Progress
Note: “Nature, Order, and Progress” is one essay, but after seeing the sheer size of the document, I thought the responsible thing to do was to divide it into three parts. This is the last installation. You can read the first part here, and the second one here.
last edited: 25-05/24
I offer mnemonic black livingness, fluctuating codes and stories of black life, new and long-standing, that honor and study, imperfectly, our collaborative efforts to seek liberation .. we are curious. I want to sustain wonder.
— KATHERINE MCKITTRICK
Currently, there are two prevalent stories about technology and progress.
The first says that as time progresses, technology becomes better too. Thus, the source of goodness can be found in the future, what is yet to be, that which can only be imagined and fantasized about. These fantasies are propagated through clever rhetoric and spectacle: The Apple events, the fancy rollouts, the Lex Fridman interviews, the bombastic biographies splattered on the display windows of monopolistic bookstore chains, the ones I shamefully enter when succumbing to their dirty convenience. I ruefully accept having to look at Elon Musk’s face while paying for yet another fresh copy of whatever I want to read, it is what I deserve, I deserve it.
This story had its hold on us for a while, but at a certain point, the pendulum swung the other way.
The second story says that the first one is catastrophic. Recent documentaries, takedown pieces, and books containing devastating revelations speak of this new technological age: undermined democracies, polarized political landscapes, phone addiction, decimated attention spans, manufactured vanity, and celebrated narcissism. Modern technology has become synonymous with a certain hypercapitalistic, white supremacist imperialist patriarchal oeuvre. It's not exactly inaccurate, what with most of the tech we interact with being conceived in the midst of, in service of, or directly by these very forces.
I am growing increasingly disinterested in the content of both of these stories. Progress has become reduced to a dichotomy akin to the classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons The Flintstones and The Jetsons, and we must pick a side, pledge our allegiance to a vehicle driven by bare feet or one hovering magically above the ground.
But it has become evident that the only real difference between these stories is which end the clock-hand is pointing to. They are essentially both moments devised from the same clock.
Progress cannot be understood before we consider the arrangement of this clock, and how we have been taught to relate to one another temporally.
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HOW WE HAVE BEEN TAUGHT TO RELATE TO ONE ANOTHER TEMPORALLY is something Walter Benjamin considered, at the end of his life, when he articulated how the idea of progress relied on a codependent relationship between people of the present and people of the future. More specifically, he claimed they entered a secret agreement with each other that enabled their conduct:
Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply. Historical materialists are aware of that.
The historical materialists in question claimed to remove themselves from any religiosity, but Benjamin aptly observed that their beliefs are highly theological. These storytellers don’t merely predict the future in a disinterested manner. Rather, as with many other religions, their narrative has a savior; a prophecy will be carried out and unburden us from our suffering. Their Messiah is not Jesus. For historical materialists, it is the people of the future who will save us.
Consider orthodox Marxists, for example. The story they tell is that reality is driven by contradictions. A contradiction in material conditions (i.e., why do we get scraps when we do all the hard work??) will cause capitalism's fall and usher in communism. This is all articulated as an inevitability. How can it be denied then, that the very form of this story, isn’t that of religion?
Incidentally, this relationship between the present and the future can also be found in the unfinished piece of fiction The New Atlantis, written by the father of imperial scientific mythology Francis Bacon. There, Bacon tells a story of a ship lost at sea, finding an unknown land called Bensalem. The lost sailors meet a mysterious, secluded society that is more advanced than them in every conceivable way. The europeans later learn that they also have been spying on them, silently making up judgments while staying out of sight.
As Louise Liebeskind tells it, Bacon does not depict the people of Bensalem as the model europeans should aspire to. More interestingly, she says that this encounter is meant to emulate a kind of perpetual distance that cannot be closed, but that will foolishly be attempted anyway:
We are easily tempted. We want privileged, secret knowledge of the workings of the world and of the power to bend those workings to our will, even if, when we look this object in the face, we are rightly terrified. The ancient philosophers were well aware of this, so they hid the virginal ideal of perfect knowledge behind veils or cast it high up and out of reach. Bacon imitates their indirection, in New Atlantis, but in the end he lays bare what they concealed from view.
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A KIND OF PERPETUAL DISTANCE THAT CANNOT BE CLOSED, BUT THAT WILL FOOLISHLY BE ATTEMPTED ANYWAY.
Sun-Ha Hong wrote a comprehensive article about the workings of these tech mythologies and their prevalence. The editors of Logic(s) Magazine summarized the sentiments in his piece like this:
While aiming for pushback, critics too often move in sync with these corporate proclamations, debunking the “AI hype” while at the same time elevating and disseminating it. Ultimately, Hong’s essay brings us face to face with a pressing question: does contrasting white tech bros’ speculative fiction marketed as scientific truth with detailed documentation of racialized harms that corporate tech is enacting in the present, do anything to fundamentally challenge the modernist symbolic order?
Whether we see the “incoming age of AI” as some messianic homecoming or the apocalypse, we are still believers. We just disagree about the specific interpretations of the same scripture. So why do we believe?
In Elisa Gabbert's essay Magnificent Desolation, she describes this strong fascination with disaster, particularly when it is technological. Destruction is sensationalized horror, always looked upon with awe: whether it is the Titanic, the Twin Towers, the Challenger:
All three incidents forced people to either watch or imagine huge man-made objects, monuments of engineering, fail catastrophically, being torn apart or exploding in the sky … one of the horrible parts of disaster, our complicity: the way we glamorize it and make it consumable; the way the news turns disasters into ready-made cinema; the way war movies, which mean to critique war, can only really glorify war. And we eat it up.
Hindsight and hubris go hand in hand. They are siblings, born from seductive clarity; the kind that thrives off quick and easy answers. We look back at people in the past and think, how could they not know that was a terrible idea? But hubris can only be inhabited from the comforts of hindsight, where one already knows how the story will play out, safely after the unknown unknowns have made themselves appear to the naked eye.
Unlike Gabbert, I do not believe hubris-hindsight purely stems from naïvete. Many know full well that risk and uncertainty are inevitabilities in whatever endeavor is embarked on. Rather, it is an allegiance to catastrophe itself.
***
IT IS AN ALLEGIANCE TO CATASTROPHE ITSELF.
When Bedour Alagraa speaks of catastrophe, she does not mean it as a single event, “but a political category or concept that offers an analytic for the manner in which people structure their political and social lives”.
Catastrophe-as-event says that once in a while a bad thing happens. Alagraa argues instead that the state of perpetual anticipation of a catastrophe is itself, catastrophic. This is how catastrophe becomes a method, a politic, a way of life.
Our better is created by a boom ignited by the idiocy of our ancestors. The production of progress is energized by catastrophe, it propels us forward, ripping the delicate fabric of other betters that might have been.
According to the knowledge produced by this episteme, we are reliant on the catastrophic failures of the tech elite. We cannot conceive of a possible future without their catastrophes to transcend.
This approach, the one that calculates offset emissions and how-many-degrees-until-apocalyse, is the same one that produces thinkpieces about how AI is gonna take over, if it hasn’t already. What Alagraa makes evident is that the adaptation of these methods are contingent on those we disagree with . It makes us collaborators in this ecosystem of idle calculative contemplation. Critics need disasters not merely to revel in, but to tell them what they believe through what they are not.
And isn’t this precisely what Benjamin saw as the pact between the people of the present and the future — a pact that ensures a specific way of life? We enjoy technological disasters, as long as we get to rise above their ashes. Those of the future get to paint us of the past as idiots to justify their own hubris, afforded by the luxury of hindsight. Whoever “we” or “they” are at any particular moment: leftist critics, tech optimists, present folks, or those of the future, we are essentially beholden to the same tired story.
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WE ARE ESSENTIALLY BEHOLDEN TO THE SAME TIRED STORY.
What if we operate on a different clock entirely, beyond this one that alternates between technological utopia and dystopia? Alagraa says:
beginnings are, ironically, frozen in time and not understood as elastic and requiring rearticulation depending on the historical moment. The result is the conviction that concepts are either historical in away that suspends them in their moment of inauguration, or that they should be seen as transhistorical. Unburdening ourselves of such theological assumptions of beginnings as fixed might open up a different pathway for understanding the unfolding of concepts over time, and permit space for not only multiple beginnings but also for a recognition that we can intervene in our own categorical assumptions by creatively altering our representation of these beginnings, of these particular conceptual histories and semio-linguistic tendencies in political theory and other disciplines as well.
Whenever I think about progress, I imagine time as it is depicted in the movie Arrival, and the short story by Ted Chiang that it is based on. Arrival tells the story of a woman named Louise, a linguistics professor called by the military when these alien octopi-like creatures dubbed heptapods descend from the sky. She is tasked to learn their language and figure out what their purpose on earth is.
If you haven’t seen the movie or read the story, it ends with her successfully ascertaining the heptapod language, and with it adopting their way of experiencing time. Heptapods don’t experience time linearly, but rather simultaneously. One moment does come after the next, but they weave into each other, their order becoming arbitrary. There is no temporal hierarchy. Beginnings are abundant.
What a beginning is, according to Edward Said, is distinguished from that of an origin, which is secreted from divinity, inevitable, like gravity. In contrast, a beginning is often more subtle. It’s just a choice someone makes, or as June Jordan put it, to begin is no more agony than opening your hand.
That doesn’t make it any less special. A beginning is situated in space and time, and it decides, amidst it all, to be something else. A beginning Said noted, is the production of difference.
Think of how many children’s stories begin, the famous sentence once upon a time. How it sets the scene, what it chooses to introduce to the listener, who the characters are, and what aspects are important for us to know. How it tells us why it invites us to this particular place with these particular people.
Consider the kind of storytelling Toni Cade Bambara outlined, when she spoke of Grandma Dorothy who would tuck her dress between her knees before sitting down, which reminded me of how the women in my family do that with their baati. Miss Dorothy, who wouldn’t let this little girl talk if her speech was not in the cadence of the black knowledge tradition.
Theory cannot come unaccompanied according to Grandma Dorothy. Not without it living among friends, not without rhythm or repetition, and least of all not without freedom. It was rude to let the poor thing just dangle in the air like that, no family to speak of, no culture or time, a mere lonely vacuous existence.
A mere lonely vacuous existence is prevented, naturally, by beginnings. Beginnings are imbued with meaning and intentions, of values and direction. This makes it easier to accept how reality itself is intertwined with narrative. Sylvia Wynter famously said the world never precedes the stories we tell about it: “We humans cannot pre-exist our cosmogonies or origin myths/stories/narratives any more than a bee, at the purely biological level of life, can pre-exist its beehive.”
When I first encountered this quote, it was difficult for me to wrap my head around, because I’ve been taught to see things as the very opposite. Reality simply exists, and we tell stories about this existence; crystallizing the various wonders and wisdoms we ought to pass on. But lately, it has become more evident to me that Wynter got it right. How everything is a story, desperate for us to repeat its words back to itself, again and again, a kind of holy repetition, it says, repeat my words back to me, affirm my existence.
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REPEAT MY WORDS BACK TO ME, AFFIRM MY EXISTENCE.
Repetition is something that both Gilles Deleuze and Edward Said spoke of, and I am fighting the urge to tell you exactly what these men said about repetition, even to put it in a footnote. Forgive me for the times I’ve led you astray by my fascination with dead authors. Despite my fondness, they didn’t teach me the truth about repetition. My faith did.
At the time of writing this, we are nearing the end of the holy month of Ramadan. Like any other aspect of Islam, it is a mode that repeats, with prayers and Quran recitations, communal gatherings, relearning old wisdoms.
But this isn’t sameness, because the conditions by which you enter this repetition are not the same, you aren’t the same, nothing ever is the same. Sure, we may experience familiarity, a brief moment of recognition that we call home that brings us comfort and safety, but it is never the same because
sameness is contortion, it is whiplash and sprained limbs brought on by being held in place when the only stable thing about us is the fact that we never stand still, sameness imprisons, it is immovability brought on by the stubbornness of the abstract, that which never attends iftar dinners, something that never exchanges salaams with you on the bus, greeting you with both hands, that which doesn’t live and breathe and isn’t responsible for the wellbeing of its neighbors, sameness is the universal that hovers in the air, placing itself on an unearned throne above us all, the thing I refuse to worship because
I know my God, and I come to know him through the smell of my purple prayer rug on each repetitive prostration, the lack clawing the insides of my belly raw before sunset, the collective cupped hands quietly pleading to the heavens to ease pain of our comrades at war with this very violent sameness
I understand, unforgetting the beauty of everything that I knew through repetition, relearning as I did before, as I will do again, because existence is entropy, and it never stops, but it always begins again by producing difference.
***
As Benjamin put it in his 1931 piece “Leftwing Melancholy”, which Hannah Proctor revisited for the latest issue of The Baffler, this allegiance to catastrophe becomes a kind of tortured stupidity and constipation, which tramples everything in its path, and as Alagraa, who said in an interview how these people did not get the beginning right, so why would I trust them to know when the end is, I am left with the question of what stories we may tell if we leave this catastrophic mode of considering the world.
It may not seem so, but I try very hard to protect my ability to be awed by technology. There are those rare moments when I am delighted by something instead of horrified. It takes a great deal of self-discipline to let myself feel this joy. I succumb to my suspicions and disillusionment more often than I’d like. These flashes of light that disappear as quickly as they arrive; they illuminate a very dark existence, and I’d like to, as carefully as possible, while I politely step over these buffonic techies, see where they lead.
I want to do something more than nod in agreement when people say that said techies are silly and stupid and evil, this self affirming sameness that merely renders us into witnesses of their catastrophes and nothing more. I want to find places and people and things that are as interested in these flickers as I am, to memorize the path to the places they call home.
These flickers of light being hope, a feeling completely unwarranted given the circumstances we are living in. As with most of my feelings, I cannot justify them, nor can I explain my audacity to revel in such sensations. But it is there nonetheless, dancing on the horizon despite how much we yell at it to knock it off. And I am well aware that I am reaching the limits of how far I can stretch this tiny slice of light, but it is a hope that I have, and I choose to, and will continue to choose, to live off it, even if I must ration it.
When I think about progress, I don’t think of something that is yet to be conceived of or something that has passed, but rather specific pockets of value scattered all over the tapestry of existence. Progress must be a heptapod, its octopus head filled with memories of the past and the future, memories that are the raw material of better stories.
I think about what Ben Tarnoff called technologies that are class traitors who refuse their heritage, about programmers whose immense love for their craft has them accidentally recreating communal and socialist practices through initiatives like open source and debugging forums.
I think about people like Safiya Umoja Noble, Abeba Birhane, Ruha Benjamin, Timnit Gebru, and many others, diligently debunking the latest technological ugliness, their willingness to let the fumes emitted by these types of machinery darken their lungs, allowing people like me to breathe in better possibilities.
I think it makes all the difference, how we begin to think of things, because ultimately, they are what propel us forward. And surely, if we are to consider something as nebulous and ubiquitous as technology, then we should be choosy with how we talk about them.
This is how I learn to live. This is where I would like to begin.
Human beings are magical. Bios and Logos. Words made flesh, muscle and bone animated by hope and desire, belief materialized in deeds, deeds which crystallize our actualities . . . And the maps of spring always have to be redrawn again, in undared forms.
SYLVIA WYNTER