§52 Terminators from the start

“The Terminator was there from the start!”, said Mark Fisher on how we should not think of the human in a mythical originary form without an inherent relationship with technics that are not something we simply make and master.

The same applies to contemporary philosophies of technology and being, in which anything like the ‘human condition’ came about only through thinking that technics forced into being itself. For Bernard Stiegler, technics separated the human out of purely immanent relations with nature. With a chisel or tending a fire, temporal horizons of planning, teaching and sociality with language developed alongside these technologies. So, too, did temporal notions of being itself, including death.

Already in 1964, Marshall McLuhan wrote his famous adage, ‘the medium is the message’, meaning that the form of any medium is more influential than what they ‘say’ as their content. The form, be it the printing press or electricity, changes the very possibility of being and thinking far more than their particular events of use. This is the question of globalized capitalism and particularly its manifestations in online immediacy and social media we need to ask today. For Stiegler, technics is both a gift and poison for this exact reason — they gave the human its possibility of being, but now seem to be actively destroying being in the immanent investments we make in faceless global networks.

In Terminator, SKYNET system only becomes the enemy of humanity when it becomes self-aware. This anthropomorphic view thus necessitates a particular move: The machine can only become hostile when it becomes like us. It also needs to live the myth of being in control and agency as a coherent and goal-directed entity. It would seem much more likely though that this naïve attitude is already in tatters if one is to recognize our being the ‘limb of the machine’ already in immanent global subjection to algorithmically guided decoding of social relations.

/Joel Hietanen

References:

McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. ‘The Medium is the Message’ In Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McGraw-Hill Chapter 1. web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/mcluhan.mediummessage.pdf

Originally published at anowmedia.com on August 10, 2018.