#radical technologies

If you want to end the depredations of scarcity, then, better by far that you work for the just distribution of the goods we already have than wait for some cornucopian machine to solve the problem for you. If you want to contest the power of the state, take concrete steps to claim decision-making power locally, rather than hoping that someone will release the code of an autonomous framework that instantly renders states obsolete. If you’re interested in eliminating class and racial bias in the criminal justice system, work with one of the many civil society organizations established and chartered to do just that before handing the powers that be yet another tool and rationalization for their use of force. In every case the hard, unglamorous, thankless work of building institutions and organizing communities will demand enormous investments of time and effort, and is by no means guaranteed to end in success. But it is far less likely to be subverted by unforeseen dynamics at the point where an emergent and poorly understood technology meets the implacable friction of the everyday.

Wearables work in synchrony with workstation systems to furnish bosses with a comprehensive overview of employee behavior. At KFC, Wendy’s and the RiteAid drugstore chain, workers at the point of sale log into their workstations biometrically via the Crossmatch U.are.U suite of hardware and software. Crossmatch touts this system as preventing “tardy arrivals, ‘buddy punching,’ ‘lollygagging,’ extended breaks and early departures, inventory shrink, unauthorized discounts and returns, and fraudulent gift card transactions;” anyone who’s ever worked retail will understand this list as an almost perfect, point-for-point recitation of the tacit measures employees have always taken to compensate themselves for having to put up with abusive bosses, shitty pay and intolerable working conditions.

Whether consciously or otherwise, interaction designers have learned to stimulate and leverage this desire: they know full well that every time someone texts you, “likes” your photo or answers your email, it changes you materially, rewiring neurotransmitter pathways, lighting up the reward circuits of your brain, and enhancing the odds that you’ll trigger the whole cycle over again when the dopamine surge subsides in a few seconds. This clever hack exploits our most primal needs for affirmation, generally from the most venal of motivations. But it can also sensitize us to the truth of our own radical incompleteness, if we let it, teaching us that we are only ever ourselves in connection with others. And as we have never been anything but open and multiple and woven of alterity— from the DNA in our cells, to the microbes in our guts, to the self-replicating modules of language and learned ideology that constitute our very selves—in the end maybe the network we’ve wrought is only a clunky way of literalizing the connections that were always already there and waiting to be discovered.

At every point in history, control over the shape and distribution of matter has been tightly coupled with the shape and distribution of power. The present is no exception. Even now, human dignity is predicated on the satisfaction of material need, on the ability to furnish everyone alive with the made objects that afford us shelter from the elements, comfortably scaled space and some measure of control over our immediate environment.

Everyday life in Perfect Harmony is the voice-stress analysis of the call-center worker that allows for the training of the virtual agent that replaces her. It is the risk-assessment algorithm that predicted she would be laid off, and preemptively raised the APR on her loans, as well as the blockchain-mediated smartlock that turfs her out of her high-rise microflat the moment she comes up short on rent. It is the skeletal, 3D-printed drone that supervises her eviction, and the gait-recognition and station-keeping algorithms that keep it locked on her until she’s safely offsite; the augmented reality interface that allows a security guard eight thousand miles away to watch her through that drone’s eyes, and the fact that he’ll do that work for fifty US cents an hour, grateful to have any job at all in the charnelhouse of his domestic economy. It’s the high-resolution immersive VR that keeps the neighbors twitching in their flats next door, docilized, politically decorticated and completely uninterested in what’s happening. It is the RFID tags ensuring that any moveable property belonging to her landlord remains on the premises. It is even the landlord itself—an autonomous parastatal enterprise without human shareholders, whose portfolio operates at such a narrow margin of profitability that her flat is already rented to a new tenant by the time she’s a metro stop away. In this world all is aimed at the ruthless extraction of advantage precisely because everything is falling apart.

What is vital to remember is that there’s no such thing as “raw data.” Whatever data we measure and retain with our sensors, as with our bodily senses, is invariably a selection from the far broader array available to us; perception itself is always already a process of editing and curation.

In this world we need to have things, or a certain kind of things, or at the very least a certain number of them, to sustain a robust sense of ourselves—more, we need to be seen to have them. The statistics on consumer credit furnish abundant testimony to the psychic salience of our want, the lengths we’re willing to go to in order to surround ourselves with objects way past any point at which any of them could be said to be remotely necessary to our survival. And of course the burden of debt that hangs over so many of us constitutes a stunningly effective disciplinary mechanism: people dependent on a paycheck to service credit-card debt that compounds at 24 percent annually don’t rock boats at work, or likely much of anywhere else. To whatever degree our addiction to things contributes to that burden, it’s part of what breaks us to service and inures us to our complicity in the unspeakable.