Re: <nettime> rage against the machine

[tbyfield <tbyfield@panix.com>]

Felix, this is really interesting. Normally, I'm allergic to sweeping 
models of history that involve anything like 'technology' or 
'technology,' because they mostly serve as playgrounds for wannabe TED 
talkers. Yours is different — maybe, in part, because you don't assume 
that capitalism and computation play well together.

You wrote:

> In the case of the plane crash, it's just out in the open, like in the
> case of a massive stock market crash. The difference is only that in 
> the
> case of the plane crash, the investigation is also out in the open,
> while in virtually all other cases, the investigation remains closed 
> to
> outsiders, to the degree that there is even one.

Yes and no. In theory, plane crashes happen out in the open compared to 
other algorithmic catastrophes. In practice, the subsequent 
investigations have a very 'public secret' quality: vast expanses are 
cordoned off to be combed for every fragment, however minuscule; the 
wreckage is meticulously reconstructed in immense closed spaces; 
forensic regimes — which tests are applied to what objects and why — 
are very opaque. And, last but not least, is the holy grail of every 
plane crash, the flight recorder. Its pop name is itself a testament to 
the point I made earlier in this this thread about how deeply 
cybernetics and aviation are intertwingled: the proverbial 'black box' 
of cybernetics became the actual *black box* of aviation. But, if 
anything, its logic was inverted: in cybernetics the phrase meant a 
system that can be understood only through its externally observable 
behavior, but in aviation it's the system that observes and records the 
plane's behavior.

Black boxes are needed because, unlike car crashes, when planes crash 
it's best to assume that the operators won't survive. That's where the 
'complexity' of your sweeping history comes in.

Goofy dreams of flying cars have been a staple of pop futurism since the 
1950s at least, but until very recently those dreams were built on the 
basis of automobiles — and carried a lot of cultural freight 
associated with them, as if it were merely a matter of adding a third 
dimension to their mobility. But that dimension coincides with the axis 
of gravity: what goes up must come down. The idea that flying cars would 
be sold, owned, and maintained on an individual basis, like cars, 
implies that we'd soon start seeing the aerial equivalent of beat-up 
pickups flying around — another staple of sci-fi since the mid-'70s. 
It won't happen quite like that.

When cars crash the risks are mainly limited to the operators; when 
planes crash the risks are much more widespread — tons of debris 
scattered randomly and *literally* out of the blue. That kind of danger 
to the public would justify banning them, but of course that won't 
happen. Instead, the risks will be managed in ways you describe well: 
"massive computation to cope, not just to handle 'hardware flaws', but 
to make the world inhabitable, or to keep it inhabitable, for 
civilization to continue."

The various forms of 'autonomization' of driving we're seeing now are 
the beginnings of that transformation. It'll require fundamentally 
different relations between operators and vehicles in order to achieve 
what really matters: new relations between *vehicles*. So, for example, 
we're seeing semi-cooperative procedures and standards (like Zipcar), 
mass choreographic coordination (like Waymo), the precaritizing 
dissolution of 'ownership' (like Uber); GPS-based wayfinding and 
remora-sensors (everywhere) and the growing specter of remote control by 
police forces. None of these things is entirely new, but their 
computational integration is. And as these threads converge, we can 
begin to see a more likely future in which few if any own, maintain, or 
even 'drive' a car — we just summon one, tell it our destination, and 
'the cloud' does the rest. Not because this realizes some naive dream of 
a 'frictionless' future, but because the risks of *real* friction 
anywhere above 50 meters off the ground are too serious. And, in 
exchange for giving up the autonomy associated with automobiles, we'll 
get to live.

That's why criticisms of the 'complexity' of increasingly automated and 
autonomized vehicles are a dead end, or at least limited to two 
dimensions. I liked it very much when you wrote that "the rise in 
complexity in itself is not a bad thing"; and, similarly, giving up 
autonomy is not in itself a *bad* thing. The question is where and how 
we draw the lines around autonomy. The fact that some cars will fly 
doesn't mean that every 'personal mobility device' — say, bicycles — 
needs to be micromanaged by a faceless computational state run amok. Yet 
that kind of massive, hysterical, categorical drive to control has been 
a central feature of the rising computational state for decades.

> The system that has worked for the last 40 years is reaching the 
> limits
> of the complexity it can handle. The externalities produced by the
> radical reduction of the lived experience to price signals are coming
> back to haunt the system, which has no way of coping with it. The
> attempts to put a price on "bads", say in the case of cap'n'trade have
> failed. And similarly, the attempts to save the climate are failing.

If a category muddles the difference between something that happens on 
the ground and 15,000 meters in the air, or blurs basic distinctions 
between a person and a multinational corporation, it's useless. 
Complexity does that, which is a good reason to start disassembling it. 
In *every* case, doing so will require historical 'excursions' into 
densely technical fields.

Cheers,
Ted

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