Recently I've been working through the philosophy of Alain Badiou and his central text/magnum opus Being and Event. I've been interested in ontology, the study of being, and the ways we conceptualize being impacts our interactions with technology, culture, etc. This has taken me to the work of Gilbert Simondon, Bernard Stiegler, Yuk Hui, works of Afro-pessimism and Black Nihilism, and more. What I have noticed is that when having conversations about Ontology eventually all roads lead to Heidegger. Martin Heidegger looms very large in philosophy broadly, in the German idealism tradition, and more specifically in the turn to the ontological in the 20th century. So much so that one of the statements that Badiou began his book with is "Heiddegar is the last globally recognizable philosopher" Heidegger was also a Nazi, some I explored in a previous post about the idea of algorithmic racializing logics. In my view, sitting with the truth of Heideggar’s Nazi commitments and collaboration cannot be simply reduced to a simple ad hominem but instead says something about his poetic approach to ontology and philosophy of the ways these ideological commitments pervade the philosophical system we seem to have inherited in so many disciplines (refer to Heidegger in Ruins by Richard Wolin for a more rigorous treatment of these points).

What is technical philosophy against or outside of Heidegger? What is ontology outside of Heidegger's poetic framework? Badiou bases his metaontology on the decision that mathematics, specifically Cantor's set theory provides a basis for a fundamental ontology of the pure multiplicity as the way to understand being. However what I've found out over the course of reading Badiou and people who've written about this work. The famous "mathematics is ontology, the science of being qua being" statement is just where it starts, not the whole point of his project. The being and event series is a radical philosophical system of truth as distinct from knowledge, the situation or world, and the event or a rupture in the situation. The event is that which seems impossible and is the chance of radical change. That's about as much as I've grasped so far but this has been a fascinating way to get into a very different way of conceptualizing metaphysics, theories of the state, and "change" using these terms very loosely since they have far more complicated meanings within Badiou's text. One interesting thing is unlike his contemporary Deleuze or even Heidegger Badiou doesn't have much to say about technology. I think there are some interesting ways to apply some of these concepts alongside the intersections of philosophy and technology to find interesting reconceptualizations and innovative ideas. I am also attracted to Badiou’s system because, to be honest, is such a weird and unique philosophical system.

In addition to looking for ontological schemes contra-Heidegger I also in engaging with the work of Afropessimism encountered the work of Calvin Warren which was another factor in leading me to the work of Badiou. I first found Warren through his fantastic book Ontological Terror. This book seeks to reinvigorate and expand Black nihilism by going past Afro-pessimism to investigate the nothing(ness) that is Blackness. The subjugation of Blackness is necessitated by metaphysics to triumph over nothing and to avoid the problems of being and ontology. This work engages with the work of Heidegger, hortense spillers, fanon, afro pessimism, du Bois, and more to unveil the limits of humanist goals of including the Black into ideas of humanity and Being and the ontological terror caused by nothing to show how Blackness does not have access to being but only existence and is represented as Heidegger available equipment. After reading Ontological Terror and engaging with his radical vision of the relation/antirelation between being and Blackness I was led to a paper called The Catastrophe where Warren more directly engages with the Badiou and math as pure form alongside Katthrine Mckittrick and Denise Ferreira Da Silva. The paper’s ideas can be thought of as confronting the loose syllogism displayed below

If math is ontology
And the Black is non ontological
Does that mean the Black is anti math

Warren seeks to demonstrate a relation between form and mathematics and how this relation engenders antiblack violence ultimately calling for mathematical nihilism which is the unthinking and destruction of form and matter through the catastrophe. The catastrophe bears very obvious connections to Badiou’s conceptualization of the event. I am still working through these ideas and thinking through the implications of the non-ontological nature of Blackness and what that means for Blackness in relation to technology. From a very pragmatic standpoint, ontology is not necessarily just a metaphysical concern but also the tools and framing for machinic representation and design in information systems. The Black Technical Object by Ramon Amaro engages with many of these points. For example, we may be able to think of the lack of legibility of Blackness to machinic perception as evidence of the inability of Blackness to have access to being under ontology and ontologies (in the technical sense of digital ontology as the structured representation of an object in an information system). This is just one way the questions of ontology have implications for information studies that I have been thinking about.

Here are a few questions and provocations putting Black Nihilism, Information/Technology Studies and Badiou’s metaontology in conversation 

• What would it mean to unthink our current metaphysical/ontological framework, if Blacks do not have access to being then can we explore other ways of existence outside of being?
• How do surveillance technologoes maintain the divide between belonging and inclusion in relation to the state?
• What does Badiou’s conception about truth and knowledge have to say about data and its ontological nature?
• Can we evaluate the potentiual of a technological epoch as an event
• Why does badiou not seem to make room for or diminish race, alterity, relation, etc. through his emphasis on the universal and generic?
• Can we displace Heideggarian thought as the foundation for contemporary discussions of Being and Technology?
• The powerset which in Badiou’s system represents the state of the situation, can also be thought of as the discrete topology on a given set. Badiou leverages set throry for his conceptualization of ontology in Being and event and uses category theory in logics of worlds. Is there anything useful in thinking of spatiality when it comes to ontology, the generic, the event, etc?
• What are the connections between the generic and the undercommons? In general how can we think about that which is not legible to the state i.e. Blackness?
• Can we have a non-ontological math?
• What is mathematical nihilism?
• Where does category theory fit in all of this?

There is an ideological investment in the idea that technology is neutral. However, true neutrality doesn't exist and typically this status quo or neutral position is one that is in service of power. This position reflects a Euclidean notion of spatiality, one that assumes absolute position and a top-down perspective. The notion of a "view from nowhere", an ideologically objective and removed position, should be challenged, as it assumes a single, solitary perspective from a static viewpoint. We must challenge this view, and respond with the world as round and space and position as relative. This turn from the Euclidean to the non-euclidean is a turn to an embrace of subjectivity. Many scholars and thinkers have advocated for this new understanding of spatiality as relative against the euclidean/cartesian understanding of objectivity and neutrality. For example, Hito Steyerl looks at the evolution of the perspective and its ties to modern GIS technology in her essay In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective^[1]. Everything comes with its own epistemological and ontological presuppositions, which is why, as abstract as it may seem it is necessary to investigate and critique these underpinnings. It is with this insight that we then began an investigation into the fetish object that is Artificial intelligence. We will return to these notions of spatiality at the end to see what a non-euclidean understanding space has to say about the ways in which AI is shaping and being shaped by our modern techno-culture.

Gilbert Simondon, French Philosopher and theorist in Science and Technology Studies, offers a speculative history of the technical which will be useful in this analysis. I first encountered this framework in a book I am currently working through, On the Existence of Digital Objects by Yuk Hui ^[2]. Simondon speaks of the bifurcation of magic into the religious and the technical, the technical is then further bifurcated into science (the theoretical) and technology (the practical). Practical can be further interpreted as in service of capitalism. In our modern, or perhaps post-modern, era the distinction between science and technology is in how rapidly discoveries are commodified. Artificial intelligence is interesting because it seems to bridge these bifurcations one by one. First bridging the bifurcation of the theoretical and the practical with a rather rapid appropriation of theoretical insights into practical application and commodified products. Many tech companies essentially function as ivory tower research centers funded by either ad companies or SaaS businesses. There is an almost semi-permeable membrane where discoveries diffuse from the highly theoretical to the practical to the consumer available. Next AI undoes the bifurcation of the religious and the technical bringing us back to an engagement with phenomenon that almost feels magical. The method of this bridge is obfuscation and opacity of operation. Magic is that which is not understood; where the substance and mode of operation are more than the human actors who participate in its rites. AI has taken on this nature both through marketing campaigns, function, and the way in which is it positioned within the culture—we are all implored not to look behind the curtain.


In order to illuminate this more-than-human nature that AI has taken on, we can turn to Marx and more specifically the Marxist conceptualization of commodity fetishism^[3]. Marx's concept of commodity fetishism seeks to illuminate the way in which under capitalism, commodities take on a life of their own apart from the material relations they are produced under and the labor that goes into their production. In order to more clearly explain, we must clarify two terms that have slightly different meanings here than their colloquial definitions: commodity and fetish. Commodity refers not necessarily to the commodities one might commonly think of such as coffee, oil, gold, etc. but to any product or service produced with the intention to make a profit. Fetish is not to be taken in a necessarily sexual context. Marx takes this term to mean a fetish object, something that is believed to have a special inherent power. Through the fetishization of commodities we obscure the social relations underlying their production, creating alienation.

My argument is that artificial intelligence has taken on the nature of a fetish object, meaning it has been imbued with these metaphysical properties, a substance that is beyond materiality and production. For example, Dall-e is a mysterious entity that you can ask to create art on command instead of the cumulative work of millions of artists on whose work the models were trained. The machine is the assembler and synthesizer, using increasing complexity and massive amounts of underlying data to obscure its source material.


The evangelists and champions of AI would have us believe that AI will ultimately make work irrelevant and lead to the final triumph of capital over labor. Paul graham recently posted a Twitter thread asserting that "AI is inductive proof that Marx was wrong about his labor theory of value". Utilizing a very simplistic understanding of LTV that essentialized Marxist theory, he posits that AI shows why founders deserve to make considerably more money than their workers. In fairness, he did delete the tweet with reference to Marx but maintained, in fact, doubled down, on the point that founders can grow without many employees, hence they are not valuable. The incredulous nature of the very claims is pretty self-evident and really I won't spend time here disputing them but this provides a good opportunity to speak to the invisible labor that goes into AI and machine learning models.



AI and ML don't allow would be founders to completely expunge labor but essentially crowdsource labor for "free" or near free and leverage it to obtain the value. What we are talking about is simply labor that has been calcified into symbolic algorithmic representation and is abstracted away.

In a recent discussion between Ramon Amaro and Yuk Hui moderated by Rana Dasgupta when discussing the narrative that has become commonplace about AI taking "our" jobs, Amaro both cautions and investigates that term "our" ^[4]. For many the precarity felt and has existed and the jobs have already been taken. He speaks of the work done by often Black and Brown communities for Google to scan books for it's digital corpus of Google Scholar and Google Books. These jobs already no longer exist because their only value was to eventually disappear, with the dead labor paradoxically becoming invisible through opacity.


Next, we will try to de-fetishize AI by examining the materiality and social relations that are behind a type of AI that has become a topic of conversation, large-language models or LLMs. For many people, ChatGPT came from nowhere but this is the culmination of scientific breakthroughs and corporate innovation projects going back to 2016. OpenAI was founded in a list of Silicon Valley veterans including Sam Altman, Jessica Livingstone, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk. Sam Altman and Jessica Livingstone are both affiliated with Y combinator, former president and foudning partner respectively. OpenAI is interesting because is it technically a non-profit research lab but in 2019 after a $1 Billion investment OpenAI signed an exclusive deal with Microsoft to use the Azure platform. This year, Microsoft has taken steps to integrate ChatGPT into its Bing search as an interactive prompt synthesizing answers to search queries^[5].

Where is the labor in this AI? When thinking about the labor that goes into these systems of automation we have to talk about what as Nick Dyer Witherford calls the new cyber-proletariat^[6]. A class that enables the hardware and software we engaged with daily. For online platforms, there has been discussion around content moderators and support technicians who sit behind screens around the world, recent investigations into Facebook, Twitter, etc. have even brought this idea into the news cycle. However, with AI this seems a bit less obvious, perhaps because the entire point of the product as it is marketed is that by training on data, as long as the data is good and devoid of bias, less not more work is involved. A recent article in Time magazine breaks this paradigm and illuminates the way in which responsibility concerns don't just live at the sight of creating the algorithm or having an inclusive dataset (There is a question to be investigated here about whether inclusion is the radical solution many believe it to be. See Simone Browne's work for more on this^[7]). Billy Perrigo, an investigative reporter at Time, found that OpenAI had outsourced to Kenyan workers paying them $2 a day to help the system become less racist and hence more marketable as a product^[8]. This was done via a company called Sama which employs workers in Kenya, Uganda, and India. Sama speaks of itself as a Data annotation platform and one first AI companies to be certified as a B corporation. As a data annotation platform, the company employs data labelers to annotate data sets, purge hate speech, inappropriate language, etc. from datasets leveraged by models and also curate data. As a B corporation, Sama helps to uplift growing economies in the global south by providing tech-first jobs to create social impact. What Time further uncovers is the precarity of working conditions, abuses endured, and toxic content workers were exposed to–without mental health resources or organized labor. I would recommend reading the article and others linked in the sources below for a full picture of the situation many of these workers face. A key takeaway here is this is not an isolated incident but the current norm.

Sama is also currently fighting a lawsuit alongside Facebook brought by former content moderator Daniel Motaung who alleges encountering significant abuses and a toxic environment while working^[9] ,the story has also been covered by Business Daily Africa ^[10]. This January, Sama announced that it would discontinue its work with Facebook and content moderation in general^[11]. This is an ongoing case and the Kenyan Labor Courts recently ruled that despite Meta's arguments that Kenya does not have jurisdiction over the foreign corporation it will not strike Facebook from the case. In a recent article by Adrienne Williams, Milagros Micheli, and Timnit Gebru they refer to the ghost work, a coin termed by anthropologist Mary L. Gray and computational social scientist Siddharth Suri, that exists underneath these systems which run counter to the narrative of sentient intelligent systems[12][13].

Far from the sophisticated, sentient machines portrayed in media and pop culture, so-called AI systems are fueled by millions of underpaid workers around the world, performing repetitive tasks under precarious labor conditions. (Williams, Micheli, and Gebru)

Sama is only one component in a network of digital labor exploitation that lies underneath the surface of the online platforms we engage with daily and AI is no different, it is important to continue to unveil the practices behind these technologies to combat the view of AI as replacing labor.

When people ask how I feel about AI I always have to reply with it's complicated. This is not something that easily breaks down into bullish or bearish, like most things when it comes to technology my initial position is to be skeptical and bring a critical lens because we don't have enough of those in tech as it is. "Tech" as an industry is one that relies on a never ending game of musical chairs. As long as the music keeps going then the advertisers will keep spending, the Angels and VCs will keep throwing money, and the CEOs and founders will keep dancing. But when the music begins to slow and investment starts to constrict, everyone gets nervous and there is a new need for a buzzword or "revolutionary" new tech that will change the landscape. This gets the music going a bit longer in this seemingly unending game. Sometimes the tech revolutionizes things but most times they are modest updates to business models and get eventually grafted into the incumbent techno-powers. Over the years we have seen Web 2.0, Cloud, Internet of Things, Gig economy all function as buzzwords leading to money pits of investment and boom/bust cycles of startups. Most recently, it seemed that last year was the year of Web 3.0 and the Metaverse with every major tech company launching some foray into this space and Facebook restructuring their entire business around the Metaverse. By the time Q4 2022 rolled around investment in Web3 had already dried up and in 2023 we will likely hear very little in this area as the crown for hot new investment opportunity has been yielded to AI^[14] Arguably, artificial intelligence is different from previous hype cycles because the technology lends itself to applications that are less convoluted then Web3 and the Metaverse. In addition, there are many ways this technology was already being used in more mundane ways such as autocomplete or image recognition. The difference this year is generative AI seeks as explained previously to restructure the way we understand labor. As a Creative and writer I see the potential ways this can be a powerful tool for artists and creatives, generative art I've experimented in and I've really interesting engaging work in this area. There's something unique about the coming together of the human and technical to create something neither could've individually. I see three main ways AI can be and has been used by in the creative process: Increasing scale, increasing efficiency and ability, and generative art as a creative discovery tool. All of these require the human in the loop, and contrary to what some would say, at some point in the process there exists labor, whether valued or not.

We are going to need to develop a more discerning eye towards creative content, what we engage with, and what is meaningful. The entrance of automation into the sphere complicates our relationship to art and creative. Is it for consumption or for being engaging and challenging. There is always going to be elevator music, hallway art, fluff pieces, and most importantly ads, art that helps to facilitate capitalism and consumption, this will be the lowest hanging fruit and the first thing to get automated.
What it does mean that machines are now talking to each other, inventing new languages^[15]. Machines are attempting to cough up poetry as Glissant said based on multitudes of creative labor of other people^[16]. However, it is not simply that they are using other work as a basis but there is at this point a non-zero probability that the models are trained on datasets of content that itself was generated by a machine. Creating greater and greater levels of abstraction built upon foundations of dead labor. Dan McQuillan puts this eloquently in a recent essay on his site that I would recommend checking out^[17]. His essay  specifically discusses ChatGPT however many of the points are relevant to discussions of AI more broadly.

"ChatGPT is a part of a reality distortion field that obscures the underlying extractivism and diverts us into asking the wrong questions and worrying about the wrong things." (Mcquillan)

We can see the effects of this extractivism in the way in which the serpent is beginning to eat it’s own tail. Articles about bad/incorrect answers from LLM chatbots  get scraped and fed back into these very models to be regurgitated. For example, a few users on Twitter noticed if you searched the question "Should I Throw my car battery in the ocean?" on the newly chatgpt powered bing you would get the answer yes, pointing to two articles as sources^[18]. Articles from 2021 which were documenting a similar phenomenon happening on Google ultimately pointing back to several Quora answers that had been written in jest^[19]. Similar behavior has been observed with Google if you ask the question who invented running you would receive a featured snippet with the answer Thomas Running invented running in 1784 [20]. These examples are the result of featured snippet features in search engines and not the LLM chatbots that are being quickly added to Bing and Google but they do indicate a behavior that will only continue. One thing that may become an important feature we will begin to see integrated into these models is some form of citing sources. An example of this is perplexity.ai which not only gives the answer to a specific query but cites sources that were used to develop the answer. Recent product demos from Google's integration of Bard into search look like it may feature a similar feature when launched. This feature is a very specific UI design change that represents a different way of understanding what a source means in this context.

In a recent article in the New Yorker science fiction writer Ted Chiang offers a comparison between AI and the lossy compression of JPEGs, I highly recommend reading this article^[21]. I want to offer another concept that gives us a way to frame this feedback loop that we are beginning to see between machinic generation and culture. Celia Lury, Luciana Parisi, and Tiziana Terranova discuss the concept of Auto-spatialization as a core component of what they term a topological turn in culture. 

Auto-spatialization refers in Chatelet’s work to a changed relation between indices and that to which indices are supposed to point. In ‘classical’ mathematical calculation, he argues, a set of indices was neutral: indexation remained external to the development of calculation. Indices were operated as if notation was completely indifferent to that which it noted. In ‘contemporary’ calculation, he proposes however, notation is becoming concrete: indexation is no longer determined by an external ‘set’ (of numbers or data) but by a process of deformation in a surface that is itself in motion. Indexation is no longer reduced to the external evaluation of a collection or set, he says, but becomes ‘the protagonist of an experiment which secretes its own overflow’ (Chatelet, 2006: 40). What this suggests to us is that it is important to look at changes in the semiosis of contemporary culture, that is, changes in processes of abstraction and translation, of proportion and participation, ordering Lury et al. 13 and valuing, sensing and knowing. Our suggestion is that there is currently a transformation in the operation and significance of the indexical in contemporary culture (Lury, Parisi, Terranova)

Topology here refers to the mathematical concept of a topological space, encoding a kind of subjectivity and spatiality. Auto-spatialization refers to the ways in which the index or measurement inscribes itself on the surface of that which it seeks to measure, blurring the lines between the subject and the tool of observation. In my view, technological tools, data, measurement etc. have previsouly acted as these indices, providing measurement and cataloging of the world. Now they are producing output that is deforming the surface of culture. This is a line of scholarship and inquiry I hope to spend more time with to unveil the ways in which our modern techno-culture has taken a spatial turn and already is experiencing the continuous deformations and shaping of relations and culture by the algorithmic. How we contend with this shaping and deformation is an open question, but one that must be informed by a defetishization of the machines enacting these changes to bolster analysis and critique and ultimately reconceptualize how we engage with artificial intelligence.


Notes and Citations
[1]  Hito Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen (pub )
[2] Yuk Hui, On the Existence of Digital Objects (pub info),
[3] Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Karl Marx
[4] Yuk Hui and Ramon Amaro in conversation with Rana Dasgupta (YouTube)
[5] OpenAI - Wikipedia
[6] Nick Dyer Witherford, Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex (Digitial Barricades: Interventions in Digital Cutlure and Politics)
[7] Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness
[8] Exclusive: OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic - Time Magazine
[9]  Inside Facebook's African Sweatshop - Time Magazine
[10] Facebook parent firm fails to stop court case in Kenya - Business Daily Africa
[11] Under Fire, Facebook's 'Ethical' Outsourcing Partner Quits Content Moderation Work - Time Magazine
[12] The Exploited Labor Behind Artificial Intelligence - Noema magazine
[13] Mary L. Gray, Siddharth Suri - Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass Hardcover 
[14] Funding To Web3 Startups Plummets 74% in Q4 - Crunchbase News
[15] An Artificial Intelligence Developed Its Own Non-Human Language - The Atlantic
[16] Eduoard Glissant, Poetics of Relation pg 84
[17] We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it. - Dan Mcquillan
[18] AI is eating itself: Bing’s AI quotes COVID disinfo sourced from ChatGPT - Techcrunch
[19] Google Tells Search Users It’s a Good Idea to Throw Car Batteries Into the Ocean - The Drive
[20] Thomas Running - Collin Lysford
[21] ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web - New Yorker
[22] Celia Lury, Luciana Parisi, and Tiziana Terranova - The Becoming Topological of Culture

If we think of design as joining the technical and aesthetics to create something with utility, then in order to radically reimagine design we have to first deconstruct it to a philosophy of the technical and aesthetics. These philosophies are ultimately encoded in the design principles at play and end result of the design process. In the philosophy of the technical, we are considering the way we understand the nature of technical things, systems, digital objects etc. The ontological nature of these abstract things, and thingness/(no)thingness broadly, may seem trivial, however it informs the questions we ask or don't ask during the design process and can contribute to alienation. Aesthetics also encodes cultural values through the design process. For my work I seek to take inspiration from the radical aesthetics of Sylvia Wynter who under/overstands aesthetic practice as always already political and mainstream aesthetic practice as often presupposing and enacting a negation of Black being¹.

One thing to think about when it comes to the ontology of the technical is that Heidegger, one of the foundational thinkers is this area, was a Nazi. Now it can be argued how involved or not involved Heidegger was in the party however he never renounced his association publicly. In my view his complicity and compliance with the logics of the Nazi party has implications. As many scholars and historians have pointed out, the ideology of the Third Reich was informed by the western colonialist projects in North America and Africa with the first concentration camps appearing during the Second Boer War in South Africa. These influences contributed to the conceptualization of the Reich's own philosophy/logic of settler colonialism called the Lebensraum²

In the Universal Machine by Fred Moten he engages the radical expressions of phenomenology of Frantz Fanon, Emmanuel Levinas and Hannah Arendt to argue for a new kind of what he calls Aesthetic sociality. Moten in the preface calls the book a monograph decomposed. This statement holds in it two ideas  that imply a kind of physicality/sensory experience, a temporality and movement. The word monograph speaks of a mono or singular project but this project has been out in the elements a bit too long. It has burst at the seams showing it's internal components and has opened up to exegesis as autopsy. Phenomenology, ontology, and politics come together as a swarm who's movements and improvisations Moten attempts to trouble and trace to have something useful to say about Black social life. He uses Fanon, Levinas, and Arendt’s work as a site for inquiry and point of departure to argue for a social (meta)physics that "violates individuation". Permit me to use a rather long quotation from this preface to begin a conversation about these colonialist/genocidal logics and what they have to tell us about technical ontology in design.

So I want to argue, or move in preparation of an argument for the necessity of a social (meta)physics that violates individuation. Critical discourse on the Shoah and on racial slavery, even in their various divergences rightly align mechanization (or a kind of mechanistic rationalization) with de-individuation while also recognizing that individuation—the theft of body—is genocidal operation. Mutually dismissive analytics of gratuitousness notwithstanding the slave ship and the gas chamber are cognate in this regard and, in their separate ways jointly end at the convergence of death and utility (for only one of which either one or the other is supposed to stand)

...At that intersection, individuation and de-individuation orbit one another as mutual conditions of im/possibility operating in and as the frigid mechanics of an indifference machine.²

The mechanization of the Shoah and slavery (in this case we are referring to slavery but ultimately pointing to the entire colonial and genocidal project affecting Africans across the diaspora) are cognates, both a same/different kind of genocidal operation with the end result being a convergence of death and utility. The operation seeks the de-individuation of it's subject. For me this brings up two key questions:

• How does the de-individuation machine individuate itself? What are it's internal logics?
• By what process (algorithm) does the machine de-individuate that which has been denied individuality? How can you kill a person who has been denied humanity/subjectivity?

Moten argues that (de)individuation operate as the mechanics of the indifference machine. Gilbert Simondon, Bernard Steigler, and Yuk Hui all deal with the process of individuation with the mechanical, technical, and digital and their work may hold something of value to answer the preceeding questions. These genocidal projects show how historically the (de)individuation process has enacted through mechanized logics and the design of these systems were informed by ontologies, aesthetics and philosophies that have not gone away. These logics take the various European projects of racial categorization to their logical conclusion and Ramon Amaro in his recent book  The Black Technical Object excavates the origin of Machine Learning from the site of racial categorization[4]. While the end result may not always be death in the physical sense, Black social death continues to be enacted through colonialist/genocidal logics, at play often in more suble ways, hidden in the algorithm. 

There's more to say on this topic and I'll have more to say a forthcoming essay on alienation and Artificial Intelligence. This is an ongoing line of inquiry for me as I work through keys texts on technical ontology and radical Black aesthetics. Here are some of the readings I'm working through:

Rethinking "Aesthetics": Notes Towards A Deciphering Practice by Sylvia Wynter

The Pope Must Have Been Drunk The King Of Castile A Madman: Culture As Actuality, And The Caribbean Rethinking Modernity by Sylvia Wynter

On the Existence of Digital Objects by Yuk Hui

Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus by Bernard Stiegler

Notes
[1] Sylvia Wynter, Rethinking "Aesthetics": Notes Towards A Deciphering Practice (Africa World Press, 1992)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lebensraum
[3] Fred Moten, Preface, The Universal Machine (Duke University Press, 2018), xii.
[4] Ramon Amaro, The Black Technical Object (MIT Press, 2023)

This is a collection of interconnected/interdependent loosely structured thoughts on liberation as a design principle. These thoughts don't necessarily put any novel ideas forward or purport to give an actionable plan, but instead seek to hover around the topic, discerning its contours and edges.

How might we design liberatory technologies

If we think of design as world-making how might we liberate it from a capitalist paradigm? How might we build new worlds and new liberatory technologies? We have to extend [or reframe?] the idea of technology and even our idea of “progress” because so much of it is informed by consumption and a colonialist framework. What is a liberatory technology? The phrase liberatory technology is one I borrow from Murray Bookchin, who explored these ideas back in the 70s in his book Post Scarcity Anarchism.

So many systems and much of the startup industrial complex has the thin veneer of being revolutionary or increasing access but in reality, it is gradually expanding the reach of big tech as a surveillance apparatus and acts as a hegemonic gatekeeper to culture and information. When I use the phrase startup industrial complex, this does not simply refer to your friend's startup idea but a complex interconnected web of Institutional investors, VCs, Accelerators, Universities, and eager founders hoping to build the next unicorn.

The goal being pursued here is not ideological purity but, how can we get rid of the idea of innovation for innovation’s sake and reorient the ideas of design towards justice and liberation? To pursue that suggests that there is something worth redeeming in the domain of design and design thinking. So what is worth redeeming, and how can we extend existing frameworks?

Recently, there has been much critique of tech and design from many different disciplines and perspectives. Many great activists, scholars, hackers, and designers have been at the forefront of calling out the insidious ways inequity is reproduced or the slow march forward of our dystopian future. However, what I have not seen as much is literature and work on what paths forward look like. I think the critique is very important, especially because we often have a false idea that innovation and progress are something that shouldn’t be questioned.

Three key areas need increasing focus to do this work of new world-building and orient the tools of design and technology toward justice. These are critique, new frameworks, heuristics and theories, and practice.

A Critique of Tech Solutionism

Tech solutionism is the idea that all problems simply boil down to a technology problem. Essentially having a hammer and hitting every nail possible with it. Every year theaters a new buzzword or popular technology that becomes that hammer. Big data, web3, future of work, etc are a few examples. Often times it is design frameworks and methodologies that guide the development and implementations of these technologies that serve a role of bolstering and legitimizing these projects. That’s why it is important to move upstream and critique the frameworks themselves to reorient towards justice and liberation. Instead of making better products or selling existing products, how do we make better worlds?

How do we differentiate between cultivation and planning

I want to juxtapose two different approaches and put forward the idea of cultivation as the approach that is needed in this era where more and more we have tools of computability but the world becomes hard to calculate/comprehend while machines continue to do so.

We can think of changing the world as an exercise in predicting and seeking to map out the world and systemize it. How then does this connect to understandings of spatiality and the overview POV represented by GIS systems which have become pervasive from Google maps to drone technology. Ultimately, when we are speaking of changing the world we are speaking of planning. When we speak of planning we are speaking of the architect, all going back to the concept of the great architect, the orchestrator of the universe. The position of the architect is one that is removed from the spatio-temporal plane of the handiwork. It is top-down, looking upon the thing that is being created. This removed view can be shown to be exactly the kind of ideological framework that is pervasive in design as evidenced in what has been observed as tech-solutionism. A position of hubris that attempts to 

We can compare this with a Glissant's poetics of Relation that which situates us with the idea of unpredictability and of relation as being in a position of change and exchange. An ontology that derives meaning from relation. In order to be in relation and observe relation one must shift from this overview archon/architect position to one that is within. The idea of the cultivator is the concept that I would like to contrast this with. Cultivator is a word that is chosen specifically for its organic connotation. Embracing this organic perspective is not about leaning into a biological analogy per se, but much more about the stochastic and emerging nature of that which exists in the organic form. Cultivation builds the house from within so to speak, instead of planning from the outside. It works within what exists and encourages along  providing care to the roots, responding to stimuli, and allowing for evolution and growth.

Thinking of Liberation as a Multiplicity

what I am interested in are notions of relation, network, connectedness, space, heterogeneity, and emergent capabilities of the assemblage. In this age of the internet where space and time have collapsed, revolutions no longer have leaders, and the hegemony of neoliberalism has taken on an atmospheric quality, where is the space for liberation? We too long have tried to design top-down solutions, grand plans for justice, and the idea of bringing on a new world that we have forgotten liberation is a multiplicity.

We have to move away from the idea of utopia as a singularity and even the need for universal solutions to an embracing of diversity. When I say diversity I don't mean in the neoliberal corporatized sense but diversity grounded in difference, heterogeneity, and opacity. We need a generative multiplicity of utopias, not a singular project.

Diversity is a recursive property

Each culture in Relation has a relation to its internal components and is irreducible to essential components. Cultures also have a relationship of exteriority with the Other.

In this way, diversity is recursive, both in the space of difference with the other and space of difference with each component of the whole. Various cultures are in more or less degrees of realizing this fact and this can be seen as existing on the spectrum of colonizing western societies as seeing themselves as a totalizing project and metrics against which every other culture must be measured and the society in the motion of Creolization which is explicitly expressing its internal diversity and place in the chaos-monde

Discoverability vs Wayfinding

Instead of building platforms based on algorithmic discoverability can we engender new, exciting, and empathetic processes of wayfinding? Algorithmic discoverability tells us its purpose is to show more of what we want but in actuality, it is a process by which users create the raw data material which when collected as assemblage is used to create an ecosystem, targeting engine, and market for ads. Wayfinding is actually discouraged making it hard to explore without the "smart" algorithm suggesting things to you promoting echo chambers. You can search, but that is not the only form of traversing digital spaces. In this case, wayfinding refers to exposing the underlying information architecture of the library of content to allow for a traversable interface. Alternatives methods of traversing include tags, breadcrumbs, browsing user-generated lists of content, and much more experimental methods.

This probably exists as a sort of spectrum where tik tok exists on one side and Wikipedia exists on another.

Liberating Design as a Discipline

A key aspect of designing for liberation is liberating design itself. Design is held captive by our overemphasis or professionalization but we must shift to a diffusion of and democratization of our understanding of design. Everyone is a designer. The creation of new heuristics, methodologies, theories, and practice is imperative to create guidance to influence the industry and practitioners. The dichotomy of builder and user is one that ultimately does a disservice because it can create an extractionary perspective and problematic chasm between the ones building and the end user. Co-creation and coliberation are important principles that should guide work that seeks to build community value and justice. An example of a heuristic that needs to be unseated and ultimately replaced is the phrase oft-repeated in Silicon Valley “move fast and break things.”