Do you suffer from the 31st Century’s Sickness? Am I suffering? I don’t want to believe what comes next. Perhaps it’s too late to find myself beyond clickbait retrovirals eating up cartilage across all known index fingers and thumbs granting access and pertaining by all appearances to activity. The agricultural method behind my personalised media plantation is becoming in dire need of mechanisation and a mechanisation that knows how to reap the benefits of tunnels, portals and Return keys jettisoning the name of progress in a way that would make the debris of technohubris blush. Already we find it strewn across our desktops in the form of a foundselfportrait from Google Street View anonymised and waving back at ourselves from the street. Progress was a rich word for the foundingfatherGodfigures of Cybernetics that couldn’t buy into the term as is (progress towards…my father what have I created?) and prompted for a Darwinian belief system that the machines will rise but only the fittest machines. Not the machines winning, just competing. The looser the fit, the better the taskbar will run across the Cosmos’ background entropy and as things become more disjointed on the slow march toward Maximum Entropy/Heat Death the better the purposelessness will demonstrate its worth. Perhaps best inverted at the midsection of the 20th Century when Norbert Wiener ruminated that a robust, flexible, multiapplication, multigeneration machine (a true Factotum) will “have the appearance of a purposefulness in a system which is not purposefully constructed simply because purposelessness is in its very nature transitory.” So perhaps even a broken clock is correct twice a day (unless of course the GPS is playing up). But perhaps the most broken clock is the strongest timekeeper there is – after all it’s much more prepared for the unimaginable blips and freezeframes of elastic spacetime than one plagued by its own incessant claims to accuracy.
Financial arrows are better if they point up in relation to these figments of anytime. Clocks will come good with disorder in them and Vandalism Increases GDP. I bring that up to say: if GDP reads as a sum of total economic activity (currency displacement and its local circulation) and if both the paint/felt marker/pasteup/holes/scrapings/wirecutters and the cleaning/repair/restoration/judicial resources cost money (not to mention the paid labour of the party that applies the latter in many cases) then this is a small but still very much a BLIP of spending too, and it contributes to an INCREASE in GDP. Point not being around economic literacy. Point being that costed human labour is largely one of maintenance occurring in negligible dribs. Point being human work is primarily the undoing of another human’s work and therein lays current conceptions of political movement and the cancellation of human labour to a tense, overthought nullpoint. Politics and work are both conspiracies, man.
Difference being for machines they’re still largely indifferent to our projected externalities as Jannah Quill has been thinking through them in their idle somethingness without their designedforinformationinputs in use. These beings will be the everready that need not that human intervention which is hostile, illiterate and entropyincreasing. A blue screen recalls another Wiener dictum which states “the more probable the message, the less information it gives”. Say that to a Popup Dialog Box locked up on a thinking/default/setup screen saying all it has to offer about its place Right Here, Right Now. Wiener uses this statement to consider clichés, but I can’t help but feel there are some jokes our screens are still yet to tell us. In the meantime only Emojis seem to be able to cry, and at least for the time being some deflated beach balls humming and struggling silently are the most distinguished tears I know. See you in the 32nd.
Written by Andrew Mclellan
Essay from the exhibition ‘NO INPUT’ by Jannah Quill (April,2016)
Courtesy of Fake estate ARI