By: Peter Conlin

Improbable: Hacking the Predictive System

We live in a time obsessed with forms of prediction, wherein prediction, despite its integration into computational technologies and its presumed rationality, is often indistinguishable from something like fate, especially if one is on the wrong side of the uncertainty circuits. It is fundamental to financial capitalism with its ‘modes of prediction’¹ wherein investment risk, directed by predictive abstractions, replaces labour as ‘the fount of value’,² and is central in the strategic decision-making of corporations and state agencies through a full suite of predictive technologies; however the focus of this commentary is on the predictive within the everyday and intimate levels of the self. In any of these dimensions we should not take prediction on its own terms (i.e. the domain of mathematics installed into digital systems, a fine-tuned instrument of data science, etc.). It is larger than this, and in a way, less than this, as it is bound to the mundane, as well as to mythical currents and powers of authority. The crux of the predictive lies in the zones where data-science meets the drawing of lots, and then disappears into the weird psyches of 21^st century lives. If there are points to hack, it is where and when a probabilistic system transmutes into an ambient condition. What if a trace of indeterminacy is injected into these points? And if no such transformation or sabotage is possible now, at least this could be a site to hone aleatory guile? These are the areas and ideas I want to explore in this speculative and generative text, which will delve into the web project Petit Tube (petittube.com) as a specific case.

For those in societies with an intensive integration into digital technologies, probabilistic calculations seep into how we think, act, and interact. In yet another layer of machinic living, underlying both production and social reproduction, prediction is produced through digital stochastic reasoning, that combines huge volumes of data with mathematical processes (e.g. Markov chains) to convert randomness into likely outcomes, and quantifies the degree and type of uncertainty. The data-quantification of our lives puts us into the probability circuit, with the naive ideal of better living (‘the more of social life that can be translated into metrics and measured over time, the better the decisions, products, or services provided by companies, political actors, and governments will be.’³) Work, health, security and cultural systems are increasingly driven by processes that govern through stochastic variables. The fact that many of these predictions fail or are unreliable doesn’t lessen the obsession and involvement of our energies into quantitative anticipation in any way—it’s not that kind of prediction. We aren’t disappointed or surprised if they ‘come true’ or not, but we might change platforms. These are predictions without a future as such, and shift experience from specific dread or promise into a ground force that manifests as a type of pressure and reconfigures motivation and expectation. 

As I will elaborate, prediction is perhaps one among many other figures leading into a social-temporal assembly or a source of social gravity. The crux of what I am calling prediction lies in our relation to contingency, which is especially heightened in turbulent times. As such, probabilistic rationality is one figuration (dominant, digital capitalist, supposedly technocratic) among a related set identified by Matthew Fuller and Olga Goriunova including: ‘luck, fate, fortune, providence, destiny, necessity, risk.’⁴ In this light, prediction is—despite the hyper-rational association—a technologised incorporation of the contingency-fate complex, connecting the corporal to abstract realms and altering the reality process. Perhaps a new being has emerged—‘homo probabilism’—a term coined by Ivan Ascher⁵ to describe the culmination of financial capital but which I see as extending more generally across dimensions and experiences of life.

A longer history of probability and a tentative call for reclaiming indeterminacy

Most histories of probability⁶ begin with games of chance—the literal rolling of bones, coin tosses and the attempts to observe patterns and manage chance, whether to improve odds and/or to develop the analysis of random probability distribution itself. If probabilistic calculation is central to social life now, as I believe it is, then we cannot downplay the significance of games of chance in the cultural and social logic of this conjuncture. Predictive living is indicative of a deep gamification whether we see ourselves as players or not. Maybe stochasticity, itself, was a hack long ago—a playful subversion of scholasticism and final causes, perhaps a form of early-Modern pranking. Wasn’t it strange to posit this speculative condition of foreknowledge with inescapable practical applications that could out-manoeuvre deterministic chains? But it quickly lost its smile and through the centuries became its own dire system. This appears to be a recurring pattern. We could see the hijinks of programmers and hardware engineers of the 60s and 70s as giving a crucial energy to the development of the surveillance society, preemptive policing, conspirituality, new realms of commodification and other Fred Turner⁷ nightmares. A cautionary note is to see hacking as having the tendency to contribute to the very entity it seeks to foil and unwittingly enhance new inaccessible systems. And to momentarily get way ahead of myself, what about the hacks of hacking, what of those projects? The self-negating way forward or a deathly serious play of fire leading into impossibly complex systems with sinister logics? Soon we will reach the end of hacking in the finite limits of life. But these are only figures of capture and betrayal of the true spirit of hacking? All of the above. Hack that.

In many ways this is the story of the ascent of the statistical into higher (or is it lower?) levels of reality—the full diffusion of stats into our lives in synergies between psychometrics, capitalism and digital technologies with the self as ground zero. ‘The system’ here is much larger than digital data and networks of the past few decades, and extends back to the 17^th century if not further. It has subsequently gone through several different phases of which ‘the algorithm’ and AI are but instants or a manifestation. However emergent or ‘digital’ all this might seem, this condition nevertheless arises from well known areas of contention within the social sciences around the representational nature of statistics and their constructive and normative functions. Following Alain Desrosières’⁸ terms, the predictive operates within the fraught relationship between the thing being measured and the measuring process, and how social entities may be, themselves, statistical constructs for the purposes of measure. Values, meaning and experience are reshaped in this quantification process. ‘Numbers create and can be compared with norms, which are among the gentlest and yet most pervasive forms of power in modern democracies.’⁹ At almost every moment when using digital devices we are within the deep web of this ‘gentle’ power. The complexities of these relations are so ubiquitous and far-reaching, it is easy to forget that data is an element of measure, and that a datafied society is a fully and obsessively measured one. Who or what is doing all of this? Why have we entered this vast realm of measured living? Can there or should there be a way out?

Prediction developed by probabilistic statistics seems to imply carefully produced knowledge, within a rigorous scientific method for gauging uncertainty and producing reliable information of future events. However, this is not our probability. There are post-probability pronouncements of moving from prediction to pre-emption, from classical frequentist statistics (probability in terms of the frequency of objective properties sampled) to Bayesian approaches (probability as a measure of believability that a statistician has about the occurrence of an event), and from a kind of knowledge to the production of correlations outside of human comprehension but certainly within the competitive advantage of businesses.¹⁰ In these shifts prediction might appear to be recast as self-interest with only an operational level of truth, and that we are no longer in the science of prediction but in the drama of pre-emptive action. But the goals and function of quantification have never been merely descriptive and are ‘part of a strategy of intervention.’¹¹ Classical statistical norms have always been creating qualities they are meant to dispassionately measure. As well, to think probability in the movement from reason to irrationality, from centralised public planning to ad hoc opportunism of private interests misses the fundamental double-nature of probability as Ian Hacking saw it.

The condition I am exploring is lodged within two theses by Ian Hacking, philosopher of probability and science, and are pivotal in coming to terms with probabilistic reason. These ideas long predate digital technologies, but I argue that they have been augmented in the politics of automated probability. The first is the dual nature of probability—it combines the search for stable frequencies to gauge uncertainty with assertions of belief on the occurrence of future events. ‘Probability…is Janus faced. On the one side it is statistical, concerning itself with the stochastic laws of chance processes. On the other side it is epistemological, dedicated to assessing the reasonable degrees of belief in propositions quite devoid of statistical background.’¹² The second thesis is that the rise of probability from the 19^th century onward (outlined in Hacking’s Taming of Chance) saw a departure from deep deterministic understandings, and an entry into an indeterminate view of the world. However, this did not result in a radical openness and social entropy, but on the contrary, in ceaseless surveying and calculating. In the development of statistical measures of control (in fact, measure as control), indeterminacy becomes increasingly synonymous with managerial quantification. Chance from this time on is taken seriously in social life as it is converted into statistical laws based on data and distribution curves, hence the titular ‘taming of chance’. From this, I am proposing—in a tentative and exploratory manner—a project of reclaiming indeterminacy in the 21^st century and a re-envisioning of predictive data as belief. I am not casting all probabilistic functions as pure belief or arbitrary plays within an anything-goes social entropy. But we cannot lose a feel for the indeterminant, nor can we be blind to all the epistemological investment in what is presented as data-driven likely occurrences.

Imagine we find ourselves wandering around the edges of a vast predictive system. Maybe we abhor it but we are nevertheless of it, either in spite of ourselves or through an all-out embrace. But in any account, from the right vantage point there is a fascination with the transactions and communion. After all these years there is still the imaginary of the cybernetic dream of an X (singularity entity, artificial superintelligence) that knows us beyond how we know ourselves, and not only knows the future but can pass into impending moments, distorting temporal boundaries like the poets sought. But instead of enriching vitality, we can feel it draining away into temporal homogeneity. So it would appear to be no easy hack—how to hack a dream of techno-omniscience and data-driven time machines? They’ve ruined randomness, so it must be reinvented. How to get lucky when contingency has become the exclusive domain of ‘data science’? How does one hack statistical fate in the 21^st century?

Artificial Futures (AI as AF)

I am working with the supposition that whenever we are in a situation modulated by digital technologies—specifically the array of machine learning techniques, algorithmic functions, extensive data processing, automated functions frequently labelled as ‘AI’—we are necessarily within a predictive realm, even if we don’t want to be. Almost all the machine learning techniques and functions associated with Artificial Intelligence are driven one way or another by a predictive logic, underscored by the dubious assumption that prediction and intelligence are somehow synonymous. As such, they are not only data processing and information technologies, but time technologies orientated to modelling future events (within the statistical sense of an ‘event’); given that prediction is a temporal function, these technologies are not only about data and processing but alter the experience and conceptualization of time. This is complicated by the way that such an engagement with the future (as a mathematical abstraction, from a system which is using prediction as a means of  control and to shape outcomes), usually has a de-futuring effect rendering what is to come as merely a projection based on existing patterns of the present and data sets without the alterity and sense of open possibility of The Future; and thus as stated, making predictions without a future.

Another way to say this is that the predictive condition I am exploring is a temporal expression of quantification. By framing data collection and analysis within the larger enterprise of prediction, I am foregrounding the temporality embedded in measure. Prediction is the time of measure, and its expansion into the time of everyday life. To be imbricated into digital networks is to enter this time, with our actions and expressions are variables of capacities and performance. This ubiquitous and quotidian aspect of digital media should be seen as a time technology altering to the future, whether it is cancelled or reassigned.

The opposite of prediction

So what would it mean to ‘hack’ this temporality of predictive living? My view is to not leave it at subsuming probability into the service of the collective (Red AI), or to democratise the modes of prediction, merging stochastic reason with social justice. These are fascinating projects, hopefully already well underway, however, for me a hack means opening these systems (and ourselves as we are enfolded in them) to the improbable. What does unpredictability or the improbably really mean at this point in time? This is what we must open ourselves to, this is part of the hack. We can ask, to begin with, why the obsession with prediction in such unpredictable times? The ostensible answer is that probabilistic relations to the future are an attempt to mitigate uncertainty and achieve a degree of control and governability. But the predictive modes I am addressing here never seem to stabilise and usually add to uncertainty. It’s time to investigate the opposite of predictability, whatever it might be.

As prediction is oriented to likely outcomes of what will happen, then the hack could mean that the great wheel of ‘what’s next’ breaks down—slows or jams shut. In life without systemic anticipation, what are we going to do indeed? How will anything function anymore, will the structures of temporality unravel? In this light, maybe the opposite of prediction lies in moments when time stands still. A bit of spiritual hacking would do us all some good. For such temporal hacking, the experience of randomness is one way to start.

Aleatory visions (Petit Tube)

If the prediction system began in games of chance, then we should return to its origins of play and indeterminacy. In a data environment where everything is incessantly trying to predict what we want, randomness can be political. So we need to relearn how to inhabit chance and develop aleatory sensibilities. From deep within the prediction economy (political and libidinal), ‘chance must be prepared.’¹³ If John Cage prepared pianos, then we need to prepare platforms. ‘The suggestion here is that these discussions offer the development of a sensual and political understanding of chance that establishes it as the grounding condition for modes of being and one that is perversely synthetic in its ethico-aesthetics.’¹⁴ In a time attempting to irradicate improbable actions through measure and probabilistic calculations, we can no longer take chance for granted. We must cultivate ourselves to chance because no one is born lucky in a universe proceeding under the sway of probability.

Hacking algorithmic recommendation systems can be one way of doing this, and the web project Petit Tube (petittube.com) is an example. It randomly filters YouTube videos that have very few views and presents itself as offering ‘the least interesting videos on YouTube.’ Click play and the aleatory and enigmatic viewing of content begins. In an algorithm vs algorithm scenario, it selects videos which have been ignored, forgotten or otherwise outside YouTube’s predictions. The experience for me is surprisingly freeing, generating both a receptive energy toward the multiplicity of images, and a space from which to reflect and rewire our experience of predictive systems. Launched in 2011, the project was developed by Yann van der Cruyssen, a polymath based in France, who works on the borders of art, video game creation, music and wallpaper invention.

What is it like? It’s both ordinary and subtly weird, maybe an infraordinary of media. More of a simple side-step than anything psychedelic or mind-bendingly entropic. On a typical viewing one might see a used car advertisement set in a North American dealership with dirty late-winter snow, an office party in a generic business environment, fingers slowly rotating an opal stone, a presentation from the Antelope High School career counselling team, a clip from a video game reposted from Twitch, a Birthday party in a South-East Asian home. So this is the great unwatched. In fact, only a small minority of videos on YouTube are actually watched in large numbers, and most of these are music videos (especially songs for children), followed by how-to videos and product demos, and then more distantly by videos from popular content creators. What about the rest? I have been exploring Petit Tube for several years, and there appears to be what I characterise as an ‘outlook’. After months of revisiting the site, it can feel like beachcombing—walking the same stretch of coast but each time finding something perplexing has washed in. It’s like some kind of media therapy or deprogramming process to work free from ultra-curated content, personalised algorithms, known pleasures, and the worn grooves of one’s own tastes reinforced by a predictive media system. It sometimes feels calming, even though the content is a haphazard assortment typical of so much of contemporary media culture, not particularly meditative onto itself. So we have not quite reached the end of the media universe—rather a cul de sac that at times seems like a worm-hole.

The overall feel is game-like, in a simple and slightly clunky interface that is both underwhelming, and in a way, mysterious—something of a Bermuda Triangle of online content. The videos have disappeared in the sense that they have almost never been viewed, but through this random selection, they still can be seen on the threshold of a media void. Perhaps even the person who uploaded the content is no longer interested or even aware of their own media. It is a site which, momentarily, makes lost content reappear. We watch them, and then we watch them disappear all over again. We watch the blinding insignificance.The larger context of this is, on the one hand, a media ecology seeking to eliminate chance through predictive systems that already know who we are and what we want to experience; and on the other hand, a larger psychosocial environment that is increasingly animated by uncertainty. This hack offers a media universe wherein video waste functions like a filtering process rather than degradation. Disinterest and abandonment function as a prism through which something presumed as trivial might reach a kind of plenitude in spite of its staggering banality. In these refractions, Petit Tube works as a distrusting agent of YouTube. It is only by way of an improbable filtering of content that no one is interested in that we might finally drop out of the supposed affirmative preemption of contemporary image culture. What we lose in expectation of the visual we might gain in hope. If this kind of randomness forms a mysterious triangle, then it is formed in the interdependence between what exceeds our grasp, the mundane and lucidity.

BIO

Peter Conlin is a writer and researcher based in Birmingham (UK) and works as a Teaching Associate at the Department of Cultural, Media and Visual Studies, University of Nottingham. He is the author of Temporal Politics and Banal Culture: Before the Future (Routledge).

REFERENCES

1. Ivan Ascher, Portfolio Society: On the Capitalist Mode of Prediction (New York: Zone/Near Futures, 2016). ︎
2. Ascher, Portfolio Society, 26. ︎
3. Andreas Jungherr, Gonzalo Rivero and Daniel Gayo-Avello, Retooling Politics: How Digital Media Are Shaping Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 165. ︎
4. Matthew Fuller and Olga Goriunova, Bleak Joys: Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 78. ︎
5. Ascher, Portfolio Society, 85. ︎
6. F. N. David, Games, Gods and Gambling (London: Charles Griffin, 1962); Rüdiger Campe, The Game of Probability: Literature and Calculation from Pascal and Kleist (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2012); Brian Everitt, Chance Rules (New York: Springer Science & Business Media, 2008); John Haigh, Probability: A very short introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). ︎
7. Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture (London: University of Chicago Press, 2006). ︎
8. Alain Desrosières, The Politics of Large Numbers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). ︎
9. Theodore Porter, Trust in Numbers (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 45. ︎
10. Mark Andrejevic, Infoglut (London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2013), 96-110. ︎
11. Porter, Trust in Numbers, 42. ︎
12. Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 12. ︎
13. Fuller and Goriunova, Bleak Joys, 83. ︎
14. Fuller and Goriunova, Bleak Joys, 83. ︎

back to the ball

By: Tanvi Kanchan

Performing digital illegibility

“A body that pushes back at the application of pronouns, or remains indecipherable within binary assignment, is a body that refuses to perform the score. This nonperformance is a glitch. This glitch is a form of refusal. Within glitch feminism, glitch is celebrated as a vehicle of refusal, a strategy of nonperformance.”

Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020), Legacy Russell, p.8

What in-between spaces do we inhabit and what fissures do we cleave open when we perform deliberate acts of digital illegibility through subversive performances of gender, sexuality, aesthetics, and languages? Can we subvert digital systems that seek to discipline, categorise, and regulate us?

“I think the negotiations that I do on a social media platform is so similar to the negotiations that I do on a daily basis [as a queer/trans person] in life itself. Because there are so many things that you’re in conflict with, but then you still have to make do. For example, if I’m also a very anti-capitalist person, but then at the end of the day, I’m also feeding into the capitalistic logics of society, you know. So there’s this constant conflict that I’m making… I’m trying to find, trying to draw my line, how much I can make peace with and how much is a total no-go.”

Conversation with Z, 2023

I’m on a train from London to Bath. The internet on my phone is spotty. I ask to connect to the train Wi-Fi and it redirects me to a sign-up page. I sigh. The ask is transactional; I knew I would have to pay in some way for the pleasure of getting online, if not in money (my train fare notwithstanding). The form wants to know my name. It wants to know my age. It really wants to know my gender, and whether I live in the UK. It’s going to need an email address from me, sorry, if I really want to get online.

I’m not in the mood to comply. Refusal is already bubbling up through my throat, and my fingers pause over the keyboard, twitching and annoyed. So I don’t. The name I put down is nonsense, a keysmash; the surname is too. My date of birth becomes the 1st of April, 2004, nowhere close to my real one. (I know all the system really needs to know is that I’m above eighteen. I feed it what it wants, but give it nothing of value.) There are only two options for gender – man, woman – I pick one at random. My email address is an old one formed during my pre-teen online flash game heydays, a combination of the words ‘game’, ‘master’, and a string of numbers. It doesn’t really matter.

The system is satisfied. I answered its questions. It lets me get online. I feel, for a moment, triumphant at my refusal, my participation in the system in order to subvert it. I then immediately feel silly. It’s just a web form for a Wi-Fi connection. It’s not a big deal. It doesn’t really matter.

“Well, being trans and being queer means… (laughs). Well, I think of it in a certain way. It’s like when you are playing a game. Some simple options are handed out to you. OK, well, how far do you want this slider? Like, four or five sliders are given to you. How do you want to manage your life and how do you want to customise your life, if you will. Being queer feels like living life on advanced settings. It’s so many things you have to check and options, and you have to manually reset and set and check and think about what you have never thought about in life, which many people don’t have to think about in life. Because it’s already taken care of for them. It’s already good for them. Why do they want to change? But I don’t blame them for not wanting to change it. But I also can because they – they did not want anybody to access those advanced options. So yeah, that’s how I kind of view queerness. It’s kind of this juggling of, like, multiple sliders. Like I want this much, and I want that much… I want to breathe this much air. I want to walk like this. I want to talk like this. Things that people don’t really have to think about because it is prescribed to them.”

Conversation with R, 2023

Legacy Russell looks at glitch feminism as a form of dissent, as a refusal, as a “pushing back” against capitalism. Glitches, she says, can “show us the machinic limitations”, give us a “sense of where we might hack further in pointed undoing”.¹ If to glitch against the system deliberately is to hack, then to hack is to queer. Reappropriating Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s words, it is to “open [up the] mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning”.² Its potential lies, as Cathy Cohen reminds us, “in its ability to create a space in opposition to dominant norms”.³ To queer our digital presence is to enact “a body that is inherently fluid, a body emancipated from ever being asked to register its traces online”. It is to “render [ourselves] useless as a subject of capital’s regime of mining and profiting from data”.⁴ It is to resist categorisation by becoming, if not invisible, then at least indecipherable; illegible; unreadable to the system whose goal is to extract, to define, determine, categorise and exploit.

In the grand scheme of things, my refusal on the train ride was trivial; a moment of childish stubbornness rather than conscious political praxis. It reminds me of what @park_slope_arsonist, an online comedian whom I’ve been following for many years, always says: I love to lie online. Why wouldn’t you lie online? she asks. Why wouldn’t you confound, contradict, create a persona that may or may not have anything to do with who you are when you’re not online?

I wanted to get online – something stood in the way – I resented it for standing in the way – I messed with it in turn, while still getting what I wanted out of it. But perhaps these small moments of refusal, of a lack of compliance, pave the way for more deliberate acts of illegibility, of gaming the system to escape it, of thwarting surveillance. A month before I was on that train to Bath, I was back home in India, attempting to organise a Palestine solidarity reading circle with some friends while evading governmental scrutiny and a police shutdown, which had increased manifold for anything Palestine-related over the last several months. We planned to spread the word about the reading circle online (carefully). There existed a thin space where we could play with this. It had to be immediately obvious what this was about to those we wanted there, without tipping our hand in a way that was legible to those we didn’t want there. We had to play in the space of symbols and icons. A poppy in the colours of the Palestinian flag. A watermelon against the background. A reading circle that was about “solidarity”, without explicit mention of any word or phrase that would tip off content moderators, cops, or right-wing troublemakers. A piece of digital ephemera that would expire after a period of time, and not subsist in perpetuity.

“I guess with [platforms like] Instagram, it actually doubles your chances of being moderated in a particular way, because it’s image and text. So you have to be careful on both fronts of like, what will be seen as offensive or what will be seen as not meeting the guidelines. However, people are innately deeply creative when they want to share something. And, of course, again, that goes both ways in the good, bad, whatever. I think people have kind of learned that they have to be creative. And there’s a combination of creative and careful that is being played with, constantly both in words and in image, in order for content to be seen, important content to be seen, important content to reach the right people. But I think because it shifts so fast, it’s also a steep learning curve because the learning curve doesn’t end. Like we have to keep up with all the things that are being looked at and seen as offensive or inappropriate.”

Conversation with A, 2023

In Sayan Bhattacharyya’s piece on Epistemically Produced Illegibility, they point out how material in non-Western languages that are nonetheless presented in Roman script suffer a sort of invisibilisation. “Data that is epistemically heterogeneous,” they say, “can become illegible within a representational scheme that enforces standardization.”⁵ They argue that our knowledge production structures need to be interrogated and reformed, to account for these oversights.

It strikes me as a sort of epistemic injustice, drawing on Miranda Fricker’s work.⁶ It reminds me of Causevic and Sengupta’s argument that the internet itself is built on a sort of digital epistemic injustice. They remind us that the “knowledges of the majority of the world – women, people of color, LGBTIQ+ folks, indigenous communities, and most of the Global South – have been marginalized, undermined, exploited, or ignored by historical and contemporary structures of power and privilege,” and that “nowhere is this more starkly obvious – and simultaneously hidden – than in the digital worlds of the internet”.⁷

Their arguments ring true to me. There’s a stark disparity: we undoubtedly live in an age of digital colonialism, a devaluing of knowledge that is not Western, not normative. But I also want to ask: what if we were to use epistemic illegibility as a way to hack a system that commodifies and co-opts?

“We’ve created a kind of liminal space where people just get to be themselves and get to create their own selves and get to understand themselves in the context of who they are, and understand their identity in the context of their experience, and not vice versa. It gives birth to a very beautiful chaos, in the middle of Instagram posts that are like very ‘Get Ready With Me’ and like, ‘girls, you should do this’ and ‘boys, you should do that’.”

Conversation with L, 2023

What if digital epistemic illegibility became a way to resist and subvert, to slip between the cracks of a system that never existed for us in the first place? Drawing on James C. Scott’s Seeing Like A State,⁸ I want to ask, what happens to digital knowledge production when queer and trans communities refuse legibility so as to become more ungovernable? What if we game the algorithm, refuse its discipline, dare to exist beyond its logics?

It’s a difficult trick to pull off. I might do all my browsing on incognito tabs and I might have spent a lot of time trying to confound the system so that it never serves me a relevant ad, but I’m still trying to subvert a system that wields massive amounts of control over me. It decides who I reach, how I reach them; it decides if I’m too much; it decides if I deserve the platform I have; it decides whether my reach is suspended. It decides whether to call the police. It decides whether to muzzle, to amplify, to dampen, or to simply leave me alone. More importantly, I’m trying to game a system with tools that are also available to those with oppositional political interests – tools that they can also harness towards their own interests.

“What happens is Indian trolls are very clever that way, they make homophobic, transphobic posts in regional languages [in English script]. And robots don’t understand the most nuanced transphobic insults that are there in Bengali. I have seen so many posts about me, which are in Bengali, which are trolling me. I have reported them time and again. I have also asked for – you know, there is an option of subjective review, by a person. That has also happened and I’ve got the reply that this doesn’t go into our community guidelines. And I’m like, you fucker, you do not even know my language, how would you even do it? Or you’re using Google Translate or you are a person who is not… I don’t know how they do it. There are thousands of languages in India itself. And I feel that language plays a very important role in it. Since it is easier to address things if they are in English, because I’ll get a lot of eyeballs. But when they’re done in regional languages, it’s very difficult. And also, you know, weird way that it is, I don’t know what happens, what goes on, behind the workings of these platforms, but there are more reported posts being taken down when the person who is posting is a marginalised person.”

Conversation with E, 2023

I’m also trying to game a system that would sooner curtail and fail me than it would those who bring it eyeballs and thus revenue whilst sticking to the status quo. In India, authoritarian governmental aims dovetail with corporate moderation measures. The right-wing Hindu nationalist government is aware of the mobilising and organising power of social media as a site for dissent; they saw it in action during the 2020-2021 farmers’ protests. Social media platforms must now comply with content take-down notices from the government, or risk being held legally and financially liable.⁹ India is too big of a profit-making market for social media companies to not comply.¹⁰

As such, platforms censor marginalised users – particularly Dalit Bahujan Adivasi (DBA) and Muslim users – and take down their content disproportionately, or ignore their reports of hate speech and discrimination, with such experiences heightening at the intersection of caste, class, race, gender and sexuality.¹¹ Platforms are more likely to take down the accounts and posts of DBA users calling out casteism or presenting dissenting views, than they are to curb the users spreading such bigotry. Contextual ignorance is a defence these platforms simply cannot claim anymore – by now, we all know that polarised reactions and content deliver the most attention and engagement, and thus bring these platforms the most money. It’s simply not in these platforms’ financial interest to curb such a windfall, and their lines of censorship align along state-corporate lines of power and surveillance.

“No one sees people saying Jai Shri Ram and giving us gaalis as hate speech, you know, like, that’s not something that they understand as hate speech or like, even would conceive of that as such… What we are doing is more hate speech in the eyes of Instagram, than what the comments are.”

Conversation with N, 2023

And yet, we continue to be illegible. We hack. We glitch. We resist and subvert, we deliberately obfuscate, we poison the system with ‘bad data’, we perform invisibility in open sight, and we blur and muddy the waters, signalling to those we care to signal to, and turning away from those we don’t. As Russell reminds us, “glitch moves, but glitch also blocks. It incites movement while simultaneously creating an obstacle. Glitch prompts and glitch prevents. With this, glitch becomes a catalyst, opening up new pathways, allowing us to seize on new directions”. To perform digital illegibility, then, is to “celebrate failure as a generative force, a new way to take on the world”.¹² To become digitally illegible is to become force and obstacle all at once, all together, in a system that would rather you did not exist, or if you did, that such existence would only serve its interests. It becomes a way to exist in a world that commodifies and co-opts. We do it because to do so is to hack the system, and to queer it, and to play in that space of dissonances and resonances that Sedgwick talks about, to revel in those “lapses and excesses of meaning.” We do it because we can, and we do it because we must.

Conversation snippets come from research interviews conducted in early 2023 for my doctoral fieldwork.

BIO

Tanvi Kanchan is a PhD candidate and graduate teaching assistant in the Department of Politics and International Studies at SOAS University of London. Their research sits at the intersection of gender, sexuality, nation-statehood, political economy, and digital media. They hold an MA in International Journalisms from SOAS University of London, and a BMM in Journalism from University of Mumbai. They are Co-Managing Editor of the CHASE AHRC DiSCo (Digital Studies Collective) Journal and work as a tutor with The Brilliant Club. They have previously worked in research communications and as a journalist covering gender, sexuality, politics, music and culture, and digital justice.

REFERENCES

1. Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (London and New York: Verso, 2020), 102. ︎
2. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (London: Routledge, 1994), 7. ︎
3. Cathy Cohen, “Punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens: The radical potential of queer politics?,” GLQ 3 (1997): 438. ︎
4. Russell, Glitch Feminism, 123. ︎
5. Sayan Bhattacharyya, “Epistemically produced illegibility,” in Global debates in the digital humanities, eds. Domenico Fiormonte, Sukanta Chaudhari and Paola Ricaurte (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022). https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/global-debates-in-the-digital-humanities/section/aa256742-ea03-4aaf-a1c7-5b925ccc22ac#ch01 ︎
6. Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing (Oxford University Press, 2007).  https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198237907.001.0001 ︎
7. Azar Causevic and Anasuya Sengupta, “Whose knowledge is online? Practices of epistemic justice for a digital new deal,” A Digital New Deal: Visions of Justice in a Post-Covid World (2020). https://itforchange.net/digital-new-deal/2020/10/30/whose-knowledge-is-online-practices-of-epistemic-justice-for-a-digital-new-deal/ ︎
8. James C. Scott, Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). ︎
9. Katitza Rodriguez, Sasha Mathew and Christoph Schmon, “India’s strict rules for online intermediaries undermine freedom of expression,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, April 7, 2021. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/04/indias-strict-rules-online-intermediaries-undermine-freedom-expression ︎
10. Kumar Sambhav, Nayantara Ranganathan and Shreegireesh Jalihal, “Inside Facebook and BJP’s world of ghost advertisers,” Al Jazeera, March 15, 2022. https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2022/3/15/inside-facebook-and-bjps-world-of-ghost-advertisers ︎
11. Anirban Kapil Baishya, Darshana Sreedhar Mini and Thenmozhi Soundararajan, “The anti-caste alter-network: equality labs and anti-caste activism in the US,” Communication, Culture and Critique 16, no. 2 (2023): 99-106. https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcad011; Shakuntala Banaji and Ramnath Bhat, Social media and hate (London and New York: Routledge, 2022); Nilesh Christopher, “TikTok is fuelling India’s deadly hate speech epidemic,” Wired, August 12, 2019. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/tiktok-india-hate-speech-caste; Thenmozhi
    Soundararajan, Abishek Kumar, Priya Nair and Josh Greely, “Facebook India: Towards the tipping point of violence”, Equality Labs, USA, 2019. https://equalitylabs.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Facebook_India_Report_Equality_Labs.pdf ︎
12. Russell, Glitch Feminism, 30. ︎

back to the ball

By: erynn young

@lgosp3@k: C0mmun!c@t!0n H@ck!ng on T1kT0k

Introduction

On TikTok, a platform notorious for algorithmic content moderation¹, there is an emerging phenomenon of strategic communication hacking, called algospeak for algorithm speak. Algospeak provides users with a seemingly limitless yield of communication hacks in response to content surveillance and policing. Algospeak is situated in a specific digital, interactive context (TikTok), where appropriate content is defined through mobilisations of politics of politeness (e.g. no hate speech), neoliberal sociopolitical ideals (e.g. no racist ideologies), and existing sociocultural hierarchies of marginalisation (e.g. moderation of sexual content).² Through the enforcement of its community guidelines, TikTok establishes a bounded system that targets inappropriate users/communication for censorship via algorithmic content moderation. Algospeak communication hacking enables TikTok users to subvert these interactive constraints; it disrupts this system.

Guidelines = Discourse = System

TikTok is a multimodal social media platform, providing users with audio, visual, and written communication channels, expanding opportunities for interaction and content generation. All platform interactions are moderated, predominantly through automated/algorithmic content moderation systems; TikTok remains opaque regarding specific operational details.³ Users are instead provided with a collection of community guidelines that circumscribe TikTok’s dos and don’ts (mostly don’ts): this is TikTok’s proclaimed attempt to foster an inclusive, welcoming, and safe social space. Do: treat fellow users respectfully. Don’t: incite violence. Don’t: depict sexually explicit activities. Do: express yourself. Don’t: discriminate based on religion, race, gender identity, etc. Don’t: harass others.

Users must comply with these guidelines or risk having their content removed and their accounts banned. The algorithmic content moderation systems that enable TikTok to constantly surveil its users contribute to users’ maintenance of the pervasive fear of censorship (e.g. studies investigating behaviour and communication chilling/silencing effects of surveillance).⁴ Despite the consequences of content violations, TikTok’s community guidelines are not explicit in how inappropriate content is made manifest in users’ communication practices. Many guidelines indicate that TikTok does not allow X, Y, or Z, but do not elaborate on which words are violative. Users must assess their own communicative content within TikTok’s systemic context and its definitions of inappropriate content, correcting when necessary, to avoid algorithmic scrutiny. Algorithmic content moderation thus coerces users into anticipatorily self-censoring.

TikTok defines its ‘safe’ space through a bricolage of sociocultural, political, and legal values, ideologies, and conventions. It establishes the rather vague boundaries of this system (or discourse, in the Foucauldian sense)⁵ through content guidelines and (re)definitions of what it means to be appropriate and eligible for TikTok audiences predominantly through language censorship.⁶ Survival within TikTok’s system translates to platform access (i.e. non-banned accounts) and visibility (i.e. content distribution/circulation). This survival is predicated on a confluence of factors. First, users must successfully internalise TikTok’s community guidelines; they must translate what these guidelines mean in terms of restricting particular language use and put these understandings into practice. Users must also develop (and reference) perceptions of how extensive they believe TikTok’s algorithmic surveillance capabilities to be – termed users’ algorithmic imaginaries.⁷ These imaginaries drive varying defensive digital practices, including severe self-censorship or speech chilling⁸ if algorithmic surveillance is perceived/believed to be comprehensive. Users mobilise these perceptions/beliefs through subsequent self-moderation⁹ and communication hacking. Algospeak, a medley of (written, video, audio) communication manipulation strategies, is one such defensive digital practice, protecting users within TikTok’s surveilled system by providing them with creative, innovative, and crucially, adaptive means of (communication) resistance.

Hacking Strategies

Developing research into algospeak on TikTok has illuminated numerous possibilities for communication subterfuge that algospeak users exploit in challenging TikTok surveillance, culminating in a rich toolkit of communication hacking strategies.¹⁰ Algospeak-as-hacking is a perpetually ongoing process of system disruption by which users take back some expressive agency. The informing research underlines algospeak strategies themselves as tools for successful and sustainable communication hacking rather than specific algospeak forms that might be considered as constitutive of a coded language. This is because the boundaries of TikTok’s system can and do shift – for example, their content moderation capabilities adapt – and users are better prepared to respond to the system’s fluidity with equally fluid hacking strategies rather than lasting (and therefore more moderate-able) words/forms. The algospeak strategies¹¹ below demonstrate a broad range of users’ approaches to communication hacking.

Censoring obscures content through strategic content substitution; text, sound, or image censors disrupt content filters that are triggered by linguistically meaningful words and recognisable imagery.

Users can also manipulate letters/characters within words or phrases. Visual coding (also l33tspeak¹², hackers’ language,¹³ rebus writing¹⁴) and typos disguise word forms while maintaining intelligibility through users’ abilities to treat non-alphabetic characters as if they were alphabetic. Users can convey and understand meaning through these hacked spellings by making meaning where it does not exist; automated word-detecting filters cannot.

Visual cues exploit recognisable cultural themes/artefacts for audience comprehension but can also encode meaning through the intertextuality or memetic culture of digital communication.¹⁵

Emojis exploit the fuzzy boundaries between visual and written channels. Emoji use can be representative (or literal); it can also integrate implied phonetic (linguistic) material, as in the case of the emoji homophone for ‘fuck.’ Users’ digital literacies regarding evolving emoji meanings also play a substantial role in subversive emoji communication.

Users use visual gestures to convey sensitive content without triggering text or sound filters.

Language gestures and performances skirt the boundaries between gesture/performance and speech by strategically removing or manipulating parts of conventional communication; this includes withholding audio content (e.g. mouthing), separating a word form (e.g. spelling), and using associative sounds to indicate particular words (e.g. onomatopoeia). 

Users sometimes change the phonetic makeup of their communication while maintaining intelligibility, mostly by relying on similar sounds to keep the intended meanings retrievable for audiences.

sects, a phonetic substitution of ‘sex,’ substitutes -X with -CTS, which achieves a similar pronunciation. Adding consonants -HM before the vowel – a variation of shm-reduplication from Yiddish¹⁶ – results in a minimal difference: /seks/ becomes /ʃmeks/. Heaux’s,¹⁷ a homophone, is identical in pronunciation to its target word ‘hoes’: /hoʊz/ remains /hoʊz/. This approach to communication hacking can be extended to unexpected word endings, which substitutes new word endings to potentially violative words and relies on context to convey the intended meaning.

Multilingual/-dialectal creativity reveals how TikTok’s system boundaries are conceptualised by users – what is and is not considered at risk of moderation – and how these boundaries are transgressed by users in their English interactions.

Users highlight how inappropriate content is socially/culturally/etc. specific. In other words, a word’s inappropriateness shifts depending on the language variety in which it is communicated and local social/cultural customs, norms, and conventions. Users can manipulate either one of these aspects by integrating multiple language varieties. Loanwords for (English) algospeak functions like typical loanword use; a word is borrowed from another language variety and integrated into English language content. The loanword’s non-Englishness becomes subversive, helping users evade filters meant to track locally (i.e. English) violative words. Users borrow sounds (phonetics) from other language varieties, using multilingual homophones like phoque (‘seal’ in French) instead of ‘fuck.’ Phonetic similarities facilitate audience comprehension, and borrowed phonetics exploit the lack of situated (English) inappropriateness; phoque is not violative in French.

Algospeak word creation has garnered considerable attention on and beyond TikTok,¹⁸ owing in part to the novelty of such neologisms as well as their seeming emblematic of algospeak as a coded language.

This strategy follows existing rules for word creation; for example, unalive is created by adding a negating prefix (e.g. UN-) to an adjective (e.g. ALIVE) to convey meanings regarding death or killing. The resulting word is unconventional but shares semantic qualities (i.e. literal meaning) with the word(s) it replaces. Unalive’s accordance with word creation conventions and its use of a binary opposition to convey a familiar concept facilitates audience comprehension while its unconventionality disrupts the system’s expectations.

Removing part(s) of users’ communication – from vowels to entire words – is also an effective form of algospeak.

These strategies rely on context for communicative success; audiences must fill in the blanks with contextual knowledge they gather throughout the interaction. Users’ heightened sensitivities to communication and content on TikTok – driven by the centrality of TikTok’s content guidelines and moderation – contribute to the success of such partial language as hacked communication by encouraging users to anticipate implicit messaging. 

Algospeak euphemisms and dysphemisms are alternative words/expressions for at-risk communication that also reduces or increases negative connotations, respectively. One subset of euphemisms frequently used for hacking is the innuendo – owing to TikTok’s conspicuous moderation of sexual content.¹⁹ 

Conventional euphemisms, innuendos, and dysphemisms rely on broad, cultural intelligibility while non-conventional alternatives require audiences to access context and cues to key into the intended meaning.

Algospeak metaphors involve mapping potentially inappropriate concepts onto new words/expressions that share some common threads of meaning or symbolism so audiences can figure out what is being communicated.

Metaphors, as well as allusions, retain one or more salient characteristic(s) of the original word or concept. In envelopes/envelopians for ‘White people,’ the salient characteristic is whiteness. This enables audiences to make inferences based on conceptual continuity between the intended meaning and the algospeak form. The eggplant emoji , used metaphorically on and off TikTok for ‘penis,’ illustrates the role of conceptual continuity in comprehending hacked communication. This continuity can rely on cultural artefacts (e.g. memes²⁰) to ensure audience comprehension, like the meme-ification of algospeak itself (e.g. le dollar bean’s alluding to le$bian/le$bean²¹).

Users’ contextualisation attempts show direct, dialogic engagement with TikTok at the system level. Users attempt to negotiate with (i.e. appeals, real contextualisation) or challenge (i.e. fake contextualisation) TikTok’s content evaluation and moderation practices. These strategies function in tandem with the potentially violative content, which remains uncensored.

These strategies represent a continuum of users’ willingness to be more or less subversive. On one end of the continuum (i.e. appeals, authentic disclaimers), users directly confront the potential inappropriateness of their content. On the other end (i.e. inauthentic disclaimers), users are deceptive about the nature of their content, following the internal logic that content that is not real cannot be a real violation.²² 

Discussion & Conclusion

Algospeak is a process of communication hacking that has developed in the face of TikTok’s algorithmic content moderation systems, which threaten users’ platform access and visibility, as well as their communicative agency. The manipulative strategies that comprise the algospeak toolkit for subversive communication enable users to hack their lines of code to achieve their goals: literally altering segments of (language) code to embed, disguise, imply, hint, and covertly convey their intended meanings. These strategies reach across communicative channels (i.e. written, audio, visual), media types (i.e. cultural allusions), geographies and languages varieties, cultures, and time (i.e. 90’s l33tspeak) to helps users keep their communication safe from moderation, remain selectively comprehensible among intended audiences, and embrace creativity and adaptability. Algospeak strategies provide users with rich and diverse ways to hack their communication and manage and restrict comprehensibility, allowing them to survive within TikTok’s algorithmic surveillance state and remain visible to fellow users. These seemingly paradoxical functions of algospeak – self-censorship or self-moderation to expand content reach – mirror the double-edged nature of TikTok’s algorithmic capabilities. TikTok’s algorithms moderate and remove undesirable content; they also promote desirable content to broader audiences, expanding content visibility (e.g. viral videos). With communication hacking, users can simultaneously keep their content safe from algorithmic scrutiny and eligible for mass, algorithmic distribution. Algospeak is simultaneously communication hacking to avoid algorithms and to benefit from algorithms. Thus, algospeak – or algorithm speak – is speaking for and against algorithms.

It is crucial, however, to reckon with the implications of algospeak as a communicative phenomenon, as well as algospeak research and heightened visibility more broadly. First, contending with algospeak in the digital hands of differentially motivated users is necessary. While it is a resourceful collection of language hacks that help protect users from having their communication unfairly moderated,²³ it is also accessible for strategic uses in covertly conveying harmful, discriminatory, violent communication. For example, it is possible to protect hate speech or threatening language – which are both unequivocally in violation of TikTok’s community guidelines – from content moderation through algospeak communication hacking (e.g. racist dog whistles as a kind of metaphor/allusion). Though no instances of such algospeak application were encountered during this research process, hacking is (inevitably) a tool accessible to a diverse range of users.

Additionally, it is also necessary to reconcile the risks associated with maintaining algospeak discourses, among its users online and in other domains including media journalism and academic research. Heightened algospeak visibility can backfire and unintentionally push content moderation systems like those operating on TikTok to adapt, improving moderation capabilities by integrating more complex forms and styles of communication. It is not implausible to anticipate that subversive, algospeak communication is someday soon explicitly targeted for moderation, at which point algospeak use by platform users will invite rather than avoid surveillance and (algorithmic) scrutiny. It is difficult to predict exactly how such evolutions to TikTok’s content moderation practices would come about, if at all. But perhaps some solace can be taken in the historical successes of subversive communication observed: for example, Lubunca, a repertoire of secret slang (an argot) for various queer and sex worker communities in Turkey.²⁴

TikTok surveils, moderates, and controls content and user behaviour through language. And it is through language that users disturb systemic expectations and norms. Users reassert their control, negotiating their communicative and expressive agency by pushing boundaries, manipulating language, and subverting community guidelines. They resist in the face of TikTok’s threats of censorship and deplatforming/banning. They exploit the weaknesses in TikTok’s algorithmic armour by playing across communicative channels: their human and creative communication skills outsmart and outpace current content moderation systems.²⁵ They layer manipulations, blend strategies, juxtapose and converge communication channels: innovate, innovate, innovate. Users are resilient against the imposition of content moderation through algospeak, creating new possibilities for communication, expression, connection, and ensuring digital survival. However, as algorithmic content moderation practices adapt in response – for instance, integrating popular or widely used algospeak communication into content filters – users will need to continue to generate and deploy innovative, increasingly complex and/or creative strategies for communication hacking to stay one step ahead.

Acknowledgements: The author declares no conflict of interest.

BIO

I was born and raised in the United States of America, where I completed the majority of my undergraduate studies (in French language and linguistics). I have recently completed a research master’s in Linguistics and Communication at the University of Amsterdam. I am currently located in and conducting independent research out of Amsterdam, Netherlands. Previous and ongoing research interests include critical (technocultural) discourse analysis, argumentation analysis, communicative and interactive phenomena on digital platforms, deliberate linguistic manipulation as user agency negotiation/resistance, and communication practices language users engage in to represent/perform/negotiate their positionalities/identities.

REFERENCES

1. Danielle Blunt, Ariel Wolf, Emily Coombes, & Shanelle Mullin, “Posting Into the Void: Studying the impact of shadowbanning on sex workers and activists,” Hacking//Hustling, 2020; Faithe J. Day, “Are Censorship Algorithms Changing TikTok’s Culture?,” OneZero, December 11, 2021; Taylor Lorenz, “Internet ‘algospeak’ is changing our language in real time, from ‘nip nops’ to ‘le dollar bean’,” The Washington Post, April 8, 2022; Kait Sanchez, “TikTok says the repeat removal of the intersex hashtag was a mistake,” The Verge, June 4, 2021. ︎
2. Blunt, Wolf, Coombes, & Mullin,  2020. ︎
3. “Community Guidelines Enforcement Report,” TikTok. https://www.tiktok.com/transparency/nl-nl/community-guidelines-enforcement-2022-4/ (accessed March 2023); “Community Guidelines,” TikTok. https://www.tiktok.com/community-guidelines/en/ (accessed March 2023). ︎
4. Elvin Ong, “Online Repression and Self-Censorship: Evidence from Southeast Asia,” Government and Opposition, 56 (2021): 141-162; Jonathon W. Penney, “Internet surveillance, regulation, and chilling effects online: a comparative case study,” Internet Policy Review, 6 (2017). ︎
5. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972). ︎
6. Tarleton Gillespie, “Do Not Recommend? Reduction as a Form of Content Moderation,” Social Media + Society, 8 (2022). ︎
7. Taina Bucher, “The algorithmic imaginary: Exploring the ordinary affects of Facebook algorithms,” Information, Communication & Society, 20 (2017): 30-44; Michael A. DeVito, Darren Gergle, & Jeremy Birnholtz, “’Algorithms ruin everything’: #RIPTwitter, folk theories, and resistance to algorithmic change in social media,” Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2017): 3163-3174. ︎
8. Ong, 2021; Penney, 2017. ︎
9. Nadia Karizat, Dan Delmonaco, Motahhare Eslami & Nazanin Andalibli, “Algorithmic Folk Theories and Identity: How TikTok Users Co-Produce Knowledge of Identity and Engage in Algorithmic Resistance,” Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 5 (2021): 1-44; Daniel Klug, Ella Steen, & Kathryn Yurechko, “How Algorithm Awareness Impacts Algospeak Use on TikTok,” WWW ’23: The ACM Web Conference 2023 (2023). ︎
10.  Kendra Calhoun & Alexia Fawcett, “’They Edited Out Her Nip Nops’: Linguistic Innovation as Textual Censorship Avoidance on TikTok,” Language@Internet, 21 (2023); Klug, Steen, & Yurechko, 2023; young, 2023. ︎
11. In this article, algospeak hacked communication is in italics, its glosses (non-hacked forms) are in ‘single quotes,’ and gestures/performances are underlined. ︎
12. Blake Sherblom-Woodward, “Hackers, Gamers and Lamers: The Use of l33t in the Computer Sub-Culture” (Master’s thesis), (University of Swarthmore, 2002). ︎
13. Brenda Danet, Cyberpl@y: Communicating Online (Routledge, 2001). ︎
14. David Crystal, Internet Linguistics (Routledge, 2011); Ana Deumert, Sociolinguistics and Mobile Communication (Edinburgh University Press: 2014). ︎
15. Calhoun & Fawcett, 2023. ︎
16. Andrew Nevins & Bert Vaux, “Metalinguistic, shmetalinguistic: the phonology of shm reduplication,” Proceedings of CLS 39, 2003 (2003). ︎
17. This form also uses multilingual borrowed phonetics, borrowing eau(x) and its pronunciation from French. ︎
18. Ellie Botoman, “UNALIVING THE ALGORITHM.” Cursor, 2022; Alexandra S. Levine, “From Camping To Cheese Pizza, ‘Algospeak’ Is Taking Over Social Media,” Forbes, September 19, 2022. ︎
19. Blunt, Wolf, Coombes, & Mullin, 2020; Mikayla E. Knight, “#SEGGSED: Sex, Safety, and Censorship on TikTok” (Master’s thesis), (San Diego State University, 2022). ︎
20. Calhoun & Fawcett, 2023. ︎
21. Ibid. ︎
22. Charissa Cheong, “The phrase ‘fake body’ is spreading on TikTok as users think it tricks the app into allowing semi-nude videos,” Insider, February, 8, 2022. ︎
23. Blunt, Wolf, Coombes, & Mullin, 2020; Calhoun & Fawcett, 2023. ︎
24. Nicholas Kontovas, “Lubunca: The Historical Development of Istanbul’s Queer Slang and a Social-Functional Approach to Diachronic Processes in Language” (Master’s thesis), (Indiana University, 2012). ︎
25. Day, 2021; Robert Gorwa, Reuben Binns, & Christian Katzenbach, “Algorithmic content moderation: Technical and political governance,“ Big Data & Society, 7 (2020). ︎

back to the ball

By: Anna Hughes

The Cybercrip

The summer before I started my practice-based PhD a mysterious sickness struck me. Determined not to let it get in my way, I carried on. I presumed that these symptoms would resolve themselves somehow, but they never did. Instead, my illness developed. Eventually, I realised I could not carry on as before any longer. I needed to adapt. I needed a different way of working because making large sculptures was becoming too much of a strain on my changing body. In research, well-considered methods are essential. A method is how something is done, and these choices need a particular logic. Sickness involuntarily became a part of my methodology because it helped shape why I do things in a certain way. My body not only affected my way of doing things but also nurtured my ability to respond creatively to this body’s influence. As a way of continuing to make art and my research, I turned to digital media. Digital space operates differently from analogue space because I can do so much with minimal bodily movements. Embodiment is now a fundamental part of my methodology, yet my methods centre around me “using” my body less. Despite its apparent disembodied ephemerality, cyberspace is a vital form of mobilisation, creativity, work, and socialisation particularly for sick and disabled people. With my research, I emphasise not only the creative utilisation of cyberspace within disabled and chronically ill communities but also the importance of these voices in developing cyberspace as an embodied encounter. We have learned to adapt with and for our bodies, becoming adept at a genuinely hybrid, digitally augmented body, and the methods we develop can be learned from. The cybercrip.

Using the computer graphics software program Blender I learn to make things differently. Sculpture no longer feels accessible to me. I need to limit how much I move my own hands to make artwork. Digital making is a way in which I can open up space, and continue with my research project. My body is no longer a passive object in the decisions I make concerning methods. I soon realised that this form of making offers me more than a substitute for working with my hands: I can use this software to add more space and open up different understandings of the things I make. In Blender, I make myself a digital hand. I endeavour to recreate the creases and folds of my own hands creating an object that looks realistic. Crafting these details myself, I spend time with this new creation. I know this hand. I perfect the skin material that covers this severed hand, careful to accentuate the depth of the skin surface by including the “dermis” layer which appears red and splotchy on the hand. With this hand, I can reach out in cyberspace. The digital hand is not my avatar, it is a digital prosthesis that allows me to interact in digital media. The uncanniness of this digital hand does something to me, making it more than a representational object. The uncanny is what pulls me into this bodily appendage, and not its ability to become a “real” hand. I feel through it, as I use it to touch and interact with other materials in my digital artworks. With this digital hand, I learn how embodiment manifests in cyberspace, and nurture my relation to embodiment in general as a sick person. I learn both the science of my body and the effects bodies have on one another. Cyberspace does not need to be a space of disembodiment.

Online Resistance

My sick body extends into cyberspace. I turn this movement into a creative output. Cyberspace has been designed by and for capitalist greed. Capitalism profiteers from disability while it uses us to benchmark the limits of normality. Disabled people, therefore, need to hack these capitalist systems to gain any benefit from using their digital facilities. This disruption is a practice in itself. Legacy Russell coined the term Glitch Feminism.¹ Russell argues that the glitch can be utilised as a means to disrupt.  Reclaiming the error as something agential is useful for my body that is being consumed by unexpected sensations. The error is a creative endeavour. Preset algorithms dictate interactions in cyberspace; therefore, the error creates difference and produces much-needed alternative pathways. In a system without error, we see much repetition, even if this system grows in a feedback loop. The error is a new way forward. The error is innovation despite whether it is a positive or negative interruption. Without an interruption (error, anomaly, breakthrough, or shift in a system, even a system of thought), momentum is contained to a predetermined path, meaning invention is only possible through deviation. Illness diverts us in the course of a “healthy” path. Instead of thinking of this change in direction as something to be corrected, we need to leave room within our systems for change; without the assumption that things should and will achieve expected results (a healthy/”normal” body) and function in expected ways. Creativity, then, would be built into and cultivated within a system. The sick body is a creative body, and with it, we find different paths forward and different methods of being and being with others. This creativity stems from the body while it creates symptoms, mutations, disease and more. It also creates the need for a change in method. Ultimately, disruption is critical to combat the marginalisation capitalism shapes. 

The collective Laboria Cuboniks introduces such tactics in their manifesto Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation.² This manifesto expresses optimism for technology to disrupt the patriarchal, capitalist practice of marginalisation. The manifesto strongly rejects “essentialist naturalism.”³ Essentialism is a harmful prospect for those who differ; it posits a fixed expectation despite its unattainability. In this instance, nature is thought of as possessing an undisputed sanctity. Naturalism itself is not the problem. The problem is the proposition that things possess inherent qualities. In this way, there is a quintessential human from which all others deviate, creating a hierarchy of perfection. In contrast, crip theory does not form itself around a central figure (the perfect human) from which any difference creates deviation. Crip theory decentralises what it is to be human, allowing for deviation to create a multiplicit picture of humanity (as well as non-humans). Crip theory puts the power of collective difference into practice, allowing for the integration of variation through finding common goals, desires, and needs. Most importantly, crip communities are formed through subjective decisions to include oneself in this group, as opposed to being made a part of a group through exclusion, which the essentialist human dictates. 

For disabled people, essentialism is a frightening, othering prospect. All this fixity completely bypasses the reality that “nature” is composed of change. Medical care can be thought of as either the proof that bodies are malleable, autonomously changing and liable to being changed, while, on the other hand, medicalisation has long reflected a desire to correct and indeed eradicate disabled people. The medical model of disability has been widely criticised for its problematization of disability. The medical model of disability focuses on the impact of an “impairment” or illness on the individual and emphasises the need to medically intervene with the intent to cure disability. The medical model frames disability as a negative thing to be corrected, therefore emphasising the “deviance” of the disabled person. This model fails to see disability as a viable difference, where disability can cultivate thriving culture, joy, skills, knowledge, and creativity. Importantly, the medical model focuses on the individual at the expense of acknowledging how one’s society is designed in such a way as to disadvantage disabled people, which reflects society’s disregard or prejudice towards disability.

To counteract the medical model, the social model of disability has become the preferred ethos for the majority of disability rights campaigners today.⁴ The social model of disability argues that society actively disables a person and not that their body disables them. The need for accessible buildings and the eradication of stigma is crucial for this movement. This model does not seem perfect to me, however. If society is the one barrier that causes disability then it also posits that disability can be eradicated with social changes. I am disabled; all the bodily difference, knowledge and experience have made it a crucial part of who I am. I do not know who I am, or if I will be me anymore without disability. Furthermore, there are certainly social changes that would make things easier and less symptomatic for me, but having a genetic disorder means that my body creates symptoms and functions in a way that disables me. Social attitudes also impact the politics around medical care, which greatly affects my disability. The social model is important to consider because social design hugely affects disabled lives, but there needs to be more to it. Disability is a “complex embodiment” one that combines the social and the embodied, as Tobin Seibers would argue.⁵  Medical intervention can be vital, while society causes its scarcity, neglect, abuse, and malpractice. Disability need not be cured, and Alison Kafer argues that the assumption of cures in the future assumes a better world is one without disability, while it undermines the need to plan for disability in the future.⁶ Disability is neither positive nor negative; it is a reality that creates different ways of being. Disability is a way of being as a body, as well as with other bodies.

 Medical intervention does not need to be framed as a correction, or a cure for disability. Medicine should be the creation of technology that relieves difficulties and suffering. Medicine is not always necessary for all disabled people, but it should be treated no differently from innovation in assistive devices/aids or accessibility features: something that is available and prioritised when needed or wanted. Medicine and assistive technology are both creative responses to the body. In the text, ‘Crip Technoscience Manifesto’,  Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch argue that

“Disabled people design our own tools and environments, whether by using experiential knowledge to adapt tools for daily use or by engaging in professional design practices. Crip technoscience conjures long histories of daily adaption and tinkering with built environments.”⁷

Technology gives agency if we use it to deviate beyond the “norm” as opposed to preserving normality through medical corrections. Bodily “hacking” through medical intervention is given as an example of technological disruption in Cuboniks’ cyberfeminist manifesto.⁸ Cuboniks explains that the black market distribution of hormonal pharmaceuticals resists the gatekeeping of gender affirmative care.  The internet provides us with medical knowledge as well as access to structures of exchange. Cuboniks acknowledges the dangers of unregulated medical markets but argues that these underground practices model a better way forward, calling for a “free and open source medicine” platform.⁹ Open source software holds the user-focused advantage of being free, but it also provides the user with the source code, enabling them to modify the program. This open-source model brings into question the withholding of vital care that pharmaceutical profiteering creates.

The project Get Well Soon by Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne serves as an online archive of well-wishes from GoFundMe campaigns for medical care. They state that “it is an archive that should not exist.”¹⁰ As Cuboniks identifies, people are assembling and taking healthcare into their own hands online. The well wishes archived may offer hope for society’s capacity to care and help others, yet this archive only exists because of a lack of state-provided medical care;¹¹ a result of inconsistencies in society’s capacity to care for all. This charitable crowd-sourced system is vital for particular individuals but without the fair contribution and distribution of these medical provisions. 

All the well-meaning messages in this archive do show that care can be easily distributed online, as Laboria Cubonix points towards open-source-style medical care. The sporadic distribution of the GoFundMe campaigns means crowd-sourcing individual care is not the most ethical way forward because it inevitably selects and excludes people for varying reasons including bigotry.  Cuboniks calls for a form of “health communism” exemplified by open-source medical care and considers fair distribution, unlike a crowd-sourced charitable model. This argument goes beyond the socialism of our current NHS system in the UK (putting aside the point that the NHS is being systematically decimated through austerity measures, driving the appeal of private treatment). The NHS’s main principle of being available to all is important, but we could enhance this system beyond simply funding it properly: the open-source model is not only about universal accessibility (free to use), but it also provides an infrastructure where individuals can contribute knowledge and agency to a collective endeavour.  In this way, patient care becomes both medical and social at the same time. Agency and subjective knowledge become crucial in this new way forward that includes new systematic technologies and a collective responsibility to care and share with others in a community. 

We can take from these well-wishes the prospect that care can be accumulated and distributed online but we must remember that medical distribution systems need to move on from individualised empathy.

Crip Cyberspace

Cyberspace is equipped for the user-based self-inclusion that characterises crip theory. Crip theory focuses on self-assembly and fluid definitions, forming a coalition of crips drawn to the other through a commonality in being disabled. Robert McReur uses queer theory in his introduction to crip theory. He explains, “able-bodiedness, even more than heterosexuality, still largely masquerades as a nonidentity, as the natural order of things.”¹² For McRuer, disability and queer theory originate from what he calls “compulsory able-bodiedness” and “compulsory heterosexuality.”¹³ Both disability and homosexuality arise as other to the “norm.”  Crip theory identifies disability through commonality. This commonality does not need to be exact symptoms; it could be a commonality in being othered or marginalised as a body. The act of reclamation involved in using what was once a slur (queer or crip) gives the group agency; disability is not to be seen as positive or negative but a legitimate reality in need of acknowledgement. Although instigated through marginalisation, a crip community still forms itself by affirmation of those who are drawn together when previously classification was given to them without consent.

Touching Bodies at a Distance

Cyberspace enables me. It assists me, or moreover, it facilitates my movements in a more accessible format for me. Digitally, I can create whole worlds, be they expressed visually or conceptually. My expressions of this embodiment create a world. However, in cyberspace, this world is open. Creating different worlds is an invitation; a form of reaching out to others so they can encounter something new. The mobility of cyberspace is built into its functionality and material composition. With this in mind, other practitioners in cyberspace can be learnt from. How do others utilise the “affective” potential of cyberspace?

An online phenomenon I have been drawn to is ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response). ASMR videos feature sources of sensory stimulation, isolating and intensifying particular sounds (triggers), visual and material properties, often being manipulated in some way by hands or other objects, as well as sometimes just using whispered speech. The desired effect is a tingling at the back of one’s head, or simply, relaxation. 

A YouTube video created by ASMRMagic has garnered an astonishing ninety-two million views to date (2024).¹⁴ In this hypnotic footage, the creator delicately interacts with an array of objects, evoking sensory responses in viewers. I find myself entranced as manicured fingers trace the surface of a glitter-covered mannequin head, the sound of the glitter crackling beneath each gentle stroke. My body absorbs this sound, and I feel this crackle at the back of my head. I feel a resonance with this sound as it transforms and amplifies itself on my own skin. A side effect of a medication I take called Midodrine (for Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome) is a tingle at the back of my head. When I feel this sensation I know the medication is taking effect. This medication helps pump blood around my body. A nurse was surprised when I announced that I liked the tingling the first time I tried the drug. This tingling reminds me that my body is working to be me. Similarly, ASMR instigates this tingling sensation. The phenomena that I encounter outside my body, reverberate with me. These sensations collapse traditional notions of proximity because I am no longer so separate from the screen. Paradoxically, something outside myself has produced such strong sensations in my body. Illness produces a similar outcome in that it forces me to feel my body. Relief from these symptoms does not need to be a neutralisation of the body, but it can be something that therapeutically produces its own effects, like warmth, tingling, or euphoria. Illness is creative in this way and is perhaps why I seek sensation from all that I consume. 

Digital software has given me the means to create things in an accessible medium for me. Online media platforms give a means to share and interact with things created. Digital/digitised art is formatted in such a way as to be compatible with this form of presentation and dissemination. Before becoming sick, I did not fully understand the importance of this formatting: with digital media I can reach things now rendered out of reach. I can reach out to others and find ways to resonate with them. This is particularly liberating for those unable to reach out in “physical” ways. Beyond individual efforts to reach out in cyberspace, digital media gives the means to collect and mobilise embodied knowledge that is often under-represented, particularly in medical settings. I have participated, and learnt from others with my medical conditions in dedicated forums. Without such knowledge, I would never have solved the mystery of my illness when doctors could not diagnose it. Digital media allows us to find each other through embodied commonalities. Art-making is an attempt to reach out to others and find these resonances, and digitisation broadens this reach. As with the example of ASMR, digital art requires another body to feel something for it to reach its potential. Artist and theorist Simon O’Sullivan explores this potential of art to instigate “affects” in those who encounter it.     

“Affects can be described as extra-discursive and extra-textual. Affects are moments of intensity, a reaction in/on the body at the level of matter.”¹⁵

In making digital art, I draw from things that resonate with me as a body in the hope that another body might respond to it. It is not the outcome of this reaction that is meaningful for me as the artist, but the thought of this potential. Like when I have participated in online forums, I have resonated with others despite such a seemingly indirect mode of connection: one body putting their knowledge “out there” for others. The potential that art, or a shared phenomenon holds excites me. 

ASMR is a good example of what I can do with the specificity of cyberspace. Using cyberspace as a disabled person is more than an alternative method in response to a loss of access to the “original” method. With digital media, I can make things without straining my body, and I can use it to reach others, whether I consume the material of others or contribute and interact socially with an online community. Illness has instigated my use of digital media as an art-making method, but it also inhabits the work I create. Illness has taught me that my body is present in everything I do, only before, I did not notice it: my body was quiet in the background. I know now that making artwork is an embodied move; a move that is both practical and knowledge-based. Digital media has given me the means to both directly express what it is to be this body, as well as how to produce as a body. Illness and embodiment have become a framework for my art-making methodology. The methods I have adapted with come with their own methodology and techniques designed and instigated through/for digital media. There is a reciprocal relationship between developing methods in response to the body’s needs and the media that facilitates these methods. A feedback loop that creates difference because the body autonomously diverts my study away from repetition. I must adapt and change with this volatile body. Cyberspace gives me particular abilities, while my body contributes to how and what I make using these new abilities.

The Cybercrip

The cybercrip acknowledges that embodiment is key to disrupting capitalist systems online. My theory of the cybercrip is not necessarily aimed at sick and disabled people; we already know that the embodied subject cannot be superseded by “rationality” and that cyberspace can be a useful tool when “physical” access is not possible/viable. The cybercrip is to affirm the vital knowledge of cyberspace that disability/sickness/non-normativity nurtures; we are bodies who have learnt to find alternative methods, ready to adapt, divert and disrupt dominant platforms in cyberspace, bringing forth embodied practices using this seemingly ephemeral augmentation.

BIO

Born 1990, UK. Anna is a visual artist, writer and researcher based in London. She has recently completed an art practice-based PhD titled Sickness in Cyberspace: Sensual Encounters in Digital Media Towards a Radically Embodied Future, supervised by Melanie Jackson and Tai Shani at the Royal College of Art, London. Anna also completed an MA in Sculpture at the RCA in 2014. Her work has been exhibited with institutions across the UK and abroad including Southwark Park Gallery, Beaconsfield Gallery, QUAD (Derby), Outpost (Norwich), Hackney Picture House, Flattime House and Art Copenhagen.

REFERENCES

1. Legacy Russell, Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (London New York: Verso, 2020). np. ︎
2. Laboria Cuboniks, ‘Laboria Cuboniks | Xenofeminism’, accessed 16 September 2019, https://www.laboriacuboniks.net/. ︎
3. Ibid. np. ︎
4. For an example of these campaigners see Disability Rights UK, ‘Social Model of Disability: Language | Disability Rights UK’, accessed 1 February 2023, https://www.disabilityrightsuk.org/social-model-disability-language. ︎
5. Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory, Corporealities (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 25. ︎
6. Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Indiana University Press, 2013), 1–2. ︎
7. Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch, ‘Crip Technoscience Manifesto’, Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 5, no. 1 (1 April 2019): 5, https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29607. ︎
8. Cuboniks, ‘Laboria Cuboniks | Xenofeminism’. ︎
9. Ibid. ︎
10. ‘Get Well Soon!’, accessed 13 October 2020, http://getwellsoon.labr.io/. ︎
11. The project, Get Well Soon! was made in the US, so the lack of medical care is amplified compared to the UK. Still, in the UK, the NHS is running insufficiently due to austerity which forces individuals to seek private care and fundraise. ︎
12. Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, Cultural Front (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 1.
    ︎
13. Ibid, 2. ︎
14. ASMRMagic ‘ASMR 50+ Triggers over 3 Hours (NO TALKING) Ear Cleaning, Massage, Tapping, Peeling, Umbrella & MORE – YouTube’, (YouTube video, 3:16:49, 2018) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXp0hTkXiks&t=2187s.
    ︎
15. Simon O’Sullivan, ‘THE AESTHETICS OF AFFECT: Thinking Art beyond Representation’, Angelaki 6, no. 3 (December 2001): 125–35, https://doi.org/10.1080/09697250120087987. ︎

back to the ball

By: Charlotte Lengersdorf

Hacking Writing – Asemic Writing

Black marks on a white background,
Lines form and deform, 
Densifying into complex arrangements, 
Converge into linear formations. 
Horizontal row after row. 
A familiar strangeness, 
A resembling dissemblance, 
A pleasurable frustration.

The formal, structural and rhythmic qualities of the black lines on the white background evoke an undeniable association with writing. They lure the viewer into a habitual act of reading. Any attempt to extract meaning is unsuccessful. While maintaining stylistic coherence, the lack of repetition in the arrangements eliminates any possibility of decoding. Asemic writing treads a fine line between reference and repulsion, a characteristic that is already reflected in the term itself: It combines ‘asemic’, the absence or negation of meaning, with ‘writing’, challenging the key function of writing to convey meaning through written language. 

Visual poets Tim Gaze and Jim Leftwich coined the term asemic writing in the 1990s, but there are numerous works that predate the term that could be described as asemic writing.¹ The term cannot be mentioned without acknowledging the discussions surrounding its various understandings, including debates about its motivation, its meaning, how it should be read, and how it should be understood. An underpinning rationale, as well as a clear definition, continue to be negotiated in various web blogs, forums and online groups. As Peter Schwenger writes in the first published book on the historical, critical and contemporary contexts of asemic writing, the term asemic writing has not led to ‘a general consensus, an artistic practice governed by conventions’.² The American writer and artist Michael Jacobson, who publishes asemic writing through the website The New Post-Literate and his Post-Asemic Press, states: ‘Sometimes it seems so large that there is no one clear definition of what asemic writing is or will become.’³ The abstract nature of asemic writing defies both theoretical consideration and academic attention. At the same time, it exerts an undeniable fascination and attraction that is hard to resist, as reflected in its growing popularity across various web blogs, forums and online groups.⁴

The terms ‘hacking’ and ‘hacker’, and their implications, have been widely debated since their origins in computer circles. Descriptions of the hacker range from the stereotype of the anti-social geek and cybercriminal who gains unauthorised access to computer systems, to the more positive portrayal of the hacker whose ‘energy, vision, and problem-solving perseverance’ are indispensable to the well-being of large technology companies, to more abstract definitions of the concept in which hacking is not necessarily bound to the context of computers and computer networks.⁵ The Australian academic McKenzie Wark in A Hacker Manifesto, argues for the value of ‘freeing the concept of the hacker from its particulars, understanding it abstractly’.⁶ Sociologist Tim Jordan writes: ‘Despite 20 years of ongoing research into hacking, it remains unclear what hacking means.’⁷

Both terms, hacking and asemic writing, are bewildering in discussion and abstract by nature. Reason enough, one might argue, not to complicate matters by bringing them together. At the same time, the research for this paper revealed an exuberant amount of parallels in the discourse around hacking and the discussions around asemic writing, almost as if they were talking about the same subject. This paper takes this observation quite literally, using references from one discipline to write about the other, to see what else might emerge from such an encounter. 

Hacking writing,
Writing hacking,
Hacked writing,
Written hack,
Hacking in writing,
Writing into hacking, 
A writing hack.

This paper hacks writing. It is not just writing about the practice of asemic writing as a practice that hacks the formal and structural elements of writing, as explained in the introductory section of this paper. The act of writing this paper is itself subject to the practice of hacking, exploring the concept of hacking through the choices of structure and writing style. The paper therefore explores the relationship between hacking and writing, and writing and hacking in its various forms. Any confusion is intended and welcome.

In the context of this paper, references are taken out of their original context and used to describe a different context in order to open up new conversations and explorations in a creative alliance across disciplines. The aim is to extend and deviate from what has already been written, ‘[hacking/writing] the new out of the old’.⁸ As exemplified in the previous quotation, the altered quotations retain their original wording and structure. The words written in square brackets replace or add to the author’s original words, transforming the quote to talk about the same idea, but in the context of a different subject area. They appropriate the quote to intersect with, but depart from, its original context. The ‘/‘ makes a sentence hover between the contexts of asemic writing and hacking, confusing both and prioritising neither — the order of the words is random to avoid direct identification of the original context. Due to the borderline academic nature of this method, endnotes are used to ensure academic integrity, traceability and transparency to the original source.

This creative method of ‘hacking writing’ is not intended to misrepresent the thoughts, ideas and work of the original author, nor to devalue or disrespect their words. Rather, it seeks to use their words as a starting point for making interdisciplinary connections that might lead to new interpretations and discussions beyond the original context. Hacking writing becomes a process of writing writing out its repetitive cycles of citation and recitation. Feminist media scholars Bassett, Kemper and O’Riordan, for example, in their book Furious, justify their ‘unforgivable […] lack of full citations’ by refusing to maintain the ‘citation circularity, which finds itself trapped in ever smaller circles, an echo chamber that does not break out’.⁹ They argue for ‘the need for new forms of scholarly writing’, in which writing becomes a ‘process of experimenting and opening’.¹⁰ In hacking writing, writing is not a reproduction of what is already known, but a creative process that produces difference: ‘New [hacks/writing] supersede old [writing/hacks] […]. [The hack/The writing] takes information […] and produces new information out of it again.’¹¹ 

Asemic writing cannot be understood merely as a term used to classify or assemble various pre-existing practices or ideas, nor can it be said to explain, describe or abstract an object, a class or the essence of a practice. The term asemic writing refers to nothing other than itself. Unlike traditional writing, whose appearance is defined and constrained by the somewhat flexible but limited forms of its respective writing system, asemic writing has no predetermined or preconceived form. Its appearance is defined by a movement of challenge, of resistance to the known and the prescribed. However, asemic writing is not a mere rejection or negation of writing; it retains a reference to its opposite. The formal diversity of asemic writing emerges from an active engagement with the tension between the constraining properties of writing’s convention and gestural expression beyond routines, habits and systems. The gestures and awareness of the act of writing and reading are countered by a determined resistance to giving in to conditioned patterns of movement and thought. It is a deliberate departure, but not a complete dissociation from conventional writing. It does not seek to separate writing from writing, or reading from reading. Rather, asemic writing leads to more intense forms of writing and reading through active participation in an act that is usually disguised by habit. As Schwenger writes: ’It extends beyond what can be read or understood according to the logic of any signifying system.’¹² 

Wark describes the complications of describing hackers as a class while remaining true to the abstract and unstable nature of the practice. She writes: ‘Hackers are a class […] but an abstract class.’¹³ The article ‘a’ rather than ‘the’ in the title of her book A Hacker Manifesto is a manifestation of this struggle to define that which refuses representation: ‘We don’t quite know who we are […] it is in the nature of the hacker to differ from others, to differ even from oneself, over time. To hack is to differ.’¹⁴ 

[Asemic Writing/Hacking] is best described as a ‘concept’ in the Deleuzo-Guattarian sense. It does not name something in order to define it, to enclose it within disciplinary boundaries, to exclude it from what it is not. Rather, it is a term that encourages the creation of new practices and discourses; That transcends boundaries rather than erecting them. It is a practice that is defined by a conscious act of troubling and transforming the existing, redirecting it towards the new and different. [Asemic writing/Hacking] is ‘turning a system against itself’; It is a process in which elements and qualities of a system are used beyond their original purpose and limitations.¹⁵ An ‘exercise of ample creativity’, that consists of a continuous surpassing of the known.¹⁶

A practice that challenges a system central to our culture and that frustrates our habitual interaction with media, is easily dismissed as nonsensical and useless and as a practice pursued for mere self-expression and pleasure. The [asemic writer/hacker] is defined as a person who ‘enjoys exploring the details of [programmable/writing] systems and how to stretch their capabilities […], who [writes/programs] enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys [programming/writing]. […] An expert or enthusiast of any kind. […] Who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.’¹⁷ [To hack/write asemic] means to ‘to interact with a [computer/writing] in a playful and exploratory rather than goal-directed way’, to be ‘motivated to [hack/write] for the sheer pleasure of doing so’, Just for Fun.¹⁸ They [write/hack] ‘simply for the joy of pulling off an awesome trick’.¹⁹ 

The nonsensical and useless nature of [asemic writing/hacking] seems to be reinforced by the repeated use of words such as enjoyment, enthusiasm and fun. These words are commonly used to qualify an activity as trivial or irrelevant. An aimless, casual, playful or exploratory activity at the other end of doing something useful, purposeful or goal-oriented: ‘”Whatcha up to?” “Oh, just [writing/hacking].”’²⁰ However, on closer inspection, what the [asemic writer/hacker] enjoys is a stretching of their capabilities, an intellectual challenge, an overcoming of limitations. The [hacker/writer] is driven by a ‘desire for access to something new, something previously unknown’.²¹ They ‘derive pleasure in outwitting constraint’.²² The joy derived from [asemic writing/hacking] stems from expanding the limits of what was is considered possible, destabilising and pushing personal and technological boundaries. It embodies a pleasure and desire to transcend the constraints of conditioning, unlocking untapped potential; A liberation from the static, fixed and predictable nature of everyday life. [Asemic writers/Hackers] ‘illuminate the ways in which [programming/writing] is tamed and contained by its socially accepted formats’.²³ 

There is a striking similarity between the definition of humour and the pragmatics of [asemic writing/hacking]: ‘[Humor/asemic writing/hacking] requires a similarly irreverent, frequently ironic stance toward language, social conventions, and stereotypes.’²⁴ [Asemic writing/hacking] and humour involve ‘a play upon form’, questioning the necessity of accepted patterns.²⁵ A hacker’s enjoyment of hacking and outwitting technical constraints is reflected in the central role of humour among hackers. Furthermore, the [hackers’/asemic writers’] provocative rejection of systems translates into their inventive use of language: ‘Hackers, as a rule, love wordplay’.²⁶

[Hacking/Asemic writing] is ‘an invitation to play.[…] to resist a stable meaning in favor of […] the interminable play of differences’.²⁷ It is driven by a ‘joy’ of experiencing the virtual.²⁸ The virtual here is not to be equated with the digital or contrasted with the real. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the virtual is that which is not yet manifested or realised, a realm of potentiality of reality that is not yet actualised in the present. The concept of [asemic writing/hacking] is liberated from its specificity to be understood in a more abstract sense: ‘The virtual is the true domain of the [hacker/asemic writer]. […] To the [asemic writer/hacker], what is represented as being real is always partial, limited, perhaps even false. […] To [hack/write asemic] is to release the virtual into the actual’.²⁹ Through [asemic writing/hacking], the [hacker/writer] penetrates seemingly infallible systems and disciplinary regimes, creating the possibility of new and alternative practices, but also new and alternative futures: ‘Every [asemic writing/hack] is an expression of the inexhaustible multiplicity of the future, of virtuality.’³⁰ The [hacker’s/asemic writer’s] joy in experiencing the virtuality of nature parallels what Nietzsche calls the ‘joy of becoming’, that is, the joy of experiencing the dynamic nature of life, existence and identity.³¹ Joy, here, consists in challenging the rigidity of static ideals in favour of exploring the inherent complexities of life, finding fulfilment in continuous processes of transformation, growth, change, and creation.

BIO

Dr Charlotte Lengersdorf is a visual communicator, researcher and lecturer based in London and Düsseldorf. Her research emerges from an intersection between type design, human-computer interaction and a practice of programming with specific interest in the nonsensical, undetermined and unknown. She holds a BA from the Peter Behrens School of Arts in Düsseldorf and an MA from the Royal College of Art in London. Her PhD (2023) in communication research at the Royal College of Art, titled ‘Towards an Uncausal Practice of Visual Communication‘,  was funded by The German Academic Scholarship Foundation.

info@charlottelengersdorf.com
charlottelengersdorf.com
@charlottelengersdorf

REFERENCES

1. Peter Schwenger, for example, refers to three ‘asemic ancestors’: Henri Michaux, Roland Barthes and Cy Twombly. ︎
2. Peter Schwenger, Asemic: the Art of Writing (Minneapolis, MN; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 17. ︎
3. ‘Four questions about asemic writing, #12: Michael Jacobson’ (14 February 2016) <http://scriptjr.nl/four-questions-about-asemic-writing-12-michael-jacobson/3447#.W8O5Ai_Myog> [accessed 20 January 2022]. ︎
4. ‘Asemic’, Google Group: <https://groups.google.com/g/asemic> [accessed 04 April 2024].
   ‘Asemic Movement’ (Sep 24, 2011), Tim Gaze <https://issuu.com/eexxiitt/docs/asemicmovement1> [accessed 04 April 2024].
   ‘Asemic’, Tim Gaze, <http://www.asemic.net> [accessed 04 April 2024].
   ‘Asemic Writing for Mail Artists’ (2024), Ruud Janssen <https://iuoma-network.ning.com/group/asemicwritingformailartists> [accessed 04 April 2024].
   ‘The New Post-literate: A Gallery Of Asemic Writing’, Michael Jacobson <https://thenewpostliterate.blogspot.com> [accessed 04 April 2024].
   ‘Post-Asemic Press: A Publisher of Asemic Writing & Beyond’, Michael Jacobson <http://postasemicpress.blogspot.com> [accessed 04 April 2024] ︎
5. Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2010), 458. ︎
6. McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto (Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 2004), [072]. ︎
7.  Tim Jordan, ‘A Genealogy of Hacking’ (2017), Convergence, 23(5): 528–544, 528. ︎
8. Wark, [004]. ︎
9. Caroline Bassett, Sarah Kemper and Kate O’Riordan, Furious: Technological Feminism and Digital Futures (London: Pluto Press, 2020), 15; 105. ︎
10. Ibid., 19; 105. ︎
11. Wark, [080]. ︎
12. Schwenger, 122. ︎
13. Wark, [006]. ︎
14. Ibid., [003]. ︎
15. Gabriella Coleman, Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013), 98. ︎
16. Coleman, 97. ︎
17. ‘The Hacker Jargon File 4.4.7’ <http://catb.org/jargon/html/online-preface.html> [accessed 20 January 2024]. ︎
18. Ibid.; Coleman, 98; Linus Torvalds, Just for Fun: the Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (New York; London; Toronto; Sydney: Harper, 2001). ︎
19. Levy, 464. ︎
20. ‘The Hacker Jargon File 4.4.7’. ︎
21. Tim Jordan, Hacking: Digital Media and Society Series (Cambridge, Malden: Polity Press, 2008), 5. ︎
22. Coleman, 98. ︎
23. Schwenger, 7. ︎
24. Coleman, 100. ︎
25. Douglas 1975 as quoted in Coleman, 100. ︎
26. ‘The Hacker Jargon File 4.4.7’. ︎
27. Schwenger, 149. ︎
28. Wark, [060]. ︎
29. Wark, [074]. ︎
30. Wark, [078]. ︎
31. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols (1889), trans. by Richard Polt (Indianapolis, IN; Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1997), 91. ︎

back to the ball

By: Luigi Monteanni & Matteo Pennesi (Artetetra)

Sounds from the Modem’s Peripheries

A survey of the transglobal digital underground

Keywords: music; underground; transnational; folklore; temporalities

Mix Tracklist

• Internet-themed Skits from “The Amazing World of Gumball – Gumball and the Internet” and “Seaman Rocks! (Chat about internet)” (Downloaded from YouTube, 173 kps)
• YNO – うざん (UZAN)
• JPN Kasai – 山姿
• Kevin Silalahi – Bagian 2
• Sara Persico & Xavier Lopez – Dreamwork
• Nikolaienko – The Ancient Musical Complex Of Mammoth Bones
• Francesca Heart – Giochi, Dispetti, lo Sguardo della Ninfa
• Kensho Nakamura – Waltz (feat. keisuke s_d_)
• Shakali – Aluilla
• 03sem – nyc
• Yem Gel – Mageborn
• Mondoriviera – You Don’t Belong Here
• Polonius – Sharing a Caña @ Café Marcelino 2000
• Loris Cericola – Planet 23
• Emamouse x Yeongrak – Gaguusad
• Rainbow Island – Jesterbus Ride
• DJ Kimchi – Tetrapot Melon Tea
• DJ Kimchi – Goblin Mode

Mix Description

“Sounds from the modem’s peripheries” is Artetetra’s non exhaustive survey of the developing transglobal, digital underground. Through the mixtape format – a compilation of music drafted from multiple sources and album releases – Artetetra offers an aural homage to and glimpse into the musical aesthetics and digital-vernacular practices of these post-internet freaks. Dive into one hour of pure digital time-space compression, fifth world music, digital folklore and samples of internet-themed audio-commentary framing the uncertain boundaries of this decentralised scene.

If it’s on Facebook, it’s not underground at all: an introduction

As a decentralised, transnational and semi-material infrastructure instigating a new experience of time and space, the Internet has allowed a plethora of new social environments based on virtual encounters, audiovisual content and digitally mediated practices. Due to various historical factors, alongside the economic and spatio-temporal convenience of new technologies, this encounter is increasingly influencing underground music communities worldwide. However, there is an ingrained proclivity to declare underground music dead in the digital age. 

For example, a 2021 social media post discussing the underground in Berlin, wrote: 

“If it’s on Facebook, it’s not underground at all”

Conversely, many of my social media feeds on Facebook, Reddit and Instagram feature Internet-influenced underground musical subcultures, and as scene insiders^[1], we present a mixtape of underground music collectives representative of these occurrences accompanied by this explicative text. While not exhaustive, the contribution is a multi-media commentary on the digital development of transnationally connected subcultural movements and maps the spatial and temporal boundaries of a specific network of artists grounded on artistic, conceptual and political affinity. As a consequence of the progressive disappearance of performative spaces and the multiplication of niche ‘no-audience underground’ subgenres—music movements in which authors and fandom collide (Hayler 2015) —artists have moved online experimenting with the DIY possibilities offered by the net and its ‘digital folklore’ (de Seta 2019). Through production and dissemination tools, musicians have gained renewed access to subcultural capital and artistic exchange, collapsing geographical distances and the shortage of economic and social resources, while adapting to maintain the ethos of underground practices. 

In order to characterise and analyse what we term the ‘digital underground’, we explore the argument in three sections, building on our personal experiences alongside data gathered from artists’ descriptions. In the first part of this article we illustrate how the meta-genre has formed, then we illustrate how this subculture experiments in their productions with alternative temporalities and, finally, we hypothesise some of the genre’s key-features, expanding on themes discussed in the first two sections. On the one hand, we postulate that the musicians defining this new digital underground respect the fundamental traits of the ‘original’ genre; that is, under-the-radar projects pursuing aesthetic radicalism and a ‘Do It Yourself’ ethos, intentionally placing themselves at the margins of the music industry.^[2] On the other, we argue that for some of these artists the Internet is not only an instrument of music dissemination, but a creative device. Through its audio-visual tools, a new, digital underground represented by entities like Quantum Natives ^[3](44:25 – 46:45) can only thrive online as it becomes a lens to express and reinterpret conceptions of time and space, often with synesthetic connotations.

Death to the underground: is it still a thing?

In 2014, The Wire published an article titled ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues‘^[4], where David Keenan, author and key figure of the U.S. and UK underground^[5], stated that after more than forty years, the pseudo-movement incarnated by the post-1960 cultural expansion of bands such as The Velvet Underground and Captain Beefheart^[6] wasn’t a symbol of ‘Do It Yourself’ attitude and countercultural isolationism anymore; the defining elements of the subculture. Instead, it had become a genre, a gimmick ready to be emulated.^[7] Ultimately, an issue of attitude had become an issue of style, thus compromising the subculture’s integrity.

Following Frank Zappa’s principle^[8] that, “the mainstream comes to you, but you have to go to the underground”, journalists and cultural theorists such as Simon Reynolds observed that the Web has extinguished the idea of an obscure “true underground”, being now too easy for anyone to discover anything.^[9] Nonetheless, Reynolds stated that the ‘new underground scenes’ differ from the ‘originals’ in two senses^[10]: first, as a constellation of online microgenres spanning from Soundcloud rap to vaporwave^[11] and, second, as musical subgenres where authors and fandom coincide; a no-audience underground.^[12]

The digital transformation of music is imputable to the democratisation^[13] and hijacking^[14] of mass-distributed, affordable consumer—from cables and smartphones, to headphones to audio-monitors—alongside the Web’s creative and circulatory affordances provided by the internet.^[15] Free, cheap or illegally downloaded music apps and Virtual Studio Technologies (VSTs) such as like Borderlands, VCV Rack, Supercollider, Pure Data or Serum as well as digital audio workstations and editors such as GarageBand, Ableton, Logic Pro, Pro Tools, FL Studio or Audacity, nudged amateurs and underground musicians to employ semi-professional and professional music production tools constituting valid alternatives to otherwise expensive, cumbersome, and esoteric technologies.^[16] Moreover, free streaming websites like Bandcamp and Soundcloud, along with non-musical, digital platforms such as Linktree, YouTube, Discord, WordPress and social networks, namely Instagram, Tik Tok and Facebook, provided musicians with virtual stages to not only promote and sell their productions more or less directly to the public, but also to discover, exchange and collaborate with kindred artists transnationally. With tools allowing them to record complex musical works and digital services substituting classic, physical trading circuits and mailorders between artists, distributions and labels, musicians are ultimately crafting their sounds in new economically and logistically convenient ways, building scenes in the meantime; all without necessarily leaving their bedrooms. 

The general preference of many underground musicians to favour these new media and technologies is instigated by hostile cultural and urban policies making it increasingly difficult for artists to access spaces in real life (IRL). The dramatic and ongoing rise of rents in city centres following the global real estate crisis^[17], the continuous decline of independent clubs’ and live venues’ revenues^[18], the closing down and criminalisation of many autonomous zones and squats^[19], the drastic cuts to arts and culture fundings^[20], as well as the downfall of music sales and the rise of the streaming industry,^[21] have forced experimental musicians to resort to marginal territories such as garages, flats, bookshops and art galleries, because normal venues for live shows are increasingly unsuitable and hostile.^[22] Thus, the no-audience underground also becomes a no-venue underground,^[23] and is compelled to follow Gavin Prior’s coniage: ‘to hell or to Internet‘^[24]; when the lack of offline resources makes the sustenance of underground musical cultures impossible, the internet’s applicative, promotional, and communicative potential proves the only alternative capable of nurturing small, connected international scenes. In short, to compensate for the disappearance of localised, physical space, musicians resort to virtual, decentralised environments. 

Contrary to the popular opinion that the underground is a set of independent, radical aesthetic practices incompatible with the internet, contemporary musicians have employed the digital infrastructure to expand on the metagenre’s credo and creative possibilities^[25], connecting with scattered fellow artists and forging transnational ties. But how does this new pseudo-movement differ from its original IRL counterpart?

Sounds from the modem’s peripheries: temporalities in the new digital underground

In order to highlight the peculiarities of the scene, it is worth trying to grasp its speculative boundaries first. From this perspective, one of the entities that most represents the digital underground is modem, based in Ljubljana, Slovenia, they are described by its founder^[26] as a student radio show, “uncovering the hidden sounds from the online underground […]”. While not exhaustive, the broadcast charts the development of these decentralised subcultural movements. 

Employing imagery and other technical improvisations, many of the projects showcased by modem fit the ethos of digital folklore; that is, “a vernacular emerging from below and a folk art created by users for users, coalescing into repertoires of jokes, memes, and other genres of digital content”.^[27] Projects customarily resort to vernacular, pirate techniques such as sampling Internet content or employing free or illegally downloaded music apps and softwares. These musicians also propose readings of folklore through digital means, superimposing mythical registers and historical symbologies with the secularity and pop appeal of technological devices, memes and video games. 

Interestingly, many of these artists strongly engage with ideas of alternative, non-linear time and space. For example, Rainbow Island’s album ILLMATRIX ^[28](46:30 – 54:10) dabbles with time’s physical alteration by affiliating themselves to the symbol ‘GMT±∞’: an uncharted temporality that defines the digital timezone of the band’s “internet diaspora”.^[29] Francesca Heart’s^[30] album Eurybia (16:15 – 20:58) explores a superimposition of different ages, where images of nymphs and mythological landscapes are connected with new age music and contemporary video game soundtracks and ringtones.^[31] Through these artists, time is both perceived and expressed as tangled and multilayered, as opposed to linear, progressive and irreversible.

In addition, one of the albums which best embodies the collision between underground music practices, digital folklore and alternative, digital temporalities is Mondoriviera’s^[32] soundtrack to video game Nòtt Lönga (33:04 – 37:07), described as the music to “an abandoned retro game haunted by folk horror creatures and ghosts of broken futures. […] a liminal dimension where time has lost all meaning […]. Past and future, reality and dreams, nostalgia and amnesia have merged beyond repair.” Likely unknown to many, this follows the temporal tropes familiar to gaming, where  multiple temporal frames^[33], time compression and de-sequencing^[34] are employed to execute a regional narrative to conjure a suspended time-space; a new liminal dimension.

As projects like Mondoriviera show, these temporalities also bear synaesthetic qualities. Superimposing timelines frequently implies overlapping spaces, planes, dimensions and vice-versa, in a way that reminds of Leopardi’s ‘vague’, where concepts like ‘far’ and ‘ancient’ are lost in space-time extension and consequently their meaning cannot be fully grasped.^[35] In this sense, as Enrico Monacelli has pointed out in his essay-review of Loris Cericola’s album “Metaphysical Graffiti”^[36] (43:00 – 44:48), although these works flirt with nostalgia, the digital world and the screen are for the most part conceived as portals, gateways to personal, sonic imagery. A compendiary definition comes from one-man project Polonius’ (36:48 – 43:00) whom advertises their wares on bandcamp as, “sciencefiction archeomiragical time travel tapes”^[37]; an expression where history, imagination and different temporalities are mutually involved in a work of vague, sonic world-building.

The fascination for alternative temporalities and the digital is not exclusive to this subculture and has been recently picked up by artists defined as accelerationist pop^[38] or conceptronica^[39]; the latter defined as conceptual electronica and most likely to be found in a museum than a nightclub. The peculiarity, then, is not that artists have imagined alternative geographies and timelines, but that they have done so as often self-taught, DIY amateurs resorting to vernacular practices and easily-accessible digital technologies. Their works are not ordered critiques of capitalism or conceptual pieces designed for gallery exhibitions. Rather, they are naive, ambiguous and lighthearted pastiches of mismatched audio-video influences reminiscent of the Web’s compulsory hyperlink structure driven by escapism and curiosity.

Conclusions

By analysing different positions regarding the underground’s contemporary evolution and examining ethnographic data (i.e. liner notes, descriptions), I have tried to show how bands and projects belonging to the digital underground have come to exploit the Internet as a field of possibilities for vernacular, creative action as well as a tool revitalising the democratic ideology of the subculture, largely expressed through and inspired by digital means. Additionally, I have framed this developing scene through some of its key features. In sum, participants to the digital underground (1) perceive complex, synaesthetic temporalities attributable to digital media’s structure, (2) express them though the digital-folklore-vernacular, (3) create gateways to personal, DIY world-building processes and (4) explore naive and lighthearted pastiches of audiovisual references and influences.

[end]

BIO

Luigi Monteanni is a PhD candidate in music studies at SOAS under the AHRC CHASE. He studies the relationships between contemporary transnational pop music genres and regional music and, particularly, the indigenisation of extreme metal in Bandung, Indonesia. He is also the co-founder of Artetetra Records and the duo Babau: a music label and project pursuing practice-based inquiries regarding notions of digital folklore, world music 2.0 and exoticism in late globalisation. Among others, he has collaborated with Norient, Simon Reynolds, Scuola Cònia, CTM, The Attic, NON-Copyriot, ISMMS, Aural Archipelago, Kiosk Radio, NTS, Rai Radio 3, and Roskilde Festival.

REFERENCES

^[1] Alongside musician Matteo Pennesi, I have co-founded the digital folklore label Artetetra and neo-exotica duo Babau in 2014.

^[2] Stephen Graham, Sounds of the Underground: A Cultural, Political and Aesthetic Mapping of Underground and Fringe Music (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press) 2016, 5.

^[3] Quantum Natives official website. Accessed on June 22, 2022.

^[4] David Keenan, “Subterranean Homesick Blues” The Wire, January 2014.

^[5] Joeri Bruyninckx, “Volcanic Tongue interview with David Keenan,” It’s Psychedelic Baby Magazine, August 15, 2015. https://www.psychedelicbabymag.com/2015/08/volcanic-tongue-interview-with-david.html

^[6] Stephen Graham, “Where is the Underground”, The Journal of Music, August 1, 2010. https://journalofmusic.com/focus/where-underground

^[7]  Valerio Mattioli, “L’underground è morto, viva l’underground”, Vice, December 23, 2014. https://www.vice.com/it/article/6vdyw8/david-keenan-intervista

^[8] Graham, “Where is the Underground”.

^[9] Ibid.

^[10] Simon Reynolds, email to author, October 12, 2021.

^[11] Vaporwave, similarly to coeval niche internet phenomena such Witch House, Seapunk, and Health Goth, is an Internet aesthetic and «genre of electronic music that emerged online in the early 2010s, with an aesthetic originally oriented to slowing down and looping ostensibly “kitsch” or “schmaltzy” music from the 1980s and 1990s.» A definition taken from Raphaël Nowak and Andrew Whelan in ““Vaporwave Is (Not) a Critique of Capitalism”: Genre Work in An Online Music Scene” Open Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (2018): 451-462. https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2018-0041

^[12] Robert Hayler, “what i mean by the term ‘no-audience underground’, 2015 remix”, Radio Free Midwich, June 14, 2015. https://radiofreemidwich.wordpress.com/2015/06/14/what-i-mean-by-the-term-no-audience-underground-2015-remix/.

^[13] Jace Clayton, Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 2016.

^[14] David Novak, Japanoise (Durham: Duke University Press 2013).

^[15] Graham, “Where is the Underground”.

^[16] Among similar items, in this category fall at least most analog synthesisers, percussion and drum kits, amplifiers and personal address systems (PAs).

^[17] Victoria Masterson, “What has caused the global housing crisis – and how can we fix it?”, World Economic Forum, June 16, 2022, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/06/how-to-fix-global-housing-crisis/

^[18] Mark Savage, “Live music revenue fell again in 2021, despite gigs returning”, BBC, April 25, 2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-61187598

^[19] Siobhán Dowling, “Berlin Clears One of its Last Remaining Squats”, Der Spiegel, November 25, 2009,  https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/city-getting-blander-berlin-clears-one-of-its-last-remaining-squats-a-663449.html

^[20] Guy Morrow, “Why arts and culture appear to be the big losers in this budget”, March 31, 2022, https://theconversation.com/why-arts-and-culture-appear-to-be-the-big-losers-in-this-budget-180127

^[21] “Global Music Report 2022”, IFPI, last modified 22 March, 2022, https://globalmusicreport.ifpi.org/

^[22] Gabriele de Seta, “The no-venue underground: Sounding Hong Kong’s lack of performance spaces”, The Society for Ethomusicology, December 19, 2016. https://soundmattersthesemblog.wordpress.com/2016/12/19/gabriele-de-seta-the-no-venue-underground-sounding-hong-kongs-lack-of-performance-spaces/

^[23] Ibid.

^[24] Graham, “Where is the Underground”.

^[25] Giovanni Prattichizzo, “Social media is the new punk. User experience, social music and diy culture,” in Keep it Simple, Make it Fast! An approach to underground music scenes, Volume 1, ed. Paula Guerra and Tânia Moreira (Porto: Faculdade de Letras Universidade do Porto, 2015), 309-324.

^[26] Modem Facebook page information. on June 22, 2022.

^[27] Gabriele de Seta, “Digital Folklore,” In International Handbook of Internet Research, ed. Jeremy Hunsinger, Matthew M. Allen, Lisbeth Klastrup (Dordrecht: Springer, 2019), 1-17. P.14. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1202-4_36-1

^[28] Rainbow Island, ILLMATRIX, Artetetra, ATA26, 2020, CD. https://artetetra.bandcamp.com/album/illmatrix

^[29] “ILLMATRIX DIGITAL BOOKLET”, last accessed June 22, 2022. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UjQruywKb7_bBmPSJceCOZSHmvCjytwB/view?

^[30] Francesca Heart, Eurybia, Leaving Records, LR227, 2022, cassette.

^[31] Liner Notes I wrote for Eurybia’s Bandcamp page, last accessed June 22, 2022, https://francescaheart.bandcamp.com/album/eurybia?

^[32] Mondoriviera, Nott Longa, Artetetetra, ATA34, 2021, digital. https://artetetra.bandcamp.com/album/nott-longa-ost

^[33] José P. Zagal, and Michael Mateas. “Time in Video Games: A Survey and Analysis,” in Simulation & Gaming 41, no. 6 (December 2010): 844–68. https://doi.org/10.1177/1046878110375594.

^[34] Stine Gotved. “Time and Space in Cyber Social Reality.” New Media & Society 8, no. 3 (June 2006): 467–86. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444806064484.

^[35] Fabio Camilletti, “Lutto e melanconia dell’antico in Leopardi,” in Melancholy, ed. Valentina Serio (Pisa: Università di Pisa, 2018), 93-119.

^[36] Enrico Monacelli “Loris Cericola – Metaphysical Graffiti”, NON-Copyriot, June 19, 2022. https://non.copyriot.com/loris-cericola-metaphysical-graffiti/

^[37] Description from Polonius’ Bandcamp page, last accessed June 22, 2022. https://polonius1.bandcamp.com/music

^[38] Valerio Mattioli, “Appunti per una discografia accelerazionista”, Prismo, April 13, 2015. http://www.prismomag.com/appunti-per-una-discografia-accelerazionista/

^[39] Simon Reynolds, “The Rise of Conceptronica”, Pitchfork, October 10, 2019. https://pitchfork.com/features/article/2010s-rise-of-conceptronica-electronic-music/

By: Ben Potter

AI, Myth and Metaphor

What’s the ‘Intelligence’ in Artificial Intelligence?

Keywords: artificial intelligence; GPT-3; myth; metaphor; communication

Introduction: Welcome to the Future

Ok, full disclosure, I didn’t write this introduction, an AI called Generative Pre-Trained Transformer-3 (GPT-3) did.^[1] GPT-3 is at the crest of a new wave of ‘AI’ research which uses deep learning and natural language processing (NLP) to manipulate data about language with the aim of automating communication. There is an astonishing amount of hype and myth surrounding these new ‘AI’ with Google researcher Blake Lemoine calling Google’s language model LaMDA ‘sentient’ and GPT-3 engineer Ilya Sutskever calling them ‘slightly conscious’.^[2] This position is reflected in popular culture with films like Ex Machina (2014) and Her (2013) perpetuating ideas of machine consciousness. But something is amiss – we often equate machine intelligence with human intelligence, even though human understanding and computational prediction are radically different ways of perceiving. Why is this so? It is because of the imprecision and myth surrounding the metaphor of ‘intelligence’ as it has been used within the field of AI. As AI researcher Erik J. Larson argues, the myth is that we are on an inevitable path towards AI superintelligence capable of reaching and then surpassing human intelligence.^[3] Corporations have exploited this intelligence conflation and transformed it into a marketing tool, and we, as consumers, have bought into the myth. Despite the fact there has been real progress in recent years with AI’s capable of outperforming humans on narrowly defined tasks, dreams of artificial general intelligence (AGI) which resembles human intelligence are sorely misplaced.

What I will attempt to do in this article is unpack the myth to show how reality differs from the hype. Firstly, taking GPT-3 as a case study, I will look at machine learning algorithms’ deficient understanding of language. AI research is a broad field and taking GPT-3 and other Large Language Models (LLMs) as my case study helps focus on a particular branch of AI research which has dealt with what has often been considered the defining trait of human intelligence: language. Secondly, I will critique the metaphor of ‘intelligence’ as it has come to be used in AI, showing how its usage contributes to the myth. Finally, I propose that, to counter this myth, we rethink the term ‘artificial intelligence’, in view of what we know about how these systems operate.^[4]

Calculating communication without understanding

Developed by the company OpenAI, GPT-3 can perform a huge variety of text-based tasks. Known as a ‘transformer’, it works by identifying patterns that appear in human-written language, using a huge training corpus of textual data, scraped from the internet (input), and turning this into reassembled text (output). Effectively it is a massively scaled-up version of the predictive text function we have on our phones. But what separates GPT-3 from other NLP systems is that after training it can execute this great variety of tasks without further fine-tuning. All that is required is a prompt to manipulate the model towards a specific task.^[5] For example, to generate my introduction, I supplied the text: “Where will Artificial Intelligence be in 10 years?”. GPT-3 can then work out the chances of one word following another by calculating its probability within this defined context. Once it has picked out these patterns, it can reconstruct them to simulate human written text related to the prompt. The reason it can do this so fluently relates to its size – GPT-3 is one of the most powerful large language models (LLMs) ever created, trained on nearly 1 trillion words and contains 175 billion parameters.^[6] 

The fluency attained by GPT-3 and similar models has convinced some within the field of AI research of a breakthrough in the search for artificial general intelligence (AGI). Indeed, OpenAI even have as their mission statement that they seek to “ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity”.^[7] AGI is the idea that machines can exhibit generalised human cognitive abilities such as reading, writing, understanding and even sentience. Attaining it would be a key milestone towards ideas of superintelligence and AI singularity popularised by futurists like Ray Kurzweil, whereby machines eclipse humans as the most intelligent beings on the planet.^[8] This is the holy grail of the myth of AI but a deeper look at exactly how GPT-3 functions and the problems it has with basic reasoning will show how far away we are from this reality.

The single most important fact in grasping how LLMs like GPT-3 work is that, unlike humans, they have no embodied and meaningful comprehension of the world and its relation to language. GPT-3 is an ‘autoregressive’ model, which means that it predicts future values based on past ones. In other words, it uses historical data of past words to predict the likely sequence of future words. There is no doubt that this method can create realistic and original discourse that can be difficult to distinguish from human text. It is nevertheless an entirely different method of composing text to the one used by humans. This is because GPT-3 and similar models have no understanding of the words they produce, nor do they have any feeling for their meaning. As AI researchers Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis show, you cannot trust GPT-3 to answer questions about real-world situations. For example, ask it how you might get your dining room table through a door into another room and it might suggest that you “cut the door in half and remove the top half”.^[9] And it is not only problems with basic reasoning but also with racist and offensive language.^[10] This is because GPT-3 simply approximates the probability of one word following another. Its disembodied and calculative logic leaves it semantically blindfolded, unable to distinguish the logical from the absurd. It has no consciousness, no ethics, no morals, and no understanding of normativity. In short, these AI are nowhere near ‘human-level’ intelligence, despite what those who perpetuate the myth might say. 

In highlighting the myth and its detachment from reality, I am not suggesting that GPT-3 and similar models are not valuable and impressive technologies but rather that these machines simulate human abilities without the understanding, empathy, and intelligence of humans. They are the property of the biggest corporations in the world who have a vested interest in making these machines profitable and may do so without thinking through the dangers to society. This is the key point to keep in mind when we think about how these technologies might be used as they break out into the mainstream. 

So, what could this technology be used for? As we have seen, GPT-3 can be used to create text. This means that it can be used to make weird surrealist fiction, or perhaps usher in the age of robo-journalism. It can be used to create computer code, to power social media bots, and to carry out automated conversational tasks in commercial settings. It could even be used to power conversational interfaces in the style of Siri or Alexa, thus redefining how we retrieve information on the internet. More recently, OpenAI released a 12 billion parameter version of GPT-3 called DALL-E, which has been trained on pictures, and which can generate hilarious original material (Figure 2).  However, the dark side of such technology would be its use in the creation of realistic deepfakes, hence why OpenAI currently blurs human face generations. What is certain is that the economic potential of GPT-3, and NLP AI more broadly, is massive, due to these systems’ versatility and their apparent ability to communicate with us. They nevertheless do so without the fundamental quality of human intelligence, despite what their advocates might suggest. 

Putting the ‘Intelligence’ in AI: the origins of the myth

The term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ was coined in 1955 by John McCarthy and consolidated a year later at the 1956 Dartmouth Conference which signposted the official founding of the field. ‘AI’ as it is colloquially known, is now an umbrella term for a diverse set of technologies, the meaning of which is imprecise. Indeed, I would argue that applying the term ‘intelligence’ to models such as GPT-3 or LaMDA is ideological and obfuscating – it contributes to the myth as a poorly thought through metaphor conflating human intelligence with the statistical reasoning displayed by machines. To explain how we got here, we need to look more closely at the concept of ‘intelligence’ and exactly what it came to represent for the early field of AI.

In 1950, before the nascent field of AI had coalesced, Alan Turing proposed the ‘Imitation Game’. More commonly known today as the Turing test, the game seeks to assess machine intelligence and involves an anonymous text conversation between a human interrogator and two interlocutors: one human and one machine. The task of the interrogator is to determine which interlocutor is the machine.^[11] Turing initially poses the question “Can machines think?” but sidesteps it because of difficulty in defining the terms ‘machine’ and ‘think’.^[12] Instead, he focused on one specific aspect of human intelligence: communication. In doing so, Turing turned a question about whether machines possess the broad and situational understanding that defines human thinking into a task where machines and their programmers are concerned solely with using a set of calculated decisions to simulate linguistic textual communication. In this move, he placed human perception of machines at the centre of AI research. What mattered was not whether machines thought like humans but rather how convincing the machines were at appearing human. Thus, Turing radically narrowed the meaning of ‘intelligence’ within the embryonic field of AI, to focus on simulating communication.^[13] 

It was 14 years before a machine capable of even playing Turing’s hypothetical game was invented, when Joseph Weizenbaum, an MIT computer scientist, created the first chatbot, ELIZA, in 1964. The program itself was relatively simple and worked through scripts. Each script, or program, corresponded to a human role. For example, the most famous ELIZA script, Doctor, simulated a therapist.^[14] It worked by breaking down text, input by a human interlocutor, into its data structure, and searching for patterns within it. If a keyword was spotted, the text was reassembled as a response to the interlocutor; if no keyword was spotted, a generic response was sent.^[15] 

What was important for Weizenbaum was not that his machine be intelligent but that it appear intelligent. He was not seeking true human-like intelligence; neither was he attempting to build a machine capable of understanding language. What he focused on instead was how humans interpreted the machine’s generated output, combining abstract mathematical reasoning with psychological deception.^[16] This is why scripts such as ‘doctor’ are important. They frame, and to some degree control, humans’ interpretation of computer-generated conversation. Weizenbaum’s insight has had far-reaching consequences in the field of AI. Indeed, the tendency of humans to anthropomorphise machines is known today as the ‘ELIZA effect’. Blake Lemoine’s claims of language model sentience with his assertion that “I know a person when I talk to it” is a classic example of this.^[17] Weizenbaum was wary of such effects and warned against exploiting them; however, his early and prescient concerns went unheeded. The mere appearance of intelligence was consolidated as a vital tool in the development of AI and the myth of computers with human-like intelligence took hold.

The control behind communication

Computer programmers researching AI since Weizenbaum have deployed a range of techniques to manipulate human interaction with machines in ways that make us more inclined to view these autonomous machines as possessing human-like traits. These range from writing idiosyncratic behaviours into code to creating personalities for ‘virtual assistants’ like Siri and Alexa. So, if these machines are not intelligent and are rather engaging in a kind of simulated communication, the question we should be asking is: what power and control lies behind the myth of apparent intelligence? 

Weizenbaum used the analogy of how some people believe what a fortune teller has to say about their future to describe how some people read more insight and understanding into his ELIZA program than is there. When thinking about future uses of today’s LLMs, it is not a huge stretch to extend that analogy. Imagine a Siri or Alexa-type assistant powered by GPT-3. They would be like a fortune teller who has scores of data about the person having their fortune told – so much data that they can predict the types of things that you might search for. You could easily start to think that this assistant knows you better than yourself. Moreover, the assistant might present information from the internet to you in idiosyncratic ways, simulating quirky traits which give it a personality. You might start to trust it, form a friendship with it, fall in love with it. All the while, the more you have been communicating with the machine, the more it has been learning about you. It has been drawing on encoded ideas from human psychology to maintain an illusion of spontaneity and randomness, while also consolidating control within your interactions.^[18] 

What is happening with the deployment of communicative AI is that the complex systems which administer and shape ever more of our lives are being placed behind another layer of ideological chicanery. We need to ask if we trust the likes of Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft to influence our lives in increasingly intimate ways with systems which they describe as ‘intelligent’ and which in reality are anything but. We need to ask why they want machines to appear humane, spontaneous and creative all whilst being strictly controlled.  As Erik J. Larson suggests, AI produced by Big Tech will inevitably follow the logic of profit and scalability and forsake potentially fruitful avenues of future research, which could go some way toward creating a machine with the capacity to understand language as humans do.^[19] Moreover, the race towards profitability – evidenced by OpenAI’s change from ‘not for profit’ to ‘capped profit’^[20] – will mean one thing: these systems will be rushed into public use before we have a chance to fully comprehend the effect they will have on our societies. These new forms of interaction will be no different underneath the hood. But they will feel friendlier and more trustworthy, and that is something we should be wary of. 

Beyond the myth: reimagining the ‘Intelligence’ metaphor

As recently noted by the European Parliamentary Research Service, “the term ‘AI’ relies upon a metaphor for the human quality of intelligence”.^[21] What I have tried to do in this article is show how the intelligence metaphor is inaccurate and thus contributes to the myth of AI. The metaphors that we use to describe things shape how we perceive and think about concepts and objects in the world.^[22] This is why reconsidering the metaphor ‘Artificial Intelligence’ is so important. The view of these systems as ‘intelligent’, as I have shown, dates back over 70 years. In this time, the idea of machine intelligence has captured public imagination and laid the ideological groundwork for the widespread and unthinking reception of various technologies which pose as intelligent. The technologies that fall under the AI umbrella are diverse. They carry out a huge array of tasks, many of which are essential to society’s function. Moreover, they often offer insights that cannot be achieved by humans alone. Therefore, the narrow and controlled application of machine learning algorithms to problem-solving scenarios is something to be admired and pursued. However, as I have highlighted, the economic potential of systems such as GPT-3 means that they will inevitably be rolled out across multiple sectors, coming to control and influence more aspects of our lives. One way of remaining alert to these developments is to reimagine the metaphors we use to describe the technologies which power them.

But what would be a more suitable names for these systems? Two descriptions that more accurately represent what LLMs do are ‘human task simulation’ and ‘artificial communication’.^[23] These terms reflect the fact that programmers behind LLMs have consciously or unconsciously abandoned the search for human-like ‘intelligence’ in favour of systems which can successfully simulate human communication and other tasks.^[24] These metaphors help us understand, and think critically about, the workings of the systems that they describe. For example, the word ‘simulated’ is associated not only with computing and imitations but also with deception. ‘Communication’ points to the specific aspect of human intelligence which is attempting to be simulated. It is a narrow and precise term, unlike the vaguer ‘intelligence’. One of the core features of language is that it helps us orientate ourselves in the world, come to mutual understandings with others, and create shared focal points for the meaningful issues within society.^[25]  If we are to retain perspective on these systems and avoid getting sucked into the AI myth, then avoiding the ‘intelligence’ metaphor and the appropriation of human cognitive abilities that this entails is not a bad place to start.

[end]

BIO

Ben Potter is a PhD researcher at the University of Sussex researching the social and political effects of artificial intelligence. Specifically, his interest is in how communicative AI technologies such as Siri, Alexa or GPT-3 are changing the structural mediations within what has been termed the ‘public sphere’, including how we communicate on and retrieve information form the internet. He is interested in the policy implications and ethical regulation of AI and writes on the philosophical and sociological effects of technology more broadly.

REFERENCES

^[1] To generate this introduction, I provided the GPT-3 powered interface ‘philosopherAI’ with the prompt: “where will Artificial Intelligence be in 10 years?”. For clarification, the GPT-3 generated text starts with “we will have much more data” and ends with “and it can magnify anything we do with it – good or bad”. I removed two paragraphs for concision but left the rest of the text unaltered. You can try out your own queries at https://www.philosopherai.com. 

^[2] Blake Lemoine, ‘Is LaMDA Sentient? – An Interview’ accessed on 18^th June 2022 at: https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917; And Ilya Sutskver’s twitter comments at: https://twitter.com/ilyasut/status/1491554478243258368?s=21&t=noC6T4yt85xNtfVYN8DsmQ.

^[3] Erik J. Larson, The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can’t Think the Way We Do (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2021), 1.

^[4] This article is drawing on research from my wider PhD project which is enquiring into the way artificial intelligence creates discourse out of data. I aim to publish a full-length research article on natural language processing artificial intelligence in 2023 which will include preliminary work conducted here on GPT-3.

^[5] Pengfei Liu, Weizhe Yuan, Jinlan Fu, et al., ‘Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing’, p. 3. Visited 17^th June 2022, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.13586.pdf.

^[6] Parameters are the adjustable ‘weights’ which inform the value of a specific input into the end result. For the technical paper from OpenAI showing how GPT-3 was trained, see T. Brown, B. Mann, N. Ryder, M. Subbiah, J. Kaplan, P. Dhariwal et al., ‘Language models are few-shot learners’, OpenAI, p. 8. Visited 10^th June 2022, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.14165.pdf.

^[7] https://openai.com/about/.

^[8] Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Penguin, 2005).

^[9] Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis, ‘GPT-3, Bloviator: OpenAI’s language generator has no idea what it’s talking about’, MIT Technology Review, August 2020. Visited 17^th June 2022, https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/22/1007539/gpt3-openai-language-generator-artificial-intelligence-ai-opinion/.

^[10] Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, Shmargaret Shmitchell et al., ‘On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models be too Big?’ FAccT ’21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 2021. At https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3442188.3445922. For an example of a GPT-3 powered interface creating racist text see: https://twitter.com/abebab/status/1309137018404958215?lang=en.  This something that OpenAI are aware of, restricting the generation of certain content and adding a layer of human fine tuning to prevent GPT-3 creating racist discourse. To see how they achieve this, see Long Ouyang, Jeff Wu, Xu Jiang et al., ‘Training Language Models to Follow Instructions with Human Feedback’, OpenAI, 2022: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.02155.pdf. The process of adding a human layer of supervision within these systems is called ‘reinforcement learning from human feedback’ (RLHF) and makes GPT-3 somewhat safer and commercially viable but less autonomous.

^[11] Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”. Mind, 59 (236), 1950: 443.

^[12] Turing, ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, 433. To date, no AI has ever passed the Turing test. Those that have come closest have used deception to trick the human interlocutors.

^[13] Larson, The Myth of Artificial Intelligence, 10.

^[14] If you want to have a play at interacting with an ELIZA replica you can do so at: http://psych.fullerton.edu/mbirnbaum/psych101/eliza.htm.

^[15] Joseph Weizenbaum, “Contextual Understanding by Computers”, Communications of the ACM (Volume: 10 Number: 8, August 1967), 475.

^[16] Simone Natale, Deceitful Media: Artificial Intelligence and Social Life after the Turing Test (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 53.

^[17] Blake Lemoine, ‘Is LaMDA Sentient? – An Interview’.

^[18] Natale, 120; and Esposito, 10.

^[19] Erik J. Larson, The Myth of Artificial Intelligence, 272.

^[20] Alberto Romero, ‘How OpenAI Sold its Soul for $1 Billion’, accessed on 24^th Aug 2022 at https://onezero.medium.com/openai-sold-its-soul-for-1-billion-cf35ff9e8cd4.

^[21] European Parliamentary Research Service, ‘What if we chose new metaphors for artificial intelligence?’ accessed on 24 Aug 2022 at  https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2021/690024/EPRS_ATA(2021)690024_EN.pdf.

^[22] George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, The Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

^[23] Elena Esposito, Artificial Communication: How Algorithms Produce Social Intelligence (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2022), 5.

^[24] Ibid.

^[25] Morten H. Christiansen and Nick Charter, The Language Game: How Improvisation Created Language and Changed the World (London: Bantam Press, 2022), 15-23.

By: Sandy Di Yu

Eternal Recall

Keywords: digital immortality; discrete units, archives, subjective duration, eternity

Eternal Recall/You only live on 

A wise man once wrote, “one lives but once in the world”^[1]. Centuries later, a decade or so ago from today, a wiser man popularised the related aphorism “you only live once” by igniting it with a catchy anagram and letting it spread like wildfire on a maturing Internet 2.0.^[2]

I remain cynical of aphorisms both old and less old. How do they know that one lives only once? What makes them so sure that existence doesn’t simply go on and on and on and on and on? It’s not like they died and came back to let us know, like a cyclical continuation of life after death, like wilted flowers renewing their blooms in the spring.

I suppose that’s the whole point. We don’t know, just as surely as they don’t. The impossibility of knowing instils in us the fear of an unremarkable life lived mutely and without purpose. And so we say, “YOLO”, and in a stirring display of presentism, follow through with actions that claw at the possibility of ecstatic escape.

This same unknowing compounds with the unassailable knowledge of life’s ending. We only live once (probably), and it’s not even for that long. This is the condition that makes our limited time precious, and why finitude is a categorical component of Dasein. As the late philosopher and celebrated bank robber Bernard Stiegler once wrote, “Human beings exist only under the condition of the anticipation of death, which is a protention they hold in common, but is also their impossible protention.”^[3]

Our shared impossible protention is the commonality of death, the knowledge of the unknowable. It’s what Emmanuel Levinas calls there is, an alterity that might parallel other minds: “the other that is announced does not possess this existing as the subject possesses it; its hold over my existing is mysterious. It is not unknown but unknowable, refractory to all light. But this precisely indicates that the other is in no way another myself, participating with me in a common existence.”^[4] Boris Groys says something of similar nature, but in relation to the flow of time and the implications of museum objects: “…in analysing my own thinking process, I can never find any evidence of its finitude. To discover the limitations of my existence in space and time, I need the gaze of the Other. I read my death in the eyes of others.”^[5]

If the alterity of death and the alterity of the Other are analogous, then the death of the subject might be the gentle marriage of individual minds into an ocean of collective unconscious. It would make true Hito Steyerl’s proclamation about how the internet, the swathe of networked activity often characterised as a collective mind, approximates death by being undead.^[6] If death is a return to the great collective, then immortality is the contrived individuation of the self, continuing on without anticipation. If not death, then there is no destination to anticipate.

But what if the alterity of death is not to be anticipated? What if immortality, in all its grotesque implications, was within our reach? Imagine that you only live once, but you live forever. Without finitude, what would be of being?

What do you think of immortality? Most people I ask seem to shudder at the thought. A lifetime of this is more than enough, they say. But to have it go on forever? One might crumple under the mere thought of that immeasurable exhaustion. Then there are the outliers, those who revel in the idea of experiencing what’s to come with the next thousand or more rotations around the sun. It’s all harmless speculation. No one I know has taken up an offer of immortality and lived to tell the tale.

Not yet, anyway. 

With the acceleration of technological innovations, and with the shared commonality of death that extends throughout human history, we might just be on the cusp of some sort of life-prolonging breakthrough at any moment.

In the bid for an indefinite postponement of biological death is gerontologist Aubrey de Grey. In his interview with Douglas Lain, he claims that people dismiss his project because they don’t want to get their hopes up^[7] rather than there being issues that are overlooked in his proposals.

De Grey will have to forgive me if I don’t quite buy his whole “misunderstood genius” schtick. As the self-appointed spokesperson of everyday people, I’d like to clarify that the root issue with such programmes aiming at indefinite life extension is the replication and perpetuation of the systemic inequalities that would be exacerbated. Who do you think would have access to life-prolonging medical procedures? Surely not the struggling worker who can’t afford private dental, or the time-poor caretaker who must choose between heating and food. Who needs longer-living oligarchs and tech billionaires? They can all die mad, thanks.

Postponement of biological death aside, in the digital milieu, there are other ways to think about immortality. That’s not to say that loading one’s mind up to the cloud would produce any more of an egalitarian society, but conversations about systemic issues can be carried out along with speculative modes of reinvention. Digitality is a relatively nascent field still formalising its structure. The possibility of redirecting its evolution away from the reproduction of preexisting hierarchies emerges with its advent. 

Perhaps such tech optimism feels familiar, and caution to keep this in check may be warranted. Media theorist Wendy Hui Kyong Chun warns that the internet in its earlier stages was never truly the utopia purported by 90s technologists with a hard-on for William Gibson, but rather “the Wild West meets speed meets Yellow Peril meets capitalism on steroids.”^[8] In the years since, with the monopolisation of the internet tempered by the phenomenon of platforming, the situation has only grown direr. But if by some miraculous feat we’re able to redress such systemic plights in the digital, might the physical follow suit?

Suppose that digital networks can be built up without the issues latent in their physical counterpart. Can the digital then become a vessel for eternal life? Could a former military-funded project for allowing executable code to survive past Cold War-induced catastrophes let us exceed the deterioration of physical bodies, of earthly death?

Metaphysically, the issue becomes multi-pronged. Digital networks are temporal in their architecture. They necessitate change, an elemental aspect of time. Yet immortality assumes a certain unchangeability. This is exemplified by the preservation of artefacts in museums, as explained by Boris Groys. Taken out of the flow of time, such objects enjoy the status of eternal commemoration. They become immortal, as far as culture will allow, but they are dead, no longer a part of the present milieu. Immortality, then, becomes timelessness, without change and out of time.^[9]

This is further complicated by the genesis of data analytics, a core component of the current tides of the web, and its connection to eugenics. “Both big data and eugenics seek to tie the past to the future–correlation to prediction–through supposedly eternal, unchanging biological attributes.”^[10] With eugenics, phenomenological time is folded in on itself, as the temporality of the object is stretched into eternity. Such is also the basis of biological immortality, of “good” genes that thwart the decay of telomeres. It might not be such a coincidence that the logic of eugenics rears its troubling head in the digital milieu. 

Another issue arises if we accept that immortality is indeed the extended and contrived individuation of the self. Would this be at odds with the digital? Does the digital presuppose a lack of individuation? 

Yes and no. Digitality as a pure concept implies differentiation, requiring discrete units in its very function.^[11] Such units might be interpreted as unmitigated individuation. However, digitality in practice, as the internet functions, is not so straightforward. The transfer and use of data are inherently leaky, spilling into one another as it makes borders obsolete.^[12] There’s little to say where one object stops and the other begin. 

The immortal subject as a digital entity thus produces contradictions. To reconcile this, it must be remembered that subjectivity is fundamentally temporal. Dasein is nothing if not a historical being, bound up in time. Therefore, time in the historical sense must be injected into the immortal digital subject in order to reclaim its untainted existence.

To do this, the historicity of the digital subjectivity may be captured in the digital archive. It might also provide a way to rethink the individuation of extended life, or what it means to be an individual subject confronted with eternity. Counter to the hierarchical systems of contemporary societal structuring, we might consider the archive as the commons, after author Ariella Aisha Azoulay.^[13] We heed the cautions from sceptics telling us that a true digital commons is a pipedream, impossible to substantiate in this reality, but we shimmy forward towards a digital archive that might activate a site, rich in historical nuance, that offers respite from the lonely inidividuation of the immortal subject.

We’re still building our archives, architecture and contents and all. As they continue to be engineered, it is still unclear what it would mean to be a pure subject living on as a digital being. But the historicity sculpted into the framework of the potential digital archive may be key and crucial to the possibility of eternity. Its digital beams and columns reverberate in the realm of not-yet-but-soon, echoing the refrain, “You only live once, but you’ll have always lived.”

[end]

BIO

Sandy Di Yu is a Canadian writer, researcher and artist currently based in the UK. She primarily works with painting, text and digital media, having obtained an MA in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, the University of London in 2018 following her BFA in visual arts and philosophy at York University, Toronto. Sandy has taken part in several group exhibitions, and she has written extensively on visual culture, working with several arts organisations, independent zines and publications from the UK and beyond. Her current research focuses on the dissolution of time that coincides with the advent of digital networks. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Digital Media at the University of Sussex.

REFERENCES

^[1] Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Clavigo. 1774.

^[2] Drake ft. Lil Wayne, Tyga. The Motto. 2012.

^[3] Hui, Yuk, and Bernard Stiegler. On the Existence of Digital Objects. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. 

^[4] Lévinas, Emmanuel. Time and the other. Translated by Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1987, 77.

^[5] Groys, Boris. In the Flow. London: Verso, 2016, 27.

^[6] Steyerl, Hito. “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?” E-flux, no. 49 (November 2013). https://www.e-flux.com/journal/49/60004/too-much-world-is-the-internet-dead/.

^[7] Lain, Douglas, and De Grey, Aubrey D. N. J. Advancing Conversations: Aubrey De Grey. Zero Books, 2016. 

^[8] Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. UPDATING TO REMAIN THE SAME: habitual new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT PRESS, 2017, 8.

^[9] Groys, Boris. In the Flow. London: Verso, 2016.

^[10] Kyong, Chun Wendy Hui, and Alex Barnett. Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2021. 

^[11] Galloway, Alexander R. Uncomputable: Play and Politics in the Long Digital Age. New York: Verso, 2021. 

^[12] Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. UPDATING TO REMAIN THE SAME: habitual new media. Cambridge, MA: MIT PRESS, 2017.

^[13] Azoulay, Ariella. Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism. London: Verso, 2019.

By Nicky Broekhuysen & Mine Kaplangi

When the Dust Settles

An unsettled experimentation on a 2016 exhibition The Digital Archaeologist

Keywords: media archaeology; binary code; collaboration; digital archive; experimentation

How do we remember [ex]hibitions? Feelings of the day, [art]work, space? 
Time runs in various ways in digital realms. I always wonder how we will recall the space when it’s [meant to be] temporary.  

As an independent curator and art practitioner, my understanding of digital event programming, archiving and recalling previous exhibitions changed drastically in the last years, mostly due to the pandemic, an event which has consequently changed many previously held perceptions. As a means to further explore this change, I offer Nicky Broekhuysen’s exhibition The Digital Archeologist, as a pathway to guide us as we meander through these far corners of the digital realm in our search for understanding. 

I wrote this text Dig Deep^[3] in 2016, three years after the Gezi Movement in Turkey, where due to the political situation, digital spaces became safer places to gather yet still we tried to hold on to the physical as long as it was due. Since then, many things have changed in my hometown Istanbul where various [art] spaces have closed and been forced to move or transform themselves—a familiar phenomenon currently occurring in London, my new hometown, thanks to state-led gentrification, the financial crisis and other inhumane policies put forth by the current Tory Government. 

What is our responsibility with these memories, then, these artefacts? Just because you remember them, will you be able to hold them when the time comes or when they are urgently needed? Or should they perish into the [in]visible archives of the digital? Does the past become present when you recall them? Who has the keys to the ongoing archiving of the internet lockers? Mckenzie Wark rightfully and beautifully suggests that “we need another worldview, one drawn out of what is left of the actually collaborative and collective and common practices via which the world is actually built and run, a worldview of solidarity and the gift. A worldview that works as a low theory extracted from worker and hacker practices, rather than a high theory trying to legislate about them from above.”^[4]

Sustainability works differently regarding individual memories and storytelling, yet websites need budgets for eternal open-sourcing. We all do have our open and private libraries of knowledge productivity in the arts, yet when shared in social media, newsletters, forums or even diaries, one can lose their way in the maze even with the help of keywords. The Matrix is expanding, and binary codes are now similar to recipes; all we need to do is to cook with the taste of our own hands.^[5] Therefore experimentation, iş birliği^[6], collective-collaborative practices and repetitive acts of making kins are essential for our times to bound the time with the work and resist the destruction of our worlds in the making.

How our paths were crossed with Nicky Broekhuysen
a short story within a story

BLOK art space, where I first worked with Nicky, has been closed since I moved to London, right before the pandemic started in the winter of 2019. The Bumiller Collection’s studio, which generously hosted The Digital Archeologist, has also since closed its doors to contemporary interventions instead of continuing as a nomadic space. So we follow a phantom of stamps that echoed inside the walls of an Islamic Art Collection’s project space that no longer exists. When I think about apparitions and recalling archives, I always find myself thinking about artist Patrick Staff’s work, The Foundation^[7], which takes place around the iconic Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles, an archive dedicated to protect erotic arts. Even though the preserved art and works are different, the methodology of Staff’s response to this archive as building relations and stories between objects, artworks and the foundation’s space rather than categorising them is quite spellbinding, a term I frequently use to describe Nicky’s practice.

It was a vociferous Istanbul afternoon when I met Nicky; we found our peaceful moment in an antique shop next to BLOK art space, where we would work together in the following days. Nicky had a Turkish coffee; I made a silly joke to break my social anxiety by offering to read her future [reading one’s future from the coffee cup is a way of saying for future-telling]; Nicky accepted it gracefully as she is always ready for a midday seance. She closed her cup, turned it upside down, and handed it over. I put a cold 1 Turkish lira on it and waited for a while; we talked about our passions, families, and many others. Time passed impatiently; I opened the cup and immediately realised it was not just another exhibition experience with a temporary companion. Nicky was quite special, and so was her cup, showing me a giant ‘0’ next to ‘1’. Such a poetic way of starting a journey with a magical artist like Nicky, who works with binary codes, intuition and repetition as methodologies that create magic when combined. I smiled and laughed for the entire day as the proper grinagog of the project space I was working at the time couldn’t handle the flow of emotions I was receiving through Nicky’s presence. 

Every year following the summer of 2013 was getting stranger and weirder for Istanbul; I was already convinced that Nicky and I were meant to know each other beyond time and space. Our journey was not for or about us, but for both of us to have the courage to face and to reveal something immense that you would rather prefer to have company while it unfolds.

When we make exhibitions, we respond to certain things, experiment and create spaces and stories, but these come to life through various spatial, emotional, and temporal relations. I have recently grown more tempted and interested in these relationships, more so than even at the beginning of my [art] journey. It took us a couple of years to become close friends. After Istanbul, Nicky invited me to her Berlin exhibition at the Bumiller Collection and to write about her work and practice for the exhibition catalogue as well as to moderate the artist’s talk alongside the exhibition’s programme.

Later on, we had our first lengthy dinner in Berlin and talked about parallel universes, our family secrets and how our generation should be more caring and giving, especially while working together and collaborating when it comes to queer loving. Then we published an interview^[9] where Nicky shared the details of her relationship with her grandmother and her life generously; later on, we decided to call each other and have the same conversation^[10] in a podcast format. It was during the first lockdown, and we never felt closer. It was not the physical boundaries that kept us apart; the limitations of our stories were seeking expansion, fluidity and more space. And we decided to let them have their contagion. 

The Bumiller Collection held a contemporary intervention exhibition twice a year and invited an artist to exhibit their work alongside the collection, creating new understandings and relations between the works, artefacts, objects and their time. Using binary code as ‘her artistic language’ Nicky created these incredible messages that calmly ask roaring questions about language to the collection objects, the space, and the exhibition visitors. There was only one screen placed in the exhibition space that shows the video work of Nicky Broekhuysen (see video II) – ‘inserting the digital space into the physical room as part of the exhibition’s exploration of media archaeology.’ The rest of the works played their parts in fracturing our understanding of time by inviting all to meditate in front of this new language that we usually take for granted as machines and computer systems read before and for us. I never thought that binary code belonged to the machines; it is the universal code of a rudimentary understanding of time and system makings. Taking the codes out of their current use and representation and creating lustful, physically-driven languages out of them is very queering and alluring to our already complex relationship with the digital, which can still be distancing for many due to lack of sweat and spit. The objects exhibited from the Bumiller Collection were related to the early times of writing,  tools of writing, manuscripts, and experimentations which were uniquely loose, open to change and to flux yet remain well-preserved in the passing of time. Inspired, Nicky recalled this freedom by reconstructing some of those methodologies yet maintaining supreme craftsmanship and experimentation. I believe the paper will hold the ink as long as it can and we will trust the printed materials as the continuation of the digital realms, which might give us new ways of looking at digital archives and their sustainability. 

Watching The Matrix for the third time from Nicky’s perspective is a caring experience; Nicky uses binary code to open up [time] portals in our short yet wired existence on this earth.

[end]

BIOS

Nicky Broekhuysen was born in 1981 in South Africa. At the age of 13, her family moved to New Zealand where she completed her studies. After graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree from Auckland University, she moved to Shanghai, China, in 2006. It was in Shanghai that she first began working with binary numbers 1 and 0. In 2008 Broekhuysen moved to Berlin, Germany where she continued to develop her language of binary code, exhibiting both in Berlin and internationally for the following 11 years. Recently, in 2019 she relocated her studio to The Pyrenees in France to be closer to nature and where she continues to create and exhibit. Broekhuysen is represented by Davidson Gallery in New York.

Mine Kaplangi (they/them, 1987, Istanbul) is an independent curator and art mediator based in London. They are the co-founder of the curatorial collective Collective Çukurcuma (2015) and KUTULU (2021). They worked as an artist representative and curator at BLOK art space Istanbul between 2014-18. Together with Collective Çukurcuma, they have been curating public programmes of exhibitions and running their reading group events as an ongoing transdisciplinary project since 2016. They are currently working as a freelance editor for the Berlin-based contemporary art platform Artfridge, and publicity manager at a cross-cultural, multilingual, experimental publisher, Pamenar Press (London).

IMAGE CREDITS

Figure 1. Nicky Broekhuysen, The Map is Not The Territory III, Oil on paper, 2016

Figure 2. Photograph of a Turkish coffee cup, taken at the antique store right next to BLOK art space, Istanbul [Photo by Mine Kaplangi]

Figure 3. Nicky Broekhuysen, The Digital Archeologist IV, Oil on paper, 2016

Figure 4. Nicky Broekhuysen, The Digital Archaeologist V, Oil on paper, 2016

Figure 5. Nicky Broekhuysen, The Map Is Not The Territory V, Oil on paper, 2016

Figure 6. Nicky Broekhuysen, The Digital Archaeologist III, Oil on paper, 2016

Video 1.  The Stonebreakers, 2015, A collaboration by Nicky Broekhuysen, Maria Kamutzki and Martin Keane. Originally exhibited as part of the exhibition ‘The Stonebreakers’ at Blok Artspace, Istanbul, Turkey, 2015

Video 2. The Digital Archaeologist, 2016, A collaboration by Nicky Broekhuysen, Maria Kamutzki and Martin Keane custom-built physical modelling program and sound piece

Figures 1-4 and Video 2 are the selected works from The Digital Archeologist exhibition that took place in Bumiller Collection, University Museum Islamic Art in Berlin between 10 September – 15 October, 2015.

REFERENCES

^[1] Kaplangi, Mine. “INTERVIEW: NICKY BROEKHUYSEN.” Artfridge.de, 2018, www.artfridge.de/2018/10/interview-nicky-broekhuysen-mk.html.

^[2] Hernàn’s band is called The Depth of Delusion Ensemble in Memoria. 2021. [film] Directed by A. Weerasethakul.

^[3] Kaplangi, M. (2016). Dig Deep. On Nicky Broekhuysen’s Solo Exhibition “The Digital Archaeologist.”

^[4] McKenzie Wark, Digital Labor and the Anthropocene, dis magazine transcript from Digital Labor Conference, New School, 2014, http://dismagazine.com/disillusioned/discussion-disillusioned/70983/mckenzie-wark-digital-labor-and-the-anthropocene/

^[5] Taste of the hand [elinin lezzeti] is a Turkish saying that the dish will taste differently even if you follow the same recipe due to each unique flavour and taste of our hands and fingers.

^[6] This means ‘collaboration, partnership’ in Turkish.

^[7] Staff, Patrick, dir., The Foundation. 2015, www.vdrome.org/patrick-staff-the-foundation/.

^[8] See Video 1.

^[9] Kaplangi, M. (2018). INTERVIEW: NICKY BROEKHUYSEN. http://www.Artfridge.de/. http://www.artfridge.de/2018/10/interview-nicky-broekhuysen-mk.html

^[10] Collective Cukurcuma [CC STATION]. (2020, May 12). Conversation with Nicky Broekhuysen [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wbXkwdZrTI&ab_channel=CCSTATIONICOLLECTIVECUKURCUMA

^[11] Proust, M. (2022). Remembrance of Things Past (Complete in Two volumes) (Reprint ed.). Random House.

By: Katherine Mitchell

Computational Constructions of Time and Deep Futures in John F. Simon’s Every Icon (1997)

A media philosophy of (deep) time

Keywords: temporality; computation; obsolescence; internet; aesthetics

In an age of rapid technological obsolescence and pervasive discourse on communication technologies’ phenomenological annihilation of time and space stands a body of media theory preoccupied with slow and deep time. Occupying a Venn Diagram with media archaeology, this material or “geological turn” has turned over the dirt of the digital to surface the earthly entanglements of computational materiality, opening design thinking to planetary-scale interventions. Through their different preoccupations, media scholars including Jussi Parikka,^[1] Nicole Starosielski,^[2] Sy Taffel,^[3] and Benjamin Bratton^[4]collectively situate the perpetual present of computational media and the contemporary digital condition within planetary scales of experience. Through attention to media materiality, this body of scholarship re-orientates our temporal perception toward mineral durations of deep pasts, and media residues of deep futures, and in doing so, it also dismantles any material/immaterial distinctions that emerged with early ideologies of communication technologies. Through advancing a sense of computing as deep earth archives, and looking toward global systems and the immensity of cosmological time, these theories continually decentre and recentre the human subject both spatially and temporally.^[5] When contemplating the construction of time through the digital condition, then, it is principally this commitment to deep time perspectives as an epistemological tool that invites a framing of such media ecological and media archaeological thinking principally as a media philosophy of time. 

Time is a central subject of philosophy and contemporary media theory and its significance cannot be overstated: it goes to the core of human consciousness, our desire to understand the human condition, and our (time-limited) mode of earthly inhabitation. Media and communications theory itself is inescapably linked with the phenomenology of time: both the ordering of discrete time through standardisation and the attempts to reclaim durée – duration, or lived time – as a central tenet of human experience.^[6] The question asked here is whether we might re-orientate these academic preoccupations with non-human scalar entanglements to look toward a phenomenological construction of deep futures through the act of computation. Where theory might only go so far, can we comprehend profound duration not in spite of a digital condition, but specifically through it?

The trouble with futurity

Attempting to construct a digital aesthetic against the annihilation of time is John F. Simon’s net artwork Every Icon (1997). Through the material medium of computation, Simon takes both speed and deep duration as the principle means by which to posit the possibility of a media event for post-human scholarship, but in doing so, the work simultaneously reveals its own impossibility. The work asks:

Launched on 14 January 1997, Every Icon asks what it means to algorithmically produce every conceivable image within a 32×32 black and white pixel grid, and takes seriously the temporal burden of such a task. Moving from corner to corner and from white to black, the Java programme enumerates through all possibilities of the binary grid totalling 1024 squares. The first row alone has 2³² combinations, or 4.3 billion, which at an original rate of 100 permutations per second took approximately 16 months to complete. The second line was scheduled to complete after approximately 6 billion years,^[8] and the entire grid has 2^32×32 or 10³⁰⁸ possible combinations, requiring a total of 10²⁹⁸ years to complete at its original processing speed. Simon ascribes this timescale for the work of the enumeration algorithm to be the ‘human perceptual limit’,^[9] being unable or perhaps unwilling to engage with the scale and complexity of thought needed to truly comprehend the immensity implied here.^[10]

Whilst Every Icon was launched in the shadow of the millennium, and so could be read alongside a contemporaneous body of creative practice that sought to comprehend such durations and our individual place within past and future timelines of human history, Simon’s work was imagined earlier on, as a reaction to postmodernist claims of the death of art and the end of images.^[11] Promising to manifest all potential images in the grid like Borges’ Library of Babel, the project tests the capacity of the computer to produce visual icons in its own image: namely, the aesthetics of early computing and the visual language of Susan Kare’s bitmap icons, designed in the 1980s for Macintosh.^[12]

The strong rectilinear organisation of the system also recalls the grid-based aesthetic of early computer art, and the algorithmic imagination of conceptual artists, such as Sol LeWitt, but the work’s distinctively digital aesthetic is born from its strict adherence to binary modalities. The visual iconography it promises to deliver is both temporally-situated and (Western) culturally-specific (Western), however any precise icon will not emerge from the visual “noise” for trillions of years. In employing these timescales, the work both centres and displaces the importance of a particular kind of human subject through the ambiguous relationship to visual communication with imagined future audiences. And despite being the instigator of the artwork-event, the artist himself is also then displaced by the non-participatory and non-hierarchical algorithmic process of image production. The questions to ask of Simon’s intention are therefore: for who does the work hold meaning? And what time does the work inhabit?

The notion of posterity is crucial to the apparatus of progressive modernity, and this belief that the present is capable of producing something for future generations both fuels and deliberately fails in this project. By offering up vestiges of a cultural moment to be resolved by far-future audiences indifferent to such iconography – most likely no audience at all, and with no analogous computing system at all – the project inevitably complicates its own imagined futures in the age of the Anthropocene. It is worth noting that Every Icon was not the first or only work to employ durational aesthetics as a structuralist investigation of the medium, nor the first to engage with the exhaustive processes of algorithmic image production,^[13] but its specifically digital and web-based condition intensifies the futility of such a scratch at the itch for eternity.^[14] Because whilst Every Icon as an algorithmic exercise may be indifferent to its own resolution, it has nevertheless shapeshifted across different web formats over the past quarter century in order to keep time.

Any ambitions for a cross-generational and panhuman visual language are continually curtailed by the ongoing threat of obsolescence, triggered by recurrent changes to the web infrastructure. Fortunately for the artwork, its minimal aesthetic and operational logic favours cross-platform adaptability, and in the 25 years since its launch, the work has remained accessible on the artist’s website with a professed continuity made possible through rewriting the underlying programme. Originally produced as a Java Applet and migrated to HTML5 to outpace format obsolescence, alternate versions of the work were also developed for PDAs – remember those? – briefly available as a mobile app, and released as an NFT series in 2022.^[15]

The NFT series was a celebration of the project rather than a live version of the time-keeping event itself, however in the context of Simon’s philosophical project, the use of the NFT nevertheless invites important questions as to the legitimacy of the blockchain to counter such existential risk: can the promises of “forever” made by the NFT model and the immutability of the blockchain still hold up in the time after the death of the sun? In the work’s early stages, other Java Applet versions were also produced for sale, but today these editions only haunt their original sites. Existing not as dead URLs but as blank spaces on their original websites, these voids now trace the past presence of an obsolete plugin long since refused a visual translation.^[16]

In the twenty- five years since Every Icon began, we have already observed the continual evolution of operating systems, formats and programming languages, the birth and death of web browsers and computing devices themselves, and the emergence of ever-new systems and formats. So in witnessing the constructive and destructive effects of time on Simon’s project, we must also acknowledge the deficiency of assigning such descriptors as continuity and permanence to a digital artefact that must continually regenerate. We might ask instead whether continuity of an idea can be sufficient here. Only time will tell what future modes of survival might look like, why, and for whom because the perceived and actual continuity of the system, as an idea, depends not only on human survival, but also the survival of relevant knowledge and shared cultural practices to motivate acts of continued care. The future of Every Icon is thus interlaced with broader questions of posthuman ethics: will there be a future in which to sustain this work, and what will that look like? Who, or what, will Simon’s prospective audience be? Any speculative answers to these questions will also be deeply contingent on the expected completion of the media event itself, because in the landscape of rapid technological progress and obsolescence as a cultural project, the work’s anticipated duration also holds the possibility to be continually negotiated via processor speeds.

Telling time and constructing futures

The computational task underpinning Every Icon is a deliberate calculation of chronological time, yet through this, temporality is experienced as both multi-layered and always reconfiguring. Multiple timescales are experienced here: psychological time, fixed “clock-time”, and processor speed, which is itself variable and structured according to the material conditions of the CPU. Translating these temporalities into a visual language, Every Icon becomes a time-keeping device– or rather a time-making device– with the blank white tiles anticipating an outstretched future waiting to be produced by the techno-logic of the programme itself, which tests the user’s computer processor speed and structures time within the work accordingly.

Processor speed is partly determined by the CPU clock speed, which refers to a pulse synchronised by an internal oscillator and measured in cycles per second. In the CPU clock, which is essentially a microchip, a crystal vibrates at a specific frequency when electricity is applied. And whilst the focus of algorithmic thought often stays with the metamathematical and symbolic regime of computing, it is important to recognise how its impact occurs in the intertwining of this symbolic order (the code) with the actual matter of computing (the electro-technical implementation).^[17] Time here is a material condition, and continually subject to change.

Where the work was originally operating with an average processor speed of 230-300 MHz of the then-contemporary Pentium II processor and producing a change rate of 100 permutations per second, the visual execution hovered at the threshold of human perception, with each change being detectable by the human eye as a flicker. Early on, however, Simon also anticipated future progress in computing power to resolve the work faster than its original 10²⁹⁸ years, and of course the rapid increase of typical processor speeds in the intervening years does hold the potential for ever-faster completion if so desired. However where a hypothetical image change rate of 1 billion times per second (ten million times faster than the original experience) could produce a comparably manageable duration of 539 years until complete resolution, this would also render any images impossible to detect with the human eye, thereby eclipsing the work’s original purpose. At any chosen speed, the project problematises notions of perception and phenomenality, because whilst the work operates at the thresholds of human perception, it inevitably performs its own failure by never revealing any, let alone every, icon it promises us.

Concluding Thoughts

As a speculative project of computational and durational aesthetics, Every Icon composes an indeterminate deep future in the layering of multiple temporal logics that are both constructed and destabilised by the rapidly changing material conditions of computing. Ultimately understood as an intellectual exercise in image production without referent, computation is used reflexively to explore how cultural knowledge is reconfigured within a digital epistemological framework, but in its undertaking, it also tests and exhausts the limits of both computational and human finitude. In being always unresolvable, the work also presents an open-ended challenge to the idea of artistic completeness and technological mastery.But whilst the centrality of the artist may be displaced by the non-participatory algorithmic processes at play, the artwork’s fragility and its short history of continual shapeshifting reveals the very human work of care, repair and intention that will ultimately be needed to keep time. Will anyone take up this task into the future, or will the clock eventually stop due to neglect? The future of and in the work remains open and unknowable. Of course, it could never be intended to fully resolve itself in practice, and in any case, the algorithm is indifferent to the cultural specificity of visual configurations. Yet as a speculative exercise, Every Icon serves as an important lens through which to think through both our phenomenological perception of the time-discrete aesthetics of digital computation against the backdrop of deep(er) time thinking, and the “race against time” that is cultural and technological obsolescence.

[end]

BIO

Katherine Mitchell is an AHRC CDP PhD student at Birkbeck College and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Her PhD research explores collecting and conserving born-digital images in the museum through the lens of digital decay, modes of failure, change and loss. She has an academic and professional background in architecture, and an MPhil degree in interdisciplinary film and screen studies.

REFERENCES

^[1] Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).

^[2] Nicole Starosielski, The Undersea Network (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

^[3] Sy Taffel, Digital Media Ecologies: Entanglements of Content, Code and Hardware (New York; London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019).

^[4] Benjamin Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).

^[5] Computing systems are physical systems that operate through silica, copper, lithium and other geochemical energy resources momentarily materialised as hardware, network infrastructures, before returning to the earth once again as forms of waste. For foundational perspectives on the mineral lifecycles of digital and electronic media and e-waste, see: Sean Cubitt, Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017); Jennifer Gabrys, Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011).

^[6] Durée being a philosophical concept put forward by Henri Bergson partly in response to the standardisation and mathematisation of lived time as a late 19^th century project. For media theoretical engagement with the industrial and technological standardisation of time, see: Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency and the Archive (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 2002); Wolfgang Ernst, Chronopoetics: The Temporal Being and Operativity of Technological Media (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016); Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014)

^[7]  John F. Simon, “Artist Statement,” Numeral , http://www.numeral.com/paraicon.html

^[8] Taking 2^64 possible combinations, divided by 100 frames per second, then by number of seconds per day, and number of days per year. Or (((2^64)/100)/86400)/365 = 5,849,424,173.55.

^[9] Matthew Mirapaul, “In John Simon’s Art, Everything Is Possible,” Numeral , last modified 17 April, 1997, http://www.numeral.com/articles/041797mirapaul/041797mirapaul.html#1.

^[10] He instead refers to this as ‘several hundred trillion’, a number still effective in communicating such a phenomenological impossibility. However in reality, the figure is just shy of one centillion, so approaching the limits of conventionally-named numbers at 10³⁰³. For comparison, one billion is 10⁹. See John F. Simon, “Artist Statement”.

^[11] Meredith Hoy, From Point to Pixel: A Genealogy of Digital Aesthetics (Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College Press), 172-176.

^[12] Emma Tucker, “Susan Kare’s pioneering Macintosh icons are on display in France,” Creative Review , last modified 11 April, 2022, https://www.creativereview.co.uk/susan-kare-icons-exhibition/.

^[13] John Cage’s composition Organ2/ASLSP has an intended duration of 639 years, and directly inspired Juha Van Ingen’s 1000-year GIF AS Long As Possible (ASLAP), both in name and intention. Like Every Icon, Jem Finer’s 1000-year generative composition Longplayer is continually confronting technological obsolescence and immense cultural shifts in both musical practice, cultural understanding, and language itself. In the visual space, Lars Eijssen and Boele Klopman’s De Wensput (1991) and Leander Seige’s ImageN (2000) employed similar approaches with print and RGB colour sets respectively, whilst more recently Alex Anikina’s Chronic Film (2019) translates these motivations into digital film.

^[14] I borrow this phrase from Pontus Kyander’s excellent writing on Juha Van Ingen’s AS Long as Possible (ASLAP). See Pontus Kyander, “The Itch for Eternity”, As long as possible (2018). https://www.aslongaspossible.com/images/As_long_as_possible_publication_2018.pdf.

^[15] The NFT project is a parallel reimagining of the work, including images with resolvable patterns that serves to probe the ways in which we can sustain an idea. See “Every Icon by John F Simon Jr (2021),” e.a.t.} works, 2022, https://www.eatworks.xyz/john-f-simon-jr-every-icon/.

^[16] See links for the “Enterzone copy”, the “Stadium copy” and the “IAAA copy” along with Simon’s terms of sale. In the Enterzone copy, the absence of the applet is marked through visual negation: a blank space framed by the surviving text instructions. Each version discloses various states of refusal. See “John F. Simon Jr.: Every Icon.,” Radical Art, 2001/2004, http://radicalart.info/AlgorithmicArt/grid/every/EveryIcon/index.html.

^[17] Wolfgang Ernst, “Existing in Discrete States: On the Techno-Aesthetics of Algorithmic Being-in-Time”, Theory, Culture & Society, 38, no. 7-8 (2021): 13-31.