Posts - nicholas carah

This is Carl Schmitt writing in 1918 about a fictional civilisation, the Buribunks. Every person has a personal typewriter.

The Buribunks use the typewriter to reflect on themselves, the information they record is archived in a database, where it is analysed by officials. They use the information to both monitor the thoughts of individuals, the mood of particular regions, and as a kind of market research to create entertainment and culture that reflects the interests of Buribunk citizens. This story just flattens me.

Here is Schmitt in 1918, looking at the typewriter. He sees a device that standardises written script, which enables vast amounts of information to be created, stored and processed. Schmitt sees in the typewriter the beginning of a civilisation where everyday life is extensively recorded. In 1918, Schmitt sees not just the smartphone, the wearable, the social media platform but also the kind of personhood and society that would go along with it. Here’s a critical point in his story: Buribunks are very liberal, they can write whatever they like in their diary. They can even write about how they hate being made to write a diary. But, they cannot not write in the diary. So, you can say whatever you like, but you cannot say nothing. You must make your thoughts, movements, moods and feelings visible to a larger technocultural system. Schmitt here envisions a mode of social control that doesn’t depend on limiting the specific ideas people express, but rather works by making their ideas visible so that they can be worked on and modulated.

I find this aspect of Buribunkdom startling, not because Schmitt is the only one to articulate a mode of control like this. Of course other critical thinkers in the twentieth century have too: Foucault, Deleuze, and Zizek to name some. I find it interesting because here in 1918, we have someone seeing personal media devices operating to manage the processes of representation and reconnaissance. That media technology was understood here as both instruments for symbolic communication and for data collection. So, here we are one hundred years later and we are the Buribunks. We use our smartphones every day to record reams of information about our lived experience: our expressions, preferences, conversations, movements, mood, sleep patterns and so on. This information is catalogued in enormous commercial and state databases. The information is used to shape the culture that we are immersed in. And, importantly, this system works by granting us individual freedom to express ourselves, and places relatively few limits on what we can say. But, this system does demand our participation. Participation is a forced choice. Very few of us successfully navigate everyday life without leaving behind data about our movements, preferences, habits and so on.

Schmitt imagined a large government bureaucracy where information would be stored on index cards. It was a kind of vast analogue database. Of course, instead of this, we have a complex network of digital databases owned by major platforms: Facebook, Google, Amazon and Netflix. And, these database function as enormous market research engines that capture and process information which is used to shape our cultural world. What Schmitt saw in the typewriter, has congealed in the smartphone, the critical device in a culture organised around the project of the self. The work of reflecting on and expressing the self, as a basis task in everyday life. And, super importantly, these tasks are shaped by the tools we use to accomplish them.

Here is a famous line from Nietzsche about his typewriter, which he experimented with in the late nineteenth century: ‘Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts’. What did he mean? As we use media technologies to reflect on and express ourselves, we become entangled with them. They shape the way we think, act and express ourselves. They shape the way we imagine the possibilities of expression, and we might say that in our own minds we begin to think like typewriters, or films, or smartphones. We think using their grammar, rhythms and conventions. So, with the typewriter and the smartphone, we might say that these devices ‘work on us’ in the sense that they facilitate a process through which we ‘monitor’ and record data about ourselves.

OK, so I’ve suggested here that in Schmitt’s early twentieth century we can see the pre-history of the smartphone. Well, Kate Crawford and her colleagues actually offer us a study of this history. They trace the genealogy of devices and practices we use to weigh ourselves since the 19th century through to present day self-trackers like FitBits. Think about how FitBit talks to us in its advertisements. The FitBit is presented as a radically new technology offering precise information about the ‘real’ state of our bodies. This knowledge will be useful to us, it will make us fitter, happier, more desirable and more productive.

What Crawford and co. remind us is that this set of claims are not all that new. Devices that ‘work on’ or shape our thoughts and feelings about our bodies have been around a long time.
Weight scales are one example. From the 19th century onwards both the cultural uses and technical capacities of weight scales have changed. In cultural terms, weight scales shifted from the doctor’s office, to the street, to the home. They gradually changed from a specialist medical device used only by doctors, to public entertainment, to a private everyday domestic discipline.

So, here’s a run through of Crawford’s narrative. Doctors began monitoring and recording patients’ weight toward the latter end of the 19th century, but this was not routine until the 20th century. In 1885, the public ‘penny scale’ was invented in Germany, which then appeared in the US in grocery and drug stores.  Modelled after the grandfather clock, with a large dial, the customer stepped on the weighing plate and placed a penny in the slot.

Some penny scales rang a bell when the weight was displayed, while others played popular songs like ‘The Anvil Chorus’ or ‘Oh Promise Me’. The machines would also dispense offerings to lure people into weighing themselves in public, such as pictures of movie stars, horoscopes, and gum and candy. Built in games such as Guess-Your-Weight would return your penny if you accurately placed the pointer at your weight before measurement. However, the extraction of money in exchange for data was the prime aim of the manufacturers; ‘It’s like tapping a gold mine’, claimed the Mills Novelty Company brochure in 1932.

The domestic weight scale first appeared in 1913. A smaller, more affordable device for the home, it allowed self-measurement in private to offset the embarrassment of public recording one’s weight with attendant noises and songs. The original weight scale is an analogue or technical form of media - our body weight makes an impression on a mechanism that is calibrated to record it on the scale. As a media device it collects and presents information to us but it is also important to consider how it is configured in broader social and identity-making processes. There is a gendered history of these devices.

Public weight scales were initially marketed to men but in the1920s women started to be encouraged to diet. Weight scales were presented to women as a private bathroom device to monitor their bodies, thus becoming a tool to ‘know’ and ‘manage’ ourselves. Here’s Crawford’s account of this:  

Crawford refers to a study, where a participant in an eating disorders group was asked how she feels if she does not weigh herself; ‘I don’t feel any way until I know the number on the scale. The numbers tell me how to feel’. That’s basically Nietzsche claim about the typewriter – the device is working on my thoughts. The numbers tell me how I feel. Similar claims are made around self-tracking devices. There are accounts of self-tracking and internalized surveillance taken to an extreme by people suffering from eating disorders.

So, the history of the weight scale reminds us that tracking devices are agents in shifting the process of knowing and controlling bodies, both individually and collectively, as they normalize and sometimes antagonize human bodies. The Fitbit turns the body’s movement into digital data: daily steps, distance travelled, calories burned, sleep quality, and so on. This is then fed into a ‘finely tuned algorithm’ that looks for ‘motion patterns’. There are two things at work here in this sequence from the personal weight scale to the FitBit. One, a moral epistemology: knowing one’s weight and body habits can lead to an improved, possibly ideal self and life. And, two: an economic imperative. Penny scales were significant money making enterprises and there was a strong profit motive in encouraging people to weigh themselves ‘often’. This exchange of money for data is clear: spend a penny, receive a datum, but the collection of data is also private, going no further unless the user willingly shared it with others. This is less clear in trackable devices. The user can reflect on their own data but that data will always be shared with the device maker and a range of unknown parties. What is then done with that data is not transparent and ultimately at the discretion of the company. Consumer data are mediated by a smartphone app or an online interface and the user never sees how their data is aggregated, analysed, sold, or repurposed, nor do they get to make active decisions about how that data is used.

As a tagline for an advertisement, for the wearable Microsoft Band, states, ‘this device can know me better than I know myself, and can help me be a better human.’ So then, Crawford argues, ‘the wearable and the weight scale offer the promise of agency through mediated self-knowledge, within rhetorics of normative control and becoming one’s best self.’ On one hand the ability to ‘know more through data’ can be experienced as pleasurable and powerful, the promise of which is evident in this advertisement for Microsoft band.

OK, and on and on it goes. Ugh, corporate brand vomit. But, also here’s the basic claim Microsoft are making: buy this device, it will work on you! It will change you. What wearables like the FitBit achieve that the personal weight scale could not, is the real-time aggregation of data about all bodies, and the feeding back of this information to each users via customised screens. Again here, Schmitt’s Buribunks had paper index cards and human-scale analysis of expressions. The FitBit is real-time biological analysis of millions of bodies. Here’s Crawford:
‘Statistical comparisons between bodies are necessarily contingent on a set of data points. Users get a personalized report, yet, the system around them is designed for mass collection and analysis, so the user becomes ‘a body amidst other tracked bodies.’ So ‘the user only gets to see their individual behaviour compared to a norm, a speck in the larger sea of data.’

Drawing on the work of Julie E Cohen, Crawford argues that this functions as a ‘bio-political public domain’… designed to ‘assimilate individual data profiles within larger patterns and nudge individual choices and preferences in directions that align with those patterns.’  So ‘while there is a strong rhetoric of participation and inclusion, there is a ‘near-complete lack of transparency regarding algorithms, outputs and uses of personal information’. And, this is the crucial point. Mark Andrejevic calls this the ‘big data divide’. The difference between individuals who record their data, and the corporations who collect and process that data.
The lesson then is to think about the evolution of media devices for collecting, storing, processing, and disseminating information over a hundred year period, as well as the individual and social facets of digital media.

The FitBit and similar tracking devices that collect data about us and present that back to us as customised and individualised media content, become part of a much larger social system of control in several ways. The data that we give and view at an individual level is logged in databases that operate at population level. These devices are implicated in a cultural process based on self-monitoring and self-improvement. They work on our thoughts. And, importantly, these devices normalise data-driven participation and computation in our everyday lives. They become a foundational model for how we do our lives, bodies and identities.

On the night of October 15, 1940, the German air force sent 236 bombers to London. ‘British defences were dismal’. They ‘managed to destroy only two planes’. London, the heart of the British Empire, was under siege.

In Rise of the Machines Thomas Rid explains this moment’s historical significance. ‘For the first time in history, one state had taken an entire military campaign to the skies to break another state’s will to resist’. Survival for Britain, and the Allies, would depend on their ability to engineer a way of shooting those German bombers out of the sky.

This problem triggered a ‘veritable explosion of scientific and industrial research’ which would result in ‘new thinking machines’ capable of making ‘autonomous decisions of life and death.

Rid puts it this way:

This challenge involved configuring the interplay between human and machine (to allow, for instance, a human operator to move an enormous weapon precisely at speed), engineering radar that could detect a plan before a human eye could see it, creating a network that would relay information from a radar to a computational device, building a computer that could predict the path of an enemy plane through the sky and predict where to fire, constructing the apparatus that could transfer the prediction into the operation of a weapon in real-time.

What was going on here? The creation, by a large network of scientists and engineers within a military-industrial system, of machines that could sense, learn, calculate and predict. Machines that could exert control over the material world via ongoing cycles of feedback and learning. In June 1944, the Germans launched V1 rockets across the English channel toward London. The V-1 was ‘a terrifying new German weapon: an entire unmanned aircraft that would dive into its target, not simply drop a bomb’. The first cruise missile.

At this moment, Rid explains

The Allies had engineered a ‘cybernetic’ system. A combination of technological devices that could sense, calculate, predict and execute decisions. These devices included the primitive digital computers.

Following the war, the mathematician Norbert Wiener was a key figure in popularising the idea of ‘cybernetics’. There are three critical concepts in ‘cybernetics’: feedback, learning and control. Cybernetics comes from a Greek word which means ‘to steer’. It articulates a process of exercising control by learning from feedback. A key feature of humans is that we can learn and adjust by using our senses and decision-making capacities. Cybernetics was the effort to construct ‘intelligent machines’ that could also learn. Wiener would often imply that he was central to solving the ‘prediction’ problem during the war.

It is true that Wiener was one of many scientists funded to undertake experiments, and Wiener did propose a mathematical model for predicting the path of an enemy aircraft. He did not however ‘solve’ the prediction problem, his model didn’t work. The lesson here is that complex technological systems are the result of a network of actors. There is rarely any one individual genius who ‘invents’ them. Jennifer Light makes this point emphatically in her study ‘When Computers Were Women’, explaining that while two male engineers often credited with automated ballistics computations during the war, critical to the effort were ‘nearly 200 young women’ who worked as ‘human ‘computers’, performing ballistics calculations during the war’. The first computers were hundreds of female mathematicians.

In 1948, Wiener coined and popularised the term ‘cybernetics’ as the science of ‘control and communication in the animal and the machine’. In short, cybernetics views the state of any system – biological, informational, economic, and political – in terms of the regulation of information. A cybernetic device can sense or collect information, and be programmed to respond to that information. In the case of wartime anti-aircraft defence, a radar detects movement, it tracks an enemy plane across the sky. Information is relayed to a primitive computer, which calculates aircraft trajectory. This calculation is passed on to an anti-aircraft weapon, which fires at the enemy aircraft.

Wiener is a significant figure in the story of cybernetics because he articulated how these computational technologies would reshape industry, society and culture. In his 1950 book, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, Wiener made an important historical move by placing ‘cybernetics’ at the heart of what he called the second industrial revolution.

The first industrial revolution bought about new forms of energy, such as steam and electricity created by machines. Harnessing these energy sources enabled the production of a goods on a scale far beyond what humans on their own could make. Wiener claims that in the first industrial revolution the machine acted as an ‘alternative to human muscle’. For example, one of the first applications of the steam engine was to pump water out of mines, a job that had previously been done by humans and animals. Many changes resulted from replacing human muscle with machines – factories emerged, urban labour forces created mass cities, and the demand for raw materials stimulated the growth of plantations and mines in the colonies, and hence rail and shipping networks for transportation.

For Wiener, machines ‘stimulated’ the development of an entire industrial and social system. In the second industrial revolution a new kind of a new kind of machine emerged - the computer which extended machines to the idea of communication. This is how he put it, ‘for a large range of computation work, [machines] have shown themselves much faster and more accurate than the human computer’. Wiener thought that computers would eventually communicate with and modulate a range of instruments. These instruments would act as ‘sense organs’. They would feed information back to the computer, so that it could make decisions and learn about its environment. Computers in factories would be programmed to generate and collect data to give feedback on production processes.

Thomas Rid makes the point that ‘Wiener didn’t change what the military did, the military changed what Wiener did’. What does mean? He means that Wiener’s peripheral involvement in wartime efforts to create machines that could sense, calculate, predict and execute decisions led him to perceive the development of a new kind of society. A society organised around devices and systems that were cybernetic – able to control their environment through processes of feedback and learning. Able to make collect, store and process information in ways that were once confined to the human.

Wiener and the other mid-century engineers, scientists and thinkers involved in the development of cybernetics imagined how media technologies would usher in complicated relationships between human forms of sense-making and decision-making and the capacity of computational devices to simulate, augment and even exceed those human capacities.

Media are technologies that organise human life and experience. They symbolically represent reality and they also collect information about reality.

How did they come to do this? First up, we often think of digital media as ‘new’. We register this most clearly in the advertising and corporate rhetoric of technology companies. Go and trace the history of Apple advertisements and product launches from their Macintosh personal computer in 1984 through to their iPod and iPhone launches. Listen to Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook when he tells us about the artificial intelligence he built, named Jarvis, that runs his house. Or, Facebook engineers when they tell us that they want to build a brain machine interface that will enable us to type from our brain. Or, Jeff Bezos from Amazon when he tells us that his AI Alexa will run our homes by listening in to our conversations.

Over and over the digital media industries present their technologies within a narrative of straightforward, linear progress. The next technology we build will be better than the last. And, implied in that sense of better, is what we might call a ‘technological imaginary’.

If we build all the cool gadgets, all the human problems will go away!

Here, I think of John Durham-Peters’ in Speaking into the Air, ‘’Communication’ whatever it might mean, is not a matter of improved wiring or freer self-disclosure but involves a permanent kink in the human condition. That we can never communicate like angels is a tragic fact, but also a blessed one.’

The kinks of human experience cannot be solved with technologies. And, new technologies are not ‘better’ than the last ones. As in, they don’t automatically make for a ‘better’ human experience. One way we can think about media technologies then is how they emerge out of the experimental effort of humans to exercise power in the world. This is not a straight-forward process.

That means we should listen carefully to Apple, Facebook and Google when they tell us what they are experimenting with, and where they think they are headed – not because this enable us to ‘narrate’ the development of technology, but because it offers us a way of thinking carefully about the kind of human experience they are imagining and creating.

With that in mind, let’s turn back to Kittler who takes this ‘genealogical’ approach to a history of media technology. Genealogy is a method inspired by Nietzsche and Foucault, a way of doing history that pays attention to how material technologies emerge as part of historically-conditioned discourses, social formations and modes of power.

Kittler identifies three historically significant media systems.

The first is a symbolic media system. In this system, writing, physical speech sounds, or musical tones are transposed by a human into visual symbols, which are then re-translated by users into a sound, word, or idea in the mind. Think the alphabet, musical notation, or paintings and drawings. These systems work because the human users create and follow rules. Alphabets and musical notation have technical specifications that the users have to follow if they are going to work. For example, the alphabet is a media system, with visible symbols and rules for how sounds in speech are to be captured, stored, and processed. This symbolic media system dominated until about 1900 and allowed for the development of new forms of social, cultural, and political life.

A second system, technical media, emerged during the 19th century and into the 20th century. While writing transposed physical sensations into symbols, technical media could capture physical sensations directly as impressions on a medium. The difference between symbolic and technical is crucial here. With a symbolic system the physical sensation – sound or light – has to pass through the human body to be transposed into a symbol. The human ear hears a word, and transposes it into letter from an alphabet. With a technical system that physical sensation is recorded directly as an impression in another medium, without the human body having to turn it into a symbol. Photographs, which capture light, and phonographs, which capture sound, are the key technologies. Both emerge in the 19th century, and become mass technologies in the early 29th century. Photography is a process where film records a physical impression of light on a media. Phonography records the physical impression of sound on a record or tape. Those impressions can then be ‘converted’ back via the medium into an accurate representation of the original image or sound.

The first phase of the age of technical media was the capacity to ‘capture’ and ‘store’ images and sound, while the second phase was the transmission of those images and sounds over distance, via radio and later, television. This system is analogue. Think about a vinyl LP where the physical grooves in the record are ‘impressions’ of a sound that are read and converted into an audio signal you can hear via the technical device of the record player. Analogue devices, such as record players and tapes, read the media by scanning the physical data off the device.

By the end of the twentieth century, the age of technical media gave way to our present epoch - the age of digital media. Rather than record data as a ‘physical’ trace, a digital system converts all data into a numerical system. The really important point Kittler makes here is that the digital system collapses all ‘senses’ into one medium. This enables media to calculate, process, and simulate. In the mid-1980s, Kittler predicts that sooner or later we will be hooked into an information channel that can be used for any medium. Movies, music, phone calls, and mail will reach households via fibre optic cables. Once any medium can be translated into 1s and 0s, and passed through the one infrastructure of digital computers and networks, the capacity of media to experiment with reality dramatically explodes in scale.

With digital media the physical properties of the input data are converted into numbers. Media processes are coded into the symbolic realm of mathematics, which can then be ‘immediately subjected to the mathematical processes of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division through algorithms contained within software.’

Think of the present moment.

Our bodies permanently tethered to, and integrated with, digital devices like smartphones. These devices convert human experience into data. They store, they calculate, they predict as much as they represent. Our imagination is entangled with the data-driven, algorithmic, flows of images, sounds and texts streaming via their screens. This genealogy of this kind of human experience can be traced back, at least, to the mid-nineteenth century.

In the mid-1800s the technologies for storing reality emerge. The phonograph stores sound, the photograph stores light, the typewriter standardises the storage of alphabet, numbers and code. From the early 1900s, the technologies for electronic transmission of sound, light and code over distance emerges in the form of telegraph, radio and television. In the mid-1900s, around the schema of the typewriter, the capacity of media to calculate and predict emerges. For Kittler, Turing’s mathematical definition of computability, and the codebreaker he built during World War II mark the moment where media become first and foremost calculative devices for intervening in reality.