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the term creative destruction, although it is also associated with Joseph Schumpeter.156 Today’s ruling class embraces it without the ambivalence and irony the term once had, under the more anodyne labels disruption and innovation, which in actuality means the decimation of jobs, mass surveillance, and algorithmic confusion. The practice of design is celebrated, but weapons design is not mentioned in polite company.
Art appears floating above all that. Its autonomy rests in part on its weird economy of value. It is about singular things rather than mass commodities. It is also an economy of presence, which is in turn an odd subset of what Yves Citton thinks of as an ecology of attention.157 Sometimes the encounter with the artist is of more value than the work, because the artist is rarer. Artists are cheaper to transport than art, because they don’t require the specialized handling and insurance. This means that the artist has to be permanently available to be present and usually without getting paid. This attention to the artist is bad for the artist’s own powers of attention. The artist gives off an aura of unalienated labor and unmediated presence but is actually living in a fragmented, disjoined junktime.158
Various proposals for an art strike, by Lee Lozano, Stewart Home, and others, have never quite worked out, because the artist does not exactly perform labor in the first place.159 But maybe there is a kind of attention strike that goes on all the time. Your body is there, present and correct, but you are distracted, checking Instagram. Your attention is on strike, and that distraction is then captured as value through one or another networked, computational device.
If your body is present but your attention is not, then perhaps that’s a sort of proxy for presence. A proxy is there in place of something else; it at least counts for something and registers as a valid stand-in. Steyerl wants to ask who or more likely what is getting to make the distinctions between valid and invalid stand-ins. When is one’s existence recognized as giving off a signal and when is it just noise? That might be the fault line today between existing and not-existing, in a polity, a culture, an economy, even in the definition of what might be allowed to live.
Perhaps because the art world is rather slow on the uptake with all things technical, it’s a useful vantage point from which to think it’s much bigger and more powerful rivals in the information and image trade. Take for example what is happening in computational photography.160 The lenses on cellphone cameras are not that great, so the production of the image rests in part with computation, which is more and more inclined to make images out of what the computer thinks you want to see. It decides on your behalf what in the visual field is signal and what is noise.
What happens in an individual camera happens on a bigger scale in the policing of images of sex and violence online. When is an image signal, and when is it noise? It only appears as if algorithms are deciding all this for us now. There is a lot of what Astra Taylor calls fauxtomation, where such work is outsourced to a globally subcontracted workforce.161 But developers are on the case, designing “probabilistic porn detection.”162 It works by feeding millions of images into a computer so it can find the patterns, so the computer can determine whether that’s a ginger cat next to a teapot, or some obscure sex position, such as Yawning, Octopus, Fraser MacKenzie, Watching the Game, Stopperage, Chambers Fuck, and Persuading the Debtor. You can look those up for yourself to see if they’re real or if Steyerl made them up, but then all the services with which your computer communicates about its actions will know you wanted to know.
What’s at stake when algorithms clear noise from information? Steyerl updates Jacques Rancière’s distinction between the crowd or public and the mob or multitude.163 The former can make demands, which they should do through their representatives, or proxies. The latter is noise, to be met with the riot police. Our representatives are in some cases still people, and sometimes they are elected. But we also have images that function as our proxies, if we are lucky enough not to be excluded as noise. It may not be a one-way street, however. “As humans feed affect, thought, and sociality into algorithms, algorithms feed back into what used to be called subjectivity.”164
The image is an effect of an algorithm, which may be a proxy for something, but it may have generated that for which it is a proxy through scripted operations. These operations model in code what it is they are supposed to double, whether it is a population or the subject of an individual photograph. What computation produces as signal out of noise is generated by a probabilistic template of what ought to be there: “Likeness becomes subject to likelihood.”165
The business of producing image and information proxies is of course immensely gameable.166 There’s all kinds of proxy cold war going on, not all of it the fault of “The Russians.” Indeed, “The Russians” are now a proxy stand-in for the whole crazy game of information warfare, fought as often as not with noise. There’s all sorts of actors, acting through stand-ins, duplicates, dupes, sock puppets. It is what the situationists called détournement on an epic scale, producing what elsewhere I called the spectacle of disintegration.167
Global civil war contains shooting wars too, also fought through proxies. These are the military equivalent of shell companies. “The border between private security, private military company, freelance insurgents, armed stand-in, state-hackers and people who just got in the way has become blurry.” It’s not so much a deviation from a norm as the new normal.168 “To state that online proxy politics is reorganizing geopolitics would be similar to stating that burgers tend to reorganize cows.”169
Steyerl: “Not seeing anything intelligible is the new normal. Information is passed on as a set of signals that cannot be picked up by human senses.”170 The critical approach is less about interpreting hidden power structures underneath an orderly culture as it is a practice of questioning the routine habits of apophenia, the selecting of patterns in random data. Your camera’s computer detects what it thinks you want to see in the noisy data captured by its lens. (Kittens!) Your social media service detects what it thinks is acceptable content amid the dick pics. A deadlier version is National Security Agency’s Skynet, trained to find “terrorists” in cellphone data from Pakistan. But were the thousands killed by missile and drone actually terrorists?171 Hard to say, as there’s no empirical test or benchmark for Skynet’s procedures.
Perhaps it’s a matter of finding different patterns, based on different protocols. Steyerl wants to show the connection between the design of death and the design of life. Her emblem is what Harun Farocki called the suicide camera, or what I once called missilecam, the nose-cone camera sending signals of its progress as it approaches its target.172 Steyerl: “the camera was not destroyed in this operation. Instead, it burst into billions of small cameras, tiny lenses embedded into cellphones.”173 Now we are overrun with the fallout of zombie cameras that failed to die.
The camera may once have framed the world as if it were there to be made into a picture for a person. But now humans are just part of a landscape that machines picture for other machines. “If the models for reality increasingly consist of sets of data unintelligible to human vision, the reality created after them might be partly unintelligible for humans too.”174
Who can forget the internet weirdness of Google’s Deep-Dream images, which reveal the presets of machinic vision and yet which managed to visualize the unconscious of circulation, with added cuteness? As Sianne Ngai reminds us, the cute can also have its scary side, as when DeepDream decides that what emerges out of a plate of spaghetti and meatballs is a series of disembodied puppy-heads. It had a habit of recognizing patterns that aren’t there. “It demonstrates a version of corporate animism in which commodities are not only fetishes but morph into franchised chimeras.”175
Humans are an inconvenience for machines. It’s a commonplace to think of work as turning humans into robots, but the humans always seem to remain repulsively mammalian. One way that computation has resolved the human into the world of the machine is through games. Alan Turing’s famous Turing Test was a way of deciding if something is human.176 If we think the way something communicates with us is human, then it is. He based it on a parlor game, involving