How Do We Think About Networks Under Post-Digital Conditions? What

How do we think about networks under post-digital conditions? What The next does this imply for transmediale festival, research? End to End (E2E), aims to deal with the pervasiveness of networks and their limits. It refers to Robert Filliou’s The Eternal Network (1983), pointing to the interconnectedness of everyday-life ac- tions across an emerging global world at that time. This is a good reminder that network cultures exist beyond the technical reality of network culture as we now know it despite our primary identification of networks with social media and planetary computation. By drawing on the legacies of critical and autonomous network cultures, transmediale 2020 aims to make the limits of Internet-based networks visible but also highlight alternatives. Is there a conceivable counter-power to networks? Which alternative technological models and cultural narratives are needed to construct the principles of end-to-end communi- cation anew? How might the critique of networks extend to non-west- ern contexts and reflect The once the limits in a global canonical perspective? model of central- ized, decentralized and distributed networks is in need of differentiation and more detail today. This means broadening the discussion of networks to other ecologies that would include non-human elements such as animals, energy, clouds, cli- mate, and so on. Moreover, despite this ever- lasting debate over networks and their poten- tial to rethink eco-socio-technical structures, relatively little of this network thinking has permeated the artworld or research cultures. In this workshop we would like to explore this line of thinking and ask what it means to research networks, and moreover to think beyond the organizational logic of the academy to other forms of organizing knowledge production and distribution. What are the limits of research networks and what would an end-to-end principle of research look like? Might the workshop (if not festival) ex- amine its form in light of this? Research Networks, A Peer-Reviewed Newspaper Volume 9, Issue 1, 2020 4 APRJA_ archives Starting: Mon Nov 11 23:19:27 CET 2019 Ending: Wed Dec 18 10:52:29 CET 2019 https://maillist.au.dk/mailman/private/aprja 3 4 Posting the first msg with "hello world" on 10/10/2019 at 08:44 from Winnie Soon Hello world! Re- search Networks - getting started on 11/11/2019 at 23:19 from Geoff Cox Welcome to the list. I'd like to intro- duce Maria, Sudipto, Tatiana, Cristina, Giseli, who will begin the discussion this week about Research Networks, with a focus on borders, frontier zones and feminist car- tography. Invited respondents are Kalen, Ozgun, The Ends of Juan, who also the Network as take over next Frontiers of Extrac- week. Everyone tion on 12/11/2019 else, please feel at 12:58 from free to join in at Sudipto Basu any time. Geoff The Ends of the Network as Frontiers of Ex- traction What do we mean by the ends of the network? In a world-order where networks have subsumed and 5 restructured nearly all spheres of existence, what has not already been connected to the network lies in wait as standing-reserve. The contemporary capitalist mode of production being profoundly networked and algorithmic – en- compassing the planet with a digital layer – there is therefore a formal equivalence and significant overlap between the spheres of valorization and circulation of capital and the expanses of the network. As capital looks for new sources of value (when the rate of profit tends to falls), as it expands, it looks for new ‘outsides’ to subsume, i.e. for newer frontiers of extraction. In what fol- lows, I therefore attempt a preliminary defi- nition of the ends of the network as frontier zones. Anna Tsing’s work on global supply chains and resource extraction is key to my understanding of this field. Tsing claims that the bigness of Capital is built precisely on difference and social-cultural diversity instead of being impeded by it. She differs here with orthodox Marxist critiques which consider class the overriding criteria of analysis, and relegate other axes of oppression and identities based on race, gender, region etc. as secondary de- terminants. For Tsing, the abstract machine of global Capital renews itself and grows precisely by feeding on and making strategic use of friction (social friction, but also mate- rial friction) across its many scales of operation. Profit is maximized by weighing off a range of factors in real-time across contexts (where to procure materials from, where to get manufacturing done, where are labor and corpo- rate laws most favorable, what exact setup of subcontracting to rely upon, which shipping route to take, etc.), their probabilities cal- culated and the most favorable arrangement chosen. A logistical supply chain is a weird spatiotemporal arrangement characterized by “contingency, experimentation, negotiation, and unstable commitments” (Tsing 2009, 151). A supply chain cuts through diverse regimes and lifeworlds, remakes territories as well as temporalities, capitalizes on social difference by establishing a field of equivalence (what we may also call a zone of operation) 6 across which things and people can be moved. I absent-mindedly click ‘confirm order’ on Ama- zon, asking for one-day delivery; hundreds of miles away things and people start moving in a remote warehouse, workers listlessly dig up one more package, tag it, send it along for dispatch, many sleepless souls drag this package along as part of various batches of goods divided up by territory and delivery speed, until it finally reaches me (most often sooner than I’d expected). This is perhaps today’s update of the butterfly effect! The smallest perturbation on a screen sets a complex jug- gernaut in motion, whose contours can be barely intuited from progress on the ‘track order’ widget. The relation of friction so crucial to the sustenance of capitalist production is the most acute in those realms of existence into which capitalism has just started to pene- trate. These are resource frontiers in which, Tsing argues, there is utter chaos and a sus- pension of the law. The lawless, ‘wild’ frontier is only navigable by bands of resource miners drunk with frontier optimism, living an utter bare life even as compete with each other as mercenaries to make imaginary for- tunes. They are the ones who accelerate the production of wilderness at the frontier, who decode and destratify previous social-natural ecologies, connect the abstract machine of Capital with its outsides by engaging in a labor of translation or conversion. While Tsing is concerned in Friction (2005) with natural resource frontiers such as the forests of Kal- imantan (where logging is rampant), I think the salient features she outlines name a gen- eral frontier condition that is observable wherever the networks of capital encounter their ends. We may now specify a name for these ends: they are interfaces that open onto something else that is not-yet-networked, but key to its functioning. What is an interface, then? It is a threshold of friction between regimes that are contigu- ous, yet not fully resolved and interoperable. Therefore, an interface is the surface where one code (usually of a higher order of com- 7 plexity) is translated into another (more com- putable, manageable). A surface as much of connection as of separation, which polices the boundaries between information and noise (between the useful and the excessive). The re- duction of complexity (and contingency) is crucial given the problematic relation of cybernetic systems (networks) with their outsides: the environment has a fundamentally destabilizing effect, even as it is a source of value for the system’s regeneration and self-perpetuation. As Alexander Galloway argues in The Interface Effect (2012), the interface is a dialectical, dynamic relation of opacity and transparency, of conscious mediation and naturalization. The moment a particular labor of translation is absorbed into the algorithm or network architecture, or the moment it is stabilized as an embodied habit, the interface dissolves and reappears else- where. For Galloway, the interface is therefore not so much a thing as an effect (a mode of mediation) of interpellating the outside into the cybernetic network. In a short counter-history of the notion, Nis- hant Shah (2017) shows how the colloquial dom- inant identification of the interface with GUIs was contingent on a particular era of computing that needed to posit the user as its subject (one who consciously needed to inter- vene in computational processes by ‘reading,’ ‘writing’ or making decisions). Before the PC revolution, there was no one-on-one relation between the machine and the user defined by ease-of-use and affective intimacy. And now the transition to an Internet of Things (so called ‘no-UI objects’ that recede into an am- bient networked environment, constantly gather data and perform computational tasks silently) has effaced that particular visual form of the interface, thereby redrawing the boundaries between ‘embodied’ and ‘artificial’ intelli- gence. Shah therefore proposes three ways of looking at the interface anew: (1.) especially as it relates to the dialectic of machinic in- telligence in networked computational systems, to see the interface as a negotiation with the human body; where the network augments, re- shapes and competes with the body to fulfill 8 certain operations (2.) to see the interface as located in feedback loops that are not nec- essarily visual or haptic, loops which modu- late relations of ease-of-use and everyday habits that tend to obfuscate structures of power, control and discrimination (3.) to see the interface as a reconciliation of contra- dictions or opposites that meet within the probabilistic space of computers.

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