that technology is always the solution—Broussard argues that it’s just not true that social problems would inevitably retreat before a digitally enabled Utopia. To prove her point, she undertakes a series of adventures in computer programming. She goes for an alarming ride in a driverless car, concluding “the cyborg future is not coming any time soon”; uses artificial intelligence to investigate why students can’t pass standardized tests; deploys machine learning to predict which passengers survived the Titanic disaster; and attempts to repair the U.S. campaign finance system by building AI software. If we understand the limits of what we can do with technology, Broussard tells us, we can make better choices about what we should do with it to make the world better for everyone.
timespace coordinates: somewhere in the present or near-future Berlin (or close to you)
Attempts at reviewing this movie might fail miserably. It is an incredibly – very dry though very funny – slapstick movie about some really serious shit. It is many things – for one it is probably the best recent German (and probably contemporary) film on the increasing corporate interests and pressures encroaching upon students, assistants, researchers, postdocs, universities and high education institutions.
Most probably one of my favorite movies lately. It is a very low budget looking movie. Its made-up and unreal low aesthetic serves its scope perfectly – toning down the huge investments and media craze behind variously hyped “technological fixes” and gimmicks (as this TechNO-fix book argues) that seem to worsen up things the more they juggle quick ‘solutionism’ with hidden costs and a big price-tag. The most ridiculous fixes and exploitative solutions abound in such a desperate situation (dire annual reports, accelerating ecological collapse). Although there are probably very good reason to attempt large-scale geo-engineering, there is also the feeling that there is no grand plan and that everybody is trying to circumvent, ignore or redirect the increasing flows of climate migrants. Blue screens only makes the VR developers attempts at making the forest fires or hurricanes more realistic, more close to home seem impractical and plainly wrongheaded. Everything is muddled, completely detached from anything outside holodeck. The main character is Phoebe (Sara Ralfs) who is not an actress – and this helps bringing some real picaresque cine verite – as well allowing all the other proper actors to play ham (and quite hateful) roles. Phoebe is completely enmeshed in Academic exploitative situations. Instead of a “quant” role – she gets mired into the machinations of higher faculty members. She lands a university bullshit job (David Graeber with a smile in heaven) that isn’t even a part-time (25%?!). A precarity that proves what Universities risk becoming, and how insecurity and exploitation go hand in hand.
At no other time in history has Innovation, A.S. (artificial stupidity), VR/AR founder magic leaps, transmedia festivals or generally VR development (dah! experience economy!) – felt so just-in-time, just simple cover-up gimmicks (that is why we need apud Suzanne Ngai a Theory of the Gimmick). Expensive gadgetry that seems to basically exists just in order to secure badly needed (and dwindling) research funds. There is nothing to predict, there is nothing to anticipate, since it all seems crystal clear from the point of view of the scientists (and a good part of humanity as well as various other species that are forced to adapt as well as they can) that the current situation is untenable and leading only to an increasing sense of doom.
And yet almost in symbiosis with the above, lots of initiatives are bound up in the same display (rut) of smartness & innovation. There’s lots of money especially in desperate times – funding is not lacking if you’re in the high-tech Demo branch. In fact the core team in the movie has so much unspent money from the previous assignments that they feel one should buy new furniture, new lamps (more decor for more meetings and farcical brain storming!). Yet, funding bodies themselves seem oblivious, complacent and bound up with the same carousel of justifying their own investments – encouraging high-tech low concept toys and exercizing market pressures to outdo any competitors by promising better tomorrows. It is a Welt am Draht (1973) without the wiring and with visible strings attached.
Both the university, the creative sector and the NGO environment seems to veer towards what amounts to a cognitive sweat shop (“concept sweathops” mind you – which u could extend to anything: from corporate boardrooms toneo-Stakhanovite (стахановец) brainstorming- heartstorming workshops.
This is a movie about the huge arrogance and cynicism of (how else can u call them without espousing the same balmy anti intellectualism & anti-science tropes?!) specialists, elites and (even worse) tech gurus & pundits everywhere giving paid advice on how to motivate depressive and increasingly loan-dependent and indebted students. Weitermachen Sanccouci is about how to incentivize and still keep all hierarchies intact (the constant joke of the movie is nudging – a sort of neo-behaviorist Pavlovian methods dressed as evolutionary cognitivism, behavioural economics or hokey evo- psychology). Let’s pretend and keep things afloat during austerity economics via minimal positive reinforcement (cookies, medication, drugs, gamifictation? or anything else in btw) with a theory behind: Nudge Theory. The abstruse self congratulatory language of seminars, bizarre surreal PowerPoint presentations is also being fully explored and ridiculed.
It is not a dark or spiteful movie – and it is easy to identify with the main heroine that seems to stray off beaten paths and genuinely try something different. She teaches math that actually listens to the problems of her students (not much younger than her) and tries not to transform everything into a Monopoly game.
A VR or augmented reality that fails to augment is a basic glitch – (not only in the sense explored by Asher in his recent documentary A Glitch in the Matrix) but also as a feature of post-cinematic, post-phenomenlogical media apparatuses (Steven Shaviro). Glitches, bugs, technological failures should not be seen just as breaks of an otherwise smooth technological progression but as valid manifestations of what lies beyond current capabilities of technology. A ‘demonic realm’ featured in recent paranormal found footage horror (Paranormal Activity series) and recent meta horror sci-fi (Resolution or Mandela Effect) movies seem to communicate with hapless humans correspond more often than not with new technical devices that stand outside of the human sensorium. What is untouchable, inaccessible – peers trough the boundless technological promises where another reality might find itself excluded, junked and reduced to the status of a blindfolded audio walk. The unreality of our current hell gets simulated because we don’t seem to take notice, leaving us immersed as before, Sanssouci -like the title. No worries. Keep going as if. The air cooling systems in the main university building goes crazy starts an artificial snow storm almost in solidarity with the planetary climate system. The same chaotic effects of a buildings thermostat that augment the student strike (as most student strike go gets shut down or gets described as minor nuisance by the VR faculty staff). The climate change inside faculty hallways unexpectedly makes it finally experienced and touchable.
This slapstick situation becomes almost our default way to express harsh truths. Weitermachen S – humorously retrieves another forgotten or slowly emerging backlog – the history of Socialist computing via its Chilean Cybersyn Project. A decentralized computer vision that was never fully implemented (stopped short by the military CIA backed coup) and that was not trained on War Games but on managing economic emergencies red blinking in a slick room designed almost like a futuristic planned-economy example of a Star Trek-like spaceship deck.
TimeSpace Warps 
