Maps of the Megamachine | Part I | Agency
Part I of XI
Even now, perhaps a majority of our countrymen still believe that science and technics can solve all human problems. They have no suspicion that our runaway science and technics themselves have come to constitute the main problem the human race has to overcome.
— Lewis Mumford, Findings and Keepings (1975)
Lewis Mumford’s technics. Jacques Ellul’s technique. Gilbert Simondon’s technicity. Alfred Gell’s technology. Neil Postman’s technopoly. William Henry Smyth’s technocracy.
All heads of the same Hydra, which will be beheaded and biopsied in due course.
I. Prologue
On paper, Lewis Mumford was a twentieth-century historian of technology. In spirit, however, to a Whitmanesque degree, the man contained multitudes; to some an “accidental historian,” to others a “prophet of doom.”ᶦ ᶦᶦ It was a multeity perhaps best epitaphed by Mumford himself, who embraced his purpose and endured his perception as “that terrible fellow who keeps on uttering the very words you don’t want to hear, reporting the bad news and warning you that it will get even worse unless you yourself change your mind and alter your behavior.”ᶦᶦᶦ
One would do well not to be rushed to judgement by the moniker of “twentieth-century historian of technology,” however. For while the two volumes of The Myth of the Machine were published in 1967 and 1970, the theoretical foundations laid therein have stood the test the time; Parthenonic, Pyramidal.
“Indeed,” writes Zachary Loeb, “when it comes to the ‘digital’ turn, it is a ‘turn’ in the road that Mumford saw coming.”ᶦᵛ Eerily, considering Mumford died long before social media and ecommerce conquered the zeitgeist, much of The Myth of the Machine could have been written yesterday. There are some parts of the book, however, which could have been written tomorrow: namely, Mumford’s variations on the theme of “the megamachine.” Hence, the titular character of this series, whose silhouette will define, delineate and drift across the maps that follow.
But where to begin? How does one even begin to map something so abstract and ambiguous?
Well, a good place to begin is where the mapmaker ends—perhaps the most Daedalion line of all.
The way we use a hammer or a blind man uses a stick shows that in both cases we shift outward the points at which we make contact with things outs
— Michael Polanyi, Knowing and Being (1969)
To say nothing of technologies that shift inward, pouring themselves into us.
II. Dataism
Throughout the years, theorists have studied the coevolution of humanity and technology through a number of conceptual frames: agency,ᵛ autonomy,ᵛᶦ morality,ᵛᶦᶦ the right to privacy,ᵛᶦᶦᶦ the right to dignity,ᶦˣ the right to be forgotten,ˣ the list goes on. Increasingly, however, as software continues to eat the world,ˣᶦ and society becomes less definable by the values of the Enlightenment than the varieties, velocities, veracities and volumes and values of Big Data,ˣᶦᶦ the epistemic foundations upon which one can rest any concept or category are becoming vanishingly rare.
Living within an age of quanta, which has deterritorialized and decontextualized the traditional qualia of space and time, the cognitive and behavioural grounds of words such as ‘autonomy’ and ‘privacy’ are beginning to show signs of erasure; fading, to paraphrase Michel Foucault, like concepts drawn in sand at the end of the sea.ˣᶦᶦᶦ
It is with such a caveat that Shoshana Zuboff begins The Age of Surveillance Capitalism; noting that, despite the need to protect the likes of privacy, “the existing categories nevertheless fall short in identifying and contesting the most crucial and unprecedented facts of this new regime.”ˣᶦᵛ Reviewing the book for The Baffler, Evgeny Morozov adds ‘capitalism’ to the list, suggesting Surveillance Dataism as a more incisive title and theme.
Indeed, when one adopts the datum as the fundamental unit of analysis, the downstream effects of the Zuboffian “behavioral surplus”ˣᵛ begin to converge with those of a critical tradition that runs from the least capitalistic sectors of societyˣᵛᶦ to the less capitalistic corners of the world.ˣᵛᶦᶦ From such a vantage point, surveillant capitalists become reframed, less as players than as pawns in a larger, longer game of behavioural chess; one taking place far below and beyond anthropic principles, human rights and sociohistorical isms.
It is a game—or game-theoretic scenario—whose dimensions have outgrown the all-too-human framings of Julien Benda’s trahison des clercs, Alfred Chandler’s managerial revolution, Aaron Bastani’s luxury communism, and Shoshana Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism: all of which fail to give a full account of the acceleratingly nonlocal, nonlinear and nonconscious side of living as—and amongst—agents.
III. Agency
Like technology, ‘agency’ is something of a Hydra: not only slippery, but many-headed. Relative to many other concepts and categories, however, agency has remained more constant than variable. Rooted in the physical world, the word has come to occupy rarefied ground for the study of complex systems, for ‘agency’—as well as the ‘agents’ thereof—encompasses the full range of human and technological decision-making.
On the one hand, you and I are agents of humanity, and we consult our human agency to carve our own path through life. On the other, you and I are agents of technology, for we consult our nonhuman agency—our automations, our algorithms, our choice architectures, et cetera—to carve a path on our behalf.
To this day, many theorists write of ‘agency’ in terms of ‘autonomy,’ and vice versa. In the eighth edition of Principles of Biomedical Ethics, for instance, Tom L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress open with a section dedicated to autonomy: “The principle of respect for the autonomous choices of persons runs as deep in morality as any principle.”ˣᵛᶦᶦᶦ ‘Autonomy’ and ‘autonomous choice’ are not strictly synonymous, however, for the very act of choosing autonomy as a principle worthy of respect can be traced back to two essential conditions: liberty—independence from controlling influences—and agency—capacity for intentional action.ˣᶦˣ
Of the two—at least wherever questions of humans or humanity are concerned—agency appears to run the deeper: for having independence without intentionality seems rather like having freedom of movement, but nowhere to go; freedom of association, but nobody to meet; freedom of speech, but nothing to say.
In the past, according to W. Ross Ashby, the study of complex systems has been hampered by “our not paying sufficient attention to the environmental half of the process.”ˣˣ In focusing on agency, a concept with a rich cybernetic and organismic history, the forthcoming series will redress this lack by attempting to redirect attention back along the hyphen of the self-system (or man-machine) model. For unlike such concepts as autonomy and privacy, which tend to revolve around high-level conceptualizations of selfhood and society, agency can and does ride the conceptual elevator up and down a variety of levels, which range from pure behaviour (manpower; force majeure) to pure cognition (willpower; esprit de corps).
In the eyes of social psychologist Philip Zimbardo, agency constitutes the foundation of individualism and individualization.ˣˣᶦ Albert Bandura, on the other hand, a more sociocognitive psychologist, conceptualizes agency as a spectrum of behaviour that often transcends the individual, oscillating between direct personal agency, proxy agency and collective agency.ˣˣᶦᶦ Descending the ladder of abstraction, Cristiano Castelfranchi has tended to tackle agency at the level of ‘the agent,’ which the Italian computer scientist defines as any system—human or nonhuman, subhuman or superhuman—whose behaviour is neither strictly casual nor strictly causal, but goal-oriented toward a certain state of the world.ˣˣᶦᶦᶦ
In The Screwtape Letters—a novel that explores the moral framework of Christianity—C. S. Lewis writes of how courage is not simply a virtue, but the virtue: the spine of every virtue at its testing point.ˣˣᶦᵛ With respect to the following essays, agency will function as the decisional equivalent: the spine of every choice—to do this, to believe that—when push comes to nudge.
IV. Epilogue
Though contemporary definitions abound, midway through the first volume of The Myth of the Machine, Mumford describes his twentieth-century view of “the megamachine” as:
…an invisible structure composed of living, but rigid, human parts, each assigned to his special office, role, and task, to make possible the immense work-output and grand designs of this great collective organization.ˣˣᵛ
The ziggurats of Mesopotamia, the pyramids of Egypt, the basilicas of Rome: all are archaeological evidence of megamachines gone by, writes Mumford, stressing the fact that the soft and sleek nature of our megamachine—digitalized, datafied, decentralized—is not evidence of its weakness, but its strength.
In the essays that follow, Amazon will serve as a metonym for the megamachine of present-day: a part that represents the whole. Yet, despite being painted in a largely critical light, Amazon is neither alone nor (always) at fault for many of megamachinic cracks that are laid bare, for these are cracks that exceed the masonic abilities of even the most ruthless of entrepreneurs, the most unscrupulous of capitalists, the most paperclip maximizer-esque of booksellers.
And so, to end: two quotations from two paperback maximizers, which suitably bookend the Faustian pact of our time.
The Promise
The human soul and its frontiers, the compass of human inner experience in general attained hitherto, the heights, depths and distances of this experience, the entire history of the soul hitherto and its still unexhausted possibilities: this is the predestined hunting-ground for a born psychologist and lover of the ‘big-game hunt. But how often must he say despairingly to himself: ‘one man! alas, but one man! and this great forest and jungle!’ And thus he wishes he had a few hundred beaters and subtle well-instructed tracker dogs whom he could send into the history of the human soul and there round up his game.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
The Threat
As a matter of fact, if ever there shall be discovered a formula which shall exactly express our wills and whims; if there ever shall be discovered a formula which shall make it absolutely clear what those wills depend upon, and what laws they are governed by, and what means of diffusion they possess, and what tendencies they follow under given circumstances; if ever there shall be discovered a formula which shall be mathematical in its precision, well, gentlemen, whenever such a formula shall be found, man will have ceased to have a will of his own—he will have ceased even to exist.
— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground (1864)
Be a hero…
Be a god…
References
ᶦ Rosalind Williams, “Lewis Mumford as a Historian of Technology in Technics and Civilization,” in Lewis Mumford: Public Intellectual, eds. Thomas P. Hughes & Agatha C. Hughes( New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 228.
ᶦᶦ Howard P. Segal, “The Cultural Contradictions of High Tech: or the Many Ironies of Contemporary Technological Optimism,” in Technology, Pessimism, and Postmodernism, eds. Yaron Ezrahi, Everett Mendelsohn & Howard P. Segal (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), 149.
ᶦᶦᶦ Lewis Mumford, My Work and Days: A Personal Chronicle (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1979), 528.
ᶦᵛ Zachary Loeb, “From Megatechnic Bribe to Megatechnic Blackmail: Mumford’s ‘Megamachine’ After the Digital Turn,” Boundary2, 30 July 2018. https://www.boundary2.org/2018/07/loeb.
ᵛ Albert Bandura, “Growing Primacy of Human Agency in Adaptation and Change in the Electronic Era,” European Psychologist, Vol. 7, No. 2 (2002).
ᵛᶦ Bruno Latour, “Morality and Technology: The End of the Means,” Theory Culture & Society, Vol. 19, No. 5-6 (2002).
ᵛᶦᶦ Langdon Winner, “Engineering Ethics and Political Imagination,” in Broad and Narrow Interpretations of Philosophy of Technology, ed. Paul T. Durbin (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990).
ᵛᶦᶦᶦ Samuel D. Warren & Louis D. Brandeis, “The Right to Privacy,” Harvard Law Review, Vol. 4, No. 5 (1890).
ᶦˣ Rex D. Glensy, “The Right to Dignity,” Columbia Human Rights Law Review, Vol. 43 (2011).
ˣ Jeffrey Rosen. “The Right to Be Forgotten,” Stanford Law Review, Vol. 64 (2011).
ˣᶦ Marc Andreessen, “Why Software Is Eating The World,” The Wall Street Journal, 20 August 2011. https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460.
ˣᶦᶦ Hakan Özköse, Emin Sertaç Arı & Cevriye Gencer, “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow of Big Data,” Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, No. 195 (2015), 1043.
ˣᶦᶦᶦ Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1973), 387.
ˣᶦᵛ Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (New York: PublilcAffairs, 2019), 2019.
ˣᵛ Ibid., 8.
ˣᵛᶦ Zeynep Tufekci, “Engineering the Public: Big Data, Surveillance and Computational Politics,” First Monday, 2 July 2014. https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4901/4097.
ˣᵛᶦᶦ Kai Strittmatter, We Have Been Harmonized (New York: HarperCollins, 2020).
ˣᵛᶦᶦᶦ Tom L. Beauchamp & James F. Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 57.
ˣᶦˣ Lav R. Varshney, “Respect for Human Autonomy in Recommender Systems,” arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.02603 (2020), 1.
ˣˣ W. Ross Ashby: quoted in Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 105.
ˣˣᶦ Philip Zimbardo, “The Human Choice: Individuation, Reason, and Order Versus Deindividuation, Impulse, and Chaos,” in Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, eds. William J. Arnold & David Levine (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1969), 305.
ˣˣᶦᶦ Albert Bandura, “Social Cognitive Theory: An Agentic Perspective,” Asian Journal of Social Psychology, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1999), 33.
ˣˣᶦᶦᶦ Cristiano Castelfranchi, “Guarantees for Autonomy in Cognitive Agent Architecture,” in International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages, eds. Michael J. Wooldridge & Nicholas R. Jennings (Berlin: Springer, 1994), 57.
ˣˣᶦᵛ C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1942), 161.
ˣˣᵛ Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine, Vol. 1: Technics and Human Development (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1967), 189.