This Emptiness is Normal

From one lens, contemporary computing culture is built on an astoundingly simple idea: an extension of the logic of punch cards. Charles and Ray Eames’ 1953 film for IBM, A Communications Primer, (linked in full below) is especially prescient at telling us how this works: holes are punched, and light passes through or light stops. Sensors on the other side read the light.

Calculations are true or false, and can determine the next step in the calculation. From this, we have created enormous systems of prediction and control. Over time, we have increasingly adapted our behavior and institutions to this logic.

But I think the metaphor, taken from an educational video from Charles and Ray Eames to explain cybernetic communication for IBM, is also excellent in explaining the limits of this: light has various forms, from concentrated lasers to prismatic refractions. What about those?

True or False moves you to the next step, and that step determines another set of binary choices that slightly shift the response. Everything is a series of binary choices, on or off, if this then that. Over time, the “whole” begins to emerge: computers can automate increasingly complex sets of decisions. All it needs is more energy to make more on/off calculations.

This is different from the mechanistic thinking of a clock, which ticks ahead regardless of what’s happening to it. In Cybernetics for the 21st Century, the philosopher Yuk Hui explains what this means:

Recursivity is a general term for looping. This is not mere repetition, but rather more like a spiral, where every loop is different as the process moves generally towards an end, whether a closed one or an open one.

Hui argues that this is a description of the activity of organisms, and it’s an interesting idea. In one way of thinking, an organism is defined by things like what’s inside it, or how it was formed. In another way of thinking, an organism is defined by behavior of those components, and the interactions between the cells and atoms within a body. At that point, there is an opening for including built systems within our definitions of organisms, even social systems. For the organism emerging from cyber-physical systems, Hui coins the term mechano-organism.

Helpfully, Charles and Ray Eames have a useful film for understanding this, as well. It’s the educational film Powers of Ten, which aims to show the effect of adding an additional zero to the scale of visual distance.

Hui’s argument is a version of Scales of Ten, but might be considered in terms of processing power. Just as a human being shrinks into near invisibility after a few 0’s, and the Earth itself disappears quickly thereafter, the idea of “organic” and “built” activity becomes increasingly difficult to discern when computational processes occur in large enough numbers.

This film gave me tremendous anxiety when I watched it in high school. At vast scales, it’s tempting to recoil at the invisibility and precarity of the small systems we imagine to be so important. But this is, perhaps, the opposite lesson. Instead, we might emphasize the importance of the smallest details. As the narrator explains as he pauses somewhere on the outskirts of our universe:

This emptiness is normal. The richness of our own neighborhood is the exception.

We may imagine that the richness of our own neighborhood is exclusively human, but that would be folly. We live entangled in a vast set of vast systems, and these systems behave in ways that are not the behaviors of clocks and sewing machines.

Hui explains:

We live in an age of neo-mechanism, in which technical objects are becoming organic. … Being mechanistic doesn’t necessarily mean being related to machines; rather, it refers to machines that are built on linear causality, for example clocks, or thermodynamic machines like the steam engine. … And if philosophy since Kant has mechanism as its counterpart, it seems that today, as you and others have observed, this counterpart has been transformed into an organic being. Our computers, smartphones, and domestic robots are no longer mechanical but are rather becoming organic. I propose this as a new condition of philosophizing. Philosophy has to painfully break away from the self-contentment of organicity, and open up new realms of thinking.

And later adds:

What if these machines are no longer simply “organized inorganic” entities, but rather gigantic systems in the making? These systems are now the organizing agents of human lives and social orders. It seems to me necessary to return to these questions and to extend the concept of organology already developed by anthropologists and philosophers to the analysis of our actual situation.

What Hui is suggesting is not that we categorize our smartphones as people, but that we bring humanist approaches to understanding, unpacking and critiquing what emerges from machines through the lens of its behaviors and interactions.

W. Ross Ashby, an early cyberneticist, suggested the move from the question of what a thing is to the question of what the thing does. It’s probably time we start asking both.

Things I’m Doing This Week

I’ve been working on the next “Cyborg Pop” record for my musical project, The Organizing Committee. I’ve shared track one, “Light Passes Through,” which samples the aforementioned Charles and Ray Eames video on cybernetics. The video is built on the same portion of the video that’s sampled in the track. The sound of a computer scanning punch cards is performed by a Farfisa organ to create the main melody of the song. It is noisy. You can check out the video on my Instagram.

Also, “Oligarchic Ganglions” appears on a gorgeous orange vinyl compilation of “cyberpunk and electric guitar” from Hippie Drive Records. Grab a copy if you dig pop songs about cybernetic anarchism and Stafford Beer’s Viable Systems Model!

Things I’m Reading This Week

• Algorithmic Injustice: A Relational Ethics Approach
  Abeba Birhane

I’ll write more about this in a future newsletter, but Birhane’s paper lays the groundwork to shift computer science from “rational” ideologies to “relational” ideologies. This couldn’t happen at a more important moment, either.

Unjust and harmful outcomes (of machine learning systems) are treated as side effects that can be treated with technical solutions such as “debiasing” datasets rather than problems that have deep roots in the mathematization of ambiguous and contingent issues, historical inequalities, and asymmetrical power hierarchies or unexamined problematic assumptions that infiltrate data practices.

• Long Live the Entanglement
  Danny Hillis

A slightly more accessible version of the ideas Yuk Hui describes:

We are our institutions, cooperating super-organisms, entangled amalgams of people and machines with super-human intelligence, processing, sensing, deciding, acting. Our home planet is inhabited by both engineered organisms and evolved machines. Our very atmosphere is the emergent creation of forests, farms and factories. Our networks of commerce, power and communications are becoming as richly interconnected as ecologies and nervous systems. Empowered by the tools of the Enlightenment, connected by networked flows of freight and fuel and finance, by information and ideas, we are becoming something new. We are at the dawn of the Age of Entanglement.

• Popular Things
  Dean Kissick

An essay exploring the current art-meme-collection hysteria:

There’s too much content that appears different but is the same. Too many identities are available to us. Too many hysterias. The reason so many flavours of Oreos are invented, according to the cookie’s brand director, is that this overabundance of choice reminds us of and drives us back to the original. It reminds us of how much we like the old Oreo. When there’s too much of everything, however, at some point the original is lost, and all that remains are flat, hollowed-out derivatives.

The Kicker

Manu Luksch’s Algo-Rhythm is a 14-minute long hip-hop treatise from Dakar that looks at the political oppression of algorithms. It’s streaming now through March 22 thanks to e-flux.

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