Rendering Utopias Lecture

foreign [Music] hello everyone my name is Andrew mountain and I'm one of the co-founders of feminist internet and I'm here today to share a lecture with you that was originally part of the rendering utopia's intensive course delivered at the CCI in February of 2023. this course was a four day course open to all students across ual and was designed to allow those involved to investigate our relationship with Technologies looking at the role they play in our lives with the aim of rendering a new more inclusive model for the future so throughout the week we engage in a series of critical conversations and activities definitely the subjects that explore the social and political implications of Technology as well as its revolutionary potential so if you'd like to learn more about what was created during the course you can check out the rendering top of the Showcase as well as the other content also featured on the CCI YouTube channel so I want to begin by exploring this question of what is Utopia quintessentially in a sort of kind of basic description it is a tool for Imagining the other envisioning another place one that is inclusive prosperous peaceful and so on the idea of Utopia in literature has this really important function of social critique so utopia's point out flaws in society by making comparisons to an imaginary ideal they help to create a desire for change but I want to go back from and kind of trace the history of this concept so the word Utopia was coined in 1516 by Sir Thomas Moore and derived in the ancient Greek coming from the words for not and place so it kind of literally translates as no place created the word as a title for his Latin text Utopia which is a work of fiction and socio-political satire primarily depicting a fictional island society and its religious social and political customs and you can see illustration of that here on the screen since then the term has become a kind of conceptual fixture in literature and media equally its diametric opposite the term Disturbia has existed for a long time although not quite as long as utopia dystopia again is derived from ancient Greek for the words and bad and hard and place so kind of literally translating into bad place hard place difficult place it was believed to have been coined in 1747 in Lewis Henry Young's poem Utopia or Apollo's golden days which saw him describe how a dystopian Society moved towards a utopian society it is important to be aware that these Concepts tend to denote the most far-reaching points of an opposing spectrum they tend to describe somewhere that doesn't exist they are descriptors for idealistic or cataclysmic visions of society culturally we tend to see a lot more depictions of dystopia in film and media a really Vivid example being the dystopian future Los Angeles that's depicted in the Blade Runner franchise so and this is adapted from Philip K Dick's novel through Android stream of Electric Sheep and here we see a society kind of ravaged by overpopulation over consumption by the machine of capitalism misogyny the image of the city itself becomes a kind of metaphor for the Colossal scale of capitalism reach it's overcrowded apartments at the top of towers escape the kind of fumes and pollution of the streets below the Tyrell Corporation who this kind of um antagonist antagonistic pseudo-state at the center of the story they occupy this uh pyramids shaped building which we can kind of see as another metaphor for capitalism and the labor of working classes upholding these upper classes allowing the rich to get richer the poorest day poor in this kind of pyramid-like scheme and while this is a really visceral depiction of a disturbing Society the story also holds on to this kind of Trope we see a lot in dystopian fiction which tends to place a hero at Center who is usually a man doesn't a repeated kind of images of misogyny and this essential figure will be the antagonist who Rises who Rises up against the antagonist and is that antagonist is usually a representative of the state and or capitalism on the other hand depictions of Utopia I would argue are less common or difficult to pin down in part because how do you isolate this idea of Utopia how do you envision a Utopia for everyone because I think there is a problem when we start to fully binarize these Concepts saying you know this is the dystopian this is utopian and looking at Blade Runner again while it depicts a dystopian Society You could argue that the upper classes are living a life of luxury they're protected in their High towers with access to Technologies and they're benefiting from the rewards of capitalism that the lower classes could only dream of so in this Society Utopia and dystopia are a matter of perspective and you could equally apply this logic to the world that we live in this tension between these two states of existence is often explored and contested firstly societies aren't homogeneous the desires of one group of people may differ from another I know my desires as a queer person very greatly from a heterosexual person so this idea of building the Utopia is almost impossible because it's contradictory in its Essence and you could kind of argue that it's futile because what is one to something else will be different to someone else and to come back again to depictions of Utopia dystopia one of the most constant aspects you see in such depictions is the presence of Technology whether it's a society that has prospered because of their access and autonomy over technology or the destruction of society because of their dependence on technology technology remains this kind of constant force and this is in part because I believe technology has become Inseparable from our lives but also because Technologies are marketed to us as the tools which will improve our lives technology is a narrative tool for capitalism it's a means to which to sell us a better vision of society a better version of ourselves it's a fantasy for reality um the creators of technologists say to us by this use this invest in this your life will greatly improve Society is going to change etc etc and I'm not sitting here and saying that it doesn't uh access to certain Technologies in day-to-day life has fundamentally changed Society um it's because of technology that I'm able to create this lecture and I'm able to deliver it to you today in your home I'm able to travel to see my family and friends across the country and connect with people across the world through the internet and they're also certain diseases and illnesses don't present as much of a problem in society these are all the outcomes of developments through technology um there's no denying that it has improved our quality of life but it's all about perception of reality what looks like progress in Western Society is for example creating environmental degradation in South America or producing inhumane working conditions in factories in China it's all a matter of perspective and as I was saying it's because of this perceived Improvement that technology is often touted somewhat of a savior both in reality and in fantasies like Blade Runner and the people that invent certain Technologies particularly the ones that have a huge impact on our daily lives they become idolized by Society so you only need to look at the cult built around people like esteem jobs and and apple to see this in action so a quick Google search reveals that a plethora of Articles idealizing the company's founder so and the same is true of other Tech Giants people like Jeff Bezos seal a musk what happens to these people is they become part of the cultural lexicon they become memed tweeted about and they become further idolized through a repetition of images and media and they do this on kind of the canvases of their own invention in these digital worlds that they've helped to build you only kind of have to um look at the dystopian hellscape that Twitter has become since Elon Musk took over it he's sort of um reproduced it in an image of his of his of his envisioning um but it's not just the creators who are idolized it's the products they create too think about the kind of cultural war that takes place between Apple and Android users the way that people queue outside of stores for new devices wait every year with baited breath about kind of incremental income incremental upgrades um just think about how important the iPhone is becoming to our daily lives I'm sure everyone here has made a comment about how did people function before Google Maps or or something along those lines and not every new technology though has managed to embed itself into our lives and into culture in the same way as as iPhones and and Google Maps have I think a really brilliant example of a technology feeling to lead us towards Utopia when in some ways it was touted to do so is the rise and fall of voice assistance so they gained a real popularity in around 2007-2018 um Alexa and kind of other voice assistants such as Google home and Siri they were tipped as being the future of personal technology so you had an assistant in your home who could potentially order your shopping adjust the heating the lighting the music you could play games with it Etc so you had so many tech companies touting these devices at the future of the user experience MSL spent a lot of time researching them and their consequences and during this time technology writer Ben Thompson observed that voice assistance held a special place in the market because of their Target location was the home the one place in the entire world where smartphones were not necessarily the most convenient device or touched the easiest input method more often than not your smartphone is charging and talking to a device doesn't carry the social baggage it might elsewhere but it was voice assistant's unique selling point that became their downfall you could not have a nuanced conversation with them it wasn't a functional assistant it was kind of far from it in a recent article for the guardian discussing the kind of downfall of voice assistance John Norton pulls a retired Alexa from his drawer to ask Alexa why are you such a loss maker to which it replies this might answer your question mustard gas also known as lost is manufactured by the United States Norton goes on to explain that Amazon was apparently selling the Alexa devices at a loss with the intention that consumers would go on to buy more products from Amazon and this is failed in part because of how difficult it has proved to do so um I'm sure we've all heard or experienced an Alexa Horror Story you know children ordering toys accidentally Alexa's suddenly playing music without being prompted and kind of and so on and all of this has led to reports that Amazon's Alexa business is on track to be operating at a 10 billion dollar loss by the end of the financial year and the same is true of its competitors with Google making major cuts to its assistant programs Beyond usability almost Essence presented a kind of mountain of ethical and social issues some of which we at Famous internet have tried to tackle so if you're interested in this kind of thing you can look up our designing a feminist Alexa project as well as the queering voice CI project where we developed a prototype voice interface purposed towards trans and non-binary people Beyond feminine set they were constantly being debated Within These utopian dystopian bounds with many particularly deriding the kind of potential for them to survey their users as completely dystopian I think this question is extremely important because you have to look at the devices around you and ask where are we being Land is Our techno Utopia one where a device is listening to every word I say where I'm kind of left with no autonomy because my home assistant knows I've kind of run out of milk and thus orders from an artificially intelligent grocery store but fundamentally these social and ethical issues are not the reason home assistants have failed as consumer products it's because of their inability to hold a nuanced conversation with the user Alexa simply wasn't smart enough but in this failure I think there is a discovery that in a future successful relationship with technology is one that's nuanced and an uninvasive um if we're going to one day engage with the technology in a truly conversational way then that conversation needs to operate like an actual conversation and with these devices it became clear quite quickly how much they were reading from a script but while voice assistance did not impact the world the way their developers intended there have been some technologies throughout history which have fundamentally changed society and in premise could kind of be interrogated under this Banner of utopian the internet fundamentally changed the world some would argue for the worst I would argue for the better but in premise the internet was supposed to provide us with a decentralized network to communication allowing us to share information across borders without the jurisdiction of the state Joshua Coles wrote that like most Technologies the mainstream adoption of the internet was surrounded by utopian rhetoric but the internet is more than just technology it offers a virtual reality that is designed to simulate place and this makes the internet a Utopia in itself rather than merely the subject of utopian thought here he sort of um reiterating this idea that Because the Internet exists as a place of meeting where you can occupy a digital manifestation of yourself or another with avatars Etc it is inherently utopian because of its kind of transformative potential in a lecture um technologist Carla O'Brien speaks about how as a trans woman simulation games such as second life allowed her to create a digital Avatar of herself that more accurate accurately represented who she felt she was and I think this highlights this beautifully transformative potential of the internet where we're able to kind of leave our bodies behind and become something new but equally because of this transformative potential that the internet holds we've seen it become this kind of contested site of control between governments and private corporations and it's become this place of of multitudes of plurality it's kind of everything at once and it's a tool of capitalism and the state who are using it to monitor our actions build data profiles sell us products tracker browsing history but also a meeting space for activism for organizing for queer and trans people to connect and in another kind of deeper darker area of the internet you can take part in various legal activities so now I think the internet perfectly occupies the space where it sits comfortably kind of nowhere it's a contested site it's not utopian it's not dystopian because there's always a way to carve out a new space on the internet with either good or bad intentions but I also think the idea that the internet would remain this utopian Dreamscape that it was kind of thought to be as frankly naive because capitalism will always Co-op spaces where there is money to be made the state will always try to exert power illicit activity will always find a way to exist in the shadows but I do think what I want to hold on to here is the essence that this fundamental principle that the internet presented of decentralization connectivity statelessness nothing like that has ever existed before and so much change has come about because of it but to think beyond the internet which is kind of most obvious example I would argue um there's actually no other technology that I think has come close to feeling quite as utopian or or dystopian as the camera um the camera was and continues to be a technology that asks us to kind of confront ourselves and our future and our reality it presented people with originally with the opportunity to freeze time to take a piece of reality and make it solid so Susan's on tag who I'm going to talk a little bit about here wrote in her notes on photography essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality and eventually in one's own and she's speaking about this idea that the camera is a tool for archiving reality and that through images and photography we can browse the past but not only our own other people's too um over time photography has evolved from a professional activity and an expensive hobby to something completely democratized and accessible and everyone has a camera now everyone has one in their pockets it's in the Fidelity of of the lens on an iPhone is so high quality that we can you know zooms and in as close as possible they've become a kind of um extension of the body of of the eye of the arm modern cameras and imaging devices they close physical spaces there as I say they bring us closer to artists at concerts they allow us to see details they've ever seen before they allow us to see through walls into the Stars inside cell walls you know through the camera our relationship to scale has completely changed we're no longer confined by the kind of Optics of our own eye what's also changed over time is photography's relationship to the truth historically photography was a way of achieving absolute truth this idea that the camera cannot lie but now with the Advent of digital imaging software a photograph can take on an entirely new meanings you know it can be altered or even rendered without a camera um and all of this growth in photography has been matched by the mechanisms of capitalism and the state photography the camera and images have become one of the most single most important tools of control to go back to Seasons untied she writes that a capitalist Society requires a culture based on images it needs to furnish fast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class race and sex and it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information the better to exploit natural resources increase productivity keep order make war and give jobs to bureaucrats the camera's twin capacities to subjectifies reality and objectify it ideally serve these needs as strengthen them cameras Define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society as a spectacle for the masses and as an object of surveillance for rulers the production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology social change is replaced by a change in images the freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself the narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires the unlimited production and consumption of images now just to unpack this a little further I think what's really important to highlight is that this was written in 1977 and what Susan Sun tag states around surveillance is even more true today what she's really getting at here is how the camera has become both a tool of capitalism and the state and what began as a tool of invention a means of capturing reality are now tools mounted on flagpoles and street corners kind of constantly watching constantly recording and cameras have evolved through software and AI to be able to recognize people so I live in London and it's one of the most surveyed cities in the world and these advances in visual recognition they present huge social and ethical questions and for some the paranoia around being watched has reached such Heights that some people have the cameras covered on their laptop and because they think they're being watched and there's this whole internet conspiracy in America which is to some degree spread globally or in this idea of is the FBI watching me um and apple even introduced a notification into iOS that that lets you know when the camera has recently been activated which is kind of ironic if you consider the power that Apple has the idea that they are truly protecting you but in some ways it's very true the state is watching imagine um that a notification existed for every time you were seen on camera and I really um challenge you to kind of to think about that if your phone notified you every time you were seen on camera CCTV is used to monitor public life but it's also used to stop and prevent crime it's used as a tool of documentation in journalism the camera has become one of the kind of primary proprietary tools of violence it's it's used to document violence issues to intervene in violence it's used to prove violence in a court of law it's this multi-faceted multi-use tool and I really do believe that it's kind of one of the most important if not the most important invention of modern times but again I don't want to just focus on the focus on the dystopian aspects like the internet I want to try and remind you of the kind of uh Magic of the camera and it's utopian premises it's the camera that allows us to produce images create films produce art make this presentation and or what I'm kind of asking us to think about here it is is what something could be you know can be without the mechanisms of capitalism and the state or perhaps even how it can exist in opposition to such forces but I do think it's important to understand the live reality of such Technologies so that we can kind of begin to move Beyond them so to dive into this a little deeper the harsh reality is that Technologies are as it stands in their kind of current mode of idea to manufacture to consumption they're destroying the planet and and people if things continue as they are we're heading towards uh dystopian future of complete kind of um to be frank environmental collapse so I just want to share a few examples here and as I said I think it's really important that we do confront these realities so I think what I've seen this focus in recent years on electric cars so in the UK for example they'll ban petrol engine cars by the year 2030 although this looks unlikely at the moment due to the inaction of the current government installing electric car charging stations across the country particularly outside of London um but equally while this shift away from fossil fuels is a necessary one one that will lead us towards a more sustainable future the current manufacturing processes for electric cars namely the large Quantum quantities of lithium that's required to produce their batteries is having a catastrophic effect on the environment so lithium is extracted by taking the mineral-rich brain from underneath salt flats in countries such as Bolivia and South America after which it is left to evaporate in a series of ponds for 12 to 18 months forming a mixture of potassium magnesium borax and lithium salts across these kind of fluorescent colored pools and you can see this process playing out here in images on the screen so Laura Grace Simkins notes in her research on a lithium mine in Bolivia that the common environmental side effect of lithium mining are water loss ground stabilization biodiversity lost increased salinity of rivers and contaminated soil and toxic waste Beyond this to produce a ton of Lithia up to 2 million liters of water are required the majority of this is lost to the sky so the indigenous imara Community who Laura Grace Simpkins research was um had a particular focus on who live and work around the cellar mine in Bolivia they are being directly impacted by this mine's water use so many of them are growing quinoa raising livestock selling salt and Flamingo eggs which are native to the land um all of which these are these are traditional forms of income generation which after hundreds of years and generation after generation are never being compromised and this threatens their entirely livelihood all in the name of a kind of sustainability and the Crux of the problem is that as developed Nations move towards these utopian ideals of sustainability Prosperity Etc underdeveloped Nations natural resources labor force and particularly indigenous populations are being exploited and frankly destroyed if we look at actual Electronics manufacture there's problems throughout the production process so only recently where a factory workers in China protesting again for better working conditions just to give you some examples of the problems these people have faced and continue to face in 2007 Steve's jobs Steve Jobs decided at the very last minute to change the iPhone screen to class and this meant that approximately 800 workers at a factory built dormitory in China were awaking in the middle of the night to walk around the clock to meet this new deadline set by Apple um and before I continue I'm trying to give a trigger warning I'm going to talk about some instances of violence as well as suicide so if that's something you are am Keen to listen to I would just skip forward a couple minutes um so there's a nine an employee of Foxconn who are a manufacturing company whose key partner is Apple was um accused of stealing a prototype with a new iPhone and following this accusation his apartment was searched and he was beaten by foxcon security team in July of that year and he committed suicide unfortunately this wasn't the end of suicides of Foxconn following complaints of low pay and brutal working conditions 2010 saw 15 markers through themselves from their building committing suicide there were a further four in 2011 and then one more reported per year in 2018 and while none had been reported since then the any suicide attempts to take place outside of working hours or the factory are not reported by the company but it's not just a way in which Technologies are being made it's also the way they're being used artificial intelligence is involving more fear at our rate quicker than we've seen in recent decades autonomous and semi-autonomous drones are becoming a cheap and easy tool for attacking conventional targets rather than sending in the Air Force or ground soldiers Beyond this the use of lethal weapons AI is being put to use in training models in threat sensing in data processing and so many other applications and its wealthy developed Nations who have access to such Technologies allowing them to their control in war AI presents a particularly complex set of ethical questions to navigate AI is everywhere now it's in your pocket it's tick tock it's Instagram it's the algorithms predicting the content you want to see it's chat gbt it's Dali it's it's really being debated in the public sphere in a way that it never really has before particularly in the last few months the kind of beginning of 2023 we know publicly we are considering it's imp its implications both socially and ethically in our current reality but also in our future you know we're asking this question will AI lead us toward Utopia and that's because AI as I've said you know it is it's now everywhere you know it's in these Technologies but it's also a Warfare it's in visual recognition it's unpredictably safe it's being used in employment and benefit systems in healthcare it really has kind of become everywhere but the real problems lie in the hidden realities all these Technologies um it's the impact that these hidden realities are having on underdeveloped Nations on the planet on our environment and the problem is that capitalism and technology companies and developers they're selling us this this dream of a new future with technology at the same time as exploiting natural resources and physically harming people this notion of Utopia put forth by biomedia by companies over technologically advanced Society unaffected by climate crisis or or climate crisis which are solved by technology this kind of complete sustainable model of a future with social and political peace is a completely unattainable concept if any Community has to be exploited to achieve it one community's Utopia should not create another's dystopia and that's really what I'm trying to highlight here with these examples I know that some of it is difficult to listen to but I think it's important to confront the reality of the situation we live in because ultimately we are complicit in its continued production but I want to be clear that we are not necessarily entirely responsible blame lies with the people who create and perpetuate these problems but we are seduced by capitalism and its Rewards I think an analogy of this seduction with capitalism is the kind of cultural Obsession that we have with reality television and wealth culture it's a sort of um Utopia through osmosis because of what in part it allows you to achieve is to live vicariously through others you're allowed into the intimate moments and lives with people in the kind of upper echelons of society you're allowed to build a vision of what your life might look like in this shiny Utopia of wealth all through the power of the camera so how do we move Beyond this well I want to leave you with the proposition that we abandon these problematic kind of Cooperative visions of dystopia and Utopia and think of these Concepts as more than just literary tools or plot devices or narratives that are being sold to us I want to suggest that we approach Utopia and dystopia of imagining somewhere else from a position of emotion a place of feeling from a place of inclusion Leave Behind these kind of them behind us these tools of capitalism and allow them to become freeing allow them to help us generate ideas to grow and build as well as also to resist and tear down that which does not serve us I want to ask is Utopia something that we can feel inside inside ourselves mutually and somewhere that we can go somewhere that we can stay somewhere that we can build by imagining something that exists in the future in a multitude of forms in a kind of multitude of definitions what I said at the beginning was that Utopia is essentially the idea of Imagining the other a place for another life to exist and I think as human beings we are sort of always looking for Utopia our mind is kind of like a render engine we're always building always imagining always imagining something new and sometimes those things seem like a fiction or a fantasy but it's possible for us to blur the line between fiction and reality through creativity through play through imagining something else so I really would like to thank you for listening and I really encourage you to check out the other videos that are part of this series particularly the Showcase where you can discover some of the work produced by the students during the course and see how they took these Concepts and apply light them and envisioned a new future for technology goodbye foreign

2023-05-18 12:18

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