Thoughts on technology

It’s by now a reasonably standard metaphor to describe humans as the reproductive organs of machines: Samuel Butler, to my knowledge, advanced the position first, most famously in Erewhon (1872), but themes of evolution and reproduction dominated his work; in Civilization and its Discontents (1930), Sigmund Freud calls machines the “auxilliary organs” of humans; J.C.R. Licklider, in his essay “Man-Computer Symbiosis” (1960), compared humans to an insect that polinates a plant and feeds on its fruit; Marshall McLuhan, in Understanding Media (1964), calls the electrical communications network an extension of the human nervous system; Ben Woodward, describing Slime Dynamics (2012), problematizes the distinction between the matter of humans and of machines; Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, in asking Are We Human? (2016), interrogate whether the homonid or technical body is the true human. The hominid body acts as a lubricant, as a seed, as a catalyst around which the technical body can accumulate like a shell: the many hominids build a structure like a coral reef or a conch shell, which will be inhabited by future generations of fellow-hominids, who will build it out for yet later generations, and so on in saecula saeculorum. Or again, humans are like wasps, building a nest to shoot out more of themselves (compare Mark Fisher’s reading of the wasps’ nest dream in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) in Fisher’s Flatline Constructs (1999)). The entire assemblage, in the sense of Deleuze-Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus (1980), is “human.” This is the meaning of saying that humans are “rational beings”: their action is determined by a principle greater than the organization of their own bodies; they are subservient to a higher logic, namely, that of their technical body. This should be compared to Kant’s second critique, wherein he outlines an ethical theory that does not make any prior assumptions about the body of the ethical agent except that it be capable of rational deliberation. I do not bring this up to apply the categorical imperative to the hominid-mechanical assemblage but to say that any ethical principle must be articulated with respect to the whole, which I take to be the aggregate of the hominid bodies and their accompanying technical apparatus. Hominid forms are useful and will continue to be a valuable component of the human body for a long time, but they are not a privileged component of what it is to be human.

If a human being acted perfectly rationally and spent as much time as possible availing themselves of all available information, then their action would be constrained because determined by a mechanical process, which is to say, one which could protentially done by a non-hominid organ without a body (apologizing to Deleuze-Guattari). Even if this process were chaotic, which is to say, it were such that an arbitrarily small difference between two starting states would eventually result in an arbitrarily large difference in state somewhere down the line by the application of deterministic transformations, it would still be deterministic and so determined in the final instance by the configuration of noise that obtained in the first instants of the universe. Now this is obviously a preposterous hypothesis, for no human ever acted perfectly rationally. Of no import, however, since the human’s actions are nevertheless the result of some deterministic finite process and again fall back on the initial noise of the universe for their ultimate cause. But if we are entirely contingent assemblages, what is to be done? For it is not, I don’t believe, possible to overcome the illusion of autonomy, any more than it is possible to overcome the illusions of location or time: there is no absolute here or now, but it is impossible to cogitate except by some finite deterministic process which, being finite, must be limited in space and time and so have a here and not-here, a now and not-now. I have hereby redefined the critical project in terms of speculative materialism, by speculating the existence of a finite deterministic process and derived three specific limitations on cognition: the phenomena of time, space, and freedom. Now the first two limitations, time and space, I believe are obvious. But why must freedom be a necessary category of human cognition? Can humans think themselves as being wholy determined? Not as long as the causes of their actions remain obscure to them: the illusion is freedom exists so long as we can’t see the strings that control us.