Monthly Muse: 2/2024
Recapitulation, contemplation, provocation
Monthly Musings are published during the last week of every month. In each Monthly Muse, I recap content from the past month of Handful of Earth, offer some freewheeling reflections, and share a quote or passage that I’ve found especially thought-provoking.
Here’s the February 2024 Monthly Muse.
Recapitulation: Published this month on Handful of Earth
Contemplation
In my essay this month, “The Era When Nothing Ever Ends,” I addressed the topic of crisis. In particular, I proposed that the ideology of the inevitability of technological progress serves as a template for the manufacture of perpetual polycrisis. If that sounds too jargony, read the piece in full, and I think you’ll have a better sense of what I’m getting at.
I was alerted to another facet of the inevitability ideology this month while perusing reactions to Open AI’s Sora text-to-video technology. At Forbes, futurist Bernard Marr began his column with the following sentence: “Just a few weeks back, I wrote that we are probably still some way from being able to create a movie from a natural language prompt.” The remainder the piece goes on to follow a common template. Marr admits his failure to apprehend the pace of technological development and summarily begins to rejoice in the fact that things are progressing faster than he expected. Of Sora, he gleefully writes that “it’s an amazing technology that gives a tantalizing glimpse of what we will soon be able to do!”
What strikes me about both of these excerpts is Marr’s use of the word “we.” By talking about what “we” are able to do, he implies that technologies like Sora are the common property and (even more significantly) the common aspiration of everyone. In other words, what Sam Altman and his technotopian ilk at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta envision for the world’s future comes to be associated, through this discursive sleight of hand, with the capacities and strivings of humanity as a whole.
This “we”-ification of discourse around technology, if you will, is but another weapon in the arsenal of the ideology of inevitability. To oppose technological progress is not only irrational, but also against “our” own interests, since new products like Sora are already something that “we” can (and ought) to use and celebrate even before they hit the market.
But this begs the question: Who exactly is the “we” that asked for a technology like Sora to be developed in the first place? I personally don’t know anyone who made such a request, but now “we” are all expected to accept Sora as “ours.” Identification with a technology is the best way to promote a belief in its inevitability.
What do you think?
Provocation
“[T]he upshot of the disrupter’s super-historical impulse is the expectation that, rather than your idea conforming to the world in some manner, the world ought to accommodate the sheer genius of your idea…[But] anytime disruptees suggest that they might like to have the world adjusted to ensure their survival, they’re told that this is a sign of their weakness and resistance to change.”
—Adrian Daub, What Tech Calls Thinking: An Inquiry into the Intellectual Bedrock of Silicon Valley
Nicely done, Vincent. I think "we" stems from a techno-materialist view of history. So history is done to us by techno-capitalism. We tolerate this because of very longstanding imaginations of the world, including the proposition that "economics" is not "politics." (What are you, some sort of Commie?) I'm trying to work on this . . . but your intuition here strikes me as right: who gave Altman sovereignty? And why are we expected to kiss that ring?