The coils of the serpent

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A short introduction to technologies of control¹

Yet what I felt of dread was no ordinary ghostly fear. It was infinitely greater, stranger, and seemed to arise from some dim ancestral sense of terror more profoundly disturbing than anything I had known or dreamed of. We had “strayed”, as the Swede put it, into some region or some set of conditions where the risks were great, yet unintelligible to us; where the frontiers of some unknown world lay close about us. It was a spot held by the dwellers in some outer space, a sort of peephole whence they could spy upon the earth, themselves unseen, a point where the veil between had worn little thin. As the final result of too long a sojourn here, we should be carried over the border and deprived of what we called “our lives,” yet by mental, not physical, processes. In that sense, as he said, we should be the victims of our adventure—a sacrifice. — Algernon Blackwood²

Technology, through all of human history, has been linked to power, its implementations and management closely related to the opportunistic appropriation of its use. The present age as one where technology pervades all forms of daily life, is no minor occurrence of history, but far rather a fundamental one for the restructuring of humanity’s future, at both the individual but also on a planetary scale. In this way humanity’s ever growing power to change, manipulate, enhance and mutate nature as well as ourselves and our future, as the field where destiny is played out, becomes of upmost importance. As Nietzsche once wrote, man is most responsible for his dreams³, and in the present work dreams are both our point of departure as well as its destination.

Technology and Apparatuses

What is to be done, as Heidegger points out in the beginning of his 1954 work “The Question Concerning Technology’, is building the necessary groundwork, for a free relationship with modern technology, which he believes is in essence a kind of destining, or what he would later in the same text call Enframing. What is at danger, he diagnoses, in said essay, is the human faculty of being able to judge the ontological consequences of the forward march of techno-scientific development and its deployment. The ethical paradox we find ourselves in today, thus is for him such that with our ever growing power over nature, its manipulation and our ability to shape it, we as such are becoming caught up in said process. Elucidating further on the direction of this investigation he writes:

the essence of technology is by no means anything technological. Thus we shall never experience our relationship to the essence of technology so long as we merely conceive and push forward the technological, put up with it, or evade it. Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral; for this conception of it, to which today we particularly like to do homage, makes us utterly blind to the essence of technology.⁴

To get to this essence he unpacks the ancient Greek word τέχνη (techne), from which we inherited our word technology. Heidegger aims to show that for the ancient Greeks there was no distinction between the arts and crafts and the constitutions of technology. In this way both were a type of φύσις (physis), giving birth to⁵, or a making of something emerge from the concealment of it being only a possibility. This he contrast to the brash definition one might give technology, as being a purely goal-oriented and thus anthropocentric activity, a definition inherited from the Latin instrumentum meaning, tool or utensil⁶. In asking what an instrument might be we are drawn to the discussion of getting things done, accomplishing or causing. Heidegger draws our attention to an example of a Christian silver sacrificial chalice and its production. In the classical Aristotelian doctrine of causality the production of said chalice would consist in:

(1) the causamaterialis, the material, the matter out of which, for example, a silver chalice is made; (2) the causa formalis, the form, the shape into which the material enters; (3) the causa finalis, the end, for example, the sacrificial rite in relation to which the chalice required is determined as to its form and matter; (4) the causa efficiens, which brings about the effect that is the finished, actual chalice, in this instance, the silversmith.⁷

In the present case the causa finalis is indebted to both the material silver as, that which provides it its physical properties for use, and on the other hand to the vessels form or εἶδος (edios), which the material takes. Thus this co-responsibility gives the vessels its τέλος (telos), or binds it together as complete, or ready for use. The last part, the silversmith, Heidegger follows cannot be properly understood as one amongst the causes in the Aristotelian doctrine. For him it is the silversmith that through his careful practice gather all the three causes together and thus can make the product come into existence, and reveal itself out of its possibilities⁸. This bringing-forth, he thinks is what has been masked-over in the development of the history of western metaphysics since Plato, or what Derrida would later call metaphysics of presence. For Heidegger what has come to be understood as truth, emerged from the Latin véritas (veritas), and came to overshadow the originary Greek ἀλήθεια (aletheia)⁹, meaning revealing. For him technology was exactly of this sort of revealing for the Greeks before the platonic doctrine took hold, on which the Latin veritas was later based on and came to dominate thought. By way of this he continues to write that:

Technology is therefore no mere means. Technology is a way of revealing. If we give heed to this, then another whole realm for the essence of technology will open itself up to us. It is the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth.¹⁰

This poietic¹¹ character of revealing, and truth production that lies at the heart of the ancient Greeks understanding of technology Heidegger thinks stands at a sharp opposition to the form that modern technology takes at the time of his writing. The physics of the 17th and 18th century, the fundamental bedrock in which all modern forms of technology are based, he holds is fundamentally linked to the creation of apparatuses. This is due to the experimental nature of the investigations of the field, or the fact that it relied on its instruments for measurement and precision¹². What is at work here is the very same truth production, or poiesis (ποίησις) mentioned before. Now the paradigm was such that through conducting repeatable experiments, one could produce wholly empirical truth claims. What Heidegger though was fundamental to this was the ability of instruments to challenge their objects to stand forth and present their properties as accessible¹³. This, in time, transformed in such a manner as to unlock the energy concealed in nature and in so doing render it infinitely storable and sortable¹⁴. He continues that nature when rendered milkable in such a manner, does not reveal itself as φύσις (physis)¹⁵ any more but instead: “The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit.“¹⁶. The process of fitting nature into a mold, thus rendering it distributable and constantly accessible, is what he calls Enframing or Gestell in German. The difference between the old bridge on the Rhine and the new hydroelectric plant build onto it is such that:

That challenging happens in that the energy concealed in nature is unlocked, what is unlocked is transformed. what is transformed is stored up, what is stored up is, in turn, distributed, and what is distributed is switched about ever anew. Unlocking, transforming, storing, distributing, and switching about are ways of revealing. But the revealing never simply comes to an end. Neither does it run off into the indeterminate. The revealing reveals to itself its own manifold interlocking paths, through regulating their course. This regulating itself is. for its part, everywhere secured. Regulating and securing even become the chief characteristics of the challenging revealing¹⁷

A Shift at the Factory

Labour appears, rather, merely as a conscious organ, scattered among the individual living workers at numerous points of the mechanical system; subsumed under the total process of the machinery itself, as itself only a link of the system, whose unity exists not in the living workers, but rather in the living (active) machinery, which confronts his individual, insignificant doings as a mighty organism.¹⁸ — Karl Marx

It can easily be seen how this process in turn is reversed back onto us, and brings about a making of man stand in reserve as a resource as well himself. What we will see later is that general purpose computing, heralded by the universal Turing machine undergrounds not only nature but also social and human relations. The emphasis on control and security here cannot be stressed enough. Anticipations of this, on one hand circular and on another control oriented technological practice, can be found in Karl Marx’ “Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy” an unfinished manuscript later to be reworked into “Capital”. What we find in the Grundrisse, more specifically “The Fragment on Machines”’¹⁹, is Marx quoting Andrew Ure in saying that:

Factory signifies the cooperation of several classes of workers, adults and non-adults, watching attentively and assiduously over a system of productive mechanisms, continually kept in action by a central force (…) excludes any workshop whose mechanism does not form a continuous system, or which does not depend on a single source of power. (…) In its most rigorous sense, this term conveys the idea of a vast automaton, composed of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs operating in concert and without interruption, towards one and the same aim, all these organs being subordinated to a motive force which moves itself. ²⁰

This is exactly the subjection of both man and machine to a larger imposed order, build-up of seamless transition between environments, what Foucault called disciplinary society²¹. Here Marx distinguished this integrated automaton that is the factory, from the traditional means of labor, which were adopted and appropriated by capital. This acceleration of the productive capacities of the factory Marx notes lead:

once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labor passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery (system of machinery: the automatic one is merely its most complete, most adequate form, and alone transforms machinery into a system), set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages. In the machine, and even more in machinery as an automatic system, the use value, i.e. the material quality of the means of labor, is transformed into an existence adequate to fixed capital and to capital as such; and the form in which it was adopted into the production process of capital, the direct means of labor, is superseded by a form posited by capital itself and corresponding to it.²²

The automatic factory and its assembly lines therefore, lacking human agents in any classical sense, radically shift the worker’s relation to the tool. The worker, now subordinated to the machine, does not transmit his activity to the object of his labor, as in the case of the craftsman, but rather this process as such is transposed onto the machine which now transmits its process onto the raw material. In this case the worker is left to supervise the machine, guarding it against interruptions. The machine replaces the worker as the possessor of skills, it becomes the virtuoso of the craft, in the sense of putting together the teleological goals and mechanisms needed to achieve the task at hand²³. In this way the occasioning and responsibility of the craftsman are transposed onto the machine. On the other hand in its consumption of coal, oil, and other fuel, needed to sustain its perpetual work, the machine reflects the needs the worker²⁴. The actions of the machine and how they are brought about is not through the mind of the worker, but rather through the materiality of the machine and its construction, as a alien power, parallel to that of the worker, it is the power of the machinic itself. This power started slowly but surely bleeding out of the enclosed spaces of the past disciplinary societies and into the the public sphere, something that would be greatly accelerated by the coming wars and conflicts. This shift is also what Deleuze holds is the movement from the enclosures of the past disciplinary societies, which acted like molds for the subject to the networked nature of modulations in control society. We will venture now to analyze the specifics of the emergence of some of the most important technologies of control.

Contemporary technics

It is not until the 20th century that we start to see the emergence of specialist weaponry, at this point the act of battle, as noted by many of the German pessimists²⁵, shifted to the more refined tactic of killing²⁶, as contrasted to the chivalrous battles of the past. From this movement Heidegger took much of his language and rhetoric, found in his investigations of the emergent titanic dimensions of technology. About the same time, out of the Dada of Wiemar Berlin emerged the first images of this radical merger of human and machine, the cyborg²⁷. This happened not only in the field of weaponry but in all categories of externalization the human had on offer, sparking many diverse movements from Bauhaus to the roots of Quantum Mechanics.

It was in such an atmosphere that the young mathematician and physics Norbert Wiener joined the Fist World War mobilization of mathematicians and physicists²⁸. His work would go on way into the Second World War, where the young prodigy found his calling working on anti-aircraft predictors. Norbert Wiener, was a founding member of the aptly called “Teleological Society”²⁹ a group devoted to the study of neurology and engineering, later to become the infamous “Macy Conferences”³⁰, a breeding place for many of the ideas that shape technology today³¹. The agenda of the group was the study of “Circular Causality and Feedback Mechanisms in Biological and Social Systems”, from which, 3 years after the establishment of the group³² the term cybernetics³³ emerged. The etymology of the word comes from the ancient Greek κυβερνήτης (kybernḗtēs), to steer or guide well. The question of who or what is steered, holds a rather simple answer that emerges histrionically one way or another: All of conceivable nature us along with it. On the other hand who does the steering is a different question altogether and demands further unpacking.

Later with the help of his friend and sharp ideological opponent John Von Neumann the tradition of cybernetics gained considerable importance as a new multi-disciplinary paradigm. To elaborate further on the topic, one does not have to look more distantly then Wieners work in the 50s. Tasked with the creation of an anti-aircraft predictor, Wiener came up with the fundamental principle of second-order cybernetics: the feedback loop. Due to the high speed of German bombers in World War 2, and on other hand the altitude they flew at, predicting the place of the plane accurately became highly complex³⁴. The development of the closed-loop information system he was tasked with consisted of three tasks: 1. Using radar data to get the position of the dodging plane; 2. Calculating in a non-numeric manner the possibilities of future paths by using the information about their past behavior; and lastly 3. Feeding back the data to the radar so that it corrects itself, repeated in a recursive fashion. The human element in this mechanism is indispensable as he writes:

It does not seem even remotely possible to eliminate the human element as far as it shows itself in enemy behavior. Therefore, in order to obtain as complete a mathematical treatment as possible of the overall control problem, it is necessary to assimilate the different parts of the system to a single basis, either human or mechanical. Since our understanding of the mechanical aspects of gun pointing appeared to us far ahead of our psychological understanding, we chose to try and find a mechanical analogue of the gun pointer and the air plane pilot. In both cases, the operators seemed to regulate their conduct by observing the errors committed in a certain pattern of behavior and by opposing these errors by actions deliberately tending to reduce them…. ³⁵

The human is present in two manners here: On one hand, as the one correcting where the gun is pointed at, using the given information, and on the other as the one giving the information ie. the aircraft pilot, this is the feedback loop, a negative one to be exact as it narrows down on possibilities recursively³⁶. This is where one can see how the history of Enframing is bubbling up from the multi-theatre combat of the Second World War, and is beginning to take the form of control. Philip Mirowski an economist specializing in cybernetics here stresses the informational aspect of this paradigm when he writes how: The physical and the human both had to undergo ontological metamorphosis into a ‘messages with noise’ in order to be combined into a new synthesis.³⁷ This was accomplished by Claude Shannon in his seminal paper on Information Science, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” where he articulates a concise theory of information propagation in systems, something that Wiener had done earlier³⁸ but had not been perfected until Shannon’s work. He developed an average measure of information complexity called entropy³⁹. The smallest unit of entropy he calls a bit, representing a standard probability distribution or more simply put a fair coin toss⁴⁰. In this way one has a manner of quantifying emergent behavior, the example given in the before mentioned paper being the putting together of comprehensive sentences, by quantifying the minimal amount of binary sort operations one need to do to predict said sentence. The Turing machine, the ancestor of these cybernetic systems, is another indispensable element in the development of modern technology and cybernetics. It is a conceptual machine though up by the famous British mathematician Alan Turing in the late 30s. What it consists of is a mechanical head that reads and writes binary symbols onto an infinitely long tape, which can be moved to the left or right. The tape is thus processed by stored translation rules, and in turn produces depending on the given input, an output value for a particular mathematical function. This machine is the logical predecessor to our contemporary personal computers, and is the first single machine which could “compute any computable sequence”⁴¹. The rules of these machines thus could be recorded and provide the possibility of a Universal Turing machine able to deal with all kinds of mathematical operations. Such were the abstract machines that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari reference to in their work, and in the light of these technologies the future of humanity was to be determined.

Deadly Games

John von Neumann, one of the main figures of the Manhattan Project⁴², was another fundamental figure of the cybernetics movement. He was an early and ardent supporter of the military industrial complex as well being one of the main proponents of a preventive attack on the Soviet Union after it tested its first atomic bomb in Kazakhstan. Later, disillusioned by all form of social activism, he developed a mathematic game theory for achieving dominance over economic actors. Neumann a fervent anti-communist, who attended the Atomic Energy Commission in a wheelchair, was the figure to inspire Stanley Kubrick’s famous character Doctor Strangelove⁴³. His work on the mathematical theory of games, would prove indispensable both for economics but also, the American Military to follow after the war. The new atomic threats of the cold war demanded, not the numerical institutional computer of the past⁴⁴, but elaborate game theories based on exact stochastic behavior in limited finite systems. This provided the means to for the first time simulate the unthinkable, lending reality to the tactics and fantasies of generals, businessmen and politicians. Neumann’s work was appropriated by the RAND cooperation which at the time oversaw the research of nuclear weapons and possibilities of mutually assured nuclear destruction. The same cooperation later helped the American Management Organization to translate these military strategies of planning to the market. At this point what was happening is that effectively RAND employees were hired to deal with the logistic of the emerging welfare state out of the conditions of total mobilization⁴⁵.

Cybernetics at this point came to become the ultimate paradigm of control. Brian Holmes a scholar of cybernetics thus writes: “The paradigm expanded thanks to the patronage of the Anglo-American research administrators in the 1940s and 1950s the laboratory shifter its sites of inquiry from the deepest recesses of the mind to the entire range of relations before finally focusing on the most integrated circuit of all the ecosystems.”⁴⁶ This he continues proliferated not only in the realm of the military and the cooperation, but also to social scientists, anthropologist, neurologists, engineers and many more, now furnished by the almost limitless behavioral data provided by the internet.⁴⁷ Cybernetics by the 70s and 80s moved out of the minds of the public and most journals, giving way to its own host of inventions and disciplines⁴⁸. This happen hand in hand with president Roosevelt giving a mandate for the National Defense Research Council of America, charged with organizing 700 universities and research institutes, with the task of the application of science to the efforts of the coming war⁴⁹. The mass accesses of the internet, in the 90s, then finally made it possible for the public to experience the technologies till now developed in military labs⁵⁰, and thus cemented their place is our society. All this provided for cybernetics to become not only the domain of control engineering but also the general model of information manipulation in all dynamic systems, biological or otherwise. This inspired many reiterations of its structural principles in psychiatry, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, political science, genetics, and many other fields. One should not forget the fact that Shannon’s and Wiener’s work on information theory was a decisive influences on the linguistic theories of Roman Jacobson, Claude Levi-Strauss and the young Jacque Lacan. Ultimately the whole movement of French structuralism and post-structuralism cannot be though without the influence of cybernetics and information theory⁵¹. This is too eagerly forgotten even in the light of the fact that Wiener’s Founding book “Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine” was first published in France⁵². By way of these influences, Wieners and many others work, were adopted and rethought, as Holmes continues:

Wiener would speak of cybernetics as the study of communication and control in both the animal and the machine. Today it is difficult to even imagine the prestige that came to surround this model, which promised both a unifying paradigm for the sciences and a formula for their application to the man-machine systems of industrialized society. The age of the world laboratory begins with the ambition to extend the universal model of coded informational loops into every substrate, whether physical or biological.⁵³

So what can be said about being a subject of a cybernetic system today. Deleuze called this new cyborg not an individual but a dividual⁵⁴. Today’s subject is quite different from Foucault’s disciplined and normalized worker of the factory. Whereas for Foucault the individual of disciplinary society was self-governed, the dividuals of control society are always coded in advance, no matter what open space is left for them to act in. Dividuals are people reduced in their ontological status, to data stored and ordered in databases, ready for recombining and use, at the whim of capital. Where the panopticon stood we now have the diagrams of feedback and cybernetic participation. What had happened was that the mechanic regulation of spaces, akin to the disciplinary form of society, shifted control over to the management of information, which was rendered possible by the above mentioned technologies of epistemologising the ontological. Now systems were not the spaces and institutions one passed through seamlessly, but systems “that follow you, so to speak, out the door and into the open.”⁵⁵ Calling these spaces today a laboratory is not anything novel, and there are projects that are for the first time meeting such problems on a new massive scale⁵⁶. But no matter if we take the stance, of on one hand reactionaries like Ted Kazisnky (the Unabomber), or the optimism of the 80s and 90s open system approach, the world laboratory was here to stay, culminating in todays:

database constructions, derived from rich, highly textured information on ranges of individuals that can be recombined in endless ways for whatever purposes. They are the abstract digital producers of data-mining technologies and search engines and computer profiling, and they are profiled digital targets of advertising. insurance schemes and opinion polls. A dividual is a data distribution open to precise modulation, stripped down to whatever information construct is required for : a specific intervention, task or transaction. ⁵⁷

What societies of control thus do, is overcode per-existing belief, making them fluid, able to be modulated and ultimately exploited. This stands in contrast to the stratified and hierarchical ordering of the past disciplinary societies, where now postmodern capital moves through vast distributed global networks of consumer democracies. What global business thus does is make labor more fluid and flexible. The key difference being that now it is not the institutional form but the very mechanical form of the network, which dictates the “limits of control”⁵⁸. Where disciplinary societies modelled individuals, for Deleuze control society modulates them⁵⁹. In this way rather than constituting an individual what is created is the fragmental dividual made accessible and put to stand in reserve. These are the result of a new “dividing practice in politics and society, the practice that distributes information rather than disciplining bodies, and that use networks rather than physical enclosures to separate and distribute functions”⁶⁰. Thus neoliberalism was fast to appropriate this kind of technology, which were to be rapidly adopted to the use of the market economy. Wiener wrote that the value of information one that was — radically different from that of both the time of societies of sovereignty and discipline, was based neither in energy nor matter⁶¹. What he though was, that applying his theories of information to the market, would not result in favorable consequences if the markets themselves were not based on human values to begin with⁶². He anticipated the vast economies of control that would come along with the newly deregulated banking and massive debt escalation, disguised as market populism⁶³. This was the great invention of post-war Keynesian economics, and the emergence of America as the ultimate Keynesian subject. As Deleuze wrote in the “Postscripts on the Societies of Control” now “Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt.”[^49] Here even with all the democratizing power of decentralized networks, such as the internet, real-time market information has been and is still is kept carefully managed and guarded.

Inherent to neo-liberal thought is the idea that such markets can arise anywhere at any time, and that the individuals involved need not be directly interconnected, in this way the markets got deterritorialised from any geographic and social relations, and brought about an absolute merger between the technologies of communication and the market, making it vastly more accessible to economic planning and modulation⁶⁴. We can now see how the consumer came to be the predominant subject of these systems. By way of gentrification of all possible assets of human life, neoliberalism came to adopt the tactic of mass advertisement, flooding the semiotic field of the consumer. As William S. Burroughs put it

No control machine so far devised can operate without words, and any control machine which attempts to so relying entirely on external force or entirely on physical control of the mind will soon encounter the limits of control.⁶⁵

Society thus becomes a vast encoding mechanism, seeking out and overcoding differences and flows of desire⁶⁶. Capital has become such a decoding machine today, for Deleuze and Guattari it is in the pre-capitalist model of disciplinary society in which desire was deconstructed and overwritten, whereas today control leads to a constant modulation of the flow of desire, keeping in perpetual flux. Deconstructing and reshaping desire is by no means anything new, the point here is that it is capitalism that makes it its task, as the end of production. This is not only visible in real estate gentrification, but also in the diversity rhetoric and multiculturalism being co-opted by way of the same tactic, and ending up as marketable brands, thus making anything profitable. By way of this capitalism doesn’t do away with the old codes, but makes them proliferate on vast scales of new variation by deconstruction of the old ones. The shift from disciple to control, signaled not the end of the old codes, but a process of a mass sifting through⁶⁷, with the aim of finding those most fluid and adaptable codes best suited for creating surplus capital in the face of the coming technics of the future.

This is the great power of capitalism to adsorb and co-opt identities and differences. Inclusion thus becomes a slave to overcoding and just another spectacle that is good for business. Slavoj Zizek points this out, as the absolute danger of modern neo-liberalism, the fact that it can present political correctness as the ultimate fix-all, allowing to keep on acting as a part of the system without being interrupted by the violence and poverty it proliferates in the background. For Zizek the in-building or the always-already-compensated-for character of neoliberal production is the perfect blend of action and inaction breeding, a form of passivity where it is possible to not actually take responsibility for changing the world by always already contributing to change trough charity. By way of this criticism, the possibility of questioning as formulated by Heidegger, becomes absolutely disarmed. In turn consequences and the power to take on responsibility is removed altogether. This is exactly the problem of political correctness that renders most of the left today so impotent, and only able to think of small scale emancipation or Temporary Autonomous Zones, as Hakin Bay calls them⁶⁸. This is what Baudrillard called the “securing of the condition of the reproduction of catastrophe market”⁶⁹. War was now not waged against barbaric war mongers but so called agents of hate. This was the appropriation of tolerance America went through after September 11th, a new tactic of war, with its own mythology of a clash of civilizations, in which tolerant neo-liberal capitalism, had to wage war on the world to protect it from itself, in other words the dawn of American interventionism. As Hegel would have put it “Evil resides in the very gaze that perceives evil everywhere around itself”[^xix]. The Iraq war, was to be a new kind of war, as Bush remarked “By god we have kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.”⁷⁰. This syndrome was what French theorist Jean Baudrillard was writing on in his short work “The Gulf War did not Take Place”, referring to the heavy manipulation of imagery presented to the American public, in short a radicalized form of propaganda. What the abolition of this syndrome meant, was that now finally control had mastered the media, the culture industry had won. It was during the Gulf War that many of the public; got exposed for the fist time to the images of high-tech weaponry, and saw the link between information technology and militarization. It is not amazing then that this war was commonly referred to by the public as the Nintendo War. But it wasn’t until September 11th 2001 that the public came to grips with the full reality of the blending of game world and life-world, when the American Air-force was completely caught off guard, as reports of the hijacking came in, the fighter strategically propositioned remained grounded as the same question came over and over, is this real or part of the simulation. The new war thus didn’t have as it enemies only the people of Afghanistan hiding falsely alleged weapons of mass destruction, but the very American citizens themselves. War was waged on the American citizen, employing vast media propaganda, false intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, and of course the beginning of today’s ever growing surveillance state. These politics of full spectrum dominance, or the mixing of propaganda and public relations, presented America with just two shades of opinion that of the “The high gloss computer generated red white and blue of the studios, or the sunless green of the war zone.”⁷¹

In this sense control societies look like a radical version of disciplinary societies, brought into future of the contemporary on-top of the cybernetics technologies we have inherited. This is easy to be seen in the reaction of government agencies to domestic problems in cyber-security[^xx]. Technological neo-capitalism, or cyber-capitalism, doesn’t aim to discipline the body, but the human to the minutest details in behaviors monitored in a cybernetic manner by way of the now coming close to possible direct engineering of the DNA, the molecular structure of the individual. This is exemplified by synthetic biologist Craig Venter and his conception of DNA controlled production⁷². His aim to create artificial life with the power to transcendent Darwinian evolution⁷³. Venter was also an inventor of “shot-gun” method for sequencing of human genomes, faster and cheaper than before, he was the first person to publicly publish his genome⁷⁴. Control thus even down to the micro-biological level today has reached its final frontier:

to transform human society into a distributed bio-network of memetic machines, whose relations nano-technologies can adjust in real time, all in the name of power and money. Decode and deterritorialise enclosure, make it flow. . .⁷⁵

Nagasaki, Japan, before and after the atomic bombing of August 9, 1945. My crop, U.S. National Archives

The Eschatological Dimensions of Our Predicament

“technification” of our being: the fact that today it is possible that unknowingly and indirectly, like screws in a machine, we can be used in actions, the effects of which are beyond the horizon of our eyes and imagination, and of which, could we imagine them, we could not approve this fact has changed the very foundations of our moral existence. Thus, we can become “guiltlessly guilty,”a condition which had not existed in the technically less advanced times of our fathers.⁷⁶— Gunter Anders

This history, thus defined, then is the continuation of the gross misinterpretation of the question of Being. Mortality, for Heidegger, is the condition for time to be actualized as my time. Death in this way, my death, cannot be appropriated by anyone, nobody can die in my place⁷⁷. On the other hand even though I never encounter death before my eventual end (I encounter it only as the death of others, and I will not be there for my own death), it is my absolute inevitable possibility, still to come⁷⁸. By way of death then does time as the possibility of a future become meaningful. How Heidegger distinguishes the human being from other beings, is its fundamental character of being concerned with its own being⁷⁹. Meaning and truth for him therefore are only revealed in the open of temporal existence, making our throwness and its ultimate direction, death, the basis for his fundamental ontology⁸⁰. In the light of this a Gunther Anders ventures to uncovered the phenomenological consequences of the end of the Second World War, in the form of the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (the above picture shows Nagasaki before and after the bomb). At this time, Gunther Anders, one of Heidegger Jewish students was writing ferociously on the two atom bombs that ended the war. Anders’ writing in the 60s focused on the atomic end of the war (the “Encore” to the war as Babette Babich puts it) more-so then his Jewish peers who concentrated on the atrocities of the holocaust. A fringe character of sorts Anders, was a true follower of Heidegger that, as Adorno, did not have much patience for him. For Anders the position of Dasein as the “Shepard of being” was still too Christian in its conception. Far rather for him:

The Shepherd of Being,” that which Heidegger still yet very biblically, that is to say anthropocentrically, suggests whereby he vastly overrates “the position of the human being in the cosmos” (which couldn’t give a damn about whether we continue to exist or have already disappeared), no, we are certainly not “shepherds of being.” Far rather we might consider ourselves the “shepherds of our product and gadget-world” as a world that needs us, more strikingly than we do ourselves, as servants (e.g., as Consumers or possessors).⁸¹

The fact of the two atomic bombs, as posing the possibility of total world annihilation, signs a moment of massive transition where all of us are rendered killable, rather than just finite. In this the, tittle of his two volumes on the “Obsolescence of man”⁸² becomes clear as the obsolescence of Dasein. On this topic Anders invokes Goethe but not his Faust myth, but that of “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’. In talking about the overkill of the two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Anders writes that in the technological situation one finds himself today: “We are incapable of not being able to do what has once been done. It is thus not can-do-ability [Konnen] that we lack, but no-can-do-ability [Nichtkénnen].”⁸³ And is this not our predicament today, in the use of drone warfare as one of many examples of the evolution of mechanized combat, that warfare is conducted, “from agents somewhere, thousands of kilometers distant from us, following orders in accord with duty, or indeed through brainless and sightless machines, that have long since been emancipated from the hands and the intentions of their creators and user” ⁸⁴

Following the same line of thinking, his teacher, Heidegger remarked that farming and agriculture, for example, now have turned into a motorized food industry, and are thus in essence the same as the production and use of weapons”⁸⁵. This his student follows, when talking about eschatological dimension of the atomic era as being a naked apocalypse when he remarked that:

Hundreds of thousands die en masse. Do they die? They succumb. They are done in. Do they die? They become mere quanta, items in an inventory in the business of manufacturing corpses. Do they die? They are liquidated inconspicuously in extermination camps. And even apart from that, right now millions of impoverished people are perishing from hunger in China. But to die is to endure death in its essence. To be able to die means to be capable of this endurance. We are capable of this only if the essence of death makes our own essence possible.⁸⁶

What this capacity for overkill show more than anything else for Anders is the fact that if an apocalypse is to come it will be not by chance or accident, but by design. The vastness of this possibility, Anders tried to convey in his correspondence with the Claude Eatherly, the weather reconnaissance pilot, tasked with giving the go-ahead for the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima. He called Eatherly to widen his comprehension of this event “until imagination and feeling become able to comprehend and to realize the enormity of your doings.”⁸⁷ As Babette Babich points out quoting Anders in his correspondence with Eatherly, today in the face of the possibilities of total devastation:

The door in front of us bears the inscription “Nothing will have been”and from within: “Time was an episode.”’Not however as our ancestors had hoped, between two eternities; but one between two nothingnesses; between the nothingness of that which, remembered by no one, will have been as though it had never been, and the nothingness of that which will never be.⁸⁸

She continues recalling Christ on the Cross, that in the same way, as Nietzsche writes, he hung there, asking us for forgiveness as we his murderer have become guiltlessly guilty⁸⁹. To continue the Nietzschean thread, if we are the steersmen of the unchained earth, plunging continually into the infinite nothing of space⁹⁰, our guiltlessly guilty position becomes a quite nightmarish one in the face of technological development of control. This for Heidegger is the ultimate danger of technology, the fact that with our ever-growing mastery over it, and in turn its power to determine our future, to destine us⁹¹, our capacity to question it, is ever diminishing. Anders tried to convey this to Eatherly when he is talking about the Nietzschean conception of time as an episode. For Anders the new radical dimension of the nightmares of the cotemporary world, marks a point in history where we have reached new radical possibilities of the forgetting of being (Seinsvergessenheit), the end of time (zeit-zu-enden), or in other words the obsolescence of historicity. This condition as Babette Babich puts it nicely is “what it means for all of us, to accept the designation of banal evil as a descriptor for all us, every one of us a son of Eichmann, Hiroshima everywhere.”⁹²

The Sleep of Reason Produces Terrible Monsters

To take the wheel then is to take hold of our dreams. Jean-Pierre Dupuy, draws our attention to this analogy of dreams, in talking about how Israeli scientists were successful in “bring(ing) biology to self-assemble an electronic device is a test tube. (..)” In this way he continues to say: “The DNA serves as a scaffold a template that will determine where the carbon nanotubes will sit. That’s the beauty of biology.”⁹³ The dream here is obvious by way of the verb self-assemble, its to capture the self-organizing (auto-poietic) properties of the living organism, or to enframe them in Heideggerian terms. In connection with this Dupuy brings our attention to Goya’s famous engraving El sueño de la razón produce monstruos⁹⁴, where “suefio” is ambiguously translatable from Spanish as either “The sleep” or “The dreams of reason produces monsters’. We have seen that these dreams of reason, if left unchecked, can become nightmarish fantasies of control. But as Heidegger himself notes in quoting Friedrich Hölderlin there “where the danger is, also grows the saving power.”⁹⁵. lf we are to move beyond being reactionary or blindly optimistic, what Dupuy is critiquing in his essay, we must find a way to dream better. The way to this might be found in the work of Gilles Deleuze, when he writes:

The technocrat is the natural friend of the dictator—computers and dictatorship; but the revolutionary lives in the gap which separates technical progress from social totality, and inscribed there his dream of permanent revolution. This dream, therefore, is itself action, reality, and an effective menace to all established order; it renders possible what it dreams about.⁹⁶

Both discipline and control are not in themselves the issue here, as Heidegger wrote “There is no demonry of technology, but rather there is the mystery of Its essence. The essence of technology, as a destining of revealing, is the danger.’⁹⁷. The danger being the link of social-technical assemblages, like the capitalist means of production, and deterritorialized, decoded environments such as the non-capitalist modes of consumption. In connection to this danger Wiener writes that:

This thing will come as an earthquake the impact of the thinking machine will be shock certainly of a comparable order of the of the atomic bomb. The machine is not frightening because of any danger that it might achieve autonomous control over humanity. Its real danger is the quite different one that such machines though quite helpless by themselves may be used by a human being or a block of human beings to increase their control over the rest of the human race. by means not of machines themselves , but trough technique as narrow and indifferent to human possibility as if they had in fact been conceived mechanically.⁹⁸

For Giorgio Agamben, the contemporary state governs the individual as βίος (Bios) and ζωή (Zoe) separately (distinguished as two form of life by the ancient Greeks), this he calls beastialisation of man. The cotemporary nation state thus comes to have a vested interest in its subject life, defining itself by way of its population rather than territory, in other words the birth to bio-power⁹⁹. The subject of the state thus given political life only by his citizenship, can be rendered killable if it is taken away. This birth of Thanato-Politics is something that brings to importance why the Nazis fist took away Jewish citizenship¹⁰⁰, before proceeding with their plan. The device states use for this expulsion is the state of emergency, something refugees, prisoners and increasingly slum-dwellers find themselves in today. This is implemented on the normal citizen as well, by way of violent militarized protest suppression. Control is thus in the Heideggerian register, the mechanism that divides life into bios and zoe, which cannot be split for him in the case of Dasein. Thus if control, in its cybernetic incarnation de-humanizes Dasein, then its manner of use becomes of upmost importance. This new relation of the two manners of life can be mapped onto Heidegger’s understanding of Dasein’s essence as lying in its existence. History being as it is, does not give any more orignary position, before this split, what we have to orient ourselves to is the new relation that control introduces to it. And this is the importance all thinking thus mentioned wants to bring our attention to, namely that what is at stake in the way of life is life itself. The overreaching climate of all of this is one of fear and greed, which brings with itself its own need for security and defense. But as Marx writes in the preface to the Grundrisse:

Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production.¹⁰¹

In light of the historic line presented in this work, it is easy to slip into thinking that all thus far outlined a shows a generalized servitude under the capitalism’s constant development, reorganization, mutation and weaponization of societal assemblages. But it cannot be denied that the new emergent global means of communication, provides not only for appropriation by destructive and restrictive forces but also the potential for liberation. These technologies albeit providing for the immense fracturing of the social body into endless identity politics non-issues also cuts across all these categories providing a platform for very progressive form of equality. Revolution on any scale today then can only exist, by way of the collapse of the gap between technological and social forces, “between computers and dictatorship, between our panoptic infrastructure and our militarized consciousnesses”¹⁰².

Conclusion: Waking Up

A dream, a new world vibrates between the whole of social existence and our infrastructure, the chaotic plumbing churning beneath and around us.¹⁰³

It is in the wake of all of this that the contemporary political paradigm of Accelerationism is trying to articulate itself. Marx in his own right was a reformer, not advocating for capital per-se, but the fact that it on its own was more progressive then other forms of sovereignty to come before it. Therefore one cannot deny that control today in the guise of integrated world capitalism, is more progressive then the direct exploitation of disciplinary societies of the past, in other words there is no turning back if we are believers in the ideal of progress. The question today ultimately is if capitalism can be decoupled from its technics and “can the codes programming our planetary abstractions be decoupled from dictatorial social forms of control?¹⁰⁴

This is the question that stands today at the heart of issue of articulating a left Accelerationism. Can such an Accelerationism truly crate socialist information technology⁶⁴ that can rival the capitalist one, creating a red stack, as proposed by Yanis Varoufakis, that could equalize financial capital and organize the left’s capacity for futurological analysis”¹⁰⁵, is somethings yet to be seen. The use of networks in art, practices like file-sharing, hacking, encryption, the use of proxies for anonymity, pod-casting, denial of service attacks, open-source application development, along with more traditional methods like refusal to use networks, unplugging, and so on, are just some of the plethora of ways to resist information control. Just as there is no universal form of control, there is no universal mode of resistance. to control, and thus what is demanded is an active deconstruction and appropriation.

This is becoming more so a necessity, with the growing nightmarish right-ward drift of Accelerationism, best exemplified by Curtis Yarvin. This movement calls itself “The Dark Enlightenment” is one based in a natural affinity to the above mentioned arborescent and dictatorial tendencies[^xix] present in the history of these technologies, and has an absolute eagerness of taking them on-board. Again we find ourselves dealing with the Heideggerian predicament of danger and responsibility. The distance that we need to gain here, what this essay tries to accomplish, to be able to stop seeing the Zizekian “blot” and get to the heart of the problem, is exactly what Heidegger meant by the task of thinking. With the rise of the billionaire reading hard-right Accelerationism and leaning towards hyper-secessionism, we again see the shadow of micro-fascism, in the lack of public control over profiting industrialist that are tinkering with life¹⁰⁶. This is problem that has plagued this line of social though from Heidegger to Ted Kaczynski¹⁰⁷ and makes our nightmares are as vivid as always. The computer war machine has to be decoupled from the state apparatus and its totalizing and fragmenting stratification of desire, to render visible the chaotic and violent character of mechanized world integrated capitalism. This has to be done by acceleration of the process of moving these fundamental decision about technology into the public sphere, where their inevitable effect are, and out of the private one where they are defined now.

Slavoj Zizek here sees a resuscitation of what is truly the most worth saving element of liberalism. He suggest that we should take the extra step, by seeing that cotemporary liberalism is technically creating its own enemy, and to move beyond it. In this way our nightmares shouldn’t be the limits we set ourselves, and thus be left only as unfaced symptoms. Facing up to the thus far presented history and not recoiling in the face of possible disaster then will be what dictates the form that Accelerationism articulates itself into[^xx].

The problem that stops today’s Accelerationism from taking up its rightful place as a new and rightfully modern movement is one that has plagued this line of though on technology, It is the Promethean shame Dupuy talks about, recounting Anders thinking on self-enhancement and consumerism. This idea based in Heidegger’s lecture on Nietzsche holds that, the line drawn by the fact that we are born and not produced should not be crossed. Here for Heidegger Nietzsche’s Ubermensch is the culmination of self-enhancement and ultimately western metaphysics¹⁰⁸. Gestell then becomes, in the de-subjectivised world, the only left reason for meaningfulness. Put in other words the will-to-power comes to dominate the world for Heidegger, through the Nietzschean collapse of Kantian manifold¹⁰⁹. If we take Science thus to be collapsing transcendental categories more and more into the properties of substance, then what Heidegger is saying Is that we should be weary of this, especially after the history we have thus presented.

Nietzsche here is a strong accelerationist himself when he writes ‘the levelling process of European man is the great process which should not be checked: one should even accelerate it’’¹¹⁰. And it is here where Heidegger departs from Nietzsche and falls into the a reactionary hole¹¹¹, of thinking that this end is a failure or disaster instead of a logical and long awaited conclusion. If one follows the Nietzschean line to its rightful end, then where one will find himself is that we need to take the wheel of our planet that has been unchained from the sun. And if we have slept and it has plunged into infinite nothing¹¹² away from the sun during this time, then we should take on our cybernetic heritage and steer it well and deep into the abyss. In this way the revolutionary today can only escape the nightmare and truly dream by collapsing the gap between techne and socious, and taking responsibility upon himself. What this essay suggest is that if the left has any hope then it lies in reconciling itself with the recent history of control, and taking upon itself the ultimate burden of the consequences of technology, not as failure but as a responsibility over the future. What it would be like, to wake-up form this nightmare of control is yet to be seen but if one thing is for certain, that has been proven historically that is, as Gilles Deleuze wrote, that today:

“There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons”¹¹³

List of figures:

In order as found in document:

1. Diagram of Wieners work from John R Pierce, An Introduction To Information Theory (New York: Dover Publications, 1980).p.212
2. Screenshot from taken and cropped from the film Metropolis, Fritz Lang (1927). Karl Freund, Gunther Rittau, Walter Ruttmann (cinematograpers)-Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Foundation one of the fist movies to feature a fully fleshed out cyborg character.
3. Diagram of a negative feedback loop from C. E. SHANNON, A Mathematical Theory of Communication,Reprinted from The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 27, pp. 379-423, 623-656, July, October, 1948.
4. Ibid.
5. Screenshot take from Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb by Stanley Kubrick
6. Nagasaki, Japan, before and after the atomic bombing of August 9, 1945. My crop, U.S. National Archives : RG 77-MDH (according to William Burr, The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 162) Nagasaki
7. Francisco Goya, Spanish: Capricho Ne 43: El suefio de la razon produce monstruos English: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, Etching, aquatint (Los Caprichos - Google Art Project, 1796-1798).

References and Endnotes