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Wasup humans and automated readers,
Amazon is a heavily automated value-extraction engine that has brought convenience to shoppers like me while visiting devastation upon local businesses and the bodies of its human workers. In the tech section below, I link to two Very Important articles on this subject, but right now I want to riff.
On the one hand, we’re told that automation and networked tech is humans versus machines. The robots are coming for our jobs. On the other hand, we’re told that no, the machines will be our co-workers. Automation is really about augmenting and complementing humans. Both of these takes are correct, but there’s also a third hand I’ve been thinking on for years which is that automation isn’t about what the machines do to us or do with us. Automation is about what we do for the machines. The machines don’t get automated. The humans do.
Increasing numbers of decisions in our lives are responses to prompts drafted by automated systems. Is my job performance up to par? Where do I invest my money? Should I be monitored by law enforcement? How long should I be incarcerated? Am I pretty? What sort of article should I write? Who are my friends? Who should I vote for? Do I turn left or right at this intersection? What is truth? What is real?
These decisions and more are being removed from individuals and semi-accountable human systems and are shifting to proprietary and unchallengeable algorithms and automated systems built by people with narrower motives than the range of humans they are applied to, dare I say than they are governing. Mostly, the motivation of these systems is efficiency and profitability. In order to exist in this increasingly automated world, we start to automate ourselves, catering to these systems, behaving in ways they would approve of, contorting our actions to satisfy their reward systems.
What is at stake isn’t just our jobs or our democracies, but our own self-determination. What’s at stake is our ability to be in a way we decide we should be. What’s at stake is human freedom.
So I’ll just pause there for now. Thanks to my friend Tricia Wang who posted an epic Twitter thread on capitalism and personhood which moved me to whip this up. I’m still working out this concept of The Automated Human, and I welcome your own thoughts. I’ll also try live streaming on Instagram (gotta feed that algorithm yo!) around 11am pacific today.
Meanwhile, I’ve restructured the newsletter a bit. Enjoy the content!
RACE
Leave it to Ta-Nehisi Coates to bring much needed context to our social discourse in The Cancellation of Colin Kaepernick | The New York Times.
And since a picture is worth a thousand words, feast your eyes on this very powerful collection: Visualizing racism: Nine photographers take on the challenge of depicting bigotry | The Washington Post
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