Cyborg Society and its Futures

Transformations in the technology of bureaucracy

Bureaucracy is a technology — a technics which extends the human capacity to perceive, cognize, and act at larger-than-individual scales. However, this technology is itself built on a number of more foundational technologies, among them language, writing, reading, record-keeping, testing and many others.

We might call this constellation of underlying technologies the technology of “literacy.” Samuel Loncar points out that literacy serves as a technology for recording and retrieving information. [1] Literacy allows us to take human memory, and convert that memory into a durable artifact called “information,” which can then be stored, circulated, and decoded, even in the absence of the original source of that memory.

Because the technology of literacy allows humans to sever the connection of information from its original source of memory, the artifacts produced by this process facilitate the emergence of an entire institution which supports the persistence of these objects and the reproduction of the material and symbolic relations which make their coding and decoding possible across generations.

Loncar calls these epistemic institutions [2]— they function like a brain which ingests and processes information in order to generate an outcome. Whether it’s the library which archives media for the community to access later or the Department of Motor Vehicles which maintains the authoritative perspective on who is legally allowed to drive or not, each of these institutions consists of a vast neuronal network of human and non-human entities transferring information via defined processes. Bureaucracy is that form of social organization which composes the body of these institutions.

The presence of bureaucracy in a human community transforms that society into a cyborg entity — a hybrid synthesis of human and machine, working together to achieve a goal. Another way to think about this is that human society now includes information as a nonhuman actor. The dumb repetition of the bureaucratic machine can now affect new social realities, ones which were not willed or accomplished by any particular human intention or mind.

To understand the future of this cyborg human society, we must understand bureaucracy. But to understand bureaucracy, we must understand the possibilities and transformations which take place within its underlying technologies, especially, as Loncar points out, changes in literacy. As humans experiment with and development new technologies for the production and management of information, we alter those nonhuman entities which shape our world (and even our own subjectivity).

From Petro Power to Electricity

We’re in the latter stages of a massive technological shift from the world of petro-power to electrification. Marshal McLuhan was called “the oracle of the electric age,” because he rigorously theorized the ways that electricity as a medium would change information. From words on pages which travel on physical paper to machine code which travels as packets of energy, he argues that humanity is upgrading and extending its nervous system (which is also a network of electrical transmissions) out of our bodies and into the physical world.

The industrial revolution started with the discovery of coal (and then later, oil), and thus was built on the back of petro power and steam. In reality, the combustion engine is no more than a glorified water wheel — coal burns in order to boil water, which then turns into steam, which creates pressure when confined to a chamber, ultimately pushing some pistons which produces force. Petro power transforms kinetic energy from one form to another.

While petro power and the combustion energy provided the most immediate methods for getting industrialism off the ground, these new inventions could not transform information technology because they did not produce discrete packets of energy (“signal”) which could travel over long distances.

However, as soon as electricity and methods for its production and management were mastered, we immediately see an explosion of new information technologies — the telephone, the telegraph, the gramophone — which bring into existence a vast network of wires to connect them all. A new brain for humanity was being constructed precisely at that moment.

(I think this is why steampunk fiction places scan capture our imagination so much — the world of steampunk stopped at the combustion engine, thus enabling a world of prodigious innovation and energy but without the subsequent developments in electricity which gave us phones, computers, and the internet. We are nostalgic for an age of invention and exploration that remains untouched by the effects of electricity on human consciousness).

Coming transformations for information technology

We now live in what Loncar calls “the information regime.” As the world increasingly moves away from the initial stage of industrialization which relied on petro power and the combustion engine, and seeks instead to replace everything with electricity and information, we can begin to speculate about what new technologies will transform bureaucracy and its underlying literary technologies in the coming centuries.

I want to point out two, namely, (1) artificial intelligence and (2) blockchain.

In his piece I cited earlier, Loncar notes that bureaucracy is defined by the way that no single individual within the larger structure can be determinative of the institution’s operation. In a truly functional bureaucracy, no particular human is necessary for the function of the machine, and this is precisely why it facilitates an expansion of society’s overall capacity to do work.

Humans only exist within bureaucracies today for the purpose of checking, correcting, or connecting. For instance, because an accounting software can’t talk to an excel spreadsheet, or an excel spreadsheet can’t be auto-filled from a particular PDF, you need a human being to manually intervene at that node to ensure the proper transfer of information. Further, the machines which compose the material functioning of the bureaucracy haven’t developed enough meta-reflective capacity to identify when an outcome is not as expected or hoped, or to implement corrective measures when thing go awry.

Having said all that, machines are still generally much more reliable than humans. They can perform the same task again and again with perfect accuracy for as long as they are properly maintained. On the other hand, humans constitute the failure point of every bureaucracy. Most bureaucratic failures happen because of human fallibility — erroneous data gets introduced, a human makes a wrong decision, someone mishears a word over the phone, money exchanges hands to facilitate an unfair outcome… the list could go on.

The push in Silicon Valley for the development of artificial general intelligence holds out the promise to replace human beings as the connectors and correctors in the bureaucratic structure. Humans are the weak links in the node of the information network, and so the next step in the development of bureaucracy as an inhuman actor in society is the complete removal of humans from the functioning of institutions. This is hailed as the next step in not only effectiveness, but also equity and justice.

From the ability of a computer to immediately evaluate a credit card application to programs which can run on a rover on another planet, we already witness the power of computers to massively extend the capacity of organizations to ingest and evaluate information, but we haven’t yet mastered the technology which can reliably act on the information received. We still treat self-driving carsas experimental, and most people wouldn’t feel comfortable allowing a robot to perform surgery on them (even as amazing advancements have been made).

For those who believe that bureaucracy is the best method for organizing a stable and flourishing society, the imperative to develop artificial intelligence which is smarter and less fallible than human beings can become a quasi-religious pursuit. We’re literally killing people if don’t develop the technology to deliver the best medical care or more just ways of allocating social resources.

The second coming transformation of bureaucracy will likely involve some combination of artificial intelligence and blockchain. Like artificial intelligence, blockchain also attacks a key problem with bureaucracies which rely on humans, namely, the mutability of information records.

As each block is added to the blockchain, it becomes more and more prohibitively difficult to alter any of the past records, for to change a prior record would involve an immense expenditure of time and energy to undo the prior block of records. Further, this structured database is decentralized, which means that it will be more difficult to censor and easier to reconstitute in the case of a disaster.

This extreme permanence of blockchain records contrasts with bureaucracies built on centralized databases, typically living in proprietary software on remote servers, and which often have difficulty being made interoperable with one another. Information becomes siloed, easily changed or lost, and this state of affairs poses significant barriers to information traveling between systems.

One area where we still don’t allow machines to make decisions is in the realm of jurisprudence. We still dress up in suits and go make arguments in front of a human judge, and we wait with bated breath as they hand down the verdict based on their judgment. So too with bureaucracies, where it often falls to humans to interpret the institution’s maze of policies in order to determine how they apply to particular cases. This exercise of human judgment creates a susceptible vector for system failure.

Developers have been building ‘smart contracts’ on top of the blockchain, which means that now a program can live in the blockchain and users can ping that contract to perform work and make decisions for them on the basis of other records in the blockchain. For instance, when I go to a decentralized exchange to swap one type of coin for another, I’m using a smart contract where putting in one amount of coin triggers the contract to check the current market price signals of a different coin and deliver me an equivalent amount of that coin.

Envision this functionality of “law without lawyers” where contracts are executed automatically on the basis of immutable records in a decentralized blockchain. Imagine also that a smart contract could ping an artificial intelligence to make complex decisions on the basis of policies and information within the institutions digital archives, and then send this decision to another digital entity which could execute some action or pass a decision in the social world of human beings. In fact, we could even imagine a roll up of higher order artificial intelligences which could allow a smart contract to perform instantaneous appeals to a digital appeals court where a decision is reached and communicated back down the chain, all in a matter of nanoseconds.

Final comments

If I sound like a breathless booster of the new and the novel, then you’ve misunderstood me. To see this technological potential is also to have a dark vision into the horrific possible futures — human beings ruled by machine overlords, deadly decisions made by opaque algorithms with inscrutable logic, strange recursions, revolting absurdities, and a Cambrian explosion of new forms of slavery and exploitation.

Nick Land is the prophet of this cyborg future, and for that alone his work is eminently worth reading. You can’t come away from vision of history without acknowledging that we human beings have always been cyborgs. Nature constantly produces hybrids. For Land (and he progenitor Deleuze), nature is a prolific generator of forms, and yes, even of monsters. From the moment we first lifted a stone to throw it, we human beings became monsters who extended ourselves beyond the limits of our body and into nature itself.

Technology may be an extension of ourselves, but it also acts like a summoning circle which invites foreign spirits and entities to inhabit our communities (and our minds). What powers might our technologies be summoning? The Israelites grumbled and wished for a king, so Yahweh gave them one, all the while warning them that they wouldn’t like it. But whence comes the desire for a king? Why do we desire to be ruled rather than to rule ourselves?

I do not have answers, but I do know what the Psalmist says — that all who worship idols will become like them — cold, dead, and less than human.