The Prefigurative Ontological Power of Computation

Editor's Notes

1. Hi everyone, my name is Zach, and I teach at Michigan State University. I’m going to take a minute to introduce myself, and partly by way of doing so, introduce two very short video pieces that I’m going to show.
2. So, I teach graphic design and user experience design, but my background is really in old school print design—like posters and books and stuff. During graduate school, starting around 2010, I started learning about interaction design and I began doing some interaction design projects in school and also for different companies in the Boston area.
3. One of my favorite graphic design studios around the time I started grad school was Experimental Jetset. They are probably most famous for their appearance in the movie Helvetica, but I really was digging the way they thought about graphic design. It was a little more intellectual than the way I had been taught in undergrad.
4. Anyway, they did this interview in a book called the Design and Art Reader,
5. and there was this passage that—it's possible this will sound obvious now, especially if you are familiar with Flusser or many other media and cultural theorists, but this passage really changed my life —
6. this passage calls “design” “an embodiment of ideology.” I understand that this is by no means a novel realization, but coming from graphic design, and as someone just starting to really work with technology (or work with people who were working with technology), I started to see the way that the interfaces I was designing were serving to legitimate particular ideologies embedded in the computational products and services for which I was designing.
7. After graduate school, I began to study — through scholarly inquiry as well as artistic practice — the way in which design (especially interface and interaction design) legitimates specific ideologies within computational products and services and the impact of these ideologies on human intersubjectivity in everyday life.
8. There are a few sub-topics of this broader inquiry that my work most frequently addresses, and those will be illustrated in the two short video pieces I’m going to show. But the overarching theme itself is “The Prefigurative Ontological Power of Computation,” which is a power that I think is deeply related to the way in which our experience of our computational tools is designed and how those designs exist and function within everyday life.
9. The two video pieces I’m going to show reflect on the ways in which technological positivism propagates an ontology of computability. This ontology colludes with neoliberal capitalism in order to produce normalized subjects who believe themselves and each other to be comprised of data, perfectly computable and manipulable by the market. //Instead of distant speculations of an overly aestheticized future, the films present eerily familiar technocratic interventions into everyday life.
10. When I say “prefigurative ontological power,” I mean more than just the ability for computational systems of inference and recommendation to “control” us in a sort-of behavioral-predictive fashion. What I mean to say is that there is something much more incisive—something that John Cheney-Lippold gets at in his 2011 article “A New Algorithmic Identity.” By believing that we are computable, that we are, in Deleuze’s words, “dividuals,” we open ourselves UP to this type of biopolitical control EVEN MORE. Graphic design and user experience design present computational technologies as convenience- and efficiency-enhancing, and when those technologies fulfill their promises of enhanced convenience, we are led to believe that we ourselves are able to be understood by those very technologies. And of course, once we behave predictably and within the normalized patterns prescribed by our technologies, it becomes even easier for our technologies to enhance convenience for us. This cycle is anticipated by Thomas Tierney in his excellent book the Value of Convenience: A Genealogy of Technical Culture (1993).
11. But what of the consequences? What modes of resistance might there be? Tactics? Tactical media? Grand strategies? My consistent references to “everyday life” indicate an indebtedness to Lefebvre – do we then try to leverage the idea of the “festival?” No matter what, we have to organize, but the “dividual” cannot organize; someone who doesn’t see the value of the singular and fundamentally qualitative nature of human existence does not see and reach out to other bodies as other complete and singular beings but rather utilizes in an instrumental fashion the parts of the other data-bodies with which they interact. Such an intersubjectivity precludes organizing and collective action. It’s almost as if collective action is predictively proscribed in the same way that Netflix recommends us a movie. I don’t think my short video pieces will ever end up on Netflix, but let’s try to watch them anyway…