Lecture by Alessandro Sbordoni
Transcription
Alessandro Sbordoni:
For some time, I've been interested in the relationship between digital technology and how our society is structured, which can be quite an obvious relationship, but I'd like to emphasize the difference between digital technology and analog technology. And something related to this could be talking about how different kinds of media have a bias implicit in them and how they, not just allow, but facilitate certain structures, certain political economies.
So, 75 years ago, a scholar named Harold Innis wrote a series of books, the most important of which is called The Bias of Communication (1951), and the subtitle of my lecture is “The Bias of Information”, so it's a reference to this work. So, he published The Bias of Communication in 1951, and in 1950 he published another book called Empire and Communications, and in 1952 a third book called Changing Concepts of Time. In these books, Harold Innis was looking explicitly at the rise and fall of ancient empires as a way of tracing the effects of communication media.
So Harold Innis, like other theorists of the time in Toronto, like Eric A. Havelock, was part of the first generation of the Toronto School of Communication Theory. One generation later would be Marshall McLuhan, who is the most well known and most popular. And in fact, I would say that is only because of Marshall McLuhan that I have discovered Harold Innis, and this early generation of what I consider Media Theory.
So, what is the bias of communication, and what was Harold Innis writing about specifically? So he was the first to show, I think, that the media tend to produce monopolies of knowledge. And to give one example, he talks about societies based on writing versus societies based on orality.
And if you think about societies based on writing they require, over time, a storage space which could evolve into a building, which could evolve into a library. And all these developments bring with them other systems, for example, a security system around the building and guards and armies, and at the end, you get from a society based on writing to a society based on army and the State, which is quite an interesting connection.
I have to say that Harold Innis was not deterministic in this connection, in contrast with Marshall McLuhan, who actually depoliticized the work of Harold Innis a decade later.
So another example could be that in ancient Egypt, papyrus was literally growing on the banks of the Nile River, and because papyrus was so important to the development of ancient Egyptian knowledge, and was only growing in this specific area, it tended towards a centralized system which favored the rise of absolute monarchy. So again, papyrus facilitates absolute monarchy, which to me all these connections are very interesting. And he goes on and he makes all these connections.
He talks about the printing press in medieval Europe. And we know how the printing press allowed for the alienation of knowledge from the monasteries, from the control of the Church towards what we know as the Humanistic period, and then a century later, after the invention of the printing press, we get the scientific revolution. It's not that the printing press made the scientific revolution, but it facilitated a certain spread of knowledge and, specifically, Innis talks about monopolies of knowledge and monopolies of time.
And to give you just a broad overview before I dive into what I wanted to talk about, he makes a distinction, we could say, between heavy and durable media like stone tablets, obelisks, that tend to have a bias on stability and time and, let’s say, religious hierarchies and so on, in contrast with lighter media like paper and parchment.
And these media, which tend to be lighter, can be moved faster and they allow for commerce, they allow bureaucracy to evolve, and eventually they paved the way for what we call modernity with the printing press. So, these dichotomies are very interesting and they could be criticized because all these distinctions between light and heavy media can tend to collapse.
And by the way, empires like the ancient Egyptians had a hybrid system of two media, both stone media and lighter media like papyrus and then parchment, which, according to Innis, then led to the decline of the empire when these two different emphases—on time, because of stone, and on space, which also means colonization and so on—came into contrast.
Specifically in the history of Ancient Egypt, there was the contrast between the absolute monarchy and the rising religious hierarchy. This led to the decline of ancient Egypt, which later on was colonized by the Greek Empire and collapsed.
So in this lecture, I'd like to adapt the theory of Harold Innis to the last, I would say, 50 years, and just ask a very simple question: What is the bias of digital technology? And Harold Innis focused on analog types of communication, because of the time when he was writing, there was very little emphasis on the rise of computers. Marshall McLuhan, one decade later, talks a little bit about computers, but I think he couldn't have foreseen some of the specific political economies in which media like computers, smartphones and so on, were allowed to develop, even though some of his general theories are still correct.
So I would say that today, in contrast with the time of Innis and Marshall McLuhan, technology is no longer analog, like paper, but is digital, and is no longer fixed like televisions, but it's mobile, which is also something in analogy with scrolls and paper. But the difference, which is the most important for me, is that the bias of digital technology—and I'm going to try to prove this point—is not a bias towards time, which as I said was a bias of stone based media, and it's not even a bias towards space, but it's a bias towards speed, because digital technology not only allows to store incredibly vast amounts of information, but it allows light speed communication.
There is a joke by Bernard Stiegler who says that digital communication is literally faster than lightning. Lightning is about one-sixth or one-eighth of the speed of light, and fiber-optic cables are faster than that, so it's faster than lightning. So, I find it interesting that we reached a point in which communication is almost immediate, and we'll get back to this.
A preliminary question before we start and we dive into the technicalities could be how is thought affected? How is thinking affected by digital technologies like computers, smartphones, 3D printing and virtual reality? And in the 15th century, to make an analogy, Marshall McLuhan was talking about the rise of typographic society and Typographic Man, and he talks about the printing press and the types of thought structures that it enabled, for example, a linear, rational way of thinking which paved the way for a scientific revolution.
And I think that today we shifted towards a different kind of mentality, which allows different forms of communication and different forms of political economies to arise. So I'll try to talk about what is the bias of digital technology. As I said before, digital technology is faster and able to store more information than ever before.
I don’t know if you remember this picture from the 90s. It's a picture from 1994, and there is Bill Gates sitting on a stack of 3000 papers in a forest, and he's holding in his hand a CD—and the advertisement for Microsoft reads: “this is how much information a single CD-ROM can hold.” So he is holding a flat surface of about 20 cm, which can contain as much information as before in 3000 pieces of paper.
And you'll be familiar with Moore’s Law, and the idea that every 18 months, the speed of computers doubles, which obviously is an almost self-fulfilling prophecy for the market. But nevertheless the speed increases and continues to increase. And on the other hand, I would say that digital technology, and especially cybernetics, paves the way for new methods of data compression, which can potentially be implemented in analog technology, but in digital technology, they are simply facilitated and we tend to compress much more than the CD in the hands of Bill Gates.
It's in this situation that we arrive at what Jacques Derrida called an archive fever. Everything that can be stored will be stored and is going to be stored again tomorrow.
And I think that it’s interesting to make a link that Mark Fisher sometimes makes between the nostalgia for the past, and what he dubs hauntology following Jacques Derrida, and the capacity of digital technology to literally create these “anarchives”. Because an “archive” would be something that is a selection of things from the past; it’s a library. But what we have with the internet is that literally everything that exists is on the internet. And I would call this some kind of digital hauntology.
So this virtual, infinite capacity for storage and retrieval leads to the situation of hauntology, in which, on the one hand, the modern development of technology should, we’d think, diminish the power of ghosts to haunt us. But on the other hand, it's specifically these developments that make the ghost of the past able to come back, again and again, leading to this obsession with the past and leading to all the cultural impasses of the present. So I would say hauntology is one of the most interesting cultural phenomena that I would say is intrinsically digital.
But then if we continue in this direction, we try to think about digital technology and what it enables, I think we can see the rise and the abolition… As I said before, digital technology does not only have a bias towards space, it obviously does have this bias towards space in the sense that it’s very mobile and decentralized, but it's a bias towards speed, and the bias towards speed makes commodities look ephemeral.
I think this is part of a digital ideology, but it's true that concepts that used to be relegated to very hard and physical frameworks like ownership and property, which tended to be physical concepts, now have disappeared, and they are being replaced by renting and licensing.
For example, if you think about how digital culture is distributed and circulates, it’s intrinsically based on an infrastructure that allows for renting and licensing, which could be possibly done with analog technology if you think about Blockbuster. But Blockbuster was put out precisely on the verge of the beginning of digital technology, and then was later supplanted by Netflix and so on. So this could be a second point.
Now I want to introduce something that I find conceptually very interesting: this shift from analog technology to digital technology is not just a shift in a mechanism intrinsic to the technology, but it’s really a formal shift in the materiality onto which we are storing our information. Umberto Eco, in a lecture from 20 years ago, makes this distinction between vegetal memory, which can be the memory that we store on paper and parchment, which is organic, or papyrus more specifically. So he contrasts vegetal memory, on the one hand, to organic memory, which is obviously the memory of brains and the nervous system, and then a third type of memory is mineral memory. And that's the memory that we store on stone tablets and obelisks, but also on computer microchips, which are based on silicon. And the fact that silicon is a mineral is a very interesting paradigm shift from a medium like paper that, as I said, has dominated the monopolies of knowledge of the last several hundred years, which towards the second half of the 20th century is replaced by a new type of medium, which is based on silicon and computers, which tend to be less fragile. At the beginning, they tend to be heavier but as we go on, they become lighter and lighter, and we get to the situation which we are in now.
And I'd like to talk a bit about what is the difference between digital and analog technology. Something that digital technology enables and that it's impossible with analog technology, or at least very difficult and cumbersome, is globalization. And by globalization, I mean that the world is literally divided in Global North and Global South, which means that the commerce of products as well as the infrastructure and the manufacturing system has been outsourced to the Global South. And this requires a network of communication, which needs to be fast and potentially could be done with analog technology, but it could not be so widespread and literally global. So globalization, I would say, is one of the phenomena that has been enabled, or at least facilitated, by digital technology.
But specifically in this context, we can think of digital technology and remove one of the big prejudices about what digital technology is. So we think about a digital device like this [e-reader], and we think it's so light, it can be taken everywhere with me, but this device requires infrastructure, which is, for example, its charger, potentially, or its internet connection, which considered globally is much heavier than analog technology.
So I would define digital technology as the repression of the physicality, which is pertinent to the diffusion of that analog technology, which digital technology has been able to push away as if under the table and literally moved it to the Global South and it doesn't need to be materially in the Global South, but we can think of data centers as these very anonymous buildings seen in Europe and elsewhere, which we don't even know that they are data centers.
And there is a network of workers in precarious conditions, working in these data centers. Also think about the undersea cables and the satellites and so on, and all this infrastructure which tends to be pushed away and is hidden from our immediate reality, which returns as the illusion that our digital technology is immediate, light and virtual but it's not.
So I would define digital technology is literally this repression of the physical element. And as we know from psychoanalysis, the repressed always returns, and I would say that three of the ways in which these repressed elements of digital technology return is through climate change, which, as we know, all the data centers and digital technologies produce, enhance, and aggravate. And on the other hand, the increasing social and economic inequality, which is produced by the monopolies of information in the Global North.
And thirdly, on the increasing amount of glitches, system errors and blackouts, which digital technology, and this hyperconnected infrastructure, produces. So this preeminent climate change, social instability and system errors return the physicality to the medium. At the same time, digital technology enables also new forms of political resistance. We can think of Tahrir Square, the Arab Spring, but even more recently, what has been dubbed “the selfie yacht”, on which Greta Thunberg is going to go to Palestine for the second time.
It’s interesting that the Israeli government has decided to denominate it or to characterize it as a “selfie yacht”, because I think that the most powerful element of this incursion of these activists towards Palestine is not so much the physical movement of the boat with people in it, which obviously poses a threat, but the biggest threat is the digital technology and this moving global network that they are transporting to the terrain of war, to which obviously the Israeli government responds with equal, mediatic warfare.
And so we get to a situation in which now, in our globalized environment, the politics has been spectacularized, the spectacle has become politicized. And I would say that the beginning of our current situation really begins in 2001, which is the year of 9/11 and the terrorist attacks in New York. But it's also the year of Google Search, Google Images, Wikipedia, the Xbox, and Windows XP. And I find this to be a very interesting connection between the history of terrorism and the history of digital technology. And it's also interesting how power becomes, as we know from our Foucault readings, that power tends towards becoming softer and more—I would call it “nano-power”—so when power is inserted in these devices, which are portable, lighter and digital, it shifts towards something different.
And there is a quote by Mark Fisher that I really like in one of his last lectures, where he says to some of his students, “Imagine if you could invent something like that, where you just endlessly distract yourself, at any point in the world and at any time in the world, you can be reached by the imperatives of capitalism. Imagine an object like that. What would it look like?” And a student replies, “A phone?”.
It’s interesting that ideology is almost being miniaturized in our devices, and that as we hold our world in the palm of our hands, we are also carrying ideology in our pockets, so to say. So power is miniaturized and is not only transparent, but is literally engineered into the algorithms on social media, the notification system, and the everlasting presence of internet connection.
So, I find it interesting that digital technology has enabled these forms of power and surveillance capitalism to flourish in this infrastructure in a way that analog surveillance could only dream of. And censorship I would say has changed too, in a way that is no longer negative, repressive as we know from many theorists like Žižek, who talks about things like this. Censorship has shifted towards a more positive, almost like suppressing dangerous information with more information rather than removing it from circulation, which may only expose it further. So I think the strategy is a strategy of “obesity”, to take a concept from Jean Baudrillard.
And then to turn towards the conclusion, I would say that our conception of history is also shifting, and we're becoming more and more aware that the power of the State, which has been facilitated and allowed to increase to the point of State-crafted capitalism, has shifted towards a new type of corporate power in which corporations have taken more and more power within the State. Symbolically, we could think of the dual election of Trump and Elon Musk. But in general, we could say that I think a new history is emerging, and will continue to emerge, in which we stop reading history and time as the history of the State, but we are going to, and we should, read it as the history of corporations. And just something that I find very fascinating is the involvement of IBM, the computer company, in the punch cards used by the Nazis during the Second World War to record the data about the Jewish prisoners in the concentration camps. Without the technology produced by IBM, an American computer company, Nazi Germany may have not been enabled, or at least had been facilitated, towards committing the Holocaust. In State history, this seems like a contradiction; in corporate history, this is obvious, and I think we should start shifting and rethinking our view of time, having in mind what the bias of digital technology will produce and will facilitate in the future.
So to conclude, I would say that digital technology is able to affect us much deeper now, and we've seen this with censorship and soft power—or “nano power”, as I like to call it—but it's also able to create new ways of reconceptualizing reality, new forms of resistance. And I think that the bias of communication towards speed, which enables essentially information to travel faster, and also enables capital to travel faster in the form of information, could also enable different forms of communication and new ways of reconceptualizing what history can be, and what digital technology in itself could be and facilitate. And I don't think we should reject the distinction between analog and digital. I think we should retain this bias of digital technology and weaponize it in order to read the present and see how the value that this technology is producing in our society, which, as I have just said, tends towards power and capital and uses speed in order to achieve this, could also be used in order to make the system crumble even faster by using digital technology as a political medium, taking into account all the limitations and all the biases that it contains.
Something that we need to consider is that digital technology is also physical, but there is no return towards the physicality of the past. What we should really take into consideration is that the leading principle of technology now has shifted towards speed, and therefore we should integrate speed in our politics.
Thank you.
Marek Poliks:
I really want to understand the distinction that you draw between analog and digital. Because I'm trying to figure out what your enemy is, a little bit, because digital technology can be a lot of different things and analog technology can be a lot of different things. And if I think about where computation is currently orienting itself, in some sense, it's away from digital technology and towards more analog modes of compute, principally because analog technologies actually transmit more data, right?
The problem with digital technology is that it's digital. By digital, do you mean the compression of information into binary data or do you mean the kind of mobilization of this type of information into something like the internet, which is related to digital technology, but it isn’t in principle a digital technology? Or is your enemy actually computation itself, which can be done obviously, of course, on both analog and digital substrates, but is a kind of super class that contains a lot of things?
Alessandro Sbordoni:
When I was writing notes for this lecture, I was thinking about bringing up this distinction between analog and digital technology and problematize it. For example, that's something that Mark Fisher sometimes brings up, but I was thinking of adding a Derridean approach to it, in which it seems that one is the negation of the other. And I was thinking immediately of some portable calculators, like the Curta, which I think is from the 1950s, which essentially uses a binary system but it’s analog in the sense that it's entirely mechanical. And it's very interesting how this particular technology works, and what are its limitations to make particular operations and so on. And so there are many technological examples which are in between analog and digital, but I would like to draw a distinction on a different level, which is the level in which digital versus analog is part of an ideology. I do not think we should give away so quickly, because it's literally the form of power through which we need to think.
So to come back to what I said before, I'd say that my definition of the digital is definitely the technology that uses a binary system, but is a technology that is able to literally detach its support from its infrastructure. To a certain extent paper also does that, although it’s not binary, because the manufacturing of the paper and the manufacturing of the pen or whatever, is not present at the time of writing. But with digital technology, there is a certain, I would almost say, quantitative definition, as digital technology is able to make a 1000 to 1 proportion between its infrastructure and its final product in a way that analog technology doesn't need to, and doesn't do it, and I think after a certain point there is almost a qualitative shift.
The difference between digital and analog, and the reason why we shifted towards digital is because digital technology is a system that is so simple, that allows you to work on microscopic structures in a way that a lathe machine has some problems with analog machines. And so I think part of our shift towards digital is also being because of this microscopic advantage that digital technology has.
And on the other hand, I'm not looking for hard definitions and I’m very flexible, because I think that this distinction between digital and analog is a definition that, unless it's politicized, tends to favor the control of power. So, for example, we were talking before about the paranoia about surveillance. Why is digital surveillance more dangerous than analog? And I would say that most of the answers are based on prejudice on this distinction. But in fact, it's not radically different. It's just more pervasive, but that also depends. It's partly because we carry the technology with us. So I think the distinction can be problematized, and I like to leave it quite flexible.
And just to conclude on the distinction that Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan make between orality and writing. This has all been constructed 10, 20 years after they wrote it. But I think this brings a certain political strategy in maintaining this almost fallacious distinction.
Alberto Ricca:
Do you feel that this becoming faster and faster of the sharing of information can actually bring back to a sort of orality as a kind of faceless and authorless orality in which the making of new information, some new content—I hate the term, but it’s just to compare—and that becomes more open source in a way than when you actually need to use money to bring the stuff and ship stuff.
Alessandro Sbordoni:
Something else that digital technology is able to do is to phagocytize all other forms of communication. We can have a video call, the form of the message could be considered oral in a video call, but at the same time it’s already integrated in a structure that abides to a different logic. So there is also almost a simulation of orality. I would tend, probably, to think about it in this sense. At the same time, this distinction between orality and writing is really that writing simulates to be different from orality, and orality simulates it...
I don't see myself as a philosopher, and a philosopher would approach this differently. I see these questions more as theoretical or political. So my question would be, politically, what is the best answer to this? And I would say, that probably no orality has been integrated. But you could find some conceptual attunement to the idea of orality.
I prefer to think about it... to force the argument, and maybe make it more hyperbolic and say that it's all been integrated in this tangle like mineral writing. It's a reductionism that I find it's very interesting because that's the type of philosophy that the forms of power are also allowing. It's almost like sympathy with the devil. I like to think in these counterintuitive terms or almost fallacious terms, if they allow you to open up or to remove the veil. And the alternative strategy could be to go just in a totally different direction, and say that orality actually is present, but I find that maybe less seducing as a possibility.
Claire Elise:
Just to build on that point, if I was to think about my understanding of orality coming from Derrida, one thing that they bring up is—and he's talking about Socrate’s approach to writing and to orality, because Socrates was like extremely anti-writing.
And I can say that maybe one thing that I agree that it's a kind of simulation of orality is that maybe the analog word is an interesting thing there, because with Socrates it's very clear that orality is important because it's the “pure being at one with yourself”, because you are listening to yourself at the same time. And there's this kind of vibrational... that you are vibrating, you are vibrating, everybody's vibrating, you are resounding within yourself and coming back out, and there is this kind of very Platonic idea of like being completely at one with yourself when speaking. And I don't know if this has more to do with the fact that he really “hated writing”, and you can read it more that he put an emphasis on orality for various other reasons, including the fact that, you know, he says, “I could never leave my notes lying around because who's going to be there to defend them with me not being present”.
But I'm always curious about, like, whether this is relevant to what you're talking about with the kind of simulation of orality is that like when we speak, all the sound waves, you know, there's this kind of conversion process where your bodily energy is being transformed into vibrations here, and then that's being transferred into rarefaction and compressions of air, and then there's this kind of electrical signal process. I don't know if there is a distinction between those conversions and the conversions that would go through, let's say we introduce a computer and a microphone and we have conversation in a different room. I personally can't work out whether that's important or not, because I am shaking the air, which is shaking your eardrum, the eardrum is communicating electrical signals to your brain. If you put a digital conversion part in there, that could be the distinction between whether or not we're simulating orality, or whether it's a genuine...
Because I really like [Alberto’s point that there's a directness...
Alessandro Sbordoni:
It’s very interesting how Harold Innis makes the distinction between orality and writing in terms of their effects on the political economy of an empire. What he says is this: in an oral society, by which I mean a society which shares its knowledge, its customs, its traditions only orally, what happens is that we cannot store this knowledge. We can store it in organic memory, but we cannot store it in any durable or long-term type of memory. And so what tends to be created, interestingly, is that the hierarchies, for example, in these oral societies, tend to be less stable because to a certain extent it’s difficult to “etch in stone” the social structure. So you could retroactively define orality in this way, which would be deterministic, and you wouldn’t do it. But I find it has an interesting effect, which definitely digital technology does not allow.
Other forms of memory like vegetal memory, which can be ephemeral—there could be a fire in the Library of Alexandria and lose this piece of knowledge forever. But with this decentralized network, we have the impression that this is not the case, and then we make a society based on this... in fact, there could be a solar flare that actually fucks up all the computers in the world, and we live as though this was not the case.
So going back to orality, does orality play a role in our society? I'd say the counter question could be to show me the effects of this orality on the political economy, and it's a bit hard to find them. Even Plato tried to figure out what’s the distinction between writing and orality, and it's two different ways of storing knowledge.
Lain:
Yeah, I’d be curious, you had a thought about speeding up, which for computer technology was observable until a certain point in time, I would say, but it's more or less coming to a halt, which is similar to that whole thing of Mark Fisher that actually the speeding up is the cancellation of the future.
But more interestingly I think is, maybe we should not think about it as something that is speeding up, but as the decreasing distance between points of measurement. And so it's just like a more constant rate of updates. Years ago you would get a software and that’s it, that's the software. Then you start to get some updates, and now you start getting different versions and then it's the alpha 0.01, and it accumulates to this. And it's not developing faster, not at all, it's even slower, I would suggest. But you just get more regularly updates of it...
Alessandro Sbordoni:
... which are maybe meaningless. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, mass production means that you have mass-produced items which are produced in the same way. Imagine doing this in a little shop with your own tools, it’s very difficult, you need machines, which at some point have to become lathe machines, which you need to cut the tools in kind of a standardized way. There is a whole history of the standardization of tool production, which starts from, as far as I know, with the lathe machine, which gets a big jump with the creation of standardized weapons in the 20th century. The Americans realized that having exchangeable standardized parts for every gun was actually an improvement. If a gun broke, you need to have a part that was substitutable and perfectly matched your gun rather than remaking a gun from scratch. And so they invented mass production.
40–50 years later, Ford developed a particular type of lathe machine which augmented the productivity by a factor of two, because they had a lathe machine that was able to cut with a certain amount of precision, which was milimetric or sub-milimetric. And from then, the Ford model of mass production went on, and we get to a point with digital technology, in which we are super-dependent on the miniaturization of technology.
This is for hardware. For software, I'd say that the software tries to catch up with the manufacturing system in this way, but I don't know if you really can, because we don't have lathe machines, it’s just a matter of if you're thinking about a software update, we are talking about updating the code. I’d say that the hardware is really upgrading, and we can even test it with Moore’s Law, because it's kind of an imperative on the market that every 18 months you need to make the new microchip that it's faster than before. And it almost never happens that every 18 months there isn't one. We may be approaching actually a limit, like almost a quantistic limit on the miniaturization of components, but it's still increasing. And with software, yeah, I don't think that's actually true. It could be part of its ideology—I don’t know, yeah, you raise an interesting question.
But I just wanted to say this stuff about miniaturization. And I think when it gets to the invention of the binary system, which is obvious. In fact, I think it was maybe Claude Shannon, or one of these people, who at some point remarked how obvious it’s as a system—to have a binary system of data compression—and how absurd it’s that people didn't come up with it before. And it’s a half truth, people have come up with it before beginning to have the technologies to implement it.