Smart fridges, fifteen lane highways, and the Singularity

8/6/2019 Smart fridges, fifteen lane highways, and the Singularity

1/8

Digital Media: Critical Perspectives Justin Pickard

Smart fridges, fifteen-lane highways, and the Singularity:

the role of futurism in the technological imaginary

With its origins in Lacanian psychoanalysis, the 'technological imaginary' is a concept through which

'tendencies that may have been originally posited as belonging to individuals are also () [seen to be] present

at the level of social groups and collectivities.' (Lister et al., 2009: 67) The adjective 'imaginary' becomes a

noun; a cultural gestalt 'embedded in the habitus of a population () [and] carried in modes of address, stories,

symbols, and the like.' (Gaonkar, 2002: 4) Pitched in opposition to the rarefied social theory of the academy, the

imaginary-as-noun is grounded in the social vernacular. It is a first-person subjectivity. We are subjects of the

technological imaginary as a 'common sense' understanding of technology's role and history, 'shared by large

groups of people, if not the whole society.' (Taylor, 2002: 106)

For commentators such as Cabrera, the 'newness' of new media or new technologies suggests an

'empty phrase with () multiple and indefinite meanings that permit the projection of different devices and, of

course, diverse fantasies.' (Cabrera, 2009: 109) The technological imaginary is not simply the sum of all public

imaginings about the development of science and technology; but, in a very real sense, it includes and

precedes the technologies which are its manifestations. Recognising the impossibility of reducing technology

to its physical affordances or materiality, Cabrera suggests that we should instead approach it as an 'imaginary

institution' 'a jumble of representations, affects and desires by which society understands, feels, thinks, lives,

compares and projects itself.' (Cabrera, 2009: 110)

On the subject of futurism, as Tofts and Jonson argue, 'there is something oddly, even uncannily

anachronistic about the very notion of futuristic speculation, since its visions are always, and of necessity,

irresistibly measured against an eventual point that is designated, in an imminent present, as the future.' (Tofts

& Jonson, 2002: 210) Nevertheless, such discussions and discourses occupy a powerful position in public

discourse, with futurity often framed as automatically and inherently desirable. The BBC is running

advertisements for the switchover from analogue to digital radio; urging people to trade in their portable radio

sets on the basis that 'digital radio is future radio'; it is implied that this is enough no further explanation or

1


2/8


justification is required. Here, technology is 'a deus ex machinathat transforms everything we do and, so long

as we embrace it and are not obstructive, just about everything will turn out for the better.' (Robins and

Webster, 2000: 66)

One of the earliest sites where we can see the emergence of this progressive, desirable and modernist

conception of futurism and the technological imaginary is at the international expos and world fairs particularly

those of the 1930s and 1960s. While the fairs in Chigaco and San Francisco in the 1930s had 'sensationalized

the spectacle of mechanical progress () the [1964] New York fair [tried] to showcase entirely planned and

integrating living environments () an attainable near future.' (Ross, 1991: 428) Though some sensationalism

definitely persisted, with Highmore reading these displays and exhibits as a modernist, postwar analogue for

turn-of-the-century phantasmagoria.

Much as its spectacular predecessors, which fired the public's imagination with magic lanterns and

moving pictures, these exhibits tapped into the technological imaginary not simply as a result of their content or

message instead, seducing their audience with the technological wonder of their staging and physical form.

For Highmore, the most obvious forerunner to IBM's Information Machine was 'the General Motors display

'Futurama', shown at the 1939-40 New York World's Fair (...) a vision of what the US might look like in 1960 and

consisted of a ride over and through an environment newly networked by motorways () [and] used the

technology of the assembly-line to carry spectators rather than cars.' (Highmore, 2004: 142) Such displays fed

a technological imaginary 'loosely shared by () the major engineering societies, leading corporations with

global stakes in high tech, universities looking for substitutes for declining federal support, (...) and the State

Department searching for new technological means to maintain an American hegemony.' (Carey, 2009 [1989]:

106) Though details differed, the symbolic capital of these sectors allowed them to push a hegemonic vision of

the future, long after it ceased to be relevant.

Here, one of the more graspable representations of the relationship between futurism and the technological

imaginary can be found in William Gibson's short story, 'The Gernsback Continuum.' Gibson's protagonist, a

freelance journalist on a job, 'is haunted by the semiotic ghost of these outdated [legacy] futures, chunks of

deep cultural imagery from the mass unconscious that take on part hallucinatory, part material form as he

2


3/8


travels around Southern California a flying-wing luxury liner, gleaming eighty-lane highways, shark-fin

roadsters; a city with ziggurats, zeppelin docks, giant neon spires; and a population of white, blond, perfect

Americans' (Ross, 1991: 411-412). Even now, the technological imaginary continues to be dominated by these

legacy futures - born of corporate brainstorming, international expos, and mid-century science fiction. Though

such images are rarely useful, having been superseded by history, according to Cascio, they 'have so

thoroughly colonized our minds [and social imaginary] that even new scenarios and futures models may end up

making explicit or implicit references to them.' (Cascio, 2008) Such legacy futures share a structural logic with

that Hayles refers to as the skeuomorph 'a design feature that is no longer functional in itself but that refers

back to a feature that was functional at an earlier time.' (Hayles, 1999: 17) Like the skeuomorph, the legacy

future 'calls into play a psychodynamic that finds the new more acceptable when it recalls the old that it is in the

process of displacing' (Hayles, 1999: 17). Cascio invokes the examples of:

'discussions of post-petroleum transportation that continue to elevate hydrogen fuel cells as The

Answer, even though most eco-futurists and green automotive thinkers now regard that technology

as something of a dead end (...) population projections that don't account for either healthcare

technologies extending both productive lives and overall lifespans () visions of a sustainable

future reminiscent of 1970s commune life, and visions of a viable future that don't include dealing

with massive environmental disruption.' (Cascio, 2008)

Hayles gives the example of homeostasis in theories of cybernetics; for though 'homeostasis remained an

important concept in biology, by about 1960 it had ceased to be an initiating premise in cybernetics ()

[instead] perform[ing] the work of a gesture or an allusion used to authenticate new elements' (Hayles, 1999:

17). With futurism, this mode of authentication sees the legacy trappings the smart fridges and fifteen-lane

highways so effectively interrogated by Gibson deployed in all discussions of the future in public discourse,

because that's what the future looks like.

This model represents a resurgent millenarianism, in which 'dissatisfactions with social reality and

desires for a better society are projected onto technologies as capable of delivering a potential realm of

completeness.' (Lister et al., 2009: 67) By directly equating the future with progress, we attribute to technology

the potential capability to liquidate human deficiency. As we back into the future, humanity approaches its

technological salvation a relatively direct legacy of the teleological rhetoric of nineteenth century United

3


4/8


States. For both the digital prophets of our 'global village' future and the American pioneers driving civilisation

westward across the United States, the teleological culture is one in which 'a dominant sense of optimism and

faith in the progress of industry and science encourag[ing] the view that history (as the growth, evolution and

maturing of human societies) [is] drawing to a close.' (Lister at. al., 2009: 55) Within futurism, this manifests as

'an orientation of secular religiosity that surfaces whenever the name of technology is invoked.' (Carey, 2009

[1989]: 87)

Although these linear and morally-loaded models of history have on the whole been long since

abandoned, they continue to exert a certain cultural influence, particularly in the popular rhetoric surrounding

science and technology; often framed as evidence of mankind's mastery over the physical world. In this

context, the cultural significance of a new medium of technology lies 'not in what it [can] do in the here and now,

but in what more advanced models might be able to do' (Barbrook, 2007: 8) at some future point. In this

iteration of the technological imaginary, existing gadgets and technologies are only important in as much as

they can be seen to represent an embryonic form of that which is yet to come the infinite potentiality of a

future perpetually deferred. This kind of futurism began to enter the public consciousness in the early 1970s,

since which point, 'experts and futurologists have regularly announced the advent of new media expected to

revolutionize our modes of acquiring knowledge and, more broadly, our ways of living and working: cable,

VCRs, videodisks, videotext, PCs, videophones, HDTV, information highways and (...) the Internet.' (Flichy,

1999: 33) Indeed, this was a point in which:

'futurism, a quasi-subject area which had been out of favour since the late 1960s, enjoyed a

remarkable revival that was manifested in a host of outlets. At once reverential and alarmist,

persuasive and hectoring, realistic and visionary, futurists pronounced on the immediate and long-term consequences of a technological revolution from which no-one could escape.' (Robins and

Webster, 2000: 64)

But as Tomorrow's World(1965-2003) was replaced by Wiredmagazine (1993-), the emphasis shifts from

Fordism-but-bigger to ideas of cyberculture and the emerging information society; again, as rhetoric, if not

necessarily an extant object. Thus, the legacy futures of postwar American society are replaced with a less

specific model of futurism a reading that places less importance on individual gadgets, and more on the

4


5/8


dynamics of technological change. Rather than pushing the inevitability of the networked home or electric car,

this discourse claims as its only certainty the fact that 'the future () will be very different from today, and that it

will become different more quickly than ever before.' (Robins and Webster, 2000: 1)

This is an opinion taken several steps further by authors such as Vinge and Kurzweil, for whom

humanity is surely due another paradigm shift something of a comparable magnitude to the shift from hunter-

gathering to agriculture and urban settlement, or the development of language. Their emphasis is on

technological acceleration and transformative change, with multiple developments in science and technology

expected to converge in a 'wall of technological novelties blocking the future from us.' (Broderick, 2002: 278)

Though more commonly referenced as 'the singularity', Broderick calls this 'the Spike' a horizon of ever-

swifter change we can't yet see past () a kind of black hole in the future, created by runaway change and

accelerating computer power.' (Broderick, 2002: 280) Whether such a shift will come from self-bootstrapping

artificial intelligence, the digitisation and 'uploading' of human consciousness, biotechnological enhancement,

or something altogether more exotic, the singularitarians' argument is that the future contains elements so

unexpected and paradigm-shattering that it is foolish to continue viewing it as a linear extrapolation from past

and current trends. In this body of theory, as Hayles notes, 'there are no essential differences () between

bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and

human goals.' (Hayles, 1999: 3)

Here, a straightforward and uncritical appraisal of this singularitarianism, positing it as a more

sophisticated model of futurism particularly when compared with the teleological models of the nineteenth and

early twentieth centuries, or the postwar legacy futures of the West would have to consciously set out with the

intent of ignoring the sustained and vigorous criticism of Vinge, Kurzweil, and their colleagues. Certainly, Hayles

seems less than convinced by the prospect of downloading human consciousness into a computer. She

describes the process by which 'a robot surgeon pures the human brain in a kind of cranial liposuction,

reading the information in each molecular layer as it stripped away and transferring the information into a

computer.' (Hayles, 1999: 1) Shocked by their lack of regard for notions of embodiment and affect, Hayles takes

this singularitarian scenario as emblematic of a broader rhetorical emphasis on the (illusory) dematerialisation

of information.

5


6/8


Nevertheless, notions of this game-changing singularity, regardless of the form it takes, have failed to

have much of an impact on the popular technological imaginary. Derided by its critics as a fundamentally

messianic worldview, as complicit in an teleological model of history as any of the singularitarians' Marxist or

Whiggish ancestors, the singularity has been dubbed 'the rapture of the nerds'; an early indication of Vinge and

Kurzweil's core constituents broadly speaking, those in possession of libertarian politics and advanced

degrees. In this context, further missives from the singularitarians have seen them preaching to the already

converted, with the postwar legacy futures proving capable of resisting those who would seek to displace

them.

Though it is tempting to treat the technological imaginary as an organic and spontaneous cultural

phenomenon, to do so would be to disregard the political and economic actors with stakes in the resulting

technological culture. Instead, our current imaginary emerged from a specific alignment of class and ideology,

with the Silicon Valley 'digiterati' posing as 'the spokespersons of technological evolution, when in fact they are,

above all, the advocates of a decentralized and libertarian development of the information society.' (Flichy,

1999: 38) Approaching the future as a site of symbolic struggle or conflict, such technologists and cultural

commentators can be seen as cyberspace revolutionaries; 'a vanguard charged with the task of developing all

the potentialities of tomorrow's digital society.' (Flichy, 1999: 38) By couching their rhetoric in the teleologies of

evolution, these commentators have been 'engaged in spontaneously constructing a future which was

[presented as] inevitable.' (Barbrook, 2007: 267) Here, the role of this Californian futurism in the resulting

technological imaginary lay not in its highlighting the improved physical affordances of new technologies, but

with aspirations more grandiose in its excited anticipation of their 'supposed capacity to transform the

commonplace into the extraordinary: to create novel forms of human community, new standards of efficiency

and progress, newer and more democratic forms of politics, and finally to usher a new man into history.'

(Carey, 2009 [1989]: 146)

While this is but one specific historical configuration of the technological imaginary a gestalt entity

whose social contingency is rendered obscure by discourse it does demonstrate how, by providing pre-

existing channels for society to think and talk about the future, the rhetoric of futurism has conditioned our

6


7/8


interactions with notions of media and technology. Though Gaonkar describes the social imaginary as 'an

enabling but not fully explicable symbolic matrix within which a people imagine and act as world-making

collective agents' (Gaonkar, 2002: 1), more often that not, the impact of the technological imaginary has been a

question of limitation. Outdated futures continue to hold disproportionate amounts of influence much as

marketing gurus continueto herald Second Life as the salvation of e-commerce. That said, it is difficult to

imagine a technological imaginary without some form of futurism. Cabrera may have criticised the concept of

'new technologies' as a hollow, empty signifier, but the impact and performative agency of this concept is such

that it is hard to discount. As Carey comments, somewhat melodramatically, 'the future is already out there ()

an active agent reaching back into the present and past from its own superior vantage point and revising time

and ineluctably removing obstacles to the previous unachieved rendezvous with destiny.' (Carey, 2009 [1989]:

150) Even if we recognise the flaws and limitations of the teleologies on which such a narrative is built, these

'new technologies' would, as he comments, be 'inconceivable without a certain belief in progress, in looking

forward and quickening the pace toward a future that we are convinced is [as] () [s]ome kind of blind

conviction in the future is necessary for new technologies to be possible.' (Cabrera, 2009: 119)

7


8/8


Bibliography

Barbrook, R. (2007) Imaginary Futures(London: Pluto Press)

Broderick, D. (2002) 'Racing Toward the Spike,' in Tofts, D., Jonson, A. and A. Cavallaro (eds.), 'Futuropolis:

Postmillenial Speculations,' in Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press)

Cabrera, D. H. (2009) 'The Soul of the Golem', Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of

Communication, Vol. 1 (1), pp. 107-121.

Carey, J. (2009 [1989]) Communication as Culture(New York, NY: Routledge)

Cascio, J. (2008) 'Legacy Futures,' Open the Future, 08/12/2008,

[accessed 20/05/2010]

Flichy, P. (1999) 'The Construction of New Digital Media,' New Media & Society, Vol. 1 (1), pp. 33-38.

Gaonkar, D. P. (2002) 'Toward New Imaginaries: An Introduction,' Public Culture, Vol. 14 (1), pp. 1-19.

Gibson, W. (1988) 'The Gernsback Continuum,' in Burning Chrome(London: Grafton)

Hayles, N. K. (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics

(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press)

Highmore, B. (2004) 'Machinic Magic: IBM at the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair,' new formations, Vol. 51,

pp. 128-148.

Lister, M., Dovey, J., Giddings, S., Grant, I. and K. Kelly (2009) New Media: A Critical Introduction(Abingdon:

Routledge)

Robins, K. and F. Webster (2000) Times of the Technoculture(New York, NY: Routledge)

Ross, A. (1991) 'Getting out of the Gernsback Continuum,' Critical Inquiry, Vol. 17 (2), pp. 411-433.

Taylor, C. (2002) 'Modern Social Imaginaries,' Public Culture, Vol. 14 (1), pp. 91-124.

Tofts, D. and A. Jonson (2002) 'Futuropolis: Postmillenial Speculations,' in Prefiguring Cyberculture: An

Intellectual History(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press)

8

Documents

Smart fridges, fifteen lane highways, and the Singularity