“I am not proposing a return to the Stone Age. My intent is not reactionary, nor even conservative, but simply subversive. It seems that the utopian imagination is trapped, like capitalism and industrialism and the human population, in a one-way future consisting only of growth. All I’m trying to do is figure out how to put a pig on the tracks.”1
Ursula K. Le Guin
K. Le Guin, Ursula. Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. New York: Grove Press, 2006, 85.
Schemas of uncertainty as a proposition suggests a space of indeterminacy; a set of possible frameworks that allow the unintelligible to flow through them. Perhaps an introduction is all too fixing—enacting a form of pre-emption of what is to come. Therefore, as a reader, you can treat this text as an invitation to move with us through some of the many possible links the contributions generate when read in relation to one another.
Under the current socio-political structures, uncertainty is managed by agents to fix the future into ‘stable’ yet merely approximate trajectories—ones which might be predicted, secured and monetised. Through complex, technological means, uncertainty is subsumed under the paradigm of ‘prediction’. Concurrently, uncertainty also becomes the very product of a neoliberal capitalist system which simultaneously creates the desire for certainty, while increasing the material and social precarity for the neoliberal subject who is ever more responsible for their own fate. With this project, we aim to think with uncertainty as the blurred space of indeterminacy, a productive space of mobility that holds potential; a means of resisting visions of total legibility that are suggested in Silicon Valley’s visions of the future. In such visions, ones subjectivity can be rendered legible into a data metric, allowing ubiquitous computing to power a frictionless life under capitalism. How can staying with uncertainty become a means of resisting representation, and what would such an evasion mean in a political system that requires representation to function?
Through a collection of contributions that vary in format and mode of address, the book explores the relation between prediction and prescription. It traces the effects of predictive technologies on the imagination of possible futures, aside from the future of technological progress. The future, as a singular noun, is rather daunting. If it is seen as the space lying ahead within a spatiotemporal continuum it becomes a place to get to, a space to colonise, to invade and exploit. In that metaphor, the past is occupying the space behind the present, and therefore when looking ahead to the future, the past becomes easy to forget. Such a metaphor allows for a Western view of the future as a blank space to project onto, removed from its colonial and patriarchal histories. Science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, in Science Fiction and The Future, proposes to think with the Quechua-speaking peoples of the Andes that consider the past as laying in front of you, since it is what you are aware of. She writes, “The future lies behind—behind your back, over your shoulder. The future is what you can’t see, unless you turn around and kind of snatch a glimpse.”2 In addressing the role of predictive methods in imagining the future, through multiple epistemological frameworks, we aim to treat the future as unknown, yet not removed from ancestral lineages. Moving between machine learning, critical theory, tarot readings, astrology, personal narratives, myths, fiction and much else, the book makes space for porous readings. Through various accounts on predictive practices, it opens up alternate propositions for other possible futures.
K. Le Guin, Ursula. Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. New York: Grove Press, 2006, 142.
Be it in reading coffee, tarot, sheep livers, turtle shells, the flight patterns of birds, or even using machine learning capabilities, prediction has been a long-standing interest for human beings, often involving non-human actors in the process. However, agency and intention for the reader, the one being read as well as all actors involved, vary at each of these instances. Within current technological predictive systems, the receiver of a prediction is not afforded the opportunity for their own interpretation; leaving them in a position of little if any agency. Conversely, through older divination practices interpretation can be performed both by the reader and the person being read; the divination method becoming a system in place to structure that interaction. Agency, in these cases, is distributed along all things and people partaking the divination, rather than concentrated in a single entity. Such acts perhaps can be seen as gestures towards reaching more-than-human knowledges.
What are the roles of algorithms both in generating multiple fates but also as a bounding force to a singular fate led by technological progress? In her essay ‘Algorithms as Cartomancy’, Flavia Dzodan challenges the distinction between modern science and ancient forms of esoterica by highlighting their shared and inseparable past. Flavia complicates the history of Enlightenment thinking by pointing to the interest in, and use of, divination practices by some of its key figures. Likewise, she exposes the pseudo-scientific underpinnings of algorithmic governance pointing to contemporary taxonomies and racist databases. In doing so, the hypocrisy of contemporary technological thinking is brought to the fore, one that dismisses non-western epistemological methods, whilst relying on the very same histories. Flavia’s analysis not only investigates how these different methods of knowledge have been co-existing but also how scientific epistemologies render other knowledges illegitimate, especially when such knowledges accept unknowability as a potential.
Such unknowability is what Eric Smidt, the former CEO of Google, is trying to alleviate by stating in 2006: “The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask questions such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’.” This quote forms the point of departure for Emily Rosamond’s investigation of what she describes as the future-oracular mode of address which describes a relationship between the seeking-subject and predictive platforms. In her essay, Rosamond explores the dual histories of companies like Google which draw not only on a tradition of prediction but also on one of divination. She posits similarities between the organization of informational power possessed by the Oracle in ancient Delphi and tech giants at present, while addressing the ‘colonization of divination’ at play as calculation and divination intermingle under neoliberal ideology.
Could the status of refusing anticipation be a productive way of stepping aside from the position of the seeking subject? Through a fictionalized conversation with a friend, Holly Childs discusses the nature of anticipation, or more accurately, the nature of not doing so. The prose wanders through shopping malls and furniture stores, asking what desire might mean when one does not anticipate. In the text, the possibility of not anticipating is thickened. In a society that is ruled by calculation and strategy is it possible to not anticipate the future?
“The problem with calculation is that it is just an effect of our assumption of separability, that is, we see ourselves as separate (and superior) to everything else in the world. Because of that, we also presume that it is our task to determine, and control, everything else. So, calculation – which is about being able to control (through prediction of what will happen in the future) – becomes necessary. So I think we have to be aware of the separability. Cause if the ontological condition taken for granted is separability then calculation is natural, isn’t it? If we are not aware of that pre-conditioning then we end up identifying with the work we do, and then trying to instrumentalize something. And instrumentalization still begins with and reinforces the subject. You see?” 3
Denise Ferreira Da Silva
Da Silva, D.F. and Desideri V., A conversation between Valentina Desideri and Denise Ferreira da Silva, 2016, 15.
handreadingstudio.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/V-Dconversation.pdf
When thinking about the future, our research for this project led us repeatedly back to fictionality. Ever out of reach, the future is necessarily always an imagined one, making a speculative future somewhat of a tautology. It is this fictionality which Callum Copley addresses in his text ‘Profit and Prophecy’, exploring the relationship between futurity and an increasingly financialized global economy. He focuses on the commodification of risk as means to generate a profit in the now, and the ways in which this action might be foreclosing the possibility of any truly livable future. By keeping fictionality close when exploring such varied themes as tarot and machine learning, we were ever aware of the role of interpretation in all forms of prediction. Fictionality is at play both in the interpersonal reading, as an opportunity for meaning-making, and in the interpretation of approximations of data for algorithmic governance. In interviewing K Allado-McDowell, the co-leader of Artist + Machine Intelligence at Google, Danae Io addresses the different roles interpretation plays in divination and machine learning. In their exchange, they speak about the multidimensionality of neural nets as an alternate thinking schema, but also about predictive algorithms as enactors of the plausible instead of the possible. K suggests that the high-dimensional space of neural nets might be a method of thinking that enables multiplicity to enter. But here we would like to ask, what is the difference between multiplicity and indeterminacy?
Sociologist Adrian Mckenzie, in a paper addressing the relation between machine learning and the generation of desire for predictability that, “While powerfully equipped to model variations, they [technologies such as machine learning] struggle to predict becomings, let alone change themselves.”4 Mackenzie writes, “the effectiveness of machine learning in any setting depends on relatively stable forms. Variation fuels data mining, but change thwarts it.”5 Following Mckenzie’s argument, it is important to think whether technologies whose foundation is based on determinacy can support becomings. It seems that technologies at present, although facilitate multiple categorisations of subjects, presume the stability of such categories or even the possibility of subjects being rendered legible and classifiable under questionable taxonomic systems.
Mackenzie, Adrian. The production of prediction: What does machine learning want?, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol 18, Issue 4-5, p. 444, First Published June 16, 2015.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549415577384
Ibid.
Classification reduces individuals to data, therefore making them visible to governance. Thinking with Fanon, Ramon Amaro writes: “surveillance is a mode of visibility, a technology through which colonialism distributes power as a suspicion of the Other.” Amaro traces how machine learning and AI enforce such modes of surveillance, highlighting their capacity to uphold colonial logics. In thinking how to disrupt such logics, Amaro proposes of the Black Technical Object as a way of relating with technology that generates new forms of being and becoming that evade representation—starting with the re-imagining the self. Blackness challenges the “state of homogeneity and the perceived stability of categories to instead engage in a transformative politics of affirmative self belonging,” he writes.
“What we need is a robustly nuanced reasonableness, one that can operate in an atmosphere of uncertainty, that gives us the courage to forge on, to launch our hopes into the unknown—the future—by engaging positively with otherness and unintelligibility.”6
Joan Retallack
Retallack, Joan. Poethical Wager. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014, 22.
How can we get to that nuanced reasonableness that allows us to live with the complexity of the world without drowning in it? Or further, how might uncertainty become something to live with, as well as being deployed as a means of resistance? In practices of divination, agency and co-determination is distributed among human and non-human participants, allowing uncertainty to flow in the process. However, often non-human participants are taking place in a divination for human ends. Alice Dos Reis’ contribution further asks us to think through what it might mean to not only instrumentalise non-human animals for human ends within predictive practices, but rather look at prediction as a space of possible collaboration towards mutually constitutive futures. In Juliette’s multi-path story, we are offered a variety of possible narratives that link the reader to witchcraft taking place in the year 2038, a time when the Earth has become a hostile environment to exist in. By choosing their path, the reader moves through a field of possible outcomes and ways of linking to Earth, technology, community, magic, ecofeminism and interplanetary travel. In these narratives, synergies between human and non-human entities are composed, suggesting of living with otherness.
Ioanna Gerakidi is proposing the framework of myths to engage with otherness in a complexified present. By drawing on personal narratives, poems and other texts, she thinks through myth as a schema to undemonise the unintelligible. “Myths are metaphors; they are movements towards reaching the unknown, touching otherness, espousing ambiguities,” she writes. Thinking with myths and divination practices might be a way of ‘putting a pig on the tracks’ of trajectories that point towards a future constituting only of growth. They might become means of staying with the unknown in the present and therefore sidetracking the fate of technological progress.
“The fate of the earth. The fate of me. The fate of you.”
Anne Carson 7
Carson, Anne. "Fate, Federal Court, Moon." London Review of Books 39 no. 6 (2017): 30, https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n06/anne-carson/fate-federal-court-moon.
Although in its singularity—Fate—seems rather a narrow term, when thought of in its multiplicity—Fates—can become a means of imagining various possible futures. Fates in their plurality might become an axis with which to think through our relation to the future in a present where the future is commonly seen as a path which each individual must strategise towards to realise. In their conversation, Valentina Desideri and Stefano Harney build on the meaning and practice of what they term ‘Fate Work’. They regard reading practices as a way of resisting the capitalist imperative to strategise towards a singular future. Instead, they propose reading practices as methods of navigating the complexity of the present by collectively generating multiple narratives of the future while actively shaping the present. As they write,“developing a practice that proliferates fates, generates futures, can perhaps cause the future to lose it authority, which is to say to lose its abstraction, to come into the present as sensation, as something susceptible to the senses and something that in turn works on those senses in the present.”
For Harney and Desideri, reading practices can be readings of the stars, palms, tea leaves, or texts; they are practices of co-determination that involve at least two people. Tom Kemp while tracing a para-history of Dungeons and Dragons points to certain kinds of roleplaying games as opportunities to facilitate such productive indeterminacy. Reading practices can be a game of D&D or a research group; they are practices that sabotage a linear trajectory of the future led by capitalism. As Harney and Desideri write, they are ways “of unsettling each other, thus opening oneself up to co-determination while becoming more perceptive, since in order to sabotage, you need to be able to perceive the rhythms of the machines at work. You need to become a present reader, a reader of these abstract machines, and you throw a shoe in the middle of them. So that many fates can open up.”
With this book, we invite you to think through what it might mean to welcome uncertainty as a way of resisting ideas that impose a singular meaning or direction. Rather than something to be overcome, uncertainty might become a means of encompassing multiplicity. Subsequently, prediction ceases to be instrumentalised as a tool to prescribe the future but instead is undertaken as a gesture towards occupying an elsewhere and otherwise.