Rant Against The Machine

Recently I had a short discussion in an open channel in our company chat tool. It went along the idea, that Reddit was just again target of some spoiled sod posting AI generated slop and that Reddit’s users were, let’s say, showing the user whose house it is.

One fellow co-worker argued that this was exactly the way to go and handle those sods and while I agree in the context of a felt mixed bag of emotions called schadenfreude and admiration for the sharp creative wits I grew accustomed with (and at times was mutilating or were mutilated by mentally) in discussion boards online since 1998 - I still had to object:

As long as we as users do not know the why, we cannot judge if we succeed or fail at sinking this AI slop or the user posting it. We might believe that we could, but we won’t know for certain.

What if that user wanted to test how people react to AI slop in general on different platforms?

What if that user wanted to get positive feedback for some real work they put in?

What if that user just wanted to flood the zone (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) with crap to gain attention (or distract from something else)?

There are countless possibilities and as long as we do not have any deeper knowledge of what is going on for that one slop post, the riposte might be spot on or exactly the opposite: an expected feedback which actually enforces or falsifies a certain theory.

Objectively, all reactions boil down to data points.

A quite interesting strand to follow could be how perception and feedback (data points) build our individual personal reality.

Or going deep Paul-Watzlawick-Style on “you cannot not communicate” how that even you (yes, you!) could be a data point because you simply exist without having touched Reddit at all and ever.

But what says the God of Meandering? Not today.

Buckle up for the next chapter which is about discipline and punishment.

Back in university we had to take theory classes, a simple necessity which did not sit well with many of us artists and designers. I was rather intrigued and while I consider some of my time there as toxic career waste - those theory classes of writing and reading and “fashion history targeting the period of 1890 and 1945” also did not directly help my career either but at least my brain is still lighting up like a Christmas tree once in a while.

One of those theory classes had a philosophical topic. It tackled a thorough analysis of Michel Foucault’s “Discipline and Punishment”. Fortunately for you right now and for my reputation as a serious author it has nothing to do with certain sexual preferences. Funnily enough it starts in an era right where a certain Donatien de Sade made his impact on french literature. It’s a time dubbed the “Ancien Régime (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)” and punishment was gruesome and in-the-face. You know the style Benioff and Weiss visually employed in Game of Thrones. Or let’s say how punishment is handled in some religiously fundamental legal entities. Or how Trump would likely like to deal with his adversaries, probably by airing a tv-show akin to Running Man.

So the book starts of with that. Some guy called Robert-François Damiens (Öffnet in neuem Fenster) tries his hand at regicide in mid-18th century (no, not Jamie, Jamie brings a sword to king-slaying, not a penknife). He fails, mentally unstable as he might have been, and while I do advocate against royalty, I would not go as far as to just killing off blue-bloods. But well, you got (french) revolutions for that. Anyway, Damiens was tortured and executed for his feeble attempt and hey, the 1 cm deep cut could have gone terribly wrong in the eras before antibiotics plus his victim was chosen by that one god to bind them all. That has to count, too. People chosen by gods generally don’t favor other peeps questioning their authority, still the punishment might have been slightly over the top for modern standards:

1. Slowly crashing his legs

2. Burning him with glowing red metal pincers

3. Chemically burning the hand used in the assault with sulfur

4. Pouring liquid, hot wax, lead and oil into his wounds

5. Cutting of his genitals

6. Harnessing horses to all limbs for dismemberment (which did not go smoothly)

7. Burning him at the stake

At least some of it in front of a cheering crowd and probably with a PG Rating of Zero.

Why is this important for Foucault’s book? Because it sets the baseline how things were done in the not-so-very-much old days (not even 300 years back - maybe some works of J.S.Bach were a sort of aprés torture soundtrack).

So, it was bad. We got it. But then humanism kicked in, right? Right?

One of the main arguments of Foucault is that not (only) the forgiving ideas of humanitarians changed to the in comparison now rather easygoing (?) methods of handling delinquents we have now - but that a combination of knowledge and a massive power shift led away from the brutal and vicious splatter movie equivalent of the past.

There were the technological advances that led to the Industrial Revolution and with them the shift from feudal societies to those were power accumulated in people who owned the industries. The blood line became less important and the power of singular bodies of aristocracy declined. A good example is the french revolution at the end of the 18th century or the rise of the British Parliament at the beginning of it.

There were the ideas of the era of Enlightenment, weakening the grasp of the churches on the human soul, which was entirely the domain of religion and only accessible by its messengers before.

There was the idea of the Scientific Method, that the world could be understood by observation and manipulated by probing it through experimentation.

Newton, Kant, Voltaire, Rousseau.

The previous system was built on a superstitious idea of punishment. It worked by the idea of an-eye-for-an-eye to rectify the guilt as of ancient times with their angry god – the body of the individual as a canvas to paint the punishment on, while its soul was subject to the judgment of that god.

There’s a reason why Damiens was punished the way he was. He literally attacked a holy person. And since everything is ritualized in a system which is based on superstition instead of facts, the punishment had to be ritualized as well to be understood as a symbol - for the delinquent, the victim and the audience.

The new paradigm followed a completely different approach in the following decades, centuries.

Power dissipated from one or a few person (the king, aristocracy) to the bourgeoisie - people lacking the birth-right of power by blood but qualifying through a lot of money and owning production value. That does not mean those people were less cruel, but the previously existing “tree structure” order was overthrown and it needed to be replaced by something that allowed those people in power to interact with each other.

Also, it was a very bad idea to mutilate your prospective work force if you own the production value of manufacturing lines which needs those workers to operate. You need to make sure those “bodies” do not step out of line, without destroying them.

Introducing the human “soul => identity” and the human sciences, claiming their stake from the churches. A new self consciousness arose: Through science the human race can be educated nearly limitless. One just needs to know the right levers and buttons.

“A man does not have himself killed for a half pence a day or for a petty distinction. You must speak to the soul in order to electrify the man.” – Napoleon Bonaparte

So, how do you actually punish not a body, but a soul? Especially if you start telling people that the teachings of the church might be somewhat… incomplete and the whole idea of purgatory and hell loses its glamour? How do you prevent people from the idea of disrupting the cogs of your production? How do you make sure any outlawed elements cannot affect you in a way which you cannot predict? How do make a human resource available again after its transgression?

Something else was needed: proactive, immaterial, controllable, predictable.

The scientific method for the delinquent masses

It’s quite evident to assume that if one could understand the universe by observation, this could be done with the human consciousness as well. And since this is science, one would have to conduct experiments to falsify their theories or to find proof. Just a reminder: “Frankenstein” and their limbs were joined in writing by Mary Shelley somewhat 1816 and that’s more or less 60 years after Damiens was ripped apart.

The brighter side of the enlightenment - that an individual’s freedom and welfare is increased by its education, its health is improved by advancing medical faculties, its identity is not hard-coded by birth and that its wrongs could be rectified - is equally contrasted by the fact that an infrastructure of constant surveillance and micro-punishments and indoctrination was established in areas where the victims of this infrastructure were the weakest in societies: kids in schools, soldiers in the army, patients in the hospitals, inmates in prison. (Öffnet in neuem Fenster)

Foucault describes this infrastructure as a carceral system. An all encompassing net where humans are constantly watched and observed and micro-punished - all the time. What once was a highly authoritarian system transformed more and more into one, where individuals and institutions become actors of the whole. And every actor started watching the others and dealing out.

This whole structure is so omnipresent that it became truly impossible to exist outside of its boundaries. Even the homeless bum and their extraordinary rich opposite cannot escape the prison of being under constant surveillance.

I want to emphasize on how relevant this shift is:
There was a time when one could just walk away. Sure, you’d probably become an outlaw, would have to give up all advantages your social context gave you - but ultimately you were able to disappear because there was still space without social context. Your identity was the result of only collateral relations. Your actions were defined by your boundaries and you could decide yourself how far you wanted to push them - only to be judged by god.

It transformed into something which could at best described as a meta-identity. As soon as something springs to life, it develops an existence outside of it’s body and identity, which is subject to musing and regulations by other actors to a degree that it is impossible to escape (e.g. take birth registers and compulsory education). Here your actions are defined by their boundaries and your mind is infused with the intricate consequences since you draw your first breath.

Whereas the first would only allow the subject the disobedience to topple its direct social context, the latter would enable the individual to disrupt the system’s order by overstepping its systemic boundaries. A little cog maligned in the clockwork. This is the nature of machines and the profiteers of those machines hate this trick.

All the wheels shall stand still if thy strong arm so wills - Georg Herwegh

Hello Algorithm, how are you today?

I hope you enjoyed the little side track and entertained yourself with some enlightenment.

Foucault published Discipline and Punish in the 1970ies and it indeed is a very interesting view how wealth and tech and power can affect each other and to discuss this in a larger context of other things that transpired in the last ~300 years.

It is also a conceptual blueprint how especially tech and wealth transformed the global scale and intensity of observation and punishment and shifted the power balances along the way. The carceral system holds us all in its greedy clutches and we see its effects on the ‘soul’ of humanity.

Social Media, in all its beauty and horror, is the embodiment of the concept. Individuals and institutions being exposed, observed and micro-punished and micro-punishing constantly. It’s all in the numbers and shitstorms and cancel culture are the very proof that Bentham’s panopticum works very nicely. Nobody is safe from being judged.

The effect on the human psyche is astonishing because we are not really built for that kind of feedback loops. We are also not built for predeterministic perfection, so surveillance creeps into our lifes and workspaces, depending how much data can be effectively processed. All for the greater good, of course, and it’s not entirely wrong.

Algos constantly either reward or penalize us, no matter if or if we do not provide meaningful interaction, as long as we provide data points. We think we are free and happy but only as long as we move within our boundaries. There our view is shaped by the information which is available to us.

AI will be the pinnacle to that, the evolution of the scale of social media to a 24/7, all year, all life surveillance and discipline engine. It will conduct its on experiments and you will not know next time your trashing someone posting AI slop on Reddit.

The ultimate question that remains is: Who owns the engine? For a while the answer seemed to be that it belongs to everyone - at least in the eyes of a white, male middle-upper-class, a few richer spikes here and there, in the western hemisphere between 1950 to 2015.

Neo-Feudalists masking as Neo-Libertarians

Do you remember the Arab Spring? In the west it was perceived as an uprising of basically lesser educated people from their Ancien Régime - hailing them for finally leaving the shackles of an oppressive fundamentalist feudalism for a turn to enlightenment, democracy and freedom.

It was the perfect example how that one little cog could massively ripple through power structures and social media played a relevant part in it (Öffnet in neuem Fenster). Observation. Punishment.

It is also the perfect example about declining legitimacy to privilege and how that privilege reacts to it. Most persons with privilege don’t want to be in that place where the target is painted on their back, out of control of the maelstrom. Chaos is fine, as long as it provides a ladder to climb, but ideally they can predict and crowd control.

One step to get there is to remove the fail-safes established since the last big technological shift: Human and worker rights. Rights for “minorities”, the vulnerable, the intersectional ones. Those fail-safes gives individuals the power to step out of their place.

But the official story is along the lines that those fail-safes are bureaucracy and rules keep an individual from harnessing their full potential. Which is partially true, yes (if you have any leverage to begin with).

Another step is to remove the dependency on other humans in the production line. If the worker’s strong arm does not matter, why should you treat him well when it just reduces your privilege? Why should you protect a person when you have no use for him?

But the official story is along the lines that machines can perform better than you and your efficiency will go through the roof and your work will create more value. Which is partially true, yes (if you still have work and relevance).

And the last step is to be part of the enigmatic circle of people who define the boundaries for others and to be able to scale this indefinitely. They want to own all the “prison systems” and even though they will still need a social context to live in, they certainly do not want the pollution of low-lives interfering.

But the official story is along the lines that there are people much smarter and better and more beautiful than you and they earned everything they got. In turn, everyone else is trying to take the little scraps you have left away from you. Follow them and they’ll provide you with what they think you deserve (the last sentence is actually true, while the rest is rubbish).

It’s basically the amalgam of the worst thing the Ancien Régime and the Enlightenment have to offer. People with king-like power at scale, operating a carceral system of constant observation and correction for their serfs, legitimizing them in the eyes of each individual right from birth. Internally based on countless scientific experiments, countering every notion the individual might have to break free. Every existence, every behavior a data point. Externally a shit-show of rituals because their injustice has no scientific foundation, but is rooted in a display of raw, brutalist force.

And there were the ones thinking the idea of the original sin and baptizing infants to safe them from damnation was an advanced idea to keep the reigns over people.

Where we go from here
is a choice I leave to you. – Neo (sort of)