Enjoyed this. One of the more horrifying examples I've seen of the process of machines working through us is in Keegan's The Face of Battle:
The machine-gunner is best thought of, in short, as a sort of machine-minder, whose principal task was to feed ammunition belt into the breech, something which could be done while the gun was in full operation, top up the fluid in the cooling jacket, and traverse the gun from left to right and back again within the limits set by its firing platform. Traversing was achieved by a technique known, in the British Army, as the 'two inch tap': by constant practice, the machine-gunner learned to hit the side of the breech with the palm of his hand just hard enough to move the muzzle exactly two inches against the resistance of the traversing screw. A succession of 'two-inch taps' first on one side of the breech until the stop was reached, then on the other, would keep in the air a stream of bullets so dense that no one could walk upright across the front of the machine-gunner's position without being hit – given, of course, that the gunner had set his machine to fire low and that the ground as devoid of cover. The appearance of the machine-gun, therefore, had not so much disciplined the act of killing – which was what seventeenth-century drill had done – as mechanized or industrialized it.
Part of the utility of this is also in the shift in the relation of the machine-minder to the act of killing. This seems to have something to do with Enframing as you characterize it, enabling the machine-minder to stand in a different relation to the violence he's doing.
I'm going against my own promise not to pay for one man bands on substack, but you're smart enough to make me want to say you're missing something.
You say say you don't read fiction. Writers of fiction are craftspeople; they know language is the master and they're just the servant. Musicians serve music. Philosophers want to be the masters of language. They're put off when people remind them that what they say can mean something other than they intend, that the distinction between reason and rhetoric is false. Philosophers are originalists, like Nino Scalia. But the constitution is a living thing; it doesn't mean what it did. It changes with us. "But art is not essentially content. Art is essentially form. Art is object, not subject." (Ursula K. Le Guin ) Artists and critics may fight like cats and dogs but they're a pair, like prosecutors and defense attorneys. Theorists turn artists into illustrators. Legal philosophers disdain lawyers.
The problem with factories is not that people are subsumed, but that they're subsumed by something that leaves them very little room to craft a space for themselves.The two links are to a documentary about Detroit techno and "Addiction by Design" gambling game design for Las Vegas.
If you want to think about Heidegger you need to think about Foucault. Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism" is the poor man's "Discipline and Punish". If you want to think about von Neumann, your need to think about Strangelove.
J.H. Burns was the first General Editor of the Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham
---If we review Bentham’s contemporaries in search of a figure who might be seen as exemplifying the antithesis of the Benthamic view of life, many names might suggest themselves and might, in one context or another, be appropriate. Rousseau, Burke, Kant himself, Hegel – each of these would have a claim, though each might prove, on closer inspection, to have something at least in common with Bentham. There is, however, a figure – a man who was born less than ten years after Bentham and died less than five years before him – who may provide the requisite antithesis. William Blake, I suggest, both embodies that antithesis and proclaims the imperfection of Bentham’s understanding of happiness. Two passages may serve to illustrate the point. One is, inevitably,
He who bends to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.
And the other is all the more telling for its expression of a view – an understanding – of life as far as possible from Bentham’s utilitarianism:
If social media is a problem it's because the social itself has collapsed. Individualism has produced its opposite. As a Greek factory worker told me in frustration. "Americans aren't social!" And many of the people he's talking about call themselves socialists.
Thank you for this very stimulating essay—and for all the work you're doing on here. I think an important post-modern aspect of what makes twitter so crazy-making is that the promise of posting is, as you noted, in your previous piece, the promise of recognition and exposure. If you want to make a living as a writer/podcaster/journalist/pundit, you need to be visible on twitter. This means that in addition to all the work essay and book writing requires, you also need to be participating in the twitter economy so that when your work comes out, you have an audience primed to engage with it. You produce free content for twitter and facebook, and the payoff you get is recognition that you may be able to monetize down the road. Say what you will about Fordist capitalism, but those factory workers were getting paid for their time. The twitter economy, like any developed economy in the 21st century, is highly speculative and basically a matter of cruel optimism.
This is fascinating and persuasive. It's clear that people who post to Twitter are "working the machine." What's your view of people who only read? (That includes me, BTW)? Are we also working the machine? If so, how (if at all) does the work of "merely reading" differ from the work of writing?
I find this point a little over the top. Yes there is a sense in which in Capitalism everyone feeds the machine. But the problem with alienation is tied to the issue of deskilling that modern technology favors when tech is chosen by Capitalists. I think the moral point about machinery is closely related to Adam Smith’s point about how the division of labor dehumanizes the laborer. So too with deskilling technology. David Nobel wrote on these issue insightfully as did Braverman. At any rate, my question to you is do you think blogging, writing for the net etc is deskilling or more deskilling than doing so for, say, book or article publication. Twitter perhaps. But I found that blogging was the opposite of the deskilling one finds in large scale mechanization.
Last point, if the aim is to build the future in the present then some forms of work today provide glimpses of what work could be like were it non alienating. There are such forms, I believe. Artisnal work which can use fancy tech can be such, so too various kinds of academic work. They may not be as good as they might be, buT they are much different from the kind o mind numbing work on associates with assembly lines or call centers.
Enjoyed this. One of the more horrifying examples I've seen of the process of machines working through us is in Keegan's The Face of Battle:
The machine-gunner is best thought of, in short, as a sort of machine-minder, whose principal task was to feed ammunition belt into the breech, something which could be done while the gun was in full operation, top up the fluid in the cooling jacket, and traverse the gun from left to right and back again within the limits set by its firing platform. Traversing was achieved by a technique known, in the British Army, as the 'two inch tap': by constant practice, the machine-gunner learned to hit the side of the breech with the palm of his hand just hard enough to move the muzzle exactly two inches against the resistance of the traversing screw. A succession of 'two-inch taps' first on one side of the breech until the stop was reached, then on the other, would keep in the air a stream of bullets so dense that no one could walk upright across the front of the machine-gunner's position without being hit – given, of course, that the gunner had set his machine to fire low and that the ground as devoid of cover. The appearance of the machine-gun, therefore, had not so much disciplined the act of killing – which was what seventeenth-century drill had done – as mechanized or industrialized it.
Part of the utility of this is also in the shift in the relation of the machine-minder to the act of killing. This seems to have something to do with Enframing as you characterize it, enabling the machine-minder to stand in a different relation to the violence he's doing.
I'm going against my own promise not to pay for one man bands on substack, but you're smart enough to make me want to say you're missing something.
You say say you don't read fiction. Writers of fiction are craftspeople; they know language is the master and they're just the servant. Musicians serve music. Philosophers want to be the masters of language. They're put off when people remind them that what they say can mean something other than they intend, that the distinction between reason and rhetoric is false. Philosophers are originalists, like Nino Scalia. But the constitution is a living thing; it doesn't mean what it did. It changes with us. "But art is not essentially content. Art is essentially form. Art is object, not subject." (Ursula K. Le Guin ) Artists and critics may fight like cats and dogs but they're a pair, like prosecutors and defense attorneys. Theorists turn artists into illustrators. Legal philosophers disdain lawyers.
The problem with factories is not that people are subsumed, but that they're subsumed by something that leaves them very little room to craft a space for themselves.The two links are to a documentary about Detroit techno and "Addiction by Design" gambling game design for Las Vegas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1KkE6I1wJo
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691160887/addiction-by-design
If you want to think about Heidegger you need to think about Foucault. Jonah Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism" is the poor man's "Discipline and Punish". If you want to think about von Neumann, your need to think about Strangelove.
J.H. Burns was the first General Editor of the Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham
---If we review Bentham’s contemporaries in search of a figure who might be seen as exemplifying the antithesis of the Benthamic view of life, many names might suggest themselves and might, in one context or another, be appropriate. Rousseau, Burke, Kant himself, Hegel – each of these would have a claim, though each might prove, on closer inspection, to have something at least in common with Bentham. There is, however, a figure – a man who was born less than ten years after Bentham and died less than five years before him – who may provide the requisite antithesis. William Blake, I suggest, both embodies that antithesis and proclaims the imperfection of Bentham’s understanding of happiness. Two passages may serve to illustrate the point. One is, inevitably,
He who bends to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.
And the other is all the more telling for its expression of a view – an understanding – of life as far as possible from Bentham’s utilitarianism:
Man was made for Joy & Woe
And when this we rightly know
Through the world we safely go.
Joy & Woe are woven fine
A Clothing for the soul divine.
Under every grief & pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.---
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/utilitas/article/abs/happiness-and-utility-jeremy-benthams-equation/1BE48AA389161E1F676033457141BB1A
If social media is a problem it's because the social itself has collapsed. Individualism has produced its opposite. As a Greek factory worker told me in frustration. "Americans aren't social!" And many of the people he's talking about call themselves socialists.
Thank you for this very stimulating essay—and for all the work you're doing on here. I think an important post-modern aspect of what makes twitter so crazy-making is that the promise of posting is, as you noted, in your previous piece, the promise of recognition and exposure. If you want to make a living as a writer/podcaster/journalist/pundit, you need to be visible on twitter. This means that in addition to all the work essay and book writing requires, you also need to be participating in the twitter economy so that when your work comes out, you have an audience primed to engage with it. You produce free content for twitter and facebook, and the payoff you get is recognition that you may be able to monetize down the road. Say what you will about Fordist capitalism, but those factory workers were getting paid for their time. The twitter economy, like any developed economy in the 21st century, is highly speculative and basically a matter of cruel optimism.
This is fascinating and persuasive. It's clear that people who post to Twitter are "working the machine." What's your view of people who only read? (That includes me, BTW)? Are we also working the machine? If so, how (if at all) does the work of "merely reading" differ from the work of writing?
I find this point a little over the top. Yes there is a sense in which in Capitalism everyone feeds the machine. But the problem with alienation is tied to the issue of deskilling that modern technology favors when tech is chosen by Capitalists. I think the moral point about machinery is closely related to Adam Smith’s point about how the division of labor dehumanizes the laborer. So too with deskilling technology. David Nobel wrote on these issue insightfully as did Braverman. At any rate, my question to you is do you think blogging, writing for the net etc is deskilling or more deskilling than doing so for, say, book or article publication. Twitter perhaps. But I found that blogging was the opposite of the deskilling one finds in large scale mechanization.
Last point, if the aim is to build the future in the present then some forms of work today provide glimpses of what work could be like were it non alienating. There are such forms, I believe. Artisnal work which can use fancy tech can be such, so too various kinds of academic work. They may not be as good as they might be, buT they are much different from the kind o mind numbing work on associates with assembly lines or call centers.