Exhaustive media

There is constant talk about the 'fact' that we (or our societies and econo­mies) are exhausted, depleted or in a state of decay (see Wiedemann and Zehle 2012). This notion of decline is a common theme in Western society, for example, Spengler's The Decline of the West, and is articulated various­ly as a decline in morals, lack of respect for law, failing economic or military firepower, relative education levels, threats from ecological crisis and so on.

The issue of a tendency inherent in a temporal social location, that is, the certain definite modes of behaviour, feeling and thought in what we might call constantly repeated experience in a common location in the historical dimension of the social process is what Karl Mannheim called the generation entelechy (Mannheim 1952). This is the process of living in a changed world and is a re-evaluation of the inventory and the forgetting of that which is useful and covert and which is not yet won. In other words, the particular stratification of experience in relation to the historical contexts of a specific generation - in both, what we might call, the inner and the outer dimensions of experience. This social process also naturally causes friction between different generation entelechies, such as that between an older and younger generation - there may also be moments of conflict within a generation entelechy or what Mannheim called generation units, and indeed certain elements of a generation unit may be delegated into computation which becomes prescribed on the next generation.

The relative conditions of possibility, particularly in relation to what we might call the technical milieu for a generation entelechy, contribute towards slower or faster cultural, social and economic change. The quicker the pace of social, technical, economic and cultural change is, the greater the likelihood that a particular generation location group will react to the changed situations by producing their own entelechy. Thus, individual and group experiences act as crystallizing agents in this process, and play out in notions of ‘being young', ‘freshness', ‘cool' or ‘with it' in some sense, which acts to position generation entelechies in relation to each other both historically and culturally. Indeed, through critical praxis, such as the unbuilding of reified code objects or revealing the commodity fetishism of algorithmic interfaces, also opens up the possibilities of other ways of doing things, and indeed new ways of being in the world.

Mannheim identifies crucial features of a generation entelechy as (1) new participants in the cultural process are emerging, while (2) former participants in that process are continually disappearing; (3) members of one generation can participate only in a temporally limited section of the historical process; and (4) it is therefore necessary to continually transmit the accumulated cultural heritage; (5) the transition from generation to generation is a continuous process (Mannheim 1952). Indeed, this is a suggestive way of thinking about the movement of culture, but it is important that we do not restrict such agency purely to humans as participants as it is clear that there are other actants, also formed of a generation entelechy, such as code objects, for whom certain assumptions, accumulated cultural heritage and the threat of disappearance are possible. For example, we might consider the code and algorithms still functioning on the British-made Ferranti Argus 500 and 700 computer series which was produced in the early 1980s, and is still used in 2013 for control and data processing in some nuclear power stations in the United Kingdom - it even still boots from 8" floppy disks.

In relation to this general talk of depletion in Europe and the United States, one of the recent decline issues has been, particularly in the United States and United Kingdom context, the worry about the decline of computational ability of young generations. More specifically, it is the lack of digital literacy (or what I previously discussed as iteracy) of the new generations. In this specific discourse, the worry is articulated that a new generation is emerging that is not adequately prepared for what appears to be a deeply computational economic and cultural environment. This is usually, although not always, linked to a literal exhaustion of the new generation, the implication being a generation that is unprepared, apathetic, illiterate and/or disconnected. Often these claims are located within what Mannheim calls the 'intelligentsia', he writes, 'in every society there are social groups whose special task it is to provide an interpretation of the world for that society. We call these the 'intelligentsia' (Mannheim 1967: 9). It is no surprise, then, that in the instance of digital literacy we see the same strata across society, commenting on and debating the relative merits of computational competences, abilities and literacies at a number of different levels, but particularly in relation to the education of new generations through discussions of school, college and university digital literacies (as previously discussed).

Some of these claims are necessarily the result of a form of generational transference of the older generations' own worries concerning its inadequacies, in this case usually either (1) an inability to use the correct type of computational devices/systems; (2) a concern that the young are not using the computers in the correct manner that they themselves were taught, for example, using a physical keyboard and mouse; or (3) a dismissal of the new forms of digitality that are seen as trivial, wasteful of time, and hence socially or economically unproductive, a classic example of this is social media. There are a number of themes and levels of analysis that are brought out in these discussions, often, but not limited to the question of moral failings of the new generation, but also to the technical abilities, economic possibilities, such as vocationalism, and also the ways of thinking appropriate to a perceived new environment or economic and technical ecology. This is similar to Foucault's question of a generational ethos, as it were, and whether it might be helpful if we,

envisage modernity rather as an attitude than as a period of history. And by “attitude,” I mean a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task. A bit, no doubt, like what the Greeks called an ethos. (Foucault 1984: 39)

Here, I want to take the problem of exhaustion of the new generations as a focus, the 'exhausted' literally, as in terms of the Latin exhaust as 'drained out'. In other words, to ask the why, how, who, what is 'drained out' and where to, in our highly computational cultures? That is, to turn the question around and identify exhaustion of the new generations as indeed an important site of concern, but that the exhaustion that the new generations are experiencing is not an apathy or lack of energy, but rather a product of the political economy, an ethos that results from being subject to the digital draining data, information and energy into technical systems through specific drainage points, operating through and on computational devices, and particularly intimate technologies like mobile phones, tablets and laptops.

To put it another way, what would be the 'enlightenment' in relation to the new exhaustive media and the software ecologies of trackers, web bugs, beacons, apps, clouds and streams? If we are to agree with Kant that the enlightenment is the universal, free, public uses of reason (Kant 1991), how do we assure freedom of public reason in the digital age? As Foucault described, for Kant,

when one is reasoning only in order to use one's reason, when one is reasoning as a reasonable being (and not as a cog in a machine), when one is reasoning as a member of reasonable humanity, then the use of reason must be free and public. Enlightenment is thus not merely the process by which individuals would see their own personal freedom of thought guaranteed. There is Enlightenment when the universal, the free, and the public uses of reason are superimposed on one another. (Foucault 1984: 36-7)

Thus for Kant, to reach our political maturity as human beings we should 'dare to know' or sapere aude, that is, 'to have courage to use your own reasoning' (Kant 1991: 54). This remains the challenge for us today, rearticulated by Foucault as thinking in terms of the 'historical ontology of ourselves'. This further enables us to test contemporary reality to find 'change points', and what might the implications be for an investigation of events by which we constitute ourselves as subjects? As Foucault argues,

I do not know whether we will ever reach mature adulthood. Many things in our experience convince us that the historical event of the Enlightenment did not make us mature adults, and we have not reached that stage yet. However, it seems to me that a meaning can be attributed to that critical interrogation on the present and on ourselves which Kant formulated by reflecting on the Enlightenment.

One way forward might be to begin to map the exhaustion of a new generation entelechy in terms of a new computational political economy that is emerging in terms of the ability to exhaust us of our thoughts, movements, health, thoughts, life, practices, etc. That is, usefully captured in terms of the term of the art in technical circles of the ‘data exhaust' that all users of computational systems create. We might therefore think in terms of the computational imaginaries that are crystallized within particular generation entelechies - and how we might gather a critical purchase on them. In other words the generation entelechy connected to a particular computational Weltanschauung, or worldview of computationality (Berry 2011).

We need to move away from a concern with mere competences of a new generation entelechy and widen the focus on the critical and reflexive abilities of a new generation and how they might be actuated. Rather than teach computer programming as a skill for a new economy, we need to explore the historical, philosophical, theoretical and critical context for particular kinds of the various forms of digital praxis. One way of doing this might be to look at concrete case studies of actual programming sites and projects, in order to understand why and how these forms of activity are related, the context in which they have developed and their trajectories, a research project that has recently begun to be closely associated with critical strands in software studies and digital humanities.

This is a critical means of contributing to the importance of the project of making the invisibility of much of the digital infrastructures become visible and available to critique. That is an exploration of the logistics of the computal and its various organizing and classificatory logics. Of course, understanding digital technology is a 'hard' problem for the humanities, liberal arts and social sciences due to the extremely complex forms which contain agentic functions and normative (but often hidden) values. Indeed, we might contemplate the curious problem that as the digital increasingly structures the contemporary world, curiously, it also withdraws and becomes backgrounded (Berry 2011). This enables us to explore how knowledge is transformed when mediated through code and software and to apply critical approaches to big data, visualization, digital methods, digital humanities and so forth. But crucially to also see this in relation to the crystallization of new entelechies around digital technologies - that is we need historical and political critique to understand this new situation.

Thinking about knowledge in this way enables us to explore genera­tional epistemological changes that are made possible by the installation of code/software, for example, in our contemporary instantiation of computa­tional devices, which are increasingly streams, clouds and networks. These computational devices, of course, are not static, nor are they mute, and their interconnections, communications, operation, effects and usage have to be subject to the kind of critical reasoning that both Kant and Foucault called for.

We might consider these transformations in light of what Google calls ‘augmented humanity'. Described as a number of moments within the capabilities of contemporary computational systems, such that Google, ‘knows roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are Google also knows, to within a foot, roughly where you

are....... most people don't want Google to answer their questions............... They

want Google to tell them what they should be doing next' (Eaton 2012b). Translated, this means that Google believes that it knows better than the user what it is that they should be doing, and in many cases even thinking. This is the background to the project of Google Glass and wearable technology that is always available within sight of the new kind of augmented user. Thus, the computational device the user wears or holds contains the means to source the expertise to prescribe action in particular contexts, what we might call ‘context consumerism' but which is essentially cognitive co-option. That is, that the user is able to purchase his or her cognitive/memory/expertise capabilities as required on-the-fly. Thus, humanity becomes what we might call, following the development of programming languages such as C+ +, a new augmented or extended humanity+ +. Indeed, there are now a number of examples of these developments in relation to, for example, Google Glass, contextual UX, locative technologies, etc. We can also see new developments in brain interfaces that enable direct connection of silicon and brain tissue such that the ‘augmentated' technology is quite literally part of the body (Anthony 2013).

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

These are new forms of invisible interface/ubiquitous computing/ enchanted objects which use context to present user with predictive media and information in real time. The aim, we might say, is to replace forethought by reconfiguring/replacing human ‘secondary memory' and thinking with computation. That is, the crucial half-second of pre-conscious decision-forming processes whereby we literally ‘make up our own minds' is today subject to the unregulated and aggressive targeting of the programming industry. This temporally located area of the processes of mind we might call the ‘enlightenment moment' as it is the fraction of a second that creates the condition of possibility for independent thought and reflexivity itself. Indeed, far from being science-fiction, this is now the site of new technologies in the process of being constructed, current examples including: Google Now, Apple Siri, MindMeld, Tempo, etc. Not to mention the aggressive targeting by advertising companies of this area, but more worryingly of new generation entelechies who are still developing their critical or reflexive skills, such as children and young people. This, of course, raises important questions about whether these targeted computation systems and contextual processes should be regulated in law, especially in relation to the young.

The new imaginaries are already being conceptualized as an ‘age of context' within the programming industries (see O'Reilly 2013). Indeed, under this notion all material objects are carriers of signals to be collected and collated into computational systems, even the discarded, the trash, etc. contains RFID chips that can provide data for contextual systems. But more importantly, the phones we carry, the mobile computers and the tablets, now built with a number of computational sensors, such as GPS, compasses, gyroscopes, microphones, cameras, Wi-Fi, radio transmitters and so forth, enable a form of contextual awareness to be technically generated through massive real-time flows of data. For example, in the US Presidential election on 6 November 2012, Twitter recorded 31 million election-related Tweets from users of the streaming - that is 327 452 Tweets per minute (TPM) (Twitter 2012) which is then streamed back to its users. In a real-time stream ecology, such as Twitter, the notion of the human is already contested and challenged by a form of ‘hyper attention' in contrast to the ‘deep attention' of previous ages. Indeed, the user is constantly bombarded with data. This is increasingly understood as a lack within human capabilities which needs to be remedied using yet more technology - real-time streams need visualization, cognitive assistants, push notification, dashboard interfaces and so forth.

This current computational imaginary of an ‘age of context' is being built upon the conditions of possibility made feasible by distributed computing, cloud services, smart devices, sensors and new programming practices around mobile technologies. This new paradigm of anticipatory computing stresses the importance of connecting up multiple technologies that provide data from real-time streams and APIs to enable a new kind of intelligence within these technical devices. A good example of this is given by Google's new ‘Google Now' product, which attempts to think ‘ahead' of the user by providing algorithmic prediction based on past user behaviour, preferences, Google search result history, smart device sensors, geolocation and so forth. As Google explains,

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

These new technologies form a constellation that creates new products and services, new tastes and desires, and the ability to make an intervention into forethought - to produce the imaginary that Google names ‘augmented humanity' (Eaton 2012b). In some senses this follows from the idea that after ‘human consciousness has been put under the microscope, [it has been] exposed mercilessly for the poor thing it is: a transitory and fleeting phenomenon' (Thrift 2006: 284). The ideas of augmented humanity and contextual computing are intended to remedy this ‘problem' in human cognitive ability. Here the technologists are aware that they need to tread carefully as Eric Schmidt, Google's ex-CEO, revealed ‘Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it' (Richmond 2010). The ‘creepy line' is the point at which the public and politicians think a line has been crossed into surveillance, control and manipulation, by capitalist corporations or the state. Of course, internally, Google's experimentation with these technologies is potentially much more radical and invasive. These new technologies need not be as dangerous as they might seem at first glance, and there is no doubt that the contextual computing paradigm can be extremely useful for users in their busy lives for consuming commodities and services - acting more like a personal assistant than a secret policeman. These technologies are built on complex intertwined webs of software tied together with these new meta-systems which abstract (are built) from the: (1) social layer, such as Twitter and Facebook; (2) ambient data collection layer, using the sensors in mobile devices; (3) web layer, the existing and future web content and technologies; (4) notification layer, enabling reconciliation and unification of

real-time streams; and lastly, (5) the app layer, which is predominantly made up of single-function apps,

These various layers are then loosely coupled to interoperate in an unexpected 'delightful' fashion, such as experienced with the conversation interfaces, such as Apple Siri, which have both an element of 'understanding' and contextual information about their user and environment. Critically engaging with this algorithm-enabled age of context is challenging due to the distributed software, material objects, 'enchanted' objects, black-boxed systems and computational 'things' that make it up. The threads that hold these systems together are not well understood as a totality nor even as individual components experienced as they are through new calculative dashboards (e.g. notification interfaces). Indeed, we can already discern new forms of power that are tentatively visible in this new context layer, enabling new political economic actors, and a new form of intensive exploitation, such as that demonstrated by the intensification of the pre-cognitive moment discussed earlier.

Ihave argued previously that in moments like the new aesthetic, glitches can be critically instructive (Berry 2011, 2012a, b, c), and that exceptions and contextual failure are useful to begin mapping these new systems (Berry et al. 2012a, 2013).The black box of these exhaustive systems is spun around us in wireless radio networks and RFID webs - perhaps doubly invisible. We need to critique moments in exhaustive media that are connected to particular forms of what we might call 'exhaustive' governmentality, self­monitoring and life-hacking practices, aesthetic, political, social, economic, etc. but also the way in which they shape generational entelechies. For example, this could be through the creation of an affective relation with real-time streaming ecologies and a messianic mode of media or through the coping tests that disrupt the smooth surfaces of software. Indeed, we might say that the new anticipatory computing paradigm creates a new anticipatory subject, which elsewhere I have called a riparian citizen (Berry 2011: 144).

Indeed, it seems to me that it is crucial to understand how computation contributes to new generational entelechies and may function to limit the ability to critically reflect on the historical dimension of the social process. For example, visual rhetorics of the digital - 'new aesthetic', 'pixels', 'sound waves' and so forth - are widely used in interface culture to represent and describe computational agency without a corresponding critical dimension. Indeed, this contributes to a wider discussion of how medial changes create epistemic changes and how critical praxis can be mobilized towards emancipatory knowledge and technologies. For me, this project remains linked to a critical ontology of ourselves as ethos, a critical philosophical life and the historical analysis of imposed limits to reach towards experiments with going beyond current conditions and limits (Foucault 1984).

The possibility of a 'digital' enlightenment ethos needs to be translated into coherent 'labor of diverse inquiries', one of which is the urgent focus on the challenge to thinking represented by the intensification of the programming industries on the 'enlightenment moment' of our pre-thought. This requires new approaches, which could certainly draw on the archaeological and genealogical analysis of practices suggested by Foucault (1984) and also on the logistics and strategic practices associated with shaping both the policies and concrete technologies themselves - perhaps, if not necessarily 'Evil Media' (Fuller and Goffey 2012), then certainly critical software and political praxis. Last, and not least, is the theoretical moment required in developing the conceptual and critical means of defining unique forms of care to things, others and ourselves that are not limited by the framing of computationality.

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