The Stack On Software and Sovereignty · 第 80 页

Anything else risks misleading conclusions drawn from deceptively conditional extrapolations from the present. For some, logarithmic arcs like Moore ’ s law suggest exponentially accelerating change in the most general sense and lead them to posit a big computer in the night sky, or a quasi-theological master operating system, and to identify computation as some vital force pulsing through all media. ¹⁴ From there, a future horizon filled with formal convergence, magic, and rapture looks inevitable. For some, that is the best possible news and for others the worst, but they can agree on the basic outline of a script that is too simplistic. At the same time, perhaps this genre of extrapolative futurism is just another way of saying that mathematics is universal and algorithmic technologies are medium independent, and so we need to employ them differently than we do now (which is true). Or, perhaps, is it but an elegant humming along with the most superficial and poorly theorized aspects of digital capitalism as it dissolves raw materials into interchangeable goods and services, and so the melody is rewarded for flattering the illusion that these linear speculations represent timeless principles? Industrial capitalism had social Darwinism, and today do we have instead a social Turingism: financialization as social metaphysics? Perhaps it is both (and more besides). Like Freud ’ s figural model of the mind in the rough image of the thermodynamic industrial engine, ¹⁵ the paradigmatic idea that the ongoing reassemblage of the world is, in some literal sense, given to computational processes is more than just ideological metaphor run amok. ¹⁶ It is more than partially true because we have made it true. The long-term technical question is to what extent we can describe and practically manipulate material systems by algorithmic calculation — flipping bits on and off, like the motes present or absent at any given point in the light, and gathering them into the forms we recognize as the world — and to what extent not at all, and more important, when we can and cannot do so, and toward what outcomes they should be directed.

As is well known, hyperfast algorithmic asset trades flourish in global equities and futures markets and account for huge percentages of all executed trades; their swerves also form value but do so in ways that can exceed or outpace human oversight. Algorithmic capitalism ’ s own story is often too happy to confuse means and ends, but perhaps counterintuitively, we may conclude nevertheless that the synthetic inhumanity of computational capital is actually the most direct vector out of the anthropocentric humanism that places short-term human needs at the center of public philosophy and engineering. The limits of machinic calculation are not the same as the limits of deterministic rationality, and the social effects of computational systems are certainly given to creative accidents. ¹⁷ Reactionary analog aesthetics and patriotisms, Emersonian withdrawal, and deconstrucivist political theology buy us less time and far less wiggle room than they promise, even less actually than the unfortunate notion that planetary-scale computation could emerge and mature without fundamental constitutive violence against traditional (that is, “ modern ” ) concepts of individual, society, and sovereignty. Because they simulate logic but are not themselves necessarily logical, computers make the world in ways that do not ultimately require our thinking to function (such as the interactions between high-speed trading algorithms that even their programmers cannot entirely predict and comprehend). The forms of inhuman intelligence that they manifest will never pass the Turing test, nor should we bother asking this of them. It is an absurd and primitive request. ¹⁸ It is inevitable that synthetic algorithmic intelligences can and will create things that we have not thought of in advance or ever intended to make, but as suggested, because they do not need our thinking or intention as their alibi, it is their inhumanity that may make them most creative. ¹⁹ Like Deleuze on the beach making sand piles, humans wrangle computation with our algorithm boxes, and in doing so, we make things by accident, sometimes little things like signal noise on the wire and sometimes big things like megastructures.

80

Earth Layer