(2019-07-09) Shorin Desire For Full Automation

Toby Shorin: The Desire for Full Automation. While relational agency is crucial to understand, as a species we obviously cannot just return to animism, because we no longer have the naïvety of our historical youth. We do not exist in an optionless world. Our job in the coming centuries is to reconcile this view with our scientism and humanism.

These two words (full automation) usually come attached to another pair: “luxury communism.” Originally proposed by Aaron Bastani, the phrase’s popularity was compounded by the release of Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ 2015 book Inventing the Future. Intentionally or not, “fully automated luxury communism” has become the calling card of left accelerationism, the basic political stances of which I will now briefly rehearse.

What does “fully automated” mean, and what can we learn about the desire for “full automation?”

They argue that technology and science has been enslaved to capitalist objectives, and that this scenario must be reversed: capital must be subordinated to a technoscientific political project, such as that imagined in the famous Chilean governance initiative Cybersyn.

Yet this particular strain of political imagination has fallen under critique from both ends of the spectrum. Nick Land critiques left accelerationism from the right, on the basis that it represents a sort of self-deceit in which we convince ourselves there is an engine of acceleration and growth beyond capital itself. Can a self-reinforcing cybernetic system of technocapital really be made beholden to ideological ends? Land answers this question in the negative.

In both critiques, it is human capability, human liberation, human autonomy that is at stake when “full automation” is invoked. This is crucial to understand. It is a question of agency—what we are able to do under technocapital, and what we are able to do without it. It is this question I want to explore today

The idea of left accelerationism is that with full automation, we will no longer be slaves to this system of technocapital

We will, in essence, gain agency, whereas now we are merely agents of capital

This is precisely what Nick Land gets at in his interview linked above: “what the left means by emancipation is freedom from capital autonomization.” But would this really be agentive? Or what kind of agency would it actually be?

I have adapted this chart from Vitalik Buterin's 2014 taxonomy of organizations and their relationship to automation. Vitalik’s original chart features DAOs (DACs) and dapps; I’ve kept same the axes but replaced the contents with systems of production, so it now maps humans’ relationship to technology and capital

On the bottom left, humans are the engine of production, but aided by light automation. On an individual level, automation at the edges could be considered to be tools, but at scale it is closer to a Fordist system of assembly line production. Left accelerationists do not want a return to Fordism/Taylorism, “where workers received security and a basic standard of living in return to a lifetime of stultifying boredom and social repression” (Srnicek et al, 2013). Instead, the argument is to put automation at the center: to build a system that can deterministically create wealth and reduce work.

Yet such a system would only have an understanding of humans as a subject that consumes the goods and services it produces. It would render humans necessary only insofar as we produce demand. And in a sense, this is what capital already is. It’s certainly what evolution is.

left acceleration presents a paradox

This paradox arises from a specific historical construal of agency, one which Westerners are largely under the influence of today. This conceptualization of agency has, in my view, at least three principles.

Agency is something that humans possess. To express it, we must free ourselves from various limitations

Mankind is the sole possessor of agency; nature is inert and we must reshape it to suit our needs.

Meaning exists in our minds, rather than in things.

All of these conceptualizations are not just about agency, they are clearly important to what it means to be human

for many years, I had a kind of fixation on agency, on a personal level

With my psychologist, many things we discussed were channeled through a framing of “things I wanted to do” and both interior and exterior “obstacles to those things.”

I resented authority figures, and needed to feel “maximal mastery” in a work setting, leading to conflicts with bosses, and later the sweet release of precarious self-employment

Recently, I’ve been reading Charles Taylor’s book A Secular Age.

we have not always lived this way.

In Renaissance and medieval society, we lived with another agency, or rather an agent: a super-agent, called God

In this enchanted world, objects and spirits had real causal power, their own form of agency. And go back even further than medieval Europe, to traditional human tribes, and we find an even more “animated” world, where there’s not just one God figure but many gods and a natural spirit in everything

what if our desire for full autonomy is not a desire for “maximal mastery and total liberation, but the desire for limited agency? The desire to live once again in a naïve state of belief, one in which we are not paralyzed by optionality?

Here’s that chart once more. It’s the same axes, but instead of automated technological systems, in this new version, the nonhuman agency is the divine.

This view of full automation helps explain the current cultural obsession with the medieval and the popular revival of magick

But isn’t it bad to return to this era of magical thinking? Wouldn’t we be deceiving ourselves about what is possible if we start talking to trees?

with recent developments in the humanities and in physics, some cracks in this modern understanding of agency are starting to show

Designers in the crowd may already be familiar with James Gibson’s ecological approach to visual perception

Gibson’s theory of affordances suggests that our meanings are not just in our minds, but created in relation to other entities, inanimate and animate. A two-humped camel affords being sat on.

they go beyond our everyday anthropocentric view of representation and symbols, and capture a relational dynamic of active communication between beings, between humans and humans, humans and nonhumans, and nonhumans and nonhumans.

Others in the Italian anticapitalist tradition critique left accelerationism from the left, pointing out that the desire for “liberation” or “emancipation” intrinsic to these notions of “full autonomy” have always been a part of capitalist claims.

What is emerging is a different understanding of the world. Agency is not a posessable quality, but relational. Actions are always interactions and intra-actions. All things are agentive as they behave, exist, and afford in relation with other beings. Meanings objectively exist in the relation between material things, including but not limited to human minds.

The relational view of agency affects every level of our belief systems.

While relational agency is crucial to understand, as a species we obviously cannot just return to animism, because we no longer have the naïvety of our historical youth. We do not exist in an optionless world. Our job in the coming centuries is to reconcile this view with our scientism and humanism.

Nurit Bird-David, an anthropologist of the Nayaka people, calls animism a relational epistemology

it is impossible to look at objects as totally dead and lifeless, animals and plants as deterministic little machines executing their programs. In this view, not only do they have their own way of making meaning, but they once again can impose their meanings on us

We Westernized humans live with an illusion of control.

“Unconditional” or right-leaning accelerationists fetishize capital’s autonomy and liken it to an intelligence of its own.

Our current definition of agency, and our understanding of ourselves, constitute a finite game, a game played over many thousands of years, but nevertheless with a definite conclusion. Seeing our agency as one inseparable from our surroundings, our relatives, our collaborators in life can change our impetus from accumulation to equilibrium. Accelerating instead toward entropy, we must now play an infinite game, one in which we too are constantly regenerating time.

I'm not clear where this ended up. It feels like it rationalizes any status quo or future authoritarianism. ICommented to ask.