ALEXANDER R. GALLOWAY
Alexander R. Galloway is a media theorist and computer programmer probing the political and philosophical consequences of our increasing enmeshment in vast networks of digital infrastructure. Professor of media, culture and communication at New York University, his extensive body of work includes books such as Protocol (2006) and The Interface Effect (2012), as well as Kriegspiel, a video-game adaption of a board game designed by late Situationist thinker Guy Debord and his then-wife Alice Becker-Ho. In Galloway’s latest book, Uncomputable: Play and Politics in the Long Digital Age, he presents an errant history of computing told through a series of vignettes spanning algorithmic weaving, the rise of cybernetics and experiments in artificial life, revealing the ruptures and unresolved contradictions that underpin our present moment of computational ubiquity. Galloway spoke to TANK about the uncertain boundaries between the computable and the uncomputable, re-enactment as a research methodology, and whether decentralisation always translates into liberation.
Interview by Guy Mackinnon-LittlePortrait by Ivan Brodey
Guy Mackinnon-Little Let’s start with the book’s title. It’s a word that holds together many definitions for you, but how do you conceive the “uncomputable” and what excites you about this domain?
Alexander R. Galloway As a title, the word “uncomputable” is meant to be suggestive, even a little mysterious. Of course there is a technical definition, which I furnish in the book but don’t dwell on. Scientists like Alan Turing had a strict technical definition of the kinds of problems that computers could solve and the kinds of problems they couldn’t. It’s an elegant and provocative way to think about the uncomputable, yet I’m not so concerned with mathematical definitions. The book explores the threshold between computation and material artefacts. What does computation look like in physical objects, for instance, or in living creatures? What things are computable in games, in modern warfare, in digital networks? And what things remain uncomputable? I’m interested in the threshold between the computable and the uncomputable.
GML At various points in the book, you make use of re-enactment as a research methodology, like buying a loom to better understand Ada Dietz’s algorithmic weaving, for example. I wondered how, or if, that approach connects to your understanding of the uncomputable as the realm of experience beyond the limits of discrete rationality?
ARG I value a “hands-on” relationship to technology. If I write about code I want to write code first; if I write about games I want to play them first (and perhaps even design and build a few). As you suggest, this book is a bit unusual in that it’s organised around a series of reconstructions or re-enactments of historical algorithms that have, for whatever reason, been forgotten in the archive. One learns much more through practical interaction with media than one could ever learn through a description or even a photograph. Three such re-enactments anchor the book: Ada Dietz’s algebraic weaving patterns from the late 1940s; an unusual artificial-life algorithm made by Nils Barricelli in the early 1950s; and finally a tabletop war game made by French Situationist Guy Debord in the 1970s.
GML One aim of the book is to expand the conceptual and durational frame of the history of computation. When does computation first appear? And how do we know it when we see it?
ARG We might rather ask when technology first appears. I take a rather expansive view on computation and digitality. If we think beyond immediate referents like Twitter or PlayStation, the digital is in fact extremely old. Representation using discrete symbols is as old as the alphabet and the counting numbers. Computation is a little trickier, since the word is more ambiguous, but if computation means using structures and logical mechanics to manipulate data, we can find examples of such devices going back hundreds, if not thousands of years. My historian friends chide me for using such broad strokes, but computers are by definition “universal” machines. We might snicker at the word “universal”, but I feel we must contend with that problem, nonetheless.
GML What looks like computation, but isn’t? What doesn’t look like computation, but is?
ARG Lots of tech companies look like computation, but under the hood they’re just the same old tricks. Take Uber, for example; they look like computation, or at least display a high-tech sheen, but in fact their “innovations” have much more to do with labour exploitation than software. On the other hand, consider something like woven textile. It may not look like computation, but woven textiles have been made for thousands of years by machines that resemble computers more than you might think. For instance, when Charles Babbage designed the difference engine, a forerunner to the computer, he borrowed some crucial bits of technology from Jacquard’s power looms. In fact, it was likely Ada Lovelace who suggested this idea to Babbage. And even in a prosaic sense the analogy makes sense: weaving involves discretised materials that pass through a “processing” unit in order to be combined into binary patterns.
GML You also trouble the absolute distinction between analogue and digital computing. What significance do those terms, and their distinction, hold today?
ARG It’s a distinction that should be troubled, by all means. At the same time, I want to hold on to it. Even if we enlightened humans want to think beyond binarisms and strict definitions, computers certainly don’t and possibly can’t. Digital machines are locked into binary logic, at least for the time being, even if quantum computing will certainly upset that balance when it arrives in earnest. So my attention to the digital and the analogue is not so much an absolute endorsement of the two categories as it is a realisation that we have to grapple with the actually existing machines all around us, many of which are stubbornly digital.
GML Even if we’re surrounded by these stubbornly digital machines and our existence is more digitised than ever, you nevertheless argue that we are in some ways living in the golden age of the analogue.
ARG Living through the golden age of analogue – this claim can be understood both in a narrow sense, as well as more generally. In a narrow sense, I refer to some rather esoteric trends in philosophy and cultural theory, where, in my assessment, a number of defiantly analogue thinkers have risen to prominence in recent years. French philosopher Gilles Deleuze is probably the best example of this trend. I would categorise Deleuze as the pre-eminent analogue philosopher of the modern era. Yet in a more general sense, this “golden age” has to do with a kind of maturation of technology and the insinuation of machines into the core of everyday life. Computers aren’t just number crunchers any more. They also intrude into the analogue realm, the realm of affect and sensation, of complex social interaction, and dare I say, even of intuition and lived experience. Some have termed this “post-digital” although I don’t much care for that term.
GML The rise of cybernetics in the mid-20th century coincides with the ascent of a more general form of knowledge that you describe as a “black-box epistemology” and which permeates both power and its opposition. Could you expand on what that phrase means to you?
ARG A black box is a technical device defined by two specific qualities: you can’t tell how it works on the inside, but you can see all the inputs and output on the outside. A computer is a good example of a black box. I can see the outside of the box – it has a screen, some buttons, and so on – but, good lord, I have no idea how my GPU multiplies floating-point numbers. This tense dynamic between inside and outside interests me. It used to be that people cared about depths and thought less of surfaces. Think of how we use words like “profound” and “superficial” as forms of praise and disdain, respectively. Or think of Freud, who wanted to read surface symptoms as a way to unravel the latent meaning of the unconscious. The black box inverts this arrangement. Today, surfaces are complex and coded with meaning, while the profound depths are radically inscrutable. You can open a black box, of course, but it doesn’t reveal all that much, since the boxes recede indefinitely like nested dolls.
GML You write towards the end of the book, “Today we live amid the ruins of centrelessness.” What do you make of the current optimism around decentralisation, and what does it potentially overlook?
ARG People disagree on this point, but for many years my position has been that decentralisation is not inherently good or liberating. In fact, I see decentralisation as just another management style, certainly different from centralisation, but no less effective and no less pernicious. In the past I’ve discussed these kinds of “new” management styles under the heading of “protocol”. There are a number of problems with decentralisation. When it comes to cryptocurrencies, decentralisation is just a dog whistle for fairly conservative notions about how society should be organised: less regulation of finance, get the government off our backs, no taxes (and hence no social safety net). At best one might label this “libertarian” or even “anarchist”, but it mostly just resembles the worst kinds of capitalist fantasies, where every aspect of life is converted into a coin. I mean, I hate the state as much as the next person, but the crypto vision of decentralised money is much, much darker.
GML And – if not decentralisation – what does give you optimism for how we might escape or at least better endure the ills of information capitalism?
ARG Why endure? Capitalism is already dead. My optimism is found in the unkillable spirit of a humanity that wants to move beyond capitalism for all time. ◉