Notes on posthumanism
Humanism places humans against nature and technology.
Humanism emphasises responsibility, exceptionalism, free-will, working for some future.
There is no longer an essence of ‘the human’, instead where the human used to be is now filled with ongoing processes, forces, histories and judgments and technologies.
The person carves themselves out of the world.
Humans are cyborgs. Never been distinct from the world. We have always used tools.
We can’t think of ourselves as outside of the world, separate from nature.
The product user is a cyborg, a human merged with tool.
Memory and thought are outside of our body.
Stieglar. Humans are not a special animal.
Writing and art outsource our thinking and memory and agency to log term memory embedded in objects.
Our use of tools was not intentional or agentic.
We think we are separate from nature because we never start at square one because we have history and culture written down to build upon.
What makes humans special is not something within us, it is in our use of tools and technology.
The world is ever less mutable to individuals. It is comprised of massive unstoppable forces, systems and markets, and no matter how much anyone tries, it all keeps going and accelerate, indifferent to our choices.
Deleuze. The world is run by machines, not by free-will. Systems of information processing. Education machine. They use programmes to categorise people.
Systems of interruptions.
Machines are not things, they are processes. They work on inpits to produce outputs, They make distinctions based on the data they collect from an environment.
The outputs of one machine are the inputs of another.
Societies of control regulate access.
Remote working is part of Deleuze’s shift from Disciplinary Societies to Societies of Control.
Voluntray self-dsicipline. Regulate yourself or suffer the consequences. You are expected to burden yourself with the responsibility for making choices.
Flows. Everything is always on it’s way to something else.
We are sources of information for whichever systems we are interacting with.
Diviudal
Classified by the data the machine has about us. Your access to your own future is limited by what the machine decides.
The education machine is a filtering. Poor scores limits access to income.
the machines of control societies perpetuate existing inequalities.
The system does not expect you to be a good person, it just prevents bad behaviour.
From self-regulation to auto-regulation.
Your options are controlled before you ever have to make a decision.
Control machines steer your actions and so data into channels.
Cybernetics are systems that use feedback to eliminate deviation over time.
Wiener
A given pattern: the difference between this pattern and the actually performed motion is used as a new input, to cause the part regulated to move in such a way as to bring its motion closer to that given by the pattern.
Our social cyberneutic machnes control people’s behaviour. These control societies don’t force you to do anything, but as soon as you offer them information they offer feedback which is then used to steer your behaviour.
Control societies are designed to create the future.
User data is subject to the mechanisms of these future generating machines.
Human identity is always in flux, always changing and situated in a material and cultural context.