This is a 1 hour general-audience introduction to Large Language Models: the core technical component behind systems like ChatGPT, Claude, and Bard. What they are, where they are headed, comparisons and analogies to present-day operating systems, and some of the security-related challenges of this new computing paradigm. As of November 2023 (this field moves fast!).

Context: This video is based on the slides of a talk I gave recently at the AI Security Summit. The talk was not recorded but a lot of people came to me after and told me they liked it. Seeing as I had already put in one long weekend of work to make the slides, I decided to just tune them a bit, record this round 2 of the talk and upload it here on YouTube. Pardon the random background, that's my hotel room during the thanksgiving break.

• Slides as PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pxx_ZI7O-Nwl7ZLNk5hI3WzAsTLwvNU7/view?usp=share_link (42MB)
• Slides. as Keynote: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FPUpFMiCkMRKPFjhi9MAhby68MHVqe8u/view?usp=share_link (140MB)

Few things I wish I said (I'll add items here as they come up): - The dreams and hallucinations do not get fixed with finetuning. Finetuning just "directs" the dreams into "helpful assistant dreams". Always be careful with what LLMs tell you, especially if they are telling you something from memory alone. That said, similar to a human, if the LLM used browsing or retrieval and the answer made its way into the "working memory" of its context window, you can trust the LLM a bit more to process that information into the final answer. But TLDR right now, do not trust what LLMs say or do. For example, in the tools section, I'd always recommend double-checking the math/code the LLM did. - How does the LLM use a tool like the browser? It emits special words, e.g. |BROWSER|. When the code "above" that is inferencing the LLM detects these words it captures the output that follows, sends it off to a tool, comes back with the result and continues the generation. How does the LLM know to emit these special words? Finetuning datasets teach it how and when to browse, by example. And/or the instructions for tool use can also be automatically placed in the context window (in the “system message”). - You might also enjoy my 2015 blog post "Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks". The way we obtain base models today is pretty much identical on a high level, except the RNN is swapped for a Transformer. http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/ - What is in the run.c file? A bit more full-featured 1000-line version hre: https://github.com/karpathy/llama2.c/blob/master/run.c

Chapters: Part 1: LLMs 00:00:00 Intro: Large Language Model (LLM) talk 00:00:20 LLM Inference 00:04:17 LLM Training 00:08:58 LLM dreams 00:11:22 How do they work? 00:14:14 Finetuning into an Assistant 00:17:52 Summary so far 00:21:05 Appendix: Comparisons, Labeling docs, RLHF, Synthetic data, Leaderboard Part 2: Future of LLMs 00:25:43 LLM Scaling Laws 00:27:43 Tool Use (Browser, Calculator, Interpreter, DALL-E) 00:33:32 Multimodality (Vision, Audio) 00:35:00 Thinking, System 1/2 00:38:02 Self-improvement, LLM AlphaGo 00:40:45 LLM Customization, GPTs store 00:42:15 LLM OS Part 3: LLM Security 00:45:43 LLM Security Intro 00:46:14 Jailbreaks 00:51:30 Prompt Injection 00:56:23 Data poisoning 00:58:37 LLM Security conclusions End 00:59:23 Outro

Art takes a unique combination of skill, creativity the very human element of aesthetic taste. But what if the visual arts also fall to AI. In this episode we discuss Dall-E 2, a powerful text to image generator that's set to shake things up.

A.I. Playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0iVR8sl9TiXmZUgZSZOpGFouuFNieqgP

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--- About ColdFusion --- ColdFusion is an Australian based online media company independently run by Dagogo Altraide since 2009. Topics cover anything in science, technology, history and business in a calm and relaxed environment.

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--- "New Thinking" written by Dagogo Altraide --- This book was rated the 9th best technology history book by book authority. In the book you’ll learn the stories of those who invented the things we use everyday and how it all fits together to form our modern world. Get the book on Amazon: http://bit.ly/NewThinkingbook Get the book on Google Play: http://bit.ly/NewThinkingGooglePlay https://newthinkingbook.squarespace.com/about/

Sources:

https://cdn.openai.com/papers/dall-e-2.pdf

https://fortune.com/2022/04/06/openai-dall-e-2-photorealistic-images-from-text-descriptions/

https://www.engadget.com/open-a-is-dall-e-2-produces-fantastical-images-of-most-anything-you-can-imagine-170056814.html

https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-open-ai-dall-e-2-images-111840375.html

https://towardsdatascience.com/generating-images-from-prompts-using-clip-and-stylegan-1f9ed495ddda

My Music Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGkpFfEMF0eMJlh9xXj2lMw

//Soundtrack//

Burn Water - Nostalgia Dreams

no spirit - leaves covered by snow

Burn Water - Does it Get Easier (clean)

Nils Frahm - You (Teen Daze Rework)

Jon Hopkins - The Wider Sun

Ben Böhmer - Flug & Fall

Kidnap Kid - Moments (feat. Leo Stannard)

Hammock - Wasted We Stared at the Ceiling

Burn Water - Fate

» Music I produce | http://burnwater.bandcamp.com or » http://www.soundcloud.com/burnwater » https://www.patreon.com/ColdFusion_TV » Collection of music used in videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOrJJKW31OA

Producer: Dagogo Altraide

Susan Stewart (Public Domain Review, 02/09/2022), "A Paper Archaeology: Piranesi's Ruinous Fantasias": "the grotteschi--their broken statues, columns, tombs, roundels, reliefs, herms, cornucopias, shells, fasces, cameos, trumpets, bones, skulls, chains, mooring rings, and urns; their half-erased or faint inscriptions, rosettes, portraits, egg-and-dart moldings; their hazy skies, intimations of the sea, pines and palms, cascades, broken sticks and weeds, entwined with snakes and vines." Piranesi: Opere varie di architettura, prospettiva, groteschi, antichità; Vedute di Roma; Le Antichità Romane - Tomo Primo, Secondo, Terzo, Quarto; Vasi, candelabri, ... ; Le rovine del castello dell'Acqva Givlia; Carceri d'invenzione; etc.. Previously.

The idea that other worlds might be home to alien beings has been part of our thought for as long as we have been looking skyward. To feel small, all we have to do is look up. The sun, the Moon, the stars, the planets, and the Milky Way are evidence enough that Earth is not all that is.

Playfully Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCIS_QuklPMwuEnfnjjHKfg?sub_confirmation=1

Twitter: @FormingFiction

Watch Some Stuff: Extra Credits, Because Games Matter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6xz58O4xq8

Bibliography: Hunicke, Robin/LeBlanc, Marc/Zubek, Robert, MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research, https://users.cs.northwestern.edu/~hunicke/MDA.pdf

6-11 Framework: https://www.academia.edu/1571687/THE_6-11_FRAMEWORK_A_NEW_METHODOLOGY_FOR_GAME_ANALYSIS_AND_DESIGN

Huizinga, Johan, Homo Ludens. A study of the play-element in culture, http://art.yale.edu/file_columns/0000/1474/homo_ludens_johan_huizinga_routledge_1949_.pdf

Dillon, Roberto, On the Way to Fun. An Emotion-Based Approach to Successful Game Design, https://www.amazon.com/Way-Fun-Emotion-Based-Approach-Successful/dp/1568815824

Kotte, Andreas, Theaterwissenschaft. Eine Einführung, https://tinyurl.com/y43bdvj4

Jung, C. G., and Joan Chodorow, Jung on Active Imagination, https://tinyurl.com/y627n6gp

Music: "The Process" by LAKEY INSPIRED: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daWvummA8ZQ

"Pokemon Gym" by Mikel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DVpys50LVE

"Hopes & Dreams" by Jonas Munk Lindbo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNp4_pFkM5Q

Other: Ace Attorney Font: BMatSantos

http://www.kojimaproductions.jp/en/

The future as shown to us by science fictions is almost always shiny. Whether in aspirational daydreams or depictions of dystopia, the vision continues to be one of gleaming metal, stark white interiors, and of course many more robots.

The New Observatory opened at FACT, Liverpool on Thursday 22nd of June and runs until October 1st. The exhibition, curated by Hannah Redler Hawes and Sam Skinner, in collaboration with The Open Data Institute, transforms the FACT galleries into a playground of micro-observatories, fusing art with data science in an attempt to expand the reach of both. Reflecting on the democratisation of tools which allow new ways of sensing and analysing, The New Observatory asks visitors to reconsider raw, taciturn ‘data’ through a variety of vibrant, surprising, and often ingenious artistic affects and interactions. What does it mean for us to become observers of ourselves? What role does the imagination have to play in the construction of a reality accessed via data infrastructures, algorithms, numbers, and mobile sensors? And how can the model of the observatory help us better understand how the non-human world already measures and aggregates information about itself? In its simplest form an observatory is merely an enduring location from which to view terrestrial or celestial phenomena. Stone circles, such as Stonehenge in the UK, were simple, but powerful, measuring tools, aligned to mark the arc of the sun, the moon or certain star systems as they careered across ancient skies. Today we observe the world with less monumental, but far more powerful, sensing tools. And the site of the observatory, once rooted to specific locations on an ever spinning Earth, has become as mobile and malleable as the clouds which once impeded our ancestors’ view of the summer solstice. The New Observatory considers how ubiquitous, and increasingly invisible, technologies of observation have impacted the scale at which we sense, measure, and predict. Citizen Sense, Dustbox (2016 – 2017). The New Observatory at FACT, 2017. Photo by Gareth Jones. The Citizen Sense research group, led by Jennifer Gabrys, presents Dustbox as part of the show. A project started in 2016 to give residents of Deptford, South London, the chance to measure air pollution in their neighbourhoods. Residents borrowed the Dustboxes from their local library, a series of beautiful, black ceramic sensor boxes shaped like air pollutant particles blown to macro scales. By visiting citizensense.net participants could watch their personal data aggregated and streamed with others to create a real-time data map of local air particulates. The collapse of the micro and the macro lends the project a surrealist quality. As thousands of data points coalesce to produce a shared vision of the invisible pollutants all around us, the pleasing dimples, spikes and impressions of each ceramic Dustbox give that infinitesimal world a cartoonish charisma. Encased in a glass display cabinet as part of the show, my desire to stroke and caress each Dustbox was strong. Like the protagonist in Richard Matheson’s 1956 novel The Shrinking Man, once the scale of the microscopic world was given a form my human body could empathise with, I wanted nothing more than to descend into that space, becoming a pollutant myself caught on Deptford winds. Moving from the microscopic to the scale of living systems, Julie Freeman’s 2015/2016 project, A Selfless Society, transforms the patterns of a naked mole-rat colony into an abstract minimalist animation projected into the gallery. Naked mole-rats are one of only two species of ‘eusocial’ mammals, living in shared underground burrows that distantly echo the patterns of other ‘superorganism’ colonies such as ants or bees. To be eusocial is to live and work for a single Queen, whose sole responsibility it is to breed and give birth on behalf of the colony. For A Selfless Society, Freeman attached Radio Frequency ID (RFID) chips to each non-breeding mole-rat, allowing their interactions to be logged as the colony went about its slippery subterranean business. The result is a meditation on the ‘missing’ data point: the Queen, whose entire existence is bolstered and maintained by the altruistic behaviours of her wrinkly, buck-teethed family. The work is accompanied by a series of naked mole-rat profile shots, in which the eyes of each creature have been redacted with a thick black line. Freeman’s playful anonymising gesture gives each mole-rat its due, reminding us that behind every model we impel on our data there exist countless, untold subjects bound to the bodies that compel the larger story to life.

James Coupe, A Machine for Living (2017). The New Observatory at FACT, 2017. Photo by Gareth Jones. Natasha Caruana’s works in the exhibition centre on the human phenomena of love, as understood through social datasets related to marriage and divorce. For her work Divorce Index Caruana translated data on a series of societal ‘pressures’ that are correlated with failed marriages – access to healthcare, gambling, unemployment – into a choreographed dance routine. To watch a video of the dance, enacted by Caruana and her husband, viewers must walk or stare through another work, Curtain of Broken Dreams, an interlinked collection of 1,560 pawned or discarded wedding rings. Both the works come out of a larger project the artist undertook in the lead-up to the 1st year anniversary of her own marriage. Having discovered that divorce rates were highest in the coastal towns of the UK, Caruana toured the country staying in a series of AirBnB house shares with men who had recently gone through a divorce. Her journey was plotted on dry statistical data related to one of the most significant and personal of human experiences, a neat juxtaposition that lends the work a surreal humour, without sentimentalising the experiences of either Caruana or the divorced men she came into contact with. Jeronimo Voss, Inverted Night Sky (2016). The New Observatory at FACT, 2017. Photo by Gareth Jones. The New Observatory features many screens, across which data visualisations bloom, or cameras look upwards, outwards or inwards. As part of the Libre Space Foundation artist Kei Kreutler installed an open networked satellite station on the roof of FACT, allowing visitors to the gallery a live view of the thousands of satellites that career across the heavens. For his Inverted Night Sky project, artist Jeronimo Voss presents a concave domed projection space, within which the workings of the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy teeter and glide. But perhaps the most striking, and prominent use of screens, is James Coupe’s work A Machine for Living. A four-storey wooden watchtower, dotted on all sides with widescreen displays wired into the topmost tower section, within which a bank of computer servers computes the goings on displayed to visitors. The installation is a monument to members of the public who work for Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing system run by corporate giant Amazon that connects an invisible workforce of online, human minions to individuals and businesses who can employ them to carry out their bidding. A Machine for Living is the result of James Coupe’s playful subversion of the system, in which he asked mTurk workers to observe and reflect on elements of their own daily lives. On the screens winding up the structure we watch mTurk workers narrating their dance moves as they jiggle on the sofa, we see workers stretching and labelling their yoga positions, or running through the meticulous steps that make up the algorithm of their dinner routine. The screens switch between users so regularly, and the tasks they carry out as so diverse and often surreal, that the installation acts as a miniature exhibition within an exhibition. A series of digital peepholes into the lives of a previously invisible workforce, their labour drafted into the manufacture of an observatory of observations, an artwork homage to the voyeurism that perpetuates so much of 21st century ‘online’ culture.

The New Observatory at FACT, 2017. Learning Space. Photo by Gareth Jones. The New Observatory is a rich and varied exhibition that calls on its visitors to reflect on, and interact more creatively with, the data that increasingly underpins and permeates our lives. The exhibition opened at FACT, Liverpool on Thursday 22nd of June and runs until October 1st.

Follow your dreams

FrankJavCee knows what the kids like to listen to, and will teach you how to make songs in popular new genres, like chillwave and ocean grunge.

A brief look at the history of Vaporwave. - Music (In order of appearance): Diskette Romances - Fentanyl Flowers Kenny G - Songbird Chuck Person - A1 James Ferraro - Palm Trees, Wi-Fi and Dream Sushi Macintosh Plus - リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー B L U E - \ Visual \ // Entropy // Internet Club - BY DESIGN ░▒▓【ALL CAPS AND αւτ kεÿ CΘᕸEᔕ™】░▒▓ - DAE le 90's Kid 骨架的 - life Blank Banshee - Ammonia Clouds Infinity Frequencies - Lotus Bloom Eco Virtual - Cumulus Fractus Hong Kong Express - Your drink, sir 鸡尾酒酒吧 식료품groceries - Aisle 3 (Summits, Clouds, and Greener Grass) GOLDEN LIVING ROOM - DREAMS Vaperror - Surf Saint Pepsi - Cherry Pepsi - マクロスMACROSS 82-99 - 水野 亜美AMY Yung Bae - Bae City Rollaz (w/ИΔΤVИ) Disconscious - Endless Escalation 猫 シ Corp. - B5 - Second Floor 死夢VANITY - nightlife §E▲ ▓F D▓G§ - ASCENDING THE DARKEST FUTURE - 無題 2814 - 恢复

This was the paper I delivered at The Theorizing the Web Conference, New York, 18th April 2015. This video of the paper begins part way in, and misses out some important stuff. I urge you to watch the other, superb, papers on my panel by Natalie Kane, Solon Barocas, and Nick Seaver. A better video is forthcoming. I posted this up partly in response to this post at Wired about the UK election, Facebook’s echo-chamber effect, and other implications well worth reading into.

Data churning algorithms are integral to our social and economic networks. Rather than replace humans these programs are built to work with us, allowing the distinct strengths of human and computational intelligences to coalesce. As we are submerged into the era of ‘big data’, these systems have become more and more common, concentrating every terrabyte of raw data into meaningful arrangements more easily digestible by high-level human reasoning. A company calling themselves ‘Narrative Science’, based in Chicago, have established a profitable business model based on this relationship. Their slogan, ‘Tell the Stories Hidden in Your Data’, [1] is aimed at companies drowning in spreadsheets of cold information: a promise that Narrative Science can ‘humanise’ their databases with very little human input. Kristian Hammond, Chief Technology Officer of the company, claims that within 15 years over 90% of all news stories will also be written by algorithms. [2] But rather than replacing the jobs that human journalists now undertake, Hammond claims the vast majority of their ‘robonews’ output will report on data currently not covered by traditional news outlets. One family-friendly example of this is the coverage of little-league baseball games. Very few news organisations have the resources, or desire, to hire a swathe of human journalists to write-up every little-league game. Instead, Narrative Science offer leagues, parents and their children a miniature summary of each game gleaned from match statistics uploaded by diligent little league attendees, and then written up by Narrative Science in a variety of journalistic styles. In their book ‘Big Data’ from 2013, Oxford University Professor of internet governance Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, and  ‘data editor’ of The Economist, Kenneth Cukier, tell us excitedly about another data aggregation company, Prismatic, who: …rank content from the web on the basis of text analysis, user preferences, social network-popularity, and big-data analysis. [3] According to Mayer- Schönberger and Cukier this makes Prismatic able ‘to tell the world what it ought to pay attention to better than the editors of the New York Times’. [4] A situation, Steven Poole reminds us, we can little argue with so long as we agree that popularity underlies everything that is culturally valuable. Data is now the lifeblood of technocapitalism. A vast endless influx of information flowing in from the growing universe of networked and internet connected devices. As many of the papers at Theorizing the Web attest, our environment is more and more founded by systems whose job it is to mediate our relationship with this data. Technocapitalism still appears to respond to Jean Francois Lyotard’s formulation of Postmodernity: that whether something is true has less relevance, than whether it is useful. In 1973 Jean Francois Lyotard described the Postmodern Condition as a change in “the status of knowledge” brought about by new forms of techno-scienctific and techno-economic organisation. If a student could be taught effectively by a machine, rather than by another human, then the most important thing we could give the next generation was what he called, “elementary training in informatics and telematics.” In other words, as long as our students are computer literate “pedagogy would not necessarily suffer”. [5] The next passage – where Lyotard marks the Postmodern turn from the true to the useful – became one of the book’s most widely quoted, and it is worth repeating here at some length:

It is only in the context of the grand narratives of legitimation – the life of the spirit and/or the emancipation of humanity – that the partial replacement of teachers by machines may seem inadequate or even intolerable. But it is probable that these narratives are already no longer the principal driving force behind interest in acquiring knowledge. [6] Here, I want to pause to set in play at least three elements from Lyotard’s text that colour this paper. Firstly, the historical confluence between technocapitalism and the era now considered ‘postmodern’. Secondly, the association of ‘the grand-narrative’ with modern, and pre-modern conditions of knowledge. And thirdly, the idea that the relationship between the human and the machine – or computer, or software – is generally one-sided: i.e. we may shy away from the idea of leaving the responsibility of our children’s education to a machine, but Lyotard’s position presumes that since the machine was created and programmed by humans, it will therefore necessarily be understandable and thus controllable, by humans. Today, Lyotard’s vision of an informatically literate populous has more or less come true. Of course we do not completely understand the intimate workings of all our devices or the software that runs them, but the majority of the world population has some form of regular relationship with systems simulated on silicon. And as Lyotard himself made clear, the uptake of technocapitalism, and therefore the devices and systems it propagates, is piece-meal and difficult to predict or trace. At the same time Google’s fleet of self-driving motor vehicles are let-loose on Californian state highways, in parts of sub-Saharan Africa models of mobile-phones designed 10 or more years ago are allowing farming communities to aggregate their produce into quantities with greater potential to make profit on a world market. As Brian Massumi remarks, network technology allows us the possibility of “bringing to full expression a prehistory of the human”, a “worlding of the human” that marks the “becoming-planetary” of the body itself. [7] This “worlding of the human” represents what Edmund Berger argues is the death of the Postmodern condition itself: [T]he largest bankruptcy of Postmodernism is that the grand narrative of human mastery over the cosmos was never unmoored and knocked from its pulpit. Instead of making the locus of this mastery large aggregates of individuals and institutions – class formations, the state, religion, etc. – it simply has shifted the discourse towards the individual his or herself, promising them a modular dreamworld for their participation… [8] Algorithmic narratives appear to continue this trend. They are piece-meal, tending to feedback user’s dreams, wants and desires, through carefully aggregated, designed, packaged Narratives for individual ‘use’. A world not of increasing connectivity and understanding between entities, but a network worlded to each individual’s data-shadow. This situation is reminiscent of the problem pointed out by Eli Pariser of the ‘filter bubble’, or the ‘you loop’, a prevalent outcome of social media platforms tweaked and personalised by algorithms to echo at the user exactly the kind of thing they want to hear. As algorithms develop in complexity the stories they tell us about the vast sea of data will tend to become more and more enamoring, more and more palatable. Like some vast synthetic evolutionary experiment, those algorithms that devise narratives users dislike, will tend to be killed off in the feedback loop, in favour of other algorithms whose turn of phrase, or ability to stoke our egos, is more pronounced. For instance, Narrative Science’s early algorithms for creating little league narratives tended to focus on the victors of each game. What Narrative Science found is that parents were more interested in hearing about their own children, the tiny ups and downs that made the game significant to them. So the algorithms were tweaked in response. Again, to quote chief scientist Kris Hammond from Narrative Science: These are narratives generated by systems that understand data, that give us information to support the decisions we need to make about tomorrow. [9] Whilst we can program software to translate the informational nuances of a baseball game, or internet social trends, into human palatable narratives, larger social, economic and environmental events also tend to get pushed through an algorithmic meatgrinder to make them more palatable. The ‘tomorrow’ that Hammond claims his company can help us prepare for is one that, presumably, companies like Narrative Science and Prismatic will play an ever larger part in realising. In her recently published essay on Crisis and the Temporality of Networks, Wendy Chun reminds us of the difference between the user and the agent in the machinic assemblage: Celebrations of an all powerful user/agent – ‘you’ as the network, ‘you’ as the producer- counteract concerns over code as law as police by positing ‘you’ as the sovereign subject, ‘you’ as the decider. An agent however, is one who does the  actual labor, hence agent is one who acts on behalf of another. On networks, the agent would seem to be technology, rather than the users or programmers who authorize actions through their commands and clicks. [10] In order to unpack Wendy Chun’s proposition here we need only look at two of the most powerful, and impactful algorithms from the last ten years of the web. Firstly, Amazon’s recommendation system, which I assume you have all interacted with at some point. And secondly, Facebook’s news feed algorithm, that ranks and sorts posts on your personalised stream. Both these algorithms rely on a community of user interactions to establish a hierarchy of products, or posts, based on popularity. Both these algorithms also function in response to user’s past activity, and both, of course, have been tweaked and altered over time by the design and programming teams of the respective companies. As we are all no doubt aware, one of the most significant driving principles behind these extraordinarily successful pieces of code is capitalism itself. The drive for profit, and the relationship that has on distinguishing between a successful or failing company, service or product. Wendy Chun’s reminder that those that carry out an action, that program and click, are not the agents here should give use solace. We are positioned as sovereign subjects over our data, because that idea is beneficial to the propagation of the ‘product’. Whether we are told how well our child has done at baseball, or what particular kinds of news stories we might like, personally, to read right now, it is to the benefit of technocapitalism that those narratives are positive, palatable and uncompromising. However the aggregation and dissemination of big data effects our lives over the coming years, the likelihood is that at the surface – on our screens, and ubiquitous handheld devices – everything will seem rosey, comfortable, and suited to the ‘needs’ and ‘use’ of each sovereign subject.

TtW15 #A7 @npseaver @nd_kane @s010n @smwat pic.twitter.com/BjJndzaLz1

— Daniel Rourke (@therourke) April 17, 2015

So to finish I just want to gesture towards a much much bigger debate that I think we need to have about big data, technocapitalism and its algorithmic agents. To do this I just want to read a short paragraph which, as far as I know, was not written by an algorithm: Surface temperature is projected to rise over the 21st century under all assessed emission scenarios. It is very likely that heat waves will occur more often and last longer, and that extreme precipitation events will become more intense and frequent in many regions. The ocean will continue to warm and acidify, and global mean sea level to rise. [11] This is from a document entitled ‘Synthesis Report for Policy Makers’ drafted by The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – another organisation who rely on a transnational network of computers, sensors, and programs capable of modeling atmospheric, chemical and wider environmental processes to collate data on human environmental impact. Ironically then, perhaps the most significant tool we have to understand the world, at present, is big data. Never before has humankind had so much information to help us make decisions, and help us enact changes on our world, our society, and our selves. But the problem is that some of the stories big data has to tell us are too big to be narrated, they are just too big to be palatable. To quote Edmund Berger again: For these reasons we can say that the proper end of postmodernism comes in the gradual realization of the Anthropocene: it promises the death of the narrative of human mastery, while erecting an even grander narrative. If modernism was about victory of human history, and postmodernism was the end of history, the Anthropocene means that we are no longer in a “historical age but also a geological one. Or better: we are no longer to think history as exclusively human…” [12] I would argue that the ‘grand narratives of legitimation’ Lyotard claimed we left behind in the move to Postmodernity will need to return in some way if we are to manage big data in a meaningful way. Crises such as catastrophic climate change will never be made palatable in the feedback between users, programmers and  technocapitalism. Instead, we need to revisit Lyotard’s distinction between the true and the useful. Rather than ask how we can make big data useful for us, we need to ask what grand story we want that data to tell us.   References [1] Source: www.narrativescience.com, accessed 15/10/14 [2] Steven Levy, “Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter?,” WIRED, April 24, 2012, http://www.wired.com/2012/04/can-an-algorithm-write-a-better-news-story-than-a-human-reporter/. [3] “Steven Poole – On Algorithms,” Aeon Magazine, accessed May 8, 2015, http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/steven-poole-can-algorithms-ever-take-over-from-humans/. [4] Ibid. [5] Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Repr, Theory and History of Literature 10 (Manchester: Univ. Pr, 1992), 50. [6] Ibid., 51. [7] Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Duke University Press, 2002), 128. [8] Edmund Berger, “The Anthropocene and the End of Postmodernism,” Synthetic Zero, n.d., http://syntheticzero.net/2015/04/01/the-anthropocene-and-the-end-of-postmodernism/. [9] Source: www.narrativescience.com, accessed 15/10/14 [10] Wendy Chun, “Crisis and the Temporality of Networks,” in The Nonhuman Turn, ed. Richard Grusin (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 154. [11] Rajendra K. Pachauri et al., “Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,” 2014, http://epic.awi.de/37530/. [12] Berger, “The Anthropocene and the End of Postmodernism.”

A man wakes up one morning to find himself slowly transforming into a living hybrid of meat and scrap metal; he dreams of being sodomised by a woman with a snakelike, strap-on phallus.

Since the dawn of cinema, the cut has been one of the most powerful tools in a director’s kit. If we see a man walk through a door and turn his head to the right, and the scene immediately cuts to an image of an apple on a side table, our brain fills in the gap, and we understand that this man is looking at the apple. That’s because the brain has a natural propensity for smoothing over interruptions of stimuli. Whenever we blink, our eyes close for up to half a second, but we don’t notice the breaks. We also make rapid eye movements called saccades several times a second as we adjust to a constantly shifting environment, and we lose access to visual information until the eye movement settles down. This may why we generally don’t notice cuts in movies—they work like saccades. But neuroscientist Sergei Gepshtein dreams of a new visual vocabulary for cinema—one that relies much less on the cut, or perhaps even eliminates the cut altogether. “The film industry rests on a narrow selection of possibilities that got discovered early on and then got canonized by the force of inertia and entrenched by filmmaking technology and habit,” he says. Gepshtein sees some of the most disagreeable traits of entrenched movie technology in today’s blockbuster action movies. In these films, shots last only seconds, and there are regular barrages of rapid-fire cuts. Think Transformers, Battleship, the Bourne trilogy, or Pacific Rim. As Scott Derrickson, director of recent thrillers like Sinister and The Day the Earth Stood Still, laments, “The story is happening to you, but you are not interacting with the story.” But Gepshtein thinks he can offer an alternative to this trend—and it doesn’t necessarily involve long takes in the style of directors like Alfonso Cuarón, who recently snagged a directing Oscar for Gravity. Instead, it involves harnessing the modern science of vision. In December, I paid a visit to Gepshtein at his workplace, the Systems Neurobiology Laboratories of the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, its sleek whi

In a world increasingly concerned with questions of energy production and raw material shortages, this project explores the potential of desert manufacturing, where energy and material occur in abundance. In this experiment sunlight and sand are used as raw energy and material to produce glass objects using a 3D printing process, that combines natural energy and material with high-tech production technology. Solar-sintering aims to raise questions about the future of manufacturing and trigger dreams of the full utilisation of the production potential of the world’s most efficient energy resource - the sun. Whilst not providing definitive answers this experiment aims to provide a point of departure for fresh thinking. This project was developed at the Royal College of Art during my MA studies in Design Products on Platform 13. markuskayser.comCast: Markus KayserTags: Solar Sinter, Markus Kayser, Royal College of Art, RCA and 3D Printer

Internet of my dreams was Anthony Antonellis’ solo show at Transfer Gallery, in March 2014. At the conclusion of the exhibition, a digital panel convened around a series of topics that had informed the exhibition. Eleven panelists were invited to participate by moderators Anthony Antonellis and Arjun Ram Srivatsa. The discussions took place online over the course of two days in the form of written submissions and video chats conducted from the gallery. Each panelist was able to address topics raised by previous panelists in a linear format similar to a comment thread. I contributed a science fictional fabulation to proceedings, responding to the ideas generated by, and circling around, Anthony Antonellis’ exhibition. You can listen to the text below, but I urge you to go to Anthony’s website for the full digital panel and browse browse click dream browse.

Places that have never existed except in the human imagination may find an incongruous afterlife in the everyday world. Umberto Eco tells of how an attempt to commemorate the brownstone New York home of Nero Wolfe, Rex Stout’s orchid-loving fictional detective, runs up against the resistance of fact. Wolfe’s house cannot be identified because Stout “always talked of a brownstone at a certain number on West 35th Street, but in the course of his novels he mentioned at least ten different street numbers – and what is more, there are no brownstones on 35th Street”. Using Eco’s typology, a fiction has been transmuted into a legend: “Legendary lands and places are of various kinds and have only one characteristic in common: whether they depend on ancient legends whose origins are lost in the mists of time or whether they are in effect a modern invention, they have created flows of belief.”

Because they involve the belief that they existed, exist or can be made to exist – whether in the past, the future or somewhere off the map – legendary places are illusions rather than fictions. The distinction may sometimes be blurry, as the example of Nero Wolfe’s house shows; but the difference is fundamental to this enriching and playfully erudite exploration of the fabulous lands that human beings have invented.

Fictions we know to be neither true nor false and paradoxically this gives them a kind of absolute veracity that historical facts can never have: “The credulous believe that El Dorado and Lemuria exist or existed somewhere or other, but we all know that it is undeniably certain that Superman is Clark Kent and that Dr Watson was never Nero Wolfe’s right-hand man ... All the rest is open to debate.” Unfortunately, humans have an invincible need to believe in their fictions. So they turn them into legends, which they anxiously defend from doubt – even to the point of attacking and killing those who do not share them.

Eco thinks it is not too difficult to explain why humankind is so drawn to legendary places: “It seems that every culture – because the world of everyday reality is cruel and hard to live in – dreams of a happy land to which men once belonged, and may one day return.” Nowadays everyone believes that the ability to envision alternate worlds is one of humankind’s most precious gifts, a view Eco seems to endorse when, at the end of his journey through legendary lands, he describes these visions as “a truthful part of the reality of our imagination”. Yet Eco highlights a darker side of these visions when he describes how the Nazis drew inspiration from legends of ancient peoples, variously situated in ultima Thule (“a land of fire and ice where the sun never set”), Atlantis and the polar regions, who spoke languages that were “racially pure”. Himmler was obsessed with ancient Nordic runes, while in an interview after the war the commander of the SS in Rome claimed that when Hitler ordered him to kidnap Pope Pius XII so he could be interned in Germany, he also ordered the Pope to take from the Vatican library “certain runic manuscripts that evidently had esoteric value for him”.

The Nazi adoption of the swastika began with the Thule Society, a secret racist organisation founded in 1918. Legends of lost lands fed the ideology of Aryan supremacy. In 1907, Jörg Lanz founded the Order of the New Temple, preaching that “inferior races” should be subjected to castration, sterilisation, deportation to Madagascar and incineration – ideas, Eco notes, that “were later to be applied by the Nazis”. Legendary lands are idylls from which minorities, outsiders and other disturbing elements have been banished. When these fantasies of harmony enter politics, a process of exclusion is set in motion whose end point is mass murder and genocide.

A metamorphosis of fiction into legend occurred when some Nazis took seriously a picture of the world presented by the Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton. In his novel The Coming Race (1871), Bulwer-Lytton tells of the “Vril-ya”, survivors from the destruction of Atlantis who possessed amazing powers as a result of being imbued with Vril, a type of cosmic energy, living in the hollow interior of earth. He intended the book as an exercise in fantasy literature but the founder of the Thule Society, who also founded a Vril Society, seems to have taken it more literally. Occultists in several countries read Bulwer-Lytton’s novel as a fictional rendition of events that may actually have happened and the legend was mixed in the stew of mad and bad ideas we now call Nazism.

The process at work was something like that described in Jorge Luis Borges’s story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”, in which an encyclopaedia of an imaginary world subverts and disrupts the world that has hitherto been real. The difference is that in Borges’s incomparable fable the secret society that devised the encyclopaedia knew it to be fiction, while 19th-century occultists and some 20th-century Nazis accepted Bulwer-Lytton’s fiction as a version of fact. Among the marks that Bulwer-Lytton’s Vril-ya left in the real world, the most lasting was reassuringly prosaic: the name given to Bovril, the meat extract invented in the 1870s.

Among the legendary places human beings have dreamed up, those that Eco calls “the islands of utopia” have exercised a particular fascination in recent times. As he reminds us, “Etymologically speaking, utopia means non-place” – ou-topos, or no place. Thomas More, who coined the term in his book Utopia (composed in Latin and only translated in 1551 after More had been executed for treason in 1535), plays on an ambiguity in which the word also means a good or excellent place. Using a non-existent country to present an ideal model of government, More established a new literary genre, which included Étienne Cabet’s A Journey to Icaria (1840), in which a proto-communist society is envisioned, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872, an anagram of “nowhere”) and William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890).

Visions of ideal societies have recurred throughout history but such societies were nearly always placed in an irretrievable past. The paradise of milk and honey of which human beings dreamed – a land of perpetual peace and abundance – belonged in religion and mythology rather than history or science. Yet by the end of the 19th century, the fiction of an ideal society had been turned into a realisable human condition. Already in the second half of the 18th century, Rousseau was writing of an egalitarian society as if something of the kind had once existed – a move repeated by Marx and Engels in their theory of primitive communism, which they believed could be recreated at a higher level. More’s non-existent land was given a veneer of science and situated in a non-existent future. Having been a literary genre, utopia became a political legend.

The Book of Legendary Lands covers a vast range of non-places, including a flat and a hollow earth, the Antipodes, the lands of Homer and the many versions of Cockaigne (where honey and bread fall from the sky and no one is rich or poor). A fascinating chapter deals with the far more recent invention of Rennes-le-Château, a French village near Carcassonne that has been hailed as a site of immense treasure and of a priory established by descendants of Jesus, who supposedly did not die on the cross but fled to France and began the Merovingian dynasty.

Presented by Eco in light and witty prose, these legendary places are made more vivid by many well-chosen illustrations and historic texts. Yet this is far from being another coffee table book, however beautiful. As in much of his work, Eco’s theme is the slippage from fiction to illusion in the human mind. Rightly he sees this as a perennial tendency but it is one that has gathered momentum in modern times. So-called primitive cultures understood that history runs in cycles, with civilisations rising and falling much as the seasons come and go – a view of things echoed in Aristotle and the Roman historians. The rise of monotheism changed the picture, so that history came to be seen as an unfolding drama – a story with a beginning, an end and a redemptive meaning. Either way, no one believed that history could be governed by human will. It was fate, God or mere chaos that ruled human events.

Legendary lands began to multiply when human beings started to believe they could shape the future. Non-places envisioned by writers in the past were turned into utopian projects. At the same time, literature became increasingly filled with visions of hellish lands. As Eco puts it, “Sometimes utopia has taken the form of dystopia, accounts of negative societies.”

What counts as a dystopia, however, is partly a matter of taste. Aldous Huxley may have meant Brave New World (1932) as a warning but I suspect many people would find the kind of world he describes – genetically engineered and drug-medicated but also without violence, poverty or acute unhappiness – quite an attractive prospect. If the nightmarish society Huxley imagines is fortunately impossible, it is because it is supposed to be capable of renewing itself endlessly – a feature of utopias and one of the clearest signs of their unreality.

Whether you think a vision of the future is utopian or not depends on how you view society at the present time. Given the ghastly record of utopian politics in the 20th century, bien-pensants of all stripes never tire of declaring that all they want is improvement. They assume that the advances of the past are now permanent and new ones can simply be added on. But if you think society today is like all others have been – deeply flawed and highly fragile – you will understand that improvement can’t be inherited in this way. Sooner or later, past advances are sure to be lost, as the societies that have inherited them decline and fail. As everyone understood until just a few hundred years ago, this is the normal course of history.

No bien-pensant will admit this to be so. Indeed, many find the very idea of such a reversal difficult to comprehend. How could the advances that have produced the current level of civilisation – including themselves – be only a passing moment in the history of the species? Without realising the fact, these believers in improvement inhabit a legendary land – a place where what has been achieved in the past can be handed on into an indefinite future. The human impulse to dream up imaginary places and then believe them to be real, which Eco explores in this enchanting book, is as strong as it has ever been.

John Gray is the lead book reviewer of the NS. His latest book, “The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths”, is published by Allen Lane (£18.99)

Metaphor wants to be…

‘[...] metaphors work to change people’s minds. Orators have known this since Demosthenes. [...] But there’s precious little evidence that they tell you what people think. [...] And in any case, words aren’t meanings. As any really good spy knows, a word is a code that stands for something else. If you take the code at face value then you’ve fallen for the trick.’ (Daniel Soar, “The Bourne Analogy”).

Tao Lin’s recent novel Taipei (2013) is a fictional document of life in our current digital culture. The protagonist, Paul — who is loosely based on the author — is numb from his always turned on digitally mediated life, and throughout the novel increases his recreational drug taking as a kind of compensation: the chemical highs and trips are the experiential counterpoint to the mundanity of what once seemed otherworldly — his online encounters. In the novel online interactions are not distinguished from real life ones, they are all real, and so Paul’s digital malaise is also his embodied depressive mindset. The apotheosis of both these highs and lows is experienced by Paul, and his then girlfriend Erin, on a trip to visit Paul’s parents in Taipei. There the hyper-digital displays of the city — ‘lighted signs [...] animated and repeating like GIF files, attached to every building’ (166) — launch some of the more explicit mediations on digital culture in the novel: Paul asked [Erin] if she could think of a newer word for “computer” than “computer,” which seemed outdated and, in still being used, suspicious in some way, like maybe the word itself was intelligent and had manipulated culture in its favor, perpetuating its usage (167). Here Paul intimates a sense that language is elusive, that it is sentient, and that, in the words of Daniel Soar quoted above as an epitaph, it tricks us. It seems to matter that in this extract from Taipei the word ‘computer’ is conflated with a sense of the object ‘computer’. The word, in being ‘intelligent’, has somehow taken on the quality of the thing it denotes — a potentially malevolent agency. The history of computing is one of people and things: computers were first the women who calculated ballistics trajectories during the Second World War, whose actions became the template for modern automated programming. The computer, as an object, is also-always a metaphor of a human-machine relation. The name for the machine asserts a likeness between the automated mechanisms of computing and the physical and mental labour of the first human ‘computers’. Thinking of computing as a substantiated metaphor for a human-machine interaction pervades the way we talk about digital culture. Most particularly in the way we think of computers as sentient — however casually. We often speak of computers as acting independently from our commands, and frequently we think of them ‘wanting’ things, ‘manipulating’ culture, or ourselves.

Pre-Electronic Binary Code Pre-electronic binary code: the history of computing offers us metaphors for human-machine interaction which pervade the way we talk about digital culture today [Image by Erik Wilde under a CC BY-SA license]

Julie E. Cohen, in her 2012 book Configuring the Networked Self, describes the way the misplaced metaphor of human-computer and machine-computer has permeated utopian views of digitally mediated life: Advocates of information-as-freedom initially envisioned the Internet as a seamless and fundamentally democratic web of information [...]. That vision is encapsulated in Stewart Brand’s memorable aphorism “Information wants to be free.” [...] Information “wants” to be free in the same sense that objects with mass present in the earth’s gravitational field “want” to fall to the ground. (8) Cohen’s sharp undercutting of Brand’s aphorism points us toward the way the metaphor of computing is also an anthropomorphisation. The metaphor implicates a human desire in machine action. This linguistic slipperiness filters through discussion of computing at all levels. In particular the field of software studies — concerned with theorising code and programming as praxis and thing — contains at its core a debate on the complexity of considering code in a language which will always metaphorise, or allegorise. Responding to an article of Alexander R. Galloway’s titled “Language Wants to Be Overlooked: On Software and Ideology”, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues that Galloway’s stance against a kind of ‘anthropomorphization’ of code studies (his assertion that as an executable language code is ‘against interpretation’) is impossible within a discourse of critical theory. Chun argues, ‘to what extent, however, can source code be understood outside of anthropomorphization? [...] (The inevitability of this anthropomorphization is arguably evident in the title of Galloway’s article: “Language Wants to Be Overlooked” [emphasis added].)’ (Chun 305). In her critique of Galloway’s approach Wendy Chun asserts that it is not possible to extract the metaphor from the material, that they are importantly and intrinsically linked.[1] For Julie E. Cohen the relationship between metaphor and digital culture-as-it-is-lived is a problematic tie that potentially damages legal and constitutional understanding of user rights. Cohen convincingly argues that a term such as ‘cyberspace’, which remains inextricable from its fictional and virtual connotations, does not transition into legal language successfully; in part because the word itself is a metaphor, premised on an imagined reality rather than ‘the situated, embodied beings who inhabit it’ (Cohen 3). And yet Cohen’s writing itself demonstrates the tenacious substance of metaphoric language, using extended exposition of metaphors as a means to think more materially about the effects of legal and digital protocol and action. In the following extract from Configuring the Networked Self, Cohen is winding down a discussion of the difficulty of forming actual policy out of freedom versus control debates surrounding digital culture. Throughout the discussion Cohen has emphasised the way that both sides of the debate are unable to substantiate their rhetoric with embodied user practice; instead Cohen identifies a language that defers specific policy aims.[2] Cohen’s own use of metaphor in this section — ‘objections to control fuel calls [...]’, ‘darknets’ (the latter in inverted commas) — is made to mean something grounded, through a kind of allegorical framework. I am not suggesting that allegory materialises metaphor — allegory functioning in part as itself an extended metaphor — but it does contextualise metaphor.

Circuit Board 2 How tenacious is metaphoric language? The persistence of computational metaphors in understanding digital culture could harm legal and constitutional understandings of user rights [Image by Christian under a CC BY-NC-ND license]

This is exemplified in Cohen’s description of the ways US policy discussions regarding code, rights and privacy of the subject are bound to a kind of imaginary, and demonstrate great difficulty in becoming concrete: Policy debates have a circular, self-referential quality. Allegations of lawlessness bolster the perceived need for control, and objections to control fuel calls for increased openness. That is no accident; rigidity and license historically have maintained a curious symbiosis. In the 1920s, Prohibition fueled the rise of Al Capone; today, privately deputized copyright cops and draconian technical protection systems spur the emergence of uncontrolled “darknets.” In science fiction, technocratic, rule-bound civilizations spawn “edge cities” marked by their comparative heterogeneity and near imperviousness to externally imposed authority. These cities are patterned on the favelas and shantytowns that both sap and sustain the world’s emerging megacities. The pattern suggests an implicit acknowledgment that each half of the freedom/control binary contains and requires the other (9-10). I quote this passage at length in order to get at the way in which the ‘self-referential nature’ of policy discussion is here explained through a conceptual, and specifically literary, framing. Technology is always both imagined and built: this seems obvious, but it justifies reiteration because the material operations of technology are always metaphorically considered just as they are concretely manifest. The perilous circumstance this creates is played on in Cohen’s writing as she critiques constitutional policy that repeatedly cannot get at the embodied subject that uses digital technology; thwarted by the writing and rewriting of debate. In Cohen’s words this real situation is like the science fiction that is always-already seemingly like the real technology. Whether William Gibson’s ‘cyberspace’, a programmer’s speculative coding, or a lawyer’s articulation of copyright, there is no easy way to break apart the relationship between the imaginary and the actual of technoculture. Perhaps then what is called for is an explosion of the metaphors that pervade contemporary digital culture. To, so to speak, push metaphors until they give way; to generate critical discourse that tests the limits of metaphors, in an effort to see what pretext they may yield for our daily digital interactions. The articles in this issue all engage with exactly this kind of discourse. In Sophie Jones’ “The Electronic Heart”, the history of computing as one of women’s labour is used to reconfigure the metaphor of a computer as an ‘electronic brain’; instead asking whether cultural anxieties about computer-simulated emotion are linked to the naturalization of women’s affective labour. In “An Ontology of Everything on the Face of the Earth”, Daniel Rourke also considers computers as a sentient metaphor: uncovering an uncanny symbiosis between what a computer wants and what a human can effect with computing, through a critical dissection of the biocybernetic leeching of John Carpenter’s 1982 film The Thing. Finally, in “The Metaphorics of Virtual Depth”, Rob Gallagher uses Marcel Proust’s treatment of novelistic spacetime to generate a critical discourse on spatial and perspectival metaphor in virtual game environments. All these articles put into play an academic approach to metaphors of computing that dig up and pull out the stuff in between language and machine. In his introduction to Understanding Digital Humanities David M. Berry has argued for such an approach: [what is needed is a] ‘critical understanding of the literature of the digital, and through that [to] develop a shared culture through a form of Bildung’ (8).

Elysium A wheel in the sky: Neil Blomkamp's futuristic L.A. plays on the territorial paranoia of the U.S. over alien invasion and dystopian metaphors of digitally-mediated environments [Image used under fair dealings provisions]

I am writing this article a day after seeing Neill Blomkamp’s film Elysium (2013). Reading Cohen’s assertion regarding the cyclical nature of US digital rights policy debates on control and freedom, her allegory with science fiction seems entirely pertinent. Elysium is set in 2154; the earth is overpopulated, under-resourced, and a global elite have escaped to a man-made (and machine-made) world on a spaceship, ‘Elysium’. Manufacturing for Elysium continues on earth where the population, ravaged by illness, dreams of escaping to Elysium to be cured in “Med-Pods”. The movie focuses on the slums of near future L.A. and — perhaps unsurprisingly given Blomkamp’s last film District 9 (2009) — plays on the real territorial paranoia of the U.S. over alien invasion: that the favelas of Central and South America, and the political structures they embody, are always threatening ascension. In Elysium the “edge city” is the whole world, and the technocratic power base is a spaceship garden, circling the earth’s orbit. ‘Elysium’ is a green and white paradise; a techno-civic environment in which humans and nature are equally managed, and manicured. ‘Elysium’, visually, looks a lot like Disney’s Epcot theme park — which brings me back to where I started. In Tao Lin’s Taipei Paul’s disillusionment with technology is in part with its failure to be as he imagined, and his imagination was informed by the Disney-fied future of Epcot. In Taipei: Paul stared at the lighted signs, some of which were animated and repeated like GIF files, attached to almost every building to face oncoming traffic [...] and sleepily thought how technology was no longer the source of wonderment and possibility it had been when, for example, he learned as a child at Epcot Center [...] that families of three, with one or two robot dogs and one maid, would live in self-sustaining, underwater, glass spheres by something like 2004 or 2008 (166). Thinking through the metaphor of Elysium has me thinking toward the fiction of Epcot (via Tao Lin’s book). The metaphor-come-allegories at work here are at remove from my digitally mediated, embodied reality, but they seep through nonetheless. Rather than only look for the concrete reality that drives the metaphor, why not also engage with the messiness of the metaphor; its potential disjunction with technology as it is lived, and its persistent presence regardless.

CITATION: Zara Dinnen, "Digital Metaphors: Editor's Introduction," Alluvium, Vol. 2, No. 6 (2013): n. pag. Web. 4 December 2013, http://dx.doi.org/10.7766/alluvium.v2.6.04

This essay was originally published as part of a special issue of Alluvium Journal on Digital Metaphors, edited by Zara Dinnen and featuring contributions from Rob Gallagher and Sophie Jones. John Carpenter’s 1982 film, The Thing, is a claustrophobic sci-fi thriller, exhibiting many hallmarks of the horror genre. The film depicts a sinister turn for matter, where the chaos of the replicating, cancerous cell is expanded to the human scale and beyond. In The Thing we watch as an alien force terrorises an isolated Antarctic outpost. The creature exhibits an awesome ability to imitate, devouring any creature it comes across before giving birth to an exact copy in a burst of blood and protoplasm. The Thing copies cell by cell and its process is so perfect – at every level of replication – that the resultant simulacrum speaks, acts and even thinks like the original. The Thing is so relentless, its copies so perfect, that the outpost’s Doctor, Blair, is sent mad at the implications: Blair: If a cell gets out it could imitate everything on the face of the Earth… and it’s not gonna stop!!! Based on John W. Campbell’s 1938 novella, Who Goes There?, Carpenter’s film revisits a gothic trope, as numerous in its incarnations as are the forms it is capable of taking. In Campbell’s original novella, the biologically impure is co-inhabited by a different type of infection: an infection of the Antarctic inhabitants’ inner lives. Plucked from an icy grave, The Thing sits, frozen solid, in a dark corner of the outpost, drip dripping towards re-animation. Before its cells begin their interstitial jump from alien to earthly biology, it is the dreams of the men that become infected: ‘So far the only thing you have said this thing gave off that was catching was dreams. I’ll go so far as to admit that.’ An impish, slightly malignant grin crossed the little man’s seamed face. ‘I had some, too. So. It’s dream-infectious. No doubt an exceedingly dangerous malady.’ (Campbell)

The Thing’s voracious drive to consume and imitate living beings calls to mind Freud’s uncanny: the dreadful creeping horror that dwells between homely and unhomely. According to Ernst Jentsch, whose work Freud references in his study, the uncanny is kindled, ‘when there is intellectual uncertainty whether an object is alive or not, and when an inanimate object becomes too much like an animate one’ (Grenville 233). A body in the act of becoming: John W. Campbell’s novella depicts The Thing as a monstrous body that “swallows the world and is itself swallowed by the world”

In the original novella, The Thing is condensed as much from the minds of the men, as from its own horrific, defrosting bulk. A slowly surfacing nightmare that acts to transform alien matter into earthly biology also has the effect of transferring the inner, mental lives of the men, into the resultant condensation. John W. Campbell had no doubts that The Thing could become viscous, mortal human flesh, but in order to truly imitate its prey, the creature must infect and steal inner life too, pulling ghosts, kicking and screaming, out of their biological machines. As a gothic figure, Campbell’s Thing disrupts the stable and integral vision of human being, of self-same bodies housing ‘unitary and securely bounded’ (Hurley 3) subjectivities, identical and extensive through time. John W. Campbell’s characters confront their anguish at being embodied: their nightmares are literally made flesh. As Kelly Hurley reminds us in her study on The Gothic Body, Mikhail Bakhtin noted: The grotesque body… is a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body. Moreover, the body swallows the world and is itself swallowed by the world (Hurley 28). Each clone’s otherness is an uncanny exposure of the abject relationship we endure with ourselves as vicarious, fragmented, entropic forms. In the 44 years between the novella and John Carpenter’s 1982 film, there were many poor clones of The Thing depicted in cinema. Films such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and, It Came from Outer Space (1953) are replete with alien dopplegangers, abject human forms, cast away very much as in gothic tradition. Howard Hawk’s film, The Thing from Another World (1951), the first to explicitly translate Who Goes There?, completely disfigures Campbell’s story. The resultant monster is nothing more than, what one character calls, ‘an intellectual carrot’, grown from alien cells in a laboratory. The film is worth considering though for its Cold War undertones. Recast in an Arctic military base, Hawk’s Thing is an isolated monster set against a small, well organised army of cooperative men. Faced with disaster the men group together, fighting for a greater good than each of them alone represents.

Cinematic clones of The Thing: 1950s American Science Fiction films like It Came From Outer Space and Invasion of the Body Snatchers are replete with alien doppelgangers and abject human forms [Images used under fair dealings provisions] The metaphor of discrete cells coordinating into autopoeitic organisms, does not extend to the inhabitants of the isolated Antarctic outpost in the original short story, nor in the 1982 version. Rather than unite against their foe, they begin to turn on each other, never knowing who might be The Thing. In a series of enactments of game-theory, the characters do piece together a collective comprehension: that if The Thing is to eventually imitate ‘everything on the face of the Earth’ it must not show itself now, lest the remaining humans group together and destroy it. The Thing’s alien biology calls to mind the original design of the internet, intended, according to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri: …to withstand military attack. Since it has no center and almost any portion can operate as an autonomous whole, the network can continue to function even when part of it has been destroyed. The same design element that ensures survival, the decentralisation, is also what makes control of the network so difficult (Hardt and Negri 299). The novella Who Goes There? and the film, The Thing, sit either side of a pivotal era in the advancement of information technology. How a life form or a biological computer work is immaterial to the behaviours they present to an observer. John Carpenter’s The Thing explores the fulfilment of Alan Turing’s ‘Imitation Game.’ Moving away from Campbell’s original appeal to telepathy and a mind/body split, the materialist vision of Carpenter’s film confronts us with a more fundamental horror. That every part of us is reducible to every other. In her book Refiguring Life, Evelyn Fox Keller argues that: As a consequence of the technological and conceptual transformations we have witnessed in the last three decades, the body itself has been irrevocably transformed… The body of modern biology, like the DNA molecule – and also like the modern corporate or political body – has become just another part of an informational network, now machine, now message, always ready for exchange, each for the other (Keller 117–118). Meanwhile, eschewing Martin Heidegger’s definition of a thing (in which objects are brought out of the background of existence through human use), Bill Brown marks the emergence of things through the encounter: As they circulate through our lives… we look through objects because there are codes by which our interpretive attention makes them meaningful, because there is a discourse of objectivity that allows us to use them as facts. A thing, in contrast, can hardly function as a window. We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us… (Brown 4).

A thing or an object? Bill Brown argues that we look through objects but are confronted by things [Image by Marc PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE under a CC BY-NC-ND license] In his infamous 1950 paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Alan Turing introduced the notion that a computer is nothing more than a machine that functions by pretending to be other machines. (Turing) Asking the question ‘can machines think?’ Turing replaced the ambiguity of ‘thought’ and ‘intelligence’ with imitation, proposing a test that avoided the need to know what was going on inside a machine, in favour of merely experiencing its affects. In a lecture entitled ‘Can Digital Computers Think?’, Turing expounds his point: It is not difficult to design machines whose behaviour appears quite random to anyone who does not know the details of their construction. Naturally enough the inclusion of this random element, whichever technique is used, does not solve our main problem, how to programme a machine to imitate a brain, or as we might say more briefly, if less accurately, to think. But it gives us some indication of what the process will be like. We must not always expect to know what the computer is going to do. We should be pleased when the machine surprises us, in rather the same way as one is pleased when a pupil does something which he had not been explicitly taught to do (Shieber 114–115). The mutability of Earthly life, its ability to err, to stumble upon novel strategies through random, blind chance, represents its most innate capacity. Biological life changes by mutation, passing those mutations on to the next generation, ad infinitum. The Thing, in opposition to this, can only become its other absolutely. There is no room for error, for mutation, for change or evolution: instead, The Thingly cadaver of Norris must protect its otherness in the only way it knows how: by transforming itself into a defensive form previously programmed and stored in its protoplasm. In terms of creativity it cannot escape its programming. Turing’s lecture hints at a further unsettling conclusion we can make: that even though novel behaviour may be consistent with error, from appearances alone it is impossible to distinguish something ontologically novel, with a behaviour which has been programmed to appear as such. The Thing is a Universal Turing Machine, a post-digital plasma, encoded with the biological ticker-tape of a thousand alien worlds. Put more simply, in the words of protagonist John MacReady: MacReady: Somebody in this camp ain’t what he appears to be. [my emphasis]

The “Gothicity” of matter? The digital metaphor of the Thing reveals that through imitation computers confer humanity upon us [Image by 

I want to read about Augmented Reality. Tech developments IRL; techno-utopian / transhuman dreams, and hard-fought aspirations; and any sci-fictional dystopian nightmares you know of. Articles and academic papers especially welcome, but what sci-fi stories have dealt imaginatively with Augmented Reality? Where's it going? And who is worried?

Google Glass seems to offer us the best Augmented Reality possibilities at the moment, but it all feels a bit geeky and mundane. Who is really thinking outside the box?

Note: I'm not as interested in Virtual Reality here - an old paradigm which was written about extensively in the 90s. Thanks