Issue 1/2015 - Kritische Netzpraxis


Palinopsia

Graham Harwood, YoHa


An Agent-based Legal Knowledge Acquisition Methodology for Agile Public Administration is just one of the many hyper-dull agent based modelling papers that require me to complete a course in selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors before reading. This is not to say the paper is uninteresting but antidepressants offer a certain numbness that cushions the multilayer boredom necessary in trying to come to grips with how logics, operate at multiple scales within the performance of power in a world that has computation as a central pillar.

I have just finished writing a paper with Matthew Fuller, Goldsmiths, University of London about Abstract Urbanism which is my excuse for reading the paper above along with many other tomes including Thomas C. Schelling's extensively racist algorithm 'Models of Segregation'. Written in 1969 just four years after the Voting Rights Act gave large swaths of African Americans the right to vote the paper posited a logic for discerning the micro/macro behaviours in segregated USA cities. The subsequent logics of agent based computer modelling offer the proposition that explanation can be derived by growing social structures from the bottom up. If you give (n) agents behavioural properties and structure the environment through which they move, you can observe emergence. Which can easily be imagined as an adjunct to what Deleuze termed Societies of Control, an environment in which the body moves freely through reconfigurable control structures.

Agent Based Modelling (ABM) is the direct descendant of Schelling's logics currently used in papers like Economics as Distributed Computation , A mathematical model of the London riots and their policing or A Weakly Supervised Bayesian Model for Violence Detection in Social Media. The logics of ABM see society as people acting purposively with self interest with limited cognitive processes. Social interaction is largely seen through the lens of techno-logically-facilitated social networks. As ABM is integrated into live networks, such as stress testing transport systems, electricity grids, mobile phone systems or recently Ebola epidemiology. The urban environment moves toward a place where networked existence programs logical agents who manage the environment of that existence. Agents increasingly carry out mundane acts of consumerism, education, minor work tasks for you. Freedom becomes choice between the pathways agents model for us. A little bit like how Amazon, Ebay or Google second guess what you want to buy, but ubiquitously at every scale of life. You can choose a pathway, any pathway as long as it's based on bubble sorted behaviour derived from people just like you. Never mind the drones will be fuelled using knowledge extraction algorithms interacting with field operatives in Ukraine, Iraq, Syria calculating significant acts, work products, courses of action for the best scenarios of attack and awaiting the systems administrator to just say yes.

Work in this imaginary becomes a cycle of knowledge extraction to create more efficient agents to make dictions on our behalf. Companies will regard all knowledge you posses or process and any decisions you make as the property of the enterprise. Having invested in you, made it possible for you to consume calories and proteins through monetary exchange will the enterprise will not want to loose that investment should you quit. Agents will be harvesting your decision making capability into machine learning that will structure the environment of your choice and having chosen they will learn form you and calculate your efficiency and optimum time for your retirement. This sounds attractive, a world were you can finally be free in any way you wish, as long as you just keep shopping.

Having finished the article on Abstract Urbanism I decided to take a drug holiday from anti depressants, high blood pressure tablets and something that made the neck of my bladder relax. It was during this vacation that I began to notice the after-image or Palinopsia created by staring intently at my monitor while replying to a never ending chain of email. Apparently the photo receptors exhaust their supply of photo-pigment, become numb and result in a decrease of signals to the brain. The logics of staring motionless at inconsequential information physiologically programmes the eye to retain an afterimage no matter if the eyes are closed or change focus, a small square of complementary colour remains. I decided to try this technique in the office. I would sit motionless and stare into the abyss of email with a fixed gaze for one hour, I tried not to blink, then as someone entered the room and asked me some meaningless administrative question I frame them with the afterimage of the screen and enjoyed the aesthetics of my eyes dysfunction and completely ignored them.

Logics act on and with multiple scales of materiality at the same time, electrons merge with neurons, flesh contorts, code compiles, minerals are extracted to feed the machine I'm typing this on. Techno-logically-mediated 'life' becomes in the words of Rosi Braidotti a contested political field. The space between the people who programmed my email client and people like me using computers to experiment with Palinopsia, create domains of different forms of logic. This occurs at the level of coding the machine to perform calculations to display the text and regulating the behaviour of me pushing around my mouse and navigating menu systems to produce desired results.

One way to think about computational logics and the current trends in agent based systems is to think of them as a Foucault type discipline, a mode that analyses and breaks down a phenomena through modelling it to produce a kind of remote control. Computational logics, discipline the way a phenomena is approached and analysed, so that when it becomes visible again from within the computer, it makes the phenomena materially available for comparison and modification. As users participate in the flows of power created by comparing information they become normalised to its process and themselves entailed into the inter-relation of logics at different scales.

The logics described above fixes what Foucault would call “progressive training” for those that model, feed, collect, process and react to the logics, as well as those objects that are the subject of its calculations. Logics like those we saw in ABM decompose processes and entities, including people, that are aggregate with such process and the routine processing/interaction with such models set a stage, a collective logic to be applied to all areas of society and the natural world.

In this imaginary, critical thought becomes replaced by the structural analysis of behavioural data in systems like ABM as we act out our extended minds through mobile devices offering us the freedom of more of the same in a concentrated pay as you go form of containment. Their is no need to understand motivations of anyone, only be able to detect discernible patterns within consumption or monitor the body as it moves through technologically structured environment. This is a world without even the need for notional progress, meaning and it's critic becomes redundant. Just another way to give a jolt to the decaying corpse of the failed humanist project.

Better to start a new course in antidepressants and interfere interestingly in the worlds collapse.

 

 

1 An Agent-based Legal Knowledge Acquisition Methodology for Agile Public Administration is a paper by Alexander Boer & Tom Van Engers from the University of Amsterdam. The paper is tasked with finding mechanisms by which administrative machinery can adjust to the production of new laws using multi-agent systems to simulate agents in bureaucratic structures making them more agile and able to save money by avoiding potential liabilities or bottlenecks in the system.
2 Professor Matthew Fuller is Director of the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London and is best known as an innovator of Software Studies.
3 Schelling's model worked by assigning black and white agents a space on a grid and a degree of happiness which is increased or decreased depending on the proximity they have to other black or white agents. To little happiness and they move to ward their own type creating discernible patterns of segregation. Thomas Schelling, “Models of Segregation”, The American Economic Review, vol. 59. no 2, Papers and Proceedings of the Eighty-first Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association (May 1969) pp.488-493.
4 Epstein J. Axtel R. (1996) Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science From the Bottom Up (Complex Adaptive Systems),
5 Deleuze G. 1992. Postscript on the Societies of Control. OCTOBER 59, Winter 1992, MIT Press, Cambridge, pp. 3-7.
6 Axtell R. L. () Economics as Distributed Computation , The Brookings Institution, NW Washington.
7 Davies, Toby, Hannah Fry, Alan G. Wilson, and Steven Bishop. 2013. A mathematical model of the London riots and their policing. http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130221/srep01303/full/srep01303.html
8 Cano, E; He, Y; Liu, K; Zhao, J. (2013). A weakly-supervised Bayesian model for violence detection from social media. The 6th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing.
9 Computational model: Ebola could infect more than 1.4 million people by end of January 2015 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140926085559.htm