(and Programme)
To learn that mine and my ex-husband’s behaviours were all entirely predictable, recognisable patterns, was somewhat sobering. Every self-help book I read detailed our history, our marriage and our divorce almost exactly as if their authors had been alongside us for the duration. We had, with the deeply narcissistic conviction of people just like us, assumed we were terribly original. Different. And yet there we were, on the pages of countless books, doing things in precisely the way those with our particular traumas could be expected to behave. As extraordinary and peculiar and outlandish as events were, nothing was, in fact, outside of expectations. I had to accept that even when we think we are marvellously unusual, we humans are often predictable and legible to those with certain training [edit: and quite often, no doubt, to those without]. Twentieth-century social and scientific literature is overstuffed with systemisations, models, tests, and case studies that aim to describe and succeed in describing our behaviours. Whether we buy into Freud and the depths of the unconscious, Skinner’s behaviourism, or even Nick Chater’s (2019) depressing The Mind is Flat, which rejects an inner world altogether, literature on human behaviour reveals a lens through which our species is seen, quite frequently, as more predictable and therefore more manipulatable than the weather.
There are significant problems and dangers with this reality. Lean in too hard to this vision of humans as predictable, patterned critters risks authoritarianism – when we fall down the truly horrific hole of over-systemisation, and lose sight of real lives, we dehumanise each other; we risk no longer thinking at all, or seeing ourselves entirely as non-thinking beings; even non-beings. When the pattern is enforced from outside, the scandal around Facebook and Cambridge Analytica being one well-known example, the legitimacy of our political and social systems is threatened. However, and this is the danger, there is so much enticing comfort available in such a view. Routine, inscription, ritual allow us to let go, relax, to feel held. To know and understand that in our paradigm, we are creatures of pattern is not inherently bad. But exploiting such a reality to its furthest reaches is fraught with trouble.
Much of this is anathema to the common notion of the Enlightened human, which has been undermined throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by the very developments that grew out of its history. It is also one of the reasons the presence of dynamic machine learning processes is so very, very difficult for many of us. Machine learning processes are pattern-recognition systems. But, in the paradigm we have built for ourselves, so are we. Of course, the fact that despicable billionaires (now also a trillionaire) have been, in part, responsible for the deployment of visible consumer platforms that utilise and exploit our patterned behaviours means these platforms are very easy to despise. The fact that our economic reality has perpetuated the notion that individuals alone are responsible for their well-being and welfare makes it difficult, economically, of course, but also ideologically hard to accept processes that undermine that frame. Even as those processes emerged, in many cases from ideologically opposed corners. And perhaps, even more awkward for us is that the processes utilise and exploit our inscribed patterns and the images we produce, before reflecting them back at us. Which tends to makes a mockery of the idea that the things we thought made us special, even connected to some ineffable force – language, art, creativity – cannot be decoded and then recoded by a machine. Sure, it emerges as slop but only because so much we produce is slop already. The machine learns from our slop and condenses it further.
Incidentally, but not unimportantly, these latest iterations of technology – dynamic machine learning systems that recognise, emulate and exploit ours and the universe’s patterned behaviours – were invented and developed, not by the billionaires who had the resources to scale, but by networks of developers and annotators and scientists and philosophers and technologists who date back to the emergence of cybernetics and before that quantum sciences which led to the invention of digitisation. Vilém Flusser (2011: 4) is one such philosopher, writer and artist who understood how the apparatus emulated, learnt from and reproduced patterns, and converted them into programmes. These programmes produce a universe of technical images, made from patterns. Technical images emerge from the programme – the patterns we recognise, decode and recode into the apparatus. What we don’t recognise, decode and recode remains silent. He sets out a divergence under such conditions:
Taking contemporary technical images as a starting point, we find two divergent trends. One moves toward a centrally programmed, totalitarian society of image receivers and image administrators, the other toward a dialogic, telematic society of image producers and image collectors (2011: 4).
And from there, suggests Flusser (2011: 19), the receivers and image administrators will be producers of images, whereas some dialogicians may become envisioners. Envisioners will ‘try to turn an automatic apparatus against its own condition of being automatic’. But even the envisioners, as opposed to the administrators, says Flusser (2011: 21), will recognise that while it may be possible to imagine stepping outside of the programme, they will have to be content with the fact that any supposed alternatives are, in his words, trompe l’oeil.
This does not mean little remains outside our view. It may, however, suggest we are limited by a capacity to recognise only what exists inside the programme. But was that not always so? It also doesn’t mean we are utterly reduced to cells, or quanta, or dust or pixels. But it may mean that our behaviours can only emerge from the programme, which may be what makes them predictable, legible and quotidian. And if we are honest with ourselves, our patterned being can be very comforting in a universe that often seems extraordinarily random, even though when we relax too far into such a state, we risk our humanity altogether. It was in the end, for me, a relief to read my behaviours could conceivably be predicted by a 101 psychology student. It was somehow comforting to know I was not so special, not too isolated, not so terribly precious. This is not to diminish the value of my role as a mother, a daughter, a friend or anyone else’s position in the world. Or reduce my ambition to be a humble, dialogic envisioner who aims to turn the automation of the apparatus ‘against its own condition of being automatic’ (Flusser, 2011: 19). We are, of course, often very special to our close relations. Nor is it to reduce wider human relations to schema, deterministic patterning, cells, quanta, dust or pixels, while recognising the inherent risk of it happening anyway. But to know we are part of something more than and bigger than our parochial view, even when it means being part of an apparatus, can be a bit of a blessed ‘effing relief. For the truth is that even the envisioners cannot escape the apparatus – no one reading this or anything else produced in and for the modern world – and therefore cannot escape the patterned programming of which we are a part, and which we produce. Even when some insist that their images exist outside the apparatus, their image of self is likely to be flawed, erroneous.
The trick is to maintain a modicum of distance within the apparatus, if you can. And maybe to read the books about one’s patterned behaviours without resorting to rage, ennui, or superiority, no matter how enticing those reactions may be.
Ref:
Chater, N. (2019) The mind is flat: the illusion of mental depth and the improvised mind. London: Penguin.
Flusser, V. (2011) Into the universe of technical images. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (Electronic mediations, v. 32).