Caroline Bassett - Anti-computing : Dissent and the machine

Anti-computing

Anti-computing

Dissent and the machine

Caroline Bassett

Manchester University Press

Copyright Caroline Bassett 2021

The right of Caroline Bassett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN978 0 7190 8378 5hardback

First published 2021

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This book is for Rosie. I thought you might like it.

I wrote this book in three halves at least and it took me far too long. Life, work, and COVID intervened. I wouldn't have finished it now without threats and encouragements from close friends and colleagues, particularly Kate Lacey, who told me to stop, and Sarah Kember and Kate ORiordan, who told me to keep going it's true we wrote a different book together, but this one is finished because of that one.

This project was completed at Cambridge but it began at Sussex University, and I also worked on it during my time as the Sanomat Fellow at the hugely hospitable Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (HCAS). Thanks are due to many at the international community of scholars at HCAS for feedback and for many inspiring discussions. Huge thanks are also due to my former colleagues in the School of Media, Film and Music (MFM) at Sussex. I am particularly indebted to the MFM Women's Reading Group for their forensic feedback. I'd also like to acknowledge a debt to Ben Roberts, whose thinking has influenced the discussions of 1960s cybernation debates and of contemporary automation anxiety in this book very directly.

Above all I want to thank past and present members of the Sussex Humanities Lab; in particular James Baker, David Berry, Kat Braybrooke, Alice Eldridge, Beatrice Fazi, Wes Goatley, Emma Harrison, Tim Hitchcock, Ben Jackson, Sally Jane Norman, Ben Roberts, Rachel Thomson, Amelia Wakeford, Sharon Webb and David Weir; but there were many more people there who were inspiring, cheering, or noisy in a good way. Modular synth and robot opera have nothing to do with the contents of this book, but the sanity of people working in those areas saved mine.

Some other acknowledgements are due; I interviewed Alice Mary Hilton in New York shortly before her death. Her recollections were not always comfortable, but they opened a door into an earlier moment of automation fever and began this project. I'd also like to acknowledge the Special Collections unit at the University of Sussex, where the Matusow Collection is housed, and to salute the infinitely patient Matthew Frost and others at Manchester University Press. Thanks to readers named and unnamed, but definitely including Jussi Parikka. Finally, thanks to Kate ORiordan (again), Cecile Chevalier, Hilary Baker and Jane Bassett for solidarity above and beyond writing.

Anti-computing punctuates computational advances; the rush ahead, the demand to be wanted, the claims for progress, and for progress as automatically good. Anti-computing is a pause, a stop, a refusal, an objection, a sense, an emotion, a response, a popular campaign, a letter, an essay, a code-work, a theorist, a sensibility, an ambience, an absolute hostility, a reasoned objection, a glitch, a hesitation, an ambient dislike. It may be articulated by a human, a crowd, a network, or by a program that refuses to run. It may also be an element of an assemblage containing many other elements; some of them in conflict.

Anti-computing takes many forms. It is unique to its moments of emergence, but is also characterized by recurrence. Many (though not all) of the components of anti-computing today are familiar even if they arise in response to a specific formation as if new, even if the claim is that the issues they address are graver than ever before, entailing qualitatively higher even existential stakes. Anti-computing may emerge as something felt and believed, something cultivated. It may be presented as a rationally adopted position or critique, a feeling (perhaps a yuck factor), or it may be an operation. It is articulated as an individual view, a collective one, as a one-off, and as a circulating and time-travelling discourse (operating synchronously and diachronically albeit in the latter case in disrupted ways). As a human response to the global embedding of the computational it materializes in heterogeneous ways, but since humans, after all, are not separate from the machines with which they co-evolve, this materialization entails technologies as well as humans. It is indeed partly technological.

Anti-computing is all of these things at once because it is part of, and responds to, a formation that is itself pervasive, intrusive, ambient, emergent, installing, materially heterogeneous. I am talking, of course, of the computational, and of computational culture; about a history, about informational capitalism now, and about the computationally saturated and only partly foreseeable future. Computers have spread. They have spread further and faster than earlier human generations imagined possible or that earlier generations of computer appeared to make feasible. There are over two billion computers in the world, and many billions more embedded control circuits. There will be 20 billion sensors in the world by the end of the 2020s, the decade we have already entered as I complete this book. The numbers become meaningless though their sheer weight remains significant. The extent of the computational has broadened and deepened; networking the world, entering the body, reaching into Space.