Vote neg for dirty computing--- a subaltern, materialist utilization of embodied knowledge that suggests alternative kinesthetic ways to process information.

We recognize that, for some, this self-serving asceticism which makes ego, masculinity, and whiteness disappear in the very medium of its fabulations produces comforting thoughts. The scientist, who insists that his biology, chemistry, or physics contains truths that exceed “man” and exist before and after, addresses himself to man. With his grandiose statements, he humiliates man—at times not without provocation and often not without dire results. Nonetheless and despite their seeming indifference to an Other, the ontological pronouncements, the ontological claims, are always triangulated; they are speech acts—a something for someone, a signifier for another signifier. They are also fetishistic, ways of knowing and not knowing, ways of preserving the phallus man in the face of his castration. The child-man killing the traditional father-man to marry mother nature and consummate truth: this becomes science the universal man whose power is now expressed in sublime technologies that in the next generation threaten man with further castration. Such hand wringing about “technology itself” becomes a mansplaining complex as deadly as it is schematic and even absurd—though one nonetheless dangerous for its libidinal-economic logic, its pathologic. Among the stakes in the analysis of computational racial capital, therefore, is a critique of this very sense of disembodied mind, of the “us” that is supposedly without us. The imperial, Oedipal “us,” to be sure, the psychotic, the sociopath, the fascist. One clearly grasps the problem: god or cyborg—and, in this, Donna Haraway’s materialist answer still resonates: “I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess.” Cybernetics as the now unavoidable ontology of ontologies must become the ground for anarchocommunist becomings, sociocybernetic becomings. Information as physical process bound to alienated, deracinated labor, is itself a cyborg formation. Janelle Monáe, as if building on the Fanonian analysis of the impossibility of Black ontology, makes answer to both the prohibition of all but cyborg ontologies and the violence of abstraction. With her brilliant musical and video work, most recently, the song “Screwed” and the “emotion picture” Dirty Computer, embodied and desirous, dynamic, assertive, affecting, sexual and creative dirty computing becomes a kind of answer embracing queer, Black, and non-normative alternatives to being constituted and commanded to perform by the deracinated abstractions that colonize bodies. And the emotion picture changes the way we are screwed (together): “You fucked the world up, now we’ll fuck it all back down.” This détournement of the activity machine that is the body, dancing, musical, thinking suggests that we can and perhaps must occupy computation differently, using the resources of our bodies, of our musics, and of our histories. Since everything runs on us, since we are the substrate at the bottom of the stack, Monáe proposes and actualizes a creative utilization of the immense reserves of capacity in music, dance, movement, song, experience, and embodied knowledge. Such an embarkation is not a total answer but a strategy that suggests alternative kinesthetic ways to process information. One thinks also here of Erin Manning’s (2018) work on neurodiversity and Black life, the living taking place beyond the confines and perceptions of institutions: “The urgency of these undercommons cannot be ignored. We are moving through them, but are we proliferating enough? Are we inventing at the speed, in the duration, of the movements of thought that move us to ask what else it can mean to know?” (5). As societies move from cultural hegemony to computational hegemony machine-instituted forms of abstraction and computing become colonial enclosures, worksites, and camps—lived, embodied experience. Computers and their programs are thought to be technical deployments of mathematical concepts and mechanisms that up until now have most often been perceived as value-neutral, that is, as technical or scientific or objective. This misunderstanding provides those vested by the current technocracy with an alibi. An additional purpose of this book is to permanently disrupt the very notion that concepts and machines occupy or could ever occupy such a neutral zone, a kind of degree zero of technicity, untouched by histories of social difference and the practices of inequality. It is as foolish to think that machines are neutral as it is to think neutrality is neutral. “The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships” (Marx, 1978: 172–3). Thus, today we might say that the ruling thinking machines are nothing more than the informatic expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as technologies and therefore the machines of their dominance. As opposed to the various quasi-ontological instantiations of dominant informatics (e.g., “the self,” “greed,” “human, “white”), we glean that consciousness is at once material and distributed, relying upon a whole set of substrates, machines, images, and codes as well as upon the visible living beings—and, what’s more (much more), the beings disappeared among them.14 In view of such distributed systems, therefore, you are not the locus of your thought, even if the functionality of “your” thought simulates you as such; the locus of your thought is the world computer and its material implantation in the bios, what Benjamin Bratton (2016) poetically and indeed accurately conceives as “the stack.” You is a node. Nodes of the world, remake your networks! The only thing you have to lose is your algorithms of oppression (Noble 2018). Despite not being able to write in the key of Marx any longer, it is possible to politicize social relations that are naturalized, technologized, or buried in abstraction, in machinery, and in the unthought. Social difference, the profitable maintenance and elaboration of social differentiation fundamentally but not exclusively along “racial” and monetary lines is inherent in information itself. Learning from Hortense Spillers, this critique of information extends itself to the grammar of social differentiation and to the increasing granularity of that grammar. It is impossible to write in the key of Marx because of the historical materialist recognition that both the writer and the reader are distributed cybernetic agents who are themselves caught up and constituted in the traffic of information and must therefore decolonize themselves as they work to decolonize the world. No single perspective is adequate to such a task. We observe that the situation of difference and differentiation, inseparable as it is from histories of violence, is, in fact, the deeper meaning of what is called “the world market.” The world market is the real-time computational processing of the evaluation of everything—and from which today (next to) nothing escapes—by the relentless calculus of the value-form endemic to profit under the historical system of racial capitalism. By looking at specific machine histories and processes of grammartization we shall demonstrate that modern machines themselves are racial formations. They are formed by actual practices of racialization and are informed by them as these relentless and for the most part remorseless activities crunch money into more money. But how could they not be? Indeed how could we not be? Machine-mediated hegemony continues to posit (if less and less convincingly) autonomous individuality and value-neutral machines, while at the same time facilitating a disavowal of the fact that “we” think what we think because of our cybernetic relation to machines and to objectified bodies (ours or others) consigned to what in Get Out, Jordan Peele (2017) brilliantly configures as “the sunken place.” It is these sunken places that provision liquidity for those who put folks in them, and if they run dry, if we die, more have to be created. When we consider the social totality in this way, when the integrated information machines of social mediation are designed to confer life to some and social death, debility, or disposability on others, it should really be no surprise that racist encodings sedimented into institutions and machines organized for value extraction reencode racism. But for some it is, and for some, no matter how clear the argument—this singular fact in an instrumentally postfactual world, namely, that capitalist technology is a racial formation, will remain unintelligible.