We—let us reclaim the We, the declaratory We, the contentious We, the collective We. On this inaugural day, as the seas rise, the drones fly, the tweets storm, and a reality TV star ascends to the heights of world power, the Infernal Machine returns. Just as all that is solid is melting into air and all that is sacred is profaned (yet again but differently), we want to face the real conditions of our life together, again.
And these conditions are new: Our politics, our institutions, our reality have been eroded by a techno-enabled cynicism and a vociferous optimism peddled from Silicon Valley to Washington, DC. Our media channels, often filled with noisy disinformation, have come close to overwhelming all hope for truth and a common good. Technology has become both a demon and a god, oppressor and savior, post-human and super-human.
Less than a year ago, many of us were decrying technocracy and neoliberal automation—the routinization of decisions by distant experts. And now? We have been compelled, by the Twitter-assisted success of the newly inaugurated president, to defend expertise, even as we know that it is not enough. But a few moons ago, we were skeptics when it came to data, statistics, and polls. Now social science, not to mention science, is under attack by those who believe that “to tweet it is to prove it.” A year ago we thought that the great showdown of the decade would be between the state and Silicon Valley. Now we see their collusion, willed or not.
So we are at our own inauguration point, our own auspicious beginning, full of omens.
During the age of high technology—think mid-twentieth-century broadcast media and rust-belt production lines—entropy, the erosion of order, represented the great problem of the age. “Information = entropy” became the rallying cry of a new coterie of scientists, engineers, and poets, the basis for a celebration of new media channels for a potentially limitless proliferation of communication.
And then the science fiction of that earlier pretense turned cyberpunk; the Internet promised freedom and gave us something more complex. And with the production of unprecedented quantities of digital data, the virtual world got Big. The prospect of our own technological age is now tipping points and system failures that threaten sudden catastrophe. Experts, yes, but what happens when a politics far outside the boundaries of the Old Media and the Old Discourse—including what threatens to become Old Democracy—emerges?
During the age of high technology, media could be left to their own. Signals, senders, receivers, and noise constituted an engineering schema that could be bought, regulated, and directed by the relatively few for advertising to, informing, and entertaining the many. The media was both an institution and a fantasy of power: a towering professional enclave that sent signals to the receivers of a polis of citizens, couch potatoes, airport-bound travelers, and runners on treadmills.
But today “the media” has no towering centers: Media are on wrists, our hearts, our streets, and in space. The center of media production is no longer New York, Hollywood, or the editorial room at the local newspaper, but Facebook and would-be Facebooks (Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, and so on). But these new media types don’t edit. Their only norm is unregulated use for the sake of unlimited profit. And so a form of parallel meme-processing is the underbelly of what once was decried as “merely the news” by thinkers from Nietzsche to Neil Postman.
During the age of high technology the academic study of media developed its own high towers and professional enclaves: communications; radio, film, and television; cinema. It also included courses from journalism, speech communication, economics, business, and literature. Each operated on its own frequency. Technology studies, meanwhile, built an edifice (rather plain and drab at first, until a Gothic renovation by a Frenchman, Bruno Latour, with a penchant for networks, actants, and jokes). If the age of high technology yielded a change in the categories, such that agency was distributed and binaries upended (a “general cyborg condition,” as Donna Haraway put it), then what does the fast-advancing Digital Era call for? What philosophy will grasp this history?
A chorus on the Left decries the “fading of fact,” as though we had not attached media and rhetoric to the disappearance of fact for half a century—or since Plato. How can our self-proclaimed sophisticates have failed to see this continent of intellectual energy emerging outside their media, yet on the platforms those media share? How can those trained to think of Enlightenment as having the darkest of sides, a necessary backlash in its very heart, be so naively surprised by this predictable development?
And, so, on this inauguration day, we dedicate this platform to finding those positions, to develop the techniques, to find the pressure-points in our media and rhetoric to make sense of our new conditions, technological and political, and to articulate commonalities and goals.
It’s therefore time we collect and meet in a common, contested, conflicted, complex field that we variously call research, criticism, scholarship, philosophy, or science. Let us inaugurate a collective, a collective that might form a community, but that cannot and should not be an academic “discipline,” inasmuch as it is academic but undisciplined thinking that we need.
It’s time to collect, and to be collected. Let us be philosophical, whimsical, constructive, critical, and confused. But let us collect, and be collected. Let us write proverbs, poetry, commentary, essays, explorations, and maybe even code. But let us collect, and be collected. Let us listen, learn, make notes, draw connections, and consider diagrams. But let us collect, and be collected, with ecumenical means in search of effective voice.
We—this “We,” too, is a complex field—invite a world of scholars, computer scientists, thinkers, programmers, poets, and priests to join us. This platform is a position, but a position that will change through collection and collation. We will make a database and channel of what is to be done. And that must remain an open question, our question, for as long as we have energy and affordance to answer to it.