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- It has come to seem to me recently that this present moment must be to language something like what the Industrial Revolution was to textiles. A writer who works on the old system of production can spend days crafting a sentence, putting what feels like a worthy idea into language, only to find, once finished, that the internet has already produced countless sentences that are more or less just like it, even if these lack the same artisanal origin story that we imagine gives writing its soul. There is, it seems to me, no more place for writers and thinkers in our future than, since the nineteenth century, there has been for weavers.
- There are memes circulating that are known as “bingo cards,” in which each square is filled with a typical statement or trait of a person who belongs to a given constituency, a mouth-breathing mom’s-basement-dwelling Reddit-using Men’s Rights Activist, for example, or, say, an unctuous white male ally of POC feminism. The idea is that within this grid there is an exhaustive and as it were a priori tabulation, deduced like Kant’s categories of the understanding, of all the possible moves a member of one of these groups might make, and whenever the poor sap tries to state his considered view, his opponent need only pull out the table and point to the corresponding box, thus revealing to him that it is not actually a considered view at all, but only an algorithmically predictable bit of output from the particular program he is running. The sap is sapped of his subjectivity, of his belief that he, properly speaking, has views at all.
- If the function pulls up something bad, it must be because what preceded it is bad. I must therefore have bad taste, stupid politics; I must only like what I like because I’m a dupe.
- But human subjects are vanishingly small beneath the tsunami of likes, views, clicks and other metrics that is currently transforming selves into financialized vectors of data. This financialization is complete, one might suppose, when the algorithms make the leap from machines originally meant only to assist human subjects, into the way these human subjects constitute themselves and think about themselves, their tastes and values, and their relations with others.
- Professional sport has long been ahead of the curve in depriving those involved in it of their complete human subjecthood, and it should not be surprising that FIFA and NFL and similar operations are producing for viewers the one thing even more stupid and dehumanizing than Hollywood’s recent bet-hedging entertainments. Is there any human spirit more reduced than that of an athlete in a post-game interview? The rules of the game positively prohibit him from doing anything more than reaffirming that he should like to win and should not like to lose, that he has done his best or that he could have tried harder; meanwhile, the managers and financiers and denizens of betting halls are reading him up and down, not as a subject with thoughts and desires at all, but as a package of averages, a bundle of stats. This process of deprivation was famously (and to much applause) accelerated in recent decades when new methods of mathematical modeling were applied in managerial strategies for team selection and game play. In even more recent years the tech companies’ transformation of individuals into data sets has effectively moneyballed the entirety of human social reality.
- The first vessels to cross oceans simply set out as singular physical entities, as wood in water. But by the age of global colonialism and trade, ships were not just physical constructions. They were now insured by complicated actuarial determinations and economic commitments among men in the ships’ places of origin, and these operations, though they left no physical mark on the individual ship that set out to sea, nonetheless altered the way ships in general moved through the sea, the care the captain took to avoid wrecks, to log unfamiliar occurrences, to follow procedure in the case of accidents.
- When I first began to drive, cars, too, were individual things; now, when on occasion I rent a car, and the company’s GPS follows me wherever I go, and the contract binds me to not drive outside of the agreed-upon zone, and assures me that if the car breaks down the company’s roadside service will come and replace it, I am struck by how ontologically secondary the car itself is to the system of driving.
- in more straightforwardly political matters people should spend more time worrying about structural violence than about violence: more time worrying about microaggressions or the emotional strain of having to listen to someone whose opinion does not entirely conform to their own, than about violence properly speaking, the blows that come down on individual heads like waves striking individual ships or individual birds getting stuck in individual jet engines on take-off.
- Someone who thinks about their place in the world in terms of the structural violence inflicted on them as they move through it is thinking of themselves, among other things, in structural terms, which is to say, again among other things, not as subjects.
- People are now speaking in a way that results directly from the recent moneyballing of all of human existence. They are speaking, that is, algorithmically rather than subjectively
- what we still call “books” are no longer physical objects so much as they are multi-platform campaigns in which the physical object is only a sort of promotional tie-in
- part of what is involved in launching a book like this into the world is strategizing over how to catch the attention of a true influencer, for a retweet or some other metrically meaningful shout-out. You would be a fool to think that it is the argument of the book, the carefully crafted sentences themselves, that are doing the influencing.
- Perhaps silence is the only fitting response to the present moment, just as it would have been fitting to put down one’s needle and thread when the first industrial looms were installed, and to do something—anything—else to maintain one’s dignity as an artisan.
- As we enter our new technological serfdom, and along with liberal democracy we lose the individual human subject that has been built up slowly over the centuries as a locus of real value, we will be repeatedly made to know, by the iron rule of the metrics, that our creative choices and inclinations change nothing. Creative work will likely take on, for many, a mystical character, where it is carried out not from any belief in its power to influence the world as it is at present, as it may remain for the next millennia, but as a simple act of faith, as something that must be done, to misquote Tertullian, because it is absurd.