Category Archives: Philosophy

What Does Technology Lust After?

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A Wearable Tech Hackathon sex app for Google Glass

So this was inevitable, right?

First thoughts:

  1. Really? Picture-in-picture?
  2. Seeing what my partner sees might make me never want to have sex again. I am reminded of Steve’s disquisition on “nether freckling” from Coupling s3:e5: “There are … angles. In a relationship you get seen from certain … angles.”
  3. With all the photos being stolen off of hacked mobile devices and posted to revenge porn websites, how could this possibly go wrong?
  4. Wasn’t Strange Days (1995) a great / terrible sci-fi film?

But more seriously, total immersion in the experience of another ranks along with immortality, total recall, omniscience, radical subjectivity, demediation of desire and fulfillment and a few others as ultimate goals of technology.

What I’m saying is that I think technology is teleological. The evolution of technology is not a random walk or a function of reachability or the traversal of a dependency network. Well, it is all those things, but it is not only those things. There are ends or extreme outer limits toward which technology is evolving. I think I listed a few off-the-cuff. Some systematic and dedicated attention to a fuller list is warranted.

But wence do the ends come? As I have framed them, they could be construed as merely the desiderata of the human makers of technology — technology has no end of it’s own: they are bestowed by their makers. But perhaps technology as a continuation of life, as a fourth domain, inherits these ends. Or perhaps these ends admit of a more objective formulation: eternity instead of immortality, idealist anarchy for radical subjectivity. Or perhaps for Kantian cyborgs, they are the transcendental illusions of technology.

Also, as if my digression hasn’t already been far enough, there’s this as a longing to supersede individuation:

The Zero Effect of Archival Research

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Daryl Zero Paper Headache

Now that I’m spending time doing research for my thesis at the Library of Congress Manuscript Division and the National Archive, I’m really wishing that the fictional manual / memoir that serves as Daryl Zero’s voice-over in The Zero Effect were a real book that I could consult:

Now, a few words on looking for things. When you look for something specific your chances of finding it are very bad because of all things in the world, you only want one of them. When you look for anything at all your chances of finding it are very good because of all the things in the world you’re sure to find some of them.

Daryl Zero is for me a guru on par with Yoda, Keisuke Miyagi and Ogami Itto.

Marxism and Existentialism, the Made and the Born

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Blade Runner, Pris and Roy Batty

In two brief epigrams, why Sartre had such a hard time in Critique of Dialectical Reason trying to reconcile his existentialism with Marxism:

“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”

~ Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)

“Freedom is existence, and in it existence precedes essence.”

~ Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism Is a Humanism” (1946)

It is a wonder Sartre so hated psychoanalysis and the unconsciousness for the suggestion that freedom was anything other than absolute, but Marxism he could work with.

New Aesthetic, 1975-1979

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The aim of all these conferences is to be like the Broad Street water pump: a hub where everyone gets infected. The cholera outbreak of South by Southwest 2012 is New Aesthetic.

A morning sessions on day four of the conference was dedicated to the subject and James Bridle, the prime mover of the theory, wrote up some notes of his talk in what is now the text of reference (“#sxaesthetic“, booktwo.org, 15 March 2012). The basis for Mr. Bridle’s talk is the material he has been collecting for nearly a year now via his New Aesthetic tumblr. Bruce Sterling attended the session and wrote it up in an effusive post for Wired (“An Essay on the New Aesthetic“, 2 April 2012). A significant conversation has broken out on twitter. Julia Kaganskiy at The Creators Project has collected up a number of responses (“In Response To Bruce Sterling’s ‘Essay On The New Aesthetic’“, 6 April 2012). Ian Bogost has responded in The Atlantic Monthly (“The New Aesthetic Needs to Get Weirder“, 13 April 2012).

U.S. Navy MARPAT digital camouflage

In the military, where the people are tessellated.

And Mr. Bridle isn’t making this up. There is the example of New Aesthetic with which most people are probably most familiar, namely military’s new generation BDU, the ACUPAT / MARPAT digital camouflage, consisting of complex, non-repeating pattern generated by fractal equations. But before starting this post I decided to go out and walk around my neighborhood to see how much stuff I could find in half-an-hour with a vaguely New Aesthetic sensibility. The street that I live on is only five blocks long, boxed in by a school, sports fields and parks department superblock to the east and Rock Creek Park to the west. At the east end of my street, the local library is undergoing an expansion. Here is the new wing under construction:

New wing of the Mount Pleasant Public Library under construction, Mount Pleasant, Washington, D.C., 13 April 2012

At the west end of my street, this guy finished a repurposing of his off street parking into an outdoor area just in time for the best weather of the year:

Repurposed neighborhood back parking stall, Mount Pleasant, Washington, D.C., 13 April 2012

That’s two independent projects within five blocks of each other in my sleepy spur neighborhood. New Aesthetic is obviously real as a popular practice, not just a theory.

I’m sympathetic but skeptical for a number of reasons. I will detail what are my two major reasons for skepticism here.

Bricks: pixilated clay, Mount Pleasant, Washington, D.C., 13 April 2012

Bricks: pixilated clay

First, as Nathan Jurgenson has said, an oddity of New Aesthetic is that “many of the images rely on the techno-nostalgia of the near past.” New Aesthetic is technologically eclectic in its inspiration, with some of its images reliant on the most advanced scientific visualizations, but a significant portion of its most outstanding images rely on pixilation, low resolution, interpolation, false color, reduced data sets or the selectivity of only machine-decisive elements. So we end up with things like pixilated crayons and umbrellas.

But this isn’t representative of the influence of technology on contemporary technology. It is an anachronism, a recreation of an already superseded era of computer capability. To illustrate by reference to the development of stealth technology.

Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk

New Aesthetic, circa 1979

The first of the modern stealth airplanes was the Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk. In response to the effectiveness of surface-to-air missiles in the Vietnam and Yom Kippur Wars, and to significant improvements in the Soviet air defense system, in 1974 DARPA requested that contractors begin investigating the application of advances in theories of radiation deflection into the construction of low radar cross-section (RCS) aircraft. The problem that designers faced was the need to come up with shapes that balanced the requirements of both aerodynamics and radiation-deflection. The prototype that Lockheed Skunk Works developed came to be known as Have Blue. Aeronautical engineer Bill Schroeder worked with software engineer Dennis Overholser to write a program called ECHO-1, run on a Cray supercomputer, that would search a design space for an optimum tradeoff of aerodynamics and radar cross-section. The problem was the limited computational power at their disposal. Searching over the variability of smooth shapes would have resulted in an intolerably long run-time. The way around this problem was to limit the variability of the surfaces by what came to be termed within Lockheed Skunk Works as “faceting”: the larger the facets, the shorter the run-time. What determined the facet resolution of the plane that would become the F-117 Stealth Fighter was the desired run-time of the computer program to optimize its design trade-offs. In essence, the facets of F-117 are the resolution of the simulation used to select the optimum design. The F-117 is the Atari of fighter planes.

(Even having so optimized the design, the aerodynamics were sufficiently compromised by the demands of a minimal radar cross-section that the plane had to be fly-by-wire, with an onboard computer system making constant minor adjustments to engine thrust and control surfaces to stabilize the plane.)

B-2 "Spirit" stealth bomber

The new New Aesthetic.

But only a few years later the New Aesthetic moment has already passed. By the time that DARPA began contracting in 1979 for a stealth strategic bomber to replace the B-52, the availability of computer power had already improved markedly, to the point where the smooth surfaces of the Northrop Grumman B-2 “Spirit” stealth bomber are specified to such exacting precisions that most of the pieces for the stealth skin of the plane are cut and assembled by machines. A scant four years later the pixilated faceting of the F-117 had been superseded by organic shapes of the B-2, the Jurassic Park of airframes. At the high-end of computing, 1979 was already the end of New Aesthetic. Through consumer products like Atari, NES and VGA, the computational and engineering practice of New Aesthetic would persist into the early 1990s, but much beyond that New Aesthetic becomes “shock of the old”.

Taraxacum officinale: A 30 million year old network cluster diagram

A 30 million year old network cluster diagram.

My second cause for skepticism can also be construed as an extension of Mr. Jurgenson’s question, “why reduce ontological, epistemological & phenomenological points to aesthetics?” To identify the aesthetic as the interesting feature of these phenomena is to really diminish the significance of what it is that is happening in the most unusual of these situations. What is more interesting than the surface appearance of the end products is the fact that the limits of our computational capability, the limits of information, the limits that exist in the ideal realm are pushing out to become the limits of the material world as well. What is interesting about things like the F-117 stealth fighter or buildings designed with AutoDesk is not that they look computer-y, but that they are interfaces, sights of interaction between the ideal and the material — and more important, places where the ideal has assumed the superior position, determining the contours of the material.

Obama’s Debord-ian Dog Whistle

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I have previously suggested that in not releasing the photographs of Osama bin Laden’s body, President Obama was deliberately seeking to break out of the logic of bin Laden and the Bush Administration’s war of dueling spectacles (“World History, As Pantomimed in the Facial Expressions of Hillary Clinton, 20 October 2011). I made this suggestion somewhat farcically. Has President Obama set himself against the spectacle? Effectively he may have — and that’s intriguing in itself — but has he done so consciously, intentionally? Has the President read Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle? Or does the President have some ideas whose provenance is unknown to him? Are French Marxist theories of capitalist propaganda and false consciousness influencing U.S. strategy in the war on terrorism? It doesn’t even rise to the level of surmise.

But then last night I was listening again to then candidate Senator Obama’s “More Perfect Union” speech (Wikipedia | YouTube), delivered in response to the Reverend Jeremiah Wright controversy (National Constitution Center, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 18 March 2008), where he says the following about racial controversies (starting at 28:56 in the video):

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle — as we did in the OJ trial — or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina — or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

Two points:

  1. In common use, the word “spectacle” is an indefinite noun. People who aren’t invoking the theories of Debord would say, “We can tackle race only as a spectacle”. “Spectacle” used without an article, or “the spectacle”, with an article indicating a proper noun, are how people with Debord on the brain use it.

  2. As a brief explanation of the machinations of the spectacle, one that appeals to common language and experience, this is not bad.

At this point I think it is within the realm of possibility that President Obama has consciously and intentionally set himself against the spectacle. Of course President Obama is not a radical, but a meliorist and an incrementalist (“The arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice”). He is not about to explode the spectacle tomorrow. Audacity is apparently formal; it is for hope, ambition, dreams. Small opportunistic (almost Clintonian) victories are for real-world policy. But I think when the opportunity presents itself, President Obama does seek to reject and counteract the logic of the spectacle.

I don’t want to throw fuel on the right-wing illuminati — this is like my own little D’Souza-esque conspiracy — but how strange would it be if President Obama were engaged in covert acts of sublimated high philosophy, if the ideas of Guy Debord were actually influencing the President’s thinking about strategy in the war on terrorism and cultural narratives in media? If the U.S. had actually, explicitly (at least in the mind of the Commander-in-Chief) broken with the logic of dueling spectacles, to — I don’t know what — something else, it would as if Nietzsche’s “the greatest thoughts are the greatest events” (Beyond Good and Evil §285) were playing out right here in the Capital today.

Tithing for Metaphysics

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Artist's conception of the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA, 2009

In 2014 a consortium of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency will launch the James Webb Space Telescope into a solar orbit at the L2 point, permanently in the shadow of the Earth.

According to the Wikipedia article, the primary objectives of the James Webb Space Telescope are four:

  1. to search for light from the first stars and galaxies which formed in the Universe after the Big Bang,
  2. to study the formation and evolution of galaxies,
  3. to understand the formation of stars and planetary systems and
  4. to study planetary systems and the origins of life.

The expected ten year mission life will cost the consortium an estimated $4.5 billion, or about $32.60 per U.S. taxpayer. At this late stage it’s just an accepted commonplace that the government funds large science projects, but how strange it is that the pursuit of such sibylline truths as the origin of the universe and the formation and evolution of galaxies should be deemed worthy of the expenditure of billions of dollars of the public money (also strange that the perspective of biology has expanded to the point where a telescope would be considered a device essential for the study of the origin of life).

And of course these space telescopes are but a small piece of a giant system of university faculty, journal publishing, government agency bureaucracy, government contracting (Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems is the prime contractor for the James Webb Space Telescope), far-flung observatories atop mountains in exotic locales, laboratories cum cavern and valley-spanning machines (cyclotrons, synchrotrons, tokamaks, scintillators, laser interferometers). Somehow the truths offered by cosmology have been determined to be of such import as to command budgets into the tens of billions drawn from the coffers of the whole society. And it’s worth noting that as many of these projects are carried out by intergovernmental consortiums, they are not only national projects, but civilizational and sometimes global efforts.

What bizarre conception of the truth have we worked ourselves around to that the most advanced machinery that the species is capable of constructing are necessary for these expeditions? In a certain sense, there is something striking about religion, in that theogony seems like the kind of thing that should be without costs.

Giuseppe Bezzuoli, Galileo's Inclined Plane Experiment, detail, Natural History Museum, Florence (1841)

But more realistically, truth is a product of the expenditure of labor. When our system of the world was young, and much of nature was laying about as yet undiscovered, little labor was required for new insights. Mere reflection could in many cases suffice. As our system has matured, greater labors have been required (the decreasing marginal utility of verum quaerere). Apparatus became necessary — simple at first, but of growing complexity. Galileo — the great yeoman of the truth — could sire science with little more than an inclined plane. But the contrivances needed to trick out the next most obscure natural effects, to bring the investigation under sufficient control for observations to be made, to limit the range of effects to just those under scrutiny, to achieve consistency in repetition, the energy and materials necessary to proceed to ever more exotic realms of effects, all of these things have undergone similar developments as the rest of our labors: massive injections of capital replacing labor, but also extending our activity into realms that would previously have been impossible, no matter the amount of labor available.

In our era, production of new and novel truth has become perhaps the single most capital intensive — both durable and financial — endeavor in which we engage.

World-Makers, World-Owners

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Charles Mudede’s explanation for why the slave becomes the thesis of the next order dialectic in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is surprisingly straightforward and elegant (“Marxism and Insects: Slave-Making Ants,” SLOG, The Stranger, 13 May 2010):

Hegel argues that because the world is more and more made and shaped by slave labor — serving, building, putting “all to rights” — the world makes more and more sense to slaves and less and less sense to the masters (“so utterly helpless are the masters”). The masters only know how to destroy; the slaves know how to create.

If you follow the link and read the entire post, know that it is the latest installment in Mr. Mudede’s recent ant phase. His explanation of Hegel quoted above is a takeoff from a description of slavery amidst the ants found in Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. For the slave revolt among the ants, definitely read the article that commenter @10 recommends (Rodríguez, Álvaro, “Enslaved Ants Revolt, Slaughter Their Captors’ Children,” DiscoBlog, Discover, 18 August 2008).

Evolving Technology of the Psyche

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The sentiment contained in the chorus of Cat Stevens’s “Wild World” is extremely nice and I want to unreservedly like the song, but crikey!, hippies are some of the most passive-aggressive people you’ll ever meet.

There is an evolving technology of the psyche — I don’t know that we’re building a permanent body of knowledge, or that there’s progress, so much as just a random walk. It is an instance of cultural learning that today even a child would see through the crass manipulations of this song — just as whatever shabby sense of superiority the Sartean existentialist may have derived from such categories as “authenticity” and “the examined life” were already superseded for the generation of the late 1960s and 70s.

To Understand Everything without Moving

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For physicists to complete the entire task of physics without ever having set out from Earth to explore the universe — and the ratio of comprehension to capability here isn’t even close — would be like the old ideal of the rationalist philosopher who might deduce the entire system of the world from a sturdy chair in his study, or like Emily Dickinson who might feel a whole life through her Amherst window.  On the other hand, should it be possible, it will be a minor demonstration of the homogeny of the universe: it will have turned out that any given place was as good as any other for the task of comprehending the entirety of the thing.