From the time we are born we exist between the zero and one of one lifetime. The conceit of the virtual-technological world, the world of machine, artificial intelligence, is that if we string enough ones and zeroes together, we get something that seems like (at least to us) another life, another intelligence; in other words, something that is in between one and zero. But the virtual-technological world is Zeno’s paradox. Each additional digit we add, only gets us one half the distance to our target. We are poised in the mirror position. As long as we are alive, we must be in-between.

That’s one way of starting to think about the two virtuals: the virtual of zeros and ones, and the virtual space between them through which reality emerges. We understand this commonly with representation. The image, the word, etc: it’s always other than what it represents. And in the virtual-technological world all those media are ones and zeroes..

As I have written about virtual reality, it isn’t really the thing with the headsets. That might yet become a significant development. But what I mean by virtual reality is the real world as it is constructed in virtual-technological space. While it is only ever a representation, the same could be said of American democracy. It doesn’t make it any less real. And the more digits we add, the closer the map comes to being the territory, even if there is always an aporia.

Virtual pragmatism then is the practice/art of satisficing. When do we decide the map is good enough to serve as the de facto real? Maybe the right question is to ask when did we make this decision as we could follow Foucault and others and look at the rising influence of statistics in politics in the 18th/19th centuries. I’m not too interested in origins. I do however think we are at a pivot point, which I’ve been calling the digital interregnum. It’s a point where the role that machinic intelligence plays in our lives is poised to change (and grow) dramatically.

To call this shift a singularity, as some do, is, well, not pragmatic. It is not helpful to say that we have no idea of what will happen after. Of course that’s true. We have no idea what will happen tomorrow or an hour from now. And that statement will be true no matter when you read it. We’ve never let that stop us from considering the future.

Speculation is the best, perhaps only, philosophical mode for the consideration of counter-factual questions, i.e. what if? The standard critical theories of the humanities, depending on how they are practiced, have eschatologies, teleologies, or other very strong limits on what must happen and how. For me, these approaches have little pragmatic utility here. They’re not useless. They are like using a book as a beer coaster. It’ll do if you don’t care much about the book. Of course that’s not to say that others don’t have uses for them.

In short, I’m thinking about a speculative approach to the emergence of virtual pragmatism as a counter-factual proposition. Virtual pragmatism fits snugly over the world. Of course it mediates that world for humans. But it also is material itself and has material effects, like contributing to climate change but also like shaping how the stock market works. It helps us to deliberate, sometimes it makes its own decisions, and then it takes actions with our explicit, implicit, or tacit approval. As I was saying in my last post, virtual pragmatism is “just” a tool. It has some inherent ethics; it is, or seeks to be, pragmatic. But that poses the question: pragmatic regarding what? To what end? A speculative approach to virtual pragmatism considers different answers to those questions.

What do I do with a device that, hypothetically, has access to every piece of networked stored data on the planet? A device that especially has access to every data point about me, cross-referenced and intersected with all the larger datasets of humans in which my data populates just one row. What do I do with a machine that seems to know the world better than I do? That seems to know my profession better than I do? That threatens to know me better than I do? On one level I know it’s all a bit of sleight of hand. But consciousness is a stage act too in my view.

From a mainstream perspective the advice might be to take seriously the recommendations of the virtual-pragmatic machine. From the dominant image of thought, it might have authority. But this is where the speculative part comes in.

How do I negotiate with the virtual-pragmatic machine to expand my capacities, my agency, rather than narrow it?