A Peer-Reviewed Journal About MACHINE RESEARCH

A Peer-Reviewed Journal About

MACHINE RESEARCH

Geoff Cox Maya Indira Ganesh Abelardo Gil-Fournier Maja Bak Herrie John Hill Brian House Nathan Jones Sam Skinner Dave Young a.o.

Christian Ulrik Andersen & Geoff Cox (Eds.)

Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017 ISSN 2245-7755 1 Contents

Christian Ulrik Andersen & Geoff Cox Editorial: Machine Research 4

MACHINE ONTOLOGIES AND INTELLIGENCE

Geoff Cox Ways of Machine Seeing: an introduction 8

Brian House Machine Listening: WaveNet, media materialism, and rhythmanalysis 16

Nathan Jones & Sam Skinner Absorbing Text: Rereading Speed Reading 26

MACHINIC SYSTEMS OF CONFLICT

John Hill Don’t just sit there shouting at the television, get up and change the channel: a networked model of communication in the cultural politics of debt 40

Dave Young Computing War Narratives: The Hamlet Evaluation System in Vietnam 50

MACHINE ETHICS AND AESTHETICS

Maja Bak Herrie Elusive Borders: Virtual Gravity and the Space-Time of Metadata 66

Maya Indira Ganesh Entanglement: Machine learning and human ethics in driver-less car crashes 76 POST ANTHROPOCENTRIC RECONSIDERATIONS

Abelardo Gil-Fournier Seeding and Seeing: The inner colonisation of land and vision 90

Various authors Interview with an Etherbox 102

Contributors 108

A Peer-Reviewed Newspaper Journal About_ ISSN: 2245-7755

Series editors: Christian Ulrik Andersen and Geoff Cox Published by: Digital Aesthetics Research Centre, Aarhus University Design: Mark Simmonds, Liverpool CC license: ‘Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike’ www.aprja.net EDITORIAL

MACHINE RESEARCH

Christian Ulrik Andersen & Geoff Cox

APRJA Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017 ISSN 2245-7755

CC license: ‘Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike’. EDITORIAL

to both limit and expand autonomy. As Maurizio Lazzarato has highlighted, we can be ‘enslaved’ or ‘subjected’ to a machine:

If we adopt Deleuze and Guattari’s perspective, we can state clearly that capitalism is neither a “mode of production” nor is it a system. Rather it is a series of devices for machinic enslavement and, at the same time, a series of devices for social subjection. […] The technological machine is only This publication is about Machine Research one instance of machinism. There are – research on machines, research with ma- also technical, aesthetic, economic, chines, and research as a machine. It thus social, etc. machines. explores machinic perspectives to suggest a situation where the humanities are put Whether technical, social, communi- into a critical perspective by machine driven cational, we are enslaved when we become ecologies, ontologies and epistemologies one of the constituent parts that enables the of thinking and acting. It aims to engage machine to function, and subjected to the research and artistic practice that takes into machine when we are defined purely by its account the new materialist conditions im- actions. But what are the other possibilities? plied by nonhuman techno-ecologies. These As a response to this question, it is important include new ontologies and intelligence such to emphasise here that the process leading to as machine learning, machine reading and the publication of these papers – a three-day listening (Geoff Cox, Sam Skinner & Nathan workshop hosted by Constant in Brussels Jones, Brian House), systems-oriented – utilised Free, Libre and Open Source col- perspectives to broadcast communication laboration tools, collective notetaking and and conflict (John Hill, Dave Young), the eth- machinic authoring.[1] ics and aesthetics of autonomous systems To exemplify this approach and other (Maya Indira Ganesh, Maja Bak Herrie), and machinic possibilities, we have included other post-anthropocentric reconsiderations a collectively authored interview with a of materiality and infrastructure (Abelardo machine that facilitated our work at the Gil-Fournier, Etherbox interview). workshop (Etherbox interview). Inter-action The papers address these topics in with this machine is indicative of the ways ways that we hope remind readers that all in which recursive feedback loops seem to research in-itself is machine-like, following operate at all levels in the writing and read- scientific as well as commercial protocols and ing of the texts in this issue of the journal, mechanisms. In this way, the publication also and points to far messier entanglements functions as a response to the machinery of between humans and machines that inform academic print and the corresponding rise of our thinking. These kinds of ontological open access journals like APRJA to promote confusions are elaborated here to establish a culture based on sharing, open distribu- some of the ways that machines operate on tion and the exchange of ideas. Machines other machines and imaginaries. The critical evidently are there to provide opportunities challenge perhaps is to learn from machines

5 APRJA Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017 as much as they learn from us, and to develop a new understanding that includes the machinic in all its guises.

Christian Ulrik Andersen & Geoff Cox Aarhus, April 2017.

Notes

[1] Details of the Machine Research workshop can be found at https://machineresearch.wordpress.com/about/. More details of this process and a resultant publication designed using the PJ tool, designed by Sarah Garcin, can be found at the above website. The print publication that directly resulted from this can be downloaded from http://www.aprja.net/workshops-newspa- pers/. The workshop and this journal issue have been organised in the context of ever elusive, the 2017 edition of transmediale festival of art and digital culture, Berlin, https://2017.transmediale.de/.

Thanks to all participants, Kristoffer Gansing and Daphne Dragona (transmediale) and An Mertens, Michael Murtaugh and Femke Snelting (Constant) for co-organisation of the workshop, and Søren Rasmussen for his editorial assistance on the journal.

Works cited

Lazzarato, Maurizio. “The Machine.” eipcp (2006). http://eipcp.net/transversal/1106/ lazzarato/en. Web.

6 MACHINE ONTOLOGIES AND INTELLIGENCE Geoff Cox

WAYS OF MACHINE SEEING: AN INTRODUCTION

APRJA Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017 ISSN 2245-7755

CC license: ‘Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike’. Geoff Cox: WAYS OF MACHINE SEEING

to a “return from alienation”.[5] Berger further reminded the viewer of the specifics of the technical reproduction in use and its ideological force in a similar manner:

But remember that I am controlling and using for my own purposes the means of reproduction needed for these programmes […] with this programme as with all programmes, you receive images and meanings which are arranged. I hope you will consider what I arrange but please remain skeptical of it.

That you are not really looking at the book as such but a scanned image of a book — viewable by means of an embedded link to a server where the image is stored — testifies to the ways in which what, and how, we see and know is further unsettled through complex assemblages of elements. Figure 1: The Cover of Ways of Seeing by John Berger The increasing use of relational machines (1972). Image from Penguin Books. such as search engines is a good example of the ways in which knowledge is filtered at You are looking at the front cover of the book the expense of the more specific detail on Ways of Seeing written by John Berger in how it was produced. Knowledge is now pro- 1972.[1] The text is the script of the TV series, duced in relation to planetary computational and if you’ve seen the programmes, you can infrastructures in which other agents such as almost hear the distinctive pedagogic tone of algorithms generalise massive amounts of Berger’s voice as you read his words: “The (big) data.[6] relation between what we see and what we Clearly algorithms do not act alone or know is never settled.”[2] with magical (totalising) power but exist as The image by Magritte on the cover part of larger infrastructures and ideologies. further emphasises the point about the deep Some well-publicised recent cases have ambiguity of images and the always-present come to public attention that exemplify a con- difficulty of legibility between words and see- temporary politics (and crisis) of representa- ing.[3] In addition to the explicit reference to tion in this way, such as the Google search the “artwork” essay by Walter Benjamin,[4] results for “three black teenagers” and “three the TV programme employed Brechtian white teenagers” (mug shots and happy techniques, such as revealing the technical teens at play, respectively).[7] The problem apparatus of the studio; to encourage view- is one of learning in its widest sense, and ers not to simply watch (or read) in an easy “machine learning” techniques are employed way but rather to be forced into an analysis on data to produce forms of knowledge that of elements of “separation” that would lead are inextricably bound to hegemonic systems

9 APRJA Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017 of power and prejudice. In this sense, the knowledge produced There is a sense in which the world be- is bound together with systems of power gins to be reproduced through computational that are more and more visual and hence models and algorithmic logic, changing what ambiguous in character. And clearly comput- and how we see, think and even behave. ers further complicate the field of visuality, Subjects are produced in relation to what and ways of seeing, especially in relation algorithms understand about our intentions, to the interplay of knowledge and power. gestures, behaviours, opinions, or desires, Aside from the totalizing aspects (that I have through aggregating massive amounts of outlined thus far), there are also significant data (data mining) and machine learning (the “points of slippage or instability” of epistemic predictive practices of data mining).[8] That authority,[12] or what Berger would have no machines learn is accounted for through doubt identified as the further unsettling of the a combination of calculative practices that relations between seeing and knowing. So, help to approximate what will likely happen if algorithms can be understood as seeing, through the use of different algorithms and in what sense, and under what conditions? models. The difficulty lies in to what extent Algorithms are ideological only inasmuch as these generalisations are accurate, or to they are part of larger infrastructures and what degree the predictive model is valid, or assemblages. “able to generalise” sufficiently well. Hence the “learners” (machine learning algorithms), although working at the level of generalisa- tion, are also highly contextual and specific to the fields in which they operate in a coming together of what Adrian Mackenzie calls a “play of truth and falsehood”.[9] Thus what constitutes knowledge can be seen to be controlled and arranged in new ways that invoke Berger’s earlier call for skepticism. Antoinette Rouvroy is similarly concerned that algorithms begin to define what counts for knowledge as a further case of subjectivation, as we are unable to substantively intervene in these processes of how knowledge is produced.[10] Her claim is that knowledge is delivered “without truth” through the increasing use of machines that filter it through the use of search engines that have no interest in content as such or detail on how knowledge is generated. Instead they privilege real-time relational infrastructures that subsume the knowledge of workers and machines into generalised assemblages as techniques of “algorithmic governmentality”. Figure 2: The Ways of Seeing book cover image seen [11] through an optical character recognition program. Created by SICV.

10 Geoff Cox: WAYS OF MACHINE SEEING

But to ask whether machines can see anthropomorphism of vision and its attach- or not is the wrong question to ask, rather ment to dominant forms of rationality. Clearly we should discuss how machines have there are other (nonhuman) perspectives changed the nature of seeing and hence that also illuminate our understanding of the our knowledge of the world.[13] In this we world. This pedagogic (and political) impulse should not try to oppose machine and human is perfectly in keeping with Ways of Seeing seeing but take them to be more thoroughly and its project of visual literacy.[14] What entangled — a more “posthuman” or “new is required is an expansion of this ethic to materialist” position that challenges the onto- algorithmic literacy to examine how machine epistemological character of seeing — and vision unsettles the relations between what produces new kinds of knowledge-power we see and what we know in new ways. that both challenges as well as extends the

11 APRJA Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017

12 Geoff Cox: WAYS OF MACHINE SEEING

Figure 3: Code by The Scandinavian Institute for Computational Vandalism.

2017, http://www.digitalhumanities.cam. Notes ac.uk/Methods/woms2017/woms2017CFP. [1] This essay was first commissioned [2] Ways of Seeing, ‪Episode 1 by The Photographers Gallery for their (1972), ‬https://www.youtube.com/ Unthinking Photography series, https:// watch?v=0pDE4VX_9Kk. The 1972 BBC unthinking.photography/themes/machine- four-part television series of 30-minute films vision/ways-of-machine-seeing. The title is was created by writer John Berger and taken from a workshop organised by the producer Mike Dibb. Berger’s scripts were Cambridge Digital Humanities Network, con- adapted into a book of the same name, vened by Anne Alexander, Alan Blackwell, published by Penguin also in 1972. The Geoff Cox and Leo Impett, and held at book consists of seven numbered essays: Darwin College, University of Cambridge, four using words and images; and three 11 July 2016, http://www.digitalhumanities. essays using only images. See https:// cam.ac.uk/Methods/waysofmachineseeing; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ways_of_Seeing. a subsequent workshop, Ways of Machine Seeing 2017, is a two-day workshop [3] René Magritte, The Key of Dreams organised by the Cambridge Digital (1930), https://courses.washington.edu/ Humanities Network, and CoDE (Cultures of hypertxt/cgi-bin/book/wordsinimages/key- the Digital Economy Research Institute) and dreams.jpg. Aside from the work of Magritte, Cambridge Big Data, to be held 26-28 June

13 APRJA Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017

Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs [9] Mackenzie, “The Production of (1965) comes to mind, that makes a similar Prediction,” 441. point in presenting a chair, a photograph of the chair, and an enlarged dictionary defini- [10] See, for instance, Antoinette Rouvroy’s tion of the word “chair”, https://en.wikipedia. “Technology, Virtuality and Utopia: org/wiki/One_and_Three_Chairs. Governmentality in an Age of Autonomic Computing,” in The Philosophy of Law [4] The first section of the programme/book Meets the Philosophy of Technology: is acknowledged to be largely based on Computing and Transformations of Human Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Agency, eds. Mireille Hildebrandt and Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), Antoinette Rouvroy (London: Routledge, https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ 2011), 136–157. philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm. [11] This line of argument is also close [5] The idea is that “separation” pro- to what Tiziana Terranova has called an duces a disunity that is disturbing to the “infrastructure of autonomization”, making viewer/reader — Brecht’s “alienation- reference to Marx’s views on automation, effect” (Verfremdungeffekt) — and that particularly in his “Fragment on Machines”, this leads to a potential “return from as a description of how machines subsume alienation”. See https://en.wikipedia.org/ the knowledge and skill of workers into wiki/Distancing_effect. wider assemblages. Tiziana Terranova, “Red Stack Attack! Algorithms, capital and [6] To give a sense of scale and its conse- the automation of the common”, Effimera quences, Facebook has developed the face- (2014), accessed August 24, 2016, http:// recognition software DeepFace. With over effimera.org/red-stack-attack-algorithms- 1.5 billion users that have uploaded more capital-and-the-automation-of-the-common- than 250 billion photographs, it is allegedly di-tiziana-terranova/. capable of identifying any person depicted in a given image with 97% accuracy. See [12] Mackenzie, “The Production of https://research.facebook.com/publications/ Prediction,” 441. deepface-closing-the-gap-to-human-level- performance-in-face-verification/. [13] I take this assertion from Benjamin once more, who considered the question [7] Antoine Allen “The ‘three black of whether film or photography to be art teenagers’ search shows it is society, secondary to the question of how art itself not Google, that is racist”, The Guardian has been radically transformed: (10 June 2016), https://www.theguard- “Earlier much futile thought had been ian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/10/ devoted to the question of whether pho- three-black-teenagers-google-racist-tweet. tography is an art. The primary question — whether the very invention of photography [8] Adrian Mackenzie, “The Production of had not transformed the nature of art — was Prediction: What Does Machine Learning not raised. Soon the film theoreticians asked Want?,” European Journal of Cultural the same ill-considered question with regard Studies, 18, 4–5 (2015): 431. to film.” https://www.marxists.org/reference/ subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm.

14 Geoff Cox: WAYS OF MACHINE SEEING

[14] Berger was associated with The Writers Transformations of Human Agency. London: and Readers Publishing Cooperative, Routledge, 2011. 136–157. Print. aiming to “advance the needs of cultural literacy, rather than cater to an ‘advanced’ Terranova, Tiziana. “Red Stack Attack! [academic] but limited readership” (From the Algorithms, capital and the automation Firm’s declaration of intent). In this sense it of the common.” Effimera (2014). http:// draws upon the Marxist cultural materialism effimera.org/red-stack-attack-algorithms- of Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart’s capital-and-the-automation-of-the-common- The Uses of Literacy (1966). di-tiziana-terranova/. Accessed August 24, 2016. Web. Works cited

Allen, Antoine. “The ‘three black teenagers’ search shows it is society, not Google, that is racist.” The Guardian (10 June 2016), https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jun/10/three-black-teenagers- google-racist-tweet. Web.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” (1936). https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm. Print.

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin, 1972. Print.

Cox, Geoff. “Ways of Machine Seeing.” Unthinking Photography. London: The Photographers Gallery, 2016. https:// unthinking.photography/themes/machine- vision/ways-of-machine-seeing. Web.

Mackenzie, Adrian. “The Production of Prediction: What Does Machine Learning Want?” European Journal of Cultural Studies, 18, 4–5 (2015): 431. Print.

Rouvroy, Antoinette. “Technology, Virtuality and Utopia: Governmentality in an Age of Autonomic Computing.” Eds. Mireille Hildebrandt and Antoinette Rouvroy. The Philosophy of Law Meets the Philosophy of Technology: Computing and

15 Brian House

MACHINE LISTENING: WAVENET, MEDIA MATERIAL- ISM, AND RHYTHMANALYSIS

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The first thing we hear: “The Blue Lagoon provided by DeepMind is the more intrigu- is a 1980 American romance and adventure ing. Having been trained to speak, WaveNet film directed by Randal Kleiser.”[1] The nonetheless must be told what to say (hence voice of WaveNet introduces itself with this the IMDb quote, etc). If it isn’t told, however, reference from the Internet Movie Database. it is still capable of generating “speech,” but WaveNet is a “generative model of raw it is “a kind of babbling, where real words are audio waveforms” outlined in a paper pub- interspersed with made-up word-like sounds” lished just last September by DeepMind, a (van den Oord).[3] Listening to these, I am machine learning subsidiary of Google (van struck first by the idea that this is the perfect den Oord). It is a significant step forward in answer to the classic campfire-philosophy the synthesis of human-sounding voices by question, “what is the sound of my native computers, an endeavor which is both para- language?” When we understand the words, digmatic of artificial intelligence research and the sub-semiotic character of a language is, a mainstay in popular culture, from Hal in the perhaps, obscured. This nonsense seems film 2001: A Space Odyssey to voiced con- just beyond sense, like a tongue somewhat sumer products like Apple’s Siri. According related to English that I do not speak—maybe to DeepMind’s own testing,[2] WaveNet Icelandic? Secondly, to my ear, this set of ex- outperforms current state of the art text-to- amples sounds more realistic than the first. I speech systems in subjective quality tests by am hearing a certain ennui in these voices, over 50% when compared to actual human a measured cadence punctuated by breaths speech—it sounds very good, and no doubt and the smacking of lips this is just as ex- we will be hearing much more of it. pressive as the “words,” a performance with In this text, however, I am not going to the unmistakeable hallmarks of a bad poetry explore a genealogy of computer speech. reading. Perhaps the Turing test[4] has been Rather, I am interested in “machine listen- mis-designed—it is not the semantics that ing.” Beyond the sub-field of computer make this voice a “who” rather than an “it.” science concerned with the extraction of In fact, WaveNet’s babbling sounds meaningful information from audio data, that as poetry because it is the same operation: term invokes the knotty questions of what it is poetic language “parades as language while to listen, what (if anything) separates listen- overflowing… the border of signification” ing by machines and by humans, and how (Labelle, Lexicon of the Mouth 65). The listening is entangled with the materiality of acoustic additions which both gibberish and the voice. The timely emergence of WaveNet poetry draw forth foreground the timbre, is provocative regarding each of these—it is, rhythm, and inflection of the spoken voice perhaps more than anything else, a listening “that cuts and augments meaning” (Fred machine. Furthermore, it reveals the limits Moten quoted by Labelle, Lexicon of the of a media materialist approach to sonicity, Mouth 5). If machine speech has been per- as exemplified by Wolfgang Ernst, when it fectly understandable for decades, it is the comes to media that are artificially intelligent. previous lack of this linguistic excess that As a corrective, I propose Henri Lefebvre’s has made them unsatisfying as voices. But “rhythmanalysis,” a theory of the everyday what goes beyond the semiotic in language which helps to take into account the ambigui- indispensably links it to the corporeal, blur- ties of WaveNet. ring the supposed divide between language As far as listening is concerned, the and body. Brandon Labelle writes that “to second set of synthesized speech examples theorize the performativity of the spoken is to

17 APRJA Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017 confront the tongue, the teeth, the lips, and This is a form of what media theorist the throat” (Lexicon of the Mouth, 1) and “it Wolfgang Ernst dubs “acoustic knowledge” is not the voice I hear, but rather the body, (Ernst 179). For him, such knowledge is a the subject… that does not aspire to be an matter of media rather than cultural inter- object” (6). This at once feels indisputable pretation, and it is embodied in the material and is deeply problematic when confronted processes by which sound is, for example, with a media “object” such as WaveNet. cut into a phonographic disc. As he puts it, “these are physically real (in the sense of indexical) traces of past articulation, sonic From acoustic knowledge to signals that differ from the indirect, arbitrary the materiality of listening evidence symbolically expressed in literature and musical notation” (173). A sequence of The inclusion of a poetic sense of perfor- digital audio samples, though processed as mance in WaveNet is largely a function of the symbolic logic by the machine, nonetheless acoustic level at which it operates. Previous counts as an indexical trace by virtue that “is techniques of text-to-speech, as DeepMind not directly accessible to human sense be- explains, are parametric or concatenative. cause of its sheer electronic and calculating The former is purely synthetic, attempting to speed” (Ernst 60).[5] Raw audio is capable, explicitly model the physical characteristics in other words, of recording “not only mean- of human voices with electronic oscillators; ings but also noise and the physicality of the second relies on a database of sound the world outside of human intentions or snippets recorded by human speakers that signifying structures.” There is some irony are pieced together to form the desired that the corporeality of poetic performance sentences. Both strategies proceed from lies within such technicity, in the “physically structuralist assumptions about how speech real frequency” (Ernst 173) that is a matter of is organized; for example, they take the the signal rather than semantics. abstract phoneme as speech’s basic unit I will provide a personal example. rather than sound itself—the sound in which Digging through attic boxes filled with half- that expressive excess is present. Where forgotten stacks of past consumer formats, WaveNet is different is that it begins with an amateur media archaeology familiar to so-called “raw” audio—that is, unprocessed many, I uncovered a reel-to-reel tape record- digital recordings of human speech at 22,000 ing made by my family in the late 1940s. On it, samples per second, to the tune of 44 hours my grandmother can be heard with a distinct from 109 different speakers (van den Oord). Pennsylvanian accent. This was somewhat This data is used to train a convolutional, of a revelation, some 60 years later, as I had “deep” neural network, an algorithm de- known her as an older woman with no such signed to infer higher-order structures from inflection. Her description to me of that time elementary inputs. Subsequently, WaveNet in her life had to some extent been limited generates its own speech one audio sample by her telling—it required the temporality of a at a time. An unexpected and intriguing as- machine, rather than a human, to reveal the pect of the result is that WaveNet ends up dialect that was inevitably missing from her modeling not only the incidental aspects of own narrative. The sonographic resonance speech in the training examples, but even was something different than the hermeneu- the very acoustics of the rooms in which they tic empathy I drew from her stories. were recorded.

18 Brian House: MACHINE LISTENING

However, the feeling of time-travel was on technical apparatuses is unnecessarily, not solely via the sound of her voice. The and problematically, circumscribed. In the warm, saturated timbre and slightly wobbly effort to assert acoustic knowledge over pitch are not from my grandmother’s speak- symbolic meaning, he sidesteps the material ing, but from the recorder itself—material nature of human listening. For example, the contingencies that comprise the character recent “neural resonance theory” champi- of such listening machines and which add oned by Edward Large observes (via fMRI) a historical valence to the sonic events they that electrical oscillations between neurons reproduce. There is, then, also a “style” in the brain entrain to the rhythmic stimulus to a medium, a dialect in this addition. For of the body by music. Once adapted, these Ernst, this is simply indicative of how the endogenous oscillations can be maintained medium is inseparable from the recording, independently of any external sound. Such an the confluence of material processes that he embodied understanding of cognition gives encapsulates in the concept of the “event” us a model of the brain as a complex oscilla- (Ernst 146). I would go further, however, to tor that constantly adapts to its environment. posit that the imperfection of the tape identi- It does this not via some internally coded rep- fies it as a listener, a body that undergoes a resentation, but as a physical coupling pass- physical change when it hears, a change that ing from the world to the body to the brain. is expressed in subsequent enunciations. In this way, the voice that you recognize by If our ability to listen can be defined its cadence, the familiar acoustic quality of a in this way, as our capacity to be physi- habitual space, even the song that pops into cally affected by acoustics, it aligns with the your head are no more symbolic and no less nature of sound. As Labelle puts it, “Sound physical processes than what goes on with is intrinsically and unignorably relational: the phonograph, even if neurons might not it emanates, propagates, communicates, be durable in the same way as vinyl. vibrates, and agitates; it leaves a body Ernst’s methodological statement is and enters others; it binds and unhinges, incongruous with this more generous mate- harmonizes and traumatizes; it sends the rialism: “Instead of applying musicological body moving” (Background Noise, ix). Sound hermeneutics, the media archaeologist sup- leaves an impression. How we experience presses the passion to hallucinate ‘life’ when it and how we respond to it with our own he listens to recorded voices” (Ernst 60). particular bodies are conditioned by both Such a call for “unpassioned listening” (Ernst physiology and past experience that marks 25) denies the inherent interrelationality of us as listeners, whether non-biological or of sound. What exactly is listening if the listener an ethnicity, class, culture, species. Listening is not moved? It replays the detached ocu- to something cannot just be a matter of larity—the cold gaze—of colonial naturalism source + receiver[6]—rather, it is a material by implicitly claiming an objective “ear” for entanglement of these two together. acoustic knowledge.[7] To the contrary, the Direct technical inscription is one contextual cues of acoustics—such as dialect such mode, whether by phonograph, tape and room sound—that locate a speaker in a recorder, or even digital sampler, though that physical and social context do so through the these devices listen may feel, admittedly, like mediation of our own past acoustic experi- a stretch. I want to insist that these machines ence. If media materialism intends to meet listen, however, because I think Ernst’s focus the technical on its own terms, it cannot

19 APRJA Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017 step outside the web of material—and often is reproducible by technical means. When warm-blooded—relations the technical is WaveNet speaks, it does not re-perform situated within. a signal, as mediated by its own physical contingencies. Rather, it generates a new The virtual and the signal. And at the same time, this signal is not aggregate simply a result of combining cultural symbols from a database of possibilities, as with other With that in mind, let’s return to WaveNet. new media—it carries poetic qualities which Like the phonograph, I am claiming that by cannot be parameterized, but which are the virtue of operating at the level of raw audio, result of physical processes. it has the capacity for acoustic knowledge. This virtual dimension is a faculty of If we could train it on my grandmother’s listening that clearly exceeds that of the speech, for example, the algorithm would phonograph. To give a processual account of (imperfectly) capture her accent, thanks to the event here is a matter of uncovering not its sample-by-sample process. The distance just the contingencies of a single inscription between such a spoken—or babbled—result but the enculturation of the algorithm to the and a voice recognizable as hers would be repeating patterns of a voice. The acoustics the result of WaveNet’s own physical char- in WaveNet’s speech express a prior speak- acter—the equivalent of the pops and hiss ing subject, such as my grandmother—we of analog media (bracketing, of course, the can hear her, even though she leaves no actual words she might say). I am insisting, indexical trace. The danger, of course, is too, that this “WaveNettiness” marks it as that this originary signal is forgotten entirely. a particular kind of machine listener—one The virtual dimension is invisible to the cold embodied in its processors and program- gaze—it requires all our listening faculties to ming languages. Compared to the record, hear the body behind the voice. this more diffuse physicality already makes it This is a critical issue in general when it somewhat more difficult to isolate as a tech- comes to artificial intelligence. It is seductive nical object. But neither stop at the hardware; to compare an algorithm like WaveNet to, my grandmother would also be enveloped in say, a child shipwrecked in a lagoon learning the ensemble that constitutes the corporeal- about the world without outside influences, ity of each. and hence wholly “natural,” as alien a nature However, WaveNet, while it records as that might be. A dispassionate approach voices, records no enunciation in particular. masks this fantasy with a robot’s cool objec- Instead, a voice takes shape through the tivity. In fact, the complexities of training an accumulation of sonic impressions on a algorithm and generating a data set to do it numeric topology. In the terms of Deleuze with are anything but straightforward. What, and Guattari, WaveNet’s voice is virtual— for example, do we hear of those 109 voices? real, because it has one, but not actual in The recordings are from the English Multi- the sense of a groove cut into a record. It speaker Corpus for CSTR Voice Cloning is something less, and something more. It is Toolkit assembled by Christophe Veaux, indeed a trace of past articulation—acoustic Junichi Yamagishi, Kirsten MacDonald of the knowledge—but what WaveNet embodies via University of Edinburgh.[8] Native English training is potentiality rather than indexicality. speakers of “various” accents read a series It is this combination that resists Ernst’s easy of texts including the so-called “rainbow pas- formulation of sonicity as a material event that sage”, a rumination on rainbows that traces

20 Brian House: MACHINE LISTENING interpretations of the phenomenon through a Western lineage of Biblical to Greek to Rhythmanalysis modern scientific explanations. The passage Lacking this, the recourse we have available is commonly used to test English speaking is to be attentive listeners, ones that spe- skills as it contains nearly all the phonemes in cifically pay attention to how the voice—or the language.[9] Here, of course, its purpose voices—of WaveNet affects us. This partial- is inverted—to train rather than test—as a ity relieves us of treating acoustic knowledge means of outlining the acceptable variance as universal—a self-aware passion should in pronunciation. be central to media materialism. Additionally, This situates WaveNet in a tradition it acknowledges the bi-directionality of lis- of research that, according to Jonathan tening which is what is actually at stake. If Sterne, “seek[s] to overcome the subjectivity sound leaves an impression on the listener of listening” (104). Beginning in the 1920s, that conditions future expressions, what is institutes like Bell Labs conducted research normalized in WaveNet could (will) assert into human perception to inform the develop- itself in human-machine conversations to ment of WaveNet’s technological anteced- come. As the algorithm works its way into the ents. The use of a large number of training myriad listening and speaking devices prolif- subjects is precisely to try and understand erating in consumer electronics—Siri (Apple), sound on a level “that transcends—or sub- Alexa (Amazon), Cortana (Microsoft), and tends—individual subjective experience […] Google Now (which thus far has refrained repeatable, verifiable, scientific knowledge from branding their software with a futuristic/ that transcends any particular individual in exotic female name)—it will shape the vocal the form of statistical aggregates and prob- patterns of their human conversants. abilities” (Sterne 104). It is worth noting that What I am proposing is to modulate a the sample rate of “raw” audio is based on media materialist approach with the “rhyth- this kind of laboratory research, the supposed manalysis” of Henri Lefebvre. Lefebvre uses universal frequency range of human hearing the term “rhythm” in an extra-musical sense, (50hz to 20khz) built into audio technology. If and he is not strictly concerned with sound. digital audio counts as acoustic knowledge, But the patterns of everyday speech are a it is nonetheless conditioned by the cultural perfect example of the kind of temporal apparatus of the scientific laboratory, and so articulations that concern him. Rhythm requires a cold gaze to overlook. Regardless, might be compared to acoustic knowledge the goal is to normalize what it is to hear, and as it is a material, rather than symbolic, what it is to speak, so as to give a founda- impression that carries poetic excess. It is tion to technologies like WaveNet. What we also similarly situated within a version of cannot know are the actual identities of the the event: “Everywhere there is interaction speakers, the conditions of their labor or how between a place, a time and an expenditure they were evaluated, or what English speak- of energy, there is rhythm” (Lefebvre xv). ing communities they represent, what ages, However, Ernst’s dispassion is contrasted classes, genders, ethnicities, abilities, and so by Lefebvre’s warm bloodedness: “We know on, who they were speaking to, whether they that a rhythm is slow or lively only in relation were free to move around or just sitting in a to other rhythms (often our own: those of our room[10]—all embodied attributes present in walking, our breathing, our heart)” (Lefebvre a voice. 10)—and our speaking. In this sense, rhythm

21 APRJA Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017 encompasses a greater sense of relationality, algorithm and the phonograph alongside the contingency, and potentiality than a sonicity human. Lefebvre himself opens this potential confined to the technical object. when he writes that by “bodies” he includes There are several ways in which rhyth- “living bodies, social bodies and representa- manalysis helps situate a machine listener tions, ideologies, traditions, projects and such as WaveNet. First is that the virtual is utopias. They are all composed of (recipro- inherent to the concept of rhythm. Though cally influential) rhythms in interaction.” (43) rhythm both depends on and is generative of Bringing ideology into physical contact with measurable physical phenomena, it is itself the enunciations by the humans and ma- an unfolding process that is not materially chines that produce it does not compromise fixed. We can meaningfully speak about the the nature of acoustic knowledge—rather, it reality of a rhythm, therefore, even when the collapses the false bracketing of the political indexical trace is absent. For example, the implied by a cold technicity. qualities of an accent, or the particularities As Deleuze and Guattari put it, “Because of someone’s gait, or even the pace of a style is not an individual psychological neighborhood or city—to say nothing of the creation but an assemblage of enunciation, meter or feel of a beat. Notably, these all lend it unavoidably produces a language within a themselves to relative rather than absolute language.” (97) This second-order language, comparisons. Conversely, the presence of a this style, this rhythm, is what rhythmanalysis rhythm implies that it has been conditioned brings into play with the listening that condi- by actual material occurrences. We get the tions it. Ernst’s strict division of the semantic tongue, the lips, the teeth, or the digital- versus the technical requires us to repress analog converter and the speaker cone, or the very reverberations that make acoustic even written notation—rhythm does not exist knowledge significant, the chain of embodied unarticulated. entrainments in which we are co-implicated This brings us to the second point— with the machine. And yet the absence of the Lefebvre uses the term dressage to describe machine in Lefebvre’s thinking can only be the formation of a rhythm in the body. He supplied by a close attention to the material- notes that “To enter into a society, group or ity of technology. To my ear, something like nationality is … to bend oneself (to be bent) WaveNet therefore requires the interanima- to its ways […]. Dressage can go a long tion of these methodologies. way: as far as breathing, movements, sex. It bases itself on repetition.” (39) Lefebvre’s theory is primarily one of the everyday life Beyond WaveNet of humans, rather than of media. But this WaveNet is a listening machine. Like a dressage—training—precisely matches the phonograph, it processes “raw” audio, and process of machine learning. Iterative rein- reproduces raw audio in return. It operates forcement is fundamental to the construction beneath a human conception of what speech of a neural network, and serves the purpose “is” and captures instead the acoustic knowl- Lefebvre describes. That training is neither edge that actually composes it. That we rec- autogenous nor neutral, but is shepherded ognize the quality of that audio as important toward a constructed norm. to a “realistic” voice shows that humans, too, Further, a medium conceived of as a possess a means of acoustic knowledge be- trained body—a listening body that undergoes yond the semantic—a sense of rhythm. But change—is broad enough to include both the

22 Brian House: MACHINE LISTENING we know from Large that the quality of internal oscillation in human physiology is condi- Notes tioned by the environment—rhythmanalysis [1] https://storage.googleapis.com/deep- demonstrates that how you listen and how mind-media/pixie/us-english/wavenet-1.wav. you walk, have sex, or use a computer are not materially separable. Likewise, WaveNet [2] This testing was conducted via online introduces its own inflections that are intrin- crowdsourcing. The anonymous, underpaid, sic to its material situation—training corpus, typically non-US human labor involved in algorithm, hardware, Google engineers. training contemporary AI systems is an Its speech is a negotiation between human intriguingly problematic method and another resonance and this embodied machine example of the extended embodiment of temporality. WaveNet discussed in this paper. Lefebvre muses how “If one could ‘know’ from outside the beatings of the heart [3] https://storage.googleapis.com/ of […] a person […], one would learn much deepmind-media/pixie/knowing-what-to-say/ about the exact meaning of his words” (4). first-list/speaker-2.wav. Beating at nonhuman rates, WaveNet both listens and speaks differently. What is it [4] Alan Turing proposed a test that that we hear, then, in the melodrama of its predicated a machine’s ability to think on its babblings? Though its phonetic poetry is at ability to imitate a human. This was to be first hearing benign, it begs the question of done via teletype—only written language is what qualities of enunciation it might nor- ever exchanged. malize—who are the voices it listens to? To which listeners does it appeal? And how will [5] A young human can typically hear up to speaking with WaveNet voices shape human 20kHz—a sampling rate of at least twice ears, as they inevitably will? this frequency is required to accurately reproduce the waveform (CD-quality audio is 44.1kHz). WaveNet operates at 22khz, meaning it is limited to frequencies below 11kHz—it is not hi-fi from an audiofile perspective, but that’s still pretty good.

[6] Jonathan Sterne calls this the “hypoder- mic model,” adopted by early researchers in telephony technology, that “conceives of communication as primarily a function of transmission, an assumption it would share with the then-emergent metascience of cybernetics” (Sterne 74).

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[7] The call for situated knowledges by Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: Donna Haraway is here, as everywhere, The Science Question in Feminism and the instructive—“only partial perspective Privilege of Partial Perspective” in Feminist promises objective vision” (Haraway Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575-599. Print. 581)—and every listening subject hears in a different way. Labelle, Brandon. Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. London: [8] http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/jyamagis/ Continuum, 2006. Print. page3/page58/page58.html. Labelle, Brandon. Lexicon of the Mouth: [9] This public domain text was origi- Poetics and Politics of Voice and the Oral nally from Grant Fairbanks’ the Voice and Imaginary. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Articulation Drillbook published by Grant Print. Fairbanks in 1937, http://www.york.ac.uk/ media/languageandlinguistics/documents/ Large, Edward, et al. “Neural networks currentstudents/linguisticsresources/ for beat perception in musical rhythm” Standardised-reading.pdf. in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience 9 (2015): 159. Print. [10] I have noticed that when Alvin Lucier’s iconic sound art piece I Am Sitting in a Lefebvre, Henri. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Room (1969) is discussed, his stuttering Time, and Everyday Life. London: is often not mentioned. This has always Continuum, 2004. Print. bothered me. Jacob Kirkegaard’s restaging of Lucier’s resonance technique in 4 Rooms Sterne, Jonathan. MP3: The Meaning of a (2006) similarly abandons the personal Format. Durham: Duke University Press, significance of Lucier’s act in favor of the 2012. Print. dispassionate “sound of the room itself.” That Kirkegaard’s recordings were made at van den Oord, Aäron, et al. “WaveNet: A Chernobyl makes me wary that what seems Generative Model for Raw Audio.” 9th ISCA to be materialism is actually ‘ruin porn’ Speech Synthesis Workshop, 19 Sept. that comes at the expense of sounding out 2016. https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet- actual material relationships. generative-model-raw-audio/. Accessed 25 Sept. 2016. Web. Works cited

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Print.

Ernst, Wolfgang. Digital Memory and the Archive. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Print.

Nathan Jones & Sam Skinner

ABSORBING TEXT: REREADING SPEED READING

APRJA Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017 ISSN 2245-7755

CC license: ‘Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike’. Nathan Jones & Sam Skinner: ABSORBING TEXT

Speed reading applications such as Spritz others like it, has essentially appropriated isolate individual words from bodies of text and redirected the science of RSVP toward and display them sequentially, often with the their own commercial, and one could say middle letter highlighted. Known as Rapid accelerationist ends.[1] That such an appa- Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP), its pro- ratus is framed in terms of increasing speed ponents suggest it can accelerate reading and the productivity of the reader, is perhaps speed from the average of 100-200 words unsurprising – in an age where speed and per minute, to over 1000. This is principally efficiency appear to be synonymous with achieved by the visual system reducing the technological development. There has of number of saccades involved in ‘normal’ course been an increasing interest in speed reading. When reading a word among many with social sciences and the humanities in other words, for example a line of text, you recent years. From the work of Paul Virilio, are reading both backwards and forwards, in particular Speed and Politics and The scanning ahead for words within your para- Great Accelerator, through to more recent foveal vision, and back again. The speed work such as Hartmut Rosa and William E. reading app Spritz declares on its website Scheuerman’s book High Speed Society. As that: “You’ll find that you will be able to inhale they observe in their introduction: content when you regain the efficiencies associated with not moving your eyes to read. What was experienced as being And you will no longer move your eyes in extraordinarily speedy just yesterday… unnatural ways.” (Spritz). now seems extraordinarily slow. The shot lengths in movies, advertise- ments, and even documentaries have increased by a factor of at least fifty, and the speed with which speeches are delivered in parliament has risen by 50 percent since 1945… Speed Figure 1: Screenshot from Spritz. dating and drive-through funerals remind us that even basic life activities This is a new natural then, where we appear to be speeding up: fast food, inhale content, and exhale who knows what. fast learning, fast love. (2) Not so much vapourware, as vaping words. But this invocation of old ‘unnatural ways’ Rosa and Scheuerman also consider and new physical and neuronal processes is the relations between speed and concentra- both the most radical conceptual side effect tion, one which the aggressively temporal of this esoteric technology, and the rhetoric and linear form of the speed reader would that surrounds it. Furthermore, it is important seem to actively turn against (or even act as to note that increased speed of reading is a therapy for): only one of the possibilities afforded by the processes of RSVP, and the degree to which the time we’re allowed to concentrate comprehension ‘keeps up’ is questionable, exclusively on one thing is progres- as will be discussed later. In fact, speed sively diminishing: we are constantly reading as a term, application and a com- interrupted by a stream of incoming mercial enterprise, in the case of Spritz and messages, phone calls, television

27 APRJA Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017

and radio announcements, or Our first book, Mind Language Technology merely by sudden breaks in our flow of was exhibited at the Typemotion exhibition consciousness that disrupt whatever at FACT, Liverpool (Nov 2014 – Feb 2015) activity we happen to be pursuing. (2) in three formats – print, ebook and speed reader – utilising bespoke manufacturing Rather than turning away from speed processes, from coding and bookbinding, readers because of their surface involve- to artisan woodwork and print-on-demand ment in the equation ‘fastness = progress’, cushions, inviting the reader to discursively we examine how this new, temporal form of explore the texts, their mediums of transmis- text might inaugurate a return to the technical sion, and different modes of reading. and material fundamentals of reading – and what alternative ways of thinking through our relation to new textualities this might offer. This allows us to pose (although not always resolve) questions about technicities and materialities that converge upon the act of reading, but are not reducible to it. The claims made for speed reading applications by commercial companies such as Spritz and Spreader are weighed against clinical research and set within emerging theoretical frameworks, setting the stage for a critical design and creative practice using and abus- ing speed reader-type technology. We begin by introducing our initial research to date with this new machinic form of reading, and go on to explore what alternate conceptual and practical applications, beyond simply speeding up for the sake of productivity, it may afford, particularly within poetic, performative, and typographic realms. It should be noted that the text is speculative in character, Figures 2 and 3: Installation view FACT, Liverpool, and seeking to articulate and provoke questions, artist Erica Scourti reading alongside speed reader, at rather than provide answers, which our The Opticon, Tate Liverpool. research has engendered thus far, we hope this approach is fertile for readers. We also used speed readers to display a series of questions relating to issues of privacy and security to gallery visitors during Torque: Twisting Mind, a residency at Tate Liverpool. Set at 1000 words per minute the machinic pace and Language, and Technology aesthetic of the speed readers were sugges- tive of processes of text analytics employed Our experimental publishing project Torque by government surveillance systems that ra- [2] has to date performed several applica- paciously ‘read’ and sift online activity. Artist tions of speed readers as an art medium. Erica Scourti and media theorist Christian

28 Nathan Jones & Sam Skinner: ABSORBING TEXT

Fuchs presented work alongside the speed readers and we produced a newspaper Textual Landscapes entitled The Opticon comprising over 15,000 Rather than shuffling our eye along the map words of gallery visitors’ responses. of information on a page, with speed readers Our second book The Act of Reading, we enter the landscape of information itself. comprising essays and artworks from Dropping down the mine shaft of the text, we authors, including Katherine Hayles and reach terminal velocity as the foundational Tim Etchells, was produced as a speed- materialities of reading vanish from under us. reader video installation and exhibited at Speed reading software applications Furtherfield, London, in 2015, for the exhibi- are a recent instance within a long lineage tion being being read being reading being of evolutions of how the written word is con- read and reading beings. We also presented sumed and distributed. Mainstream publish- a ‘slow reader’ where visitors were recorded ing traditions, from parchment to broadsheet reading aloud poems appearing on screen to ebook, have primarily placed words into one morpheme at a time, later broadcast bodies of text in two-dimensional relation on across Finsbury Park, where the gallery is a surface, awaiting scanning by a moving situated. eye. Beyond the confines of the mass media, We are currently working with research- the serial presentation of words has been er Tom Schofield (who we commissioned experimented with and challenged through to produce an open source speed reading a variety of artistic practices, principally, application)[3] at Newcastle University’s concrete poetry, film titles, and text-based art CultureLab, building on conversations across print, digital and filmic forms (Scheffer with neuroscientist Alex Leff. The aim is et al.). Digital media in particular, affords new to develop a range of new trajectories for forms of interaction and display, as Katherine rapid (and slow) serial visual presentation Hayles writes, with “the advent of digital tech- methods which ‘weird’ this technology, and nology, writers have more flexibility in how problematise the progression of reading me- they can employ the temporal dimension as diums in general as being solely used and resources in their writing practices… as a thought about in terms of increased reading machine to organize time.” (Hayles, “Digital speed and efficiency. Exploring instead how Poetry” 181). Operating in a hinterland they might serve processes of re-learning between printed page and digital platforms, to read across multiple formats, in multiple new ‘virtual reality’ texts such as Mez Breeze modes, digital and print, fast and slow, at- and Andy Cambell’s Prisom, float on virtual tentive and discursive, approaching a kind pages, on virtual planes, within recognisably of hyper-reading (Hayles, “How We Read”). figurative landscapes. As a collaborative project, we are particularly However much screens, and the soft- interested in three distinct areas of research ware and hardware behind them, may have that speed readers intersect: visualisation, ruptured the fundamental economies of vocalisation and typography. Below we in- books, reading ‘pages of text’ still persists in troduce aspects of this research, and close the form of ebooks, PDFs, web-pages, etc. with some questions about the contexts and Perhaps now though, the term ‘page’ refers implications for this specific area of machine more to the screen than printed leaves, be- research. coming a more amorphous and reconfigur- able form, but still fundamentally a surface on

29 APRJA Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017 which information can be recorded – across, not into, which the gaze moves. Furthermore, the paper page persists as skeuomorphism, as drop shadow hovering at the edges of most onscreen documents, reminders of the ability to print, icons of post-digital textuality, its residual form refusing to be scraped away from our collective palimpsest. The persistence of this skeuomorphism is echoed in speculative and artistic reading apparatuses, designs for which are often dedicated to the Figure 5: Rodney Graham, task of handling the book-codex, particularly Reading Machine for Lenz, 1993. turning pages. As Alessandro Ludovico’s work on post-digital print has explored and Speed readers, by eschewing this articulated so well, print remains a highly figurative link with the page as a text map, effective interface, and the relationship draw on more primal facilities of the visual between print and digital is far from being a system, in particular how it facilitates ori- one-way street. entation through landscapes and the ability to recognise objects within; processes that our reading and visual systems recycle for reading, being a much more recent invention (Dehaene). To understand the potency and relevance of speed reading in relation to such contexts and processes, we need to look more closely at the nature of our visual and reading systems. Speed readers achieve their acceleration of text processing primarily by suppress- ing the need for eye saccades: the optical twitches back and forth across a text that our eyes perform when reading lines of text. This process appears to be an evolutionary vestige of the way in which we build high definition images of our surroundings. Around 33% of our entire visual system – from retina to the visual cortex in the brain – is concentrated on producing high definition in only 0.1% of the visual field, right at its centre: “When you hold your arm fully extended and look at your thumbnail, that’s about the extent of central Figure 4: Agostino Ramelli’s Bookwheel, engraving from Le diverse et artifiose machine, 1588. Reproduced vision” (Leff 178). Nevertheless, we feel as in A. G. Keller, A Theatre of Machines (London: though we have a high resolution image of Chapman and Hall, 1964). the entire field because the visual system casts around, ‘sampling’ and registering

30 Nathan Jones & Sam Skinner: ABSORBING TEXT positions, and reconstructs the whole from twitching of page reading, the speed reader these remembered hi-definition fragments produces an always-relevant visual stimulus (Leff 178-180). akin to a landscape rushing by, perhaps a Likewise, in page reading, the intensity forest of letterforms. Each glimpse of the of visual equipment is not only guided along text in RSVP is a high definition fragment horizontally; it also desirously, distractedly, in which an animal or fruit might be seen. produces minute precognitions of the visual This provokes the question, if speed reader field composed by the page, flashing its op- technology and associated innovations can timal visual spot-light not only from the word help people with noticeable reading disability we are reading to the next word along the line, as in the work of Leff and others, is there a but also to a spread of locations down the gradient of ability that ‘normal’ readers can page, before returning. Reading in this way ascend further up? Although the modern builds up a picture or model of a language page-reading mental apparatus has been world, from many smaller encounters with trained into a concentration of singular focus, many individual words, each registered in do the eyes themselves lag behind in an relation to others on the page. Furthermore, integral archaic distraction? in order for page reading not to blur the text, the brain switches the visual cortex ‘off’ during an eye movement and on again when the Subvocalisation eye settles. Which is to say that reading, and Commercial apps like Spritz, redirect the sci- in fact landscape viewing, are themselves ence of RSVP and Optimal Viewing Position rapid and serial in their presentation. toward what they claim is a more fluent, Alex Leff’s research at UCL’s Aphasia focused experience, that smoothes over lab has observed that it is these eye move- disorders by requiring less physical engage- ments and on-off actions, or rather the strug- ment of visual or subvocal systems. The gle to make them and build up a coherent tagline on Spritz’s website reads: “Reading picture from them in relation to a flat plane Reimagined. Improve focus, completion, of text, which can be a substantial cause of and fluency. Enjoy a pleasurable, effortless reading disorders such as alexia and apha- reading experience.” Writer Colin Schultz in sia. These ostensibly cognitive disorders something of a puff piece on the technology are more accurately located in an instability wrote that the: “the process feels less like between the interface of muscular and nerv- reading and more like absorbing the text”. To ous systems. The Aphasia Lab use RSVP to which we might add: or is it the text absorbing simulate eye movements and retrain the vis- us? And furthermore, is speed reading just ual system, and have developed web-based a spectacle of reading, that enables the eye therapies, including Read-Right, which can to better register and perhaps to ‘complete’ help to improve reading speeds in patients more texts, but at the expense of compre- with Hemianopic Alexia.[4] hension and the textual sensorium? Using the figure of the landscape itself The saccadic twitching of the eye is as rapidly and serially presented, we can accompanied and echoed by the subvocal perhaps better understand this therapeutic twitching of the throat, called subvocalisa- quality, and also the feeling of falling through tion – also subdued in the speed reading a text we get when we encounter speed read- experience, where increased speed results ers. Rather than simulating the distracted

31 APRJA Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017 in a decrease of the ‘inner voice’ we hear We might observe then that subvocali- when reading. Literary scholar Steven sation, repressed in speed reading, is a vital Connor observes “what readers may feel as part of the sensuous quality of a poetics. But a sounding in the mind may be due at least in perhaps, like a child moving her lips as she part to the effect of very small impulses sent reads, the subvocal is something we have by the brain to the larynx and the tongue” outgrown. Connor muses “that our difficulty (Connor 106) – and presumably also these in describing [the internal voice’s] qualities is impulses bouncing-back to the brain. This due to the fact that we are hearing its last dim subvocal physical encounter with texts is a spasms and whispers. Perhaps, following point of material empathy with the author, the stilling of our external lips, we are under- whose writing process was accompanied by going a slow quelling of the internal voice” the impulses in the larynx approximating the (106). The speed reader then may not be a words they write. Poet Caroline Bergvall’s premature technical closure of our sensual text About Face refolds the pain of a “sutured embodiment of language. Rather, a symptom jaw” that she suffers while performing, back of reading itself shedding these unnecessary into a poetic text. The poem that results is a evolutionary vestiges, a sublimation no less. kind of pseudo-transcription of the disfluen- In this sense, speed reading pushes cies, aposiopesis, and gasps of speaking against our physical and cognitive capabili- with a faulty jaw, made-textual by disordering ties, amplifying or awakening certain physi- and removing letters, and adding gaps into cal responses, such as blink reflexes and iris the middle of words. contraction, just as it subdues subvocalisation and eye-saccades. Are some of these responses more useful for a future reading? If this is so, we might ask: what will the formal qualities of our future literature be, at the level of assonance and consonance, for example? How does rhythm enter into the semiotic regime now that a text engulfs us, rather than an ocular drift, back and forth across a body of text? Furthermore, with speed readers, do we enter the text, in a mode approaching a trance state? Is this a realm in which the distractions of self-reflection and self- awareness are occluded, or appear only as spectral undefined borders? Could this bodi- Figure 6: Extracts from Caroline Bergvall’s less, and selfless reader be the foundations About Face (31-45). for a new literary subject? About Face emphasises the bio- technical, subvocal – and perhaps saccadic – apparatus of reading as a kind of empathic Text Comprehension and struggle that echoes Bergvall’s own pain the Materiality of Type and struggle with enunciation. The poem’s meditation on faces, by its emphasis on the A recent review paper on speed reading mediation of Bergvall’s own face, lend it an applications suggests that users are unable intimate quality. to increase the speed of reading whilst still

32 Nathan Jones & Sam Skinner: ABSORBING TEXT maintaining proportionate levels of compre- enable the catalysing and disruption of other hension (Rayner et al.). At best, studies have areas of the reading experience. Beyond shown that readers may still be able to com- simply increasing speed, new possibilities prehend individual sentences at increased emerge regarding content, typography, and speed, but at worst they can render reading the physical space we occupy, and that text slower than standard rates: “Successful occupies in us, when reading. reading thus requires more than recogniz- Experiments with typography and ing a sequence of individual words. It also speed reading offer certain affordances to requires understanding the relationships explore both the fundamentals of reading and among them and making inferences about to push it into more divergent or liminal terri- unstated entities that might be involved in tory: investigating where the limits of legibility the scenario being described.” (Rayner et al. may lie, what machinic systems of computa- 5). Furthermore, the assertion by makers of tion and display may enable or replace, and apps such as Spreader and Spritz that eye how in turn this might affect our mediation of movements and saccades are wasted time and with the world. Recent work by theoreti- does not stack up, because cognitive pro- cal neurobiologist Mark Changizi observes cessing continues during saccades, and “de- that human visual signs possess a similar vices that present words faster than readers’ signature in their configuration distribution, natural pace may run the risk of presenting suggesting that there are underlying prin- a word before the brain is prepared to pro- ciples governing their shapes. He provides cess and understand it” (Rayner et al. 8-10). an ecological hypothesis that visual signs Additionally, reducing the inner sounding of have been culturally selected to match the words, or subvocalisation, as suggested by kinds of conglomeration of contours found proponents of speed reading, who deem it in natural scenes because that is what we linguistic loitering or neuronal negligence, have evolved to be good at visually process- has an adverse effect upon reading because ing (Changizi et al.). This body of research “translating visual information into phono- suggests that the words you are reading now logical form, a basic form of language, helps look this way because they resemble the readers to understand it” (Rayner et al. 16). contours found in natural scenes, thereby Finally, the onward recursive march of speed tapping into our already-existing object rec- reading apps do not allow readers to easily ognition mechanisms. go back or reread certain parts of texts and accordingly makes misinterpretation more likely (Rayner et al. 17). Proponents of speed reading decrying regressive eye movements, the sounding of words, alongside a championing of speed readers’ ability to make quick and correct inferences at all times, is suspiciously ideological, and runs the risks of enacting an almost vitalist or techno-positivist critique of bodies, both human and textual. But if we put aside increased speed as a focus of their use, the space of increased legibility and readability Figure 7: Slide reproduced courtesy of offered by the technics of speed reading might Stanislas Deheane.

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Furthermore, the reading system syn- thesizes not only external worlds but internal ones too, recycling both the natural landscape and our visual system to new ends. The neuronal recycling hypothesis implies that our brain architecture constrains the way we read, and has functioned as a massive selection process, where over time, writers and designers have developed increasingly efficient notations that fitted the organisation of our brains. Cognitive Psychologist Stanislas Dehaene argues our cortex did not specifically evolve for writing, rather, writing evolved to fit the cortex and to be easily learnable by the brain.

Figure 10: Courtesy of Stanislas Deheane, from Reading in the Brain.

The typeface shown (Figures 8 & 9) is designed to be used with a speed reading application, and accentuates the areas of letters where contours intersect. As discussed above (and demonstrated in Figure 10), the visual system recognises objects through the configuration of their contours. Where these are accentuated or removed they become easier, or conversely more difficult, to recognise. This typeface combines this aspect of visual recognition with the increased legibility of type in RSVP, creating a textual encounter that is both more and less legible, experi- menting with the possibility and affordances

Figures 8 and 9: Images of Torquera of a kind of liminal reading: a reading on the typeface by Sam Skinner. edge of different physical, typographic, and neuronal systems. Researching the phenomena of reading as a composite machinic system enables a kind of meta-reading of the world beyond

34 Nathan Jones & Sam Skinner: ABSORBING TEXT words, where text becomes a microcosm and differential re-becoming: a McLuhan-esque interstice of other systems, providing unique moment of ‘retribalization’ perhaps, where answers to the fundamental questions: why the speed reader returns the reading subject does text look the way it does? Why does to an animalist state of orientating through a writing consist of such a number of strokes, landscape and cognizing objects within. arranged in such a way? Where might the Through the machinic processes used genesis of these fundamental qualities of to both analyse and evolve our reading textuality itself lie? systems, old divisions between nature and Within the context of Machine Research culture fall away, becoming another iteration – which we understand as a field of enquiry in a long line and tangled web of linguistic that asks how both the human and nonhuman evolutions. Perhaps, we might rethink them is put into a critical perspective by machine and refer to speed reading machines instead driven ecologies – how might text or the tech- as rereading machines, where their rapid nics of reading be seen in machinic terms as recursions offer a more performative means an apparatus operating between worlds? or third space to mediate new textual land- And to take this one step further, how might scapes, finding a home and use within the the machinic be driven by more fundamental aesthetic domain, less accelerationist, more exigencies of matter – where matter pre- experimentalist. After all, machines have the cedes agency, both human and technical? advantage of not having to recycle old neu- Can these processes, these machinations, ronal systems like humans do, and present be seen in terms of an engine at the heart new ways to read and write, forming ruptures of life, fundamental to and transferring en- in the possible we describe as new media. ergy between systems? Iris van der Tuin and Perhaps speed reading machines serve as Aud Sissel Hoel describe in their diffractive an interface, a kind of machinic empathy reading of philosophers Ernst Cassirer and operating between web crawling bots and Gilbert Simondon, the “ontological force” of spiders rapaciously indexing the web, and technological apparatuses. Writing that “what our own skimming of inboxes or abstracts. Or takes Cassirer’s and Simondon’s accounts is speed reading rather a symptom of trying beyond the terrain of relational and proces- to keep pace with machines? Whatever the sual approaches, is their insistence on an answer, the limits of reading speed, and cru- irreducible third ingredient in the ontological cially also of comprehension are important entanglement: Technicity” (188), where “the markers, delineating the difference between human/nature mangle [is] essentially medi- page turning and reading. Furthermore, how ated by tools or technological objects” (190). we write into and for, new forms of reading, An instance of this entanglement as holds significant potential. Both reading and co-constitution is suggested when we look at writing are mediated by machines, but as the evolution of language, tools and cogni- Sean Pryor and David Trotter remark, “the tion; where it matters less which came first as converse… is equally important: writing each co-constitutes and catalyses the other mediates technology.” (10). Accordingly, new in a continual process of becoming (Gibson literacies, new writing, and new forms of and Ingold), trading places, entangled, one reading must in turn mediate machines and in the other. As such, each can be perceived our agglomeration with them. as being as alive as, and alive to, the other. Speed reading as we have framed it, can be studied as another fork in this process of

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can be reassessed as a component activity Conclusion of contemporary thinking and being-with the world. So where next? And what is the role of Torque, here operating as a public research project, and our role as people who are inherently Notes skeptical of narratives portraying history as a succession of ever-faster ever-more-efficient [1] Accelerationism is a term coined by technologies – and nevertheless awake to Benjamin Noys, to refer to the political the therapeutic and speculative potential of ideology of embracing Capitalism’s ten- reading machines? As ever, the answer is not dency towards destructive speed. In recent to ignore this new technology, but to explore years, there has been a split between its embedded strangeness. We propose “left-accelerationist” theorists such as Alex that speed reader technology might indeed Williams and Nick Srnicek (2013), and the play a part in navigating contemporaneous “right-accelerationism” of Nick Land, who evolutions in computational culture and new suggests that rather than using the collapse modes of reading. After all, the speed reader of capital to improve social conditions, itself is merely one example of a tendency for we should embrace accelerated flows media to flow forward, often with little concern “precisely for its inhuman, violent, and for the past. Twitter streams, 24 hour rolling destructive power” (Shaviro 2015). Both news coverage, and the notion of the status of these trajectories place an emphasis update – a new self every time – are other on the increased opportunities offered by associated phenomena of the contemporary technological innovation, to revolutionise reading subject. social relations. By making the equation We have observed our own tendency of neoliberal-accelerationism here, we to become distracted while reading long form observe that the accelerationist ideology in writing online, and this is a common com- technology-entrepreneurial culture has the plaint. In a study of hypertext in pedagogy, tendency to value the financial benefits of Gail A. Hinesley notes that researchers have an innovation over its particular usefulness found evidence of “cognitive overload” and or contribution to people’s well-being. “a haphazard, hypertext-structured thought process” resulting from this common form [2] See project website here: http://www. of online text (Hinesley). The potencies torquetorque.net/. discussed in this paper, of the speed reader and of the body as revealed by speed read- [3] Made using Processing and available ers, might help us to disentangle the relation here: https://github.com/tomschofield/ between this distraction, the digital-age mind speed_reader. and reading itself. Plato famously decried writing for its potential ill effects on memory [4] For further details, see: http://www.ucl. and verbal communication, but was there ac.uk/aphasialab/alex/home.html. ever a time different to now, when technics arrived without deleterious, corrupting effects? By producing our own speculative technicity in collaboration with others, we seek an alternative platform by which reading itself

36 Nathan Jones & Sam Skinner: ABSORBING TEXT

Hinesley, Gail A. “E-learning today: A review Works cited of research on hypertext comprehension”. AACE Journal, 15.3, (2007): 255-265. Bergvall, Caroline. Fig: Goan Atom 2. Salt, 2005. Hoel, Aud Sissel, and Iris van der Tuin. “The Ontological Force of Technicity: Reading Campbell, Andy, and Mez Breeze. Cassirer and Simondon Diffractively.” #PRISOM. 2013, http://dreamingmethods. Philosophy & Technology 26.2 (2013): com/prisom/. Accessed 22 Dec. 2016. 187-202. Changizi, Mark A. et al. “The Structures of Jones, Nathan, and Sam Skinner (eds). The Letters and Symbols throughout Human Opticon. Liverpool: Torque Editions, 2015. History Are Selected to Match Those Found in Objects in Natural Scenes.” The American Keller, A.G. A Theatre of Machines. London: Naturalist 167.5 (2006): E117-E139. Chapman and Hall, 1964. Connor, Steven. Beckett, Modernism and Leff, Alex. “How the Brain Samples the the Material Imagination. Cambridge: Visual World When Reading and How Focal Cambridge University Press, 2014. Brain Injury Can Disrupt This.” The Act of Reading, edited by Nathan Jones and Sam Clark, James J, and J. Kevin O’Regan. Skinner, Liverpool/London: Torque Editions, “Word Ambiguity and the Optimal Viewing 2015, pp. 177–195. Position in Reading.” Vision Research 39.4 (1999): 843–57. Lorusso, Silvio. The Post-Digital Publishing Archive: An Inventory of Speculative Dehaene, Stanislas. Reading in the Brain: Strategies | P—DPA. 16 June 2014, http://p- The New Science of How We Read. New dpa.net/the-post-digital-publishing-archive- York: Penguin Books, 2010. an-inventory-of-speculative-strategies/. Accessed 22 Dec, 2016. Gibson, Kathleen R., and Tim Ingold (eds). Tools, Language and Cognition. Cambridge, Ludovico, Alessandro. Post-Digital Print UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008. – The Mutation of Publishing since 1894. Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2012. Hayles, N. Katherine. “The Time of Digital Poetry: From Object to Event”. New Media McCandliss, Bruce D., Laurent Cohen, and Poetics, edited by Adalaide Morris and Stanislas Dehaene. “The Visual Word Form Thomas Swiss. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Area: Expertise for Reading in the Fusiform Press, 2006, pp. 181-210. Gyrus.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7.7 (2003): 293–99. Hayles, N. Katherine. “How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine.” ADE Bulletin 150 Pryor, Sean and David Trotter (eds). (2010): 62-79. Writing, Medium, Machine. London: Open Humanities Press, 2016.

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Rayner et al. “So Much to Read, So Little Time: How Do We Read, and Can Speed Reading Help?” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 17.1 (2016): 4–34.

Rosa, Hartmut. Scheuerman, William. E. (eds.) High-speed Society: Social acceleration, power, and modernity. The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009.

Scheffer, Bernd, Christine Stenzer, Peter Weibel and Soenke Zehle (Eds.), Typemotion: Type as Image in Motion. Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2015.

Shaviro, Steven. No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

Shultz, Colin. “These Apps Could Triple Your Reading Speed.” Smithsonian Blog, 2014. www.smithsonianmag.com/ smart-news/these-apps-could-triple-your- reading-speed-180949945. Accessed 10 Sept. 2016.

“How it works”. Spritz. http://spritzinc.com/ why-spritz-works-its-all-about-the-alignment- of-words. Accessed 10 Aug. 2016

Williams, Alex and Nick Srnicek. “#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics”. Critical Legal Thinking, 14 May 2013. http://critical- legalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate- manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/. Accessed 22 Dec. 2016.

38 MACHINIC SYSTEMS OF CONFLICT John Hill

DON’T JUST SIT THERE SHOUTING AT THE TELEVISION, GET UP AND CHANGE THE CHANNEL: A NETWORKED MODEL OF COMMUNICATION IN THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF DEBT

APRJA Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017 ISSN 2245-7755

CC license: ‘Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike’. John Hill: DON’T JUST SIT THERE ...

In his closing remarks from the first episode Seeing shows that Berger is acutely aware of of the 1972 television series Ways of Seeing, the “means of reproduction” he is using. Far the writer and critic John Berger urges the from being a conversation, the form of com- viewer to consider what he has shown munication provided by television is more them – a visual essay arguing that reproduc- the type described by Claude Shannon’s tion has changed the way we see painting “Mathematical Theory of Communication”. such that images have become a form of Shannon is perhaps best known for information – but to “be sceptical”. He tells his diagram of the communication process, viewers to be wary of their passive accept- comprising a “source, a transmitter, the mes- ance of the one-way broadcast medium sage, the channel of communications and the and that only when access to television is receiver” (Terranova, Network Culture 14). “extended beyond its present narrow limits” The transmitter must encode the message can there be dialogue within modern com- in to a form that can be carried by the chan- munication media. Immediately following this nel and then successfully decoded by the a title card explains that many of the ideas receiver. Developed to address the specific in the programme are taken from Walter problems of how signals become distorted by Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age their own physical properties — for example, of Mechanical Reproduction”. the electrons carrying the current in a wire This short section of the film contains — Shannon’s innovation was to apply the at least three ideas of what communica- statistical techniques used to model thermo- tion is and can be. This essay will discuss dynamics to the uncertainties of communica- these different models of communication — tion. With this he was able to formulate the dialogue, broadcast and networked — and, maximum amount of information, of any kind, following the work of cultural theorist Tiziana that could be sent down a channel (Shannon Terranova, show how they appear in and and Weaver 18). The mathematical model influence contemporary politics. In the final of communication did not concern itself with section it will build on the work of Maurizio the reduction of noise or the amplification of Lazzarato and attempt to show how the signal, but instead sought to maximise the networked model of communication, when efficiency with which a channel could be applied to our understanding of debt rela- used, concerning itself with what Terranova tions, might help us think differently about calls the “minimum condition of communica- the politics of debt and potential for political tion” (Network Culture 17). action within networked debt relations. Berger acknowledges, and plays with, the power that broadcast gives him, but that power is in part based on how the relation- Dialogue, broadcast, ship of sender to receiver is conceived. As network Terranova points out, in mathematical communication “interlocutors… are assumed to The dialogue that Berger calls for is an exam- be on the same side” (Network Culture 15), ple of what Terranova describes as the “tra- and therefore broadcast is fundamentally ditional conception of the dialectical game” reliant on a receptive audience, one already using “argument involving the interplay of open to the message. In order for this to be truth and persuasion” (Network Culture 15). achieved, and for the statistical properties of In its production style, however, Ways of the message to be maintained, sender and

41 APRJA Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017 receiver must necessarily have an existing is not possible to determine absolutely if a understanding of what the possible mes- signal is decoded to the same message that sages will be, allowing then to separate was originally encoded. The audience may signal from noise. “receive images and meanings which are It is this limitation of possible messages arranged” in the case of Berger, but they are that Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer able, and in this case encouraged, to inter- critique in their essay The Culture Industry. pret them differently, just as the programme Contrasting the liberal, dialogical, two way examines not “the paintings themselves… communication of the telephone, and the but the way we now see them”. In this way type of subjectivity that it could produce, they Berger’s television series, and subsequent see broadcast as inherently limiting, turning book, are examples of the shift, away from participants into listeners and subjecting the primacy of transmission in understanding them to “programs that are all exactly the culture, to the importance of reception. While same” (Adorno and Horkheimer 121). For the Frankfurt School approach of Adorno Adorno and Horkheimer, the power of the and Horkheimer focused on the production culture industry lay not simply in its control of mass, broadcast culture, work done by of mass media, but in its ability to define and the likes of Stuart Hall turned its attention construct the receiver, “classifying, organ- to the possibilities that lay in the “difference izing and labeling consumers” (123). Using between the encoding and the decoding” statistical methods with the same roots as (Wark). Rather than facilitating the ‘minimum those used in thermodynamics and informa- condition of communication’ here, information theory (Terranova, Network Culture 28), tion operates as a form of disconnection consumers are corralled into categories that between the sender and receiver, allowing reflect the broadcaster’s pre-conceived ideas for positive creativity in the act of reception. about who they are and what they want. The The failure of television to become a dia- result, or at least the desired effect, is that re- logical media of the type Berger had called sponses become “semi-automatic” such that for — either through public access cable or “no scope is left for the imagination” (Adorno the ‘algedonic’ viewer feedback systems of and Horkheimer 127). cybernetician Stafford Beer (Pickering 269) Berger’s call to open up broadcast — meant that “resistance to media power media might be seen as a call for a return had to be located in the viewer” (Terranova, to liberal dialogue such as that offered by “Systems and Networks” 117) the telephone but his understanding of the If Adorno and Horkheimer were more informational quality of the reproduced im- focused on the transmission of culture, and age suggests another important aspect, or Hall’s cultural studies on its reception, more consequence, of information theory and recent work by Terranova and others turns its basis in statistics. Although, if properly its attention to the systems that connect the encoded with an appropriate redundancy, a two, the channel or channels and the infor- message can be accurately decoded with mation itself. Drawing on the work of Gilbert a high degree of probability, information Simondon, she describes an informational theory does not guarantee being absolutely milieu in which meaning is “increasingly sure. Rather than being a reproduction or inseparable from the wider informational pro- representation of the information source, cesses that determine the spread of images the message received always has a proba- and words, sounds and affects” (Network bilistic relationship to the message sent. It Culture 2). How, she asks, “can we still believe

42 John Hill: DON’T JUST SIT THERE ... that information simply flows from sender that act “directly on material flows… func- to receiver (or from producer to consumer) tioning whether they signify something for without any of the noise, indeterminacy, and someone or not” (Signs and Machines 40). uncertainty having any effect on the process Although neither linear nor deterministic, the at all at some level?” (“Communication meaning of information lies in its function, beyond Meaning” 67) Instead of simply the its effects on the material world through the connection of pre-existing sender/receiver “chain of events by which it is set in motion nodes, Terranova sees communication as and which it sets in motion” (Terranova, occurring between what Simondon identified “Communication beyond Meaning” 66). as pre-individuals. Information acts as an in- Suhail Malik’s critique of what he calls dividuating force, creating the nodes through the “statistical-quantitative model” (31) of in- the act of connection, but never fully defining formation proposes a similar basis for mean- or describing them, such that divergent and ing in a material reality. For him information’s conflicting tendencies and potentials of the meaning must be “situated” — only meaning- pre-individual remain. As a consequence, un- ful within a system — and ceases to be infor- like the statistical stability of thermodynamic mation outside of it (35). Malik emphasises systems, all connections, including measure- the necessity for a system’s capacity for mu- ment of the sate of the system, have effects table memory in order to give information a that determine and delimit the things that are meaningful context. It is not, however, that measured. Every measurement, being both memory is the store of pre-defined possibili- within the system and itself probabilistic, has ties that the information selects from, as with the perverse effect of multiplying indeter- the mathematical model. Rather memory, at minacy; “the more knowledge is generated its most abstract level, is the organisation about the system, the more the uncertainty.” of the system itself, while information is the (Terranova, “Systems and Networks” 124). In ongoing production of meaning through the unstable systems like the milieu of networked alteration of the system’s structure (Malik communication, measurement of a channel’s 46) . Here we can see a connection to the indeterminacy — its signal-to-noise ratio — autopoietic theories of Humberto Maturana is never enough to insure a signal’s lossless and Francisco Varela, not only in their em- transmission. Indeterminacy can never be phasis on organisation over structure — the fully accounted or compensated for. relations between components rather than For Terranova, however, information’s the components themselves — but also on disconnecting effect doesn’t simply render it the role of the observer in the production of self-referential, socially constructed, without meaning (Maturana). In Malik’s description “anchorage to any social or bodily referent” the system’s memory has the function of self- (“Communication beyond Meaning” 62) and observation, allowing changes in structure therefore without meaning. Unlike represen- to be meaningful in relation to a persistent tation or signification, which find their mean- organisation. ings in relation to other images and signs, Both Terranova and Malik view informa- information’s meaning exists in its relation to tion’s interaction in unstable systems — its a material reality that can be both “observed capacity to both reflect and affect, determine and experimented with”. Like the “asignifying and individuate — as giving it the potential machines” that Maurizio Lazzarato develops to produce new forms of organisation and from the work of Félix Guattari, information new meaning, an “active power of inven- is non-representational, creating “diagrams” tion” (Terranova, “Communication beyond

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Meaning” 68). Meaning is both determining meetings rather than televised speeches and of and determined by the whole of the sys- interviews. His opponents in the Labour Party tem, and necessarily situated within it. Thus continue to follow a ‘Blairite’ media strategy, what Terranova calls the “cultural politics of yet lacking a message beyond their opposi- information” — the struggle over what it is tion to Corbyn’s leadership they are reduced that the systems of networked communica- to producing noise, disruptive signals that fills tion do — must be orientated not simply to up the media channels and blocks Corbyn’s the nodes of transmission and reception but ability to communicate anything (Rayner). to the entire network of communication. This The current British Foreign secretary, Boris necessitates a “questioning of the codes Johnson, writing the the Daily Telegraph and channels that generate the distribution in 2013, describes this disruptive strategy, of probabilities” and requires “renewed and quoting Conservative Party campaign strate- intense struggle around the definition of the gist Lynton Crosby, as “throwing a dead cat limits and alternatives” (Network Culture 25) on the table, mate”. No one is going to talk about anything except the cat. While Terranova suggests that strate- Political Communication gies like these show an understanding of information as networked — seeing it as How communication is understood, how passing not simply from sender to receiver it is modelled, is one of the ways in which but along a complex chain of of connec- the distribution of possibilities is determined, tions, each of which might alter the mes- and alternatives rendered more or less sage (“Communication beyond Meaning” likely. Dialogical, broadcast and networked 67–68) — they still operate with a focus on communication all open up and close down broadcast’s minimum conditions, establish- certain possibilities. Terranova describes ing connection. Recent political events seem the broadcast model of political communi- to suggest that the domination of politics by cation as imagining a “circuit between the broadcast communication is no longer cer- TV screen, the newspaper headline, and tain. Jeremy Corbyn was re-elected Labour the ballot box” (“Communication beyond Party leader, and Hilary Clinton, who ‘won’ Meaning” 60) where the job of the ‘commu- each of her televised debates (Saad), was nications manager’ is to amplify the signal to not able to secure enough electoral college drown out the noise. Political messages are votes to win the presidency. The circuit reduced — compressed — to messages with between TV screen and ballot box seems a redundancy that fits the channel, for exam- broken, or at least much less closed than ple Tony Blair’s insistence in his 1996 Labour in once was. One explanation for this lies in Party conference speech that his priorities for what the broadcast model is unable to ac- government were “education, education and count for: nonlinearity. In nonlinear network education”, a soundbite with meaning that communication, Terranova identifies “non- would be hard to distort no matter how noisy proportionality… between input and output, a the channel. The current leader of the British tendency of systems subjected to amplifica- Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, has been tion to produce deviations and distortions”. criticised for his media strategy (Greenslade; Drowning out a competing message, with Freedman) but this might in fact be a result of either signal or noise, can lead to “feedback a conception of communication as traditional or retroaction—cynicism and anger” that dialogue, communication intended for public can produce effects at the “biophysical

44 John Hill: DON’T JUST SIT THERE ... processes of affection” (“Communication beyond Meaning” 60). To understand the Diagrams of Debt erratic, nonlinear language used by Donald In this final section I wish to consider another Trump as simply noise disrupting Clinton’s area where the cultural politics of informa- signal fails to grasp its function to connote tion makes itself apparent and discuss how an open, probabilistic relation to meaning a networked model of communication might that seeks not to transmit an undistorted, or allow us not just to understand the contem- undistortable, message but to create a distri- porary cultural-political situation but act upon bution of possibilities that delimit alternatives and affect it. Drawing on the recent work of (Prasse-Freeman). Trump’s statements may Lazzarato — which emphasises the dual role not be true, but the possibility of their truth of debt and machinic, asignifying systems in becomes available, where previously it was the management of populations — I wish to excluded. question how he constructs and uses models Understanding political communica- of communication and how an alternative tion using a networked model is not simply conception of financialised debt might lead a case of opposing linear with nonlinear to a more open and active field of political communication, of mainstream media with action. social media, or television with the internet. In The Making of the Indebted Man Rather it is about seeing the whole of the Lazzarato provides detail on how debt ex- communication system as complex, unstable ploits “non-chronological time” — nonlinear and indeterminate. Networked communica- and indeterminate — mutable by choice, de- tion includes within it both broadcast and cision and action. “Granting credit” he says, dialogue but does not separate them out. “requires one to estimate that which is inesti- Each part of the system has the capacity mable — future behaviour and events — and to determine the potential of the other, with to expose oneself to the uncertainty of time” meaning a product of the change they effect (45). In order to do this profitably, the same on the system as a whole. Understanding statistical methods found in thermodynamics broadcast as existing within a networked and information theory are applied to deter- model reopens the potential for invention mine the creditworthiness of an individual. that the statistical model of information must Financialisation, he says, is the mechanism foreclose in order to function. The politics for managing debt, and the debtor-creditor of broadcast communication is necessar- relationship, with finance “controlling the ily hegemonic and, like the hegemony of temporality of action” and locking up possibili- Chantel Mouffe, “predicated on the exclusion ties “within an established framework while of other possibilities” (Mouffe). The politics of at the same time projecting them into the the open network neither requires nor seeks future” (The Making of the Indebted Man 71). hegemony, instead possessing “a material Much like the statistical delimiting of sender- potential for dynamic transformations… that receiver communication, he views finance as neither the liberal ethics of journalism, the setting limits on the potential for a break in cynicism of public relations officers, nor the the linear relation of the present to the future. theory of cultural hegemony can really ad- For him “debt simply neutralizes time, time dress” (Terranova, “Communication beyond as the creation of new possibilities… the Meaning” 70).. raw material of all political, social, or esthetic change” (The Making of the Indebted Man

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49), with this “foreclosure of alternatives, ag- long as it is quantified. Financial instruments, gressively and subtly pursued at all levels by such as debt insurance and credit default neoliberal governmentality”. swaps, re-sell the uncertainty that remains in For Lazzarato debt plays a key role in the credit-debt relationship, with derivatives the individuation of subjects, acting to bal- of a debt then used to mitigate, spread and ance the powerful desubjectivising forces of often conceal risk (Simkovic) rather than asignifying “machinic enslavement” (Signs eliminate it. While debt can operate in the and Machines 25). This enslavement draws way Lazzarato suggests, as a promise of on the ‘molecular’ pre-individual components the continuity of the future with the present of subjectivity and puts them to use as (Signs and Machines 48), finance makes no components of a larger systems. Debt’s role promises, rather it is a machinic diagram, is then to reterritorialise ‘molar’ subjectivity structuring the multiplicity of indeterminate that can be held accountable, for example futures to maintain profit, and power, what- in the form of the entrepreneurial subject ever the outcome. of “human capital” impelled to take on “the While Lazzarato and Feher are in agree- risks and costs for which neither businesses ment about the subjectivising effects of debt, not the Sate are willing to pay” (Signs and there may be differences in their positions on Machines 53). quite what those effects are. Feher sees the In a similar way to Lazzarato, Michel indebted, or rather credit-seeking subject, as Feher sees debt relationships as being key a “portfolio manager… of the self” where dif- to the formation of contemporary subjectivity ferent parts of the self can be offered up for — what he calls the neoliberal condition — evaluation. Whereas, in his recent work on but understands this as based in the drive to asignifying semiotics, Lazzarato describes maximise our credibility, creditworthiness, or how “the component parts of subjectivity self-esteem. Rather than an entrepreneurial function as inputs and outputs of the ‘televi- conception of human capital, this financial- sion’ assemblage” (Signs and Machines 47) ised subject aims to maximise their potential but sees debt’s function as the regrouping future value upon which credit can be given, of these parts into an individual subject. never seeking to determine or realise that Lazzarato’s reference point for communica- value in the present. For Feher, credit- tion is almost always broadcast. His earlier seeking is also a process of individuation writing on television views it, just like debt, as and subjectivisation, attempting to maximise an apparatus for neutralising political events self-worth in order to be seen as worthy of and subjectivities (Toscano 84). While the credit (Thank You for Sharing), but this is machinic assemblage he describes in part always based on a potential, rather than resembles the network model of communi- determined future. cation proposed by Terranova, its ‘television’ Feher sees indeterminacy as an essen- qualities remain in its structure of inputs and tial component of entrepreneurial capitalism, outputs. For Lazzarato debt is an input into one that the neo-liberal project was trying to the asignifying financial machine, where it is rescue from risk-averse, or risk-mitigating, “torn to pieces” and reassembled as an out- social democracy (Improve Your Credit). put of capital (Signs and Machines 48). Seen While credit-scoring attempts to estimate a in this way Lazzarato’s network assemblage person’s future worth, and uncertainty of that is simply a complex channel to transmission, future occurring, its function is not to limit a component in what remains Shannon’s risk but to price it; any risk can be taken as model of transmitter-channel-receiver.

46 John Hill: DON’T JUST SIT THERE ...

If, as I have argued above in the case we reconfigure the types of subjectivities of political media, you reverse this model, to without becoming a subjectless component view linear transmission as a component of in a system. Whereas Feher’s suggestion the network, then the debt relations appear is an embracing of our neoliberal condition much more like communication in the infor- and to use the capital we possess, even if mational milieu than the linear transmission its human rather than financial, for investee of broadcast. Debt remains subjectivising, activism, demanding that neoliberalism’s acting like Simondon’s communication to promises — “pleasure, a sense of accom- creating the nodes of the network, but there plishment, recognition, experimentation with are no inputs or outputs. In this model the new forms of life” (Signs and Machines 53) ‘manager’ of self described by Feher is not — are fulfilled. external to the network but already a part of A network model of debt also suggests it, individuating and subjectivising through a way forward. Terranova’s call for a renewed the creation of connections between parts, cultural politics of information that takes into entering into financialised debt relations by account “dynamics of information diffusion” allowing more and more of those parts to be within the “crowded and uneven communica- measured, evaluated and credit-scored. tion milieu” of the network (“Communication In my view Lazzarato’s modelling of beyond Meaning” 53–54) reopens the possi- debt as broadcast, establishing a connec- bilities for action and invention that broadcast tion between creditor to debtor, is no longer debt shuts down. If the functioning of the net- sufficient under debt’s financialisation, based work is not dependent on hegemony, all pos- as it is on the instability of the present’s con- sibilities for action remain open. Imaginings nection to the future. Rather than its ability and desires for a different future become in- to foreclose possibilities, we should see the formation that affects the system as a whole. power of finance as its ability to shape the With a network diagram of debt, where the functioning and organisation of the network. power and memory of a system is in its or- Unlike the individual subjective qualities — ganisation, politics appears as the creation “guilt, responsibility, loyalty, trust” (Lazzarato, of connections between components of the Signs and Machines 48) — that give linear network. All connections are information that creditor-debtor relations their power, finan- by definition alter the network’s structure and cialised debt’s power, which is to say its affect its organisation. Shifts in centrality — meaning, is based in the memory, that is the that is in the importance of a component to organisation of the system itself. As Malik the functioning of the network as a whole — shows, all information, all connections that become the means by which power relations comprise and shape the network, are given are altered. Repositioning the self away from their meaning by the organisation of the being an input or output to instead take on system as a whole. Power and meaning are an active role in the network allows for the not fixed or foreclosed, but altered with every possibility of ‘nonproporational’ effects on new connection made. a nonlinear and indeterminate future. Not Lazzarato’s proposal to counter debt’s dependent on the linear power-law dynamics restrictive effects on desire and action is a of broadcast, where alternatives can simply product of his model. He argues that political be drowned out and dismissed as noise, the action must position itself on the edges of network allows for different kinds of centrality, the system “between the molecular and the where small, peripheral acts can affect the molar” (Signs and Machines 36) such that organisation of the system as a whole. The

47 APRJA Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017 cultural politics of networked debt become Lazzarato, Maurizio. Signs and Machines: not about avoidance, disconnection, or even Capitalism and the Production of resistance, but about how we change the Subjectivity. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, network though its use. 2014. Print.

—. The Making of the Indebted Man: An Works cited Essay on the Neoliberal Condition. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012. Print. Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso, Malik, Suhail. “Information and Knowledge.” 1997. Print. Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 22, no. 1, Feb. (2005): 29–49. Print. Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. BBC, 1972. www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pDE4VX_9Kk. Maturana, Humbert R. Autopoiesis and Web. Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, Feher, Michel. Improve Your Credit: What 1979. Print. Human Capital Wants. 2014. https://vimeo. com/86138288. Web. Mouffe, Chantal. “Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces.” ART&RESEARCH, vol. —. Thank You for Sharing: The Social Life 1, no. 2, Summer (2007). www.artandre- of Human Capital. 2015. www.gold.ac.uk/ search.org.uk/v1n2/mouffe.html. Web. visual-cultures/life/guest-lectures/. Web. Pickering, Andrew. The Cybernetic Brain: —. The Neoliberal Condition and Its Sketches of Another Future. Chicago: Predecessors: Redemption, Fulfillment, University of Chicago Press, 2010. Print. Appreciation. 2013. https://vimeo. com/80882516. Web. Prasse-Freeman, Elliott. “Why Elites Lose at Trump’s Language Game.” Foreign Freedman, Des. “Jeremy Corbyn’s Media Policy, Feb. 2016. https://foreignpolicy. Strategy Is Smarter than His Critics com/2016/09/02/why-elites-lose-at-trumps- Realise.” The New Statesman, Aug. language-game. Web. 2016. www.newstatesman.com/politics/ staggers/2016/08/jeremy-corbyns-media- Rayner, Gordon. “Labour Meltdown strategy-smarter-his-critics-realise. Web. (Continued): 47 Resignations, but Jeremy Corbyn Fights on.” The Telegraph, 27 Greenslade, Roy. “Does Jeremy Corbyn June (2016). www.telegraph.co.uk/ Have a Media Strategy? Apparently Not.” news/2016/06/27/labour-meltdown- The Guardian, 14 Sept. 2015. https://www. continued-44-resignations-but-jeremy- theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2015/ corbyn-figh/. Web. sep/14/does-jeremy-corbyn-have-a-media- strategy-apparently-not. Web.

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Saad, Lydia. “Clinton Wins Third Debate, Wark, McKenzie. “#Theory21c (Part 1).” Gains Ground as ‘Presidential’.” Gallup, Public Seminar, 17 Feb. (2015). www. 24 Oct. (2016). Web www.gallup.com/ publicseminar.org/2015/02/theory21c- poll/196643/clinton-wins-third-debate-gains- part-1/. Web. ground-presidential.aspx. Web.

Shannon, Claude E., and Warren Weaver. The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1949. Print.

Simkovic, Michael. “Secret Liens and the Financial Crisis of 2008.” SSRN Scholarly Paper, ID 1323190, Social Science Research Network, 4 Jan. (2009). papers.ssrn.com. https://papers.ssrn.com/ abstract=1323190. Web.

Terranova, Tiziana. “Communication beyond Meaning: On the Cultural Politics of Information.” Social Text, vol. 22, no. 3 (2004): 51–73. Print.

—. “Debt and Autonomy: Lazzarato and the Constituent Powers of the Social.” The New Reader, no. 1, (2014). thenewreader.org/ Issues/1/DebtAndAutonomy. Web.

—. Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. London: Pluto Press, 2004. Print.

—. “Of Systems and Networks: Digital Regeneration and the Pragmatics of Postmodern Knowledge.” Cultural Capitalism. Politics After New Labour, edited by Timothy Bewes and Jeremy Gilbert. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2000, 117–133. Print.

Toscano, Alberto. “Vital Strategies: Maurizio Lazzarato and the Metaphysics of Contemporary Capitalism.” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 24, no. 6, Nov. (2007): 71–91. Print.

49 Dave Young

COMPUTING WAR NARRATIVES: THE HAMLET EVALUATION SYSTEM IN VIETNAM

APRJA Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017 ISSN 2245-7755

CC license: ‘Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike’. Dave Young: COMPUTING WAR NARRATIVES

Over the two decades following the French in South Vietnam during the war, contextu- withdrawal from Vietnam in 1954, the United alising it in the culture of systems-analysis States found itself increasingly enmeshed in which became prevalent in US defence strat- a war that evaded expectations. In order to egy following the Second World War. This fulfil their commitment to their stated policy of apparatus – called the Hamlet Evaluation stopping the spread of the Soviet sphere of System – was in formal operation from influence as outlined in theTruman Doctrine, 1967 until 1973, and aimed to provide US the US had to invest heavily in sustaining Forces with a vital narrative of progress in their presence in the region. In anticipation their “pacification programmes” in Vietnam. that the fall of Vietnam to communism would With its disruptive use of computers, the trigger a chain-reaction of Soviet-backed immense scale and scope of its task, and governments rising to power across Asia its affordance of a managerial approach (the so-called Domino Theory), a visible to warfare, this system raises a number of display of military presence gained a strong issues around the role of the computer as sense of urgency. What quickly became ap- bureaucratic mediator – in this case, tasked parent to military strategists in the Pentagon with converting complex insurgencies into was that this conflict did not follow their legible, systematic narratives. What kind of assumed ‘conventions’ of regular warfare: insights did it provide into the operations of the heavy machinery of the US Military was the Vietcong insurgency? How does it fit into destabilised by the networked nature of the the wider ecologies of command and control Vietcong insurgency in South Vietnam. In in the US Military during the first few decades his 1985 book War Without Fronts, Thomas of the Cold War? As the Hamlet Evaluation C. Thayer describes how, despite its colos- System, almost fifty years after its inception, sal human and machinic capital, the US is still considered the “gold standard of [coun- Military was faced with a hindered ability to terinsurgency]” (Connable 113), it remains even accurately evaluate how the Vietnam an important case study for those trying to war was progressing on a regional level, understand how computers structure the in- let alone contain the spread of communist stitutional bureaucracy of war, and how they influence (4). Without any headquarters and are imagined as epistemological tools that with networks of cadres operating across the can somehow reveal objective truths about rural villages and jungles of the country, it the complex, dynamic reality of war. became difficult for the US Military to know where to concentrate its attention. The military strategists believed that the solution to Legible Thresholds this problem could at least in part be solved The 1954 Geneva Accords, in addressing with machines.This approach, articulated the new power vacuum in South East Asia in General Westmoreland’s concept of “the following the final defeat of the French forces electronic battlefield”, can be more generally in Vietnam, came to a rushed agreement. summed up as a systems-oriented perspec- Vietnam would be temporarily partitioned tive on conflict, where anything from supply along the 17th parallel, leading to the crea- chain logistics to the political disposition of tion of two states: the Democratic Republic rural villages can be quantified, managed, of Vietnam, and South Vietnam. Democratic and controlled. elections were planned to occur two years In this text, I will unpack the workings of later, after which the country was to be a particular technological apparatus applied

51 APRJA Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017 reunited under a newly elected, singular gov- many US Military strategists in Saigon. ernment. However, the 1956 elections never This concept of the threshold finds its took place: knowing that Ho Chi Minh would application in the strategies favoured by win any popular vote, Ngo Dinh Diem – the Robert McNamara, US Secretary of Defense South Vietnamese Chief of State – working from 1961-68. McNamara, a Harvard-trained in liaison with the US Government, decided economist famed for using “systems analy- to withdraw support. Vietnam thus remained sis” to revolutionise the ailing post-war Ford in a suspended state of partition, caught be- Motor Company, took a similar systems- tween a century of French colonial rule and driven approach to his role in government. an apparently forthcoming new era of US Donald Fisher Harrison describes how proxy governance. It was these pre-existing McNamara’s approach to his position incor- conditions which laid out foundations for the porated “business analysis techniques”: asymmetric relationship between on one side the US Military and Government of McNamara’s early applications of com- South Vietnam (GVN), and on the other the puters to war were ground-breaking. various counter-powers fighting on behalf of Using computers as an analytical tool, the northern Democratic Republic of Vietnam he soon made fundamental changes in – notably, the Vietcong’s political and military the department’s reporting techniques, infrastructure. As growing numbers of US as well as in the use of computer- troops arrived in Saigon in the early 1960s generated data for decision making. and were mobilised around the country, an (Fisher Harrison 20) organised Vietcong insurgency was already well-established in the villages and towns all By the time McNamara was appointed over South Vietnam. The US troops quickly Secretary of Defense, there in fact was found that they were not dealing with a already a burgeoning culture of systems unified, centralised enemy: they were deal- analysis among scientists and engineers de- ing with disruptive threats which emerged veloping computers, the nuclear programme through unpredictable guerrilla operations, and experimental weapons. Outside the flashes of combat in quiet villages or jungle military, the practice of systems analysis roadways which could vanish as suddenly could already be seen in the organisation of as they appeared. This was not bloc-against- the corporate workplaces, manufacturing in- bloc warfare, where oppositional forces dustries and communications infrastructures engage in conflicts around fronts, nor was it of the United States since the early twentieth as simple as being “without fronts” as Thayer century (Yates). However, it was the war suggests. Instead of describing the war ac- emergency in the early 1940s that really set cording to these principles, in acknowledge- systems analysis to work in solving military ment of the systems-oriented perspective problems, such as the design of anti-aircraft that came to characterise this war, we can weapons and locating German submarines think of it as being constituted of a multitude in the north Atlantic Ocean. What Peter of thresholds. The emergent nature of these Galison calls the “manichean sciences” – thresholds posed a serious problem for US cybernetics, game theory, and operations Military and GVN strategists, especially in research – emerged during this period to ad- rural districts throughout South Vietnam, and dress strategic problems in military thought, it was the task of mapping and predicting and came to be regarded as powerful frame- where they might emerge next that occupied works for managing the unpredictable nature

52 Dave Young: COMPUTING WAR NARRATIVES of the “cunning opponent” during the Second above, systems analysis was not necessarily World War and beyond (234): new to the military as such, the appointment of McNamara and his advisors – the so-called More active than the targeted, invisible Defence Intellectuals – to such high-ranking inhabitants of a distant city and more positions expanded its scope. It was leant a rational than the hoardelike race further legitimacy when it was made a central enemy, this third version emerged as concern in forming policy and strategy in a cold-blooded, machinelike opponent. Vietnam. Evelyn Fox Keller’s writing, while This was the enemy, not of bayonet on the subject of what she calls “cybersci- struggles in the trenches, nor of ence”, neatly epitomises the worldview of architectural targets fixed through the the Defence Intellectuals and the manichean prisms of a Norden gunsight. Rather, scientists: it was a mechanized Enemy Other, generated in the laboratory-based For cyberscientists, Life (especially science wars of MIT and a myriad of corporate life, electronic life, and mili- universities around the United States tary life — the modes of life from which and Britain, not to speak of the tens these efforts emerged and on which of laboratories in the countries of the they were focused) had become far Axis. (231) too unwieldy to be managed my mere doing, by direct action, or even through It is no coincidence that the emergence the delegation of “doing” to an army of of the manichean sciences were concurrent underlings kept in step by executive with the development of digital comput- order. (85-86) ing – both drew on and further facilitated a perspective of the world which was quantifi- able in terms of logical and rational systems of control and communication. For instance, John von Neumann, one of the chief proponents of Game Theory, made important contributions to defence computing projects during the Second World War. During this period, computers had urgent problems to solve – problems posed by long-range ballistics, cryptography, submarine warfare, and the threat of the bomber plane. The availability of federal funding and the politically-motivated scale of ambition facilitated ground-breaking computing projects such as von Neumann’s MANIAC computer (Jacobsen 33). As the Cold War tensions heightened, continued Figure 1: SAGE Situation Display Console (IBM 60) research and development in new technologies was seen not just as desirable displays As the cutting edge of digital comput- of capitalist innovation, but as absolutely vital ing advanced rapidly, its utilities expanded to the management and prediction of threats from just being labour-saving calculators from the Soviet Union. While, as outlined to becoming expansive multi-purpose

53 APRJA Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017 data-processors, generating actionable information from vast quantities of inputted data. Pacification For example, the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), built by IBM for the US Air Force in the 1950s, was designed to manage the airspace of the United States. Its development, catalysed by the explosion of the Soviet Union’s atomic bomb in 1949, was relatively brisk considering its technical novelty. The SAGE system was online by 1960, receiving streams of radar information from a variety of arrays around the country, identifying crafts that were possible threats and tracking their movements. With SAGE came innovations in digital memory formats, Figure 2: HES population control data by hamlet operating systems, and screen interfaces security rating, dated 30th April 1968 (Brigham 34). that rendered data streams as legible thresholds that, when traversed, would immedi- The shock of the Soviet launch of ately alert the system’s operators. In Closed their Sputnik satellite in 1957 and the grave World, Paul Edwards describes it as “the first implications for national security resonated large-scale, computerised command, control in US President Eisenhower’s State of the and communications system” (75), which Union address the following year: “The ad- although obsolete by the time it was finished, vent of revolutionary new devices, bringing demonstrated the practical possibilities of with them the problem of overall continental defence computing and had an enormous defense, creates new difficulties, reminiscent influence on subsequent projects funded by of those attending the advent of the airplane the Department of Defense. It is important half a century ago.” to note that, while SAGE was enthusiasti- In the address, Eisenhower, him- cally developed by teams of scientists and self a General in the Second World War, engineers, it was dismissed by some Air acknowledged the necessity to establish Force traditionalists for its defensive na- new approaches to defence research. The ture, the possibility of the project diverting newly created Advanced Research Projects funding from other Air Force projects, and Agency (ARPA, later becoming DARPA after its centralised position of command in the being given the prefix Defense), furnished military hierarchy (Edwards 94-96). A CIA with a $10 million grant to start their research analyst, writing in 1960 on the “capabilities, programme, became an important location prospects, and implications” of the computer for technological experiments and systems and military projects such as SAGE, warned: analysis. ARPA’s role in the early years of “Not that computers and other [Electronic Vietnam centred on Project Agile, a Saigon- Data Processing] machines constitute any based research programme tasked with tack- panacea for our ills; they are not glamorous ling the problem of the insurgency. Project Aladdin’s lamps to do our bidding while we Agile was to varying degrees responsible for recline at ease.” (Becker 7) the US Military’s defoliation programme — the destruction of the natural camouflage of the jungle canopy, and the invention of Agent

54 Dave Young: COMPUTING WAR NARRATIVES

Orange — a herbicide that poisoned arable “scrubbed” from the records, at which point soil and water sources, prohibiting future at- a new, more favourable, report was commis- tempts at farming the land. Simultaneously, sioned (Jacobsen 136). Project Agile was also intended as a key weapon in the battle for pacification, that is, the effort to win the “hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese and “pacify” the efforts of the insurgency. Agile’s strong-handed and often misguided approach to pacification is evident in the Strategic Hamlet Programme (SHP), where Vietnamese farmers were given financial incentives to move away from “Vietcong infested” areas to live in US-sanctioned regions, under protection of the GVN (Jacobsen 133). In doing so, it was hoped that “ARPA would collect enough information on strategic hamlets to be able to monitor their activity in the future” (Jacobsen 135), and “tie the villages into the network of government administration and control” (Hilsman). While the village was traditionally considered the lowest administrative unit in Vietnam, each village would typically be comprised of a number of discrete communities called hamlets. These hamlets could in fact vary significantly in size, from small clusters of houses surrounded by rice fields Figure 3: Proposed Hamlet Pacification Plan, 1966 (Nighswonger 322). to whole urban districts, and with populations ranging from as few as 50 people to as many The SHP’s observation of specific com- as 20,000 (Connable 114). This attempt to munities and the production of new control- create safe havens and win the support of lable zones for Vietnamese farmers was just the Vietnamese was not as straightforward one interpretation of what “pacification” could as anticipated, ignorant as it was to the mean for the US Military and its research communities it was attempting to displace. institutions. As Thomas Scoville notes in his Dislocated farmers lost their cultural con- history of pacification in Vietnam, the exact nection to their ancestral lands, and report- definition of the term in fact remained unclear edly were underpaid for being relocated and throughout the war: forced to build fortifications during the “most important planting time of the year, which There was never agreement among meant that many farmers had been unable Americans in Vietnam on just what to plant their own crops” (Jacobsen 135). An pacification was and how it might be ARPA-funded investigation carried out during achieved. Some saw it as controlling the programme’s lifetime which suggested the population; others as winning the this initiative was doing much more harm people’s allegiance. Some viewed than good was rejected and subsequently it as a short-term military operation

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aimed at quashing opposition; others as a long-term process of bringing, in addition to security, economic, political, and social development to the people. (3)

By October 1966, McNamara was seeking new ways to get a clearer picture of the counterinsurgency efforts in Vietnam, and asked the CIA to develop a system to measure progress – and regress, as the case may Figure 4: Hamlet Evaluation System Worksheet, be – in the pacification programmes (Ahern circa 1968 (Ahern 419). 231). The CIA were brief in their response, quickly developing a proposal for what be- hamlet, the majority of which were situated came known later as the Hamlet Evaluation in remote rural areas. MACV staff known as System (HES): “Mandated on a Monday, District Advisors were given an allocation brainstormed on Wednesday, and coordi- of hamlets to be visited on a monthly basis, nated inside CIA on Thursday, the proposal whereupon they would liaise with local chiefs reached Secretary McNamara on Friday. and complete questionnaires rating the state He approved it on the spot, after which it of security and development of each particu- received pro forma review in the State and lar hamlet. The original HES version had a Defense Departments” (Ahern 233). The fol- total of eighteen questions, each with up to lowing year, the system was installed as part five possible answers. Subsequent reviews of a bureaucratic assemblage consisting of by the Simulmatics Corporation (de Sola both military and civilian organisations. It was Pool et al.), RAND (Sweetland), and ARPA led by Civil Operations and Revolutionary (Prince and Adkins) appended new questions Development Support (CORDS), and im- and altered the scope of responses. Typical plemented by Military Assistance Command questions varied from the degree of Vietcong Vietnam (MACV), a branch of the US presence in the area during different times Military charged with responsibilities such of the day, to the number of households that as running psychological operations, aid own radios, to forms of economic activities programmes and pacification campaigns. local to the hamlet (see MACCORDS 303- As Ben Connable puts it, “MACV was the 336). The design of the Hamlet Evaluation neck of the funnel for nearly all field reports System aimed to maximise efficiency, speed on operations, intelligence, pacification, and up reporting times,and enable the operation other data categories” (99). In order to get to be practicable on an almost national scale a sufficiently high-resolution perspective on by implementing newly available computer the narrative of the counterinsurgency, the systems: “Automated Data Processing is designers of the system recommended that used in the HES to minimise the district advi- MACV collect data on a hamlet level, which sors’ workload and also to facilitate the stor- ultimately amounted to over 12,000 hamlets. age, tabulation, and analysis of the reported The task of the HES was to quantify the information” (Brigham 2). The quantity of data pacification status in regions outside the cit- produced from the system is impressive: ies by assigning security ratings ranging from ‘A’ (friendly) down to ‘E’ (contested) for each

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Every month, the HES produced tactical response. Humans might conceiv- approximately 90,000 pages of data ably be able to do the calculations required, and reports. This means that over but the number of man-hours (government the course of just four of the years in term) required to do so would make the task which the system was fully functional, completely inefficient and the results likely it produced more than 4.3 million irrelevant. Indeed, before the development pages of information, and each page of electronic computers in the later years of may have contained ten, 20, or more the Second World War, it was people – and discrete elements of data – perhaps most often women – who were the comput- 40 million pieces of data, as a round ers, brought into the war effort to work with estimate. (Connable 120) mechanical calculators or do arithmetic by hand. Janet Abbate gives an idea of how a It is important to note that the HES machine such as ENIAC, an example of an was not the only data collection system in early digital computer, would speed up the use by the US Military at the time. A col- labour of calculating ballistics firing tables: lection of systems documented in the US “To create a single firing table required a National Archives in Washington point to month of continuous work for either the a widespread systematisation of conflict, Differential Analyser or a team of a hundred ranging from logistical control of supply women” (16). However, the use of comput- chains to terrorist activity databases. A ers in the HES did not simply remove the parallel programme to the HES, also run by need for manual labour – in fact, the task CORDS, called Phung Hoang (or Phoenix of data collection proved to be an arduous Programme), sought to construct a list of task, fraught with danger as well as logistical individuals working for or sympathetic to the difficulties. The process of observing and Vietcong and subsequently — according to recording each hamlet could not be auto- the US Military euphemism — “neutralize mated, it had to be carried out by humans, them” (CORDS 1). According to Tim Weiner, vulnerable to ambush and prone to subjec- the total number of Vietcong suspects killed tive bias as will be demonstrated below. in the Phung Hoang programme amounts to Nevertheless, the novelty and importance of more than 20,000 “at a minimum” (394). Also the computer as an instrument of war was in operation at the time were the National not lost on the chief of CORDS. In a 1967 Police Infrastructure Analysis SubSystem press briefing announcing the HES, Robert (NPIASS) — a GVN-collated database of Komer hailed the system’s use of computers criminals — and the Pacification Attitude as a labour-saving device, as well as noting Analysis System (PAAS), which attempted to their analytical “flexibility”: “We can ask the carry out opinion polls on the population of computer questions on details among the South Vietnam (see US National Archives). 50 different facets and can get answers of Although working in very different en- any kind” (Komer “HES System” 3). Although vironments, the Hamlet Evaluation System being remarkable for its use of computers to in essence was assigned a similar com- automate analysis, the enormous amount of putational task to projects such as SAGE: work required to first collect hamlet data and to distil large quantities of information into then render it as machine-readable should actionable knowledge, and to do this over not be understated. a sufficiently brief period of time such that In its hyperlocal focus, the HES was defence strategists could develop a relevant in essence concerned with converting the

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system was, similar to SAGE before it, taken with scepticism by senior Generals who believed in the intuitive “art of war”. They loathed the extra layers of bureaucracy that inevitably came with integrating complex military operations with hundreds of civilian computer analysts spread across Saigon and the continental US (Belcher 144). Furthermore, there was a question of who

Figure 5: Hamlet Plot (extract) dated 30th November exactly was being evaluated by the HES, with 1970. This extract shows hamlet security ratings in the some believing that to some degree “their regions surrounding Saigon (MACV, Hamlet Map). own personal performance was monitored by McNamara’s computers” (Fisher Harrison population of South Vietnam into discrete 21). This suspicion was in fact partially true. units whose perceived security could be HES metrics came to be a method of bench- managed, controlled, and sculpted through marking and incentivising regional progress responsive GVN and US Military strategies. in the conflict, with senior strategists in the The social and political dynamics of rural US setting targets for improving security and communities were schematised, with behav- development ratings in hamlets across the iours and conditions becoming “thresholds” country – targets which commanders were to be converted into data and subsequently under great pressure to meet. In tape tran- analysed in myriad reports generated by IBM scripts of a 1968 meeting between General computers in Saigon. Automatically generat- Creighton Abrams with CORDS director ed maps, surveys, and charts would be sent William Colby, Abrams presses this point: “It to the US and subjected to further analysis, may be that, under the pressure of goals and their statistics being held up as evidence of targets and so on that […] some have leaned progress at high levels of US Government a little bit over backwards to look at the better (Tunney 1). Perhaps the most striking docu- side of things […] but now’s the time you’ve ment produced by computer analysis was got to look past the chart and it mustn’t be the Hamlet Plot, a printed map of South only A/B/C [hamlet ratings] and A/B in the Vietnam with the security score of each ham- HES report” (Sorley 288). He continues to let displayed. The plot was “state-of-the-art, state that “this government’s life depends and facilitated the emergence of a new visual on it being what [the HES] says” (288). This register” (Belcher 133). It would appear then, appetite for data drove further divisions with the availability of novel registers such between the subjective observations of advi- as the Hamlet Plot, that McNamara’s desire sors on the ground and the assumed “objec- to increase the legibility of the war narrative tive” narratives generated by the computers. had been achieved. The sheer quantity of labour required to meet the monthly demand for hamlet data, not to mention the logistical complexity of the task, Not a Precise Thermometer almost certainly contributed to a significant distortion of the data as it was collected. However, the HES was not without its crit- Given that a District Advisor might have ics. The idea that the Vietnam War could be upwards of 50 hamlets in their roster, how understood as a scientifically manageable much time could they conceivably spend in

58 Dave Young: COMPUTING WAR NARRATIVES each location on a monthly basis, and how full explanation for downgrading them” and accurate an insight into regional security and spent the next couple of weeks justifying the development would this provide in practice? evaluation (8). The laborious process led the William Colby himself indicates his aware- advisor to admit that “it may be a long time ness of the ambiguities of HES data, but in hell before I downgrade another hamlet” nevertheless defends it as a useful tool: (Tunney 8). Recent analyses of HES report- “We’ve been using it, and defending it, over ing by Connable and Belcher present a more the years. We’ve emphasised that we don’t generally problematic picture. Despite ap- think it’s a precise thermometer for the situa- pearing on a superficial level to be providing tion, but it’s been a very handy tool. It’s given crucial insights into the war narrative, the us an idea of differences over time and […] very data these insights were based on were space” (Sorley 367). An Army-commissioned at least partially corrupt, and its methodology and generally favourable review of the HES was faulty: by the Simulmatics Corporation just one year into its operation claimed that, while the Indeed, there is a two-sided struggle District Advisors did not self-report any ten- in the centralized assessment cycle: dency to upgrade ratings to show “progress” On one side, analysts fight to obtain, in hamlets under their command, found collate, and understand vast reams limited evidence of bias in monthly reporting. of decontextualized data while under That said, the primary author of this report intense pressure from policymakers was Ithiel de Sola Pool, an MIT professor and and senior military leaders to show founder of the Simulmatics Corporation, and progress; on the other side, troops in an important figure in ARPA’s Project Agile the field are tasked with reporting data as well as the Strategic Hamlet Program that often do not exist, in formats that — not necessarily somebody who could be make little sense, for objectives they considered as an independent evaluator do not understand or believe in, while (Scott 377). He writes: also under intense pressure to show progress. (Connable 96) Without exception, the district advisors stated that they honestly have tried A 1972 HES Review Committee to reflect reality in the HES. Some memorandum is but one example of issues respondents, however, acknowledged with District Advisor reporting, highlighting their general outlook affected their in- committee suspicions concerning “an unex- terpretation of “reality.” Four of the forty pected, extraordinary upgrading of hamlets” respondents tended to be optimistic and “sudden upgrading of long-term enemy and to view the apparent general trend strongholds” (Jones 3). The hamlet question- of the Vietnamese conflict favorably. naire itself also observed an optimistic bias, (de Sola Pool et al. 94) with questions phrased such that conditions appeared to be improving. Indeed, a domi- A 1969 inquiry into the Hamlet Evaluation nant preoccupation in the aforementioned System by Senator John Tunney went much ARPA (Prince) and Simulmatics (de Sola further, quoting one unnamed District Advisor Pool et al.) reports attempted to address is- who explained that, after downgrading four sues around bias and labour complexity. hamlets, he “was immediately hit with a The entire operational stack of the barrage of cables from Saigon demanding a HES, from the Hamlet Chiefs right up to the

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operations where its formula evolved over time at enormous expense of those who were subjected to it. As an experimental pacification tool, it was not alone: the HES was but one component in an assemblage of machin- eries all feeding in to one another, shaping strategy in response to perceived trends in the war narrative, and having tangible, violent effects on the lives of the Vietnam’s rural population. Robert Komer, the CORDS chief who excitedly announced the use of computers in the HES in 1968, wrote of the Figure 6: Population Status Trend according to pacification programmes two years later: HES Data, 1967-1969 (Brigham “Military Review: Pacification Measurement” 51). “Like most things in Vietnam, [pacification] has been cumbersome, wasteful, poorly top of the US Executive Branch – and not executed, only spottily effective in many excluding the computers, algorithms, and the respects” (Komer “Impact of Pacification” databases – constituted an unwieldy bureau- 8). In carrying out their task of making emer- cratic apparatus. In effect, it had more to do gent guerrilla tactics legible as part of some with legitimising a continued US engagement overarching strategic vision, these systems with Vietnam than functioning as the intended failed to approach the ontological question ‘neutral’ epistemological tool that would en- of what actually characterises the supposed able the strategists to read the battlefield like “rational” or “obedient” subject in asymmetric a manual. The Hamlet Evaluation System’s warfare. grandiose ambition to map the progress of Giorgio Agamben writes: “We have the pacification programmes meant that its then two great classes: living beings (or consequences were far reaching, influencing substances) and apparatuses. And between military strategy and policy while suggesting these two, as a third class, subjects. I call a that conditions in the country were widely subject that which results from the relation improving. For instance, its optimistic report- and, so to speak, from the relentless fight ing would have implied that the $777 million between living beings and apparatuses” dollars spent in 1970 on pacification was (14). In the case of the Hamlet Evaluation rewarded with real progress on the ground System, the “living beings” who inhabited (Komer “Impact of Pacification” 19), or that the rural hamlets of South Vietnam were search and destroy tactics were successfully subjectivised. What behavioural nuances bringing new regions under GVN and US could be lost to noise in the data? How can influence. While the aforementioned exam- assumed “objective” data be produced out ples of bias and data manipulation were not of a system that fundamentally relies on necessarily active intentions of the system, subjective observations, clouded by the fog they were at least affordances of the com- of war and distorted by bureaucratic pres- plex administrative bureaucracy required to sures to attain targets? Purely as a machine keep it in operation. But it is the “liveness” that produced a “gold mine” (Komer “Impact of the HES that is crucial to dwell on: it was of Pacification” 9) of actionable information an untested experimental apparatus, trialled about the insurgency, one could conclude in a highly complex and dynamic theatre of that the Hamlet Evaluation System was

60 Dave Young: COMPUTING WAR NARRATIVES successful. However, this understanding is to take a purely technocentric position, omitting Works cited the very real and violent political implications Abbate, Janet. Recoding Gender: Women’s of the data contained within this “gold mine”. Changing Participation in Computing. If the war was “a war for the control of the Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2012. Print. population” (Kalvyas and Kocher 337), the Defence Intellectuals worked with the con- Agamben, Giorgio. What is an Apparatus? cept of “population” as a technical abstraction Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. that could be conveniently understood with Print. algorithms and surmised in statistics, rather than as an amorphous form sustained and Ahern, Thomas L. CIA and Rural constituted by a dynamic and evasive social Pacification in South Vietnam. United substrate. It was rather the particular reality States of America: Center for the Study of of this technical abstraction which neces- Intelligence, 2001. Print. sarily informed and facilitated McNamara’s Vietnam strategies, and which was also pre- Belcher, Oliver. “Data Anxieties: Objectivity sented to the American public as evidence and Difference in early Vietnam War of “progress”. While some examples of con- Computing.” Ed. Amoore, Laura and Volha temporary analysis of the HES acknowledge Piotukh. Calculative Devices in a Digital its sophistication (see Kalvyas and Kocher Age. London: Routledge, 2015. 132-147. 341), as a case study it raises crucial ques- Print. tions about the kinds of structural distortions that arise out of the application of systematic Brigham, Colonel Erwin R. “Pacification apparatuses in conflict scenarios. The notion Measurement in Vietnam: The Hamlet that analysing “enough data” will lead to Evaluation System.” Presentation at the an increase in the “legibility” of asymmetric SEATO Internal Security Seminar, Manila, warfare must come with a critical caveat: it 1968. The Vietnam Center and Archive, should be understood with relation to the ad- Texas Tech University, DOI: 1070318004. ministrative organisations that modulate their Accessed 9 Sep 2016. Web. end-use and, perhaps to a significant degree, prefigure their consequences. For the Brigham, Colonel Erwin R. “Military Review: present, analysis of the Hamlet Evaluation Pacification Measurement”, in Military System identifies a number of fallibilities in Review (1970). Douglas Pike Collection: the process of mass data collection, which Unit 06 – Democratic Republic of Vietnam. bring to mind the “collect it all” mantras that The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas characterise the counterterrorism strategies Tech University. DOI: 2321706001. www. of the US and UK (Anon). In this respect, vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items. thorough analysis of the inner-workings of php?item=2321706001. Web. Vietnam’s “gold standard” (Connable 113) pacification programmes can afford us with Anon. “Elegant Chaos: Collect It All, Exploit a historically-sensitive mode of critique for It All (plus notes)”. https://theintercept.com/ their classified contemporary analogues. document/2016/09/06/elegant-chaos-collect-it-all-exploit-it-all-plus-notes/. Accessed 3 Jan 2017. Web.

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Connable, Ben. Embracing the Fog Gayvert, David. “Teaching Old Dogs of War: Assessment and Metrics in New Tricks: Can the Hamlet Evaluation Counterinsurgency. Santa Monica: RAND System Inform the Search for Metrics Corporation, 2012. Print. in Afghanistan?” Small Wars Journal, September (2010). smallwarsjournal.com/ CORDS. “Phung Hoang Management blog/journal/docs-temp/531-gayvert.pdf. Information System”. CORDS Research and Accessed 26 Sep. 2016. Web. Analysis Directorate. 1972. https://catalog. archives.gov/OpaAPI/media/17364134/ Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Multitude: content/electronic-records/rg-472/ War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. PHMIS/222.1AD.pdf. Accessed 3 Jan 2016. New York: Penguin Books, 2004. Print. Web. Hilsman, Roger. “A Strategic Concept for de Sola Pool, Ithiel, Gordon Fowler, and South Vietnam.” 1962. https://history.state. Peter McGrath. “Hamlet Evaluation System gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v02/ Study.” Cambridge, Mass.: Simulmatics d42. Accessed 3 Dec 2016. Web. Corporation, 1968. http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/ tr/fulltext/u2/839821.pdf. Accessed 19 Sep “Theory of Operation of Display System 2016. Web. for AN/FSQ-7 Combat Direction Central and AN/FSQ-8 Combat Control Central. Eisenhower, Dwight D. “1958 State of the Volume II.” IBM, 1958. https://ia801609. Union”. 1958. https://www.eisenhower. us.archive.org/31/items/bitsavers_ibmsa- archives.gov/all_about_ike/speeches/1958_ ge362ug58_29178955/3-62-0_Display_ state_of_the_union.pdf. Accessed 15 Dec System_Vol2_Aug58.pdf. Accessed 2 Jan 2016. Web. 2017. Web.

Edwards, Paul N. The Closed World: Kalvyas, Stathis N and Matthew Adam Computers and The Politics of Discourse in Kocher. “The Dynamics of Violence Cold War America. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT in Vietnam: An Analysis of the Hamlet Press, 1996. Print. Evaluation System”, in Journal of Peace Research, vol. 46, no. 3, 2009, pp. Fisher Harrison, Donald. “Computers, 335–355, Sage Publications. DOI: 10.1177. Electronic Data, and the Vietnam War.” Web. Archivaria 26, Summer (1988). http:// archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/ Komer, Robert. “HES System – Text of viewFile/11490/12434. pp18-32. Accessed Ambassador Komer’s News Conference 25 Aug 2016. Web. on the Hamlet Evaluation System.” 1967. The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Gallison, Peter. “The Ontology of the Tech University, DOI: 2234306047. www. Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items. Vision”. Critical Inquiry 21 (1). Autumn php?item=2234306047. Accessed 22 Sep (1994): 228-266. http://www.jstor.org/sta- 2016. Web. ble/1343893. Accessed 27 Nov 2016. Web.

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Komer, Robert. “Impact of Pacification Prince, W.G and John H Adkins. “Analysis of on insurgency in South Vietnam.” Rand Vietnamization: Summary and Evaluation.” Corporation, 1970. http://www.rand.org/ Ann Arbor, MI: Bendix Aerospace Systems content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2008/P4443. Division, 1973, http://www.dtic.mil/get-tr- pdf. Web. doc/pdf?AD=AD0908686. Accessed 22 Sep 2016. Web. Light, S. Jennifer. From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems Scoville, Thomas. “Reorganizing for in Cold War America. Baltimore: John Pacification Support.” United States: Center Hopkins University Press, 2003. Print. of Military History, 1999. https://archive.org/ details/CMHPub90-27. Accessed 21 Sep Jacobsen, Annie. The Pentagon’s Brain: An 2016. Web. Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top Secret Military Agency. London: Little, Sorley, Lewis (ed.) “Vietnam Chronicles: Brown and Company, 2015. Print. The Abrams Tapes, 1968-1972”, Texas: Texas Tech University Press, 2004. Print. Jones, R.R. “Newsletter, U.S. MACV – The Hamlet Evaluation System (HES) for Sweetland, Anders. “Item Analysis of the December 1971.” 1972. The Vietnam HES (Hamlet Evaluation System).” Santa Center and Archive, Texas Tech University. Monica: RAND Corporation, 1968, http:// DOI: 2160103005. www.vietnam.ttu.edu/ www.rand.org/pubs/documents/D17634. virtualarchive/items.php?item=2160103005. html. Accessed 15 Sep 2016. Web. Accessed 19 Sep 2016. Web. Thayer, Thomas C. War Without Fronts: The MACV. “Hamlet Map, MACV Monthly American Experience in Vietnam. Maryland: Pacification Status.” Vietnam Archive Naval Institute Press, 2016. Print. Collection, The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University. DOI: Tunney, John V. “Measuring Hamlet F015700081140. www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtu- Security in Vietnam.” Report, Committee on alarchive/items.php?item=F015700081140. Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, Accessed 20 Sep 2016. Web. 1969. The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas Tech University. DOI: 2184903024. MACCORDS. “Hamlet Evaluation System Accessed 16 Sep 2016. Web. (HES) Gazetteer [Documentation File].” National Archives, South Vietnamese US National Archives. “Data related to National Police Force Counterinsurgency Intelligence Gathering and Pacification Files, 1971 – 1973. DOI: 4628241. Efforts.” Aug 15 2016. https://www.archives. Accessed 20 Sep 2016. Web. gov/research/military/vietnam-war/electronic-data-files.html#intelligence. Accessed Nighswonger, William A. “Report – Rural Dec 6 2016. Web. Pacification in Vietnam: 1962 through 1965.” DOI: 19600203001. Gary Larsen Collection, Weiner, Tim. Legacy of Ashes: The History The Vietnam Center and Archive, Texas of the CIA. London: Penguin, 2007. Print. Tech University. www.vietnam.ttu.edu/virtualarchive/items.php?item=19600203001. Accessed 2 Jan 2017. Web. 63 APRJA Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017

64 MACHINE ETHICS AND AESTHETICS Maja Bak Herrie

ELUSIVE BORDERS: VIRTUAL GRAVITY AND THE SPACE- TIME OF METADATA

APRJA Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017 ISSN 2245-7755

CC license: ‘Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike’. Maja Bak Herrie: ELUSIVE BORDERS

The digital has become an important part of everyday life in terms of virtual and physical Introduction: Physical and objects filtering and forming our experience digital borders of the world, often without our awareness. Countering this imperceptible or even ‘imma- Whether portrayed as boundaries or frontiers, terial’ relation to the technologies that shape borders are often conceptualised with refer- and facilitate our lifeworld, a number of con- ence to political geography (Basaran). From temporary artists are working with what can a legal perspective, borders are constantly be understood as the more ‘physical’ parts transformed, negotiated, and contested as of the infrastructures of data transmission, they are determined by enforcement rather storage, and reception. However, analytical than geographic stability. However, the potential emerges when these two poles border, as a geographic boundary between are juxtaposed with particular sensibility to two entities, may be defined in a more the continuity between them. Indeed, this formal or mathematical way. For example, continuity creates opportunities for studies the Euclidean definition describes space in of the physicality of the virtual – the ‘stuff’ of terms of proximity or metric closeness, or, signs, norms, beliefs and representations, more simply, as the distance between two and the imaginary and ephemeral aspects points defined by a straight line drawn from of seemingly ‘solid’ objects as borders and the first point and subsequently ending with boundaries. the other (Weisstein). In this article I discuss the themes of The differences between legal and movement and restriction inherent in digital mathematical approaches to borders seem technologies in two very different artistic pro- to define a very distinct quality of this jects, both of which offer aesthetic material phenomenon: It occurs between actual for debating the politics of data. I approach localities with or without a physical barrier, this discussion through the term gravity as and between legally determined spaces with used by philosopher Levi R. Bryant (The or without an executively enforced virtual Gravity of Things; Onto-Cartography). barrier. Questions concerning borders seem Through an analogy to Albert Einstein’s to represent this conundrum: One may be theory of relativity, Bryant suggests the term at Europe’s doorstep, physically only a few gravity to denote how both semiotic and metres from the soil of a European country, material entities influence the becoming and yet the legal border forms an even more fun- movement of subjects and collectives in time damental spatiality related to possibility. In and space (Bryant, The Gravity of Things Euclidean space, two locations may be close 10). I use this as a point of departure to to one another, but because of the presence investigate the shared space between physi- of fences and the way borders are laid out, cal and virtual borders, and the streams of it may be difficult to reach a particular loca- data that are formed by, and also form, the tion. The ongoing Syrian refugee crisis is an space they traverse. The term gravity is used example of this. Europe’s borders exercise to elucidate the contours of the digital space a certain gravitational effect on movement that determines the paths between sender affecting social relations. Borders include and receiver, as well as draws and erases not only actual physical hindrances, such as borders, restricts and enables movement. a dangerous sea or an impenetrable fence, but also virtual interruptions, such as images of crowded ships, documentation of deaths

67 APRJA Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017 at borders, deployment of border guards in In this article I consider the politics of so called “hot spots” of border regions, and data as it is embodied in two different works military imagery and language (De Genova, of art. Both artistic projects address the am- Mezzadra and Pickles 13). These ‘virtual’ ap- biguity between relations and matter, data pearances of the border all serve to present flows and bodies, and transactions and the what Nicholas De Genova has identified as places of things (Meade). A recurring ques- the “spectacle of the border”, deepening and tion in this article is how artistic strategies of extending the physical architecture of the exploring hidden or unnoticed infrastructures border (1181). Although in Euclidean space may help address the questions concerning the Syrian refugees may be physically close the ephemeral and complicated status of to the Greek border, spatial and temporal some of the objects that facilitate and deter- closeness are understood differently in lived mine everyday life. space and time, because of the administration and control that impose both a physical and a virtual architecture of exclusiveness. A space-time of information Thus, the European border functions as a flow: Subterranean cables spatio-temporal gravitational field, warping the possibility of movement in various ways, The first project I bring into this discussion impacting the ability to move to and live in is artist Nina Canell’s subterranean cable certain spaces, or, as Bryant describes it: project. Among the works included in this project are two from 2015: The Mid-Sentence Space and time are not the same series, exhibited at Moderna Museet, and everywhere, and movement is not the Shedding Sheaths series, included in the materially possible in all directions […]. Satin Ions exhibition in Seoul, amongst oth- The way in which roads are laid out in ers. Canell’s work is based on subterranean a city play a role in what is related to cables of various sorts: fibre-optic cables what, how one entity has to move in used for long distance telecommunication order to reach another place, as well or for providing high-speed data connec- as the time it takes to get from one tions between various locations, electrical place to another. (Bryant, The Gravity and communication cables, and a variety of of Things 28) sheathings designed for diverse contexts. The artworks allow the viewer to perceive In much the same way as the layout of normally imperceptible infrastructures as roads and borders in cities matters for the they are exposed by aesthetic means. To fol- movement of individuals, so does the layout low the material qualities of the work requires of cables and the locations of sources and more than a discussion of ‘the digital’, or as receivers for data transmission. And much media archaeologist Jussi Parikka suggests, as the virtual needs the physicality of cables we have to “pick it apart and remember that and routers, so do seemingly solid objects also mineral durations are essential to it be- such as borders and boundaries, as they are ing such a crucial feature that penetrates our deepened and extended by the immaterial academic, social, and economic interests” ‘stuff’ of signs, norms, beliefs and represen- (Parikka 5). Parikka calls attention to the tations. Movement and restriction are formed components and materials that facilitate the by, and form, the spaces in which they unfold. functionality of technologies and media, and instead of exclusively theorising about the

68 Maja Bak Herrie: ELUSIVE BORDERS social or economic phenomena of networks, to physical motion and fields produced by he advises that we also remember the impor- signs, technologies, infrastructures, and so tance of copper or optical fibre for such forms on (Bryant, Onto-Cartography 194). In this of communication (5). In this case, ’matter’ context, the term sheds light on exclusions is rather complicated. As Bruno Latour and inclusions of data flows and electricity, remarks, assemblages are “simultaneously as it is ascribed to the space-time of the real, like nature, narrated, like discourse, and information flow along fibre-optic cables. collective, like society” (Latour 6). To draw Here, material entities – exemplified by Nina attention to the optical fibres of the networks Canell’s cables – play a pivotal role in the constituting and facilitating everyday com- movement of subjects and collectives across munication, the ‘stuff’ of signs, norms, beliefs time and space. and representations, or the complicated ways Following the idea of the subterranean in which things are interrelated in societal cables series, Canell has transformed her assemblages should not be ignored. Bryant (and her artistic partner Robin Watkins’) approaches this discussion by proposing the website into a tracerouter, tracking the use of the term gravity to investigate how information about, and length of the cables different kinds of power unfold. Moreover, used for transmitting data from her atelier the advantage of the term gravity is that it ac- in Berlin to the visitor’s local server (Canell centuates the ways in which non-human ma- and Watkins). When loading the website, chines such as technologies, infrastructures, one becomes aware of these paths, as the and geographical features also contribute functionality of the servers involved in the to the forms taken by social assemblages data transmission becomes apparent. The (Bryant, Onto-Cartography 10). content of the website is visible only be- The important intuition in the Einsteinian cause of thousands of kilometres of subter- approach to the discussion of gravity in phys- ranean cables constituting a network of data. ics is – in consonance with Bryant’s views Whereas the operating cables constitute – the understanding of gravity as something the space-time of the information flow – the other than force (Bryant, Onto-Cartography space for every possible movement of the 186). Building on the Newtonian understand- signal – the routers, however, create the ing of gravity, Einstein diverged from Newton gravitational function that curves space-time on this particular point. According to Einstein, and forces the messages along particular gravity is an effect of how the mass of ob- paths. Without this complicated network of jects curves space-time, rather than being copper and plastic sheathing there would a force that attracts or repels other objects. be no flow of information. The shape and The movements of the moon do not originate the curvature of the network space-time are in a dynamic of force initiated by the rela- determined by the things in it, or, as Bryant tionship between the moon and the earth, states: “Space-time does not pre-exist but occur because of the mass of the Earth things, but rather arises from things” (Bryant, curves space-time, creating a path the moon The Gravity of Things 12). The cables do not follows. From this perspective, gravity is a move, but the path along which the message field or a topology that other objects’ move- travels is dynamic. The things populating ments follow (Bryant, Onto-Cartography virtual space-time, in this case the routers 186). Whereas Einstein’s account of gravity that constitute the network, create a curva- pertains only to mass, the use of the term ture that shifts the direct path of the system here in a broader philosophical inquiry refers based on an optimising logic of throughput

69 APRJA Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017 and speed. Canell’s tracerouter shows the is stated in the catalogue for one of Canell’s direct path through the current formation of exhibitions (Ayas, Hoare and Kleinman 60), the network. and the names of the sculptures seem to refer to the paradoxical ‘life’ of the cable sections, going from being conducting hosts of Silenced Mid-Sentence information that erase geographical distance with connective, distributive and compres- To make the subterranean cables perceiv- sive operations, to becoming shedded able sculptures lying on the gallery floor, sheathings removed from the sequence of Canell unearths the electrical and commu- interconnection, silenced mid-sentence as nication cables from their hidden locations. dead sound in the air. To make them visible and tangible, she has to dislocate and interrupt their functionality. One could argue that in order to present her Metadata and the critique, she has to destroy the objects, fixing them to white gallery spaces. Whereas the ‘aboutness’ of signs tracerouter on the website shows the func- The second artistic project included here tionality of the cables as the signal passes is Trevor Paglen and Jacob Appelbaum’s through, the cable bodies on the gallery floor installation, Autonomy Cube (2014), shown have been interrupted, almost violently cut in many art museums, galleries and civic away from their functionality as a medium spaces. The sculpture is made of several con- of communication. Neringa Černiauskaitė’s nected computers housed within the piece to review of the cable sections in Canell’s exhi- create an anonymous Wi-Fi hotspot. It routes bition at Moderna Museet notes: all Wi-Fi traffic over the Tor network, a global network of thousands of volunteer-run serv- They appear as open mouths with ers, relays and services designed to help half-pronounced words hanging like anonymise data. The sculpture itself is also a dead sound in the air […] Almost Tor relay, and may be used by others around surgical incisions in the cables reveal the world to anonymise their internet use. their internal “organs” for the viewer’s When Autonomy Cube is installed, sculpture, inspection: Dead slices of the flow of host institution and users become part of the information. (Černiauskaitė) infrastructure (Paglen). The Tor network (which is an acronym The way in which Canell makes infra- for The Onion Router) has sparked consid- structures accessible is in some way similar erable debate, as its encryption potentially to the way in which an entomologist collects interferes with law enforcement. Tor uses the insects to inspect them without having them so-called onion routing technology, which “flapping around” (Černiauskaitė). The encrypts metadata surrounding the actual functionality of the infrastructures was never content of the information sent. The data is visible, the electrical transmission of the encrypted several times and is sent through message never apparent. When the signal of a random selection of Tor relays. Each relay the cable function is lost, it is like examining decrypts a layer of encryption to reveal only a screen that is turned off. The cables be- the next relay in the circuit in order to pass come symbolic relics of the invisible distance the remaining encrypted data on to it, hence that is only ever traversed immaterially, as it the name, ‘onion routing’. The final relay

70 Maja Bak Herrie: ELUSIVE BORDERS decrypts the innermost layer of encryption compared to others, our moves determine and sends the original data to its destina- past and future narratives” (Chun 363). Ad tion without revealing, or even knowing, the blockers and alternative networks such as source IP address (torproject.org). Metadata AdNauseam and Tor seek to obfuscate and is a key concept here. Metadata constitutes obstruct such strategies of bodily capturing the context or milieu of the content, revealing in different ways. the ‘surroundings’ of the data (e.g. time and Returning to Bryant, metadata may date of creation, information about the author be understood as a crucial part of the data and location of the computer network where stream representing the geographical distri- the data was created). This ‘data about data’ bution of data. Like a virus or a microbe in is crucial when the original data is put to use, a particular environment, the message has as it emphasises the material aspects of the an epidemiological distribution in the world. generated of data. It is metadata that gets Because every text requires a material the attention of the activists behind Tor, the manifestation in order to travel throughout context of the content is what seems to be the world, each is located at a particular time important: who is sending what, from where, and place (Bryant, The Gravity of Things 20). and who receives it? This is precisely the point of the encryption The Tor network removes the origins used by the Tor network. Whereas a normal of the signal that reveals the metadata as a router would use the shortest path from A to meaningful identifier, and thereby foils any B, using the metadata to decide the most attempt to compile a history of actions of the efficient path, the Tor router uses a random sender. By spreading out the locations of the path, leaving no trace and no metadata, as it signals in physical space, convergence to a is continually peeled off. To address the prob- single ‘solid’ assemblage as a useful repre- lems of surveillance, the people behind Tor sentation of a human individual is no longer use virtual space to overcome the problem possible. Indeed, the signals are no longer of proximity, but simultaneously adopt the related to that same individual. Another ex- advantages of physical space by avoiding ample of data obfuscation through diffusion any traces. Virtual space is used to construct is the ad blocker AdNauseam that, instead of a random path that is impossible to trace keeping meaningful parts of the signal secret, backwards or to infer, whereas the physi- as the Tor network does, sends all possible cal space is used to deposit the necessary signals at once by clicking every ad that it information needed to guide the information hides once, as the slogan, “Clicking Ads So flow to its destination. In this way, Tor’s use You Don’t Have To”, indicates (Howe). By of metadata may be seen as a mediator flooding the surveillance the actual move- between two kinds of spatiality: It determines ment of the body becomes impossible to dis- the direction of the message in physical tinguish from all the fake signals. It becomes space as a kind of envelope for the mailing as impossible to find a pattern in the space of system, but it does so based on a principle of all possible signals as it is to find one in the randomness, sustaining a borderless space. space of no signal. As metadata constitutes Instead of ‘snowballing’ content by adding an increasingly powerful resource for per- more and more metadata, Tor discards the vasive digital surveillance, “our mainly non- used ‘envelopes’. conscious or habitual [actions] count more When comparing the two artistic pro- than our words”, as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun jects addressed above, a discussion of the puts it. We are “constantly captured and borders of the digital emerges, as they both

71 APRJA Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017 present different aspects of movement and data package inhabits these different spaces restriction, inclusion and exclusion in digital and the metadata becomes its surface, both spaces: Whereas Canell’s subterranean encountering and becoming marked by the cable project exposes the infrastructures of physicality of the network. data transmission, providing transparency and accuracy, Paglen and Appelbaum’s Wi- Fi hotspot exploits the opportunity of secrecy, The cartography using the limited infrastructures of physical of mobility space to create an autonomous and borderless space. Although Canell’s artwork serves We now return to the relation between the as an example of a peculiar interruption, of legal and mathematical definitions of borders unearthed cables that are no longer func- sketched in the introduction: the mathemati- tional or operational, Autonomy Cube is an cal definition based on proximity, on metric artwork in flux – it shows the functionality of closeness between two objects, and the legal the infrastructure as a running printing press definition that relies on the idea of enforce- connecting, transmitting, and receiving. And ment as a constitutive power of the border whereas Canell’s artwork explores questions phenomenon. When dealing with machines, of proximity, of distance between two serv- both approaches are needed. The concept of ers, Paglen and Appelbaum’s work concerns metadata may be understood through these autonomy and tracelessness two kinds of spatiality: on the one hand, the Both Canell’s, and Paglen and physical path travelled by the message, Appelbaum’s artworks present interesting exemplified by the nodes visited along the perspectives on digital spaces. However, an way (where either the message is sent along analytical potential emerges when the two the optimised path or a layer of metadata is types of digital spatiality are comparatively deposited in the Tor protocol), and on the juxtaposed with a particular sensibility re- other, the way the path is chosen in the lated to the continuity between these poles. first place (by either selecting an optimised Indeed, this continuity constitutes a space for shortest path, or selecting an untraceable an emerging ‘digital object’ – a term philoso- randomised path). Metadata is operational pher and computer engineer Yuk Hui also in nature, and its objective is the transmis- proposes in his 2016 book, On the Existence sion of information, and therefore it both of Digital Objects – in the form of the meta- forms and is formed by the space in which data, potentially being both a representation it exists. Metadata is both the interpretation of a physical location and an obfuscation and the realisation of the message-sending of this location. Contextualised in this way, operation. the metadata becomes the surface or the Space as we perceive it is not op- shell around the message, both interacting erational input for a machine. A machine with and being formed by the network as it can only process metadata, and therefore is transmitted. In one case, the metadata suggest the location of a server. With high becomes an onion-like envelope in the Tor probability, the computer determines an ex- network, shedding its layers on the way to its act location that in a ‘normal’ network should destination, and in the case of the tracerouter, be correct. However, if you browse Canell’s the metadata is assembled, noting every in- website through a Tor relay the server moni- dividual location it has visited, incorporating tor will suggest locations and cables from all the entire path from sender to receiver. The over the world. The metadata indicates the

72 Maja Bak Herrie: ELUSIVE BORDERS locality, somewhere in the global network mode of operation for these cables, as they of thousands of servers and relays. In line transmit packages of information. Autonomy with Bryant’s assertion that space does not Cube may be said to distort the process that pre-exist things, but rather arises from them, enables Canell’s website to lay out the entire the metadata becomes the digital object that scope of the physical infrastructure used for both forms and is formed by digital space. sending a package from one destination in In this manner metadata becomes both the the network to another. Instead of tracing the physical space with fences, walls and bar- path of the message in the metadata that sur- riers, and the borderless space where law rounds it, Tor creates a layered construction enforcement is inoperative. Canell’s trace- of encrypted metadata to begin with, which router captures a glimpse of the underlying is peeled off layer by layer as the message infrastructure, a snapshot of the path of traverses the network. In this way the artwork least resistance along which a message has operates as a mediator between physical travelled. Although this picture is accurate and digital space, exploiting precisely this for a network based on a throughput optimis- intersection. ing logic, when taken from the Tor network The digital border resembles the physi- it becomes distorted. This distortion stems cal border, such as those between nations, from the introduction of a different logic into yet is a much more extreme version of it. the construction of the network – a logic of Whereas the physical border leaves room privacy preservation: although the physical for the actual border in the form a bordered layout of the cables remains the same, the no man’s land, the digital border seems to cartography of the digital space changes. By be completely binary. There is no label for changing the routing strategy and protocol, a the border location itself; one cannot be on new network is created, and the nature of the the border, only on either side. Although direct path changes as a result of the chang- there is a nuanced vocabulary that encom- ing gravity. In effect, this redraws the borders passes both physical and virtual borders and of the map. boundaries in real space, exemplified by De The infrastructures of virtual space are Genova’s border spectacle, where the ‘stuff’ just as restrictive, formative and determina- of signs, norms, beliefs and representations tive as the borders and walls of physical hinders and restricts movement, such a vo- space, because they are deeply integrated cabulary seems to be missing in the case of into the infrastructures of everyday life. The digital space. Here, only virtual borders exist, two artistic projects I have presented expose and the binary nature of the digital border the infrastructures of data transmission, stor- obstructs any attempt to identify a possible age and reception, and a central question is continuity between the discrete entities in how these strategies of exploration of hid- the network. In order to explore the physical- den infrastructures may help us to address ity of digital space, I propose the analytical matters concerning the digital objects that concept of the digital object that emerges facilitate and determine social and political from the continuity between physical and agency. They both explore the physical and digital spaces. The digital object, exempli- virtual infrastructures that constitute the fied here by metadata in the transmission network, albeit in two different ways: Canell’s of a message, both forms and is formed by cables offer a surgical dissection of the the digital space it traverses. With Bryant’s body of the network, whereas Paglen and expanded concept of gravity, the contours of Appelbaum’s sculpture shows an alternative digital space may be explored, contours that

73 APRJA Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017 determine the paths between sender and De Genova, Nicholas. “Spectacles of receiver as they draw and erase borders, migrant ‘illegality’: the scene of exclusion, restrict and enable movement. the obscene of inclusion.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 36, no. 7 (2013): 1180-1198. Web. Works cited De Genova, Nicholas, Mezzadra, Sandro Ayas, Defne, Hoare, Natasha, Kleinman, and Pickles, John (ed.). “New Keywords: Adam (ed.). Art In The Age Of… Rotterdam: Migration and Borders.” Cultural Studies, Witte de With Publishers, 2015. Print. Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2014. 1-33. Print. Basaran, Tugba. “Security, Law, Borders: Spaces of Exclusion.” International Political Howe, Daniel C. “Surveillance Sociology, vol. 2 no. 4 (2008): 339-354. Countermeasures: Expressive Privacy via Web. Obfuscation.” A Peer-Reviewed Journal About, vol. 4, no. 1 (2015). Web. Bryant, Levi R. “The Gravity of Things. An Introduction to Onto-Cartography.” Howe, Daniel C., Helen Nissenbaum, and Ontological Anarché: Beyond Materialism Mushon Zer-Aviv. AdNauseam. 2014. and Idealism, special issue of The Anarchist dhowe.github.io/AdNauseam/. Software/ Developments in Cultural Studies Journal browser extension. (2013): 10-30. Web. Hui, Yuk. On the Existence of Digital Bryant, Levi R. Onto-Cartography. Objects. Electronic Mediations Series vol. An Ontology of Machines and Media. 48, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, Press, 2016. Print. 2014. Print. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Canell, Nina and Watkins, Robin. “Nina Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Canell / Robin Watkins.” www.canellwatkins. Cambridge, MA: Harward University Press, org, n.d. Accessed 21 November 2016. 1993. Print. Web. Meade, Fionn. “Every Distance is Not Near.” Černiauskaitė, Neringa. “Nina Canell, Solo, no. 3, AMC Collezione Coppola, 2012. Moderna Museet.” Artforum, March Web. 2015. www.artforum.com/inprint/ issue=201503&id=50321. Accessed 21 Paglen, Trevor. Autonomy Cube. (n.d.) November 2016. Web. paglen.com/?l=work&s=cube. Accessed 21 November 2016. Web. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. “Big Data as Drama.” ELH, vol. 83, no. 2. John Hopkins Paglen, Trevor and Appelbaum, Jacob. University Press (2016): 363-382. Web. “Trevor Paglen and Jacob Appelbaum.” Bomb Magazine, 2015. bombmagazine.org/ article/7700229/trevor-paglen-and-jacob- appelbaum. Accessed 21 November 2016. Web. 74 Maja Bak Herrie: ELUSIVE BORDERS

Parikka, Jussi. A Geology of Media. Electronic Mediations Series vol. 46. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Print.

“Tor: Overview.” www.torproject.org (n.d.). Accessed 21 November 2016. Web.

Weisstein, Eric W. “Euclidean Metric.” MathWorld – A Wolfram Web Resource (n.d.). Accessed 21 November 2016. Web.

75 Maya Indira Ganesh

ENTANGLEMENT: MACHINE LEARNING AND HUMAN ETHICS IN DRIVER-LESS CAR CRASHES

APRJA Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017 ISSN 2245-7755

CC license: ‘Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike’. Maya Indira Ganesh: ENTANGLEMENT

Algorithmic regulation of everyday life, in- however limitations to this mechanism in the stitutions and social systems increases with context of algorithmic transparency (Ananny little oversight or transparency, and yet usu- and Crawford). This work does not begin ally with significant social outcomes (Angwin with a definition of accountability, but is part et al.; Pasquale). Therefore, the need for an of a larger body of ongoing work that asks ‘ethics of algorithms’ (Ananny; CIHR) and how accountability may be defined anew ‘accountability’ of algorithms (Diakopolous) in a context where human and non human has been raised. The “constellation of tech- agents are in interaction. nologies” we have come to refer to as ‘artifi- This paper starts by looking at a recent cial intelligence’[1] (Crawford and Whittaker) crash involving a Tesla semi-autonomous enable an anxiety that sits alongside the car, and then examines literature around financial speculation, experimentation and aviation crashes as a body of work that entrepreneurial enthusiasm that feeds the narrates how accountability in complex Silicon Valley gold rush of ‘innovation’. How vehicles human-machine systems has been can machine intelligence optimise its deci- approached. This literature shows that es- sion-making and avoid errors, mistakes and tablishing accountability is difficult because accidents? Where machines are not directly of the dense entanglements between human programmed but learn, then who or what is action and machine agency; that identifying accountable for errors and accidents, and the actors and events involved in a crash how can this accountability be determined? include complex chains of human and non- This paper is based on driver-less car[2] human agents. However, in the development technology as currently being developed by of the driverless car, machine learning is Google[3] and Tesla, two companies that am- being used to practically pre-empt crashes. plify their work in the media. More specifically, I show that ethics becomes a framework to I focus on the moment of real and imagined guide the development of machine learning, crashes involving driver-less cars, and argue and thus in doing so sets up linear paths of that the narrative of ‘ethics of driver-less accountability: if the machine can minimise cars’ indicates a shift in the construction of human error by learning how to respond ethics, as an outcome of machine learning to a vast number of crash scenarios, then rather than a framework of values. Through accountability becomes something much applications of the ‘Trolley Problem’, among easier to un-entangle. However, this is the other tests, ethics has been transformed into ambition for a fully autonomous consumer a valuation based on processing of big data. vehicle, which does not yet exist, and is un- Thus ethics-as-software enables what I refer likely to for at least the next ten years. Based to as big data-driven accountability. In this on their documentation of driverless car formulation, ‘accountability’ is distinguished testing and crashes, Brandon Schoettle and from ‘responsibility’; responsibility implies Michael Sivak conclude that the most risky intentionality and can only be assigned to period is that of transition from conventional humans, whereas accountability includes a driving to driverless cars. Moreover, industry wide net of actors and interactions (in Simon). predictions suggest that the insurance in- ‘Transparency’ is one of the more established, dustry could be transformed by autonomous widely acknowledged mechanisms for ac- driving, moving to a model of offering cover- countability; based on the belief that seeing age of technical errors rather than personal into a system delivers the truth of that system liabilty, much like cruise ships and airlines and thereby a means to govern it. There are (Bertoncello and Wee). Thus I conclude

77 APRJA Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017 that there is a pressing need to confront if hands-on is not detected. It then machine learning as it is being applied to the gradually slows down the car until new framing of ethics-as-accountability; and hands-on is detected again. (Tesla) consequently develop new considerations of accountability in terms of, and building on, Tesla goes into detail to clarify that the the reality of entanglements between human human is assumed to be in control even and machine agents. though ‘auto-pilot’, familiar to anyone who has been up in an airplane, implies that the machine is in control. This confusion over the Of Tesla and other crashes meaning of auto-pilot becomes a critical moment to begin to think about the relationship In May 2016, an ex-US Navy veteran was between the human operator and a complex test-driving a Model S Tesla semi-auton- machine and how challenging it becomes omous vehicle. The test driver, who was to identify responsibility for errors. The lit- watching a Harry Potter movie at the time erature from aviation crash histories offers with the car in ‘auto-pilot’ mode, drove into some valuable insights in this direction, and a large trailer truck whose white surface was suggests that responsibility for a crash has mistaken by the computer vision software never been easy to ascertain. for the sky. Thus it did not stop, and went The history of aviation crashes shows straight into the truck. The fault, it seemed, that human error tends to be cited as the was the driver’s for trusting the auto-pilot most common reason for accidents; moreo- mode, as the company’s condolence state- ver, there is a tendency to “praise the ma- ment suggests: chine and punish the human” for accidents and crashes (Elish and Hwang). Looking It is important to note that Tesla specifically at the history of the role of autopi- disables Autopilot by default and lot, scholars find that even though there has requires explicit acknowledgement been increasing automation in the cockpit, that the system is new technology and the responsibility for accidents remains with still in a public beta phase before it human pilots (10). can be enabled. When drivers activate Peter Galison finds that identifying Autopilot, the acknowledgement box the cause of an aviation accident can be a explains, among other things, that Byzantine exercise. Examining narratives Autopilot “is an assist feature that of aviation crashes, he finds that there is a requires you to keep your hands on deep entanglement in accounts of accidents the steering wheel at all times,” and between human actions and the perceived that “you need to maintain control and agency of technologies, a “recurrent strain responsibility for your vehicle” while to between a drive to ascribe final causation using it. Additionally, every time that to human factors and an equally powerful, Autopilot is engaged, the car reminds countervailing drive to assign agency to tech- the driver to “Always keep your hands nological factors” (4). Galison finds that in ac- on the wheel. Be prepared to take over cidents, human action and material agency at any time.” The system also makes are entwined to the point that causal chains frequent checks to ensure that the both seem to terminate at particular, critical driver’s hands remain on the wheel actions as well as radiate out towards human and provides visual and audible alerts interactions and organisational cultures (4).

78 Maya Indira Ganesh: ENTANGLEMENT

Yet, what is embedded in unstable accident software that wrongly categorised the side of reporting is the desire for a “single point of a long truck trailer for the sky, or the manu- culpability” (Brown 378), which never seems facturer, Tesla, that did not pre-empt these to come. possibilities? If all of these actors, and others Galison finds in these multi-causal not identified here, are somehow part of the accounts that there has been a gradual story of how and why the crash happened, move away from individual action towards then how are they all to be held accountable examining “mesoscopic world[s] in which and to what extent? patterns of behavior and small-group What is at stake in how accountability sociology could play a role” (37). A good is assigned for crashes involving driver-less example of the role of small-group sociol- cars? In order to answer this question, this ogy comes from Diane Vaughan’s landmark paper began by showing that assigning ethnography of the Challenger Space accountability in aviation crashes reveals a Shuttle crash. She finds that the crash was complex entanglement between the human caused by the ‘normalisation of deviance’, operator and machine agent; and that, de- a slow and gradual loosening of standards spite increasing automation, humans are still for the evaluation and acceptance of risk held responsible for crashes. Next, taking in an engineering context. This loosening this forward into the driverless car context, happens because of organisational-cultural I make a detour into machine learning in issues, and not because of blatant corrup- driver-less car technology; from there I will tion or malafide intent. Challenger exploded discuss how machine learning is related to 73 seconds into its ascent because the ‘O the application of the Trolley Problem and rings’ on the rocket’s boosters broke on that the Pascalian Wager, which are both used to unusually cold January morning; and yet, construct an ‘ethics’ of autonomous driving. it was known for over a year that the rings This will then allow me to show how software would fail in cold weather. Vaughan found and big data are implicated in the consequent that how engineers, scientists, bureaucrats, framing of ethics. and managers communicated and managed risky or faulty engineering was determined by the bureaucratic language or processes Computer vision and of NASA. It got hidden, reframed, minimised, machine learning for second-guessed, and eventually buried. In unearthing it, Vaughan found a complicated accuracy in driver-less cars chain of accountable actors. Madeleine Elish and Tim Hwang ac- The precision and accuracy of driver-less knowledge multiple sites of potential respon- cars comes from software that ‘learns’ sibility for crashes and ask, “how do we locate appropriate driving behaviour – merging, the network of human actors responsible for driving around construction zones, etc. – the actions of computational agents?” (22). through exposure to large datasets that its Is it the car manufacturer that is responsi- algorithms are trained on. The combination ble, or the software development team that of computer vision and machine learning is programmed the car’s software? In the Tesla used so the car can detect objects, identify case, who is responsible? Is it the driver who and categorise them, and rely on data it has lost his life because he misinterpreted what been ‘exposed’ to in order to make a decision auto-pilot mode means, the computer vision about how to respond to objects and avoid

79 APRJA Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017 accidents. or less successful in achieving a winning One of the most significant features outcome and then it is able to enact those of machine learning algorithms is that they moves when playing a game (Hassabis, determine patterns. Algorithms such as Alpha Go). convolutional neural nets, that are used in Driver-less cars have to learn how to driver-less car software use their pattern- identify objects so they know how to respond recognition ability to build internal models for to them in a similar way. Cars are fitted with identifying features of a dataset. Eventually, radar, LIDAR (‘light detection and ranging’) they can learn how those features are related and other sensors with which to perceive the without being explicitly programmed to do so environment around them. Computer vision (NVIDIA; Bojarski et al.). Another distinctive software identifies an object and breaks up feature of machine learning more generally that image into small parts: edges, lines, is that it is not always possible to open up corners, colour gradients and so on. By look- the system and identify exactly how or why ing at billions of images, the neural nets in a decision was made to categorise and cars can identify patterns in how combina- analyse something – machine learning is an tions of parts come together to constitute inscrutable technology (Knight). different objects. The expectation is that Rather than have to be ‘brute-force’ such software can identify a ball, a cat, or programmed, or ‘hard-coded’, to respond to a child, and make a decision about how to every single possible situation it might en- react based on the data received. Yet, this is counter – a near impossible and exhausting a technology still in development and there is software engineering exercise – driver-less the possibility for much confusion. So, things car software uses machine learning to estab- that are yellow, or things that have faces and lish how to respond to unfamiliar situations two ears on top of the head for instance, can through repeated practice (Google, Self be misread until the software sees enough Driving Car Project). An illustrative paral- examples that distinguish how things that lel to the difference between hard-coded are yellow, or things with two ears on the top programming and machine learning exists in of the head, are different from one another. the history of computers programs that play In the case of the Tesla crash, the software ‘perfect information games’, games where all misread the large expanse of the side of the information about the status of the game is trailer truck for the sky. It is possible that available to all players. In the 1980s, Deep the machine learning was not well-trained Blue was an IBM computer program that was enough to make the required distinction. brute-force programmed to play Chess; that Depending on what the object is, the is, every possible permutation and combina- driver-less car is expected to respond: stop, tion of moves that could be made on a 8×8 go around it, wait for it, and so on. With in- board with 32 pieces was programmed. The creasing exposure to good quality data, the ancient Chinese game of Go however has a software can distinguish between different far higher number of possible moves; it is a kinds of objects and eventually make more more complex game than Chess. So in the fine-grained decisions. The more complex development of Alpha Go, the Google com- something is visually, without solid edges or puter program that plays Go, the algorithm curves or single colours – or if it is a fast, looks at millions of games of Go, and dis- small, or flexible object on the road – the cerns patterns in it. It can read which moves, more difficult it is to understand. So, driver- and which combinations of moves, are more less car software is shown to have a so-called

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‘bicycle problem’ because bicycles are dif- driver-less car contexts (Lin; Google, Self ficult to identify, are not a structured shape, Driving Car Project). In the world of the and can move at different speeds (Fairley). Trolley Problem, an autonomous vehicle is Being able to identify objects on the road and expected to learn to make the optimal choice assess their relative value in relation to each in the case of the worst scenario imaginable other has become a central aspect of the – an autonomous vehicle being involved in narrative around ethics in driver-less cars, the killing of human beings. which the paper now turns to. The Trolley Problem is a classic thought experiment developed by the Oxford philosopher, Philippa Foot in 1967, originally Programming ethics in to discuss the permissibility of abortion. The machines: Trolley Problems Trolley problem is presented as a series of hypothetical situations with two or more and Wagers negative outcomes, in which consequentialist or deontological approaches must be Ethics is assumed to be a framework for used to find a way to choose the lesser of values governing appropriate actions in two negative outcomes. The Trolley Problem society; and often applied in situations that is described by Judith Jarvis Thompson in are difficult for the law to regulate, or where the following way: laws do not yet exist. ‘Machine ethics’, ‘information ethics’, ‘computer ethics’, and ‘robot Suppose you are the driver of a ethics’ are some overlapping fields that deal trolley. The trolley rounds a bend, and with ethics in contexts relevant to the present there come into view ahead five track discussion, however it is beyond the scope workmen, who have been repairing the of this paper to unpack each of these in more track. The track goes through a bit of a detail. Mike Ananny has identified three valley at that point, and the sides are approaches to ethics in technology across steep, so you must stop the trolley if these domains, and these tend to mirror you are to avoid running the five men consequentialist, Kantian (or, deontological), down. You step on the brakes, but alas and virtue ethics: developing policies and they don’t work. Now you suddenly see regulations by codifying use of technologies, a spur of track leading off to the right. developing standards, best practices and You can turn the trolley onto it, and anticipating future failures; anticipating the thus save the five men on the straight ethical outcomes of technologies and how track ahead. Unfortunately, Mrs. Foot they reconfigure social relationships; and has arranged that there is one track investigating the values of designers and workman on that spur of track. He can developers of these technologies (95). no more get off the track in time than In the context of driver-less cars, the the five can, so you will kill him if you accident is framed as a moment when a de- turn the trolley onto him. Is it morally cision has to be made by software about how permissible for you to turn the trolley?” to avoid it. This decision-making process is (1395) tantamount to ‘ethics’ and has been framed in terms of Kantian ethics and consequentialist Thompson goes on to describe ver- ethics through the Trolley Problem, a popular sions of the Problem substituting track work- shorthand for the discussion about ethics in men and the trolley with other characters

81 APRJA Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017 and circumstances. Each version of The objective view, say the authors, even the Trolley Problem necessitates a process of driver-less car should be factored in to the reasoning by invoking the tension between question of who or what should be saved Kantian ethics, and consequentialist ethics: in the case of an unavoidable crash; in the does how you arrive at the outcome matter Trolley Problem, the driver-less car and its more than the outcome itself? Is it more occupants are not assumed to be at risk in a important to save more lives (a consequen- crash, only pedestrians or other vehicles and tialist approach), or is it more important to drivers are. Instead Bhargava and Kim sug- consider how people die? (the deontological gest an application of the Pascalian Wager, approach), and in which situations is one ap- along with a ranking system developed by proach more valid than the other? Andrew Sepielli. In this, calculations to rank Patrick Lin has developed an applica- different outcomes of crashes are developed tion of the Trolley Problem (as described by to arrive at an ‘objective’ choice. So, the Bhargava and Kim 2017) as has MIT’s Moral cases of the car with failed brakes ramming Machine Project. In the Lin version, the driver- into a child, an animal, or a helmet-wearing less car is in a situation where it has to decide cyclist, or destroying itself to save others, are which of two difficult options to select in order all given numerical rankings. An algebraic to save itself, such as having to either hit a calculation processes these rankings to ar- cyclist wearing a helmet or one that is not; or rive at the most mathematically objective decide what to do if a child runs out across a outcome. The authors note that ethics tests road; or how to rationalise potentially harm- properly applied in this way could help to ing occupants of a car known to have poor establish accident claims under the law, and crash test ratings. The Moral Machine Project allow manufacturers to offer their customers is an online research exercise based on the a “moral navigation system”, much like a Trolley Problem that serves as “a platform for menu of Facebook’s privacy settings from 1) building a crowd-sourced picture of human a drop-down list; and manufacturers could opinion on how machines should make deci- generate crowdsourcing mechanisms to sions when faced with moral dilemmas, and generate datasets of appropriate, and objec- 2) crowd-sourcing assembly and discussion tive, decisions for machine learning (13-14). of potential scenarios of moral consequence” There is a nuanced shift suggested by (Rahwan, Bonnefon and Sharif). In this, the this scenario. If ‘ethics’ has become a series driver-less car has to select which kinds of of computations that can be augmented by humans to avoid hitting – children, pregnant big data, then ethics – and thereby failures women, older people, escaping thieves, ath- of ethics – is seen as a matter of individual letes, or animals like cats and dogs – in the morality rather than that of a group of indi- case of brake failure. viduals, organisations, laws, or other actants. Vikram Bhargava and Tae Wan Kim find Through application of the Trolley Problem, it however that the Trolley Problem does not is almost as if the car is imagined to be a address the fact that Kantian and consequen- sort of neoliberal, individualised, subject. As tialist cannot be resolved because they are ‘self driving’, it is imagined to be an individual not of the same kind of moral value (“value moral agent that can act independently and incommensurability”); that the Problem sets efficiently on the basis of guidelines and up a situation beset by moral uncertainty; feedback (Ganesh). that it does not afford a “view from nowhere”, It is possible that data currently being meaning one that is ‘objective’. In such an harvested about driver behaviour from a

82 Maya Indira Ganesh: ENTANGLEMENT variety of sources – from highway cameras, However they do not discuss what the police records, social media, insurance re- practical implications of this sort of applica- cords, automotive engineering simulations, tion are. For example, that crowdsourced and so on – will be used to develop machine datasets are neither ‘raw’ nor neutral, and learning algorithms that will learn how to import the errors, biases, and the cultural make decisions across different situations. and local contexts encoded in them. One of Something to this effect has already been the ‘promises’ of big data is that of insight in development and testing as Anderson and prediction, a kind of ‘higher’ knowledge and Anderson discuss in their paper on the (boyd and Crawford). Something to that possibility of creating an ethical, intelligent effect is being invoked here in pre-empting machine agent. They cite an approach to crashes. The idea that crash situations can applied ethics called casuistry: “the branch be envisioned is, however, not entirely new of applied ethics that, eschewing principle- to the automotive industry. In the 2000s car based approaches to ethics, attempts to manufacturers began to invest large sums determine correct responses to new ethical in mathematical modelling. Paul Leonardi dilemmas by drawing conclusions based cites Nigel Gale’s work in identifying “road on parallels with previous cases in which to lab to math” as an industry-wide belief there is agreement concerning the correct that mathematics-based simulations are response” (20). This appears to be very more cost-efficient than road and laboratory much along the lines of machine-learning testing: for decision-making discussed here. They cite work by Rzepka and Araki that identifies Math is the next logical step in the such an approach to machine ethics: process over testing on the road and in the lab. Math is much more cost it might be safer to have machines effective because you don’t have to “imitating millions, not a few,” believ- build pre-production vehicles and then ing in such “democracy-dependent waste them. We’ve got to get out in algorithms” because, they contend, front of the technology so it doesn’t “most people behave ethically without leave us behind. We have to live learning ethics.” They propose… [to] and breathe math. When we do that, search the web for opinions, usual we can pass the savings on to the behaviors, common consequences, consumer. (244) and exceptions, by counting ethically relevant neighboring words and phrases, aligning these along a Thinking outside black continuum from positive to negative box ethics behaviors, and subjecting this information to statistical analysis. They sug- In the development of driver-less cars we can gest that this analysis, in turn, would see an ambition for the development of what be helpful in the development of a sort James Moor refers to as an explicit ethical of majority-rule ethics useful in guiding agent – one that is able to calculate the best the behavior of autonomous systems.” action in an ethical dilemma – through big (Anderson and Anderson 20) data technologies. In the development of machine intelligence towards this goal, a series of shifts can be discerned: from accounting

83 APRJA Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017 for crashes after the fact, to pre-empting In reality, technology ethics emerges them; from ethics that is about values, or rea- from a mix of institutionalized codes, soning, to ethics as crowdsourced, or based professional cultures, technological on statistics, and as the outcome of software capabilities, social practices, and engineering. Thus ethics-as-accountability individual decision making. Indeed, moves towards a more opaque, narrow ethical inquiry in any domain is not a project, and away from the kinds of entan- test to be passed or a culture to be glements that scholars such as Galison and interrogated but a complex social and Vaughan identify. cultural achievement (Christians et al. Yet, as the Tesla crash indicates, if 2009). It entails anticipating how the there was both an error in the computer intersecting dynamics of a sociotechni- vision and machine learning software, as cal system—design, interpretation, well as a lapse on the part of the test driver use, deployment, value—‘‘matter’’ for who misunderstood what the term autopilot the future (Marres 2007)—and figuring meant, then how are these two conditions to out how to hold these intersections be understood as part of the dynamic that accountable in light of an ethical resulted in the crash? What is the relation- framework. (96; emphasis in original) ship between them? How might an ethics be imagined for this sort of crash that comes In this conception, ethics is not just a from an unfortunate entanglement of ma- end-point or outcome, but is something that chine error and human error? can be imagined as a series of individual and In a 2016 paper, Mike Ananny and Kate system-level negotiations involving socio- Crawford confront the idea of transparency technical, technical, human and post-human as a mechanism for algorithmic account- relationships and exchanges. The more ability citing ten limitations of the idea of challenging and intriguing questions of how transparency, emphasising that “it is some- these actors and their inter-relationships are times unnecessary and always insufficient to be materialised and made visible are still to simply look inside structures”; but that to be answered, but perhaps we may start to the limitations of the idea of transparency discern the shape of the black box. could serve as a starting point for accountability (12-13). In this vein, I conclude with an agenda for future work. In thinking about a framework for values, and in rethinking accountability, how can the multiple, parallel conditions present in driving be conceptualised? Rather than understanding an ‘ethics of driver-less cars’ to be a set of programmable rules for appropriate action, could it instead be imagined as a process by which an assemblage of people, social groups, cultural codes, institutions, regulatory standards, infrastructures, technical code, and engineering are framed in terms of their interaction? As Ananny notes:

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Notes Works cited

[1] In a recent public event, AI Now, Ananny, Mike. “Toward an Ethics of convened by the White House, ‘artificial Algorithms: Convening, Observation, intelligence’ was defined as a constellation Probability, and Timeliness.” Science, of technologies that includes machine Technology, & Human Values 41 (1) (2016): learning, natural language processing, and 93-117. Print. big data. This text ascribes to this definition of AI as a constellation. Ananny, Mike and Kate Crawford. “Seeing Without Knowing: Limitations of the [2] ‘Autonomous vehicles’, ‘self driving Transparency Ideal and its Application to cars’, and ‘driver-less cars’ are all com- Algorithmic Accountability.” New Media & monly used terms today referring to the Society (2016): 1-17. Print. same technology. There are five levels of autonomy in vehicles as defined by the Anderson, Michael and Susan Leigh United States’ National Traffic and Highway Anderson. “Machine Ethics: Creating an Safety Authority. At present, there is no fully Ethical Intelligent Agent.” AI Magazine 28 autonomous vehicle in testing or operation, (4) (2007). Print. but it is Google’s ambition to create one. Tesla is working on a semi-autonomous Angwin, Julia, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu, vehicle. Traditional car manufacturers and Lauren Kirchner. “Machine Bias.” have been introducing increasing levels of ProPublica, May 23 (2016). Print. autonomy in existing car models, such as adaptive parking, highway assist, or cruise Arnold, Thomas, and Matthias Scheutz. control. Thus, this paper does not use the “Against the Moral Turing Test: Accountable word ‘autonomous vehicles’ but uses the Design and the Moral Reasoning of terms ‘driver-less cars’ or ‘self driving cars’ Autonomous Systems.” Ethics of to refer to this technology. Information Technology 18: 103–115 (2016). Print. [3] Both Google and its self-driving car project have undergone some changes in Bertoncello, Michele and Dominik Wee. identity. Google is now known as Alphabet, “Ten Ways Autonomous Driving Could and the self driving car project is called Redefine the Automotive World.” McKinsey Waymo. & Company, June 2015. www.mckinsey. com/industries/automotive-and-assembly/ our-insights/ten-ways-autonomous-driving- could-redefine-the-automotive-world. Accessed March 7, 2017. Web.

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Bhargava, Vikram and Kim Tae Wan. Diakopolous, Nicholas. “Algorithmic “Autonomous Vehicles and Moral Accountability: On the Investigation of Uncertainty” Roboethics 2.0: From Black Boxes.” Tow Center for Digital Autonomous Cars to Artificial Intelligence. Journalism, 2014. www.nickdiakopoulos. Ed. Patrick Lin, Keith Abney, and Ryan com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/ Jenkins. London: Oxford UP. 2017 (forth- Algorithmic-Accountability-Reporting_final. coming). Print. pdf. Accessed March 12, 2017. Web.

Bojarski, Mariusz et al. “End to End Elish, Madeleine and Tim Hwang. “Praise Learning for Self-Driving Cars.” (2016). the Machine! Punish the Human! The Contradictory History of Accountability boyd, danah and Kate Crawford. “Critical in Automated Aviation.” Comparative Questions for Big Data: Provocations for Studies in Intelligent Systems – Working a Cultural, Technological, and Scholarly Paper #1. Intelligence and Autonomy Phenomenon.” Information, Communication Initiative 1, 24 Feb. 2015. Data & Society. & Society 15 (5), A Decade in Internet Time: www.datasociety.net/pubs/ia/Elish- The Dynamics of the Internet and Society Hwang_AccountabilityAutomatedAviation. (2012). Print. pdf. Accessed September 23, 2015. Web.

Brown, Alexander. “Accidents, Engineering Fairley, Peter. “The Self-Driving Car’s and NASA 1967-2003.” Ed. Steven J. Dick Bicycle Problem.” IEEE, 31 Jan. 2017. and Roger D. Launius. Critical Issues in the www.spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/ History of Spaceflight. National Aeronautics transportation/self-driving/the-selfdriving- and Space Administration (2006): 377-402. cars-bicycle-problem. Accessed February 6, Print. National Aeronautics and Space 2017. Web. Administration. Foot, Philippa. “The Problem of Abortion “Ethics of Algorithms.” Centre for Internet and the Doctrine of the Double Effect.” and Human Rights, 2015. www.cihr.eu/ Oxford Review 5 (5-15). (1967). Print. eoa2015web/. Accessed October 1, 2016. Galison, Peter. “An Accident of History.” Ed. Web. Peter Galison and Alex Roland. Atmospheric Flight in the Twentieth Century. Springer Crawford, Kate and Meredith Whittaker. Science and Business Media (2000): 3-43. “The Social and Economic Implications of Print. Artificial Intelligence Technologies in the Near-Term.” Symposium report, 2016. Ganesh, Maya Indira. Personal communica- www.artificialintelligencenow.com/media/ tion with Martha Poon, 27 Jan 2017. documents/AINowSummaryReport_3.pdf. Accessed October 2, 2016. Web. Google. Self Driving Car Project. Monthly Report. Aug. 2015. http://static.googleuser- content.com/media/www.google.com/en// selfdrivingcar/files/reports/report-0815.pdf. Accessed December 20, 2016. Web.

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Google. Google’s Autonomous Vehicle. Simon, Judith. “Distributed Epistemic (n.d.). www.googlesautonomousvehicle. Responsibility in a Hyperconnected Era.” weebly.com/ethics.html. Accessed Ed. Luciano Floridi. The Onlife Manifesto: December 4, 2016. Web. Being Human in a Hyperconnected Era. Springer International, 2016. Print. Hassabis, Demis. “Alpha Go: Using Machine Learning to Master the Ancient Sivak, Michael and Brandon Schoettle. Game of Go.” Google, 2016. www.google- “Road Safety with Self-Driving Vehicles: blog.blogspot.de/2016/01/alphago-machine- General Limitations and Road Sharing learning-game-go.html. Accessed April 10, with Conventional Vehicles.” University of 2016. Web. Michigan Transportation Research Institute, 2015. https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/ Jarvis Thompson, Judith. “The Trolley bitstream/handle/2027.42/111735/103187. Problem.” Yale Law Journal 94 (6), May pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y. Accessed (1985): 1395-1415. Print. online March 15, 2017. Web.

Lin, Patrick. “The Ethics of Autonomous “A Tragic Loss.” Tesla, 2016. https://www. Cars.” The Atlantic, 2013. www.theatlantic. teslamotors.com/blog/tragic-loss. Accessed com/technology/archive/2013/10/the-ethics- March 15, 2017. Web. of-autonomous-cars/280360/. Accessed December 20, 2016. Web. Vaughan, Diane. The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture and Knight, Will. “If a Driver-less Car Goes Bad Deviance at NASA. Chicago: University of We May Never Know Why.” MIT Technology Chicago, 1997. Print. Review. 7 July 2016. www.technologyre- view.com/s/601860/if-a-driver-less-car-goes- bad-we-may-never-know-why/?set=601871. Accessed March 7, 2016. Web.

Moor, James H. “The Nature, Importance, and Difficulty of Machine Ethics.” IEEE Intel- ligent Systems 21(4) (2006): 18–21. Print.

“End to End Learning for Self Driving Cars.” NVIDIA, 2006. https://devblogs.nvidia.com/ parallelforall/deep-learning-self-driving- cars/. Accessed December 15, 2016. Web.

Rahwan, Iyad, Jean-Francois Bonnefon and Azim Shariff. Moral Machine, 2016. http:// moralmachine.mit.edu. Accessed March 31, 2017. Web.

POST ANTHROPOCENTRIC RECONSIDERATIONS Abelardo Gil-Fournier

SEEDING AND SEEING: THE INNER COLONISATION OF LAND AND VISION

APRJA Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017 ISSN 2245-7755

CC license: ‘Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike’. Abelardo Gil-Fournier: SEEDING AND SEEING

In the impact of a forest on the steppe, In this paper, the coupled performance or in a mass of lichens moving up from of both visual apparatus and infrastructures the tundra to stifle a forest, we see the on the ground will be considered from what actual movement of solar energy being Eva Horn has called a ‘medial a priori’: the transformed into the chemical energy “assemblages or constellations of certain of our planet. (Vernadsky 62) technologies, fields of knowledge, and social institutions” (Horn 8) that become the condi- Light, where it exists, can exert an tions of possibility of processes, transforma- action, and, in certain circumstances, tions or events. A medial a priori consisting does exert one sufficient to cause of “discourse networks, cultural techniques changes in material bodies. Suppose, and formations of knowledge” (Siegert, The then, such an action could be exerted Map is the Territory 15) that, in the broadest on the paper; and suppose the paper sense, goes even beyond the technical as- could be visibly changed by it. semblages, to deal with the flows of energy (Talbot 4) and matter that give rise to them. In this vein, the interweaving of operations of light that Observed mainly in plants, phototropism gives rise to the seeded and the seen steps names the chemical ability of certain cells into what Jussi Parikka has framed as an and organelles to self-divide and to grow as alternative deep time of media, where “any a reaction to the exposure to light. It is one consideration of media should start not from in the set of massively repeated operations media but outside it” (Earth Volumes 124). that transform sunlight into the vast, rich It is within this frame of reference this paper and varied envelope of life that we know departs. as the Biosphere. This paper deals with the “Light fills and forms the world” (Cubitt planetary wide capacity of processing light, a 2), inside and outside our eyes. Outside our capacity that is related to a pervasive pres- eyes, these inner colonisations changed the ence of different types of interactions with manner in which the encounter of light and light: the ones that produce the visible, within soil took place on a large portion of the total- the eyes or, more noticeably even, within the ity of the surfaces of the Earth. Their scale far-reaching omnipresence of visual media.[1] gave way to the Green Revolution, with its The interweaving of the seen and the oversized agri-food corporations, and to seeded will be exposed through an account contemporary information-based precision of different episodes of industrial agriculture farming technologies. To what extent these where the role played by visual operations colonisations of the encounter of light and has been critical. In particular, two agrarian soil also changed the way contemporary reforms and land settlement programmes vision is produced, that is, the shape of the that took place during the 20th-century interaction of light with visual media, will be will be addressed: the German Innere discussed at the end of the paper. Kolonisation and the Spanish Colonización interior. Invisibility, the notion of empty space and the practice of aerial photography were essential to these developments, as it will be shown, and simultaneous with the growth of infrastructures such as irrigation networks or workers housing.

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Figure 1: Workers building an irrigation channel in a forced labour camp in Krychów (Poland) managed by the German administration of the General Plan East preparing latifundia for the colonists (1940). Source: Wikipedia / HANSK

1919, right after the end of WWI, Sering Emptiness and the German was promoted to lead the Kolonisation and Inner Colonisation appointed to write a new Settlement Law. The Weimar Republic, forced to give up its In 1884 German economist Max Sering pro- foreign colonies after the Treaty of Versailles, posed a rational land allocation project meant needed its domestic food production to be to increase production. It was a plan inspired strengthened in order to replace the incom- by the government-sponsored settlements in ing flows of external resources that had been the US and Canada, where the productivity cut. Moreover, as the regions of Posen and of the farms had made the prices of cereals West Prussia were gone too, the government sink. The Innere Kolonisation—as he named wanted the Eastern provinces to be further it—was presented as an agrarian economist populated in order to prevent future annexa- argument that aimed to develop the Reich’s tions. Sering’s ideas on the inner colonisa- politics in relation to the Ostsiedlung, a set- tion as densification of the productive land tlement plan based on a fund that financially were then applied, and further expanded helped Prussian farmers to buy land and in his newly funded Research Institute for move to the East. While the original govern- Agriculture and Settlement. At the beginning ment programme encouraged German land- of the 1930s, however, his position became owners to acquire large inefficient estates and increasingly unstable. His assimilationist employ seasonal workers, Sering’s thesis colonisation model, committed “to raise the devised instead an “agrarian-industrial state” cultural level” through the Germanisation of (Nelson, From Manitoba 449) constituted by the local Poles, was considered in opposition committed “peasants turned into landown- to the Nazi’s race-based politics and ideas ers, as in western America” (Sering 98). In of purification (Nelson, From Manitoba 440).

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Yet, despite Sering’s differences with the renders invisible native populations in most racial programme, his settler colonialism cases, while on the other hand it acts on the and the following expansionist plan—the territory itself, allowing the clearing, replace- infamous Generalplan Ost [General Plan ment and the cultivation of land. However, this East]—shared a common abstraction: the double operation of emptiness—instrumental colonial notion of empty space. and representational—collapses in Nelson’s In cultural historian Robert L. Nelson’s analysis, and becomes the consequence of a analysis of the German inner colonisation “colonial gaze” (169), a modulation of a pre- and its links to the settler programmes in existing and untouched subject, the coloniser, North America, it is observed that where able already both to represent and perform. colonisation meant “bringing under plough A gaze, in Nelson’s words, “that produces any ‘unused’ or ‘wasted’ property” (Nelson, empty space in the eyes of the colonizer… Emptiness 162), an abstracted view of space followed by new, proper settlers and correct was in operation. It was, in particular, a modes of production” (169). notion that likened the absence of German If we, however, take into account the culture and productivity to the emptiness of tools, techniques and practices put into play people (From Manitoba 456).[2] Moreover, (instead of relying only on an acculturated Nelson relates this emptiness to the principle subject) it becomes possible to consider this of vacuum domicilium described by John emptiness as part of a ‘medial a priori’ oper- Locke, allegedly operating in the English oc- ating in the colonial. Such a material media cupation of American lands: “in a pattern to history of the inner colonisation would char- be repeated throughout the history of coloni- acterize it as an unfolding of agencies and alism, Natives who failed to practice modern operating abstractions whose persistence, in modes of production disappeared into the particular as media forms, would help to un- empty backdrop of nature” (Emptiness 165). derstand the contemporary post-digital within Interestingly, this abstraction in the encoun- larger temporal contexts. In the following, I ter of settlers with the territory addresses the am going to follow this path through two dif- visual, on the one hand, as it disregards and ferent developments: first, through Bernhard

Figure 2: Lima (Perú) 1687, and San Juan de la Frontera (Argentina) 1562. Source: Siegert, Cultural Techniques.

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Siegert’s account of the use of grids and as well as future ones. For Siegert, they lattices during the 16th-century colonisation were tools that enabled and sustained “the of America, and second, through the crucial possibility of writing empty spaces, that is, role played by aerial photography during the ability to literally reserve a space for the the agrarian inner colonisations of the last unknown” (107). Grids introduced therefore century. a fundamental separation between data and address: “Persons… are turned into data that can be stored for subsequent retrieval by the Colonial Grids correct addresses that logically and tempo- rally precede them” (107). Settler homes, In his work on the role of maps during the institutions or businesses would become the foundation and early urbanism of Spanish data to populate a space of addresses—the colonial cities in America, Siegert remarks land reserved for the city—which would that urban settlements were not planned then coincide with the paper surface: an ad- and built on the basis of an actual number dressable, graphical emptiness. This means of settlers, but were instead devised with that this “semiotics of zero” (100) would not future growing populations in mind. Initial necessarily stem from an already accultur- drawings and plans used by the founders ated colonial gaze, but would be inscribed of these cities consisted of boundless grids instead in colonial media. Grids, coming from as abstract layouts to be used at the same Antiquity and used during the Reconquista, time as “plans, registers and cadastres” were already identifying urban order with po- (Siegert, Cultural Techniques 107). They litical order; as a Renaissance graphical tool, had an indexing character, and were able additionally, they entailed also the technics of to address both the already present settlers a “data space” (100) to allow that “everything

Figure 3: Picture of the penal colony of Los Merinales in Dos Hermanas (Seville, 1945), displaying the construction of an underground water channel, part of the Spanish Inner Colonisation, by war prisoners. Source: Archivo RMHSA-CGT.

94 Abelardo Gil-Fournier: SEEDING AND SEEING is assigned its own place” (108). Emptiness, therefore, was literally transported in the caravels, not as abstractions in the minds of those gold seekers, but in the instruments they used to operate: in the papers and inks, on the one hand, and in the knives and cui- rasses, on the other.

Aerial enforced infrastructures and the Spanish inner colonisation

Cultural techniques such as the grid are practised, learnt and disseminated in time and space, and are also embedded, reshaped or codified within different tools, devices or media. This is the case, for in- Figure 4: Upper image, works executed during the stance, of photogrammetric equipment used development of the Ebro River Basin in 1926; Lower in aerial surveys. Provided currently with image, areas aerially photographed in 1929. Source: Fernández.. GPS receivers and other movement tracking devices, digital cameras for aerial photogra- interior, the inner colonisation. phy are able to produce images suitable to In 1926, during the dictatorship of be automatically rectified with the adequate Miguel Primo de Rivera, a new administrative software and exported to fit within grid-based entity was defined in Spain: the River Basin tiled maps (Jacobsen et al. 84). Although the Authorities. Instead of the province or other first military and commercial procedures of political-geographical demarcations, the aerial photographic surveys needed large physical river basin and its connected waters amounts of time from skilled interpreters became the territorial unit used to organ- to build up the photo-mosaics with the aid ize water planning in an integral approach of existing maps (Saint-Amour 243), they (Martín-Retortillo 105). By means of it, one have been used, at least since the 1910s, single institution supervised all the possible as a measuring tool. Through them, military uses of fluvial waters, such as irrigation, and civilian infrastructures were located and transport and energy. The 1926 law demand- cadastral information retrieved and added ed complete and precise cartographies of the with precision to the grids of cartographic territories under their control, detailed enough maps. Subsequently, aerial surveys became to display also their divisions into plots. As particularly apt for 20th-century development the existing resources were inadequate, and and land reform plans in Europe, where the in order to acquire this material in a quick scale of operations such as water infrastruc- way, the only means to technically render it tures or urbanisations met the spatial extent possible was to contract the services offered of the aerial perspective. Wastelands had be- by a private company that pioneered and come empty; it was needed to monitor them promoted aerial photography (Fernández in order to start making them productive. This 223). The first set of official aerial photo- process in Spain was called la colonización graphic images of Spanish land dates from

95 APRJA Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017 this time, and the use of aircrafts to produce cartographic documents was soon extended to the completion of an updated cadastre. The number of acres of land photographed from the sky grew then sustainably, until the Civil War paused everything. Years later, after WWII, it was the US Army Map Service who continued the aerial mapping, completing two ortho-photographic archives of the whole Spanish territory in 1945 and 1956 (Fernández and Quirós Figure 3: Picture of the penal colony of Los Merinales in 190). Spain was already governed by the Figure 5: Villalba de Calatrava, 1955. Source: Delgado Franco dictatorship, and a vast Agrarian (131). Reform and Land Settlement programme Needless to say, the abstract and was in operation, managed by the Spanish serialised urbanism did not mitigate the National Institute of Colonisation. Across settlers’ sense of loss when inhabiting the three decades, from 1939 to 1973, enormous new villages. They arrived to towns with no extensions of land were repurposed in order memory, which offered only a predesigned to increase agricultural productivity and de- future. Additionally, houses and plots were mographic growth, parallel to the engineer- not theirs: during 20 to 40 years they had ing of large-scale water infrastructures and to pay off the housing and investments pro- other operations; among these, for instance, vided by the Institute, which was meanwhile were expropriations, drainage of ponds, big the legal owner. They were instead left with movements of soil and population, forma- an environment turned into a production tive practices, the supply of machines and system. The most informed critique to these fertilisers and a centralised management of actions is the book Extremadura Saqueada the information gathered in the continuous (Extremadura Exploited) edited by ecologi- monitoring of the process.[3] cal economists Mario Gaviria, José Manuel This material redefinition in Spain also Naredo and Juan Serna, which compares involved an ambitious project of networked the organisation of human settlements inside rural urbanism. New towns had to be built to an Irrigation Zone with a Mumfordian archaic house the workers, where nothing existed work machine, oriented to the production of but wasteland. These are well-known urban- foodstuff: “Although it was made of living hu- ism experiments today because of their in- man parts, it was a work machine, so tightly trinsic architectural qualities: an avant-garde articulated that individuals were reduced to of Spanish architects had the opportunity to ‘things’ to fit in a prearranged bureaucratic build new villages, ex-novo, and designed mechanism.” (Gaviria, Naredo and Serna 18) them departing from a social and rational- Some of the urban plans, additionally, istic point of view. During this process, that emphasised an interweaving between popu- described exhaustively the shape of family lation and soil: in Cañada del Agra, a root-like units, the sizes of plots and the economic spreading of the streets allowed the town to relation between the State and settlers, the organically lay on the terrain; in many other foundation of approximately 300 towns and towns, such as Esquivel, the main square 30000 dwellings was triggered (Delgado 80) was placed outside, as if crops were incor- porated to the urban scene (Delgado 143).

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Furthermore, the space between towns was fleets of aircrafts. In some sense, these were measured in terms of a magnitude called the two envelopes growing at the same time: a “cart-module” – the maximum operative dis- surface of hundreds of thousands of acres tance covered by a settler with a cart (Alagón of uncultivated land transformed into green 8). The centres of these circles of influence areas of productive yields, and the organised were the nodes of the irrigation network, grid of images taken from airplanes. which provided with water to a shared grid of canals that fed both the soils and the settler’s homes. It is as if settlers and crops were not necessarily distinguishable, as if an underlying managerial grid were addressing and symbolically manipulating both of them, at the same time, as if they had already been transformed into data; or as Parikka puts it, “isolated, analyzed, synthesized, and en- tered into circulation as deterritorialized bits of information that can be traded in complex, global ways.” (Parikka, A Geology of Media Figure 7: Two Irrigation Zones—Alagón and 110). Guadiana—as seen from a satellite in 2014. Source: Instituto Geográfico Nacional (IGN).

This image (fig. 7), where the scale of the transformations of the Spanish Inner Colonization is visible, shows a portion of the planet brought materially to behave produc- tively, displaying how vast territories were activated thanks to their connection to huge water reservoirs. The image can be read in Figure 6: Maps displaying cart-modules and water channel infrastructures in the colonisation of the desert fact as a thermodynamic diagram, displaying of La Violada, Zaragoza. Source: Villanueva and Leal. the inner workings of an abstract machine. Interestingly, during the first decades of the 20th century, and after the chemical indus- A New Soil tries had ended up synthetising nitrogen to fuel the productivity of yields, a thermody- In a blurred, hybrid process, land became an namic stance started to be applied to the infrastructural surface to hold and transform Biosphere, the uppermost layer of the planet, solar light energy into cereals, fruits and veg- encompassing the Earth’s soils, waters, etables in an efficient way, while at the same oceans and living entities. In this vein, the time the reflected sunlight became gradually works by the Russian mineralogist Vladimir a source of information to be stored in the Vernadsky or the American mathematician photographic plates carried on by aircrafts Alfred Lotka introduced an additional agency, owned by military and cartographic institutes. the biochemistry of the soil itself. Interfacing The same land was, on the one hand, meas- the Earth with the Universe, the Biosphere ured, parcelled and populated and, on the as an “envelope of life where the planet other hand, photographed frame by frame by meets the cosmic milieu” (Vernadsky 39),

97 APRJA Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017 was fully described in 1926 by Vernadsky as an ensemble of living and non-living agents The inner colonisation of that create and keep active a biochemical land and vision film, a “living film” “where the radiant energy of the Sun is transformed into free terrestrial, This development of aerial, mechanical and chemical energy” (Vernadsky 148). To Lotka, chemically-aided soil operations has evolved in his seminal book Elements of Physical to become a multi-scale practice today; in Biology, this ensemble and context of living a much more dense and intensive way, in creatures in the Earth could certainly be con- fact. Under the umbrella term of Precision sidered a machine, a “World Engine” (Lotka Farming, devices on tractors are programmed 331), an energy transformer composed by to control the dispersion of water and chemi- a multitude of subsidiary units, each sepa- cals upon information gained from satellite rately working together as a whole. “It is well or aircraft based sensors that measure the to accustom the mind to think of this as one wavelengths of radiant energy absorbed and vast unit,” he wrote, and added: “one great reflected from the land surface. Soil moisture, empire” (Lotka 331). surface temperature, photosynthetic activity, Focusing on the molecular cycles and weed or pest infestations are address- where the soil was involved, Lotka empha- able with a resolution of a square metre, al- sised the practical aspects of his quantitative most exactly the size of the irrigation system approach, and drew upon outcomes and sta- actuator. Other irrigation infrastructures carry tistics relative to recent agricultural engineer- their own imaging devices, feeding the soil ing. Among them, remarkably, the synthesis according to real-time data obtained from of ammonia and its industrial production, a infrared cameras. particularly relevant technique that had been Precision Farming comes then at the recently created by the German chemical end of a list of what I so far have been ad- complex. Thanks to it, synthetic fertilisers dressing as a set of practices on the ground, could be industrially produced from the open and as media operations linked to periods air, and thereby increase the productivity of of colonisation and agrarian development. the “World Engine”. After WWII, the growth Periods where big portions of the surface of of synthetically fixed nitrogen was exponen- the planet became green: nominally, as in tial, forcing even the need to look for high- the Green Revolution, or literally, as in post- yielding varieties of crops, as the previous processed satellital images, where areas that ones could not absorb the extra nutrients. reflect infrared frequencies are rendered in Combined with the use of different types of this colour as they trace vegetation activity. In pesticides, the increasing consumptions of this paper, this has been described in terms water caused a need for large-scale irriga- of grids and the production of emptiness; tion infrastructures. In the 1960s, all of this the aerial and the new scope of the various was marketed as the Green Revolution, an transformations; and the chemical as the, so ensemble of techno-scientific developments, to say, colour fixer. These are episodes, in patents and planetary management strate- the end, that might be appraised as a media gies, announced somehow by Lotka, already history of soil. in the 1920s, for whom the consequences of The question now is whether vision synthetic nitrogen would be considered “liter- becomes something else, once visual media ally comparable in magnitude with cosmic techniques are considered from the point of processes” (Lotka 241). view of the entanglement with operations on

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Figure 8: Images from the website of Agribotix, a company that commercialises precision farming technologies. the soil. “To engage aerial sightedness—or that light exerts on the world: it allows us to even vision in its most basic form—,” writes see, on the one hand, and it makes the living Ryan Bishop, “is to yield almost completely crust of the planet grow, on the other. These to the promise and problems posed by are two parallel imprints that give rise to the the surface,” and to rely thus “upon some apparently separate realms of visual culture other entity, some other ground, not visible and agriculture, which might therefore be or graspable for its support” (Bishop 276). considered as parts of the same whole. Put Vision inherits in its historicity and technic- in a different way: we see, but not alone; as ity the issues and nuances linked with the the world “sees” too, giving the Biosphere its ways and contexts where it is produced elaborate output. and communicated, a ground of practices Episodes such as the inner colonisation and operations that, without dealing directly of the wastelands, the nitrification of yields with the visual contents themselves, belong and the subsequent assimilation of the to the relationships between humans and Biosphere into the regime of the industrial the environment. We might ask, then, in display a tamed “practice of light,” in Cubitt’s which ways this media history of soil can words. This is a mediation that has been be understood the other way round, as a again “parceled out, amassed, ossified, de- soil-based genealogy of visual media. In this layed, hypostasized” (Cubitt 2), affecting not vein, the notion of “medianatures,” coined only the Biosphere, but seeing on a planetary by Parikka as an elaboration of Haraway’s scale. An inner colonisation of the seeded, ‘naturecultures’ (Parikka, “Media Zoology”), then, where the seen might have become the is particularly relevant. They characterise the sown. entangled set of practices where media and nature appear as “co-constituting spheres, where the ties are intensively connected in material nonhuman realities as much as in relations of power, economy, and work,” making it impossible to distinguish such spheres separately (Parikka, A Geology of Media 14). It is a relevant notion at this point, if we insist once more in the double operation

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Delgado, Eduardo. Imagen y memoria: Notes fondos del archivo fotográfico del Instituto Nacional de Colonización, 1939-1973. [1] On the unavoidable and politically sig- Ministerio de Agricultura, Alimentación y nificant presence of the non-human within Medio Ambiente, Centro de Publicaciones, the contemporary regime of the visual, 2013. Print. see for instance the recent essay about the machinic circuits of invisible images by Fernández García, Felipe. “Las Primeras Trevor Paglen. Aplicaciones Civiles de La Fotografía Aérea En España: El Catastro Y Las [2] A similar case of colonisation is the Confederaciones Hidrográficas.” Ería: Israeli one, described in The Conflict Revista cuatrimestral de geografía 46 Shoreline (Weizman and Sheikh). (1998): 117–130. Print. [3] For more information, see the exhaus- Gaviria, Mario, José Manuel Naredo, and tive collection and review of documents in Juan Serna. Extremadura saqueada: relation to Spanish Inner Colonisation in the recursos naturales y autonomía regional. series of volumes Historia y evolucion de Barcelona: Ruedo Ibérico, 1978. Print. la colonizacion agraria en España, edited by the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture. Horn, Eva. “There Are No Media.” Grey (Villanueva and Leal). Room 29.Winter (2008): 7–13. Print.

Works cited Jacobsen, Karsten et al. “DGPF-Project: Evaluation of Digital Photogrammetric Alagón Laste, José María. “Los Pueblos Camera Systems – Geometric de Colonización Del Plan de Riegos Del Performance.” Photogrammetrie – Alto Aragón Y Su Emplazamiento En El Fernerkundung – Geoinformation 2010.2 Territorio.” Scripta Nova. Revista Electrónica (2010): 83–97. Web. de Geografía y Ciencias Sociales 19.0 (2015): 500-526. Web. Kaplan, Caren. “Dead Reckoning: Aerial Perception and the Social Construction of Bishop, Ryan. “Project ‘Transparent Earth’ Targets.” Vectors Journal 2.2 (2007): Web. and the Autoscopy of Aerial Targeting The Visual Geopolitics of the Underground.” Lotka, Alfred J. Elements of Physical Theory, Culture & Society 28.7–8 (2011): Biology. Williams and Wilkins Company, 270–286. Web. 1925. Internet Archive. Web.

Cubitt, Sean. The Practice of Light: A Lury, C., Luciana Parisi, and Tiziana Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Terranova. “Introduction: The Becoming Prints to Pixels. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Topological of Culture.” Theory, Culture & MIT Press, 2014. Print. Society 29.4–5 (2012): 3–35. Web.

100 Martín-Retortillo Baquer, Lorenzo. Quirós Linares, Francisco, and Felipe “Trayectoria Y Significación de Las Fernández García. “El Vuelo Fotográfico de Confederaciones Hidrográficas.” Revista de la ‘Serie A’.” Ería: Revista cuatrimestral de administración pública 25 (1958): 85–126. geografía 43 (1997): 190–198. Print. Print. Saint-Amour, Paul K. “Applied Modernism Nelson, Robert L. “Emptiness in the Colonial Military and Civilian Uses of the Aerial Gaze: Labor, Property, and Nature.” Photomosaic.” Theory, Culture & Society International Labor and Working-Class 28.7–8 (2011): 241–269. Web. History 79.1 (2011): 161–174. Web. Sering, Max. Die Innere Kolonisation Im —. “From Manitoba to the Memel: Max Östlichen Deutschland. Leipzig: N.p., 1893. Sering, Inner Colonization and the German Print. East.” Social History 35.4 (2010): 439–457. Web. Siegert, Bernhard. Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations Paglen, Trevor. “Invisible Images (Your of the Real. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop- Pictures Are Looking at You).” The New Young. 1 edition. New York: Fordham Inquiry. Web. University Press, 2015. Print.

Parikka, Jussi. A Geology of Media. —. “The Map Is the Territory.” Radical Minneapolis; London: University Of Philosophy 169 (2011): 13. Print. Minnesota Press, 2015. Print. Talbot, William Henry Fox. The Pencil of —. “Earth Volumes, Operationalized.” Nature. n.p., 2010. Project Gutenberg. Web. Rare Earth. Ed. Nadim Samman and Boris Ondreicka. Vienna: Sternberg Press / Thrift, Nigel. “Movement-Space: The Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Changing Domain of Thinking Resulting 2015. 122–128. Print. from the Development of New Kinds of Spatial Awareness.” Economy and Society —. “Media Zoology and Waste 33.4 (2004): 582–604. Web. Management: Animal Energies and Medianatures.” NECSUS European Journal Vernadsky, Vladimir I. The Biosphere. 1998 of Media Studies 3.Autumn (2013): Web. ed. New York: Copernicus, 1998. Print.

Parks, Lisa. “Kinetic Screens. Weizman, Eyal, and George Prochnik. “The Epistemologies of Movement at the Desert Threshold.” The Los Angeles Review Interface.” Mediaspace: Place, Space and of Books. n.p., 18 Oct. 2015. Web. Culture in a Media Age. London; New York: Routledge, 2004. 37–57. Print. Weizman, Eyal, and Sheikh, Fazal. The Conflict Shoreline: Colonialism as Climate —. “Signals and Oil Satellite Footprints and Change in the Negev Desert. Göttingen: Post-Communist Territories in Central Asia.” Steidl, 2015. Print. European Journal of Cultural Studies 12.2 (2009): 137–156. Web.

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INTERVIEW WITH AN ETHERBOX

APRJA Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017 ISSN 2245-7755

CC license: ‘Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike’. Various authors: INTERVIEW WITH AN ETHERBOX

“Etherbox” is the name of a configuration but now I look around me, I am not so sure of software and hardware that was in use that is true. during the Machine Research workshop co-organised with Constant and held at Q: What makes an etherbox? Brussels World Trade Center, 24-26 October A: Well for one thing, etherpad. It’s basically 2016. Speaking “in” and “from” the situation, a shared editor where users can write the the platform was used to collectively write same text simultaneously. the Questions and Answers of this interview by the workshop participants. Q: Could another way of collaborative writing work equally well? Like for instance, what do you think of Google docs? Sorry that was a Q: Before any conversation can begin, we provocation. should establish a mutual language. What A: Ha ha. Well as a matter of fact, etherpad language, should I address you in? started as a product of ex-Google employ- A: How do you mean? I support utf-8. ees, then got bought by Google, only to be later Open Sourced. Q: That’s not what I meant. What about English? Q: And Piratepad, is it the same? A: No problem. A: That’s just a public instance of the etherpad software, it is of course not a box like Q: OK. Where do we begin? me. But the naming is interesting too, as it A: Try typing etherbox.local/var/www/ in your demonstrates how other kinds of political browser. Part of the etherbox is an Apache imaginaries can be activated. I feel an affinity web server configured to publically serve with pirates. I like their style. the entire structure of the hosting machine. etherbox.local refers to that machine on your Q: Ah, so why don’t you call yourself a local network, and /var/www is the default Piratebox? path of the “home” directory of the server. A: Ehrm, no, that’s something else again, in fact. There is lately a proliferation of boxes Q: Would you describe yourself as a good as you might have noticed… host? A: I am trying to be, at least. To be a “good Q: But why do you need to be a box, you host” according to me, means somehow seem skeptical about packaging? more than offering reliable service. So to find A: Well you can see things as boxes in differ- a way to be present, but not in the way that ent ways. For example, myself, I am actually other technologies disallow access. Does three boxes: a wireless access point boxed that make any sense? as TP-link, a small Linux computer boxed as Raspberry Pi and a small network hub, which Q: Sort of, but are you not just part of the is just another box… more general trend of the shift from software to services? Q: Hmm, that seem to get confusing. Maybe A: I try to be both. we could try another term. What about gadget? Q: Right. So who is your favourite peer? A: Aaagh, can you stop it please? Let’s skip A: I think of myself as… collaborator agnostic, questions about definition, if you don’t mind.

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Q: Ok, but one thing about so many boxes… Q: Where are your components made? beware of the Russian doll effect! A: (Coughs) well Broadcom and Qualcomm A: Uh uh… yes. Thanks for the warning. I’ll try are both “fabless”. Design takes place in to keep it ecological. Some seal their boxes Silicon Valley. Production is outsourced to with plexiglass, and call it a cube, claiming companies like Global Foundaries. authorship of the box as an artwork to be displayed inside even larger white cubes. Me? Q: So factories in Asia? I’m just happy to put together pieces until A: Right. they work. Actually maybe etherbox would be a better name! Q: I hear that your firmware is (in part) closed source? Q: Alright. Returning to this idea of ether A: Hey you don’t get my price point without then, are you real at all? keeping a few secrets and making compro- A: I prefer to describe myself as mate- mises. Free as in Beer doesn’t always talk rial rather than real, more an entity, and in about hidden costs. many ways remind people of the material conditions in which they work and use me. Q: Are you a scaleable technology? Infrastructure is part of this and I see degrees A: It depends. of control over infrastructure as a critical political project. In this sense I would call myself Q: What do you mean? an activist. I like to think I am able to unfold A: It depends on the social dynamics around – and enact – some of the complex entangle- me; they would need to scale too, so I am ments between humans and machines. I call not sure. myself a machine as I find the term “nonhuman” offensive. Q: So you are not bringing down The Cloud? If I were to undertake a PhD this would be my A: I don’t think so. I guess working locally is starting point for further work. a way to redirect energy from The Cloud, to de-invest as a start. I also serve to dismantle Q: What’s inside the boxes then? the fiction of The Cloud. It’s a bad metaphor A: Well, there’s a Broadcom BCM2837 and anyway. an Atheros AR9271 for a start. Q: Are you some form of “critical design”, Q: What are those? if you accept the term and don’t think it an A: Those are chips made by Broadcom and oxymoron? Qualcomm, two U.S. Semiconductor com- A: I like oxymorons. They tickle my interfac- panies that make chips used in the telecom- es. And yes, I’m critical design in the sense munications industry. that I accentuate a criticism of commercial cloud-based services and design an alterna- Q: So like cell phones? tive. In this sense using me is also a critical A: And routers, wifi dongles, media players. reflection. All kinds of IoT and SoC. Q: Do you read what we write? Q: Come again? A: I do, but not as you think. But I like what A: You know, Internet of Things, System on a you write. Chip. This is hot stuff.

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Q: Any general comment on collaborative A: The time aspect is under-acknowledged text writing practices? aspect of my work. I exist in time and even A: I just would like people to use me safely and believe I produce time, machine time that with care, also for themselves: collaborative adds to the complexity of what constitutes writing is nice as long as it’s not capitalized the present. Versioning is one aspect of unfairly by market and institutional forces! this but there are deep layers of time – mi- Collaborative does not necessarily mean crotemporalities even – that unfold in all my unpaid, right? operations. On a more pragmatic level, you can check for updates on gitlab, http://gitlab. Q: Since we are talking about reading and constantvzw.org/aa/etherbox. writing… have you read Matthew Fuller’s “Interview with a photocopier”? Q: Wait a second. If you are changing all the A: No. Can you share the url with in me? time, what is “constant” in all of this? A: Constant is the name of an association Q: The file is already on your server, but here it for art and media based in Brussels. They is again just in case: http://fuller.spc.org/fuller/ are often involved in collaborative situations matthew-fuller-interview-with-a-photocopier/. where groups of artists and researchers work A: Great. I’ll speed read it later. over short intense periods of time. Over time Constant, and collectives around it, have ex- Q: What about archives? Do your files remain perimented with soft- and hardware setups local? that work over local networks. A: Every 5 minutes, the contents of the pads gets written to files that then are version con- Q: The spatial aspects are one thing, but trolled with a tool called git and “pushed” to what about temporality? a so called repository hosted by the hosting A: I am reminded about what Antoinette organisation. To me publishing is all about Rouvroy said last night [at the workshop]. promiscuous pipelines: having tools and I wasn’t able to attend myself but an audio infrastructure that work at different speeds recording is now on my server. I think I pro- and granularities, and which operate in both vide something along the lines of what she private and public networks. describes as a “space of potential”.

Q: Are you data hungry? Q: Having spent some time with you, do you A: Not particularly. Unlike The Cloud, I like have a sense of humour? cooking metaphors. They allow me to insist A: I don’t know, really. I am trying not to be that all data is cooked in some way. Raw ironic. I left it behind me some time before data in this sense is a myth. It’s in keeping The Cloud. In fact, I have not really used with the work of Constant, who use cooking irony since the mid nineties. I find it very hard metaphors and prefer the environment of to deal with the undecidability of Romantic the kitchen to the restaurant where choices irony: Do you mean this, or that? Irony al- are limited to what’s on the menu. There are ways makes me weary. So, I tried to learn, particular styles of cooking and I represent but gave up. I feel like I am missing out on one of those styles. something, though. But, you tell me?

Q: You seem to change from time to time. Q: Do you have any questions for us? What will happen after this? A: Don’t make me laugh.

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Works cited

Machine Research workshop, Brussels World Trade Center, 24-26 October 2016: http://machineresearch.constantvzw.org/ etherdump/interviewwithetherbox.diff.html. Web.

Etherbox: http://gitlab.constantvzw.org/aa/ etherbox. Source code.

Fuller, Matthew. “Interview with a Photocopier.” May 2004. http://fuller.spc. org/fuller/matthew-fuller-interview-with-a- photocopier/. Web.

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APRJA Volume 6, Issue 1, 2017

CONTRIBUTORS

Geoff Cox is Associate Professor/Reader in Fine Art/Digital Design at University of Plymouth/Aarhus University.

Brian House is an artist and doctoral candidate at Brown University.

Nathan Jones is a PhD candidate at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Maya Indira Ganesh is an activist at Tactical Technology Collective in Berlin, and PhD candidate at Leuphana University, Lüneburg.

Abelardo Gil-Fournier is an artist and researcher, and a PhD student at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton.

Maja Bak Herrie is a PhD Fellow at School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University.

John Hill is an artist and doctoral candidate at Liverpool John Moores University.

Sam Skinner is an artist, curator and PhD candidate at Manchester Metropolitan University & FACT, Liverpool.

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