Leaving Hotel California: Digital Futures in postnormal times

edit 29.2.2020: fixed a slew of typos

A Road trip

Recently I held a talk at the Nordic Art Education in Motion-seminar on the topic of Digital Futures in postnormal times. When writing this talk, it turned from a simple presentation to a journey, a road trip of sorts into the digital landscapes of the late Anthropocene. 

I like the idea of a journey, it highlights how every presentation is a performance, a path that is followed to get to somewhere. At the same time, other ways are ignored, or not-seen, or talked about. This journey is just one journey, one perspective, but nevertheless into something that can be perceived and shared in some sense.

Below you can read the presentation along with most of the slides. Few things popped up in my head after the talk, so I added them in there as well.

Hello everyone, Thank you for the introduction and for inviting me here. 

I have recently talked quite a bit about code and data and their relation to art, culture and education. Mostly, I have done this from a mainly general perspective. However, I have been starting to think that maybe what we need is a more radical shift in attitudes towards the digital. Therefore, I am attempting to take a more alternative take, a one that is grounded on feminist technology studies and feminist phenomenology; I am interested in what are our digital futures and how the digital impacts the future.

And instead of a talk, I want to invite all of you to a magical mystery tour, a little drive across the Anthropocene, to a road trip of some sorts. So don't expect a well documented empirical research analysis, but more a kind of journey, horrible gas station coffee and cheap burgers, as this middle-age nearing white man is inviting all of you to hop on his white van of misery.

So I am sorry and let's go already!

This white van, the means of transportation, the wheels for our trip, is not just any van, but a post-normal van. Is it bigger on the inside or is the whole always less than the sum of its parts? I am not sure, but post-normal, as defined by Ziauddin Sardar (2010), refers to an in-between period, where old orthodoxies are dying, new ones have yet to be born, and very few things seem to make sense. Futures - and the present - are seen not only as complicated and complex but chaotic, contradictory and conflicting.So our drive is complex, contradictory and conflicting. As the name post-normal suggests, in post-normal times, the concept of normal is less and less useful. For example, what would be deemed normal on the internet? Or vice versa what would be thought to be not normal for longer than the lifespan of a meme? Or How "normal" is it to routinely contact satellites and data servers from another continent just to know where the nearest cafe is - yet this is what we do with Google Maps (Dufva, Slotte Dufva, & Ikäheimo). 

Furthermore, post-normal refers to the tensions between the longing for simpler times and accepting the intricate, complex state of things. Moreover, these simpler times and the concept of normal has no universal temporality, but fluctuates and runs differently for all of us. 

Post-normal is not the only transport in this time, for this time, but it might offer us some ways to take paths one might not otherwise see - or take.

From our post-normal car, looking at the scenery, we can start to piece together a picture of the digital. It is not just the things vibrating in our pockets, nor the computers at the workplace. But as, for example, Hayles defines it as interfaces and communication between a plethora of components and actors (Hayles, 2017). She emphasizes the need to comprehend the digital not only through the technological concepts of networks and devices, but to see how the digital is bound into, if not everything, then to most things.

For instance, let's think about a photograph, tourists snapshots from a recent holiday. Earlier, the photos ended up in the family albums, dug up mostly at family get-togethers, to the unsuspecting, innocent aunts and other relatives, with no escape in sight, condemned to sit through the whole photo-album.

Now, if we don't instantly send the photo to a social media service, the photo does not really exist. There, in some social media cloud, relatives can tap through the photos, maybe like or love them, and then, forget them. 

But what is happening at the same time is a massive assemblage of different actors, looking, analyzing, categorizing the photo. The camera -often a smartphone- besides taking the photo, records all the metadata; information about the location, time of the day, temperature, last app used before taking the photo, amount of battery left, and so on and so on. Then when all this data is sent to social media service, the servers, in some continent somewhere, churn the image through image recognition algorithms, and spot all the things happening: Things being eaten, brands being shown, faces of the subject - and of everyone else. And all this is then compared to the vast database of other information and other images and stored for later use. All this information can then be used for many things, normally,

normally

it is now mostly used to sell you more things, but maybe in the future, it could be used for something else as well.

Maybe.

But what this simple example aims to portray is that digital is not only the technology but rather a mess, a folding of various sorts of things, attitudes and aims.

Now that we are on our way, having driven for a while, starting to get a bit bored at the scenery, we might start wondering what our destination is?

Do we have a destination?

And yes, if we don't run out of fuel, or electricity -Not sure what kind of van this is,  I want us to visit three places:

First one is in the land of Cinderella subjects

The second requires us to take a jump to the hyperspace to go and listen to the Darth and the Death Stars.

And then third, if we are lucky we'll see how to save the galaxy and still make it home before midnight.

And be warned, there are some spoilers ahead!

So, let's start and drive down to the cinderella subjects.

Cinderella subject refers to the digital fantasy woman, to the ever-narrowing concept of being a woman, or actually any gendered being in the digital. However, women and LGBTQ-people are hit the hardest. The contemporary cinderella is an Instagram-celebrity, heroine waiting to be rescued. She is at the same time cooking wonders in the kitchen, managing a tight work schedule, making sure she looks good for everyone to look at, working 12-hour shifts only to go to the gym for 17 hours a day before reading good night stories to kids in a tidy perfectly designed home.

Yes, she is short of Monty Pythonian worker of the yore that manages to have more hours in a day than the rest; A Hermione supermodel.

The screenshot here depicts Jennifer, the Cinderella of Corning's future vision. She wakes up in the morning, and the smart mirror on the bathroom wall messages her to reschedule the morning meeting to a still earlier time before she has even brushed her teeth. Smilingly accepting the sudden change, she goes on to live her perfect day of the digital life, filled, here in Cornings case -Corning is the manufacturer of the glass used in most digital products- glass.

Basset, Kember and O'Riordan remark that the digital reintroduces and reinforces a very conservative concept of women that is not at all unlike those of the past (Bassett, Kember, & O’Riordan, 2019). They argue that automatization and digital technologies reinstate the traditional American values of the 1950s where women's place was in the kitchen (and at the same time being a sex goddess that waits for Mr Right). The future visions of digital tech companies, such as Corning above, but also from other tech giants, such as Google and Microsoft, depict a woman whose kitchen apron has just been replaced with, or maybe more precisely, augmented with, a smartphone. 

Or the apron has changed into some other wearable that tracks, analyzes and casts future objectives; better health, fitter body, tighter schedule, mindful living, happy smile. 

All this while wearing a bra that unlocks itself when it finds the prince, the true love. As is the case with this Japanese lingerie brands product.

In short, digital technologies seem to shelter women from the bad men and present the women as a price to the Mr Right while at the same time demanding for more work hours and devaluate the work of women. 

As we are preparing for the digital futures lead by AI (or insert any other trending digital buzzword, like bitcoin, instasomething, etc.), we are focusing on gaining the needed skills to barely comprehend the new technologies, as well as skills to actually use them. But, what is often forgotten is that at the same time we still need the basic critical skills of for instance media education, critical pedagogy and feminist pedagogy. Digital technology, be it because of the machine learning bias, the ignorance, or straight out misogyny of the developer, or something other, reinforces age-old myths about gender, beliefs - or values in general.

The digital assemblage contains a weird mixture of top of the line technologies and almost medieval pseudosciences;

whatever that does the job, as an engineer might say.

As such, digital assemblage folds different conceptions into strange origamis. From the smart bras, we can go to facial recognition, a technology that is being increasingly used in a variety of situations. "Harmless" apps collect everyone's face data when they are aching to see how they would look like when they are old, or jumping hoops to find their celebrity doppelganger. Schools around the world utilize facial recognition in schools to measure concentrations, attendance, or to identify possible school shooter. Some firms even provide services to analyze whether the person is gay -or has the potential to become gay. In short, we are trusting that our technologies can read us like an open book, that our face really does expose us. 

Dieterring has noted how some of the ideas in facial recognition is based on physiognomy, a fifteenth-century practice of viewing a person's physical body — most notably, their face — to determine that being's personality and fortune (Dieterring, 2019). 

Combine this to the dominant -and often arrogant- perspectives of the white western male, and we can start to see some problems.

But these technologies become even worse when they are being used to identify out minorities to police them and see if there is need to send them to" re-education" camps, as for example, China is doing with Uyghurs (Dieterring, 2019).

Digital borrows, reintroduces and remixes old practices, and in doing so introduces often unthought biases of centuries olds myths and false truths together with hundreds of years of colonialization, racism, chauvinism and so on. Digital, is in no means neutral, and in many ways is a black box of the unknown, unthought, uncritical blend of abuse and pursuit for maximal profit. 

As digital technologies become omnipresent, it becomes even harder to escape the dominant views. Furthermore, as we start to rely on machine learning algorithms, that we train with our biased data-sets and mix them with dubious theoretical models, the digital future seems overly grim. Aside from the remarkable leaps in machine learning, and the few actual beneficial uses for it, for example in spotting certain diseases more quickly and accurately than humans (see for, e.g. (Hinzman, 2019), machines are not getting intelligent in a way we comprehend it.

But using such narrow AI to replace people, and often, to hopelessly trying to accelerate the dying economic growth, represents us with the architectures that benefit almost no one.

As an example:

is it a problem that the image recognition algorithm can not understand that a woman might be angry, or she is holding a gun?

If the rebellion is not even recognized, it has never happened?

Or,

Is that the pathway to redemption, as she shatters the data centers uninterrupted?

From these thoughts, we will walk in quiet and wander back to our post-normal transport and head towards Hollywood hills to listen to the Darth and the Death Stars."

“On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair"- pipes Darth with his slightly digitally modified voice, as we open the doors of our transport. Apparently, Darth and the Death Stars is a cover band playing old rock hits.

FROM THE CALIFORNIAN IDEOLOGY… ”The Californian Ideology simultaneously reflects the disciplines of market economics and the freedoms of hippie artisanship. This bizarre hybrid is only made possible through a nearly universal belief in technological determinism…

…As technological determinists, they believe that human social and emotional ties obstruct the efficient evolution of the machine. Abandoning democracy and social solidarity, the Californian Ideology dreams of a digital nirvana inhabited solely by liberal psychopaths.” - Barbrook & Cameron

Even though technology has a thousands of years of history, and as for instance Couldry and Mejias ( 2019) have argued, that the massive collection of digital data is actually a continuation of colonialism, here I am going to focus on the amalgam of the eastern philosophy and right-wing liberal capitalism that was pieced together mainly in California in the last part of the twentieth century, and is aptly named the Californian Ideology.

As Barbrook and Cameron (1996) have noted, the Californian ideology is a weird mix of free-market economics and hippie artisanship. Just like Darth, it believes in the all-encompassing mystical force as it simultaneously believes in the survival of the fittest. And the fittest is the one that uses the force to gain control. To build platforms like death stars to obliterate rebelling planets. Furthermore, -at the same time-, it rallies on the belief that technology is inevitable and objective, more something that is found than created. The future is the vision for the few who can escape the planet when it becomes unlivable.

"They livin' it up at the Hotel California"- Continues Darth, as we wonder whether the band is so bad that it is good, or is it just plain bad. Audrey Watters has recently redefined the Californian ideology to a more contemporary Silicon Valley narrative (2019). It is a suitable narrative for Darth, who has all the means to make it big in such a landscape. She describes Darth and other Silicon Valley heroes as:

• the technology entrepreneur. 

• Smart. 

• Independent. 

• Bold.

• Risk-taking. 

• White.

• Male…

Silicon Valley narrative thinks of itself as rebellious in a way it distrusts institutions, be it government or education systems, and builds its own solutions it deems much better than the old ones.

An ironical side point is that many heroes of the Californian ideology or Silicon Valley narrative were the result of the well-functioning education system.

Problem is that the sort of technological solutionism, the belief that any problem is solvable with the right algorithm or hardware, is blind to gender, race or socio-economical issues;

Looking from their straightly white male position: everyone is equal.

Or, - equally qualified to be a stormtrooper. 

The solutionist thinking does not only trouble the ruling class, but the rebellion might fall into the trap as well. Luke, Who is Darth's son (!Who knew!) represents the idea that we only need one clever thing, a one incredibly well placed shot into the thermal exhaust port and the entire apparatus of our oppression explodes spectacularly.

But maybe it is not so?

Sadly it is not so?

As the ever-repeating chorus of Darth's cover of the Hotel California starts to tire our ears, and we are beginning to piece together that Luke or anyone in theSkywalker family cannot fix this, we might begin to wonder if we are actually living in a used future (Inayatullah, 2008)?  In a future that does not feel ours, feels borrowed, feels like the repetition of the Jetson from the 1950s?

Cinderellas in space?

If we disown Darth's grandiose vision of stormtrooper slavery and force chokes, and have no “one last thing" to blast the oppression, then, where to go?

How to get out of here?

For this, for the last part, we have to run back to our car, hop on our seats and see if we can still save the galaxy before the magic runs over.

The scenery changes fast as we are nearing the light speed of the technological change, the Anthropocene, the geological period of the human influence can be seen everywhere. As we watch how Earth quivers as it might be starting to explode, we might feel a certain kind of hopelessness creeping into our chests.

How did we get here?

How do we work this?

But instead of talking about human influence, should we really be talking about specific paths of patriarchy and capitalism that lead us here?

Capitalocene according to Jerome Roos depicts a distinct geological epoch in which the capitalist formula of "accumulation for accumulation's sake" has penetrated into every nook and cranny of the planet's biophysical environment, to the point where the survival of the capitalist system has come to constitute an existential threat to the survival of humanity as a whole (Roos, 2017).

Or even, as Kate Raworth points out, should we be talking about Manthropocene, as it is mostly white western males from the Anthropocene Working Group that talks about the end of the man (Raworth, 2014).

Basset, Kember and O'Riordan go even as far as suggesting the tagline of "It's the end of man, says man", in order for we to get it. They continue:" Irony, like parody, is a queer feminist writing strategy and political method that still has work to do, not least in relation to Anthropocene working groups afflicted by a collective irony bypass." (Bassett, Kember, & O’Riordan, 2019).

The futures belong to everyone, and different roads might be taken.

Instead of enacting a new (s)cene, Basset, Kember and O'Riordan have outlined a manual, one inspired by Martine Sym's Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto (Syms, 2013), to get the directions out from the Anthropocene. Kember (2017) has earlier remarked that we already have established academic, artistic and critical approaches on many issues within digital, but that what is needed is a maybe more all-encompassing, active further-reaching role of arts and humanities.

So, as we are yet again sitting in our post-normal transportation device, the clock nearing midnight -although the time passes differently for all of us- we start glancing at the manual. Maybe we can work this -into the blue again after the money's gone.

First thing in the manual:

Forget ends and beginnings. Let us stay with the trouble (Haraway, 2016).

Number two: We need a new synthesis, new kind of working together through disciplines, borders and ways of thinking. There are a lot of promising new ideas across the sciences that could be the start of something new. 

Three:  We need active resistance -Futures are not owned and are worth fighting over. We cannot rummage around in our misery, waiting for the end, believing to the night man telling us that we can never leave.

Four: Let's not be afraid of utopia or hope. It is a place to start from. They can direct to paths that like any good idea about the future, seem ridiculous at first.

The manual ends,

It is partial,

And the authors are asking for addition.

So to conclude our journey, we scribble to the manual, hoping someone will add to it later.

Five:  It is estimated that only 5% of all the climate research is done by humanities (Overland, Sovacool, 2020); in order to change the culture, to get the new synthesis, we need to change that.

As they say, culture eats strategy for breakfast.

Shifting the focus from the capitalocene, manthropocene to something completely different needs a new driver who can take strange paths. Furthermore, we do not need yet another replay of finding out who has the most life-force within their blood, or the drama of who is going to be the new dark emperor. This means that for this ride, we have to cram our selves into the backseat of the post-normal drive, next to the creepy cousin (whoever you think that is) and get along. Maybe it would be the beginning of the beautiful friendship?

Like all journeys, this one too has come to a stop. And as with all the road journeys, there is no end - only perpetual becoming. Still, the post-normal carriage is starting to look more and more like a pumpkin, and we'd better stop.

Thank you.

References: 

Barbrook, R., & Cameron, A. (1996). The Californian ideology. Science as Culture, 6(1), 44-72. doi:10.1080/09505439609526455

Bassett, C., Kember, S., & O’Riordan, K. (2019). Furious: Technological Feminism and Digital Futures. London: Pluto Press. 

Couldry, N., & Mejias, U. A. (2019). The Costs of Connection. Palo Alto: Culture and Economic Life.

Dieterring, A. (2019). Facial Recognition, Physiognomy, and Racism - The Sundial (ACMRS) - Medium. Retrieved 14. Feb, 2020 from https://medium.com/the-sundial-acmrs/facial-recognition-physiognomy-and-racism-ffc3d232a352

Dufva, M., Slotte Dufva, T., & Ikäheimo, H.-P. (2020) Grasping the tensions affecting the futures of internet. In review for the Journal of Futures Studies. 

Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the Trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.

Hayles, N. K. (2017). Unthought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

Hinzman, L. (2019). Zilic: Rare Disease Detection with Machine Learning. Retrieved 26. Feb, 2020 from https://towardsdatascience.com/zilic-detect-any-disease-with-machine-learning-fdae88664148

Inayatullah, S. (2008). Six pillars: futures thinking for transforming. Foresight, 10(1), 4-21. doi:10.1108/14636680810855991

Kember, S. (2017) Panel "The Technological Body" | IMPAKT Festival 2017. from https://youtu.be/81pr1CubQZI

Overland, I., & Sovacool, B. K. (2020). The misallocation of climate research funding. Energy Research & Social Science, 62, 101349. doi:10.1016/j.erss.2019.101349

Sardar, Ziauddin (June 2010). "Welcome to postnormal times". Futures. 42 (5): 435–444. doi:10.1016/j.futures.2009.11.028.

Raworth, K. (2014). Must the Anthropocene be a Manthropocene? Retrieved 26. Feb, 2020 from https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/20/anthropocene-working-group-science-gender-bias

Roos, J. (2017) Living Through the Catastrophe. Retrieved 26. Feb, 2020 from https://roarmag.org/magazine/living-through-the-catastrophe/

Syms, M. (2013). The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto. Retrieved 26. Feb, 2020 from https://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/dec/17/mundane-afrofuturist-manifesto/

Watters, Audrey (2016) The Curse of the Monsters of Educational Technology, Tech Gypsies