The Shamrock Shake Society

Rational and Artificial

Jacques Ellul’s book The Technological Society is pretty readable for a 500 page book by a French sociologist published in 1964. Every few paragraphs there is something so pithy and correct, you feel this guy somehow had the key to modern existence. Holding the totality of his arguments in mind is beyond my distracted cognitive abilities, however. I can handle a page or two, though. In my copy, that’s pages 77-78.

Specifically, two words: rationality and artificiality.

You Must Become Machine-Like to Be Seen by a Machine

A lot of what I have written about in Desire Paths is about how technology orders society to make it readable to machines. That’s Ellul’s “rationality.” For example:

1) Your life is a credit journey. A group of economic facts about you that results in a number.

2) Education is a series of measurable outcomes.

3) Art can be systematized into a flat simulacra of art.

The question is: why? None of these developments, IMHO, benefit humanity.

What these changes do is organize society around rationality or, perhaps a better term, machine-logic. This organization happens via what Ellul calls technique. Technique is what enables technology to shape society. I think of technique as the sci-fi goo-drenched wires that connect humans to the machine. A conduit between machine reality and natural reality. The mechanism that shapes us so we can live within a machine-logic world — that’s technique.  

Side note: If you have read this far and you are thinking, oh, like the Matrix. Not really like the Matrix: the Matrix is a much more hopeful text than Ellul’s work. It doesn’t matter to Ellul if you wake up or take any pills of any color, rational machine-reality will never have anything to do with nature except to destroy it.

We use rationality to cut away machine-unreadable human qualities like spontaneity and creativity. This is difficult. These qualities have been a part of being human since forever.

Spontaneity and creativity are not valued in American society nor nurtured in most educational settings. To the extent that they do exist, because they must exist for humans, they are fed into an entertainment / social media system that effectively flattens them to readable products.

For example, take the recent movie Sinners. A lot of what was reported regarding the movie was how much money it made and the nature of the deal its director signed on the back end. The scores it got on various websites. Its ranking. Its Oscar chances. These are all machine-rational ways of understanding art.

Instead of, you know, considering the amazing creativity and artistic flourish, not to mention dogged persistence, it took to get Sinners made. How did the movie make you feel? What is the meaning of music to a community? How do cultures interact in ways that bring about cultural flourishing? Does cultural interaction necessarily involve appropriation? How fucking talented is Michael B. Jordan? These are just a few of the questions about Sinners that machines can’t read, answer, or understand regardless of the complexity of their language models.

Art, Artifice, Artificial

Lord, give me the confidence of a mid-century French sociologist:

“Technique is opposed to nature. Art, artifice, artificial: technique as art is the creation of an artificial system. This is not a matter of opinion.”

But, dear Jacques, what is technique as art?

Technique as art is not art. It is a society re-shaping technology that molds us in its lifeless image. Put another way: When creativity and spontaneity are used in the service of shaping society around technology, the result is artificial.

This isn’t a weird or academic idea. (Though it may be, contra Ellul, a matter of opinion.)

Have you ever iterated an A.I. image via a bot? The bot taught you how to write a prompt. You molded your brain to a machine reality in order to interact with it. The resulting art is technique — it shapes the round peg of our humanity into the square hold of technology.

This kind of artificiality does these two things:

1) Turns the natural into the technological: Ellul uses a hydroelectric dam as an example. (So did Heidegger — hydroelectric dams are very useful when thinking of how nature becomes technology.)

2) Subordinates the natural world: The technological, Ellul says, absorbs the natural world. Soon there is no natural environment left at all. Everything is in the service of technology.

We Live in a Shamrock Shake

We don’t live in a fun computer simulation where there are endless possibilities for us to dodge bullets and look cool in a trench coat. Let’s just admit what is obvious: We live in a shamrock shake. A world that gestures towards the natural but inhabits an entirely artificial space. A plastic cup. A reality that pretends to be green and pretends to be ice cream but is neither thing: it is mere product without human intention. The fake shake, like fake art and fake education, is stripped of creativity and spontaneity to be machine readable and mass producible. A shamrock shake world gestures towards culture. It is, after all, Irish. But it is a bereft, spreadsheet-deep culture. A shamrock shake is an Irish ice-cream drink in the same way that outcomes are education, that A.I. iterations are art, and that credit scores are humans.

BTW: I like Shamrock Shakes as much as the next guy, it just seems to me the perfect marriage of rationality and artificiality. Enjoy!

Summer Hours

Desire Paths desires to (shamrock) shake things up in July and chillax on the porch. (Chillax = Chill + throw axes) — Desire Paths central offices may throw a few bits and bobs your way this month, but will be back to our regular “every two weeks” schedule in mid-August.