eugene thacker, data made flesh, towards humane technologies — ideas
a bunch of latour's students basically being really mad about how they have no say in the next coolest mind virus implant
for thacker, biomedia moves through translation (biomatter turns into data) -> recoding (creation and activation of new epistemic modes of transforming data such as "searching") -> decoding (data rematerialized into bodies transforms bodies but doesnt necessarily "transcend" them as an essence, but only as a functional mutation with ideological motives). furthermore, the distinction between bioengineering (physical creation of new living matter through technology) is distinct from biotech (intergating technology as an epistemic interface into mediated, yet exclusively, biological matter - even though thacker doesnt mention it as a unique concept and only as a scientific occurance) and infotech (shannon's cyberneticism where embodiement itself is only an abstreaction of information, which itself is purely mathematical or non-semantic).
this gives thacker the ability to then indirectly argue that extropianism cannot possibly transcend the body through bioengineering, but only through HJir own epistemology, they are more primal forces but also more specific/distinct ones).
this view of their essence could technically be seen as "informational" (isolating every essence into a set of itself and functionalizing it by recoding it, after which it is emptied of its embodied contradiction), however, idealism itself isn't actually necessarily informational (functional networks fighting over territory, unable to produce metaphysical reality but unable to deny it either, fighting in a cosmic battle of "locked synapses" arguing over abstract space), and this is the first instinuation that needs to be denied from thacker's narrative. yet, clearly, "locked synapses arguing over abstract space" is a condition only of informatic metaphysics, not of metaphysics as such.
the second indirect insinuation is that since infotech itself is fundamentally corrupt due to its ties to corporatism and humanism, it cannot possibly create an "ontology of data" or even future materials for a speculative metaphysics that isnt predisposed to either original organic corporeality (biology) or epistemic negotiations with biotech. however, as recoding creates abstractions, it also creates tools for enginetech. enginetech itself vbfevelopments that result from war. although it may be true that war itself accumulates the necessary epistemologies that actually develop biotec"n as a more fundamental essence of the world, one with a developmental trajectory akin to a skilltree. it isnt the case that epistemology is simply void of it, but rather that the question of epistemology is the question of the limits that certain races of beings have with certain forms of development, yet epistemology itself clearly doesnt "invent" what is ontologically possible in the world.
a third insinuation visible in thacker's narrative is the idea that since infotech is has financial interests, its cybernetic impulse is that of fundamentalizing control over biocodes rather than an invention through translation of originary biocodes. graham's thesis moves in this direction, it argues that the corporate-biological nexus is related to biotech companies and their manipulation of genetic structures at the sub-cellular level that fundmantally operate control structures related to almost every social function.
although likely believable on its own, it seems as if the cathedral (medieval academic-media nexus) wages a war on the forge (science cult-new media-war weapons genuienly turned cultural abilities) as an attempt to gain access over what control means and where it can be applied. sunderland gives us an example in the final chapter of the work "the direct translation process from the previously inalienable “language of life” into technocratic scientific discourses and modes of representation is apparently separate from any contemplation over the ethical and moral aspects of the technologies." there could very well be a moral language in all scientific discourses within their own seperate domains of supposed morality, rather than as seen by sunderland in light of a domain of morality extracted away from science by governmentality.
sunderland uses an article by vargason to demonstrate the way in which scientists are practically and empirically making use of translation in real time. the article itself reads something like this "we have now mapped this transformation through a set of single-crystal structures of the sequence d(ggcgcc),, with various intermediates being trapped by methylating or brominating the cytosine bases. " but what if, say, vargason instead said he was not mapping, but algorithmically synchronizing it, or augmenting it without mapping it first? or say he was destroying it but not in a way that annihiliates it, simply in a way that produces a weird not fully functional abjective derivative that may have future unpredictable value for coporations?
or what if he argued he was displacing it with a chaotic and uncodable map? or what if he was exclusively sending his research to an anarchist collective that he knows will delete the data of, rather than a corporation? or say he was mapping thymine bases instead of cytosine ones in a way that is productive in bioengineering but not orthodox practice within the community. so what does that mean? that means that "mapping" is an infotech verb. "synchronizing" is an enginetech verb. "destroying-but-producing-an-abjective-derivative" is something else entirely.
the point here isnt to be scientifically accurate or to attempt to figure out cases of fringe morality, but to reconstitute what morality means for scientific exploration. you could simultanously say that corporations finance it due to war or eugenics, and at the same time say that it is still progressing a certain vision of technology not related either to information nor to bodies. what you could also say is that the cathedral itself has a problem with it because of the heuristic of control being only somewhat tied to biology in a way they don't epistemically enjoy, rather than control as a totality being a problem for them.
sunderland, feenberg and latour are undeniably correct to emphasize how absorption, recontextualization and frame shifts alter public perception and mediate technology on the level of international consciousness. however, directly tying governmentality to sovereignity and control to cybernetics itself is damning, due to the way in which all of these processes have a secondary value - to emanate and cultivate ontological primacy in new ways - in essential ways - to give path to essence.
essence in this context is the re-formation of previously unavailable inferences. it is true that a fetus once it leaves the body and enters the hospital is suddenly re-functionalized, and then through biomedia enters news channels as either a right, liberty, a commodity, a product, or something else. but these ontological formulations themselves don't just serve intentions or economic models, they are totalities of experience that are so far actually locked into particular rooms and practices rather than base experience. the "organic" of "biology" is a "synthetic" which is a "de-naturalized naturality", meaning everything that appears a certain way, including pre-conscious social or ethical law, is itself a form of government over the possibilities of what appears. which means the question isn't "how do we protect nature from technology" (the cathedral's question) or "how do we optimize nature through information" (the corporatist question) but something like: how do the technical practices themselves open or close the space of what can appear as essential? (which i believe is something bratton's camp is doing right now)
yuk hui in "cosmotechnics" states "feng was only twenty-seven years old when he published the article. but this young philosopher asserted confidently that the reason why china didn’t have science is that it didn’t need science. feng understands sci ence to be closely related to philosophy; or, more precisely, to be determined by certain philosophical modes of thinking. hence, for feng, the absence of science in china owes to the fact that chinese philosophy prevents the scientific spirit from emerging." this view of disciplines as essence hides behind it forces that are primitive in the sense that they are metaphysically prior to epistemological unlocking, but nuanced in the secondary sense, in that they don't just create perspectives and experiences within their own epistemology (a particular cultural view of what an invention is or what it does).
in fact, that this emerges precisely by its contradiction, that by positing the very particular epistemology that is indeed contained within them, they transcend it by "particularizing" it in the time of history (not in the history of time), the time of history can also be understood as general space. ideologies themselves have particular interests in the general space (such as the world-interior of capital wanting to equalize social spaces with techno-cultural possibility), but there is also a more fundamental/rudamentary interest in "progress-as-product" that escapes the cultural specifities of the gimmick (say in ngai's understanding), and in biomedia's portrayal (say in rick and morty), which views gimmicks not as cultural products or civilizational imprints, but as logics that arrive in the world through modernity rather than because of modernity.
by segregating practices to particular rooms, science isn't ruiling over ontology by segragating and controlling its epistemology, it limits its epistemology as a control mechanism and actually limits its own power due to its inability to universalize sovereignty as a control-paradigm. in deleuzian fashion, science freezes its own time-of-affairs and prevents itself access to its own envisioned reality.
think of universal speculative technology in the form of biotech as a particular commerical product, but also as a media-enviornment gimmick in the sense of how biomedia treats it. lets combine rick and morty's "death crystals" from the intro to s4ep1 with thync energy's "thync vibe", a speculative startup from more than a decade ago, a technology "module [that] attaches to a user's temple and is able to produce mood and energy altering feelings by sending low-level electrical pulses to your brain, dialed in by the user on a smartphone application".
in "edge of tomorty" the death crystals are a stupid metaphor for infinite mental possibility, for mexican cartels, for the dangers of prediction, for a million things. the way the device itself operates is that you strap it to your head and are able to predict future events based on how you will die in infinite possible worlds, displayed to your head in the form of a diamond fragment shattering perspectives and causing you to be verbally slow, but with the ability to follow pathways accurately.
these two enginetechs present as two opposite logics but within a unified infotech vision. the death crystal is an attempt to create an "original/natural" metaphor-surface for a speculative ability, but one with sentimental value and classic moral problems rather than actual functional use in a way that economizes it (the cartel only uses it as a currency, rick and morty only use it to fall into dilemmas and life paths, nobody uses it the way you would a smartphone - that would be too specific yet simultaneously too general). whereas, nobody uses the thync vibe at all because electrical signals don't actually do what coffee and alcohol can do, but this also abstracts coffee and alcohol into stimulants that have no cultural function other than to change the way your brain receives information.
in both cases, there is a de-functionalization of technology. but yet, the cultural perspectives that are born out of these ideas both very obviously share the basic idea of "a vision-implant that alters your reality by giving you speculative/libidinal powers", but also the more advanced idea of "reality isnt necessarily mediated by augments, augments present reality to you, but as gimmicks they are also a form of reality on their own seperate from what you do with them". these technologies ultimately organize space, and rick and morty solves the "technology actually has an effect on space" problem by bypassing it with space, time and trajectory transversal respectively. yet in reality, nothing stops us from actually abstracting/economizing space, time and trajectory. this is ultimately because if we want technology to not have a sentimental-political divide, we must understand how metaphysically it alters conditions (risk, access, episteme) rather than altering possibilities (which is what graham and thacker falsely believe technology is trying to do)
hui's geometry/time chain in cosmotechnics is a perfect example of one specific epistemic gate (greek geometrisation → spatialization of time → tertiary retention → mechanization → reconstitution of temporality) that unlocked a specific set of branches. hui argues that when european logic encountered china, it ruined cyclical time by changing it from points back into intervals, ruining propensities/situations by bringing them into modernity-as-linear-advancement. hui believes that cosmology + technics produces epistemic outcomes, but epistemic gates themselves only foreclose on conditions.
the conditions for a specific epistemic gate is what graham and thacker aren't able to wager in regards to technology. technology alters the conditions under which possibilities themselves become available, rather than, as thacker would say, altering the informatic conditions of how bodies are encoded. conditions themselves clearly are not culturally engrained perspectives but tanamount to certain "developmental-historic conditions". hui himself shows us this when he allows the enablement of a tertiary logic of the world, this logic in china develops differently because the epistemology is tied to certain technologies. the question of how technologies themselves develop is precisely the endless question, not because war machines are infinitely developable, but more-so because epistemic frameworks rely on sets of practices to enable actual conditioning to begin with (which is why we are enslaved by the conditions of the world tanamount to their technological states)
this also means it is unfair to say that certain cosmologies are more dominant or overpowering. the chinese sky didnt get killed because europe developed geometry, its because geometrization became temporarily sticky in a time where the chinese were getting bored of it. today, europe is getting bored of inferral and would actually love to have situations again, and this requires the re-emergence of cosmic cycles (one itll have to invent since it technically killed a big part of the cosmos using corporate space-lordism/grammatization of the cosmos). this framework is bound towards change, a change in conditions that enable power to perpetuate historically as "sets of rules that are followed in certain directions" not as "tertiary essence is a logic that follows from a more primitive but always equal tool-use, that itself is a modus of operation unalterable and that doesnt have future speculative replacement-forms". this itself locks technics into "formats" that develop unique cultural-epistemic novelties but not cultural-epistemic temporalities. if temporality develops key concepts, then temporality must be understood as the seat for future speculation.