Becoming Human Amid Diversions: Playful, Stupid, Cute and Funny Evolution. 9783031138768, 9783031138775, 3031138767

Table of contents :
Front Matter
1. Attractive Screens
2. Microbe Computing
3. Vegetative Games
4. Worldwide Fungi
5. Social Petworks
6. Human Tribes
7. Becoming Humidity
Back Matter

Citation preview

Andreas Ervik

Becoming Human Amid Diversions Playful, Stupid, Cute and Funny Evolution

Andreas Ervik Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

ISBN 978-3-031-13876-8 e-ISBN 978-3-031-13877-5 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13877-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Ryouchin | Getty Images

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Becoming Human Amid Diversions “Develops its own original and even idiosyncratic trajectory through the scholarship and analysis. It is playful in its choice of case studies and ambitious in its drawing on material and sources from beyond the usual media / communications literature. It is certainly timely, recent transformations of the digital and networked mediasphere need this book’s critical assessment and explanation of attention, engagement, everyday temporality, play, etc. Whilst some of the examples may feel dated in five years or so, the underlying argument and framing will I think prove longer-lived.” —Dr Seth Giddings, University of Southampton, UK “Stupid but cute, distracted and fungal, burned out and playful: this is an inventive and sometimes mischievous media theory that embraces ecology, artifice and delight to propose an art of living with the internet we know today.” —Matthew Fuller, Professor of Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London

Acknowledgments This book would not have been possible without the PhD funding provided by the Department of Media Studies at the University of Oslo. My sincere gratitude to Liv Hausken and Matthew Fuller, for precise and poignant guidelines and advice. My deepest appreciation to Tony D. Sampson, Levi Bryant, Sean Cubitt, and Eivind Røssaak for substantial responses at various stages of the project. Thank you, Patrick Jagoda for generously extending an invite from the University of Chicago, and for invaluable support and feedback. My gratitude for valuable comments in workshops and conversations to Gertrud Koch, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Michael Marder, Ina Blom, Aurora Hoel, Stéphane Aubinet, Desiree Foerster, Maja Bak Herrie, Khalid Azam, Truls Strand Offerdal, Ellef Prestsæter, Marlene Wenger, and several others. Special thanks to colleagues Jon Inge Faldalen, Steffen Krü ger, Timotheus Vermeulen, Kim Wilkins, and Gry Rustad. I am indebted to research groups, especially Media Aesthetics at the University of Oslo. A big thanks to my family and to friends. Finally, my deepest heartfelt gratitude to my wonderful partner Siv.

Contents 1 Attractive Screens 2 Microbe Computing 3 Vegetative Games 4 Worldwide Fungi 5 Social Petworks 6 Human Tribes 7 Becoming Humidity Bibliography Index

List of Figures Fig.​1.​1 Screenshot from the app Forest.​The app helps people stay away from their phone, with the incentive being animated trees growing in fields during set periods of not using the phone

 

Fig.​2.​1 Screenshots from Barricelli’s digital ecosystem of symbioorganisms, reprogrammed and described by Alexander Galloway:​“Each swatch of textured color within the image indicates a different bionumeric organism.​Borders between color fields mean that an organism has perished, been borne, mutated, or otherwise evolved into something new”

 

Fig.​2.​2 Constantin Mereschkowsky offered a model of the tree of life with crisscrossing lines of descent in 1905 (Wikimedia Commons)

 

Fig.​2.​3 Stills from a YouTube video showing Brice Due’s OTCA metapixel, running in John Conway’s Game of Life.​The documentation video starts up close and then gradually moves out to reveal structural recursive patterns.​Emerging from the interactions between cells and the rule set of Game of Life, the metapixel gives rise to a higher-level game abiding to the same rule set; however, these rules are themselves also emergent properties of the running system.​Video posted by Phillip Bradbury

 

Fig.​3.​1 A screenshot from Nintendo’s Super Mario Maker 2 (2019), showing a trail of Mario’s movements

 

Fig.​4.​1 Screenshot of clickbait from galacticbuzz.​com, showing some attractors for a bait-clicking population:​winning money, fantasy

combat, phallic pareidolia, and especially female faces, and female bodies in semi-undress

 

Fig.​4.​2 An xkcd webcomic by Randall Munro shows the irresistible urge to engage in and continue debates online, especially when it is emotionally aggravating, and the discussion will bring nothing but further disagreement

 

Fig.​5.​1 Picture from the Facebook profile of Lil Bub, a profile with 3 million Facebook likes, courtesy Mike Bridavsky

 

Fig.​5.​2 Still from a video posted September 25, 2020, by Twitter user @bloodtear_​(account has since been deleted)

 

Fig.​5.​3 Imagery produced using the artificial neural network Deep Dream, which “hallucinates” the visual presence of animals and nonanimate objects in otherwise inconspicuous visual patterns.​Image by Mordvintsev et.​al.​/G ​ oogle DeepDream

 

Fig.​5.​4 Doge presenting the emotional states of music in minor and major scales.​Original photo by:​Atsuko Satō

 

Fig.​5.​5 Still from a video posted to Lil Bub’s Facebook profile, showing Lil Bub being fed by its owner, Mike Bridavsky, nicknamed “Dude,” who also puts pain relief medication into the cat’s food

 

Fig.​6.​1 A political compass showing primitivist political positions, along an axis of right to left and authoritarian to libertarian.​The positions are generally rendered ridiculous, with crude illustrations

accompanying them.​Sourced from Know Your Meme, originally posted by user pangolinshell to r/​PoliticalCompass​Memes

 

Fig.​6.​2 An image macro attributing the election of Donald Trump to memes.​Sourced from Know Your Meme

 

Fig.​6.​3 Image macro made with the website Imgflip’s meme generator, offering a funny prospect for the end of Trump’s presidency

 

Fig. 7.1 Emoji displaying the gas, liquid, and crystal states of H2O

 

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Ervik, Becoming Human Amid Diversions https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13877-5_1

1. Attractive Screens Andreas Ervik1   (1) Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

 

  Andreas Ervik Email: [email protected]

Prologue Bzzt bzzt! The vibration motor in the rose gold-framed, Samsungbranded, black rectangle buzzes. Inattentively my hands move away from typing. My gaze shifts from the computer screen, and the Word document I am writing, to the smaller screen of the phone. A change of screenery. Maybe a friend has sent a funny picture? Nope, just junk mail. I should be working, not procrastinating. To regain focus, I open the app Forest (see Fig. 1.1), which lets me set a timer, ranging from a quarter to a couple of hours, in which a cartoon tree grows. If I check the phone during this period, the tree will wither, leaving a permanent dead tree in the digital fields of the app. This incentive is effective, as I have yet to kill a single tree. But the reason may not necessarily be less procrastination.

Fig. 1.1 Screenshot from the app Forest. The app helps people stay away from their phone, with the incentive being animated trees growing in fields during set periods of not using the phone

As I return to the laptop, my muscle memory knows the shortcut command to change applications. And hardly noticing, my fingers make the switch from Word document to Firefox web browser. I find myself

scrolling down my Facebook feed, pausing at a video, bemusedly watching a cute animal stumbling around, before scrolling to another, ridiculing the latest fumbling of political leaders. Web browsers can be equipped with extensions like Stayfocused, letting me restrict access and limit the amount of time spent on specific sites. Another attention seeker lies waiting in my backpack, however, ready to interrupt the Stayfocused workflow: Nintendo’s portable gaming device Switch. While supposed to be restricted to work commute, it is hard to keep fingers keyboard-tied when they could embark Super Mario on his latest odyssey. Although specific to me, this account of diversions is undoubtedly familiar to anyone equipped with one or more screens to stare at during their workday, as well as during leisure hours, letting people send important e-mails from the subway, or even watch videos while on the toilet. The junk mail, animal clips, political jokes, and videogames are diversions in a computerized and networked environment where the use of time and amount of procrastination is ours to decide and limit. The computerized, screen-centered, and networked living seems to ruin our attention span, leaving us at the whims of notifications, as we constantly check our screens. No wonder then that one today might wish to reduce these distractions, both individually and for digital living in general. My approach in this book is different. Rather than taking diversions as pervasive aspects of digital living to avoid, I seek to form knowledge of how and why they function the way they do. I seek to understand what are simultaneously some of the most mundane and the most popular elements of digital living. The central question for this book is therefore: Why are diversions so important for digital living today? I will attempt to answer this through considering, more specifically: What makes videogames, mindless web browsing, cute animal images, and political mockery divert attention? The book is committed neither to assist nor negate diversion development. Potential side effects, however, include how it could offer a smart manual on how to profit from diversions. But it might be equally instructive for curbing individual dispositions toward diversions, or aid opposition against companies profiting from them. The proceeding section considers how digital distractions are usually framed and approached. I review certain strands of distraction research, and problematize some preconceived notions. Commonly, distractions are rendered aspects of digital living to be avoided and reduced, as they distract from what we ought to direct our attention to. I propose instead

to conceptualize these media forms as diversions, which will allow a less antagonistic framework. The section closes by considering how diversions, as prominent aspects of digital media, may also influence the possibilities for developing theoretical reflections today. Rather than lament this as a problem, I develop an approach of not only seeking to understand diversions, but to also learn from and think with them. When masses of people get to decide what they want to spend time on, the result is diversions, in the form of videogames, Internet browsing, social network scrolling and swiping, and the sharing of images and engaging in discussions. Having shifted the perspective from distractions to avoid to diversions to reflect with, I propose that diversions provide insights into what it means to be human. Drawing perspectives from systems theory, realist philosophy, and biology, diversions will be rendered here as important not only for being human today, but for the evolution of our species. The importance of diversions today indicates their influence on the process of becoming human. The introduction concludes by presenting an outline of the objects of analysis and the central queries of each following chapter. The objects range from the beginning of digital computation and networking to the present: computer programs by Nils Aall Barricelli from the 1950s and Game of Life by John Conway from 1970; the classic videogame Super Mario Bros. from 1985; networks, from the ARPANET in the 1970s to the World Wide Web in the 1990s, with a focus on clickbait in Internet browsing in the present; social networking and the Facebook accounts of celebrity dog Boo and cat Lil Bub, as well as YouTube videos of pets; the knowledge database of funny imagery Know Your Meme; and the activities on online forums 4chan and Twitter.

Amid Diversions Philosopher and former Google advertising strategist James Williams presents what seems to be a dominant perspective on digital distractions.1 Williams organizes his reflections with an anecdote about the ancient philosopher Diogenes. As Diogenes was relaxing one day, Alexander the Great came up to him, offering to fulfill any one wish he might have. Diogenes replied: “stand out of my light.” Williams takes this as a critical lesson, and a retort against those who may be considered as standing in our light today, clouding our ability to concentrate: the platforms and companies of digital distractions. Williams is far from alone in his concerns. As computers and networks connect an unprecedented number of people, these people seem to have become overwhelmed with the immensity of produced and shared audiovisual material. People find themselves distracted from whatever they were supposed to be doing to whatever triggers their attention: shifting from focused work to trivial play; from thoughtful contemplation to mindlessly browsing the Internet, from mature behavior to infantile cuteness; from reasonable discussion to ridiculous mockery. It would seem that people need to avoid the trivial but exciting, in order to stay focused on what by comparison might be significant though tedious. To combat the perceived lack of control, people have started digital detoxing. To get work done in such an environment, it might indeed be best to periodically opt out—turning off notifications, disconnecting, and even shutting down devices. As Williams reminds, we are not simply addicted to our screens; the software and networks they connect to do not belong to us. While the buzzing phone might seem a personal nuisance, tech companies have incentives for guiding behavior, as their revenues depend on applications keeping people in addictive activity loops. Williams is far from the only former employee of a big tech company or philosopher, who has spoken out about technology hijacking our minds, and, as a consequence, potentially threatening individual human freedom and by extension our societies.2 Digital technology could perhaps be considered exploitative capitalism, ushering in a new dark age.3 Should we call our current period an age of distractions? This could be taken to indicate that, although personal adjustments could be

effective in terms of combating procrastination, calls for society-wide changes might be required. Withholding evaluation on the necessity for personal or political changes, I think it is necessary to form an understanding of what distractions are. Sociologist William Bogard offers a productive perspective, pointing to how distractions tie together two seemingly distinct logics. The first of these is how distractions offer escape. Distraction can be forms of relief, allowing you to slip away from whatever you should be doing. You might be reading this book, but after a while you need some escape from its monotony, so you look at your phone. Secondly, Bogard renders distractions as a form of capture. Screens are captivating. Before you know it you’ve watched hours upon hours of TikTok videos or scrolled endlessly through Twitter. When did distractions, with their potential for captivating escape, become a problem? Starting from popular discourse of distractions, one might get the impression that smartphones, or perhaps networked computing, ushered in the age of distractions. The Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma (2020), traces the problems to the business model of social networks, encapsulated in the catchphrase “if you are not paying for the product, you are the product.” This notion is traceable to the artwork, “Television Delivers People,” by Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman from 1973. As indicated by its title, it referred to an earlier media technology delivering viewers to advertisers. The Netflix documentary fails to mention this point, and does not draw attention to itself as a development of television, and perhaps part of the problem addressed. More broadly, this brings the question of whether a supposed age of distractions began with television, and were carried over into networked computing. Also published in the 1970s were the writings of Herbert A. Simon on attention economies, in which “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”4 But media are problematized as distractions even further back in time. In his aesthetic theory from the 1930s, Walter Benjamin describes how the editing in cinema distracts, as opposed to the contemplative gaze upon a painting.5 The age of distraction could be traced to industrialized production, and in the 1940s, critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer coined the term culture industry, criticizing the

standardized industrialized culture of film, radio, and popular music.6 This factory-like cultural production manipulates masses into passivity by creating false psychological needs. Art theorist Jonathan Crary continues the identification of distractions as emerging in early modernity, and connects the struggles over attention with the need for productive and efficient workers, writing that “[s]ince the late 1800s. the problem of attention has remained more or less within the center of institutional empirical research and at the heart of the functioning of a capitalist economy.”7 Might the multitude of modern media offering distractions indicate that rather than an inconsequential side effect of media development, there could perhaps be a fundamental relation between media and distractions? Moving from images to writing, there are those that would present even this as a distraction. Philosopher Jean Paul Sartre provides a description of the ambivalent function of the newspaper in public transport in a manner reminiscent of the use of a smartphone or a portable gaming device today: “to isolate oneself by retaining the paper is to make use of the national collectivity and, ultimately, the totality of living human beings … in order to separate oneself from the hundred people who are waiting for or using the same vehicle.”8 Bogard suggests that “[t]here is no reason to think that print is any less distracting than electronic media, or that modern forms of spectacle distract the masses more than ancient ones.”9 Media theorist Yves Citton has traced concerns of attention to complaints over book overabundance already in the eighteenth century, and the art of rhetoric even suggests an ancient need for speakers to seize the limited resource of attention.10 In the ancient dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus, writing is rendered a distraction from face-to-face interaction, which problematically makes possible learning without a teacher that authorizes what is true and who should learn. As Phaedrus states: “What a wonderful kind of diversion you’re describing, Socrates—that of a person who can amuse himself with words …—compared with the trivial pastimes of others.”11 Despite the threat historically posed by books to attention, it would seem today that distractions come from screens. And indicated by technological fixes such as removing the color from the phone screen, attractive entrapments are dominantly visual. While writing also functions as distractions, and offers captivating escape, it has according

to media scholar Marshall McLuhan been framed as a rational technology: “we have confused reason with literacy, and rationalism with a single technology. Thus, in the electric age man seems to the conventional West to become irrational.”12 This framework seems central for distractions framed as threats to sustained attentive focus, of either work or leisure, of reading, or today even of watching a whole movie without checking the phone. Rather than our current age as an age of distractions, this brief historical swipe indicates a more fundamental relation between humans and media distractions. I consider therefore that we live amid media distractions. The preposition here indicates that people are surrounded by as well as exist in the middle of and against a backdrop of media distractions. This perspective is related to Benjamin’s thoughts on architecture and film, in which he develops a notion of reception in a state of distraction, of being attentive to and letting something recede into background through habit.13 Media is part of the architectural backdrop of existing today. Smartphones are habitual to the point that one might wonder where one put one’s phone, all the while reading an article on it. But smartphones will also make themselves known, demanding immediate attention through sounds indicating some kind of update. If distractions are fundamental to the way media functions, should they even be considered distractions? As a concept, distraction is linked to attention, even a specific understanding of attention. This is the sustained and voluntarily controlled form of attention, rather than any form of dispersed and responsive attention. This frames distractions as by default negative, unwanted, and obtrusive. The terms distraction and attention seem to have a built-in preoccupation with separating the proper from the improper focus. This lends itself well to the critical perspectives, be they personal or political, which consider distractions as lapses from what we ought to concern ourselves with: control over distractions, working over playing, knowledge over stupidity, maturity over cuteness, and responsibility over humor. Distractions are regularly framed as corporate hijackings of common urges, and thereby turn into something simultaneously irrelevant and in urgent need of removal. Yet as anyone with a smartphone will readily attest, distractions might also be desirable. Distractions offer respite from unwanted situations, such as a dreary task we would rather not engage in. Procrastination can be

joyous, filled with discovery and novel excitement for the wonderful peculiar things and beings of the world. Instead of identifying the problems of distractions, and the necessity of telling tech companies to stand out of one’s light I am interested here in what draws us toward them. A new approach therefore becomes necessary. An initial approach is to designate these media forms not as distractions, but rather as diversions. This term retains the notion of something being shifted in its course. Yet this something is no longer only human attention, as the term diversion denotes any form of system shifted in its course. This also indicates an ambivalent frame of evaluating, from the evidently negative perspectives on distractions to the more open-ended possibilities resulting from something diverting to something else. The notion of diversion influences also how attention is framed. When paired with distractions, attention is something over which individuals have, or should have, control. Instead, I open here to an understanding that as humans, we exist amid diversions, where control might reside not in us as individuals but be distributed into a myriad of different objects and relations. As identified in the discourse on distractions, an important part of existing amid diversions is how they influence possibilities of reflection. Considering media forms as distractions makes their influence seem wholly negative. For the reader and writer alike, distractions take attention away from books to the exciting audiovisual splendor of screens. As diversions, however, their influence becomes more indeterminate, with the capacity not simply to negate but to shift the course of something. A historical example of such consequences from technological development is pointed out by media theorist Friedrich Kittler. He observed how the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche switching to a typewriter changed his writing “from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”14 Likewise, digital diversions may influence writing today, by giving rise to the nagging question: How could I ensure that readers do not simply divert into other media? One approach to such pressure is to criticize readers lacking the determination, intelligence, maturity, or responsibility needed for comprehending complex arguments. Since my interest here instead lies in considering how diversions attract, a less dismissive attitude would be a more constructive point of departure.

One such point of departure is found in the work of poet and media scholar Kenneth Goldsmith, who has both taught a course and written a book titled Wasting Time on the Internet. Goldsmith frames time spent surfing as wasted, yet enthusiastically champions the ways in which network makes people engaged, creative, and socially connected.15 This is a welcome counter to the social stigma and guilt which is usually attached to existing amid diversions. What if the problem is not the diversions themselves, but rather the organization of societies in which school kids, students, and adult workers are glued to screens, but at the same time have to avoid the most enjoyable things that these screens can be used for? In Goldsmith’s class a range of ideas for wasting time on the Internet together were brainstormed and tested, ranging from public sessions of web browsing to pranks and games such as uncovering every detail possible online on someone and sharing the information with them, or fifteen-minute competitions of filling the most expensive shopping cart on Amazon.16 Although Diogenes was introduced at the beginning of this section in opposition to developers of distractions, he also offers perspectives for thinking with diversions. Philosopher Peter Sloterdijk has resurrected the cynicism (meaning dog-like) of Diogenes, rendering him as a philosopher who talks “in a dialogue of flesh and blood,” and thus creating a sort of embodied philosophy which “does not speak against idealism, it lives against it.”17 Diogenes entered philosophy with other parts of the body than simply the head, with his mind and mouth, being a philosopher not only of thought or dialogue. For instance, when asked to listen to someone lecturing about movement being illusory, Diogenes stood up and walked away. His refusal to leave material reality out of discussions turns Diogenes into an obstacle for philosophical thought. Plato referred to him as a Socrates gone mad. This criticism turns into a virtue, however, as it to a certain extent levels him with someone regularly credited with founding Western philosophy. Diogenes initiates a counter-philosophy, where arguments may take the form of actions. How would philosophical inquiry have developed if, instead of Socrates, it followed from Diogenes? Diogenes left no written sources, which might be an indication of how his form of arguing refrains from passing the threshold from living into writing. Perhaps his way of doing philosophy is less functional when inscribed. This philosophy might

divert proper academic discourse; it might be anathema to books, with the written word only able to gesture toward it. Such gesturing is found in the work of philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who contends that talking is dirty, because it relies on charm more than rational argument.18 Writing with diversions is a dirty way of writing, infusing arguments with charm. My goal is to consider inattentiveness productively, to learn from, as much as understand, diversions. This could furthermore be considered a prospect of experimental humanities. Gaming scholar Patrick Jagoda identifies how this subfield goes beyond analysis and, with improvisation and problem-making, formulates unexpected responses to contemporary conditions.19 With Deleuze, such experimental methods are encapsulated as a way of writing for readers, in a double sense—toward their attention and in their absence. Deleuze is particularly intrigued with the potential of writing in place of someone illiterate or insane, whereas the alignment here will be with less exceptional people. I set out to write in place of the digitally diverted, those who write and read mostly in short bursts of multichannel audiovisual conversation, as opposed to the long-form monotony of a monograph. If you would rather engage with diversions than read theory, then this work of theory is for you! The endeavor of writing theory for diverted readers might be described, with aesthetic theorist Sianne Ngai, as a way of acting zany.20 Traditionally the zany is a comic fiction character, often a servant of some kind. This worker is put in an insecure and unstable position, given opposing or even impossible tasks. The zany nevertheless tries to please, but their situation becomes increasingly desperate. The zany is pushed toward doing more than necessary, which inevitably leads to spectacular failure. Tasking myself with writing theory for diverted readers is itself a zany prospect. It seeks potential for reflection, somewhere between the rigorous and the ridiculous. How am I setting myself up to fail spectacularly? Read on!

Becoming Human The concept of diversions shifts these forms of media from something we should avoid to something we exist among. Becoming human is today a process occurring amid diversions: From the toddler intuitively grasping screen interfaces and to some extent preferring them over other playthings, to school children struggling to learn alongside networked devices, from teens on their phone during class to students playing videogames instead of preparing for seminars. As distractions these are fleeting, feeble, and foolish. They are problems of inattentiveness—a mess that we need to find a way out of. As diversions they are instead injected into situations and lives with a greater sense of significance. Becoming human today involves infuriation over political disputes on Twitter, it involves the overwhelming urge to squeeze-hug a kitty, and it involves failing to resist playing videogames during lunch hours. Rather than trivialities, these media forms shape development, and as such they can offer indications of how we become human amid diversions. I find the philosophy of Manuel DeLanda helpful for conceptualizing diversions as shapers of development.21 Central for DeLanda is a form of population thinking, which offers a reorientation away from preoccupations with the individual experience of being alone with one’s phone. One is never actually alone with a phone. Anyone scrolling through social networks does so amid a population of others engaged in processes of tapping keys or swiping screens. Shifting the focus from the individual with their attention, to population dynamics, renders diversions not as the personal choices you make, but as the result of myriads of choices made by hordes of people. Diversions are thereby not reducible to the intention of producers, who are also responding to and attending to the behavior of users. If not merely through the manipulation of producers, what makes entire populations tend toward and converge on similar things? While individuals engage with multiple different things, showing great subjective variation, populations converge around common interests. What do networked computing indicate as base human interests? Humans assemble with computers, tending toward play, stupidity, cuteness, and humor. In the coming chapters I will synthesize answers to questions of why diversions attract through the sub-questions of what characterizes

assembling with something, what constitutes play, games, and fun, what characterizes stupid behavior, what makes someone cute, and what makes people laugh. In defining diversions, I will potentially disrupt conventional notions. Among disruptions is the way I shift the difference between diversions and what are commonly framed as their opposites. Play is a diversion of work, as it involves features of working such as difficulties effort, concentration, and perseverance, without fully coinciding with working. As I will show, stupidity likewise shares similarities with intelligence, especially in how it enables problemsolving, while nevertheless being clearly different from intelligence. Cuteness may seem like it has little to do with mature humans, but as will become clear, we retain cute appearance and behavior into adulthood. Humor seems like it would be entirely inappropriate in responsible discourse, but need not be completely separated from it. Diversions differ from their opposite tendencies without fully diverging from them. Diversions precede networked computing. This holds true for diversions in general, as well as for the specific diversions I have identified. These aspects are base human tendencies, which become amplified by networked computing. The question of how diversions shape processes of becoming human today thereby turns into one that is deeper and wider, to speculatively consider: How have diversions shaped the process of becoming the human species? Far from insignificant distractions, diversions could offer indications into prehistoric human attention, to what has shaped our species evolution. What has made play, stupidity, cuteness, and humor something we so regularly attend to? Drawing interdisciplinary perspectives from biology, I will in the following chapters examine the potential significance of play, stupidity, cuteness, and humor, for becoming human. My focus on becoming human amid diversions takes cues from posthumanist philosophy, in that it destabilizes the privileged and exceptional position of humans as beyond all other organisms.22 Instead of conceptualizing the process as a posthuman shift, the framework here comes from the theory of evolution, which fundamentally destabilized anthropocentrism by showing the relatedness of all organisms. Approaching contemporary media diversions through the evolution of organisms would seem to naturalize technological development, rendering this development as inevitable and following prescribed rules.

I contend that such an understanding misconceives nature as an unvarying stasis, against which human ingenuity unfolds with dynamic freedom. This is simply not the case, as nature unfolds with dynamic variability, and human behavior follows certain predictable tendencies. Becoming human is a process occurring amid non-human objects, tools, and technologies. Philosopher Bernard Stiegler considers technology as foundational for the evolution of our species.23 In Stiegler’s account humans are a fundamentally technologically mediated species; the origin of the species is in tool usage. This also shifts the question from who to what evolves, extending from the body schemas of humans to the tools the species use and surround themselves with. Such development includes tools for the purpose of hunting, cooking, and food preservation or forms of protection and shelter in the form of clothing and homes. It also includes cognitive environments provided by entertainment, myths, and knowledge offered through the development of oral storytelling, cave markings, weaving, painting, printed words, phonography, photography, and cinematography, as well as computer programs and network streams. When presented as distractions, any development in these cognitive environments can be framed as posing threats to the existing order. As diversions, they are prospects to be studied to understand humans. The perspective adopted here aims to bridge the opposing notions of McLuhan’s influential notion of media as “extensions of man” versus that of Friedrich Kittler’s perspective that “media determine our situation.”24 These two perspectives can be summarized as technological naturalization versus determinism, the former considering that media will only “attach itself to what we already are,” whereas the latter claiming that in the digital era “senses turn into eyewash.”25 Instead of framing these as opposing accounts, diversions show at once how sensory experiences are increasingly determined by networked computing and screen-centered living, but also how diversions are formed by tapping into evolved behavioral tendencies. Evolution theory teaches not only that humans are descended from primates, but, in the words of media theorist Jussi Parikka, that “each human being is a recapitulation of the whole of the animal kingdom, the potential of any animal whatsoever.”26 The process of becoming human is one which contains traces of the entire prehistory of humans, but also

the evolution of other animals. We retain evolved patterns of behavior, such as tendencies toward play, stupidity, cuteness, and humor, which networked computing acts as amplifiers of. In much the same manner, humans themselves could be considered amplifiers of tendencies of animals. Extending the perspective of Parikka from animals to include the evolution of all organisms, becoming human is a process which retains and develops the bodily organizations, ecological relations, and behavioral tendencies of all sorts of organisms. A central question here becomes, how do also other organisms tend toward play, stupidity, cuteness, and humor? In the following I explore processes of becoming human, both today and in deep evolutionary time. This will be done through discussions with perspectives from biology on a range of different organisms, including microbes, vegetation, fungi, mammals, and human huntergatherers. Central questions to which I offer philosophical speculation include: How do microbes assemble with the world around them? How do plants play and have fun? How can fungi open evolution to stupidity? What function can cute behavior and appearance have for mammals? How do human hunter-gatherers use humor in their social dynamics and political organization? Each of the following chapters organizes the study of networked computing with organisms: early computer assembly with microbes; videogames and play with vegetation; networked websites and stupidity with fungi; social networking and cuteness with animals; forum discourse and humor with hunter-gatherer tribes. Before delving into these chapters, a note on reading order: The book can be read nonlinearly, jumping in at certain chapters and even particular parts attracting the reader. As an overall whole the book presents an account of the evolutionary development of becoming human. This development is itself non-linear, in the sense that it does not chart a progress from least to most advanced, rendering humans as the goal of development. Evolution is a process of variation and adaption, where forms of structure and behavior can be retained, released, refined, as well as regressed. As a species, humans have depended and still depend on the development of microbes, vegetation, fungi, and mammals. This book attempts to show human development as a process not of increasing efficiency, labor, intelligence, maturity, and seriousness. Becoming human is a diversion of these aspects, and if humans are the pinnacle of

evolution, it is as a species which tends toward playful, stupid, cute, and funny diversions.

Chapter Outline Chapter 2, “Microbe Computing,” examines how assemblage processes divert. The central understanding of assemblages is informed by the Deleuze-influenced philosophy of DeLanda. A word of warning: This chapter is the most complex and difficult read of the book. It diverts away from the playful, stupid, cute, and funny to instead develop the theoretical foundation. The focus of the chapter is on the under-studied computer programming of evolutionary processes by mathematician Nils Aall Barricelli (1950s), and John Conway’s well-known Game of Life (1970). From these programs the chapter develops a symbiotic notion of the relation between programmer and program, in which the human participant is not in complete control of the process. Perspectives on evolutionary programming are thereafter shown as instructive for understanding how populations of users influence technological development. The chapter concludes by considering how human attention is not distinctly separated into conscious agency, but has evolved in symbiosis with and distributed into technologies such as computing. Chapter 3, “Vegetative Games,” examines how play diverts. The central understanding of play—and its relation to games and fun—is formed here through analysis of Nintendo’s iconic game Super Mario Bros. from 1985. By connecting game studies with botany, the prospect of vegetative games is developed, which provides an understanding of how and what makes humans and non-humans play. The chapter reflects on vegetative decision-making, and how this takes the form of playful improvisation. Vegetative creativity is conceptualized as a dispersed form, which becomes rooted down into centralized systems of conscious thought in animals and human beings. Human play becomes a process of interacting with and redistributing cognition into other systems. Digital gameplay becomes fun by making us vegetate together with technological devices—to grow, metamorphose, and decay in programmed environments. Theorizing non-human forms of play opens also for the possibility of algorithmic fun. Chapter 4, “Worldwide Fungi,” examines how stupidity diverts. Networking is traced to an evolutionary lineage of assembling for problem-solving, stretching back to slime molds and fungal mycorrhiza. The chapter reconceptualizes the worldwide web into the worldwide

fungi. With intelligence characterized by efficiency in problem-solving, fungi is argued here as opening evolution to the immense differentiation potential of stupidity. Empirical material is analyzed to uncover how stupidity proliferates online, as ways of solving the problem of gaining attention. Populations browsing websites are shown to regularly follow clickbait directed to base desires, drawn to the secrets of good health and easy wealth, beauty, fame, and sexual promiscuity. The chapter tests what might be learned from such stupidity, in particular how clickbait reveals the potency of foolishness for a range of human social fields. This includes the technological development of artificial stupidity (rather than artificial intelligence), economic reliance on greater fools, art as abbreviation for artificial stupidity, and philosophy as a form of morosophy (a love of stupidity rather than knowledge). Chapter 5, “Social Petworks,” examines how cuteness diverts. Cuteness is rendered a process of retaining juvenile features and behavior into adulthood. The chapter analyzes some exceptionally famous social media profiles, including the Facebook celebrity dog Boo. Social networks are framed as social petworks, where users share animal selfies. This frame opens for exploring how technological development is predicated on and continues mammalian evolutionary processes, as technology is cutened and humans are domesticated to screen-bound living with algorithm-determined feeds. Cuteness comes with a range of creative potential, examined here through theorizing YouTube videos of birds parroting pop songs. Cuteness allows mammals to turn evolution from struggle to snuggle for survival, to increased investment into comforting and soothing distress. The intensity of this in contemporary social petworks is examined through care-giving of the disabled celebrity cat Lil Bub. The chapter concludes by offering a novel way of understanding what is known as cute aggression, a common yet paradoxical desire to squeeze or crush that which is perceived as cute without harmful intent. Chapter 6, “Human Tribes,” examines how humor diverts. Humor is rendered a social process, which has the potential for giving rise to as well as diverting ridiculous behavior. Analysis starts here with the 2016 election, where certain communities were invested in turning politics funny, and getting Donald Trump elected president as a joke. The chapter explores the different aspects of what made Trump funny, in particular in the production of Trump memes, and what allowed online discourse to

become politically influential. While Joe Biden’s victory could be considered a much-needed return to the normality of regular unfunny politics, the chapter considers how humor holds potential for leftist politics. The chapter asks the seemingly tautological question of what humans could teach us about human politics. The answer is found through reflections on tribalism in politics and a rethinking of the ideological position of paleoconservatism with perspectives from research on the actual politics of paleolithic tribes. Central here is the function of humor for tribal subversion of individual dominance. From tribal structures I develop a notion of truly funny politics, where ridicule is used to achieve and maintain collective egalitarianism. Chapter 7, “Becoming Humidity,” synthesizes an answer to the question of why diversions are so important for digital living today. I discuss what is indicated as the three main reasons. Firstly, I consider what it is about human cognition that might lead to diversions, bringing perspectives from cognitive neurology. Thereafter, I reflect on the ways in which diversions shape both organic and media evolution, offering a summary of findings. Finally, an epilogue brings an experimental attempt at thinking with diversions, considering what happens to theoretical reflections when they shift from the center of attention to themselves being turned into diversions.

Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. 1944/1997. Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso. Benjamin, Walter. 1935/2007. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, Trans. Harry Zohn, In Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt. Bogard, William. 2000. Distraction and Digital Culture. CTheory. Bridle, James. 2018. New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future. London: Verso. Citton, Yves. 2017. The Ecology of Attention. Transl. Barnaby Norman. Malden, Ma: Polity Press. Crary, Jonathan. 1990. Techniques of the Observer. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. DeLanda, Manuel. 1997/2000. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Swerve Editions.

DeLanda, Manuel. 2006. A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic. ———. 2011. Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic. Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. 1988/2006. Dialogues II. London and New York: Continuum. Goldsmith, Kenneth. 2016. Wasting Time on the Internet. New York: Harper Perennial. Jagoda, Patrick. 2020. Experimental Games: Critique, Play and Design in the Age of Gamification. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Crossref] Johnston, John. 2008. The Allure of Machinic Life. Cybernetics, Artificial Life and the New AI. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Crossref] Kittler, Friedrich A. 1986/1999. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose. Lewis, Paul. 2017. ‘Our Minds can be Hijacked’: The Tech Insiders Who Fear a Smartphone Dystopia, The Guardian. October 6. https://​www.​theguardian.​c om/​ technology/​2017/​oct/​05/​smartphone-addiction-silicon-valley-dystopia. Accessed 14 Jan 2020. McLuhan, Marshall. 1962/2011. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. McLuhan, Marshall. 1964/2001. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge. Ngai, Sianne. 2012. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Parikka, Jussi. 2010. Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Plato. 2002. Phaedrus. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1960/2004. Critique of Dialectical Reason. London and New York: Verso Books. Simon, Herbert A. 1971. Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World. In Computers, Communications, and the Public Interest, ed. M. Greenberger. Baltimore: The

Johns Hopkins Press. Sloterdijk, Peter. 1987. Critique of Cynical Reason. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Srnicek, Nick. 2017. Platform Capitalism. Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity Press. Terranova, Tiziana. 2004. Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. London: Pluto Press. Williams, James. 2018. Stand out of our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. [Crossref] Wolfe, Cary. 2009. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wong, Julia Carrie Wong. 2017. “Former Facebook Executive: Social Media is Ripping Society Apart, The Guardian December 12. https://​www.​theguardian.​c om/​technology/​ 2017/​dec/​11/​facebook-former-executive-ripping-society-apart. Accessed 14 Jan 2020.

Footnotes 1 Williams 2018.

  2 Lewis 2017 and Wong 2017.

  3 See for instance Terranova 2004; Srnicek 2017; Bridle 2018.

  4 Simon 1971: 40–41.

  5 Benjamin 1935.

  6 Adorno and Horkheimer 1944/1997.

  7 Crary 1990: 33.

  8 Sartre 1960/2004: 257-258.

  9 Bogard 2000.

  10 Citton 2017: 5, 12.

  11 Plato 2002: 71.

  12 McLuhan 1964/2001: 28.

  13 Benjamin 1935.

  14 Kittler 1986/1999: 203.

  15 Goldsmith 2016.

  16 Ibid: 27.

  17 Sloterdijk 1987: 104.

  18 Deleuze and Parnet 1988/2006.

  19 Jagoda 2020.

  20 Ngai 2012.

  21 DeLanda 1997/2000; 2006, 2011.

  22 See for instance Wolfe 2009.

  23 Stiegler 1994/1998, in Johnston 2008.

  24 McLuhan 1962/2011; Kittler 1986/1999.

  25 McLuhan 1962/2011; Kittler 1986/1999.

  26 Parikka 2010: 10.

 

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Ervik, Becoming Human Amid Diversions https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13877-5_2

2. Microbe Computing Andreas Ervik1   (1) Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

 

  Andreas Ervik Email: [email protected]

Assembling With Programs Hello, world! The starting point for programming newbies is to write a program that prints this message. The computer does much of the work in order for this simple program to work. But, as astronomer Carl Sagan famously stated: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”1 To form an initial understanding of how humans have come to coexist with computation, this chapter explores some examples of early computing. In this chapter I examine some early computing and how it grew out of cybernetics. Cybernetics is framed as an interdisciplinary approach to exploring the structure and capacities of systems, but I take issue with the notion of cybernetics as being in control and steering systems.2 This chapter considers the role of humans in the world instigated by computers through the framework of assembling. How do humans assemble with digital computers? The notion of assemblages comes from DeLanda’s philosophy, which is concerned with the ways processes and objects exist and exert influence, independently of what one may think and say about them.3 DeLanda has offered an account of development which does not privilege humans as actors, but discusses the influence of a range of things, from inorganic matter to the biomass of food and microbes, to linguistic forms.4 While humans may consider themselves to be in charge, as steersmen of technological progress, any development involves a range of different parts in assemblage.5 The concept comes from Deleuze, who defined assemblages as a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations, between them, across ages, sexes and reigns—different natures. Thus, the assemblage’s only unity is that of a co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a ‘sympathy’. It is never filiations which are important but alliances, alloys ...6 Sympathy, symbiosis, and co-functioning are ways of emphasizing processes of being informed by rather than being in control. Assemblages are exemplified with ecosystems rather than organisms, as in the words of DeLanda, “the relation between insects and the plants they pollinate … involves heterogeneous species interacting in

exteriority, and their relation is not necessary but only contingently obligatory, a relation that does not define the very identity of the symbionts.”7 The assemblages of computers likewise involve heterogenous parts of humans with hardware and software. Rather than in control, humans attend to the properties, tendencies, and capacities of a system.8 The term attending is used here to convey co-presence, coexisting with or tending toward. For instance, when attending to the assemblage that is a garden, some conditions are initiated by people; others are beyond control. And whereas attention has as its opposite in distraction, attending is a diversion of controlling, involving degrees of having and giving up control. Computer assemblages involve agency distributed into its parts. While the early pioneers of computing assembled with and attended to computers, they were stimulated by biology and the tendencies and capacities of organic systems. Wired magazine founder Kevin Kelly has stated that “biology was ported to computers just as they were born.”9 The porting includes engaging with and modeling machines and programs on organisms, ecosystems, and evolutionary processes. Examples include W. Ross Ashby’s self-organizing homeostat and the navigating and maze-solving robot mouse of Claude Shannon and robot tortoise of W. Grey Walter, as well as John von Neumann’s theory of selfreproducing automata and Barricelli’s programming of such automata.10 Barricelli’s program was among the very first pieces of software written for one of the earliest programmable pieces of computer hardware, and it attempted to instigate digital evolution. In this chapter I will examine the porting of biology. This involves not simply transferring knowledge produced in biology to media. It requires an openness to novel and potentially unexpected sharing of structuring parameters. Analyzing empirical material and synthesizing knowledge from a range of disciplines, the goal here is to understand the structure of what might otherwise appear as accidental and unpredictable consequences of development. Testing boundaries, convergences, and possibilities, I will infuse computing and network with a range of organisms and organic structures, drawing from the development, relations, and behavior of organisms in fields of evolution, ecology, and ethology.

I will be focusing on the work by Barricelli, who despite a certain resurgence of interest in computational evolution has remained relatively obscure. Secondly, I focus on another piece of evolutionary programming, The Game of Life (hereafter simply Life). This program holds a particular position in DeLanda’s philosophy, where computer modeling provides perspectives on physical, chemical, and organic development.11 Both programs are discussed in order to explicate aspects of evolution theory which will be foundational for the work in the following chapters. Most fundamentally, I am concerned with modeling networked computing in order to understand the properties and dispositions of diversions, and the potential for examining development across different origins and materials. The next section analyzes Barricelli’s evolutionary programming. His programing could be considered a precursor for studies in artificial life.12 Yet, the questions raised by Barricelli were not whether digital computing could generate artificial forms of life. He aimed to test whether processes of selection and mutation could instigate evolution, and what role symbiosis could have in this process.13 This necessitates forming an understanding of symbiosis, with its impact on the forming of organisms, species, and ecosystems. I consider how the structural organization of organic systems is comparable to that produced in programming. Furthermore, I discuss the relation between programs and humans: How could the symbiosis inform our understanding of their relation? Thereafter, I continue to Life, which was first presented in a monthly column on recreational logic puzzles in Scientific American. Life was introduced by Martin Gardner, who claimed that because of its “analogies with the rise, fall, and alterations of a society of living organisms, it belongs to a growing class of what are called ’simulation games’—games that resemble real-life processes.”14 Life would turn into an extremely popular pastime, and it is currently available online for anyone to tinker with. I examine Life precisely because it has been dispersed broader than Barricelli’s mostly forgotten programming. This dissemination has allowed for richer knowledge produced about the dynamics of the program. I will use this knowledge to discuss how complexity emerges, is sustained, and is varied in the program. In his theory of evolution, Darwin distinguished between natural and artificial selection. Is

computer programming of evolution closer to artificial or natural selection? Lastly, the chapter turns to the development of computation, to consider not simply evolution within programs, but the evolution forming from the meeting with populations of users. How did computation turn from select individuals investing themselves into a field of lasting importance for large populations? An obstacle for considering technological development as evolution seems to be the purpose and function technology has for humans. From Barricelli and Conway’s program I will uncover key structuring tendencies which will complicate the possibility of ascribing computational change entirely to human decisions. Computer development will be argued to form out of unintentional consequences and evolutionary pressure.

Symbiotic Programming What is life? The word “life” makes us think of natural beings, organisms. Life designates beings sharing common chemical building blocks. All known life forms are carbon-based, but is this substrate an obligatory or simply a contingent factor of known life forms? In strong theories of artificial life, computer programming not only produces models of, but should be seen as generating, life in another material basis.15 Do computers generate artificial life forms? Prior to the theory of evolution, the question of life could be considered a metaphysical inquiry, concerning the fundamental nature of the world and its entities. Life was an essence of organisms—that which makes them fundamentally what they are. The living can be understood as alive because it belongs to the category of life, whereas something non-living does not and thereby cannot. Darwin’s theory showed the relatedness of organisms not as categorical belonging, but as formed through historical processes. Philosopher Eric Schliesser frames Darwin as among the first synthetic philosophers, bringing “together insights from a whole number of distinct sciences (geology, botany, paleontology, morphology, entomology, animal husbandry, climate science, etc.) and, in turn, self-consciously revolutionized them with his ideas and opening up new avenues for scientific research.”16 From geology, Darwin took the expansion of the timescale of our planet, the changing of landmass, and the excavation of fossils. Economics provided the theory with the impetus for change, in the form of resource scarcity and abundance. Darwin turned biology into a discipline of examining how organisms and species evolve over time. The theory of evolution renders organisms and species as processes as much as beings. With DeLanda the stability of an object becomes determined by timescale: “at the level of geological time scales, in which a significant event such as the clash between two tectonic plates may take millions of years, an entire human life becomes a bleep on the radar screen—that is almost instantaneous event.”17 The process of becoming and the state of being are not categorically distinct, but temporally distinct. DeLanda uses the notion of individuation to describe the processual nature of organisms, but “once the process yields fixed extensities and qualities, the latter hide the intensities, making

individuation invisible and presenting us with an objective illusion, the same illusion that tempts us to classify the final product by a list of spatial and qualitative properties, a list which, when reified, generates an essence.”18 Rather than fixed essences, organisms and species are defined by processes of individuation. Evolution has been considered a process where environmental pressure leads to the best result, after which change ceases. But this conception of evolution has been replaced with one lacking a fixed endpoint, and thus the potential for change remains part of any current stable state.19 Until Darwin, the regularity of a species could be regarded as conveniences based on visual resemblance, with arbitrary relation to the fluctuating forms they described.20 With evolution theory, species were reconceptualized. As philosopher Elizabeth Grosz writes, they “transform[ed] a difference in kind into a difference of degree.”21 DeLanda notes how evolution theory turned species into “piecemeal historical constructions, slow accumulations of adaptive traits cemented together via reproductive isolation.”22 Speciation results from sexually reproducing organisms becoming isolated and, over time, becoming incapable of propagating or of giving birth to sexually reproductive offspring. Species thereby likely first emerged with sexual differentiation in microbes. Rather than the question of what life is and whether systems could generate artificial life, Darwin’s theory paved the way for understanding species and organisms as processes. Furthermore, it opened for the possibility of producing these processes in other material substances than organic ones. The connection between organisms and technologies was noticed by Darwin’s contemporary, the author Samuel Butler. He proposed that were arrangements of intricate mechanisms: If, then, men were not really alive after all, but were only machines of so complicated a make that it was less trouble to us to cut the difficulty and say that the kind of mechanism was ‘being alive’, why should not machines ultimately become as complicated as we are, or at any rate complicated enough to be called living, and to be indeed as living as it was in the nature of anything at all to be?23

Cyberneticians would later attempt to actualize Butler’s notion.24 W. Ross Ashby identified a historical lack of machines of what could be termed “medium complexity,” as systems had either been simple mechanisms like watches and pendulums with “few and trivial properties” or they were animals, with “properties so rich and remarkable that we have thought them supernatural.”25 Among the early pioneers of digital computing, and a contributor to the first nuclear bomb, the Hungarian-American mathematician John von Neumann worked also to produce machines of medium complexity, capable of dynamic and unpredictable behavior. While calculating for the production of the first nuclear bomb, von Neumann was theorizing digital organisms. He proposed using the regularities of organic organization to construct what he termed “self-operating machines” or “automata.” With mathematician Stephen Wolfram automata is defined as “mathematical idealizations of physical systems in which space and time are discrete, and physical quantities take on a finite set of discrete values.”26 Such automata are “black-boxed,” in that their inner structure need not be disclosed, but are in the words of von Neumann, “assumed to react to certain unambiguously defined stimuli, by certain unambiguously defined responses.”27 I find it important here to distinguish between programming “artificial life” and programming digital organisms. In DeLanda’s philosophy, categorically opposed terms such as living and non-living, and nature and technology, are reified generalities—theoretical constructs for which no account of actual assembly could be given.28 In DeLanda’s philosophy, regularities are not ascribed to things by categorical belonging—what makes an organism an organism is not their essential belonging to the category of life. Instead, any material, thing, or being is considered as unique, actualized individuals, whose regularities are provided by what is conceptualized as “the virtual.” These regularities can cross what is perceived and conceptualized into categorical divides. DeLanda renders reality as “populated by virtual problems,” which are actualized as “a divergent set of actual solutions to those problems.”29 The actual form something takes is determined by the problems it responds to. While the actual is made up of distinct forms that may be categorically opposed, virtual problems may be shared across domains. The notion of actual and virtual thus allows for

theorizing dynamics shared across media and organic evolution, without postulating a collapse of distinctions between nature and man-made technologies. The question is thereby not whether programmed evolution instigates a passing of categorical thresholds from non-living to living, but simply whether it accurately parallels the dynamics of organic evolution. Shared parameters in digital and organic evolution become not a product of more or less convincing metaphors, but of successful computational synthesis of system dynamics.30 Media scholar, N. Katherine Hayles, has stated that “computational media have a distinctive advantage over every other technology ever invented … because they have a stronger evolutionary potential than any other technology.”31 Hayles ascribes this evolutionary potential to computing making possible the simulation of other systems. How does the evolutionary potential of computers function, and how do computers simulate organic systems? Having constructed one of the first computers, at Princeton University’s prestigious Institute for Advanced Study, von Neumann invited Barricelli to use it for an experiment with automata.32 Barricelli saw evolution as a process of “spectacular simplicity,” considering that it holds the characteristics of a “purely statistical phenomenon,” and would attempt to produce it computationally.33 Beginning in the early 1950s, he would conceptualize, program, and successfully run what is likely the first experimental evolutionary computer programs. The results were published in Italian in 1954, with English translations following three years later. Barricelli created his ecosystem of one-dimensional cellular automata, through working in binary machine instruction code (see Fig. 2.1). The ecosystem was made up of a horizontal row of 512 arrays, each consisting of a number from -18 to 18 (termed genes), or no number (no gene). The first row acted as starting condition, followed by successive generations in rows below. The initial conditions were selected by randomized number generation. The automata were then exposed to a set of rules for mutation and reproduction—termed “norms.”34 Running this program on the Institute for Advanced Study’s computer, the process was allowed to unfold over 5000 generations. Barricelli made notes on how the running program would produce patterns, which could maintain coherence over successive generations. He would name such enduring

forms “numerical symbioorganisms,” but cautioned that these patterns were not to be mistaken for organisms. The terminology was intended as mathematical, with terms from biology as analogies with biological concepts.35 Barricelli describes the process required to give rise to evolution: Make life difficult but not impossible for a simbioorganism [sic], let the difficulties be various and serious but not too serious; let the conditions be changing frequently but not too radically and not in the whole universe at the same time; then you may see an evolution transforming the symbioorganism with a surprising rapidity and creating properties and organs which will make the symbioorganism able to face all the difficulties and all the new situations it meets. But do not expect to observe an evolution process if you let the symbioorganism vegetate in peace and safety in a perfectly homogenious [sic] universe. In that case you will probably observe nothing essentially more complicated than the simplest molecule.36

Fig. 2.1 Screenshots from Barricelli’s digital ecosystem of symbioorganisms, reprogrammed and described by Alexander Galloway: “Each swatch of textured color within the image indicates a different bionumeric organism. Borders between color fields mean that an organism has perished, been borne, mutated, or otherwise evolved into something new”

Both in identifying “numerical symbioorganisms” and in setting the difficulty right for evolution (not too safe, but not too challenging; neither too few nor too frequent changes), Barricelli seems to impact the program. What is his role? Are the numerical organisms produced by the program as it runs, or are they imposed—through interpretation or

through programming—by Barricelli? It is possible to consider Barricelli as a “no-player,” who determines the position and number of “numerical genes,” which are then subject to the rule set, with the rule set subsequently generating interactions between these genes, causing the formation of numerical organisms.37 As a no-player, the person could be replaced with a mechanism providing randomized starting conditions, and perhaps also randomly varying the rule set—which was indeed part of Barricelli’s method. In diametrical opposition to such a no-player view, the entire evolution and the forming of “numerical organisms” could be ascribed to Barricelli. The distinction between the perspectives above and the questions that they raise is better understood with references to the shift from what is referred to as first-order to second-order cybernetics. First-order cybernetics (among others Norbert Wiener, W. Grey Walter, von Neumann, Ashby, and Barricelli) were concerned fundamentally with understanding and replicating system dynamics. Second-order cybernetics (Gregory Bateson, Stafford Beer, Gordon Pask, and von Foerster) situates what is regularly referred to as “the observer”—but should perhaps be considered an “interactor”—as part of the system dynamics. In his historical account of cybernetics, Andrew Pickering considers this shift as a broader change from concerns of ontology (knowing how things are) to epistemology (knowing how we know how things are): I take the cybernetic emphasis on epistemology to be a symptom of the dominance of specifically epistemological inquiry in philosophy of science in the second half of the twentieth century, associated with the so-called linguistic turn in the humanities and social sciences, a dualist insistence that while we have access to our own words, language, and representations, we have no access to things in themselves. Cybernetics thus grew up in a world where epistemology was the thing, and ontology talk was verboten.38 Pickering here connects second-order cybernetics to an account of knowledge in which humans cannot know anything beyond our own discourse. As philosopher of science Roy Bhaskar has argued, such an account constitutes an epistemic fallacy, as the question of what there is

becomes conflated with questions of access to reality.39 The question of what is known becomes indistinguishable from the question of how we can know. If the behavior of the patterns in Barricelli’s program were reduced to the programmer one would be committing this fallacy. At the same time, second-order cybernetics’ insistence on including the interactor as part of the system is not without merit for understanding what is going on in Barricelli’s programs. As opposed to the dichotomy of focusing on either an “observed system” or an “observer of a system,” however, Barricelli offers a way to include the interactor without reducing system dynamics to human understanding. This perspective is not made explicit in his writings. It is instead developed here from his programming, the theoretical work underpinning it, as well as later theorizations of computer evolution. Pioneer of digital dynamic behavior Christopher Langton emphasizes how automata produce results which are independent of its programmers: “The constituent parts of the artificial systems are different kinds of things from their natural counterparts, but the emergent behaviors that they support are the same kinds of thing as their natural counterparts: genuine morphogenesis and differentiation.”40 Morphogenesis means structure forming, and the programming is argued to give rise to emergent or second-order structures. This entails structures not contained in the rule set, which result from interactions between automata. The simple and rulegoverned objects interact, and form something not entirely determined by the rules of the program. Another pioneer of evolutionary computing, John Holland, uses the term complex adaptive systems, which are not “a simple sum of the behavior of its parts,” but produce “aggregate behavior” which “often feeds back to the individual parts, modifying their behavior.”41 While determined by the rule set, the emergent patterns are unpredictable, as computer historian John Johnston writes in his account of cybernetics: “[T]he changing variables … are now influencing one another in such a tangle of nonlinear feedback circuits that there is no way to compute the outcome in real time.”42 DeLanda details how structures are emergent when they “have properties, tendencies, and capacities that are not present in the individual automata.”43 While the initial properties are determined by the rule set, the states and dispositions that emerge from interactions cannot be fully

accounted by or ascribed to the programmer. The program must run in order for the researcher to gain knowledge of what kind of emergent structures emerge. In Barricelli’s program, free-flowing “numerical genes” would form into larger patterns, termed “numerical symbioorganisms.” These displayed behavior which rendered their coherent structures as emergent, more than observations and distinctions made by the researcher. In particular the structures would attempt to maintain their own coherence. Barricelli describes a process of him randomly cancelling elements, which would lead the stable structures of numerical organisms into a mode of self-repairing this damage.44 This repairing echoes a central framework for understanding organisms first introduced by physicist Schrö dinger in 1944. Schrö dinger frames entropy, the tendency of order to break down over time, as a central problem for organisms. The systematical arrangement in organisms—of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen—demonstrates an (at least temporary) avoidance of entropy. Organisms “keep going”—they maintain energy exchange with environments longer than other entities. While most systems reach a standstill quite quickly, living entities take their time. As the entropy of organisms increases, they approach states of maximum entropy (death). To avoid (or rather, postpone) death, organisms “draw negative entropy from their environment, by eating, drinking, breathing and ... assimilating.”45 Organisms live in an environment tending toward disorder, and maintain their own organization by increasing external entropy. Following from the entropic understanding of organisms, the aforementioned cybernetician Ashby formulated a machinic notion of organisms as self-organizing systems, which “demonstrate a self-induced change of organization.”46 Biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela developed this into the concept of autopoietic machines, which “subordinate all changes to the maintenance of their own organization, independently of how profoundly they may otherwise be transformed in the process.”47 In a more recent account of how organic systems organize, geologist Eric Schneider, writing together with Dorion Sagan, shifts the understanding from individual organisms self-structuring to organisms forming as responses to external gradients.48 Gradients are defined as differences across distance, including differences of pressure,

chemical concentration, or temperature, which act as fuel for organization.49 Gradient-organizing makes organisms metastable, as coherence is maintained by continuously reducing internal entropy through increasing external entropy. In the process of maintaining stability, organisms “capture and deploy energy and spin out intricate material flows; they undergo predictable and sometimes sudden changes in organization.”50 Organisms metabolize, converting chemical materials (carbon, water, nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus) into energy and by consequence generating waste products. Returning to Barricelli’s program, what he terms “symbioorganisms” are metastable wholes capable of resisting entropy by maintaining and repairing their structures. As Barricelli ran his program, however, the structures regularly ended up in either “organized” or “disorganized” homogeneity, producing either pure stasis or pure change, lacking the emergent behavior of coherent patterns that would maintain themselves in response to disturbances. Barricelli’s program would run for a few hundred generations before homogeneity would overtake it. Thereafter sustained randomness without coherence would dominate. Later analysts of computational evolution have remarked precisely this tendency of bursts of initial activity followed by stability where no further substantial changes occur. This suggests that other factors beyond those of variation, reproduction, and inheritance could be significant to maintain evolution.51 How did Barricelli deal with this problem? He attempted, in the words of media scholar Alexander Galloway, to “strike a balance between two dangerous extremes, each threatening to block the development of living organisms: on the one hand, eradicating heterogenous forces brought on by the overreaching greediness of a single monoculture; on the other, the suffocation of heterogenous forces brought on by the collapse of organic structures into pure randomness.”52 To find this balance, he would shift and combine the rules of replication. How does this impact Barricelli’s role in programming—does the behavior then become determined by the programmer? A perspective on this is gleaned from the theoretical background of Barricelli’s experiments, and their implications for understanding organisms, species, and evolution. Barricelli worked from the theory of symbiogenesis, which is unpacked in the following.

The first part of this theory is symbiosis, which ruptured the traditional concept of organisms as undividable wholes whose unity fully determines the nature of their parts.53 Symbiosis designates communions of more than one organism, thus rendering organisms as heterogeneous elements coming together, while such elements still retain some independence from this unity. Symbiosis can be approached using DeLanda’s notion of assemblages, in which parts become not necessary aspects of categorical belonging, but contingently obligatory resulting from evolutionary processes.54 In symbiosis, organisms connect, disconnect, and reconnect with others, whereas wholes of interior unity would cease to be what they are if parts are detached.55 The next part of the theory, genesis, concerns the role of symbiosis in evolution. It was originally formulated by Russian naturalists Constantin Merzhkowsky and Boris Mikhaylov Kozo-Polyansky at the beginning of the twentieth century.56 By these naturalists, symbiosis was given a formative role in the evolution of organisms. Kozo-Polyansky overturned the classic dictum of biology, subscribed to by Darwin, that nature does not make leaps. Darwin considered evolution as a slow, gradual forming of species, with intermediary gradations as transitory forms between fully formed species. Evolutionary biologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould have later argued that evolution may occur through “punctuated equilibria,” where long stretches of stability is relieved by sudden transitions.57 Symbiosis accounts for such leaps, by producing dispositions that are larger than the sum of individual parts.58 Among the most significant contributions of symbiosis in development is energy conversion. As some organisms found ways to convert inorganic compounds into energy—through processes of fermentation, photosynthesis, and respiration—others could gain their abilities by internalizing these organisms. Evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis frames this process as one cell eating another and, instead of being digested, the eaten becomes a symbiotic part of the predator.59 Symbiosis opens the boundaries of organisms, with symbiogenesis making organic unity even more porous. The evolutionary influence of symbiogenesis extends from microbes to larger organisms, as descendants of microbes live within their bodies, such as the mitochondria of animals and chloroplasts of plants. Larger organisms are symbiogenic superorganisms, habitats for several species, such as the

gut bacteria of animals responsible for digesting food and producing nutrients for hosts. As superorganisms become ecosystems for other beings, what is the difference between an ecosystem and an organism? With DeLanda, both can be conceptualized as assemblages, with varying degrees of integration, where territorialization acts as a measure of “the degree to which the components of the assemblage have been subjected to processes of homogenization and the extent to which its defining boundaries have been delineated and made impermeable.”60 Organisms become territorialized by spatial boundaries of varying degrees of integration, which fixate an inside from outside through cellular walls. The boundary does not become absolute. Organic membranes are “amphiphilic” (loves both), and thus allow cellular diffusion to bring elements across cell walls, transporting waste to the outside while accumulating nutrition.61 Organisms can, through symbiosis, fuse into spatially integrated territorialized wholes, or exist in deterritorialized form, as interactions in ecosystems with varying degrees of codependency. Returning again to Barricelli’s program, the numerical genes could overrun and extinguish, but if numerical symbioorganisms formed, these could absorb others into their organization. Barricelli writes: “Deprived of the advantage of a more rapid reproduction, the most primitive parasites can hardly compete with the more evolved and better organized species ... and what in other conditions could be a dangerous one gene parasite may in this region develop into a harmless or useful symbiotic gene.”62 The numerical gene could turn parasite or symbiont, depending on the propensity of the structure for absorbing it. There are indications in evolutionary biology of similar processes, as virologist Luis Villarreal has shown the hereditary material of genes to potentially originate from viruses.63 Schneider and Sagan likewise point out how the replication process could lead to “a parasite that may become rampant and dangerous, or usefully transmit information needed by its host.”64 Genetic replicators can take the form of viral infectors or genomes, both depending on cells for spreading. These cells “persist and spread, and in some cases make rough new versions of themselves without the parasites,” while “[t]he same cannot be said of the virus-like molecularly fastidious parasites.”65 Only after the appearance of cells with membranes could the DNA structure attach itself, which means that

organisms emerge from the collaborative “production between information-storing genetics and energy-transforming thermodynamics.”66 How does symbiogenesis impact the understanding of species? While evolution theory renders speciation as a process of organisms becoming isolated and incapable of propagating or birthing sexually reproductive offspring, symbiogenesis turns boundaries permeable. This occurs through horizontal transfers of genomes, instigated either by viruses or bacteria, and happens across species and phyla (a classifier signaling splitting descent longer than species).67 This has consequences for the model of evolution. Since Darwin it has been modeled as a tree growth, where the branches and twigs represent the lines of development: “At each period of growth all the growing twigs have tried to branch out on all sides, and to overtop and kill the surrounding twigs and branches, in the same manner as species and groups of species have tried to overmaster other species in the great battle for life.”68 Deleuze, writing together with Félix Guattari, offers a countermodel in the rhizome, which aids in conceptualizing symbiogenetic evolution. Rhizomes do not follow “arborescent descent going from the least to the most differentiated, but instead a rhizome operating immediately in the heterogeneous and jumping from one already differentiated line to another.”69 The rhizome is characterized by connections and heterogeneity, with any point connectable to multitudes of others (Fig. 2.2).

Fig. 2.2 Constantin Mereschkowsky offered a model of the tree of life with crisscrossing lines of descent in 1905 (Wikimedia Commons)

With the understanding of organisms, species, and morphogenesis discussed here, the notion of symbiosis can be parametrized—ranging from the tightly bounded to the loose and open (from organism to ecosystem), but also from parasite to mutualism (from one-sided (dis)advantage to mutual benefit).70 The ecosystem can fold into an organism, but the organism can also unfold into an ecosystem. Parasitical relations may over time become beneficial, or a former mutualist can turn into a threat. Ecological relations may also involve less directly substantial interaction, taking the form of commensalism (beneficial to one but neither beneficial nor harmful to the other), amensalism (harmful to one but neither beneficial nor harmful to the other), or apathy (neither harmful nor beneficial to each other). Symbiosis turns evolution from linear splitting branches into rhizomatic change. Because of symbiosis, species never fully split from each other, instead retaining potential for sharing both genes and larger organizational structures. With symbiosis and its morphogenetic influence established, it also accounts for the programmer as part of the programmed system. With philosopher Graham Harman, the symbiogenetic perspective offers a “focus on the way that humans are themselves ingredients.”71 Rather than either “no-players” or determinant for the programs, they are “symbio-players.” The symbiosis ties together two distinct systems: a human programmer acting with cognitive capacities and a system of digital evolution. Once human cognition had formed on our planet, it does not need to re-emerge (for instance as artificial cognition) in order to impact programmed dynamics. Other systems attach themselves and form symbiotic structures with human cognition. The parameters of human cognition influential for computer development will be discussed in the coming chapters, but for now this section ends with a brief detailing of a specific function of human cognition in this symbiosis. For the symbioorganisms emerging within programs, human cognition is an intruder, comparable to genetic material introduced into proto-cells. Human cognition introduces structures, which is potentially retained and replicated. A major distinction between genes in proto-cells and human interaction with programs is how structural changes in programming need not be

random. The emergent forms utilize the capacity that the cognitive part has for learning. Learning how a program operates involves configuring the properties of systems and, as formulated by DeLanda, “performing interventions on them with the aim of forcing them to manifest their tendencies or of getting them to interact with a variety of other entities so that they exhibit their full repertoire of capacities.”72 Philosopher Eric Winsberg describes interventions as putting the program in particular states, opening the possibility to “learn about its properties in light of that intervention.”73 The cognitive part of the symbiosis can experiment and observe which actions lead to which results. The cognitive part introduces the possibility of generating emergent structures capable of withstanding entropy, requiring fewer random mutations with positive outcome to produce them.

Structures of Life To explore the possibilities of emergent structures, and how complex these become through the effort of symbio-players, I turn from Barricelli to Conway’s Life. Based on von Neumann’s cellular automata theory, Life is a grid structure populated with cells. In Life, just Barricelli’s program, the predetermined conditions give rise to emergent structures. Following von Neumann’s proposal of forming simple organization sufficient for self-reproducing automata, Conway drastically reduced the rules. While von Neumann’s model equipped cells with 29 different states, Conway’s Life only has two: boxes in a grid are either filled or empty—as models of cells they are either alive or dead. The state of each cell is determined by the states of those surrounding it (horizontally, vertically, and diagonally) in the previous generation. The rules for determining the state of individual cell each generation are as follows: Birth occurs with precisely three live neighbors. Life perseveres with two or three live neighbors. Death occurs if the live neighbor is just one (loneliness) or four or more (overpopulation). With these rules, a playing field is produced, where cells occupy states of being born, remaining alive, or dying. These states are represented as the grid being filled (born, living) or empty (non-living). Each run starts by inputting starting conditions, selecting which cells are alive. From starting conditions, Life evolves according to the rule set, forming a continuous, potentially endlessly differentiating game of interactions between the cells. The work of Conway is taken by DeLanda to reveal how any variable replicator (not just genes) coupled to any selection pressure (not just environmental variations) leads to processes of evolution.74 For digital evolution, the issue thereby becomes locating the replicator and determining what constitutes the selection pressure. Biology has a longstanding debate over replicators. Richard Dawkins is the most well-known proponent of the gene-centered view, a framework that considers genes as the only replicating units: “In sexually reproducing species, the individual is too large and too temporary a genetic unit to qualify as a significant unit of natural selection. The group of individuals is an even larger unit. Genetically speaking, individuals and

groups are like clouds in the sky or dust-storms in the desert. They are temporary aggregations or federations.”75 The smallest unit for Dawkins is itself a sequence—a retained and replicating structure—although the shorter it is, the longer it will survive. Other evolutionary biologists, such as Margulis and Ernst Mayr, take the view that organisms themselves can be units of natural selection. Philosopher David Hull clarifies the distinction between gene and organism selectionists, where the former “mean to claim at very least that genes are the only entities capable of replication,” while the latter “mean to claim at very least that organisms are an important focus of interaction with the environment.”76 As discussed in the previous section, microbe evolution shows how mutations and descent are not the only processes (perhaps not even the most crucial) for producing, retaining, and spreading novelty. Nevertheless, Margulis points out how selection pressure is vital for species shifting from ecological interconnection to being folded into unities.77 This makes it apt to consider, as Schneider and Sagan suggest, that selection “simultaneously and interconnectedly at the level of the gene, organism, species, and higher taxon levels.”78 In contemporary biology, there are discussions of whether the importance of aspects such as symbiosis on evolution necessitates replacing what has been termed the “modern synthesis” in biology with an “extended evolutionary synthesis.”79 When it comes to digital evolution in the programs of Conway and Barricelli, what is retained and replicates extends from shorter to more elaborate sequences—from fragments of structure to larger and more intricate organization comparable to organisms. Turning to the selection pressure, the discussion was also anticipated in the previous section. Selection pressure is located within the program, but also extends to those setting conditions and testing parameters. The immense popularity of Life meant that a large population of symbioplayers could form a selection pressure for the process within the program. Is this selection pressure comparable to that of evolution? Darwin famously distinguished between natural selection and artificial selection. The former is what is commonly referred to as evolution, where external pressure from predators, parasites, and climate makes some variations more or less viable for survival. The differences between individuals are posited by Grosz to be the “impetus of evolutionary change; it is only against the background of natural selection that these

variations come to have value.”80 Individual differences range from parental distributions and genetic mutations to transfers of genetic material and whole systems of energy conversion in symbiosis. Individuals equipped with better responses to their environment are more likely to survive and give birth to offspring, which in turn may have even greater chances of survival. Mayr thus distinguishes how natural selection acts negatively by reducing the harmful structures, and positively through retaining beneficial traits.81 Artificial selection is also a form of evolution, but the pressure is posed (at least partly) from other forces than the natural environment. The survivability for cows in breeding, pigeons in keeping, or even fungi farming by ants and termites is not only determined by what the environment requires but also by breeder fancy.82 Artificial selection is thereby selection in which certain changes are brought about—which also includes potentially unintended consequences.83 The population of symbio-players of Life acts as pressure, with the ability to push the structures within the program in directions that increase or decrease the fitness of the emergent cellular organizations. As there are few ways of maintaining structural retention and replication without those also being beneficial within the programmed environment, the selection pressure will nevertheless be closer to natural than artificial selection. The emergent forms in Life cannot be shielded from their environment in the way that breeders and farmers shield their animals by feeding and sheltering them from weather conditions. Through interaction with Life, the symbio-players explore the possible forms that may emerge in the program’s ecosystem. Development is influenced by what DeLanda terms attractors, which are “the inherent or intrinsic long-term tendencies of a system, the states which the system will spontaneously tend to adopt in the long run as long as it is not constrained by other forces.”84 It is not only the intentions and choices by individuals, but attractors acting as guidelines that shape development. Aforementioned computer scientists Wolfram and Langton are among those who have worked out the dynamic regimes of enduring structures arising in cellular automata, through analysis of among others Life. They divide behavior patterns into tendencies: stasis, periodic oscillation, chaotic destabilization, or complex (self-sustaining) patterns.85 In Life, the simplest patterns are static “still lives,” such as the

“block,” which consists of four cells in a square, which will remain locked in this position. Other enduring types are periodic oscillators, which will cycle through patterns repeatedly. The “tumbler” is one such simple oscillator, visually reminiscent of two butterfly wings flapping in symmetric repetition. A more complex oscillator is the “exploder,” which varies through 25 generations, before stabilizing in a fluctuating manner. The third class after still lives and oscillators adds a tendency for the cells to move through space. Even the simplest one of these, the glider, is emergent, since it is not the individual cells that move. Instead, movement emerges from interactions; individual cells remain fixed while coherent states move across them.86 The patterns of Life may interact with each other, often resulting in the dismantling of both in collision. While seemingly simple, a pattern such as the “glider” can collide with another glider in 73 different ways, resulting in a variety of still lives or oscillators, or even annihilating both or one of the gliders. When increasing the number of structures interacting, the number of possible outcomes becomes enormous. The results of interactions rapidly become so complicated that they cannot be predicted and must instead be studied empirically.87 In the decade since Life’s inception, symbio-players have developed several complex emergent structures. The first came as part of a bet by Conway with the readers of Gardner’s mathematics column in Scientific American. Conway hypothesized that no pattern could continue to grow without limit, offering $50 to anyone who could prove or disprove this hypothesis before the year’s end.88 Such a structure, the glider gun, was found shortly after. This is a pattern of periodic repetition, consisting of two “queen bee shuttles” and two blocks. While the block by itself is a still life, it has the capacity of acting as an “eater” in conjunction with the shuttle’s capacity to be eaten. The interaction between them causes repeated behavior: As the shuttles meet in the center, they collide, reverting the movement, to send blocks toward each end, where movement is turned back toward the center again. The resulting interaction between shuttles produces a constant stream of gliders, flowing diagonally from the point of collision. The possibilities for introducing structures into Life by humans are restricted by the knowledge and ingenuity of each symbio-player, but also their access to and connection to the rhizomatic evolution of

structures instigated by others. At the beginning of Life, Scientific American could act as a center for sharing, with internetworking intensifying the potential for sharing. The population could now produce pools of external knowledge of recipes for Life structures, to be further adapted and imposed into the program. Among the complex organizations is the “OTCA metapixel,” by Brice Due (see Fig. 2.3).89 The complexity of this pattern is made possible by folding lower-level patterns (ranging from simple still lives, oscillators, and gliders) to larger conglomerate patterns. Due did not have to invent all the structures utilized, but could adapt already existing structure. The result is a Rube Goldberg machine-like series of contraptions that unfold to configure new contraptions. The simple patterns, such as the glider guns, send bullets flying, and these bullets trigger new reactions, which in turn trigger new reactions.

Fig. 2.3 Stills from a YouTube video showing Brice Due’s OTCA metapixel, running in John Conway’s Game of Life. The documentation video starts up close and then gradually moves out to reveal structural recursive patterns. Emerging from the interactions between cells and the rule set of Game of Life, the metapixel gives rise to a higher-level game abiding to the same rule set; however, these rules are themselves also emergent properties of the running system. Video posted by Phillip Bradbury

Using interaction between the lower-level patterns, the OTCA metapixel generates what could be considered Life “metacells.” The metacells are gridded cells of identical function to their building blocks, effectively producing a form of structural recursion. Metacells give rise to another, second-level Life process. The state of a single metacell is

determined by its relation to neighboring metacells, following the same rule set as Life. These rules are not predetermined, in the way that lower-level cells are, but instead emerge from interactions. While the individual cells in Life are black -boxed, individual metacells possess immense internal complexity. As part of metacells, the passing between states of life and death of the single cells becomes integrated into the structural coherence of metacells, and is thereby locked into repeated cycles of life and death. These cyclical flows form the internal metacell structure, and also the membrane around it. This membrane is porous, capable of letting cells pass through, both into and out of the cell to its nearby environment. Complex structures such as the OTCA Metapixel generate structures which with Wolfram act as “membranes which ‘protects’ sites within it from the effects of noise outside.”90 The largescale pattern combining other emergent patterns forms a metaorganization where parts have increased chances for maintaining life cycles, as the larger structure will likely be able to subsume colliding and intruding patterns into their processes without causing it to disintegrate. The metacell displays what DeLanda terms isomorphism, sharing structural organizing and behavior with organic cells, since “deferrals, when they become cyclical, are crucial to the operation of complex systems, including those of life.”91 What drives the forming of complex forms in Life, such as the metacells? The tendency toward complexity might seem to be the result of the ingenuity of symbio-players. I suggest instead approaching it through the framework of entropy discussed in the previous section, and the general tendency of evolution of ecological succession. Ecological succession indicates complexity as a consequence of entropy. While the warmth of the sun creates a gradient with the coldness of space and a tendency toward cooling, ecosystems reduce the difference of this gradient. Margulis and Sagan write: “The superior efficiency of complex ecosystems at reducing gradients is measurable and has been measured, for example, by airborne thermometers that show the superior ability of tropical forests relative to grasslands and deserts to cool themselves, thereby reducing the solar electromagnetic gradient.”92 Entropy creates a pull toward complexity, as described by Schneider and Sagan this forms as an “increase in gradient reduction over time,” as “[t]he more mature an ecosystem, the more solar energy it degrades.”93

DeLanda points out that plant ecologies grow in relatively predictable sequences—fast-growing settlers (lichen and moss) are succeeded by relatively stable states of other species assemblages (birch and aspen, followed by pine, and then oak, lime, and elm).94 Individual ecosystems thus develop and mature in ways comparable to individual organisms. While organisms generally have more tightly territorialized boundaries than ecosystems, their boundaries nevertheless remain open. Both organisms and ecosystems have unique, individual processes of assembly, yet populations share regularities of growth. The maturity of an ecosystem, just as the maturity of an organism, is not necessarily its ultimate purpose, which prompts DeLanda to describe development as “a blind groping from stable state to stable state in which each plant assemblage creates the conditions that stabilize the next one. A variety of historical constraints (energetic, material, dynamical) determine at some point that there is no other stable state attainable from the current one, and so the process climaxes.”95 Like the growth of an organism, that of an ecosystem could be set back by external factors. If the system finds its way to a climax state, energy use is reoriented, as Schneider and Sagan formulate it, that which was “formerly used in expansion is redirected internally, showing up as diversity, differentiation, and increased cycling.”96 How does successive growth manifest in Life? Most starting conditions will disintegrate, or become locked into still lives. For the patterns of cells in Life a larger number of disorganized states exist than organized, providing probabilistic tendency toward disorder. The state of maximum disorder is its likely outcome, acting as the main attractor for the cells. Even gliders are so complicated that they rarely emerge from random interactions.97 The unlikelihood of structures is counteracted by differences which act as fuel for selection processes.98 An important difference fueling Life is investment of attention, and the program maintains this for structure forming, differentiating, and complexifying. The more elaborate the digital pattern is, the more investment is required, which generates a direction of development of successive growth. The early ecosystems formed in the symbio-play of Life are short-lived, either quickly disintegrating, or becoming locked into still lives or small-scale cyclical patterns. The ecosystem grows from such fast-burners toward structures capable of greater complexity and longer

coherence by increased amounts of investment from the population of symbio-players. Successive growth toward complexity in Life is not about discovering final solutions to the problem of survival, but simply exploring the possibilities of maintaining and increasing complexity.

Computer Evolution Through analysis of early computer programming and its foundation in biology, I have argued that programmed evolution is irreducible to human intentions. Instead, processes of entropy, symbiogenesis, and natural and artificial selection lead to the emergence of structures with the capacity to retain themselves and replicate, and to differentiate and complexify within the program. The programmers act as symbiotic agents who insert, retain, and vary structures as well as act as selection pressure, forming gradients of fitness which fuel processes of successive growth. In this section, I will apply this framework to digital systems more generally. This follows Johnston who has developed a similar notion of computer evolution, as he considers the evolution of the computer, from simple calculators to the stored program machines capable of executing more complex instructions like conditional jumps, to the multiplicity of PCs, mainframes, work stations, and super computers, which run complex simulations and instantiate vast communicational networks. All these computational assemblages compete and evolve, get copied and improved at both hardware and software levels as new computational spaces, or ‘niches,’ open up and gradually become saturated. Overall, these computational assemblages may even appear to constitute a new ecology.99 Fleshing out Johnston’s observations on copying and improvement, niche construction, and computer assemblages, I subdivide computational evolution into the following, using the key terms developed in this chapter: symbiosis, selection, and succession. Symbiosis. The modern principle of the computer was invented in parts by Alan Turing. He described what has become known as a Turing Machine, which moves along a tape, divided into steps, with the machine having the capacity of making or erasing a mark at each step.100 Computer historian George Dyson describes how this “embodies the concept we now know as software—encoding a description of some other machine as a string of symbols, say 0s and 1s.”101 Johnston describes the computer as a “second-order machine in which the logical

form of many different kinds of machines is abstracted and made equivalent to a set of algorithms.”102 Different media forms turn into digital data, or, with McLuhan, old media becomes the content of new media.103 As digital data, the media can be stored, transmitted, and manipulated, and the data rendered as text or audio-visually, even shifting between sensory modes. Computer operations are not determined solely by the materials they are constructed from. As computing is a framework of logic rather than materials, computer programs can be implemented in various forms of hardware. Turing machines have been constructed in Life. Rather than determined by hardware, software functions in a similar manner to the author William Burroughs’ description of language as a “parasitic organism that invades … the central nervous system.”104 Programs and language are perhaps symbionts to their respective forms of hardware. The operations in computing and language have some degree of autonomy, and could be instigated in other materials. The alphabet, genes, and Turing machines intrude and attach to hardware, of cognition, cells, and computers. Structures can then emerge, retain, replicate, and develop—actualized in the form of cellular organization, symbolic thought, and software. In the evolution of computers, symbiotic structures emerge, and novel functions can be included into prior structures. While programs are made to perform different operations, they share some commonalities, such as connecting input to storage, retrieval, processing, and display. Computer evolution led to shared order codes turning into subroutines becoming common units of programs, and in the 1960s, these structures formed into operating systems. These are forms of core software that control basic input, output storage, and processing. The most successful operating systems, OS/360, MS-DOS and UNIX, became mutualistic systems, removing idiosyncrasy of unique hardware, and no longer requiring reprogramming for programs to work on other computers. Dyson writes in biologically infused language about the explosion brought about by operating systems and microprocessors: “New species of numerical symbioorganisms began to appear, reproduce, and become extinct at a rate governed by the exchange of floppy disks rather than the frequency of new generations of mainframes at IBM. Code was written, copied, combined, borrowed and stolen among

software producers as freely as in a primordial soup of living but only vaguely differentiated cells.”105 Comparable to organisms and species, the barriers of computer programs remain permeable, as codes and procedures are exchanged. Yet barriers do form, for instance with programs and hardware peripherals only being compatible with certain operating systems, and as hardware and software perform certain functions. The boundary between software may be highly deterritorialized, as in the early days of computer software, and in the open-source software movement, or it may be rigorously territorialized. Computer scientist Dave Ackley writes: “The traditional closed-source ‘protect the germ line at all cost’ model is reminiscent of, say, mammalian evolution; by contrast the free software movement is more like anything-goes bacterial evolution, with the possibility of acquiring code from the surrounding environment and in any event displaying a surprising range of ‘gene mobility.’”106 Among early computer programs were also those that started as experiments, but evolved into parasitical viruses. Such programs, as Parikka notes, contained “instructions to copy themselves from one memory location to the next,” as a way of “potentially crashing a UNIX or Windows operating system with a little program that exponentially multiplies itself.”107 Symbiosis also structures the ways in which humans and computers interact, where the operator and the system together form new capacities, becoming partially interdependent. The function of bacteria in human guts is useful here for understanding the relation with computers. Gut bacteria have been shown to modulate human cravings for specific types of food, as well as the general mood that people are in —to the point of potentially having causal influence for among others anxiety and depression.108 In human–computer symbiosis, the computer provides positive experiences. It also offers a range of negative ones: interruptions to tell that it is time for software updates may annoy; preventing a computer battery from losing its charge may be a nuisance; lacking back-up of folders may cause stress; staring into screens all day provides eyestrain and using computers can lead to carpal tunnel syndrome in wrists; perhaps most troubling is the possible accompanied uneasy feeling that computers control increasing amounts of human existence. Computer devices are not at the mercy of their operators, or even their constructors, but may—like microbes—modulate human

behavior for their own survival. As symbionts they negotiate who is in control. Selection. The ability to retain basic functions in operating systems greatly intensified the possibilities for diverse applications. And as with organisms, symbiogenesis in computation gave rise to processes of selection. What kind of selection process is this? Philosopher Gilbert Simondon has argued for the forming of a new kind of technological object by the industrial revolution—a technology with adaptive conditions comparable to biological dynamics.109 Discussing technological evolution, John Ziman notes how “the criteria by which technological innovations are selected are not universally agreed, so that artefacts with similar purposes may be designed to very different specifications and chosen for very different reasons.”110 This leads him to conclude that “there is usually enough diversity and relatively blind variation in a population of technological entities to sustain an evolutionary process.”111 This is not to argue that humans are without impact, as shown in discussions of evolutionary programming, humans greatly shape this development. Digital evolution does not exclude human intentionality, but is not limited to it either. Computers develop from the meeting between computer devices and programs (made by developers and companies) and populations of users. Producers here invariably attempt to solve certain problems—not only technological, but also those concerned with increasing adaption and revenue. Users select programs according to their own sets of criteria. The companies and programmers produce variations which in meeting populations of users become more or less viable. While individual users and individual producers may to varying degrees act as conscious agents, selecting based on informed criteria, as populations it is not their intentions, but the combined result of their actions that determine the outcome. In addition to intentionality, digital development thereby involves what could be considered unintended collective consequences of human decisions.112 Simondon notes how technological progress happens in places of economic constraint such as aviation and warfare.113 As military innovations seep into general public computing, meeting populations of consumers, another process is initiated. The pressure may here be oriented toward diversions as much as any form of progress. Mainstream adoption of computer hardware or software could

result from functional superiority, but may just as easily stem from marketing impressions or brand recognition—or simply fads. Selection pressure forms enduring identity for hardware devices and programs. For computer hardware, the population poses an external pressure of users coming to expect the computer to consist of certain capacities, including output display monitors and input devices for moving a pointer, and a keyboard for typing letters and numbers. This pressure turns peripherals from parts of an ecosystem to parts of the unity of the system. A smartphone or a game console becomes a different device, although they are simply computers with different inputs. Functional differences allow completely new lineages to form. Software may likewise establish itself through carving out a new niche, or extending an already existing one, or through imitation and adaption of already existing applications. Whether such software becomes successful depends on the impact made on users. As computer hardware and software differentiate, subpopulations of users form around specific hardware and software (such as those selecting Android-based or iPhones, or opting for open-source solutions such as the operating system Linux, instead of commercial ones from Windows or Apple). Succession. If undisturbed, ecologies that most efficiently degrade the gradients that they tap into will grow successively. The development of animal ecosystems, and even human culture, can be rendered as processes of successive state change. This is not to posit determinism, or to say that complex forms render simpler ones obsolete. Technological development is a process of crossing thresholds, where development is pulled toward greater dissipation of gradients. Such development nevertheless does not become the ultimate purpose of development, and development into climax states may be disturbed. While organisms form by tapping into physical and chemical gradients for energy, human organizational and technological development also taps into social gradients. Of particular interest here is the ways in which computer evolution taps into gradients of human attention. Like heat, attention will cool over time as novelty wears off. Structures capture and sustain attention over time, working against this cooling. Attention here acts as a resource for structure generation, with media technologies emerging as structures which hold human attention over extended duration. Computers are organized to live and reproduce, to keep going and resist thermodynamic destabilization by feeding on

the gradient of attention investment. The most successful entities are those that manage to keep investment high over time, and to tap into and minimize the difference in the population between high and low intensity of investment. Increased internal complexity comes at the expense of external, so by reducing the difference in attention outside of computation, greater differentiation of computers is achieved. The development of computation will favor systems that best dissipate gradients of human investment. Simondon identifies technological development as moving from being uniquely artisanal to having increased ties to scientific research and production becoming industrially standardized.114 Computing has grown into a widely differentiated field of manufacturers of hardware parts, devices, operating systems, and programs. Producers here seek to improve and standardize, and increase revenue. Humans are not the climax state of these technological ecosystems. They are the early pioneers, succeeded by longer-lasting companies. The companies themselves have different durations, as a select few mature into dominating ones. While bodies of organisms subsume cells and organs for their homeostasis, digital systems—and the companies producing them—subsume human engagement into system operation, to maintain organization, and to increase internal differentiation. From relative meager and short-lived impact on human cognition, computing reaches maturity in becoming increasingly ubiquitous parts of contemporary life. To conclude this chapter, I would like to note how each of the aspects of digital evolution explored here, from symbiosis to selection to succession, deemphasizes humans and their intention as the prime movers of development. Digital evolution results from interconnectivity and sharing in symbiosis, the unintended consequences of selection, and the drive toward greater dissipation of attention gradients. Humans influence through symbiosis, and as parts of populations that develop and select, becoming succeeded by companies. How did diversions become such a central part of networked computing? Media theorist Matthew Fuller has introduced the notion of feral computing, as a term describing the tendency of computers to spill into the world, to rework the modes of life of computational subjects.115 This term can also be used to denote the shift from the early programmers with their relatively controlled settings into the wilderness. Computers escaped confinements and went feral. In the

same sense as the running of Life cannot be fully anticipated before running it, letting computing go feral means that programmers may no longer fully anticipate the symbiotic interactions, the uses and misuses their programs will find. Similar to Life, however, it is possible to consider the attractors that the system will tend toward, as periodic, stable, or chaotic ones, as the least and most likely of developments, as gradients tapped into. Technological development is ripe with unintended consequences, as technologies invented for one purpose may end up serving something completely different, and impacts other media in unanticipated ways.116 Technologies with practical usage today may have been developed for popular entertainment, and vice versa; technology intended for economic, scientific, or military use may become commodities.117 Ripe with unintended consequences, computer evolution is in between totally random and completely controlled. The following chapters will build on the framework developed here, to explore further the ways in which the cognitive symbiosis of humans and computers uncovers efficient ways of dissipating gradients of attention through play, stupidity, cuteness, and humor.

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Footnotes

1 See Landén 2012.

  2 Wiener 1948/1985.

  3 DeLanda is regularly affiliated with other trends in contemporary philosophy, in particular new materialism and object-oriented ontology. See Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012; Harman 2008.

  4 DeLanda 1997/2000.

  5 DeLanda 2016.

  6 Deleuze and Parnet 1988/2006: 69. While the notion of assemblages is regularly attributed to Deleuze, the French philosopher did not use this word in his original works, but instead wrote about agencement. This emphasizes the action of assembly, of fitting together, as much as the result of such processes.

  7 DeLanda 2016: 3.

  8 The notion of properties, tendencies, and capacities is central for DeLanda’s notion of assemblages; see DeLanda 2011, 2016.

  9 Italics in original, in Dyson et al. 1997.

  10 See Dyson 1997; Johnston 2008; Parikka 2010.

  11 DeLanda 2011.

  12 Dyson 1997: 125.

  13 Barricelli 1962: 70.

  14 Gardner 1970: 120.

  15 Johnston 2008: 1.

  16 Schliesser 2019.

  17 DeLanda and Harman 2017: 59.

  18 DeLanda 2016: 141. The notion of individuation comes from Simondon 1958/1980.

  19 Ibid 1997/2000: 13-14.

  20 Darwin 1859/1985: 108.

  21 Grosz 2004: 61.

  22 DeLanda 1997/2000: 13.

  23 Butler, quoted in Dyson 1997: 28.

  24 Wiener 1948/1985: 11.

  25 Ashby 1962/2004: 270.

  26 Wolfram 1983: 602.

  27 Von Neumann 1948/1963: 289.

  28 DeLanda 2016: 14-17.

  29 Ibid 2010: 104, italics in original.

  30 See Johnston 2008; DeLanda 2011.

  31 Hayles 2017: 33, italics in original.

  32 Prior to programming evolution, Barricelli started his academic career in the mathematics of climate. Professor of mathematics, Tor Gulliksen, recounts Barricelli attempting to submit his doctoral thesis. It was 500 pages and considered too long to print, yet Barricelli did not budge and would not cut anything. He instead chose not to receive his degree. See e-mail, Dyson et al. 1997.

  33 Barricelli 1962: 70-71.

  34 Ibid: 71.

  35 Ibid: 69-70.

  36 Ibid 1957: 175.

 

37 The concept of “no-player” comes from John Conway in interview; see Numberphile 2014.

  38 Pickering 2010: 26.

  39 Bhaskar 1975/2008: 29-30.

  40 Langton 1989: 68.

  41 Holland 1992: 184-185.

  42 Johnston 2008: 33.

  43 DeLanda 2011: 23.

  44 Barricelli 1962: 80; 84.

  45 Schrö dinger 1944: 24.

  46 Ashby 1947: 125.

  47 Maturana and Varela 1973/1980: 80.

  48 Schneider and Sagan 2005: 85.

  49 Ibid: 116.

  50 Ibid: 81.

  51 See Taylor 2013.

  52 Galloway 2012: 36.

  53 First proposed in 1867, as Simon Schwendener framed lichen as a communion of two organisms, algae and fungi. Several others would go on to describe the coupling of different organisms as symbiotic. This framing was initially met with criticism and often downright dismissal.

  54 DeLanda 2016: 10.

  55 Carrapiço 2015: 84; 90.

  56 Kozo-Polyansky 1924/2010: xxvi. Russian literature on symbiogenesis became available in English first in the early 1990s, with Kozo-Polyansky’s book published in English in 2010, under the title Symbiogenesis: A New Principle of Evolution. Barricelli’s first publication on evolutionary symbiosis dates back at least to 1947, and he likely read these works, either in original Russian or some other translation. In a letter to Barricelli, Joshua Lederberg notes that he finds himself “on the whole, entirely sympathetic” with Barricelli’s views on genetics (Lederberg 1955). Lederberg coined the term microbiome and discovered that bacteria could transfer genes horizontally (see Sheldrake 2020: 76-77).

  57 Eldredge and Gould 1972.

  58 Carrapiço 2015: 93-94.

 

59 Margulis and Sagan 2002: 72.

  60 DeLanda 2016: 3.

  61 Ibid:110; Schneider and Sagan 2005: 117-118.

  62 Barricelli 1957: 169.

  63 Villarreal 2012: 302, 363.

  64 Schneider and Sagan 2005: 169.

  65 Ibid.

  66 Ibid: 118.

  67 See Margulis and Sagan 2002; DeLanda 2006: 27; Schneider and Sagan 2005: 321.

  68 Darwin 1859/1985: 171.

  69 Deleuze and Guattari 1980/2016: 10; DeLanda 1997/2000: 15; Ramulu et al. 2012; symbiogenetic theorists also operate with a rhizomatic model. As pointed out by philosopher Michael Marder, the framing of tree arborescence in Darwin as well as Deleuze and Guattari is itself inadequate. Tree growth is more comparable to rhizomes: “Trees can branch out in quite unpredictable ways; they can accommodate the grafts of other species; they can give rise to shoots that can survive independently of them; they can change their sexes to become hermaphrodites for a limited stretch or for the rest of their lives; and the list continues” (Marder 2016: 136).

 

70 This dynamic is found in early formulations of symbiosis by Heinrich Anton de Bary, who “adopted [the] term and generalized it to refer to the full spectrum of interactions between any type of organism, stretching from parasitism at one pole, to mutually beneficial relationships at the other” (Sheldrake 2020: 73).

  71 Harman 2016: 54.

  72 DeLanda 2002/2013: vii.

  73 Winsberg 2010: 59.

  74 DeLanda 1997/2000: 138-139.

  75 Dawkins 1976/2006: 34.

  76 Hull 1981: 33-34.

  77 Margulis and Sagan 2002: 12; Schneider and Sagan 2005: 240.

  78 Schneider and Sagan 2005: 239.

  79 The modern synthesis combines Darwinian natural selection with Mendelian genetics. In addition to symbiogenesis, the aspects argued to be unaccounted for in this paradigm include multilevel selection, developmental plasticity of organisms, and how organisms can modify environments through niche construction. See Laland et al. 2015.

  80 Grosz 2004: 45-46.

 

81 Mayr 1997: 45.

  82 Margulis and Sagan 2002: 111-112.

  83 See for instance Darwin 1859/1985: 75.

  84 DeLanda 2002/2013: 7.

  85 Wolfram 1983, Johnston 2008: 11.

  86 DeLanda 2011: 24.

  87 Wolfram 1983/2005: 13, 30; Pickering 2010: 30, 169; DeLanda 2011: 24.

  88 Gardner 1970: 120-123.

  89 Bradbury 2012.

  90 Wolfram 1983: 631.

  91 DeLanda 2002/2013: 105; 176.

  92 Margulis and Sagan 2002: 47-48.

  93 Schneider and Sagan 2005: 225; see also Margulis and Sagan 2002: 49.

 

94 First chronicled by Henry David Thoreau in 1860, ecological succession was developed into precise science by among others Raymond Lindeman in 1942. Lindeman set up a system for analyzing different ecosystems, showing succession to be a universal feature of ecosystems. See Schneider and Sagan 2005: 191.

  95 DeLanda 1997/2000: 105-106.

  96 Schneider and Sagan 2005: 236.

  97 Wolfram 1983: 637.

  98 DeLanda 2011: 48; Schneider and Sagan 2005: 239.

  99 Johnston 2008: 123.

  100 Turing proposed an unbounded length of tape, divided into sections, which a machine moves along, at each section capable of reading and writing a mark. Using this method, any problem which can be broken into steps is solvable, and thus computable—that is, executable by a machine. Computing machines can themselves be produced through computation, as universal turing machines. See Turing 1936.

  101 Dyson 1997: 57.

  102 Johnston 2008: 71.

  103 McLuhan 1962/2011.

  104 Burroughs 1968: 39.

 

105 Dyson 1997: 122.

  106 Ackley 2000: 493.

  107 See Parikka 2007: 40-41.

  108 Rezzi et al. 2007; Swartz et al. 2012; Valles-Colomer et al. 2019.

  109 Johnston 2008: 9; Simondon 1958/1980.

  110 Ziman 2000: 7.

  111 Ibid.

  112 See for instance Levinson 1997: 8; DeLanda 1997/2000: 17.

  113 Simondon 1958/1980: 23-24.

  114 Simondon 1958/1980: 32.

  115 Fuller and Matos 2011.

  116 See for instance Levinson 1997.

  117 Bö hme 2006: 63.

 

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Ervik, Becoming Human Amid Diversions https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13877-5_3

3. Vegetative Games Andreas Ervik1   (1) Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

 

  Andreas Ervik Email: [email protected]

Let’s Play What drove the adoption of and adaptations of personal computation? An indication is found in what early computers were used for. Work, surely, but importantly also play. The early adopters of computers include corporations, business, and government facilities, but also youth discovering novel forms of play in arcade halls lined with coin-operated gaming machines, and later as home entertainment systems and portable devices. Today, digital games are a multi-billion industry, generating global revenue greater than other creative industries. This chapter considers the capacity computers have for producing play as a central force for the development and dissemination of computational devices in the general population. Exploring digital gaming, the central question to begin with is the fundamental: What makes people play? The answer to this seems obvious: Because it’s fun! But what makes game fun? To begin with, it is necessary to form a notion of play, and how this activity connects to fun as well as games. Play is often perceived as superfluous, as something the rational adult should leave behind in childhood. But adults also play, often as respite and recreation from workday efforts. From an evolutionary perspective, play might seem like inefficient behavior, expending resources without evident benefit. In his classic treatise on play, Johan Huizinga considers it “a free activity standing quite consciously outside ‘ordinary’ life as being ‘not serious.’”1 The appeal of play seems closely aligned with its lack of seriousness and obvious purpose, which also gives play an edge over mundane everyday functional behavior. Turning to games—and more specifically the digital kind—these are multi-faceted assemblages of interconnected parts (graphics, audio, world-building, character development, and storytelling), resulting from interaction between player and game system through audiovisual display and controllers.2 Part of the fun of digital games is traceable to the potential for dynamic interaction. Press a button and something happens. Games offer what is probably the highest frequency of interaction between user and software of any form of computing. The simple cause and effect of human–computer interactivity offers both predictability and unpredictability for the person controlling. Digital games offer feedback, in the form of enhancing and negating

player activity, thus providing the potential for success, but also for failure. Failure brings the possibility of frustration, as the player is unable to succeed. How could games be fun, when they so regularly have the potential for frustration? Playing digital games is rewarded with continued challenge, thus requiring increased player skill. Instead of the frustrating fun, perhaps games could offer ease and tranquility? Game theorists are generally against such prospects. Bernard Suits offers a positive spin on adversity by defining games as “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”3 Gaming theorist Ian Bogost points out how “we think fun is enjoyment, but in practice it often feels like quite the opposite.”4 Jesper Juul proposes that games produce situations where the player has the immediate desire to avoid failure, yet the desire to play is predicated on the possibility of such failure.5 Playing is fun because of struggle. The motivation to play and enjoyment of games comes from the feeling that something is at stake. Using external or selfimposed more or less arbitrary restrictions, games prevent the player from simple success. Juul writes that players come to “expect the designer to have spent considerable effort preventing you from easily reaching your goal, all but guaranteeing that you will at least temporarily fail.”6 Jagoda delimits challenge with three parameters of difficulty: mechanic, interpretative, and affective difficulty.7 The former concerns the ability to control, perform, and manipulate the system. The second are narrative, fictional, or empathic concerns of relating to and understanding characters, story arcs, and themes. The third concerns responses arising in the player, ranging from positive (enchantment, confidence, pleasure, pride, calm, aspiration, and mastery) to negative sentiments (boredom, fear, shame, disgust, annoyance, anxiety, and rage). To overcome and engage with increasing challenge requires focus and involvement. Bogost therefore argues that play is not a simple pastime, “but the work of working a system, of interacting with the bits of logic within it.”8 Play can thus be reconfigured as a form of non-trivial interaction with the material capacities of systems. The player perceives possibilities for interaction, in other words, what kind of interactions the systems afford them.9 Fun becomes a term not for enjoyment in the form of respite from effort, but rather “a nickname for the feeling of operating”

a system, in particular “of operating it in a new way, in a way that lets us discover something within it, or to rediscover something we’ve found before.”10 This makes it possible to appreciate play as a process in itself as well as a part of a range of other activities. From playing games to playing music and even writing playfully—all sharing a foundation of engaging with and uncovering the interactions afforded by systems. Far from trivial, play is a way of actively working with some form of system, to understand and explore its possibilities. Stephanie Boluk and Patrick Lemieux push gaming scholarship to consider not just the packaged consumer product of individual games: “From the most complex house rules, arcade cultures, competitive tournaments, and virtual economies to the simple decision to press start, pass the controller, use a player’s guide, or even purchase a game in the first place, for all intents and purposes metagames are the only kind of games that we play.”11 Their focus on metagames in a certain sense levels the player with the designer of games, to account for the ways in which players may uncover and become preoccupied with unintended and novel ways of playing, and how development of games is itself often a playful process. Provocatively Boluk and Lemieux argue that “[t]he greatest trick the videogame industry ever pulled was convincing the world that videogames were games rather than a medium for making metagames.”12 In this chapter I will be writing about games, focusing on the forms of play that emerge as players interact with the game not only as a finished package, but diverting it into new forms, including speedrunning, level building, and software hacking. In this chapter I will follow Jagoda’s notion of experimental games, in which problems are not only to be solved, but to be engaged with in uncertainty and open-ended problem-making.13 I will get myself into trouble by trying not only to solve central questions for game theory, but also to create new problems along the way. I will play a metagame about play itself: theorizing play, and playing while doing it. A major challenge in theorizing games to be engaged with here is its foundation in human experience—to theorize play beyond humans. What kind of organisms are capable of play? Though we have no direct access to their experience, anyone who has been around a dog can attest to their propensity for play. There is a considerable body of literature on animal play, including evolutionary biologist Gordon Burghardt’s work ranging from insect play

fights to mammalian locomotive, object-using, and social play and the complex rule structures of human games.14 Sharing Juul’s penchant for difficult games, I will make the theoretical game particularly engaging by considering not only human and animal play, but the non-conscious play of plants. What does vegetative evolution, growth, and the behavior of plants offer to our understanding of how and what makes us play digital games? Patrick Jagoda renders games as not only works of entertainment or art, but machines for formulating philosophical concepts.15 In the following I introduce and develop a concept of playful botany. I reflect on the possibilities of vegetative play, considering how this diversion has shaped the evolution of organic and digital systems. The starting point is not the plant, which etymologically comes from plantare, from being driven into the ground, but instead from vegetative, which comes from vegetare, characterized or endowed with the power of growth.16 This signals a shift away from considering plants as passive recipients to environmental conditions. Instead, this frames growth processes as unfolding from vegetative will. Through discussions of structural parts of vegetative bodies (branches, roots, and flowers), the playful botany will develop new understandings of some of the key aspects of games: gameplay, experience, and development. In the next section, stem growth and branching will function as a framework for examining what vegetation might offer for an understanding of gameplay. I will analyze the first game in Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. series of platforming games (1985, hereafter Super Mario).17 Chosen for its iconic status, as Mario remains among the most iconic figures, and the 1985 game is influential for countless of game developers and recognizable even to people with little interest in gaming. As Boluk and LeMieux write: “Over the past thirty years, thousands of thumbs have piloted herds of Marios over Goombas and green pipes before sending the plumbers to their collective doom down the first pit of Super Mario Bros.”18 Originally released for a console I never owned, I would play the game at my cousin’s house. Turning the console on involved metagames, such as blowing dust out of the cartridge to get the system to read it and quarreling over who got to ease into the game by playing first. I could never beat the game as a kid, and as I revisit it here, the focus is not on completing but on playing around

and through it, to consider gameplay with vegetativegrowth. How does vegetation behave, and what can it reveal about gameplay? The playing of games will be extended here from the human to machine learning. Machine learning operates with an implicit vegetative model of play, and here I will consider how it overlaps and contrasts with human play. When referring to human behavior, vegetative has certain connotations. Vegetating in front of a screen is a negative framing, reducing agency and mental activity, as if players effortlessly pass time. The second section explores the possibilities of vegetative experience, and how this comes into play in human play and the fun of digital games. Vegetative experience will extend here to negative sides of gaming in the form of addiction, and positive, as sensations of flow and immersion. In order to do this, I will draw from contemporary research of vegetative experience, to argue that aspects may be comparable to animal and human experience. Here I will uproot the understanding of intentional behavior as an attribute stemming mainly from centralized decisionmaking faculties. This also opens for a consideration of what kind of experience machine learning has. What does vegetative thought reveal of the fun of digital gaming, for both humans and game-playing software? The final section discusses the evolution of play, and how play influences the trajectory of development of organic and digital systems. Central here is the evolution of flowers, which will offer perspectives on the development of digital games. In the process, the structural understanding of vegetation and games will be allowed to crosspollinate, opening for potentially unexpected blossoming.

Super Mario Branches It would seem more intuitive to base an understanding of gaming on animals, or perhaps insects, than vegetation. Digital games invariably include some form of action, and plants seem immobile compared with animals. Vegetation has, according to philosopher Michael Marder, been “relegated to an impassive backdrop from the drama of animal life,” yet “the fixedness of plants is an impressionistic mistake, given their lateral and vertical extensions both above and below ground.”19 This is similar to their treatment in games, which gaming scholar Alenda Y. Chang terms “vegetable readymades” which are “simultaneously hyper-visible and invisible … designed to be seen and ignored.”20 The examination of animal behavior has a longer tradition than that of plants, which makes it appropriate to start here with a pioneer of animal behavior. In his ethological studies, Jacob von Uexkü ll showed how different animals, while inhabiting the same environments, pick up on cues according to the sensory apparatuses and survival needs of their species.21 The biologist separated the individual’s experience of what he termed their umwelt (world) from the objective conditions of their surroundings. Von Uexkü ll’s formulation of species-specific experiential worlds did not extend beyond animals, as plants were still considered passive backdrops for animal activity. Does vegetation have its own worlds, and what are these worlds like? Vegetation has at least a minimal distinction between themselves and their surroundings, formed by identifying molecules inside and outside cell walls.22 Instead of movement in the animal sense of shifting the position of their limbs and bodies, plants move by growing. Their growth is direction-dependent, with gravitropism as the vegetative response to gravity, which allows vegetation to discern between up and down. Marder proposes these as first steps toward imposing a grid of meaning onto surroundings, turning it into a habitat.23 Plants extend bodies through space, in the form of foliage and stems growing toward sunlight, and roots growing toward nutrients and water. Marder renders their bodily organization through growth as “tending toward the abolition of distance.”24 Vegetation finds ways of directing toward relevant factors for survival, such as climate variations, gradients of humidity, and nutrient

concentrations. As vegetation changes paths upon detecting nutrients, this is characterized as a form of foraging.25 Vegetation is thereby not passive, but actively orients and selects what to interact with. Digital games simulate surroundings, where actions take place. Super Mario is a “two-dimensional game,” in which the game world simulates a flat plane, which is traversed along the horizontal x-axis and the vertical y-axis. At the beginning of World 1-1, Mario is placed at ground level, pitted against a backdrop of blue sky, clouds, shrubs, and hills. The self in digital games emerges from the connection between a human being moving to generate output and a controller system receiving this as input, which is then processed by a computer and output as display.26 The avatar becomes a visual cue connecting these different components, with game production using animation to make the background recede from attention, leaving what is interactable clearly identifiable. Because the controls are so intuitive to grasp and perform, and the learning curve is low, it is easy to miss how playing this game, as any other, requires learning the controlling interface in order to navigate the character in its surroundings. During the very first attempt at playing Super Mario, the player discovers directions and gravity. The diagonal pad of the game controller is split into four, establishing a focus on directional movement, and by Mario’s position at the far left of the screen, the open field to his right encourages movement in this direction. Mario can walk on visible ground but will fall into oblivion if placed above a pit. Pressing “a” causes Mario to leap into the air, allowing the player to avoid pitfalls. The importance of jumping is testified by how the character was initially simply called Jumpman.27 While walking brings no sound, jumping produces a synthetic, springing “bloing.” This unusual audio cue excites the player to repeat the action. The emphasis on jumping is a particular navigational form, uncoupled from the regular human traversal, and the extent of Mario’s abilities is also unique. In the early arcade games by Nintendo, Jumpman’s leaps were limited, comparable to regular humans. Becoming the character known as Mario entailed a shift from realistic to unique jump physics. In Super Mario, the avatar is able to jump forward and upward several times his own size, the direction of leaps is changeable mid-air, and the character can fall from great heights without taking damage.28 In the game, jumping is an oppositional force whose height and length is determined by how long

the button is pressed and the speed of character movement, with running speed producing greater leaps than walking or stand-still jumps.29 Distinguishing what might be interacted with during play is an obvious part of figuring out how this system works. The player identifies the obstacles, safe zones, and possibilities for interaction, which unfold against the negligible backdrop. The affordances of the game are signaled through audiovisual cues. Some objects merely act as the platforming surface upon which Mario runs and jumps. Others affect and can be affected by Mario, such as non-player characters like the goombas and koopa troopas. The goomba is introduced as the very first obstacle of the game, offering a range of possibilities: Mario can jump over it, run into, and jump onto it. Both the goomba and the koopa have rounded designs, signaling that they can be jumped on, with the goomba flattening upon impact and being eliminated, while the koopa recedes into its shell and is sent sliding. The shell may hit other obstacles, including enemies and blocks, where the latter may break to reveal new passageways and hidden resources. The shell may also hit unbreakable walls, hurling back toward and potentially harming the avatar. Mario’s movement is a form of growth through levels. The character, in moving through surroundings, functions as the tip of an invisible trajectory of stalk growth and branching. Visual representations of the branching growth of Mario are found in Super Mario Maker (2015; 2019), where the path taken through levels is displayed in the level creation mode (see Fig. 3.1). Like plants growing toward light, Mario stretches through levels, abolishing the distance to the flag goalpost at the end of each level, and the princess in the castle at the end of each world. A sense of urgency is produced by a timer, with music speeding up when little time is left.

Fig. 3.1 A screenshot from Nintendo’s Super Mario Maker 2 (2019), showing a trail of Mario’s movements

Returning to vegetative growth, plants retain a memory of their surroundings, in the form of a “material inscription on the body of the plant and contributes to the register of physical stimuli (touch, exposure to light or darkness, etc.).”30 With Nietzsche, Marder therefore goes on to describe growth as a form of memory, which is “imageless and nonrepresentational.”31 There is some degree of latency in this materially inscribed memory, as plants are indicated to have the capacity to retrieve recollections of stimuli even when it is no longer present. The prime example of this is the plant that prompted Nietzsche’s reflections, the sensitive mimosa, which retracts leaves in response to touch or the absence of light. Contemporary research indicates retention to be a general capacity. Marder exemplifies with flax depleting calcium from cells in response to stress, which continues for over a week after the stress is initiated. Another example is how barley will unroll leaves in response to red light exposure as long as they contain calcium, but when the element is removed and added some hours later the same behavior will be instigated without red light being introduced. Perhaps the most striking example of plant memory comes from the research of Monica Gagliano, who dropped sensitive mimosa from great heights, prompting

leaf shutting. Over time the response changed—they no longer reacted to the stimulus, which can be taken to indicate that they learned that falling was harmless.32 In Super Mario, resources are collected (coins, flowers, mushrooms, stars) and stored by the game system in the form of points, coins, and extra lives. In addition, the game echoes the capacity of vegetation for radical transformation. Philosopher Emanuele Coccia points out how the vegetative body “never ceases to develop and grow, to construct new organs and new parts of their own body (leaves, flowers, parts of the trunk, etc.), which they previously lacked or had gotten rid of”, and this makes the body of a plant “a morphogenetic industry that knows no interruption.”33 Mario’s morphogenesis is induced by picking up certain items, causing altered appearances and novel interactions. The mushroom doubles Mario’s size, becoming capable of sustaining more than a single hit from an enemy without dying, and jumping up into certain bricks will now break them. Fire flowers let Mario shoot fire projectiles, taking out enemies from a distance. The star turns Mario temporarily invincible, letting him run unharmed (although still dying when falling into pits). With the exception of stars (which are maintained for a limited period of time), the changes are stored until hazards eliminate them. Mario’s death can be followed immediately by his rebirth. Andi Mcclure ties the potential for repeated and parallel play to the manyworlds interpretation of quantum physics, writing that “[a]t each moment of the playthrough there’s a lot of different things Mario could have done, and almost all of them lead to horrible death.”34 Rather than quantum physics, Mario’s death and extra lives are part of the vegetative tendencies of games. Each level is a new branch, and at each point Mario will have a set number of times to retry growing through it. Failing to respond to obstacles leads to the loss of accumulated lives, and if you lose too many the growth cannot restart anew from the branching point, but must start from the very beginning. The death of non-player characters in Mario can be tied to plant growth as well. Plants may (in general) be rooted, but they are not defenseless. Vegetation perceives and defends, as well as taking evasive actions against competing roots and aiming to outgrow opposition in order to avoid shade.35 Vegetation acts upon surroundings, controlling

the microbial and fungal fauna of roots. Detecting the extent to which leaf damage is of danger, some plants may retaliate against over-grassing animals, for instance by regulating the concentration of poisons and sending biochemical cues to neighbors to do the same. If threatened by herbivore insects, vegetation may even cue insect predators.36 For the player, the goombas in Super Mario are stomped and then disappear. Entities of the game, either player-controlled or otherwise, will nevertheless respawn upon replay of a level. Goombas are thereby not actually killed, but rather have their own processes of growth, which become thwarted in order for the growth patterns of Mario to unfold. The interaction between Mario and goombas is one where both oppose each other and try to prevent the other from further growth (although they have the same start position and actions each time the level begins anew). Long-term survival in Mario requires curiosity. As Mario grows through the level, he has the capacity to engage in foraging behavior, to gain extra lives. Growing through the level, resources become increasingly scarce and hard to discover and access. Staying alive is rewarded with new possibilities of growth, interaction, and engaging with the problems posed by the Mushroom Kingdom. Managing to grow all the way to the end of the game is comparable to reaching the finitude of a life cycle for a plant. Vegetative growth is predicated on seed sprouting and climate conditions, while starting a new game after “game over” or successfully beating the game is predicated on player willingness. It may be tempting to consider the process of vegetative growth and play of videogames as a form of instinctual automatism. Super Mario is, after all, a game of progressing through routes in fixed sets of levels and worlds, with set goals and collectibles. Is the player not simply, through trial and error, reverse engineering the programming, to uncover the intended and inevitable route? Likewise, what kind of intentionality characterizes vegetation growth? Consider firstly the intentionality of simple animals, who exercise intention through directing themselves with muscle movement. Darwin noted in a study of earthworms that they were not driven simply by impulse, as the same stimulus could provoke a variety of effects.37 As philosopher Brian Massumi writes, animals respond not to “the generality of the situation, but to its

singularity.”38 If animals responded automatically to their surroundings, they would be unequipped to meet shifting requirements; thus, animals vary their actions, and even adaptively modify surroundings. Through processes of growth, vegetation evaluates available resources and makes decisions on which directions to take and how to avoid obstacles. As vegetation responds to environments, their growth has been described by researchers as a form of learning.39 This learning, as the singular and improvisatory nature of animals, is one of play. An impression of vegetative play is produced by speeding up what for human senses appear as unmoving to a tempo more readily appreciable. Time-lapse videos reveal vegetative growth as circular dances, as plants probe surroundings for possibilities. Play is not fundamentally human or animal, but a more general tendency of organisms to form and engage with their worlds. What emerges from playing a videogame is specific to each run of the game. From the start, the player learns to respond to what occurs, such as jumping on a goomba without prior instructions of how and why to do anything, and what the potential consequences of actions could be. Through player activation and choices, the player impacts how even the most scripted routines of the game unfold. The player is met with a branching set of choices from their actions, from the different ways of interacting with koopas to maintaining or losing abilities offered by mushrooms or fire flowers at different points in playthroughs. Responding to changes and adapting, no two playthroughs are ever entirely the same, as players explore, in the formulation of Boluk and Lemieux, “enormous (but finite) set of possible playthroughs emerging from those repetitive, procedural, and discrete elements that drive computational media.”40 Neither plant nor player is simply involved in an instinctive reverse engineering of the game’s code or the plant’s genetic material. Playful survival requires presence and active participation. For the remainder of this section, I turn to another form of nonhuman play: machine learning. The notion of play as a process of vegetative growth has been an important factor in its development. Games have been used for machine learning, likely because they are highly formalized systems of interaction and decision-making with clear states of win and loss, which thereby provide efficient measures for computational capacity to perform and enhance the fulfillment of tasks.

Machine learning has been used in order to generate programs that randomly perform moves within a rule set. It has also produced programs which succeed in the non-ambiguous category of playing well, that is, developing and improving the skills required to win. Beginning in the 1950s, the field of machine learning focused on board games.41 From the 1980s and onward, the field has increasingly attempted to master digital games, which provide different and often increased challenges for machine learning. The vegetative understanding of play is evident in how machine learning determines the complexity of games by their branching factors. This is the number of actions that can be taken at points of decisionmaking. Super Mario has a branching factor of 32 (eight D-pad directions times two buttons (though not all combinations yield differences in play). In comparison, chess has an average branching factor of 35, while Go has 400 for the first move, which decreases during play. Other aspects make digital games tougher for algorithms, such as more continuous game states and often an immense increase in the amount of input, with a lack of immediate feedback on whether any single input was good or bad. Videogames contain more hidden information with less overview over consequences. As noted by Georgios Yannakakis and Julian Togelius (2017) in their textbook on artificial intelligence and games, even in Super Mario, “most randomly generated action sequences would not see Mario escaping the original screen, but basically pacing back and forth until time runs out.”42 The branching factor of machine learning makes such processes another test case for understanding the play of digital games as a vegetative process. Algorithms follow a set of possibilities of vegetative growth somewhat different from human play. Machine learning entails searching through possible actions in a game, finding solutions to the problems the game poses, and improving upon these solutions through iteration. The pathfinding is generally characterized as a search tree, which starts from a root and grows into different branches as it searches the possibilities and consequences of actions. One big difference in how tree search algorithms approach games, compared to human players, is the use of “forward model.” Tree searches make predictions, based on the present state, independently of their past. This allows the search tree software to play the game as a simulation of anticipated consequences of possible actions, before actually making any decisions. Such simulation

runs thousands to hundreds of thousands of times faster than real playtime.43 Rather than playing in the form of responding to and attempting to overcome obstacles, the algorithm is playing by planning and executing using high-speed predictions. To the human observer its actions seem comparable to human play, yet it results from executing multiple possibilities at a micro-temporal scale. While vegetative growth is immensely slow compared to human movement, machine learning moves too fast for our sense to perceive. Levels in Super Mario are (mostly) straightforward, local information (everything on current screen) is known, and the obstacles move predictably. Tree search algorithms therefore play Mario quite well. The algorithm moves Mario forward, giving the impression of playing unreasonably well. When moved by an algorithm, Mario might never perform some of the common things that humans make him do, including pausing to consider what to do in the moment, or reevaluating decisions. Tree search algorithms instead push forward relentlessly. Videos of the algorithm MarI/O playing the game show how well-tuned play of one level may nevertheless be followed by useless performance. Having beaten the first four levels, the algorithm got stuck at level 2.1 for two weeks straight.44 The algorithm would keep jumping into the same pit, over and over again, with inhuman abandon and patience. The relentless drive forward also makes it difficult for algorithms to develop strategies for exploring, and remembering off-screen parts of the level. While the first Mario level is easily beatable by such algorithms, later levels (as well as game sequels) may involve nested challenges, such as collectibles required to progress, or maze-like structures with backtracking.45 There are incentives for programming algorithms that are more human-like in their play. For game development, this is used for playtesting as well as for training human players. Simulated play-testing allows game designers to test how humans may approach the game, involving characteristics such as curiosity as well as misjudgments of jumps.46 In New Super Mario Bros. (2006), the game may take over and show how to overcome obstacles if the player fails too many times. Human-like play also emerges from machines learning through watching human play.47

The non-human characteristics of machine play may hold certain advantages even for humans. It leads to the discovery of possibilities ranging from the hard to consider to the highly unlikely that human players would come up with. Google’s DeepMind algorithms AlphaGo and AlphaGo Zero have beaten high-ranking human players of Go, who describe the play style as alien.48 Some are trying to figure out whether aspects of the bewildering and unpredictable style can be adopted by humans. In January 2019, AlphaStar won matches against professional players of the complex digital real-time strategy game StarCraft. One of the players again remarked how the algorithm “takes well-known strategies and turns them on their head,” and in the process “demonstrates strategies I hadn’t thought of before, which means that there may still be new ways of playing the game that we haven’t fully explored yet.”49

Uprooting Cognition Whether by stretching toward the sun, prioritizing between different nutrients, or adapting to climate conditions and hazards, vegetation makes decisions. How do organisms that seem to lack the consciousness to provide them with the capacity for decision-making nevertheless manage to decide which paths to take? A way of approaching the problem would be to locate the source of its decision-making in some central system, whether more or less comparable to that of animals and humans. In Socrates’ dialogue with Timaeus, humans are conceptualized as upside-down plants, with our heads as our rooting, stretching into the plane of ideas above us.50 Contemporary research to some extent follows this philosophical account, extensively connecting the intentionality of plants with their roots. Plants sense with their roots, investigating and forming an understanding of their world, determining growth direction. If the root cap is cut off, roots no longer grow toward water. Roots are, however, not the root of plants—in the metaphoric sense, meaning the source of their structure and behavior. Vegetation survived rootless for millions of years.51 The first roots could have functioned as embellishments, as modifications of leafless and rhizomatic branching. Even today, there are examples of vegetation getting by without being planted into earth by roots. Examples include algae, moss, and tillandsia, which are equipped with rhizoids that to varying degrees anchor them down, while nutrients are drawn into their bodies. Rather than central systems for decision-making, roots simultaneously tie down and allow greater sizes (through increased symbiotic possibilities) of what is otherwise more distributed growth forms. The distinction between knowing that and knowing how offers an alternative solution to the apparent conundrum of vegetative, noncentralized decision-making. 52Knowledge of something entails the use of concepts and representations, and has traditionally been considered vital for the capacity of decision and action. Knowing how to do something can be, and quite often is, averse to conceptualizing. The knowing how of bodies and organisms includes growth, nourishment, cellular organization, decay, and locomotion. Vegetative decision-making faculty does not need to be ascribed to a central location, as it is distributed across its different parts in processes of growth.

A perspective on the distributed growth of vegetation is offered by Coccia, who divides plants into two bodies growing as one. The foliaged stem grows through air toward light, and is “made of visibility and of an intense interspecific interaction with other plants and with other animals of all kinds,” while the other, its roots, is “secret, esoteric, hidden” and “pushes the plant in a direction exactly opposite that of all the efforts above the surface.”53 It is of course no exactitude of mirroring between the two bodies, as root growth patterns are relatively independent of the light-absorbing above-ground foliage. Both foliage and roots have their own improvisatory paths, probing for potentials (nutrients, light, kin) and problems (other plants, herbivores, parasites). The notion of body doubling also offers potential for understanding games. These are also doubled, made up on one side of the expressive audiovisual interactivity, and the (for players) hidden level of game operations which anticipate and respond to the player activities. In games, the hidden stretches into operations, and the expressive out to experience. As with vegetation, there is a certain tendency to privilege the hidden operations of games, and consider the audiovisual interactivity as by-products. Rules in digital games are non-negotiable, and one could therefore think that the defining trait of a digital game is the computer-enforced rules. But rules and operations are no more the origin of games than roots are of plants. French philosopher Roger Caillois makes a useful distinction here, between games characterized by rule-bound and formalized systems, which he terms ludus, and the openended, impulsive, and exuberant forms of play, termed paidia.54 Caillois points out that games originate from the more open-ended paidia, which through development can become formalized into regulated systems of ludic competition. From the improvisatory open-ended play and its multitude of possibilities comes the formation of games, with their firm rooting in procedures, which act as hidden, yet vital, parts of games once they become established. While any individual digital game depends on its operations, the origin of games is not their programming, but rather in open-ended forms of play. The doubling also sheds light on aspects of the relation between play and experience. As Huizinga reminds, play is a production of boundaries, of transient order, with its own rules distinct from ordinary life.55 The production of such transient order shares similarities with the creation

of the individual and its world, in which organisms demarcate from surroundings and form their own rules. This again functions by doubling, as the organism divides into one side of outward expressivity and one of concealed operations. Huizinga’s formulation on play is indicative of this, as he writes that in play “we are different and do things differently.”56 The individual world is perhaps played before it is known; or rather, it is play that generates the possibility of the individual and of thought. The playful exploration of form, with multitudes of patterns as well as evolutionary developments, was undertaken without rooting, in the sense of firmament into centralized decision-making apparatus. The individual forms as a limitation, a centralization, or rooting of more open-ended flows. Marder writes: “At the core of the subject, who proclaims ‘I think’, lies the subject-less vegetal it thinks, at once shoring and destabilizing the thinking of this I.”57 Studies on rhizomes reveal the vegetative capacity to navigate mazes, which indicates that they form models of their environment, as non-representational mappings of affordances.58 Already prior to the emergence of animal cognition, organisms thus understand their surroundings by forming models of their world. For humans, this embedded and vegetative it thinks comprises bodily growth as well as motility and immunity. The vegetative it thinks is described by neurologists as systems of more, rather than less, complexity than the conscious processes of the I think. The it thinks mediates the complexity of the world for the I think: A considerable amount of evidence indicates that as compared with consciously controlled cognition, the non-conscious information-acquisition processes are incomparably faster and structurally more sophisticated. They allow for the development of procedural knowledge that is “unknown” to conscious awareness not merely because it has been encoded (and entered the memory system) through channels that are independent from consciousness. This knowledge is fundamentally inaccessible to the consciousness because it involves a more advanced and structurally more complex organization than could be handled by consciously controlled thinking.59 Games can be played from extrinsic and intrinsic factors of motivation—the former being point systems and potential for rewards,

while the latter how it offers the experience of being in charge and influencing outcomes as well as testing competence.60 The fun of games exists in the interplay it offers between vegetative and conscious thought. The I think becomes important as the feedback system of games lets the player know that not just anyone but they themselves are in charge and capable of achieving victory in the game. Yet, they take charge precisely by giving themselves over to the it thinks of the body and of the game system. Embracing the vegetative state of gaming requires interacting with the game in a non-trivial way. Learning to play digital games involves stilling and overcoming some basic bodily responses, while performing others, through an interplay of conscious and non-conscious cognitive operations. Within the ordered form of interactions produced by games, players receive immediate feedback on their interactions: Mario jumps over an obstacle precisely at the moment the player pushes the button assigned to make Mario jump. Playing the game involves a sensation of becoming Mario: The obstacle you are faced with is not I need to push this button to make Mario jump over this hole, but simply, I need to jump over this hole. The player learns which actions have effects, which buttons to press, as well as giving oneself over to the game. The self that jumps over the whole is at once oneself and non-self, the I think that has decided to let the it thinks take charge and interconnect with the avatar and the game system. The player learns to destabilize their I think and re-open routines of bodily excursions. The it thinks is at work in connecting sensory apparatus and muscle memory to the game. With bodily know-how, play can become more agile and responsive than with conscious thought. The fun of digital games comes from allowing the I think to recede into the active orientation of sensory apparatus and muscle memory where the who and what is less pronounced than how, when, and where. This process, rather than being in “control,” is one in which the player learns to share agency with the game system. This is the enjoyment of being to some degree made sessile, to become embedded with the technological apparatus and the environment of the game, and to vegetate, grow, metamorphose, and decay in the expressive, simulated landscape. It is a way of engaging with the systems of the game, investing effort into its material affordances and restrictions.

The vegetative is not simply passive reception as opposed to active participation, but an interplay between the active and the passive. This notion thus captures some of the mystic experience of gaming, such as how long spans of consciously striving toward overcoming something can be relieved by unexpected bursts of success, or how players might be unable to conceptually account for what is happening or why a certain move was performed beyond being the right one for that moment. Rather than luck or talent, such instances are the result of vegetative absorbing and learning how. The vegetative it thinks is central for states of flow and addiction. In research on flow, the appeal of games is connected to their ability to produce states of immersion, forming a balance between skill demands and loss of self-awareness.61 Similar states are also influential for the less socially desirable form of gaming addiction, where immersion into flow states comes to be considered—by the player or others—as compulsive and beyond conscious judgment. The vegetative encapsulates both experiences of flow and the possibility of addiction. Whereas flow positively privileges the moment, addiction negatively frames long-term engagement with games. Vegetative growth combines performance (with its moment-to-moment flow) with long time spans where you not only lose yourself, but also gain attunement to the game system through play. The satisfaction of playing a game is, as noted at the beginning of the chapter, predicated upon the possibility of failure. Falling into the same pit, over and over again, could be due to pressing the jump milliseconds too late or too lightly or too hard, and cause frustration. As the game progresses, success requires greater excursions of motility, and thereby increases frustration, as unrelenting reminders of insufficient abilities. Over time and practice this frustration gives way to creativity and flexibility, and ultimately the immense satisfaction in mastery. Through exercises of will and skill, the player is taking charge of the situation. Playing Super Mario provides the opportunity for an experience of being the one capable of beating the first level, then the first world, and gradually inching toward the exuberant excess required to beat the game. I have argued that playful inventiveness is not only human or animal but vegetative. Perhaps, it fundamentally results from pressures for survival in all kinds of organisms. Algorithmic play that invests into

overcoming unnecessary obstacles indicates that fun is perhaps not even essentially organic. Luciana Parisi and Beatrice Fazi suggest that machine fun is to be understood “in terms of the final purpose of the computational process, which is to say, by its functionalist imperative to complete a task.”62 They consider how, in computing, fun is a process in which “data are organized and unified; when this unity is achieved, the actual occasion is ‘satisfied’ because it has fulfilled its scope by becoming complete.”63 The analysis of playing Super Mario, for both humans and algorithms, indicates that fun is not simply the end state, but also the process of getting there. This is the fun pushing toward engaging, understanding, and discovering. Using end goals as motivation algorithms works best to achieve deterministic behavior. It becomes much harder to achieve skillful play with such methods in games as Super Mario 64 (1996). In this game the goals and sub-goals are nested, varied, and often conveyed rather vaguely. The feedback on correct actions is also more indirect than previous games in the series. As noted in the previous section, creating algorithms that will beat single levels is much simpler than making ones capable of exploring and searching for different collectibles throughout game worlds. Equipping algorithms with some form of intrinsic motivation system seems to be a way of priming them for the joyful frustration of pressing buttons to perform actions, moving through space, picking up collectibles, and overcoming obstacles—not only to survive, but to do so with creative excess.64 This is a step toward algorithms that not only play well on single levels or specific games, but play any game well. Perhaps rather than overcoming obstacles, processes of play aim toward maintaining obstacles, to always keep something difficult enough to avoid reaching the fulfillment of success. How can obstacles be maintained as engaging? The answer to this is found through considering how players keep playing, even after having finished and mastered games. One such way is to involve not only the intrinsic motivations of play, but also social motivational factors.65 As Boluk and Lemieux remind, in spite of individual experience of Super Mario as a single-player game, an unfathomable number of people have played it.66 At any given moment there might be multitudes of players trying to succeed, failing, frustratingly, or managing to execute something skillfully. Social play—

locally or remotely and taking turns, or even sharing controllers to play simultaneously—produces incentives not simply to be anyone capable of playing a game, but to be the particular someone in a social group who stands out. Fun thus becomes linked with status in social circles where accomplishment is met with appreciation and admiration. The intensity of difficulty provides the frustrating fun of experiencing yourself as not only the one causing something to occur, but being the one to make something remarkable occur. Becoming someone great turns into a process of being better than others, which produces propensity toward competition. Competition is thus not necessarily dominating behavior; as Huizinga reminds us, the competitive drive “is not in the first place a desire for power or a will to dominate,” but rather forms from a “desire to excel others, to be the first and to be honoured for that.”67 Playful prowess also gives rise to spectatorship, the drive to watch someone more apt than oneself perform feats, both to potentially learn from them or simply to enjoy their displays of skill. Super Mario can pit players against each other taking turns (or in later games competing simultaneously) attempting to get the highest score, or the quickest playthrough. The latter form is referred to as speedrunning. Those who are particularly skilled can make a name for themselves as virtuoso players. For these expert players, speedruns offer, according to Boluk and Lemieux, “metagames that encourage the discovery and manipulation of mechanical exploits,” which are “recombinatory rules operating outside both the experience of any one player and even the expectations of the original programmers.”68 Speedrunners play the game in a particular way, unlike and often even unacceptable to regular players. They probe the game, attempting to uncover critical exploits to improve the time to beat the game. Finding the fastest way becomes a process of streamlining, but also of uncovering novelty. Some strategies may at first be considered to require such precision that they are believed impossible to perform consistently enough to be useful for runs. Some players will invariably refuse to acknowledge the impossibility, and may repeatedly attempt and ultimately master them. While the individual speedrun may be over in astonishingly short bursts of hours, minutes, and seconds, being able to execute the actions will require weeks, months, and years of practice and perfection. As of early 2022, the world record for Super Mario is four minutes, and 54.881

seconds. It is considered close to flawless, as the optimal run by a computer is only 0.62 seconds faster.69 Even though a perfect run of Super Mario could possibly be discovered and performed, there are always more obstacles to overcome. Self-imposed limitations include beating the game with the lowest possible score; flipping the screen upside down; beating two games simultaneously with single-controller input; using non-standard controllers not intended for the game (which might include racing wheels, voice commands, floor pads, guitar, and drum controllers); as well as blindfolded (with fire flowers projectiles acting as echolocators to judge distance).70 Regular speedruns are themselves played at the limits of the visual sense, testing the limits of the game system, and the limits of the I think, turning oneself machinic, becoming vegetative. If games and non-standard input are insufficient or unintriguing obstacles, there is also Kaizo Mario World, termed Asshole Mario. This extremely challenging game was made by hacking Super Mario World (1990).71 Asshole Mario offers not simply challenge, but pits the player into highly elaborate traps. The only way to avoid them is to deploy precise solutions of pinpoint, split-second, and pixel-perfect accuracy, requiring advanced play techniques, which may include game glitches. Playing Kaizo, one must learn to avoid immediate death, followed by an understanding of how any progress could be achieved, and then the frustration over the seeming impossibility of performing the correct sequence of actions with sufficient speed and precision. Kaizo thereby follows a similar trajectory to regular Super Mario games, as the player discovers how growth is possible, then conducts it, and finally, some are driven to excessively improve. As a testament to the non-conscious aspects of masterly play, Kaizo-speedrunner dram55 performed a record run while answering questions posed by viewers of his video stream, all the while also listening to and commenting the events of a TV show running on a separate screen.72 With the release of Super Mario Maker, players without hacker knowledge could create their own Mario levels. Some player-producers enthusiastically embrace the nearly unplayable. To make sure levels remain actually beatable, Nintendo will not let people share creations with others until they have beaten the level themselves. A player nicknamed Val spent sixty hours performing over thirty thousand

attempts at beating his own level.73 Finally succeeding, Val cried with joy, having proven to himself and the viewers of his Twitch live stream that he could overcome his perfectly produced superfluous obstacles. Only 143 out of over 2 million players attempting it have managed to clear his level, but a couple of these have gone from merely beating it to improving on the time Val took to do so.74 Playful plants and gaming algorithms indicate that instead of individual cognition as a prerequisite for fun, it could be the other way around, with fun being central for giving rise to thought. Billions of players invest immense amounts of time and energy into the simulated game worlds offered by contemporary computation, manipulating controllers and avatars to perform non-trivial challenges. This interactivity is played before it is known, thumbing buttons to make Mario run around and jump. Testing forms relevance and boundaries, discovering possibilities for what the game system is capable of, and what the player’s capacities are, pushing them from merely overcoming adversity toward overdoing and increasing the difficulty. Plants, algorithms, and human players show that neither the roots nor the goals of games are fundamental for play. While overcoming obstacles may seem like a central aspect, once overcome the game is simply over. Play is therefore not the actual overcoming of obstacles, but the attempting to overcome, and thereby requires success to be postponed through introducing evermore difficult obstacles. In this sense, the first testing lines of growth constitute all there is to play, but the more one engages in vegetative thought, the more elaborate the obstacles needed to avoid reaching the endpoint. The worst kind of game over is the final screen saying “Thank you Mario! Your quest is over,” but the blow is softened by the follow-up: “We present you a new quest.” To remain playing beyond completion, traits need to be exaggerated, as players stretch toward the impossible, to stay engaged and discover anew the qualities of the system.

Flowering Fun I have so far discussed the ways in which play produces boundaries, forms individuals, and produces increasingly challenging obstacles. What about the evolution of play? Huizinga’s theory of play frames the activity as a structuring force that pushes toward novelty, as well as ordering and embellishing existing forms. With ethnographer Leo Frobenius, Huizinga renders civilization as “a ‘play’ emerging out of natural ‘being.’”75 Could this remark be generalized to examine the evolutionary consequences of play? Nietzsche offers a perspective which connects evolution to play. The philosopher found evolution theory too negatively formulated, as it placed organisms at the mercy of their surroundings. Reorienting from struggle, for existence through avoidance of death, Nietzsche argued instead for resourcefulness: “[T]he overall aspect of life is not a state of need and hunger, but instead, wealth, bounty, even absurd squandering.”76 Play is not a respite from survival, but the process through which organisms survive. This is done through equipping organisms with a propensity not only for responding to stimuli, but for anticipating, and providing more than what environmental pressure enforces. The process of play generates not just the basic means of selfsufficient patterns, but creativity as well. As formulated by Massumi: “Given the choice between conformity to the limitative demands of adaptation and death, it invents a third way: the excess invention.”77 Writing with Olga Goriunova, Fuller discusses the potent morphology of vegetation as rendered in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s metaphysics and in contemporary biology: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s account of the morphology of plants presents us with a metaphysics in which the leaf is the primary organ or urphenomena of the underlying shapemaking properties of the plant. Each component of the plant is but an articulation, in relation to the environment, of this underlying protean leaf. Contemporary science has perhaps shifted the scale of such a state of pluripotency and capacity of variation to that of the undifferentiated cell. The progressive powers of differentiation within a plant or across a species constitute the unfolding of the dynamic vegetal form in growth. Goethe used the

term ‘morphology’ in order to mark the study of the changes and of the capacity to change, emphasizing dynamic rather than static (Linnean) taxonomy.78 The vegetative is a dynamic morphology, a variation of forms. Vegetative evolution leads to a wide range of growth morphologies responding to different surroundings. Leaves may be covered with short fibrous hairs, or they could stretch and stiffen and take the place of leaves. In an environment plentiful of liquid, vegetation will require mechanisms preventing it from drowning; in environments plentiful of sun, it will require mechanisms preventing it from drying out. Thus, water might be stored as vegetation swells their leaves into thick juicy bulbs, or be passed through quickly. Leaf pigments may darken to absorb more light, and lighten to protect from burning in intense sun. Vegetation could lose its capacity for photosynthesizing completely, turning frail white or pink. In evolutionary theory, play is more readily connected to sexual than natural selection. Darwin distinguishes it as an adaptive pressure, stating that it “depends, not on the struggle for existence in relation to other organic beings or to external conditions, but on a struggle between the individuals of one sex, generally the males, for the possession of the other sex. The result is not death to the unsuccessful competitor, but few or no offspring.”79 While natural selection leads to speciation, sexual selection mainly differentiates between sexes and within each sex according to traits that are attractive to the opposite sex. In order to attract one needs to stand out, and standing out pushes sexually reproductive organisms to not simply meet sufficient standards, but to generate creative surplus. Sexual selection pushes organisms to play, to generate elaborate forms of display or patterns of movement that may attract and seduce. Starting from the example of birds rather than vegetation, their bodies may be adorned with patterns, such as peacock plumage, or external forms, such as bowerbirds building elaborate colored nests, the dance rituals of birds of paradise, or the elaborate songs of blackbirds.80 Huizinga notes how a bird in performance “steps out of common reality into a higher order,” generating something “more beautiful, or more sublime, or more dangerous.”81 In evolutionary theory, it remains undecided whether sexual selection is a process in its own right, or reducible to the impetus of

improved fitness in natural selection. Among the respondents to Darwin’s evolutionary theory, naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace proposed that mate preference could correlate to actual traits of vitality, and displays could indicate fitness.82 There are several fitness-inducing consequences of sexual selection, including the possibility of greater resilience to extinction.83 At the same time—as Darwin addressed—the features of adornment may render organisms more noticeable to predators and, as a consequence, less able to protect themselves. In the words of Grosz: “even if its plumage and adornment make the peacock more vulnerable to attack, the more magnificent its coloring, the more the attractiveness of the peacock to the peahen is enhanced. Although it is or may be disadvantaged in the stakes of natural survival, it is positively advantaged in the stakes of sexual selection.”84 The elaborate tail makes the individual an easier target for predators, and the ability to survive with such adornment could be a display of fitness. The influence of play is thus not necessarily opposed to requirements of survival. What becomes useful is not decided in the present, as Grosz points out, it could be “awaiting the invention of use from its current excess.”85 Sexual selection could produce traits with relatively little or even detrimental environmental survival value. Such traits can survive if they offer sexual selective advantage while not hindering the organism from reaching reproductive age. The playful development forming in sexual selection may become an important factor in the generation of new characteristics, later developing into adaptations with survival value. A particular example is the evolution of feathers. Prior to granting birds their capacity for flight, or even offering insulation, feathers are theorized to have had sexual selective advantages. Feathers could have been used in courtship displays, with sexual selection leading to feathers for insulation and aerodynamic function.86 Darwin did not consider how sexual selection effected vegetation development, probably due to difficulties in conceiving how plants could appreciate each other’s beauty. While plants may lack something comparable animal consciousness, they nevertheless seem to engage in activities that facilitate mate competition.87 The question becomes whether sexual selection forms intra-species or in co-evolution with pollinators. Whether the selection pressure is female plants or pollinating insects, plants in any case engage in male–male competition

for attraction. This generates feedback, where the male will be impacted, which will in turn also impact the selector. Evolution is steered in the direction of producing and differentiating what Darwin termed the contrivances of plants—flowers. These are vegetative reproductive systems, with four main organ types: sepals, petals, stamens, and carpals. Through the play of sexual selection, these become immensely varied, both in shape, color, types of symmetry, and leaf arrangements and in the production of extra floral organs, as well as the olfactory registers they produce. While plants do not display the exaggerated traits of animals, males commonly possess larger floral displays than females, which may indicate intra-species selection.88 With play as a pre-individual, pre-animal drive to embrace intensification of more-than-necessary obstacles, flowers become signals that vegetation does not simply survive, but has the capacity and drive toward something more. Deleuze writes that “[t]he plant … feels in this prehension the self-enjoyment of its own becoming.”89 Flowers are ways for plants to enjoy themselves, and be enjoyed by others, whether it is by other plants, pollinating insects, or human beings. Flowers are a result not just of growth, but of having fun growing. The explosion of sensorial attraction of vegetation in flowering produces, according to Coccia, “a conquest of the domain of appearance.”90 Flowering renders the world as visually and olfactorily attractive. Lacking mobility means that vegetation does not approach their surroundings, but rather draws their surroundings toward themselves. In the interspecies connection of flowers, where plants meet insects and animals (including humans), flowers may attract in a variety of ways, but all involve sensorial invitation. Coccia further describes flowering as a mechanism of self-estrangement. This can be appreciated by considering how the development of flowers is adapted for someone else. Flowers are the production of visual and olfactory form, undergone for other species, as the plants themselves seem to lack the sensory apparatus required to experience the pleasure of their own attractiveness. What might biological perspectives offer to the understanding of digital game development? Digital games connect populations of game developers to populations of players. Developers generate attraction and form the novelties of gameplay and visual spectacle. The interplay

between developers, gamers, and computational systems here explores the possibilities of game mechanics and visuals. This exploration eventually leads to the consolidation of games into styles or genres, with certain traits attached to them. From my analysis of Mario as vegetative growth what follows is a morphology (similar to the variation of leaf form detailed above) of a broad dynamic range of videogame forms (to be varied and mixed): Greater emphasis on collecting a wider variety of resources, with these resources distributed in a range from the entirely regular to the entirely random, with increased differentiation of the metamorphosis and the interactive possibilities with the environment and non-player characters (role-playing, survival, strategy, construction, and managing simulation) Completely streamlined to open-ended growth patterns in environments ranging from static to constantly changing (platformer, adventure, metroidvania, sand-box, rogue-like) Increased variety in ways to defend and defeat opposing growth, in proximity or across distance, indirectly or round-about, in real time or as discrete steps (turn-based, action, shooter, fighting, sports) Learning and adapting interactive elements, systems, or rule sets to achieve goals (puzzles, problem-solving) In addition to flowering, the visual attraction of vegetation incorporates mimicry—the resemblance of other organisms or nonorganic compounds. Commonly noted as part of vegetative defense systems, mimicry is used to keep others away or to remain unseen, as mistletoe parasites avoid being eaten by mimicking stingy nettles; passifloraceae grow leaves with spots resembling butterfly eggs to deter the laying of new eggs in their leaves; crop weeds mimic rice seedlings to avoid being weeded by humans.91 Mimicry might also draw others in, such as orchids forming shapes resembling insects in order to attract them for pollination. What is displayed to players of digital games is a form of mimicry. It can be cartoon-like or visually realistic, a choice predicated upon artistic vision, stylistic tropes, and technological hardware limitations, as well as business strategies and market analysis. The avatars and playing fields are adapted to human perception—either as highly stylized cartoon-like or attempting increasingly nuanced, picture-perfect mimicry. This draws

players in through providing familiarity. The players are also attracted to exaggerated features, to what Niko Tinbergen defined as supernatural stimuli.92 The visually realistic and human-like expressions contrast with the abstract system logic of the game. Because Mario has a pair of eyes, a nose, and a moustache, his cartoon-like human appearance hides how utterly alien his being is from us. Mario’s capabilities of actions have little overlap with those of humans, but he looks like a cartoon version of a person, so players are drawn toward him. Like insects drawn to their plant-mimicked form, digital game players want themselves imitated in avatars in fantastical worlds (regularly taking the form of historic and contemporary warfare, space odysseys, medieval folkloristic battling, and zombie apocalypses). Digital distribution platforms and the general access to complex tools for game development have ushered in an era of game production characterized by unparalleled ease and affordability. This has led to what is often referred to as “indie” games, and a revival of platform games, with developers rediscovering and renewing the possibilities of the format. It has also led to an oversaturated gaming market, making it more pertinent for game companies to attract potential players. Attention management techniques become important. This comes down to providing audiovisual, interactive, and world desirability, maintaining relationships with propagators, retaining desirable and purging undesirable elements of past forms, and differentiating into new and enticing flowering, as well as discovering ways of disseminating awareness of these forms. Game developers and game players develop by responding to obstacles, and in the process differentiate and complicate such obstacles. The developers engage in symbiotic interaction with other producers, as well as those releasing, marketing, and selling games, coming up with novel ways of attracting players. From the vegetative perspective, plants evolved insects and animals for pollination, fertilizing, hybridization, defense, and cultivation. Likewise, from software companies’ vantage point, users are evolved in their service. The players act as carriers of information about their products; their attention is maintained through cultivating fandom. This opens pathways for new products and outperforming rival companies. As insects extend the vegetative sexual reproductive system, gamers act as the extended reproductive systems of game companies.

Gaming companies lack the sensorial means for experiencing the enticing audiovisuality they produce. Instead, they employ conscious and sensorial parts of their company bodies, namely humans, in shaping something enticing for the populations of players. Organic plant pollination includes self-estrangement, as “the majority of hermaphroditic flowers develop a system of self-immunization to avoid self-fertilization, a defense against themselves that allows them to open up to the world more.”93 The central developer of Mario, Shigeru Miyamoto, has made a remark on behalf of Nintendo which similarly attests a desire for self-immunizing pollination: he tries not to hire gamers.94 Players turning into game developers and game developers as players is perhaps a diversion that the industry embraces more than the divergent protection lines of Miyamoto. Nintendo is a notoriously cautious company, for instance in defending property rights of their gaming icons. Yet, as Boluk and Molineux write, Mario exists as “an infinitely renewable resource whose potency lies not in scarcity, but in its multiplication and cross-pollination in numerous projects and media experiments. … The mutations, modulations, and manipulations that occur by placing these series in relation to each other only further activates Mario’s proliferation and brand power.”95 The impact of playful interactivity in digital computing extends from Mario games to the most mundane activities of computation, such as opening folders or typing text. Stroke the screen to wake the phone from its slumber; open a program with the pointer; the widespread dissemination of the personal computer originates at least partly from the childlike wonder in navigating GUIs, comparable to playing games. Computer responses generate a sense of control and individual agency. Enticing audiovisual displays attract repeated interaction. There is a certain wonder in computer interaction, which is usually forgotten as computing turns widespread and inevitably becomes part of our daily routines. Programs simulate aspects of leisure or even work, forming playgrounds as if out of nothing. Interacting with programs, you are not simply one of masses using a computer, but a playful participant engaged in specific activities of your own choosing and customizing. Co-authoring is built into interactivity, through selecting your own playstyle and obstacle type: cosmetic (for instance, changing the desktop background

or customizing sound cues), explorative (downloading and installing software), and creative (editing existing or writing pieces of software). Miyamoto considers game production itself as a form of problemsolving fun. The developer works within the limitations of the game system, yet strives to offer something unseen and improbably grandiose.96 As Mark Brown puts it in his popular game development YouTube channel: “Programming is basically the best puzzle-game in the world, because it is truly open-ended and it is wonderfully satisfying to dream up, jot down and iterate upon some totally unique solution to the overwhelmingly complex problem at hand.”97 Media theorist McKenzie Wark offers a more oppressive but equally appropriate take on the overlapping sensations of computing and gaming: “You are a gamer whether you like it or not, now that we all live in a gamespace that is everywhere and nowhere. As Microsoft says: Where do you want to go today? You can go anywhere you want in gamespace but never leave it.”98 Computer players interact in trivial passing, or become enmeshed into the gamespace, to understand the core operations of their doubled bodies, learning how to play particularly well or to edit, hack, or write their own programs. All the while the digital computer blossoms into new forms, flowering and mimicking to attract attention.

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dram551. 2015. Kaizo Mario any% Speedrun – 14:29, YouTube, January 01, https://​ youtu.​be/​Jv5Lpzzjf6s. Accessed 14 Jan 2020. Einfach nerdig. 2018. MarI/O – AI playing Super Mario Bros, Youtube, February 07: https://​youtu.​be/​I 6F3rRr8s28. Accessed 14 Jan 2020. Fuller, Matthew, and Olga Goriunova. 2019. Bleak Joys. Aesthetic Ecology and Impossibility. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. [Crossref] Gagliano, Monica, M. Renton, M. Depczynski, and S. Mancuso. 2014. Experience Teaches Plants to Learn Faster and Forget Slower in Environments Where it Matters. Oecologia 175: 1. [Crossref] Gagliano, Monica, Charles Abramson, and Martial Depczynski. 2018. Plants Learn and Remember: Let’s Get Used To It. Oecologia 186: 1. [Crossref] Gibson, James J. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2004. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely. Australia and New Zealand: Allen & Unwin. [Crossref] Hernandez, Patricia. 2016. Super Mario Bros., Beaten Blindfolded in Under 15 Minutes, Kotaku, February 03, https://​kotaku.​c om/​super-mario-bros-beaten-blindfolded-inunder-15-minut-1756830921. Accessed 14 Jan 2020. Jagoda, Patrick. 2020. Experimental Games: Critique, Play and Design in the Age of Gamification. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Crossref] Juul, Jesper. 2013. The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Kenrick, Paul, and Christine Strullu-Derrien. 2014. The Origin and Early Evolution of Roots. Plant physiology 166 (2): 1. [Crossref] Lewicki, Pawel, Thomas Hill, and Maria Czyzewska. 1992. Nonconscious Acquisition of Information. American Psychologist 47: 796–801. [Crossref] Lumley, Alyson J., Łukasz Michalczyk, James J.N. Kitson, Lewis G. Spurgin, Catriona A.

Morrison, Joanne L. Godwin, Matthew E. Dickinson, Oliver Y. Martin, Brent C. Emerson, Tracey Chapman, and Matthew J.G. Gage. 2015. Sexual Selection Protects Against Extinction. Nature 522: 1. [Crossref] Marder, Michael. 2012. Plant Intentionality and the Phenomenological Framework of Plant Intelligence. Plant Signaling & Behavior 1: 7. ———. 2013. Plant-Thinking. A Philosophy of Vegetal Life . New York: Colombia University Press. ———. 2014. The Philosopher's Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium. New York: Colombia University Press. [Crossref] ———. 2016. Grafts. Writings on Plants. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Massumi, Brian. 2014. What Animals Teach Us about Politics. Durham: Duke University Press. [Crossref] Michailidis, Lazaros, Emili Balaguer-Ballester, and Xun He. 2018. Flow and Immersion in Video Games: The Aftermath of a Conceptual Challenge. Frontiers in Psychology 9: 1. [Crossref] Moore, Jamie C., and John R. Pannell. 2011. Sexual Selection in Plants. Current Biology 1: 21. Pannell, John R. 2016. Mimicry in Plants. Current Biology 26 (17): 1. [Crossref] Parisi, Luciana, and M. Beatrice Fazi. 2014. Do Algorithms Have Fun? On Completion, Indeterminacy and Autonomy in Computation. In Fun and Software: Exploring Pleasure, Paradox and Pain in Computing, ed. Olga Goriunova. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic. Przybylski, Andrew K., Richard M. Ryan, and C. Scott Rigby. 2010. A Motivational Model of Video Game Engagement. Review of General Psychology 14: 1. [Crossref] Rouse, Richard. 2005. Game Design: Theory & Practice. Texas: Wordware Publishing. Sanabria, Natasha, Daphne Goring, Thorsten Nü rnberger, and Ian Dubery. 2008. Self/Nonself Perception and Recognition Mechanisms in Plants: A Comparison of SelfIncompatibility and Innate Immunity. New Phytologist 213: 1.

Scott Persons, W., and Phillip J. Currie. 2019. Feather Evolution Exemplifies Sexually Selected Bridges Across the Adaptive Landscape. Evolution 73: 9. Sharp, John. 2016. Dimensionality. In The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf and Bernard Perron. New York and London: Routledge. Snyder, Colin. 2013. The Palette of T. Takemoto and the Dark Art of Asshole Mario 3, Motherboard. Tech by Vice, February 12. https://​motherboard.​v ice.​c om/​en_​us/​article/​ nzzyzm/​the-palette-of-t-takemoto-and-the-dark-art-of-asshole-mario-3. Accessed 14 Jan 2020. Suits, Bernard. 2005. The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia. Peterborough, Canada: Broadview Press. Swink, Steve. 2009. Game Feel. A Game Designer’s Guide to Virtual Sensation. Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. Takemoto, T. 2007. Jisaku no Kaizō Mario (Super Mario World) o Yū jin ni Play Saseru, Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Tinbergen, Niko. 1951/1989. The Study of Instinct. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Trewavas, A. 2017. The Foundations of Plant Intelligence. Interface Focus 7: 1. [Crossref] Val JP. 2016. [60 hours] Super Mario Maker – Upload a Very Hard Level [32873 attempts], Youtube, March 01 https://​youtu.​be/​tcA66TUoxqs. Accessed 14 Jan 2020. Uexkü ll, Jakob Von. 1943/2010. A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with a Theory of Meaning. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Wark, McKenzie. 2007. Gamer Theory. Harvard: Harvard University Press. [Crossref] Weinberger, Matt. 2017. The Legendary Creator of ‘Super Mario’ Explains why he Tries not to Hire Gamers to Work at Nintendo, Business Insider, December 30. https://​www.​ businessinsider.​c om/​shigeru-miyamoto-hire-gamers-nintendo-2017-12?​r=​US&​I R=​T. Accessed 14 Jan 2020. White, Brock. 1998. The Life of Birds. UK: BBC. Yannakakis, Georgios N., and Julian Togelius. 2018. Artificial Intelligence and Games. New York: Springer. [Crossref]

マリオ. 2016. [Super Mario Maker] Tricky Mario: Val's Shellspace Speedrun in 37.660,

Youtube, 19.09.20, https://​www.​youtube.​c om/​watch?​v =​ibUbf3lRGqs. Accessed 14 Jan 2020.

Footnotes 1 Huizinga 1938/1980: 9.

  2 Pressing buttons causes actions to unfold, and through these actions the player engages with the game world. What games show is here less important than what emerges from interactions. As in other forms of games, the practical reality of interactions in digital games is non-negotiable: “No skepticism is possible where the rules of a game are concerned, for the principle underlying them is an unshakable truth,” Paul Valery, quoted in Huizinga 1938/1980: 12. This is an even firmer truth, as the rules are enforced by a computer than by some person acting as a referee.

  3 Suits 2005: 157.

  4 Bogost 2017: 66.

  5 Juul 2013: 43.

  6 Juul 2013:11. Some digital games task the player with simply navigating through hazardless landscapes. These are generally narrative-driven, and some players consider them boring, possibly because a lack of failure makes actions inconsequential. Regardless of a lack of challenge, they can still be defined as games, as no matter how simple, the spatial navigation imposes an obstacle for engaging with the narrative.

  7 Jagoda 2020.

  8 Bogost 2017: 114.

 

9 Sharp 2016: 97; See also Gibson 1979.

  10 Ibid.

  11 Boluk and Lemieux 2017: 3.

  12 Ibid: 8.

  13 Ibid: 75.

  14 Burghardt 2010: 340, 347.

  15 Jagoda 2020: 34.

  16 Online Etymology Dictionary.

  17 The platformer is a genre of games where the player controls a character that runs and jumps between platforms. Levels are “distinct areas,” which “may be constrained by geographical area (lava world versus ice world), by the amount of content that can be kept in memory at once, or by the amount of gameplay that ‘feels right’ before players are granted a short reprieve preceding the beginning of the next level” (Rouse 2005: 450). The game in discussion is divided into eight worlds, each containing four different levels.

  18 Boluk and Lemieux 2017: 173.

  19 Marder 2016: 72; 2012: 3.

  20 Chang 2017: 115.

  21 Von Uexkü ll 1943/2010: 117.

  22 Sanabria et al. 2008.

  23 Marder 2012: 3.

  24 Ibid 2013: 173.

  25 Ibid 2016: 45.

  26 See Swink 2009: 34.

  27 Swink 2009: 123.

  28 Ibid: 207.

  29 Ibid: 213.

  30 Marder 2013: 155.

  31 Ibid.

  32 Gagliano et al. 2014, 2018.

  33 Coccia 2019: 13.

  34 McClure in Boluk and Lemieux: 173.

  35 Sanabria et al. 2008; Trewavas 2017.

  36 Marder 2016: 58.

  37 Darwin 1859/1985: 64; Darwin 1881.

  38 Massumi 2014: 15; Bateson 1972.

  39 Trewavas 2017.

  40 Boluk and Lemieux 2017: 19.

  41 Christopher Strachey created a checkers-playing algorithm in 1951; Alan Turing proposed a chess-playing algorithm in 1952. Classic board games have been used for computer learning for a variety of reasons, including the simplicity of modeling them. Algorithms have been developed that can beat the reigning human champions of among others Backgammon (1992), Chess (1997), and Go (2017). See Yannakakis and Togelius 2017.

  42 Ibid:112.

  43 Ibid: 106-109.

  44 Livestream of MarI/O attempting to beat Super Mario Bros.; see Einfach nerdig 2018. MarI/O was originally created by Seth Bling, and combines a neural network with an evolutionary algorithm. Such algorithms differ from search trees by allowing

mutations and crossovers, not just branching decisions (Yannakakis and Togelius 2018: 117). Algorithms act as a cloud moving over a fitness landscape, where they cluster around optima, which may be shifted as the search uncovers optima of higher fitness and reestablishes around these (DeLanda 2011: 52-53). The problem for MarI/O is likely that the fitness evaluation continues counting as Mario falls into a pit, and the algorithm thereby sees this as optimum, and is unable to switch to less optimal actions which could get it further along in the game.

  45 In the Mario AI competition in 2010, the playfield was equipped with dead ends. The solution to this challenge was found using an algorithm called REALM, which applied an evolved rule-based system to decide sub-goals and navigate these sub-goals with A*. See Yannakakis and Togelius 2018: 128.

  46 Ibid: 95.

  47 Ibid: 129.

  48 Chan 2017

  49 DeepMind 2019

  50 See Marder 2014; Coccia 2019.

  51 Kenrick and Strullu-Derrien 2014.

  52 The distinction of knowing how and that comes from Gilbert Ryle. DeLanda applies it not only to humans, but to other organisms as well (DeLanda 2016: 80).

  53 Coccia 2019: 82.

 

54 Caillouis 1958/2001: 13.

  55 Huizinga 1938/1980: 9,11.

  56 Ibid: 13.

  57 Marder 2013: 131.

  58 DeLanda 2011: 80; Trewavas 2017.

  59 Lewicki et al. 1992: 796.

  60 Przybylski et al. 2010: 155.

  61 See for instance Michailids et.al. 2018.

  62 Parisi and Fazi 2014: 111.

  63 Ibid.

  64 Bellamare et al. 2016 and Pathak et. al. Google’s DeepMind has used intrinsic reward systems to produce curiosity in exploration. Deep neural networks have been trained to play games from the Atari 2600 games console (launched in 1977). DeepMind has used the reinforcement learning technique Q-learning in addition to a method of experience replay, which stores and replays short sequences of gameplay to the algorithm (Yannakakis and Togelius: 116-117).

  65 Przybylski et al. 2010: 155.

  66 Boluk and Lemieux 2017: 19.

  67 Huizinga 1938/1980: 51.

  68 Boluk and Lemieux 2017: 46.

  69 See Bismuth 2021 and Speedrun.

  70 Dawson 2015 and Hernandez 2016.

  71 Takemoto 2007; see also Snyder 2013.

  72 dram551 2015

  73 Time lapse of the 60-hour playthrough, VAL JP 2016.

  74

 

マリオ 2016.

75 Huizinga 1938/1980: 47.

  76 Nietzsche quoted in Grosz 2004.

  77 Massumi 2014: 18.

  78 Fuller and Goriunova 2019: 113-114.

  79 Darwin 1895/1985:117.

  80 White 1998.

  81 Huizinga 1938/1980: 13-14.

  82 See Despret 2016: 41.

  83 Lumley et al. 2015

  84 Grosz 2004: 75.

  85 Ibid: 105.

  86 Scott Persons and Currie 2019.

  87 Moore et. al. 2011: 181.

  88 Ibid: 180.

  89 Deleuze 1988/1993: 78.

  90 Coccia 2019: 100.

  91 Pannell 2016.

  92 Tinbergen 1951/1989.

  93 Coccia 2019: 103.

  94 Weinberger 2017.

  95 Boluk and Lemieux 2017: 190.

  96 Nintendo/Iwata Asks.

  97 Brown 2015.

  98 Wark 2007:1.

 

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Ervik, Becoming Human Amid Diversions https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13877-5_4

4. Worldwide Fungi Andreas Ervik1   (1) Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

 

  Andreas Ervik Email: [email protected]

Artificial Stupidity From the 1980s and onward to the present, the Internet has been discussed in relation to notions of intelligence (Fig. 4.1). The Internet has been described as a “global brain,” or “swarm intelligence” forming decentralized or self-organized systems, via accounts of the online “hive mind,” and even with the claim that Google’s search engine itself is a form of consciousness.1 The Internet started out as a military and academic venture for sharing intelligence and knowledge. Half a century after its development, however, something fundamental seems to have changed in how the relation between the Internet and intelligence is framed. Networking seems to have been curiously overtaken by clickbait, conspiracy theories, and fake news, as proper judgment seems to have been replaced by sheer stupidity. This could be blamed on Internet access shifting from elites to common plebs, but if tech writers and authors like Nicholas Carr are to be believed, even the most studious among us may have experienced a form of Internet-induced cognitive decline.2 An artwork by Douglas Coupland is emblematic of the current relation people have with networking, stating “I Miss My Pre-Internet Brain.” Internet-induced cognitive change can be summarized using a common metaphor for online activity: surfing, which encapsulates the rapid, irregular, and multidirectional surface level engagement with information, in contrast with the sustained processes of diving into the depths to acquire knowledge.3 Instead of something to be avoided in order to reach insight, and to rediscover the original intent of the Internet, what might the stupidity of surfing reveal of the central dynamics of networking?

Fig. 4.1 Screenshot of clickbait from galacticbuzz.​c om, showing some attractors for a bait-clicking population: winning money, fantasy combat, phallic pareidolia, and especially female faces, and female bodies in semi-undress

Goldsmith makes use of Ngai’s notion of the “stuplime” to characterize the web as a combination of stupidity and the sublime, in the sense that mundane content is delivered by awe-inspiring technology, but also since the mind-boggling is made entirely trivial through being turned into online content.4 The Internet forms amazing amounts of links between wildly different forms and formats of content. It can be equally massive and interlinking on the personal level as well, regularly taking the form of seemingly endless cascading rows of windows open in one’s browser or unread e-mails. The sheer amount of it all is made even more stuplime by the possibility of constantly finding new links to open and never actually go into depths with. The Internet may stupefy—astonish, but also make stupid. Humans seem dumbstruck by technology. This technology becomes increasingly capable and intelligent—from homes to phones turning smart. All the while humans seem to become stupider.

What even is stupidity? This might seem entirely self-explanatory: Stupidity is the opposite of intelligence. Instead of the clear, reasonable judgment shown by intelligence, stupidity lies in the consistent making of mistakes. Stupidity is therefore often valorized, and seems to belong to someone else. The others may be the uneducated, lacking in mental faculties. Their stupidity is attestable in the poor results on standardized measuring, either in tests of their intelligence quotient (IQ) or on exams. Alternately, even intellectuals could be called stupid, for instance for thinking and talking about lofty ideas rather than getting into the practical realities of things. There are furthermore a range of what is termed cognitive biases. A quick Google search reveals a number of such biases, including the Dunning-Kruger effect (poor performers in a task overestimate their abilities), confirmation bias (trusting information that confirms what one already believes), status quo bias (preferring the way things are and rejecting change), automation bias (trusting automated systems over one’s own judgments), the Google effect (forgetting information that is available online), and the bandwagon effect (adopting ideas and fads because others have). The cognitive misgivings indicate that stupidity is not straightforwardly something belonging to others, or to certain kinds of people (be they the under- or the overlearned). Literary historian Matthjis van Boxsel has collected historical definitions of stupidity. He finds it to be generally characterized by aspects such as dullness, obstinacy, mediocrity, and shamelessness—as a process of responding to something in a manner variably too sluggish or too swift. Stupidity has been connected to problem-solving, but it is not as simple as claiming that intelligence will grant success while stupidity breeds failure. It is regularly “described not as a failing but as a force.”5 Biologist David Krakuer indicates how stupidity can be a force, by distinguishing it from both intelligence and ignorance.6 Ignorance emerges with the lack of the information required for solutions. Yet, as opposed to ignorance, both intelligence and stupidity uncover solutions, but they use opposing methods. Krakauer considers intelligence a process of turning complex problems into simple solutions, while stupidity creates complex solutions to simple problems. Krakauer exemplifies using two interrelated statements, where the first signals intelligence and the other stupidity: “You made that look effortless / You made that look really hard.” If intelligence is the ability to learn from mistakes in order to improve solutions, stupidity takes the wrong

lessons and obfuscates. In an article on online culture, Goriunova offers a similar threefold distinction, dividing into intelligence, basal thinking akin to Krakaur’s ignorance and idiocy—rendered similar to the framing of stupidity here.7 Instead of focusing on the stupidity of humans, the question could be shifted to considering which organisms are capable of intelligence or stupidity. Human intelligence is invariably presented as what makes us so successful as a species. A development toward greater insight is often postulated for the evolution of our species and the historical emergence of human civilizations. Darwin provided a more nuanced perspective on the intelligence of a species, as a term for “how efficient a species becomes at doing things they need to survive.”8 If intelligence is a measure of survival efficiency then humans are in a peculiar position. As a species we cannot be said to ensure efficiency, but rather attend all sorts of things unrelated to survival or even outright detrimental to it. Biologist Eugene D. Robin has written a provocatively titled article, “The Evolutionary Advantages of Being Stupid,” in which he points out advantages of smaller brain size, and asks who is more adapted, humans or the brainless oyster?9 Brainless behavior which is simply efficient for survival thus appears intelligent, while humans surprisingly foolish. Where and how did the evolutionary potential for stupidity come from? The name of our species, Homo sapiens, means wise man. With our propensity for stupidity, perhaps it would be wise to rename us using the obsolete term for Neanderthals, Homo stupidus? This is not meant as an insult, as stupidity, in uncovering complex solutions to simple problems, may shape evolution, by offering novel adaptations that could prove advantageous. In the following I will consider the possibility of stupidity shaping the evolution of organisms. What does stupidity entail as an evolutionary survival strategy? In the previous chapter I discussed the ways in which play was not an essential organic quality, but something that also machines are capable of finding enjoyment from. What about stupidity? What kind of function does it have for artificial intelligence? The classic experiments of machine intelligence, the Turing test, propose that a computer program is artificially intelligent if it is capable of convincing a human through written conversation that they are talking with another human rather than a program.10 Bogost describes Turing’s test as a “gimmick that

accidentally helped found the field of artificial intelligence,” where “computer scientists missed the point by contorting Turing’s thought experiment into a challenge to simulate or replace the human.”11 Regardless of the significance put on whether the test indicates artificial intelligence or not, the Loebner Prize has staged regular competitions since 1990. An early winner was reported in an article as using “artificial stupidity” to convince its interrogator.12 The winning strategy implemented deliberate spelling errors, fooling the judges but leaving the reporter less infatuated, stating that a computer unable to type correctly would be of interest to no one. The artificial stupidity of the program follows a tradition of using forms of strategic deception to convey (un)intelligence, traceable at least to the Mechanical Turk, a fake automated chess player that amazed late 1700s worldwide audiences.13 Instead of artificial intelligence, I propose the pun of artificial stupidity to account for the intentional use of stupidity to achieve some form of goal. Artist and media theorist Hito Steyerl has suggested artificial stupidity to be the actual reality of the promises of computer intelligence, as she contends that “artificial stupidity is a mediocre and greedy version of the sublime machine intelligence intended to elevate and improve human life.”14 The next section of this chapter will examine how stupidity is deployed to intentionally divert populations online. I will focus on clickbait, a notoriously stupid form of online content. Clickbait is a format of maximizing interaction by tricking people to click. It has been ubiquitous online, visible at the bottom of pages as rows of captioned images under headings such as “sponsored content,” or the less revealing “more from the web” and “you may like.” Although prevalent online, there is a scarcity of research on clickbait.15 Clickbait may seem like one peculiar form among an enormous surfable ocean of content online. In a certain respect, however, clickbait crystallizes tendencies of networking. In the following section, I will detail my clicking bait, generating insight into the methods used to trick people to click. How are effective bait generated, and how come people are drawn to certain bait over others? The bait will be connected here to evolutionary adaptations guiding biases to produce a taxonomy of what appeals to humans. The examination of clickbait will thereafter be connected with digital networking more generally, placed within the history (and pre-history)

of networking. Networks are regularly conceptualized as webs, a concept traceable at least to 1897, to spiders as “the original inventors of a system of telegraphy.”16 But as network theorist Albert-Lá szló Barabá si states, the “Internet is closer to an ecosystem than to a Swiss watch.17 Instead of “meticulous design,” internetworking offers “a vivid example of how the independent actions of millions of nodes and links lead to spectacular emergent behavior.”18 Rather than a web, spun by weavers, I will conceptualize networking using mycologist Paul Stamet’s alternative fungal model. Mycorrhizas are underground connections between plants and fungi, which the mycologist rendered “the earth’s natural Internet,” seeing internetworking as “merely an extension of a successful biological model.”19 What would be the theoretical implications of reformulating the World Wide Web (www) into the worldwide fungi (wwf)? Fungality might bring a better understanding of digital networks, and how networking emerges from the myriads of actions of users and developers, as well as from network properties. I will examine the technological trajectory of digital networks, from ARPANET to the World Wide Web, connecting it with fungal evolution. My argument here is not that engineers draw influence from organism growth, but rather that the development of internetworking and the evolution of fungi have been shaped by similar attractors. This does not necessarily remove the ensnaring qualities of webs, which will be configured here as fungal. The final section returns to stupidity to reflect upon its evolutionary consequences. How does the stupidity emerging in digital networks solve problems, complexify, and spread? I make use of a clickbait headline generator, to enact the practical lessons offered by artificial stupidity in forming attention. Making use of this headline generator is a way of destabilizing my own intelligent procedures for producing and reflecting upon knowledge of digital and organic networking. The headline produced by the generator is set here as the title for the concluding section. This produces a problem for myself, as the nonsensical title thereby somehow needs to be returned into the sensemaking of theorizing. The generated title thereby becomes a stupid way of solving problems, as it complexifies and obfuscates and opens up novelty. I turn the section meaningful by making what is regularly framed as the waves of unwanted online content into something to think

with and utilize, by attempting to answer the question: What could be learned from stupidity?

Clicking Bait At a certain point it seemed like one were unable to visit major websites, including news outlets, without being exposed to clickbait. Clickbait comes in grids, showing images and text captions, or as banners at the top and side of a page. Part of the advent of clickbait can paradoxically be tied to Internet browsing users defending themselves against the unwanted intrusions of online advertisement, by way of ad blocking applications added to browsers. With advertisement as a less viable source of income for news outlets, another source of click-driven profit emerged in ads that masked themselves as legitimate news content. One could also argue that any form of click-driven journalism is to some extent comparable to clickbait. Some websites have successfully developed clickbait into a business model, such as Upworthy, Gawker Media, Huffington Post, and Buzzfeed. In the process such companies shift toward more legitimate journalism, as well as provide legitimacy for clickbait. Instead of clickbait supplementing or supplanting news sites proper, I focus on those that infiltrate and muddle distinctions from within. These generally come courtesy of two major companies, Outbrain and Taboola (started in 2006 and 2007, respectively). What characterizes clickbait, and how does it bait people into clicking? The link grids and the pages they lead to are filled with trigger words and enticing images, regularly mimicking the format of news and proper content aggregators to appear insidious. The grids offer no distinction between links simply advertising, ads pretending to be articles, or pages offering actual articles—in the case of the sponsored content, other articles from the actual news site. With each click, one is pushed toward further movement; each recommended link transport to a different website entirely. Clickbait presentation takes the form of alluring titles and imagery, exploiting what has been termed the “curiosity gap.” The headlines and images show something enticing enough to provoke curiosity, but do not provide enough details to satisfy unless clicked through.20 Clickbait is a descendent of yellow page journalism, characterized by underresearched and minor news presented by misleadingly exaggerated headlines, eye-catching and lavish picturing, pseudoscience and false learning from so-called experts, fake interviews, and producing

sympathy with the “underdog.”21 A single example shows how such attributes are used to bait online: “Norway Casino Expert Shares A Winning Trick That Casinos Can’t Stop.” The headline starts with a lie, as casinos are illegal in Norway. The underdog is the self-identification for anyone hoping to win. The accompanying picture shows a one-armed bandit partly disassembled. A hand holding an unspecific tool points to machinery, further highlighted by a circle drawn onto the picture. While not showing anything particular, this visual element contributes to a sense that people will be let in on a secret that aids toward victory. The secret is nowhere to be found if one actually clicks. The expert tip is blatantly false. Ultimately, the clickbait simply leads to an ad for an online gambling site. The casino link is one among clickbait’s multiple get-rich-fast schemes, which range from easy jackpots to investors offering the hapless the chance to take part in the Bitcoin price surge. Pop-ups will announce “STOP! Start making huge profits,” and let you know why “Banks Are Worried About Norwegians Knowing This.” Although anyone opening websites where clickbait is found receives such offers, the schemes are presented as confidential information revealed only to the individual. Hitting jackpots and investing in finance and cryptocurrencies is presented as easy, as long as you follow the guidelines. The sites offer testimonials from skeptics who nevertheless took the plunge, now testifying huge winnings, granting access to the good life: “This bitcoin secret Let Me See the World In Style.” Endorsers speak of ease, as overly specific earnings: “Surprisingly, I used to be an investor on Wall Street. And I’ve never seen anything like this in my 10 year tenure at the company. My colleagues all thought I was crazy when I quit the firm to invest with the Bitcoin Code software full-time. $384,594 in profits later, all of my colleagues are now BEGGING me to let them in.” Following the same structure are pages baiting with health support. The little guy is pitted against the medical establishment, which is presented as purposely withholding information which might otherwise cure ailment. Headlines follow the format of “What your doctor doesn’t want you to know,” offering miracle remedies, in particular in the form of food—to end diseases or bring rapid weight loss. Both financial and health-oriented bait generate an impression that it is vital to act quickly. The individual opportunities will supposedly also expire shortly, often with countdowns included to demonstrate the urgency. This pushes

toward action before critical reflection hinders it, producing responses that are simultaneously too sluggish and swift. Beauty is a central part of clickbait. Imagery often hones in on plainly discernible faces. Facial recognition has allowed humans to discern predators, prey and potential friends, enemies, or mates. People are drawn toward faces that are perceived as attractive, with more attractive faces indicated to produce emotional reward.22 There is a sex bias in clickbait, with more female than male faces. This is ascribed to the human neurological reward circuitry, as pictures of females in general seem to elicit greater pleasure than those of men. Central in clickbait is the prospect of pleasure, and the potential for sexual arousal. This is identifiable in the proliferation of images of women dressed in nothing but underwear, and headlines such as “Cars And Girls” or “Sexiest Female Football Players.” Clickbait women are commonly highlighted in captions as having Slavic or Asian backgrounds, with texts such as “This is the Reason why Ukrainian Girls Make the Best Girlfriends.” Slavic and Asian women are efficient bait as these backgrounds align with stereotypical associations, such as traditional values of femininity. The allure of Asian and Slavic women connects with feminine beauty in figure and facial features, but also with subservient love. The offers found in this type of clickbait are at once tied to locations and detached from any context: When in Japan, you might be informed that “Russian Women Prefer Japanese Men,” while in Norway the same images are tied to bait stating that the women have a particular craving for Norwegians. Rather than preferring any sort of men, what clickbait women seem to crave are IP addresses. And while the promise of matchup regularly states the possibility of meeting someone nearby, the only requirement is being online. The sexual attractor is predominant in ads for what is brutally honestly self-presenting as “dangerously addictive” games. A central selling point of these clickbait games is their straightforwardly addictive potential. The games are without win states, instead tasking the player with accumulating resources and climbing leaderboards.23 In the clickbait ads, the games also tease with the potential of conquering women, who will take you to “a place where you’re allowed to do everything.” But the promise of such juicy encounters remains unfulfilled in actual play.

Celebrities are frequent lures, from Hollywood actress Megan Fox and supermodel Kate Upton posing for fantasy games to picture series showing “hot” celebrities. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer criticize popular culture as a standardization and manipulation factory, and the widespread interest in celebrities could be considered a consequence of such processes.24 Such an explanation does not, however, offer an understanding of what makes people take interest in the lives of celebrities. Evolutionary psychologists attribute celebrity interest to the evolution of group dynamics. Humans may have been selected to focus on individuals whose relations would affect their potentials in group relations, which in addition to kin and peers include high-ranking individuals.25 The influence of group relations for celebrity interest is particularly evident when considering which type of celebrity information receives most attention: physical health and relationship standings, especially sexual relations. This can be seen in clickbait titles such as “Game of Thrones’s Stunning Actresses looks absolutely gorgeous in real life,” “Hollywood’s Hottest Moms,” “Most Expensive Divorces,” “Top Celebrities You Did Not Know Were Gay,” and “Celebrities that Cheated.” There is a strong focus on appearance, and on sexual relations, which is characterized by appeals to envy and schadenfreude. Clickbait commonly lures with a series of pictures alleged to be what celebrities “do not want us to see,” as well as imagery showing celebrities that have gone from fit to fat, or child stars growing up unattractive or broke. Clickbait regularly lures with references to specific individual celebrities. When clicking, finding images of or information about the celebrity often proves difficult, if not impossible. Firstly, it requires diligently clicking through slide show carousels while also avoiding the alluring muddle of intrusive recommendations to slide shows on other topics. For instance, when trying to figure out how Hollywood actor Ryan Reynolds was among “Celebrities Who Almost Died in the Most Horrible Ways” the curious probing can easily detour, for instance into the entry on “These Firefighters Rescued Puppies But Later On They Realized Those Were Not Puppies At All.” After a slew of information on firefighters and their regular doings and how they rescue animals, the bait finally gets to the situation referred to in the headline. Clicking through the carousel, the animals are shown rescued from a manhole. The animal species is put into question in both the title and on the page.

The conclusion, curiously enough, turns out that the animals rescued were indeed puppies. Clicking bait takes the inquisitive on a journey into a disorienting strange unknown, where things aren’t always what they seem, except they are nearly always exactly what they seem. The bait is regularly mundane, frequently focusing on what people need to do in order to go through the events of any generic human life. This includes a range of tips on how to live everyday life—such as ways of controlling emotions, as well as workplace reputation boosters, but also how to prepare eggs, or pages with household items placed in lists according to seemingly random criteria (for instance one showing the coolest doorstoppers). It is a world of contradictions, right down to the URLs of the pages, which range from “ammmazing-woman” to “boredarticles.” The mundane is contrasted with the outrageous, seemingly random, and confusing. The miracle cure claiming to replace diabetes medicine is depicted using a close-up of a foot with a sock pulled halfway down to reveal a sliced onion placed on the sole of the foot. The headline “An Employee at McDonalds in Oslo Storms Out After Winning 2.928.256 Kr” is coupled with a picture of a women sitting on the toilet, with an expression on her face like that of someone screaming in agony. In an essay on clickbait, John Mahoney connects the often outright strangeness of clickbait images to the bodies of the individuals clicking.26 Pictures geared toward triggering bodily responses include trypophobia, sensitivity to repeated patterns of holes; pareidolia, seeing other objects and patterns as parts of human bodies, in particular implied penises and vaginal or other bodily orifices; extreme bodies either as overly muscular, obese, or skinny; and various skin problems such as bruises and injuries, wrinkles, or skin being peeled. Outrageousness as an attractor is explicit in several clickbait pictures and headlines, from the relatively harmless interest in the uncommon, as in “The 22 Strangest Fruits Around the World,” to the more intimidating “20 extremely bizarre Medical Disorders,” to the outright horrific “Father murders his son after he found photos of his father eating feces.” The French sociologist Gabriel Tarde directed attention to “the similarity of millions of people.”27 Clickbait has become ubiquitous online by tapping into such similarity, by appealing with a set of widereaching attractors: money, sex, health, beauty, and fame. One of the largest studies of the spread-ability of news items identified content that

produces intense emotion, either positive or negative, as driving dissemination.28 Clickbait rustles emotional responses, as base drives of abject or lust, generating a tension that stimulates into clicking. The flows are at once distinctly separate and interconnected, as disgust and desire coexist and interact: next to a picture of a skinny semi-nude woman with large breasts is another showing an overweight belly; celebrities are worshipped, yet their misfortune is met with glee. Clickbait reveals a world of secrets, where an abundance of affluence, sexual encounters, and life partners are reserved for those in the know. It is a strictly hierarchical world where wealth and beauty are flaunted, and wins come just as quickly as losses. It is easy to find dream women and celebrities readily fall from grace. Against the unpredictability and chaos of living, clickbait lures with how understandable the world will become if you simply click the bait.

The Trick of Networks From the high-tempo turmoil of clicking anything that attracts, I will turn now to forming links between clickbait and networking more generally. I will start with associations between biological and computational networking, to generate a concept of the wwf—the worldwide fungi, as opposed to the World Wide Web. The concept of the fungi is used here to examine the ways that problem-solving emerges from networking and how interconnectivity gives rise to problem-solving capacities, both intelligent and stupid. I will consider the central question: How do networks evolve and take shape? I will tease out parameters of networking, before placing clickbait within a larger framework of deploying captivating tricks for internetworking. Thereafter, I tie this framework to other current predominant aspects of internetworking. The earliest digital networks were local area networks of companies and organizations, directly linking together computers with a singular path of information flow. In contrast, ARPANET, the military and academic precursor to the Internet, connected separate systems. This made it necessary to distribute data through multiple routes, achieved using a process which came to be known as packet switching— transmitting data by grouping into packets. The technology was invented separately by two different researchers: Paul Baran, working at the Rand Corporation in the USA, and Donald Davies, at The National Physical Laboratory in England. Baran’s project grew out of military requirements for a communications system that would remain operable during warfare. Conventional communication systems, such as the telephone system, were hierarchical, connecting individual users to singular offices. This structure makes communication vulnerable to attacks, and Baran proposed to counter this by creating a system of distributed communication nodes. This would be a system of redundancy, where single nodes would be of less importance than the entire structure. If one area was cut off by attack, others could fill in to take its place. While Baran proposed such measures for increased survivability, Davies was concerned with making communication easier, more affordable, and more commercially viable than current systems. Baran’s suggestions were formed from post-nuclear communication needs, while Davis sought economic and technological innovation.

If the system development of packet switching is approached through the dynamics of slime molds, the seemingly contrasting ambitions of surviving attacks and prosperity become overlapping aspects of evolutionary adaptation.29 Slime molds exist in different states, determined by their environmental conditions. When resources abound, this single-celled amoeba moves around freely. In times of scarcity, however, the amoebas couple together. They still retain individuality, as rather than being integrated into a hierarchical whole with differentiated functions, the individual amoeba groups together as networks. The foraging abilities of slime molds have been studied extensively, in particular that of the model organism Physarum polycephalum. In studies, slime mold is placed in mazes containing sources of nutrition (often oat flakes, a preferred type of sustenance). The slime mold then searches for nutrients by sending trails of slime, and upon discovery the probing will recede, with pathways reduced to straight lines to the food source.30 Meeting alternatives, the slime mold prioritizes nutritional value.31 Slime molds successfully solve mazes through this process, uncovering the shortest paths, with the best carrying capacity and greatest resistance to breaking down. Slime molds optimize travel routes comparable to highly efficient human-engineered structures. In one experiment, researchers placed food at points corresponding to the locations of Tokyo metro stops, and the slime mold formed pathways “similar to those of the rail network in terms of cost, transport efficiency and fault tolerance.”32 One slime mold enthusiast tested the organism’s capabilities of navigating a model of an IKEA store, finding slime mold did not get lost as easily as the human model builder themselves did.33 Yet, slime mold is also capable of imperfect or irrational decision-making when selecting sustenance. Philosopher Steven Shaviro describes their behaviors as ones which “do not maximize utility or desirability in a rigorous way, but sloppily compare the various alternatives at a given moment.”34 Returning to packet switching, this technology shares features with slime mold behavior, which I will elucidate here by describing its functionality. Packet switching builds on message switching systems, such as the postal system or telegraphy. In these systems, messages are labeled with origin and destination, and pass through from one point to another. Historian of digital networks Jessica Abbate writes: “Storing

messages at intermediate stations made it possible to even out the flow: if a line was busy, messages could be stored at the switch until the line was free.”35 In addition, packet switching networks increase efficiency by digitizing the package—that is, dividing them into bits, regenerated at each switching node. The consequences of going digital include eliminating signal noise, and sending pieces of messages through different routes and at different times. The packet switching operations retain the integral unity of each individual node connected in a larger whole of distributed data. Like slime molds sloppily searching for points of interest in a maze, packet switching technologies are required to find routes for the data. Slime molds find the path between the starting points of the maze and sources of nutrients, while for packet switching nodes the path is between senders and recipients. What kind of intelligence does packet switching nodes and slime molds possess? Starting with slime molds, this organism makes decisions through bodily excursions, including growth, nourishment, cellular organization, decay, and locomotion. Slime mold decisionmaking arises out of the material properties of its components, from for instance the physical and chemical properties of conglomerating amoeba and trailing slime. Organisms such as slime mold generate models of their environment, as non-representational mappings of opportunities and risks, with researchers describing slime trails as “an externalized spatial memory system.”36 The slime mold threads are both organisms and connections, both individuals and connectors that information transmits through. The organisms are at once pathways and points. Researchers on slime mold, Beekman and Latty, propose that “decisionmaking strategies may arise as an unavoidable consequence of the way in which living systems process information.”37 Shaviro encapsulates this using the concept discognition, denoting the disruption and extension of notions of cognition into slime molds.38 In the previous chapter I described it as a form of non-conscious intentionality, as know-how which is not tied to a specific centralized system of consciousness, but rather to the dynamic process of growth and behavior. How does packet switching compare to slime mold? Baran noted that the “intelligence required to switch signals to surviving links is at the link nodes and not at one or a few centralized switching centers.”39 While smaller networks may operate according to set tables for routing

packets, larger ones, such as the ARPANET, and later the Internet, generate complex and rapidly changing connectivity which necessitates dynamic routing. ARPANET utilized small computers called Interface Message Processors (comparable to later developed network routers). The IMPs used store-and-forward packet switching, transmitting packets with non-conscious intentionality. The nodes select when to transmit, in which order, preferred routes, avoiding collisions, and when pathways are closed the routing nodes find alternate paths. Each node is thereby required to evaluate the pathway, using addresses to determine the next step of the route. As with slime molds, the intentionality of network nodes is tied to the bonds between them. The process is one where nodes measure routing proximity to neighbors periodically, and update pathways if improvements are found. This produces a spatial memory within the network. Node intentionality is comparable to those distributed between amoeba in slime mold, with dynamic routing tables deciding where and when to transmit packages. Since the distributed memory formation of non-conscious intentionality is part not only of simple organisms but also of packet switching technologies, it should not be considered an essential organic quality, but rather a general tendency of distributed systems. Moving from packet switching technologies into the development of internetworking, the tendencies of fungal mycorrhiza will be shown here to be influential for the development from the ARPANET and to internetworking and the emergence of a digital wwf. The notion here of the wwf offers an alternative to the World Wide Web (www), but also to the wood wide web, a term which has come to describe the interconnection of fungi with plants in forests. Mycologist Merlin Sheldrake renders the notion of the wood wide web as misleading.40 The problem is not with analogy itself, as Sheldrake draws upon Darwin’s analogy between orchids and humans. Darwin describes orchids as comparable to that of a “man with his left arm raised and bent so that his hand stands in front of his chest and with his right arm crossing his body lower down so that the fingers project just beyond his left side.”41 Sheldrake presents this as Darwin practicing phytomorphism (plantstructuring), and reimagining “the male body—including his own—in floral form, suggesting that he is open to exploring the flower’s anatomy

on its own terms.”42 The notion of a worldwide fungi is a form of mycomorphism (fungi-structuring), seeking to understand fungi not from notions of internetworking and webs, but internetworking from understandings of fungi. The forager on the lookout for mushrooms picks only the fruiting bodies of fungi, which the fungi uses for spore-spreading. Most of fungi are underground, forming mycorrhiza. This latter term itself is a grafting, combining the Greek words for fungi (mykós) and root (riza). Sheldrake describes fungi as living labyrinths, discussing their growth as “opportunistic investigation—speculation in bodily form.”43 This bodily speculation can be encapsulated in the capacity to branch and instead of selecting one path over the other, following both directions at once. As with vegetation and slime molds this growth is indeterminate, stretching in any direction, alternately finding nutrients, proving fruitless, or interconnecting with other organisms, including, bacteria, yeast, algae, and plants. Barabá si describes networks as either scaled or scale-free, referring to the distribution of links between nodes. Most networks are scale-free, where a “majority of nodes have only a few links and that these numerous tiny nodes coexist with a few big hubs, nodes with an anomalously high number of links.”44 This pattern is found in mycorrhiza, where some fungi are specific and interact only with a few plants, while others are generalists and interact with several. The scalefree networking generates a “nested assembly pattern” with “highly asymmetrical interactions and organizes the community cohesively around a central core of interactions.”45 Mycorrhizas do not connect to single plants, but rather form entire ecosystems between various fungi and plants, and “as a consequence, plants are usually interconnected by mycorrhizal mycelial networks.”46 Mycorrhiza is theorized to be a determinant factor of plant evolution, facilitating the transition from sea to land.47 When oceanic fungi and green algae coupled together, this provided the adaptive advantage of shared resources, thus leading to the capacity to colonize land. The coupling could then lead to symbiosis of varying integration, like fungi penetrating the outer layers of connected plant roots, or remaining extracellular mycorrhizas. Immense evolutionary differentiation could

emerge from this coupling, with an estimate of 50.000 fungal species coupled to 250.000 plant species. Mycorrhizas are vital parts of terrestrial ecosystems today, with plants depending on fungi for growth. Up to 80% of plant nitrogen and phosphate is provided by fungi symbionts, and in turn, plants allocate nutrients produced through photosynthesis to the fungi. These resources are shared in a process of negotiation, where both have the capacity for detecting and rewarding beneficial symbionts. Nevertheless, mycorrhizas regularly “cheat,” and although generally beneficial, fungi form a symbiotic continuum with other organisms, ranging from parasitism to mutualism.48 Fungi rewards cooperation, hoards minerals, and even creates networks where plants are not sustained but instead consumed by fungi. Some plants, mycoheterotrophs, are fully dependent on mycorrhiza for nutrients and parasitize fungi. In general, some fungi will be more cooperative and some less, with their behavior capable of changing over time, with fungi and plants making decisions on when and what to share.49 How do mycorrhizal tendencies emerge in digital networking? Internetworking initially started out as military research. The uniform and hierarchical organizational model of the military had given rise to a distributed network. This paradoxical inversion is presented by DeLanda as a common tendency of structural formation, as “meshworks and hierarchies not only coexist and intermingle, they constantly give rise to one another.”50 By 1970, packet switching nodes were installed at a handful of initial spots, and from its humble beginning it would multiply and produce offshoots. A year after launch, the network had 15 nodes, and by the following year, it had 37.51 Apart from the military, contributors to ARPANET went into the project working with different tasks and differing interests: UCLA and Network Analysis Corporation focused on theoretical concerns, while others like Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN) were commercial enterprises interested in prospective profit. Network Working Group (NWG), made up of graduate students, described themselves as amateurs: “We were all feeling our way because there wasn’t anybody of current expertise or knowledge or anything.”52 Like slime mold sending out probing trails of slime, they were exploring possibilities of network structure.

As local entities happened upon beneficial routines, these could then spread through the networks to be adopted by others. Despite the military foundation, the first decade of the ARPANET encouraged open experimenting, and would integrate user considerations into development. As a result, benign theft of computer software was widespread, and the stolen parts would disseminate rapidly through the network. As the network grew, the military command of ARPANET called for increased control to prevent misuse and reduce file sharing.53 While the military would later seek to defend structural integrity, actual growth and development resulted from initial openness toward potential misbehavior. Abbate explains that early networking was underutilized, and to evaluate system performance required traffic: “In fact, a recreational mailing list for ‘science fiction lovers’ was apparently allowed to operate over the ARPANET on the ground that it generated significant amounts of traffic and therefore provided an opportunity to observe the network’s behavior under load.”54 A central example of how openness would lead to innovation is the invention of e-mail. It was invented by a user who modified local file transfer protocols to also send and receive messages. This created what became a main use for the early Internet, without which, as Abbate writes, ARPANET “might be remembered today as a minor failure rather than a spectacular success.”55 The same tendency of overcoming boundaries was important as the network extended to new locations as well. Eastern European universities had to cope with cold-war restrictions on connecting to the USA, but this did not prevent e-mail communication taking place with regularity.56 CERN would likewise find a way to bypass ARPANET connectivity prohibition by using Cambridge University’s computer as a drop-off point.57 The development of the ARPANET into the Internet and the World Wide Web came about through a series of offshoots. ARPANET connections were costly for anyone but universities and institutions, so other networks began popping up and offering affordable alternatives.58 With the increased number of networks, steps were made to internetwork them together: ARPA developed and commercialized internet routers, and funded the implementation of standard protocols on personal computers. Because of its modularity, new networks could easily be attached, with a rate escalating from 15 networks

interconnected in 1982 to over 400 in 1986. The increase in networks also leads to an explosion in network access—from 2000 computers connected in 1985, to 30,000 in the following two years, and 159,000 in 1989.59 In the 1980s networking also shifted from ARPANET to National Science Foundation (NSFNET), and in the 1990s away from US government ownership to commercial providers. In 1990, Tim BernersLee and Robert Cailliau, together with others working at CERN, created the World Wide Web. Launched the following year, the web used hypertext transfer protocols (HTTP) and uniform resource locators (URLs), and allowed for non-linear linking of information, and the sharing of multimedia data. The first browser for accessing the web, Mosaic, was released in 1993. It spread quickly, paving the way for other browsers. Search engines emerged, letting users find data on the web using keywords. A network of links functions as a fitness landscape, where the number of links to a node is an indicator of its fitness. Fitness landscapes might have multiple peaks and valleys of higher and lower fitness, and, depending on how fitness is distributed, these can be surrounded by either cliffs or slopes.60 Does internetworking form landscapes of slopes or cliffs? From its early days of experimentation and dispersed interconnectivity, the mature network of today has coalesced into massively interconnected hubs of millions of links, while others—as much as 90% of sites—according to one account have ten or less links.61 Search results follow a similar distribution, as an average of 92% of those searching for something do not go beyond the first page of results, and the first hit is clicked 32.5% of the time, with diminishing results down to the 11th hit receiving only 1% of clicks. The central core consists today of only a few platforms, in particular Amazon, Facebook, Google, Reddit, Wikipedia, Twitter, TikTok, Yahoo, and YouTube. If these are categorized into different fields, such as social networks, encyclopedia, search engine, and commerce, the dominance of certain companies becomes near monolithic.62 Google has an 80% dominance in search engine traffic.63 While internetworking grew out of a hierarchical structure, the successive growth of internetworking has thus led to another inversion: the network turns into a hierarchy of massive commercial conglomerates. The platforms are surrounded by

sites linking to and from these central hubs, as well as scattered nodes of near total isolation.64 How do certain websites achieve high fitness? The distribution between links can give the impression of a weave spun by a weaver, but the hypertext format creates behavior more comparable to mycorrhiza with their sharing and negotiating resources along symbiotic continuums. The hierarchical structure emerges from what Barabá si describes as the tendency of preferential attachment, in which people “unconsciously add links at a higher rate to those nodes that are already heavily linked.”65 Networking is a collective process, where intentions are dispersed, and unintended consequences influence. Media theorist Nick Srnicek terms it the network effect, in which “the more numerous the users who use a platform, the more valuable that platform becomes for everyone else.”66 The wwf connects populations of links which can be clicked with populations that can click those links. These different populations have properties, tendencies, and capacities irreducible to the individuals that produce links and the individuals clicking. The attributes instead emerge from their interactions. I suggest accounting for these emergent attributes in terms of click rate and trickiness for the link populations, and speed and connectivity for the clicker populations: Click rate designates how the population of links engages with traffic flows of the populations clicking. There are fitness differences in terms of the rates of linking and clicking, as some sites cannot escape isolation, while click maximizers constantly attempt to increase fitness. Trickiness is an index of how the link population achieves a higher or lower click rate. With high trickiness, any way of attracting is used, including clickbait, fake news, and conspiracies, while lower seek truthfulness, like news reports and wikis of knowledge. Speed concerns the frequency of clicks and how much time is spent on each page. With low speed, certain activities are prioritized, such as reading, downloading, and streaming, while high is characterized by browsing, scrolling, skimming, and searching. Connectivity is the degree of isolation or community of the clickers. If connectivity is high, the sharing of links, files, and cookie trails is frequent, and when it is low, browsing happens in private enclosure.

Higher connectivity leads to more coherent flows, as larger populations converge, while isolation leads to more idiosyncrasy. I have been most concerned here with the types of websites seeking to maximize click rate through trickiness, pushing clickers to engage with high speed and high connectivity. This is the tactic for a vast amount of different web content, from mass distributed e-mails, advertisement, and pop-ups to clickbait. These link populations act from the incentive of optimizing traffic by any means necessary. Clickbait, scam blogs, and email spam may seem like an accidental growth of online mycorrhiza. Yet, they are also exemplary forms of networking. Online, everything is turned into linked content. While any form of content may be successful in achieving and sustaining attention, click rate maximizers take the consequence of internetworking as systems of linking any type of content. Conducting fieldwork on developers of online content recommendation systems (such as those underlying clickbait’s “more from the web” systems), anthropologist Nick Seaver has noted how these developers characterize their work as trap-making.67 For these actors, the central task is to locate what catches and holds people’s attention. Rather than relying on explicit statements and ratings made by users, such systems would consider data gathered from people’s actual linkclicking behavior as more truthful indicators of their preferences. Seaver describes the infrastructure of digital systems as traps which are “[s]lowed down and spread out …, making worlds for the entities they trap.”68 The link population persuades people into compulsive connectivity, spending their online life in captivating structures of entrapment. The link and clicker population interplay creates parasite–prey arms race. The parasite (links) here tries to get its prey (users) to click an email, a link, or a downloadable file. The outcome might be the advertisement of products or services, sales, generating traffic for ad revenue on a per-click basis, or to infect computers with trojan software. When link populations meet the population of link clickers, the initial response of the clickers may be greater or lower, depending on the allure. Well-formed bait may generate curiosity, and the clicker population will be curious to see whether it holds potential.

Clickers become gradually familiar with what they are presented with. One way of overcoming this problem for the link population would be to simply provide what the link clickers have come for. This would, however, generate a temporary halt in the speed of the clicker population, shifting their actions from browsing to reading. With fitness tied to click rate, the link population will instead aim to keep this speed high. The parasitic link populations therefore keep trying to outsmart their prey’s defense mechanisms, maintaining the efficiency of bait. This is a process of sensitizing and desensitizing the clicker population, where the parasite seeks maximal sensitivity, while the prey seeks habituation, to avoid unsatisfactory clicks. The clicker population is never able to become fully habituated, due not only to bait remaining efficient, but also because the participants in its population keep shifting. The clicker population is not uniform nor stable, but will at any point be made up of a number of users who may or may not be familiar with the bait they meet. Indeed, clickers also knowingly engage with what they know to be somehow deceptive lures. The clickers will also have different potential for sharing with others, as some users may act as massively interconnected infectivity hubs or as bridges between otherwise isolated islands. The prey–parasite clicker-link arms race is in effect already in the early days of the Internet precursor Usenet. Among the first instances is an ad for a lottery to receive a green card, allowing residency in the USA. With increasing access to digital networks, and as commercial actors began engaging with users, the presence of such links increased to the point that users needed to defend themselves. Attempts were made at blocking, removing, publicly shaming, or even hacking those who posted such links, and to criminalize certain types of material. One particularly successful defense is Paul Graham’s Bayesian filing program. By applying automatic analysis of the words used in e-mails, and noticing how certain words which are otherwise rare commonly appear in scams, the program could intercept and send such content straight to a junk folder. The parasitic link population responded by changing the language used, in order to bypass the filter. A readily available and easily programmable way of doing this is tapping into public domain literature. Historian of Internet spam (a nickname for unwanted content distributed online), Finn Brunton, describes the fragmentary process that emerged as a form of modernist poetry: “a completely disinterested dispatch from an

automated avant-garde that spammers and their recipients built largely by accident.”69 Blogging services offer another powerful breeding ground for the click rate and trickiness maximizing parts of the link population. Such services let anyone sign up to create sites without payment or effort spent on coding or design. Combined with services which offer site summaries, text material could then be sourced and reposted on blogs automatically. In order to generate payload from clicks, blog posts are optimized to fit Google’s search engine algorithms, and subsequently filled with ads, so that every visit becomes a source of revenue. While seemingly parasitical to the central hub Google and their ad-revenue business model, Brunton shows how this structure actually gives rise to mutualism between Google and scammers: The ads on a spam page may be entirely served through Google’s affiliate advertising program—in other words, they can be a significant source of revenue for Google. What this means is that search engine spammers running their vast stables of spam blogs and sites are not anomalous. They are making the greatest possible use of the technologies and economies available, constructing a system in which all the extraneous matter of people and conversation has been pruned away in favor of the automation of content production, search results, clicks, and ads served. This system in turn puts Google in the contradictory position of having to analyze and expel many of their most dedicated customers: those who deliberately overexploit, and accidentally overexpose, the financial and attention economies and technologies that underlie the contemporary web.70 The income strategy of combining click rate with ad revenue has been employed by Google on the video hosting and sharing site YouTube as well. Media outlets have documented how recommended videos alongside the selected videos have been optimized to maintain and increase user engagement, which has led to an increase in misinformation, conspiracy, political extremism, and child-inappropriate videos.71 Although YouTube aims for responsible growth in engagement, doing away with all types of rogue content would mean losing major sources of income.

One defense mechanism to stop automatic scam blogs are CAPTCHAs. There are multiple claims of origins for CAPTCHA, thus attesting the necessity of restricting bot access to login services. CAPTCHAs present small puzzles for people to solve before being allowed to create blogs, log in, or make posts or comments. The puzzles task people with recognizing visually skewed strings of letters and numbers or identifying certain objects from pictures. These problems function as Turing tests, being simple for humans, at least in comparison with the difficulty they pose to automated programs.72 CAPTCHAs are regularly captioned with phrases such as “Are you human?" While the Turing test was conceived as a competition where computers attempt to trick humans, CAPTCHAs turn this around by making the human part of the clicker population qualify themselves. Proving to a service that you are indeed human can also lead to the frustrating experience of failing. One might be told by the CAPTCHA, again and again, that one is not qualified or intelligent enough to be human. As with other defense mechanisms, CAPTCHA is no hindrance for scammers. Services such as Kolotibablo exploit low-cost labor countries, paying employees a minimal amount for every CAPTCHA solved.73 In the most extreme forms of parasitic intrusion by fungi, the ability to make intentional choices is completely overtaken. A range of fungi are predatory, and they can trap and consume nematode worms if they lack other available food sources.74 The fungi cordyceps use spores to infect and take over body movements of ants and spiders while leaving their neurological systems intact.75 Once infected with cordyceps, spores may be spread through communities such as an ant’s nest (unless the other ants are efficient enough in identifying and evading the infected individual). The fungi will then guide the ants toward locations to die, erupting its fungal fruiting body from their bodies. A parallel tendency to cordyceps is also found in the captivating networks. Clickbait may funnel clickers into sites where links mislead them to download software or browser applications which take control over computers and network operations. Such applications often present themselves as software defending against the very function it performs, framed as if the software will help remove a problem that in fact only arises once one installs it. Some applications hijack browsers, modify settings, impart advertising, and replace browser home pages, error

pages, or search engines. There are specialized cordyceps for different insect species, and likewise different hijacker applications for MacBooks and Windows computers. One such application is MacKeeper. Making the mistake of installing it, the browser extension transforms any word on any website visited into a link, which does not even need to be clicked. Simply hovering the pointer over the word-turned link will open pop-up pages of clickbait. Clickbait has here found a way of locking you into its parasitical loops, hijacking mobility through the network, while still leaving the conscious part of the assemblage intact to experience the horror of its loss of control. Concerns over control run throughout clickbait, and can also be used as a strategy to manipulate, direct, and capture. The parasite uses cunning to present itself as less intelligent than it is, and render the world tricky. This is tricky in the sense that central aspects of survival, affluence, and desire are rendered difficult, but also in the sense that tricks are presented as the solution to overcoming such difficulty: clickbait presents the hottest girls and enormous winnings as easy achievements, as long as you just use this one trick. The clicker population is funneled toward the central hubs, where their ability to make decisions themselves—on their relations, interests, and activities —is minimized. The clickbait feigns stupidity to make humans seem like the ones doing the selecting. By letting individuals believe that they somehow seize control of their fate, the clickbait population lets clickers dream of being in control. This dream is crucial for continued clicking. But it is also a major source of confusion and existential anxiety: Are you really in charge of your actions, and the originator of your decisions? And if so, can you accomplish what you aim for? One clickbait headline speaks to the elusiveness of human abilities: “How can you save your family when no one else can?” Clickbait shows the grand efficiency of appealing to the perception of will, self, and deliberation. The hijacker application may seem extreme, and a trap only for the most foolish of fools. What I would argue is that it reveals a central function of most networking. A perspective on this process is found in the framework of Tony D. Sampson, who has adapted Gabriel Tarde’s social theory to digital networking. In Tarde’s social framework, the focus is not on individuals or collectives, but rather on what contagiously and unconsciously passes through populations in a process of suggestion and imitation. This generates a view of populations as made up of

somnambulist (sleep-walker) individuals, who are “involuntarily associated with each other via their hypnotic absorption of the contagions of others … mesmerized and contaminated by the fascinations of their social environments.”76 Somnambulism connects to the inability to act on one’s own accord and the illusion of being in command, as the sleep-walker is “possessed by the illusion that their ideas, all of which have been suggested to them, are spontaneous.”77 Networked individuals are sleep-scrollers. They experience themselves to be in charge, selecting where to scroll, when to swipe, and what to tap. Links and content are instead algorithmically recommended to them, placed to draw in and ensnare. Recommender systems function by creating so-called data doubles from the trails of information left by the trails of one’s searches, the links clicked, time spent watching, and where and when one scrolls and swipes. What one encounters in data doubles is a constant feedback with continued engagement, in Sampson’s terminology “a mimicry machine.”78 The video-sharing app TikTok is frequently presented as addictive, locking people into loops through an uncanny ability to know exactly what to offer in its “for you” recommended videos in order to keep you watching. A common conspiratorial notion of personalized recommendations floats around in the idea that your smartphone or your laptop is listening to conversations to provide its accurate recommendations and advertisements. For how does TikTok know your exact idiosyncratic interests? How could recommendation systems chance upon this or that service or product right after you’ve talked with someone about it? From the perspective of the user, one’s preferences may seem infinitely varied and deeply personal. But network relations are larger and more dispersed than the individual. Individuals are funneling connections and being funneled into interacting with the content of the top percent of the network, with the data double limiting the possibilities of networks. What clickbait indicates is that the data double is not simply a double of an individual’s likeness. Recommender systems funnels users not toward individual, but toward general likeness. They give the impression that the network forms according to one’s actions, influenced by diverse and shifting interests and desires. Giving the impression that the network forms according to your agency, actions,

and interests, it is shaping and funneling users into mazes, away from what you may like toward what humans in general like, from idiosyncrasies to species lures of health and wealth, fame, beauty, and partners. When ads or TikTok videos find their way into one’s recommendations they exist as part of a global Captcha system, where the user is constantly identifying themselves as human to the network. The simple trick of network is that it makes it seem like you are the one in charge, making active choices. Precisely you are the one to search for and click something. Networks instead turn intentions into living labyrinths of interactions along symbiotic continuums. The trick of networks is to hide its networking, revealing only the fruiting bodies of mushrooms, making it seem like we are the active participants in picking them, rather than agents of their dispersal. Like the ants turned into zombies with their cognition intact and the hijacked web browsers are the smartphone users. People are sleep-scrolling zombies lost in repetitive routines: Opening apps to see if there is anything new, closing them, and putting away the phone only to mindlessly re-open and refresh moments later. The smartphone sleep-scroller experiences the process as if something has gotten hold over their minds. While they may want to break addiction and regain control, it’s as if decisions have been handed over to the smartphone. Yet, this is not an entirely negative sensation. Rather than zombies and somnambulists ensnared in webs, it is a way of becoming fungal. It is a way of sensing comparable to slime molds, of dispersed minds made mycorrhizal.

Why You Should Give Up Sex and Devote Your Life to Artificial Stupidity As is probably evident, the title of this chapter-concluding section is not wholly my invention. I am too intelligent to come up with anything as attention-grabbing as this. I had to retort to a clickbait headline generator. Other suggestions include “10 Reasons Artificial Stupidity Is Going to Be Big in [Year]”; “The Most Boring Article About Artificial Stupidity You’ll Ever Read”; and “The Evolution of Artificial Stupidity That Not Many People Know About.” All good options, but a headline that includes the word sex (and in particular the provocative suggestion of giving it up) will arouse greater emotional response. With the title having attracted attention, now what? At the start of the chapter, I presented stupidity as acting simultaneously too swift and too slow, and thus solving problems by creating new ones. In using a clickbait to produce the title, this is precisely what has happened. By selecting the clickbait generator produced title, I have let artificial stupidity set the agenda for this section. Somehow, I am tasked with filling the title with some form of relevant content, something providing a modicum of substance. How do I get out of this mess? One solution would be to take further notes from clickbait. What is promised by clickbait always seems out of reach once you have clicked. The bait you were after is moved into a new link, behind another advertisement. Perhaps it would be appropriate then, to push the examination of choosing artificial stupidity over sex into the following paragraph. Or, and I think you might like this: I could keep pushing any discussion that could potentially attach some relevance to the title further and further down in the text. I could even let the central point of the paragraph at any point shift slightly out of reach. The point could be hidden behind pop-ups of irrelevant information: “What the government doesn't want you to know about irrelevant information.” Or, the pop-up could take the form of hijacking intrusions masquerading as helpful suggestions: “6 Reasons to be addicted to helpful suggestions.” Alternately, the text could be replaced with inserts of flashy images which only vaguely highlight parts of what the writing hints toward. The pictures entice without disclosing. Or, I could take a cue from the content

of clickbait, and offer highly specific large sums of money up for grabs if you do this or that. As a medical unprofessional, I could provide confusing and even potentially unsafe health tips. I could offer populations of women dying to date you simply because you happen to be reading this. The passage could simply postpone getting to the point, but carry on stating that, in fact, now comes the crucial point I am going to make: Simply bear with me, in a little while the point will be stated, it will be written out in clear language, and it will be gloriously fascinating: With a delay tending toward infinity, the impression can be produced of getting closer and closer to the point: In the following sentence, it will undoubtedly arrive: Hold on just one more second: Without further ado: Wait for it: It’s coming: Soon: ad nauseum. Falling for the risk of stating the obvious, these are of course stalling tactics. Having caught readers’ attention, and then not providing what is promised, the readers are kept waiting. When will the part about giving up sex for artificial stupidity be addressed? In a while, surely, probably, hopefully, but before that, there are other interesting associations to be made and links to follow: Stalling as a rhetoric device has received less attention than what could be considered a closely linked tactic: producing dispute. Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer offered a comprehensive collection of the different methods to use for derailing discussions in his work The Art of Being Right. To stray further away from the point that will indeed be made here regarding artificial stupidity and sex, it is worth listing the 38 tricks Schopenhauer offers as useful for ruining discussions: The extension; the homonymy; generalize your opponent’s specific statements; conceal your game; false propositions; postulate what has to be proved; yield admissions through questions; make your opponent angry; question in detouring order; take advantage of the nay-sayer; generalize admissions of specific cases; choose metaphors favorable to your proposition; agree to reject the counter-proposition; claim victory despite defeat; use seemingly absurd propositions; arguments ad hominem; defense through subtle distinction; interrupt, break, divert the dispute; generalize the matter, then argue against it; draw conclusions yourself; meet him with a counter-argument as

bad as his; petition principia; make him exaggerate his statement; state a false syllogism; find one instance to the contrary; turn the tables; anger indicates a weak point; persuade the audience, not the opponent; diversion; appeal to authority rather than reason; this is beyond me; put his thesis into some odious category; it applies in theory but not in practice; don’t let him off the hook; will is more effective than insight; bewilder your opponent by mere bombast; a faulty proof refutes his whole position; become personal, insulting rude.79 Schopenhauer intended his volume as an overview, to help guard oneself against these techniques. Yet if the goal of a debater is neither logic nor truth, his work offers a set of quite wonderful lessons. The tricks are not only, or perhaps even mainly, ways of ruining discussion. These techniques work best to manufacture dispute and thereby to drag discussions out, to attempt making them last forever, or at least until everyone becomes bored with the whole thing. Online they are evident in how discussions most readily spring up whenever someone riles others through any of the above methods. Oh, here’s a comic to confirm this tendency in online debates (Fig. 4.2):

Fig. 4.2 An xkcd webcomic by Randall Munro shows the irresistible urge to engage in and continue debates online, especially when it is emotionally aggravating, and the discussion will bring nothing but further disagreement

As a detour to this detour, I want to highlight that academia is by no means immune to Schopenhauer’s tricks. In fact, they may have a special incentive for encouraging them. This can be gleaned from the controversial philosopher (and later climate change denialist) Dennis Dutton’s “The Bad Writing Contest,” which was spawned by his frustration over what he called “awkward, jargon-clogged academic prose.”80 The winning sentence of the contest from 1998 (the final year of the award) was written by philosopher Judith Butler, which I will quote here in its full glory: The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked

a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power. Without passing any judgment over Butler’s prose, as worse sentences have probably been written both before and since, it is clear that Dutton has a certain point in awarding it. The sentence is too long, needlessly convoluted, it is unclear who (if anyone) is doing exactly what (if anything), and what exactly is supposed to be conveyed (again, if anything). As Dutton explains when awarding Butler: “To ask what this means is to miss the point. This sentence beats readers into submission and instructs them that they are in the presence of a great and deep mind. Actual communication has nothing to do with it.” 81 Dutton singling out and offering prizes to academics is itself an impressive feat of artificial stupidity. It is a way of engaging with academic discourse with Schopenhauer’s techniques for derailing: “this is beyond me”— instead of attempting to understand the argument it is dismissed on the basis of its style of writing; “false propositions”—presenting bad writing as a “language crime”; “putting thesis into dubious categories”—an award ceremony of prose quality is perhaps not the best way of evaluating academic contribution; and “persuading the audience rather than the opponent”—the winners and their proponents likely remained unfettered by Dutton’s award. From the perspective explored here, both the prose and Dutton’s work are nevertheless admirable. The cause for admiration comes from precisely the reasons which provided it with the award for bad writing, and for disapproving Dutton’s project. In an academic attention economy, where fitness is measured mainly in terms of citations, what better way to increase impact than by making use of the productive potential of complexifications and propagations? With likelihood of misunderstanding comes greater creative misuse, and tasked with discussing and interpreting, opposing trajectories of Butlerinfluenced thought can develop. Dutton likewise assures continued interest in Butler’s writing. In his criticism, Dutton goes on to compare the awarded author with the bastions of philosophy, who—as Dutton admits—were not always great writers, “[b]ut when Kant or Aristotle or Wittgenstein are most

obscure, it’s because they are honestly grappling with the most complex and difficult problems the human mind can encounter.”82 But are the problems of philosophy really that difficult, and do the philosophers actually offer intelligent solutions? In his discussions, Socrates would make it his method to deny the contextual, lived experience of those he was conversing with, instead insisting on abstractions such as “virtue,” “justice,” “courage,” “beauty,” and “goodness.”83 This is a way of turning something evident and practical (something people know when they experience and interact with it), into something that can be discussed, potentially indefinitely. What could be the true nature of intelligence, or of ignorance, or stupidity, and what about artificial stupidity? You could approach this question by discussing different ways of combining artificial and natural stupidity, ignorance, and intelligence (with potential further distinctions made with synonyms and proximities to either of the terms—for instance essential futility as opposed to contrived meaninglessness). Philosophy is supposedly the love of wisdom, but as sophists would likely agree, it bears more than passing resemblance to the techniques identified as prevalent for artificial stupidity. But only the intelligent would consider this as an altogether negative quality. The limitless potential of philosophy comes perhaps precisely from its morosophy—its love of stupidity. Anthropologist Gregory Bateson points out that there exists “an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds, and it is characteristic of the system that basic error propagates itself.”84 And the love of stupidity proliferates online. There is a tendency for people to be attracted to what is basically wrong—to falsehoods and misconceptions. Mathematicians have shown that in the spread of “true” and “false” news online, truth slows down, while falsehood speeds up.85 There simply seems to be less potency in factual than counterfactual prospects. As likeminded assemble across greater distances in greater numbers than ever before, internetworking is highly beneficial for stupidity. Nowhere is this clearer than the exaggerated and unnecessary complex responses to simple questions with straightforward answers of conspiracy theories. While not a theory in a philosophical or scientific sense, it has its ways of arguing, and its standards of proof.86 While philosophy turns from specific instance to theoretical abstraction, conspiratorial provides an

alternate stupidity strategy. Rather than seeking reasonable explanations in which accidents and unintended consequences occur, these theories invariably require and provide someone conspiring. In secrecy, the conspirators come together, lying to remain in control yet provide clues to the observant. Those responsible are presented as elite actors, or generalized abstractions like the government, the deep state, or Jews or communists, or even humanoid reptiles. Common conspiracies claim that the moon landing was fake and that the earth is flat. One prevalent conspiracy theory is that aliens and UFOs are hidden in a Nevada desert United States Air Force facility, and in 2019 a few million people claimed online to be going to an event titled “Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us.”87 There are incredible fortunes to be made from the gullibility of others. There are almost too many examples of artificial stupidity in online economies to mention: From the clickbait products of sites such as Wish that upon arrival regularly turn out as impoverished and faulty versions of what was promoted, or ads purporting to offer things like free luxury watches—while profiting from over-charging shipping for ultra-cheap items. Economic stupidity can be seen in full effect in situations such as when someone starts a funding campaign to make a potato salad, and gets $50k from donors to do so; when someone sells a Cheeto cheese puff that looks vaguely ape-like for several hundred thousands of dollars in an online auction; or when a kid asks how many reposts he would need on a social network to get a lifetime supply of chicken nuggets from a fast-food chain.88 The prominence of Bitcoin in clickbait indicates cryptocurrencies as another prime example of the stupid economy. Cryptocurrencies are digital means of exchange, whose ownership and transactions are verified by a distributed network termed the blockchain. The digital assets are hyped as a form of decentralized digital currency, but the potential for making any kind of purchases with cryptocurrencies remains limited. Instead, they seem to function largely as financial investments. And while crypto has been hyped as decentralized money systems, the ownership of Bitcoin is more centralized than US dollar. While the top percent of the population in the USA controls 30% of the wealth, the top 0.01% of Bitcoin owners control 27%.89 As cryptocurrencies allow borderless global trade without government

oversight, it also allows for money laundering and funding criminal activities. The blockchain also requires immense amounts of energy, increasing with its popularity. As of 2021, Bitcoin’s electricity usage is larger than some developed nations and the company Google, and expected to continue increasing.90 Bitcoin has had a tremendous surge from around $300 dollars per coin in 2015, to an all-time high of $60,000 in late 2021, before plummeting to $20,000 in mid-2022. Will it bounce back to reach new highs, or has the bubble burst? A perspective on the hype around Bitcoin is found in Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions, where anthropologist Charles MacKay relays the Dutch tulipomania of the mid1630s. MacKay describes the tulip speculation objects as “golden bait hung temptingly out before the people, and one after the other, they rushed to the tulip marts.”91 At its peak, a single tulip bulb of an intensely sought-after variety would fetch a price as high as ten times the annual income of a skilled craftworker, before the economy dramatically collapsed in 1637. The crypto-craze, as the tulipomania, seems to be premised on wealth accrued from getting in early, in combination with fear of missing out (FOMO) and the possibility of a “greater fool,” with prices rising from expectations that someone will be ready to pay even higher prices. Having hinted briefly at the possibility of dragging things out by posting clickbait imagery which might be vaguely relevant, this is an opportune moment to move from money to visuals. One of the important transitions of the wwf happened in 2000, when hyperlinking words turned into a network of visuals as it became possible to search for images. This started as Google realized that they needed a way to provide people with easy access to what was then the most popular search to date: Jennifer Lopez wearing a revealing Versace dress to the 2000 Grammy Awards.92 Fast forward nearly 20 years, and visual attraction seems to have taken a different turn for the weirdly mundane. The most liked picture on Instagram is a plain photo of an egg posted by the account “world_record_egg,” with the cunning caption: “Let’s set a world record together and get the most liked post on Instagram. Beating the current world record held by Kylie Jenner (18 million)! We got this .” What could possibly be the point of this? One response would be to consider it—like Ben Davis, writing for Artnet—as art. The critic places

the egg in a lineage of “Marcel Duchamp’s recontextualizing a urinal as a joke about fine-art sculpture, or Andy Warhol’s recreation of Brillo Boxes as riffs on consumerism, or Yoko Ono’s offering of a Granny Smith apple as a reflection on mortality.”93 This seems in line with how artist Micheá l O’Connell in his PhD thesis renders artistic practice as a process of making oneself stupid in order to be creative, and in this sense art is an abbreviation for artificial stupidity.94 Artist Brad Troemel offers advice on how to make artwork stupid enough to be clicked and shared online, by identifying the potential it has for provoking an interrelated set of responses from the clicker population: 1. 2. 3.

WTF [what the fuck] I don’t even? You’re doing it wrong. My kid could do that.95

     

These three bullet points indicate that removing context, riddling something with mistakes, and conveying irresponsibility are ways to imbue something with a particular ease of transmission. Art finds potential in the most mundane, with an openness to what could otherwise be considered failure, and an enthusiastic embrace of even the most unreasonable decisions. As such, this artificial stupidity forms from producers and viewers honing each other’s attacks and defenses in arms races of artful failure. Artistic stupidity can be combined with economic for synergy effects. A central example here are NFTs, which stand for “non-fungible tokens.” NFTs make use of blockchain for creating and verifying ownership of digital files. Already in the 1930s Benjamin described the changes brought by the possibilities for mechanical reproduction of art through photography, and how the process stripped the aura of authenticity from artworks.96 NFTs reintroduce a form of scarcity onto what would otherwise be near perfectly and instantaneously reproducible files. This way, digital files become objects for economic investment. NFTs thus connect the stupidest aspects of financial speculation with artworks of often debatable creative merit. When companies and institutions jump on the craze to offer NFT the result is tacky and pointless, like Pringles

offering limited editions with “cryptocrisp” flavor. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) attempted to sell NFTs to raise money for wildlife, but the energy consumption of the underlying blockchain and its climate impact make this perhaps most moronic thus far. The stylistic register that has come to dominate NFTs is a series of icons made by applying algorithms to create variations over templates. The differences between the high selling NFT series are themselves comparable to this process of internal variation. Several of these NFT series feature similar looking characters, ranging from the stupendously crude pixelated heads of “Crypto Punks” to the feline variations of “Crypto Kitties,” “Cool Cats,” and “LazyLions,” the primates in “Bored Apes,” and the “Cryptoadz” and “Pudgy Penguins.” The series of icons are comparable to the fads of the 1990s such as cardboard caps with images called Pogs, or the collectible stuffed toys, Beanie Babies. But whereas Beanie Babies may be worth up to hundreds of thousands of dollars, some iconic NFT characters have been sold for millions. The popular NFTs could in sense be considered fitting icons for internetworking, and the ways in which internetworking filters individual variations toward a general base level human. A literary example of artistic stupidity online is the avant-garde poetry flarf, which started out as a scam of a scam. The website Poetry.​ com hosted a fake contest, tricking people into believing any poetry they submitted had won a prestigious award, in order to sell them books featuring their contribution. Gary Sullivan wanted to see how ludicrous a poem they would honor, so he offered a completely nonsensical word— sauce.97 The open-ended possibilities of nonsense proved too fun to give up, and as Sullivan shared his poem with others, they joined in. Someone found that they could automate part of the process by using Google searches, what Goldsmith describes as a process of “uncreative writing,” using non-literary techniques to produce new forms of writing.98 Following Sullivan’s minimal method—googling certain terms and cutting and pasting from results—here is an instance of flarf which I produced by searching “giving up sex to embrace artificial stupidity” and copying random lines from results: The Art of Intentional Mistakes hehe com the brain of a driverless car can take you on a wild and crazy journey

so empowering and liberating being the odd one out my eyes could quickly see you are walking in bed in your pajamas Around 10,000 hair samples strive to impress unless you give it a shot Are You Are Pumpkin filling? The search strategy employed to write this poem can also be connected to the notion of the dérive, by Guy Debord.99 The political theorist presented the process as “a psychogeographical study” of city streets, in which attendees drift along with whatever catches their fancy as they stroll through the cityscape. Dérives were undertaken to break unengaging routines, and avoid succumbing to the path of least resistance when going on strolls. Debord describes the severely restricted routines of a characteristic young student, who follows a set path between the university, their apartment, and piano lessons. Internet surfing itself takes the form of digital dérives. It starts by going into any website or searching for something, and letting one’s attention be caught by something, clicking it, and then finding new links to click or new words to search for. Internet browsing may, however, solidify into narrow routines similar to the student’s triangle of movement, as people are funneled into and kept within the main platforms and the content providing the most engagement there. As Goldsmith details from a session in which students were tasked with browsing the Internet publicly for each other: She then cracks another tab, checks her Yahoo e-mail, and begins streaming Mumford and Sons’ “Little Lion Man” (radio edit) on Pandora, which resembles a soundtrack for a spaghetti Western and gives her performance a cinematic quality; we now feel like we’re watching a movie. Her browsing style is restless and jumpy. Quickly, she is back on Facebook, where she full-screens a clip from Ellen DeGeneres for a brief moment, then closes it. By now, she’s losing her self-consciousness and her surfing becomes

rhythmic: first she checks her e-mail, then Facebook, then back to YouTube, over and over. Both structured and restless, this cycle continually repeats with slight variations over the next ten minutes.100 Actively engaging dérives offers an alternative, to re-open browsing habits. It can be achieved through session where one attempts to steer the browsing into the periphery, actively seeking out the weird and wild mycorrhizal undergrowth. One could even make use of search engines like Marginalia, made by Viktor Lö fgren, which “favors text-heavy websites, and punishes those that have too many modern web design features” to aid in uncovering non-commercial websites.101 This could be necessary for even the most arduous internetworkers, as Goldsmith notes: “As the web becomes more commercial, I find I do less wandering than I used to. The web is now so riddled with zombies and their foul culture—clickbait, spam, ads—that I tend to return again and again to the few sites I know and trust.”102 The Internet has changed, with most of the traffic shifting to a few dominating platforms, in which the browsing is shaped not by links but targeted recommendations. In Goldsmith’s work on wasting time on the Internet, the group workshopped methods for reinventing golden ages of browsing, including “Make a website and fill it with spam” or “Find a niche piece of media that you love and a place on the Internet where someone are discussing it as recently as a month ago.”103 Debord offers yet another valuable detour to the prospect of giving up sex for artificial stupidity. This detour comes from his notion of détournement, as a form of rerouting or hijacking, which subverts function and inserts radical potential.104 This chapter has focused on the lowliest form, clickbait, as a prototypical format of networking. Against utopian claims of networks destabilizing centralized power relations and bringing equality, the focus on clickbait offers ambivalence and uncertainty. In addition, the chapter could be framed as a détournement of artificial intelligence, rendered instead as artificial stupidity, and exploring its multiple possibilities. Clickbait offers a détournement of artificial intelligence, as a form of discognition, an externalized distributed understanding of the functions and interests of humans. Neural networks generate multiple, dynamic, distributed weighted, and

non-arbitrary representations between the connected units.105 A similar process occurs in clickbait, as some terms and images frequently occur in clickbait material they shift from individual instances to become more general categories. As clickbait develops through the interaction between populations, the categorization refers not to that imposed by producers of clickbait, but ones that form through repeated meeting between link and clicker populations. As a form of artificial stupidity, clickbait dreams of humans. Their dream may offer insight into the similarity of humans, and the deep dream of evolutionary pre-history, where attractors are formed by actions and priorities shaped long before civilization, industrialization, urbanization, and technologization. For instance, the general category of celebrity may emerge from frequent occurrence, and this category may then be attached to other emergent categories, such as “beauty,” “wealth,” but also “getting fat,” “secretly gay,” and “cheating.” The overlapping categories could also offer glimpses of knowledge that do not correspond to, or even resemble, human views. The categories may come to have no comparison to those held by producers, connecting body parts, people, food, places, situations, activities, and preferences, in ways that are completely alien to humans. It would be possible to use clickbait to produce a neural network. In doing so, one could form a version of the distributed discognition of clickbait dreaming about humans. Programmer Lars Eidsnes has done precisely this, feeding a neural net with two million headlines from clickbait news outlets, and instructing it to write articles that resemble the ones found there. The resulting site, Clickotron, generates nonsensical articles with crude impressions of how the links understand the clicker population. A small selection of headlines includes: “Taylor Swift Becomes New Face Of Victims of Peace Talks,” “New President is ‘Hours Away’ From Royal Pregnancy,” “Keeping Out the American Dream.”106 Taking a more qualitative approach, as opposed to such statistical feeding, clickbait’s knowledge could be speculatively interpreted based on my time spent clicking. Following the format of clickbait, an interpretation of the clickbait dream could look something like this: Seven tips that reveal everything about humans 1) Humans have bodies. This brings pain, worry, and discomfort, for

instance acid reflux making humans unable to speak, and snoring being a potential cause of death. 2) 3) 4) 5)

6)

7)

Humans eat food to heal bodies, melt fat, or get cancer. Never put food in the fridge. Humans are male or female. Females are hot, and the males want the females to go crazy. Humans want money. It is easy to get, by simply quitting your job. Some jobs are going extinct. Humans are killed by other animals. They also keep animals as pets. Pets are cute, but also skilled in mimicry, looking like their human owners, politicians, or celebrities. Humans take photos. Photos are shocking. Humans take the same picture every year for 25 years. Or they take selfies seconds before dying. Humans look for new iPhones. These cost 1 Euro.

             

In a well-known piece of Daoist writing, Zhuangzi recalls waking from a dream of being a butterfly and wondering whether he might be a butterfly dreaming of being human. Do other things dream of humans? Do fungi dream of humans? Fungi is at the very least capable of making humans dream while awake, triggering out of the ordinary cognitive states. Referred to as psychedelic or magic, some mushrooms contain the compound psilocybin. When ingested these mushrooms offer mindaltering experiences. Discussing his experience with such mushrooms, DeLanda describes how large doses have the consequence that “your self literally disappears … but you do not become unconscious: rather consciousness becomes decentralized and now belongs to each of the intensities.”107 DeLanda notes how this need not be disturbing, but can bring positive qualities, as “each trip is a ‘revelation,’ not of course in the sense that a personal god is speaking to you from above, but merely in that the amount of information that you are processing is much larger.”108 Sheldrake similarly points to how fungi challenge notions of individuality, from the way lichen and mycorrhiza work to the effect that

psychedelics have on human minds.109 There is a profound weirdness in the structural overlap between the growth patterns of fungi and the experience brought by magic mushrooms. The fungi provide humans with an experience that destabilizes centralized cognition into mycorrhizal form. It is mind-blowing how this process lets humans experience themselves fungally—or perhaps how it offers a way of fungi letting themselves experience through humans. The intensity of encounters with mind-altering substances is central for what is called the “stoned ape hypothesis.” This hypothesis aligns the emergence of self-reflection with the use of psychedelic mushrooms.110 The Tassili cave paintings in Algeria, produced sometime between 9000 and 7000 BCE, includes a figure with mushroom-like forms popping up from all over its body. Psychedelic mushrooms might have been prominent in ancient rites, such as the Greek Eleusinian Mysteries in which Plato is thought to have attended. There is something wonderfully stoner about the possibility that tripping on shrooms gave rise to selfreflection, and fueled the founding of philosophy. Sheldrake cautions, however, that “[s]urviving texts and artifacts are patchy, and almost always ambiguous.”111 The passing of the threshold from hunter-gatherer to agriculturalists has been ascribed to fungi, to yeast with its ability to transform grains. The taste for alcohol is pre-human, with the “drunken monkey hypothesis” stating that the ability to metabolize alcohol could have been crucial for “a time when our primate ancestors were spending less time in trees and adapting to a life on the ground where they would discover “a new dietary niche: overripe, fermented fruit that had fallen from trees.”112 It is a toss-up whether farming arose as a response to the use of yeast for bread-making or beer-brewing, but “the beer-before bread hypothesis has steadily gained traction among scholars since the 1980s.”113 Agriculture and civilization might have emerged as a predictable and consistent way for humans to get themselves drunk. No wonder then that there are so many foolish side effects from civilization. Even the underlying interlinking in this chapter of networks and mycorrhiza could be experienced as a revelation: Wait, you’re telling me that our networks act like fungi? Woah, that’s so mind-blowing! Far out! The connection might offer a rush, an overwhelming impression of serendipitous association, and a stupendous coming together in the most

appropriate and surprising manner, more intriguing than one would expect. The notion of ‘networking as fungal as mind-blowing’ could itself be considered a form of seductive bait. The notion draws readers in and traps them within mazes of related but perhaps ultimately irrelevant details presented as parts of arguments. Was it foolish to even attempt connecting fungi with networks? There is some stupidity to the association of fungi as networks as minds. The connection itself grows like mycorrhiza interconnecting and intensifying a range of different interactors. It is mind-altering, expanding, extending, stretching, cognition distributed into discognition, digital networking mycomorph. Having followed the associative digressions, and discussed the potency of artificial stupidity in knowledge production, economy, art, and political theory as itself a form of discognition, leading into the mind-blowing connection between human cognition and fungi, this section ended up in self-reflection on the premise of this chapter as itself a somewhat stupid proposition. It is perhaps time now to finally detour to the main diversion and narrow the focus onto the notion of giving up sex for artificial stupidity. The use of the word sex in the title is of course based on clickbait’s discovery and honing of methods of engagement: to generate desire and withhold its outcome, to perpetually promise, but never actually offer, sex. The symbiosis of orchids and insects offers a clue to why something as seemingly maladaptive as falling for lures prevails. As orchids imitate female insects, the insects are drawn toward them as potential mates. Hesitation may lead to a missed opportunity for mating, so it’s better to be too ready to mate than to be skeptical toward offers.114 Rejecting the clickbait opportunity for affection or affluence appears as a greater risk than that of simply falling for bait. As one of the clickbait headlines reads: “The risk of doing nothing.” The prospect of giving up sex part is perhaps not mainly a suggestion directed at the clicker population, but could be considered a statement of the link population. The clicker population unwittingly acts as the reproductive system for clickbait, allowing it to reproduce and spread. So reliably dimwitted are humans that other organisms can take the advice of this clickbait-generated title. Fungi growing on feet and toenails have co-developed with humans, giving up sexual reproduction to rely on us for their continued survival.115 The propensity that humans have for stupidity, for allowing fungi to grow on us, yeasts and psychedelic

mushrooms to grow with us, and artificial stupidity such as philosophy, conspiracies, art, economic investments, and clickbait to grow from us, offers great productivity for their development. The deceiving of wasps by orchids leads to greater proliferation and diversification for the flowers.116 Likewise, clickbait is wildly successful and differentiated, both in the types of bait and for the range of actors that profit from them. Another central insight into the potential of stupidity comes from philosopher Arne Næss’ discussion of research on maze-running mice.117 The focus in such research has been on the intelligence of those capable of quickly solving the maze. The philosopher suggests that mice spending more time exploring are not slower learners, but rather retain the ability to stay curious longer. The process of staying explorative can be a way of making a maze more difficult than it has to be, which maintains the possibility of solving problems in less than efficient ways. Comparing the intelligent and the stupid maze solver, the former succeeds and finishes the process, while the second struggles, and when finally managing, might have caused new problems in the process. Artificial stupidity harnesses the prospect of preventing success, to stay exploring, to form workarounds rather than completing tasks. Intelligence may be key to reaching logical conclusions, producing scientific knowledge, philosophical clarity, economic rational choices, and artistic quality. Yet neither of these have the evolutionary impact of artificial stupidity, which maintains consistent production of new problems for populations to grapple with. Artificial stupidity over sex is a way of swapping potentially successful orgasm and potentially successful reproduction with the explosive uncertainty of associative paths. The more primitive an organism, the more foolproof are its decisions. Slime molds and fungi are more intelligent than humans. Lured by the tricks of networks, we stupidly get lost within living labyrinths in ways they can only make us dream about.

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Footnotes 1 In an interview in 1926, Nikola Tesla declared that wireless communication will convert earth into a huge brain; see Kennedy 1926; see also Mayer-Kress 1995; Beni and Wang 1993; Kelly 1995; TedxTalks 2011.

  2 Carr 2010.

  3 Levinson 1997 and McLuhan 1962/2011.

  4 Goldsmith 2016: 18.

  5 Boxsel 2003: 20.

  6 See Krakauer in interview, Paulson and Bang 2015.

  7 Goriunova 2013.

  8 Darwin 1871, quoted in Sheldrake 2020: 66.

 

9 Robin 1973.

  10 Turing test was based on an “imitation game,” where an interrogator converses in writing with a man and a woman. The participants try to convince the judge that they are the woman. Replacing one of the humans in the imitation game with a computer produces the Turing test; see Turing 1950.

  11 Bogost 2017.

  12 Powers 1998.

  13 See Schaffer 1999.

  14 Steyerl 2018 and Steyerl and Crawford 2017.

  15 See Rony et al. 2017.

  16 Parikka 2010: xv.

  17 Barabási 2002: 145.

  18 Ibid: 221.

  19 Stamet 1999: 74.

  20 Abebe 2014.

 

21 Cambpell 2001; Mott 1941/2000: 41.

  22 Fink and Penton-Voak 2002.

  23 Zak 2017.

  24 Adorno and Horkheimer 1944/1997.

  25 Barkow et al. 1996: 628-629.

  26 Mahoney 2015.

  27 Tarde, quoted in Deleuze and Guattari 1980/2016: 255.

  28 Berger and Milkman 2012.

  29 Slime molds have been classified as fungi, but are now grouped into the kingdom of protists. As eukaryotic organisms, like plants, animals, or fungi (but unlike bacteria or archaea), slime molds have cell nuclei and other organelles in membranes. Slime mold classification is itself broad, grouping together unrelated organisms.

  30 Reid et.al. 2012.

  31 Beekman and Latty 2011, 2015.

  32 Tero et al. 2010.

 

33 Sheldrake 2020: 15.

  34 Shaviro 2016: 207.

  35 Abbate 1999: 11-13.

  36 DeLanda 2011: 80; Reid et al. 2012.

  37 Beekman and Latty 2011.

  38 Shaviro 2016.

  39 Baran 1960, quoted in Abbate 1999.

  40 Sheldrake 2020: 160-161; 155-156; 136.

  41 Darwin 1862, in Sheldrake 2020: 214.

  42 Sheldrake 2020: 214.

  43 Ibid: 51.

  44 Barabási 2002: 70

  45 Van der Heijden et al. 2014

 

46 Ibid.

  47 Selosse and Le Tacon 1998

  48 Van der Heijden et al. 2014.

  49 Sheldrake 2020: 160-161; 155-156; 136.

  50 DeLanda 1997/2000: 32.

  51 Abbate 1999: 78 and Barabási 2002: 151.

  52 Alex McKenzie, quoted in Abbate 1999: 73.

  53 Abbate 1999: 136.

  54 Ibid: 84-85.

  55 Ibid: 106.

  56 Barabási: 154.

  57 Abbate 1999: 94.

  58 Ibid: 70-71; 80.

 

59 Ibid: 186-188.

  60 DeLanda 2011: 50-51.

  61 Barábasi 2002: 58.

  62 Though regional alternatives with great impact exist (such as the Chinese search engine Baidu, portals Tencent QQ and Sohu, Taobao and Tmall for online shopping, and Russian social network VK), on a global scale their traffic is miniscule.

  63 See Net Marketshare.

  64 Barabási 2002: 167-168.

  65 Ibid: 86.

  66 Srnicek 2017: 30.

  67 Seaver 2018.

  68 Ibid: 12.

  69 Brunton 2013: 147-148.

  70 Ibid: 161-162.

  71 See Bergen 2019.

  72 Von Ahn, et al. 2003.

  73 See Krebs 2012.

  74 Sheldrake 2020: 39-40.

  75 Ibid: 96-97.

  76 Sampson 2012: 12-13.

  77 Tarde 1903/1962: 77.

  78 Sampson 2020: 133.

  79 Schopenhauer 1831/2004.

  80 Dutton 1999.

  81 Ibid.

  82 Ibid.

  83 See Abram 1997: 109-112.

  84 Bateson 1972: 489.

  85 Vosoughi et al. 2018.

  86 Byford 2011: 5-6.

  87 Chokshi 2019.

  88 See Roman 2017.

  89 Makarov and Schoar 2021.

  90 See Huang et al. 2021.

  91 Mackay 1841/2003: 102.

  92 Schmidt 2015.

  93 Davis 2019.

  94 O’Connel 2017.

  95 Troemel 2013.

  96 Benjamin 1935.

  97 For Gary Sullivan’s account of flarf’s origin; see Poets.org 2011.

  98 Goldsmith 2011.

  99 Debord 1956a.

  100 Goldsmith 2016: 34.

  101 Lö fgren.

  102 Goldsmith 2016: 47.

  103 Ibid: 157.

  104 Debord 1956b.

  105 DeLanda 2011: 88-90.

  106 Eidsnes 2015.

  107 DeLanda 2012.

  108 Ibid. For my account on how destabilizing consciousness can lead to the processing of more information, see the section “Uprooting Cognition.”

  109 Sheldrake 2020: 111-112.

 

110 Ibid: 101

  111 Ibid.

  112 Ibid: 217.

  113 Ibid: 203.

  114 Alcock 2005.

  115 Persinoti et al. 2018.

  116 Cozzoolino and Widmer 2005.

  117 Rothenberg and Næss 1993: 72.

 

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Ervik, Becoming Human Amid Diversions https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13877-5_5

5. Social Petworks Andreas Ervik1   (1) Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

 

  Andreas Ervik Email: [email protected]

So Cute! When asked which of the main current uses he had not anticipated (Fig. 5.1), World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee replied: kittens.1 The importance of feline—as well as canine—friends online is attested by the onslaught of news headlines referring to how animals haven taken over the Internet. This can come in the form of massively popular pages dedicated to distributing pet content, such as I Can Haz Cheezeburger, or by the proliferation of pet video clips in social media platforms. The central question in this chapter is: What makes animals, and pets in particular, attract so much attention from online populations? The answer may seem so self-evident that it potentially obscures its intricacies: because they are cute! But what makes these beasts so adorably cute, and more fundamentally, what is it about cuteness that makes it such a powerful attractor?

Fig. 5.1 Picture from the Facebook profile of Lil Bub, a profile with 3 million Facebook likes, courtesy Mike Bridavsky

Answering such a question needs a definition of cuteness. As an attractor, cuteness depends on the meeting between expressive and receptive capacities; someone needs to be able to perceive someone or something as cute. It could thus be considered subjective, located in the eye of the beholder. As fluffy as cuteness may appear, it is no vague and unpredictable response. Cuteness is more than a fleeting individual sentiment; it has lasting effects on populations. There is a certain structure to cuteness, with specific parameters shared among large parts of the human population. In a classic study, ethologist Konrad Lorenz showed how humans are attracted to the youthful appearance and features of animals, such as large eyes, large heads relative to body size, small paws, and small noses.2 The role of cuteness in this shared bond

can be elucidated with what ethologist Niko Tinbergen identifies as supernormal stimuli.3 Exaggerated versions of stimuli generate stronger responses, and thus the large eyes and plump furry body of a pet are likely so cute because they are supernormal versions of human offspring. The human capacity for perceiving cuteness is extremely high, as mostly anything can be considered cute as long as it conforms to the basic scheme of juvenility. There are individual differences in where cuteness potentially passes a threshold into something different, for instance disgust or the uncanny, yet there are also shared tendencies, such as the creepily cute. Mammals with floppy ears, shorter snouts, larger heads, and larger eyes are supercute. As discussed by evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, animated characters are regularly cute, and may even develop to more clearly exhibit these features over time.4 Even something as simple as a colon and parenthesis, :), may elicit the response of cuteness.5 The connection of cuteness with cartoons also seems to indicate easy legibility (clear form and outlines) to make something cuter. In her aesthetic categorization, Ngai connects cuteness “to our desire for a simpler, more intimate relation to our commodities.”6 This points out how cuteness is not limited to beings, but also to objects, and to size disparities between the observer and the cute. It also points to a particular form of intimacy, where the cute can be held physically, but also held ownership over. The cute is smaller, less able, and more physically vulnerable than those that perceive its cuteness. The cute, be they an animated character, a pet, or a stuffed toy, become cute not only through the appearance of juvenility, but also by some degree of compliance to being owned, dominated, and controlled. This is perhaps why for Ngai, cuteness becomes an “aestheticization of powerlessness” and an “affective response to weakness,” which leads her to point out how violence “is always implicit in our relation to the cute object.”7 Philosopher Simon May, in his book on cuteness, opposes such an absolute statement. He points out that cuteness is generally perceived as harmless, innocent, cuddly, comforting, yet contends that it nevertheless holds power, through its ability to attract and seduce.8 In its connection to juvenility the power of cuteness is tied most intimately not to the threat of violence brought by size and power disparities, but to the attention and care

required by and offered to the juvenile from its older, or simply larger, caregivers. Cuteness is theorized to prime caregivers to pay extra attention to offspring at an early age, when they are particularly vulnerable.9 There are also indications that looking at something cute has wide-ranging benefits for humans beyond eliciting responses of care-giving, to include improving cognitive focus and perceptual carefulness.10 How could cuteness become so important for humans that it would span from baby animals to simple drawings, and become an attractive quality that brings focus and pleasure? Some explanation is found in the co-evolution of caregivers and caretakers, and the potential that strong bonds between the two have had for mammals. Here humans are in a particular position, not only because of our tendency to provide an inordinate amount of care to our own offspring, but also through our interspecies bond with pet companions. This bond runs deep into human prehistory. It is estimated that dogs were domesticated at least 14–15.000 years ago, with recent fossils found in a cave in Belgium dating the process back approximately 31,700 years, whereas cats are indicated to have been domesticated sometime around 10,500 years ago.11 The evolutionary bonds formed with pets are unique in human history, as they do not rely on exploitation of animal produce (meat, hide, or wool), but rather turn pets into parts of communities and families. The novel capacities of humans, and the animals that found ways to take advantage of interactions with humans, generated another form of interspecies relation—one not dependent on predation or prey, but rather on keeping each other company and sharing bounty from hunts. Cuteness is paradoxical. Attraction to cuteness is superficial, in the sense that it is directed toward certain looks and behavioral quirks, cherishing those who possess them. Yet it is also a central primer for care-giving. Cuteness can be thought of as infantile distractions, as it draws the adults toward the infant, but in the process it also infantilizes, as adults may become attracted to the foolish fluffballs of pets, animated characters, or toys. When people watch loops of cute pet clips on TikTok or Instagram it may be accompanied by a certain ambivalence, a desire to seek the comforting simplicity and familiarity it offers, as well as a shame tied to its seeming insignificance and sentimentality. Most will

testify watching cute animals online, but will likely be quick to note that it is far from their main media diet. Cuteness could be engaged from a critical perspective, to uncover the perhaps unconscious and ideological biases behind the sentiment, and to expose and demystify it. Or it could take the form of reducing cuteness to genes. Instead of attempts to see through the veil of superficial sentiments, I will examine cuteness at surface level, staying close and intimate with how it appears. If the cute provokes a desire to hug, then why be suspicious and attempt avoiding rather than embracing this emotional response? Taking cuteness at face value means that such sentiment is not simply dismissed as sentimental, and not reduced to the symptom of something else—be that genes or ideology. I will be adopting instead a superficial approach to understand cuteness. This does not mean shying away from inferring, interpreting, imagining, and imposing. It simply means that these will not be understood as tactics to reveal deceptions—to overcome the surface to reach truths. Instead, impositions of intentions and emotions are considered commonplace and superficial forms of engagement with the cute. A superficial analysis of cuteness stays invested in pets and cute imagery, but also with pet breeders and owners of celebrity animals—those who are concerned with the potential of animal surfaces to invoke attraction. My contention is that a superficial perspective can offer new ways of understanding the traits of animal individuality, emotional states, and the dynamics of care. In the following section, the evolutionary influence of cuteness will be discussed through analysis of cute content found on Facebook. Facebook has been selected here because it was at one point culturally engrained as the quintessential social network, despite predecessors such as MySpace and successors in Instagram and TikTok. Social media generally store information so it is recollected and searchable, enabling the sorting of users into ranks based, among other things, on how well their content performs and their posting frequency. In social networks, focus, time, likes, and follows act as currencies, with cuteness an affective intensity. Boo was one of the first famous dogs on the Internet, with at one point 17 million Facebook followers. I will use Boo’s Facebook profile as a starting point for understanding social networking more generally, including what is posted and shared. Boo’s pictures and videos are captioned in ways that give the impression of Boo himself posting and commenting. What does Boo’s individuality consist of, and how does

it function within interspecies social dynamics and online social networks? I here develop the concept of the animalselfie to understand the function of pet images, and social petworks to form an understanding of the social dynamic they exist within. The section thereafter will focus on a selected range of immensely popular pet videos on YouTube. The first video uploaded to YouTube, in April 2005, was an animal clip, where one of the co-founders of the page visited a zoo, showing elephants and talking about how cool their long trunks are.12 Philosopher Vinciane Despret suggests that YouTube is a site for ethological examination, as it offers an array of recordings of the varied manners, customs, and habits of animals.13 Some videos show behavior that suggests states that would otherwise be considered uniquely human, such as love, grief, and creativity. What kind of emotional states are animals capable of? Most commonly this question is connected to the possibility of animal experience, and examined with specific reflections on for instance whether birds actually enjoy their singing. It also pertains to the evolution of human artistry, where the emergence of song is regularly traced to rituals of social bonding or the soothing of infants. This raises the deep question of whether animals have the capacity for such experiences. Instead of engaging with this question from vantage point of internal intentional states, I approach it superficially. Central here will be examining the displays of creativity in animal clips, to form an understanding of the emergence and tendencies of such creativity. My notion of creativity is developed here from the meeting between populations, and the possibilities of surface creativity of this process. The final part of the chapter deals with another well-known cutie pie, the cat Lil Bub, to explore the impact of cuteness on human care-giving behavior. How could humans become so compassionate that their caregiving extended from their own offspring to that of others? How far does such affection extend? The special affinity that humans have for cuteness will be explored here through its impact on a range of activities, including its role in sexual attraction and the willingness to give up one’s own life for those you love, as well as on the subject of eating animals.

#animalselfies Boo is so cute. He is perhaps the cutest dog ever. If you google the world’s cutest dog, you’re going to get a lot of hits for Boo, not least because there is a book about him titled Boo—The Life of the World’s Cutest Dog. Boo’s cuteness is not just an individual sentiment, but the consequence of Boo’s features aligning with the central aspects of cuteness: His head is a large round ball on a small body; his fur appears immensely soft and fluffy; his neck is short and his legs are stubby, with paws that are seemingly claw-less; his eyes are button-like; his nose is heart-shaped and squeezed in on a tiny snout; his ears are round and fold downward; and his tongue is perfect pink. How quaint it is to see him dressed up like a bumblebee or a pumpkin; how helpless and clumsy he appears, simply by putting on oversized sunglasses, or in a dinosaur costume (“Chubby dinosaurs are the best ,” as one commenter on his profile put it). Boo has an almost perfect toy-like quality, and his fur is trimmed to retain the looks of a real-world, walking, woofing teddy bear. Place Boo next to a bunch of the teddy bears produced in his likeness and it is hard to spot the difference. While some might find his proximity to an inanimate object turned living slightly disturbing, the general sentiment is one of fondness due to his extreme cuteness. Posts to Boo’s Facebook are regularly greeted with bursts of emotional affection: “I love you Boo!! ” While Boo does not take pictures of himself, the pictures are regularly presented as if they are taken by him, captioned with some variant of “Here is a picture of me.” What kind of selfhood is depicted in these photos? Photographic portraits are defined by photography scholar Graham Clarke as a picture which “surreptitiously declares itself as the trace of the person (or personality) before the eye.”14 This minimal definition renders portraits as traces of some person displayed to some viewer. To consider whether Boo holds such personhood, I turn to philosopher Cynthia Freeland’s account of animal portraits. For the picture of an animal to be a portrait, Freeland requires firstly the identification of an individual animal.15 This is simple to acknowledge for Boo. As any dog, he is the product of a lineage of domesticated canines. Pets are considered part of families, where they are not generalized part of species or breeds, but have names and identifiable behavioral

idiosyncrasies. On Facebook, people are following the specific and identifiably individual dog Boo. Boo is a dog of the breed Pomeranian, and Buzzfeed once attempted—but admittedly failed—to reproduce the cuteness overload that is Boo, by a makeover of another pup of the same breed.16 This indicates Boo to be a specific individual, both like and unlike other Pomeranians. Boo is part of a household which includes several other dogs—Buddy, Benny, and Bluebeary Pie, each shown on Boo’s Facebook profile as individuals with distinct personalities. The second requirement for animal portraiture is discussed more in depth by Freeland, as she reflects on the possibilities of animals possessing internal states. In particular their potential for suffering is taken to indicate emotional states.17 The question is then whether they express emotions in ways that can be shared across species, so that humans appreciate the pup’s expressions approximately as intended. For humans this is generally a question of looking at and understanding each other’s facial expressions. While faces may seem like an obvious candidate for individual characteristics, for most other animals this is not a self-evident marker. As discussed in previous chapters, bacteria, fungi, plants, and insects possess and grow as systems of spatialized memory. Birds and animals have an increased capacity for internal memories, as well as for forming more elaborate social dynamics.18 While some insect species have social lives in colonies, their ways of communicating is indirect, for instance through chemical differences. Animals and birds are equipped with the sensory, psychological, and social sophistication to identify each other as specific individuals, and to categorize and maintain kinship groups with dominance hierarchies.19 Individuality can be identified in social groups by specifics of body odor, vocal calls, and bodily and facial features. Other animals mostly deter from making direct eye contact, as it is a signal of threat, while humans regularly meet eye to eye. Human evolution involves the evolution of the face as a form of social technology.20 The importance of face recognition for humans is testified in how the tissue of the brain involved in this activity keeps expanding throughout life, unlike other brain regions.21 The increased time spent by humans looking at each other’s visages has led to an evolutionary process of differentiation of facial characteristics. This process turns the face into a territory of its own, a partially self-contained field of

intensities of significance and subjectivity.22 In the process, facial muscular movement and emotional signaling have become coupled, opening for the possibility of displaying one’s own and influencing the emotional states of others.23 Facial expressivity involves displays of voluntary as well as involuntary signs to others. Individual differentiation of human faces is extraordinary when compared to other animals, testament to the extent of the adaptive pressure in human social groups toward unique and expressive individuality. Darwin considered similarities of expressions among animals as possible testament to the shared function and origins of expressions.24 What kind of emotional expressions are shared between humans and dogs? Canids staring at each other is a sign of aggression, but domesticated dogs enjoy interspecies gazing.25 Research on dogs indicates that in addition to being attuned to vocal and olfactory emotional cues, dogs respond to human emotional facial expressivity.26 This goes the other way as well, with dog facial expressions conveying emotions to humans—in particular through eyebrow-raising, which resembles human expressions of sadness, using a muscle which is not present in wolves.27 Humans have turned what was for our ancestors a threat, into prosocial signals, and this transition was instigated in our companions as well. How could this shift take place? Without reducing the relations to the genetic underpinning, there are indications that genes implicated in Williams-Beuren syndrome are found in dogs as well. This syndrome is characterized by hyper-sociality, and suggests that taming selects for hyper-social behavior.28 The evolution of humans and our co-evolution with dogs seem to have involved the forming of animals that initiate contact more often, seeking and extending gaze, including with interspecies strangers. The neurotransmitter oxytocin has been shown to impact this relationship. Considered fundamental for parent–offspring bonding in humans, oxytocin also contributes to bonding between friends as well as sexual partners—produced by both hugs and orgasms.29 Petting and looking into each other’s eyes bring about this effect for both the pet and the human, heightening their oxytocin levels in a feedback loop.30 With the emotional influence between caregivers and pets, it would seem legitimate to accept the prospect of animal portraiture, until

Freeland adds the third and final requirement. Focusing on the process of photography, she writes that for a picture to be a portrait, “the artist and subject of a portrait must participate knowingly in its creation, so that the resulting image manifests their differing desires and attitudes about it. For the subject, portraiture involves an act of posing or of selfrepresentation.”31 The pictures of Boo would thereby require not only some degree of a subject aware of its possibility of expressing emotional states to others, but also a conception of what a picture is, and to be aware of being depicted. As a consequence, for Freeland, animals cannot be portrayed. To a large extent, I follow Freeland in her distinctions, but I arrive at a different conclusion. Part of the issue I take with Freeland is the way she restricts photography’s ontological status from any participation in social dynamics beyond that of the photographer, the depicted and the viewer. This follows Clarke’s basic definition of portraits as presented before the eye, with the singular form here indicating that the picture is shown to an “I”—a singular subject. The portrait is thereby framed as an interplay between the portrayed, portrayer, and viewer (with technologies of depiction and distribution as intermediaries), all of which are discrete individuals. This narrow loop of interactors emphasizes the intentions and understanding of the situation of the individuals involved—and would thereby seem to close off the possibility of portraits of animals. Expanding the circle to include not only individuals, but a population of viewers makes this distinction less clear, as what constitutes a portrait depends then not entirely on the individual with their specific understanding, but on the social pressure of an entire population. Whether or not the pictures of Boo are to be taken as portraits of Boo is not solely based on individual intention and reflectivity of the situation (neither by the dog, the photographer, nor the philosopher viewer), but in what constitutes portraiture for the group interacting with the pictures. How do people interact with the picture of Boo? As already indicated in the first paragraph of this section, they talk directly to him. The captions accompanying the pictures on his profile formulate what is to be appreciated as the pet’s sentiments—as described by Boo’s caregivers (or others recaptioning and redistributing the pictures). The Facebook page of Boo gives him a voice, through humans speaking on his behalf. Presenting the selfhood of Boo through pictures and captions is of course

not a novelty of social media, but something present even in everyday relations with dogs. When interacting with them, people regularly exclaim (often using a higher pitch than regular speech): Who’s a good boy? Yes, yes you are! Such dog-directed speech shares prosody and syntax (melody and word arrangement) with infant-directed speech, and has been indicated to enhance dog attentiveness toward humans.32 Dogdirected speech habitually contains both question and reply— simultaneously talking with and talking for. W. J. T. Mitchell has identified a general tendency for humans to talk on behalf of others, be they human, animal, or even inanimate objects. Mitchell discusses his own theoretical work on images as falling into the latter category, as he examines what images themselves can be said to want. He is open about this being a line of thought which in some sense “flirts with a regressive, superstitious attitude towards images, one that if taken seriously would lead to practices like totemism, fetishism, idolatry, and animism.”33 But this does not prevent him from retaining such attitude, as he considers it a way of taking seriously the ontology of images.34 In a similar manner, political theorist Jane Bennett has considered anthropomorphic projection of human qualities onto nonhumans a counter to the more prevalent view of anthropocentrism, which holds humans to be different from and superior to other beings.35 Conceptualizing Boo as an individual with emotional states, and equipping him with self-representation through text and imagery, could be considered a regressive attitude. At the same time, it is a significant way of replacing anthropocentrism with an openness to the inner lives of other organisms. Mitchell and Bennett offer ways of reflecting on the portrait captions as ways of presenting both how Boo sees himself and how humans see themselves through Boo. Following Mitchell’s notion of desiring images and Bennett’s anthropomorphism as a counter to anthropocentrism, I consider the pictures of Boo not simply as portraits of this pet, but as selfies. Selfies are commonly used as designator for a particular type of self-portraits, taken with the cameras of smartphones and shared on social networks.36 I propose that the pictures of Boo are animalselfies. What characterizes the animalselfie is that it shows specific individuals who are considered distinct selves by others who are themselves distinct selves. These distinct selves interpret and impose mental states and motivations upon

each other, often in a non-reciprocal manner. Animalselfies take the form of superficial imposing and interpreting, without consideration into whether it is actually possible to access each other’s internal states. This can be appreciated in the ways that dogs and humans engage with each other in daily life. The dog snaps a piece of food as their human partner looks away, and the human scolds the dog after discovering its mischievousness, considering it an act of disobedience. The animalselfie is characterized by a certain direct address, which is evident from the comments to posts on Boo’s Facebook page. These are commonly directed toward the dog, with exclamations such as “I absolutely love seeing you be happy. You deserve all of the comforts available as you have one hard job of keeping your family safe.” It seems that if the account is presented in first person, the reaction is a direct response to the depicted individual, with the picture acting as an unacknowledged intermediary. When the account is presented in third person, the first person-oriented responses are more likely if what is presented are exclamations of love, or expressions of distress if the animal is sick, relief that the pet is well again, or grief that the pet has died. Pictures of humans follow similar tendencies. With their “this is me” format selfies are more likely to elicit responses of direct communication. The same is the case for celebrity’s death, which is regularly greeted in social media with waves of people telling the person to rest in peace. Animalselfies may indicate central aspects of pictures more generally. Photo theorist Roland Barthes describes photography as an extension of the child’s pointing: look at that there; that’s the way it is.37 The status of pictures as intermediaries becomes less noticeable the more they seem to offer access to an individual. As populations respond to animalselfies, mediation recedes from focus, allowing people to experience the relation as more directly to the depicted self. While directed toward someone, the communicative acts of animalselfies are displayed in groups, where as much as talking to the animal, person, or “selfie,” the members of the group signal each other that they care. Animalselfies thus let us show ourselves to others, as well as see ourselves through others, say things about ourselves, say things about others, and relate to what others are saying about themselves and others. What do animalselfies let humans say about ourselves? A telling example of this is found in the posts of Boo referring to his caretakers,

presenting them as human. A video of Boo tilting his head from side to side and moving his ears is captioned: “this was 5 years ago today when human used to put me through neck and ear workout drills. totally normal.” The relation between humans and pets is here not of parent, caregiver, playmate, or owner, but simply one of different animal species. The caption renders Boo as capable of grasping species differences, but incapable of distinguishing between individual persons. This is not supported by studies, which show dogs, as well as sheep and pigeons, to be capable of distinguishing between individual human faces.38 It is likely not part of the way that people think about their pets either, but instead indicates that the pictures offer a way of talking about general human sentiments. The caption points to pets as transcending human variations, functioning as universals. Pets are simply there, expressing sentiments and eliciting emotional responses. The toy-like face of Boo has a neutral yet positive-looking expression, which emotions are projected onto: when his tongue sticks out and his mouth curves upward, he gives the impression of smiling; when his eyes are squinty and he has a frown above his snout, he is imagined to be grumpy, or perhaps tired. There is indeed an abundance of photos of Boo and his friends sleeping: “my friday accomplishments so far: waking up just long enough to eat to reenergize for my mid morning nap.” Another common scenario is craving for treats. Boo is presented as having the same basic needs as any human: sleeping, eating, and being recognized and cared for as an individual. A plethora of posts talk about Mondays being hard, and about wanting more snacks. People recognize themselves in these pictures: Boo is so much like me, I am also happy. Or: Boo is so much like me, I am also sleepy. The section of his profile explaining what the page is about simply states: “My name is Boo. I am a dog. Life is good.” What else could one want to know about someone? When life is good, life is good. With the animalselfie and its potential for social signaling established, it is apt to consider, in a broader sense, the role such pictures have in the social networks they are distributed in. To do this, I orient myself from Boo’s profile to a view of Facebook in general. Facebook originated as a website called “Facemash,” created by Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard University. Inspired by the website Hotornot, Facemash compiled and randomly paired photos of students at Harvard, and then let users select the most attractive in the pairings. As the site

became a big hit on campus, the Harvard administration had Zuckerberg shut it down over breaches of security, as well as copyright and privacy violations.39 The ill-fated Facemash grew into something else, as the base program was used for creating an online student directory. At universities, such directories are referred to as “face books.” Adopting this term, Zuckerberg launched “Thefacebook” in February 2004, dropping the “the” a year later. From initially being Harvard student-exclusive, the site opened for everyone over the age of 13 in 2006. Within the coming decade it would become the most used social media, and remains the world’s largest social network, with over 2 billion users today.40 Registering on Facebook gives the user a profile that displays their posts, including status updates, photos and videos, app interactions, and events. On Facebook people interact with others, through public posts, and private messaging and sharing event invitations. The social network acts as a distributed system for group interactions, linking together people, putting their bonds on display, and maintaining a record of them. As animalselfies are shared in online social networks, these networks turn into what I call social petworks.41 This term is used here partly to indicate how the interactions of the networks form around pets of a community’s choice. An important discussion in this regard is whether cats or dogs are the main animal in these petworks. Since 2006, “lolcats” (lol is an abbreviation for laughing out loud) has been an immensely popular form of cat pictures with text added to enhance their amusing potential. The New York Museum of Moving Images has hosted an exhibition titled “How Cats Took Over the Internet,” stating that cats “ruling the internet is an undisputed truism.” Yet, Boo’s Facebook following completely dwarfs that of the most popular cat, Lil Bub, and comparing dogs to cats with regard to the number of Google searches, likes on Facebook, videos on YouTube, and pet accounts on Instagram reveals canine domination.42 This could indicate that, while felines may have previously been favorized online, dogs have become more popular in recent years. On a global scale, the dominant pets are neither cats nor dogs, but both. Local communities may organize around other pets of their choice, such as for instance Ugandan petworks, forming around goats and chickens.43

Articles regularly discuss whether cats or dogs are the legitimate spirit animal of the Internet, but art critic Brian Droitcour goes one step further and divides web browsing into distinct patterns aligned with the pets: Catbrowsing is by oneself, in secret, while dogbrowsing explosively shares and likes.44 Cats are of course curious yet reclusive, while dogs are enthusiastic and social. Cats are smart and play hard to get, while dogs are dumb and try too hard. Among the famous social petwork cats is Grumpy cat, known for a characteristic appearance which gives the impression that she is grumpy. And a regularly cited comic in discussions of networks shows a dog in front of a computer, explaining to another dog sitting next to it: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”45 With the notions of catbrowsing and dogbrowsing, this could perhaps be reformulated to, “On the Internet, everybody is a dog or a cat.” The concept of social petworks is also a way of reflecting on online social interactions as extensions of social mammal dynamics. The adoption of Facebook by its users can be ascribed to the possibilities it affords for displaying and observing others’ specific selfhood, as well as the socially motivated fear of missing out, desire to find partners, or interest in stalking ex-lovers, in addition to more generally keeping in touch and building communities. These habits are shared with social mammals, which have the capability to identify individuals and group relations. While Facebook originated from a game of hot-or-not, in effect using sexual attraction, what it developed into after is more in line with enduring forms of affection in mammals, oriented toward care-giving grooming and nesting behavior. From the attraction to looks in Facemash, Facebook has matured, and over the years seems to have shifted into a site for baby and pet pictures. Flirting is relegated to younger social petworks, where youth match up without their parents potentially spying on their activities. This includes moving to Facebookowned Instagram, followed by Snapchat and TikTok. In the interspecies relations between dogs and humans, there is a drive toward collapsing distinctions, through imagining and imposing intentions, and likening pups to human offspring. Social petworking likewise seems to constitute a domestication and cutification of digital technologies, turning the non-human and potentially alien aspects of these technologies into something that looks and responds in ways comparable with those of humans. The simplest way of making digital technology human-like is displaying faces on it. Since prehistory, humans

have spent a lot of time looking at each other’s faces, and no wonder then that people enjoy looking at pictures of each other, and at individual Facebook profiles. Part of the human interest in images of other humans could perhaps be traced to how it allows us to look directly at someone for prolonged periods, while they are unable to scrutinize us with their gaze. In social petworks, pictures which include faces are indicated to have more traction, and produce more engagement.46 This could be denounced as a central aspect of concern over social petworking, that we are spending more time with our phones than with people, and that faceto-face has been replaced with Facebook.47 Whether social petworking is making humans more or less social, the widespread investment into social petworking signals how Facebook allows for easy access to the intensity of looking at others without the burden of that person looking back. Oxytocin is indicated as part of the molecular underpinning of Internet addiction.48 This opens for the possibility that like interaction with pets, social petworks seem to seize neural pathways of social connectivity. People start responding to the time spent engaging with the social petworks and the objects used for this (especially our ready-athand smartphones) as parts of, if not the locus, for social relations, providing us with bonding and stress relief. The language of social petworks is one of short, exclamatory bursts of speech acts—which has included playful “pokes,” and non-verbal positive affirmations, like thumbs up and a range of smileys, as a means of establishing and maintaining contact. Facebook tells you when it’s time to pay extra attention to certain contacts in your petwork—because they are trying to reach you, liked something you posted, or it it’s their birthday, or even that they are going to a place where you might want to join them. Pet relations are not only visual but also tactile, including cuddling and caressing, and social petworks provoke similar relations between humans and digital technologies. We stroke our phones, and bring them into our beds, as the first thing to interact with when waking up in the morning, and regularly giving them the last embrace before sleep. Social petworking seems to lead to a predominance of content that provides people with what animals generally give each other with: soothing and comforting. Sharing animalselfies with each other is a digital cuddle, a way to maintain friendships and hug each other over distance.

The soothing comfort of social petworks includes not only pet content, but also the emergence and proliferation of forms of highly popular video formats unique to social petworks. In particular, these are strangely satisfying videos, which display repeated and varying patterns of order, symmetry, and fractals, triggering tactility and likely relieving stress through gratifying sensory stimuli, and ASMR videos (autonomous sensory meridian response) of gentle, tiny sounds such as whispers, brushes, taps, or chewing, or doing mundane tasks such as folding towels or slurping spaghetti, which trigger low-grade euphoria and tingling sensations in the neck and head of some people.49 Returning to Boo’s position on Facebook, his rise to fame is regularly portrayed as an accidental happening. In an interview, Boo’s caretaker— Irene Ahn, operating then under the pseudonym J. H. Lee—talks about how the Facebook page started without any expectations of the stardom that Boo would reach. This unassisted rise to fame has been problematized, by speculations regarding Ahn being employed in a high position job at Facebook when Boo rose to stardom.50 Without suggesting this led to Boo’s fame, I find the potential steering of fandom appropriate to discuss, as it in a certain sense echoes reports of Facebook’s treatment of its users. In 2014, it was revealed that Facebook has manipulated the feed (content stream) of 700.000 users, to shift their emotional state in positive or negative directions.51 The algorithms of Facebook are also said to be able to make more accurate personality judgments about someone than other humans.52 From facial recognition software tracking you, to data about your personal life being collected, there are concerns over your individual selfhood being turned into animalselfies. No longer in control, as animalselfies one exists at the mercy of social petworks (both companies and other interacting animalselfies). When considered through the framework of social petworks, it becomes another example of animal relations. These include forms of control far worse than what humans are exposed to by tech companies: breeding, drugging, eating, euthanizing, experimenting on, feeding, healing, hunting, imprisoning, killing, petting, selling, and sterilizing. Donna Haraway frames the coevolution of companion species as downright messy, at once horrible and joyful, part of which stimulates her to an ethic of staying with the troubled relations.53

Digital social petworks generate dynamics fraught with emotional manipulation, but this is not necessarily a surprise, as impositions of mental states and manipulative behavior are already part of offline animalselfies and social petworks. On Facebook, humans become subjugated to automated algorithms performing the bidding of the company. Humans perhaps no longer hold the positions of dominant and decider in the same way as in other domestic affairs, where we select who to pet and who to eat, or more mundanely when to give a dog a treat or when to scorn it for begging. Online social petworks are not just domesticated to appeal to us, but also domesticate us, trapping us to screens, where algorithms are rigged to dictate our feed. In social petworks, we find our animalselfies obliged to voice support of our friends and family through an array of self-effacing smileys and affirmative speech acts. All the while Facebook gets data on anything and everything in our feed, from interest in a Pomeranian named Boo, to whether one shares some of his favorite things: “chicken, cheese, flowers, grass, dirt,” to any and all of the private and seemingly secure information shared. For Facebook, this is monetizable, offering specific demographics of users to advertisers. To conclude this section, I bring in another evocative social petwork imagery. The video (see Fig. 5.2), recorded from a car, shows the robot named Spot, made by Boston Dynamics, roaming suburban streets. The distinctly colored robot is without facial features, yet its movement patterns make it seem animal. Echoing the main response to Boo, in the video someone can be heard greeting the robot with a gleeful female voice: “Oh my god. I love you. I love you so much. Oh my god.” The video has a dystopian quality. It comes from the contrast between this enthusiasm and the cultural imaginary of robots as bringers of human doom. A more utopian perspective on human–machine relations, which could perhaps even be described as cute, is offered in a poem by Richard Brautigan, who dreamed of “a cybernetic meadow/where mammals and computers/live together in mutually/programming harmony” and “a cybernetic ecology/…all watched over/by machines of loving grace.”54

Fig. 5.2 Still from a video posted September 25, 2020, by Twitter user @bloodtear_ (account has since been deleted)

Hallucinating Harmonies In January 2019, Boo died. His owners stated to Boo’s followers—and the BBC reported in earnest—that he died from a broken heart.55 Boo’s heart problems supposedly started when another Pomeranian in the household died in 2017. The senior dog, Buddy, died at the age of 14, while Boo only turned 12, both within the common age range for the Pomeranian breed. The breed has a genetic predisposition for heart conditions, which is a leading cause of their death. This heartbreak might exist only in the social realm of humans, and not as a material aspect of the dog’s life. Other examples of heartbreak among animals exist, however, such as the gorilla Koko nurturing long-term companionship with a cat, expressing grief upon its death. Koko spoke sign language, and when learning the news of the death of her friend she told her caregiver: “bad, sad, bad.”56 There are studies indicating animal empathy, to the point where primatologist and ethologist Frans de Waal states that he is not “particularly interested in demonstrating animal empathy, because for me the critical issue is no longer whether they have it, but how it works. My suspicion is that it works exactly the same way in humans and other animals, even though humans may add a few complexities.”57 Animal empathy seems to be expressed in the wilderness of pet videos on YouTube—which, as Despret points out, is a site for studying animal behavior.58 Several videos seem to show emotional states more generally, and the strong connections made with human companions. This includes a dog owner saying to a husky, “Mishka, I love you,” and the dog howling an approximation of “I love you” in response.59 On YouTube there are also incredibly popular videos compiling clips of dogs and cats howling along to human song.60 This and other videos indicate the empathic, and perhaps even artistic, side of animals. Among displays of the latter is one where a man plays guitar for his golden retriever, and the latter bobs its head up and down seemingly timed to the beat of the music, stopping and starting several times as the guitar player briefly pauses.61 Among the bird videos of social petworks, some of the most striking ones feature mimicry. This includes a magpie imitating human calls (“Hi

George” and “watcha doing?” intermingled with whistles and snaps), and also parrots parroting songs. There are birds whistling theme songs from movies such as Totoro or Pirates of the Caribbean, but also a bird imitating the singing by Rihanna from Eminem’s hit “Monster” from 2013.62 Does Mishka know what it is saying? Does Boo grieve over the loss of Buddy, and Koko over her cat? And in what sense might the sounds of the animals and birds be comparable to what humans consider song or speech; what kind of understanding do these animals have over their own and others’ internal states of emotions? One approach to analyzing animal emotions is to attempt to uncover how the pets were stimulated into performing. This involves showing how the animals were duped by deceitful owners into performing tricks that could provide online attention. Despret notes how this position is regularly one adopted by scientists, who pride themselves with what seems like rational disenchantment of the joyfully naïve belief in the miraculous abilities of animals.63 Skepticism to animal emotion and creativity is in a certain sense closely related to the belief in animal empathy and creativity. These two positions oppose each other: the naïve believes in the existence of internal animal emotions comparable to humans, while the skeptic denies it. Both consider the question of animals’ awareness of their activities to be central, whereas I follow Despret’s suggestion that this question is perhaps not the most important one to pose in response to animal clips displaying such behavior.64 Instead of posing questions concerning internal states, I have approached pets through the notion of the animalselfie, and the position these have within social petworks. The question of whether animals are actually empathic or artistic becomes less important here than the evolutionary potential of processes of imagining, interpreting, and imposing such states in interspecies social dynamics. What interests me here is not mainly whether or not the animals are actually capable of experiencing love and grief and engaging in artistic behavior—although I firmly believe that they do, with evidence such as the activity of neurotransmitters in birds indicating an experience of pleasure from their song.65 The YouTube videos in question neither simply show intentional artistic behavior, nor animals duped into performing by treats or other external motivators. Opposing authentic intentionality

with inauthentic social motivation overlooks a puzzling feature, namely how any form of performance could be possible at all. These videos open a discussion about the origin of acts which, over evolutionary time, could potentially (and, at least for humans, actually) accrue value both socially and internally, eventually forming into empathy and artistry. The chirping birds and howling dogs of YouTube are in this section of the chapter taken as indicators of the shapeable potential of cuteness, with its variant forms and formations. This is a creative form no matter what the participants might get out of the experience. To understand how this potential is shaped and developed, I consider the evolution of cuteness here as the meeting between a population of breeders and a population of animals. This is a dual process, involving the creative potential of both populations. I will first discuss the population of animals, before moving on to the breeders. Nowhere has the creative potential of populations of animals been explored more than in the processes of selection, with artificial selection allowing the specific selection of certain parameters to develop. A central insight into the creative pliability of domesticating and breeding in artificial selection was made by Russian geneticist Dmitry Belyaev in research starting in the 1950s. Under current Soviet rule, genetics was rendered bourgeois misapprehension rather than science, meaning Belyaev had to perform experiments under guise of practical matters.66 Turning his attention to fox breeding, Belyaev set out to attempt taming foxes, and examine the changes instigated by their domestication. Over the course of decades, Belyaev set up experimental conditions where foxes that showed non-aggressive behavior toward humans were allowed to breed. Within only a few generations marked changes occurred, both in the behavior and the appearance of the foxes. Foxes would retain juvenile traits into adulthood, looking cuter and acting curious, playful, and carefree even as adults.67 Belyaev termed the process destabilizing selection, in that it undermined the normal adaption to adulthood, with the potential to “break up normal patterns of gene activation and inhibition and result in a great increase in the range and rate of hereditary variation.”68 With the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, the discovery by Belyaev can be appreciated as a general process of animal morphogenesis. Deleuze and Guattari argue that animal differentiation

results from processes of molding and folding performed on animal bodies.69 While adult animal bodies are rigid, and thereby incapable of undergoing significant transformations without taking damage, the embryo endures such changes. After birth, organisms come with fully formed organs and limbs, yet in their embryotic state they can be shaped according to multitudes of different parameters in various species. Working from a Deluzian framework, DeLanda compares organism morphogenesis with assembly line production. Such production requires perfect positions and fittings, while in morphogenesis “the specific shape of a cell’s membrane is less important than its continuity and closure, and the specific length of a muscle less important than its attachment points.”70 The construction of the animal body is adaptive, as “muscle lengths can change to fit longer bones, and skin can grow and fold adaptively to cover both” and transport can use “simple diffusion through a fluid medium to bring different parts together … without the need for exact positions.”71 The pliable potential of an embryo is rich, with the capacity for “an undifferentiated virtual limb that can be actualised as a bird’s wing, as the single-digit limb of a horse, or as the human hand with its opposable thumb.”72 As the individual organism grows from embryo or seed into adulthood, its flexibility recedes, but nevertheless animal and plant bodies retain “their capacity to self-repair,” and sometimes “even the capacity for complete regeneration.”73 The less fully formed an organism or a species is the greater intensity of transformations it can undergo. As individual organisms become differentiated, the extensive possibilities of their transformations shrink. Through organism and species maturity, pliability stiffens. Belyaev identified how the processes of destabilizing selection caused organisms to retain, and species to regain, their pliability. Retention of juvenile features into adulthood is referred to as neoteny, and as DeLanda argues, it decouples evolution from progress from young to mature: In neoteny the rate of sexual maturation is disengaged from the rate of development of the rest of the body, indeed, accelerated relative to somatic development, resulting in an adult form which is a kind of ‘grown-up larva’. Neoteny illustrates that novelty need not be the effect of terminal addition of new features, but on the

contrary, that it can be the result of a loss of certain old features. … More generally, the loss of a feature made possible by the uncoupling of rates of change may provide an escape route from morphologies that have become too rigid and specialized allowing organisms to explore new pathways. To Deleuze this aspect of individuation processes … is highly significant because it eliminates the idea that evolutionary processes possess an inherent drive towards an increase in complexity, an idea which reintroduces teleology into Darwinism.74 DeLanda here uses perspectives from Deleuze to formulate an evolutionary account close to Belyaev’s concept of destabilizing selection: An increase in complexity is not necessarily the most adaptive, as neoteny re-opens the potentials of embryonic pliability. This echoes the insight of Sianne Ngai, who in reflections on the aesthetics of cuteness notes that “the epitome of the cute would be an undifferentiated blob of soft doughy matter.”75 While breeders are unable to transform actual animals into blobby dough-like matter, the taming of animals is one where breeders push populations toward it. How does breeder creativity function? The creative potential of the breeder population has partly been anticipated in the previous section of this chapter, in particular its attraction to faces and juvenility. Honed over evolutionary time, our vision is indicated to search for the presence of other animals.76 Computational mimicry of this process shows another key feature for how humans operate as breeders. Google’s image recognition neural network, dubbed “DeepDream,” has been trained on a diverse set of imagery with an emphasis on animals, and set to identify objects as well as animals in the images. Through refeeding this neural network with its own visualization, a feedback mechanism is produced, which has been described as “hallucinatory.”77 In this hallucination, DeepDream imagines and imposes patterns upon images, based on what it is familiar with. In a process of algorithmic pareidolia, any visual stimulus might be hallucinatorily transformed into eyes, faces, and animals (see Fig. 5.3).

Fig. 5.3 Imagery produced using the artificial neural network Deep Dream, which “hallucinates” the visual presence of animals and non-animate objects in otherwise inconspicuous visual patterns. Image by Mordvintsev et. al./Google DeepDream

The breeder population produces pets through acting together, as forms of collective hallucinations occurring over time. While dogs have likely long been selected for functional purposes, such as hunting or companionship, the modern idea of dog breeds defined by their visual traits emerged in the 1800s in conjunction with dog shows.78 The

breeder population here begins to explore the potentials of development, hallucinating through imagining and selecting for fur that is thicker or thinner, ears that are bigger or smaller, floppier or pointier, more gracious or stubbier legs, developing the body of the animal as stretched out or stuffed together. In online social petworks, the infinitely malleable dough-like cuteness meets the hallucinatory breeders in creative search of possible developments. The meeting of these populations leads to a process of cutening or cutification. This is seen in the imaginative language exploration of Boo’s mental life: my face may be saying “friyay!,” but my tummy is saying “humans, go make me a sammich.” Friyay morphs Friday with enthusiasm over this being last day of the work week, and the last word smooths out the letters spelling the word sandwich. Similar cutification is evident in other instances of pet vocabulary, such as aforementioned LOLcats, as well as dogespeak, which originates in images coupling a dog of the breed Shiba Inu with particular ways of writing. LOLcats has been analyzed as a form of language play, a creative exploration of the possibilities of language.79 Both LOLcats and dogespeak follow specific regularities. LOLcat writing can be exemplified with a sentence “WHICH I HAS AUTOMATICALLY TRANZLATD WIF LOLCAT SPEAKR,” showing the use of caps lock and spelling errors. Dogespeak shies away from simple mistakes, using instead an ungrammatical form, with incorrect use of modifiers, as well as exclamations of “wow.” The process of cutening can, with Ngai, be considered an empathic reduction of the distances to the cute object.80 The pets are here turned into cute little people with limited linguistic knowledge. Linguist Gretchen McCulloch notes how, in talking for our pets, people seem to mirror in writing the emotional intensity of their own experience.81 Ngai further traces the linguistic cutening to the word cute itself: Since ‘cute’ derives from the older ‘acute’ in a process linguists call aphaeresis (the process by which words lose initial unstressed syllables to generate shorter and ‘cuter’ versions of themselves; ‘alone’ becomes ‘lone’, ‘until’ becomes ‘til’), its etymology strikingly replicates the logic of the aesthetic it has come to mean. While cuteness is an aesthetic of the soft or amorphous that therefore becomes heightened when objects are

depicted as sleepy, ‘acute’ means ‘coming to a sharp edge or point’ and suggests mental alertness, keenness, and quickness. Cute thus exemplifies a situation in which making a word smaller—or, if you like, cuter—results in an uncanny reversal, changing its meaning into its exact opposite.82 While it may be right to call Boo adorable, with cutening it seems more appropriate to say (with high-pitched gleeful enthusiasm) Boo is totally adorbs! Linguistic development seems to be influenced by the same evolution as the domestication of pets—that of cutification. This could be generalized further, as a sensorial experience, of something acute, alerting with sharp and alarming potentiality, which becomes softened into the cute, to appeasement over a familiar face and friendly greeting. Dogs are themselves often referred to by their sound (itself a process of cutening their presence), a sound that is linguistically shifted from the acute “bark,” into a creative array of cute onomatopoeic possibilities: woof-woof, ruff ruff, arf, au au, borf, bork, yip, yap, and bow-wow. Having established how the process of cutening occurs, I turn to a video recording of animal expressive behavior. My focus is on what I consider among the most impressive instances of bird song in social petworks. The video shows a bird imitating Sia’s song “Chandelier” (2014).83 The bird here sings “I wanna fly from the chandelier, chandelier.” While collapsing the opening phrase of Sia’s original “I’m gonna swing” with the line following “I wanna fly,” it maintains the melodic prosody and rhythmic phrasing of the original. The bird stretches out the “I” at the beginning, and makes a distinct tonal change upon repeating “chandelier” in a manner similar to the artist Sia. The bird skips the line “I’m gonna live like tomorrow doesn’t exist/Like it doesn’t exist,” going straight to “I wanna fly like a,” stopping where Sia sings “bird in the night.” The parrot then picks up the next sentence, singing “my tears running dry.” The video, shot with a handheld camera, shows the bird stuck in a cage, on a porch outside in the rain, which enhances the melancholic beauty of its performance. The inability of the bird to finish its phrase might be completely unrelated to the bird understanding the semantic content of the song’s lyrics, and have more to do with its difficulty forming the sound of the letter “b,” due to having a beak instead of lips.

The possibility of some form of understanding of what it is singing nevertheless exists, as ethologist Irene Pepperberg’s research on the African grey parrot Alex indicates that this bird understood the meaning of a vocabulary of over 150 words.84 In the video, the clearly audible phrases are followed by muted, garbled cackling, like someone who do not remember the words or fully understand the language. This is perhaps simply a result of difficulty distinguishing vocal performance from the rest of the song, except in the most clearly vocalized parts—the refrain in particular. The parrot begins articulating words again, appearing more confident, singing “One two three/ one two three, three three/ one, two three three,” where the repeated “three” is actually “drink” in Sia’s original. The bird then once again bursts into the refrain. What is easy to overlook, if focusing mainly on the intentionality of the bird, is the actual imitation of the song, and the way that the parrot in this activity shares central aspects with humans writing in LOLCat and dogespeak. The similarities can be appreciated with an understanding of the processes of imitating. Vocal mimicry is documented in a multitude of songbirds, the most striking of which is captured by BBC and David Attenborough’s Life of Birds series, featuring a lyrebird accurately imitating the sounds of a car alarm, a chainsaw, and a camera shutter. It is found in a range of other creatures, including bottlenose dolphins, killer whales, orangutans, and elephants. Hypothesized functions for this mimicry are increasing variability to attract females and repelling competitors.85 Mimicry is more widely documented in domesticated than wild animals. The hypothesis for such discrepancy is that wild animals favorably learn vocalizing from other animals of their species, while taming removes this kinship, thereby leading to learning mistakes and an openness to copying multiple different sounds.86 The preferred form of development, which would otherwise lead to stiffening into routines, is through destabilizing turned into a less rigid encounter with its surroundings, allowing various forms of repeated and structured stimuli to become significant enough to be mimicked and made present. Imitation seems to have the function of drawing close or producing distance to other organisms, to scare away or attract someone, either of their own species or of other species. Could perhaps music be traced back to an origin of this destabilized imitation? If cuteness could be considered a process of turning the acute into the cute, of rendering

features appeasing, then the foundation of music could be traced to the process of responding to some form of noise by filtering it through oneself to repeat and render pleasing. Such cutening would not necessarily require internal consciousness or external social grouping. Nevertheless, it is likely that the creative potential of cutening becomes intensely varied following the emergence of organisms with the capacity for experiencing internal states and accruing social value. After the emergence of such organisms, repeated exposure to and offering filtered responses to a sound could gain its importance in feedback between internal states in the organism and its external social group. Through feedback between internal and external motivators, the imitation could coalesce into whole systems of cutened expressivity: music. The evolution of music is regularly compared and contrasted with the evolution of language, perhaps due to both seeming fundamentally communicative. Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker has given an account of music as “auditory cheesecake,” claiming it to be “a delightful dessert but an evolutionary byproduct of the evolution of language.”87 My proposal of music originating from a cutening of noise through imitation would point toward a co-evolution of music and language rather than music as a by-product of the other. The cutening of stimuli could be a proto-structure that over time split into the communicative possibilities of language and music. Music could thereby share certain evolutionary commonalities with language, while remaining irreducible to it. A perspective on language evolution is offered by DeLanda, who conceptualizes it as “accumulations of linguistic material sorted into homogenous sets and cemented together through isolation” as well as a specific process not found in organic evolution, “combinatorial constraints transmitted as replicators.”88 Music is likewise theorized by musicologist Gary Tomlinson as an accumulation of different audible material, organizing sounds into meaningful elements, hierarchic processing of perceptions, perception of periodic intervals, sensitivity to pitch and to discrete levels or intervals and octave equivalence, as well as distinction of timbre.89 The heterogenous musical material combines into more homogenous sets, harmonic and rhythmic intervals and songs, which become cemented together by partial isolation, producing expectations of form. Music shares the dynamics of combinatorial constraints with language, but they are tied to other parameters than in

language. For music, these involve external factors such as norms restricting preferences according to various social values, as well as internal ones—including neurological attentiveness to certain pitch and rhythmic intervals. In a hallucinatory manner, the evolution of music can be framed using the evolution of wolf and dog faciality. Both the wolf and the dog face are socially constructed, emerging through the meeting of the moldable animal form and the social pressure afforded by social selection. The face is here akin to harmonic sounds and intervals, in that it is a cutened form. The wolf face retains a certain autonomy from its potential for gratification. Looking at the wolf still involves some degree of uncertainty. Harmonic intervals can be unresolved, in particular regarding emotional states: How is this music supposed to make me feel? And, likewise: How is the wolf face supposed to make me feel? Perhaps it is not supposed to produce any feeling besides creating presence. For modern eyes and ears, such presence without emotional consolidation may appear intimidating, not primarily because the wolf may be dangerous, but simply because it has not been formed to clearly accommodate our emotional states. A particularly evocative musical equivalent to the wolf face is the sounds played on a paleolithic flute, found in the Geißenklö sterle cave, Germany. Dated to 37,000 years before present, it is the earliest known instrument. It can be heard in Friedrich Seeberger’s recording of “Imitation cries of birds on flute made of bone swan.”90 As the flute does not conform to standards of Western tonality it may sound unfamiliar, potentially even unpleasant, for the listener. It offers little emotional certainty—simply the imitation of birds, as the repeated and sliding tones of calls and shrieks. The dog face, by contrast, is akin to diatonic scales, and the divide into minor and major. Looking at the dog face involves next to no risk— only pleasure. Listening to minor and major scales, uncertainty is diminished, in particular regarding emotional states: How is this pop song supposed to make me feel? How is the dog’s face supposed to make me feel? The answer can be offered in dogespeak (see Fig. 5.4):

Fig. 5.4 Doge presenting the emotional states of music in minor and major scales. Original photo by: Atsuko Satō

Taming Crushes I am watching a video tutorial about sushi making.91 In the video the chef is also watched attentively by two cats. The cats are paying attention to his every move, while also displaying curiosity about the intriguing smells and sights of the ingredients handled—the tuna, chicken, and bonito flakes. The chef is not preparing sushi for other people, but for his curious onlookers. At the end of the video, the sushi is served to the cats, and devoured with enthusiasm. The specific question triggered by such viewing—what would make someone prepare sushi for their cats? This can be generalized into a broader query: What would make humans feed other animals at all? I suggest that this question can be addressed through discussing the connection between cuteness and empathy. To do this, I turn to another pet celebrity: Lillian Bubbles, known by the shortened nickname “Lil Bub.” Lil Bub was kept alive (until December 2019) mostly thanks to her caretaker and their millions of followers in social petworks. The extent of care-giving required for Lil Bub is seen in a video from the cat’s Facebook profile. The video presents a regular morning feeding routine, where the owner of Lil Bub, Mike Bridavsky, nicknamed “Dude,” feeds her (see Fig. 5.5). It is titled “Lil BUB CBD Tutorial,” and Dude shows “exactly how I give BUB her cbdMD CBD Oil every morning.” Tutorials are themselves a common format in social petworks, allowing transfers of skills. The Lil Bub video plays with this format, as it is both generalizable to other pet and caregiver relations, and also highlights the specificity of Lil Bub and Dude’s situation. This tutorial is not a general one for feeding a pet or a cat and giving it painkillers, but specifically for feeding a “Bub”, of which there is only one.

Fig. 5.5 Still from a video posted to Lil Bub’s Facebook profile, showing Lil Bub being fed by its owner, Mike Bridavsky, nicknamed “Dude,” who also puts pain relief medication into the cat’s food

In the video, Dude pets Bub, causing her to produce peculiar grunting sounds—her own particular form of purring (as Dude writes in a comment, “like a pug or a boston terrier”). The unique sound results from Bub’s lower chin being shorter than her upper, so her tongue constantly sticks out. Bub’s teeth have not grown in, so she eats only wet cat food. Dude explains that since she usually does not drink water, he mixes water into her food. Lil Bub’s website explains that the cat needs pain relief mixed into her food daily due to her being born with a rare bone disease that “causes her bones to progressively grow denser as she grows older, eventually making it hard for her to move around,” but through treatment “BUB is now able to run and jump like never before— something we were told would never be able to happen.” The unique features of Bub do not end there, and are detailed further on the site: she is a “perma-kitten,” retaining kitten-like features, as well as extreme dwarfism, which causes her limbs to be disproportionally small. Although her situation seems dire, Bub shows a healthy appetite in the video (a sign of well-being), jumping in to eat as soon as the food hits the bowl. In addition to Bub, Dude has four other adopted cats, one

of which is visible in another infomercial for cbdMD’s oil. Perhaps due to Bub’s body language, her feline housemate misinterprets her behavior as threatening, and the cat greets Bub by hissing. Pushing social inclusivity, Dude calms the cats by putting cbd oil in their food. While Dude is feeding Bub, he takes up much of the video screen. Dude starts the video by pointing to his shirtless body, explaining that he was wearing a black shirt, but that it got covered in cat hair and he doesn’t have a lint roller. It also makes the situation “more realistic,” as Dude remarks, because when he feeds Bub in the morning, he is usually shirtless. In the written comments to the video, Dude discusses his body weight with others, saying that he is “fully aware” of his “dad bod, and proud of it.” The dad bod (characterized by excessive weight) and the pride signal Dude’s embeddedness in social petworks, where he is not searching for a fling, but is a committed caregiver. The side of Dude facing the camera is adorned with a large tattoo of Bub (holding a lantern and a sword with her head encircled by a halo). Although the stereotype of permanent body painting being a sign of toughness may seem less viable due to the ubiquity of tattoos today, some amount of resilience is necessary for getting a tattoo. Dude’s large tattoo (and his tattoo-covered arms) creates a juxtaposition of ruggedness against the affectionate display of care. With tattoos signaling hardship, this presents the common trope of the threatening turned sweet—another process of cutening. What makes the tough guy embrace his soft side? This is not simply a personal question, but pertains to population dynamics in offline and online social petworks. Studies on breeding suggest that toughness, at least in the form of aggression, dissolves through domestication. In discussing retentions of variation, Darwin formulates correlations of growth, in which wildly different parts of animal development are connected: “I mean by this expression that the whole organization is so tied together during its growth and development, that when slight variations in any one part occur, and are accumulated through natural selection, other parts become modified.”92 In the aforementioned studies on foxes, the features of cuteness emerged as correlates to precisely the selection against aggressive behavior. As the foxes which showed the least aversion to humans were allowed to mate, over a few successive generations outright friendliness to humans formed. Not only the visual characteristics but the behavior of the foxes cutified. Belyaev’s research

partner for more than a decade, Ljudmila Trut—writing together with biologist Lee Dugatkin, describes the development: While fox pups, like almost all animal pups, are curious, playful, and relatively carefree when they are very young, the behavior of foxes both in the wild and in captivity dramatically changes when they turn about forty-five days old. At that point, which is when wild pups begin exploring on their own more often, they become much more cautious and anxious. Lyudmila was finding that the tame pups were retaining the typical impishness and curiosity almost twice as long, for about three months, and after that, they stayed markedly calmer and more playful than is typical for foxes. These tamer foxes seemed to be resisting the mandate to grow up.93 In addition to keeping foxes curious and playful, cutening also produced an extended mating season, as well as calmer behavior from the cubs, letting keepers pick them up, wagging their tails in expectation, whimpering for attention, licking hands, and rolling over for belly rubs.94 Domestication thus seems to turn evolution into what mathematician Martin Kowak has formulated, in a play on the notion of “struggle,” as a “snuggle for survival.”95 Something akin to this snuggle was theorized by Belyaev as a driving factor for the emergence of humans. He theorized human evolution to result not from changes in genetic composition—as we famously share almost all genetic composition with chimpanzees— but in changes in the regulations of which genes are expressed. Genetic expression was considered by Belyaev as regulated through the delaying of growth into maturity as a form of destabilized selection.96 Belyaev proposed that the processes of destabilized selection were self-initiated by humans. As hominids interacted more frequently and in larger groups, this required increased negotiation of encounters, producing a social environmental pressure which favored non-aggressive behavior and thereby lead to self-taming.97 Selecting for friendlier mates led to the co-occurrence of the same features as those found when comparing wild and tamed foxes: as compared to other primates, humans have more juvenile, cuter features of appearance and behavior, which is retained into adulthood; we are capable of breeding all year and exhibit lower levels of stress hormones. Contemporary studies of human

genomics indicate Belyaev’s hypothesis to be correct: that humans have indeed self-domesticated.98 Another aspect of the shift from struggle to snuggle is noticeable in the way that Lil Bub provokes affection while also potentially producing a more paradoxical response: aggression. Cute aggression is defined in psychology as the urge to “squeeze, crush or bite cute things, albeit without any desire to cause harm.”99 An example is when people say about and to pets or babies that they are so cute, they just want to eat them up. Certain findings suggest that it has neurological basis in reward processing.100 Cute aggression and caretaking have been shown to correlate. This informs the central hypothesis that it serves as a regulator for the experience of cuteness, which could otherwise overwhelm the caretaker to the point of not being able to provide adequate care.101 This hypothesis rests on the assumption that cute aggression does not feature any actual aggression, and that its primary purpose is to improve the relation between the youngster and caregiver. But what if cute aggression is in fact not as decoupled from wanting to cause actual harm as researchers proclaim? Perhaps this explanation of cute aggression is itself a cutening of what could be a pre-domestication response? An alternate hypothesis for cute aggression would be to take the statements of cute aggression literally. Mammals may indeed eat their own offspring, a behavior which biologists historically have regarded as categorically pathological, but which contemporary studies have rendered a more reasonable response to certain situations.102 Both males and females have been shown to kill cubs, but for different reasons. Male lions have been theorized to kill offspring as part of a reproductive strategy to get females fertile again, to then be the ones to mate with them. Females have been shown to kill their offspring because of perceived inability of the offspring to survive (born with malformations for instance), or if the mother for some reason finds herself unable to care for the offspring. Eating it would then provide added benefits of nourishing the mother, plus removing the carcass to avoid attracting scavengers. As horrific as such strategies may seem, there is reason to believe that similar sentiments may be displayed in cuteness aggression, and that females could thereby be more prone to exhibiting cuteness aggression. A study of 110 cases of human mothers

who—without exhibiting any other traits of psychopathology—killed their offspring indicates their actions as potentially led by a lack of resources to care for the offspring. The killing could be framed as a form of reproductive disinvestment, an elimination of newborns to save resources for offspring born in better conditions.103 Bub is perhaps especially cute precisely because of her signs of being unhealthy. Bub’s growth deformities and illness do not necessarily reduce our feelings regarding her cuteness, but enhance them. She is cute precisely because she would be incapable of surviving in the wild, where she might instead be devoured. As Ngai points out, “objects seem most cute when they seem sleepy, infirm, or disabled.”104 Ngai further references the classical aesthetics of Edmund Burke and writes about beauty as characterized by weakness, imperfection, and powerlessness, and how women may “learn to lisp, to totter in their walk, to counterfeit weakness and even sickness” in order to appear beautiful.105 Perhaps this description is not so much one of beauty, however, but one which was not fully linguistically marked into a separate attractor—cuteness. Philosopher Jean Baudrillard echoes the observation by connecting weakness to seduction: To seduce is to appear weak. To seduce is to render weak. We seduce with our weakness, never with strong signs or powers. In seduction we enact this weakness, and this is what gives seduction its strength. We seduce with our death, our vulnerability, and with the void that haunts us.106 Cute aggression carries a potential explanation for how cuteness regularly overlap with feelings of abject. Someone or something might be cute yet generate disgust or annoyance at the same time. Finding something simultaneously ugly and cute would not be an inconsistency but a coherent response, based on the dynamics of cuteness. (As a side note, one might find not only the very young but also the very old to be cute.) Rather than a functional response to reduce overwhelming experience of cuteness, cute aggression seems more like a fossil of behavior that might have been utilitarian in evolutionary prehistory, but today strikes as vicious and cold-hearted. Caring becomes not only a process of overcoming the harshness of our environments, but more fundamentally one’s own cruelty. Cute aggression is perhaps not only a

fossil of horrifying behavior, however, but could paradoxically also be an important part of the human inclination for care. In addition to the outwardly aggressive behavior of (a desire for) eating a cub, another form of cute aggression exists. Perhaps best encapsulated by a scene from the CGI animated film.107 In the scene, the toddler character Agnes sees a stuffed unicorn and exclaims: “It’s so fluffy I’m gonna die!” Getting her hands on the unicorn, Agnes shouts in a deeper, grubbier voice while simultaneously shaking the unicorn: “It’s so fluffy!” Agnes is here firstly displaying an inward-directed frustration as she finds herself unable to reach the fluffy unicorn. When finally getting her hands on it, she channels the frustration outward, toward the cute creature. What Agnes displays is perhaps a twofold strategy of responding to the offspring: First, the openness to letting the cute devour the caregiver, to letting the baby feast on the caregiver’s body to nourish itself. If this does not still cute aggression, if the offspring seems unable to eat the caregiver, then the secondary form—the drive to eat the cute—will emerge. Thus, the plush unicorn’s inability to nourish itself from Agnes gives rise to an outward frustration. Watching cute animalselfies in social petworks produces a similar situation to the one displayed in the scene, where the possibility of directing the cute aggression toward oneself is obstructed, invoking a drive to direct it outward instead. So, the response to cuteness can be summarized as: You are so cute it kills me, come here and eat me. But if you are too cute to do this, I will eat you up. Perhaps care is made possible because of aggression, and the extent and passion of human care could not have emerged without such foundation. If there is a snuggle for survival, it seems to emerge from the snugglers’ drive to smother themselves and each other. Burke’s understanding of beauty indicates some degree of overlap between cuteness and beauty, perhaps even sexual attraction. This connection is evident simply in the way that people may describe those they find sexually attractive as “cute,” or as a “babe” or “baby.” Such cute sexual affection may be relatively benign, taking form as a desire for certain aspects of neoteny to be present in looks and behavior of sexually mature partners. Social petworks are filled with supernatural stimuli, in the form of “babes.” In The New Yorker, Jia Tolentinon writes about such social petwork cuteness, and what she terms the “Instagram face,”

formed by the feedback between Instagram beautification filters and plastic surgery: It’s a young face, of course, with poreless skin and plump, high cheekbones. It has catlike eyes and long, cartoonish lashes; it has a small, neat nose and full, lush lips. It looks at you coyly but blankly ... The face is distinctly white but ambiguously ethnic—it suggests a National Geographic composite illustrating what Americans will look like in 2050, if every American of the future were to be a direct descendant of Kim Kardashian West, Bella Hadid, Emily Ratajkowski, and Kendall Jenner (who looks exactly like Emily Ratajkowski). ‘It’s like a sexy . . . baby . . . tiger’. A sexy baby tiger, or indeed any form of resemblance to a baby, pet, or cartoon character, can be good looks, especially if one turns oneself into what the French critical collective Tiqqun terms the “Young Girl.” She is not necessarily female, and not necessarily young, but “[w]hen the Young-Girl giggles, she’s working.”108 The individuals with massive numbers of followers in social petworks, commonly termed influencers, regularly act as zoo animals in cages. They perform routines of confinement, involving the more or less species-uncharacteristic and desperate behavior of someone constantly aware of the potential for being watched by an unseen and unheard mass audience. A young woman using the moniker Belle Delphine provides an example of sexual attraction and cuteness in social petworks.109 Regularly wearing kitty ears over her pink hair in photos, Belle Delphine offers content to her subscribers on the platform OnlyFans, as well as accounts on various other platforms including Instagram and YouTube. Indicative of the often fraught relation between social petwork platforms and sexualized content is the fact that Belle Delphine has been banned several times. On OnlyFans she presents herself in a naïve fashion, offering a “lewd (18+), cute and weird little world,” stating that she is “so excited to share this silly, vulnerable, and magical journey with you.” The weird “little world” includes surreal events, such as a video of her playing with a dead octopus, and selling used bathwater (which buyers would document and publish themselves drinking, cooking pasta with, or vaping).

Belle Delphine found initial fame posting pictures of herself posing in animated Japanese pornographic (hentai) style orgasm face, ahegao, with eyes rolled back and tongue sticking out. Her first foray into OnlyFans was announced in an Instagram post, stating that she would do porn if the post gained over a million likes. Smashing this limit, Delphine provided subscribers with the opportunity to see her play with her pussycat. From this teasing, Belle Delphine would move into actual adult content. As a surrealist social petwork pornographer, Belle Delphine engages in parasocial relations. The term parasocial relations was first coined in reflections on television watching, and the experience that viewers would get of knowing celebrities personally.110 Social petworks offer even greater potential for parasociality, as platforms let fans engage directly with their idol, who may then respond to their messages. In her pornographic videos, while masturbating and engaging in sexual intercourse, Belle Delphine stares directly at the camera. She thereby looks directly at her subscribed viewers, forming parasocial intimacy and offering the feeling of being in direct contact with individual viewers. Among the sexual content proliferating online, there are other forms which curiously relate to cute aggression, in particular voraphilia. It is described by psychologists Amy Lykins and James Cantor as a fantasy in which “the victim is swallowed whole—in fact, several requests for fantasies included a specific ban on the chewing of the victim. … Though consumption most often occurred through the mouth, it also occurred through the vagina, the anus, or the breasts (through the nipples) of the consumer.”111 The mostly cartoony imagery used to purvey this fantasy depicts humans or humanoid animal creatures—so called furries. In the pair depicted, one is commonly larger than the other, and the smaller either willingly or unwillingly is eaten by the larger. The larger is most often female, with cutified facial features and large breasts, devouring the smaller. This does not necessarily lead to death for the devoured, who instead continues to live inside the female. Her belly expands, as if she was pregnant, but with a greatly exaggerated belly size. The devoured is often depicted living inside the other body, curled up as a fetus inside their belly. A partly related fantasy is arousal from being enveloped and swallowed by a vagina, referred to as “unbirthing.” As unusual as such fetishes may seem, they have likely formed from common aspects of cute aggression. They also relate to phrases in sexual

desire and love more generally, in particular when describing someone as sweet, juicy, appetizing, or tasty, or saying—echoing cute aggression— that someone sexually attractive “looks good enough to eat.”112 In addition, it extends to referring to cunnilingus as “eating pussy,” as well as ingesting semen in fellatio. It also shares features with less fetishized (but no less aggressive) expressions of sexual desire found in social petworks. In particular, some express the desire for their celebrity crush to physically crush them. Posting a picture of Ariana Grande in front of a car, a Twitter user writes “run me over, back up and run me over again ma’am,” followed by an emoticon of two palms, as if something is handed over. The online magazine The Cut interviews a writer of such posts, who says that “there’s something about how the ideal resolution of a crush is to be completely obliterated by it and suffer no longer under the terrible demands of desire.”113 Taking the sentiment again in its literal form, it displays the dynamic of cute aggression: an affection so strong that it will be alleviated only through giving oneself up for the cute being. Since the cute here is a celebrity, compared to which the fans are random nobodies, there is a certain fitness logic in offering whatever necessary for the further survival of the cute person, even if it would mean giving up their own lives. A related notion is expressed in the notion of a “simp,” as someone who according to Urban Dictionary “does way too much for a person they like.”114 Simping refers to fawning over and being subservient to someone one has a crush on, and is often used as a term for those to paying subscriptions to e-girls who stream (oftentimes sexualized content). The dynamics of cute aggression is also present in some forms of religious rituals. In the Catholic Christian rites of transubstantiation, bread and wine is offered as the blood and flesh of Jesus for believers to eat and drink, in order to receive the Holy Spirit. Taking this sentiment as literal as it has been in the case of wanting to eat the cute, or to devour one’s sexual desire, religious sacrifice is again formed by the prospect of giving oneself up for others to live. The Christian dynamic inverses religious ritual sacrificing of others—of either animals or humans—and directs the cute aggression toward oneself, to be devoured by one’s followers. Cuteness might even be a vital part in the construction of gods generally. Through gods, the radical otherness of beings and

surroundings is imbued with a spiritual dimension, with caring selves formed in our likeness. The logic of cute aggression is evident in the videos of Lil Bub, not just in the appearance of Bub, but also in the actions of Dude. One video shows the extent of Dude’s sacrifice, as he helps the cat urinate, because she is unable to do this herself. While Dude obviously does not actually let Lil Bub eat him, he gives up a significant amount of his time and his life by being there and providing the extraordinary assistance required for her survival. Their relationship is a particularly intense version of a more general dynamic. The co-evolution of cuteness and care has made possible greater forms of protection over more extensive time frames. Our pets are not just other beings that we dwell together with, but are kept from maturing—to the point that owners consider their adult pets as their teeny tiny babies. Haraway laments fixation on cuteness as a “projection in the Western world that makes domestic canines into furry children.”115 I would like to nuance Haraway, as this is not foremost a Western projection, but could simply indicate that Western societies are where domestication has been allowed to develop furthest. In the processes of cutening, wild looks and behavior are replaced by increasingly intense displays of and needs for care. This is in some sense a validation of the widespread conception of pets as adorable babies. The idea that pets are environmentally adapted wild animals that have been ruined through domestication would, however, seem to be less wellfounded. While neoteny may have a detrimental impact on an animal’s potential for survival in the wild, it increases their adaptivity to social environments. Human beings are cute. Our newborn are fully dependent on care for longer periods than those of other primates. Human offspring are adapted to a social environment in which parents are willing to give themselves up to care for others. Anthropologists Wenda Trevathan and Karen Rosenberg suggest that the “helpless infant” has been an equally important factor for human social evolution as the hunter-gatherer adult.116 And while the harshness of survival conditions has historically required that children work to help feed the rest of the family, this has gradually lessened. May notes how child labor and abuse was common between the 1850s and the 1930s, but increased prosperity revolutionized conditions quickly and greatly, as “the child has become ever more present to the adult as the key to a flourishing life; as the

repository of the sacred; and increasingly as the highest object of love—a revolution that has resulted in the child’s safety and security becoming a litmus test of a society’s moral health to a degree that would have been inconceivable for most of Western history.”117 Western societies no longer select for those that withstand the toll of labor required to help nourish themselves. Instead, increased time and energy can be invested in children. Childhood has become more carefree, and as a result people can embrace creative potential for longer before stiffening into the behavioral and visual characteristics of adulthood. Childhood extends into longer time spans, as care-giving expands to entail more than infant breastfeeding, lasting into the toddler stage, into early to late childhood, to the teen years, and extending further into the 20s and perhaps even the 30s. An exponential intensification of cuteness is instigated in the industrialized, democratic, peaceful, Western nations, and is likely further intensified by processes of online social petworking. In the article “Youth Mode,” artist group K-Hole offered the observation that rigid age expectations have become destabilized, leading today to the possibility of a form of ageless youth.118 The group render youth as “a mode” and an “attitude,” with freedom to try new things, to adapt and make mistakes. This is a form of halted maturity in which one stays helpless and malleable into adulthood and perhaps even for entire life spans. Cuteness extends across species, developing into the sentiment that not only pets but all animals deserve our care and consumption of animal products should be limited. When our lips touch other bodies, they cover our teeth.

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Biomarker of Positive Emotion in Dogs. Hormones and Behavior 60: 1. Mok, Kimberley. 2015. This is What Happens When Deep Learning Neural Networks Hallucinate, The New Stack, August 02. https://​thenewstack.​io/​deep-learning-neuralnetworks-google-deep-dream/​. Accessed 23 Jan 2020. Montag, Christian, Cornelia Sindermann, Benjamin Becker, and Jaak Panksepp. 2016. An Affective Neuroscience Framework for the Molecular Study of Internet Addiction. Frontiers in Psychology 7: 1. Mordvintsev, Alexander, Christopher Olah and Mike Tyka. 2015. DeepDream – A Code Example for Visualizing Neural Networks. Google AI Blog, July 01, https://​ai.​ googleblog.​c om/​2015/​07/​deepdream-code-example-for-visualizing.​html. Accessed 23 Jan 2020. Morell, Virginia. 2014. Why Do Animals Sometimes Kill Their Babies?, National Geographic, 28.03.14, https://​www.​nationalgeograph​ic.​c om/​news/​2014/​3/​140328sloth-bear-zoo-infanticide-chimps-bonobos-animals/​. Accessed 23 Jan 2020. Nagasawa, Miho, Takefumi Kikusui, Tatsushi Onaka, and Mitsuaki Ohta. 2009. Dog's Gaze at its Owner Increases Owner's Urinary Oxytocin During Social Interaction. Hormones and Behavior 55: 1. Nagasawa, Miho, Shouhei Mitsui, Shiori En, Nobuyo Ohtani, Mitsuaki Ohta, Yasuo Sakuma, Tatsushi Onaka, Kazutaka Mogi, and Takefumi Kikusui. 2015. Oxytocin-Gaze Positive Loop and the Coevolution of Human-Dog Bonds. Science 348: 333. New, Joshua, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby. 2007. Category-Specific Attention for Animals Reflects Ancestral Priorities, not Expertise. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 1: 104. Ngai, Sianne. 2012. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nittono, Hiroshi, Michiko Fukushima, Akihiro Yano, and Hiroki Moriya. 2012. The Power of Kawaii: Viewing Cute Images Promotes a Careful Behavior and Narrows Attentional Focus. PLOS ONE 7: 1. Odendaal, J.S., and R.A. Meintjes. 2003. Neurophysiological Correlates of Affiliative Behaviour Between Humans and Dogs. Vet J 165: 1. Ortiz-Ospina, Esteban. 2019. The Rise of Social Media, Our World in Data, September 18. https://​ourworldindata.​org/​rise-of-social-media. Accessed 23 Jan 2020. ouss. 2017. Eminem’s the Monster but Rihanna Replaced With a Parrot, YouTube, https://​youtu.​be/​jy4mEBrDCUY. Accessed 23 Jan 2020.

Paiella, Gabriella. 2019. “Why Does Everyone Want Their Crushes to Run Them Over?”, The Cut, Jan 10. https://​www.​thecut.​c om/​2019/​01/​people-tweeting-run-me-over-atcelebrities.​html. Accessed 23 Jan 2020. Pappas, Stephanie. 2018. “Why #OddlySatisfying Videos are So … Satisfying”, March 22. https://​www.​livescience.​c om/​62091-oddlysatisfying-videos-satisfying.​html. Accessed 21 Jan 2021. Pepperberg, Irene M. 1999. The Alex Studies: Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pfäfflin, Friedemann. 2008. Good Enough to Eat. Archives of Sexual Behavior 37: 1. Phillips, Owen. 2018. The Numbers Don’t Lie: Dogs are the Internet’s Favorite Animal, The Outline, January 30. https://​theoutline.​c om/​post/​3128/​dogs-cats-internetpopularity?​zd=​2&​zi=​pnqvsh32. Accessed 23 Jan 2020. Pinker, Steven. 1998. How the Mind Works. London: Penguin. Pokomarichard. 2012. オカメインコ ぽこちゃん cockatiel singing Totoro, YouTube, https://​youtu.​be/​O7D-1RG-VRk. Accessed 23 Jan 2020. Riters, Lauren V. 2011. Pleasure Seeking and Birdsong. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 35: 1. Schmidt, K.L., and J.F. Cohn. 2001. Human Facial Expressions as Adaptations: Evolutionary Questions in Facial Expression Research. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 33: 1. Seeberger, Friedrich. 2003. Klangwelten der Altstenzeit. https://​c lassical-music-online.​ net/​en/​performer/​24431?​c omposer_​sort=​3310&​prod_​sort=​67972. Accessed 16 Mar 2022. Shahriar, Fahim. 2015. A Brilliant Musical Parrot Singing, YouTube, https://​youtu.​be/​ e6sUJXDHaqk. Accessed 23 Jan 2020. Siemasko, Emma. 2015. Is Boo Just a Pomeranian With a Haircut, BuzzFeed, April 28. https://​www.​buzzfeed.​c om/​emmafaye2/​is-boo-just-a-pomeranian-with-a-haircutx61q#.​vb8YNbzw0. Accessed 23 Jan 2020. Siniscalchi, Marcello, Serenella d’Ingeo, and Angelo Quaranta. 2018. Orienting Asymmetries and Physiological Reactivity in Dogs’ Response to Human Emotional Faces. Learning & Behavior 46: 1. Somppi, Sanni, Heini Tö rnqvist, Laura Hänninen, Christina M. Krause, and Outi Vainio.

2014. How Dogs Scan Familiar and Inverted Faces: An Eye Movement Study. Animal Cognition 17: 1. Stavropoulos, Katherine K.M., and Laura A. Alba. 2018. ‘It’s so Cute I Could Crush It!’: Understanding Neural Mechanisms of Cute Aggression. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience 12: 300. Stephan, Claudia, Anna Wilkinson, and Ludwig Huber. 2012. Have We Met Before? Pigeons Recognise Familiar Human Faces. Avian Biology Research 1: 5. Theofanopoulou, Constantina, Simone Gastaldon, Thomas O'Rourke, Bridget D. Samuels, Pedro Tiago Martins, Francesco Delogu, Saleh Alamri, and Cedric Boeckx. 2017. Self-Domestication in Homo Sapiens: Insights from Comparative Genomics. PLOS ONE 12: 1. Tiger FurryEntertainment. 2018. I Have Never Seen Anything Better Before! – Funny Dogs Singing Compilation, YouTube, May 18. https://​youtu.​be/​_​A jz8UVH1oo. Accessed 23 Jan 2020. Tiger Productions. 2016. Cats & Dogs Singing With Their Owners – Funny and Cute Animal Compilation, YouTube, May 09. https://​youtu.​be/​DM91100gT4c. Accessed 23 Jan 2020. Tinbergen, Niko. 1951/1989. The Study of Instinct. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tiqqun. 2001. Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl. Transl. Ariana Reines. Los Angeles: Semiotexte. Tomlinson, Gary. 2015. A Million Years of Music: The Emergence of Human Modernity. New York: Zone Books. Trevathan, Wenda R., and Karen R. Rosenberg. 2016. Human Evolution and the Helpless Infant. In Costly and Cute: Helpless Infants and Human Evolution, ed. Wenda R. Trevathan and Karen R. Rosenberg. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press. Trut, Ljudmila, and Lee Alan Dugatkin. 2017. How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog): Visionary Scientists and a Siberian Tale of Jump-Started Evolution. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Turkle, Sherry. 2011. Alone Together: Why we Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books. Von Holdt, Bridgett M., Emily Shuldiner, Ilana Janowitz Koch, Rebecca Y. Kartzinel, Andrew Hogan, Lauren Brubaker, Shelby Wanser, Daniel Stahler, Clive D.L. Wynne, Elaine A. Ostrander, Janet S. Sinsheimer, and Monique A.R. Udell. 2017. Structural

Variants in Genes Associated with Human Williams-Beuren Syndrome Underlie Stereotypical Hypersociability in Domestic Dogs. Science Advances 1: 3. de Waal, Francis. 2010. The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society. New York: Random House. Worboys, Michael, Julie-Marie Strange, and Neil Pemberton. 2018. The Invention of the Modern Dog: Breed and Blood in Victorian Britain. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Youyou, Wu, Michal Kosinski, and David Stillwell. 2015. Computer-Based Personality Judgments are More Accurate than those made by Humans. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112: 1036. Zeder, Melinda A. 2008. Domestication and Early Agriculture in the Mediterranean Basin: Origins, Diffusion, and Impact. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 1: 105.

Footnotes 1 See Berners-Lee.

  2 Lorenz 1971.

  3 Tinbergen 1951/1989.

  4 Gould 2008.

  5 Angler 2006.

  6 Ngai 2012: 31.

  7 Ngai 2012: 76-77.

 

8 May 2019: 2.

  9 Glocker et al. 2009.

  10 Nittono et.al. 2012.

  11 Zeder 2008; Germonpré et al. 2009.

  12 Kosoff 2015.

  13 Despret 2016: 196.

  14 Clarke 1992: 1, italics in original.

  15 Freeland 2010: 5.

  16 Siemasko 2015.

  17 Freeland 2010: 13.

  18 DeLanda 2011: 111.

  19 Ibid.

  20 The notion of social technology here comes from Bratton 2021: 94.

 

21 Grill-Spector 2017.

  22 Deleuze and Guattari 1987/2016: 201.

  23 Schmidt and Cohn 2001.

  24 Darwin 1874/1989.

  25 Nagasawa et al. 2015.

  26 See Siniscalchi et al. 2018.

  27 Kaminski et al. 2019.

  28 vonHoldt et. al. 2017.

  29 Magon and Kalra 2011.

  30 See Odendaal and Meintjes 2003; Mitsui et al. 2011; Nagasawa et al. 2009.

  31 Freeland 2010: 17.

  32 Jeannin et al. 2017a and 2017b.

  33 Mitchell 2005: 29.

 

34 Ibid: 47.

  35 Bennett 2010: 99.

  36 Although earliest use can be traced to an Australian news website in 2002, selfie came into colloquial usage in the following decade, being awarded as word of the year by Oxford English Dictionary in 2013.

  37 Barthes 1980/1981: 5.

  38 Somppi et. al. 2014; Knolle et al. 2017; Stephan et al. 2012.

  39 Kaplan 2003.

  40 Ortiz-Ospina 2019 and Clement 2019.

  41 Among the first uses online seems to be Yummypets, which presents itself as “the social petwork, community for pet lovers”; see Kotenko 2013.

  42 McHugh 2013 and Phillips 2018.

  43 Mina 2013

  44 Droitcour 2013.

  45 Made by Peter Steiner, published in The New Yorker in 1993.

 

46 See for instance Bakhshshi et. al. 2014.

  47 See for instance Turkle 2011.

  48 Montag et.al. 2016.

  49 See Barratt and Davis 2015 and Pappas 2018.

  50 Doll 2012.

  51 Booth 2014.

  52 Youyou 2015.

  53 Haraway 2008; 2016. As Harway notes, the most statistically frequent human– animal interaction is killing.

  54 Brautigan 1967.

  55 BBC Newsbeat.

  56 David 2011.

  57 Waal 2010: 142, italics in original.

  58 Despret 2016: 196.

  59 gardea 2008.

  60 TigerFurry Entertainment 2018 and Tiger Productions 2016.

  61 Cole 2011.

  62 Shahriar 2015, pokomarichard 2012, ouss 2017.

  63 See Despret 2016: 3.

  64 Ibid: 2.

  65 Riters 2011.

  66 Trut and Dugatkin 2017.

  67 Ibid: 56.

  68 Belyaev 1979: 307-308.

  69 Deleuze and Guattari 1980/2016: 53-54.

  70 DeLanda 2002/2013: 60.

  71 Ibid.

  72 DeLanda 2016: 151.

  73 Ibid 2002/2013: 113.

  74 Ibid: 112; Deleuze and Guattari 1980/2016: 56.

  75 Ngai 2012: 64.

  76 New et al. 2007.

  77 Mordvintsev et al. 2015; Mok 2015.

  78 Worboys et al. 2018.

  79 Gawne and Vuaghan 2012: 103.

  80 Ngai 2012: 87.

  81 McCulloch 2014.

  82 Ngai 2012: 87.

  83 Coyle 2016.

  84 Pepperberg 1999.

  85 Kelley and Healy 2011.

  86 Ibid.

  87 Pinker 1998: 534.

  88 DeLanda 1997/2000: 216, 218, 226.

  89 Tomlinson 2015.

  90 Seeberger 2003.

  91 JunsKitchen 2017.

  92 Darwin 1859/1985: 182.

  93 Trut and Dugatkin 2017: 58.

  94 Ibid: 56.

  95 DiChristina 2012.

  96 Belyaev 1981, quoted in Trut and Dugatkin 2017.

  97 Ibid.

  98 Theofanopoulou et al. 2017.

  99 Aragó n et al. 2015.

  100 Stavropoulos and Alba 2018.

  101 Aragó n et al. 2015.

  102 Morell 2014 and Cepelewicz 2016.

  103 Ciani and Fontanesi 2012.

  104 Ngai 2012: 54.

  105 Burke 1757: 157.

  106 Baudrillard 1979/2001: 83.

  107 Universal Pictures and Illumination Entertainment 2010.

  108 Tiqqun 2001.

  109 Know Your Meme.

  110 Horton and Wohl 1956.

  111 Lykins and Cantor 2014.

  112 Pfäfflin 2008.

  113 Paiella 2019.

  114 Urban Dictionary.

  115 Haraway 2003: 11.

  116 Trevathan and Rosenberg 2016.

  117 May 2019: 139

  118 Fong et al. 2013.

 

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Ervik, Becoming Human Amid Diversions https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13877-5_6

6. Human Tribes Andreas Ervik1   (1) Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

 

  Andreas Ervik Email: [email protected]

Setting up the Joke The Internet is one roaring, big laugh (Fig. 6.1). It is permeated with humor, from popular websites such as the satirical news site The Onion, or the content sharing platform 9gag, dominated by humoristic images, or r/funny being top subforum of content sharing platform Reddit (second only to r/announcements). Among the popular formats of YouTube videos are “Try not to laugh challenges,” which offer video compilations of clips that most will struggle getting through without bursting into laughter at some point. A central aspect of the Internet, to the point of being a fundamental mode of communicating and forming communities, perhaps simply being the central dialect of the Internet, is the meme. Memes are a form of evolving and circulating funny images, which are formed by and inform current events. Before getting further into memes and humor’s role online, a more foundational question needs to be addressed: What makes something funny, and why do humans even laugh?

Fig. 6.1 A political compass showing primitivist political positions, along an axis of right to left and authoritarian to libertarian. The positions are generally rendered

ridiculous, with crude illustrations accompanying them. Sourced from Know Your Meme, originally posted by user pangolinshell to r/PoliticalCompassMemes

Philosopher Simon Critchley waxes eloquently on the importance of humor for our species: “Humor is human. Why? Well, because Aristotle, says so.”1 Other animals have been shown to laugh, including primates laughing in response to tickling, but also in play chasing and fighting.2 Just as with play, stupidity, and cuteness, humor is part of what makes our species what it is, but also something other beings are capable of. There are many attempts at explaining what makes something funny. Humor theory is often divided threefold – incongruity, superiority, and relief.3 The first focuses on the object of humor, as ambiguities, logical impossibilities, irrelevances, and inappropriateness bring comedy. The second is founded upon people identifying themselves as above others. The third notion considers humor as a release of energy generated by repression. I will focus here on the theory of laughter by Henri Bergson, as it provides a synthesis of these notions, by tying humor to its social function, while also indicating its evolutionary role. Bergson ties humor to absentmindedness, to behaving mechanically instead of dynamically. If everyone would pay attention to everything they were doing, all the time, then nothing funny would ever occur. But since people become absentminded from time to time, humor emerges: “The comic is that side of a person which reveals his likeness to a thing, that aspect of human events which, through its peculiar inelasticity, conveys the impression of pure mechanism, of automatism, of movement without life.”4 If a person gives the impression of being transformed into a thing it prompts laughter.5 Bodies thus easily become funny, as they remind people that certain parts are beyond conscious control. For Bergson this is why tragic heroes rarely eat, drink, or warm themselves; as attention drawn to their material aspects risks reducing them to bodily mechanisms. The humoristic potential of bodies can be used strategically, twisting a situation to one’s advantage: “Napoleon, who was a psychologist when he wished to be so, had noticed that the transition from tragedy to comedy is effected simply by sitting down.”6 More than using one’s behind to sit on, however, if a fictional hero’s butt blurts like a bad trumpet in front of a love interest, the situation’s romantic

potential dissolves into farce. In addition to serving as an example of how a lack of bodily control provokes laughter, a comical hero’s fart shows how humor arises primarily in social situations. For flatulence to be funny, it needs an audience alerted to its existence. Bergson’s theory of humor connects laughter to social function, where it acts as a reprimand. Humor seeks to reorient the butt of the joke from automatism to conscious and conscientious consideration of their actions. It is worth quoting Bergson’s wonderful – if, admittedly, a bit bewildering– writing at length: Any individual is comic who automatically goes his own way without troubling himself about getting into touch with the rest of his fellow-beings. It is the part of laughter to reprove his absentmindedness and wake him out of his yiream. … Every small society that forms within the larger is thus impelled, by a vague kind of instinct, to devise some method of discipline or ‘breaking in’, sq as to deal with the rigidity of habits that have been formed elsewhere and have now to undergo a partial modification. Society, properly so-called, proceeds in exactly the same way. Each member member must be ever attentive to\ his social surroundings ; he must model himself^ on his environment; in short he must avoicT shutting himself up in his own peculiar character as a philosopher in his ivory tower.7 The blunders in the passage are of course not by Bergson’s invention, but are formatting errors resulting from transitions between different text media: from book to pdf document, uploaded online and then downloaded, converted into Amazon Kindle’s reader format, and finally exported and copied into a Word document. The mistakes are left intact to potentially offer a practical example of Bergson’s theory. The errors could be funny, as they signal an absentminded academic applying a quote – without actually paying attention to what is written. If you find it amusing, then this would result from your attempt at rectifying the peculiar character of the person performing such careless referencing. If not, it might come down to reading being a solitary and inward experience – a fart without an audience, if you will – and therefore not something in need of orientation to social attentiveness.

Alternately, Bergson’s theory elaborates greatly on the actual work needed for jokes to work, so this particular gag might lack a proper setup. Discussing Bergson’s humor theory, and the importance of setting up the gag, Harman discusses how “the literary genius of the Marquis de Sade … can bring at least some of the readers to laugh at kidnapping and sexual felonies, even if ninety-nine percent of them would be emotionally shaken when reading actual reports of such events in newspaper.”8 Humor requires preparation, a structure of anticipation and most often a punchline. The notion of the punchline and someone being the butt of the joke are not accidental. The same goes for the connection to sadism. While there are different forms of humor, the most foundational is what is regularly referred to as low humor, prevalent in cartoons for children, taking the form of slapstick violence. Forms which are considered more mature, from puns to schadenfreude to dark humor, regularly also involve someone getting hurt, either physically or mentally. Humor thus seems to require a suspension of empathy, to disengage from empathy and care-giving. Laughter is nevertheless assigned a normative role by Bergson. He refers to the old adage of human as the laughing animal, but notes that humans are animals that are laughed at.9 The structure of anticipation of jokes extends from the joker to communities, where laughter is informed by social affinity. In a community, laughter produces humiliation for the person laughed at, and may thereby act as a behavioral corrective.10 Laughter acts as a preventive measure, seeking to reduce deviant behavior, as Simon Critchley writes: “Most humor – “simply seek to reinforce consensus and in no way seek to criticize the established order or change the situation in which we find ourselves.”11 This also explains the tendency of humor to be selfreflexive, as one uncovers the laughable in others, but also comes to internalize the potential for laughter to avoid ridiculous behavior. It also makes humor a contagious force, spreading in a group and offering social cohesion. In its potential for normalizing behavior as well as motivating ridiculous behavior, humor contributes to forming and maintaining structures of social order. The role that humor has in current media indicates how central it might have been for making us human. In this chapter I will explore how humor functions as a social structuring

force, and how it might have evolved. As part of my analysis, I aim to write with humor. This does not mean that I try to provoke laughter throughout. Writing with humor is considered here as a form of writing that seeks to reduce certain forms of behavior and to encourage others. Humor may be used for critiquing the established order of things, and make other forms possible. In the chapter I will analyze the role of humor in politics, and attempt to exert influence into this social dynamic. The question permeating this chapter will therefore be – how does, and how should humor influence politics? I will examine humor’s influence focusing mainly on US politics, in particular the election of Donald Trump, his presidency, and the aftermath of him losing re-election. Trump will act as a test case for understanding the function of humor in politics. Central here is the problem and the potential of populism. Politics has a long history of responding to the threat of masses of people, of putting in stop measures to avoid the masses becoming too influential. The threat of populism is regularly considered the threat of the masses, and the lesson of Trump taken as precisely the dangers of populism, the way that a demagogue can accrue power on false premises claiming to “drain the swamp” while actually increasing their wealth. But it could also offer lessons of what populism may achieve. This chapter is a call to arms for the left, riffing on Trump’s election campaign to “make memes great again.” Parikka and Massumi are among those who have theorized what insects or animals teach about politics.12 This chapter instead considers the somewhat tautological and seemingly ridiculous question, what can humans teach about human politics? The focus here is huntergatherers, in part as a response to the notion of Trump’s particular political ideology as a form of paleoconservatism.13 This ideology is characterized by nationalist rejections of economic globalization, and anti-immigration policies. The word paleo is here simply used to mean “old,” and gives the impression that this is a historic and authentic form of conservative politics. The word paleo, however, is also short for Paleolithic, and refers to the old stone age, which extends from the earliest use of stone tools by hominins 2.6 million years ago until the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago. What is the actual paleolithic politics of hunter-gatherers, and how does humor influence their

political organization? The paleolithic period comprises most of the life of the human species, and the political organization of these humans is thereby considered here not a particular form but instead as a reservoir of the virtual possibilities of human politics. The following section considers the humoristic potential of Trump by analyzing memes. The material is sourced mainly from the wiki Know Your Meme, which gathers and attempts to stabilize the shared and fleeting format. This section conceptualizes the notion of MemeTrump, as distinct and connected to other Trump personhoods, such as the actual person, the news media representation, and the presidential candidate and later president. Trump may be a liar, a charlatan, and a showman, but Meme-Trump shows even further creative disregard of boundaries in search of humoristic potential. How did the memetic personhood of Trump contribute to his election? What about the current situation that has made humor a viable way into politics? The following section will ethnographically explore the social dynamics and tendencies of habits and potentials for change of the communities producing and dispersing memes. I focus here on communities central for the production and dispersal of memes, in particular 4chan. My approach to understanding these communities is ethnographic, seeking to describe the social dynamics of these communities – their tendencies of habits and their potentials for change. Central here will be a notion of trolling, as forms of pranking and ridiculing, and these communities as forms of troll tribes. The latter term indicates that these communities will be examined using knowledge of hunter-gatherer tribes, to consider what such groups may reveal about online discourse and communities.14 This will open examinations of the role of humor in human evolution. While Trump commanded the White House, there were calls for what Baudrillard in his road trip book America called the “only remaining primitive society” to grow up.15 In 2020, America would seem to do just that, as Joe Biden won the election through offering a return to normal. With a sigh of relief, politics stopped being ridiculous, so people could stop paying attention to it. Does Trump’s loss signify an end of an era, or will he be re-elected in 2024? The final section tackles this by taking the call of meme theorists Alfie Bown and Francis Russell to consider memes as “a battleground on which the politics of the

future must be fought.” How does the future of meme politics look, and why is it so similar to the deep past of humans? The chapter conclusion trolls both conservative and progressive sentiments alike, in the provocation that we should not look to the future for political progress, but to the past for political regress, arguing for a new form of primitivism. I propose the notion of truly funny politics, as opposed to regular boring politics and Trump’s merely funny form.

Electing a Meme for President After the election of Donald Trump in 2016 (Fig. 6.2), users of the message board 4chan exclaimed: we did it, we elected a meme for president. While the previous president of the USA, Barack Obama, has been framed the social media president, Donald Trump has been rendered a joke elected as president.16 Media researcher Matt Goerzen writes, for years “memes were perceived as a negligible artefact until meme magic elected Trump.”17 Before getting into why this particularly group would consider themselves as influential for the election, I need to establish what memes are.

Fig. 6.2 An image macro attributing the election of Donald Trump to memes. Sourced from Know Your Meme

Memes originated in Dawkins’ 1976 book The Selfish Gene. Memes were introduced as a unit of cultural transmission, analogous with the function of genes in biology. Memes are thus cultural expression that spreads by imitation or copying and develops through selection. Dawkins considers the notion of memes not as a metaphorical transfer of meaning from one field to another.18 Genes and memes are instead

presented as having an equivalent function in the evolution of species and culture. In Dawkins’ gene-centered understanding of evolution, organisms are conceived as survival machines for genetic material. In a similar manner, the brain is understood as an apparatus ensuring the survival of memes. In widest possible sense, memes are anything that can be characterized as ideas, as well as skills, behavior, and trends. The spread of memes can be from person to person, via media, such as speech, text, images, and digital technologies. Memes take the form of symbolic representations, but also bodily gests or patterns of action. The transmission is characterized by imitation, where memes are copied either exactly or with variation. Memes are exposed to selection processes, where some succeed in spreading to great masses of people, whereas others achieve little influence. As a meme, the concept of the meme itself has had greatest success in straying from scientific fields, becoming instead a popular way of designating funny content circulating online. The possibility for image editing and sharing has made the Internet especially favorable for memes. In the accounts of memes by Dawkins, the most meme worthy in its Internet sense is found on YouTube.19 In the video, wearing a floral-illustrated shirt, Dawkins gives a short introduction on memes. This is then followed by a version of the lecture where sound bites of his talk are autotuned into catchy song, and the visuals are edited into a music video. At the end of the video, he plays a breath-operated midiinstrument to generate a melody of digital synth tones, while crudely rendered dolphins and dinosaurs move through a pixelated simulated landscape behind him. In the video lecture, Dawkins designates memes as “altered deliberately by human creativity,” maintaining mutation as the primary source of novelty, and pondering whether creativity is “something like a mutation in the mind.” In the previous chapters, I have shown how creative development is far from random, as populations explore creatively, using symbiosis, play, stupidity, and cuteness. The nonrandomness is evident in the remixed version of Dawkins’ lecture as well. The wording shifts, so that the statement of human creativity becomes “altered deliberately by hedgehogs.” The mention of these animals appeared in a more sensible manner in his lecture. Its placement in the remixed version might appear entirely accidental, but

it is not. It is a precise and intentional selection, simultaneously playful, stupid, and cute, as well as gaining functional value in the situation by being funny. In the following, I will take the approach of Limor Shifman to Internet memes as structures that group together related items with the potential for circulating and varying.20 Memes are formed, maintained, and distributed, from individuals to masses, through processes of imitation and variation. According to Shifman, memes thus encapsulate certain fundamental aspects of social life online: ease of sharing, copying, imitation, and editing which leads to diffusion through competition and selection, and gradual scaling from individuals to masses.21 Online memes spread like pandemics, which explains why they are often likened to viruses. The notion of Internet memes is loosely connected to virality in digital culture. Rendering memes as a structure rather than singular allows Shifman to distinguish between memes and viral spreading. Something goes viral, if it reaches certain popularity online, but to transition into a meme it needs to turn into a structure that people can identify, relate to, and modify.22 While memes may begin as viral content, they need to pass through a threshold to turn into memetic form, identifiable despite shifting actualizations. The term meme is often used to refer to a specific format called image macros. These are images with added top and bottom text, which most often provide the visual with humorous punchlines. Some websites offer meme generators where people can flip through templates, select images, and write text on them to store and share with others. Image macros are immensely widespread in online culture. Internet memes are furthermore distinguished by stylistic properties. They are commonly poor images, in the sense explored by Steyrl, with poorness resulting both from technological production and social status.23 Taken with smartphones, and compressed into .jpg files, the poor image is distributed online to mass viewership. The poor image thereby defies copyright, allowing widespread depiction, editing, and sharing. Poverty imbues images with circulatory speed. In terms of both motives and execution, online populations tend toward impoverished images, in particular when compared to other forms of media where audience attention may center on more elaborate displays

of skillful execution. From everyday snapshot to crude drawing or the hastily edited image macro, the poor image follows a stylistic register that can be termed “Internet ugly.”24 The shared notion of Donald Trump, celebrity, billionaire, presidential candidate, president, and former president, produces clusters of related imagery. These assemble and stabilize into what I call Meme-Trump , which is viewable on (but not limited to) the online database Know Your Meme. The former US president is far from the only person to have his own page in this online database, but one among over a thousand entries on specific people. The entry on Trump is found in the category of person, but with Shifman’s definition of memes as structures, Trump (as indeed the other people with individual entries on Know Your Meme) is a memetic structure. MemeTrump is distinct from the candidate and president, as well as the Trump reported in the news, or even from a fictional character. MemeTrump depends on connections to other personhoods: without the individual human being, without his celebrity status and presidential candidacy and election, there would be no cluster of images forming a Meme-Trump. Memes are produced in response to the activities of the other personhoods of Trump, and through circulation different recurrent tropes form, which can be imitated, referenced, edited, and combined. In the following, I will tease out some of the regularities of the memetic personhood. What are the characteristics of the form that Meme-Trump takes, across its shifting actualizations? Among the most easily recognizable recurrences are those related to Trump’s visual characteristics: his looks, gestures, and expressions. There is something instantly recognizable about Trump’s appearances, which makes it possible to stretch them far without losing the connection to their referent. The ridiculous Meme-Trump follows distinct orientations when it comes to his orange tan complexion, his over-combed hairstyle, his plump body form, and his goofy expressions and demeanor. Is Trump’s body laughable in itself? Perhaps, but at the very least it becomes humorous through its treatment in memes. Trump’s body becomes funny when it reveals his inability to keep its mechanics under control. Thus, Trump’s tan, comb-over, flabby belly, and peculiar mannerisms are recurrent aspects of ridicule. Meme-Trump is

demarcated by these four aspects, and this basic meme form is stretched tirelessly in all kinds of directions. Trump can be discovered in other entities, as testified by memes stating: “The inside of my puppy’s ear looks like Donald Trump” or “Bru why this tub of margarine look like Donald Trump?” Any animal with hair issues are Trumped: A hamster with an over-combed hairstyle, a dissatisfied cat with a large fluff of comb-over fur, a moth on a leaf in the rainforest looks like Trump’s hair, and a Pokémon shares the signature hairstyle. A range of amphibians are Trump-ified, such as Pepe the Frog-Trump.25 Even as a hamster, there is a sentiment that the caricature somehow captures a quality of Trump, making evident something in his persona which was already present, but less opaque. Meme-Trump not only presents caricatures of Trump, but influences how Trump presents himself through self-caricature. By exaggerating certain features of his, Trump is sculpted into an easily identifiable character. Trump memes thrive on account of Trump’s actual being, as connected to his candidacy and presidency and mass media interest, with his persona being simultaneously more and less absurd than the memes. As a media figure and president Trump would operate in a feedback loop with his memetic personhood, such as regularly embracing the imagery through retweeting them. During the 2016 election campaign, he retweeted a video titled “You Can’t Stump the Trump,” featuring remixes of republican candidate debates, with sound effects and visual effects added to Trump’s roasts of other candidates. Trump’s online embrace of Meme-Trump carried over into the presidency. He retweeted a post with images of Trump gradually covering Obama, captioned “best eclipse ever.” He also retweeted a meme making fun of Hillary Clinton’s book memoir, titled What Happened, with Clinton’s name replaced by a smug picture of himself and the title switched to I Happened. Another jab at Clinton came with a post of a short video clip showing him taking a golf swing, with the ball hitting Clinton’s back, causing her to stumble. Cartoon characters follow what has been termed “laws of cartoon physics,” which somewhat simplified can be defined as “anything is possible – as long as it is funny.”26 The dispositions of Meme-Trump are likewise determined by humor. Yet, it is further structured by the position Meme-Trump inhabits within the universe(s) proposed by the

memes. This can be explicated using Shifman’s argument that memes integrate politics and pop culture, often with ambiguous political motivation.27 The many possible Meme-Trump universes are created using references from animated movies and blockbusters as well as games, and are distinguishable by genres such as science-fiction, horror, and fantasy. In the worlds of the political imaginary, Trump acts as a force of good or evil, or as a troll: Trump as the good-guy ranges from propaganda and political mythmaking to full-blown savior figure. Most of the visual elements come from fantasy and warfare, drawing Trump as a sword-slinger or with heavy weaponry. One image shows Trump clad in a fur coat, perched on a rooftop, holding a sword larger than his entire body, with a dragon next to him. Another shows a muscular, bare-chested wizard with Trump’s likeness, summoning a demon against a frightened woman with Clinton’s face superimposed. Another places Trump on a tank, while an eagle flies in front, an American flag waves in the background, and fireworks and dollar bills abound. Referencing the fictional game universe Warhammer, Trump is wearing a gold mech-armor, portrayed as God-Emperor of Mankind – a guardian-figure embodying order. On the opposite end of the scale are memes framing Trump as evil, often as an imbecilic narcissist. One shows a news headline about Trump getting two scoops of ice cream, while everyone else only receives one. It’s almost too easy to make fun of Trump’s incompetence, as his arrogant bragging slips into self-deprecation, most immediately identifiable in one of his tweets turned meme, where he describes himself as “a very stable genius.” When tied to incompetence, the villain regularly becomes a puppet for a greater mastermind. The mastermind is mainly Russian president Vladimir Putin, but may also be former executive of Breitbart News and former White House Chief Strategist for Trump, Steve Bannon. One shows Putin walking Trump on a leash, while a drawing shows Bannon guiding Trump’s arm in signing documents while saying “Who’s a big boy.” With Trump as the villain, he is matched up against heroes. In reference to the leaked tape where Trump boasts about “grabbing women by the pussy,” a drawing shows the superhero Wonder Woman asking Trump to “go ahead, grab it, see what happens.” A strain of images imagine the impending doom of Trump’s presidency: Patrick

Bateman, the Wall Street investor turned mass murderer in the movie American Psycho, poses smiling and holding Trump’s book on business, The Art of the Deal. Rendering Trump as a villain regularly frames the potentially grave consequences of his presidency as horror: Trump is presented as the younger version of the villain of Mad Max: Fury Road, closing the gap between our present and the post-apocalyptic nightmare world of the film; Trump is shown as initiator of the death matches of the Hunger Games film series and the totalitarian regime of the Handmaid’s Tale series. The position of Trump as hero or villain is straightforward and readily understandable according to political sympathies and antipathies. As a hero, Trump will use fame and fortune to make America great again, and as a villain bring a reign of terror, either for his own benefit or for the Russian puppet master. The dichotomy between good and evil comes as no surprise, considering the position of monotheistic religion in the USA – where no presidential candidate has ever been an open non-believer. As a contrast to these, trolling seems altogether more ambiguous, both in its function and its attraction. Trump the troll is either wittingly or unwittingly playing tricks on others. In an image, his smug smirk has placed him in the role of the purple-suited, green-haired, chaotic evil clown the Joker from the 1980s Batman film. Among the most elaborate notions of troll-Trump is one rendering Trump as a character conceived and enacted by the deceased comedian Andy Kaufmann – a joke taken too far, and not necessarily one that will ever be revealed.28 Another takes the Star Wars universe as its starting point, and the fan speculation that comicrelief character Jar Jar Binks was a masterful manipulator and perhaps the greatest force of evil of the series.29 Connecting Jar Jar’s silly conduct to Trump running for president renders him as someone who knows exactly what he is doing, playing everyone by acting the fool. Because humor has accrued such importance in human social structures, including online discourse, Trump’s antics could be turned into a viable way of seizing attention. One meme speaks of this, showing Trump and another person in front of a computer, captioned: “Now watch. I hit the Tweet button and obtain full control of the news cycle.” Acting the role of the buffoon, Trump’s candidacy was a string of

scandals and outrageous statements, including a constant bombardment of tweets from Trump himself. By being the butt of the joke, Trump could effectively form the news cycle, gaining potential supporters in spite of how overwhelmingly negative the attention was. 30

Trump is often genuinely funny, not only as a joke, but as a comedian. In his speeches he has a knack for comical timing, roasting others and making a fool of himself. Rather than the kind of political affiliation expressed, it might simply be more important for the production and dissemination of Trump memes that they are funny. Shifman’s perspective on memes is insightful here, stating that “heavy reliance on pop culture in images in political memes may, at some points, lead to a process of ‘depoliticization,’ in which the political and critical aspects of Internet memes are diminished in favor of pure playful amusement.”31 Trump as a troll can be traced to his incongruity – a massive celebrity, regularly in the limelight, but far removed from the political establishment. The media generally portrayed Trump as unelectable. With Shifman this becomes precisely what fueled his potential for online communities, as memes often focus on “one person who sticks out as alien to the surrounding situation” which produces a response “since the people featured in memetic photos appear to be out of context, their reappropriation to other contexts seems almost natural.”32 Not fitting in as a politician could be embraced and enhanced in memes, to the point of forming the attractor of electing a meme for president.

The Origins of Trolling Who were attracted to the potential of electing a meme for president? In this section I will focus on a particular community invested in memeifying the US election. This section will move from individual memes to the collective forming and distributing, which are more or less loosely aggregated and longer lasting or shorter communities. These communities will be approached through a framework of tribalism. Tribalism has been a trendy designator for the “deeply divided USA,” and the political polarization under Trump. It is used to problematize partisan division, and combatting allegiance to groups which incite hatred toward others. The term comes with its own set of problematic assumptions, however, and some have pointed out its colonial origins.33 Tribe is the historical legal term for Native Americans nations. Presenting US problems as tribal is a way of sneaking in notions of civilization as progress and tribes as unruly, backward, and violent groups. My starting point here is not the assumption that tribalism is bad, and something to overcome. Instead, I will consider how social networking could indeed be making people tribal, and that to understand tribalism it would be insightful to look into actual huntergatherers. The notion that media technology leads to tribes is traceable to McLuhan’s formulation of the global village. For McLuhan this is a way of acknowledging how media enables person-to-person relations without regard of the scale separating the locations. McLuhan states: “On a planet reduced to village size by new media, cities themselves appear quaint and odd, like archaic forms already overlaid with new patterns of culture.”34 Simultaneously global and local, McLuhan suggests that the possibility of connecting across great distances does not divest people from social grouping. The global village of online tribes is formed by repeated social encounters. The parameters of these encounters are temporal (from real-time messages to forums or mail), of data size and type (from conversation through text to streaming, and file sharing audiovisual content and software), and of interconnectivity (group size).

For Trump memes in particular, groups are formed by meme producers as well as those who simply like or repost them. Individual user participation might be of greater and lower intensity – from the amount of posting, to the potential reach, and how creative individuals are with the possibilities of Meme-Trump. 4chan occupies a central position. Originally started in 2004 to share and discuss Japanese manga and anime, 4chan has become an infamous breeding ground for memes.35 Comparing 4chan with Facebook and Twitter provides perspective on what has made this forum so effective for meme production. Firstly, while Facebook requires not only a login, but obligate people to use their legal name, 4chan users post anonymously (beyond signaling country). While Twitter stores user posts and sort them based on performance, 4chan stores only temporarily, without any scores tied to the anonymous users. The lack of user identity, post retention, and ranking leads social value to be coupled to post content, which generates a sustained incentive for producing attention grabbing memes. Lacking other kinship identifiers, meme creation, and usage turns into tokens for the group to signal their communal bonds, where appropriate use acts as cultural capital and social memory.36 The general impression of 4chan as a breeding ground of memes grants further influence, as people become more likely to check the platform for discovery and attempting to instigate new memes. Sociologist Michel Maffesoli offers another useful framework for online communities, in his understanding of the development of neotribes. These are kinship groups, coming together around shared interests and affects, developing from people searching for “those who feel and think as we do.”37 These can also be understood as what media theorists Ryan M. Milner and Whitney Phillips term “deep memetic frames,” which act as “sensemaking mechanisms that allow people to tell coherent stories about the world.”38 While memes are images, memetic frames are the frameworks through which people understand the world around them. Media technological development has made it easy to enter into neotribal groups on a global scale. This leads to rapid evolution of such tribes – in terms of organizing structure, distinguishing markers, and expressive forms, as well as impact on the larger societies they are embedded into. The question of how funny Trump was as a president,

or alternately how funny it was when he lost re-election, is a question of which neotribal emotional affinity, of where you find the ones who feel as you do, and how this shapes your deep memetic frame. Ridicule and laughter here become important, in order to establish what kind of behavior the community considers appropriate or not. Central here is the level of schadenfreude or dark humor that is socially acceptable or even enthusiastically encouraged by the particular community. What kinds of affects are unleashed in this anonymously anarchic community; what kind of structure does their behavior form? 4chan’s use of memes as signals of community is built on enthusiasm over posting anonymously.39 The central aspect of 4chan, however, is trolling, a way of deliberately pissing people off, through controversial and outrageous remarks and malicious deceiving.40 Trolling is done for the lulz (a version of the term lol). Basic techniques include baiting into arguments, faking ignorance, mock concern, exposing potentially shocking imagery, and offering cruel advice. It could take the form of bullying teenagers and leaving inappropriate messages on memorial pages for deceased. Lulz derives its humor from people taking too seriously something meant as a joke – and trolling would perhaps be less appealing if people were not so quick to assume that others are stupid or crass enough to say or do some of the things that trolls do. Phillips and Milner speak of such gullibility as a condition for lulz, presented as if a troll is explaining to its victim: “you should know better than to take us seriously, but make sure you take us seriously because if we are actually joking in the way we say we are, you taking us seriously is, quite literally, the entire punchline of our joke, so please ignore us when we say we’re just joking.”41 The language wiki Urban Dictionary exemplifies lulz with how “Anonymous gets BIG lulz from pulling random pranks!” 42 “Anonymous” comes from 4chan, as the standard post moniker. It also signals something beyond individuals, used as a group identity marker for coordinated large-scale trolling.43 The coordinated trolling is a form of social activism, with Anonymous protests against and hackings of corporations and organizations. This includes a series of protests against the Church of Scientology, in which ‘Anonymous’ first made use of Guy Fawkes masks from the movie V For Vendetta (hiding personal identity and shaping group identity); the group has spammed YouTube

with pornography; alleged racist moderators of social network game Habbo Hotel were protested by blocking off the game’s pool using characters to form a swastika; 4chan users have rigged Time Magazine’s person of the year poll, so that 4chan’s founder Christopher Poole would win in 2009 (including an in-group reference by arranging all the nominees in a particular order), and in 2012 giving Kim Jong Un the honor.44 Because the main aim seems to be absurd mischief, perhaps more than social activism for a greater cause these acts are social prankivism. Trolling generally seems to involve some form of cruel treatment of unsuspecting victims and a disregard for civil decency, authority, and norms of behavior. Because of this, it has in academic discourse been tied to narcissism, sadism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism.45 Trolling has been placed in a countercultural legacy of transgression and spectacle, with predecessors found in hackers, punk, and Dada.46 As perhaps the classic troll, the ancient philosopher Diogenes rejected social conventions and behaved crudely, but not without a potential for satire: picking his nose while Socrates speaks of the divine, farting at Plato’s theory of ideas, and answering his theory of eros by masturbating in public.47 The behavior of Diogenes follows a lineage of tricksters, an archetype which is present in anything from stories about Native American coyote spirits to Norse mythology’s character Loki. The prevalence of tricksters suggests that trolling and doing things for the lulz might be more universal than it would seem if approached through perspectives on psychological maladjustment or specific subcultures. I propose to consider trolling and lulz as fundamental aspects of the human evolution of humor. How did humor evolve? A starting point is the evolution of facial expressivity, as consequences of the social behavior of looking at each other’s faces. Deleuze and Guattari discuss how the mouth began evolving relatively independently of a snout, leading to developmental traits and capacities specific to the mouth, such as “filling [it] with words instead of food and noises.”48 This also includes the possibility of contorting the face in different ways as social indicators of internal states and intentions. Primates have the capacity for intricate facial displays, formed by more intricate facial muscles than that of other mammals.49 As further intensification of the relatively independent

development from the snout, Deleuze and Guattari present “the lips as a deterritorialization of the mouth (only humans have lips, in other words, an outward curling of the interior mucous membranes).”50 More than any other animals, humans have sensitive and flexible lips which further intensify the possibilities of tiny nuances in social signaling. Not only the mouth but other parts of the face as well need to be included to produce an expression as humble as a smile. Without eyes contributing to conveying this emotion, the smiling mouth will seem unconvincing. A smile further takes what is prominently for other animals a sign of aggression, the baring of teeth, and inverts it. How could the smile have turned into a positive display? Neurologist Michael Graziano points out that other parts of the body than the face are often involved in smiling, and uses this to elucidate a possible evolutionary emergence of smiling: “Watch a low-status underling in a company, a new intern, smiling at a high-status boss, and you’ll see the echo of the defensive cringe. The intern grins, teeth on display, face crinkled painfully around the eyes, body hunched, knees slightly bent, shoulders raised, hands pulled inward and curled over the abdomen or chest.”51 Graziano theorizes the smile to have originated from a defensive stance, as a way of signaling non-threatening presence from one primate to another: “When in the presence of a potentially dangerous monkey with whom you don’t want to fight, you reflexively flash the mimic defensive stance. You don’t need to know how it works, or even that it works. You simply produce the action because the context triggers it in you, and the action then has a specific, useful effect.”52 Laughter could likewise have emerged firstly as protection. Graziano explains this through the example of a child being tickled, who will start laughing and defending himself. Both laughter and the defensive gesture can occur long before the hand actually touches, which the neurologist takes to be a sign of its origin in playfights. As the intruder breaks through the defense in playfights, the beaten signals that it has had enough, to protect its vital organs from damage. This defensive response could thereafter be deterritorialized from the specific situation. It could then be exploited to influence the behavior of others, for instance to calm others from attacking even prior to them getting through the defense. Through evolution, the response could grow into a ritualized social sign. Laughter would turn into a way of

signaling to others that one submits to an attack, and even that one is at ease. From the work of Graziano and Bergson, humor appears to have formed from interacting functions – attacking those who attempt to dominate and defending against dominance, as well as using selfdeprecation to avoid being perceived as dominating. The evolution of laughter can be traced to the importance of the interplay between these positions in the social dynamics of early human tribes. Through social attack and defense, laughter has a normative effect on a group, in that it sets straight if others disapprove. But it also provides the impetus to embrace outrageous behavior to make others laugh, if the demeanor is not accompanied by otherwise undesirable dominating behavior. Humor is not entirely opposed to violence, but is itself a diminished form of violence. As a form of violence, the central question in humor is often who is punching and who is the punchline. Graziano ends his account of laughter’s evolution at the point of forming a social potential independent of fighting. Here, perspectives from anthropology provides indications for what could have driven this shift, further implicating the role of humor in power dynamics. Anthropologist Christopher Boehm studies paleolithic human tribes using contemporary hunter-gatherers as stand-ins. This has led him to form a possible answer to the ancient debate on the innate good or bad view of human nature: as primates we have a tendency to dominate, but since we enjoy individual autonomy and social serenity, human hunter-gatherer tribes form moral groups to overpower those who seek to individually dominate the rest of the group.53 To do so, groups need to act in agreement, in order to socially sanction “upstarts ... hungry for power,” who “almost always seems to be males who try to dominate their peers.”54 Forming what Boehm calls moral communities, women and men use peer pressure, tactics of criticism, and ridicule, toward those pushing for power. In a tribe, unwelcome leadership has the ability to form and maintain itself, but it is regularly met with and can be averted by humor. Connecting laughter with the evolutionary role of humor for huntergatherer groups also forms a perspective on the function that lulz has for troll tribes. While seemingly aggressively dysfunctional in its Machiavellian sadism, it is precisely doing it for the lulz that provides

trolling with a moral purpose. Far from unstable and unpredictable consequences of lack of hierarchy and control, 4chan has a specific structure. It is observable in how 4chan resists the microcelebrity and egocentric displays of prestige found in other social networks; how trolling regularly directs its protests against censorship – whether in the form of legal actions taken to remove videos by corporations and organizations, as well as how trolling rejects limitations on what can and cannot be said and shown, producing alternative “poor image” ecosystems where marginalized individuals can come together.55 Trolling is adhesive for these groups, as individuals are taught to partake in exchanges without being upset by what takes place. The group dynamics of trolling raises the bar for what constitutes offensive behavior, pushing the group toward evermore preposterous trolling. 4chan produces a group dynamic characterized, according to troll researcher Vyshali Mannivannan, by willful “alienation from mainstream culture and take pride in their collective shame.”56 The marginalizing of hunter-gatherer tribes today includes the dismantling of their ways of governance, as political structures of weak to nonexistent leadership are highly unusual in contemporary societies. The way that 4chan is presented in mainstream media – as chaotic, threatening, and pathetic – could thereby be considered a strategy of minimizing the potential threat their organizational structure could pose.57 Humor is fundamentally about struggles of power, and so was also the joke of Trump’s presidency. Shifting perspective here from 4chan’s embrace of Trump to the ridicule in mainstream media, in which the primitive attempt at averting unwanted leadership with humor was clearly evident. The broad response to Trump can be exemplified with Time Magazine sharing “The Funniest Tweets about Trump’s Presidential Bid” and the talkshow Jimmy Kimmel Live rendering Trump’s candidacy as an April Fool’s joke.58 Although writing from another era, concerned with another media technology, in his book America, Baudrillard’s combination of high theory with stand-up comedy observations are insightful reflections to bring in here. Baudrillard at once reflects on ridicule and offers a ridicule of American media:

Laughter on American television has taken the place of the chorus in Greek tragedy. It is unrelenting; the news, the stockexchange reports, and the weather forecast are about the only things spared. But so obsessive is it that you go on hearing it behind the voice of Reagan or the Marines disaster in Beirut. Even behind the adverts. It is the monster from Alien prowling around in all the corridors of the spaceship. It is the sarcastic exhilaration of a puritan culture. In other countries, the business of laughing is left to the viewers. Here, their laughter is put on the screen, integrated into the show. It is the screen that is laughing and having a good time. You are simply left alone with your consternation.59 What has changed from television to Twitter is precisely that people are no longer left to their own consternation, but have been given technological access to the chorus. People are chiming in as a laugh track against what they find offensively crude. The response to current events is shared in myriad ways and platforms, as people repost and respond to whatever is happening. Trump’s candidacy and presidency was made ridiculous in an attempt to hassle him out of the run. These are efforts to humiliate what was by many seen as an illegitimate attempt at achieving a dominant position. Not only did ridicule do nothing to prevent Trump; it could instead contribute to catapult him into position. If humor is so effective in tribal politics, why did it not deter Trump? For hunter-gatherers, ridicule is not the only way to hinder upstarts. If such preventive measures prove insufficient, the group will – reluctantly – increase its intensity. The next level of preventive measures is ostracism – freezing someone out – but if this fails the tribe can execute the trouble-maker. Ridicule remains effective in preventing power-hungry individuals, because the group has more severe options available: “For the most part, the mere threat of sanctions (including ostracism and execution) keeps such power seekers in their place. When upstartism does become active, so does the moral community: it unites against those who would usurp the egalitarian order, and usually does so preemptively and assertively.”60 With structures in place today preventing any further measures against Trump beyond ridicule – he

could neither be excluded from the election nor executed – his campaign could continue full-strength (Fig. 6.3).

Fig. 6.3 Image macro made with the website Imgflip’s meme generator, offering a funny prospect for the end of Trump’s presidency

Why would the seemingly anarchic and at least somewhat egalitarian communities of 4chan be interested in boosting Trump with their meme magic? With Trump, the poor image of memes and troll tribes seems to have shifted into what Clinton during the campaign referred to as “deplorable” – the racist and sexist Trump fans. Central for Trump’s role in the deplorable development is, with Phillips and Milner, how he “inspired ingroup unity by way of outgroup hostility.”61 The shift into deplorable could conceivably be a development over time, but 4chan has always been at least partly deplorable. 4chan has been characterized by Brunton as the “most broadly offensive artifact that has ever been produced in the history of human media.”62 In her research on trolling, Angela Nagle frames 4chan as filled with racism, misogyny, dehumanizing, and disturbing content for years prior to Trumpism.63 A dividing line can perhaps be made between being mainly concerned with in-group members or out-group dividing lines.

In-group activities can definitely be in poor taste, such as the use of extreme material as initiation rituals to keep newcomers from spoiling the fun.64 Certain events spill out, such as popular memes or largerscale trolling, but with Trumpism this shifted to a more general sense of finding self-worth based on hostile opposition to others. If the deplorable is political, it is a form of oppositional politics, determined by being against successful men, women in general, minorities, mainstream media, and the political status quo. Nagle argues for the growth of lulz as a political position in the USA in part because of a general cultural and intellectual disdain for anything mainstream, as an indicator of the “absolute hegemony of the culture of non-conformism, self-expression, transgression and irreverence for its own sake.”65 With the rise of white nationalism, dubbed the alt-right, on 4chan (and later 8chan), a shift took place, from the impoverishment of lulz to the deplorability of kek. The latter term was originally used by players of World of Warcraft, but turned into “The Cult of Kek,” combining the cartoon drawing of Pepe the Frog with Egyptian god Kek.66 The deplorable mythology of kek includes an ancient kingdom “Kekistan,” which has become overwhelmed by “Normistan.” A national “Kekistan” flag has been produced which mimics a German Nazi War flag. Fantastical narratives were spun of Trump as the embodiment of kek, or as doing kek’s bidding in bringing chaos. This was further fueled as Trump himself retweeted a drawing of himself as the cartoon frog. Fast forwarding to the end of Trump’s presidency, after he had lost re-election, a group of disappointed followers stormed the US Capitol. Was this an attempted coup, or a ridiculous embarrassment? Just as trolling in general, it might be considered both at the same time. Political philosopher Benjamin Bratton notes the bewilderment not only for those watching but also for those partaking: “Their rage was matched only by their confusion. Many seemed perplexed as to what to do with themselves once here. To take selfies was the eventual decision of many who were not busy brutally attacking guards.”67 Among the most visible of the ridiculous insurrection was a flamboyant figure: wearing buffalo headgear, face painted in red-white-blue, and holding a USA flag, bare-chested with multiple tattoos including Nordic pagan symbolism. The seemingly confusing mixture is heightened by the

labeling of him as the “Q Shaman.” He is a fitting figure for the end of Trump’s presidency: a dress up in tribal costume making a mockery of ancestry and of himself, or as one meme framed it in reference to videogames, “[w]hen you click ‘random’ during character creation.”68 As the letter Q indicates, the so-called shaman is a proponent of the conspiracy theory of QAnon. This conspiracy was instigated by someone posting to 4chan. Claiming to be a government insider, QAnon posted about a global “deep state” cabal of satanic pedophile elites, which Trump was supposedly working against. Extremist researcher Marc André Argentino has described QAnon as a “hyper-real religion.”69 He notes that it bears the hallmarks of religions, including oaths, the conversion of family and friends, saving children from damnation, and a general good versus evil format. The messages by Q furthermore need to be pondered over and interpreted in order to find the hidden meaning. Argentino connects hyper-reality of this semi-religion to its liberal borrowing from popular culture. A particular example of this comes from the movie The Matrix, from which QAnon adopts the notion of taking a blue or red pill to signify remaining unknowledgeable about what is really going on versus wakening up and joining the insurrection. The hyper-reality of the situation makes it pertinent to again reference the philosopher of hyper-reality, Baudrillard. Writing on President Ronald Reagan, the words of Baudrillard might as well describe the position of Trump, as “no mistake or political reversal damages his standing and that, paradoxically, his failures even improve it.” Throughout his candidacy and presidency, Trump was plagued by scandal after scandal, which did not seem to negatively affect his support. Baudrillard calls paradoxical confidence the one placed in someone on the basis of their failure, pointing to how the “the failure of prophecy – a process that is well-known from the history of messianic and millenarian movements – following which the group instead of denying its leader and dispersing, closes ranks around him and creates religious, sectarian, or ecclesiastical institutions to preserve the faith.”70 In 2021, as much as 15% of Americans continue to believe in QAnon long after Trump lost re-election.71 One question seems as pertinent as ever: Are people stupid enough to actually believe QAnon that a satanic elite kidnaps children and Trump was a deep state agent sent to fight it?

The question of sincerity has been central for Trump and his supporters since the 2016 election: Trump can’t actually mean these things, can he? Are the alt-right actually fascists, or just people pretending, in order to rile up gullible liberals? Do people actually believe that the election in 2020 was stolen from Trump? Is Trump the hero of troll tribes and do they embrace his authoritarian tendencies, or is it all a big trolling for the lulz? Perhaps the distinction between serious belief and ironic play is not as clearly separated as it is usually considered. 4chan’s position on political engagement can be approached through 4chan’s warning to its users and others: “The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact.” This sentiment, however, is confounded by another warning, the meme that “The Internet is serious business.”72 In online discourse, uncertainty concerning whether something is serious or a joke can be traced back to 1982, when computer scientist Scott Fahlman proposed a system to alleviate the potential for misunderstanding on a message board: I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers: :-) Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use :-( 73 Needless to say, the proposed system – whether its intent was sincere or not – did not succeed in formatting online discourse. The extent of the problem is big enough for there to be an Internet meme axiom describing it: Poe’s law states the impossibility of distinguishing something from satire without explicit statement of intent.74 Uncertainty of intent runs as a strain through academic discourse on lulz itself – with a central question being whether trolls are genuinely antagonistic toward progressive attitudes, or if they act the way they do simply to provoke “politically correct” sensibilities.75

The troll tribe’s embrace of Trump seems unserious if considered using Shifman’s perspective on memes as depoliticization and playful amusement.76 It may simply be more important for the production and dissemination of Trump memes, even for the troll tribes, that they are funny, rather than what kind of political affiliation they express. Nagle points to this, rendering trolling the perfect “postmodern offspring, where every statement is wrapped in layers of faux-irony, playfulness and multiple cultural nods and references.”77 Trolling seems thereby to lead to what Bogost calls ironoia, which constitutes a collapsing of irony and paranoia, as a doubling of the world by “creating a safe, fictional version atop the real one … which will save us from both pain and boredom.”78 Doomscrolling – a form of compulsive attention to bad news and negative events – can be alleviated by injecting it with a dose of schadenfreude, laughing at the misfortune of others. The confounding of fiction with reality, of sincerity with mockery, is not necessarily an Internet invention, or even a product of postmodernism. An alternate perspective can be formulated by further pursuing the connection made here between humor and tribal social dynamics. I therefore turn to another anthropologist, Rane Willerslev, and his study of the animism of contemporary hunter-gatherers.79 Willerslev gives an account of a band of sub-arctic indigenous people, the Yukaghir, on a bear hunt. Having killed a bear, the Yukaghir try to avoid misfortune by convincing the spirit that it was not they who did the misdeed. They say that crows are pecking out its eyes, not the tribe, and since the temperature is warm the bear should be pleased to have its fur removed. While spinning a tale to deceive the spirit, one part of the group provides a counternarrative, telling the bear that it was in fact they who killed it. This makes Willerslev conclude that “underlying animistic cosmologies is a force of laughter, an ironic distance, a making fun of the spirits which suggests that indigenous animism is not to be taken very seriously at all.”80 The humoristic tactics are by Willerslev theorized as ways of avoiding animism stiffening into dogma, maintaining instead its playful vitality as part of everyday life. Trolls follow the process of laughter-inducing animism. Without distinction between lulz and political action, between taking seriously and trolling, the online troll tribes remain attractive for its tribe, and gain mainstream spreading and infamy. Phillips and Milner have

written extensively of the situation in which “troll-trained” news reporters contributed to “launder white nationalism into the mainstream” through presenting deplorable memes under the guise that the intent of it was likely trolling and satirical.81 The same goes for the ridiculousness of the QAnon conspiracy, whose influence was nurtured by enthusiasts, skeptics, and ironoiacs alike. As Phillips and Milner note: No matter how condescending and snarky the headlines, no matter how negative the coverage, QAnon proponents basked in the attention. This was perfect; this was exactly what they wanted for their great ‘awakening’. … [O]ne YouTuber who streams conspiratorial musings to his forty-five thousand subscribers perfectly captured this giddiness. ‘I haven’t been this happy in a very long time’, he said, ‘CNN, NBC News, MSNBC, PBS News Hour, Washington Post, MSNBC, those are our new Qanon reporters!’ The man paused, then burst out laughing.82 The question of whether people believe in QAnon or not is ultimately unimportant. Perhaps this should be termed post-truth politics, and tied to Trump’s amazing number of false and misleading claims?83 Post-truth politics is characterized by populist voter appeals, more than a search for truthful solutions to real political issues. Philosopher Lars Fr. Svendsen offers a contrasting perspective, rendering Trump as something besides a liar, whose followers will not be swayed by truth. Instead, Trump spews bullshit, and his followers are concerned not with truth but truthiness, what they feel to be true.84 Sociologist danah boyd has argued a similar point about someone posting what is unquestionably misinformation, who did not care about truth; they simply wanted to signal that they hated Hillary Clinton.85 Perhaps post-truth politics signal a current distrust in any form of truth politics. The outright deceptive position of Trump, who does not try to hide his own power play, and has no truth, may in such a situation paradoxically seem honest. Overall, right-wing populism has been most successful in hijacking humor by filtering it into deplorability, focusing on power, without concern for truth.

Perhaps rather than questions of intent and truth the concern should be placed with the media ecology that makes possible the dissemination. Former president George W. Bush stated in a much ridiculed statement: “The best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what’s happening in the world.”86 As an unlikely candidate to theorize media, what Bush described seems to have become the common situation, not only for those QAnon believers. In online discourse people tend to trust the people one follows and considers peers, or the celebrities one looks up to. This is a primitive trust in one’s peer group, and a distrust in the ridiculous unwanted elites. In such a media environment it is not fact-checking that will prevent the spreading of post-truths and fake news. Misunderstanding this social dynamic made Twitter implement certain changes, supposedly in order to combat the spreading of fake news during the 2020 election campaign. In order to share news on the social network, one were from then on obligated to also include comments of one’s response to the event. Baudrillard would appreciate the irony. When Trump retweets troll activities it acts a token of support for the troll tribe. He can thus become not an unwanted but an accepted leader for these individuals. For this group, Trump is not a president, but following van Boxsel frame of royalty, he is a king: The constitutional monarchy is a rational unit with an irrational element at its head. The gulf between People and king is no impediment to, but a prerequisite of, democracy. The political order needs an exceptional focus, a force willing to assume responsibility and to render that order effective. The objection of republican critics to monarchy, namely that the fate of the state hinges on the accidental character traits of the monarch is futile; since his authority is purely formal, his qualities are irrelevant. A president, by contrast, poses a threat to democracy: there is a good chance that we come to believe in his rationality. A king at least is manifestly out of place.87 Part of the allure for trolls came from the candidacy of Trump being treated as a joke, and thereby as a threat to the status quo, which

trolling also challenges. As troll-king, Trump is someone to latch onto for lulz. And, like a king, Trump does not lose high standing as a result of erratic behavior. The more inappropriate his leadership, the more lulz is produced, in a mockery of any pretense of grandeur. As van Boxsel writes, “the more the king acts like the man in the street, embroiled in idiotic everyday emotions, the more of a king he becomes. For that reason, mockery, far from posing a threat to his power, only serves to strengthen it.”88 Ridiculing Trump becomes a way not of diminishing power, but of hailing Trump, the king of trolls!

What Humans Can Teach Us About Human Politics Meme researchers Thomas Hobson and Kajal Moodi render online discourse as “increasingly the battlegrounds on which political battles are fought, and if not where hearts and minds won exactly, then at least where they are exposed to alternative political ideas, causes, and crusades. They are a rich recruiting ground for previously antithetical or apolitical young people who might feel disenfranchised by the established politics of our time.”89 Could the left find again a way of using memes, shifting people away from Trump and his trolls, to produce a new normality without returning to vanilla politics? This would take action against the right-wing extremist sentiment found in troll tribes, the “immutable law of both the internet and the real world,” that the left can’t meme.90 Literary scholar Leif Weatherby encapsulates the sentiment of this claim to be that leftists have been “antiintellectual about the way we communicate now, about the conditions and possibilities of social media’s amplifications of the capacity called irony.”91 Artist and political podcaster Joshua Citarella points out the potential that social networks today have for radicalizing, and how this can be used to funnel youth into leftist politics: “In many cases people go down ideological rabbit holes not because they are cynically misled by platforms, but because they cannot find satisfactory answers in mainstream media or discover hypocrisies in the narratives they have been told.”92 What might leftist meme politics look like? Starting with the Democratic Party, who in the potential candidates for the 2020 election, had those with memetic potential that might rival Trump. Andrew Yang was dubbed a meme candidate, as a political outsider turned Internet favorite.93 Among the catchiest memes to come out of his candidacy is a music video remixing Yang’s phrase “where’s the money?/where’s the money?/we have the money” over a vaporwave vibe. Ultimately Yang failed to gain traction in the Democratic primaries, and dropped out after the second state election. Another candidate Michael Bloomberg is reported to have hired influential Instagram profiles to make meme posts. The memes take the form of conversations between Bloomberg and the Instagram profiles, with Bloomberg asking whether they will “let the younger demographic

know I’m the cool candidate.”94 This presents him as a more self-aware version of Clinton’s attempt at forced memes (she would for instance urge voters to “Pokemon go to the vote”). The punchline is how out of touch and cringeworthy Bloomberg was. The self-mockery highlights how he, as Trump, is unafraid of appearing ridiculous and losing face. In addition, he is asked by an influencer to pay “like a billion dollars,” and is immediately ready to splurge, showing his immense wealth. Although vaguely amusing, these democratic candidates lack any of the disruptive trolling discussed in the previous sections. There are historical precedents for more outright funny leftist meme politics found on the grassroot level. Design group Metahaven details some of these in their pamphlet Can Jokes Bring Down Governments. The group discusses Anonymous and 4chan’s trolling, as well as the radical potential of the Arab spring, and “the cute cat theory of digital activism.”95 As also indicated by Hobson and Moodi, meme politics is characterized not by specific ideologies but by spreadability, and can range from “ISIS and InCel to Bernie Bros and Corbynmania, to the rise of Trump and the new British nationalism.”96Although it would seem like a distant memory already, it should be added here the memetic slogan of “we are the 99%” used by the Occupy Wall Street Movement in 2011 to mobilize against financial elites. Another earlier leftist disruptive meme is the countless remixes of an image of a cop in riot gear mazing a group of sitting students in the face with pepper spray. At the time it was described as a moral drama which the protestors won, as a breach of normalcy demanding participation in the form of remixing and redistributing.97 The notion of the pepper spray cop as a breach of normalcy seems quaint compared to current events. The racial injustice of the USA is evident in how it allowed the black man George Floyd to be brutally murdered by police officers over unlawfully selling cigarettes. In contrast, the white young man Kyle Rittenhouse could bring an automatic rifle with him and be thanked by police for his efforts, before later the same night fatally shooting two people who were protesting against the killing of Floyd. Rittenhouse were also cleared of the charges. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests a meme circulated, contrasting police in paramilitary gear with frontline health workers dressed in repurposed trash bags. The caption of the image

reads “If you had any doubt about America’s priorities, here’s how the people killing us are equipped vs the people keeping us alive.” These are indications of longstanding crisis, brought not by the pandemic nor by the presidency of Trump. In the words of Bratton: “If after decadeslong dismantling of governance there is nothing left but police functions, then that is not only where the structure of society will be contested, but even worse, it is where society will attempt to construct itself.”98 Bratton has further termed the pandemic “the largest control experiment in comparative governance in history, with the virus as the control variable and hundreds of different states and political cultures as the experimental variables.”99 Even though the USA in 2019 was hailed by a report Global Health Security Index as the country most prepared for a pandemic, it failed miserably, with the highest amount of infected and dead in the world.100 After the vaccine was rolled out, large amounts of people in the country would rather take horsedeworming drug ivermectin because of the fear that the vaccine contains microchips. The screenshots of people saying they have had explosive diarrhea after injecting ivermectin, shitting themselves in the store, are of course funny.101 One might also find it amusing that rightwing influencers who have called COVID a hoax and refused to take the vaccine actually got COVID and died. Major members of the Republican Party opposed the vaccine and COVID restrictions and the majority of people dying from COVID seems to be Republican voters. Some might find it darkly humorous that the Republican Party seem to be killing their own voter base. Doomscrolling turns into schadenfreude before shifting back into existential dread. The American COVID response reveals a population in deep mistrust of central governance. How this maintained and worsened the pandemic is resolutely unfunny. Already in the 1980s, Baudrillard would describe the situation in US politics as one in which the country has “entered this era of undecidability: is it still really powerful or merely simulating power?”102 Trump as a president with all of his shenanigans and tomfoolery was only a distraction from the situation in which the pandemic only exacerbated problems that had been plaguing the country for a long time. A 2014 study indicates the USA to be a country in which economic elites have substantial impact

on US politics, while average citizens and their interest groups have very little.103 While millions of US workers lost their jobs in the pandemic, the fortune of the richest increased by the astronomical sum of more than a trillion dollars.104 The Democratic Party actually had a potential presidential candidate outspoken against billionaires, and in favor of medical health care for all, free education, and $15 minimum wage, in Bernie Sanders. There were several hurdles facing Sanders for election in both 2016 and 2020. Most significantly were likely the Democratic Party establishment and mainstream media. The Democrats are indicated to have rigged the candidate election against Sanders in 2016, and although mainstream news outlets contest the claim, a central part of the concern for the democratic establishment in 2020 was also avoiding that Sanders got the candidacy. In 2016, media framed supporters as misogynistic Bernie Bros.105 The term Bernie Bros has been tied directly to the popular podcast Chapo Trap House, famous for being as radical in its leftist politics as its humor. The podcast’s mostly male hosts were strong supporters for the candidacy of Sanders, but have been denounced by news outlets as misogynists with a negative impact on the public opinion of the Sanders campaign.106 In 2016, Chapo co-host, and coiner of the term “dirtbag left,” Amber A’Lee Frost defended vulgar humor in politics, discussing both Trump and the satirical pamphlets of the French Revolution in an article. Frost writes that “to dismiss vulgarity as a tool for fighting the powerful, to say that being mean is ‘ridiculous,’ is to deny history, and to obscure a long and noble tradition of malicious political japery. In fact, ‘being mean’ not only affords unique pleasures to the speaker or writer, but is a crucial rhetorical weapon of the politically excluded.”107 While mainstream media derided Bernie Bros, young people of all genders flocked to Sanders, building a 2020 campaign of small donors averaging at $18 contributions, in contrast to the billionaire-funded Biden campaign.108Among the most memorable memes spawned from the Sanders’ campaigns was a video by TikTok user @neekolul. While wearing a Bernie 2020 t-shirt the video shows her bopping around while mouthing the words to the song “Ok Boomer.”109

Another key hurdle has been the question of how policies proposed by Sanders were to be paid for. The absurdity of this question has been repeatedly pointed out on Twitter, in which any sort of problems in the US economy are met with the meme originating from the absurd humor account @dril. Originally posted in 2013, the post showed an overview of expenses: “Food $200, Data $150, Rent $800, Candles $3,600, Utility $150” before pleading “someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my family is dying.” From major metropolitan cities of the US spending up to 45% of their budget on policing, to the US government spending more than half of its budget on the military in 2015, there should be plenty of ways to find money to save Americans instead of killing people.110 In 2020, electability was a key counterpoint to the Sanders’ campaign. The late Marxist theorist Mark Fisher offers a perspective on the folly of this perspective through his concept of capitalist realism. In contrast to the realism adopted as a framework in this book, the capitalist realism is one which limits any possibilities of change. Fisher describes it as a “widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.”111 Political philosopher Aaron Bastani writes on Trump and the populist left of Bernie Sanders: “While they might not share much politically, Trump and Corbyn, along with Brexit and the emergence of Podemos, Bernie Sanders and Syriza, indicate the era of capitalist realism is over.”112 The question of electability becomes, as the concept of political polarization, a way of upholding capitalist realism against alternatives. Capitalist realism is offered as a protection against the seductiveness of fanaticism (which could perhaps be framed simply as the lure of right-wing populism). In the words of Fisher again: “Lowering our expectations, we are told, is a small price to pay for being protected from terror and totalitarianism.”113 At least Biden beat Trump; surely he is better than the combed-over clown, right? One might compare the responses of Trump and Biden to the Black Lives Matter protests: While Trump sent special armed forces to stop BLM protestors, Biden suggested that police should shoot people in the leg instead of the head.114 The choice here seems to be between the swift destabilizing and a gradual one – Dumb Donald or Sleepy Joe, the latter a representative of capitalist

realism in which actual change is impossible. As the old adage goes: “its easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.”115 Among alternatives to current forms of governance is the grand system of Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC). First outlined in 2014, in a YouTube video by Bastani and later developed into a book, it proposes a post-scarcity without wage labor where people work for 10–15 hour weeks.116 Bastani shows that a central part of Marx’s ideas of communism were the replacement of the labor workforce with machines, to create “a society in which work is eliminated, scarcity replaced by abundance and where labour and leisure blend into one another.”117 This should sound luxurious to all but those who already live it, and those who might be too deep in their memetic frame to accept communism as a viable path to it. Fully Automated Luxury Communism has itself spawned a memetic remix, in “Fully Automated Luxury Gay/Queer Space Communism (FALG/QSC).” Positively, this could be considered a queering of communism, working toward a genderless future. And while progressives will find due cause to celebrate inclusivity, it nevertheless shifts the focus from the economic and political to questions of identity. What about space? Redditors discussing the meme suggest its inclusion as “a natural upgrade. People hear of a good thing and just want to make it even better. … space is fucking cool.”118 Space is “fucking” cool; is it also cool to fuck with space? There might be some joke in there about mother Mars not having consented to being colonized by phallic rockets. I’m all for speculating; in fact I have been engaged in this mode of thought throughout much of this book. Nevertheless, I think there are benefits in keeping speculations realist. Harman points out how conservatism (and I would add any form of realism, even the capitalist kind) has a “positive trait of skepticism towards the human ability to change reality by wishing it to change. Though this attitude easily slips into an account of fatalism that listens too closely to the past, it does have the upside of not assuming that the world is the same as what we think it is: a valuable kernel of realism sometimes lost by progressives amidst their fervor for a better world.”119 One way of striking a balance, of keeping a kernel of realism while striving for a better world, is to

shift the focus away from progress and the future. Focusing on what has been, rather than what should become, brings a better indication of what could actually change. Development is not necessarily one of progress, as evolution has no direction toward an end-goal. Following the physicist Arthur Iberall, DeLanda conceptualizes the successive organization of human societies as different states of existence, along the lines of H2O, as different states according to environmental pressure (gas, liquid, ice). This renders the state changes of human populations, from hunter-gatherer to agricultural to urbanity, as coexisting, interacting, and developing into each other according to internal and external pressure.120 Comparable to how water may exist in different states according to environmental pressure, internal and external factors cause humans to organize and reorganize in tribes, agricultural or urbanization.121 By contrast, Bastani frames the Neolithic revolution, the passing threshold into agriculture, as a “shift, powered by the innovation of domesticating animals and plants, generated something never known before: a sizeable surplus of food and energy. For the first time in their existence, humans could begin to think about the future and make plans for a world that would be different to the one around them.”122 This is the futurist fantasy, one in which improvement is made by accommodating the world to one’s will. Agriculture is unlikely to have offered benefits in terms of obtaining food, and hunter-gatherers attempted avoiding the passing of this critical development threshold. DeLanda points to how hunter-gatherers anticipated and prevented this through “the burning of all surplus food in ceremonial rituals to prevent the formation of a reservoir that a central authority could use to promote a division of labour, thereby forcing primitives to cross the townthreshold and the state-threshold.”123 Primitivism is efficient and skillful problem-solving. So, instead of progressing, could one reject modernity, and embrace tradition?124 Clearly this needs to go beyond Trumpism’s paleoconservative attachment to some more or less random moment in US history, to an actual resurrection of paleolithic politics. But what makes such paleolithic politics any less random? Humans have existed for a tiny fraction of the time since the emergence of animals. There are memes

suggesting a rejection of the human species, to return to “monke.” A meme in the “Wojak” comic format shows a crudely drawn monkey in conversation with a bearded, blond-haired guy who in other comics in the format regularly has the upper hand.125 In the comic, Chad, as the blond character is known, says: “You are such a dumb animal.” To which the monkey in different iterations responds with variations highlighting their own jobless, debtless, and ungovernable life: “You’re the creature that pays to live on earth,” “humans kill each other and destroy our planet for pieces of paper called money,” “you work 40 hours a week.” The three-panel comic ends with Chad’s face replaced by what is known as “withered wojak,” a face covered in shade with black voids where the eyes should be, conveying a sense of desolation and hopelessness. Woe to humans. What might primate politics look like? Evolutionary biologist David P. Barash has suggested that god is a gorilla, a great ape alpha male which is territorial and omnipotent and keeps a harem of women.126 Perhaps this could be compared to the notion of Donald Trump as a god-like figure, bragging about grabbing women by the pussy, being moody and dominating. It also seems perfectly fitting that the two primates closest to humans, chimpanzees and bonobos, have such contrasting forms of relations: the former kill each other in war-like raids, while the latter have sex as a way of getting to know strangers.127 The contrast between the liberal and conservative humans mirrored in the monkeys is almost too much on the nose: the bonobo-like prochoice progressives who champion queer sex between consenting adults, and the conservatives dominating and warmongering. Frans de Waal has argued that the human capacity for empathy rests on our animality.128 It seems risky to align ourselves with animals rather than humans, however, because they have such different ways of organizing themselves and living compared to humans. Sticking with humans is not simply speciesism. Humans have lessons to teach about human politics. What they teach is what I call truly funny politics, as intelligent and effective ways of overturning individual dominance and maintaining egalitarian dynamics. These methods existed in prehistorical paleolithic form, but have been lost in human history. Another important lesson is that humans have not always been workers. When compared to hunter-gatherers, it's generally

acknowledged that people in WEIRD countries (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) spend too much of their life engaged in modes of intense effort.129 Hunter-gatherers work whenever they feel like it, doing whatever seems necessary and fun to do, often together. They generally enjoy more free time than people of so-called wealthy nations. Weird people, by contrast, are generally obligated to work on a strict schedule of early morning commute to spend great parts of their days in office confinement. The time is shared with people they may have little in common with besides their paycheck. Huntergatherers may work as little as half of the average work week of weird people. Free time is spent caring for each other, playing and having a laugh. For hunter-gatherer social organization, the joyous laughter-filled free time is important. Humor lets them avoid unwanted dominance and replace leaders with group decision-making. The evolutionary account of humor given here indicates power struggle as the primary form of politics. First there is a drive to dominate, and to reversedominate. What hunter-gatherers teach is the rejection not of any form of leadership, but the unwanted leader. It is truly funny when people treat leaders poorly enough to embrace egalitarian relations. The ideal president would be one doing people’s bidding, leading to prosperity for masses rather than individuals and small groups. Anarcho-primitivist philosopher John Zerzan states that “life before domestication/agriculture was in fact largely one of leisure, intimacy with nature, sensual wisdom, sexual equality, and health. This was our human nature, for a couple of million years, prior to enslavement by priests, kings, and bosses.”130 Truly funny politics seems to have lost a major part of its potential, in part because it has become detached from the ability of groups to ostracize and eliminate. But also because humans have become weird. Maybe the online aspect, an “o” making people “weirdos,” could actually alleviate some of the weirdness, through reinserting tribalism into politics? This line of reasoning goes against Zerzan, who ascribes the problems of civilization to technological development, but it does not align with Bastani’s futurism either, in which technological development is a requirement for egalitarianism. Throughout this book I have refused to consider technology as either panacea nor poison.

What kind of effect can online forums and discourse have on egalitarian politics? One version is in effect when Twitter erupts with glee to the news that Donald Trump is infected with COVID: “so sad to see how people are reacting to this news. to wish death on anyone is uncalled for. what if he were your dad, husband, br- haha i couldn’t do it lol get fucked.” What would be funny is if American oligarchs and space imperialists like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos no longer stole infinite riches from earth and its inhabitants. Just as jokes of Donald Trump dying from COVID were rampant, there have been jokes about Bezos simply not returning from space. These are leftist trolling tactics, in-group messaging and out-group shock. Saying unreasonable things are also ways of pushing the discourse, so that slightly less outrageous positions may seem reasonable and pragmatic. There should be no billionaires, neither in space nor on earth. Of course, I am not suggesting that billionaires should be killed. But perhaps the threat should be there? Passing a certain amount of wealth should involve an actual risk, not only of losing face, but also fortune and life. Eat the rich? The more environmentally sound prospect would be composting them. While COVID unemployment might make people eagerly anticipate a return to normality, there are good reasons not to go back to working the way we used to. This includes diseases of civilization as well as the collapsing ecosystems and widespread extinctions caused by the gradual temperature increase of the planet. The political willingness to put everything on hold over COVID shows the possibilities of governance. It also shows that most of what we are doing, most of the time, is completely unnecessary. What David Graeber calls bullshit workers, with their high income, likely has a far worse climate footprint than an unemployed person.131 The climate footprint of the average weird person is not only unjustifiably large, but should be avoidable through shifting political priorities. Artist Timur Si-Qin states in an essay that “[i]ndigenous commentators have been consistent in pointing out that the crisis has been a time of healing for the earth, and to speak of the virus as the planet’s own immune response against humans’ relentless destruction.”132 Si-Qin is quick to warn against this as a defeatist notion that humans are the virus. It is not humans in general opposing nature. For anyone but the weirdest, it’s clear that humans are and should be part of nature.

Instead of poor and desolate, hunter-gatherer is better framed as “the original affluent society,” a form of primitive communism.133 The USA used to be a great country. But that was before it became a country. The USA was great when it was made up of tribes. DeLanda describes how the Americas were conquered by Europeans with their “biological weapons”: the viral diseases “germinating in European centers of dense settlement,” which the dispersed tribes of natives were lacking resistance against; thus the “the majority of the native inhabitants died from disease, draining the reservoirs of skills and know-how that sustained their culture.”134 Already 500 years to the COVID pandemic “the globe was beginning to form a single disease pool.”135 The same aspect that led to the eventual downfall of hunter-gatherers could have been crucial for them remaining successful in maintaining egalitarian dynamics for tens of thousands of years. Boehm presents the difficulties of making truly funny politics scale from dispersed tribes to nation states: Had this blueprint taken shape as envisaged, a truly remarkable surprise would have appeared in human social evolution. Entire nations would have behaved much like cooperative huntergatherers in their bands, with the same economic egalitarianism and the same freedom from personal domination. The rapid spread of communism, on the basis of an ideology that glorified the political empowerment of the rank and file, provides us with a possible model for how the egalitarian syndrome diffused from band to band in the Late Paleolithic (or whenever it occurred). We humans are attracted to political ‘deals’ that free us from domination and exploitation, precisely because we are innately prone to resent authority. However, in practice, the Paleolithic ‘deal’ was far better one than Marxism.136 The failed leftist attempts at scaling truly funny politics indicate that it might be more difficult to accomplish than regular unfunny politics or Internet meme-driven funny politics. Capitalist realism is not the only hindrance, as people in general seem to prefer to take their place in dominance hierarchies. Perhaps the most likely development path for primates such as humans is letting the bigger man become the boss,

mixed with a desire of one day being able to claim that position. Both normal people and trolls seem attracted to greatness and strength, to obey those above, which seems difficult to divert. Both traditional politics and the poverty of its funny alternatives indicate that people might be too conventionally weird for truly funny politics. The likely outcome of humor seems to be splitting into deplorable uncivility or civilized normality. Yet, truly funny politics remains a possibility. This would reinsert history, but not just the history of civilization, which is heavily skewed toward inequality, hierarchical structures, and an adversarial conception of nature and leads to ecological disaster. Embracing human prehistory and tribal dynamics could bring back egalitarian human nature. All that remains to say is: Hey weirdo, go outside!137

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[Crossref] Shifman, Limor. 2014. Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Sides, John. 2015. Why is Trump Surging? Blame the Media, The Washington Post, July 20. https://​www.​washingtonpost.​c om/​news/​monkey-cage/​wp/​2015/​07/​20/​why-istrump-surging-blame-the-media/​?​noredirect=​on&​utm_​term=​.​a5f825e040ad. Accessed 24 Jan 2020. Si-Qin, Timur. 2020. Heaven is Sick, https://​013a1819-abc9-41e1-a17c36b7132e6870.​filesusr.​c om/​ugd/​51f4d3_​c 1557271dfb044e9​85796b2c3332095a​.​pdf. Accessed 31.05.22. Sloterdijk, Peter. 1987. Critique of Cynical Reason. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Statista. 2020. How Much Does U.S. Cities Spend on Policing, Statista, June 12, https://​ www.​statista.​c om/​c hart/​10593/​how-much-do-us-cities-spend-on-policing/​. Accessed 18 Oct 2021. Steyerl, Hito. 2009. In Defense of the Poor Image, e-flux Journal, 10. Suzman, James. 2020. Work: A Deep History, From the Stone Age to the Age of Robots. London: Penguin Books. Svendsen, Lars Fr H. 2022. A Philosophy of Lying. London: Reaktion Books. Tindera, Michaela. 2020. The Billionaires Backing Joe Biden’s Campaign, Forbes, June 05. https://​www.​forbes.​c om/​sites/​michelatindera/​2020/​05/​06/​here-are-thebillionaires-backing-joe-bidens-presidential-campaign-as-of-march-2020/​. Accessed 08 Oct 2021. Turner, Fred. 2006. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago: University of Chicago. [Crossref] Vance, Erik. 2014. Donald Trump is the World’s Greatest Performance Artist, The Last Word on Nothing, September 22. http://​www.​lastwordonnothin​g.​c om/​2014/​09/​22/​ why-donald-trump-is-the-worlds-greatest-artist/​. Accessed 24 Jan 2020. Weatherby, Leif. 2019. Irony and Redundancy: The Alt Right, Media Manipulation, and German Idealism, boundary 2, June 24. https://​www.​boundary2.​org/​2019/​06/​ leif-weatherby-irony-and-redundancy-the-alt-right-media-manipulation-andgerman-idealism/​. Accessed 21 Mar 2022.

Willerslev, Rane. 2012. Laughing at the Spirits in North Siberia: Is Animism Being Taken Too Seriously? e-flux Journal 36: 1. Zannettou, Savvas, Tristan Caulfield, Jeremy Blackburn, Emiliano De Cristofaro, Michael Sirivianos, Gianluca Stringhini, and Guillermo Suarez-Tangil. 2018. On the Origins of Memes by Means of Fringe Web Communities, arXiv. Zerzan, John. 1994/2009. Future Primitive and Other Essays. New York: Autonomedia. Zerzan, John. (ed.). 1999/2005. Against Civilization. Readings & Reflections. Washington: Feral House.

Footnotes 1 Critchley 2002.

  2 See Davila-Ross et al. 2009, 2015.

  3 See Smuts, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

  4 Bergson 1900/2003: 46.

  5 Ibid: 33. The opposite, a thing turned dynamic agent, is not funny, but a cause for concern. An example of this is the horror trope of invigorated dolls.

  6 Ibid: 31.

  7 Ibid: 64-65.

  8 Harman 2005: 127.

  9 Bergson 1900/2003: 4.

  10 Ibid: 65.

  11 Critchley 2002.

  12 Parikka 2010; Massumi 2014;

  13 See Matthews 2016.

  14 Tribe can be replaced with related terms: nation, people, band, or chiefdom. In anthropology these terms have specific meanings signaling size and organizational structure. Although Boehm discusses bands and tribes as distinct forms, I use the term tribe here to designate any hunter-gatherer group.

  15 Baudrillard 1986/2010: 7.

  16 Ohlheiser 2016.

  17 Goerzen 2017.

  18 Dawkins 1976/2006: 192.

  19 Saatchi & Saatchi New Directors Showcase.

  20 Shifman 2014: 41.

  21 Ibid: 18-23.

  22 Ibid: 56-59.

  23 Steyerl 2009.

  24 Douglas 2014.

  25 Pepe the Frog is a cartoon frog character originally drawn by Matt Furie for his comic Boy’s Club (2005), which turned into a meme, becoming appropriated by the alt-right as a symbol of white nationalism. See Neiwert 2017.

  26 O’Donnell 1994.

  27 Shifman 2014: 150.

  28 Vance 2014.

  29 Hartwell 2016.

  30 For an account of the share of news coverage of Trump compared to other candidates, see Sides 2015.

  31 Shifman 2014: 138.

  32 Ibid: 90.

  33 See for instance Mungai 2019 and Leary 2020.

  34 McLuhan 1964/2001: 167.

  35 Zannettou et al. 2018.

  36 Manivannan 2013: 112; Shifman 2014: 173.

  37 Maffesoli 1996: 28.

  38 Phillips and Milner. 2021: 19-20

  39 Shifman 2014: 60.

  40 The definition of trolling and lol is taken from Urban Dictionary.

  41 Phillips and Milner 2017: 197.

  42 Ibid.

  43 Know Your Meme.

  44 Ibid.

  45 Buckels et al. 2014.

 

46 Turner 2006; Coleman 2012.

  47 See Sloterdijk 1987: 101.

  48 Deleuze and Guattari 1980/2016: 71.

  49 Burrows 2008.

  50 Deleuze and Guattari 1980/2016:

  51 Graziano 2018: 126.

  52 Ibid: 125.

  53 Boehm 1999: 147, 149.

  54 Ibid: 7-8.

  55 Coleman 2012; Auerbach 2012; Manivannan 2013; Higgin 2013; Steyerl 2009.

  56 Manivannan 2013: 115.

  57 Phillips 2012.

  58 Grossman 2016 and Jimmy Kimmel Live 2016.

  59 Baudrillard 1986/2010: 48

  60 Boehm 1999: 10.

  61 Phillips and Milner 2017: 180.

  62 Brunton 2011, quoted in Phillips and Milner 2021.

  63 Nagle 2017: 105.

  64 Coleman 2014: 42.

  65 Nagle 2017: 67.

  66 “Pepe the frog” has been labeled a symbol of hate speech. See Know Your Meme.

  67 Bratton 2021: 154.

  68 Know Your Meme.

  69 Argentino 2020

  70 Baudrillard 1986/2010: 110.

 

71 PRRI 2021.

  72 Know Your Meme.

  73 Fahlman 1982.

  74 Know Your Meme.

  75 Milner 2013.

  76 Shifman 2014: 138.

  77 Nagle 2017: 62.

  78 Bogost 2017: 43.

  79 Willerslev 2012.

  80 Ibid.

  81 Phillips and Milner 2021: 85; 103-106.

  82 Ibid: 133.

  83 As of January 2020, Washington Post’s Fact Checker lists 16241 false or misleading claims by President Trump. See also Flood 2016.

  84 Svendsen 2022.

  85 boyd 2021.

  86 Kinsley 2003.

  87 Boxsel 2003: 140-141

  88 Bown and Russell 2019: 149.

  89 Hobson and Modi 2019: 344.

  90 Urban Dictionary.

  91 Weatherby 2019.

  92 Citarella 2020.

  93 Roose 2019.

  94 Know Your Meme.

  95 Metahaven 2013.

 

96 Hobson and Modi 2019: 344.

  97 Garber 2011.

  98 Bratton 2021: 131.

  99 Ibid: 21.

  100 GHS Index 2019 and Worldometers.

  101 Know Your Meme.

  102 Baudrillard 1986/2010: 110

  103 Gilens and Page 2014.

  104 Peterson-Withorn 2021.

  105 See for instance Meyer 2015 or Badham 2016.

  106 Bowles 2020.

  107 Frost 2016.

  108 See Tindera 2020 and Otterbein 2020.

  109 Know Your Meme.

  110 Statista 2020 and National Priorities Project

  111 Fisher 2009: 2.

  112 Bastani 2019: 30.

  113 Fisher 2009: 5.

  114 Abc News 2020.

  115 Fredric Jameson, quoted in Fisher 2009: 2.

  116 Novara Media 2014; Bastani 2019.

  117 Bastani 2019: 51.

  118 Reddit Out of the Loop.

  119 Harman 2018: 142.

  120 DeLanda 1997/2000: 15-16.

 

121 Ibid.

  122 Bastani 2019: 31-32.

  123 DeLanda 2016: 130-131; see also Deleuze and Guattari 1980/2016: 501-502.

  124 This formulation is itself a meme.

  125 Know Your Meme.

  126 Barash 2018.

  127 De Waal 2006.

  128 Ibid 2018.

  129 See for instance Suzman 2020.

  130 Zerzan 1994/2009; 1999/2005.

  131 Graeber 2018.

  132 Si-Qin 2020: 25.

  133 Sahlins 2017.

  134 DeLanda 1997/2000: 132-133.

  135 Ibid.

  136 Boehm 1999: 256.

  137 This is a reference to a meme format. A highly detailed political compass with multiple different positions is overlaid with the words: HOLY SHIT GO OUTSIDE.

 

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 A. Ervik, Becoming Human Amid Diversions https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13877-5_7

7. Becoming Humidity Andreas Ervik1   (1) Department of Media and Communication, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

 

  Andreas Ervik Email: [email protected]

Why Diversions Attract Is there anything more attractive than a networked computer device? (Fig. 7.1) Even when screens are off, they remain visually striking elements of most surroundings, in the form of large television sets turned computer devices or smaller smartphones. While Microsoft suggests screens to be like windows, their darkened surfaces block your field of vision while inviting to interaction through their negative space. Screens are attractive because they are never supposed to be off —and most are likely not completely off either, but in sleep mode. Dormant devices suggest not that it is time to take a rest from them, but that alien beings—or other worlds—are waiting to engage with you, by the touch of your fingers or a voice command.1 What has this book contributed to the understanding of these alien worlds, and why diversions are so important for digital living today?

Fig. 7.1 Emoji displaying the gas, liquid, and crystal states of H 2O

To understand the attractive qualities of computers with their diversions, I have examined networked computing, and analyzed paradigmatic examples of diversions. My analysis sought to uncover the parts going into their assembly, and then to provide a synthetic account of their development. Media evolution has been shown to be neither entirely intentional nor wholly coincidental, as it is unpredictable, yet follows certain tendencies. I have attempted to grasp its structuring tendencies through aligning diversions with features of human attention, in particular the preoccupations with play, stupidity, cuteness, and humor. Furthermore, I have examined how diversions could result from general tendencies of development, shared between

media forms and evolving organisms, species, and ecosystems. In this conclusion, I present what I have found to be the main reasons for why diversions attract, which are divided here into three sections. Firstly, diversions attract due to how human cognition functions. Diversions are likely outcomes of the meeting between populations of producers, media, and users because of human cognition. Throughout the book I have explored different aspects of our cognition, which will be summarized here through reflections on DeLanda’s tripartite system of state transitions—from gas to liquid to crystal. This system was introduced in the first chapter, and in this conclusion it will be put into discussion with contemporary cognitive neuroscience and critical theory. Central here is establishing what the ubiquity of diversions indicates about how our cognition functions. Secondly, diversions attract because of their influence on evolution. Diversions are not simply leisurely distractions to be avoided, as they have been shown throughout this book to be central aspects of evolutionary development. The second section summarizes findings, aligning diversions not only with human cognitive function, but with tendencies of evolution shared with microbes, vegetation, fungi, mammals, and hunter-gatherer tribes. What makes diversions so impactful for evolution, and how do they influence the development of the human species? Finally, diversions attract simply because they make a difference, because they provide something else, something more, or something new. It is fitting, therefore, to conclude by embracing the practical potentials offered by populations in diversions. The final section echoes back to the introduction, where I found myself diverting from writing. In this epilogue, I speculate on what happens to writing theoretical reflections, when it shifts from the center of attention to itself becoming a diversion among others. Here, I unite all the different attractors of the project in one form, the diversion of writing into contemporary forms of ideograms: smileys, emojis, and emoticons. These are playful engagements with unnecessary obstacles, stupid by removing nuance and forming novel connections, cute because they disarm and appease, and they are humorously inappropriate in the context of an academic book. What could such emotive expressivity offer for theoretical reflection?

The Main Stream of Cognition Among the successful instigators of online diversions is the site Buzzfeed. Before co-founding Buzzfeed, Jonah Peretti studied critical theory, and even published an article in the journal Negations. The article discussed Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, in particular their understanding of subjectivity in capitalist societies.2 From Deleuze and Guattari, Peretti draws a distinction between a subtractive and a generative understanding of desire—the former drawn to what it lacks and the latter toward novelty. Peretti argues for contemporary visual culture creating desire for novel forms of subjective identities. Advertisement in particular forms an associative link between identity and the purchasing of products, leading to hyper-consumption which “encourages weak egos that are easily formed, and fade away just as easily.”3 Buzzfeed follows this understanding of subjectivity, offering varied content for populations to engage in the ever-evolving, fleeting ego-forming: scrolling through Buzzfeed you shift from identifying as a soulmate searching food-lover to a supporter of the #freethepimplemovement, before learning what to do to consider yourself an ecowarrior. With the success of the site came newfound interest for Peretti’s earlier writing, as the article seems to both lay the groundwork for and critique its business model. Dylan Matthews commented the article in the magazine Vox, asking “whether we should interpret BuzzFeed as the pinnacle of late capitalism or a way of subverting it?”4 I bring this up here not to humor this question, but as an example of the oppositions structuring discourse on diversions: Either Buzzfeed is an anti-capitalist subversion or a successful business model, in much the same way as diversions are configured as a consequence of letting companies hijack one’s desires, or they are negated by opposing their blocking of one’s light of attention. I have attempted to nuance these extremes, by considering how people actually engage with diversions. In the following I will form an answer to what it is about human attention that makes diversions so prominent. This will also offer a possible explanation for why responses to diversions regularly organize around opposing poles of uncritical and critical.

I approach this through human cognition, with an understanding informed by DeLanda’s modeling of systems on the state transitions of H2O. This transition is one of gradual shifts in regularity, from the dispersed molecules of gas to the fluid coherence of liquid into crystal rigidity. In this book, the distinction between these states has been part of reflections on ecosystem development and human social evolution. I have framed the shifts as movement toward maturity, while retaining the potential for destabilizing into less mature forms. When used as a model for cognitive subjective states, the model becomes a process in which streams of sensory intensities (such as sounds, flavors, and kinesthetic experience) over time stabilize into coherent structures (such as emotions, memories, routines, and identities). These can crystallize into relatively unchanging and rigid structures of thought and behavior, which follow similar patterns in order to solve similar problems. Alternately, they could be destabilized, as a result of sensory isolation, fever, madness, or meditation and taking mind-altering substances. Discussing his experience with hallucinogenic mushrooms, DeLanda describes how large doses have the consequence that “your self literally disappears … but you do not become unconscious: rather consciousness becomes decentralized and now belongs to each of the intensities.”5 When tripping, the crystallized state of selfhood may evaporate entirely, into an indistinguishable and inarticulate fog of intensities. DeLanda notes how this need not be disturbing, but instead brings positive qualities, as “each trip is a ‘revelation,’ not of course in the sense that a personal god is speaking to you from above, but merely in that the amount of information that you are processing is much larger.”6 The gaseous and the crystal make up opposing polarities in cognitive function. Crystallized thought is functionally oriented, using deliberate and clear-cut pathways and imposing straightforward constraints to ensure a high probability of achieving whatever goal is intended. Crystallized cognition is thus uninterested in anything apart from the functional potential of whatever is brought to attention. The gaseous, on the other hand, is destabilized and radically open to different kinds of experiences. It opposes functionality, potentially even rejecting any consistency apart from the unwieldy and ungraspable. The gaseous thereby offers radical resistance to functionality through

dismantling. So, while the crystal finds its value in enterprises— commercial or otherwise—the gaseous becomes a critical part of dissent. These opposing sides of cognition thereby find themselves in paradoxical agreement that whatever exists beyond functionality is simply incompatible with anything else. Constructive processes are considered rigid, and are either embraced or resisted. While crystallizing reduces complexities into functions that can be regulated, the gaseous seeks to account for complexities and remains skeptical about any prospects of control. What is missing from the polarities of the rigid and destabilized is the intermediary, which I think is most important for understanding the attraction to diversions. Whereas the functionally oriented attention and the destabilizing effects of mind-altering substances have long been recognized, the discovery of the intermediary is quite recent in neurology. It was long thought that when minds were not engaged in actions and problem-solving, they were simply not doing much. Even in DeLanda’s account of cognition, the emphasis is on the opposing poles of the crystal functionality and the destabilized gas. Neurologist Marcus Raichle was the first to coin a “default” of resting state brain function.7 Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), he revealed how human brain functions are organized into different networks, with higher or lower connectivity and different modular organizations producing different functions. Mostly, these are divided into two major systems: the task-positive networks and the default mode. The former is active when we are engaged in focused attention, while it switches to the latter in times of not performing explicit tasks. It is thus often referred to as wakeful rest, yet it is not averse to simple activities requiring minimal attention.8 Since its discovery, the default network has become theorized as the basis of self, as the experience of inward-oriented cognition reflecting on personal significance, experiences, feelings, values, abilities, and physical attributes.9 Neurologists have further uncovered how taking mindaltering substances like LSD alters brain connectivity, destabilizing the default mode network.10 A wide range of mental disorders likewise show altered networks, with for instance increased connectivity in schizophrenia.11 Cognition can thus be considered mainly a system of three distinct states, which transition into each other, as task-positive

focus and destabilized open-endedness, and—in between these—an idle default state. The benefit of considering cognition as a tripartite system is that, in addition to the clear function and foggy opposition, the in-between state, which is otherwise easy to gloss over, is taken into account. Against differently dispersed molecules of a gas, and separate dividing lines of a crystal, liquidity explores potential within specific boundaries, neither too destabilized nor too rigid. For all the crystallized focus of intelligence, knowledge, research, and discipline, and all the amorphousness of idiosyncrasy, dissent, critique, and instability, it is easy to miss the regularity of zoning out and simply being present. In liquid daydreaming, both open-ended intensities and calculating to achieve specific results await as possible transitions. The default mode thus neither desists tasks, nor is it limited by standard procedures. With consistent capability it destabilizes into dysfunction or stabilizes into instrumentalized action, but mostly stays in between. Immense pressure is required to turn H2O from liquid into gas or crystal, requiring temperatures of either 0 or 100°C. Likewise, human selves tend to remain liquid most of the time, in a default mode network of daydreaming, engaged in wakeful rest and simple activities. Cognition can take seriously the priorities of work, intelligence, maturity, and responsibility, and even embrace the radical differences of madness, drugs, or critical opposition. It may crystallize into functionality or evaporate into intensities, but this requires immense and continued effort. And even when pushed into gas or crystal, it will readily and easily liquefy again. Against the effort of resistance and rigidity, the self just flows—ebbing between forgetting itself in experience and pursuing intentional goals. The main stream of thought is liquid. Diversions attract because of their alignment with the way that human cognition functions mostly in a state of liquid flow. The preferences and abilities to stay close to either opposing pole may vary for individuals, as some more easily crystallize and some more readily gasify. As a general function, however, the success of diversions in attracting populations indicates liquidity to be the most dominant form. When networked computing assembles with human cognition, it therefore flows regularly into diversions. As a default, people are

mostly somewhere in between focus-oriented and completely inattentive, somewhere in between apathetic boredom and fully engaged concentration, flowing together with the digital devices, playing games, opening links, watching videos, scrolling through social networks, and replying in forums. I have attempted to stay close to diversions, to write a liquid account of the assembly of cognition and networked computing. From the perspective of those seeking incompatibility, my account may be considered insufficiently differentiated, while for those seeking to dominate, it may not seem useful enough. What is the purpose of a liquid account? Why research, if not to produce functional knowledge or to critically oppose? Why write and why reflect in between the certainty of function and the equally clear uncertainty of negation? My answer is as straightforward as it is diverting: I am not sure, but not unsure either—writing not in order to achieve or to critique something, but to engage with it. Without clarity of purpose, liquid knowledge digresses creatively, yet it does not become completely open-ended. Instead of either the functional crystallization or a mist of negation, a liquid account remains in between, with the possibility of moving both closer to and further away from these contrasting interests. The liquid remains transitional, a possible flow, open to be diverted to better account for real systems, to destabilize into psychedelic unknowing as much as stabilizing into dependable knowledge.

Evolutionary Diversions The tripartite model of state transitions has guided my attempts to understand the influence of diversions on evolutionary trajectories. In evolution, the first, and least stable, state can be grasped using Deleuze’s conception of difference. He reorients difference from designating something differing from something else to include fundamental difference in itself: “Every diversity and every change refers to a difference which is its sufficient reason. Everything which happens and everything which appears is correlated with orders of differences: differences of level, temperature, pressure, tension, potential, differences of intensity.”12 Rather than identity as the fundamental, for Deleuze, anything is different from anything else, as specific assemblages, with unique trajectories of assembly and their own sets of opportunities to become parts in other forms of assembly. Grosz reads Darwin’s philosophy of evolution from a Deleuzian perspective, rendering “[t]he origin of species … as the discernable but noncalculable measure of degrees of difference between individuals and groups, a kind of biological pure difference.”13 In biology, speciation is generally formulated as a process where certain of the individually different traits (resulting from genetic mutations and drift as well as symbiosis) become more viable than others and accumulate in a population. Difference is a precondition, which could result in divergence, when populations with shared ancestors split into distinct species. Development begins then as a series of differences, with the potential for certain conditions leading some to assemble and split off, thus diverging their lines of development. I propose that in between the differences of any population solidifying into divergent species, there are diversions. This intermediate step is where differences become pronounced and impactful, without yet substantially diverging parts of populations fully from each other. As a few individual instances of difference become viable and accumulate, they may turn into lasting engagements, shifting from irregular occasions into marked priorities. Diversions cause some to stray from whatever is the predominant mode, and over time, these diversions may lead to divergence.

My notion of evolutionary differences diverting and diverging has furthermore been accompanied in this book by a notion of convergence. In evolution, convergence occurs as distinct species happen upon similar solutions to similar problems by way of separate development trajectories. As evolving forms respond to environmental problems, they may converge on shared ways of doing so. Working from a framework of assemblage theory, this comes to not only be true for biological change, but as a general tendency of development. Assemblages are actualized solutions to virtual problems, where the problems may be shared across different materials and origins. Without making any claims that digital systems are becoming life-like, it thereby becomes possible to consider similar structures as emerging to solve similar problems across what we generally frame as categorical boundaries between man-made media technologies and natural organisms. The tendencies toward diversions in networked computing have throughout this book been examined using structures emerging in organic evolution. I have identified structures in development across processes of evolution, acting upon natural, sexual, and artificial selection. The structures I have identified do not necessarily emerge with the organisms with which I have attached them, but at the very least become evolutionary forces with their emergence. The structures continue to influence proceeding development, extending from the organisms they are connected with here to their function for human social and media evolution. With these perspectives, the seeming uniqueness of human preoccupation with diversions can be considered extensions and intensifications which differ, divert, and diverge certain parts of other structures of evolution. Media technological and human social evolution here converges with organic development as problems give rise to solutions of similar structure. What characterizes the diversions I have identified, and how do they influence the evolution of organisms and the assembly of human cognition and media technology? Chapter 2 showed how microbes divert evolution from random genetic mutations to structure-forming through symbiotic relations. As different forms of energy conversion were uncovered by microbes, other organisms did not need to reinvent them, but could instead

incorporate these microbes into their organization. Through assembling together, larger and more complex structures could emerge without the necessity of advantageous mutations. In the process, microbes may give up their freedom of metabolism and movement, to become spatially integrated and subsist as parts of organisms. The control in these relations is negotiated between symbionts and hosts, whose relations may vary and shift from mutually beneficial to parasitic. Organism and ecology growth have been modeled here as state transitions from initial disorganization, succeeded by a state of liquid structure, which solidifies into crystal regularity. Microbe assembly stays in between, in a state with potential for structural innovation and integrity, a process of diversion. Humans assemble with media technology as co-evolved and symbiotic ecologies where each of the participants negotiates who is in charge. Media may start out making a difference by extending human capacities, but over time divert—in between extending whatever purpose they have for us and fully diverging from human interests. Media, in this sense, are diversions of humans. Networked computation is a process of diverting away from past media forms. Far from byproducts, diversions are inseparable, irreducible to human intentions and experiences, as media develops guided by negotiations between populations of media, producers, and users. More than fleeting lapses into new forms of engagement and expression, diversions are differences that have accumulated but not yet fully diverged. The process shifts from transitory moments of screen-gazing individuals to work and entertainment increasingly becoming relegated to networked computer devices. The diversions of digital living form in between the dysfunctionally disorganized and functionally organized, as that which most successfully incorporates cognition, tapping into and equalizing differences between attention and inattentiveness, making as many as possible screen-bound. Chapter 3 showed how vegetation diverts evolution from organisms being at the mercy of surroundings to instead play. Through growth processes, various forms of vegetation form understanding of surroundings, of what is relevant for possibilities of further growth. Growing with non-conscious decision-making involves improvising, learning, and knowing how to respond to obstacles and potentials. This

brings non-representational understanding—knowledge incorporated into the growing vegetative body. Finding ways to maintain processes of growing, plants not only respond to but enrich their vegetative possibilities. Play is neither entirely purpose-oriented, nor does it reject purpose entirely. It flows between, with the potential to crystallize into functionality or to evaporate into uselessness. Play diverts organisms from the opposition between functional responses and dysfunctionality, through sexual selection favoring extravagance as long as it does not hinder survival until sexual maturity and reproduction. This includes the evolution of flowers, providing plants with sensorial means of drawing others to oneself and thus rendering reality attractive. Playful plants indicate that instead of individual cognition as a prerequisite for fun, it could be the other way around, with fun as fundamental for giving rise to thought. From the dispersed vegetative creativity in decision-making comes the potential for rooting down, attaching to centralized systems of problem-solving conscious thought in animals and human beings. Human play emerges as we interact with and distribute our cognition into other systems. This takes the form of playful writing, or of learning how to engage with and think together with computers. In computing, humans explore trivially or invest themselves into examining the different potentials of various programs. Among the most common systems to play with today are digital games. Games let players experience predictability of input leading to regular causal effects, with relative unpredictability in how other agents of the play field respond to those actions and initiate others. Games impose regularity of rules, yet with possibilities of open-ended play. From clarity of success and failure, games achieve their gravity of stakes, turning them into potentially more fulfilling systems to play with than others. Play lets us experience with non-conscious intentionality, learning bodily how, when, and where to act. In play, one is simply there, flowing with what is offered, responding to, and attempting to overcome obstacles. It is fun to be made vegetative together with technological devices—to grow, metamorphose, and decay in programmed environments. If obstacles are fully overcome, however, play stops, which means that both developers and players constantly construct ways to keep obstacles in play to stay engaged with the

system. Flowering teaches humans how to draw—how to mimic and embellish, evolving into computer graphics that draw humans to computers. All the while humans become the extended reproductive systems of game companies. Chapter 4 showed how fungi divert evolution from the necessity of functional solutions to stupidity. This is characterized not simply by lack of intelligence, but by not letting insufficiency deter from attempting something. Both ignorance and intelligence restrain movement, the former by lacking sufficient means, and the latter by arriving at solutions. Stupidity, in contrast, finds ways of engaging with problems insufficiently, and as a consequence opens for maintaining activity and increasing variations of possible outcomes. This notion of stupidity overturns the common view of humans as the most intelligent organism. Instead, all organisms need intelligence to solve problems of survival. Although requiring the dynamism of play, such intelligence is nevertheless rigid in its purpose. Fungi divert development into stupidity through their connections with other organisms, in particular plants. Novel capabilities form from sloppy pathways of sharing resources, and explosive evolutionary differentiation results from negotiations in this resource sharing. Stupidity is suggestible and open to detours—open to being fooled and fooling others in an arms race of tricks to negotiate interconnection. Fungi thus respond to problems not by offering optimal solutions, but by generating new problems, and through connectivity maintain the possibility of forming new mistakes. The associative connections and sloppy choice making of stupidity are intensified into human capability for avoiding the reaching of solutions. Instead, humans produce workarounds which maintain productive associative flow. As a default mode of cognition, stupidity is widespread in networked computing. The main behavior of stupidity is found in browsing—a liquid search and link-forming, which is neither completely open-ended and unreliable, nor fully goal-oriented and dependable. Populations browsing websites regularly follow suggestions directed to their base desires, attracted to displays of peculiarity, secrets to good health, easy wealth, beauty, famous people, and sexual promiscuity. The suggestibility of browsing is coupled with the experience of being in control, which makes people likely to incorporate external suggestions into their own prospects. Cognition is

susceptible to foolery, either to fooling others or oneself into believing what is offered in browsing is selected with intention. The social importance of stupidity is indicated in the tricky reliance on greater fools in financial investment, in the refusal of authoritative accounts in conspiracies, as well as in the form of morosophy (a love not of knowledge but of stupidity—of decontextualizing and retaining indefinitely the potential to contemplate and discuss) and art as an abbreviation for artificial stupidity (a way of making oneself less knowledgeable in order to be more creative). Stupidity diverts development away from the limitations brought by solutions to the explosive productivity of maintaining problem generation. Chapter 5 showed how mammals divert evolution from hostile relations into cuteness. This is a process of filtering what could be threatening stimuli into something appeasing. It forms social living, where organisms looking at each other no longer signals aggression, but becomes a desirable bonding mechanism. Co-evolving with social relaxing of adversity are changes in appearance, as faces become surfaces to dwell in, letting facial expressivity differentiate as signals of internal states. This leads to the retaining of juvenile features—such as small snouts, large eyes, and round heads—into adulthood. Cuteness thus diverts development from reaching the clearly distinct stability of adulthood, without fully reverting it to the malleable open-ended development possibilities of the unborn embryo. It unlocks the potential of remaining in between, in the liquidity of childhood, and of widening and elaborating its possibilities for appearance and behavior. Mammals turn evolution from struggle to snuggle for survival, to increased investment into comforting and soothing each other’s distress. Yet, this snuggle never fully decouples from aggression, as caring seems predicated on it. Mammals may eat their offspring on occasions where parent, offspring, or environment seems unfit for child-rearing. The parent’s aggression can instead be inverted back toward themselves, if the infant is able to feed on them. This might have been a precondition for the emergence of caregiving in social relations. Human taming intensifies cuteness. In the process, both humans and other species co-evolving with us turn friendlier in their behavior and more childlike in appearance. The evolution of dogs into wolves is a molding of looks and behavior, as a collective hallucination over long

time spans. Pets display supernormal exaggerations of the features that trigger affective responses to human offspring, as not just children, but furry, fluffy, tiny pups and kittens. Cuteness is perhaps fundamental for the evolution of music, forming from threatening environmental stimuli appeased into self-similarity through imitation. While imitation regularly turns into either unfocused instability or solidifies into patterns learned from parents, with music it stays liquid and able to divert and further cutify. The same process could be part of domesticating nature, rendering it more human-like by filling it with gods similar to humans. By turning networked computing human-like in appearance, it becomes domesticated. This takes the form of animal selfies—images which people respond to as if they offer direct access to the depicted individual. The format allows enthusiastic sharing of mammal universals, expressing desire for food, sleep, and comfort, as well as care, play, and creativity, in social petworks. Networked computing also domesticates humans, conditioning us to screen-bound living, with algorithms rigged to dictate what we are shown. As a result of greater prosperity in human societies, we stretch the liquidity of childhood into longer periods, delaying stiffening into mature routines. Extending to other species, humans find animals increasingly too cute to eat, and provide increasing amounts of affection. Chapter 6 showed how human tribes divert evolution from rigid hierarchical dominance into humor. Laughter is generally provoked when someone behaves mechanically rather than dynamically. Bodies thus have particular comic potential, as they reveal the incontrollable parts of people. Laughter functions as a behavioral corrective, shaping people into dynamically taking account of their surroundings, in particular their social contexts. The cross-cultural prevalence of tricksters indicates the importance of social dynamics in finding ways to divert rigid responsibility—to instead laugh at oneself and others. The evolution of humor indicates its emergence as interrelated functions of attack and defense: ridicule of individuals attempting to dominate the rest of the group and self-deprecation to avoid others assuming that you are trying to dominate. Humans seem to have an inclination to dominate each other, but tribes have turned this into group dominance. As the first measure of a three-part intensified system, followed by exclusion and execution, humor is pivotal for

hunter-gatherer governance becoming and remaining egalitarian. Tribal dynamics thus reveal the importance of humor for politics, as well as how it can lead to violence. In networked interactions, humor regularly takes the form of funny memes. Memes are characterized by structural coherence and variability; specific forms become delineated from each other, multiplying internally, as well as combining and diverting to generate adjacent novelty. Networked computing makes it possible for people across great distances to identify and share the mechanical behavior of others, which increases the significance of humor, and the pressure of people toward social adaptability. Networks allow kinship groups to form around specific passions, such as tribes sharing a common desire to deliberately troll themselves and others. Troll tribes seem to share an egalitarian ethos of rejecting individual ambitions for acclaim and dominance. The trolls’ embrace of the deplorable but funny figure of Donald Trump has been replaced by the return to boring normal politics of the WEIRD. Online trolling could potentially shift from both the funny and the boring, to what I have termed truly funny politics. This would reinstate history, but not just the history of civilization, which is heavily skewed toward work, inequality, hierarchical structures, and an adversarial conception of nature and leads to ecological disaster. The truly funny would be to embrace human prehistory, and reinstate egalitarian hunter-gatherer tribal dynamics. Diversions have been argued here as prevalent in digital media mainly due to their alignment with the tendency of human cognition toward a default mode of liquid flow. Our cognition tends toward liquidity, however, because of how this aligns with tendencies of evolution—toward a mode of destabilizing the rigidity of structure without completely deforming. In evolutionary development, diversions retain innovation and conformity, increasing the rapidity and possibility of change, with the likelihood of this change being advantageous. This further suggests that our preoccupation with diversions has been vital for the success of humans in dominating the planet, and diversifying our own possibilities here. More than any other species, we have tapped into and differentiated the evolutionary intensifiers of play, stupidity, cuteness, and humor.

Reaching toward the end of the book here, one might expect a turn toward the future. Is it now time to reflect on the future influence of diversions? A theoretical account of media evolution could place itself at the forefront of development, to consider what is to come. Such a perspective has the potential to critically imagine likely or unlikely scenarios following our current situation, or align itself with tech innovation. Notions of media development are regularly influenced by science fiction, speculating about aspects such as the dangers of a robot revolt, or lamenting the lack of hoverboards or holograms, or whatever else classic sci-fi thought would become possible. Futurist fantasies invariably seem to turn questions of what is or will into what should be. An optimistic outlook might imagine a utopia, while pessimism by contrast considers the dystopian. The word comes from ancient Greek, with topos meaning place, and utopia as no place and dystopia as bad place.14 But is the future a place? Is it not a time? In fact, it is neither. The future simply is nothing at all. Philosopher C. D. Broad distinguished the reality of the past and present against the unreality of the future: “Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present. On the other hand, the essence of a present event is, not that it precedes future events, but that there is quite literally nothing to which it has the relation of precedence.”15 The future is not what comes after the present, but is instead a projection. Some systems are more prone to perform such projection than others, as some humans are more prone than others. As a mental projection it is regularly normative, seeking to alter the course of something, to shape a trajectory. The idea of the future is itself an attempt to shape a trajectory, to reduce possibilities of what could happen into what one hopes or fears will happen. My interest in this book has been in the mundane reality of what exists. I have mostly avoided normative assessments of what should come, while exploring how attractors shape the tendencies of development. This includes a notion of what could develop. This is done through adopting DeLanda’s framing of assemblages as consisting of actual and virtual parts. The former pertains to what is observable in the present and the latter the potentials for change.16 The actual form

responds to environmental forces, and might reform into a different actualization if the environmental conditions shift. For complex assemblages, such as organisms and species, the tendencies will include such factors as goals, motivations, and social relations. No matter how complex it is, the developmental dynamic is conceptualized here as one of actual and virtual, where the current actualization does not exhaust potential for change. Research may thus indicate what could become. Yet it does not indicate the future. When thinking or reading about the future, one should consider whether it could be replaced with possibilities. Even more productive is to shift away from the sweeping generalizations of the future, to consider the present as indicative of what has become actualized in the past, and to speculate on the virtual. If you want to understand the continued evolving forms of earth, forget about the future.

Epilogue :-) Phew! Getting to the end of a book can be exhausting, for readers and writers alike. Discussions, arguments, and trails of thought to follow, as well as trails that derail. Starting, stopping, forgetting, restarting, and rereading to remember where you were, or to figure out where any of it could even be going. This talk without sound, this listening with the eyes; reading and writing is intense. It requires time and effort to sit still in sustained attention. Continuing relentlessly and tirelessly, page after page, it strains eyes and necks and backs, as well as cracking paperback spines and wearing off the lettering on keyboards. Writing and reading detaches from feedback besides words, with the potential for isolation, producing evermore idiosyncratic thoughts. While specific to me, this account may undoubtedly be familiar to anyone enduring writing and reading during their workday, as well as their leisure hours, providing access to important thoughts from across human history, and even to read comics on the toilet. Writing and reading are diversions from a sensory and social environment where the use of time and amount of investment is ours to decide and limit. It seems to discipline people to be engaged in deep attention, as we lose ourselves in captivating long form. As a quick Google search reveals, inspiring quips on writing are easy to come by. This one by Carl Sagan is emblematic, stating: “Books break the shackles of time—proof that humans can work magic,” while Ursula Le Guin is accredited with stating: “The unread story is not a story; it is little black marks on wood pulp. The reader, reading it, makes it live: a live thing, a story”; and Truman Capote noted, more bleakly: “Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.”17 These quotes indicate the significance placed on written forms, but also reveal some of the struggle and conviction required to maintain sustained attention. Innovations have been made to avoid reading more than necessary, such as research abstracts, book indexes, and lexicons. In the Christian Bible, Ecclesiastes warns “[o]f making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body.”18 And even the most devoted to the Book of Books, such as medieval monks, complain that writing bores, as they get distracted, staring out windows, checking the time (with their sundials), thinking about food or sex.19

The social human species adapted sounds made by lungs pumping air to the vocal cords to share experiences between ourselves. Turning sounds into scribbles, these would lead to the wonderful divergence of writing, of language diversifying into stone-carving, papyrus-inking, or wire signals and computer digits and screen pixels. Sometimes, when I am not writing, I get ideas, and to avoid forgetting them I use my smartphone to make notes. And as I write, any thumb-slips become automatically corrected by a built-in feature of the phone. It even offers suggestions for what I would want to write next. As I select the word “I,” the phone suggests “have” and “think” as likely ways of proceeding. If I wanted, I could simply start accepting its suggestions, to formulate a sentence entirely on autopilot: “I have to be at home with you and I think that is a very important part of our own way forward to seeing you tomorrow morning at home.” This autopiloted sentence is unconvincing in terms of literary quality, yet it holds semantic sense. The process of automated writing can be taken a step further. An online neural network text generation tool has received this book as input, paragraph by paragraph. In response it has created its own pieces of writing. The result is a refracted version, a diversion of Becoming Human Amid Diversions. The neural network generated book is available as a downloadable pdf (or purchasable as a printed copy) from andreaservik.​com. It is titled Becoming Humidity as a Diversion, alluding to the liquid state of mind explored in this conclusion. The title also plays with the title of this book, in a similar manner to a classic diversion of McLuhan’s media theory. One of the central points for McLuhan is that “[s]ocieties have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.”20 This is encapsulated in the notion “the medium is the message,” which in the collaborative collage book by McLuhan and graphic designer Quentin Fiore is transformed into the title The Medium is the Massage, and “how electric technology shapes, works over, alters—massages—every instant of our lives.”21 What kind of message or massage does the neural network contribute? The following paragraph is a neural network diversion of the last paragraph: Notice the change from an organic form to a solid, a form now abstract and code-like. The addition of the ‘electricity’ symbol is

significant in this regard. A theme in Becoming Human Amid Diversions is that we are electric beings. From batteries and transformers to the microchip in our head and its conductivity, the connection between form and function is well explored. This is because evolution—and the evolution of humans—is dependent on the process of self-transformation, on a continual rationalisation and re-apportioning of our DNA. Thus, we are both electrical beings and organic beings, each giving birth to a new kind of form. The difference is that we carry the ability to amplify this process, and it can be taken out of a control state and applied to another state, thus transforming the living and the dead. Such automated writing is possible because any process of writing shares certain similarities with it. DeLanda characterizes writing as a sorting process, where words pose pressure on each other, with higher and lower probability of following each other due to processes of gradual standardizing.22 Writing is a process of construction, as letters generate words, which in turn build sentences which together form paragraphs making up sections forming chapters which produce the whole that is this book. And this book is part of the genre or form of writing that is media theory, with its own sets of possibilities and expectations. But I want to focus here not on the way this book fits into grand schemes, but rather on the minimal unit of writing. The minimal unit of writing is not the word, nor even the letter. The etymology of writing, from Old Norse rita, Latin scribere, and Greek graphein, suggests writing as tearing, carving, scratching—simply making a mark.23 Not only words, with their expressive capacities, lie in waiting for writers today. While taking notes on my phone, other signs attract. The innocuous smiley is a highly potent diversion of words. A colon, a line, and a parenthesis can, through human pareidolia, turn into an imitation of a smiling visage: :-). There are a range of simple smileys, forming minimally distinct, parallel traditions: :) :] (: =) . Varying the parameters will also change the expressions, forming written standins for a range of emotions, offering the possibility to store, share, and produce them. As differences accumulate and populations become familiar with a range of smileys, they turn into a separate system of

sharing emotions through writing—emoticons. Emoticons remain attached to and make use of linguistic characters, turning into divergent form as emoji, which no longer use characters and letters but instead grids of pixels to draw icons. The first 176 emojis were launched by Japanese Telecom NTT DOCOMO in 1999. The divergence from emoticons into emojis starts its own processes of difference, with the number of individual emojis ballooning into 3019 in March 2019. Oxford Dictionaries named the emoji its word of the year in 2015.24 Emojis take the form of generally familiar or individual peculiarities, and different uses thereby divert groups from each other: can be used to indicate not being bothered by what others might think of your actions and views; has been used by white supremacists as an in-group signal; and dealers use as a reference for drugs.25 Some emojis may be more commonly used because of connotations than for what they visually depict, such as the peach and the eggplant. Lacking syntax, there are great limitations to combining emojis, but they can imply movement and action and combine in creative ways, here to various forms of sexual innuendo: .26 The shift from smiley to emoticon to emoji is a successive evolution from difference to diversion to divergence. Our alphabet is theorized to have evolved from hieroglyphs into individual letters, and emoticons restart this process by turning individual linguistic characters into pictograms. Emoticons are neither progress nor regress of writing, but simply remove certain of the conceived necessities of the writing it diverts from, to engage with aspects that might be less readily available in its previous form. Ideograms could potentially diverge into their own language of writing, either through echoing the process of hieroglyphs turning into characters or through standardization of emoji syntax. But they do not need grammatical complexity for communicative function. As I send you those emoticons you might like, it is not important whether you understand them the way I do, or even that they say something particular. The format is not entirely divergent from conveying meaning, yet they divert from meaning-making, to instead draw emotions and actions. As drawings the icons follow “cartoon physics,” where lessening gravity is key for development. They reduce

the rigidity of work, intelligence, maturity, and seriousness to intensify their potential to divert. I offer something playful, stupid, cute, and funny and you send something in return—and this could go on and on, in populations, indefinitely, as our difference in producing, interpreting, and using these emotes lead to new diversions. What if I extract the main points of the book using contemporary ideograms instead of words? Smileys, emoticons, and emojis are wonderful diversions, producing new reasons to keep writing. Using them could be playful, stupid, cute, and funny, producing difficulties, detours, sweetness, and blunders. A few well-formed emotes are attractive, easily grasped and captivating broadly, thereby memorable and ready for distribution. Emoticons present a way of writing for diverted readers, satisfying the urge to attract and speak for those who lack the determination, intelligence, maturity, and responsibility necessary to read and understand theoretical discourse. Emotive writing is a way of opening this book to the evolutionary dynamics of such inadequacies, and to destabilize it for the prospect of attraction. Simple smileys remain too undifferentiated to use, and emojis are unsuitable, as they clearly separate from writing into images. Emoticons have passed from difference but not yet into divergence. I have spent some time (more than a little, but less than a lot) searching through online databases of emoticons. From these I have selected material instead of writing my own emoticons. This way I open the process of writing from the feedback loops—between myself, the writing tool, and any virtual and actual readers—to the wilderness of people collaborating online. This final diversion thereby reveals not mainly my creative capacities in modeling evolution. More fundamentally, it is a way of rendering evolutionary creativity as unpredictable and emergent behavior of populations. The participants filling these emoticon databases have no way of knowing the full possibilities of their actions. They would likely never have anticipated the use of emoticons in a study of media, and I would not be playful, stupid, cute, and funny enough to come up with this myself: Becoming Human Amid Diversions as emoticons 1. 2.

Attractive Screens–

 

Microbe Computing– 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Vegetative Games– Worldwide Fungi– Social Petworks– Human Tribes– Becoming Humidity–

           

There is no need for telling this, because you will anyway: Stay diverting!

Bibliography Andrews-Hanna, Jessica R. 2012. The Brain’s Default Network and its Adaptive Role in InternalMentation. Neuroscientist 18 (3): 1. [Crossref] Brantz, Loryn. 2017. 69 Emoji Combinations That Symbolize Sexual Acts, Buzzfeed, 09 Jan. https://​www.​buzzfeed.​c om/​lorynbrantz/​nice. Accessed 15 Jan 2020. Broad, C.D. 1923. Scientific Thought. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul LTD. Broyd, Samantha J., Charmaine Demanuele, Stefan Debener, Suzannah K. Helps, Christopher J. Jamesm, and Edmund J.S. Sonuga-Bark. 2009. Default-mode Brain Dysfunction in Mental Disorders: A Systematic Review. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 33: 1. [Crossref] DeLanda, Manuel. 1997/2000. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Swerve Editions. DeLanda, Manuel. 2011. Philosophy and Simulation: The Emergence of Synthetic Reason. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic. ———. 2012. In Manuel de Landa in conversation with Timur Si-Qin, ed. Timur Si-Qin. Berlin: SOCIÉ TÉ .

Deleuze, Gilles. 1968/2001. Difference and repetition. Transl. Paul Patton. London and New York: Continuum. Greicius, Michael D., Ben Krasnow, Allan L. Reiss, and Vinod Menon. 2003. Functional Connectivity in the Resting Brain: A Network Analysis of the Default Mode Hypothesis. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 1: 100. Grosz, Elizabeth. 2004. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely. Australia and New Zealand: Allen & Unwin. [Crossref] Kreiner, Jamie. 2019. How to Reduce Digital Distractions: Advice From Medieval Monks, Aeon. https://​aeon.​c o/​ideas/​how-to-reduce-digital-distractions-advice-frommedieval-monks. Accessed 15 Jan 2020. Matthews, Dylan. 2015. BuzzFeed’s Founder used to Write Marxist Theory and it Explains Buzzfeed Perfectly, Vox, April 02. https://​www.​vox.​c om/​2014/​5/​20/​ 5730762/​buzzfeeds-founder-used-to-write-marxist-theory-and-it-explains. Accessed 15 Jan 2020. McLuhan, Marshall and Quentin Fiore. 1967/1996. The Medium is the Massage. London: Penguin Books. Mü ller, F., P.C. Dolder, A. Schmidt, M.E. Liechti, and S. Borgwardt. 2018. Altered Network Hub Connectivity after Acute LSD Administration. Neuroimage Clin 18: 1. [Crossref] Pardes, Arielle. 2018. “Academics Gathered to Share Emoji Research, and It Was”, Wired, June 26. https://​www.​wired.​c om/​story/​academic-emoji-conference/​. Accessed 15 Jan 2020. Peretti, Jonah. 1996. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Contemporary Visual Culture and the Acceleration of Identity Formation/Dissolution, Negations. Raichle, M.E., et al. 2001. A Default Mode of Brain Function. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 98: 2. Rice, Andrew. 2013. Does BuzzFeed Know the Secret?, New York Magazine, April 05. https://​nymag.​c om/​news/​features/​buzzfeed-2013-4/​. Accessed 15 Jan 2020. Wolters, Eugene. 2013. From Deleuze to Lolcats, the Story of the Buzzfeed Guy, Critical-Theory , April 08. http://​www.​c ritical-theory.​c om/​from-deleuze-to-lolcatsthe-story-of-the-buzzfeed-guy/​. Accessed 15 Jan 2020.

Footnotes 1 This paragraph inverts philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s remark from America (1986/2010): “There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you.”

  2 Peretti 1996, see also Rice 2013.

  3 Peretti 1996.

  4 Matthews 2015, see also Wolters 2013.

  5 DeLanda 2012.

  6 Ibid.

  7 Raichle et al. 2001; Observations were first made by Hans Berger in 1930.

  8 See for instance Greicius et al. 2003.

  9 Andrews-Hanna 2012.

  10 Mü ller et al. 2018.

  11 Broyd et al. 2009.

  12 Deleuze 1968/2001: 222.

  13 Grosz 2004: 23-24.

  14 Online Etymology Dictionary.

  15 Broad 1923: 66.

  16 DeLanda 2011: 4.

  17 The quotes were found and selected by googling “inspiring quotes about writing.”

  18 The Bible 2011.

  19 Kreiner 2019.

  20 McLuhan and Fiore 1967/1996: 8.

  21 Ibid: 148.

  22 DeLanda 1997/2000: 219, 222.

  23 Online Etymology Dictionary.

  24 Oxford Languages

 

25 Dictionary.com and Pardes 2018.

  26 Brantz 2017.

 

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Index1

A Addiction gaming internet smartphone Algorithms, see Machine learning Animal behavior creativity emotion empathy portrait selfie Animism Anthropocentrism Arms race Art Artificial intelligence life stupidity Asmr Assemblage Attention economies Attract -or Automata Automatic

B Barricelli, Nils Aall Belle Delphine Belyaev, Dmitry Bergson, Henri Bernie Sanders bro

Birdsong Boo Book Boston Dynamics Buzzfeed

C Care-giving Cat lolCelebrity Civilization Clicking clickbait Cognition artificial (see Machine learning) discognition fungal hijacking human I think and it thinks neurological states vegetative Computer feral operating systems program Conspiracy theory qanon Covid-19 Cryptocurrency nft Cute aggression gods music Cybernetics

D Darwin, Charles DeLanda, Manuel Deleuze, Gilles Dérive Détournement Diogenes Distraction Diversions Domestication self-

E Ecosystems Egalitarian E-mail Emergence Emoticon Evolution computer of cuteness fitness fitness landscape human of humor of play program selection (see Selection) of stupidity Experimental humanities

F Face Facebook 4chan Fully automated luxury communism Fun

machine vegetative Fungi cordyceps mycorrhiza slime mold Future

G Game flow of Life metaGlobal village Gods gorilla See also Cute Google

H Humor irony laughter lol, lulz online (see Meme) ridicule on television Hunter-gatherer tribes

I Influencer Instagram

K Knowing that and knowing how

L

Labyrinth, see Maze Laughter, see Humor Leaders billionaires elites president royal unwanted Lies and bullshit Life Like Lil Bub

M Machine learning AlphaGo DeepDream Mammals, see Animal Maze Meme deep frame deplorable image macro internet poor image -Trump Microbe, see Symbiosis Mimicry social vegetative vocal Morphology analogy anthropmorphism cute fungal isomorphism

morphogenesis vegetative

N Nature human naturalization Network arpa inter packet switching social social network Nintendo

O Organism Oxytocin

P Paleo conservative Parasite Parasocial relations Pareidolia Pets Plant, see Vegetation Platforms Play animal fight machine vegetative Politics capitalism conservative Democratic Party dirtbag left

polarization populism progressive Republican Party tribal (see Hunter-gatherer) truly funny Population thinking Primitive

R Random mutation Realism Recommendation systems

S Screen Scrolling doomsleepSee also Mimicry Selection artificial destabilizing natural sexual social units Smartphone Smile smiley Spatial memory Strangely satisfying videos Stupidity artificial (see Artificial) artistic economic

philosophical Succession ecological human development technology Super Mario Bros. speedrun Survival snuggle struggle Symbiosis genesis

T Technology TikTok Tribes, see Hunter-gatherer Trolling Trump, Donald Trypophobia Turing machine test Twitter

V Vegetation behavior cognition (see Cognition) flowering growth intentionality leaves morphology (see Morphology) play (see Play) roots Videogames, see Game

Virtual Virus computer covid-19 virality Voraphilia

W Wasting time Weird Work Writing

Footnotes 1 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.