Destaques

Rui Alexandre Grácio [2024]

«This book is primarily concerned with thinking about the relationship between critical theory and the digital. In particular, I attempt to engage with critical theory to directly address the challenge of computation. As such, the aim is to understand how we can think about computation as part of the social totality and also to provide the means to develop an immanent critique in relation to it. There is still much work to be done in humanities and social sciences to understand and critique the computational, and it is a social phenomenon that is accelerating in its growth and ubiquity, adding to the complexity of theorizing the digital adequately. This book is, therefore, a contribution to questioning the digital or what we might call the computal, and creating the possibility of thinking in an age when thinking is increasingly being delegated into the machines. As our societies are increasingly becoming computational, and with it the attendant tendency of computational systems to reify all aspects of everyday life, it is crucial that we attend to the mechanization of reification and the dangers presented when these processes crystallize into systems, institutions and consciousness itself. This reified world is ‘smart’, digital and is increasingly colonized by computationally enhanced networks, objects and subjects.» p. 1

«In other words, the critique of knowledge calls for us to again question the movement of instrumental reason into all aspects of social life. (…) This growth in instrumental reason, as rationalization, facilitates the reduction of thinking to a form of reason wedded to economic necessity, and as the Frankfurt School would argue, the domination of nature. The move towards an informationalization of society, particularly in the over-developed economies in the twenty-first century, has intensified this process, with the growth of a computational world overlaying the physical world, and which, to a greater extent, has been delegated with the logic of rationalization and instrumental reason.» p. 2

«Computation is fundamentally changing the way in which knowledge is created, used, shared and understood, and in doing so it is changing the relationship between knowledge and freedom. We are starting to see changes in the way we understand knowledge, and therefore think about it. It encourages us to ask questions about philosophy in a computational age and its relationship to the mode of production that acts as a condition of possibility for it. Indeed, following Foucault (1982) the ‘task of philosophy as a critical analysis of our world is something which is more and more important. Maybe the most certain of all philosophical problems is the problem of the present time, and of what we are, in this very moment . . . maybe to refuse what we are’ (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982: 216).» p. 4

«This calls for attentiveness to the tendency of philosophers to declaim their situatedness and historical location, and develop critical approaches to what we might call metaphysics of the computational and to the forms of computational ideology that legitimate a new accumulation regime. Which is not to say that the computational has no benefits nor potential contribution to human emancipation, indeed the critical project is to make these possibilities explicit while simultaneously contesting non-democratic and authoritarian trajectories.» p. 5

«Our phones become smart phones, and as such become media devices that can also be used to identify, monitor and control our actions and behaviour through anticipatory computing. While seemingly freeing us from the constraints of the old wired-line world of the immobile telephone, we are also increasingly enclosed within an algorithmic cage that attempts to surround us with contextual advertizing and behavioural nudges.» p. 6

«Rather, the key point is that technology offers specific affordances within certain contexts which enable and disable certain forms of social and political interactions. Putting it another way, certain technologies within historical and social contexts serve to accelerate styles and practices of life, and marginalize others. But crucially they are also linked to associational structures of the specific network, organizational form and processes used to achieve a certain ‘performance’. To comprehend the digital we must, therefore, know it from the inside, we must know its formative processes. We can therefore think of technologies, and here I am thinking particularly of digital technologies, as being embedded in an important sense.» p. 10

«In contrast to the predicted emergence of the ‘schizophrenic’, Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of a new destabilizing subject of de-territorialized capital, we are instead beginning to see the augmented human offered by anticipatory computing. Elements of subjectivity, judgement and cognitive capacities are increasingly delegated to algorithms and prescribed to us through our devices, and there is clearly the danger of a lack of critical reflexivity or even critical thought in this new subject. This new augmented subject has the potential to be extremely conservative, passive and consumerist, without the revolutionary potential of the ‘schizophrenic’. Indeed, the norms and values of the computational economy can be prescribed quite strongly as a society of control, limiting action, thought and even knowledge. This we might understand as the danger of a transition from a rational juridical epistemology to an authoritarian-computational epistemology.» pp. 11-12

«The question this book will address is how can critical theory contribute to this critique of the digital, and what can be drawn from the critical project of the twentieth century, notably from the Frankfurt School, in order to orient and inform a critical purchase on the realtime digital world of the twenty-first century. (…) Thus the growth of the digital, both as a technical ensemble and as a global disciplinary system, raises important questions for critical thought today, and the way in which critical approaches can make a meaningful contribution to its development and effects. (…)
The challenge for a critical theory of the digital is to critique what Adorno calls identity thinking and a form of thinking that is highly prevalent in computational rationalities and practices. Here, identity thinking is understood as a style of thought that aims at the subsumption of all particular objects under general concepts, and as a result the particular is dissolved into the universal.» p. 12

«The Internet increases the supply of information hugely, but the capacity of the human mind not at all. . . . The effect of nowness resembles the effect of light pollution in large cities, which makes it impossible to see the stars. (…) The Internet has a large bias in favor of now. (Gelernter 2010)
(…) ‘Internet-centrism’ and ‘solutionism’, namely the idea that the internet provides the model to ‘fix’ everything or that everything requires a ‘solution’, even if the solution subverts or is a poor replacement for its analogue.» p. 15

«Indeed, it is important that the digital is also explored in relation to the insights of medium theory, and the theoretical richness that can be developed by using such a theoretical orientation. Digital technologies mediate the world, and in doing so offer frames and limitations.» p. 16

«The digital has become the paradigmatic means of explaining what it means to live and work in the post-industrial democracies – this I call computational identity thinking. Indeed, I argue software, computation and code define our contemporary situation, becoming part of the metaphors by which it is even possible to think today. (…) More particularly, the book seeks to examine the extent to which enlightenment values, which are strongly embedded both within the cultures associated with digital technology and within the materiality of the digital itself, can be understood and used to explain the changes that are taking place across society. Thus, the book seeks to examine the extent to which a dialectic of enlightenment can be discerned within the structures of digital technology (Horkheimer and Adorno 2006; also see Golumbia 2009). The book examines the deep materiality of the digital and how it both crystallizes particular social forms and values, and generates new mentalities, economic forms and social relations. (…) For this book, the key lies in making connections and pathways between critical theory and the digital, but also drawing on the work of the later Heidegger, to create new concepts for thinking the digital, indeed, contributing to a critical theory for the digital.» p. 19

«In colonizing out thinking processes, corporations are increasingly attempting to influence the function of cognition and memory: personal, experienced and cultural.» p. 22

«Indeed, today systems built on computational principles that reduce thinking to calculation and instrumental rationality deserve careful study. I argue that critical theory is a unique resource for giving critical purchase on such a ‘computational’ society, a society which increasingly seeks to mechanize the processes of thinking, a reliance on calculation (…).» p. 24

«Today we live in a world of technical beings, whose function and operation are becoming increasingly interconnected and critical to supporting the lifeworld that we inhabit. Crucially though, this is combined with an increased invisibility or opaqueness of the underlying technologies, and an inability to understand how these systems work, either individually or in concert.» p. 37

«Certainly, the norms and values of a society are increasingly crystallized within the structures of algorithms and software, but also a form of rationality that is potentially an instrumentalized rationality and also in many cases a privatized one too.
As Held writes, ‘as a result, the conditions are created for a decline in the susceptibility of society to critical thinking’ (Held 1997: 68).» p. 38

«One way of thinking about this is through how the digital (or computational) presents us with a number of seemingly theoretical and empirical contradictions which we can understand within this commonly used set of binaries outlined by Liu (2011) and which I want to extend and discuss here:
(1) linearity versus hypertextuality; (2) narrative versus database; (3) permanent versus ephemeral; (4) bound versus unbound; (5) individual versus social; (6) deep versus shallow; (7) focused versus distracted; (8) close reading versus distant reading; (9) fixed versus processual; and finally (10) digital (virtual) versus real (physical). Here, I am not interested in critiquing the use of binaries per se, and which of course remains an important task, rather I think the binaries are interesting for the indicative light they cast on drawing analytical distinctions between categories and collections related to the digital itself.» pp. 43-44

«According to the philosophy of the average modern intellectual, there is only one authority, namely, science, conceived as the classification of facts and the calculation of possibilities. The statement that justice and freedom are better in themselves than injustice and oppression is scientifically unverifiable and useless. It has come to sound as meaningless in itself as would the statement that red is more beautiful than blue, or that an egg is better than milk. (Horkheimer, quote in Weizenbaum 1984: 252)
This dislocation of important emancipatory concepts from reason raises challenging questions for a world that increasingly encodes similar principles within the computational logics of software and algorithms. While it is clear that not all judgements and decision points can be delegated to code, nonetheless a substantial number can be, and it is not yet clear where that line is. The question of articulation of these emancipatory concepts within code, and the danger this might pose to critical thinking is an important question. As computation becomes increasingly powerful, there is a temptation to allow algorithms and code to ‘judge’, as indeed currently happens with, for example, some parking ticket systems. So rationality encoded within the limits of computation is a form of instrumental rationality and becomes automated and prescriptive, an issue that needs to be made manifest for democratic societies.» p. 48

«We therefore need to develop an approach to this field that uses concepts and methods drawn from philosophy, politics, history, anthropology, sociology, media studies, computer science and the humanities more generally, to try to understand these issues – particularly the way in which software increasingly penetrates our everyday life. (…)
As Kitchin explains,
we know very little about the ways in which software is socially created; the nature of software itself; how discourse, practices, and knowledge get translated into algorithms and code; the geographies and political economy of software development; how software is embedded into various social systems; how software applications work with each other to create complex assemblages that work within and across scales; the power wielded through software’s “secondary agency”; and how software alternatively modulates the production of space and transforms the nature of governance. (Kitchin 2011: 946)» p. 56

«Instead, we have to take account of the fact that the internal structures that enable things to become softwarized are complex and structured. Indeed, part of this requires an appreciation of the extent to which software transforms everything it touches – and this includes hardware, which is increasingly softwarized, and also software itself. That is, software increasingly acts upon software producing new levels of abstraction and complexity in software systems.» p. 57

«This notion of performing operations ‘upon data’ is reminiscent of notions of the will to power, a controlling logic, in this case by the wielding of software tools.» p. 62

«We might say that a softwarized society is one in which society itself is computed. The term computation comes from the Latin computare, ‘com “together”’ and putare – ‘to reckon, to think or to section to compare the pieces’. To compute, then, is to ‘to count, or to calculate’ (see Berry 2011a). For computer scientists, computation (or information processing) is a field of research that investigates what can and what cannot be calculated. Understanding the theoretical, empirical and political economic aspects of ‘computational cultures’ in relation to the so-called knowledge economy, particularly through the lens of critical theory, requires us to engage with this computational dimension of the digital. Further, computation is the logic of the ‘creative’ economy and to understand the cultural outputs of computational structures (sometimes referred to as the ‘softwarization of culture’) we need a critical theory that can contribute to the understanding of the computational.» p. 67

«Today there are rapid changes in social contexts that are made possible by the installation of code/software via computational devices, streams, clouds or networks, what Mitcham (1998: 43) calls a ‘new ecology of artifice’. The proliferation of computal contrivances that are computationally based is truly breathtaking, and each year there is a large growth in the use of these computational devices and the data they collect. These devices, of course, are not static, nor are they mute, and their interconnections, communications, operation, effects and usage are increasingly prescriptive on the everyday life world. But as opaque devices they are difficult to understand and analyse due to their staggering rate of change, thanks to the underlying hardware technologies, which are becoming ever smaller, more compact, more powerful and less power-hungry, and also due to the increase in complexity, power, range and intelligence of the software that powers these devices. Within the algorithms that power these devices are embedded classificatory schemes and ontologies that pre-structure the world that is presented. Indeed, this formatting and mediating capacity directly encodes cover concepts into the device.
It should hardly come as a surprise that code/software lies as a mediator between ourselves and our corporeal experiences, disconnecting the physical world from a direct coupling with our physicality, while managing a looser softwarized transmission system.» p. 95

«The computal in its own way is producing new forms of rationalized communication of estrangement and alienation while paradoxically making it easier than ever to be in constant communication and contact. Today the condition of everyday life is represented by constantly turned down faces glancing at notifications on mobile phones, or distraction from hidden computational devices and wearable technologies. This sense of distraction and its contribution to the heteronomy of the individual raise important questions about our being-in-the-world when we are constantly pulled out of the world. Indeed, this connects to wider questions about how the digital can be reconfigured to contribute to emancipation rather than rationalization. Indeed a crucial part of this has to be moving beyond the commodity layer, the surface of the technology and opening these so-called black boxes, as both technologies and metaphors, that so demand our attention today.» p. 171

«Iteracy takes its name from the computational structure known as iteration. This is widely used in computer programming as a method of actualizing or implementing and algorithm by repeating a set of instructions. Iteration is a term used in computing to refer to the repetition of a command, code fragment, process, function, etc. Understanding iteration at a micro-level is a crucial skill for the programmer to develop, particularly as it is a method for re-using existing processes (such as in looping structures). Further, iteration itself at a macro-level, combined with constant improvements, is a key way of developing software/code (very much associated with agile programming, for instance).» p. 191

«The discussion of political imaginaries that mirror the development of black-boxed computer systems and obfuscation is, in this reading, a worrying development, such as government as a platform, massive comprehensive data collection by government agencies such as the NSA, open access and transparency as ideology, and engineering concepts transferred unproblematically into the political sphere. Additionally, the problem of cognitive capture by corporations through notions of augmented humanity and the computational intervention in pre-consciousness requires urgent critical attention. The important question becomes: how much computation can democracy stand, and what should be the response to it?
If these claims are true that an active citizenry will increasingly need to be a computationally enlightened one, avoiding what we might call the heteronomy of the algorithms for the autonomy of reason, then we must begin teaching the principles of critiquing the computal through notions such as iteracy and digital Bildung. This critical spirit is counter to the growing belief that the university is only useful for producing mandarins and workers, and highlights the importance of critical thinking in humanities and social sciences in a digital age (see Berry 2012b).» p. 193

«In other words, we cannot have access to any kind of immediate objectivity free of subjectivity and therefore subjective mediation. Indeed, any such approach would be delusive because cognitive ‘access’ to immediacy is already a mediation of it and therefore the object cannot simply be promoted to the same kind of position of priority which Adorno sees as occupied by the subject in German idealism.» pp. 195-196

«It is interesting to explore the extent to which computationality is itself also subject to an ideology. If it is indeed the case that computationality represents the incorporation of identity thinking par excellence. And where there is the slightest cognitive dissonance between reality and code, then anticipatory computing can co-opt cognition such that there is a reconciliation of disjuncture. This false unity, structured in part by the hollowing out of human reason and placing it within algorithms, requires only the acceptance of the superior cognitive abilities of the computational devices that mediate the algorithms. Human beings would then only be understood in a minor key, tragically limited in their capacities besides the truth machines of computationality. How then would this be achieved, how could computational processes sustain such a hegemonic hold over the psychic life of the individuals and groups of a computational society?» p. 196

«Bernstein writes that the ‘former Age of Anxiety has given way to the Age of Boredom’ (Spacks 1995: 3). Today, we attempt to foreclose or avoid boredom, seeking out technologies that enable us to escape the experience of boredom. Whether via entertainment or through the new real-time streaming technologies, such as Twitter, which provide a constant stream of distractions, internet memes, photographs and links, today we live in a world defined by the avoidance of boredom. Indeed, ‘idleness and boredom represent glitches in the system, glitches that call for increased and accelerated integration of the bored and potentially bored (the idle) into the institutional networks of time management’ (Thiele 1997: 514).» p. 197-198

«Indeed, we might consider the entire technical and media industries in light of what Stiegler (2010a, b) has called the ‘programming industries’ which are involved in creating institutionalized ‘context’. This is data collected from the tacit knowledge of users and their ‘data exhaust’ and delegated to computer code/software. These algorithms then create ‘applied knowledge’ and are capable of making ‘judgments’ in specific use cases. Indeed, today people rarely use raw data – they consume it in processed form, using computers to aggregate or simplify the results. This means that increasingly the ‘interface’ to computation is ‘visualised’ through computational/information aesthetics techniques and visualization, a software veil that hides the ‘making’ of the digital computations involved. Today we see this increasingly being combined with real-time contextual sensors, history and so forth into ‘cards’ and other push notification systems that create forms of just-in-time memory/cognitive processes and algorithmic interfaces.» p. 210

«As Google explains,

Google Now gets you just the right information at just the right time. It tells you today’s weather before you start your day, how much traffic to expect before you leave for work, when the next train will arrive as you’re standing on the platform, or your favorite team’s score while they’re playing. And the best part? All of this happens automatically. Cards appear throughout the day at the moment you need them. (Google 2012a).» p. 212

«This book is a contribution to a critical theory of the computal, a continuation of the enlightenment project, which I have termed iteracy. These critical technical practices will become crucial to enable us to read and write the digital, the conditions of possibility for a form of critical computational reflexivity, and also to develop the ability to make public use of critical computational reason. To this end, additional critical technical practices and habits in the use of new digital methods and tools are needed, such as antisocial media, hacking, critical encryption practices, iteracy, critical digital humanities, and politically engaged computal praxis. This will ensure that we can read and write outside the streams of data collected in the service of computational capitalism and government monitoring and so avoid the shadow of what we might call the dialectic of computationality.» p. 213