While they are composed of humans, mega-machines are fundamentally antihuman, in both their means and ends. “Under the pretext of saving labour,” Mumford writes, “the ultimate end of this technics is to displace life, or rather, to transfer the attributes of life to the machine and the mechanical collective, allowing only so much of the organism to remain as may be controlled and manipulated.” There’s a reason he used the Kremlin, the Pentagon, and General Motors as examples of mega-machines. From their vantage point, the human-cogs have little knowledge of how their actions are incorporated into the functioning of the whole system, let alone choice in the matter. They are treated like automatons or “servomechanisms” who can be kept on a need-to-know basis while work is squeezed out of them.
Now, in the time of networked computing, “smart” technologies, and digital platforms, the image of society as mega-machine is being supplanted by the mega-algorithm—with people acting not merely as cogs but as information nodes, inputs, and outputs incorporated into a calculus of control simply by existing on the network. To accommodate the mega-algorithm, people are atomized by digital technologies and blown apart into streams of data; they are given a unique identity and all their actions—every piece of content generated, every action capable of being tracked—is fed into processors.
Whereas the mega-machine operated by violent means—forcibly divorcing the human-cogs of identity and absorbing their productive and creative energies through wage or slave labor—the mega-algorithm doubles back and promises you reunification with this alienated self through “authentic” (or “creative” or “social”) work completed on your own time. We are sold a desirable narrative about the wealth of networks, decentralized production, cognitive surplus, collaborative consumption, social engagement, and instant convenience. The techno-utopic discourses of emancipation and community that surround the technologies and sociopolitics that make up the mega-algorithm serve as an effective ideological veil, which shrouds the practices of exploitation and control. Don’t think of yourself as an overworked, underpaid laborer trying to hustle for a paycheck. No, you’re actually an entrepreneurial individual, building your personal brand and finding (or making) your niche in the marketplace.
We have escaped the violence of the mega-machine, so the story goes. But the mega-machine and mega-algorithm have more in common than many commentators believe. They are not the same, but nor are they separate; both exist in the same familial lineage, like father and son. As Astra Taylor writes in The People’s Platform, “Many of the problems that plagued our media system before the Internet was widely adopted have carried over into the digital domain—consolidation, centralization, and commercialism—and will continue to shape it.” With both the mega-algorithm and the mega-machine, humans are subsumed into a feedback-driven, information-processing system to which they are at once essential and incidental. The system can’t run without people serving as cogs or nodes, yet in each case, the judgment of those serving the system is rendered superfluous. With the mega-algorithm, functions once assigned to people are assigned to code that becomes one (or many) steps removed from its programmers. The very question of where agency ultimately resides becomes fuzzy, since it is unevenly distributed across different people and times.
The mega-algorithm is powered by a particular idea of how technology fits into political economy: Algorithms serve to hide or obscure the actual human labor involved in business operations. This contributes to a large-scale reshaping of the economics of labor. That is, paying people for the goods and services they produce stops being part of the way business is done and finding jobs that come with security, longevity, and a paycheck becomes more difficult.
Unlike with the mega-machine, it’s not always clear when we’ve been assimilated as a human-node in the mega-algorithm. The systems—like social networks we use to connect with various platforms while hundreds of trackers hoover every piece of (meta)data that can be brokered for the purpose of rating and targeting us—are so interrelated that it appears there’s no escape. It functions rhizomatically: like the roots and shoots of a persistent, massive set of plants, it seems to pop up everywhere. And it is extremely flexible, able to derive value from people in ways that are not obviously exploitative or controlling.
This flexibility, this ability to reconfigure and appropriate additional parts of life extends the mega-algorithm’s power further than that of the mega-machine. The technologies of the mega-algorithm disguise human labor by hiding it in plain sight. Every action has the potential to be labor, if it can be processed in the right way. Even the sanctity of our home is not safe from intrusion. As design critic Justin McGuirk argues in an essay on the “smart home,” “the proliferation of smart, connected products will turn the home into a prime data collection node. It is estimated that there will be 50 billion wi-fi-connected devices by 2020, and all of them will collect data that is transmitted to and stored by their manufacturers. In short, the home is becoming a data factory.” This shift makes complete sense in light of the operational logic of the mega-algorithm. Excluding the home from data harvest and monetization would be a foolishly inefficient waste of exploitable labor.
by Janathan Sadowski, TNI | Read more:
Image: uncredited
