It's the shoreline at Niigata that comes to mind whenever I encounter promises about all the wonderful things that some new technology is supposed to do for us, especially when it's supposed to do those things automatically. Beyond whatever aesthetic damage they do to the coastline, it is now thought that the tetrapods racked up all along the water’s edge actually accelerate the erosion they were intended to forestall; they are mostly produced these days as a tacit state subsidy of the Japanese concrete industry. At best a misguided allocation of energy and investment, they are in some ways worse than useless.
And so it seems to be with so many of the technologies that are offered to us on the premise that they will spontaneously produce the conditions of equity, justice or freedom. The tetrapods on the Niigata strand suggest to us that there are all kinds of circumstances that capture and overtake technical interventions, any number of factors that stand to subvert designerly intention. This is what the great British cyberneticist Stafford Beer meant when he argued that “the purpose of a system is what it does.” On this theory, it doesn’t matter whether some technology was intended by its designer to enslave or to liberate, to preserve or to destroy. All that matters is what it is observed to do, and we ought to evaluate it on that basis alone. If the project of coastal engineering based on concrete tetrapods demonstrably channels subsidy to a few favored firms and constituencies, does so without preventing beach erosion, and is allowed to persist in doing so over long stretches of time, then we are bound to conclude that this is its sole actual purpose.
This is the razor we need to apply to augmented reality, or 3D printing, or distributed autonomous organizations: what is salient is not anything their visionary designers may have had in mind when imagining them, but what states of being they are actually seen to enact. And if given technologies cannot be evaluated at the level of their designers’ intention, we need to be still more wary of the promises made to us by developers, promoters and others with a material interest in seeing them spread. The most misleading aspect of this body of rhetoric perennially resides in the gulf between technoutopian claims about what some emergent innovation “might” or “could” give rise to, on the one hand, and anything it has actually been seen to do on the other. Very often the claimed benefits never do come to pass, while the easily foreseeable (and, in fact, explicitly foreseen) negative consequences invariably do crop up, and are left for others to deal with. This is why I repress a shudder whenever someone speaks of the emancipatory or liberatory “potential” of some technology under discussion. To have hope and to nurture it in others doesn’t need to mean that we let go of rigor.
But these skirmishes at the surface layer never fundamentally alter the deeper propositions presented to us by contemporary technics: that everyday life is something to be mediated by networked processes of measurement, analysis and control; that access to resources and life-defining opportunities can justly be apportioned by algorithm; and above all that human discretion is no longer adequate to the challenges of complexity presented to us by a world that seems to have absconded from our understanding. The shift in fortunes experienced by a single company, or even sector, never come anywhere close to derailing these core logics of our epoch, nor the posthuman capitalism they enable. The ecosystem that turns affect and experience into data, and data into revenue and the shape of life chances, is largely armored against the decisive, single-stroke disruption—and, if we are to believe the theoreticians of machine learning and adaptive intelligence, the ability to anticipate and preempt existential threats the apex participants of this ecosystem enjoy will only improve over time. There will be no masterstroke that all at once undoes their grip on our economies, the structure of our daily choices, or our imaginations.
Part of what keeps us from seeing this clearly is path dependency, or more simply momentum. We’re not so much becoming-cyborg as we are already halfway distributed, with our work, our familial and social lives, our memories, our capacity to imagine and even our cognitive processes in a very real sense strewn across the mesh of data centers and server farms, transmission infrastructures and interface devices that constitutes the contemporary global network. We are fully committed to this scattered apparatus, many of us, and to some degree—that material recalcitrance again—we’re compelled to go wherever it takes us.
Entrained in this way as we are, each new capability that is developed and offered to us begs the question of its origins. It presents us with certain forward lines of flight, but we rarely pause to ask whether any of those lines happens to proceed along a direction that we intended to travel in when we embarked. This year’s laptop is lighter than last year’s model, and next year’s will be lighter still; this version of the app uses an image-search algorithm a thousand times faster than that in the last version; the new car firmware provides for semi-autonomous operation, and that is sufficient unto the day. These days, the software updates mostly unfold politely in the background, unspooling quietly in the overnight hours, while buying a new laptop or phone every year or two has become virtually compulsory if we want to keep using the applications and other software everyone else does. In either case, the hassle of choice has largely been engineered out of the process. But that act of engineering deprives us of an opportunity to consider whether we really wanted to carry our workplace and all its responsibilities around with us everywhere we went, subscribe to a service that lets anyone identify us from a picture, or surrender control of our vehicle to an algorithm that might operate on a moral calculus different from any we might be comfortable with.
Whenever we get swept up in the self-reinforcing momentum and seductive logic of some new technology, we forget to ask what else it might be doing, how else it might be working, and who ultimately benefits most from its appearance. Why time has been diced into the segments between notifications, why we feel so inadequate to the parade of images that reach us through our devices, just why it is that we feel so often feel hollow and spent. What might connect our choices and the processes that are stripping the planet, filthing the atmosphere, and impoverishing human and nonhuman lives beyond number. Whether and in what way our actions might be laying the groundwork for an oppression that is grimmer yet and still more total. And finally we forget to ask whether, in our aspiration to overcome the human, we are discarding a gift we already have at hand and barely know what to do with.
If we’re disturbed by what we find when we do finally answer queries like these to our own satisfaction, if we dislike the picture of the world and our place in it that we’re left with, we find ourselves confronted with a final set of questions: Can these radical technologies be renounced? Can they be resisted? And if not, can they at least be steered toward somewhat more congenial ends?