Digital Existence by Lagerkvist Amanda;

Author:Lagerkvist, Amanda;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

6

Surveillance, sensors, and knowledge through the machine

Sun-ha Hong

Proliferation

Digital existence today is to live amidst a bewildering proliferation of data and data-emitting machines. The pattern of their appearance to human subjects is hyperobjective (Morton 2013). Seemingly ubiquitous in their vast distribution, these new technologies instantiate in innumerable local objects – a branded platform, a piece of hardware, a function – without being reducible to them. The modern word technology was itself born out of the sentiment that a new and broader system was emerging (Marx 2010). Today, as we will see, Silicon Valley bestows the newest predictive technologies totalising descriptions like the ‘technium’ (Kelly 2010) or the ‘planetary nervous system’ (Hernandez 2012). The corollary is that this expansive imaginary increasingly overshoots the phenomenological purview of the human subject. A constellation of black boxes, dramatic visualisations, collective fantasies and individual material tool-relations – each of these objects constantly put us in touch with the ever-expanding technological landscape, but in doing so, they further impress our inadequacy in grasping this ubiquitous non-human pulse, flow, hum.

This sense of excess is reflected in contemporary descriptions of life in the new media society as paranoia (Majaca 2016), sleepless fatigue (Crary 2013; Han 2010), a manic obsession with patterns (Steyerl 2016) and conspiracies (Andrejevic 2013) … in short, a subject driven to hyperactivity whilst constantly afflicted with anxiety about what is beyond its grasp. Yet it is also the same excess that animates the seductive promise that new technologies will augment human knowability in unprecedented ways. Proliferation under-girds both the uncertainty around informational excess and the fantasy of unprecedented predictive and calculative capacity.

Much of these hopes and fears revolve around the project of human knowing – a relation to the world that was elevated to a defining duty and capacity of the Enlightenment subject (e.g., Dean 2001). But to ‘know’ amidst the digital swarm is less a question of firm evidence possessed by the rational individual than a collective investment into deferred and simulated heuristics. Wittgenstein (1969) identified the curious masking work performed by the innocuous phrase, ‘I know this is a tree’: to say so does not establish any comprehensive or objectively certain ground for my knowledge. Rather, it expresses my commitment to treat the proposition as no longer requiring such proof, and thereby use it itself as ground for other statements and actions (say, my decision to fell it for lumber). To say we ‘know’ about new technologies, or about the world and ourselves through new technologies, therefore expresses our ability to keep up with the flow of machinic emissions, and to produce and justify socially ‘sufficient’ ground for judgment and action.

This chapter examines the ways in which the generalised condition of data proliferation is rewiring the relation of knowing at a phenomenological level. The question here is not whether we know ‘more’ or ‘less,’ but how knowing as human subjects’ mode of relating to the world out there is being reconfigured through new digital technologies as both the problem (of proliferation) and the solution (of data-driven predictivity).

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