uncomputing

Excerpted from a longer essay in progress.

Adeline Koh and Roopika Risam recently started an open thread on DHPoco based around an observation by Martha Nell Smith about the politics of race and gender in the digital humanities. I find these topics distinctly connected to questions about language and the relationship of various humanities fields. In one comment I made on the thread I tried to raise these issues, which I was not entirely surprised to find provoked no additional discussion, especially as they relate to the general question of a postcolonial digital humanities.

This is a great comment, and at the risk of continuing to talk too much on this board, I think it important to expand a bit on a point I hope to write up more thoroughly, which is that when we expand not just to multilingualism among imperial/majority languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Mandarin, Japanese, Russian, Hindi, Tamil, Arabic, Swahili, even Quechua) but to minority, indigenous and endangered languages, the question of what counts as DH and why something should be labeled as DH becomes extremely vexed. To keep to North America but turn to the indigenous (aka First Nations) people of Canada, most of the major First Nations groups now maintain rich community/governmental websites with a great deal of information on history, geography, culture, and language–a lot of what might go into at least the “archive” if not the “tool” version of DH type 1. But none of this work, or little of it, is perceived or labeled as DH, particularly as Type 1 (one of the earliest DH projects I worked on was the Cree language site http://www.eastcree.org/cree/en/, and I have had trouble getting this recognized “as” DH, and for a lot of reasons have stopped trying). To my mind, in many ways, these are better than “archives,” because they are the marks of living communities using any form of communications to keep themselves active and alive. It would make DH look a lot less parochial and majority-culture oriented if this stuff “counted” as DH, but it’s hard to see how it would benefit the communities themselves. This is one of the deep cruxes that DH as a label has created for itself–it needs this material in order to de-colonize itself, but taking that material in looks like a colonizing gesture, one that is meant to benefit “us” much more than “them.”

Some links to indexes of North American (especially Canadian) indigenous sites:
http://www.firstnationsseeker.ca/
http://www.afn.ca/index.php/en

In literary studies “proper”—college and university departments like English and Comparative Literature and Area Studies, and the academic journals in which researchers publish—it is fair to say that postcolonial studies manifests itself in two major ways. The first is through theoretical writing, like that of Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi K. Bhabha; the second is through the direct reading of primary texts, whether these come from traditional majority cultures or from writers more or less associated with minority and postcolonial cultures (here meaning literally those cultures once subject to colonial rule, and governance of which has been returned to one degree or another to the local culture)–texts, it’s important to say, which come from every time period and place, not just contemporary ones. This work, unless it is situated in Anthropology or Linguistics departments, typically proceeds via examination of work written in majority languages, for a variety of reasons, not all of them necessarily salutary to the postcolonial critical project. This gives rise to some of the profound tensions in the field, perhaps exemplified by the 1960s debate between the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe and the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o over the question of the appropriate language for African literature.

In departments other than Anthropology or Linguistics, subaltern texts are typically read in translation unless they were originally composed in a majority language. The practical reasons for this are obvious, but its effects are not entirely welcome, as it can tend to perpetuate the notion that all languages are not just equal but transparent, that nothing is lost if the original language is lost, that even the Ngũgĩ/Achebe debate is moot because Ngũgĩ’s original Gikuyu must be translated for anyone but approximately 6.6 million native speakers to read it (“Gikuyu”). In recent decades, a publishing explosion has meant that postcolonial literature is widely available in majority languages or in translation; but this should not obscure our understanding of the postcolonial predicament of the non-majority languages and their speakers. One hopes that the opposite can occur, and that interest in postcolonial cultures as no “more than” or “less than” our own culture will encourage a new respect for both these cultures and their rights, much as minority rights have come to be more widely accepted within majority cultures themselves; yet as the tension over these rights (and often enough, the languages spoken by minorities within majority cultures) shows, this work is slow, fraught, poorly-understood, difficult, and by no means guarantees a salutary outcome.

One of the projects that draws me to do part of my work in linguistics, and that drives the work of many linguists today, is usually referred to by the phrase “Endangered Languages.” This is another complex topic that I won’t even pretend to cover in anything like the detail it deserves; I encourage readers unfamiliar with it to explore the scholarship on it (good starting points are Nettle and Romaine 2002; Harrison 2008; Grenoble and Whaley 1998; and the central language resource called Ethnologue: Lewis, Simons and Fennig 2013). The “endangered languages” movement in linguistics is of fairly recent vintage, spurred in no small part by a 1992 essay by Michael Krauss. As the linguists Daniel Nettle and Suzanne Romaine put it,

There are good reasons to believe that the processes leading to the disappearance of languages have greatly accelerated over the past two hundred years. Linguists estimate that there are around 5,000-6,700 languages in the world today. At least half, if not more, will become extinct in the next century (Nettle and Romaine 2002, 7)

In fact estimates have risen since Nettle and Romaine published this assessment in 2002; current estimates indicate that there are more than 7,100 languages in the world today (Lewis, Simons and Fennig 2013).  The Ethnologue currently reports that around 36% of these are threatened or already in immediate danger of dying out.

The “solutions” to these problems are difficult even to imagine, but they do exist. The first reaction within linguistics was an explosion in “documentary linguistics,” also fueled by the rapid spread of digital technologies, in a direct and understandable effort to “save” the languages by recording, archiving, and transcribing them. But even in the best cases we are talking about recording a few hundred hours of speech by a small group of speakers. Imagine if someone gave you the assignment to “document English” in the “community where you live” in several hundred hours of tape. Yes, you’d get a lot—and yes, for a variety of reasons, English exists in more variants and has a larger vocabulary than many indigenous languages—but think of how much you’d miss. You’d miss almost everything, to be very honest.

So in a kind of second wave of work, one now hears the phrase “language revitalization” coupled, more often than not, to the phrase “language documentation.” The goal of such efforts is at least threefold: to document languages as fully as possible; to support communities in ongoing efforts to resist the loss of language; and to use documentary and other materials generated by the linguistic work itself, often involving community members directly in the creation of archival and educational resources—which are usually digital in nature.

The move is one from what a few linguists have smartly called “telic archivism” (Dobrin, Austin, and Nathan 2007; Nathan 2004)—the creation of archives as an appropriate and sufficient end-goal—to a focus on the community itself, where there is any hope of the community holding onto its language(s) as vital practices. This requires, too, what I understand as the work of postcolonial studies: “If people do believe their language is primitive, or are scarred by punishments imposed for speaking the language in their youth, they are unlikely to make informed judgments about their goals for language learning.” (Nathan and Fang 2009, 8).

Most of the world’s languages are spoken and not historically written (exact estimates are hard to come by, but it is largely accepted that about 220 languages account for most of the language use by 95% of the world’s population, and that these also make up the large majority of written languages and, until very recently, languages taught in schools). As such we cannot pin hopes for a postcolonial digital humanities to wait for texts from marginalized peoples to appear in print or even on the web; thus an historic problem with Wikipedia’s goal to establish an “encyclopedia in all languages” is hampered by Wikipedia’s only existing in written form (see Wikimedia Oral Citations for the only general acknowledgement of this predicament).  Efforts to make the web more multilingual or less monolingual face enormous hurdles in the accommodation of spoken practices within what is largely a written medium; what is not available is the insistence that such written practices be reduced to writing in order to accommodate the web—writing in this way fundamentally changes the character of languages in theoretically interesting ways, but the primary goal of the endangered languages movement, and of postcolonial studies, is to document and support the languages as they are, not to change them. (Note that documentation of languages is often done through IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet, but that this writing system is not typically used other than for linguistic research; the endangered languages movement has taken advantage of a variety of digital technologies to move the concept of documentation from written transcription to audio and audiovisual media.)

The late Dell Hymes is probably the linguist whose work most exposes the prejudicial assumptions on which our notion of literature itself rests. In a series of essays of which the most famous is “Discovering Oral Performance and Measured Verse in American Indian Narrative,” and which are collected in the volumes “In Vain I Tried to Tell You”: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics and Now I Know Only So Far: Essays in Ethnopoetics, Hymes argued that there are not just conceptual but formal and stylistic reasons to re-evaluate the “texts” that have been “collected” from indigenous people as literary forms. As “Discovering Oral Performance” announces in its opening sentences:

I should like to discuss a discovery which may have widespread relevance. The narratives of the Chinookan peoples of Oregon and Washington can be shown to be organized in terms of lines, verses, stanzas, scenes, and what one may call acts. (309)

Hymes concludes the essay:

The contribution to a truly comparative, general literature, in which the verbal art of mankind as a whole has a place, might be analogous to the effect once had by grammars of Native American languages on general linguistics, expanding and deepening our understanding of what it can mean to be possessed of language. (341)

Roughly, what Hymes discovered is that in every productive sense, all cultures have what we call “literature,” but for the highly parochial definitions attached to the specific literary traditions of majority cultures. This has always struck me as both intuitively and empirically beyond question, as soon as one starts to look at the evidence; and also to pose huge problems for the kinds of global theorizing advanced by literary scholars like Franco Moretti (Atlas of the European Novel; Graphs, Maps, Trees) and Pascale Casanova (World Republic of Letters), which take too much for granted our ability to isolate the “properly” or formally-named “literary” from the varieties of speech genres in which they are embedded. To put Hymes’s observation in terms which I feel confident, based on the time I spent with him, would agree: Every culture has language. Every culture has literature. Every culture has narrative. Every culture has poetry.

Photo from http://www.tcs.cam.ac.uk/the_bridge/features/cambridge-world-oral-literature-project/

Works Cited

• Dobrin, Lise M., Peter K. Austin and David Nathan. 2007. “Dying to Be Counted: The Commodification of Endangered Languages in Documentary Linguistics.” In Peter K. Austin, Oliver Bond & David Nathan, eds., Proceedings of Conference on Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory. London: SOAS. 59-68. Full text available here.
• Dryer, Matthew S. and Haspelmath, Martin, eds. 2011. The World Atlas of Language Structures Online (Munich: Max Planck Digital Library). Available online at http://wals.info/. Accessed May 30, 2013.
• “Gikuyu.” Ethnologue entry. http://www.ethnologue.com/language/kik. Accessed May 28, 2013.
• Grenoble, Lenore A. and Lindsay J. Whaley, eds. 1998. Endangered Languages: Language Loss and Community Response (New York: Cambridge University Press)
• Harrison, K. David. 2008. When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World’s Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press)
• Hymes, Dell. 1981. “In Vain I Tried to Tell You”: Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press)
• Hymes, Dell. 2004. Now I Know Only So Far: Essays in Ethnopoetics (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press)
• Krauss, Michael E. 1992. “The World’s Languages in Crisis.” Language 68:1. 4-10.
• Lewis, M. Paul, Gary F. Simons, and Charles D. Fennig, eds. 2013. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Seventeenth edition. Dallas, Texas: SIL International. Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com.
• Nathan, David. 2004. “Documentary Linguistics: Alarm Bells and Whistles?” Paper presented at SOAS Conference (November). Abstract available here.
• Nathan, David. 2012. “Archive Fever: Making Languages Contagious, or Textually Transmitted Disease?” Paper presented at Charting Vanishing Voices: A Collaborative Workshop to Map Endangered Oral Cultures. University of Cambridge (June 30).
• Nathan, David and Meili Fang. 2009. “Language Documentation and Pedagogy for Endangered Languages: A Mutual Revitalization.” In Peter Austin, ed., Language Documentation and Description. Vol 6. London: SOAS. 132-160. Full text available here.
• Nettle, Daniel and Suzanne Romaine. 2002. Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World’s Languages (New York: Oxford University Press)
• Stiegler, Bernard. 2012. “Relational Ecology and the Digital Pharmakon.” Culture Machine 13. Full text available here.

Just published on the Postcolonial Digital Humanities (DHPoco) website: “‘And If Your Head Explodes With Dark Forebodings Too’: The Dark Side of the Digital (Conference Review).”

Mark Perry’s article in the Chronicle makes the conference sound too much like a set of grousing sessions on familiar tropes: surveillance, privacy, online education. It seemed to me very different from that: it struck me as the creation of a social space where scholars were free to talk, in as useful or “useless” a manner as we wished, about all the affordances and consequences of, possibilities for, and concerns we have about the
rapid, society-wide transformations wrought by digitization. It is just a fact that much academic discussion of these matters is confronted so often with a loud and powerful utopianism based in commercial interests–accusations of “Luddism” thrown at iPhone/iPad using scholars, as if that contradiction invalidates any critical thought, as opposed to proving that the thinkers can’t possibly be Luddites–that most spaces in which humanities scholars discuss these issues become quickly mired in battles around defenses of “the digital” as a whole, and whether or not “it’s as bad” as critical scholars suggest. The effect of this is to make it very hard to pursue, as humanists and social scientists are familiar with doing in almost every other context, all the ramifications of social and human phenomena. In this sense, the “uselessness” mentioned by Grusin dovetails with a wider sense of “critique” or “critical” than people typically grant it–the sense of “critique” that Kant uses in calling his main three philosophical works Critiques, and that he sees as critical to the Enlightenment project that had a great deal to do with the birth of representative democracies in the West. (This is also why Rita Raley’s and Ken Wark’s injunctions not to resist technoutopianism entirely were very important as the conference went on.) The resistance to such critique has to be of great concern to anyone familiar with that long history, and as a longstanding critic of the digital, I can say with certainty that the resistance is profound. Indeed, as I’m finishing this piece, a major scholar of the Digital Humanities has just called the proceedings of the conference “silliness,” based apparently on just reading the conference website and the Chronicle article. It is a mark of the need for projects like #DHPoco and #transformDH that such statements can be uttered by those in our own community; it is also a reason for optimism born of critique that conferences like this one, and efforts like DHPoco and #transformDH exist, and are garnering the amount of attention they deserve.

The Dark Side of the Moon

Read the full post here.

Oh, that title. I probably shouldn’t have, but I couldn’t resist.

I was flattered to see Nicholas Carr picking up on a blog entry I wrote about the Cartesian dualism underlying most thinking about the Singularity. I was equally pleased to read this comment on Carr’s post from CS Clark, who is otherwise unknown to me:

I’m reminded that many tech/law debates depend on the new tech being completely different from old tech right up till the difference is a problem in which case the new tech is now exactly the same as the old tech. Ebooks are great because you can make infinite copies of them, and they’re also great because you must be able to share them with your friends in exactly the same way you can share a physical book. Google has changed nothing so let’s listen to them/Google has changed everything so don’t worry. Talk about syzygy. Talk about doublethink.

This happens all the time. Consider this exchange:

@sivavaid That’s like investigating cameras. It’s the use and the norms not the technology.

— Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) March 6, 2013

I think the first comment is wrong, because it isn’t just Google Glass or Google itself at all–it’s the widespread distribution of camera technologies and, most critically, the technologies that allow the uploading and archiving of these images in publicly-available fora that makes this so disturbing. It seems to me that if we have rights to privacy at all, even if the government has a right to observe us in public spaces, we have the right not to have our images displayed without our consent by third parties in public fora (Flickr, Instagram, Facebook) about which we may or may not have any knowledge. This is a profound and deeply troubling issue and it is especially pointed when we consider the rights of minors: what in the world gives Sergey Brin, or anyone else, the right to videotape or photograph a child without their parents’ permission and to put those images online? I can’t actually come up with a good legal basis for asserting that right in such a form that it trumps the right to privacy (and what some European countries refer to as the “right of publicity“).

But to return to my main point: Jarvis’s response is exactly the one mentioned by CS Clark, very oddly and tellingly used to describe a technology that deserves the adjective “new” if anything does. Yes, Google Glass is in part a camera. But it’s not the kind of camera that requires you to sit for two hours to get any exposure, or the kind whose film needs professional developing, or the kind that makes one print that develops in your hand, or even the kind that other people notice when you use it to take their picture. It’s a new kind of camera, built in part out of old bits of camera technology. Yet to Jarvis it’s “fear-mongering” to consider these new features as new, even as he and other engage in ecstatic reverie over what this new stuff enables.

This deserves expansion and further reflection. The logic is evident everywhere today, and it’s mostly aligned with power. It connects to the “Borg complex” described by L M Sacasas, with certain debates in Digital Humanities, with the advent of MOOCs, and much else. It’s not a phenomenon of which I’m aware there being a discussion in the critical literature. It deserves more attention. It deserves a name. Ideas? I’m working on it.

(Modified version of a comment on Dale Carrico’s Amor Mundi blog, in response to his excellent “Krugman Flirts with Robot Cultism“–also see the slightly different version of Carrico’s post on his blog on the World Future Society site, “Krugman Flirts with Futurism,” both of which respond to Paul Krugman’s “Is Growth Over?” and “Robots and Robber Barons“):

I write in strong sympathy with much of what Carrico says in his posts, and I share his outrage and umbrage at what he calls Robot Cultism, transhumanism, singulatarians, et al.

But I am not sure Krugman is engaged in the same kind of singulatarian fantasizing, & I want to comment on one bit of language used by Krugman that Carrico slightly follows and that the Singulatarians consistently employ, which I believe needs to be avoided. Carrico writes:

Very regularly, these adherents of AI have often spoken of “intelligence” in ways the radically reduce the multiple dimensions and expressions of intelligence as it actually plays out in our everyday usage of the term, and often they seem to disparage and fear the vulnerability, error-proneness, emotional richness of the actually incarnated intelligence materialized in biological brains and in historical struggles. It is one thing to be a materialist about mind (I am one) and hence concede that other materializations than organismic brains might give rise in principle to phenomena sufficiently like consciousness to merit the application of the term, but it is altogether another thing to imply that there is any necessity about this, that there actually are any artifacts in the world here and now that exhibit anything near enough to warrant the term without doing great violence to it and those who merit its assignment, or to suggest we know enough in declaring mind to be material to be able to engineer one any time soon, if ever, given how much that is fundamental to thought that we simply do not yet understand.

Though I believe Carrico is trying to avoid it, in this paragraph I still read some uses of the term “intelligence” as nearly equivalent with “mind,” and specifically with “human mind.”

The mind–the human mind, but also the other forms of mind we experience, especially as seen in animals–does many more things than exhibit “intelligence.” This is the thing Kurzweil is radically unable or unwilling to see, in part due to his incredible ideological rationalism (I try to demonstrate the deep historical and conceptual connections between rationalism and computer mania in my book).

The use of the term “intelligence” in the fields of AI/Cognitive Science as coterminous with “mind” has always been a red herring. The problems with AI have never been about intelligence: it is obviously the case that machines have become much more intelligent than we are, if we define “intelligence” in the most usual ways: ability to do mathematics, or to access specific pieces of information, or to process complex logical constructions. But they do not have minds–or at least not human minds, or anything much like them. We don’t even have a good, total description of what “mind” is, although both philosophy and some forms of Buddhist thought have good approximations available.  Despite singulatarian insistence, we certainly don’t know how to describe “mind” outside of/separately from our bodies, as recent work like Anthony Chemero’s Radical Embodied Cognitive Science show so thoroughly. There is a radical, deeply unscientific Cartesianism in singulatarians: they believe mind is special stuff, different from body, despite their apparent overt commitment to a fully materialistic, scientific conception of the world.The only way we know to “create” minds is to create new human beings, meaning their bodies.

Illustration from IEEE Spectrum

I know Carrico will be sympathetic with me when I assert that in too many fundamental ways, mind is body, and that there is no point in discussing how to either create minds in things that are not bodies, or to move our minds out of our bodies: to move our minds out of our bodies, on a scientific account, means moving our bodies out of our bodies, which is as incoherent as it comes.

All this said, by focusing on the red herring of intelligence I think Carrico discounts something economically accurate in Krugman’s account. There are very few tasks, including cognitive tasks, that are not currently being replaced by robots and algorithms. The idea that capital “cares” enough to make sure there will be enough work remaining for human beings to do is as ludicrous as it sounds. Marx saw that long ago. Capital will burn itself (and us) into the ground, because all it “wants” (another “artificial intelligence,” a cognitive power without a human body) is to circulate faster and faster. But that “intelligence” has very little in common with “mind.” As Krugman says in his example of speech recognition:

Speech recognition is still imperfect, but vastly better than it was and improving rapidly, not because we’ve managed to emulate human understanding but because we’ve found data-intensive ways of interpreting speech in a very non-human way.

Carrico responds:

I must protest the glib suggestion that one can still describe with the very human word “interpretation” what Krugman is actually referring to when he speaks of “data-intensive… very non-human ways of… speech.” This conflation of non-human data sifting with human interpretation looks to me not merely as bad as the straightforward falsehood of proposing, as so many AI dead-enders do and as Krugman seems to deny, that we have actually “emulated understanding” in code, but frankly the claim about machine “interpretation” seems to me actually just another form of making exactly the same proposal.

This is the part I don’t understand. The examples to consider are not Siri or autocorrect–and what Carrico calls their “enraging ineptitudes”–but speech recognition software like Dragon Dictation and many others. I don’t see any way to deny the startling improvement in these products over the past two decades; where once they required intense personal training for each individual user, and even then were incredibly error-prone; today’s products can handle a startling range of accents and dialectical variation and respond near-perfectly before training, and very near perfectly afterwards.

The point is not that Dragon Dictation displays anything like a human mind, that it is part of an embodied mind that anyone could say deserves “human rights,” etc. The point is not, and here is where I don’t quite follow Carrico’s reasoning, that what Krugman calls “intelligent robots” will have minds; the point is that an increasing number of algorithmic and robotic tools can replace labor functions piecemeal–from assembling robots in manufacturing plants, to algorithmic customer voice response systems in which humans play almost no role, to high-frequency trading systems that have replaced a large percentage of human traders, to robots that clean the floor–none of these resemble “mind” or “consciousness” at all, but in domain-specific ways,  their “intelligence” for specific tasks, or their utility for those tasks, already meets or even exceeds what humans can do. I don’t see this kind of economic extrapolation as having much in common with singulatarian thinking; no radical transformation in human being, human minds, or even machines is required to see these changes happening. This seems to be what Carrico means in a comment to the blog post, where he mentions the “socioeconomic dislocations of real-world automation”: I think this is exactly the phenomenon that Krugman means to be highlighting.

I think there is every reason to believe that machines can and will replace everything we do, or nearly everything, unless we bring technological “progress” under democratic control.

Which brings me to the concern I repeatedly see in the comments on Carrico’s blog, that the singularity movement is not important. I very much agree with Carrico’s “Ten Reasons to Take Transhumanists Seriously.” In the past, my response (which is one reason I don’t quite see mentioned in that post) to that was to say that in my experience, many of the most advanced technologists in corporate America for some reason adhere to this deeply unscientific piece of dogma, and pursue unbridled technological progress and the automation of everything because they “know” (following Kurzweil) that it is leading to transcendence–instead of believing the evidence of their own eyes, that it is leading someplace very dark indeed, especially when we reject out of hand–as nearly all Googlers do–that anybody but technologists should decide where technology goes.

And that was before Google hired Kurzweil–an avowed panpsychist-religious nutcase–as its “engineering Director.” Some have suggested that Google hiring Kurzweil “kills the Singularity.” I worry, on the contrary, that it displays the deep investment in the Singularity that informs much of Silicon Valley culture and Google in particular. The internet may have killed Scientology and birthed something much more ubiquitous, widespread, and dangerous in its wake. It is so hard to get committed technologists even to consider the mind/intelligence distinction I made in the beginning of this comment–the work to undo the terrible accelerating direction in which they are pointing us is truly daunting.

While we are eagerly awaiting the shot-across-the-bow that is Evgeny Morozov‘s forthcoming To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism (Public Affairs, 2013), a few recent pieces of writing have come across the wires that open up some of the same space on which a few of us have been working (personally, I have been working a long time–since at least 1996–so it’s heartening to find some more people joining in).  Each of them is worth reading in its entirety, but here are a few excerpts from pieces that have brightened these dark days of December:

First, on Dec 6 in The New Statesman, Steven Poole (@stevenpoole) writes a piece called “Invasion of the Cyber Hustlers” that really calls Shirky, Jarvis, & McGonigal on the carpet, with quotations & everything. Some choice cuts:

From Jeff Jarvis to Clay Shirky, a class of gurus are intent on “disrupting” old-fashioned practices like asking us to pay for valuable content. Meanwhile, web giants like Google and Apple jealously guard their profitable secrets.

Another purported quality of Coursera is that it is “open”, as everything must now be. The cyber-credo of “open” sounds so liberal and friendly that it is easy to miss its remarkable hypocrisy. The big technology companies that are the cybertheorists’ beloved exemplars of the coming world order are anything but open. Google doesn’t publish its search algorithm; Apple is notoriously secretive about its product plans; Facebook routinely changes its users’ privacy options.

A perfect Ted talk title is the recent “The Game That Can Give You Ten Extra Years of Life”, by the cybertheorist and “gamification” promoter Jane McGonigal. What could such a game be? Wiring up a joystick to an iron lung? Playing a gladiatorial game of televised chess in which the loser is killed instantly – and winning? No, it’s a little web-based game that McGonigal created called SuperBetter. There are, to date, no large-cohort longitudinal studies showing that SuperBetter makes you live ten years longer, but then a Ted talk is all about attention-grabbing truthiness, not truth.

As with the notion of sharing, so with “social”: the cybertheorists have adopted a term of presumptive virtue and sprayed on to it a newly etiolated and instrumental meaning. Social is now a commercial technique to persuade users of digital services to reveal more to potential advertisers about their “networks” of friendship and business contacts and to “connect” such users more intimately with brands by means of a “Like” button – and soon, as recent reports of in-house experiments at Facebook suggest, a “Want” button.

Robert McCall, “The Prologue and the Promise,” http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2010/06/techno-utopian-artwork/

On Dec 12, Tom Slee (@whimsley) on his own Whimsley blog contributed a scathing review of Steven B. Johnson’s Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age” called “Sixty-Two Things Wrong with Future Perfect.” Among the most notable of his “things”:

1. First, and the reason I am writing this: Claiming that the “peer progressive worldview” stands for decentralization and egalitarianism. It will lead instead to an increasingly polarized world, with centralization of information on an unprecedented scale.
3. Having a short attention span. Only a few pages further on, the switch takes place, unremarked. SBJ writes of his peer progressives that “In an age of great disillusionment with current institutions, here was a group that could inspire us, in part because they had attached themselves to a new kind of institution, more network than hierarchy – more like the Internet itself than the older models of Big Capital or Big Government” (xxxvii). The institutions that he was praising just a few short pages ago are now caricatured with Big Capital Letters, labelled as relics of old-style thinking (see also p 51). SBJ now adopts the very disillusionment that so upset him, turns away from incremental progress, and never looks back, taking on the more romantic mantle of the revolutionary. The truth in his introductory pages, that the value of incremental progress will inevitably be overlooked, is ironically confirmed.
6. Making a brief reference to trading towns of the early Renaissance as “adher[ing] to peer-network principles in much of their social organization” (p 27) is far from enough to claim that these towns are “the birthplace of modern capitalism” (28), and to place the whole of modern industry on the network side of the leger. A flimsy statement, unsupported by evidence or argument, and not to be taken seriously.
15. The Spanish Revolution? There wasn’t one. (48)
18. Believing in a magic bullet. “When a need arises in society that goes unmet, our first impulse should be to build a peer network to solve that problem”. (50)
41. Twitter was not responsible for “spawning pro-democratic flashmobs in the streets of Cairo”. (111)

Finally, this past weekend, Whitney Erin Boesel (@phenatypical) wrote a nice brief blog entry called “Dear Technoutopianism” that documents the awakening of a (relatively) young person to the sham goods sold by the Shirkys, Tapscotts, Benklers, Jarvises and McGonigals of the world:

It’s been a while though, technoutopianism. I’m not a teenager anymore. I’ve changed, but in so many ways you haven’t—and I see you more clearly now. Fred Turner’s right about you, and so are Barbrook and Cameron: you’re selfish. You never really wanted what was best for me, or for any of the rest of us; you wanted deregulation and radical individualism, wanted us out of your way so you could take the whole world—the Whole Earth—for your playground. Hawai’i is for lovers, and your shiny silver future was only for a network of the already privileged and powerful.

In fact, I’ve realized: you never apologize. You’ve never once, in all this time, said you’re sorry.

I’m tired, technoutopianism. I’m tired of your sexy, shiny surface and your utter lack of substance. I’m tired of life in the network economy, tired of all my supposed “freedom.” I’m tired of the land of “pioneers and gold-diggers.” I believe in the cyborg, but I don’t believe ‘life’ and ‘technology’ are as interchangeable as Kevin Kelly might think they are. I’m with J.J. King: there’s something about connectionism that I can’t connect with, either. I’m tired of being “disrupted, subverted, and dispersed across social space.” I’m taking my vinyl records and my MIDI-toned mp3s and my decentralized self, and I’m going home.

Let a thousand flowers of sanity bloom…

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Full paper (author’s pre-press version): High-Frequency Trading: Networks of Wealth and the Concentration of Power.

Forthcoming in Social Semiotics.

Abstract

The development of High-Frequency Trading (HFT)—automated trading of stocks, as well as bonds, options, and other investment instruments—provides a signal example of the political effects of computerization on a discrete social sphere. Despite the widespread rhetoric that computerization inherently democratizes, the consequences of the introduction of HFT are widely acknowledged to be new concentrations of wealth and power, opacity rather than transparency of information flows, and structural resistance to democratic oversight and control.

Even as computerized tools undoubtedly provide individual investors with more power relative to what they had before, they also provide powerful actors with relatively more power as well, in some cases effectively excluding the majority of individuals from insight or meaningful participation whatsoever, especially with regard to the political impacts of market activities. Reports on recent financial crises, and the 2011 film Margin Call provide narrow windows into the operations of HFT and the challenges it poses to democracy; these in turn raise significant problems for the view that computerization inherently democratizes.

In my previous post, “Computerization, Centralization, and Concentration,” I discussed how the fact that decentralization and distribution are genuine hallmarks of the networked computerization revolution can easily blind us to the fact that centralization and concentration, especially of economic power, are also its hallmarks, in many cases even more strongly than are the former.

One reason for looking at this question again is the current and to me very frightening push toward online education and in particular MOOCs, and specifically the amazing rhetoric uttered by its full-throated promoters like Udacity founder Sebastian Thrun, who tell us with not just straight but very determined and self-assured faces that their goal is the “democratization” of higher education. What Thrun means, and what so many take him to mean, is that more students may get access to a resource that is currently not easy to obtain for everyone: I consider this a real and serious problem and a laudable goal that those of us entrusted with the mission of higher education should be taking very seriously—probably more seriously than we do.

But (1) I don’t think the word “democratization” as Thrun uses it actually is his primary goal (rather, that goal is revenue, and possibly profit); and (2) the laudable goal of educating everyone looks at only one side of a complex social situation. MOOCs come not just with a diagnosis of that problem but also a solution to it, and the solution is disturbing on many levels. In a later post I’ll discuss some of their wider problems; here, I want to focus only on the several critical ways in which MOOCs and more importantly the business model they instance (and those who are insisting upon them) constitute a characteristic centralization and concentration of power-via-computerization story, while being sold as quite the opposite—and worse, that they constitute a force contrary to democracy while telling us they are acting in its name.

From several very important perspectives, the vision of online education Thrun offers makes a cruel joke of “democracy.” First, because it does not make available but in fact actively deprives students of the embodied contact with teachers and with each other that, as an educator, I believe democracy requires; second, because it is being offered as part of a large-scale commercial effort whose main goal is not the provision of education but the creation of consolidated profit-centers. The dotted line between Udacity and the consolidation of most world colleges and universities into a few privileged brands is easy to see (and explicit in the position statements of online education providers and their advocates like Clayton Christensen). The question of the need for faculty at all, other than a few high-tech subjects, once we have digitized lectures on most topics from a few leaders, is one that as with Walmart and Amazon we may not be able to resist in terms of economic efficiency. But where we can argue about the negative and positive effects for the democratic experiment of those concentrated centers of capital, few would argue that actual civil democracy would be better served by a few massive, centralized and largely disembodied education “providers,” let alone a few providers with much more direct financial interests in promoting their services than colleges and universities currently have, constrained by physical capacity to the number of students they can serve (that is, for most higher education entities there is no particular “profit” to be made by increasing  the number of students served).

Online education is offered as part of an economic analysis of the “business model” of higher education that, as in many familiar instances of computational “revolution,” accomplishes much of its work by initially mischaracterizing the phenomenon in question, in order to take it apart on economic or technological grounds. Higher education does not exist in this country primarily to train students for jobs; it exists primarily to ensure that a significant portion of the public reads and understands the thought on which our political system is founded. That “thought” extends far beyond political science proper, and should not be understood as bounded by traditional political science and philosophy, though there is no doubt at all that Locke, Hobbes, Plato, Aristotle, Schmitt, Jefferson, Madison, and many others must be part of the curriculum we offer. Instead, we must understand that “thought” to mean everything encompassed by “liberal arts” or “arts and sciences,” most of which is most effectively understood and made meaningful by personalized, embodied encounters with the material with one’s peers, under the guidance of those who have studied the matters closely.

The system of higher education as it exists today is profoundly democratic, because it does not impose too many general methods, forms, or curricula across the myriad colleges and universities in the US (and across the world). Each student and each teacher approaches the material differently. This diversity of approaches, texts, subjects, and encounters guarantees a diversity of viewpoints in the populace at large. It is essential to its proper functioning, and therefore to the proper functioning of the State itself, that few top-down controls are imposed upon it, and that it not be centralized.

Online education, especially as it’s realized in MOOCs, focuses in particular on what are blithely called “lecture courses,” on subjects in which the conveyance of relatively objective information is paramount. On the surface it is hard to object to such structures, because the kind of study I have mentioned so far typically do not occur in large lecture halls. The problems with this is that MOOCs are being deployed specifically as part of an economic argument whose consequences for liberal arts education are designed to be explosive: they are designed to make liberal arts education emerge as too expensive for us to afford. That’s true regardless of whether MOOCs are “open” or not. “Open” technology does nothing to prevent either centralization or concentration for revenue and profit (to see why, look at what IBM has done with Linux).

This is why I cannot understand the response of any academics, especially those committed to the arts and sciences, to the advent of online education as anything but a wake-up call to the most profound threat to higher education and therefore to the existence of a democratic society that our country has ever faced. Rather than accepting the analysis of Thrun and others, we should be insisting on a very simple hard line: higher education is a public good. It exists to ensure exactly that our democracy continues to function at all. Its elimination on economic grounds would make the founders of our country cringe (or worse). Whether or not we support the provision of education to those beyond the walls of existing colleges and universities, any effort to reduce the number of such institutions, the number of faculty, and the number of students who are able to study the core topics of democratic politics must be rejected absolutely.