The Technologies of All Dead Generations
Metadata
Highlights
- It would be reasonable to regard this phenomenon with alarm. At a time when right-wing politics is distressingly popular around the world, Bitcoin offers yet another boost to the forces of reaction. But what I remember feeling on the airplane was envy. Why can’t we do that, I wondered. If there are technologies that propagate selfishness, why can’t we make technologies that propagate solidarity? (View Highlight)
- At some point, we need to move from critique to creation. And this move just might serve as the basis for a third wave of algorithmic accountability, which would concern itself not with ameliorating or abolishing existing systems, but with building new ones.
Importantly, the different waves don’t displace each other but, like real waves, interpenetrate. Harm reduction is an important complement to abolition; and both, in turn, can help clear the space in which alternatives may emerge. We’ve already seen evidence of this dynamic in recent years, as the first two waves of algorithmic accountability have helped stimulate greater interest in different forms of technological practice, particularly when it comes to the internet.
(View Highlight)
- First, a definition. What is politics? Let’s say that politics is the set of practices through which a group of human beings arrive at a particular distribution of social power. (View Highlight)
- The third wave, by contrast, not only makes technology an object of politics but a terrain of politics. It wants to do politics through technology. And this means that the third-waver must develop an analysis of the specificities of technology as a site of political struggle, in the same way that feminists had to develop an analysis of the specificities of the household as a site of political struggle. To do politics through technology, we need to understand how technologies do politics. (View Highlight)
- One of Winner’s examples is drawn from Robert A. Caro’s biography of Robert Moses. According to Caro, Moses designed the overpasses on his Long Island parkways to be too low for buses to drive under them. He did so, Caro says, in order to prevent poor people, and particularly poor Black and Puerto Rican people, from getting to Jones Beach. Thus even a fairly unsophisticated artifact like an overpass can, simply by virtue of its dimensions, embody and enact a political project. (View Highlight)
(View Highlight)- The story of the steam engine illustrates an important aspect of technologies having politics. The politics of a technology is deeply involved in determining that technology’s viability. Steam power stuck because its political qualities helped advance the interests of a rising industrial capitalist class, who could use it to strengthen control over labor and increase profits. One could tell similar stories about any number of other technologies. There are always different ways to stage and to solve a technical problem, or even to define what counts as a problem. Which sets of choices win out has mostly to do with how well they satisfy the compulsions of capital accumulation, and the projects of empire and racial subordination through which those compulsions have historically been expressed. (View Highlight)
- Marx famously observed that human beings don’t make history under conditions of their own choosing but, rather, under those transmitted from the past—that “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” This is especially true when it comes to technology. An engineer or a designer is never working from a blank slate. They are always working within conditions transmitted from the past. And this introduces a problem for the third wave of algorithmic accountability.
How do you take a technological inheritance that has been engineered for empire, racial subordination, and capital accumulation, and turn it against itself? How do you pursue a politics of liberation through a medium that is permeated with a politics of domination? If the technologies of all dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brain of the living, then how do we wake up from the nightmare? (View Highlight)
New highlights added June 2, 2023 at 8:21 PM
- In fact, people rarely do: the past never completely encloses the present. There is always a discontinuity of some kind. The writer Alex Colston theorizes that this discontinuity is what makes revolutions possible. “If this separation and independence did not exist between older and newer forms of society—or families and generations themselves—all social reproduction would produce mimetic and homogeneous replicas,” he writes. “This gap is conditio sine qua non for revolution and unthinkable without it.” But breakthroughs, whether of the psychic or the social sort, don’t happen automatically. It takes work to turn discontinuity into disobedience. (View Highlight)
- But drift also presents the third-waver with an opportunity. Drift is the discontinuity within our technology inheritance. And, as with our psychic and social inheritances, discontinuity can serve as the basis for disobedience. We can step into the cracks and use them as points of subversion. The technological environment into which we have been born does not perfectly abide by the imperatives that have formed it, and this gives us room for redirection. Both the computer and the atom bomb were invented by capitalist countries to defeat global fascism, but a computer can be put to more purposes than warfare. It could probably even be used to plan a socialist economy. (View Highlight)
- Earlier, I asked: If the technologies of all dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brain of the living, then how do we wake up from the nightmare? The answer is: we can’t. But we can wake up inside the nightmare. (View Highlight)
- Waking up inside the nightmare is called dialectics. “Dialectics is the self-consciousness of the objective context of delusion; it does not mean to have escaped from that context,” writes Adorno in Negative Dialectics. “Its objective goal is to break out of the context from within.”
(View Highlight)
- For Adorno, this goal can never be completely achieved. There is no exit to that higher synthesis that Grace Lee Boggs spoke of, just the perpetual motion of dialectical cognition, restlessly picking away at the “inadequacy of thought and thing.” Think of a firefly in a jar: it buzzes around, trying to break out, and in doing so, illuminates the air around it. “It lies in the definition of negative dialectics that it will not come to rest in itself, as if it were total,” Adorno says. “This is its form of hope.” (View Highlight)
- So the “suffering of the negative,” as Boggs called it—the negative dialectics of waking up inside the nightmare and probing the gaps, the contradictions—is indispensable to the work of creating a better technological future. Without it, you can do great injury to your politics.
Not by failing, which is inevitable—failure is part of the experimental process through which a new technological politics will discover the practical forms that are adequate to it. I have in mind a different kind of failure, the sort that comes disguised as success. Disobedience can resurrect what it rejects; the revolution can become the counterrevolution. (View Highlight)
New highlights added July 29, 2023 at 9:38 PM
- So the “suffering of the negative,” as Boggs called it—the negative dialectics of waking up inside the nightmare and probing the gaps, the contradictions—is indispensable to the work of creating a better technological future. Without it, you can do great injury to your politics.
Not by failing, which is inevitable—failure is part of the experimental process through which a new technological politics will discover the practical forms that are adequate to it. I have in mind a different kind of failure, the sort that comes disguised as success. Disobedience can resurrect what it rejects; the revolution can become the counterrevolution. (View Highlight)
The Technologies of All Dead Generations
Metadata
Highlights
- It would be reasonable to regard this phenomenon with alarm. At a time when right-wing politics is distressingly popular around the world, Bitcoin offers yet another boost to the forces of reaction. But what I remember feeling on the airplane was envy. Why can’t we do that, I wondered. If there are technologies that propagate selfishness, why can’t we make technologies that propagate solidarity? (View Highlight)
- At some point, we need to move from critique to creation. And this move just might serve as the basis for a third wave of algorithmic accountability, which would concern itself not with ameliorating or abolishing existing systems, but with building new ones.
Importantly, the different waves don’t displace each other but, like real waves, interpenetrate. Harm reduction is an important complement to abolition; and both, in turn, can help clear the space in which alternatives may emerge. We’ve already seen evidence of this dynamic in recent years, as the first two waves of algorithmic accountability have helped stimulate greater interest in different forms of technological practice, particularly when it comes to the internet.
(View Highlight)
- First, a definition. What is politics? Let’s say that politics is the set of practices through which a group of human beings arrive at a particular distribution of social power. (View Highlight)
- The third wave, by contrast, not only makes technology an object of politics but a terrain of politics. It wants to do politics through technology. And this means that the third-waver must develop an analysis of the specificities of technology as a site of political struggle, in the same way that feminists had to develop an analysis of the specificities of the household as a site of political struggle. To do politics through technology, we need to understand how technologies do politics. (View Highlight)
- One of Winner’s examples is drawn from Robert A. Caro’s biography of Robert Moses. According to Caro, Moses designed the overpasses on his Long Island parkways to be too low for buses to drive under them. He did so, Caro says, in order to prevent poor people, and particularly poor Black and Puerto Rican people, from getting to Jones Beach. Thus even a fairly unsophisticated artifact like an overpass can, simply by virtue of its dimensions, embody and enact a political project. (View Highlight)
- (View Highlight)
- The story of the steam engine illustrates an important aspect of technologies having politics. The politics of a technology is deeply involved in determining that technology’s viability. Steam power stuck because its political qualities helped advance the interests of a rising industrial capitalist class, who could use it to strengthen control over labor and increase profits. One could tell similar stories about any number of other technologies. There are always different ways to stage and to solve a technical problem, or even to define what counts as a problem. Which sets of choices win out has mostly to do with how well they satisfy the compulsions of capital accumulation, and the projects of empire and racial subordination through which those compulsions have historically been expressed. (View Highlight)
- Marx famously observed that human beings don’t make history under conditions of their own choosing but, rather, under those transmitted from the past—that “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” This is especially true when it comes to technology. An engineer or a designer is never working from a blank slate. They are always working within conditions transmitted from the past. And this introduces a problem for the third wave of algorithmic accountability.
How do you take a technological inheritance that has been engineered for empire, racial subordination, and capital accumulation, and turn it against itself? How do you pursue a politics of liberation through a medium that is permeated with a politics of domination? If the technologies of all dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brain of the living, then how do we wake up from the nightmare? (View Highlight)
- In fact, people rarely do: the past never completely encloses the present. There is always a discontinuity of some kind. The writer Alex Colston theorizes that this discontinuity is what makes revolutions possible. “If this separation and independence did not exist between older and newer forms of society—or families and generations themselves—all social reproduction would produce mimetic and homogeneous replicas,” he writes. “This gap is conditio sine qua non for revolution and unthinkable without it.” But breakthroughs, whether of the psychic or the social sort, don’t happen automatically. It takes work to turn discontinuity into disobedience. (View Highlight)
- But drift also presents the third-waver with an opportunity. Drift is the discontinuity within our technology inheritance. And, as with our psychic and social inheritances, discontinuity can serve as the basis for disobedience. We can step into the cracks and use them as points of subversion. The technological environment into which we have been born does not perfectly abide by the imperatives that have formed it, and this gives us room for redirection. Both the computer and the atom bomb were invented by capitalist countries to defeat global fascism, but a computer can be put to more purposes than warfare. It could probably even be used to plan a socialist economy. (View Highlight)
- Earlier, I asked: If the technologies of all dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brain of the living, then how do we wake up from the nightmare? The answer is: we can’t. But we can wake up inside the nightmare. (View Highlight)
- Waking up inside the nightmare is called dialectics. “Dialectics is the self-consciousness of the objective context of delusion; it does not mean to have escaped from that context,” writes Adorno in Negative Dialectics. “Its objective goal is to break out of the context from within.”
(View Highlight)
- For Adorno, this goal can never be completely achieved. There is no exit to that higher synthesis that Grace Lee Boggs spoke of, just the perpetual motion of dialectical cognition, restlessly picking away at the “inadequacy of thought and thing.” Think of a firefly in a jar: it buzzes around, trying to break out, and in doing so, illuminates the air around it. “It lies in the definition of negative dialectics that it will not come to rest in itself, as if it were total,” Adorno says. “This is its form of hope.” (View Highlight)
- So the “suffering of the negative,” as Boggs called it—the negative dialectics of waking up inside the nightmare and probing the gaps, the contradictions—is indispensable to the work of creating a better technological future. Without it, you can do great injury to your politics.
Not by failing, which is inevitable—failure is part of the experimental process through which a new technological politics will discover the practical forms that are adequate to it. I have in mind a different kind of failure, the sort that comes disguised as success. Disobedience can resurrect what it rejects; the revolution can become the counterrevolution. (View Highlight)
