The end of the technological utopia
Technological utopianism - meaning for example the trust in future technological inventions to solve the climate crisis - is one of the social narratives that prevent people from acting on the knowledge they have concerning the effects of oil on the environment. This peer reviewed paper argues that technology has become a deeply cultural issue and, thus, any kind of solution has to be cultural, and not just infrastructure- or technology-based. It introduces a digital critique inspired by Amalie Smith’s AR art piece: 51 Years After The Last Oil.
A dystopian time travel
‘Around the world are DNA banks for extinct animal species, seed banks for plants that no longer grow on Earth. 3D scans of collapsed buildings. The frozen heads of the hopeful wealthy. But, as far as I know, nowhere in the world has anyone tried to preserve human art.’
The artist Amalie Smith’s (b. 1985) sound piece 51 Years after The Last Oil (51 e.DSO (2018)) takes place in a distant future where technology is omnipresent and predominant and will eventually take over humans, homo sapiens – as the species we know today. Using a binaural microphone, Smith has created a 3D sound universe for the purpose of presenting a future-time narrative to be listened to in a specific landscape in our real-time landscape thus blurring reality and fiction; disrupting our senses of time by enabling different epochs to interact in the work.
She has transformed the landscape around the ARKEN Museum of Modern Art into an experience of dystopian time travel. The prerecorded audio is accessible via a browser on the visitor’s smart phone. Using headphones, the sound piece unfolds while the listener walks around the coastal landscape surrounding the museum. The sound piece consists of recordings made in a distant future, the year 51 “after the last oil”, when it has become clear that humankind will not survive the impending catastrophes.
The scene is an ark – both site-specific and in the listener’s present – with ARKEN Museum of Modern Art forming the physical backdrop and framework for the work and listening experience. Smith’s work is, subsequently, metaphorically related to Noah’s Ark from the Old Testament. In the biblical narrative, God punishes humanity by annihilating all life while at the same time assigning humans the responsibility of gathering and preserving a pair from each animal species on the ark. In Smith’s work, there is five people gathering at the ark. A man and two women are the narrators and find themselves in a dystopian universe of deadly drones, mutated animals, and endless rain.
Smith’s sound piece is thus a tale of an apocalyptic future where present systems, structures and live forms have fallen apart. As we shall see it connects to issues reflected upon by cultural scholars discussing the consequences of technology’s ability to take control and the beliefs in the promises of technology to solve the crisis of a planet increasingly affected by our ‘culture of oil’. These are all important themes today, and this paper looks into Smith’s contribution to this expansive field as I argue that the complex sound piece adds a much needed perspective by elaborating not only on the (in)abilities of technology but also of the necessity of a humanist and philosophical notion of time.
When the music stops
In Smith’s sound piece, art plays an important part. It is a tale of destruction and survival in a hopeless future, where the only thing that makes sense to the three narrators is the conservation, categorization and dissemination of art – or, at least, that is until Louis enters a trance-like state, a form of delirium. Louis is the last person in the group with artistic and creative skills. She is the only one who can keep the music alive: ‘Before and after she blows the instrument, it’s just a piece of bent metal’. However, the music stops when the ubiquitous deadly technology tackles Louis: “I heard a strange sound here a little while ago. A bird perhaps? I brought the recorder out here to capture it. There it was! It sounds weirdly mechanical. Now it’s coming down here. It’s landed on my hand. It’s distant, with little blinking eyes. But it has a solar panel on its back. Hi, little friend! Who made you? Ow!”
For the rest of the story, she features exclusively through the other woman’s recordings of her delirious words. After the bird-like drone attacked her, Louis is no longer capable of breathing life into the instruments and the group decides to end their task collecting art. Delirium is associated with illness and death, but here, too, may be a new beginning, where nothing can be predicted, where no known concepts, meanings or experiences are of any help. Not even the names are clear: Louis, Lois, Luri, Loori? The pronunciation of the three narrators is reminiscent of a mixture of Swedish, Norwegian and Danish – Old structures and well-known systems crumble as technology of the future takes control. Those who are in power in the year 51 ‘after the last oil’, referred to as: ‘the rich people’, do not consider art to be of any importance to future societies. However, the narrators were given the task to collect and conserve art by ‘Chin’, who seems to be the commander. He is controlling the technological systems and dictates how they should be managed and used: ‘I am only continuing with the experiments because Chin wants results’. ‘Chin’ appears as an ever-present Orwellian ‘Big brother’ who is not ‘watching’ but measuring every move. Yet, again it is not clear if the name is spelled ‘Chen’ or ‘Tjin’ . According to the The Oxford Dictionary of Family Names the name pronounced ‘Chin’ is a common Chinese surname: 錢 - meaning money’, cash, ‘coins. It is unclear if ‘Chin’ is a machine or a human being, yet he commands that art only matters if it is quantifiable and that resources allocated to laboratories for purposes of human reproductions should be cut back.
Technology is not just value-neutral tools
In total, there are five people taking commands from ‘Chin’ of whom two are represented only by virtue of their function. They are being responsible for propagation: “Two have withdrawn to the basement. They said they would try to make a child. I no longer expect anything from natural reproduction, but I would like to give hair to IU, to dissolve it in a liquid and distribute it in petri dishes. He turns and rotates the dishes carefully under the electron lamps. Moves them away from the light if they bubble over. “
Human genesis is taken over by technology, and the word ‘carefully’ signifies a kind of mechanical care. This additional name sounds like ‘IU’, but could just as easily be ‘IJU’, ‘IVU’ or ‘E-YOU’ or even ‘Io’ as the moon of Jupiter or the daughter of Inachus in Greek mythology. It does not make immediate sense but is reminiscent of designations for new technologies such as IO, iOS, AI and the like. These are abbreviations of our time for technology and identification systems – AI meaning Artificial Intelligence, iOS is the operating system made by Apple and IO an abbreviation for the simple system a computer is based on: ‘Input/Output’ the idea that every input results in an output. Or even DSO (the Danish title) that is a sales performance metric.
In 51 e.DSO, Chin dictates what should be recorded and collected; thus he keeps the output – information - under control in a binary number system. As a result the Earth, the world, language; the words and names as we know them are either gone or dissolving – and ‘everything is a kind of image file stored on a hard drive.’ Technology is not just value-neutral tools – and the question is if the advanced technology promote sustainability or accelerate collapse?
Technological Utopianism
As mentioned, the narrative takes place 51 years after the last oil and marks the alarming consequences humans caused until the last oil was used up. In the future universe, we, as listeners, are on the other side of a time driven by the belief in technology’s advancement, its undreamt-of possibilities, and the need for innovation and efficiency. A time representing the terminus of the biospheric drama that humans initiated when entering the Anthropocene epoch. A proposed interval of geologic epoch which marks human influence on ecosystems in the recent period of Earth's history. Smith’s work is part of a debate where artists, authors and scholars reflect on the way a life without oil equals a postapocalyptic era. As the cultural theorist Imre Szeman in 2007 puts it in his article ‘System Failure: Oil, Futurity, and the Anticipation of Disaster’: “It is not that we can’t name or describe, anticipate or chart the end of oil and the consequences for nature and humanity. It is rather that because these discourses are unable to mobilize or produce, any response to a disaster we know is a direct result of the law of capitalism – limitless accumulation – it is easy to see that nature will end before capital.”
Szeman points to the propagandistic structure of the dominating narratives within the discourse of technological progress and the effect of oil on the environment. He emphasizes stories of technological utopianism – where the purpose is the endless pursuit of economic growth: “What it shows is the extent to which we place a lot of faith in narratives of progress and technology overcoming things, despite all evidence to the contrary.” He argues that technological utopianism - meaning for example the trust in future technological inventions to solve the climate crisis - is one of the social narratives that prevent people from acting on the knowledge they have concerning the effects of oil on the environment. According to Szeman, oil use has become a deeply cultural issue and, thus, any kind of solution has to be cultural, and not just infrastructure- or technology-based. Szeman argues technological utopianism is an irrational and bizarre social narrative. He talks about a certain Elon Musk way, an idea based upon the technological imperative: You can´t stop progress . Musk himself is preparing Homo Sapiens for a digitally evolution. According to him ‘humans are going to need to add a digital layer of intelligence to our brains to avoid becoming house cats to artificial intelligence’. He believes that due to the accelerating technological development especially regarding AI humans will be left behind, ‘and we'll be treated like pets by artificial intelligence.’ In other words, technology is the only solution because it is intended to improve on nature. And because progress is unavoidable the argument: we can’t turn back the clock is used to avoid criticism.
Smith’s sound piece seems to carry a cultural and political critique. A critique of a positivistic and progressive capitalistic scheme driven by the idea that technology will solve the problem. That technology is our only way out of the climate crisis, the only humans can continue living on the planet, yet it is a collapse of the species we know in favor of artificially driven evolution of new species. 51 e.DSO is not the tale of the survival of the human and animal species, like in the story of Noah’s Ark. Rather mutated animals warn of danger and death, and humans are kept alive artificially. And in this tale art becomes a kind of DNA for humanity’s philosophical existence.
We can’t turn back the clock: The illusion of the technological utopianism
There are two different notion of time that seems to run through the story of 51 e.DSO. Chin represents the, according to Louis; ’outdated concept of time’ characterized by being linear, chronological, and defective. The other notion of time, represented by the narrators, may be defined as a philosophical notion of time. As the character Louis puts it: “Times are full of uploads and downloads, as Professor Marvel has shown. Art has emerged in parallel in many places in the world. It did not develop like a family tree or a yeast cell. Art folded itself into local lifeworlds that are many faceted, like bubbles in quantum foam. Simultaneity is fiction. A year-date does not tell us anything. In space, there is no simultaneity. No words are playing in time. No fixed age. What gives us the right to assume that the laws that apply in space should not apply on Earth?”
This quotation constitutes a central point in the story - the turning point of the narrative – before the new artificial species overpowers homo sapiens Professor Marvel may be a reference to the character of that name from The Wizard of Oz. There he is ’Acclaimed by The Crown Heads of Europe’ and is able to ‘Read Your Past, Present, and Future in His Crystal Ball.’ Smith’s use of the name ‘Marvel’, however, may be a phony just as Smith’s depiction of the positivistic and progressive approach to collecting, categorizing and curating data is somewhat filled with irony. Smith depicts the illusion of the technological utopianism. The technology to measure and monitor, collect and analyze data has been refined to such an extent that today we are convinced that we can measure everything – even emotions. New technology provides us with efficiency: It becomes easier to consume knowledge, we can categorize and either save money, be productive or maybe even make money. That is the essence of technological utopianism. New technologies, such as Big Data, are all about calculations of correlations that can predict potential behavior. And data analysis tools are now believed to be so advanced that they can generate extremely specific data and, thus, even measure the moods we are in – even the difficult, and the depressive. Smith describes the end of the technological utopia – or the beginning of a new biotechnological dystopia where hybrid animals and new species dominate the planet: ‘Here, I am recording the sound of my DNA experiment number 462. The cells are dividing so quickly, you can see it with the naked eye. They have taken the form of a triangular lump. They breathe through something that resembles a larynx’.
In Techno-Fix, the foreword by Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich outlines how the claim that ‘technology will solve the problem’ — whatever that problem may be — is part and parcel of Western culture. ‘The record of ‘cures’ for these problems promoted by technological optimists gives little room for cheer. Over those five decades, the putative advantages of claimed ‘fixes’ have usually failed to appear or proved to be offset by unforeseen nasty side effects’. Technological solutions to social, political and psychological problems are according Ehrlich often ineffective because they generally address symptoms rather than causes.
Philosophical notion of time
When the character Louis reflects on how the art collection can be organized for the sake of future generations to understand, it shows the human categorization behavior – the need for systematizing, categorizing and classifying the world around as a desperate attempt to manage the unmanageable. A quantitively approach to time, measuring time by means of a number and systems offers only a practical solution – and one that the character Louis dismisses as ‘outdated’. French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941) has contributed to a plural understanding of time. Bergson was interested in that, which technology for monitoring and measuring cannot explain: memories, expectations, dreams, Déja vú, flashback and fantasy. He saw time as a quest, guided by freedom and randomness that, because of its abstract and arbitrary size, could only be comprehended imperfectly by science. The question ‘what is time’? has been challenged by thinkers since ancient times. Bergson’s contribution explains the human experience of time as a philosophical phenomenon. He has been criticized by Heidegger among others for concentrating on quality instead of quantity decoupling space and time. However, this qualitative notion of time
May possibly offer as a tool for searching the limits of the technological utopia. In the Anthropocene epoch the climatic, geological and biological systems of the Earth have essentially been bound up with the technological systems that have been developed by human beings. For scholars looking into this, Bergson has gained renewed interest as a representative avant la lettre in what has become known as ‘the posthuman turn’ in philosophy and history. Throughout history, and parallel to the technological development, we have clung to the belief that we can measure and weigh time. And one of the most deeply rooted ideas about the world is that time is linear and homogeneous – ‘as a container where events succeed one after the other according to the laws of causality’.
As we have seen in Smith’s 51 e.DSO, there is two different notion of time: One is time as linear and the other is the human experience of a philosophical notion of time. The power system – embodied by Chin – is structured around a capitalistic agenda of sorting everything into predefined calculable categories. On the other hand – music - personified by Louis - represents the philosophical notion of time: Art and more broadly the humanities as crucial to homo sapiens philosophical and existential survival. Music, and especially the absence of music and art, causes what sounds like the final signs of the extinction of the human – as we know human beings today: “We have been woken by sirens, going on and off for half an hour now. I don’t know how to stop it. On Monday, Louis was stabbed by a hostile drone. She’s still not herself. Last Wednesday, the bioprinter printed nails in breach. Last week, the air conditioner cooled the building down to freezing point. I’m afraid we’ve been hacked.”
The sound of music has been replaced by shrieking sirens and machine-like dog barking. Humankind has been hacked and, with that, the philosophical notion of time. Bergson describes duration through the example of music or listening to a melody –’as happens when we recall the notes of a tune, melting, so to speak, into one another´. What we do, when we listen to music, is that we form an organic whole - and that is how Bergson wants to think of both our own experience of time as duration and how we think evolution.
In 51 e.DSO the past fades away and there is only the present moment and the future. Listening to music has a sensuous immediacy to it that invokes the present moment and an experience with the help out other senses of the surroundings… However, the memories it triggers seem to crash:
The music unfolds forward in time, but it is not preserved. Like a dance, it exists only while it is being danced. As the tones chime out, small fibers in my heart stretched and ruptured. A bird flew toward the window and fell into a bush. A dove, as gray as dawn. Then the heaven’s burst. The day started over.
What are human beings without memories, without a collective history? Where the human mind is controlled like the input/output systems of computers.
Surveillance Capitalism and culturally induced ignorance
In 51 e.DSO the regime of Chin has erased history and the ability to create individual as well as collective memories and knowledge in favor of imposing stringent systems that can be objectively measured and therefore control the individuals in minds and hearts. A dystopian future that mirrors a contemporary reality, where all-pervading surveillance is inescapable and inevitable and is, for the most part, the result of a technological development driven by the endless accumulation of capitalism. For those who carry a smartphone Big Brother is controlling how knowledge is structured, stacking every move – also the listener walking in the landscape surrounding ARKEN Museum of Modern Art while listening to Smith’s 51 e.DSO.
As data has become recognized as the new oil, exclusive information has become a power factor. One of the consequences of technological utopianism is ‘agnotology’: culturally induced ignorance or doubt. Or as Szeman points out, the social narrative of technological utopianism becomes an instrument for enforcing ignorance. Data collection and data-mining of our most intimate and personal affairs is a condition for users of new connected technology shaped by what has also been called surveillance capitalism. These data-generated predictions act as algorithms that calculate the likelihood of a potential deviation; for example, when we are being controlled by impulses, when we are in a certain emotional state and susceptible to influence. E.g. when the social media platform Facebook offered advertisers the opportunity to target children and youngsters during moments of psychological vulnerability, such as when they felt ‘worthless,’ ‘insecure,’ ‘stressed,’ ‘defeated,’ ‘anxious,’ and like a ‘failure’. The reason Facebook provided this information for advertisers was because a young vulnerable person is seen to be easier to target and influence.
Today everyday lives of the global citizens are bound up with new technology. We can ask voice assistants like Siri or Alexa for direction and advices, we ask them to play our favorite music or to find the perfect outfit to wear. But we rarely if ever consider how data is structured. Who is behind the screens? And what value judgements are embedded in the technology – what are the ideology behind the computational voices we are taking orders or advices from? In 51 e.DSO Chin gives orders – but not only as explicit directions – they are concealed – like algorithms - in the ubiquitous technology. From a surveillance capitalistic aspect, ‘the goal is to automate us’
As Louis asks before she is attacked by a mechanical bird: “A year-date does not tell us anything. In space, there is no simultaneity. No words ticking in time. No fixed age. What gives us the right to assume that the laws that apply in space should not apply on Earth? What gives us the right to assume that the laws that apply in space should not apply on Earth?”.
To answer the question ‘what comes after oil’ we cannot just focus on the linear shifts but need to also give attention to the non-linear. Historical ‘progress’ – the idea that the inventions of tomorrow trumps the inventions of today is an illusion and so is the ethics of the technological imperative: that the solution is more advanced technology. The technological development shaped for the purpose of economic growth does not rescue but instead eradicate the planet.
As Szeman states in After Oil we will not make an adequate or democratic transition to a world after oil ‘without first changing how we think, imagine, see and hear’. In other words ‘we need to perceive the world differently in order to change it’. Amalie Smith’s 51 e.DSO provides a space for imaging possible futures, for revealing the blind spots of technological utopianism as an instrument for structuring and controlling collective knowledge and action. Technological critic is a recurring theme in Smith’s art. Nevertheless, it is not about questioning if technology is bad or good – it is about shedding light on the hidden power structures as well as providing a more holistic approach to the concept of technology. Smith’s sound piece portrays the double-edged sword of technological development.
The sound piece points to the fact that human impact in the geological record is not only ‘anthropogenic’ but also ‘capitalogenic’. Not all human beings, but the few in power and those empowered by a certain wealth are responsible for global warming and the crisis of climate and capital are interconnected. We are living in a transition of planetary life as well as a transition of energy and the answer is not a new Elon Musk techno-fix – it cannot be found within the logic of capitalism because it does not offer lasting solution. As the female narrator states when she stops the recording and 51 e.DSO ends: “It is not possible to guarantee the survival of all species. We must continue our work. I will stop the recording to save energy.“
Peer reviewed and published in ARKEN Bulletin vol. 8: From a Grain of Dust to the Cosmos (2020)