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Living in a time in which “nothing remains the same but nothing essentially changes”
written by: Christoffer Andersson External link.
A while ago, I stumbled upon an article External link. about some of the earliest finds of tools on Earth—stone tools dating to around 3.3 million years ago, found in northwestern Kenya. A vain part of me wishes that I could say I stumbled upon this article because of my recent visit to the Natural History Museum with my son or through some very important academic research I was undertaking. Unfortunately, it was, as it most often is, a result of proficient procrastination and (because of that very proficiency) a very finely tuned content recommendation algorithm reckoning that putting this in front of me would generate some feedback in terms of clicks, taps, and sustained attention on my part. This turned out to be correct.
I digress, though. The thing about the earliest tools that I found quite interesting is that they predate the arrival of our species' particular configuration of genetic material by some 3 million years. Humans, and even most of our ancestors, it seems quite clear, have never existed without our dear “stuff.” We have always been social, and we have always had some stuff to tinker with.
Our stuff has been different throughout the years though. In the early days, it was mostly made of stone, bone, furs, wood, and clay. Nowadays, it’s made of metal, silicon, and plastics. Nonetheless, the human condition has always been one amidst stuff. One could say with some historical certainty that our experience has always been mediated by various materialities. At some point—it's very difficult if not impossible to pinpoint when exactly (maybe right away even)—we started to have systematic ideas about our stuff. At that point, it arguably went from being general stuff and discrete tools to technology. Techniques materialized into increasingly more complex configurations of stuff, people, and ideas. Stuff turned into technologies such as irrigation systems, mining, metallurgy, weaving, and so on.
We now live in a time in which all of this has been going on for at least ten thousand years. It seems very likely that this will continue to be the case. Our species always has been, and probably always will be, amidst a whole lot of stuff and technologies. All that said, it is important to consider just what kind of stuff this very general ‘we’ allows to mediate the human condition. After all, a life of scraping pelts with stone knifes and playing a bone flute is quite different from a life spent watching an AI play games on Twitch External link., presumably.
In his book “Amusing Ourselves to Death External link.” from 1984, media scholar Neil Postman draws our attention to two very different dystopian imaginaries from the first half of the 20th century. In George Orwell’s “1984,” totalitarianism is a top-down affair. It is through coercive government action and mind-bending propaganda that individual freedom is eroded or indeed erased. The ever-present gaze of Big Brother paired with the threat of swift and violent action keeps people in check. The alternative dystopia in Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” on the other hand, is not so much that Big Brother is watching but rather that we are the ones watching him. It is a tale of totalitarianism borne out of nihilism and hedonism and upheld by willing subjects rather than a police state. As Postman puts it “when a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk”.
While Postmans prescient warnings were directed at the way journalism, politics, education, religion and public discourse all collapsed into entertainment through the medium of television, we are today living our lives mediated through new technologies. The medium of today are algorithms that are precision engineered by the best minds money can buy in order to attract attention. Because it turns out that what’s more valuable than precious metals, what can be turned into political power easier than the US dollar, and what can shape geopolitics more than hydrocarbons in the ground, is attention.
If the revolutionary part of the industrial revolution of the 19th centaury was the innovation of commodifying human labor, and thus making it possible to aggregate labor and accumulate capital at unseen rates, the innovation of the 21st centaury was the commodification of attention. One person’s attention for a couple of seconds on its own is nearly worthless. But in aggregate it turns out to be the most treasured commodity of our time.
If we as Postman put it were “amusing ourselves to death” during the television age, we are now “doom scrolling ourselves to apathy”. In Huxley’s “Brave New World” it is the drug ‘Soma’ that keeps the masses in a perpetual state of chaotic bliss and nihilism. As it turned out back here in reality what’s even more effective than mind altering drugs is digital technology. American tech companies in the early 00’s serendipitously stumbled into a new mode of capitalism in their search to capitalize on the vast amounts of behavioral data they aggregated through products such as Google Search. Drugs, while very promising as a general means for spreading political apathy, are just not as effective for catalyzing mass consumption as targeted ads, and not as effective at spreading disinformation as social media. Although, I think many drugs have proved quite conducive to disinformation as well. Drugs might still be big business, illicit or not, but it pales in comparison to the algorithmic attention business. It’s all well and good for people to muck around not caring much, but if nobody can make money on shipping plastic from China directly to the doorstep it’s a bit of a problem. Although, it’s not like it’s an either-or sort of situation either, plenty of stoned people are busy watching endless conspiracy videos about aliens building the pyramids and ordering food from their favorite delivery app and tossing in new slippers by sheer momentum at any given moment. Digression again though.
Shoshanna Zuboff describes in her 2019 book “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism External link.” in detail how technological advances and new business models have created an infrastructure to trade in the new representational artifacts she calls behavioral futures. For example, the algorithmically reckoned indicator that a person online based on all available behavioral data is perfect to be served an ad for pizza and maybe some new slippers. The system Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism is partly a result of the very effective automation made by companies such as Alphabet (formerly Google) and Meta (formerly Facebook) in the realm of data processing of online behavior. Leveraging huge amounts of data generated by human behavior online – what we click, tap and spend time on – and feeding this to predictive algorithms has created unprecedented amounts of wealth concentration and oligarchical political power for a new class of tech-billionaires. On the front end, these products have become increasingly fine-tuned and optimized for holding user attention. In the quaint early days of Facebook or Instagram the feed was populated by a chronological showing of updates in one’s social network. Now it’s all algorithmically chosen content that will be as attention grabbing as possible.
While attention in aggregate have become the commodity of our times, it is striking that the zeitgeist is also one of lack of attention for us as individuals. Indeed, we are impoverished it seems, incapable of focusing our attention on one thing for any long stretch of time. Even this piece of inconsequential writing is probably (certainly) too long for being a text for a blog. This peculiar medium born in the idealistic times of the early web that common wisdom says should never be longer than two sips of coffee, otherwise the restless reader will move on, scroll on to some other tantalizing yet vapid piece of #content. The algorithms that increasingly power all forms of content distribution are tuned to keep attention at all costs. As a result, the world as experienced through screens showing news feeds, endless YouTube shorts and TikToks, and so on, is a confusing, polarized, segregated world in which there always is conflict and contention but never resolution or collective action.
German sociologist Hartmut Rosa identifies this malaise of modernity as a problem of alienation, an anxiety bred by our shared inability to face the confusing conflagration of social acceleration and constant escalation that digital technology in particular causes together with the utter and obvious unsustainability of it all. Or as Rosa puts it “a condition where nothing remains the same but nothing essentially changes”.
There is a certain absurdity over the fact that hundreds of billions of dollars, vast energy resources and ungodly amounts of human thought and attention has been poured into the technologies that allow for the development of generative AI; products that makes it possible for anyone to generate a video of labradors having cocktails on the moon External link.. It’s very amusing and for a short while sooths the restless and alienated soul of the user. But it’s all very hollow. It all, and now I pointedly generalize around algorithmic technologies, lacks what Rosa calls resonance. According to Rosa what we need to combat a rising sense of alienation are resonant experiences, those ineffable moments of being with the world, situated in social relationships of care. In pursuit of a quick fix for the ailing alienation of modernity, it is all too easy to succumb to the Soma of surveillance capitalism though.
Love, parenting a child, hiking through nature, dinner with friends, sleeping in, sacrality, pleasure, pain, sadness. It’s all predicated on being in and with the world, existing as the type of being that is situated and embodied in the world and always already amidst social practices and culture. Resonance is, according to Rosa, “a mode of relating to the world in which the subject feels touched, moved, or addressed by the people, places, objects, etc., he or she encounters.” The human experience is so vast compared to the very narrow slice of the world that algorithmic technologies take part in. While computer software is endlessly busy looping through matrix operations and swapping bits in and out of random-access memory, humans are busy living. Or could be at least. Maybe even ought to be if we are to find resonance.
Let’s not lose sight of this very obvious and banal fact. In a world in which endless resources are poured into algorithmic technologies and computational capabilities, ostensibly for economic and geopolitical reasons but obviously since these technologies are the machines through which attention can be harvested, aggregated and accumulated, let’s not forget to look beyond technology in pursuit of solving problems.
It’s all very well to be interested in just trying to make a work task a smidge bit more efficient. It’s not my message that we should be glib about the economic and demographic conditions forcing organizations to increase productivity. Nor to say that technological tools can’t be immensely helpful and important. The increases in productivity and wealth that technology have contributed towards are not to be taken for granted, even though the costs have been steep for our planet. And it’s not so strange to anxiously scroll through social media feeds just to sooth the boiling mess that is one’s mind after eight hours of video calls and e-mails (which soon are to be AI-written I gather which presumably will make it even more soul crushing to check the inbox). Sometimes you stumble upon interesting stuff also, such as a story about the earliest tools.
But the stuff that mediates the human condition do matter. It matters for politics, for the environment, for the dignity and meaningfulness of lived experiences. I think it’s fair to be a bit skeptical towards our algorithmically mediated present and imagine a more thoughtfully and purposefully resonant future. We can imagine a set of digital technologies not borne out of the business models of surveillance capitalism but out of a collective wish for a sustainable world. We could have technology that doesn’t constantly demand our attention. It’s still well within our power to shift our attention away from our screens and towards each other.
For any questions/comments, kindly email digma@mdu.se
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