The Clockwork Penguin

Daniel Binns is a media theorist and filmmaker tinkering with the weird edges of technology, storytelling, and screen culture. He is the author of Material Media-Making in the Digital Age and currently writes about posthuman poetics, glitchy machines, and speculative media worlds.

Author: dan

  • This algorithmic moment

    Generated by Leonardo AI; prompts by me.

    So much of what I’m being fed at the moment concerns the recent wave of AI. While we are seeing something of a plateauing of the hype cycle, I think (/hope), it’s still very present as an issue, a question, an opportunity, a hope, a fear, a concept. I’ll resist my usual impulse to historicise this last year or two of innovation within the contexts of AI research, which for decades was popularly mocked and institutionally underfunded; I’ll also resist the even stronger impulse to look at AI within the even broader milieu of technology, history, media, and society, which is, apparently, my actual day job.

    What I’ll do instead is drop the phrase algorithmic moment, which is what I’ve been trying to explore, define, and work through over the last 18 months. I’m heading back to work next week after an extended period of leave, so this seems as good a way of any as getting my head back into some of the research I left to one side for a while.

    The algorithmic moment is what we’re in at the moment. It’s the current AI bubble, hype cycle, growth spurt, whatever you define this wave as (some have dubbed it the AI spring or boom, to distinguish it from various AI winters over the last century1). In trying to bracket it off with concrete times, I’ve settled more or less on the emergence of the GPT-3 Beta in 2020. Of course OpenAI and other AI innovations predated this, but it was GPT-3 and its children ChatGPT and DALL-E 2 that really propelled discussions of AI and its possibilities and challenges into the mainstream.

    This also means that much of this moment is swept up with the COVID pandemic. While online life had bled into the real world in interesting ways pre-2020, it was really that year, during urban lockdowns, family zooms, working from home, and a deeply felt global trauma, that online and off felt one and the same. AI innovators capitalised on the moment, seizing capital (financial and cultural) in order to promise a remote revolution built on AI and its now-shunned sibling in discourse, web3 and NFTs.

    How AI plugs into the web as a system is a further consideration — prior to this current boom, AI datasets in research were often closed. But OpenAI and its contemporaries used the internet itself as their dataset. All of humanity’s knowledge, writing, ideas, artistic output, fears, hopes, dreams, scraped and plugged into an algorithm, to then be analysed, searched, filtered, reworked at will by anyone.

    The downfall of FTX and the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried more or less marked the death knell of NFTs as the Next Big Thing, if not web3 as a broader notion to be deployed across open-source, federated applications. And as NFTs slowly left the tech conversation, as that hype cycle started falling, the AI boom filled the void, such that one can hardly log on to a tech news site or half of the most popular Subs-stack without seeing a diatribe or puff piece (not unlike this very blog post) about the latest development.

    ChatGPT has become a hit productivity tool, as well as a boon to students, authors, copy writers and content creators the world over. AI is a headache for many teachers and academics, many of whom fail not only to grasp its actual power and operations, but also how to usefully and constructively implement the technology in class activities and assessment. DALL-E, Midjourney and the like remain controversial phenomena in art and creative communities, where some hail them as invaluable aids, and others debate their ethics and value.

    As with all previous revolutions, the dust will settle on that of AI. The research and innovation will continue as it always has, but out of the limelight and away from the headlines. It feels currently like we cannot keep up, that it’s all happening too fast, that if only we slowed down and thought about things, we could try and understand how we’ll be impacted, how everything might change. At the risk of historicising, exactly like I said I wouldn’t, people thought the same of the printing press, the aeroplane, and the computer. In 2002, Andrew Murphie and John Potts were trying to capture the flux and flow and tension and release of culture and technology. They were grappling in particular with the widespread adoption of the internet, and how to bring that into line with other systems and theories of community and communication. Jean-Francois Lyotard had said that new communications networks functioned largely on “language games” between machines and humans. Building on this idea, Murphie and Potts suggested that the information economy “needs us to make unexpected ‘moves’ in these games or it will wind down through a kind of natural attrition. [The information economy] feeds on new patterns and in the process sets up a kind of freedom of movement within it in order to gain access to the new.”2

    The information economy has given way, now, to the platform economy. It might be easy, then, to think that the internet is dead and decaying or, at least, kind of withering or atrophying. Similarly, it can be even easier to think that in this locked-down, walled-off, platform- and app-based existence where online and offline are more or less congruent, we are without control. I’ve been dropping breadcrumbs over these last few posts as to how we might resist in some small way, if not to the detriment of the system, then at least to the benefit of our own mental states; and I hope to keep doing this in future posts (and over on Mastodon).

    For me, the above thoughts have been gestating for a long time, but they remain immature, unpolished; unfiltered which, in its own way, is a form of resistance to the popular image of the opaque black box of algorithmic systems. I am still trying to figure out what to do with them; whether to develop them further into a series of academic articles or a monograph, to just keep posting random bits and bobs here on this site, or to seed them into a creative piece, be it a film, book, or something else entirely. Maybe a little of everything, but I’m in no rush.

    As a postscript, I’m also publishing this here to resist another system, that of academic publishing, which is monolithic, glacial, frustrating, and usually hidden behind a paywall for a privileged few. Anyway, I’m not expecting anyone to read this, much less use or cite it in their work, but better it be here if someone needs it than reserved for a privileged few.

    As a bookend for the AI-generated image that opened the post, I asked Bard for “a cool sign-off for my blog posts about technology, history, and culture” and it offered the following, so here you go…

    Signing off before the robots take over. (Just kidding… maybe.)

    Notes

    1. For an excellent history of AI up to around 1990, I can’t recommend enough AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence by Daniel Crevier. Crevier has made the book available for download via ResearchGate. ↩︎
    2. Murphie, Andrew, and John Potts. 2003. Culture and Technology. London: Macmillan Education UK, p. 208. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-08938-0. ↩︎

  • Push the button for a sweet treat

    I had grand plans of posting something about Godzilla today, but that will have to wait for these delightful rats. These tiny furry folx learned to associate pushing a little button with getting a sugar treat. As time progressed, though, they ended up just pushing the button for fun.

    The results are about as delightful as you’d expect.

    The project was led by French photographer Augustin Lignier, whose work explores the technography and performativity of photography. I came across the work due to the mighty Kottke, who quotes a New York Times piece where Lignier considers that the rats’ continued button-mashing as a neat analog for our addiction to social media.

    As platforms morph, shrink, converge, collapse all over the internet, one begins to wonder what the web of the imminent future might look like. While I did mention grassroots movements and community-run services like Neocities in my last post, the network effects that platforms like Substack, X, hell, even WordPress right here, can offer, are often more tempting than a cutesy throwback. That is to say nothing of the ease with which said platforms integrate with other services to maximise attention on their users.

    Substack and X are feeling the squeeze of the real world to greater and lesser degrees; the former as a safe space for Nazis, the latter as a haven for AI-generated deepfakes. But where one platform collapses, another will happily take its place, unless we all decide to opt out together.

    The internet of the future will be several interweaved different platforms, modes, nodes, devices, personalities, and communities. In a way it has always been so, but with its sheer ubiquity, the way it layers over and enfolds so many aspects of existence, thinking ‘the internet’ (or even ‘the Internet’, as autocorrect seemed to cling to forever) as a monolith is now a waste of time.

  • The handmade internet

    A fragment from random notes over the last few days, weeks…

    There seems to be a return to an idea, philosophy, or practice of “just make stuff!” or “just do it!”; “just write something, ffs!” (Maybe that last one is more for me…)

    I noticed this most recently with Rick Rubin’s odd but intriguing Squarespace tie-in promo for his book; he’s seeking to spawn or to gather online folx who are just doing cool, interesting, intriguing stuff. At least that’s how I saw it in my cursory glance over the copy:

    A collaboration with Rick Rubin to build tetragrammaton – an online world of curated materials – and a new website design, Transmission, to inspire your creativity.

    From “Co _ Rick Rubin“, Squarespace, accessed January 22, 2024 (archived).

    It’s all a bit corporate, a bit woowoo, a bit odd, but it plugs into a broader conversation about how the internet has evolved and changed, how platforms have scorched much of the landscape that was previously a bit rougher around the edges, a bit more grassroots, more personal, more creative, perhaps.

    There are other offshoots of this movement, like tiny-internets, and lovely lite micro-blogging services like bearblog and Plume, even Neocities. Larger companies like Automattic, for all their faults, are (at least at a surface, front facing level), trying to champion this kind of crazy, personalised, creative internet.

    Whether this is a return to the internet of old, or a new evolution entirely, remains to be seen.

  • Critics and creation

    Photo by Leah Newhouse on Pexels.

    I started reading this interview this morning, between Anne Helen Peterson and Betsy Gaines Quammen. I still haven’t finished reading, despite being utterly fascinated, but even before I got to the guts of the interview, I was struck by a thought:

    In the algorithmised world, the creator is the critic.

    This thought is not necessarily happening in isolation; I’ve been thinking about ‘algorithmic culture’ for a couple of years, trying to order these thoughts into academic writing, or even creative writing. But this thought feels like a step in the right direction, even if I’ve no idea what the final output should or will be. Let’s scribble out some notes…

    If there’s someone whose work we enjoy, they’ll probably have an online presence — a blog or social media feed we can follow — where they’ll share what they like.

    It’s an organic kind of culture — but it’s one where the art and vocation of the critic continues to be minimised.

    This — and associated phenomena — is the subject of a whole bunch of recent and upcoming books (including this one, which is at the top of my to-read pile for the next month): a kind of culture where the all-powerful algorithm becomes the sole arbiter of taste, but I also think there is pressure on creatives to be their own kind of critical and cultural hub.

    On the inverse, what we may traditionally have called critics — so modern-day social media commentators, influencers, your Booktubers or Booktokkers, your video essayists and their ilk — now also feel pressure to create. This pressure will come from their followers and acolytes, but also from random people who encounter them online, who will say something like “if you know so much why don’t you just do it yourself” etc etc…

    Some critics will leap at the opportunity and they absolutely should — we are hearing from diverse voices that wouldn’t otherwise have thought to try.

    But some should leave the creation to others — not because they’re not worth hearing from, they absolutely are — but because their value, their creativity, their strength, lies in how they shape language, images, metaphor, around the work of others. They don’t realise — as I didn’t for a long time — that being a critic is a vocation, a life’s work, a real skill. Look at any longer-form piece in the London Review of Books or The New Inquiry and it becomes very clear how valuable this work is.

    I’ve always loved the term critic, particularly cultural critic, or commentator, or essayist… they always seemed like wonderful archaic terms that don’t belong in the modern, fragmented, divided, confused world. But to call oneself a critic or essayist, to own that, and only that, is to defy the norms of culture; to refuse the ‘pillars’ of novel, film, press/journalism, and to stand to one side, giving much-needed perspective to how these archaic forms define, reflect, and challenge society.

  • America confounds

    Seemed appropriate to share this one again, some 15 years down the line.