before we discuss the trolley problem
we need to find out what happened to the brakes
for no-one builds a trolley without brakes
but if the brakes were not working
we need to find out why
was it sabotage?
worker action?
were the brakes just poorly made?
and if so, why?
or the brakes were not maintained properly?
what kind of trolley company lets a trolley which has not been adequately inspected out on the tracks ?

perhaps the driver was drunk or incapacitated
but why?
are the work conditions too bad?
or living conditions too stressful?
what kind of driver would drive a potentially lethal trolley incapacitated?
needs the money too badly?
afraid to lose the job?

before we discuss the trolley problem,
we need to discuss the brakes problem,
if the brakes have failed, what happened?
how were they made? under what conditions?
how were they maintained? under what regime?

the brakes work paradigmatically
for every tech catastrophe
first try to solve the brakes quandary
to worry about a speeding trolley.

… and then there is the track problem…

>>this essay is in progress, expect changes, it may also morph into two or more separate essays<<

It is ironic, in this age of advanced scientific and technological affordances, suffused with the triumph of reason, that the status of truth is seen to be in crisis. This may be due to the fact that the technologies which work so reliably on the basis of rational, causal scientific principles, require not fundamental truths, but only instrumental ones. For the truth to be instrumental, it must produce timely facts, occurrences on which our politics are leveraged.

The Ancient Greek physicists, Thales, Democritus, Leucippus, Epicurus, were interested in the ontological truth of materials, speculating their inner workings and principles into extreme mathematics. Today’s science is more sanguine about the accessibility of any comprehensive physical truth. Though the mathematics have only become more complex and extravagant, the objective is not philosophy but reliability, the mastering of measurable behaviours of materials in the service of human needs. Rather than demonstrating comprehension of essential truths about their material existence, contemporary advanced technologies evidence, and persistently manifest control over the behaviours of (the aspects of) the materials we can understand.

In other words, we have surrounded ourselves with a menagerie of technical affordances which are designed from the atomic level upwards to serve human needs. This domestication of nature at the mineral, atomic, and sub-atomic level at play in the metallurgy of computer hardware, is no different in principle to the “Natural nano-tech”[1] domestication of plants, livestock and other humans, which produced the sedentary agrarian civilization which is the basis for the technology you are reading this on right now. As Norbert Wiener observed, cybernetics is merely automated slavery[2] Every civilization based on slavery has to contend with a perverse excess of material capacity which has no place in the servitude. What to do with the intelligence, imagination and dreams of the slave, or, even that of the resource cow?

All the things of this world come into our economy though need. Through need to feed families we scanned the skies and divined rhythms of the seasons and climates. Through need to feed families we domesticated minerals, plants, animals and other humans. Needs define the meaning anything acquires.[3]  Epistemology is not only anthropomorphic, it is opportunistic,  it always has an end in mind, the open end called “survival”. So epistemology is always to some degree teleological, in that the result must always be “we survive” it might even be an open form of secular humanist eschatology.

Needs are acute. They are more precise than general perception. Needs focus perceptions and the perceptions which are not needed to assuage the needs are disregarded. Thus the pain and trauma of the slave or of the resource animal is disregarded, much literature is dedicated to why this must be so.[4] specific parts of animals, minerals and plants are excised to fulfil particular vital needs and the rest must be discarded. In colonialism, the intelligence, the flourishing of whole generations of human beings is suppressed for the benefit of the colonizers.

Many of the “former colonies”  still work today under the heel of the Northern powers, as a massive stockpile of wealth, without which the latter would founder. Thus the inability for Europeans to respond when the misery and despair of their southern neighbours reaches such a pitch that people risk terrible odds to flee on rafts meant to escape a sinking ship. The suppression of the aspirations of those who produce the wealth for all,  has been a part of the Humanist project for so long it has become accepted  (necessary evil) inextricable from Humanist aspiration. The glories of the Louvre and Versailles are built on human bones, not only those of the serfs and downtrodden ripped-off of Europe but even more so, the sacrificed human bodies of Africa, Asia, America, everywhere humanism-justified colonial dominion maintained. Beneath the slick veneer of digital wonder-things which allow us to navigate the last-minute excitement of global finance disruption culture is “primitive accumulation” all the way down.

A utilitarian understanding of truth strips away the “necessary” from the “expendable”.  The “expendable” is an epistemological black hole called waste, a place of fear and its excess, fantasy[4]. The enormous “efficiency” of contemporary technologies leave us powerless to contend with the unexpectedly complex excesses of global warming, the e-waste and resource wars of the electronics production chain. An ambitious epistemological regime needs to square the rationalist/functionalist circle to bring “what works” back into perspective with “what is”. Acknowledging the minuscule understanding we have today of “what is” [5] will help us examine “what works” with the scientific rigour it deserves, since “what works” is not the truth, but only convenience, and the truth is forever catching up with us.

Post-truth was named the “word of the year 2016” by the Oxford Dictionary, defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”. Strangely, or perhaps understandably, there is no Truth in the definition, instead there are “objective facts”. The rest of the definition positions post-truth clearly in the realm of propaganda, coercion, peer pressure, in short “argumentum ad passiones” arguments directed to the passions as opposed to those directed towards reason. Time flies when you’re having fun.  What notion of objective fact is then operative in post-truth?

Post-truth seems only to signify a summary disappointment with the capacity of liberal democracy to uphold the primacy of rational argument in the face of overweening political force. It is promised, or hoped, that hyper-rationality, today represented by data computation practices, could inoculate the polis from deception. No amount of computation will ever suffice. Post-truth reveals technological certainty to be yet another egotistical veneer in which we make our complex reality “presentable”. Our devices appear to work for us, but that is only a ruse. More than for us, our devices are working for others, to extract every available last drop of value from our activities and, essentially to financialize our futures.

Our devices respond to our needs only on the condition that they respond to the requirements of those which provide the functionality. Our devices work for the owners in several modes, controlling and exploiting us, and controlling and exploiting people all along the production chain which make the hardware and software available. There will be no emancipation through such technology. Indeed any emancipation will only occur despite any dependence of such technology.

For political expediency, the rational precision demanded by the functioning of our advanced technologies is not demanded of our politicians. If it were, politicians would have to reveal the economic machinations of real political power of which they are merely the presentable reflection. A rational, materialist political language can encounter the immensity of this challenge, accounting for all the actors involved, from the weakest to the most powerful.  These are the “objective facts” operative in all our built technologies, and thereby in truth, post-truth and and every semblance, projection and grain of data.[6] The truth we must face is the deep intractable enmeshedness. “We are all in this together” in the web of global production of technological and cultural effects, of hardware, software, fuel, fantasy and hope.

Today’s science understands human being as a loose semantic envelope which signifies material configurations of qualities we are told by science are emergent in quantum relations. Contemporary politics understands human being in classical physics of atomic individuality. The elemental grain of political fact in contemporary anthropomorphic politics is human life.  Human life is articulated  individual political entities with a name and a set of precise spacio-temporal coordinates, birthdate, birthplace, and if applicable, time and place of death.  Every industrial product is a record of the intractable, genetic facts, the undeniable human participations (in precise space-time durations).

Human beings, under prevailing conditions of rentier capitalism, are first and foremost merely containers of raw material capacities for “primitive accumulation”, financial speculation for investment capital, a comprehensively chronological universe. The challenge is to channel this value generated in chronology into solidarity economies.[7]  Unless we stand together in the face of post-truth to demand the recognition of the merest “objective fact”: that we “are” as beings, our relationships and our promise will continue to be conformed to the purposes of contemporary “primitive” value extraction, we will pay with our lives for the resources we will need to survive.

This intolerable situation might unite us, for there is still power in numbers. Despite, or perhaps, acknowledging the post-truth condition, the majorities still need to mobilize for better conditions, not only for themselves but, as solidary actors in the global productions chain, necessarily also for the suffering exploited of the entire world. Robust and valourous imaginations are required generate and sustain  transformative political programs.  These imaginations, always embodied must be sustained materially, in human beings with food, shelter, water i.e. civilization. Our challenge is to develop programs which can sustainably provide these conditions, despite the prevailing conditions of rentier capitalist extraction, solidarity programs which can instrumentalize capital against the rentiers.[8]  These programs will attract participation, in unprecedented arrays of indelible facts, which can innovate truths operating in other notions of time.

We may not have the Truth, but at least we can have facts. The facts which document our efforts, to get ahead, to make a living, to seek or innovate Truth. The facts are tied down in space and time. This is how we organize materials which serve us and this is how we must understand the experience these technologies afford us.[9] It is not any Truth, but facts which “set us free”.

Meanwhile, it is ridiculous to imagine an outside (of rentier capitalism) without first having usurped the inside for ourselfs. To destroy chronology we must destroy the rentier capitalism which relies on it for its life-blood, for its mode producing all the things we rely on every day.  Only as we comprehensively usurp the global means of production can we begin to imagine other ways we might all get along together in the common effort to provide for the flourishing of our species, outside of chronological time models, and then, perhaps we may have to abandon some of the science which requires too much chronology, but then we may not need it any more. There will be a new truth which is in the satisfactoriness of our interactions, with ourselves and with Nature, of which we are a part.

NOTES

[1] as described here: http://telekommunisten.net/2016/11/11/dataknowledgenarrative-on-data/

[2] “Let us remember that the automatic machine is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic consequences of slave labor.” ― Norbert Wiener (1948/1965) Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Cambridge, MIT Press

[3] Protagoras’ famous maxim, cited by Socrates in Plato’s Theaetetus reads ” πάντων χρημάτων μέτρον’ ἄνθρωπον εἶναι, ‘τῶν μὲν ὄντων ὡς ἔστι, τῶν δὲ μὴ ὄντωνὡς οὐκ ἔστιν “. In the classic (Benjamin Jowett) translation this appears as “[Man is] the measure of all things, of the existence of the things that are and the non-existence of the things that are not. ”  Jowett translates “χρημάτων” as “things”, more precisely “χρημάτων” translates as “needs”. Therefore,   “human being is the measure of all needs…[to the degree that they exist or not]”

[4] examples please? is it religion, classic literature?

[5] see additivism

[6] according to CERN . chronology can get infinitely more specific, but truncation error accrues.

[7] ST6M

[8] Venture Communism

[9] counterpolitics…Michael Hudson

[10]  imagining that there are transcendences cyclical eternalities which supercede chronology is priveleged thinking dependent on the apparatus which supports this thinking. Please do it in a hand-made shed hewn from wood from the forest using a hand-made axe.

Liberal and Left are not the same thing, they are not interchangeable, each describes a different political position which is generally at odds with the other.  In an age where the right is on the rise in all the highly developed economies, it is important to make this distinction. Many liberals are fine with fascism, as long as it is good for business, however the Left will never be fine with fascism or any system which concentrates power in the hands of an unaccountable few.
Liberals seem to be about freedom, because freedom is in their name.  Indeed, historically they were all about freedom, freedom from the social strictures of monarchy and feudal power.  The liberals were wealthy bourgeois who wanted the “freedom” to run the country.  In the early days, many of these used populist rhetoric to catalyse the power of the general population behind their campaign.  However, if you look at any of their writings, for example those of Locke, Adam Smith or Rousseau, you can see that the freedom of liberalism was intended not for everyone but specifically for an educated elite. Liberal freedom means even the queen is free to sleep under the bridge.

Once liberals had displaced hereditary feudal power and become ruling parties in the great industrial states, they changed the thrust of their emancipatory campaign. Instead of civic freedom for all, liberals used their power to entrench their economic position and began to apply another notion of freedom, free markets and free trade. To this day liberals “freedom” is principally about free markets and free trade, i.e. global corporatism and its rentier property system.
The Left, on the other hand, advocate an international solidarity economy, the evening out of the inequalities of wealth and opportunity, an economy where value is produced by each according to their abilities and for each according to their needs. The Left reject the false freedom of free markets which generate cabals of colluding monopolists who inevitably abuse their wealth to exercise inordinate political power over the many. The Left reject any form of nationalistic, racist, sexist, or any other normative discriminatory political disenfranchisement. The Left struggles for an economy where rentier title has been mutualized and the value of the productive contribution of each is set towards ensuring the best conditions of the flourishing of all.

In terms of freedom of expression, both the Left and liberals are permissive. However liberals believe in the freedom of the wealthy to make their expression heard louder than anybody else’s, and they exercise this “freedom”.  Liberals also believe in the super-national privilege of corporations to silence criticism of their business as being damaging to their profitability.[1]  The Left attempts to build utopian forums and other social forms of civic organisation where in principle everybody’s views can be negotiated. This highly democratic ideal is still in its infancy, it remains one of the most important sectors of social innovations of the Left. Whereas liberal intersectionality means “anyone can be a CEO”, Left “proletarian” intersectionality affirms that the needs of all people can be best served by addressing their material concerns, solidarity with all genders, backgrounds, etc. from the ground up.

In the US, it is said, there is a crisis of the liberal media. But the liberal media with their Purple Revolution is showing itself perfectly able to function and adapt to the new reality under Trump.  Times will now only get more difficult for the disenfranchised who voted for Trump and Sanders, and the liberal media will ignore them, because MSM are the voice of free-market bankers and free trade colonial business. Wall street revenues pay the paychecks of the news anchors researchers, journalists and actors on the liberal media, it is no wonder that Bernie Sanders was given such paltry coverage, unlike Trump who blamed illegal workers and minorities for the crisis facing the US, Sanders pointed his finger squarely at the 1%, the owners of the media.

The solidarity Left economy is small, it does not have the luxury to fund massive media juggernauts which crush popular opinion into submission. Nevertheless the movement which rallied behind the Sanders candidacy was able to break fundraising records of small contributions without any benefit of MSM publicity. This is because Sanders’ message, like that of Trump, resonated the suffering and represented the conditions to the vast majority, rendered despondent under liberal austerity economics. Whereas the MSM were fine to showcase the egregious, insulting and offensive excesses of the extreme right candidate, they ignored the one which threatened to truly undermine liberal power through advocating such things as progressive taxation and banking reform.

In the US, all the Left or “progressive” media is constrained, for budgetary reasons to the margins of the Internet.  Despite what we are told about the MSM being “dead”, it is still the authoritative source for news for the vast majority of people, especially the old, who still vote.  Even Wikipedia, apogee of democratic erudition, is biased towards mostly liberal MSM with their condition that only “reliable sources” be used as references in articles.  What are “reliable sources”? The academic publications, liberal media press and publications, or the conservative ones.[2]

The monopolization of broadcast media by a collusive wealthy oligarchy is illegitimate, as is all private rentier title. Unfortunately the Left can have no chance to politically challenge both liberals and conservatives without a truly Left media of scale. Under Trump, the majority of the American people will have it demonstrated again that their best interests will never be served by either the Democratic party or Republican party because they are two sides of the moneyed elite. The conditions of the vast majority will not improve and the emancipation of the human potential of the youth will be suppressed for another generation.

Only a truly Left and not a liberal media can coalesce the political movements which can withstand the crushing intellectual and physical assaults of the elites. We have seen during the democratic primary how independent media can play a transformative role in bringing people in and supporting communication, exchange and collaboration within a movement which truly has their interests at its core. But such media must burst into the mainstream, and this will require great economic resources. The Sanders and Corbyn campaigns have demonstrated, that progressive causes can be supported long-term with small donations from a wide base. This model needs to be expanded and extended. In the meantime let us not confuse liberal with Left… it is not helping anyone face down the challenge from the right.

NOTES

[1] see https://www.rcfp.org/browse-media-law-resources/digital-journalists-legal-guide/can-corporation-sue-me-harm-its-reputatio

[2] see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_sources

Bratton’s stack model

The bottom layer of Benjamin Bratton’s stack model of the Internet is the Earth. Obscure and unfathomable (but not incalculable) like our own bodies, the Earth is the locus of a complex of chemical processes we still rely on every day. The Earth is the wellspring of all wealth that is generated through human labour because we are reproduced through interactions with the stuff of the earth. The Earth in Bratton’s model represents an indefinitely complex material sine qua non of our networked world experience.

Today’s economy is often described as increasingly “immaterial” where the costs of reproduction are “next to nothing”. Anyone who is not ideologically blinkered so as to confuse the quarterly corporate reports data with real processes going on in the world understands the offensiveness of the claims of immateriality. Climate change, institituional racism and sexism , resource wars all testify to the contrary. A new generation of scholars have reacted to address this cynical ideology in a discipline which has come to be labeled new or neo-materilaism[1].

Karen Barad explodes Bratton’s earth with a methodology trained through theoretical physics. In Barad we explore how certainties of material behaviours in classical physics are really probabilities constrained to serve political ends. Very much in the sense of the  “observer effect” [2] and the fashionable notions of Alfred North Whitehead, the properties of materials become available to us only through interactions, In Barad’s Agential Realism, matter is allowed to matter in queer ways which may elude or defy our conventional linguistic epistemologies, reworking or “diffracting” nature/culture distinctions.

“I propose a posthumanist performative approach to understanding technoscientific and other naturalcultural practices that specifically acknowledges and takes account of matter’s dynamism. The move toward performative alternatives to representationalism shifts the focus from questions of correspondence between descriptions and reality to matters of practices, doings, and actions.” [3]

Post humanism [4], is a critique, especially of the patriarchal epistemic and event ontological frames which structure Enlightenment humanism.  Post-humanism repositions humanity as a diffuse natural phenomena ‘entangled’ among, and never entirely dissociable from, the great material fluxes of the universe. Technology is not separate from, or invented by, humanity but already emergent in the relation between ourselves and the world. In Agential Realism, matter works on us and elaborates us as much as we elaborate matter.

“What often appears as separate entities (and separate sets of concerns) with sharp edges does not actually entail a relation of absolute exteriority at all. Like the diffraction patters illuminating the indefinite nature of boundaries – displaying shadows in “light” regions and bright spots in “dark” regions – the relationship of the cultural and the natural is a relation of “exteriority within.” This is not a static relationality but a doing – the enactment of boundaries – that always entails constitutive exclusions and therefore requisite questions of accountability.”[5]

Barad’s new Materialism posits the cartesian cogito as a relation where every thought idea or perception is a product of intra-actions in an entanglement of phenomena, some among which are human being. This approach might help us elaborate what Barad calls an ethico-onto-epistemology (fusing together three conventionally distinct philosophical disciplines) where human being entangled in “Natural” processes does not have the liberty to act independently but always acts relationally to an incomprehensible (non-anthropologizable) play of forces. Informed by quantum physics, our classical understanding of our human existence, its extents and taxonomies seem to disintegrate, we enter a queer space of undefinable interplay.

It remains to be seen to what extent cultural forms can be elaborated which cultivate sociabilities appreciative of the radical complementarity in Barad’s queer materialism. Quantum physics information comes to us through a regime of the most intensive rigour and discipline in labour and material forms. New materialism celebrates the an-anthropocentrized understanding generated through arbitrary mechanical actions of scientific instruments and their dominion over materials. Disciplines such as high-energy physics elaborate control over the physical world on the smallest physical scales (which are also the largest). In breaking up conventional understandings of matter, opening out into post-causal, indefinite unconstrained incomplete models, there is the tendency to adopt metaphors and allegories from cosmologies which have been excluded from the discursive space of the “rational age of science”. Ancient intuitions of universal holism are confirmed through mathematical scientific rigour, (infinitely, voluptuously complex) orders of things of which human beings (and all they do) are but an infinitesimal and fully integrated figure.

We have at once enormously powerful industries operating and perpetuating conditions of extreme discipline through every rhizomatic tuber of its (re)production chains, and a realm of speculative materiality appropriated to coalesce a new transgressive morality. Potentially emancipatory in Barad’s ethico-onto-epistemology is the delegitimisation of conventional domestic, religious, and political socio-cultural forms which have disadvantaged women and minorities throughout history, intrinsic to a dualistic culture/nature models of the world where human interests or needs always take precedence. An-anthropocentrizing our being-in-the-world promises to generate a new environmental holism where illusionary and exploitative borders of individualism melt away to avail an ever-elusive and uncontainable entanglement of experience.

There is a fundamental internal conflict between the disciplinary conditions for the reproduction of cutting-edge scientific information about the physical materials of the universe [6], and the largely indescribable, an-anthropocentrist meta-physics and transgressive post-humanist social agenda it proposes. The former normalizes conventional, nominally patriarchal world of nations, institutions, industry and finance which (re)produce & train the technicians to serve the equipment which (re)generates the material regularity of today. The latter, based on experimental practice, informed by the scientific method, radiates a diffuse, uninhibited, indistinct epistemology which, if acted upon, would disrupt debilitate and undermine the structural underpinnings of prevalent scientific practice through the high-energy physics fintech apparatus which reproduces it. The environmentalist morality of new materialism may work to inhibit the reproduction of the techno-industrial apparatus which provided the onto-epistemological basis for its formulation.

*°*

NOTES

[1] New-materialism has been generating over the last two decades a richly provocative and challenging culture and literature. Though I concentrate in this blog entry on the thought of one of new-materialism’s most prominent thinkers the theoretical physicist Karen Barad, it must be understood that this strain cannot possibly be represented by any one scholar. Myra Hird, Elizabeth Gross, Stacy Aliamo, Cecilia Åsberg and Rosi Braidotti are just a few of the prominent thinkers diffracting and elaborating new materialism .

[2] The observer effect, often conflated with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, indicates a fundamental difficulty in scientific observation and measurement, whereby the act of observing and measuring changes the object of attention, as described  here 

[3] Barad, Karen. (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007, p.135

[4] Post-humanism, a prevalent trend in new materialism, must be distinguished from trans-humanism.  The latter refers to the “technical singularity of the fusion of humans and machines” or the “end of humanity as we know it”.

[5] Barad, K. (2003) Posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 28(3), p. 803

[6]  This tension is elaborated more extensively in this essay.

There is no ecology without economy. Marshall McLuhan famously quipped

“When Sputnik went around the planet in 1957 the earth became enclosed in a man-made environment and became thereby an “art” form.”[1]

McLuhan pleaded for an ecology among the media that would save literacy. [2]

“For the first time the natural world was completely enclosed in a man-made container. At the moment that the earth went inside this new artifact, Nature ended and Ecology was born. “Ecological” thinking became inevitable as soon as the planet moved up into the status of a work of art..” [3]

Sputnik was a simple radio transmitter sent up higher than human beings had sent anything up before, and it stayed up, as was expected according to the calculations programmed by Georgy Grechko [4] into the USSR Academy of Science’s mainframe computer. It orbited the earth 1440 times for 3 months at the end of 1957.  Radio hobbyists around the world eagerly scanned the spectrum to hear its distinctive status beeps. These beeps were the only information it sent back to earth about its experience in orbit.  Sputnik, as the first satellite, was earth’s orbit’s original contamination,  a technical interface between human beings and the planet they shared and a new dimension of its pollution.

Today, computation is central to our understanding of our environment, at the same time computation powers ever-accelerating industrialization which ecological science has determined to be generating dangerous climate change effects. The reason ecology cannot save humanity is, because, in order to do so, it must not privilege humanity, but rather reinterpret humanity as a figure in an infinitely (uncomputably) expansive and heterogenous ground we might call Nature.  Against such an effort is the discipline of economy. Our difficulty confronting fundamental challenges to anthropomorphic omnipotence in anthropogenic climate change, ocean acidification and other effects of techno-industry, is due to the deep interrelated roots of our concepts ecology and economy in the the oikos [5] or household.

The house of household implied an already domesticated (domus = house) realm, a realm overdetermined by human needs and technologies to provide for these. Everything that happens within the household is thus already overdetermined by anthropocentric priorities and anthropomorphic epistemologies. The wall around the household, like the wall around the ancient city, or the contemporary national frontiers create new, distinct environments within which “civilised” behaviour can take place. Inside the oikos, we are only dealing with the aspects of Nature which have been bearing on anthropic processes, needs and concerns.  The envelope of knowledge and technological infrastructure symbolised by Sputnik creates a household out of the entire planet, thus an ecology

The second half of the word “household”, the “hold”, indicates the ownership, title and dominion over the home. In ancient Greece, this was a deme, a patriarch a hegemon who was the political representative of the household, the smallest political unit of the polis. Under the deme laboured any number of slaves, women including wives and concubines and often children. The economic benefit of their activities were subsumed into the household and the personal, private wealth of the deme. The household is “private” property in the most radical sense of the term, a nascent and prototypical realm of patriarchic autonomy connected to the “public” sphere through his democratic tributes and responsibilities.  The oikos is thus an architypal private space, private property, which implies that ecology is not a public natural resource, but a domain of proprietary or privileged knowledge.   Ecology is an interplay of economically motivated human activity within an imperfectly accessible and knowable realm referred to as Nature.

In prevailing techno-industrial approach to economics, environmental sensors are designed specifically to provide data necessary to coordinate commercial activities through networked computation. There are only sensors for that which is  understood to contribute to economic growth, or greater efficiency in the production chain.   For everything else we have no sensors.

Until some extraneous phenomena such as climate change can be seen to impact globalized productivity in some way, this phenomena remains non-sense, noise, irrelevance, little or no data is collected, and what there is is usually discarded.   Bringing phenomena into what Jacques Rancière calls the “distribution of the sensible” will always be a political act.

In order to satisfactorily encounter the complexity of the environmental concerns we face today, new dimensions of sensibility, externalized in sensing technology or otherwise,  will have to be developed. This historically has always required government funding.[6] New sensing regimes can revolutionize our environmental understandings, but if they are based on industrially produced sensor data they will only produce a new anthropomorphic concatenation. Perversely, now that our networked-computation-sensor-based models of “the Climate” have begun to reach the complexity required to provide the vital insights, even prognoses they promised, anthropogenic climate change has progressed to such an extent that the new “anomalous” conditions continue defy the models. [7]

Today’s sensor-data-based environmental science is completely beholden to and overdetermined by computational industry which produces sensing technology through the global electronics production chain. It is well known that this production chain is not only intensely polluting in the production phase, but also in the disposal phase. Therefore the contemporary practices of ecology informed through digital data itself produces dangerous waste as it helps justify the deleterious human and environmental impacts of the electronics production chain. Can ecology integrate the technical reproduction of its own practices into itself?

Disaster capitalism [8] wraps around this ecological excess as a second layer of economic concern. So-called “green” technologies promise to address the threats detected through techno-ecological sensing regimes with profitable innovations.  Though the operation of these green technologies may generate less harmful emissions it is unlikely that their production is any bit easier on the environment or on the people and places which produce them than is any other technology. Transversal commercial fields of environmental clean-up, waste processing and storage have spawned enormously profitable industries which struggle to deal with the deleterious “externalities” of ordinary techno-industry.

Enclosing the concatenated oikoi is the ecumene, the known or inhabited world. What happens outside the ecumene is irrelevant to us until it isn’t (the point when something enters the ecumene, it anthropomorphs). We live in a fundamentally anthropomorphic epistemology which sets sociocultural priorities we cannot feel or act out of.  The only Nature we know is the Nature we encounter, the Nature we hope to control through technical means.   Study of natural processes with the intention of confining them to serve human purposes has unleashed enormous technical power. Human beings today are born into imperceptibly powerful industrial dispositifs which become “second Nature”, which always already enframes Nature “tout-court” in anthropocentric interpretation, and this interpretation is a political expression.

Proprietary politics through monopolistic inheritance, IP, patent and land ownership laws mean that the dividends of technology remain unevenly distributed. This produces the contemporary computational leisure society whose cultures ritualize the management of remote workforces and resources.  The conditions under which these workers must reproduce their value for the ownership classes begin to merge in the concept “environmental justice”.   We need ecumenical modeling which elaborates the interplay between the concatenated layers of oikoi.

Whatever happens outside the ecumene is obscene, taboo and terrifying because it threatens the fragile order we have cobbled together to enjoy and understand each other. We accept all the compromises, hypocrisies and trade-offs of our societies because they are better than being exposed to the whims of unsublimated Nature. Unlike other traditional belief systems, the great rationalism of Western civilization has made a sharp distinction with the greater unknown within which it has conjured a new Nature, a Human Nature of enormously satisfying and technically wondrous effects. Nevertheless always beyond the ever expanding frontiers of the Empire of Knowledge, unsublimatable otherness persists.

Understanding of our planet provided through our technologies will always be anthropomorphic artwork. Just like art work, the effects on the (human) environment, the interactions with (human) Nature with always be incompletely foreseeable, and knowable. Techno-industry organizes the environment in orderly arrays of human activity, the domestication we refer to as “peace”. However, even in the domain of human affairs, we can see that the peace is won at the expense of the dominated, and that the domination of the (human) environment creates unacceptable consequences of pollution, destruction and war which can not be externalized. The refugees surging at the illegitimate borders drawn across the world are part of, and must be given a fair share in the ecumene.

*°*

NOTES

[1] Marshall McLuhan from “McLuhan Unbound” (2005) Ginkgo Press, Corte Madera (USA) p.22

[2] ibid, p.4

[3] https://youtu.be/a11DEFm0WCw?t=4m40s

[4] Georgy Mikhaylovich Grechko (b. 1931) trained as a mathematician, later became a cosmonaut himself, making the first spacewalk in an Orlan space suit on December 20, 1977.

[5] the “eco-” of ecology, economy and ecumene is derived from the ancient Greek word for family, family’s property or house, in short, household: οἶκος “oikos” .  Ecology would then mean the words, language or theory of the household, economy would mean the rules or laws of the household,  οἰκουμενικός ecumenical refers to the “whole inhabited world”.

[6] Marianna Mazzucato is a prominent researcher on the theme of public sector innovation, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4DhbjZ74IQ

[7]

“The planetary scale of the climate has finally been replicated in the planetary scale of our information systems, which encircle the globe. Both of these systems are, quite literally, out of control.

In the case of the weather, anthropogenic climate change is now irreversible, and is driving increasingly violent change, both within geophysical processes, and within societies. Climate-driven wars and mass migrations are already a reality, as are effects which can be experienced more immediately, such as increased turbulence in the atmosphere.

And yet, despite the direst warnings and desperate urgings of scientists, we seem unable to respond to this crisis. Writing in the New York Times, the founder of the Global Weather Corporation, a corporation using advanced data processing to improve weather prediction, forecasts “A New Dark Age”, in which the exponential disruptions produced by climate change drastically reduce our ability to predict the future. We will lack the tools and the understanding to deal with emergent, chaotic conditions, and the times we live in will be considered the point at which we passed through “peak knowledge” about the planet we live on. In response, the author proposes massive technological investment in weather monitoring and prediction: more data, more processing, more computational knowledge of the world. “

Benjamin Bratton, essay from his Cloud Index project http://cloudindx.com/history/

[8] Klein, Naomi, (2008) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Metropolitan Books, New York.