Planet of Machines

Shoshana Zuboff is an acclaimed writer of blockbuster non-fiction focused on the historical evolution of technology and its shaping and reshaping of human social organisation. Zuboff tends to write about businesses and the political systems they operate within and with which they interact. There is a strong theme of meaning production and she draws out Foucauldian lessons connecting the phenomenological with the materialist and rationalist ways of thinking.

In her book, The Age of the Smart Machine [1988], she introduced us to the idea of internet-based systems as a system of ‘smart machines’, machines that work and create knowledge, that alter the basis of human interaction, human skills and the role the human plays in the creation of knowledge. ‘Informating’ becomes an object and an activity to differentiate how humans will form knowledge and the basis of human skill. Automation of processes thus integrates, via ‘informating’, the human into the digitalised world evolving from the smart machine era.

In Surveillance Capitalism [2019] she builds on that evolution and her knowledge to describe very insightfully, aspects of how our lives are and will be shaped by the digital world. Her thesis is now focused on the impact and meaning of the smart machine age and in particular the threat to human social fabric, as measured by the label ‘democracy’. We are heading for an ‘iron cage’ of information and ‘radical indifference’ based on the ‘inhuman’ algorithm. Zuboff sees the human trapped in a digitalised world with no routes of escape.

Zuboff is crying wolf for us to see the death of human society or at least a society that is based upon and driven by values that are ‘not human’. Unfortunately, while her work is strikingly advanced compared to many establishment commentators, she repeats standard human errors in her thesis.

The human is uncritically placed in history. There is no questioning or explaining of human behaviour vis-à-vis all other being forms, human behaviour as part of a larger energy equation. The narrative is like a high brow soap opera, it is clever and insightful, but it is all about us.

Zuboff is unable to locate the human as a product of earth history. Thus, I suggest the human is an historical actor; and one that requires explanation within the trajectory of the earth. The human has such a small footprint in ‘earthtime’ that it cannot be other than a footnote at present. Like ‘human science’ Zuboff is unable to escape the hubristic instinct to explain existence and our lives anthropocentrically.

An additional aspect is the uncritical nature of the assessment of ‘the economy’. Zuboff clearly is a progressive and is commendably forthright in reference sources without fear. She locates Karl Marx, Karl Polanyi, Hannah Arendt, Frederick Hayek, Milton Friedman, David Harvey as diverse sources of thought about the movement of history. She also picks out the accidental with a quote from Google’s Eric Smidt “all of a sudden we realised we were in the auction business”. Serendipity has its place in history. Thinkers provide categories. History is not the implementation of categories. The categories follow the myriad acts of humans.

Zuboff seems not to process the smart machine as a product of human activity. The smart machine must be a product of what humans call ‘nature’ as humans are natural, ‘of nature’. The ideology of humans is that nature is a category and a separation allowing humans to exist outside it. This is of course preposterous and not conscious. It is of course a reality that such a view is made and argued, but that is not explanation, it is argument and ideological interpretation. Polanyi, made clear the fictions that economics promotes with the concepts of land, labour and capital. It is my observation that this is conscious at the micro level and results at the macro level to effect that we deny the existence of the reality that contains us.

Rather than humans being taken over by machines it seems logical that we recognise that humans have conceptualised, invented, designed, and built machines. That humans have continuously refined the concept of the machine and the machine-as-a-really-existing object, as an aspect of our existence.

Like all sentient animals, humans have senses. Unlike other animals we have developed the technologies of ‘language’, writing, art, construction/building. If we see those attributes as part of the continuum of human ‘machine making’ we can see that this is our desire, our purpose even.

We must however explain why; and in doing so accept that it is as a product of nature that we are performing our role as ‘machine makers’. Therefore, this machine making is an evolutionary act and ’nature’, as we call it, is the mother environment. Thus, the earth is the ‘planet of machines’. It is the earth that is developing the capacity for the expansion of the universe via technology.

The human has been on the earth in its present corporeal form a short time, relative to the history of the earth itself. I doubt we will exist in this form for much longer but that is lack of knowledge and understanding as much as an intelligent assessment. One thing we may be surer of is the human-machine interface is integrating and is likely in less than one human century to be at or near integration. At that point earth will be the planet of machines.