The most significant facet for my perspective is that, in hyper-modernism, the power and control exercised via narratives and fictions in the media-technological society now get implemented on much more detailed micro-levels via algorithmic-informatic codes and digital, virtual, and cybernetic technologies. We have become an informatic society. We are subjected to algorithms, data collection, Big Data analytics, surveillance, the deterrence of self-surveillance, and mutual surveillance in every area from participation in simulation-social media to targeted advertising to bureaucratic interactions with governmental agencies. We are immersed in systems of informational and informatic power. We are coded as subjects of human data processing. New data analysis techniques for categorizing us while providing us with the illusion of personalization are continuously developed and experimented on us. We are interminable feed and fodder for the algorithms. We have become our data.
Data does not only record who we have been and who we are, but it is an active force in reshaping our “becoming.” In this sense, the role of data can already be illuminated with some basic media theory insights à la Marshall McLuhan. Data is widely seen as being a useful tool for communication and administration, but it is much more than that. Data is exercising power and a performative molding of who we are. The self undergoes datafication. “Info-power,” as defined by Foucault-inspired philosopher Colin Koopman in his book How We Became Our Data, is a distinctive paradigm of power and control that unceasingly reformats the body, mind, and conduct of the individual. Koopman derives the term “info-power” from Foucault’s chain of terms of disciplinary power and bio-power. Racial bias and discrimination are also deeply built into the data and algorithms.
Algorithms construct and tell us narratives about ourselves. The info-power of algorithms comes to the fore via the narratives that they engender about us, and the individual “enjoyment” they propose to us. In the informatic society, our lives are increasingly given their meaning and their guidelines for action by algorithmic processes. The algorithm notes your viewing history, figures out your “affects” and desires, and then weaves its designed, packaged, individualized narratives just for you. The algorithm brings to realization the feedback loop originally conceived and promised by Norbert Wiener’s first-order cybernetics.
In the political arena of simulation-social media, the filter bubble and the echo chamber show you exactly what you want to see. The same computing paradigm is deployed in “politics” and in online shopping. As a Deep Learning neural network, the algorithm is permanently “training” itself at your expense, with you as its test “experience,” you are the data provider. The algorithm perfects its seduction of you, deploying the feedback mechanism to refine its narratives to endearingly stroke your narcissism. Your personalized sales or newsfeed stream at Amazon, Facebook, or TikTok. Technology or code itself is the author of these narratives. From the narratives of postmodernism to the code/algorithms/Big Data of hyper-modernism, one major persistent continuity is the profit-seeking of techno-capitalism: institutions and large organizations which seek power and control now want to use code to automate their power.
Thinkers in Science and Technology Studies (STS) like Ludwig Fleck and Bruno Latour put forward the idea that, as knowledge gets deployed for the exercise of power, the human being becomes a scientific fact. In the hyper-modern era, the human being becomes an informatic fact. The human body was earlier an object of science, the target of medical and other discourses of rationalizing control. There were many mono-sciences rich in content. The “reality” which science took as its noble mission to understand was always already a simulation model. With informatics, the individual sciences get overtaken by the generalized practice of digital models and algorithmic Deep Learners. Knowledge-content is overtaken by the statistical representation of knowledge. “Reality” becomes hyperreality of the rule of data.
In the media genre of the computer game, narrative and code come together. Navigational permutations and emergent behaviors are coded into the game in both deterministic and indeterminate coding paradigms. Game designers link intimately their story construction plans with the intricacies of software toolkits. One can analyze science fiction films about computer games in a transmedia study. Films like Tron and Tron Legacy (both starring Jeff Bridges), Free Guy starring Ryan Reynolds, David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One, Chris Marker’s Level Five, Black Mirror: “Bandersnatch,” and the Polish/Japanese co-production Avalon are exemplary in this respect. One can also contemplate films which are adaptations of a computer game, like Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. What is the significance of the POV perspective in the genre of games –the special relationship between player and avatar – for narrative? To write the software code for new games, is it possible to develop a narrative-centered Creative Coding development environment, parallel to how Processing is a visual-centered Creative Coding integrated development environment?
It would be difficult to extend the conceptual framework of Castoriadis to the hyper-modern situation of the hybrid narrative-and-code-based power and control assemblage of algorithms. The “imaginary” is seen by him as existing on the level of society and on the level of the individual. A kind of Freudian psychoanalytical connection is made between the two. For Castoriadis, there is a constant tug-of-war going on in history between the poles of the conscious autonomy of self-managed, self-instituting societies and the alienation of institutionally frozen and degenerated societies. This dialectic seems to not foresee a configuration like the “pretzel”-like paradoxical logic of algorithms which bestows on the socially constructed “individual” a pseudo-autonomy that is an extension of postmodern narcissistic consumer culture. Castoriadis would only be able to fathom hyper-modernism as a furthering of the “retreat from autonomy” which is already operative for him in postmodernism.
In her writings about “The Informatics of Domination,” Haraway was prescient about the important role that code would play in narrative-driven power and domination relations in hyper-modernism. Haraway foresaw the hegemony of information. She already underlined the ubiquity and potency of informatic and bio-technological codes. She wrote of the “translation of the world into a problem of coding.”
Foucault’s analytics of the “micro-physics” of power lend themselves very well to adaptation to the condi-
tions of hyper-modernism. He underscores the relationship between power and knowledge, and between power and discourse. The architecture of power of the social media platforms of “surveillance capitalism,” or of the Internet as a whole, can be trenchantly analyzed as a revised next generation configuration of the Panopticon. Power in hyper-modernism adds to semiotic signs the supplement of electronic signals. William Bogard, in The Simulation of Surveillance, succeeds in synthesizing Baudrillard’s concept of simulation and Foucault’s concept of surveillance.
Deleuze’s concept of the “societies of control” lends itself well to an upgrade for hyper-modernism and digitalization. He wrote already about how informatic technologies would be deployed to support power relationships. Digital systems of control monitor our movements in a virtual networked sense. Our physical location in designated spaces of confinement recedes to secondary importance. We are visible to the digital behemoth via our real-time transactions. Foucault’s “disciplinary society” of surveillance is superseded by Deleuze’s “society of control,” which is about the management of flows. The interest in turbulence unleashes the potentiality of indefinite production and signification for the era of free-floating bio-cybernetic capitalism, with its global financial transactions and money circulation via electronic impulses. Entropy becomes useful for work in the form of turbulence, chaos, and “female” flows.