Feedback Loops, Temporal Shifts

Meditations on Magickapitalism

Modernity has always been synonymous to rationality. Max Weber famously defined modernity as 'disenchantment of the world', referring to a successively consolidating secularized, progressive and institutionalized society that replaced a chaotic social whole. In the meantime, a teleological idea of society that could be split into institutions not only resulted in the modernist belief in all sorts of progress, but sublimated the incapacity to deal with an inner irrationalism of the social, inscribing it into structures and hierarchies. By producing grand narratives, modernism itself became a grand narrative -- probably, the most significant one.

The disruption of modernism, popularly described as the crisis of grand narratives, highlighted the limits of such a representation, showing that the world is not equal to the sum of institutions. However, the process of a reverse mystification left overshadowed a double disenchantment. What came to replace a modernist idea of the world is not the return of the social complexity but the logic of late capitalism; as it transgressed its institutional structure, it became a dark potentiality, underpinning thinking, cognition and imagination. There was no realism -- but capitalism became capitalist realism.

Hypersigilia: Narratives and Speculation

In the capitalist dystopia one is exposed to an overflow of interconnected media creating a continuous marketing narrative that directs their basic instincts into consumption as a vital component of the perpetration of the species. In this context, branding is vital in sourcing and converting buyers from the deepsea network of individuals into specific herds.

Sigil magic, on the other hand, is a practice derived from the medieval ages when symbols were used ritually to summon angelic or demonic beings. Austin Osman Spare, a Chaos Magician, claimed that these entities were merely complexes in the unconscious and turns this practice on its head, focusing on the crafting of symbols with intent to actively create these entities. Ray Sherwin thus defines the practice of sigilisation: 'The magician acknowledges a desire, he lists the appropriate symbols and arranges them into an easily visualised glyph. Using any of the gnostic techniques he reifies the sigil and then, by force of will, hurls it into his subconscious from where the sigil can begin to work unencumbered by desire'. The sigil must then be ostracised.

A connection between brands and sigils has gained sympathy by magicians across cyberspace and some brands were even suggested by Grant Morrison to be corporate sigils, or 'super-breeders'. There is however one fundamental difference between these two: lifespan. Brands are memetic by nature, made to replicate ad infinitum whereas sigils are made to be disposable and personal. But these concepts overlap when taking into account a memetic sigil practice called Hypersigilia.

The term 'hypersigil' appears in Grant Morrison\'s work to designate an extended cultural unit created with magical intent derived from sigil magic. The hypersigil is defined in the Cyborg Anthropology wiki as a term used to describe a feedback loop between an external or extended persona and a primary self, a hologram, a microverse or a voodoo doll 'which can be manipulated in real time to produce changes in the macrocosmic environment of \'real\' life'.

There seems to be a connection between the corporate super-breeding sigils that feed off unbranded imaginative space and personalized sigilia in the act of creation of virtual personas when the intent within the composition of the online profile lies in the production of value-oriented change and a quantitative influence on the offline world. This sophisticated corporate-based form of hypersigil seems to particularly fruitify in 'approval-oriented' social platforms, highly absorbing environments that create imaginative void and fill it at the same time with (biased) algorithmically filtered content.

The more memetic potential, the more hosts are found and the culture unit will propagate and become an idea replicator that will reproduce and ensure survival. «As with genetics, a meme\'s success may be due to its contribution to the effectiveness of its host.» The insertion of a surplus value within a social network's blackmirror hops on this replication. Ostracism, however, is the death or cristallisation of an informational transfer, as diffraction threatens blockage to a self-replicating unit's hosting.

A new cyborg breed is the testament of the overcoming of the inconvenience of having a body combined to the joy of memetic product placement: we see in the @ of lilmiquela a mind-boggling homunculus creation of a young brasilian-american virtual girl. In this case the hypersigil breaks the pelliculle between human and nonhuman corporification, but intent prevails: this is a marketing stunt. Or is it?

Corporifying a faceless algorithm with presence and response in the cybersphere has created a highly replicant superbreed whose single limitations are its own bodilessness, which, in the end, does not translate as a hindering but rather an accelerated pathway into its own survival. But this robot is incapable of 'creating' personal agency for it has no means to formulate its own intention as an autonomous unit, it is rather composed of a diligent conglomerate of servitors.

Perceptron: Imagination and Control

The structure of the social equally exposed to capitalism and mystification was summarized by Gilles Deleuze in the concept of 'societies of control'. The key principle of a control society is modulation, and the mechanisms of control represent a complex system of digital variables which are the variations of the same system distributed on the basis of a code: 'what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks the position and effects the global modulation'. The more controlling machinery is advanced, the more it turns from tracking to prediction, while the inner principles of its functioning are overshadowed by a visible complexity. We observe a temporal shift: contemporary control is defined by pre-processing, that is by prediction and prevention, while processing becomes fictional.

The description of power regimes in the society of control corresponds to the general account of cybernetics as a study. The cybernetic hypothesis represents the idea that a human behaviour is integrally programmable and reprogrammable; in other words, it considers each individual behaviour as something piloted by the need of the system. Algorithmic technologies seek to make everything programmable, but their capacity to reprogram, to produce information on its own is questionable, as an algorithm contains a finite number of operations. This is the reason to address the concept of a neural network.

An artificial neural network is not an algorithm, but rather a framework for many different machine learning algorithms to work together and process complex data inputs. So, NNs are learned to process tasks without pre-programming or any task-specific rules. Moreover, NNs do not possess any prior knowledge of the data being processed, they generate needed characteristics from the learning material. The structural principle of an artificial neural network resembles the neuronal structure of a human brain, and the objective of a neural network is to solve tasks in a way that a human brain would.

The history of neural networks ascends to a debate between two paradigms in the research of AI: the one based on symbolic deduction and the other rooted in statistical induction. The prototype of the first neural network, The Perceptron, was created in 1957 by Frank Rosenblatt, a computer scientist, as a model of a vision machine which could not only recognize patterns but also learn how to recognize patterns by calculating a single file instead of using multiple ones saved in the memory. This invention has marked the transmission to a connectionist paradigm in AI research which was a radical step forward as the machine could induce information rather than give the output based on statistical data. The connectionist paradigm remains dominant in neural computation up to date, but to what extent this mode of intelligence is 'artificial'?

The answer is implicitly inscribed in Rosenblatt's commentary to his own invention. He remarks that ANNs \'correspond to parts of more extended networks in biological systems and represent extreme simplifications of the central nervous system, in which some properties are exaggerated, others suppressed\'. That is, ANN only is able to imitate certain parts of the neuronal system of a brain, while the general simulation is distorted. Thus, the capacities of a NN are still algorithmically limited.

Another important aspect which shows the limits of NNs is the point that the capacity of a NN to generate new data lets it only amplify the existing forms of knowledge rather than to create radically new ones. The architecture of a NN is directed by the existing forms of human knowledge, and respectively, a NN is subject to human intervention and affect in its basic principles. Matteo Pasquinelli uses the term 'augmented intelligence' in order to replace the notion of AI because 'the super-human scales of knowledge are acquired only in collaboration with the human observer'. Therefore, AI is not able to automate strong abduction and requires a human input which provides the locus to power.

What is the possibility of political imagination in this situation? If politically control means prediction and prevention, the human input is what shapes the control as predictable and generates the expected forms of output. So, in terms of control as prediction, the automation (that is, the transition from augmented intelligence to AI), is supposed to envision non-prefabricated and uncontrolled scenarios of future: 'we haven't seen anything yet', while human input leaves less space to unpredictability but may invest more in an emancipatory agency. To paraphrase Mark Fisher: from a situation of total predictive accountability in which nothing seems possible, everything can suddenly be possible again.

We are reunited. [We look at ways to infect existing algorithmic models with positions that acknowledge the importance of co-existence with non-human entities.]

We have been infusing intent into the concept of alchorisma for three years. Gathering around this invented or rediscovered concept can be seen as the creation or discovery and activation of a microverse. Infusing it with intent and labour charges the operation. Iterations actualize it.

(...) \'The things we choose to place on the internet reflect and magnify the awareness of self to ourselves and those around us. The hypersigil is a sigil extended through the fourth dimension\'¹. This bundle of storylines in unity perform a feedback loop of intent back into cyberspace: from whence it dwelt

in time is dealt

As it once was so it shall become

as It became so it is cast:

Cyborg Anthropology wiki, written by Caseorganic ↩