Black boxes

In these real-time stream computational ecologies, the notion of the human is one that is radically reconceptualized in contrast to the 'deep attention' of previous ages. Indeed, the user is constantly bombarded with information from multiple data streams, all in real-time, and increasingly needs complementary technology to manage and comprehend this data flow to avoid information overload.

The critical task is not to generate, store or distribute information but to filter it so that the processing demands on the components of the system, human and mechanical, will not exceed their capacities. A good rule of thumb for a modern information system might be that no new component should be added to the system unless it is an information compressor - that is, unless it is designed to receive more information that it transmits. The scarce resource today is not information, but capacity to process it. (Lawrence 1983: 14, original emphasis)

Today streams send huge quantities of information to us, but rather than being compressors, they seek to provide as much detail as possible, for the compression or curation of these streams that make them comprehensible one has to pay for an additional service.

Of course, the user becomes a source of data too, essentially a real-time stream themselves, feeding their own narrative data stream into the cloud via compactants, data which is itself analysed, aggregated and fed back to the user and other users as patterns of data. This real-time computational feedback mechanism may create many new possibilities for computational citizens and services that are able to leverage the masses of data in interesting and useful ways. Indeed, systems are already being designed to auto-curate user-chosen streams, to suggest alternatives and to structure user choices in particular ways (using stream transformers, aggregation and augmentation) such as Google Now, Siri and related notification and contextual computing interfaces. In some senses then this algorithmic process is the real-time construction of a person's possible ‘futures' or their 'futurity', the idea, even, that eventually the curation systems will know 'you' better than you know yourself. The teleology of the real-time age is that through technology one can know oneself, both the flaws and the problems, and self-medicate, self-configure or manage to make the future self a better, healthier and a more educated person. This means that the user is 'made' as a part of the system, that is, the user does not ontologically precede the real-time streams, rather the system is a socio- technical network which 'is not connecting identities which are already there, but a network that configures ontologies' (Callon 1998).

This is the computational real-time imaginary envisaged by corporations such as Google that want to tell you what you should be doing next (Jenkins 2010), presenting knowledge as a real-time stream, creating/curating 'augmented humanity'. As Hayles (1999) states:

Modern humans are capable of more sophisticated cognition than cavemen not because moderns are smarter... but because they have constructed smarter environments in which to work. (Hayles 1999: 289)

This imaginary of everyday life, a feedback loop within and through streams of data, is predicated on the use of technical devices that allow us to manage and rely on these streaming feeds. Combined with an increasing social dimension to the web, with social media, online messaging and new forms of social interaction, this allows behaviour to be modified in reaction to the streams of data received. However, to facilitate the use of these streams the technologies are currently under construction and open to intervention before they become concretized into specific forms. We should ask questions about how participative we want this stream-based ecology to be, how filtered and shaped do we want it, who should be the curators, and whom can we trust to do this.

Nonetheless, it seems clear that distant reading of streams will become increasingly important. These are skills that at present are neither normal practice for individuals, nor do we see strong system interfaces for managing this mediation yet. This distant reading will be, by definition, somewhat cognitively intense, strengthening the notion of a 'now' and intensifying temporal perception. This is a cognitive style reminiscent of a Husserlian 'comet' subjectivity, with a strong sense of self in the present, but which tails away into history (Berry 2011a: 148). It would also require a self that is strongly coupled to technology, facilitating the possibility of managing a stream-like subjectivity in the first place. Today, memory, history, cognition and self-presentation are all increasingly being mediated through computational devices and it is inevitable that to manage the additional real-time stream data flows new forms of cognitive support software-enabled systems will be called for.

So, more tentatively I would like to suggest an interesting paradox connected with the real-time stream, in that it encourages this comportment towards futurity. That is the real-time streaming technologies that are the hallmark of computationality are geared not towards satisfying immediate desires, but towards the creation of a condition of waiting, of a deferred gratification towards the completed self. This, following Derrida, we might call 'Messianic' (as a structure of experience rather than a religion) (Derrida 1994: 211), connecting the real-time stream to an expectation or an opening towards an entirely ungraspable and unknown other, a 'waiting without horizon of expectation' (Derrida 1994: 211). As Derrida writes:

Awaiting without horizon of the wait, awaiting what one does not expect yet or any longer, hospitality without reserve, welcoming salutation accorded in advance to the absolute surprise of the arrivant from whom or from which one will not ask anything in return and who or which will not be asked to commit to the domestic contracts of any welcoming power (family, state, nation, territory, native soil or blood, language, culture in general, even humanity), just opening which renounces any right to property, any right in general, messianic opening to what is coming, that is, to the event that cannot be awaited as such, or recognized in advance therefore, to the event as the foreigner itself, to her or to him for whom one must leave an empty place, always, in memory of the hope—and this is the very place of spectrality. (Derrida 1994: 81)

The Messianic refers to a structure of existence that involves waiting. Waiting even in activity, and a ceaseless openness towards a future that can never be circumscribed by the horizons of significance that we inevitably bring to bear upon the possible future. As Tripp (2005) argues, 'the global communications networks, although often invasive and dangerously reductive, also serve as privileged sites of messianic possibility precisely because of their accelerated virtualization'.

Although the messianic “trembles on the edge” of this event, we cannot anticipate its arrival. Because the arrival is never contingent upon any specific occurrence, the messianic hesitation “does not paralyze any decision, any affirmation, any responsibility. On the contrary, it grants them their elementary condition” The moment of hesitation - the spectral moment - enables us to act as though the impossible might be possible, however limited the opportunities for radical change may appear to be in our everyday experiences. (Tripp 2005)

This futurity raises important questions about the autonomy of the human agent, coupled as it is with the auto-curation of the stream-processing, not just providing information to but actively constructing, directing and even creating the socio-cognitive conditions for the subjectivity of the real-time stream, an algorithmic humanity. A subject with a comportment towards waiting which forgets as a condition of everyday life and lives, therefore, in a radical present.

obliges us more than ever to think the virtualization of space and time, the possibility of virtual events whose movement and speed prohibit us more than ever (more and otherwise than ever, for this is not absolutely and thoroughly new) from opposing presence to its representation, “real time” to “deferred time,''effectivity to its simulacrum, the living to the non-living, in short, the living to the living-dead of its ghosts. (Derrida 1994: 212)

Indeed, the consequence of this is the inevitable emergence of a computational inequality in that the streams of the rich and powerful will flow faster and deeper, and therefore the more data they will have to think with. The dominant classes 'now' will be more complete, clearer and accurate as their computational systems algorithmically sort their streams automatically. The wider the knowledge that can be bought, the better the access and the computational analysis. This is not a computational divide between the computational haves and the computational have-nots, but the reduction of all knowledge to the result of an algorithm. The postmodern rich won't just think they are better, indeed they won't necessarily be educated to a higher level at all, rather they will just have the better cognitive support technology that allows them to be 'better'. They will have the power to affect the system, to change the algorithms and even write their own code, whereas the dominated will be forced to use partial knowledge, incomplete data and commodified off-the-shelf algorithms which may paradoxically provide a glitch between appearance and reality such that the dominated will understand their condition in the spaces created by this mediation. The dominated may therefore be recognized by the system, whereas the lives of the dominant will be pleasurably and seamlessly mediated, and through recognition may come critical forms of reflexivity and political praxis. Knowledge is here recast to be computable, discrete, connected, in a real-time flow and even shallow - if by shallow we mean that knowledge exists on a plane of immanence rather than hierarchically ordered with transcendental knowledge at the peak.

To build this new computational world order, the existing gatekeepers of knowledge are already restructuring their data, information and media to enable the computational systems to scour the world's knowledge bases to prepare it for this new augmented age.¹ Knowledge and information is said to be the fuel of this new cognitive capitalism. Lyotard clearly identified this postmodern mindset where,

knowledge becomes a force of production it also becomes both a tool and object of economic and political power. Knowledge... is already... a major... stake in the worldwide competition for power. It is conceivable that nation-states will one day fight for control of information, just as they battled of over territory, and... control of access to and exploitation of raw materials and cheap labour. A new field is opened for industrial and commercial strategies on the one hand, and political and military strategies on the other. (Lyotard 1984: 5)

The result of this new circuit of power and knowledge is that knowledge is now connected directly to wealth. Further, the underlying problem is that 'truth' is increasingly tied to expenditure and power, for the pursuit of knowledge is now tied to the use of advanced and, on the whole, expensive technologies. Power is connected to expenditure, for there can be no technology without investment just as there can be no investment without technology. In effect this generates asymmetric access to knowledge, information and data and hence a power differential between those with the money to buy such access and computational power and those that cannot. Governments will have 'top-view' over their societies that citizens and civil society organizations will not, and companies will have 'top-view' over markets that their customers, smaller competitors and perhaps even governments will not.

But further to this, in an era of augmented technology, those who can afford it will have bought the enhanced cognitive capabilities that certain technologies allow. For Lyotard the only way to fight this corporate and military enclosure of knowledge is clear: ‘The line to follow for computerization to take... is, in principle, quite simple: give the public free access to the memory and databanks' (Lyotard 1984: 67). However, it is also clear that access itself will not be enough, it is not that we live in an information age, rather it is that we live in a computational age, and computation costs time and money, something which is unequally distributed throughout the population. Indeed, Lyotard was right in calling for the databanks to be opened, but he might not have realized that they would contain too much information for any single human being to understand without access to the unequally distributed computational technology and know-how. We might therefore paraphrase Lyotard and say that the line is, perhaps, in principle, quite simple: give the public free access to the algorithms and code.

This algorithmically co-constructed humanity, or ‘augmented humanity', will require large existing businesses that depend on the economics of scarcity to change to the ‘economics of ubiquity', where Google's ex-CEO Schmidt argued, greater distribution means more profits. Augmented humanity' will introduce lots of ‘healthy debate' about privacy and sharing personal information, and it will be empowering for everybody, not just the elite (Gannes 2010). But it is also a challenge to a cultural elite that is uncomfortable with these changes to the status and distinction acquired by the digitalization of knowledge and learning that previously would have taken years to acquire. Indeed, augmented humanity represents, to some degree, a reconfiguration of the cultural, mediated through the computational in ways that are difficult to foresee.

When thinking about these profound changes introduced by digital technology at a cultural level, it is interesting, then, to see recent arguments being made in terms of discourses over the ‘control' of this new computational culture and how computation serves as the gatekeeper to it (see Jarvis 2011; Anderson 2012). On the one side, we have what I call the moderns, represented by writers like Carr (2010) and Crawford (2010), and on the other side the postmodern camp with writers like Jarvis (2011) and Shirky (2010). So, for example, Jarvis criticizes what he calls the distraction trope, the idea that technology is undermining our ability to think deeply without being sidetracked (see Agger 2009; Freedland 2011). In a similar way to the enlightenment thinkers who pitched the moderns against the old, Jarvis argues, ‘isn't really their fear, the old authors, that they are being replaced? Control in culture is shifting' (Jarvis 2011). Indeed, Jarvis attacks ‘modern' writers like Carr (2010) and Freedland (2011), who worry about the changes that digital technology introduces into our lives as we are increasingly living non-linear lives. Indeed, this move is indicated as shifting from the modernist subject, unified, coherent, linear, reflexive, to a postmodernist subject, fragmented, incoherent, non-linear and increasingly real-time (see Berry 2011).

Jarvis believes that the moderns' arguments essentially boil down to an attempt to hold back culture and technology so that old elites remain in power. These 'old' elites are not the traditionalists that the original moderns attacked - those traditionalists supported religion, the King and the old hierarchies of status and power. Rather, the moderns are, the bourgeois and the intellectuals tied to privileges of monopoly capitalism. Indeed, Andreessen, the original programmer of the first graphical browser, Mosaic, and now a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, argues, 'the idea of the middle class itself is a myth... that experiment has been run and it was a catastrophic failure' (Fernholz and Mims 2012). Indeed, warming to his theme he warned the middle classes that they should 'discourage college students from majoring in English and other humanities' which means that they would have 'a future of shoe sales... and encourage them to pick science, technology, engineering, and mathematics instead' (Roose 2012).

For Jarvis, the moderns are the middle class who have benefited from the Humboldtian ideals, the bourgeois who have monopolized the media, the universities and the professional class more generally over the past century based on a humanities education that was a marker of social status, without adequate technical and computing skills. Similar to the German Idealists, like Humboldt, for the moderns,

culture was the sum of all knowledge that is studied, as well as the cultivation and development of one's character as a result of that study...........................................................................

The modern idea of a university, therefore, allowed it to become the preeminent institution that unified ethnic tradition and statist rationality by the production of an educated cultured individual. (Berry 2011a: 19)

These moderns are the privileged minority who were educated in a national culture and shared in a cultural milieu that they believed was rightfully theirs - they shared what Bourdieu would have called a habitus. This cultural education gave them not only the power of discourse more generally, but also real power, in terms of preparation through elite schools and universities in traditionally humanities education to become dominant class. These are described as the kinds of people that used to read novels like Tolstoy's War and Peace (see Carr 2010) - although it is doubtful if they ever did. However, a computational economy and the cognitive loads it generates destabilize previous markers of culture and status, such that older forms of distinction are discarded. As Carr (2008) argues,

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medi­cine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. "I can't read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. "I've lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.” (Carr 2008)

Of course, it was a different problem for the working class to have staccato minds dulled by the industrial machine, and to suffer the consequences of the shallowness of thinking bought by mass culture, poor education and limited access to 'high' culture. But these moderns now express their concern that they too may be losing their cognitive powers in a technology-infused society where even the cognitive is now subjected to the processes of capitalism. Indeed, their fears sometimes sound rather like paranoia over a potential loss of the self,

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going— so far as I can tell—but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. (Carr 2008)

This is identified as a loss being suffered by the 'literary types' (Carr 2008), the cultural elite who previously were able to monopolize the 'deep' thinking in a society. Naturally, these cultural elites also considered themselves the natural leaders of society too. In Britain, we tend to think of Oxbridge-educated politicians like David Cameron, George Osbourne, Nick Clegg and Ed Milliband who monopolize political power - although it is doubtful if we ever thought of them as particularly deep thinkers.² But they were certainly educated in the belief that certain kinds of knowledge, usually humanities knowledge, was for 'some humans' an elite that could understand and protect it (Fuller 2010).

In other words, it is not that writers such as Carr are losing their ability to think, rather they, perhaps, no longer earn enough money to buy the right kind of technology to think with.

This implies that the new gatekeepers to the centres of knowledge in the information age are given by technologies, cognitive and data-processing algorithms, data visualization tools and high-tech companies. Indeed, thinking itself can be outsourced through cognitive technical devices which will supply the means to understand and process the raw information given by a new politics of access. Provided you have the money to access, and not just access, as we increasingly rely on computational devices to process raw data and information and to mediate others to do physical labour for us, such as with Amazon Mechanical Turk, TaskRabbit or Fancy Hands. Computation thus generates a new proletariat of ‘cloud workers', who receive ‘no paid holidays, no sick days and no health benefits in this new distributed workforce' (Leonard 2013).

The new barbarians at the gates are increasingly led by techno-libertarians who declare that technology is profoundly disruptive of old powers, status and knowledge. As Schmidt and Cohen argue, ‘anyone passionate about economic prosperity, human rights, social justice, education or self-determinaton should consider how connectivity can help us reach these goals and move beyond them' (Schmidt and Cohen 2013: 257). Indeed, this is a restatement of the technological democratization articulated by David Clark (1992) when he famously declared what has become one of the guiding principles of the IETF, ‘We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code' (Hoffman 2010). In other words, putting things within a digital environment and allowing others the access to read, write and republish create new dynamics that undermine hierarchies based purely on old wealth, domination and power, whilst simultaneously instituting new wealth, hierarchy and power - subverting what has been termed elsewhere ‘the Cathedral'.

For the postmoderns, the world has already shifted beyond the moderns' control, and this is something that is to be celebrated particularly as the previous hegemony was maintained by an illusion of meritocracy that in many instances served as an ideology for the action of expensive private education, cultural distinction and gatekeeping. Holt (2011) explains,

“No one reads War and Peace,” responds Clay Shirky, a digital-media scholar at NewYork University. “The reading public has increasingly decided that Tolstoy's sacred work isn't actually worth the time it takes to read it.” (Woody Allen solved that problem by taking a speed-reading course and then reading War and Peace in one sitting. “It was about Russia,” he said afterwards.) The only reason we used to read big long novels before the advent of the internet was because we were living in an information- impoverished environment. Our “pleasure cycles” are now tied to the web, the literary critic Sam Anderson claimed in a 2009 cover story in New York magazine, “In Defense of Distraction” “It's too late” he declared, “to just retreat to a quieter time” (Holt 2011)

The postmoderns, generally educated in technology, business, technology law and the physical sciences, see themselves pitted against an old guard increasingly defending an unsustainable position. For them, knowledge can now be freely mediated through digital technology, and the moderns, as guardians of culture and history, are out-of-date, defunct and obsolete. This is, of course, revolutionary talk, and is reminiscent of the original premise of the social sciences that argued for ‘all humans' rather than a privileged subset (see Fuller 2010). Indeed, one could argue that the universalization of their claims to democratic access to knowledge is crucial for their political project. The bulwarks of the modern empire, the university, the state, the large-scale corporation and even the culturally sophisticated educated elite are threatened with being dismantled by a new techno-social apparatus being built by the postmoderns.³

However, the arguments of the postmoderns have an important and critical flaw - they are blind to the problems created by economic inequality. The moderns dealt with this political economic problem by educating a minority of the population that would be involved in the social reproduction of knowledge but were crucially committed to the wider ‘public good'. The postmoderns, on the other hand, call for the market to right the wrongs of class, status and hierarchy without any countervailing means of correcting for areas where the market produces problems, so-called ‘market-failure'.⁴ For the moderns, the state can be used as a tool to correct the wrongs of the market and offer solutions through the use of various kinds of intervention, for example, to help prevent inequality, to regenerate an area or to correct lack of investment by the private sector.

Within the terms of the postmodern imaginary, however, the state is itself identified as part of the problem, having been closely entwined with the logic of the moderns. The only solution is transparency and ‘openness', a dose of sunlight being applied to all areas of social life. This usually takes the form of private wealth channelled through philanthropy, linked to a calculative instrumental rationality, such as demonstrated by the Gates Foundation.

In this case, 40 superwealthy people want to decide what their money will be used for,” Peter Kramer, a Hamburg shipping magnate and philanthropist, told the German magazine Der Spiegel. “That runs counter to the democratically legitimate state. In the end, the billionaires are indulging in hobbies that might be in the common good, but are very personal (Bruinius 2010).

Thus, the postmoderns see the world divided starkly between those who work hard and those who do not (usually in hidden areas away from the glare of cleansing technology); for those who work hard will inherit the riches, but for those who do not, a technological black-box solution will be found to solve this problem, usually in the form of league tables, targets, incentive structures and monitoring.

Why is it that the postmoderns think of the digital age as one requiring technical ‘black boxes'? This heuristic is widely taken as read in terms of empirical descriptions of technology, the state, the market, everyday life today and so forth, and also in terms of the possibility of a methodology to understand and explore it. Indeed, Galloway (2011) argues,

Invisibility is not a new concept within political theory [but this] is a specific kind of invisibility, a specific kind of blackness that has begun to permeate cybernetic societies, and further that this blackness is not simply an effect of cybernetic societies but is in fact a necessary precondition for them.... The black box: an opaque technological device for which only the inputs and outputs are known. The black bloc: a tactic of anonymization and massification often associated with the direct action wing of the left. Somehow these two things come together near the end of the twentieth century. Is there a reason for this? (Galloway 2011: 239)

This homology is between black boxes and black blocs, where black boxes are the obfuscated technologies that hide what is inside, sometimes productively, sometimes not, in order to simplify systems by hiding complexity or to create abstraction layers. Black blocs, on the other hand, are political strategies or tactics in protests and riots to show oneself as a member of a larger group and to hide or disguise its individual members. Both are methods of obfuscation, and both are practices that are operative within what Galloway calls ‘cybernetic societies' and I call computationality. This notion of information hiding, or encapsulation, is also important in object-oriented programming and related technical procedures of creating generative black boxes.

Thus social and political actors become understood through the metaphor of the technical practices of the technologists, and this raises an interesting question over the relationship between invisibility and visibility, or better, what I would call the relationship between means (machinery) and ends (commodity). That is, there is a problem of orientation in computationality when the code(s) are themselves hidden behind an interface or surface which remains eminently readable, but completely inscrutable in its depths. There is also the complementary problem raised in accepting the surface demands of a radical group that remains invisible and therefore beyond the possibility of contestation to its so-called 'non-demands' (a political attempt to lay claim to a technical convenience for political convenience). If the black boxing of technology is an urgent problem requiring contestation in postmodern capitalism, I suggest that the ‘black blocing' of politics remains equally problematic and in need of opening up. What is fascinating is that on two different levels, the technical and the social, we have a similarity in practices, reflecting instrumental needs in response to technical and political imperatives, respectively.

This raises the notion of an opaque class as a universal class. That a response to the transparency of computational societies is black blocs as the site of resistance within ‘cybernetic society' - perhaps the cypherpunk as exemplar. Indeed, it seems more likely that as the state increasingly monitors its citizens, using security services such as the NSA, citizens turn to obfuscation to preserve their anonymity before the state, through cryptography, for example. But perhaps it is also the case that black boxes and black blocs are both symptomatic of computationality and therefore need to be critiqued and opened up and their ‘mechanisms' exposed. Indeed there are contradictions presented in, for example, the public use of reason that is obscured and encapsulated within non-transparent forms, or the possibility of obscurity to defend practices of violence, withdrawal and nihilism. Which is not to deny the importance of obscurity in the practice of the private use of reason and away from the surveillance of the state.

In this vein, I want to explore the notion of availability in relation to this idea of surface. It is helpful here to think of the way that computationality has affordances that contribute to the possibility of availability in terms of the construction and distribution of a range of commodities. Here I am thinking of a commodity as being available when it can be used as a mere end, with the means veiled and backgrounded. This is not only in technical devices, of course, and includes the very social labour and material required to produce a device as such. But in the age of the computational, it is interesting to explore how the surface effects of a certain form of computational machinery create the conditions both for the black boxing of technology as such and for thinking about the possibility of political and social action against it. I call this the paradigm of availability following Borgmann (1984: 44). Upon this surface we might read and write whatever we choose, and on the black bloc, we are also offered a surface to which we might read the inscrutable however we might wish - politics itself as consumption.

What is striking about the paradigm of availability, made possible by computationality, is that it radically re-presents the mechanisms and structures of everyday life, themselves reconstructed within the ontology afforded by computationality. This moment of re-presentation is an offering of availability, understood as infinite play and exploitability (interactivity), of a specific com­modity form presented by the computational device. Here, I am thinking of the computational device both in terms of its material manifestations and also as a diagram or technical imaginary. That is, it is not only restructuring the mecha­nisms and structures, but also the very possibility of thinking against them. Here, the notion of the political itself requires reconciliation within the paradigm of availability and is very suggestive in relation to the black bloc itself.

So what is to be done? First and foremost would be a clear critique of both the technical and the political moment of black boxing. It is clear that the surface manifestation of the device, or the politics, is not enough for us to understand and critique what is, at least in terms of this theorization, an ideological manifestation of a computational ontotheology being instantiated in a number of medial moments (technology, politics, social movements, the environment, the state). Second, we need to deconstruct this manifestation of the commodity form as ends without means, in effect an example of commodity fetishism. Lastly, this critique implies the need for a new form of literacy, which I call 'iteracy', that is able to understand and intervene directly in the technological system we inhabit, but also to ensure that black boxing becomes glass boxing, and that political movements such as the black bloc become democratic ‘glass blocs'.