An Algorithmic Agartha: Post-App Approaches to Synarchic Regulation. (original) (raw)
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Reconceiving the Digital Network: from Cells to Selves
Bioinformational Philosophy and Postdigital Knowledge Ecologies, 2022
The concept of the post-digital and current conceptions of the bio-digital stem from an understanding of computer networks which itself has a history deriving from biology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This chapter traces the historical development of modern conceptions of ‘network’ from Rashevsky, to McCulloch and Pitts, through to the creation of the Internet, and current thinking about neural networks and machine learning. In tracing this history, we question the soundness of some of the assumptions made about networked digital phenomena and their relation to biological and phenomenological processes. In contrast to the topological node-arc model of networks, we argue that networks arise from evolutionary biological processes which are fundamentally oriented around boundary preservation rather than ‘connection’. Cellular connections observed as networks can be seen as epiphenomena of these underlying processes, where for example, a cell will establish ‘connection’ as a means of maintaining its viability in an uncertain environment. Taking a boundary-preservation viewpoint allows for a homological analysis of similar processes from cells to selves. We illustrate two areas where this viewpoint might be operationalised: in communication dynamics and in institutional organisation. We argue this is a richer way of investigating bio-digital phenomena, and opens the door to new technological experiments and alternative visions of a technological society.
'smartphone' - for Making Things International (ed. Mark B. Salter), forthcoming 2015
In February 2013 a friend sent me a link to an obtained video hosted on The Guardian’s website, detailing a datamining tool developed by Raytheon , called Rapid Information Overlay Technology (RIOT). RIOT allows the user to quickly assemble a clear picture of a person’s network of associates and their movements, as revealed through their habitual, normal smartphone use, the repeated patterns of which can then be visualized in a number of ways to accurately disclose their networks of association and predict their future behaviour. The smartphone is an extremely subtle and complex device whose uses, agency and affects depend greatly on the assemblages in which it is an actant. The effectiveness of the smartphone in RIOT’s marketable surveillance assemblage, for example, depends on the interoperation of a large number of programmed systems, with interested group agents such as the Raytheon corporation and the US government at various ends. It also depends on the broader, shifting social interaction between smartphones and their human and nonhuman users in their average, everyday dealings with one another via their smartphones – for this is, after all, why the precise pattern of data is there in the first place and for the foreseeable future. Careful consideration of the surveillant assemblage visible through RIOT prompts us to rethink agency and causality: is any ‘one’ in control here? To what ends are these tools being put, and what are their probable and possible futures? To what do individual smartphone users and system-agents of their surveillance tend to pay attention? What kind of control might they seek, and what might they have? Considering the smartphone’s enmeshment here also encourages us to think very carefully about the possible political dangers this engenders, encourages and normalizes. These are political dangers which, the 2013 mass surveillance disclosures amply demonstrate, are no longer science fiction, the cool-but-creepy imaginings of DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office, or even marginal practices that are only the obsessive worry of paranoid cranks and conspiracy theorists. Rather, they are the by-now-normal political technologies of the National Security Agency (NSA) and its project of total planetary surveillance through PRISM, Boundless Informant , and the many other projects, programs and applications of which large numbers of people are not yet aware, may never be, and may not even care to know about.
According to Hegel, the basic assignment of philosophy is to capture the present in thoughts. When it comes to understanding our present, an assessment of the technosciences and their impact on our view on nature, society and ourselves must be of key importance. A prominent feature of contemporary technosciences resides in their pervasiveness: the extent to which they pervade nature, society and human bodies, even on a molecular level, as well as each other. On the one hand, the 20th century is the era of the elementary particles, of identifying the elementary subatomic and molecular building blocks of matter and life. On the other hand, it is the era of complexity, of evolving systems. In both directions, our understanding of ourselves is challenged and deepened by technoscientific explorations. Increasingly, moreover, our technologies tend become nature-like. This allows us to embed them more adequately in natural systems, but it also opens up unprecedented opportunities for modifying natural systems, including human bodies. How are we to address the bioethical and biopolitical prospects and concerns implied in these developments?
Ground breaking contributions of cybernetics, Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life have constructed new proposals of distinct computational assemblages which have led to the exploration of complex systems which resonate with organic formations. The aim of this paper is to re-evaluate the way in which we think about technology and argues that a need exists for a new way to relate with technology at an intellectual and philosophical level. In other words, to think of technology as something more than a gadget that we use in our daily life or as robots that will clean our floors and cook for us, rather, as a medium that is constantly reshaping the unimaginable. I will examine the matter alongside important theoretical frameworks by Rodney Brooks and Kevin Kelly. From those views on technology arise deep questions on the meaning of what is a human, machine or living system which challenge the traditional distinctions between them. In 1950 new cybernetics theory of machines was interested in making systems that could learn and adapt to a changing environment, and as a result machines that could help model and understand the behaviour of living organisms. Today technology and life share more characteristics. Computer programs can duplicate themselves, robots can self-replicate like cells do, and software can breed more complex algorithms by themselves without human intervention, and surpassing John Von Neuman’s Complexity Barrier, and setting aside the Turing test.
November 2, 2023
I will start my inaugural address by outlining the main argument of my lecture. First, I will identify the phenomenon that philosophers of technology research. This subject matter, in my view, consists not only of ethical issues that disruptive technologies raise but also of the disruption of the world in which we live and act by these technologies. I will illustrate this disruption by reflecting on the convergence of the physical and the virtual in the digital world, which is expected to change the way we live together. I propose that philosophers of technology should research new disruptive technologies and the digital world in which they are embedded in an integrated manner. Subsequently, I will ask how the emergence of digital technologies disrupts the world’s design in the digital age. My hypothesis is that technological innovations themselves constitute the World in a non-anthropocentric and non-determinist manner. To make my case, I will first draw attention to the difference between technology and innovation and propose a philosophy of innovation. This will enable me to consider how innovation processes have an economic, social-political and ontological impact on the world. Based on historical and contemporary examples, I will illustrate the redesign of the world in the digital age. This broader understanding of the impact of digital technologies will subsequently enable me to articulate some of the critical questions I have regarding digitalisation, and how the philosophical tradition can be made fruitful to critically reflect on the elision between the physical and the virtual in the digital age. This criticism informs my engagement with ethical questions in ethics of technology, ELSA (Ethical, Legal and Social Aspects) and Responsible Innovation. As a final step, I open a progressive perspective on the emancipatory potential of disruptive innovations to set the world free. In times of climate change, we are urgently in need of an emancipation of the World. We need to move beyond the classical opposition between technophobia and technophilia and look for innovations that can set the World free and contribute to a sustainable future. I will illustrate the emancipatory potential of disruptive technological innovations by considering the shift from human-centred technology to bio-centred technology in biomimetic design.
This article argues for closer dialogue between the work of Kenneth Burke and contemporary posthumanist philosophers, especially in the context of the small technologies of ubiquitous computing. A Burkean critique of commercial advertisements for the Motorola Droid phone demonstrates the potency of rhetorical criticism in unpacking the tropes of what I call “corporate posthumanism.” Informed by contemporary posthumanist philosophers and critical theorists of technology, I depart from Burke’s too-sweeping claims about technology to identify a “critical posthumanist” practice that can be found in the “check-in.” By analogizing “checking in” through mobile phone technologies to canine marking strategies, I show how critical theories of technology ought to account for both the instrumentalizing and animalizing tendencies of digital media. The conclusion emphasizes the need for critical posthumanism to embrace a Burkean critique of efficiency, dramatistic analysis, and for a “definition of the animal (in a posthumanist spirit).”