As we know, utopia is nowhere, literally. Much of the literary movement of “anti-anti-utopianism” can be understood as a recognition that utopia’s seek to go nowhere and dystopias are what result from the attempt. It might be useful to reframe this as anti-anti-nowhere-ism, but probably not. This confusing triple negative might be resolved in the…
Keep readingEzra Klein has an interview with Naomi Klein today regarding her new book, Doppelgänger: A Trip Into the Mirror World. It’s a wide-ranging conversation. Klein’s mirror-world has part to do with her being confused online with Naomi Wolf (90’s feminist turned conspiracy theorist podcaster). But that’s just one interesting story of mirroring that’s part of…
Keep readingAmong Paul Virilio’s well-known concepts is that each new technology creates its own accident. I’ve discussed this earlier suggesting that generative AI creates the accident of AI-generated versions of all former accidents. We can think of this as alternative or as a different way of describing the same accident. An epistemic collapse occurs when there…
Keep readingAI output can claim no knowledge or ethical responsibility but both knowledge and consequence are produced as the output turns a building into rubble. There are humans in (and on) various loops. We could hold them accountable as the ones who know and who bear responsibility. They might take legal ownership but they do not…
Keep readingToward the end of his life, Timothy Leary began discussing the possibility of the internet as electronic LSD. Chaos and Cyber Culture is an amazing and curious artifact of the early web. There you might learn how to become an amphibian, as Leary claimed to be. Without romanticizing his provocative positioning, there has long been…
Keep readingIn the pursuit of artificial intelligence, we might consider Nietzsche’s remark that the human “intellect has no further mission that would lead beyond human life. It is human, rather, and only its owner and producer gives it such importance.” Mythologically, the AI is a non-human version of the human intellect, but could it ever have…
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My academic career has roughly corresponded with the rise of the internet, and the developments of networked digital media have been the focus of my research for the last 30 years. I have investigated the role intelligent machines play in the ways we communicate, the communities we form, and our engagement with larger world.
My current research (book) project is tentatively titled Empire, AI and Society: Artificial Warfare in the Digital Interregnum. My most recent open access publication is “Living on Digital Flatlands: Assemblies of Computer Vision.” Here’s the abstract.
This article explores computer vision not only in terms of its use with “intelligent” machines, such as autonomous vehicles, but also more broadly in terms of quotidian, digitally-mediated human vision, such as that experienced through smartphones. Drawing on assemblage theory and radical media archeology, I describe the technological processes that link together materially different spatiotemporal assemblages to produce a posthuman condition of computer vision typified by what Wolfgang Ernst terms the “epistemogenic momentum” of “techno-mathematical configurations.” Manuel DeLanda’s flat ontologies prove useful here for describing how assemblages operating in different space-times interact. I then turn to Deleuze and Guatarri’s techno-semiological stratum, specifically their discussion of the stratum’s spatiotemporal superlinearity, to articulate an emerging digital-calculative layer. I argue that understanding computer vision assemblages requires more than setting technical descriptions alongside cultural-ideological critique; it also requires an integrated analysis of the roles digital nonhumans perform in the production of a new visual regime with new capacities and desires. The shared human-nonhuman capacity of computer vision moves sight from the biological and linguistic assemblages of humans into digital assemblages where vision becomes calculable and subject to algorithmic modifications. The results are not only digitally-composed, screened images, but also new means of production, organization, and identity.
Alex Reid, Professor of Digital Rhetoric, Media, and Artificial Intelligence 