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Title: Alone in an Electric Shock Room |
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Author: Tanja Brandmayr |
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Date: 17 March 2021 |
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n observation during the first Corona lockdown, on the topic of doing nothing: It was astounding that already after the first few days after the outside world was locked away, numerous texts, commentaries, and newsfeeds started being circulated that suspiciously and hyperactively told of all the things that could finally be done in the sudden nothingness. Going from one hyperactivity to the next taking place mainly on the net. I just remembered a study that was taken in 2014. The setting was straight forward, the question was simply: Do people who are forced into doing nothing actually prefer doing nothing, or would they opt for a (weak) electric shock that THEY GIVE TO THEMSELVES? Many of those who took part of the study chose the electric shock, which was slightly surprising. During a small, non-representative survey among friends, I came to the same conclusion, or rather, the decision for the electric shock came up more often than expected. And yes, it was accompanied by laughter. But it was there. Maybe this says something about the human condition, the human need for "something". Already in the 17^th^ century *Blaise Pascal* said: "The tragedy of humans is that they are incapable of remaining calmly in a room". Blaise Pascal obviously had a good sense for people, maybe even for a future Conditio Humana organized around electricity. Thinking about all those experiments based on electric shocks à la Milgram, the question could be asked why the electric shock is such a popular method for scientific study, and yet the answer to the question why human beings have such a propensity towards torment could be simpler and more complicated at the same time: Because otherwise EVERYTHING feels LIKE NOTHING. |
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I am currently working on an SF-exploitation story that begins with early studies on electricity. Historical examples include rich kids from the early 19^th^ century who had electrostatic generators to fulfil their inquisitive pleasures. These machines produce static electricity in order to, e.g. get children's hair to stand on end. As a fledging discipline, science simultaneously -- in the late 18^th^, early 19^th^ century -- set up experimental arrangements on "animalistic electricity", which describes the experiments done with frogs, snails, dogs, oxen, etc (Galvanism). The high point of the research on the electric force of life was the grey area Galvani's nephew, a certain Giovanni Aldini, wandered through, who among other things tried to revive a dead body with electricity. He obtained the body of an executed murderer and hooked it up to a current. A description of the experiment reads as follows: "a mighty, convulsive breath was triggered. The eyes opened, the lips quivered \...". And so on. This was not only absolutely thrilling, but an officially mandated surgical attendant was supposedly so shocked by this that he died in his home shortly thereafter. It was especially these experiments (and the public discourse around them due to the anti-vivisection movement in the late 19^th^ century) that have given science a lasting image problem -- it was seen as a chamber of horror. The execution of a grown elephant on the public "electric chair"around 1900 symbolically completes the picture: After all the small animals, this remained the biggest example of execution through high voltage during the so-called electricity wars in the late 19^th^ century (the fight between direct and alternating current, Edison vs Tesla). This electrocution took place as part of the "animal trials" that were still not unusual at that time: The circus elephant Topsy had killed a human who had been tormenting the animal with a burning cigarette. The execution of Topsy then took place amidst a huge electricity company propaganda campaign and an entertainment complex. In the list of Edison's coin-operated Kinetoscopes the filmed event bore the title: "ELECTROCUTING AN ELEPHANT. Topsy, the famous 'Baby' elephant, was electrocuted at Coney Island on January 4, 1903. We secured an excellent picture of the execution. \[\...\]" |
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This goes to show that next to the human horror of nothingness, as well as the need for amusement (electrostatic generators) there is another short but highly intense story to be told, that remains unseen and focusses on electricity and death in numerous aspects. At least that is the plot line for the SF-exploitation that I am working on: It is set in an undefined future and is about weak shocks of a net-"entity", that brings the currency "E°mo" out of human beings. Humans feed the net with the currency time and emotion, they have moved from a regular raw material of tapped data resources, to a controllable, fully exploitable body to the resource. The protagonist Nik is autistic, something that seems to have become normal in this later society ("Autistic people do not feel too little, but rather too much"). However, over the course of the story Nik becomes a "hyper-feeler" more and more. Through so-called "emotional sensations", he is able to feel even the slightest sensations on the "ladder of realms" that quasi represents the inter-applications of the net through an electro-magnetic trigger system. This includes the data of its human hosts, but also all the non-human scripts of nature, and in one chapter also that of animals. The things that "hyper-feelers"then perceive in the entity always smells (generally speaking) slightly burned and faintly dead on the one hand, and on the other, Nik manifests a collective yet unique sensation in his own body from a form of left over emotion that acts as a continued counter script of pain. Under the name "Alone in the Room: Interior 1 - ∞" he sends empathy shocks through the system. At first, to resist. Later on he realizes that he is actually keeping the entity alive through his actions. As it permanently is in danger of collapsing into the systemic death of uniformity, and must keep itself afloat by expanding with more and newer datasets. So-called "InfluencerMs", immediate E°mo-executors, show up with every induced counter script imaginable. However, in the strangest manner possible, after they show up everything remains the same. This will represent the riddle of consciousness per se at the end. Enough spoilers. However, let me say this last thing: Of course war is not eradicated in the future, and of course beneath the surface the bone breaking mechanisms of techno-capitalism keep on turning. |
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And with this, I would like to turn to lockdown excursion number 2, a little, true story about the birch tree and climate change. Amidst all the reports on the virus in March 2020, there was one thing that was not talked about as much: The birch was particularly bad for us allergy sufferers this spring. It was said that in its struggle to survive, birch trees emitted a significantly higher amount of pollen this year, because it had become to warm for the tree. Ever since then, I (an allergy sufferer) cannot help but think that this uninterrupted spread of data, this content blast, but also this permanent sending of SM, streams, or whatever is being done to generate data, is nothing other than a struggle to survive -- a human struggle, permanently sending and receiving small impulses of data, in order to take part in the large scale experiment of the dimension-less data shock, so that we may somehow feel alive. Within a culture that is desperately trying to inseminate itself (including tree-to-tree communication) faced with a dead end in its big-data-metabolism, while it is actually dying. |
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This text reaches far into the past, into our reality, into a dystopia, and so forth. It does not provide answers. Orientated towards low-tech, I have been working with a premise of art and technology coordinates. What is important to me, is the assessment of fundamental shifts, or rather a re-thinking of banal terms such as "matters", "material", and "things of interest". HERE, I have arrived at the material and medium of a dissolved electro-magnetic total body, permanently in danger of collapsing into itself. That is why I say that a form of "impure, unique experience", thus a feeling body carries THE greatest potential of resistance. At the same time, this feeling resistance forms the dark resource that keep this uniform system alive in the first place. Considering the danger of dissolution and losing context, it is important to me to set up vanishing points far in the distance, of which none of us have the faintest idea during this time of transitional opportunism. However: During this time of flying blind, we should at least try to reconfigure mind and body -- so that we may find entirely different, maybe even inward horizons. It is better than nothing to write scripts like these (<https://nik.stwst.at/>), because: We know how easily human beings can fall from the edge of dimension-less discs. |
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**Tanja Brandmayr**, born 1969, freelance artist and author. Part of the Stadtwerkstatt. She conducts art and context research on Quasi-art - with all the matters that seem relevant here. She is currently completing her publication on this. She is also the editor of the art and culture booklets: Die Referentin, Versorgerin. Lives in Linz/Austria. |
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[quasikunst.stwst.at](https://quasikunst.stwst.at), [versorgerin.stwst.at](https://versorgerin.stwst.at), [diereferentin.at](https://diereferentin.at) |
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<!-- **Picture Subtext**: Wikimedia Commons / A frame from the 74 second short documentary film *Electrocuting an Elephant*, produced by Edwin S. Porter or Jacob Blair Smith for the Edison Manufacturing Company, 1903. --> |
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Title: If You Lived Here, You\'d Be at Work Already |
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Author: Marloes de Valk |
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Date: 24 March 2021 |
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Nine months into the COVID-19 pandemic, I accepted an invitation to join an event. It would take place, like all other events these days, in my house. The organiser send me an enthusiastic email with a Zoom background image attached, mentioning the image would make for a nice tool to hide anything I don\'t want share on the Zoom grid. I instantly started dreaming of also replacing my voice and face with augmented reality and AI, but was rudely awakened when I couldn't even make the background image work. My laptop's CPU is too old. Video conferencing tools handle background image calculations on the client-side, to reduce network traffic and latency. My laptop can hardly handle video conferencing without augmentation, client-side calculations are well out of its league. |
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Suddenly this phrase popped into my head: \"If you lived here, you\'d be at work already\". It's an advertisement in the movie "Sorry to bother you" from writer and director Boots Riley. The movie takes place in a dystopian future where a company called Worry Free, offers employees "lifetime labour contracts" including food and housing at the company. At Worry Free you literally live at work. When I saw the movie two years ago, I had no idea how well this ad would reflect 2020's reality of living at the office, even if the office is in the home instead of home being at the office. Somehow all my things -- my house, my laptop, my printer, my electricity, my heating -- are now also used by my employer, and by Zoom, Microsoft and Google. It was an emergency. There was no time to really think this through. Nine months later though, many companies are thinking about making working at home a permanent change. Less traveling, smaller office buildings and thus less overhead and a smaller environmental footprint. |
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It is an industry trend to shift network bottlenecks into local computational tasks. It's called edge computing. It is not a new method, it started in the 90s with the advent of Content Distribution Networks for a faster distribution of video to end users. Today, data storage and computational tasks are both offloaded to the edge node in order to improve latency and reduce network traffic. It is particularly helpful for tasks that require fast processing speed, such as facial recognition and augmented reality, but also for bandwidth heavy applications such as cloud gaming and the growing pile of smart objects on the edge of networks, that are constantly phoning home to corporate servers generating massive amounts of data to be processed, real-time data generated by sensors and users, with zero tolerance for latency[^1]. After all these years of Software as a Service and cloud storage, moving our software and data onto corporate servers many hops away from our modem, now some of that is once again decentralized, just like the office. |
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It seems I am living on the edge -- edge working, edge computing, both promising a lower carbon footprint, but how? First I was told that the cloud was more green, because it is more efficient than my crappy hardware. Now, when I'm in a video conference and my laptop is sucking the power grid dry to be able to keep up with the conversation, I'm being told it's more efficient to use edge computing because it lessens network traffic. Total energy consumption is going up either way. My energy provider installed a smart meter so I can gain insight into my usage and thus magically become more energy efficient. And so climate change became my responsibility. Perhaps the smartness of the meter is its ability to distract from the urgent need to switch to renewable energy (Gabrys, 2015)? It's yet another device on the edge of the network, consuming resources well before and after its use-phase, near future e-waste, increasing the need for bandwidth, increasing power consumption. Technology as problem and solution. Is that what they mean with the circular economy? |
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This shift of responsibility away from corporations, or the state for that matter, is an old strategy. It privatizes and centralizes services, while outsourcing responsibilities of care and maintenance. It is also one of the oldest forms of greenwashing. In the 1950s the disposable packaging industry started a campaign, "Keep America Beautiful", in response to an attempt at legislation to reduce waste. The campaign was the launch of the concept of littering. Instead of attacking the problem of plastic waste by stopping the production of disposable packaging, the campaign placed the responsibility with consumers. "People start pollution. People can stop it."[^2] We are still dutifully reaping the rewards, picking up after ourselves, updating our hardware, lowering the thermostat, hiding our mess. |
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Edge computing is promising endless streams of low latency game play and video streaming. It is promising to be useful for managing renewable energy, to be more energy efficient than data centers and to reduce network traffic. On closer inspection, it is yet another example of capitalism profiting from the problems it creates, of neoliberal doctrine outsourcing burdens, while privatizing once public infrastructures and centralising those once decentralised,. Since the start of the pandemic, the tech industry has seized the opportunity to profit from disaster and followed Airbnb into people's homes. Web 2.0 introduced a business strategy that, by giving access to the means of production of content, could gain ownership over and generate profit from the product (Carr, 2006). While edge computing and remote working, users have to also pay for access to and buy elements of the means of production, through the costs of electricity, hardware, heating and housing. As Jodi Dean puts it: "personal property becomes an instrument for the capital and data accumulation of the lords of platform" (Dean, 2020). |
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Can we still get rid of the almighty lords that have wedged themselves in between us and our work, between us and those we want to communicate with? Dean points out that current leftist dreams of small communities creating local commons, with a snarky mention of artisanal cheese, are in some sense elistist. These dreams can only be realised by the few, are culturally specific and their localism expresses tendencies to, rather than resistance against, neofeudalism (ibid.). A refusal of the silent creep of appropriation of personal property through the imagining and building of communal, more sustainable computational infrastructures, however small, is a meaningful form of resistance though. Combined with a refusal of individual responsibility for global problems such as climate change, it is about holding those who lead harmful industries, and those governments aiding them, responsible. Rather than an escapist retreat, nourishing networks reimagine the infrastructures we depend on for organising collective action and refuse to put these in the hands of the lords of platform. |
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[^1]: 5G is linked to this development, even though mostly targeted at mobile broadband for handheld devices, it offers the transfer speed needed for businesses to use edge computing without needing to rethink their centralized core infrastructure. 5G is notoriously energy inefficient. According to Earl McCune, professor in the Electronic Circuits and Architectures group at TU Delft, 2G had an energy efficiency of 60%, "For 5G, the efficiency will be only 10%, meaning that \[for every 10 watts\] nine watts will be turned into heat." (Engelsman, no date) |
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[^2]: The campaign still exists, among the sponsors are many companies responsible for disposable plastic packaging and pollution -- such as Pepsico, Dow Chemical Company, McDonald's, Mars Wrigley and UPS -- and their trade associations -- the Plastics Industry Association, the International Bottled Water Association, []{#anchor}the National Association of Convenience Stores and the American Chemistry Council. <https://kab.org/about/partners/> |
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**Marloes de Valk** (NL) is a software artist and writer in the post-despair stage of coping with the threat of global warming and being spied on by the devices surrounding her. Surprised by the obsessive dedication with which we, even post-Snowden, share intimate details about ourselves to an often not too clearly defined group of others, astounded by the deafening noise we generate while socializing with the technology around us, she is looking to better understand why. She is a PhD researcher at the Centre for the Study of the Networked Image at London South Bank University, in collaboration with The Photographer's Gallery. She's a thesis supervisor at the master Experimental Publishing at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. With Iodine dynamics she released the 8 bit NES game What Remains. Her latest project is Villains and Heroes, a game blending interactive fiction and investigative journalism in which you mingle with the supporters of Trump’s presidential campaign and bullshit your way through conversations with members of the think tanks and lobby groups that promote the denial of climate change. |
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<https://bleu255.com/~marloes/> |
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## References |
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Carr, N. (2006) Digital sharecropping, *ROUGH TYPE*. Available from: [http://www.roughtype.com/?p=634](http://www.roughtype.com/?p=634) \[Accessed 15 January 2021\] |
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Dean, J. (2020) Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?, *Los Angeles Review of Books.* Available from:<https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/neofeudalism-the-end-of-capitalism/> \[Accessed 13 January 2021\]. |
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Gabrys, J. (2015) Powering the Digital: From Energy Ecologies to Electronic Environmentalism, in: *Media and the ecological crisis*. New York: Routledge. |
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Engelsman, M. (no date). How not to waste energy on 5G, *TU |
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Delft*. Available from: [https://www.tudelft.nl/en/stories/articles/how-not-to-waste-energy-on-5g/](https://www.tudelft.nl/en/stories/articles/how-not-to-waste-energy-on-5g/) \[Accessed 15 January 2021\]. |
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Keep America Beautiful (1953). \[advertisement\] <https://www.npr.org/2019/09/04/757539617/the-litter-myth> |
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*Sorry to Bother You.* 2018. \[film\] Boots Riley. Los Angeles: |
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Annapurna Pictures. |
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<p>“The Pandemic's Dark Cloud” was written in November 2020 as a reflection on the relationship between the pandemic and environmental media, with a focus on “the cloud” and its undergirding networked infrastructure. The central idea of this piece is to demonstrate the interconnectedness of all things – covid, care, community, nature, ewaste, racism, greed – in both the making and undoing of our modern communication systems.</p> |
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<p>This piece is intended as a provocation, so your thoughts and feelings are very welcomed!</p> |
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<p><em>Mél Hogan is the Director of the </em><a href="https://www.environmentalmedialab.com/"><em>Environmental Media Lab (EML)</em></a>* and <em><a href="https://www.melhogan.com/"><em>Associate Professor</em></a></em> at the University of Calgary, Canada. She is also an Associate Editor of the Canadian Journal of Communication. Career highlights so far include keynoting the 2020 McLuhan lecture at the Canadian Embassy in Berlin, and giving a plenary at transmediale 2020.<br /> |
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@mel_hogan / melhogan.com / mhogan@ucalgary.ca*</p> |
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<p><strong>The Pandemic's Dark Cloud </strong>by Mél Hogan</p> |
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<p>As the pandemic settled into consciousness across the globe, humans devolved. People in countries where the response to COVID-19 was most mismanaged started to snack a lot.<sup><a href="#fn1" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref1" role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a></sup> Pre-sliced packaged charcuterie. Ritz crackers. Oreo cookies. In their growing helplessness, people also sharply increased their consumption of alcohol, especially women in the US.<sup><a href="#fn2" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref2" role="doc-noteref"><sup>2</sup></a></sup> For some it was drugs. Those lucky enough to keep their job doubled down on work, staying at their stations or desks for longer hours – part avoidance and part stuckness into systems that could offer no other plan.</p> |
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<p>The dread by now is cumulative. Pick your pain: covid19, white supremacy, climate catastrophe. People are reaching new levels of “doomscrolling” on social media, playing online video games, and “binge-watching” Netflix as ways to pass the time, waiting on the virus to run its course, or for politicians to make a plan. As things shut down, Zoom quickly took over as the way to communicate at a safe social distance. Education quickly became clicking at screens. No more shopping in person meant ordering by way of interfaces. All of these screens more or less allowed things to continue, if not as normal, as a viable alternative in the meantime. It remains to be seen if this online world we’ve adopted so quickly is the new normal, and here to stay, or if it’ll reflect to us the inefficiencies of how we lived before and save us from ourselves. Or, maybe it will call into question the terrible inequities that are only made more evident by this pandemic.</p> |
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<p>By April, the news media were already reporting that lockdowns had meant cleaner air and clearer water.<sup><a href="#fn3" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref3" role="doc-noteref"><sup>3</sup></a></sup> Satellite images showed less pollution over China and the US. Animals were found roaming freely in different parts of India.<sup><a href="#fn4" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref4" role="doc-noteref"><sup>4</sup></a></sup> “Nature is healing” became a popular meme celebrating the lessening of human impact and nature’s recovery.<sup><a href="#fn5" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref5" role="doc-noteref"><sup>5</sup></a></sup> But were the effects of lockdown, or quarantine, of humans being trapped in their homes, and of doing everything online, truly a more sustainable way of going about life? Had the turn to “the cloud” proven to be the weightless way forward? Social isolation and disinformation propagation problems aside, could the internet become a tool to inadvertently save the environment?</p> |
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<p>In thinking of the internet and the many devices connected to it, these account for approximately 2-4% of global greenhouse emissions, which only promise to double by 2025.<sup><a href="#fn6" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref6" role="doc-noteref"><sup>6</sup></a></sup> Data centres and vast server farms (where data is stored and transmitted) draw more than 80% of their energy from fossil fuel power stations. Online video alone – porn, Netflix, YouTube, Zoom – generated 60% of the world’s total data flows before covid19 hit. A Google search uses as much energy as cooking an egg or boiling water in an electric kettle.<sup><a href="#fn7" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref7" role="doc-noteref"><sup>7</sup></a></sup> Yearly emails for work (and not accounting for spam) have been calculated to be equal in terms of CO2 emissions to driving 320 kilometres.<sup><a href="#fn8" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref8" role="doc-noteref"><sup>8</sup></a></sup> These numbers have likely gone up considerably since the pandemic.<sup><a href="#fn9" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref9" role="doc-noteref"><sup>9</sup></a></sup> This way of living wasn’t sustainable then, and it certainly isn’t now.</p> |
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<p>There are search engines (eg. Ecosia<sup><a href="#fn10" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref10" role="doc-noteref"><sup>10</sup></a></sup>) and add-ons (eg. Carbonalyser by The Shift Project,<sup><a href="#fn11" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref11" role="doc-noteref"><sup>11</sup></a></sup> green-algorithms.org<sup><a href="#fn12" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref12" role="doc-noteref"><sup>12</sup></a></sup>) that help measure user impacts on the environment, but these miss addressing the bigger questions – such as moving away from confronting personal use to the systemic, material, and ideological issues baked into the internet. Why is the internet like this? The question is more political than it is purely technological. It’s more emotional, even, than it is political. Because we’ve drifted so far away from understanding nature as inherent to human and non-human wellbeing alike, towards unrelenting and exploitative capitalism and extractivism, it means we now have these massively entangled systems that reinforce one another, generate profit for the very few, but in the end benefit nothing and nobody.<sup><a href="#fn13" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref13" role="doc-noteref"><sup>13</sup></a></sup> These systems are harder to abolish or undo, so instead we turn to solutions that lessen their impacts, and we consider the rest inevitable – or worse, natural. We might, for example, shift data centers to cooler climates to save on cooling costs, we might develop more efficient software, we might offer carbon offsetting and plant trees, but none of these technofixes reach the heart of the our current predicament: our solutions and our problems originate from the same short-sighted, greed-driven, competitive, and market-driven agendas that caused this global deadly pandemic in the first place.</p> |
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<p>In 2020, we are generating 50 million tons worldwide of electronic waste, with an annual growth of 5%.<sup><a href="#fn14" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref14" role="doc-noteref"><sup>14</sup></a></sup> This means that we produce e-waste at three times the rate that humans reproduce. Much e-waste is toxic and severely impacts land, water, plants, animals, and humans. This damage is permanent. At the other end of the supply chain, fields of wheat and corn have become lakes of toxic sludge to accommodate the rare earth mining industry.<sup><a href="#fn15" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref15" role="doc-noteref"><sup>15</sup></a></sup> From Mongolia to China to the Congo, people labour in dangerous conditions, mining through the ore-laden mud to find rare minerals to power our devices. Elsewhere, people work endless shifts to assemble computers, phones, tablets. It should be no surprise then that the internet that connects this all is toxic too, evidenced by both the work of content moderators who filter the internet, and the shady tactics used by Big Tech to evade taxes to get filthy rich off the backs of this global human-powered machine. As Ron Deibert put it recently in his 2020 CBC Massey Lectures, “If we continue on this path of unbridled consumption and planned obsolescence, we are doomed.”<sup><a href="#fn16" class="footnote-ref" id="fnref16" role="doc-noteref"><sup>16</sup></a></sup></p> |
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<p>So we can either become extinct from the repercussions of our centuries old destructive neoliberal colonial institutions, as the planet pushes back with more pandemics, storms, and violence, or we can get together and admit to our failures as colonisers. These failures tap into something profound, deeply broken, about what settlers have historically valued and continue to enact. We are living largely in the dark fantasies of ghosts – and these old, settler ideas haunt and break us. We can imagine better. We can make other decisions. We can tune our emotions to move from awareness to anxiety to action. We return public lands to Indigenous peoples. We defund police and dismantle white supremacy. We transform ourselves, and our communication systems will follow.</p> |
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<section class="footnotes" role="doc-endnotes"> |
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<li id="fn1" role="doc-endnote"><p><a href="https://www.convenience.org/Media/Daily/2020/May/1/6-Snack-Sales-Soar-During-Pandemic_Marketing"><em>https://www.convenience.org/Media/Daily/2020/May/1/6-Snack-Sales-Soar-During-Pandemic_Marketing</em></a> <a href="https://news.italianfood.net/2020/04/02/pre-sliced-packaged-charcuterie-partly-offsets-pandemic-blow/"><em>https://news.italianfood.net/2020/04/02/pre-sliced-packaged-charcuterie-partly-offsets-pandemic-blow/</em></a> <a href="https://www.foodbusinessnews.net/articles/16078-the-snack-trends-predicted-to-persist-post-pandemic"><em>https://www.foodbusinessnews.net/articles/16078-the-snack-trends-predicted-to-persist-post-pandemic</em></a><a href="#fnref1" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li> |
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<li id="fn2" role="doc-endnote"><p><a href="https://nypost.com/2020/04/13/americans-are-handling-coronavirus-pandemic-by-binging-on-snacks/"><em>https://nypost.com/2020/04/13/americans-are-handling-coronavirus-pandemic-by-binging-on-snacks/</em></a> <a href="https://www.herworld.com/gallery/life/wellness/overeating-binge-eating-covid19-pandemic-work-home/"><em>https://www.herworld.com/gallery/life/wellness/overeating-binge-eating-covid19-pandemic-work-home/</em></a><a href="#fnref2" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li> |
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<li id="fn3" role="doc-endnote"><p><a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/coronavirus-shutdowns-have-unintended-climate-benefits-n1161921"><em>https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/coronavirus-shutdowns-have-unintended-climate-benefits-n1161921</em></a><a href="#fnref3" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li> |
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<li id="fn4" role="doc-endnote"><p><a href="https://www.planetofstudents.com/blog/social-awareness/effects-of-lockdown-on-the-environment/"><em>https://www.planetofstudents.com/blog/social-awareness/effects-of-lockdown-on-the-environment/</em></a><a href="#fnref4" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li> |
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<li id="fn5" role="doc-endnote"><p><a href="https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emmanuelfelton/coronavirus-meme-nature-is-healing-we-are-the-virus"><em>https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emmanuelfelton/coronavirus-meme-nature-is-healing-we-are-the-virus</em></a><a href="#fnref5" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li> |
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<li id="fn6" role="doc-endnote"><p><a href="https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200305-why-your-internet-habits-are-not-as-clean-as-you-think"><em>https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200305-why-your-internet-habits-are-not-as-clean-as-you-think</em></a><a href="#fnref6" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li> |
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<li id="fn7" role="doc-endnote"><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ethicallivingblog/2009/jan/12/carbon-emissions-google"><em>https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ethicallivingblog/2009/jan/12/carbon-emissions-google</em></a><a href="#fnref7" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li> |
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<li id="fn8" role="doc-endnote"><p><a href="https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200305-why-your-internet-habits-are-not-as-clean-as-you-think"><em>https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200305-why-your-internet-habits-are-not-as-clean-as-you-think</em></a> and <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/technology-55002423"><em>https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/technology-55002423</em></a><a href="#fnref8" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li> |
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<li id="fn9" role="doc-endnote"><p><a href="https://theshiftproject.org/en/article/unsustainable-use-online-video/"><em>https://theshiftproject.org/en/article/unsustainable-use-online-video/</em></a><a href="#fnref9" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li> |
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<li id="fn10" role="doc-endnote"><p><a href="https://www.ecosia.org/"><em>https://www.ecosia.org/</em></a><a href="#fnref10" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li> |
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<li id="fn11" role="doc-endnote"><p><a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/carbonalyser/"><em>https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/carbonalyser/</em></a><a href="#fnref11" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li> |
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<li id="fn12" role="doc-endnote"><p><a href="http://www.green-algorithms.org/"><em>http://www.green-algorithms.org/</em></a><a href="#fnref12" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li> |
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<li id="fn13" role="doc-endnote"><p><a href="https://landback.org/manifesto/"><em>https://landback.org/manifesto/</em></a><a href="#fnref13" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li> |
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<li id="fn14" role="doc-endnote"><p><a href="https://www.thebalancesmb.com/e-waste-recycling-facts-and-figures-2878189"><em>https://www.thebalancesmb.com/e-waste-recycling-facts-and-figures-2878189</em></a><a href="#fnref14" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li> |
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<li id="fn15" role="doc-endnote"><p><a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1350811/In-China-true-cost-Britains-clean-green-wind-power-experiment-Pollution-disastrous-scale.html"><em>https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1350811/In-China-true-cost-Britains-clean-green-wind-power-experiment-Pollution-disastrous-scale.html</em></a><a href="#fnref15" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li> |
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<li id="fn16" role="doc-endnote"><p><a href="https://munkschool.exposure.co/a-qa-with-ron-deibert"><em>https://munkschool.exposure.co/a-qa-with-ron-deibert</em></a><a href="#fnref16" class="footnote-back" role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li> |
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</ol> |
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</section> |
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<p>Title: Re-Centralization of AI focusing on Social Justice Author: Adnan Hadzi, Denis Roio</p> |
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<h1 id="re---centralization-of-ai-focusing-on-social-justice">RE - CENTRALIZATION OF AI FOCUSING ON SOCIAL JUSTICE</h1> |
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<p>In order to lay the foundations for a discussion around the argument that the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies benefits the powerful few, 1 focussing on their own existential concerns, 2 we decided to narrow down our analysis of the argument to social justic (i.e. restorative justice). This paper signifies an edited version of Adnan Hadzi’s text on Social Justice and Artificial Intelligence, 3 exploring the notion of humanised artificial intelligence 4 in order to discuss potential challenges society might face in the future. The paper does not discuss current forms and applications of artificial intelligence, as, so far, there is no AI technology, which is self-conscious and self- aware, being able to deal with emotional and social intelligence. 5 It is a discussion around AI as a speculative hypothetical entity. One could then ask, if such a speculative self-conscious hardware/software system were created, at what point could one talk of personhood? And what criteria could there be in order to say an AI system was capable of committing AI crimes? Concerning what constitutes AI crimes the paper uses the criteria given in Thomas King et al.’s paper Artificial Intelligence Crime: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Foreseeable Threats and Solutions, 6 where King et al. coin the term “AI crime”. We discuss the construction of the legal system through the lens of political involvement of what one may want to consider to be ‘powerful elites’ 7 . In doing so we will be demonstrating that it is difficult to prove that the adoption of AI technologies is undertaken in a way, which mainly serves a powerful class in society. Nevertheless, analysing the culture around AI technologies with regard to the nature of law with a philosophical and sociological focus enables us to demonstrate a utilitarian and authoritarian trend in the adoption of AI technologies. Mason argues that “virtue ethics is the only ethics fit for the task of imposing collective human control on thinking machines” 8 and AI. We will apply virtue ethics to our discourse around artificial intelligence and ethics. As expert in AI safety Steve Omonhundro believes that AI is “likely to behave in antisocial and harmful ways unless they are very carefully designed.” 9 It is through virtue ethics that this paper will propose for such a design to be centred around restorative justice in order to take control over AI and thinking machines, following Mason’s radical defence of the human and his critique of current thoughts within trans- and post- humanism as a submission to machine logic.</p> |
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<p>The paper will conclude by proposing an alternative practically unattainable, approach to the current legal system by looking into restorative justice for AI crimes, 10 and how the ethics of care could be applied to AI technologies. In conclusion the paper will discuss affect 11 and humanised artificial intelligence with regards to the emotion of shame, when dealing with AI crimes. In order to discuss AI in relation to personhood this paper follows the descriptive psychology method 12 of the paradigm case formulation 13 developed by Peter Ossorio. 14 Similar to how some animal rights activists call for certain animals to be recognised as non-human persons, 15 this paper speculates on the notion of AI as a non-human person being able to reflect on ethical concerns. 16 Here Wynn Schwartz argues that “it is reasonable to include non-humans as persons and to have legitimate grounds for disagreeing where the line is properly drawn. In good faith, competent judges using this formulation can clearly point to where and why they agree or disagree on what is to be included in the category of persons.” 17 In the case of AI technologies we ask whether the current vision for the adoption of AI technologies, a vision which is mainly supporting the military-industrial complex through vast investments in army AI, 18 is a vision that benefits mainly powerful elites. In order to discuss these questions, one has to analyse the history of AI technologies leading to the kind of ‘humanised’ AI system this paper posits. The old-fashioned approach, 19 some may still say contemporary approach, was to primarily research into ‘mind-only’ 20 AI technologies/systems. Through high level reasoning, researchers were optimistic that AI technology would quickly become a reality. Those early AI technologies were a disembodied approach using high level logical and abstract symbols. By the end of the 80s researchers found that the disembodied approach was not even achieving low level tasks humans could easily perform. 21 During that period many researchers stopped working on AI technologies and systems, and the period is often referred to as the “AI winter”. 22 Rodney Brooks then came forward with the proposition of “Nouvelle AI”, 23 arguing that the old-fashioned approach did</p> |
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<p>not take into consideration motor skills and neural networks. Only by the end of the 90s did researchers develop statistical AI systems without the need for any high-level logical reasoning; 24 instead AI systems were ‘guessing’ through algorithms and machine learning. This signalled a first step towards humanistic artificial intelligence, as this resembles how humans make intuitive decisions; 25 here researchers suggest that embodiment improves cognition. 26 With embodiment theory Brooks argued that AI systems would operate best when computing only the data that was absolutely necessary. 27 Further in Developing Embodied Multisensory Dialogue Agents Michal Paradowski argues that without considering embodiment, e.g. the physics of the brain, it is not possible to create AI technologies/systems capable of comprehension. Foucault’s theories are especially helpful in discussing how the “rule of truth” has disciplined civilisation, allowing for an adoption of AI technologies which seem to benefit mainly the upper-class. But then should we think of a notion of ‘deep-truth’ as the unwieldy product of deep learning AI algorithms? Discussions around truth, Foucault states, form legislation into something that “decides, transmits and itself extends upon the effects of power” 28 . Foucault’s theories help to explain how legislation, as an institution, is rolled out throughout society with very little resistance, or “proletarian counter-justice” 29 .</p> |
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<p>Foucault explains that this has made the justice system and legislation a for-profit system. With this understanding of legislation, and social justice, one does need to reflect further on Foucault’s notion of how disciplinary power seeks to express its distributed nature in the modern state. Namely one has to analyse the distributed nature of those AI technologies, especially through networks and protocols, so that the link can now be made to AI technologies becoming ‘legally’ more profitable, in the hands of the upper-class. In Protocol, Alexander Galloway describes how these protocols changed the notion of power and how “control exists after decentralization” 30 . Galloway argues that protocol has a close connection to both Deleuze’s concept of control and Foucault’s concept of biopolitics 31 by claiming that the key to perceiving protocol as power is to acknowledge that “protocol is an affective, aesthetic force that has control over life itself.” 32 Galloway suggests that it is important to discuss more than the technologies, and to look into the structures of control within technological systems, which also include underlying codes and protocols, in order to distinguish between methods that can support collective production, e.g. sharing of AI technologies within society, and those that put the AI technologies in the hands of the powerful few. 33 Galloway’s argument in the chapter Hacking is that the existence of protocols “not only installs control into a terrain that on its surface appears actively to resist it” 34 , but goes on to create the highly controlled network environment. For Galloway hacking is “an index of protocological transformations taking place in the broader world of techno-culture.” 35 Having said this, the prospect could be raised that restorative justice might offer “a solution that could deliver more meaningful justice” 36 . With respect to AI technologies, and the potential inherent in them for AI crimes, instead of following a retributive legislative approach, an ethical</p> |
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<p>discourse, 37 with a deeper consideration for the sufferers of AI crimes should be adopted. 38 We ask: could restorative justice offer an alternative way of dealing with the occurrence of AI crimes? 39 Dale Millar and Neil Vidmar described two psychological perceptions of justice. 40 One is behavioural control, following the legal code as strictly as possible, punishing any wrongdoer, 41 and second the restorative justice system, which focuses on restoration where harm was done. Thus an alternative approach for the ethical implementation of AI technologies, with respect to legislation, might be to follow restorative justice principles. Restorative justice would allow for AI technologies to learn how to care about ethics. 42 Julia Fionda describes restorative justice as a conciliation between victim and offender, during which the offence is deliberated upon. 43 Both parties try to come to an agreement on how to achieve restoration for the damage done, to the situation before the crime (here an AI crime) happened. Restorative justice advocates compassion for the victim and offender, and a consciousness on the part of the offenders as to the repercussion of their crimes. The victims of AI crimes would</p> |
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<p>not only be placed in front of a court, but also be offered engagement in the process of seeking justice and restoration. 44 Restorative justice might support victims of AI crimes better than the punitive legal system, as it allows for the sufferers of AI crimes to be heard in a personalised way, which could be adopted to the needs of the victims (and offenders). As victims and offenders represent themselves in restorative conferencing sessions, these become much more affordable, 45 meaning that the barrier to seeking justice due to the financial costs would be partly eliminated, allowing for poor parties to be able to contribute to the process of justice. This would benefit wider society and AI technologies would not only be defined by a powerful elite. Restorative justice could hold the potential not only to discuss the AI crimes themselves, but also to get to the root of the problem and discuss the cause of an AI crime. For John Braithwaite restorative justice makes re-offending harder. 46 In such a scenario, a future AI system capable of committing AI crimes would need to have knowledge of ethics around the particular discourse of restorative justice. The implementation of AI technologies will lead to a discourse around who is responsible for actions taken by AI technologies. Even when considering clearly defined ethical guidelines, these might be difficult to implement, 47 due to the pressure of competition AI systems find themselves in. That said, this speculation is restricted to humanised artificial intelligence systems. The main hindrance for AI technologies to be part of a restorative justice system might be that of the very human emotion of shame. Without a clear understanding of shame it will be impossible to resolve AI crimes in a restorative manner. 48</p> |
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<p>Thus one might want to think about a humanised symbiosis between humans and technology, 49 along the lines of Garry Kasparov’s advanced chess, 50 as in advanced jurisprudence. 51 A legal system where human and machine work together on restoring justice, for social justice. Furthering this perspective, we suggest that reflections brought by new materialism should also be taken into account: not only as a critical perspective on the engendering and anthropomorphic representation of AI, but also to broaden the spectrum of what we consider to be justice in relation to all the living world. Without this new perspective the sort of idealized AI image of a non-living intelligence that deals with enormous amounts of information risks to serve the abstraction of anthropocentric views into a computationalist acceleration, with deafening results. Rather than such an implosive perspective, the application of law and jurisprudence may take advantage of AI’s computational and sensorial enhanced capabilities by including all information gathered from the environment, also that produced by plants, animals and soil.</p> |
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<p>44 Cp. Nils Christie, “Conflicts as Property”, The British Journal of Criminology, 17 (1), 1977, pp. 1–15. 45 Cp. J. Braithwaite, “Restorative Justice and a Better Future”, in E. McLaughlin and G. Hughes (eds.), Restorative Justice: Critical Issues, London, SAGE, 2003, pp. 54–67. 46 Cp. J. Braithwaite, Crime, Shame and Reintegration, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989. 47 Cp. A. Conn, “Podcast: Law and Ethics of Artificial Intelligence”, Future of Life, March 31, 2017. Available at: https://futureoflife.org/2017/03/31/podcast-law-ethics-artificial-intelligence/ [accessed September, 22 2018]. 48 Cp. A. Rawnsley, “Madeleine Albright: ‘The Things that are Happening are Genuinely, Seriously Bad’”, The Guardian, July 8, 2018. Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20190106193657/https://www.theguardian.com9</p> |
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<p>/books/2018/jul/08/madeleine-albright-fascism-is-not-an-ideology-its-a- method-interview-fascism-a-warning [accessed October 25, 2019]. 49 Cp. D. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”, Socialist Review, 15 (2), 1985. Available at: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html [accessed October 25, 2019]; C. Thompson, “The Cyborg Advantage”, Wired, March 22, 2010. Available at: https://www.wired.com/2010/03/st-thompson- cyborgs/ [accessed October 25, 2019]. 50 Cp. J. Hipp et al., “Computer Aided Diagnostic Tools Aim to Empower Rather than Replace Pathologists: Lessons Learned from Computational Chess”, Journal of Pathology Informatics, 2, 2011. Available at: https://doi.org/10.4103/2153-3539.82050 [accessed October 25, 2019]. 51 Cp. J. Baggini, “Memo to Those Seeking to Live for Ever: Eternal Life Would be Deathly Dull”, The Guardian, July 8, 2018. Available at: https://web.archive.org/web/20181225111455/https://www.theguardian.com /commentisfree/2018/jul/08/live-for-ever-eternal-life-deathly-dull-immortality [accessed October 25, 2019].</p> |
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<p> |
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A Nourishing Network is a peer-to-peer publishing experiment starting from the feed as a potentially multi-directional circulation device. Through web-syndication protocols and mail art practices, this publication engages with complex circulation flows, thereby exploring the social dynamics of such networked forms of publishing. |
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</p> |
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<p> |
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Editing: Davide Bevilacqua <br> Design and development: Manetta Berends, Alice Strete <br> Paper: xxxx <br> Typeface: Gnu Unifont, White Rabbit, Ansi Shadow <br> Production: Varia |
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</p> |
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Sponsors: <br> Thanks: <br> Other <br> |
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</p> |
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</div> |
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<p>Title: About</p> |
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<h1 id="a-nourishing-network">A Nourishing Network</h1> |
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<p><em>A Nourishing Network </em>is a publishing project that aims at documenting and circulating current research done by a network of artists, activists and programmers that collaborate with the Austrian net culture initiative <em>servus.at.</em> Especially in this moment of reduced mobility and physical encounters, the publication stimulates the circulation of materials and their further development in a community that usually gathers in small-sized events and festivals.</p> |
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<p>The project is a continuation of <em>Art Meets Radical Openness</em>–<em>AMRO</em> in short–a bi-yearly festival organized by servus.at in Linz (<a href="https://radical-openness.org/">https://radical-openness.org</a>). The festival creates space for discussions around the current impact of internet technologies and platforms. It aims to imagine possible (real) sustainable models for computational infrastructures, as an alternative to the growing techno-solutionist trend.</p> |
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<p><em>A Nourishing Network</em> is produced as a hybrid publishing process realised by Manetta Berends and Alice Strete from the Rotterdam initiative Varia (<a href="https://varia.zone/">https://varia.zone</a>).</p> |
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<p>The project emerged as a response to the following three departure points:</p> |
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<p><strong>Another lost occasion for degrowth?</strong></p> |
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<p>At the beginning many thought that the spring lockdowns of 2020 might have been a great opportunity to embrace less impactful lifestyles and production models. As soon as the measurements loosened up, the level of consumption rose to pre-lockdowns levels. Was the emerging environmental awareness overshadowed by a „sort of" return to normality?</p> |
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<p><strong>Re-centralization or blooming alternatives?</strong></p> |
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<p>During the first wave of lockdown, data-avid proprietary services gained a more central role within online ecosystems and daily life. Faced with this new context, communities dealing with free and open source software continued to work on alternative platform models. What happened? And what could be further explored?</p> |
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<p><strong>Artdiversity loss: is now Zoom the best art gallery 2020?</strong></p> |
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<p>In 2020 many cultural initiatives were forced to shift towards online videocalls, where often the materiality of bodies and matter is deprioritised. As the spectrum of technical possibilities offered by (centralised) digital platforms currently shape and actively format the field of the arts, how can we make space to experiment with alternative formats?</p> |
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<h2 id="how-the-nourishing-network-works">How the nourishing network works:</h2> |
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<p>The publication is in itself an experiment: one in peer-to-peer publishing starting from the <em>feed</em> as a potentially multi-directional circulation device. Through web-syndication protocols and mail art practices, this publication engages with complex circulation flows, thereby exploring the social dynamics of such networked forms of publishing. Borrowing from food terminology, the activity of <em>nourishing</em> translates into an act of continuous care within the network and for the network itself.</p> |
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<p>A subscription to the digital and/or postal feed, nourishes her subscribers with a stream of essays. The feeds are available at <a href="https://a-nourishing-network.radical-openness.org/">https://</a><a href="https://a-nourishing-network.radical-openness.org/">a-nourishing-network.radical-openness.org</a> and can be digested in different ways: as RSS, Atom and ActivityPub streams, or as a stream of physical publications which are distributed through a “postal feed” throughout Europe.</p> |
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<h2 id="how-to-circulate-within-the-nourishing-network">How to circulate within the Nourishing Network?</h2> |
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<p>The project is an invitation to stimulate circulation by further disseminating the material in online and offline ways. Each subscriber to the postal feed will receive two copies of the publication in order to extend the circulation network with one step – by sending it to someone who might appreciate it. Similarly, the feed is prepared to circulate in online networks.</p> |
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<p>Finally, to enforce feedback and more spontaneous responses to the articles, we are open for contributions from the community of readers.</p> |
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<p>Title: Infrastructure mega corridors: a way out (or in) to the crisis? Author: Recommon.org</p> |
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<p><em>“Infrastructure mega corridors: a way out (or in) to the crisis?”</em></p> |
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<p><em>Translated from an original blogpost in Italian by Elena Gerebizza and Filippo Taglieri from Re:Common introducing their new report: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200814132820/https://www.recommon.org/la-grande-illusione/">“The great illusion. Special economic zones and infrastructure mega-corridors, the way to go?”</a></em></p> |
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<p>In the last few months our lives have changed dramatically. Many of us lost their jobs while many others continued working under extreme conditions. Inequality and social injustices have become increasingly visible features of the economic system and the society in which we live.</p> |
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<p>The pandemic might have impacted everyone’s life, but it has not affected everyone in the same way. Among the sectors that did not suffer, but rather benefited from the crisis, are online platforms such as Amazon and the likes. Those sectors have become the vehicles for the transfer from “real life” to a virtual dimension for our working, schooling, sporting and socialising. Fortunately, many have been questioning what the implications of all this would be; including what might happen to the data generated by our online lives; by whom and how is this data being treated; and what are the implications? This is a debate that we hope will remain open, since it concerns aspects that are not contingent to the health crisis, but are instead key factors in the reorganization of “the extractivist society”. A society that enables a few elites to extract more and more material and financial wealth from the territories and local communities that inhabit them, effectively expropriating them from the power to decide upon their own lives. </p> |
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<p>While most ongoing conversations center around the health crisis and the resulting recession, we want to bring attention to the systemic reorganization that is taking place as we speak. We are talking about a process that began before the pandemic, a new way of organizing large infrastructure according to the logics of mega-corridors, to reduce time and space, with the aim of continuously increasing profits on an increasing scale in the face of a slowdown in the growth of global trade. This process, which remains only partly visible, is highly energy-intensive and rooted in the fossil fuel economy, involving the construction of new high-speed railways for the transport of goods, port terminals, data centres and power stations, as well as new logistics centres covering hundreds of hectares. All this implies a radical and irreversible transformation of territories for the benefit of large private capital, where ports and production areas identified as “free trade”, or “Special Economic Zones” (SEZs), all become interconnected. </p> |
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<p>What are the manifestations in Italy and Europe of this global capital agenda? How will it change the social, economic and productive structure of our country and the continent? What impact will it have on the climate and the environment, two central areas where failures and systemic contradictions are already very visible? The question is partly rhetorical: it is difficult to imagine a “globalization 2.0” which will accelerate production, transport and consumption of goods at an unprecedented speed while at the same time profoundly reduce the systemic impact on the environment and climate, an impact that goes far beyond proposed calculations of direct and indirect emissions generated.</p> |
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<p>Will the major infrastructure mega-corridors plan be challenged in the post-pandemic economic crisis or will the current crisis be an excuse to accelerate it? Will its overall impact be properly assessed? This remains doubtful since harmful impacts of the global infrastructure agenda are so far considered as the least of their problems by investors and policy makers dazzled by forecasts and data about the production, logistics and global trade that is starting again. </p> |
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<p>How does this infrastructure masterplan meet the needs of the millions of people who are already paying the highest costs of a profit-driven model at all costs? How does it meet the needs of communities that will be removed from their lands to make way for new mega infrastructure? How will it make our societies more resilient to the great droughts, typhoons, and increasingly heavy rains? How will it counteract the increasing cementing of the most densely populated areas and how will it enable everyone to have a roof over their heads?</p> |
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<p>We believe that it is high time to open up to such far-reaching questions.</p> |
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<p>The original article and link to the report can be found <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200814132820/https://www.recommon.org/la-grande-illusione/"><span class="underline">here</span></a>.</p> |
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<p>Title: The Philosophy of Warnings Author: Santiago Zabala</p> |
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Of Whirlpools and Tornadoes <br> A Nourishing Network |
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AMRO 2020 |
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Santiago Zabala |
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The Philosophy of Warnings |
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<a href="http://www.santiagozabala.com/"><span class="underline">Santiago Zabala</span></a> is ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona. His most recent book is <em>Being at Large: Freedom in the Age of Alternative Facts</em> (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020). |
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A Nourishing Network |
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The Philosophy of Warnings |
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his month an undergraduate student told me his parents were using the pandemic to persuade him to avoid philosophy as it could not prevent or solve real emergencies. I told him to let them know that we find ourselves in this global emergency because we haven’t thought philosophically <em>enough</em>. The increasingly narrow focus of experts this century has prevented us from addressing problems from a global perspective, which has always been the distinctive approach of philosophy. This is evident in the little consideration we give to warnings. Too often these are discarded as useless or insignificant—much like philosophy—when in fact they are vital. Though philosophers can’t solve an ongoing emergency—philosophy was never meant to solve anything—we can interpret their signs through a “philosophy of warnings.” Although this philosophy probably won’t change the views of my student’s parents, it might help us to reevaluate our political, environmental, and technological priorities for the future. |
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Like recent philosophies of plants or <a href="http://cup.columbia.edu/book/a-philosophy-of-the-insect/9780231175791"><span class="underline">insects</span></a>, which emerged as a response to a global environmental crisis, a “philosophy of warnings” is also a reaction to a global emergency that requires philosophical elucidation. Although the ongoing pandemic has triggered this new stance it isn’t limited to this event. Nor is it completely new. Warnings have been a topic of philosophical investigation for centuries. The difference lies in the meaning these concepts have acquired now. Before philosophy we had prophets to tell us to be alert to the warnings of the Gods, but we secularized that office into that of the philosopher, who, as one among equals, advised to heed the signs; to use our imagination, because that is all we got. The current pandemic has shown how little prepared we were for a global emergency, even one whose coming has been <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/04/experts-warned-pandemic-decades-ago-why-not-ready-for-coronavirus/"><span class="underline">announced</span></a> for decades. But why haven’t we been able to take these warnings seriously? Before tackling this question, let’s recall how warnings have been addressed philosophically. |
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Examples of warning philosophy can be traced back to Greek mythology and Plato's <em>Apology</em>. Apollo provided Cassandra with the gift of prophecy even though she could not convince others of the validity of her predictions, and Socrates warned the Athenians—after he was sentenced to death—that their inequity and mendacity undermined the democracy they claimed to honor. Against Gaston Bachelard, who coined the term “Cassandra complex” to refer to the idea that events could be known in advance, Theodore Adorno warned that any claim to know the future should be avoided. It is probably in this spirit that Walter Benjamin warned we should pull the brake on the train of progress as it was stacking disaster upon disaster. In line with Hannah Arendt’s warnings of the reemergence of totalitarianism after the Second World War, Giorgio Agamben began his book on the current pandemic with “A Warning”: biosecurity will now serve governments to rule through a new form of tyranny called “technological-sanitary” despotism. |
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These examples illustrate the difference between warnings and predictions. Warnings are sustained by signs in the present that request our involvement, as Benjamin suggests. Predictions call out what will take place regardless of our actions, a future as the only continuation of the present, but warnings instead point toward what is to come and are meant involve us in a radical break, a discontinuity with the present signaled by alarming signs that we are asked to confront. The problem is not the involvement warnings request from us but rather whether we are willing to confront them at all. The volume of vital warnings that we ignore—climate change, social inequality, refugee crises—is alarming; it has become our greatest emergency. |
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Indifference towards warnings is rooted in the ongoing global return to order and realism in the twenty-first century. This return is not only political, as demonstrated by the various right-wing populist forces that have taken office around the world, but also cultural as the return of some contemporary <a href="https://arcade.stanford.edu/blogs/returning-order-through-realism"><span class="underline">intellectuals</span></a> to Eurocentric Cartesian realism demonstrates. The idea that we can still claim access to truth without being dependent upon interpretation presupposes that knowledge of objective facts is enough to guide our lives. Within this theoretical framework warnings are cast off as unfounded, contingent, and subjective, even though philosophers of science such as Bruno Latour continue to <a href="https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Down+to+Earth%3A+Politics+in+the+New+Climatic+Regime-p-9781509530564"><span class="underline">remind</span></a> us that no “attested knowledge can stand on its own.” The internet and, in particular, social media have intensified this realist view, further discrediting traditional vectors of legitimation (international agencies, major newspapers, or credentialed academics) and rendering any tweet by an anonymous blogger credible because it presents itself as transparent, direct, and genuine. “The quickness of social media, as Judith Butler <a href="https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/09/judith-butler-culture-wars-jk-rowling-and-living-anti-intellectual-times"><span class="underline">pointed out</span></a>, allows for forms of vitriol that do not exactly support thoughtful debate.” |
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Our inability to take warnings seriously has devastating consequences, as recent months make clear. The central argument in favor of a philosophy of warnings is not whether what it warns of comes to pass but rather the pressure it exercises against those emergencies hidden and subsumed under the global call to order. This pressure demands that our political, environmental, and technological priorities be reconsidered, revealing the alarming signs of democratic backsliding, biodiversity loss, and commodification of our lives by surveillance capitalism. These warnings are also why we should oppose any demand to “return to normality,” which signals primarily a desire to ignore what caused this pandemic in the first place. A philosophy of warnings seeks to alter and interrupt the reality we’ve become accustomed to. |
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Although a philosophy of warnings will not prevent future emergencies, it will resist the ongoing silencing of emergencies under the guise of realism by challenging our framed global order and its realist advocates. This philosophy is not meant to rescue us <em>from</em> emergencies but rather rescue us <em>into</em> emergencies that we are trained to ignore. |
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