Only a Game

Make-Up

We would be hard pressed to find a more diverse industrial network than that which manufactures make-up: plant oils, the crushed bodies of insects, mineral dust, ground up herring scales... the make-up cyborgs wear upon their faces a macabre concoction worthy of the most fantastical fairy tale witches brew.

I don’t have that much personal experience with make-up... my wife doesn’t use it, and although I’ve used a little on stage or for fancy dress parties and the like, it’s a small part of my life. Yet I have not failed to notice the number of people who ritualistically ‘put on their face’ in the morning and then, just as laboriously, remove it at night. Next to this practice, the obligations of Islamic prayer (salat) or a Christian monk’s canonical hours seem almost tame!

It would be easy to take a judgemental stance here: why do you need to cover your beauty with paint? Why get anxious to show the face underneath? Yet there is something to the rituals of make-up that people draw strength from - and this is nowhere near as gendered as it may first appear. American football players may not spend as much time crafting their faces, but they still put on ‘warpaint’ before they hit the field! What’s more, unlike that conspicuous prosthesis of the wealthy elites, the suit (cyborg #36), which must be expensive to serve its role, make-up is an affordable option for the majority of people on our planet. Compared to designer clothes and shoes, grotesquely overpowered cars, or jewellery, make-up provides a way to project a persona that is not merely aping the conspicuous excess of the commercial aristocracy. In the simple act of painting a face lies a tool for self-confidence that allows for its own excellences.

Yet I am mindful of Baz Luhrmann‘s admonition: “Do not read beauty magazines, they will only make you feel ugly.” There is truth in this claim, a tyranny of image maintained by elites for their own benefit, and one that bulldozes the inherent beauty of ethnicity with conventions rooted in whiteness. Beyoncé straightened her beautiful hair to conform to the norms of white beauty. Make-up is primarily made for lighter skin tones... those with a darker complexion not only struggle to find suitable make-up (should they wish to use it), they are repeatedly and systematically sidelined in the image industry, reinforcing a set of stereotypes of beauty all at heart celebrating a pre-prescribed image of whiteness.

As make-up cyborgs, your excellences lie in how you choose to present your face to the world. But this act is also a form of subjugation in so much as the cybernetic network distributing images of ‘beauty’ provides the dogma upon which each face finds its normative foundation. In this way, our faces become not our own possessions, but a means of possession by demons beyond our individual control, doubts and anxieties. The cybernetic network of all faces carries the baffling risks of every labyrinth.

A Hundred Cyborgs, #94

Drugs

We tend to think about legal vs illegal drugs - forgetting, it seems, the harms caused by (legal) medication, alcohol, or tobacco, and the good that unexpectedly comes from (illegal) intoxicants. One sensible constraint applies to all drugs, medicinal or recreational - moderation. Those drugs that cannot be used in moderation, such as heroin, crack cocaine, or meth, set the interpretive pattern that tars illegal drugs with the same brush. Yet it is legal drugs - paracetamol (acetaminophen) and alcohol - that cause the majority of fatal health problems, mainly via liver damage, and tobacco is not far behind.

Because ‘drugs’ are so broad a category, it can be hard to make general moral or behavioural claims about the many different kinds of drug cyborgs. But as my earlier discussion of pubs (cyborg #45) suggested, the unseen benefits to drugs lie far more in the community they foster and support than in their individual effects - at the level of the individual, we can say nothing more than ‘stick to small doses’ or abstain entirely (again, regardless of whether the drugs in question are legal or illegal). But what interests me about the cybernetic networks surrounding drugs of all kinds is the potential for them to develop into communities of care.

As a small example, in the UK, US, Denmark, France, and the Netherlands I have encountered networks of people bound together by their sharing of modest amounts of marijuana. Sometimes this occurs illegally, as a friendly distribution network, but at the level of those at the bottom of the network there are none of the movie-style organised crime cliches (although gritty stories occasionally drift down the supply chains...). Sometimes, as with Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen, it occurs in a legal grey area, with the residents not only providing hash or bud that is illegal by law but also fairly-priced food and accommodation for about a thousand residents in an ‘anarchist commune’. In the US and the Netherlands I have also seen it from inside the law, with cafes (coffee shops) and retail establishments providing the point of supply, and once again a community of support maintained, although often less intimately than when the community is bound together by the need for a certain discretion in their activities.

No such community of care exists, however, when (legal) drugs are purchased from a supermarket. Rather, a small health warning label on alcohol, tobacco, or painkillers - and in the latter case, warnings rarely or never read, despite widespread negative health effects (in terms of liver damage) dwarfing those of all illegal drugs taken together. I am forced to suggest not only that we should avoid being distracted by the legal histories in the case of the various (legal and illegal) drugs when we wish to assess their moral and behavioural influence, but further to ask whether what we have declared legal is in any way the innocent side of the fence it is so often assumed to be.

A Hundred Cyborgs, #93

Deplatforming

A basic pillar of contemporary social justice campaigning is deplatforming, which entails collectively piling complaints, economic pressure, or threats of non-violent reprisal against a venue that is hosting a speaker whom an interest group opposes. It’s effective, because venues depend upon punters for their livelihood.

Each deplatforming cyborg is a network of concerned individuals brought together to engage in a power struggle against another cyborg - the venue (it’s staff, building, and technology) and an individual, who is being deplatformed. In this match up, the deplatforming cyborg network has the insurmountable advantage on the political battlefield. A brave university official might just stand up for free speech and resist the pressure being mounted; a commercial venue will almost always fold. Deplatforming is thus a powerful tool for silencing individuals we disagree with. Perhaps the question ought to be: should we be silencing those we disagree with?

I have called ‘cybervirtue’ those positive qualities we possess when we become part of a technological network. Alas, the deplatforming cyborg is not and cannot be cybervirtuous (which is not the same as claiming that this course of action is not permitted). The behaviour deplatforming encourages is ‘not listening’ i.e. censorship, and the only reason this even appears just to proponents of deplatforming is that the people being censored are those whose ideas are deemed so offensive that censoring them is judged the only acceptable course of action. The argument in favour of deplatforming is therefore the necessity of halting evil, not that doing it will make us good people. In other words, the ends justify the means - and we ought to be very careful about anything that relies upon this principle, since the goodness of ends cannot justify the immorality of means.

The term ‘fascist’ is bandied about far too liberally these days - pun intended - but few regimes today are as brutal and oppressive as Mussolini’s fascists. A key part of the fascist ideology, however, was the forcible suppression of opposing ideas. It should cause us at least some pause when we realise that deplatforming is in no way guaranteed to be used for causes we deem just, and indeed is tailor-made for the kind of fascism-light that is popular today in the nations that once stood for liberty. I have already witnessed from afar figures from all corners of the political spectrum being deplatformed by those on both the left and the right. If tolerance is a virtue we value, we cannot foster it by deplatforming. We must allow those we disagree with to speak, else how can we challenge those ideas we wish to overcome, such as the ideologies of the bigot in myriad forms, both liberal and conservative? I fear deplatforming has empowered bigotry far more than it has done good in the world, and even if you do not cherish freedom of speech as much as I do, I encourage you to reflect upon whether a world where no outrageous suggestions may be voiced is a good world.

A Hundred Cyborgs, #92

GoogleApple

A GoogleApple cyborg is a cybernetic organism consisting of a human coupled with either an Android smartphone or an iPhone. The human feels like it is the most significant part of this network, which is odd considering that GoogleApple adds in thousands of robots and humans in order to make this cyborg work. In fact, even though the humans forming GoogleApple cyborgs are by far more numerous than the humans working directly or indirectly for Google or Apple, they are still less numerous than GoogleApple’s robots - there’s at least one of their smartphones per human, plus the rest of their cybernetic network behind them. In other words, as GoogleApple cyborgs, we are a minority component in a vast cybernetic network.

We tend to focus on the choice - do I buy an iPhone or an Android smartphone? - and thus miss the more salient point that it makes very little difference what we choose in this regard. Either way we’re becoming a GoogleApple cyborg, a being that can in seconds transact with the internet and will indeed do so frequently. The smartphone permits us instantaneous escape - and impels us to do so recurrently. The GoogleApple cyborg is thus one of the most distracted creatures that ever lived, although exceeded in this regard by various other combinations of beings and things, such as the heroin needle cyborg.

It is not fashionable to talk of ‘duties’ these days yet it is extremely fashionable to assert random wished for concepts as rights. But rights come from agreements, not emotional whims, and rights are inherently duties. To have a right is to say that everyone has a duty. But in the context of a smartphone you have no rights and consequently GoogleApple has no duties towards you - even if you die because you were distracted by your smartphone, legal responsibility for your death largely falls to you. That’s because you have moral duties towards yourself that are not rights because they do not spring from agreements.

Both Aristotle and Kant suggested that one of our duties towards ourselves is to pursue our own excellences. A smartphone can help with this - I write almost all my philosophy on my pocket robot, runners use theirs to monitor their performance, and dieters track calories to bring their eating under control. But to GoogleApple, activities that pursue your excellences are entirely interchangeable with those that squander your time and intelligence. Algorithms that curate suggestions ‘for you’ are more fairly described as curating ‘for them’ - propagating the money-making apps, the distracting apps.

I don’t imagine we’re heading into a future world without smartphones, but I do fantasise about escaping life as a GoogleApple cyborg. I dream of a cybervirtuous smartphone, a robot that brings out the best in those that partner with it. But I am sceptical that such a thing could come from GoogleApple. I have to wonder: would every cybernetic network that might replace this one fall inevitably into the same traps...?

A Hundred Cyborgs, #91

100Cyborgs: 61-70

What are the behavioural effects of technological networks? What happens if we stop thinking about technology as shiny machines and start looking at other, subtler tools? Can we design technology to have better effects upon humans? These and other questions are what this blog project, A Hundred Cyborgs, are all about. Here are the ten posts from 61 to 70:

    61. Surrogate Knowledge
    62. Phone Upgrades
    63. Phone Mazes
    64. Anti-paywalls
    65. Quality Forms 
    66. Media Libraries
    67. Abbatoirs
    68. Water
    69. Corporations
    70. Pause

There was a three month gap between the last block (#51-60) and these, but it was an even bigger gap for me as I wrote the Arcade Cyborgs during my 2019 trip to GDC, and had not written any for some time afterwards (because I was busy completing my tribute to Mike Singleton, Silk). That's why the first piece, #61 Surrogate Knowledge, is a kind of 'revision' of the themes of the serial as a whole. I was trying to put it back into its context.

I think the first one that I wrote in this block was actually #65 Quality Forms, which expresses my ongoing dissatisfaction with the way that mid-sized bureaucracies substitute paperwork that records minutiae for any attempt at good practices. I encounter this mostly in the university, which this piece has in its cross-hairs, but the problem is far wider. This set me off on a bureaucracy riff that led to the related pieces on #63 Phone Mazes and #64 Anti-paywalls, different ways for organisations to avoid dealing with people.

#67 Abbatoirs is my rebuttal to vegan advertising, which I feel is letting vegans down, and risks reducing a valid ethical choice to yet another BS marketing bullet point. As for #68 Water, I actually planned to write an entire block of ten pieces on water cyborgs - which would have been easy to do - but in the end didn't feel like it would add more than a single piece would. #69 Corporations is another of those pieces that reminds us that our desire to offload blame onto anything but ourselves is a key part of the mess we have created, while #70 Pause brought this block to a thematic end.

I am always interested in discussion, so feel free to raise comments either here (ideal for longer debates) or on Twitter (perfect for quick questions). And if you’ve enjoyed any of these pieces, please buy a copy of The Virtuous Cyborg and support my research into cybervirtue!

The final Cyborgs are coming this Summer!

Roads

The car-human cyborg remains the deadliest creature on the planet except for the alliance between malaria and mosquitoes. It’s also the cause of death we simply can’t be bothered to care about. I first made this point in Chaos Ethics, and have reiterated them ever since - including back in cyborg #5. As tragic as the quarter of a million deaths attributed to Coronavirus might be, road accidents cause over a million undiscussed deaths every year - yet it is unthinkable that we would trigger a lockdown to stop this steel-framed pandemic, even though it is quite possible when the lockdown ends we will have saved more lives by taking our cars off the road than by blunting the impact of the virus.

After the deaths, the roads are the other casualty of vehicle use we just don’t like to think about. For motor vehicles wreak tremendous violence upon our road surfaces - just as motorists cause the traffic they complain about, motorised vehicles are the cause of the potholes that drivers detest. A network of cycle routes would last many years without needing more than basic maintenance... motorised transport not only burns up resources making the vehicles and fuelling them, it uses even more resources building and repairing the infrastructure that makes the car inevitable, and thus scares people away from cycling. People are afraid to cycle because they are afraid the cars will kill them - and they’re right to be afraid, it’s just they are not safer in a car. The car itself is the very problem, and we are oh so experienced at ignoring it, especially when we get behind the wheel.

Roads as we currently operate them do offer a few opportunities for cybervirtue, such as building the excellences of navigation. So of course, we add robot navigators to destroy that possibility as well. And really, we are reaching absurdly as we try to find the positives in our nomadic “normal” life of endless motorised travel, as if it wasn’t the number one threat to life outside of the tropics, the biggest environmental health risk we face, and a major contributor to the collapse of land use diversity that is steadily driving our fellow species to extinction.

Yet we will not question the roads. We must not, for we have engaged in an endless double-or-nothing bet on this way of organising human life, and just as the gambler pursuing the Martingale strategy in a casino must eventually hit the house limit and go bankrupt, so will we. I encourage you to use the lockdown to reflect upon the way we take roads and travel for granted and imagine a future of lighter, slower, safer, friendlier vehicles that could make their roads last longer, and kill fewer people. We have a golden opportunity for making changes right now - let’s not waste this chance to imagine what a good transport network might be.

A Hundred Cyborgs, #90

The final ten cyborgs begin soon.

Supermarkets

We are supermarket cyborgs - if it were not for the cybernetic network of fields, harvesters, farms, mines, foundries, factories, ships, docks, cranes, trucks, and finally, supermarkets  you would die. You and I are as dependent upon supermarkets and wholesalers (“supermarkets for shops”) as we are on air and water. Buy from a smaller shop? They go to a wholesaler. Only eat out at restaurants? Where do you think they get their food...?

There’s something especially eerie about queuing to enter the supermarket under the lockdown restrictions that makes me feel our dependence all the more acutely. Empty shelves stick in the mind more than business as usual. But the supermarket is merely the end point in the food distribution network we are inescapably caught within. There are still a few million people within the shorter, older network of farms and markets, and even a few thousand fed in even older ways - hunting, gathering, and farming for yourself. For the most part, however, food is now a cybernetic service ensuring our utter dependence upon a network we barely comprehend. I touched upon this before in the context of palm oil, and that was a mere fraction of a percent of the vast complexities we supermarket cyborgs are embroiled within.

To ask about the moral and behavioural effects of supermarkets is to face the general condition of the contemporary cyborg - a kind of accidental ignorance I call in The Virtuous Cyborg ‘shallow-sightedness’. We are unable (and unwilling) to attempt a full picture of the inconceivable vastness of our cybernetic networks. We fill a trolley unaware that we are sustaining the poverty of sugar farmers, funding sweat shops, or keeping animals in dire conditions. Perhaps we suspect our impact, but ease our consciences by not thinking about it, or try to navigate the minefield via notions of ‘fair trade’ or ‘ethical shopping’ that flatten the wide view of the network into something that feels more manageable. Mostly, out of sight is out of mind.

Humanity is blessed with the intelligence to solve great technical problems and implement systems on a scale of complexity that rivals the intricacies of the natural world. Yet we cyborgs are cursed with a lack of wisdom that springs at its heart from our elevation of the individual in a way that allows us to equate liberty with the freedom to choose from the shelves of the supermarket, emancipated to enrich the wealthy and exploit the planet. When the philosophers of the Enlightenment argued for our self-determination and liberty, I feel quite sure this servitude to the checkout was not quite what they had in mind.

Wisdom was always a collective knowledge, a skill exercised by communities. When the scale of the systems required to feed us exceeds our mental grasp, the possibility of making wise decisions is shorn from possibility. Is there a wisdom of supermarkets beyond the shallow bribery of discounting and spurious offers? What could it possibly be?

A Hundred Cyborgs, #89

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Schools

It is a curious time to be reflecting upon the cybernetic networks of our schools, given that they are effectively closed at the moment. But the absence of something can help bring it into sharper focus - and in the case of schools, their vanishing leaves me with three small children to teach myself. This immediately gave me a sense of awed respect for the teachers who somehow manage to keep everyone’s attention for six hours, for at home even one hour is a struggle, especially when dealing with kids of wildly different ages and attention spans.

My ‘home schooling’ turned a corner when I abandoned any pretence of following the official curriculum and simply taught what I knew well enough to teach confidently and what my kids showed aptitude or interest in learning. This has led to a dramatic improvement: I’ve largely eliminated the cryptic deciphering of exercises that come from a nebulous source and instead made teaching and learning an agreement between two individuals, in the manner advocated by Jacques Rancière in The Ignorant Schoolmaster. And isn’t this, in fact, what all education amounts to, if we take it as a purposeful activity and not a striving to check boxes?

Comparing my situation to the curriculum makes me question the entire guiding principle of school curriculum, at least as they are usually understood: as the proscribed template for subdividing learning. The necessity of the curriculum is to ensure that everyone advances slowly enough that everyone learns. This, it seems to me, still doesn’t work. Going slowly doesn’t magically get everyone’s attention, doesn’t guarantee an environment where students will commit to the active process of learning. Teaching is not like spraying crops, you can just lay it down thinly and hope it’s enough. Teaching is irrelevant until the student chooses to learn. The curriculum does nothing to address this problem - it merely provides a cybernetic brake on the rate of possible learning.

I don’t know what primary school teachers make of the curriculum - maybe they’re glad of a framework that regulates what they are doing. But it seems to me that the curriculum is a tool intended to absorb many students, and not a tool for facilitating teaching and learning. Maybe that is indeed what’s needed to deal with the conditions in the schools as they currently operate. But for the time being, I am content to pass what skills I have to my kids, and I hope that other parents are doing the same. I’m using pen and paper game designs to teach maths and English because I’m a game designer. I would be delighted to know other parents had taught plumbing, or sewing, or word processors, or carpentry, or indeed any skill at all, regardless of what the curriculum says. Learning is something that happens when people want to learn. Why do we attempt to force this opportunity to take a specific shape...?

A Hundred Cyborgs, #88

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Vaccines

People walking around with masks over their faces, many unable to leave their homes. Millions dying. Between 1348 and 1351, a third of the population of Europe died as a result of the Black Death. Not only was there no vaccine against it, there was not even the concept of a vaccine. Yet there was one other vital difference between those alive in the Middle Ages and those of us alive today: they were prepared to die. They were just as afraid of dying as we are, but as Ivan Illich has stressed, prior to industrialisation everyone accepted the inevitability of death as the unavoidable fate awaiting everyone ‘when their time came’.

Vaccines were only a part of the transformation of our approach to life and health in the nineteenth century, but they marked a seismic shift in our response to infectious diseases. Suddenly, miraculously, it was possible to prevent illness by beating it to the punch, becoming mildly sick in order to develop an immunity that would prevent the worst ravages of a micro-organism. Disease, it suddenly seemed, could be defeated. And along with vaccines, there came surgeries, antibiotics, myriad drugs - so many amazing medical techniques... so many, in fact, that rather than everyone accepting that they must eventually face their own time to die, now people are willing to sue doctors for not putting their 90 year-old relative on a ventilator. We now behave, insanely, as if we could live forever if we just get the right treatments, as if we are merely machines in need of intermittent repair.

Until recently, vaccines were a focus of attention because of opposition to vaccination. Much of this resistance springs from misunderstandings: yes, the vaccine will make you sick. But that’s precisely the point: build immunity to a mild infection to protect against a worse one. But we don’t like to admit that, despite the obvious blunders, anti-vaxxers might not be mistaken when it comes to distrusting medical corporations to have our best interests at heart. The market for vaccines is worth $35 billion - and that’s less than 5% of what pharmaceutical companies make overall. With this much money up for grabs, what kind of corporation is going to pause and impartially consider where the limits of medicine ought to lie...?

Vaccines can ‘defeat’ a disease - yet disease and death remain the inescapable cost of living. Being a vaccine cyborg is sold to us in the terms of warfare - “the fight against coronavirus”, “eradicating the disease”, “help us defeat the virus”. I can imagine the landowners of the Middle Ages making similar claims about the protection they were affording in return for taxes, albeit in literal terms of invasion and rapine. Yet of course, that ‘protection money’ was used to instigate literal war - in the centuries preceding the Black Death, the Crusades were funded, ultimately, by taxation. Sooner or later, you have to look a little deeper into the arguments and actions of those we are paying for protection.

A Hundred Cyborgs, #87

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Notes

Guest post by Matt Mower.

Arguably the most sophisticated form of note-taking is the Zettelkasten system developed by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann in the 1950s.

Zettelkasten means "box of notes" and is designed to reliably produce good new ideas and make final deliverables (essays, articles, and so on) painless to create.

Key to the Zettelkasten method is the use of cards to store individual thoughts which are uniquely identified and linked together by tags. Cross-referencing with tags eliminates the problem of where to put a note and allow related ideas to intertwingle and structure to emerge organically rather than having to be imposed.

Indeed, Luhmann's career output (some 70 books and 400 articles) suggests that such a system of note-taking can be a powerful tool.

However, while note-taking itself is already a crucial part of our cyborg heritage, digital note-taking opens up exciting possibilities for what a note-system can do for us.

If nothing else the scale of information a digital system can manage dwarfs any physical system of notes. Further, once data is digital, it is possible to create new connections, to re-arrange, and to transform it in ways difficult to imagine in the physical realm.

At its simplest, a digital note is an analogue of a paper note, i.e. a stream of text, perhaps formatted. There is an explosion of applications today for organising this kind of note. The most popular of which is probably Evernote which is like a "digital file box".

However, the use of folders for structure creates a "Where do I put it?" problem since a note can, typically, only exist in one folder. It is a problem common to such applications and, a problem that's worsened the more information you store.

By breaking the limitations of folder structure, digital notes truly become a system for interconnected thoughts and, as such, eminently suitable for creating a digital-Zettelkasten. Tools such as Roam and TheBrain follow this approach and consequently emphasise the creation of a fine-grained web of thoughts.

By breaking the limitation of note-as-stream-of-text, digital notes become structured such that they can be processed with software and more easily combined and remixed into new forms. Applications such as Tinderbox and Mentat allow notes to be processed by software agents to solve more complex problems.

For example, to know a note represents a question and to look among notes which are facts for possible answers. Perhaps even to self-organise views of such information.

While we are in still in the relative infancy of digital note-taking, it is a time of great promise and tools are emerging to help us build databases of what we know that the writer Tiago Forte calls a "second brain". If what you know, or could know, is essential to you, there is no better time to pick a tool and get started building yours.

A Hundred Cyborgs, #86 by Matt Mower, a part of All-Comers April.

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