Order
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 second installation. You can read the first part here; the last part will be out soon. Enjoy!
Guide quotes1
No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that that knowledge will help set you free.
— ASSATA SHAKUR, “AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY”
[it is] a problem of knowledge, and how what can be known about Black people was often submerged in the muddy waters of a Western episteme that could accommodate neither the historical foundations nor the powerful contemporary currents of Blackness in its fraught definition of the human. . .The concerns of most who offer interpretations about [black scholars] often stem from a desire to take elements .. and to discipline them. Rather than follow [their] path for new understandings of the nature of knowledge, especially Black knowledges, such interpretations direct us back to the very disciplinary interpretations of the realities it questioned.
— JOSHUA MYERS, “OF BLACK STUDY”
The subgroup of people with power over and access to the resources used to describe, define, and create political realities—in other words, the elites—will capture the group’s values, forcing people to coordinate on a narrower social project that disproportionately represents elite interests. When elites run the show, the interests of the group get whittled down to what they have in common with those at the top, at best. At worst, elites fight for their own narrow interests using the banner of group solidarity.
— OLÚFẸ́MI O. TÁÍWÒ, “ELITE CAPTURE”
Since I inevitably must slice off the infinite monstrous meat and cut it into pieces the size of my mouth and the size of the vision of my eyes, since I'll inevitably succumb to the need for form that comes from my terror of remaining undelimited - then may I at least have the courage to let this shape form by itself like a scab that hardens by itself, like the fiery nebula that cools into earth. And may I have the great courage to resist the temptation of to invent a form.
— CLARICE LISPECTOR, “THE PASSION ACCORDING TO G.S”
My second semester began the first couple of weeks after the new year. It coincided with a cold front from Siberia sweeping the northern hemisphere, a thick mass of snow laid itself over the country like a weighted blanket. The once bustling streets became silent and deserted, save for the helpless rumbling of snowplows trying to keep up with the hefty snowfall.
When the storm subsided and the plows finally could make their little mountains at the end of each street, an unbearable, biting cold settled in — the kind that makes the air smell burnt and make your steps sound like walking on old wooden floors.
I’ve never liked New Years. New Year's Eve in particular feels like being woken up abruptly in the middle of the night by a drunk person with explosives, for no good reason. I’ve accepted that I am outnumbered in my dislike of the holiday. Save for a few others, I only seem to have anxious pets in my corner, and also Antonio Gramsci, who said that New Years is an unfortunate kind of timeserving:
these New Year’s that fall like fixed maturities, which turn life and human spirit into a commercial concern with its neat final balance, its outstanding amounts, its budget for the new management. They make us lose the continuity of life and spirit. You end up seriously thinking that between one year and the next there is a break, that a new history is beginning; you make resolutions, and you regret your irresolution, and so on, and so forth.
Like Gramsci, I suspect my dislike of the holiday is not merely due to it being celebrated violently, but rather that a new beginning seems to arrive at an odd time. Why is a beginning ushered in the thick of winter, when, as
put it, even water moves so slow it stops? Standardized time feels like being out of step, like constantly being tormented by an uneven rhythm2.In the last installation, I remarked on my inability to villainize the imagery of construction workers chipping away at nature to make room for more housing. This impulse to condemn was instilled in me by residing in a moment when tech is being thoroughly scrutinized, and the only alternative being presented is a flimsy fantasy about natural traditional living. The inefficiency of the fantasy does not mean I believe we completely ignore nature and the wisdom imbued within it. Rather, I am increasingly skeptical about the thought process that made so many of us conclude that we ever left its confines.
There is no disputing the harm of using the earth as a standing reserve, to believe it only exists as fuel for our various endeavors. Neither is there any question about our unique abilities and accomplishments as humans. But I believe it is dangerous to assume we are inherently different from nature, that we somehow burst out and evolved beyond its realm. This separation between nature and humans will always imply exceptionalism, whether we think of modernity as a blessing or a curse.
We find ourselves in a rather odd moment. The momentum that Silicon Valley was cruising on has halted. The technological ugliness3 that these companies have been responsible for is fresh in our collective memory. Public opinion about recent strides in fields like AI is being bogged down by skepticism and low morale. Nadia Asperouhova argues that this doubt has made its way to silicon valley, which is now rife with risk-averse techies:
Artificial intelligence is a rare domain where technologists themselves are being proactively cautious about their own power before any demonstrable harm has been done. The moral panic now comes from within . . . In each case, technologists are generally advocates, not detractors, of the opportunities they see before the rest of the world catches on.
But what has awareness of technological ugliness led to? what social movements has it birthed, and what alternatives have been offered?
After twitter’s new CEO turned the nickname “hellsite” into a material reality, people flocked to sites like Substack and Mastodon. Substack in particular has touted itself as an alternative to combat technological ugliness such as clickbait and content farms, listicles and [lies], cheap outrage and culture wars .. shallow engagement and dopamine hacks .. advertising and the attention economy.
This is what drew me here in the first place. I admired the site as a place that mediated creative work in a convivial4 manner — respecting the autonomy of its users, encouraging community, and allowing room for creativity.
But then they launched notes, and I fell back into my familiar disillusionment.
Notes is a diluted version of Twitter, made in the hopes of occupying the lucrative void the site left in its wake last year.
wrote a sharp essay about the function a few months ago, using philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s term elite capture:writers seem to be rewarded for algo hacks like posting on a schedule, commenting, liking, restacking. The distortion of purpose, which may have originally been to “meaningfully contribute to discussion or take pride in the quality of one’s work” (Táíwò), is classic elite capture: Game-like interactions eventually reward the user with vanity metrics like views, likes and comments on their posts, subscribers (and followers, perhaps the dumbest feature on Substack, as it only serves to further abstract performance metrics from any actual writing), and eventually one of several checkmark badges that essentially denote who is part of the elite (and how they rank within it), and who is not.
Táíwò uses C. Thi Nguyen’s framework of games and value capture to explain how elites hijack our common values and adapt them to fit their own narrow interests. Like Nguyen, Táíwò does not think these are the result of individuals stroking their mustaches like evil cartoon villains, but rather that this is a system behavior, a predictable pattern observed in multiple contexts.
Moreover, Táíwò notes how it doesn’t matter if we actually believe that companies have our best interests at heart. Sometimes we genuinely do, and other times we merely act as if we do, because we have no other choice but to if we are to participate. I can be as grumpy as I want to be about these changes on Substack, but I’m still here, acting as if I agree with them. Once again, there is no tailoring our experiences online. participation inevitably means adhering to the rules set by the powers that be.
Jenny Odell identifies a kind of elite capture with companies commodifying various valued experiences. These distorted values made her despaired because she felt limited by what they offered5:
As the experience economy expands to include commodified notions of things like slowness, community, authenticity, and “nature”—all while income inequality yawns wider and the signs of climate change intensify—I feel the panic of watching possible exits blocked. I keep wanting to do something instead of consume the experience of it. But seeking new ways of being, I find only new ways of spending.
Odell describes exactly what I feel when just considering the possibility of convivial technologies. I’ve observed, both in myself and others, that by tackling a question such as “How can we eliminate technological ugliness”, one is led to either of two camps: adhering to an unhelpful dichotomy (tech-utopia or tech-dystopia) or getting sidetracked by the metaphysics of machines (Does it have a soul?)
Both of these routes are deeply unsatisfying. It’s not necessarily the question itself that is at fault, but the way one goes about answering the question does not scratch the itch it evokes. In other words, the matter in which we think about what to do with technological ugliness and the very process of reaching a conclusion is entirely insufficient.
What I’d like to focus on is not only how elites hijack the interests of the group they belong to, but how the rest of us may internalize the elite’s goals and values. Thus, what deserves further examination is twofold: (1) what epistemic framework these elites utilize when distorting our common values and goals to fit their own interests and (2) how the rest of us are vulnerable to these distorted goals and values.
The first was from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century; the second from then on until today, thereby making possible both the conceptualizability of natural causality, and of nature as an autonomously functioning force in its own right governed by its own laws … These were to be processes made possible only on the basis of the dynamics of a colonizer/colonized relation that the West was to discursively constitute and empirically institutionalize on the islands of the Caribbean and, later, on the mainlands of the Americas.
It was this construct that would enable the now globally expanding West to replace the earlier mortal/immortal, natural/supernatural, human/the ancestors, the gods/God distinction as the one on whose basis all human groups had millennially “grounded” their descriptive statement/prescriptive statements of what it is to be human, and to reground its secularizing own on a newly projected human/subhuman distinction instead.
— Sylvia Wynter, Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation — An Argument
As beings with a limited cognitive capacity, we cannot know everything, and thus we adopt different narratives and rules of thumb to make sense of the vast and unruly ocean that is our shared reality. There have been countless knowledge traditions throughout the history of the world, each one unique in its sensemaking. But at a certain point, many of these were, as Joshua Myers put it, rudely interrupted.
Sylvia Wynter pursues various moments in European history diligently and makes evident how these paradigms continuously undermine black knowledge traditions and ways of knowing. She carefully inspects the mechanisms of the western episteme, unfolding all their implications: From the abstract platonic forms of early greco-romans, the enlightenment era rationalists, to secularization marked by Nietzsche’s infamous statement about the death of God6. What is most interesting to me is how she explains the continuous tendency towards order in the western episteme.
Order can be understood as a specific arrangement of things. We might associate order in the same manner as organizing a space, like a kitchen: cups belong here, plates here, spoons and forks there. But ordering knowledge is not something that creates this sort of innocent convenience. Rather, it is something deeply ideological that dictates our thinking and perception of the world7.
We often think of order as common-sensical, as something uncreated, as always having been there. This is what Wynter seeks to problematize: what made the divine hierarchy, which defined the human as belonging to a different category than everything else in nature? what made the disciplines of academia possible, such as the humanities, biology, sociology, and psychology? What function does it serve to consider human affairs from these discrete lenses? And why does the knowledge they produce always seem to conclude that we, as black people, are less than?
This led her to what she described as the overrepresentation of Man — the viewpoint that is the gateway into this epistemic order.
This epistemic order is not centered around the positionality of Man, the same way celestial objects orbit planets. This view is more akin to a black hole, violently forcing anyone near it to adopt its positionality. There is an important difference between the two. The former posits that this single view has historically been accommodated — meaning that we simply need to offer other positionalities a seat at the table to be more equitable8. Wynter however says that with Man, there can only be one view. Anyone attempting to sit next to it will inevitably be sucked into its vortex.
Elites might be the only ones reaping the benefits of this order, but its view is made to be adopted widely. As evidenced by early Christian colonial missionaries, the mission to civilize involved those who were categorized as subhuman by this very order. Indigenous ways of thought were seen as a threat, and thus needed to be undermined, if not eradicated altogether. Epistemic mechanisms such as rational, mathematical, and logical operations are utilized because they predictably lead back to this order. No matter who solves the equation, the answer remains the same.
Put another way: Colonizers do not have to convince anyone that they are subhuman. As evidenced by Wynter’s reading of Fanon, it is enough to offer these epistemic tools, and they will adhere to this order on their own —like the old saying of teaching a man how to fish.
Similarly, the elite do not need to actively convince anyone that their insular interests are beneficial to the rest of the group. As long as we remain faithful to the western epistemic order, we may conclude all on our own that our goals and values are aligned with elites, even though this isn’t the case.
In reflecting further on this overrepresentation of Man, Wynter discusses the decades that marked moments when various oppressed peoples emancipated themselves. In the US, Pan-African and black civil rights movements were afoot, some fueled by the grief and anger of the assassination of Martin Luther King. Given these circumstances, students at various academic institutions demanded that their curriculum reflect knowledge traditions, cultures, and histories beyond Europe and the US.
But, as the story goes, these also became value-captured by these institutions, and what they offered instead were defanged versions of these histories and traditions, completely stripped of their revolutionary objectives, and most importantly, reoriented them toward this overrepresented view of Man. Black studies, like every other discipline in these academic institutions, could only produce toothless versions of black knowledge traditions and histories. Wynter says:
they came to be defined (and in many cases, actively to define themselves so) in new “multicultural terms” as African-American Studies; as such, it appeared as but one of the many diverse “Ethnic Studies” that now served to re-verify the very thesis of Liberal universalism against which the challenges [these movements] had been directed in the first place.
These multicultural studies were symptomatic of the changes the exclusivity of the view of man was undergoing. Man morphed into Human; expanding to include those who previously were subhuman. Though it never lost its exclusivity; only a select few of the previously considered les damnés were welcomed to join the elite, to chase monetary success and power at the backs of the many who remained subhuman.
Every single graduate of these studies then, becomes siphoned away from the radical potential of these knowledge traditions. They only become familiarized with these distorted versions of them, and thus these false targets become further perpetuated.
I believe a lot of criticism against technological ugliness may be suffering the same fate. When we inevitably move on from this lull we currently are in, when more concrete rules and regulations of technology are rolled out, when silicon valley techies once again become brave enough to innovate to their heart’s content, promising to be better than their predecessors — Wynter’s critique of the western episteme can illuminate what sort of traps may lay ahead of us.
In the grander scheme of things, the case of Substack is virtually insignificant. Still, it is emblematic of the impossibility of opposing the symptoms created by a superstructure, and yet remain faithful to the methodologies that birthed them. When Substack touts itself as a viable, convivial alternative to Twitter because it is against technological ugliness, but then uses the same ugliness it critiqued in its own business logic — this is elite capture, as made evident by Hayes.
But the danger is that we become incapable of truly imagining radically different technologies, because our consciousness has become severely malnourished by the western epistemic order. We can only come up with unhelpful dichotomies and identify ourselves based on negation— such as wanting to live a half-assed cottage core trad lifestyle because phone bad. We become pacified and settle for the elite-captured alternatives that laud themselves as being better than their predecessors, but are virtually the same, only dressed differently. Or, we become completely despaired and hopeless, feel as if our options have shrunk, as Odell described with the experience economy.
To truly combat something as prevalent as technological ugliness, it must be part of this larger effort of unsettling the western epistemic order. These two things cannot be seen as separate endeavors if we hope to progress. There is nothing salvageable about a framework that necessitates the negation of other humans and the violent subjugation and exploitation of workers globally.
I’ll explore this in greater depth in the final installation, namely in relation to the idea of progress.
Following the example of Wynter, I start with a few quotes to help create a better picture of what the text seeks to tackle. In her own words, they function to orient the reader as“The Argument struggles to think/articulate itself outside the terms of the disciplinary discourses of our present epistemological order.”
In contrast, as I’m writing this I’m preparing for Ramadan. No matter when in the year the holy month falls, I always feel like I’m being snapped back into a rhythm that makes entirely more sense. It is almost a kind of reversal; it interrupts this standardized pace induced by this abstract order, but at the same, is completely immersed (or better yet inseparable) with my material reality.
Technological ugliness is a catch-all term I use to refer to recent phenomena such as (but not limited to) the attention economy and surveillance capitalism.
I use the term “convivial” to mean what Ivan Illich described in his book Tools for Conviviality. In short, it is the kind of technology that honors autonomy, creativity, and community.
It is worth noting that the book serves as what Odell calls a “panoramic assault on nihilism” and so she eventually finds a way out of the pit of despair she initially describes.
It’s easy to dismiss “God is dead” as edge-lord nonsense, but I think this statement illuminates two interesting things: first, how this statement is symptomatic of the time Nietzsche lived in, i.e, we are already moving in a godless manner, I am just stating the obvious. Secondly, it shows how order is inherently ideological by how the disciplines undermine any conception of God.
The word “religion” itself is secular. If you are “religious”, God is your entire worldview: God is inseparable from truth, science, ontology, and law. When you use the word, it yanks you out of a reality where God is ontologically inherent and forces you inside a secular standpoint. The way I see it, “God is dead” wasn’t just Nietzsche being edgy. Rather, it made evident how God disappears the second we delegate him to a separate category altogether.
This also goes for any belief system that is lenient to choice, e.g., certain strains of pragmatism. They adopt an order that is shaped as a “marketplace of ideas”: Enter the store of beliefs, and buy whatever belief system is useful to your ends. The problem with this is precisely this story about the store, the shopping, the choice. What is picked out from the store isn’t your belief, but the idea of the store itself — that is your belief system — one that undermines every single item in the store. Once you have accepted the idea of such an order, you immediately make whatever you subscribe to optional, thus not a necessary facet of reality.
I’m not advocating for a correspondence theory of truth, but rather that dichotomizing beliefs and isolating them compromises the beliefs themselves.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
Safiya Umoja Noble outlines how search technologies reflect this epistemic order in her seminal book Algorithms of Oppression:
Search does not merely present pages but structures knowledge, and the results retrieved in a commercial search engine create their own particular material reality. Ranking is itself information that also reflects the political, social, and cultural values of the society that search engine companies operate within, a notion that is often obscured in traditional information science studies.
i.e., certain strains of standpoint epistemology.