World Information Institute presents
Fake news, disinformation, psychological warfare.
The modern conceptions of truth and reality are in disarray.
Categorical systems that have organized Western culture over the last 200 years, are broken up and eroded.
We are confronted with all kinds of new hybrids.
Digital communication forces us to look not only at technical protocols
but also at protocols of the human mind and nervous system.
Over the last 30 years, artists, researchers, and activists, brought together by the Institute of New Cultural Technologies in Vienna,
have explored alternative histories of media and the emergent digital (un)consciousness.
Their perspectives, seemingly marginal during times of techno-utopianism,
are now critical as we are traversing new zones of monsters.
Digital spells spew across the plains,
turning against humans
in a feral stream of unhuman delight.
Feasting upon tormented souls of the dammned in unendurable madness.
What songs will we sing, what stories will we tell
in a post-truth era.
How might we overturn this
"absolute mastery over nature"
how might we overturn this "absolute mastery over nature"
without creating another form of mastery?
It has to be something like the mastery of non-mastery.
Until recently we thought the truth was stronger than fiction
but that has changed.
Now it seems like reality is a nonstop Yage seance
complete with vomiting and defecation.
My first attempt to answer and unravel this is to suggest that
we could maybe think about drugs as technologies, perhaps even
Communications Technologies because certainly the way in which drugs work
in the human body and the brain is that they basically intervene in
its internal means of communication.
Microsoft can be seen as what Christianity became in that sad
Byzantine time, the brutally state imposed religion that tied people to
their occupations and their land, so their work and lives could never, never change.
Cybertime is our organic, physic,
erotic, social time.
It is the time of our brain, of our body
and this kind of discrepancy of intermingling and contradiction
of cyberspace and cybertime has produced a kind of panic wave
which is now ending in the Prozac Crash.
In this kind of crash of euphoria
which is introducing a new phase, is introducing Dark Markets,
the crack in the corporate mind.
Felix Stalder is on the line, who investigates the social history and
economy of truth.
He explains how necropolitical data centers establish the
relentless rule of algorithmic theocracy,
and how this turns the future into a prison.
The idea that there is something
like an objective disembodied knowledge starts in the 17th century.
It's basically the Royal Society that brought up this idea
that, learned men coming together, observing the facts,
could come to an agreement on what these facts are.
And thus it meant that these facts,
were independent of any one particular person and thus could be seen
as an objective independent truth.
This was part of a larger move
to secularize society and of the rising bourgeoisie
to establish itself against, and independent of, nobility.
So they developed a different way of organizing knowledge, a different knowledge regime.
And this was meant to be independent, and independent meant mainly
independent of the king.
Does making Rationality computable
make computers rational?
This paradigm of rationality, it has such a deep theoretical structure that it
starts to define and limit our world. The world of possibilities that we have,
that's what I'll be talking about today. So that we're increasingly in
an information age but we lose meaning.
We are increasingly in a world of computation
but we lose intelligibility.
We're increasingly in a world where despite the quantum, and the Einstein and Quantum Revolutions,
where people in the past thought that would open the world for us,
with more possibilities, I am arguing that it does the opposite.
If we only use Game Theory to think about and to capture what we mean
by human reason that we end up only giving outcomes value. That means we
can't think about the procedures that we would arrive at them.
Specifically within the system we cannot have solidarity.
Which means that for example voluntary collective action, in trade unions for example, is just irrational.
In the laboratory of social relations, theories of action
are splitting the atoms of the social. In a behavioral matrix of group dynamics.
Loraine Daston describes the strange career of Cold War rationality
in "How Reason lost its Mind" and how Game Theory and "Kriegspiel"
turned into an overarching theme for the social sciences.
The Prisoners Dilemma drives paranoid war games in finance and public policy.
These models of operations change from descriptive to normative prescriptive.
Predatory and anti-human formulas of Rational Choice include social utility
in favor of hostile economic exploitation.
Prisoners of Public Choice are trapped in Cold War logic,
and Adam Curtis' "The Trap" shows how a simplistic model
of human beings as self-seeking, almost robotic creatures
led to today's idea of freedom.
When Van Neuman came up with rationality, he essentially made it to be computable from the outset.
So it wasn't as though we've discovered that human intelligence is computable.
John Van Neuman came up with a theory of rationality that made intelligence computable from the fact of the way that he modeled it.
And that means that in so far as Rational Choice Theory is our dominant paradigm for thinking about
intelligence and rational action we've already conceded the game.
We've already understood that it is is computable.
It is the end of theory,
because with big data mythology large amounts of data are a higher form of intelligence.
It is correlations that replace causation
and judgment is the product of machines.
The perfect search engine would be like the mind of God says Sergey Brin
Proteus, a sea god in Greek mythology, tells the future - but only answer someone
who captures him and he changes his shape to avoid just this.
This assumption of disinterestedness,
of a distance, of an outside view
becomes not tenable and has never been tenable in the social sciences.
But increasingly it also does not become tenable anymore in the natural sciences.
Problems have become too complex that it cannot be viewed from
the outside with these totalizing bird's eye view, so to speak. But all
observer positions are always inside the problem already. So this is a fundamental challenge
to the idea of this objective truth and the idea that you can
establish facts without reference to the person and the position of the person
establishing the facts.
The history of artificial intelligence also teaches us that you cannot
banish Freud's insights from the creation of the intelligent machines
that will haunt us.
This is a typical "the return of the repressed" through the machine.
There is nothing like objective data. We as scientists collect these data.
We define what is an important piece of information and how this
should be collected. So data never represent the world, or humans, or
whatever, but they also make it at the same time. They define what society
means today etc. etc. Data cannot speak for themselves because they are already
the product of work of researchers, data collectors and other people.
This idea that data are objective and that only the interpretation might be
subjective is kind of a naive idea about what data are.
Data are highly fabricated things. And actually, if you would take indicators,
and we live in in our societies a lot by indicators,
we know if our gross domestic product is that and that - then we are good or we are not good etc.
We know when we manage our lives that we measure blood pressure
and weight and all these kinds of things.
We believe that numbers represent us but that's the problem.
We are told which numbers represent us
and we forget that all this is just one form of seeing the world.
If you study scientific methodology the interesting part is
to look at what gets left out for example, or what gets formatted in such a way
that it is not represented
in the method or the output anymore.
The crucial term here would be formatting.
How are phenomena formatted to fit into the methodology.
You cannot say from the oracle in Delphi,
you can never be sure how they kind of produce that string of interpretation,
or even with a computational system you are today not so sure what happens in those
very complex settings of machine learning in between the input and the output.
I am much more interested in what we would call the social life of method,
and what kind of promises for example come attached to a certain way of prediction.
This is one particular instance where we can learn a lot about society
and how society is using such methods for describing itself,
but also for changing itself.
This is a way also of social engineering, or as we would call it social technology.
The other thing that is really interesting
in the world of predictive industries
is that, what would be the double social life of method.
Which means that you look at how the method is actually filled with social aspects,
with paradigms, with ideologies, with political decisions and all these things.
On the other hand, which would be the second aspect of it
is co-shaping the world that it describes.
This is the whole full circle of social technology.
Prediction does that since antiquity,
it was always used also as a means, as a social technology, a means of social engineering.
We all know the terminology of self-fulfilling prophecies and stuff like that.
The way you build the future into the present is of course always changing the present,
towards some aspects of the future that you are interested in.
You have this hard problem of consciousness where no one knows
how consciousness can emerge from physical structures.
So, that I guess is one of the reasons
why conscious artificial intelligence is so unimaginable right now.
"The distinction between us and robots is going to disappear" end of quote- but it
seems to me that something more profound and uncanny is taking place.
We ought to ask some new questions about the blurred distinction
between humans and machines.
My question is: are human beings evolving in to some kind of Freudian robots?
At the same time as the AI engineers design their robots to resemble humans?
I'm looking at the same kind of feedback loop
that we just saw in that concept demonstration.
Is the Uncanny Valley becoming a two-way street?
As the sirens would say, communication is a war for control
and a battlefield for body and mind.
Global finance, cyber warfare Information Age,
propaganda and psychological campaigns,
political and cultural subversion,
deception of or interference with local media.
Many of the camera systems that we see on our streets are derivatives of Vietnam War.
Their military systems come into a policing role and police information systems are the nervous system of the modern state.
In one country they aid and another country they track.
The internet embedded in global finance produces hierarchy and new forms of concentration.
When we travel up we come to telephony channels,
the users of the Inmarsat system were never really told that their phone calls are
basically broadcast over the ocean regions and that anybody can listen to them.
Technology is never neutral.
It is charged, it has a political status and what it does and what it does not do
depends to a large extent upon the political hierarchy and the power structures that wield that technology.
One of the things that has to be considered is when we talk of the
information age, it is also the misinformation age.
What flows depends upon who determines what the pipelines are, who determines
who the recipients are, what the target group is, what the message will be.
In days like now you've got the mergers of AOL and Time Warner and things
like that, people like Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner are very powerful people.
And they determine, as they have done during the Kosovo War, during the Gulf War
and a whole lot of other situations, what message will come across
and who will receive it in what way.
The Association of Automous Astronauts,
we are a worldwide network of local community based groups,
all dedicated to building our own spaceships.
Who produces the information? Who controls it? Who benefits?
Politics of surveillance change as the political situation changes.
I probably don't need to say this in Austria, but as the authority of the
state declines, the state then uses more manipulative measures.
When you go into that influence region, manipulation, that's where the
media start being interfered with.
Get into that shaded zone and repression becomes the only government service.
What we've got to understand here is that surveillance is the nervous system,
the brain of the state,
with muscle in the background, when that fails.
If you look at any of the technologies of digital surveillance today,
biometric scanning, iris scanning, fingerprint technologies,
they are all the inheritance of the late 19th Century's theories of race
and physiognomy and anthropometry.
In fact I think it has a very long history
and if we are to understand how to free ourselves
and how to live as as freely from the kind of control and surveillance mechanisms that surround us today
it would be good to look at that history.
Capitalist globalization hungers for total control over nature and human society.
Technology has, as we know, come to its aid in this project.
Obviously all of us know that we don't exist unless we're on TV.
I mean we don't exist unless on the news.
So the reality that is reported in the media,
is more real than what we have traditionally thought of as as real.
What is to be done
when the airways are choked by the screens of the dead
and a digital rain of fear and pain is leaving ruin in its wake?
When dark digital forces amass their power in their dim quarters to spring forth
and bring down all humankind in violence, pain and crazed madness?
It was in the hills of Chiapas in 1994 that the first shots were fired
in the Information War.
Despite being without electricity or telephone, the Zapatistas took the revolution online.
I said, what would happen if I put this little warm milk on my TV?
Well I did it. What do you think happened?
It blew up!
It was my first Electronic Civil Disobedience.
I therefore understood that ubiquitous technology,
powerful technology, could be destroyed by simple warm milk.
This was the beginning of a revolution.
2001 the Zapatistas marched into Mexico City and at the Zocalo, at the center,
they requested to speak to the Mexican house of Congress and the Mexican people.
People of Nurio,
Purepecha Brothers and Sisters, Brothers and Sisters of the national Indigenous Congress Brothers and Sisters of the national and international civil society,
The history which has gathered us together these days is not new.
The injuries which convoke us are not new. Our struggle is not new.
Neither sorrows nor battle have time or owner.
We are born to them, and they belong to all of us.
Sorrow unites us and makes us one, even though we are many.
We are this sorrow.
To the Power we are nothing more than a cipher in its accounts.
We are a troublesome number, a number on a scale.
To disappear us, they meaure us.
To measure their time and costs.
To exploit us they measure us.
To control us they measure us.
To measure their time and expense.
Algorithmic prayer mills are the wicked machinery
of necropolitical terraforming.
Alien automatons make the planet into a trap
to swallow our soul, enslave our will
and feast upon the entrails of our existence.
Data centers are the networked cathedrals
and high-voltage shrines of evil eyes,
to control and exploit the planets biomass.
The mythical belief in an invisible hand,
shrouded in rational logic
from the Ivory Hills of madness.
Hastening the time where it will break our minds,
the infosphere of the planet cracks open,
raising forces of destruction that render Earth
a charred altar for alien idiot Gods.
A plague that will end all human troubles for good!
I am really interested now in the category territory.
Territory is a construction
and it's a construction of power, in a way.
And when war hits a city, or a bombing, like in Lahore just now, we discover something.
We discover that we, the residents, are civilians,
and that is a state of profound powerlessness, because actually we have very few protections.
We're supposed to have protections, but we have very few.
Do those without power make history?
Yes they do, but under certain conditions.
You are powerless but your powerlessness is complex, and in that complexity lies the possibility of making history,
or "a" history, of making part of the political history.
The digitality makes clearer, so to speak, a type of connection, which was not visible before,
and that's really the argument.
There is something in digitality that clarifies the point of social affairs.
Apparently we are all volatile subjects in multi-dimensional elastic space.
There's a kind of a dark side to that because it presupposes
high levels of surveillance monitoring and information about
people being easily accessible.
There are many ways in which we can be rather worried about
the sort of consequences of that system of digital surveillance.
The symmetry is exactly the question of who is a subject
and who is an object.
If we think about visibility as something that is asymmetrical
then we certainly have to think about ways of becoming invisible.
A lot of of this is about new military ideas of security.
It's about the asymmetric warfare between states and non-state fighters.
It's about a more or less permanent sense of mobilization and it's about taking
advantage of all of the New Media technologies that are already embedded
within everyday life to sustain contemporary urban societies.
Where you take the embedded surveillance systems of the city and
you try and apply them, move them on, "functional creep", as they call it,
towards security applications.
How can you possibly identify the threat from the norm
the abnormal from the normal?
The key concept here is Battle Space.
As Tim Blackmore says Battle Space is deep, high, wide and simultaneous, there is no longer a front or a rear.
There's a sense everything is now a war zone and this is the sort of doctrine of nonlinear asymmetric conflict.
Wordwide Homeland Security spending is forecast to double from 230 billion in 2006 to 518 billion in 2015.
This collapses the threats between the inside and the outside of nation states,
where crime blurs into war, the local blurs into the global.
Western nation states are moving away from the idea
that the inside is a liberal world and the outside is an illiberal world
and that policing is organized for the inside whilst the army is organizing the outside,
to a much more complex sort of geography of safe and unsafe.
I think a lot of this these efforts and techniques are driven by a sort of technophiliac dream,
a dream of perfect mastery, of perfect control.
A lot of the new military technology is being designed to try and address
the specific architectures and geographies of cities
which is a new phenomenon.
I think that the elasticity of space
is the kind of the spatial equivalent to temporariness.
And the elasticity is what allows this constant rearticulation.
It's not that anything is more materially elastic,
elasticity is a way of reading politics through form.
I think the first problem is what the commercial operators of the news,
mostly the broadcasters and the newspapers,
do not say, the issues they do not raise,
or the issues that they raise but do not pursue.
Global Security Alliance.
The average citizen, he will decide the future of the world, because
his importance is clearly recognized by forces that seek world domination
his mind has become a target.
What decision has he made?
Who can say with certainty.
But given an effective, comprehensive Psychological Operations campaign
we could logically make an optimistic forecast.
The public relations industry is much larger and more significant in shaping public opinion
and in influencing politics than I ever imagined.
The public relations industry learned a long time ago that it's much easier to influence public opinion
if people don't know that someone is working to influence them.
Green Washing has spawned a whole industry,
its 45 billion Dollar corporate public relations business has responded to corporate clients eager to spread a green veneer.
In the meantime they also resort to, what I call, a bag of dirty tricks against their critics.
From setting up fake activist organizations to sending spies to infiltrate meetings.
"The site of these ancient underwater burial grounds deserves as much respect as the need for a supply of cheap clean energy".
Greenwash finally entered in the Oxford Dictionary, it was described as disinformation,
disseminated by an organization,
so as to present an environmentally responsible public image.
You have to stop buying into the model
that ideas can be owned.
And when you stop doing that, then sharing music or sharing software,
or any of these other things are no longer crimes.
They only became crimes not so long ago.
Is there a choice of controlling minds or liberating the spirit
to save our souls?
Free Software is free society, is free culture.
What we do, makes a revolution,
the revolution makes a new world.
There is a spectre haunting multinational capitalism,
the spectre of free information.
All the powers of globalism have joined together to exercise this spectre
and so the 21st century faces a moral question.
If everything can be given to everyone,
if it can be given to anyone,
then why is it ever moral to exclude anyone, from anything?
We believe that freedom of communication is an essential right,
essential to people's ability to freely elect their governments to find out
what their governments are doing to understand what's going on and therefore
to make effective judgments about how their countries are run.
Citizen was one of those terms that was bankrupt almost from the very beginning.
Certainly as early as the 1930s critics like Walter Lipmann had really shown that in complex information societies,
where there's lots of knowledge being produced,
where there is lots of industry,
a division of labor so complex, that the idea of an informed citizen is nearly impossible.
And that the idea of participation so crucial to democracy,
as Cees had pointed out,
is a very difficult process to have happen in any real sense of the term,
or in any practical sense of the term.
The neoliberal ethos of self-actualization is the ugly and
dark underside of the language of the civil society.
Anti-liberalism means that you have to fight against the WTO.
But it also means that you have to say
positive thinking will make you sick.
The construction of reality
and the construction of the real
is a recurrent web of multi-dimensional entanglement.
What's dimensionality?
Well we're familiar with the idea
dimensionality is often used to mean a degree of freedom or a possibility of motion.
In some sense you can never get started drawing a fractal
because you always have to put in another bump before the bump that you want to get to.
And this is similar to the experience you have
when you go to do a web search and you want to find out something about architecture.
I think it would be interesting to reflect on how the daily use of algorithms,
since so many people are spending so much time online,
how the daily use of algorithms is actually modifying our own cognitive processes.
There's been some research done by developmental psychologists
about neuroplasticity of young children
who spend a great deal of time with devices such as tablets,
smartphones and computers and who grow used to,
who develop intuitions, about the way in which the algorithms, that power such devices, work.
Which are more or less the equivalent of the kinds of in intuitions we develop
about the other more stable parts of our world,
for example our intuitions about the laws of nature.
Ideology has a big effect on people
and those that can design, the Masters of Illusion,
they are hard at work every day.
And they're doing very well of socially constructing the real in in a way that
is not tethered to the material at all.
We're never going to get away from Voodoo and from Spiritualism
it is always going to to be with us in in the sense that
we are going to accept the non-material as real,
we are going to accept what can't be proven what can't be predicted as real,
as long as we are in a social environment that allows that to be plausible.
Certainly with information and communication technology like we have today,
you can make almost anything plausible.
Those are the ghosts of our age.
The only thing we know is, that the statistical models that we use currently in machine learning
will lead to a certain precision, which is far from being the perfect precision that we would expect.
The whole development, for example, of self-driving cars.
I am convinced self-driving cars will contribute to more safety on the roads,
faster transportation and things like that, but driving a car autonomously is
comparable simple, although it might not sound to be,
to actually understand a joke that someone makes.
This is yet a complete different category of problem.
I think it's okay to find solutions for statistics where it works,
I am not saying that statistics is bad.
I just want to say that it can be dangerous or inadequate
to have a full-fledged environment for humans
depend only on statistics.
That would be a poor thing
What's happening today
is a shift in our sense of agency
and a shift in how we experience our relationship with the world.
Because we are very much used to us having a mind,
and we think that means we're active, we're acting on the world, we're changing our environment
while the environment is basically passive
to the extent of its technologies or things.
So we are used that other living matter are active
and certain animals and certainly our fellow human beings.
We assume that they have something which we like to call a mind, that we also have,
so we try to anticipate these minds, these subjects, bodies moving around,
but we are used to think that the technologies that we create
they only do what we want them to do.
We know what they do even if we do not know the mechanics.
We all have a car and we've been driving cars
and we don't want to know what's under the hood.
How the motor operates, we don't have to know that.
Now what we're seeing already for some time is that we have computing systems,
and for a long time these were only "alive" online,
but they are now also saturating slowly, but steadily,
and maybe faster than we think, our physical environment.
Think of self-driving cars as the most obvious example.
Invisible rules, wish they weren't there but unfortunately they are and
we have more technology and better technology than ever to make sure that
they're not just pushing behavior but they are actually determining
subjectivity when internalized.
So it's an unfortunate situation
that has gone far beyond what Foucault could have ever imagined.
The model that is at the basis of behavioralist science
is actually this idea that there is one standard form
of how certain things are scripted into your body in a way,
inscribed into your body.
That is a very basic assumption,
the idea how much flexibility do I have to behave differently,
how much adaptative capacities are allowed in such a model etc. etc.
But what it is actually about is the idea of coming back to a better control of a society.
Much of that is pushed for example by the idea
"can we get the public to believe in this or that",
"can we make them buy this or that",
"can we make them not refuse certain things" like in food or in technology etc.
The way that this is a worrying development is because
it's driven by an idea of manipulation and control.
Escaping the Prisoners Dilemma,
free spirits paint a different map,
navigating in the ocean of the unpredictable.
Rewriting the map that is the territory,
we need to change the rules to play a different game.
Every so-called fact takes different meanings as we run it through
our dialectical prism and study its gleam and shadows.
The fact is never inert or neutral but it can be both good and evil
or beyond them, in countless variations and combinations.
We, finally, are the artists of this immeasurable discourse.
We create values.
We do this because we're alive.
Information is as big a mess as the
material world it reflects and transforms.
We embrace the mess, all of it.
It's all life, but within the vast chaos of the alive, certain information and
certain material things begin to coalesce into a poetics, or a way of knowing,
or a way of acting.
We can draw certain temporary conclusions
as long as we don't plaster them over
and set them up on altars.
Neither information nor indeed any one fact
constitutes a thing in itself.
The very word information implies an ideology,
or rather a paradigm rooted in an unconscious fear
of the silence of matter and of the universe.
Information is a substitute for certainty,
a leftover fetish of dogmatics a superstitio,
literally in Latin a spook, a ghost.
Poetic facts are not assimilable to the doctrine of information.
"Knowledge is freedom",
this slogan is true only when freedom is understood as a psycho-kinetic skill.
Freedom is a psychokinetic skill.
Information is a chaos.
Knowledge is the spontaneous ordering of that chaos
and freedom is surfing the wave of that spontaneity.
In a cosmic war
objectified science classifies
as the absolute truth of given laws
and human objections are obsolete.
Grinding bodies and minds,
cascading capitalist data processes
serve alien appetites for blood sacrifice.
Will this curse tear us down and devour us,
mentally derange us, and destroy us forever?
In a dark covenant human and machine will strike against
the colonization of the future.
Beware the return of the invisible repressed,
breaking the spells of possession.
Painting pictures into the mind
is at the core of an arsenal of power.
Algorithmic prediction industries
paint the future by numbers.
Cultural Intelligence is a practice
that uses technologies of the imagination
to paint another picture.
The map is the territory,
your friend's statement would be absolutely axiomatic for me.
Young professors in social sciences and linguistics like to
embolden themselves and enlarge their status by
telling students that the sign is unmotivated,
the Saussurean, even Platonic idea, that there's this critical gap
between a word and what the word refers to.
The word "cat" is not the same as the cat.
And cat is different to rat and mat, and so you get this
whole system of phonemes and all that sort of stuff.
Be that as it may, I find my own practice and I think the way people understand the world,
and listen to language is totally distinct to that. Or it adds to that some other
heart felt notion that indeed there is a concrete organic connection
between language and what the language signifies.
I'm so glad you brought this up because that summarizes a lot of what we've said to this point.
In that book of mine "Palma Africana"
it's very much dedicated to the notion that the language probably not
invokes or evokes that which is being spoken about but merges with it.
And that's why there's so much interest in that book in animals,
"animalization" you might say. The words become like animals and so forth.
So the writing becomes, as I put it,
the writing becomes what the writing is about.
And I think this is how we read and how we listen.
I would say that
it's always tagging at my my writer's elbow.
It's sort of unconscious but not completely unconscious.
It's what I find exciting in ideas
and in listening to people and in responding.
Putting it simply I think
human beings are interestingly strange
in that if you point out to them the arbitrariness of the signifier,
the map is not the territory and all that sort of stuff,
people will nod, say I get it, yeah of course, what a fool I was,
but one fraction of a millisecond later
- bang -
the map is the territory.