Core Post 1: Hyperobjects and Abstraction

As I read through what was assigned this week, two conceptual anchors stood out to me that could aid in our collective comprehension: the black box and the hyperobject. Mostly in relation to Crawford and Joler’s brilliantly articulated “anatomy” of Amazon Alexa, I had the idea of a technological hyperobject which rebuffs any attempts to evaluate its totality. The authors discuss “deep time” and the geological processes that have coagulated the possibility of these machines to exist. The fractal triangle illustrated in the piece captures the difficulty of tracing origin of one particular facet of the device, while simultaneously foregrounding the innumerable linkages between disparate actors and agents.

            For this reason, I think Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network theory has a lot to contribute to this discussion as well. Besides the obvious usefulness of “actant” as something containing agentive capacity but which is not necessarily human, there is the idea of the “black box,” which obfuscates its inner workings in a pseudo-magical way such that the mechanisms which drive it cannot be uncovered. We see this literalized in the illustrations of the original mechanical Turk, as well as in Amazon’s patent diagram. Here the worker is actually “boxed in,” their limbs replaced with mechanized appendages, their humanity elided.

            Thinking with the Borges story about the map which perfectly replicates the territory, I also was enamored with the discussions of abstraction in Couldry and Mejias and to a lesser extent in Cheney-Lippold. The former write that the “fundamental characteristic of capitalism” is the “abstracting force of the commodity,” to which I wholeheartedly agree. Culturally, this abstracting force is nowhere today more present than in board games and simulation video games (I hope to return to this thought in my presentation on labor). Games demand abstraction because without it we would be forced to render totality; yet, indeed, this has always been the goal in some sectors of game development. The idea of absolute fidelity to “reality” obscures the ways in which the world has come to be “naturalized,” in much the same way that big data operations wish to assert the natural, terra nullius characteristics of personal user data.