The Ethos of Digital Environments

Technology, Literary Theory and Philosophy

Susanna Lindberg, Hanna-Riikka Roine, Susanna Lindberg, Hanna-Riikka Roine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000378627
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

While self-driving cars and autonomous weapon systems have received a great deal of attention in media and research, the general requirements of ethical life in today's digitalizing reality have not been made sufficiently visible and evaluable. This collection of articles from both distinguished and emerging authors working at the intersections of philosophy, literary theory, media, and technology does not intend to fix new moral rules. Instead, the volume explores the ethos of digital environments, asking how we can orient ourselves in them and inviting us to renewed moral reflection in the face of dilemmas they entail. The authors show how contemporary digital technologies model our perception, narration as well as our conceptions of truth, and investigate the ethical, moral, and juridical consequences of making public and societal infrastructures computational. They argue that we must make the structures of the digital environments visible and learn to care for them.

Part 1

Digital Ecologies Today

1 Three Species Challenges

Toward a General Ecology of Cognitive Assemblages

N. Katherine Hayles

As many are beginning to realize, Planet Earth is in trouble.¹ The STEM disciplines, supported by funding agencies, are organizing to identify and address a series of Grand Challenges, among them Global Climate, Hunger and Thirst, Pollution, Energy, and Health.² The challenges are “global” not only in their reach and scope but also because their effects cannot be contained by geographical boundaries. If someone contracts bird flu in Beijing, chances are it will show up in Paris and New York; if Californians dump plastic into the ocean, it washes up on the shores of Japan and Easter Island. Moreover, the challenges involve cultural, sociopolitical, and ethical issues as well as scientific and technical problems, so the STEM disciplines alone will not be sufficient to solve them; input from the humanities and qualitative social sciences will be necessary as well. Effective action on these global issues requires large-scale consensus among different regions, nationalities, and ethnicities – yet the mechanisms to achieve such consensus are woefully lacking. Only a few come to mind, such as the Paris Climate Accords, the prohibitions against nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, and constraints on altering the human genome. As humans, we desperately need a sense of solidarity and shared purpose that can help create these global mechanisms. Even to write such a sentence, however, risks bringing howls of protests from humanists and social scientists, because of the historical baggage of false universalisms that have been so effectively deconstructed over the past several decades. Hence the challenge this chapter addresses: is it possible to arrive at conceptual foundations for human solidarities that do not reinscribe oppressive ideologies and discriminatory practices? I will propose three such foundational concepts: species-in-common, species-in-biosymbiosis, and species-in-cybersymbiosis.

The Challenge of Species-in-Common

Immediately problems arise with the concept of species, because biologists have been unable to arrive at a rigorous definition of what constitutes one. All of the proposed criteria – morphology, reproductive success, genetics – have fallen short in some aspect or another. Consider, for example, the widely used criteria that individuals count as the same species if they can mate and have fertile offspring (this leaves out mating between donkeys and horses, whose mule offspring are sterile). The problem here can be illustrated with ring species. Consider squirrels, for example: individuals in adjacent geographical regions can mate and have fertile offspring (New Yorkers with Pennsylvanians, Pennsylvanians with Missourians, Missourians with Coloradians, Coloradians with Californians). Insert enough geographical distance, however – say, matching Californians with New Yorkers – and mating is not successful. Problems like these notwithstanding, most biologists nevertheless share a general understanding of species and find it indispensable for their work.

For the humanities, a more serious issue is speciesism, the ideology that humans are morally more important than other species and therefore entitled to exploit or dominate them. A founding document is the 1970 privately printed pamphlet Speciesism by Richard D. Ryder.³ Arguing against animal experimentation, it equated speciesism with racism: just as speciesism considers humans morally superior to other animals, so racism judges one ethic group morally superior to others. Contemporary commentators on speciesism include Timothy Morton, who recently argued that speciesism is more fundamental than racism and that anyone who is a speciesist must perforce be a racist as well. Given that racism is one of the most virulent charges one humanist can level against another, such arguments virtually guarantee that if someone asks, “Who here is a speciesist?” there would be a thunderous absence of response.

Why, then, do most biologists continue to find species a necessary concept, even with all of its problems? The answer seems obvious: different species have distinctively different capabilities and potentialities. The human species notably differs from others in its ability to predict the future and form intentional plans to address anticipated problems. Which brings us back to the Grand Challenges: only humans could have conceived of these as global concepts, and only humans can devise technological, cultural, and ethical solutions to them. Here it may be useful to invoke a term used by Donna Haraway (2016): human response-ability. Humans respond through an empathic bond with other humans and nonhumans, and because of our abilities to conceptualize and anticipate the future, we bear a special responsibility for working toward ensuring the welfare of others and the planet in general. That we so far have failed miserably in meeting this challenge does not negate our potential to do so. Indeed, writers such as Haraway, Bruno Latour (2018), Brian Holmes (2018) and many others are now urging us to embrace our response-abilities. For this kind of Grand Challenge, a reconceptualized notion of species may be helpful – not one that implies speciesism with its imperialistic heritages of exploitation and racism, but rather what I call species-in-common, a notion of human solidarities and purposes that can work to mitigate the damages we have so far wrecked upon our common and only home, the Earth.

So reconceptualized, species-in-common can serve as a bulwark against racism rather than a facilitator of it. For virtually all of human history, people have believed that their own group is fully human, while those in the next valley are somehow less or other than human. Indeed, when genocide raises its horrible head, one of the first (predictable) rhetorical moves is to equate the despised others with rats, vermin, cockroaches rather than with the human species (another indication of the close historical tie between racism and speciesism). Richard Rorty put the matter into useful perspective:

Most people live in a world in which it would be just too risky – indeed, would often be insanely dangerous – to let one’s sense of moral community stretch beyond one’s family, clan, or tribe. Such people are morally offended by the suggestion that they should treat someone who is not kin as if he were a brother, or a nigger as if he were white, or a queer as if he was normal, or an infidel as if she were a believer. They are offended by the suggestion that they should treat people whom they do not think of as human as if they were human.

(Rorty 1998, 125)

He cautions that saying these benighted others should simply become more rational will not solve the problem (indeed this way of thinking is part of the problem). The necessary prerequisites, he suggests, are security (“conditions of life sufficiently risk-free to make one’s difference from others inessential to one’s self-respect, one’s sense of worth”) and what he calls “sympathy,” here denoted as empathy (ibid., 128).

This pragmatic approach makes clear the relevance of the Grand Challenges, particularly Global Hunger and Thirst and Global Security, to the species-in-common concept. Solutions to each of these challenges reinforce and depend on the others. Species-in-common, with its focus on human solidarity, insists that every individual of the human species counts as human, but such a potently anti-racist vision can be effective only if everyday life for the world’s peoples includes enough of the necessities to ensure some measure of relief from danger, famine, drought and other catastrophic urgencies. In its reconceptualized form, species-in-common articulates a vision that has taken literally thousands of years of human history to achieve. Still in its infancy throughout most of the world, it calls for us to take response-ability for working toward the global conditions that will enable us to see the people in the next valley, living, feeling, cognizing people, as human like us.

Moreover, the concept of species-in-common offers new clarity for media theory as well. This aspect is implicit in the move that John Durham Peters (2016) makes when he upends media theory by proposing that elemental processes such as clouds and ocean currents function as media interfaces through which communications are processed. One may be tempted to object that this stretches the concept of “media” so far as to render it meaningless as an analytical category, since in this view almost everything can count as media. Here it may be useful to return to John Guillory’s exploration of the genesis of the media concept (2010), where he argues that almost from the beginning, media has implied both “mediation” and “communication through a distance.” If we accept these as the two essential components of media as a concept (which Durham suggests we do), then there is no reason why mediation has to involve technical apparatuses. The result has been an explosion of media theory in a number of new directions, including Melody Jue’s Wild Blue Media (2020), exploring the ocean as a medium complete with databases and communication circuits. An investigation of coral reefs, with their long histories of sedimentation and interlocking life forms, in this view could count as media archeology, which typically involves such archaic technical media as stereoscopes, magic lanterns, and cycloramas.

To evaluate what is gained (and lost) by this paradigm shift, we can compare Peters’s “elemental” scheme with Claude Shannon’s famous diagram of the communication situation (Shannon and Weaver, 1949; diagram available at http://people.seas.harvard.edu/~jones/cscie129/nu_lectures/lecture1/Shannon_Diagram_files/Shannon_Diagram.html). Recall that Shannon’s diagram begins with a sender, who composes a message that is then encoded into a signal and sent through a circuit to a decoding apparatus, which reconstitutes the message and conveys it to the receiver. Intervening in this process is noise, always threatening to degrade the signal and compromise the message’s legibility. Shannon made a point of emphasizing that the sender and receiver need not be humans; they could be technical apparatuses instead. In either case, however, implicit in the diagram is the idea that both the sender and receiver have sufficient cognitive capabilities to perform the actions required of them.

In Peters’s “elemental” model, the signal to be communicated over distance need not originate with a cognitive entity; the movement of clouds, which he argues communicates information to humans and nonhumans (birds, animals, and plants, for example), are material processes that do not require cognition to function. However, I would argue that there must be a cognizer at the end of the process for the two necessary components of mediation and communication over distance to function. Otherwise there are only material processes, distinguished as I argued in Unthought (2017) from cognition because there is no choice and no interpretation, only chemico-material events that are the resultant of the forces acting upon and through them. Communication, unlike material processes, always requires interpretation and choice – choice in determining which phenomena will be considered as media, for instance, and interpretation in the decoding and reception of the message.

This leads immediately to one of Peters’s finest insights: “media are species and habitat-specific and are defined by the beings they are for” (2016, 56). Of course! Only our anthropocentric biases can account for why the field called “media theory” remains almost exclusively about human communication, while communication within and between other species is relegated to the relatively marginalized field of biosemiotics. With a multitude of examples, Peters gives a vivid sense of what media mean, for example, to whales and dolphins, including seawater sonic waves and ocean currents. As he argues, once the species-specificity of media is explicitly recognized, many new kinds of inquiries are opened, different vocabularies become possible, and novel theoretical frameworks can be developed.

As an example, suppose that I am sitting on the couch with Monty (my dog), watching a rerun of the classic Lassie TV series. I see Lassie coming to the rescue, defeating bad men, helping the good. What does Monty see? He notices flashing lights and, when Lassie barks, momentarily looks at the screen, but he quickly loses interest because the images are contained in a box and have no smell, so he knows they are not real. Compare that with a trip to the dog park, where Monty comes across fresh urine. Smelling it, he notices the specificity of its chemicals and associates them with the handsome poodle that has just left the area. The urine smell-signature matches up with other smells coming from her anus, which he trots over to sniff. These are media for him because they communicate information and messages, although not for me. Similarly, dissolved chemicals in water function as media for redwood trees, salt-tinged air for seagulls, blood in water for sharks. What can count as media is therefore tied to the specificities of the sensory apparatus of the receiving cognizer, whether human, nonhuman, or computational, and are constituted within and through the environments of the cognizing species.

It is not enough, then, to insist on media-specific analysis, for which I have been arguing for some time to encourage literary critics in particular to attend to the specific forms in which texts are instantiated; we must also attend to the specificities of the species that engage in communicative acts. This is another reason why the concept of species remains an essential analytical tool, despite its problems and historical baggage. Without it, we could scarcely formulate the mediations and communications through distance that comprise what Hoffmeyer calls the semiosphere, the totality of signs and messages passing between and within living organisms.

Taking species into account has the additional advantage of restoring some of the specificity that opening media to elemental communications had dissolved. Even though virtually anything can be seen as originating a communication, such signals must be received and interpreted by cognizers to count as acts of communication, and the meanings extrapolated from the signals are specific to the sensory and neuronal capacities of the species that receives them. In addition to connecting species to their environments, these communicative acts help to construct and expand the deep interdependence of living organisms.⁴

The Challenge of Species-in-Biosymbiosis

Species entangle and interpenetrate. In 1967 when Lynn Margulis finally had her revolutionary paper published, she upended current biological dogma by arguing that mitochondria had descended from bacteria, and chloroplasts from cyanobacteria; these once freely living organisms became symbionts of eukaryotic cells in a process of endosymbiosis. Indeed, she went on to argue that endosymbiosis, rather than natural selection, is the primary driver of evolution: “Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn’t create,” she argued in an interview (Teresi 2011). Humans have likewise acquired symbionts in our evolutionary history, for example, the gut bacteria essential for the proper digestion of food.

Recently Donna Haraway has extended this work to global scope through the concept of sympoiesis. “Sympoiesis,” she writes, “is a word proper to c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Introduction: From Solving Mechanical Dilemmas to Taking Care of Digital Ecology
• Should a Self-driving Car
• PART I: Digital Ecologies Today
• PART II: The Ethos: Description and Formation
• PART III: The Ethos: Entanglement and Delegation
• PART IV: The Ethos: Thinking, Computing, and Ethics
• Index