N. Katherine Hayles on UAVs/drones as ‘cognitive assemblages’

In a recent article in Critical Inquiry, N. Katherine Hayles formulates an understanding of particular kinds of technological support as ‘cognitive assemblages’ (sort of following Deleuze & Guattari*). She takes as her particular case study the advent of swarming, quasi-autonomous UAVs/drones and their use in warfare. The final paragraph of the piece is interesting but, for me, raises as many questions as it seeks to answer:

Language, human sociality, somatic responses, and technological adaptations, along with emotion, are crucial to the formation of modern humans. Whether warfare should be added to the list may be controversial, but the twentieth and twenty-first centuries suggest that it will persist, albeit in modified forms. As the informational networks and feedback loops connecting us and our devices proliferate and deepen, we can no longer afford the illusion that consciousness alone steers our ships. How should we reimagine contemporary cognitive ecologies so that they become life enhancing rather than aimed toward dysfunctionality and death for humans and nonhumans alike? Recognizing the role played by non conscious cognitions in human/technical hybrids and conceptualizing them as cognitive assemblages is of course not a complete answer, but it is a necessary component. We need to recognize that when we design, implement, and extend technical cognitive systems, we are partially designing ourselves. We must take care accordingly. More accurate and encompassing views of how our cognitions enmesh with technical systems and those of other life forms will enable better designs, humbler perceptions of human roles in planetary cognitive ecologies, and more life-affirming practices as we move toward a future in which technical agency and autonomy become increasingly intrinsic to human complex systems.

(Hayles, 2016: 55)

A couple of immediate questions pop out for me:

Could you get designers of UAVs to factor in affective responses without reducing them to something like galvanic skin response or another quantifiable measure (which Hayles critiques in relation to MIT Prof. Sandy Pentland’s proselytisation of a ‘sociometer‘)?
What is meant by “accuracy” in that final sentence?! How might we qualify the idea of “better” designs? This seems to assert a kind of ethics (and maybe aesthetics) antithetical to the institutions and companies that make military equipment – by not addressing this, there seems to me to be a risk of simply making naive assertions.

I appreciate Hayles’ attempt to harness a broadly Deleuzian understanding of cognition (which might be understood as “affect theory”) in attending to pressing contemporary issues such as the rise of “killer robots” (or quasi-autonomous technological platforms that can inflict death), however – it seems to me that the paper uses the case studies (taken from other researchers’ work, such as Chamayou) to validate the theory, rather than using the theory to critically interrogate the empirical state of affairs. This, it seems to me, is a shame (not least because there’s a fruitful application of aspects of How we became posthuman here), and, as observed above, leaves more questions than answers. Maybe that’s productive, it can open debates – but others are doing slightly more to qualify how we might problematise ethics in this arena. I’d recommend taking a look at Lucy Suchman’s work, especially “robot futures” and the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots…

Addendum: I’m not suggesting that Chamayou and other ‘droners’ are “right” and Hayles is somehow wrong… I’d definitely agree with Prof Louise Amoore who suggested on Twitter that those folk could do with reading Hayles’ (and Suchman’s) work

* I’m uncertain about the proposition of ‘cognitive assemblages’ – if we were to follow D&G’s theory of agencements would not all ‘assemblages’ be cognitive? The implication is, it seems, that the ‘cognitive’ in Hayles’ formulation is human cognition – which implies a human exceptionalism that might be seen as antithetical to D&G’s philosophy.

8 September, 2016

New book from Gary Hall: The Uberfication of the University

An interesting new book from Gary Hall has recently been published with Minnesota. It kind of resonates with some of Stiegler’s latest bits and pieces…

Here’s the blurb:

Even after the 2008 financial crisis, neoliberalism has been able to advance its program of privatization and deregulation. The Uberfication of the University analyzes the emergence of the sharing economy–an economy that has little to do with sharing access to good and services and everything to do with selling this access–and the companies behind it: LinkedIn, Uber, and Airbnb. In this society, we all are encouraged to become microentrepreneurs of the self, acting as if we are our own precarious freelance enterprises at a time when we are being steadily deprived of employment rights, public services, and welfare support. The book considers the contemporary university, itself subject to such entrepreneurial practices, as one polemical site for the affirmative disruption of this model.

Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

13 January, 2016

Apps & affect – Fibreculture 25

This issue of Fibreculture on “apps and affect” from last year (2015), stemming from a conference of the same name, has some fairly substantial looking contributions from interesting people. These include a conversation between Alexander Galloway & Patricia Ticineto Clough, the ‘algorithmic agartha‘ paper by Nandita Biswas Mellamphy & Dan Mellamphy I’ve linked to before and (of particular interest to me at the mo) a paper by Melissa Gregg on speculative labour & app development. It’s edited by Svitlana Matviyenko, Nandita Biswas Mellamphy, Nick Dyer-Witheford, Alison Hearn, and Andrew Murphie.

Introduction

In William Gibson’s recent futurist novel The Peripheral, the planet has been devastated by a massive eco-techno-political catastrophe (‘the jackpot’) but remaining inhabitants are still able to enjoy the luxury of activating digital devices simply by tapping their tongues on the roof of their mouths. This touch is sufficient to set into play systems that communicate across space and time – enabling the establishment of connections back in time, for example, to people closer to our own present-day, for whom mobiles are still (somewhat) separate from the body. Thirty years ago, in his first novel Neuromancer, Gibson immortalised cyberspace with the account of what now sounds like an amazingly clunky process whereby the hero ‘jacks-in’ to virtual reality. But in The Peripheral the process of translation and transition into networks is streamlined – occluded, internal, intimate and implanted – right at the tip of the tongue.

This issue of the Fibreculture Journal explores a moment along this hypothetical trajectory by investigating the contemporary intersection of ‘Apps and Affect’, publishing papers from a conference of that name organised in October 2013 by faculty and students at Western University (specifically from its Faculty of Information and Media Studies and Center for the Study of Theory and Criticism). By recognising apps as objects that are related to the constitution of subjects, as a component of biopolitical assemblages, and as a means of digital production and consumption, our conference aimed to make an intervention in what had – since the announcements of the App-Store and the iPhone3 in 2008 – been a largely technical and rather technophiliac public discussion of apps.

Isn’t it paradoxical, we asked, that instead of becoming ‘transparent’ and ‘invisible’ – as envisioned by the thinkers of ubiquitous computing decades ago – the app-ecosystem manifests itself as permanent excess: excessive downloads, excessive connections, excessive proximity, excessive ‘friends’-qua-‘contacts’, excessive speeds and excessive amounts of information? How does the app as ‘technique’ (Tenner), indeed as ‘cultural technique’ (Siegert) and as ‘technics’ (Stiegler), channel our ways of maintaining relations with/in the media environment? Do the specific and circumscribed operations of individual applications foster or foreclose what media theorists call the transformative and transductive potential of collective technological individuation (Simondon)? How might we think about the social, political and technical implications of this movement away from open-ended networks like the internet towards specific, focused, and individualised modes of computing? Do apps represent ‘a new reticular condition of trans-individuation grammatising new forms of social relations’ (Stiegler) or do they signal instead the triumph of ‘regulatory’ networks over ‘generative’ ones (Zittrain)? If apps are micro-programs residing by the hundreds and thousands on cell-phones, mobile-devices and tablets, and affects are corporeal excitements (and depressions) running beneath and beyond cognition, what is the relation of apps to affects?

– See more at: http://twentyfive.fibreculturejournal.org/#sthash.6y9K3uyP.dpuf

4 January, 2016

Reblog> On the radicalisation (of (Muslim) youth)

Owain Jones on the need to distinguish between extremism and radicalism:

On the radicalisation (of (Muslim) youth)

On the radicalisation (of (Muslim) youth).

I think we should be concerned with media and political use of the term radicalism and radicalisation to describe the current extremist crisis.

A few things have been really stressing me about the now ubiquitous use of ‘radicalisation’ in media/political accounts of (Muslim) extremism.

We really need to save the idea of being radical from being used to describe people turning to extremism, terrorism and violence. They are going through something else – criminalisation, pathologicalisation, evilisation or something.

Radical thinking has a noble and important tradition which needs to be saved and continued. The great radicals were those who kicked against entrenched power and injustice. And did so through politics expressed in thought, language and, in some cases, direct action that was illegal and or violent (e.g. the Suffragettes). But such violence was usually against the self or property rather than indiscriminately targeted others. See Andy Fitzgerald’s article

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/20/we-need-radicals-for-social-change

A list of the great radicals would include Tom Payne, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, an on and on

I would hope and expect that many young people today would feel the urge to be radical because they can see the dire conditions of society in terms of quality of life, justice (both social and ecological) and so forth. Young people – all people – who really are paying attention to the conditions of contemporary society should be radical in outlook.

The issue is for many young (Muslim?) people who are turning against the ‘values’ of the West is that that it is difficult to see powerful, clear, alternatives being put forth, and which have a strong profile in culture and the media – for instance green radicalism, or social(ist) radicalism – that really can challenge the direction of travel on neo-liberal consumerist society. So turning to a powerful counter narrative – in this case alternative fundamentalist theologic doctrines – with (in the most extreme instances) their guns and videos must be tempting.

What ‘red blooded’ ‘angry young men/women’ are going to be content with lives, which, for some at least, involve low paid, dead-end jobs in degraded ecological and social environments, while the excessive wealth and comsumptiion of the elite is blazened all over our cities and media At the moment the alternative for them is extremism.

Hitler was an extremist – not a radical

Edward Vallance in A Radical History Of Britain: Visionaries, Rebels and Revolutionaries – the men and women who fought for our freedoms, points out that radical individuals and groups in the UK have played a key role in the development of freedom democracy and justice. And at certain times radicalism was in direct conflict with extremism e.g. against the rise of fascism in early 20th century Europe and Britain itself.

It might be very handy for those seeking to preserve the status quo in terms of power to marginalise and demonise the very notion of being radical through its repeated association with extremism.

All media and political use of the term radicalism to describe the current extremist crisis should be stopped forthwith.

21 December, 2015

Interesting new paper: Performing the sharing economy – Lizzie Richardson

This new article in Geoforum [paywall] by Lizzie Richardson (@LizzieCIRich) looks really good – I’ve only skim read it so far but looking forward digging in 🙂

Performing the sharing economy

Lizzie Richardson

Here’s the abstract:

The sharing economy converges around activities facilitated through digital platforms that enable peer-to-peer access to goods and services. It constitutes an apparent paradox, framed as both part of the capitalist economy and as an alternative. This duplicity necessitates focusing on the performances of the sharing economy: how it simultaneously constructs diverse economic activities whilst also inviting the deconstruction of ongoing practices of dominance. Such performances hold open the question of what the (sharing) economy is, suspending it as a space for both opportunity and critique. Drawing on participant observation at a sharing economy ‘festival’ and analysis of the vocabularies of online platforms, the paper outlines three performances of sharing through community, access and collaboration. It argues through these performances that the sharing economy is contingent and complexly articulated. It has the potential to both shake up and further entrench ‘business-as-usual’ through the ongoing reconfiguration of a divergent range of (economic) activities. Whilst offering an antidote to the narrative of economy as engendering isolation and separation, the sharing economy simultaneously masks new forms of inequality and polarisations of ownership. Nonetheless, the paper concludes in suggesting that by pointing to wider questions concerning participation in, access to and production of resources, the sharing economy should not be dismissed. Instead, it should serve as prompt to engage with ‘digital’ transformations of economy in the spirit of affirmative critique that might enact the promise of doing economy differently.

27 November, 201527 November, 2015

Projecting a genuine future for the living? On Latour & Stiegler comments after the Paris attacks

I was quite surprised at how quickly the translation of the short interview with Bernard Stiegler in le Monde spread on twitter, which is not usual for my posts…

Anyway, I have been struck by a similarity in ethos between the comments made by Bernard Stiegler in his interview and the commentary provided by Bruno Latour in an op-ed (translated by Jane Kuntz) for Reporterre, entitled “The Other State of Urgency” [via Installing (Social) Order].

It is an ethos of calling for the casting-off of a short-termism or ‘death-wish’ (pace Latour) focussed on (inadequately mitigating) destruction–destruction of states, of peoples and of our planet–towards affirming what Stiegler calls a ‘genuine’ future and what Latour sees as a taking of fate into our our hands. One might see it as a loosely vitalist ethos: an affirmation of life and its pluri-potency.

It seems to me significant that both Latour and Stiegler frame the issue in relation to the anthropocene and the COP21 talks being held in Paris. For both of them, the affirmation of a ‘genuine’ future entails combining stances towards ecological, economic, political and scientific atmospheres. Such an affirmation of a sustainable path towards a future of the living is set in contra-distinction to a rhetoric of war, which both thinkers reject in their own ways. To submit to war, in the manner of the French government, is to submit to a short-term imperative to (re)act, but to act for whom and to what ends is a question both Latour and Stiegler find troubling. It is analogous to government via catastrophism – such forms of reaction are already presumed in the mode of ‘normal’ operation: the ‘everywhere war’ and ‘state of exception’ is the new ‘normal’.

Who could argue against an affirmation of hope? I certainly would not. Yet, while there is plenty of diagnosis of the ‘state of urgency’, we are left to ponder: what is to be done?

I don’t think I buy Stiegler’s eurocentric call for policy, it is too easy to see how–even with the best of intentions–this would slip into the kind of technocratic malaise that has buggered up the Mediterranean EU countries. Yet, at least Stiegler attempts to offer strategies – and I think the wider outlining of a political-economics of contribution and of a kind of ‘neganthropy‘, while somewhat grandiloquent, remain inspiring. I would be very curious to see what Latour would suggest in order to “invent demonstrations more innovative than yet another march from Place de la République to Place de la Nation.”

It is, of course, excruciatingly hard to offer strategies for action – as Zizek likes to quip: we can see why it has been suggested that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than an end to the ideological milieu of capitalism. Working for a ‘genuine’ future hurts, but as both Latour and Stiegler demonstrate: it remains the task at hand.

19 November, 2015

Event> The Politics and Economics of Attention (14/12)

Both Clive Barnett and I will be speaking at the sixth seminar in the Behaviour Change & Psychological Governance series (funded by the ESRC) which is being held at the University of Bristol on the 14th of December.

I’ll be revisiting some of the things Patrick Crogan and I wrote about back in 2012 in the themed issue of Culture Machine we co-edited following an ESF-funded conference on attention in 2010. My move forward is probably being a little more critical in my thinking about what constitutes the process of valuing attention (critically reflecting on why a Labour Theory of Value might not quite fit) and thinking (with the work of Bernard Stiegler) about how the socio-technical systems that attempt to economise (something that gets called) attention are a kind of pharmakon (an indeterminacy, originating from the idea of a drug as both poison and cure). By looking at some examples I hope to offer some suggestions about how we might understand what’s going on (in networked technology systems in particular) when an attempt is made to place a financial value on ‘attention’.

18 November, 2015

CFP> “Spatializing Sovereignty”

Another interesting event, from the Society for Radical Geography, Spatial Theory, and Everyday Life, short deadline now though: 20th Nov. –– I saw this via Mark Purcell.

2016 Symposium CFP: “Spatializing Sovereignty”

Featuring keynote addresses by:
Dr. Mishuana Goeman, Professor of American Indian Studies and Gender Studies, UCLA
and Gelare Khoshgozaran, Writer and Multi-disciplinary Artist

UC Berkeley
March 4, 2016

While sovereignty is often defined in terms of the bounded nation-state, this symposium convenes to examine competing, overlapping, and “nested sovereignties” (Simpson 2014). How is the spatiality of sovereignty felt, practiced, embodied, inhabited, or imposed at various scales? We might consider how the thousands of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada and the U.S. lay bare logics of patriarchal white settler sovereignty, while ongoing state-sanctioned violence reveals that anti-Blackness is also constitutive of and central to securing the nation state. What might the controlling and blocking of Syrian refugee movement say about state sovereignty in this moment? Furthermore, transnational feminist scholars have continuously interrogated the relationship between regimes of debt and modes of sovereignty in the Global South. Movements resisting these forms of violence in turn show how the gendered and racialized body becomes a site at which sovereignty can be (re)articulated.

This symposium seeks explorations of how sovereignty is spatialized at all levels, from the power of mapping, to the affects and “erotics of sovereignty” (Rifkin 2012), to the praxis of sovereign polities. How do variously defined geographies determine the limitations and possibilities of sovereignty as concept, as process, and as discursive and political strategy?

Possible topics can include but are not limited to:

Indigenous sovereignty and spatial justice
Geographies of race and racialization
Spatialization of affect and affective sovereignty
Corporeal sovereignty and biopolitics
Sovereignty, space, and disability
Sovereignty in and through artistic, literary, and expressive cultures
Transnational feminist theory and the sovereign
Critical feminist, queer, and trans readings of sovereignty
Bordering and colonialisms
Neoliberal governance and state sovereignty
Sovereignty and carceral power
Sovereignty and sexuality, desire, and the erotic
Climate justice, ecologies of space, and the anthropocene
Urban regimes and the right to the city

Though we welcome submissions that deal generally with spatial theory, special consideration will be given to abstracts that engage this year’s theme. We encourage abstracts from activists, artists, and academics at all stages of research, and will consider proposals of any format for 20-minute presentations (including conference papers, artist talks, art interventions, short film screenings, and activist report-backs). This symposium is committed to producing sustained conversations and a collaborative environment for scholars, artists, and activists whose work engages our society’s interests in radical geography, spatial theory, and everyday life. Those interested may submit proposals of no more than 500 words to radicalspaces@gmail.com by November 20, 2015. Presenters will be notified of their acceptance by December 15, 2015.

This year’s symposium will be held at UC Berkeley on March 4, 2016 featuring two keynote addresses: Dr. Mishuana Goeman, associate professor of Gender Studies and American Indian Studies at UCLA, and Gelare Khoshgozaran, writer and multi-disciplinary artist.

References

Rifkin, Mark. (2012). The Erotics of Sovereignty: Queer Native Writing in the Era of Self-Determination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Simpson, Audra. (2014). Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Durham: Duke University Press.

18 November, 2015

CFP> Streams of Consciousness: Data, Cognition and Intelligent Devices, Apr 2016

This looks interesting:

Streams of Consciousness

Data, Cognition and Intelligent Devices

21st and 22nd of April 2016

Call for Papers

consc

“What’s on your mind?” This is the question to which every Facebook now responds. Millions of users sharing their thoughts in one giant performance of what Clay Shirky once called “cognitive surplus”. Contemporary media platforms aren’t simply a stage for this cognitive performance. They are more like directors, staging scenes, tweaking scripts, working to get the best or fully “optimized” performance. As Katherine Hayles has pointed out, media theory has long taken for granted that we think “through, with and alongside media”. Pen and paper, the abacus, and modern calculators are obvious cases in point, but the list quickly expands and with it longstanding conceptions of the Cartesian mind dissolve away. Within the cognitive sciences, cognition is now routinely described as embodied, extended, and distributed. They too recognize that cognition takes place beyond the brain, in between people, between people and things, and combinations thereof. The varieties of specifically human thought, from decision-making to reasoning and interpretation, are now considered one part of a broader cognitive spectrum shared with other animals, systems, and intelligent devices.

Today, the technology we mostly think through, with and alongside are computers. We routinely rely on intelligent devices for any number of operations, but this is no straightforward “augmentation”. Our cognitive capacities are equally instrumentalized, plugged into larger cognitive operations from which we have little autonomy. Our cognitive weaknesses are exploited and manipulated by techniques drawn from behavioural economics and psychology. If Vannevar Bush once pondered how we would think in the future, he received a partial response in Steve Krug’s best selling book on web usability: Don’t Make Me Think! Streams of Consciousness aims to explore cognition, broadly conceived, in an age of intelligent devices. We aim to critically interrogate our contemporary infatuation with specific cognitive qualities – such as “smartness” and “intelligence” – while seeking to genuinely understand the specific forms of cognition that are privileged in our current technological milieu. We are especially interested in devices that mediate access to otherwise imperceptible forms of data (too big, too fast), so it can be acted upon in routine or novel ways.

Topics of the conference include but are not limited to:

data and cognition
decision-making technologies
algorithms, AI and machine learning
visualization, perception
sense and sensation
business intelligence and data exploration
signal intelligence and drones
smart and dumb things
choice and decision architecture
behavioural economics and design
technologies of nudging
interfaces
bodies, data, and (wearable) devices
optimization
web and data analytics (including A/B and multivariate testing)

Please submit individual abstracts of no longer than 300 words. Panel proposals are also welcome and should also be 300 words. Panel proposals should also include indvidual abstracts. The deadline for submissions is Friday the 18th of December and submissions should be made to cimconf@warwick.ac.uk. Accepted submissions will be notified by 20th of January 2016.
Streams of Consciousness is organised by Nathaniel Tkacz and Ana Gross. The event is supported by the Economic and Social Research Council.

12 October, 2015

The Human Face of Cryptoeconomies – @furtherfield exhibition

I just wanted to flag this excellent exhibition about to start at Furtherfield (in London). It involves the Museum of Contemporary Commodities alongside a lot of other great work and will very much be worth visiting.

The Human Face of Cryptoeconomies

17 OCTOBER – 22 NOVEMBER 2015

Featuring Émilie Brout and Maxime Marion, Shu Lea Cheang, Sarah T Gold, Jennifer Lyn Morone, Rob Myers, The Museum of Contemporary Commodities (MoCC), the London School of Financial Arts and the Robin Hood Cooperative.

Furtherfield launches its Art Data Money programme with The Human Face of Cryptoeconomies at Furtherfield Gallery in the heart of London’s Finsbury Park.

The Human Face of Cryptoeconomies presents artworks that reveal how we might produce, exchange and value things differently in the age of the blockchain.

Appealing to our curiosity, emotion and irrationality, international artists seize emerging technologies, mass behaviours and p2p concepts to create artworks that reveal ideas for a radically transformed artistic, economic and social future.

Visit the Furtherfield website for more information.