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The codependency of physical, technological, and sociological systems is intrinsic to the way we learn. A system is any set of processes that take place within a structure over time. To fully comprehend a system, we must also understand the complex relationship between its structure, processes, and the time and space it occupies. The projects of language, education, and government are examples of systems wherein our biology, and psychology are deeply entangled with our use of technology. Each of these projects spawns a vast net over our entire species. Each net is dependent on one another to function, and capable of both protection and entrapment. Following a rise in the accelerated transfer of wields exponentially more influence on our experience. Our novel access to information is infiltrating our cognition, and expanding the way we think. This expansion has led to a shift away from traditional linguistic modes of understanding, requiring us to reconsider our continued attachment to the ideological structures these modes are predicated on.

Through the creation of a language, we have effectively unstuck our from the physical reality they represent, allowing (or perhaps forcing) us to construct difference through and means. This construction of difference allows a perceptual separation of our cognitive processes from our physical ones, framing the body as a sort of material, an object whose is dependent on the will of our minds. If we define technology as the use of external materials to carry out our desires, humans are, and have always been in the Harawayan¹ sense, Acceptance of our multifaceted, cyborgian nature may aid in explaining how we came to be both responsible for, and subject to, extensively imbalanced institutional power structures.

To better understand the psychological effects and societal implications of humans’ with technology, this series of essays will outline the relationships between the material, , and moral structures that govern human consciousness by exploring the ways in which technological advancements and social institutions have allowed information to be leveraged as a tool of power. Through an allegorical examination of how our values, psyches, bodies, and avenues of communication have dictated the ways information is designated, represented, disseminated, and perceived, we can begin to reverse-engineer these systems to construct alternatives that better account for our ineluctable physicality, emotionality, and environment.

Figure 1.

A , in grammar, is an entity that performs action on an object (fig. 1). A subject and object can be of the same substance or material but are distinguished by their position of agency. In this way, language presupposes a hierarchical structure . Subjecthood is a privilege usually assigned to the conscious or human. We are so accustomed to this structure that we feel the need to anthropomorphize animals and objects in cartoons before they are allowed to speak. The inverse is also true, humans historically strip others of subjecthood in order to validate their own violent actions, what Mel Y. Chen calls ”de- animation (by way of objectification)."² In a hierarchical capitalist organization, agency is mediated by those with significant capital. The powerful determine who is granted subjecthood by controlling access to both material and informatic resources and commodities. Vast percentages of the global population are denied subjecthood through the exploitation of their labor and objectification of their bodies. This pattern of abuse disproportionately affects those deemed as other (i.e people of color, queer people, differently abled folks, and the chronically ill) as these groups have historically been socially and legislatively marginalized. The same groups are responsible for creating modes of organization that are not dependent on singular hierarchies or even human-centered structures of organization. It is no coincidence that many of these examples come from traditional and indigenous cultures outside of the western canon, cultures which have been systematically weakened or forcibly eradicated by colonial endeavors.

The most fundamental human impulse is subjectification — the colonization of our physical bodies by the notion of self. Much like the master/slave structure of command-line programming,³ the brain governs the body through electrochemical signals. To interpret these signals and carry out cohesive action, the body’s constituent parts come equipped with a sort of Rosetta Stone, programmed in the DNA embedded in each cell. For one entity to be colonized by another, they must be separate. But within one body, or even one ecosystem, separation is entirely relative to space and scale. The elasticity of our linguistic, immaterial modes of understanding create a perception of distance that allows the self to “inhabit” the material body. This fabricated lapse between us and other is the impetus for all subsequent alienation, exploitation, and disillusionment. The self as a site of possession encourages the designation of ‘’ upon all other things, people, and processes, thereby making all actions involving the self (both inside and outside the body) into interactions or relations. Physics provides a framework for grounding our understanding of these seemingly abstract relationships in the material world. In this case, we can think of distance as difference, sculpturally — as a spatial problem.

Figure 2.

To understand relationships through space and time, let’s first define the terms of a relationship. All relationships have at the very least an action, a material, and a direction (fig. 2). For example, there is an (admittedly outdated and heteronormativite) idea in psychology that the love of a father is conditional and the love of a mother is unconditional. If we try to interpret this relation in terms of action, material, and direction, we find that love is being used to describe both action and material when we know that cannot be true. When using abstract concepts to modify abstract actions, we are left with no material or actual understanding, only a direction. Unless we develop a language that is purely directional (maybe modeled on or ?), direction means nothing without material. A more specific description of this interaction provides an alternate insight; the expression of a father’s love is conditional upon external means, while a mother’s love does not use external means to be expressed. Not only does the addition of an action and a material clarify the dynamics of this concept, it poses a question: if the material is love and the action is expression in both cases, why would the mother and father have different requirements for completing the same action if their position is equal relative to the child? We know from experience that different groups of people have different standards for what is an appropriate way for particular actions to be carried out (in this case expressing love). The authority of these standards has little to do with the actions themselves (or what would be most efficient for that matter), but rather arises through cultural constructs that are systematically and institutionally compounded over time. This contradiction illuminates a logical fallacy embedded in the structure of language: how can we pretend to exist in a perfectly shared reality when our ways of defining that reality are relative?

Our relative conception of reality is rooted in our relationship to sensory information. When what is is dependent on what is understood, matter uncoded by a familiar taxonomy exists illegibly, as a vacuum. The infinite complexity of what is observable is limited to a fixed by our ability to observe. Our brains parse information into more manageable patterns, because the infinite is certifiably unknowable⁴. When a brain is presented with information it cannot comprehend, or a pattern it cannot complete, it makes a patch by stitching together available information based on patterns it has already observed in a process known as abstraction⁵. Consequently, these patches are subject to bias based on the experience of that brain. Though they are small, they become compounded through iteration, creating an experience of reality more than informatic.

Because the simplification and categorization of information is vital to understanding, it is also necessary for communication. These processes of reduction mean that human understanding is also tangled in a dense network of abstractions. The boundary between signifiers and what they represent is slippery at best, making it difficult to construct a shared reality without confusion. The perceived danger of this type of confusion repeatedly manifests in Adolph Loos’ “Ornament and Crime” as a strangely gendered vilification of , in the Quran a condemnation of representational pictures of prophets, and even in the ten commandments: “thou shalt not bear false witness.” Though the basis of these arguments is reasonable (lying is bad because it confuses people), the conflation of decoration and ornament with manipulation implies the existence of some imaginary form of communication that is universally and objective. Like any effort towards , what they are really saying is “all uses of ornament and style are manipulative, except for mine.” The irony of these critiques is that stylistic and semantic biases are the foundation of our understanding. Other theorists, Nietzsche, and later Derrida and McLuhan, propose that this collective confusion is actually embedded into all phonetic language and perhaps translation altogether. A concept which Barthes and Farouki extend to photographic and video representation. Each of these critiques of representation seem to encircle the same obstacle, a sequence of behavior that I am calling the patch.

Figure 3. Pictured above is a patchwork quilt created by the Gees Bends Quiltmaking Collective, which creates quilts from found or repurposed material.

Figure 4. The same image of the Gees Bend quilt edited in photoshop with a tool called patch, which hides imperfections of an image by patching it with visual data from other parts of the existing image. Both images are examples of composite creation, the first grounded with physical material limitations and the second synthesized from sensory (photographic) data.

These synthetic “patches” are better known as . Patricia MacCormack describes affect as the creation of something new or “something essentially a-human,”¹¹ expanding Deleuze and Guattari’s notion: "affects are the becoming inhuman of man."¹² Michel Foucault discusses this phenomenon by telling the story of Don Quixote, who exists as only affect, less a man than a catalog of influence.¹³ Though Don Quixote's choices or qualitative assessments are based in emotion, these emotions are based on the experiences of others, as his physical and cognitive reality are completely separate. Machines are programmed in a similar manner, processing data through instructions they have been fed. The difference between programmed and agential response is one of and . This distinction collapses in the consideration of more advanced computational models, because artificial intelligence not only operates based on the instructions it is fed but learns to operate from its experience. It becomes hard to say what exactly is artificial, the programming or the experience, especially considering human intelligence also relies on those processes. Ultimately the nature of intelligence itself is a ¹⁴ of both, more aptly described as synthetic than artificial or otherwise.

¹ Donna Jeanne Haraway, Cyborg Manifesto (Victoria, British Columbia: Camas Books, 2018).
² Mel Y. Chen, “Introduction: Animating Animacy 1,” in Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
³ Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge.” (Cambridge, January 1, 2005).
⁴ Wolpert D.H. (2018) Theories of Knowledge and Theories of Everything. In: Wuppuluri S., Doria F. (eds) The Map and the Territory. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72478-2_9
⁵ Mark P Mattson, “Superior Pattern Processing Is the Essence of the Evolved Human Brain,” Frontiers in neuroscience (Frontiers Media S.A., August 22, 2014), https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4141622/.
⁶ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche and Francis Golffing, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals (New York, NY: Anchor Books, 1990).
⁷ Derrida, Jacques, "Signature, Event, Context." First published in English in Glyph 1, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977, pp. 172-197.
⁸ Marshall McLuhan, accessed January 12, 2022, www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoCrx0scCkM.
⁹ Roland Barthes, Rhetoric of the Image, 1977.
¹⁰ Trevor Paglen, “Operational Images - Journal #59 ,” e-flux Journal, November 2014, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/59/61130/operational-images/.
¹¹ Patricia MacCormack, “Cosmogenic Acceleration: Futurity and Ethics ,” in The Internet Does Not Exist (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2015).
¹² Gilles Delueze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 169.
¹³ Michel Foucault, “Chapter 3: Representing I Don Quixote,” in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 46-49.
¹⁴ Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Hegel et al., The Encyclopaedia Logic, with the zusätze: Part I of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences with the zusätze (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), 154.

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