Making Media Theory: Thinking Critically with Technology 9781501358623, 9781501358616, 9781501358593, 9781501358609

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Making Media Theory

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Making Media Theory Thinking Critically with Technology Marcel O’Gorman

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2021 Copyright © Marcel O’Gorman, 2021 Cover design by Eleanor Rose Photograph © Marcel O’Gorman All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any thirdparty websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

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For my students.

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Contents List of Figures Preface 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Making, Media, and Theory Workshop: Conductive Play Dough In Defense of Uselessness Workshop: Useless Box Writing with a Soldering Iron: On the Art of Making Attention Workshop: Smartphone Basket Digital Rituals, Wearables, and Nonusers Workshop: Resistor Case Epilogue: Dirty Media

Index

viii ix 1 27 37 57 65 89 103 123 131 145

List of Figures 1.1 Crapenter’s table, 2017 2.1 Conductive play dough with LED lights, 2019 3.1 Outa-Spaceman, Knife-Wielding Tentacle, 2019 4.1 The Solarbotics Useless Box Kit, 2019 5.1 Megan Honsberger, MindflUX prototype, 2017 6.1 Caitlin Woodcock, Basketcase, 2017 6.2 Schematic for Basketcase 7.1 Digital Tabernacle, Steel Rails Art Festival, Waterloo, Ontario, 2014 8.1 Resistor Case, 2018 9.1 Schematic for Arduino Soil Sensor

21 31 45 60 83 96 98 104 127 142

Preface Simone Giertz is hunting robots. No, not rabbits—robots. In a special episode of her popular YouTube series, the self-proclaimed Queen of Shitty Robots explores what she calls America’s obsession with hunting. Plot twist: she is a vegetarian. “I just don’t want to have to kill any animals,” she reveals to her 1,880,211 subscribers. “But robots? I would be fine with killing some robots” (2018). This sentiment falls in line with the guiding theme of Giertz’s show, which deflates popular conceptions of automation as efficient and clean, producing instead awkward and messy automata that poke fun at technological progress. The Hunting episode sends Giertz on a training regimen that involves fishing for underwater drones (and of course ripping her ridiculous rubber pants in the process), followed by an archery lesson in which she skewers cardboard cutouts of pickles, airline food, and period blood. Inspired by the experience of launching arrows, Giertz creates the object of her hunting expedition: an uncanny robotic deer whose resin head and legs, actuated by windshield wiper motors, jerk back and forth mechanically. The ridiculous legs are ultimately useless appendages, given that the deer is set on the chassis of a mobility chair equipped with remote control. By the end of the episode, Simone hits the kill zone (a bladder filled with hot sauce tucked into the deer’s side), eats a portion of her prey (a brick of braised tofu screwed to the exterior shell of the deer), and walks off into the sunset with her new cybernetic kin. It would be easy to spend an entire chapter unpacking this ludicrous and irreverent video. But deep reading of popular culture is not the guiding method of this book. I include the Shitty Robot episode because it provides an evocative entry point. If Giertz was a media studies scholar, a philosopher of technology, or, more precisely, a critical maker, she might accompany her hunting video with an essay about nonhuman kin, the politics of technological prostheses, and the clash between an antiseptic future of efficient robots and the bleeding, sweating, and shitting animals that will create them. But Giertz is not making media theory. Still, what her often-vulgar design performances

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do best is underscore the strange scene of an abject species capable of, and even obsessed with, replacing itself with efficient machines. While this is not exactly the topic of Making Media Theory, it is certainly a guiding premise. This book asks readers to reflect critically on the performance of fleshly bodies that make media technologies—a performance that can lead to the production of some rather precarious human-machine entanglements or, in Simone’s terms, shitty robots. More precisely, this book is an effort to document and share a certain way of studying media that I have developed in my own research and teaching over the past fifteen or so years. Rather than just interpreting media and their effects, perhaps viewing them as objects-to-think-with, I have endeavored to make my own technological objects-to-think-with. The result is a conspicuously embodied way of thinking critically with and about media, and it has produced strange things, such as a penny-farthing bicycle with sensors that control a large video projection and a cedar and canvas canoe with touch-screen monitors wrapped in fishing line. I tried to define this practice in a 2012 article called “Broken Tools and Misfit Toys: Adventures in Applied Media Theory.” A few years later, in my book Necromedia, I demonstrated quite explicitly how Applied Media Theory works. Each chapter on death and technology in Necromedia is followed by a chapter describing a digital project (including the aforementioned penny-farthing and canoe) that I created to think through the media-theoretical claims in the book. Recently, I have stopped using the term Applied Media Theory because the focus on application too narrowly circumscribes the practices I have been trying to develop and foster in my students. These practices do not simply attempt to embody theory in a fully formed made thing; instead, they rely on a generative feedback loop that requires shuttling back and forth between theorizing and making. Whereas Necromedia documents my own projects, Making Media Theory focuses primarily on my students’ projects and encourages readers to make their own objects-to-think-with. For this reason, I have sandwiched five DIY workshops into this book, complete with instructions and evocative discussion questions. Readers are prompted, for example, to philosophize with conductive play dough and to critically hack a kit-of-parts designed for making a useless box. These exercises reflect directly on the chapter topics, which unpack such

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issues as the value of uselessness, the importance of digital rituals, and the politics of cultural appropriation—all in a media-centric context. I do not expect that readers will actually make all of these projects, some of which include materials that may be inaccessible to readers or code that may no longer function by the time this book goes to press. The workshops can indeed be attempted (they are based on projects I have taught myself several times), but I include them primarily as prompts for readers to make media theory by combining their own research questions with fabrication materials at their disposal. I should make it clear that this is not a design book per se. Still, the methods it recommends could easily be categorized as what Bruce and Stephanie Tharp have called discursive design in their gorgeously illustrated tome of the same title. Making Media Theory is obviously not a tome. Nor is it gorgeous, and there is no expectation that the projects this book recommends should be aesthetically pleasing. The practices outlined in the book run parallel to those in the loosely categorized field of “critical design,” as exemplified in the work of Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, Anne Balsamo, Natalie Jeremijenko, Mary Flanagan, and others. Matt Malpass has attempted to firmly establish this field in his book Critical Design in Context: History, Theory, and Practice. Above all, I want to champion the work of Daniela K. Rosner, whose book Critical Fabulations: Reworking the Methods and Margins of Design was published only after I had completed a full draft of this manuscript. Rosner calls for practices of designing and making that catalyze “new embodied ways of knowing . . . [and] draw attention to the contested nature of knowledge production while caring for their repercussion” (17). As the allusion to “broken tools and misfit toys” suggests, this book was not written for classically trained artists or what Rosner calls “cosmopolitan” designers committed to ideals of mastery and perfection (2018: 127). This is not to say that these individuals would have nothing to gain from reading this book. Making Media Theory was written for anyone interested in how to integrate the body more conspicuously into acts of understanding media. In Chapter 1, I recommend a practice called crapentry, which takes the will to mastery out of the exercise of making, injecting humor, play, and the acceptance of failure into the process. I urge readers to take risks, to become producers of

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technoculture rather than consumers of it. If media technologies have reduced physical risk by allowing us to conquer distances without leaving home and to communicate anonymously with large audiences through a screen, making media theory puts physical risk back into the equation. “[M]aking,” Patrick Jagoda suggests, “brings with it materiality and all its creative possibilities and reminders of finitude” (362). As I discuss in Chapter 6 in my description of Robin Wall Kimmerer trying to weave a basket from stubborn strips of black ash, this book asks readers to embrace the tension between human bodies and the environments they inhabit. “Media are our infrastructures of being,” John Durham Peters proclaims in The Marvelous Clouds. Living technologically involves a ceaseless interplay of adoption and adaptation, a contest of bodies being violently pushed and willingly pulled into complex networks of things that offer resistance. Making media theory can provide a controlled environment to rehearse and think through these tensions; it offers opportunities, in the words of Tim Ingold, to “enter the grain of the world’s becoming” (2013: 25). The word thinkering is instructive here, suggesting that handiwork can prompt reflection and, in this case, close attention to the media with which our being is interwoven. I would like to think that making media theory, by implicating bodies in conspicuous ways, combines careful reflection with what Donna Haraway has called critical diffraction: “diffraction patterns record the passage of difference, interaction, and interference” (1997: 430). I frequently refer to making attention in this book, drawing on a literal translation of the French expression faire attention, which also connotes the idea of being careful. “Pay attention,” we say in English. But attention should not be unwittingly paid, bought, or sold, which is the unfortunate situation that tech giants like Google and Facebook have gotten us into. The concept of making attention is explored at length in Chapter 5, which perhaps surprisingly is not about making, per se, but about writing. It could be argued that writing is actually a form of making (I have made this book after all), but that is not where I am headed. Whereas my book E-Crit promoted nonlinear modes of writing that more accurately reflect the communication practices of a digital, picture-oriented culture, Making Media Theory turns its back on this idea, leaning instead on close reading and linear writing, which require cognitive modes that face extinction in a culture of texting, surfing, and streamed videos

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stuck on autoplay. My purpose is not to suggest that digital culture is shallow (Nicholas Carr) or primitively hyper (Hayles), but to argue for the creation of reflective spaces and practices that foster a critical distance from technology. At the end of the day, theory, as its Greek root theoria suggests, is inherently reflective, an act of “deep receptivity” (Grimes, 2013: 166). This receptivity should be the driving force of media theory. Unfortunately, propping up specific cognitive modalities as benchmarks for understanding media is a strategy that can be fraught with problems, especially considering the complicity of sequential logic with heteronormative, Western, and ableist power systems. I address these systems in turn throughout the book, suggesting that making media theory might be an effective way to challenge oppressive social, political, and economic infrastructures. Moreover, in the Epilogue, I contradict myself by offering a mostly nonlinear assemblage of texts on the topic of dirt, filth, and waste. To counter the Promethean bravado of white, male, Western technocapitalism, I eschew the figures of Homo habilis (tool user) and Homo erectus to introduce what I call Homo inclinus, inspired by the work of Adriana Cavarero. Homo inclinus rewrites the human origin story to promote a being that inclines toward others and toward its earthy origins. If readers are confused by the tone or form of this final chapter, I suggest they turn to the text that inspired it in the first place: Christian Enzensberger’s strangely compelling experimental book called Smut: An Anatomy of Dirt. The Epilogue might be read as a critique of various aspects of the chapters that precede it. It may also be understood as a desperate attempt to reckon with all that had to be left out of the preceding chapters, including a more thorough investigation of technocratic white male privilege and a postmortem of the toxic leftovers produced by tinkering with digital components. If this sounds too much like self-loathing, it is due perhaps to the author’s fiercely ambivalent relationship with technology and not to the sort of existential despair that might prompt one to suggest that “Man’s twenty-sixth excretion is himself ” (Enzensberger, 1972: 8). I might indeed have descended into such a state of despair were it not for the many individuals who participated in the making of this project. I have dedicated the book to my students, and by this I mean students in the past, present, and future, including the hypertexters I taught in the IBM Networked

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Writing Environment at the University of Florida, the digital renegades of the E-Crit Lab at the University of Detroit Mercy, and the thinkerers of the Critical Media Lab (CML), who provided the thriving culture from which this book sprouted. The CML students are too numerous to list here, but even at the risk of leaving someone out, I will drop some names for the sake of recognizing those who had a direct hand in this project, including Adam Cilevitz, Matthew Frazer, Peter Fryer-Davis, Julie Funk, Megan Honsberger, Jason Lajoie, Andy Myles, Stephen Trothen, and Caitlin Woodcock. I am especially grateful to Jason Lajoie, who provided valuable feedback on an early draft of the manuscript. Several of my colleagues and collaborators offered constructive criticism, recommended readings, and commented on portions of the text, including Jay Dolmage, Jennifer Clary-Lemon, Laurel O’Gorman, and Ghislain Thibault. I am amazed by the charity and wisdom of Jentery Sayers, who provided essential input on the manuscript draft. Other crucial insights were provided by the odd collection of consultants who generously gave their time in interviews, including an Indigenous digital artist (Barry Ace), a queer theorist with a soldering iron (Jack Halberstam), and an Old Order Mennonite horseshoe fitter (Wayne Martin). In a way, this book was my friend Ron Broglio’s idea; he suggested that a handbook from the Critical Media Lab would be useful for thinking and teaching with, and he also recommended Bloomsbury as an appropriate press for such a project. Indeed, Bloomsbury has been much more than appropriate, and I am grateful to Katie Gallof for championing the concept of making media theory when others failed to wrap their heads around it. Fortunately, Katie is not the only editor who understands my work, which explains why portions of this book were published elsewhere. A shorter version of Chapter 5 appears in The Routledge Companion to Digital Writing and Rhetoric (Ed. Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes. New York: Routledge, 2017), Chapter 6 was adapted for a special issue of Enculturation edited by Helen Burgess and Roger Whitson (November, 2019), and Chapter 7 reworks a piece I contributed to Embodied Computing (Ed. Isabel Pedersen and Andrew Iliadis. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2019). Nearly everything in this book was presented at one of several conferences of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts, and I am indebted to those who attended these presentations and provided feedback.

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Finally, I am grateful to report that research for this book was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, and the University of Waterloo Faculty of Arts.

References Enzensberger, Christian. 1972. Smut: An Anatomy of Dirt. Trans. Sandra Morris. New York: The Seabury Press. Carr, Nicholas. 2011. The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains. New York: W.W. Norton. Cavarero, Adriana. 2016. Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Giertz, Simone. 2018. “I Went Robot Hunting with a Bow and Arrow.” YouTube video. February 27. https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=c3P​​​LJnKP​​n6g. Grimes, Ronald. 2014. The Craft of Ritual Studies. New York: Oxford University Press. Hayles, N. Katherine. “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes.” Profession. 2007: 187–199. Haraway, Donna. 1997. Modes​t_Wit​ness@​Secon​d_Mil​lenni​um.Fe​maleM​an©_M​eets_​ OncoM​ouseT​M: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge. Ingold, Tim. 2013. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge. Jagoda, Patrick. 2017. “Critique and Critical Making.” PMLA 132.2. O’Gorman, Marcel. 2006. E-Crit: Digital Media, Critical Theory and the Humanities. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. O’Gorman, Marcel. 2015. Necromedia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rosner, Daniela K. Critical Fabulations: Reworking the Methods and Margins of Design. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2018.

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Erudition is important. A sense of history. A willingness to get into the guts of machines. It’s not something that I do well, although I think it’s really important. —John Durham Peters, Interview with Chris Russill Stupidity could refer not simply to a lack of knowledge but to the limits of certain forms of knowing and certain ways of inhabiting structures of ­knowing. —Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure A small rabbit lives in my home office, hopping about freely, but mostly sitting still, staring into the distance. When he’s not in his litter box, which also holds his food bowl, he moves between three distinct home bases to pass the time. The first is a hand-stitched rag rug under a window, where he sits in the sun. The second is a neglected laptop bag lying on the floor in an alcove of loaded bookshelves, a site he visits sporadically. The third and newest landing spot is a straw basket, designed for rabbits and woven to act like a burrow of sorts, with a front-facing aperture. When this cozy place of refuge was first introduced beside the litter box, it was quickly transformed into a site of labor. Within a week, the rabbit had chewed a hole in its side, thereby creating a second conduit for the burrow and providing direct access to the litter box. The straw that was chewed to make the hole now serves as bedding on the floor of the two-holed basket. There are many risks inherent in opening a chapter with the description of a domestic animal, let alone a cute little house pet. First of all, I am not trying to compete with Jacques Derrida, who used his nakedness before a cat to launch

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into a discussion of human animality. Nor am I exhibiting repressed jealousy over the “darter-tongue kisses” Donna Haraway received from her dog, Miss Cayenne-Pepper (2007: 15). Certainly, the rabbit in my office has provided me with several hours of quiet rumination on radical otherness and companion species. I often pause during sessions at my desk to question him fruitlessly about his umwelt.1 What is it like to be a rabbit? What do you see with your nearly 360-degree infrahuman vision? And yet, I turn to the rabbit in my office not as an animal studies scholar, but as a media theorist. The operative question then is something like this: What does a rabbit hole chewed into the side of a straw basket have to do with media theory? Getting to the punch line of this joke requires a rather capacious understanding of the terms making, media, and theory.

Making When President Barack Obama announced a National Week of Making and hosted the White House Maker Faire in June 2014, it was apparent that the word maker had gone beyond mainstream, finding itself lodged in the rhetoric of an administration trying desperately to connect with both a beleaguered manufacturing base and a STEM-obsessed technocracy. “America has always been a nation of tinkerers, inventors, and entrepreneurs,” says the White House, a legacy strengthened by today’s supposedly easy access to “3D printers, laser cutters, easy-to-use design software, and desktop machine tools” (2014). This equipment list has become synonymous with what is meant by a makerspace, a term made famous in part by TechShop, which attempted to turn the concept of a grassroots, tool-and-information-sharing cooperative into a franchise. The project failed, and in 2017, all TechShop locations were shut down, including the one in Detroit, Michigan, which was sponsored in part by the Ford Motor

This term which can mean “environment” or “surroundings” was introduced by the zoologist Jakob von Uexküll in his book A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans. The concept has become a guiding principle in philosophical reflections on nonhuman animals. See, for example, Giorgio Agamben, The Open, Chapter 10.

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Company. This failed attempt to monetize the makerspace model coincided for me locally, when a start-up named MyShop, housed in the same building as my lab, closed its doors in 2018. Meanwhile, back on campus, a heavily marketed makerspace for students sits empty most of the day, a lonely row of 3D printers quietly gathering cobwebs. Is the STEM-inspired build it and they will make gambit destined to fail? One lesson to be gained from this failure is that it is not the tools or the space that matter but the product of those tools and the specific aims of the community of makers working in that space. Above all, makers need a meaningful project, which is one of the reasons I decided to write this book. Already, the term maker is sticking in my throat like a cube of sweaty cheddar cheese. Do we need this word? What is the point of using it at all? I’ll get to those questions later. For the moment, I’m interested in asking why researchers in the arts and humanities might adopt the discourse on making. It’s easy to be cynical and dismiss humanities makers as wannabe’s who are trying to gain institutional legitimacy by adopting the tools and nomenclature of better-resourced STEM colleagues on the other side of campus. My own dean openly admitted to despising the STEAM acronym for this very reason— it just seems like a desperate plea for recognition. Rather than latching onto the STEAM train, humanities scholars might adopt the light-hearted motto “STEM, SHTEM” not to be dismissive of other disciplines but to identify a tactics of humanities making that wants to impact STEM disciplines while remaining critically ambivalent about STEM methods, products, and politics. By adopting the maker moniker, researchers in the humanities might occupy a parasitic position in the production of technoculture, pulling, bending, and folding2 humanities concepts into the STEM arena. Before I flesh out these parasitic tactics in full, it is useful to take a quick survey of how the humanities have adopted making in recent years. Rather

I am intentionally borrowing the words of Rob Mitchell here, who wrote that “Creating bioartworks requires pulling, bending, and folding these tools, techniques, and relationships into other spaces, which in turn produces new wrinkles in a commercially oriented ‘innovation ecology’” (13). In a parallel fashion, making media theory aims to pull the tools and techniques of STEM disciplines into the humanities and vice versa. I discuss this idea at greater length in Chapter 9 of Necromedia, entitled “Digital Care, Curation, and Curriculum: On Applied Media Theory.”

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than striving impossibly for a complete history, one way of undertaking such an appraisal is to look at wide-ranging, multiauthored books on this subject, especially two recent offerings: Applied Media Studies, edited by Kirsten Ostherr, and Making Things and Drawing Boundaries, edited by Jentery Sayers. The problem with anthologies is that they cannot be comprehensive—not everyone is invited to contribute to such books. In fact, Ostherr’s book was inspired by a single conference panel. What these books do offer, however, are case studies in humanities-based making, as well as a general overview of how people define this type of activity and position it intellectually, politically, and affectively. Consider this critical book review then as a freeze-frame image, a field report on how maker culture has made its way into the humanities. In Applied Media Studies, Ostherr argues that “experimental praxis” in the humanities can offer “new models for understanding humanistic knowledge formation as a productive field that can be ‘applied’ to solving ‘real-world’ problems” (2017: 3). While Ostherr is not uncritical of arguments rooted in a desire to make the humanities more practical, the focus on productivity and the “real world” here suggests that “applied” means pragmatic and useful, which is not how humanities research is typically described. It should come as no surprise that Ostherr—an applied health studies scholar who works in a medical context—champions the STEAM concept, and she easily adopts the bureaucratic language often used to justify it: “The STEM to STEAM movement argues that integrating the arts and design is a powerful technique for attracting and retaining a stronger, more diverse technology workforce, thereby producing more innovative results at a national level” (2017: 9). Fortunately, this innovation-tilted rhetoric, which pleases university administrators and city planners with a taste for Richard Florida, does not characterize the projects that Ostherr carefully chose to showcase in Applied Media Studies. The collection includes work like The AIDS Quilt Project, directed by Anne Balsamo, and crowd-sourced syllabi like #FergusonSyllabus, described by Elizabeth Losh as a tactical, “rapid response” form of pedagogy (2017: 117). It is important to note that neither Losh nor Balsamo describe themselves as makers, which brings to mind some of the gendered and political inflections

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of this term, as discussed in Chapter 3 of this book. The one author in Ostherr’s book who does make regular use of the word is Jason Farman, whose specific focus is on “critical making.” According to Farman, “making is a mode of thinking” (2017: 86), and making technological objects can provide a means for critically assessing the relationship of humanity to technology. “Applied media studies,” he argues, “is one way to think about the relationship between the body and the objects that we encounter in everyday life” (2017: 86). While Ostherr suggests in the introduction that applied media studies concentrates on “electronic, screen-based media” (2017: 4), Farman demonstrates an interest in making media off-screen. What’s more, while the other authors in Applied Media Studies see technology as a tool for delivering humanities-based content, only sometimes for the sake of engaging in cultural critique, Farman’s focus is on a critique of the technologies themselves. Put otherwise, his focus is on the medium rather than on the message. Farman’s understanding of applied media studies raises two very important distinctions (a) between screen-based media and non-screen-based media and (b) between media studies and media theory. These are the very distinctions that have guided the design of this book, which is about making off-screen objects that serve as vehicles for media theory. These distinctions are also why David Gauntlett’s Making Media Studies does not make Making Media Theory redundant. For Gauntlett, “the power of making” comes primarily from screen-based media created for dissemination on the internet (2015: 59). This helps explain the title of his most popular book Making Is Connecting, which is primarily about using social media to share DIY projects. To be fair, Gauntlett does address off-screen making at length, but only in the context of LEGO, a corporation with which he maintains an ongoing partnership, and which he claims is capable of “transformative cultural power” (2015: 110). Perhaps Gauntlett’s business relationship with LEGO renders suspect his claims about the toy building blocks’ ability to change the world (2015: 110). But this seems to be beside the point, and Gauntlett would likely view such considerations as the “despairing pessimism” (2015: 5) of a critical media theorist. What matters is that LEGO is designed for building, not making. The products created with LEGO are limited by the patented structure of each individual piece. To be sure, LEGO does lend itself to infinite design combinations, but at the end of

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the day, every design involves building a LEGO product. In an interview with Garnet Hertz, Natalie Jeremijenko goes so far as to say LEGO Mindstorms, for example, does not teach engineering; rather, “it teaches you how to consume LEGO.” “Building” is the word used by Geoffrey Rockwell and Stephen Ramsey in their make-oriented essay “Developing Things: Notes toward an Epistemology of Building in the Digital Humanities” (2012). Summarizing a discussion that took place in the journal Humanist, Rockwell and Ramsay present the following mantra, inspired by Lev Manovich and Willard McCarty: “it is the prototype that makes the thesis” (2012). This curious inversion, which casts the made product as the agent of theory, is precisely the thesis of this book. However, as the word “building” reveals, Rockwell and Ramsey are more interested in screen-based prototypes, assembling code for the sake of creating humanities research interfaces rather than, say, assembling an object out of modeling clay, LEGO, and circuits, for the sake of reflecting critically on digital culture. This is a crucial distinction. For the latter type of project, one might turn to Garnet Hertz, whose critical making methods do not fall neatly under the category of digital humanities. Nevertheless, Hertz plays a feature role in Jentery Sayers’s ambitious anthology Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities (2017). This volume brings together an eclectic crew of self-proclaimed makers, calling into question the identity of the book as a digital humanities project and perhaps calling into question the field of digital humanities itself, which is a question I will not pursue at length here.3 Hertz’s own contribution to the anthology is not an essay, but rather a cheeky page layout designed to look like the cover of Make Magazine. The title of this hacked cover has been adjusted to read Made: Technology on Affluent Leisure Time (Hertz, 2017: 128). The critical tone deployed by Hertz in this culture jam, which was originally a vinyl sticker, speaks to the more general ethos of Making Things and Drawing Boundaries.

Readers who are disappointed that I have not covered this topic can turn to my anthology chapter “Requiem for a Digital Humanist” in After the Human, edited by Sherryl Vint. Or better, readers looking for revisionist approaches to the digital humanities can turn to the groundbreaking work collected in Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities, edited by Elizabeth Losh and Jacqueline Wernimont.

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Countering the “evangelist entrepreneurialism” of maker enthusiasts like Chris Anderson and Mark Hatch, Sayers reveals that his edited collection not only critiques the normative assumptions and effects of popular maker culture—usually white, cisgender, straight, male, and able-bodied—but also conveys different histories and paradigms of making, including those associated with the arts, writing, design, fashion, history, libraries, museums, cultural studies, archaeology, experimental media, feminism, and activism. (2017: 7)

What we have here is neither an equipment list nor a set of prefab building blocks, but a set of intellectual tools that respond boldly to Alan Liu’s claim that “the digital humanities have been oblivious to cultural criticism” (2012: 491). It does seem, however, that Sayers had to stretch the boundaries of the digital humanities to mount this bold response to Alan Liu. The term “critical making” has gained momentum over the past decade, thanks in part to the DIY magazines of Garnet Hertz and a book called The Art of Critical Making produced by faculty at the Rhode Island School of Design, where critical making was a key component of its 2012–17 Strategic Plan. There seems to be some sort of friendly wrestling match over the meaning and origins of critical making, which should be addressed, if only for the sake of putting the competition to bed once and for all. The match may fall along disciplinary lines: Garnet Hertz takes a combination of DIY/fine arts approach, as evidenced in his handmade issues of Critical Making; RISD roots critical making in its illustrious history of design practice; Matt Ratto brings an engineering background to critical making, eschewing possible aesthetic outputs; and many other scholars, artists, and craftspeople have been unwittingly engaging in critical making practices for years, but may not have described their work in this way. Dunne & Raby’s speculative design practices are a case in point. Ratto, Wylie, and Jalbert use the term “critical making” as a general label for “various distinctive practices that link traditional scholarship in the humanities and social sciences to material engagement” (2014: 86). They attempt to nail it down further by describing critical making as “material technoscientific critique” (2014: 86). This focus on critiquing technoscience distinguishes the critical making of Ratto and Hertz from other forms of critical making that may involve some manufacturing and some critique, but not the

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creation of technological objects that self-reflexively critique technology. This is where critical making meets media theory. My own contribution to the discussion comes in the form of Applied Media Theory (AMT) (O’Gorman, 2012, 2015). AMT, which is the guiding practice of the Critical Media Lab, fosters a generative feedback loop between reading, writing, and making that defines a nexus of activity suitable for attentively responding and contributing to technoculture. I throw my own hat into the ring here not to lay claim to the origins of critical making in any way but to demonstrate its capacity to mean many things to many people. That is the sign, perhaps, of something more akin to a vibrant intellectual movement that to a specific academic methodology, and I think this is a rather fruitful way of understanding critical making. As might be expected, Jentery Sayers’s anthology includes a chapter by Matt Ratto, co-written with Gabby Resch, Dan Southwick, and Isaac Record. The chapter is entitled “Thinking as Handwork: Critical Making with Humanistic Concerns.” Inspired in part by Karen Barad’s concept of “posthumanist performativity” (2003), Ratto et al. focus on the problem of conceptualizing “a material-digital engagement that is attentive to institutional politics” (2017: 156). Writing in the context of 3D printing technology, they underscore the “considerable amount of handwork that goes into the digital composition and preparation of printed artifacts” (2017: 156). Given the focus of their chapter, I find it surprising that the authors did not mention Ratto’s collaboration with a NGO and a Ugandan hospital to develop 3D-printed prosthetic limbs. This impressive project vividly exemplifies the entanglement of flesh, data, and other matter that characterize Barad’s notion of “the ontological inseparability of intra-acting agencies” (Barad, 2003: 206). To be fair, Ratto et al.’s project involved the printing of lower limbs, and not hands (for this, see the Victoria Hand Project), so the connection between prosthesis and handwork may not have been obvious. More to the point, since Ratto’s version of critical making prioritizes “processual acts” over evocative objects, it is understandable that he would not want to view the prostheses made in his lab as objects-to-thinkwith (2017: 153). In fact, viewing them in this way might diminish their status as humanitarian assistive devices. Then again, as Sara Hendren insists in “All Technology is Assistive,” yet another chapter in Sayers’s book, originally

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published in WIRED, “We are all getting help from the things we make” (2017: 141). Pointing to the prosthetic nature of human being is one way to counter the concept of assistive technologies as “a separate species of tools designed for people with a rather narrow set of diagnostic ‘impairments—impairments, in other words, that have been culturally designated as needing special attention, as being particularly, grossly abnormal” (2017: 141). To make her case, Hendren asks provocatively, “But are you sure your phone is not a crutch, as it were, for a whole lot of unexamined needs?” (2017: 141). Ultimately, this is how making should be contextualized—at the level of ontology. In Making Media Studies, David Gauntlett draws on the work of anthropologist Tim Ingold to develop the crucial concept of “learning with media, rather than learning about media” (2015: 3). What this jubilant maxim distorts, as Gauntlett smartly acknowledges in a footnote, is Ingold’s theories about co-evolution, about the way in which humans and other things, recalling Barad, become entangled through a process of making. As Ingold puts it himself, Making, then, is a process of correspondence: not the imposition of preconceived form on raw material substance, but the drawing out or bringing forth of potentials immanent in a world of becoming. In the phenomenal world, every material is such a becoming, one path or trajectory through a maze of trajectories. (2013: 31)

Although Ingold would likely object, this brings us back to the rabbit in my office. To think of this rabbit as a maker—above all as a maker of holes—is to radically expand the field of making. Such expansive thinking provokes questions such as the following: “How has this hole changed the way that both the rabbit and I relate to the world?” This is the sort of questioning expected of anyone interested in making media theory.

Media I have already stepped into the bramble of defining media by evoking more than once the nebulous field of media studies. As noted, Kirsten Ostherr narrows her definition of media to include “electronic, screen-based media,” which suits her project well, but might otherwise be considered reductive

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(2017: 4). Ostherr’s conception of media studies includes topics that range from digital visualizations of medical imagery to ethnographic fieldwork that seeks to understand how people in rural Zambia make use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). The contributors to Ostherr’s book are trained in a number of media-oriented fields, including communication studies, science and technology studies, digital art, digital design, digital humanities, and more. Her use of the term “media studies” seems to imply an academic area of interest rather than a specific field, and this reflects her insistence that applied media studies is by necessity a cross-disciplinary mode of research. By contrast, consider David Gauntlett’s well-entrenched concept of media studies, a British-inflected field of research characterized by what he calls a “reasonably stable cluster of subject areas, such as ‘institutions,’ ‘production,’ ‘audiences,’ and ‘texts’” (2015: 1). Traditionally, media studies scholars have turned their attention toward mass media, technological modes of dissemination such as television, radio, and newspapers. Film could also be included in this list, but that would require a detour down the dark corridor of film studies. What matters is the matter of media studies: the media themselves. Media studies scholars, I would argue, should study anything from the innards of a Remington typewriter to data collected from a collection of mommy blogs. My goal here is not to provide a comprehensive taxonomy, but to set up a context for media studies as it relates to the discourse on making. Gauntlett has staked his make-oriented career on what I will sheepishly call new media, specifically the products of Web 2.0, or in his words, “online digital media that enables everyday people to create and share material, and to be inspired by that made by others” (2015: 3). As this statement suggests, Gauntlett wants to define media as internet-abled and screen-based, and he has no interest in disturbing this playground with critical approaches to media that are “troubling and pessimistic” (2015: 2). In Making Media Studies, he is intent on controlling the definition of media, which the book outlines “in a box,” for emphasis: We should look at media not as channels of communicating messages, and not as things. We should look at media as triggers for experiences and for making things happen. They can be places of conversation, exchange,

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and transformation. Media in the world means a fantastically messy set of networks filled with millions of sparks—some igniting new meanings, ideas, and passions, and some just fading away. (2015: 7)

As this statement reveals, Gauntlett is less interested in providing a definition of media than he is in suggesting a certain enthusiastic attunement to it. And by “it,” he means the various networked progeny of the internet. Gauntlett’s boxing in of media is designed to protect it from killjoys who are “happy to show off how ‘critical’” their media scholarship is, while “disregarding the feelings of users of digital communications media, who are regarded as hapless dupes of the system” (2015: 12). While I admire Gauntlett’s commitment to respecting the audience (let alone his commitment to good cheer), this anti-critical statement, a surprising stance from the person who invented critical theory trading cards, not only excludes any definition of media that is not linked to the internet but also forecloses any research that provides a site for critical and contemplative considerations of media technology. Why can’t there be a space for out-of-the-box critical thinking about media that is not inflected with pessimism? As a way of creating a clearing for such creative critical media scholarship, I will return to the rabbit, who has prompted me to ask the following speculative question: How is a freshly chewed rabbit hole like a medium? Perhaps I’m channeling a little too much of the Mad Hatter with this riddle, but it is a serious question nevertheless. The answer lies in a generous understanding of media that transcends digital networks and screens. In The Marvelous Clouds, John Durham Peters asks readers to expand on definitions of media that evoke radio knobs, flat screen televisions, and circuit boards, and consider instead the possibility that “media are our infrastructures of being, the habitats and materials through which we act and are” (2015: 15). In what Peters calls an elemental philosophy, earth, air, fire, and water are all fodder for media scholarship, as are “corn syrup, whale oil, squids, Facebook, jet lag, weather forecasts, and bipedal posture” (2015: 9). As this list reveals, his work has something in common with the litanies that characterize new materialist theories,4 such as the work of Bruno Latour, Graham Harman,

For a comic response to this mania for litanies, see Ian Bogost’s Latour Litanizer, an online application that “uses Wikipedia’s random page API to generate lists of things” (Bogost, 2009).

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Jane Bennett, and others. But he is careful to distance himself from this trend, noting wryly that “a media philosophy of nature does not mean a free-for-all in the object store” (2015: 10). Peters’s goal is not to speculate about the ontology of nonhuman things, although such speculations are not outside of his purview. Rather, his goal is to argue for a concept of media as complex environments. Referencing the theories of Marshall McLuhan, Peters proposes that media are “not only carriers of symbolic freight but also crafters of existence” (2015: 15). This existential conception of media is a far cry from the versions of media studies I have described already in this chapter. Peters carefully aligns himself with a tradition of media studies that does not “see media as objects or institutions,” but rather as “modes of being” (2015: 17). His list of precursors includes McLuhan and his colleague Harold Innis, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Kittler, Bruno Latour, and André Leroi-Gourhan. “These figures,” Peters suggests, take media less as texts to be analyzed, audiences to be interviewed, or industries with bottom lines than as the historical constituents of civilization or even of being itself. They see media as the strategies and tactics of culture and society, as the devices and crafts by which humans and things, animals and data, hold together in time and space. (2015: 18)

There are two immediate dangers here. The first is that this list of precursors is conspicuously white and Western. The second is the problem of Si omnia, nulla. Put less pretentiously, if everything is capable of being a medium (even a rabbit’s straw basket), then what is the point of having a concept of media at all? To address the first danger, I supplement Peters in this book by turning to theories of media that work against colonial, male, cis-gendered, and ableist perspectives. As for the second danger, maybe anything can indeed be a medium. Even a rabbit hole. By leaving this possibility open, scholars of media can be more attentive to the social, cognitive, affective, biological, and other environments in which media technologies move and have their being. To think about media in this capacious way requires a shift from media studies to media theory.

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Theory The very word “theory” is enough to strike fear in the hearts of the most intrepid humanities student, for whom it is likely synonymous with critical theory. No discipline has been spared from the disruption caused by this single word. In fact, one of the best summary definitions of critical theory I have encountered was in The Journal on Dramatic Theory and Criticism. Critical theory, Jon Erickson proposes in his article “Philosophy and Theory,” “is an offshoot of Continental philosophy starting with Hegel, radically reshaped by the suspicions of Marx and Nietzsche, abetted by the Freudian unconscious and removed from rational human will by the linguistic turn of structuralism and poststructuralism” (2001: 143). As the title of the article suggests, Erickson makes the important distinction between philosophy and theory, which I will underscore here by relying on a more infamous theorist, Fredric Jameson. “[T]heory,” Jameson proposes, “begins to supplant philosophy (and other disciplines as well) at the moment it is realized that thought is linguistic or material and that concepts cannot exist independently of their linguistic expression” (2004: 403). This focus on the materiality of thought and language, which is central to critical theory, also comes in handy when trying to understand the theoretical method espoused in this book, a practice that “shifts our methodological practice (or rather the most interesting theoretical problems we have to raise) from individual textual analysis to . . . mode-ofproduction analysis” (Jameson, 2004: 408). Before making the leap to media theory, I would like to dwell for a moment on the literal meaning of theory itself. In The Craft of Ritual Studies, Ronald Grimes explains that the word “theory” originates from the Greek term theorein, which means roughly “to look at” (2014: 166). He aligns the term with Greek theatre: “Theoria is what an audience does when it allows itself to be drawn into rapt identification with deeds transpiring onstage. In its Ancient Greek sense, theoria is not a passive gaze. It is an act of deep receptivity” (2014: 166). While it may seem odd to recruit a ritual studies scholar for this definition rather than a critical or media theorist, there are good reasons for this choice. Grimes goes on to discuss the problem of describing theory as a

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visual modality, a “reductionist prioritizing of sight above the other senses” (2014: 167). Ritual involves conspicuously embodied actions, “feet pounding on the ground”; theory, on the other hand, suggests a “head floating abstractly above a desk” (2014: 167). Grimes tackles this problem by prescribing a form of theory that is physically active. As the title of his book suggests, theorizing might be viewed as a form of craftwork: Thinking of theory construction as a craft reminds us not to romanticize or elevate the activity, and it encourages us to judge it by its fruit. Craftspeople are supposed to have fewer pretensions than artists or scientists about their work. They are supposed to be humble, thinking of what they do as useful labor, not as a calling or expression of genius. (2014: 177)

Certainly, some of Grimes’s formulation might be called into question, such as the valuation of useful labor and the notion that craftspeople should be humble. But the broader message deserves attention. Theory should be understood not as the abstracting gaze of a disembodied observer but rather as an “act of deep receptivity” undertaken by embodied agents (Grimes, 2014: 166). The etymology of the word theory is also explored by Beatrice Fazi in her essay “The Ends of Media Theory” (2017). Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s own examination of the word, Fazi ultimately suggests that theory means “contemplation and speculation” (108). Like Grimes, she is aware that this understanding of the term opens it up to “long-standing critiques of rationalism and logocentrism” (109). And yet, her goal is to reserve a place for theory in the study of media, demonstrating its continued relevance despite the “more hack, less yack”5 mantra of the digital humanities and the broader “emphasis on ‘making’ as a more authentic mode of both individual and public engagement” (108). For Fazi, “doing theory” is not about adopting a distance from the world so as to examine it more objectively; it is about selfreflexivity, “recognizing oneself as different from one’s object of study and yet part of a mutual self-determination” (112). This idea can be brought to light

For a compelling look at the origins and politics of this expression, see Bethany Nowviskie, “on the origin of ‘hack’ and ‘yack’” (2016). Claire Warwick seeks to complicate the supposed binary of this mantra in “Building Theories or Theories of Building? A Tension at the Heart of Digital Humanities.”

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and intensified by engaging with theory in conspicuously embodied ways. Put otherwise, hack and yack need not be mutually exclusive. The themes of embodiment and self-reflection are central to Mark Hansen’s own understanding of theorization, which he discusses at length in the aptly titled article “Media Theory” (2006). For Hansen, media theory is in a unique position because it is a theoretical mode that must take account of its own “infrastructural condition” (297). N. Katherine Hayles provides a good example of how this plays out through the concept of Media Specific Analysis, but it could also be argued that the work of Derrida and even less deconstructive literary critics produce theories based on a self-reflexive understanding of the materiality of media. Put simply, Hansen describes media theory as a form of “embodied reception” (2006: 298), a mode of theorizing that places media “in a transductive relation with the human body” (2006: 299). Not surprisingly, the topic of prosthetics, which I have already discussed briefly, looms large in Hansen’s media theory. Hanson pays tribute to McLuhan’s understanding of media as extensions of the human sensorium, but perhaps more important for Hansen is the work of Bernard Stiegler, who “argues for the co-originarity of technics and the human” (2006: 299). As I have discussed at length elsewhere,6 for Stiegler, there is no human without technics. Through a process of exteriorization that involves tool use, a process that Stiegler calls epiphylogenesis, the human “invents itself in the technical” (Stiegler, 1998: 141). This leads Hansen to suggest that evolution, and therefore human life itself, relies on mediation, which allows him to make the rather vivid claim that the medium is an “environment for life” (2006: 299). This brings to mind not only the sense of medium understood in laboratory science but also John Durham Peters’s elemental media, Jussi Parikka’s geology of media, Sean Cubbitt’s finite media, and other ecocritical approaches to media that are linked directly to the anthropocene. Like most of Hansen’s work, the concepts outlined in his essay “Media Theory” are applied to the reading of a contemporary artwork—in this case, a project called Son-O-House, created by Lars Spuybroek and Edwin van der

Stiegler’s theory of epiphylogenesis helped shape the primary thesis of my book Necromedia (2010).

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Heide. Son-O-House is a public pavilion that provides an interactive space of refuge for people passing through the Eindhoven corridor, which Hansen describes as “the hub of the Netherlands’ information technology industry” (2006: 303). In the words of its creators, Son-O-House is a structure that refers to living and the bodily movements that accompany habit and habitation. Son-O-House is an architectural environment and an interactive sound installation in one. The work is continuously generating new sound patterns activated by sensors picking up actual movements of visitors. (van der Heide: n.d.)

As an article in Arcspace puts it, the pavilion is “an instrument, score and studio at the same time” (Arcspace, n.d.). Given this description, it is easy to see why Hansen might have chosen this specific project to illustrate the concepts outlined in his self-reflexive theory of media. What’s more, Hanson suggests that Son-O-House comprises “a more general example of a (potential) politics of mediation” (2006: 303). What Hansen seems to be pointing to here is a mode of technological production rooted in media theory that challenges and perhaps resists the mainstream production of media artifacts that shape our environments. For this reason, Son-O-House’s location amid a burgeoning tech hub is tactical. While Hansen veers this politics of mediation toward digital media, I would suggest that other media should also be considered. After all, Son-O-House is not just a free-floating web of electronic sensors; it is a physical structure made of stainless steel, inspired by the physical properties of paper, and derived “from a carefully choreographed set of movements of bodies, limbs and hands” (van der Heide: n.d.). Recalling Ronald Grimes’s warnings about viewing theory as a form of high art or an “expression of genius” (2014: 177), I will note that not everyone has the expertise, budget, or influence to create a media theory project on the scale of Son-O-House. This book is for people who want to do media theory by engaging in concrete material practices, but who may not have access to design expertise or expensive materials. While interactive media artists have been working this way for decades, which is why Jentery Sayers smartly introduces his anthology by referencing Laurie Anderson, I want to take the pressure of making art out of the equation. This is why the term making, which could mean art-making

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but might also reference amateur tinkering, seems appropriate. Making media theory might be thought of as a practice that brings together the matterfocused self-reflexivity of media theory and the unpretentious, experimental practices of an amateur hobbyist. This is not the only way of understanding what it means to make media theory, but it’s a good start, and hopefully it will encourage readers to go further down the rabbit hole.

Crapentry: Media Theory as Failure During the process of writing this book, I took some time out to make furniture. More specifically, I made a bed and a table, working in haste and out of necessity. Given that I had little time for this activity, and perhaps even less expertise, the results are not exactly what you might find in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The bed includes a frame composed of basic spruce lumber, simple hardware like screws and L brackets, and a headboard that used to be the door of a shed. I’m not ashamed to say that one might find similar objects on etsy​.co​m. The table is a different story, something more likely to be spotted on the ruthless parody site, regretsy​.co​m. The table came to life while I was preparing to host a house party for my department, and I needed a coffee table that people could use to play a board game or rest their drinks. I scoured my cluttered garage for materials to make the table and came up with a wood beam salvaged from Lake Ontario during a day at the beach and a few wooden fence boards riddled with holes left by powderpost beetles. This seemed like the perfect combination of materials to create a flat surface and supporting legs. There was only one problem: the beam wasn’t long enough to be cut into four legs, unless I was going to make a low-lying table, which would not have suited my needs. I resolved defiantly to make a three-legged table. I’m not talking about a Greek tripod, such as those marvelous automata fashioned by Hephaestus, so-called precursors for autonomous vehicles.7 Nor am I talking

I discuss the tripods of Hephaestus at greater length in Chapter 3.

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about a round-topped table like a teapoy or trespolo, which are great words for crossword puzzle enthusiasts but unsuitable for my non-Victorian living room. My resolution was to defy the laws of physics by building a three-legged table with a rectangular top. The result, not surprisingly, is a slightly tipsy table, and it still stands defiantly in my living room, where it has yet to cause any serious spills or injuries. I refer to this table, with pride, as an example of my very best crapentry. I am not the first to mobilize a discourse on carpentry to think philosophically about things. There is, of course, Heidegger’s well-worn reflections on the hammer. Then there is the carpentry of tool-being that emerged from the sucking vortex of object-oriented ontology.8 In his Guerilla Metaphysics, Graham Harman waxes at length about “the carpentry of things,” which is the subtitle of his book. “What this carpentry speaks of,” says Harman, “is not the physical but the metaphysical way in which objects are joined or pieced together, as well as the internal composition of their individual parts” (2005: 2). Object-oriented ontology can be summed up in the sentence that follows Harman’s definition of the carpentry of things: “But since the vacuum-sealed nature of objects makes direct communication impossible, all conjunction or coupling must occur through some outside mediator” (2005: 2). And so we have a theory of mediation tied directly to causality, or more specifically, vicarious causality, since this theory proposes that there is no way for “substances to interact directly with one another” (2005: 2). As if ignoring this conceit, or perhaps taking it literally, Ian Bogost proposes in his book Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing that philosophers of objectoriented ontology should try their hand at carpentry. “[T]he job of the alien phenomenologist,” Bogost proposes, “might have as much or more to do with experimentation and construction as it does with writing or speaking” (2012: 109). As I have discussed at length elsewhere, Bogost is primarily interested in constructing digital objects, whereas the carpentry I have in mind is more conspicuously embodied.

Tool Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects is the title of Harman’s break-out book on object-oriented ontology. In addition to my discussion of this topic in Chapter 3, see also my critique of the phallocentricity of object-oriented ontology in “Speculative Realism in Chains: A Love Story” (2013).

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What I would like to propose is an alternative to the carpentry of Harman and Bogost. Not a hands-on creation of things for the sake of exploring the ontology of things but a making of media artifacts as a way of exploring mediation itself. Making, in this sense, is not a reckless interaction with things, but, following Steven J. Jackson, an ethics of care, maintenance, and repair that “invites not only new functional but also moral relations to the world of technology” (2014: 231). Above all, I want to resist phallocentric notions of mastery and perfection that dominate the traditions of craftsmanship and carpentry, keeping tools for the shaping of culture out of the hands of amateurs and other outsiders. This conception of craftsmanship is evident, for example, in Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, which might be seen as a macho reboot of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. While I am sympathetic to Crawford’s claims about the poisonous nature of institutional (specifically academic) structures, I am less enthusiastic about his glamorization of male-dominated workplaces. A single example from Crawford will suffice to illustrate this point: There is a real freedom of speech on a job site, which reverberates outwards and sustains a wider liberality. You can tell dirty jokes. Where there is real work being done, the order of things isn’t quite so fragile. . . . Where no appeal to a carpenter’s level is possible, sensitivity training becomes necessary. (2010: 157)

While reference to “the order things” brings to mind Foucault’s critique of institutional hegemony (1989), the “dirty jokes” comment should provoke questions about the gendered nature of what constitutes “real work” for Crawford. Foucault’s The History of Sexuality (1990) would be a more appropriate reading here. Who is at the butt end of those dirty jokes? What is the apparatus sustaining this specific sort of humor that flies in the face of sensitivity training? There could be better mentors on the job site. The will to mastery that is behind male-dominated institutional structures is precisely the target of Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure, where he introduces the concept of “low theory.” Citing Foucault, Halberstam asks, How do we participate in the production and circulation of “subjugated knowledge”? How do we keep disciplinary forms of knowledge at bay? How

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do we avoid precisely the “scientific” forms of knowing that relegate other modes of knowing to the redundant or irrelevant? How do we engage in and teach antidisciplinary knowledge? (2011: 11)

For Halberstam, the answer lies in a commitment to “low theory,” an “investment in counterintuitive modes of knowing such as failure and stupidity; we might read failure, for example, as a refusal of mastery, a critique of the intuitive connections within capitalism between success and profit, and as a counterhegemonic discourse of losing” (2011: 12–13). While Halberstam is obviously interested in failure as a way of deconstructing the hegemony of heteronormative power structures, failure, in the applied mode I am recommending throughout this book, might also be used to challenge the intrinsic technophilia of these phallocentric power structures. Such structures are palpable in the disciplinary divisions of universities, for example, where STEM departments carefully guard their cultural capital. Crapentry, as a modality for designing media artifacts, is an attempt to regain some of that cultural capital while challenging the capitalist, control-obsessed, efficiency-driven design methods that prevail in the shaping of contemporary technoculture. I am painfully aware that there is nothing unique about positioning failure at the center of a tech-oriented methodology. The mantra of “fail better,” clipped obliviously from Samuel Beckett’s prose parody, Worstword Ho, has become a guiding meme of start-up culture. As Mark O’Connell quips in a Slate article, The entrepreneurial fashion for failure with which this polished shard [“fail better”] fits so snugly is not really concerned, as Beckett was, with failure per se—with the necessary defeat of every human endeavor, of all efforts at communication, and of language itself—but with failure as an essential stage in the individual’s progress toward lucrative self-fulfillment. (2014)

More to the point, Daniela K. Rosner and Sarah E. Fox have documented how failure served as the essential ingredient in a mother-run hackerspace in San Francisco, where women used craftwork and community as therapeutic media for overcoming personal senses of failure. Obviously, there are several differences between the existential failures described by Rosner and Fox and the Halberstamian failure I am promoting through the

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Figure 1.1  Crapenter’s table, 2017.

concept of crapentry.9 But there is also common ground here. Both of these failure-centric approaches set out to “destabiliz[e] the category of hacking” and to position this sort of work “as relevant to the acts of ‘world-building’ just beyond it” (2016: 576). If this book adopts the “fail better” mantra, it does so only to acknowledge the full extent of the raw and confounding citation from Beckett: “Try again. Fail again. Better again. Or better worse. Fail worse again. Still worse again. Till sick for good. Throw up for good. Go for good. Where neither for good. Good and all” (2008: 8). Whereas the failure trope of Silicon Valley promotes a logic of progress, a never-lookback logic of the new, the failure of crapentry acknowledges the stupid finitude of being, and revels in the messy entanglement of human and nonhuman things. 

In fact, public criticism of the mother-run hackerspace, including accusations that it excluded childless women, could easily be supported by Halberstam’s critique of normalized reproduction and heteronormativity.

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References Agamben, Giorgio. 2004. The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Barad, Karen. 2003. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs 28.3: 801–31. Beckett, Samuel. 2008. Worstword Ho. London: John Calder. Bogost, Ian. 2009. “Latour Litanizer: Generate Your Own Litanies.” http://bogost​.com​ /blog​/latour​_litanizer/. Bogost, Ian. 2012. Alien Phenomenology or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Crawford, Matthew B. 2010. Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. New York: Penguin. Cubbitt, Sean. 2016. Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Technologies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 2008. The Animal that Therefore I Am. Ed. Marie-Louise Mallet. Trans. David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press. Dunne, Anthony and Fiona Raby. 2013. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Erickson, Jon. 2001. “Philosophy and Theory.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism XVI.1: 143–8. Farman, Jason. 2017. With Kirsten Ostherr, Lisa Parks, Patrick Vonderau, Elizabeth Losh, Bo Reimer, Tara McPherson, Heidi Rae Cooley and Eric Hoyt. “Pleasures and Perils of Hands-On, Collaborative Work.” In Applied Media Studies: Theory and Practice, ed. Kirsten Ostherr. New York: Routledge. Fazi, Beatrice. 2017. “The Ends of Media Theory.” Media Theory 1: 1. http:​/​/med​​iathe​​ oryjo​​urnal​​.org/​​m​-bea​​trice​​-fazi​​-the-​​ends-​​of​-me​​​dia​-t​​heory​/ Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. New York: Vintage. Foucault, Michel. 1989. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Routledge. Gauntlett, David. 2015. Making Media Studies: The Creativity Turn in Media and Communications Studies. New York: Peter Lang. Grimes, Ronald. 2014. The Craft of Ritual Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Hansen, Mark B. N. 2006. “Media Theory.” Theory, Culture & Society 23.2–3: 297–306.

 Making, Media, and Theory 23 Haraway, Donna. 2007. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Harman, Graham. 2005. Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. Chicago: Open Court. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2004. “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of MediaSpecific Analysis.” Poetics Today 25.1: 67–90. Hendren, Sara. 2017. “All Technology Is Assistive.” In Making Things and Drawing Boundaries, ed. Jentery Sayers. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hertz, Garnet. 2012. Critical Making. Vancouver, BC, Self-Published, 2012. Hertz, Garnett and Natalie Jeremijenko. 2015. “Conversations in Critical Making: Engineering Anti-Techno-Fetishism.” CTheory, July 15. http:​/​/cth​​eory.​​net​/c​​theor​​ y​_wp/​​conve​​rsati​​ons​-i​​n​-cri​​tical​​-maki​​ng​-3-​​engin​​eerin​​g​-ant​​i​​-tec​​hno​-f​​etish​​ism/. Hertz, Garnet. 2017. “Project Snapshot: Made: Technology on Affluent Leisure Time.” In Making Things and Drawing Boundaries, ed. Jentery Sayers. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ingold, Tim. 2013. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge. Jackson, Steven. 2014. “Rethinking Repair.” In Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, ed. Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski and Kirsten A. Foot. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Jameson, Fredric. 2004. “Symptoms of Theory or Symptoms for Theory?” Critical Inquiry 40, Winter: 403–8. Liu, Alan. 2012. “Where Is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?” In Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold, 490–510. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. http:​/​/dhd​​ebate​​s​.gc.​​cuny.​​edu​/d​​ebate​​s​/​tex​​t​/20. Losh, Elizabeth and Jacqueline Wernimont. 2019. Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mitchell, Rob. 2010. Bioart and the Vitality of Media. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Nowviskie, Bethany. 2016. “On the Origin of ‘Hack’ and ‘Yack’.” Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. O’Connell, Mark. 2014. “The Stunning Success of ‘Fail Better.’” Slate January 29. http:​/​/www​​.slat​​e​.com​​/arti​​cles/​​arts/​​cultu​​rebox​​/2014​​/01​/s​​amuel​​_beck​​ett​_s​​_ quot​​e​_fai​​l​_bet​​ter​_b​​ecome​​s​_the​​_mant​​​ra​_of​​_sili​​con​_v​​alley​​.html​ O’Gorman, Marcel. 2012. “Broken Tools and Misfit Toys: Adventures in Applied Media Theory.” Canadian Journal of Communication 37.1: 27–42.

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O’Gorman, Marcel. 2013. “Speculative Realism in Chains: A Love Story.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 18: 1. O’Gorman, Marcel. 2015. Necromedia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. O’Gorman, Marcel. 2020. “Requiem for a Digital Humanist.” In After the Human, ed. Sherryl Vint. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ostherr, Kirsten. 2017. “Applied Media Studies: Interventions for the Digitally Intermediated Age.” In Applied Media Studies: Theory and Practice, ed. Kirsten Ostherr. New York: Routledge. Peters, John Durham. 2015. The Marvelous Clouds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Peters, John Durham and Chris Russill. 2017. “Looking for the Horizon: An Interview between John Durham Peters and Chris Russill.” Canadian Journal of Communication 42: 4. Ramsay, Stephen and Geoffrey Rockwell. 2012. “Developing Things: Notes toward an Epistemology of Building in the Digital Humanities.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. http:​/​/dhd​​ebate​​s​.gc.​​cuny.​​edu​/d​​ebate​​s​/​tex​​t​/11. Ratto, Matt, Sara Anny Wylie and Kirk Jalbert. 2014. “Introduction to the Special Forum on Critical Making as Research Program.” The Information Society 30: 85–95. Resch, Gabby, Dan Southwick, Isaac Record, and Matt Ratto. 2017. “Thinking as Handwork: Critical Making with Humanistic Concerns.” In Making Things and Drawing Boundaries, ed. Jentery Sayers. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rhode Island School of Design. 2012. “Strategic Plan Summary for 2012 - 2017: Critical Making /Making Critical.” http:​/​/cam​​pusma​​sterp​​lan​.r​​isd​.e​​du​/wp​​-cont​​ent​/ u​​pload​​s​/201​​5​/09/​​RISD_​​2012-​​2017_​​Cr​iti​​calMa​​king.​​pdf. Rosner, Daniela K. and Sarah E. Fox. 2016. “Legacies of Craft and the Centrality of Failure in a Mother-Operated Hackerspace.” New Media & Society 18.4: 558–80. Sayers, Jentery. 2017, “Introduction: ‘I Don’t Know All the Circuitry’.” In Making Things and Drawing Boundaries, ed. Jentery Sayers. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Son-O-House. 2012. Arcspace. July 30. https​:/​/ar​​cspac​​e​.com​​/feat​​ure​/s​​on​-o-​​​house​/. Stiegler, Bernard. 1998. Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Trans. Richard Beardsworth. Stanford: Stanford UP. The White House. 2014. “Nation of Makers.” https​:/​/ob​​amawh​​iteho​​use​.a​​rchiv​​es​.go​​v​/ nod​​​e​/316​​486.

 Making, Media, and Theory 25 van der Heide, Edwin. n.d. “Son-O-House: Interactive Sounding Architecture.” http://www​.evdh​.net​/sonohouse/. Victoria Hand Project. n.d. https://www​.victoriahandproject​.com/. Warwick, Claire. “Building Theories or Theories of Building? A Tension at the Heart of Digital Humanities.” In A New Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens and John Unsworth, 538–52. West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons.

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Workshop Conductive Play Dough

Socrates: Let us take any common instance; there are beds and tables in the world—plenty of them, are there not? Glaucon: Yes. Socrates: But there are only two ideas or forms of them—one the idea of a bed, the other of a table. Glaucon: True. Socrates: And the maker of either of them makes a bed or he makes a table for our use, in accordance with the idea—that is our way of speaking in this and similar instances—but no artificer makes the ideas themselves: how could he? Glaucon: Impossible. —Plato, Republic, Book X: 596

Preamble How do you make a media theory out of play dough? This question is ludic, if not outright ludicrous, and it could be taken for a joke. But it is designed to provoke a mode of speculation about media that engages both the hands and the head. The punch line can only be accessed by making media theory. In the previous chapter, I mentioned that I made a bed and a table during the process of writing this book and that these pieces of furniture might be considered examples of crapentry. What I unwittingly accomplished in the making of these artifacts was a performance of Plato’s theory of forms. In fact, thoughts of Plato came to me while I was making the three-legged table,

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and this strengthened my resolve to resist adding a stabilizing fourth leg. At some point in the process, I made a commitment to embrace precarity and imperfection. As seen in the epigraph to this section, Socrates refers to beds and tables in his discussion of the ideals. These objects furnish his argument with proof that the work of carpenters is an imperfect imitation of the forms made by God. What might Socrates have said about my three-legged table? Would he cast it aside as the product of a shambling hack, an imitative thing that is not only twice removed from the truth like the work of a carpenter but also thrice removed like the efforts of a painter or poet? Making media theory should begin by challenging conventional notions of truth and the political structures that such notions engender. Any discussion that brings together Plato and a three-legged table would be incomplete without some rumination on the Delphic Oracle, with its sacrificial tripod. In an infamous passage from Laws, Plato makes the tripod a central figure in Socrates’s ongoing disparagement of poets as thrice-removed imitators: That the poet, according to the tradition which has ever prevailed among us, and is accepted of all men, when he sits down on the tripod of the muse, is not in his right mind; like a fountain, he allows to flow out freely whatever comes in, and his art being imitative, he is often compelled to represent men of opposite dispositions, and thus to contradict himself; neither can he tell whether there is more truth in one thing that he has said than in another. (Book IV: 719)

As Nickolas Pappas suggests, this passage is “profound and startling” in that it links the techne (profession or skill) of poets with both imitation and inspiration (2012: 70). “Despite how frequently Plato speaks of divine possession in poets, and despite how often he speaks of poets’ mimêsis, only this paragraph in all his works speaks of both” (2012: 70). What is perhaps most startling here is that, as Pappas puts it in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “the passage puts the poet on a tripod, symbol of Apollo’s priestesses” (2017). There may be a contradiction then in Socrates’s valuation of divine inspiration. If inspiration and the loss of individual control is what, in Socrates’s estimation, elevates the priestess to a holy stature, then why does it debase the poet?

 Conductive Play Dough 29

This contradiction might be viewed as an opportunity. The passage suggests that the poet, like the priestess, is a medium—an agent communicating through his body by means that defy conventional logic. Greg Ulmer has adopted the notion of the oracle to develop what he calls a logic of “conduction,” supplementing other modes of reasoning such as induction, deduction, and abduction. In his book Teletheory, which is an attempt to invent an electronic logic, Ulmer asks, “How should we conduct ourselves in the age of television? Electronically. How might we keep current in education? Electronically” (1989: 63). The playful language here foreshadows Ulmer’s introduction of the word puncept, which is central to his inventive approach to media theory: Conduction, that is, carries the simple form of the pun into a learned extrapolation in theory. When we pose the ancient question of the ground of reason in the context of teletheory we think first of all of the pun that gives us an electronic ground. Ground: a conducting connection between an electric circuit or equipment and the earth or some other conducting body. Reasoning by conduction involves, then, the flow of energy through a circuit. . . . [This] gives us a new definition of truth as “a relationship of conduction between disparate fields of information,” as illustrated here in the conduction between the vocabulary of electricity and that of logic. (1989: 63)

Ulmer provides us with a clue about how to bring Plato and play dough together in a single mode of reasoning that draws on intuition, intellect, and embodiment. Whereas Ulmer relied heavily on the logic of the hyperlink as a functional stand-in for the puncept, I want to rely on the practices of making media theory. As in the work of Marshall McLuhan, punning while making media theory ensures that the practice is committed to a certain short circuiting of discourse and, moreover, that it tries not to take itself too seriously while acknowledging the gap between experience and language, representation, or media. The physicality of making media theory provides a material strategy for working in that space of indeterminacy. In an attempt to enact the logic of conduction here, allow me to jump punceptually from Plato’s Laws to John Law, the author of After Method: Mess

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in Social Science Research. “If much of reality is ephemeral and elusive,” Law suggests, then we cannot expect single answers. If the world is complex and messy, then at least some of the time we’re going to have to give up on simplicities. But one thing is sure: if we want to think about the messes of reality at all then we’re going to have to teach ourselves to think, to practise, to relate, and to know in new ways. (2)

For Law, this means that researchers need to write more like poets or novelists, who “wrestle with the materials of language to make things” (12). “It is the making,” says Law, “the process or the effect of making, that is important. The textures along the way cannot be dissociated from whatever is being made, word by word” (12). While Law is targeting the methods and truth claims of social science in this statement, the idea can be applied to making media theory. Haraway’s injunction to stay with the trouble seems like a suitable companion statement here, as the methods proposed in this book strive to facilitate “the mundane articulating of assemblages through situated work and play in the muddle of messy living and dying” (42). How does one make media theory, knowing fully well that we are technical creatures capable of both careful world-building and devastating destruction? The conductive play-dough recipe provided here will no doubt result in a sticky mess (indeed, writing a recipe to combine dough with electricity forced me to encounter the provisional and contingent nature of language and representation). Moreover, the elastic sculptures will continue to change shape long after the makers’ hands have finished with them. In fact, after a few days, the dough will begin to grow mouldy and morph into a radically other physical state. As the sculptors work through their projects and get messy, I would encourage them to stay with the unexpected outcomes that foil their initial plans or even to work without a plan until something takes shape. Stephanie Springgay and Stephanie E. Truman, speculating about new methods of scholarship, ask researchers to embrace the “immersion, friction, strain, and quivering unease of doing research differently” (1). Inspired by the work of Brian Massumi and Erin Manning, they describe research occurring

 Conductive Play Dough 31

“in the middle of a mess of relations not yet organized in terms like subject/ object” (2). In the words of Erin Manning, “Neither the knower or the known can be situated in advance of the occasion’s coming to be—both are immanent to the field’s composition” (Manning, 30 in Springgay and Truman, 3). Springgay and Truman use the example of the collage to describe this sort of research practice, “a thinking-making-doing, where collaging and thought exist simultaneously” (3). The play-dough sculptors thrown into the workshop outlined below should keep in mind these theories of ontogenesis, questioning which is the sculptor and which is the sculpted, which is the maker and which is the made.

Instructions Make a batch of conductive dough out of basic ingredients and combine this medium with LED lights to model a media theory. As you make the dough, consider the chemical processes at play. The salt in conductive dough provides

Figure 2.1  Conductive play dough with LED lights, 2019.

Making Media Theory

32

sodium and chloride ions that mediate the flow of electricity. The sugar used in insulating dough resists the flow of electricity and provides insulation between circuits made of conductive dough. Insulating dough helps ensure that a short circuit does not occur. Step 1: Conductive Dough (adapted from the recipe by Squishy Circuits) Ingredients 1 cup distilled water (it is crucial for water to be distilled) 1 + 1/2 cups flour 1/4 cup salt 3 tbsp. cream of tartar (or 9 tbsp. of lemon juice) 1 tbsp. vegetable oil 3 drops (or more) food coloring −− Mix water, 1cup of flour, salt, cream of tartar, vegetable oil, and food coloring in a medium sized pot. −− Cook over medium heat and stir continuously. The mixture will begin to boil and start to form chunks. −− Keep stirring the mixture until the ingredients form a ball in the center of the pot. −− Once a ball forms, remove it from the pot and place it on a lightly floured surface. −− Slowly knead the remaining 1/2 cup of flour into the ball until it has reached a consistency suitable for modeling by hand. Step 2: Insulating Dough Ingredients Note: Do not add food coloring to this batch. 1 + 1/2 cup flour 1/2 cup sugar 3 tbsp. vegetable oil 1/2 cup water −− Mix flour, sugar, and oil in a pot or large bowl, setting aside ½ cup flour to be used later.

 Conductive Play Dough 33

−− Add one tbsp of water and stir. −− Repeat this step until a majority of the water is absorbed by the mixture and the dough until it has a sticky, dough-like texture. −− Knead the remaining 1/2 cup flour into the dough until a desired texture is reached. More flour can be added if the dough is too sticky for modeling. Step 3: Lights and Action Ingredients 1 or more mini single LED light(s) of any color 1 3 volt power supply with connecting wires 2 AA batteries Important: In general, the voltage of a power supply should not exceed the voltage of the LED it is powering. For example, if the LED is 1.7 V, a good power supply might be 1.5 V, or the equivalent of one AA battery. Note, however, that the conductive dough will act as a resistor when placed between the LED and the power supply, which is why a higher voltage of power supply is recommended here. −− Strip the ends of the power supply wires to create leads that can be inserted into the dough. −− Place the appropriate batteries into the power supply. −− Insert the positive lead into one piece of conductive dough. −− Insert the negative lead into a second piece of conductive dough. −− Use insulating dough to separate the two portions of conductive dough. This will help avoid a short circuit. −− Insert the positive end of the LED (long wire) into the dough with positive wire. −− Insert the negative end of the LED into the dough with the negative wire. −− Add additional LED lights as desired, ensuring that you follow the flow of electricity you have established in your dough circuit. Form the dough into the shape of a media theory, keeping in mind the discussion questions below.

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Discussion 1. Explain how your dough sculpture represents a specific concept from media theory, such as the word media itself. The LED in your sculpture should inform this definition. Consider using puns to propose a title for your sculpture. 2. Conduct research on the physics and chemistry behind this conductive dough project, and develop a media theory based on your research. 3. Reflect on what you might add to the recipe, instead of food coloring to differentiate the conductive dough from the insulating dough. How might this additive supplement the theoretical or political meaning of your dough sculpture? Note: be careful not to use an additive that will alter the conductivity of the dough, unless that is your intention. 4. Keeping in mind Karen Barad’s notion of intra-agency, reflect on your entanglement with the sticky dough. Attempt to describe this experience sensually, and imagine the play dough as having agency rather than simply being a thing manipulated by humans. 5. Describe your play-dough object in terms of technical failure, guided by both the work of Jack Halberstam and by a broad conception of the word technics. In doing so, consider the ethics of appropriating Halberstam’s queer theory for purposes that do not relate specifically to gender politics.

References Barad, Karen. 2003. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs 28.3: 801–31. Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Law, John. 2004. After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. New York: Routledge. Manning, Erin. 2016. The Minor Gesture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

 Conductive Play Dough 35 Pappas, Nickolas. 2012. “Plato on Poetry: Imitation or Inspiration?” Philosophy Compass 7.10: 669–78. Pappas, Nickolas. 2017. “Plato’s Aesthetics.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition). Ed. Edward N. Zalta. https​:/​/pl​​ato​.s​​tanfo​​rd​.ed​​u​/arc​​ hives​​/fall​​2017/​​entri​​es​/pl​​ato​-​a​​esthe​​tics/​. Plato. “Laws.” Trans. Benjamin Jowett. The Internet Classics Archive. http://classics​.mit​ .edu​/Plato​/laws​.html. Plato. “Republic.” Trans. Benjamin Jowett. The Internet Classics Archive. http:​/​/cla​​ssics​​ .mit.​​edu​/P​​lato/​​repub​​lic​​.h​​tml. Springgay, Stephanie and Sarah Truman. 2017. “On the Need for Methods beyond Proceduralism: Speculative Middles, (In)Tensions, and Response-Ability in Research.” Qualitative Inquiry 24.3): 203–14. Thomas, Ann-Marie and Matthew Schmidtbauer. n.d. “Recipes: Making Dough for Your Squishy Circuits.” http://squishycircuits​.com​/recipes/. Ulmer, Gregory. 1989. Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video. New York: Routledge.

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3

In Defense of Uselessness

In such a state, nothing useless exists. —Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society The problem with a rectangular three-legged table or a conductive play-dough sculpture is that someone is bound to proclaim it as useless. However, this proclamation would require the accuser to ignore the broad context of the object’s creation, restricting the definition of use to that which can be measured empirically or produced by a discrete algorithm. This chapter confronts the question of uselessness head-on, going so far as to suggest that making media theory should involve an unabashed embrace of uselessness. This embrace is neither a wily provocation nor an adolescent cry for attention; it is a practical matter, one of great political urgency. In a technological society, to borrow Ellul’s term, someone must stand up for uselessness. In his 2016 book La mélodie du tic-tac et autres bonnes raisons de perdre son temps, Pierre Cassou-Noguès provides a literary and intellectual history of how to waste time or, in his words, comment traîner—how to traîne. Smoking, daydreaming, and listening intently to the tick-tock of a clock: these are all examples he gives of traîner, which is a very difficult word to translate. Slacking or loafing don’t quite fit the bill. As Cassou-Noguès wrote to me in an e-mail conversation, “I am not sure there is an English equivalent to ‘traîner.’ It would be at the center of the constellation [that involves] procrastination (not answering an e-mail right now), lounging (doing nothing at home), hanging around (teenagers in the street), going slow (on a bicycle)” (2018). More than a discourse on laziness, this speculative book transforms traîner into a political

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act, and Cassou-Noguès ultimately calls for a movement to preserve the right to traîne. Avons-nous toujours traîné et continuerons-nous à traîner? Je n’en suis pas certain. “Traîner” est un phénomène moderne, corrélative d’un certain stade de la technologie, un temps perdu dans une économie des machines et qui tend peut-être à disparaître aujourd’hui. Où d’autres machines se développent qui ne nous laisseront bientôt plus traîner. Il faudrait alors défendre notre droit à traîner. (2018: 17) Have we always traîned and will we continue to traîne? I’m not sure. Traîning is a modern phenomenon that correlates with a certain technological stage, a lost time in an economy of machines, and today it may well be on the verge of disappearance. Or other machines will emerge to keep us from traîning. We must therefore defend our right to traîne. (2013, translation mine)

Cassou-Noguès’s words seem to address Jacques Ellul’s ultimate conviction that in a techno-capitalist state, “nothing useless exists.” At the risk of falling down an inane philosophical rabbit hole, allow me to suggest that uselessness is a very difficult state to achieve. Take, for example, the Ultimate Machine proposed by Marvin Minsky and ultimately fabricated by Claude Shannon while they were both working at Bell Labs in 1952. Minsky describes the apparatus as a small box with a single toggle switch on top. When the switch is flipped, a prosthetic hand emerges from the box and flips it back off. Minsky’s reference to the box as the Ultimate Machine can only be taken as irony. As he revealed in a 2011 video interview, “Somehow this machine got a lot of publicity, because most people thought that it was perhaps the most useless machine ever made so far” (2011). But indeed, there is something “ultimate” about this machine, which points to a final and fundamental principle: as many observers have suggested, Minsky’s useless box may be viewed as a machine that thinks for itself, an embodiment of the very field that Minsky pioneered at Bell Labs: Artificial Intelligence (AI). Minsky’s Ultimate Machine is useful then as a model. But such a view is only possible if one ascribes a certain intelligence to this very simple gizmo. And that requires a leap of the imagination. This is where Arthur C. Clarke comes in. He, more than anyone, has played a crucial role in shaping the narrative and legacy of the Ultimate Machine. After encountering the useless box on

 In Defense of Uselessness 39

Shannon’s desk, Clarke wrote the following: “The psychological effect, if you do not know what to expect, is devastating. There is something unspeakably sinister about a machine that does nothing—absolutely nothing—except switch itself off ” (1974: 159). It remains a mystery why Clarke saw the box as sinister. Did it strike him as an uncanny breach of the line between the living and nonliving? Was it simply that this stubborn machine seemed to be resisting human will? Or was it both? The concept of a machine that turns itself off was not new when Arthur C. Clarke encountered the useless box for the first time. Consider, for example, the bi-metallic thermostat or the steam engine governor, both of which served as examples of negative feedback in Norbert Weiner’s treatise on cybernetics. But what Clarke observed in the Ultimate Machine was more than control and feedback; he thought he was witnessing something sinister, a machine with its own volition. In fact, he actually claimed that the box nearly drove people mad: “distinguished scientists and engineers have taken days to get over it,” he wrote (1974: 159). “Some retired to professions which still had a future, such as basket-weaving, bee-keeping, truffle-hunting, or water-divining” (1974: 159). Perhaps the Ultimate Machine is simply an object of transference for Clarke’s lack of understanding about the field of AI that Shannon was developing. As Marvin Minsky put it in a paper entitled “Matter, Mind and Models,” “If one thoroughly understands a machine or a program, he finds no urge to attribute ‘volition’ to it. If one does not understand it so well, he must supply an incomplete model for explanation” (1996). What is most pertinent here about Clarke’s tale of the Ultimate Machine driving scientists to distraction is that it addresses, if only obliquely, the usefulness of different types of activities, be they mathematics, tinkering, basket weaving, or truffle hunting.1 Perhaps ironically, designing useless machines is precisely the sort of usefully useless activity that Claude Shannon was supposed to be undertaking at Bell Labs, which still supports curiosity-

The reference to truffle hunting brings to mind the French word glander, which is similar in meaning to traîner. As Pierre Cassou-Noguès explained to me in a private conversation, the word glander comes from the activity of bringing pigs into the forest to eat acorns. The term also has sexual connotations that would require a less topical digression.

1

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driven research to this day. In his book Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent, Douglas Coupland describes his own visit to Bell Labs, where he observed a small gathering of scientists tackling the complexity of how to win a hot dog eating contest. The point of Coupland’s vignette is to illustrate how seemingly useless undertakings might lead to earth-shattering transformations. As Coupland puts it, “this is just the sort of problem scientifically gifted people take and solve, and then they extrapolate what they learned from the process and convert the knowledge into a useful project” (2014: 27–8). Creating a space for useless pursuits has proven to be a good idea. Bell Labs’ commitment to supporting pure research has led to the invention of the transistor, the laser, information theory, the Unix operating system, and the programming languages C and C++. Bell Labs is not the only institution that has famously supported what might be called useless research. In 1939, the educational reformer Abraham Flexner published an article entitled “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge” in Harper’s Magazine, in which he defended the work of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. Founded in 1930, the Institute has fostered the work of Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel, Erwin Panofsky, and Clifford Geertz, among others. Wary of the growing specialization of knowledge, Flexner asks in his essay whether the “conception of what is useful may not have become too narrow to be adequate to the roaming and capricious possibilities of the human spirit” (1939: 544). He provides several examples of how pure research, unrestricted by the constraints of a specific disciplinary field, has led to groundbreaking results, including the work of Clerk Maxwell and Heinrich Hertz on the mystery of electromagnetic waves. This work allowed Marconi to invent the radio, and Flexner questions where the credit is due. “Hertz and Maxwell could invent nothing,” he wrote, “but it was their useless theoretical work which was seized upon by a clever technician and which has created new means for communication, utility, and amusement by which men whose merits are relatively slight have obtained and earned millions” (1939: 544).2

The same point was made by Lewis Mumford in Technics and Civilization in 1934. I want to thank Ghislain Thibault for pointing this out.

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“Who were the useful men,” Flexner asks. “Not Marconi, but Clerk Maxwell and Heinrich Hertz. Hertz and Maxwell were geniuses without thought of use. Marconi was a clever inventor with no thought but use” (545). A central problem with Flexner’s treatise on pure research and the value of theoretical work comes to light when we consider who directed the Institute for Advanced Study from 1947 to 1966: J. Robert Oppenheimer. Known for his work on the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer provides a stellar example of how supposedly useless theoretical knowledge—such as the knowledge of how neutron irradiated uranium can produce radioactive barium—can lead to catastrophic forms of utilitarianism. When Flexner wrote the Harper’s article in 1939, he could not have anticipated how the supposedly useless work of his colleagues at Princeton would lead to the mass destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki only six years later. But Flexner was not entirely naïve, and he did anticipate the potential for pure research to be applied in warfare. Referring to such discoveries as dynamite and the airplane, Flexner suggests, “the folly of man, not the intention of the scientists, is responsible for the destructive use of the agents employed in modern warfare” (1939: 546). Untrammeled by this nagging detail, however, Flexner concludes his essay by describing the Institute as “a paradise for scholars who, like poets and musicians, have won the right to do as they please and who accomplish most when enabled to do so” (1939: 552). Flexner’s comparison of scientists to poets and musicians calls for closer scrutiny. In his aptly titled book The Usefulness of the Useless, Nuccio Ordine, inspired by Flexner’s essay, argues that “together with humanists, scientists have also played, and still do, a most important role in the battle against the dictatorship of profit, to defend the liberty and gratuitousness of knowledge and research” (2017: 7). Ordine’s book is a small encyclopedic catalog of the value of uselessness as prescribed by such luminaries as Ovid, Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Borges, and more. Like Cassou-Noguès, Ordine understands uselessness as a form of resistance, “an antidote to the barbarism of profit that has gone so far as to corrupt our social relations and our most intimate affections” (2017: 23). But there is a difference between a useless poem and a useless science experiment. In fact, the very thought of a “useless science experiment” seems almost unthinkable in today’s research climate,

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where science experiments are always conducted in an innovation ecology designed to shepherd research toward the market.3 My own institution, the University of Waterloo, prides itself on the efficiency of its innovation system, as evidenced in part by its massive investment in STEM-based, student-run tech start-ups. You would be hard pressed to find such investments in the arts and humanities, which by comparison, are relatively useless, immune to so-called innovation. At the risk of digressing, I will add that the problem of excluding the arts and humanities from the innovation ecosystem was illustrated quite vividly when the former president of my university chose the following line as our institution’s innovation-or-bust motto: “You see things; and you say ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say ‘Why not?’” The president was likely inspired by Robert F. Kennedy’s use of this line at his brother’s eulogy, thereby overlooking the fact that these words actually come from George Bernard Shaw’s play Back to Methuselah, where they are uttered by the serpent in the Garden of Eden. While I am intrigued by the possibility of a university with a satanic motto (William Blake would be impressed), this unreflective decontextualization of Shaw’s dramatic prose might help explain why today, more than ever, the humanities are needed to balance the unchecked impulses of the innovation ecology. With this in mind, Part 2 of Ordine’s book is appropriately titled “The University as Company, the Student as Client.” He cites at length Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, written between 1835 and 1840. A key feature of de Tocqueville’s evisceration of the Land of the Free is his observation that in this new capitalist democracy, there is no time for theory. “[H]ardly anyone in the United States,” he proclaims, “devotes himself to the essentially theoretical and abstract portion of human knowledge” (2013). Instead, people embroiled in what de Tocqueville calls an “active life” and devote themselves

There are some exceptions to this rule, notably the rise of “citizen science” and the practices of bioart. On the latter topic, see Robert Mitchell, Bioart and the Vitality of Media. I have already quoted Mitchell in Chapter 1, and I will do so again here at the risk of being redundant. Bioart, like making media theory, “requires pulling, bending, and folding these tools, techniques, and relationships [of STEM disciplines] into other spaces, which in turn produces new wrinkles in a commercially oriented ‘innovation ecology’” (13).

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to whatever knowledge is useful in the moment for the purpose of economic gain (2013). Inevitably, this just-in-time mode of intellect impacts how science is conducted: In the ages in which active life is the condition of almost everyone, men are therefore generally led to attach an excessive value to the rapid bursts and superficial conceptions of the intellect; and, on the other hand, to depreciate below their true standard its slower and deeper labors. This opinion of the public influences the judgment of the men who cultivate the sciences; they are persuaded that they may succeed in those pursuits without meditation, or deterred from such pursuits as demand it. (2013)

For de Tocqueville, an antidote for the unreflective, unrestrained life of capitalists is the meditative life of humanists, who don’t limit themselves to books “that are easy to obtain, which are speedily read, and which require no scholarly investigation to be understood” (2013). It is worth recalling here that the concept of theory, which can be traced back to Greek theatre, is rooted in the idea of meditative thinking, or more precisely, contemplation and speculation. As I suggest in Chapter 1, citing the work of ritual studies scholar Ronald Grimes, Theoria is “what an audience does when it allows itself to be drawn into rapt identification with deeds transpiring onstage” (2014: 166). Theoria “is not a passive gaze. It is an act of deep receptivity” (2014: 166). In technocapitalism, there is no time for deep receptivity, no time for theory. What Ordine quite clearly demonstrates in his book is that the concept of uselessness, like de Tocqueville’s concepts of “labor” and “activity,” is of course culturally constructed. If today, the arts and humanities are seen as useless, it is because they do not possess the necessary cultural capital to be considered valuable. But this might be precisely what makes the arts and humanities incredibly vital and ultimately useful. By maintaining a theoretical distance from the innovation ecosystem, the arts and humanities provide a safe space from which to examine the potential impacts of research conducted in the privileged STEM ecology. It is for this very reason that media theory and the philosophy of technology are especially important in today’s rampant technoculture. What I am proposing, then, is a careful and intimate encounter

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between the useless humanities and the utility-driven innovation ecology. This proposal serves as an alternative to the trend of appending ethics committees to tech companies. Moreover, I am not talking about the STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math) movement, which might be seen as a pitiful attempt to transform the arts into something useful by wedging an awkward A into the more powerful and lucrative STEM disciplines. Those in the A disciplines must maintain their uselessness, even as they rub shoulders with STEM. The arts and humanities, ultimately, should not be an afterthought or a charity case, but, rather, they should be positioned at the root of STEM, so to speak. The main challenge for arts and humanities researchers lies in how to obtain crucial adjacency to STEM, given that reflective and critical research practices might risk a catastrophic slowdown of the innovation ecology. Don Ihde quite aptly anticipates this problem in his book Bodies in Technology, where he writes, A first response to this proposal might well be: but who wants any philosophers among the generals? the research and development team? the science policy boards? The implication is, of course, that philosophers will simply “gum up the works.” And the excuse will be that philosophers are not technical experts, and any normative considerations this early will certainly slow things down—a sort of Amish effect. Of course, the objections in turn imply the continuance of a status quo among the technocrats, who remain free to develop anything whatsoever and free from reflective considerations. (2002: 105)

In spite of Ihde’s cynicism, making media theory can be a way to actively promote an agenda that injects “reflective considerations” into the design processes of technological development. To bring this point home, I will examine yet another useless box, an object-to-think-with designed to gum up the works of AI enthusiasts. In a blog post entitled “AI Behaving Badly,” Matthew Biggins looks at the problems that can arise when speculative AI research is applied in what seems to be more useful contexts. His examples include the following: Microsoft’s Twitter-bot Tay, which almost immediately devolved into a sexist Hitler supporter; autonomous vehicles that must decide which human beings to spare

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Figure 3.1  Outa-Spaceman, Knife-Wielding Tentacle, 2019. Courtesy of OutaSpaceman.

in a crash; and military AI that threatens to start another arms race (2018). In order to illustrate the problem that each of these examples embodies, Biggins embedded a video into his blog post of the Knife-Wielding Tentacle developed by a mysterious tinkerer known as Outa-Spaceman (2016). This is a box containing a microcontroller and servo motor that power a mechanical pink tentacle wielding a Swiss army knife. Once the box is turned on, the armed tentacle flails about erratically, and there is no way to turn it off without risking injury. This, by all means, is a useless box in its own right. It is also singlemindedly murderous. If Arthur C. Clarke thought Shannon’s box was sinister, what would he think of Outaspace-Man’s creation? 

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I like to think of the Knife-Wielding Tentacle as a contemporary reincarnation of Minsky and Shannon’s Ultimate Machine. But the tentacle seems to be rooted in the speculative uselessness of arts and humanities practices more than in the speculations of science. It is a product of theoretical reflection, a paranoiac object that is just weird enough to provoke thought about the radical otherness of machines equipped with AI.4 Whereas the Ultimate Machine of Minsky and Shannon conjures up images of a hidden autonomous agent, the less subtle Knife-Wielding Tentacle brings us in full contact with a horrifying machinic other, a cephalopod with a relentless computer brain. The murderous tentacular box appears on the scene just as contemporary media theorists seem to have adopted the figure of the cephalopod as a darling creature. In fact, Murderous Tentacular Box could easily pass for the title of a Eugene Thacker book. Perhaps the greatest cephalopodophile of all is Jaron Lanier, who confesses to his own “cephalopod envy” that has resulted in many “effusive rants” about the creatures (179). According to Lanier, “cephalopods are the strangest smart creatures on Earth. They offer the best standing example of how truly different intelligent extraterrestrials (if they exist) might be from us, and they taunt us with clues about potential futures for our own species” (188). Cephalopods are useful, then, as a way of thinking about radical otherness, which explains the horror provoked by such infamous tentacular creatures as H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu. There is no horror for Lanier, however, because his anti-humanist perspective liberates him from anthropocentric tendencies that might otherwise lead to a fear of being replaced by autonomous technologies—or by giant squids for that matter. As far as Lanier is concerned, “By all rights, cephalopods should be running the show and we should be their pets” (2010: 188). Whereas Lanier admires cephalopods for the pixel-like chromatophors that allow the creatures to morph, a feature he likens to “post-symbolic communication” (2010: 179), I would suggest that the lure of the cephalopod for media theorists is also related to its multiple appendages. Enthusiasm

For example, in an article written for Popular Science, Kelsey D. Atherton uses the knife-wielding tentacle as an opportunity to ruminate on the future of AI. Half-jokingly, he asks the following existential question: “Will robots ever really understand the human condition? Is it possible, for example, for a machine to know both terrible purpose and utter futility at the same time?” (2015).

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about cephalopods may be a symptom of what Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra have identified as the prosthetic impulse, a technocultural conception of the “prosthesis as both a literal, material, and phenomenological concern and a metaphorical, theoretical, and philosophical one” (2006: 256–66). Moreover, David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder have claimed that “essayists on postmodern science and culture such as N. Katherine Hayles, Avital Ronell, and Donna Haraway deploy disabled bodies as proof of our fascination with ‘cyborglike’ prosthetic enhancement” (1997: 8). At its best, the prosthetic impulse acknowledges the material, biopolitical nature of prostheticity, including the way in which it embodies structures of power that determine the boundary between ability and disability. At its worst, perhaps, the prosthetic impulse stimulates male fantasies of technological empowerment, the selfexpanding aspirations of a technical creature tragically constrained by its mortal coil. As John Durham Peters suggests in The Marvelous Clouds, the squid serves as a “kind of masculinist counterpart to feminist dolphins” (2015: 97). For evidence, he points to a wistful statement from the admirably weird book Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, in which Vilém Flusser ruminates on the vampire squid’s mysterious third phallus: “If only,” muses the envious Czech, “we could grasp the world with a penis” (2012: 20). Flusser’s wish might easily be granted if he had access to a 3D printer, an Arduino microcontroller, a servomotor, and basic hardware that could be assembled to bring such a prosthesis to life. I, for one, hope that this particular critical making project does not come to fruition. Rather than look at the cephalopod as a penis-envy machine or the defamiliarizing figure of a transhumanist future—be it horrifying or delightful—I would like to consider how this creature’s characteristics can help supplement the tactics of uselessness developed in this chapter. In particular, I’m interested in how cephalopods might inform a practice of making media theory that intervenes critically in the production of technoculture. Put otherwise, how might practitioners of critical, reflective, otherwise useless disciplines, engage the technocratic apparatus? The answer: with cephalopodal cunning. Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant examine cephalopods at length in their book Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society. Like Flusser,

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Peters, and Lanier, they acknowledge the radical otherness of this class of sea creature. Cuttlefish, for example, “have neither front nor rear, they swim sideways with their eyes in front and their mouth behind, their heads haloed by their waving feet” (1978: 38). As for the octopus, “it is elusive, its mēchanē enables it to merge with the stone to which it clings” (1978: 38). This skill of the octopus, as described by Oppian in his Treatise on Fishing from the second century ad, is held up by Detienne and Vernant as a model of the intellectual quality known as mētis, loosely translated as cunning. More specifically, Mētis is “a type of intelligence and of thought, a way of knowing; it implies a complex but very coherent body of mental attitudes and intellectual behavior which combine flair, wisdom, forethought, subtlety of mind, deception, resourcefulness, vigilance, opportunism, various skills, and experience acquired over the years” (1978: 3). Mētis is especially useful in situations that are “transient, shifting, disconcerting and ambiguous” (1978: 4). It is for this reason that we might look to the cephalopod not as a figure of defamiliarization, but as an exemplar for those who find themselves in need of cunning when faced by systems of power that are “shifting, disconcerting and ambiguous” (1978: 4). Mētis is essential for those who want to make media theory have an impact on the broader technoculture, specifically on the STEM disciplines. Making media theory, by means of careful reflection and cunning intelligence, can be productively disruptive, moving obliquely within an ecosystem designed for the more straightforward shark. Finally, recalling the octopus-stone assemblage, making media theory requires a concerted attunement to the curious entanglements of being. Fortunately, cephalopods are not the only creatures that possess mētis. In fact, the word itself comes from an oft-ignored mythological figure: Mētis, the mother of Athena. This goddess’s lack of celebrity may be due the fact that her role was short-lived. After conceiving her first child with Zeus, he transformed her into a fly and swallowed her whole. He did so out of fear of a prophesy that her children would be more powerful than Zeus himself. Zeus’s cruelty served him well; by consuming Mētis, he ensured that “Not a single cunning trick can be plotted in the universe without first passing through his mind” (Detienne and Vernant, 1978: 14). Still, the impregnated Mētis was able to mete out revenge, so to speak, by crafting armor while inside Zeus. This caused

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him unbearable headaches until Hephaestus cut open his skull and liberated the fully grown and armored Athena. It is not surprising to find Hephaestus in this tale of craftsmanship. Known for making both the infamous shield of Achilles and the chains that bound Prometheus to his rock, Hephaestus is revered for his ability to handle the elements and to extract wondrous inventions out of fire. His list of inventions even includes what some have conjectured might be artificially intelligent automata. They appear in Book XVIII of the Iliad, when Thetis, the mother of Achilles, appears at the door of Hephaestus to request a shield for her son. In Homer’s words, Hephaestus “went to the doorway limping. And in support of their master moved his attendants. These are golden, and in appearance like living young women. There is intelligence in their hearts, and there is speech in them and strength, and from the immortal gods they have learned how to do things. These stirred nimbly in support of their master” (Iliad XVIII: 415ff). In the same passage, we learn that Hephaestus had also created a sort of robotic tripod. When Thetis approaches “the god of the dragging footsteps,” he is “working on twenty tripods which were to stand against the wall of his strong-founded dwelling. And he had set golden wheels underneath the base of each one so that of their own motion they could wheel into the immortal gathering, and return to his house: a wonder to look at” (Iliad XVIII: 370ff). As a god known for his physical disability, Hephaestus was certainly a cunning master of mobility. Detienne and Vernant suggest that “In order to dominate shifting, fluid powers such as fire, winds and minerals which the blacksmith must cope with, the intelligence and mētis of Hephaestus must be even more mobile and polymorphic than these” (1978: 272–3). The polymorphism of Hephaestus, like that of the cephalopods already discussed, is expressed in his physical characteristics. Hephaestus is reported by Antigonus to have been “mutilated in both legs” or “mutilated in the lower limbs” (Detienne and Vernant, 1978: 271). In ancient vase paintings, he is depicted with feet pointing inwards. There are many variations on the story of how the feet came to be inverted. What is certain, however, is that Hephaestus’ so-called mutilation actually served as a symbol of his admirable mētis. For this reason, Hephaestus has been compared, in yet another reference to his polymorphism, to a crab, the armored species that Hesychius called “sons of Hephaestus” in his fifth-

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century lexicon. As Detienne and Vernant put it, “All the characteristics of a crab—its twisted legs, its oblique gait, the double and opposite directions in which it moves—are unmistakeably reminiscent of the most famous of Greek blacksmiths, Hephaestus, the polumētis god” (1978: 270).5 At this point, I must make a confession. My first introduction to Hephaestus as the polumētis god was not in Detienne and Vernant, but in an essay by my colleague Jay Dolmage. In “‘Breathe Upon Us an Even Flame’: Hephaestus, History, and the Body of Rhetoric,” Dolmage draws on crookfooted Hephaestus to tease out some key themes in critical disability studies, including the idea that normalcy is a “useful fiction that marks out unwanted elements while reinforcing the hegemony of the dominant group” (2006: 123). Dolmage situates mētis, which “values bodily difference as generative of meaning” (2006: 122), as a mode of resistance to the “useful fiction” of normalcy. In the case of Hephaestus, for example, “his disability is his ability” (2006: 122). Dolmage ultimately concludes his essay by noting that historians and teachers of rhetoric must both “use mētis” to challenge prevailing rhetorics of normalcy and also “recognize our students’ cunning intelligence,” which requires acknowledging the complex ways in which knowledge is embodied. The story of Hephaestus serves as a vehicle, then, for understanding the “connection between our history and changing ideas about normalcy” (2006: 123). It is here that I will make the precarious leap, encouraged by Dolmage himself, between disability studies and the discourse on uselessness I have been developing in this chapter. The history of disability can be characterized as a broad societal power struggle shaped by discursive practices. Out of this struggle there emerges such distinctions as abled versus disabled, normal versus abnormal, and, most pertinently here, useful versus useless. As Sunny Taylor puts it in an essay on power, labor, and disability, “Western culture has a very limited idea of what being useful to society is” (2004). Wary of the danger of

In Detiene and Vernant, the comparison of Hephaestus to a crab is preceded by a long section on seals, which are associated with Telchines, “metal workers with the power of the evil eye, magicians who are invariably malignant and who are primordial powers” (259). According to traditions from Rhodes, the Telchines had fins, but neither arms nor legs. Their strength was in their polymorphism, combining “elements of the sea and the earth equally,” acting “as mediators between the two” (263).

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trivializing the material reality of disabled bodies, I will suggest that the arts and humanities are often perceived as the disabled kin of the more culturally revered and economically profitable STEM disciplines. I will resist the urge to develop this dangerous analogy at length. I raise it only to suggest that practitioners of critical media theory have much to learn from critical disability studies, and perhaps vice versa. After all, we are both working within a techno-capitalist power structure that determines which bodies and which ways of knowing are useful. At the very least, the uncomfortable comparison of the power struggle of media theorists and disability theorists presents an opportunity to do away with metaphoric conceptions of the prosthesis that at once ignore the grounded, physical reality of disabled individuals while uncritically celebrating what Vivian Sobchack has called “a fascination with artificial and ‘posthuman’ extensions of ‘the body’ in the service of a rhetoric (and, in some cases, a poetics) that is always located elsewhere” (2006: 20). In an attempt to ground the various intellectual abstractions and strategic analogies I have developed in this chapter, I will now turn to the work of an exemplar who brilliantly demonstrates how making media theory can cunningly involve a direct confrontation with disability. In her Abler blog, and in her teaching and design practice, Sara Hendren has demonstrated that “the questions cultures ask, the technologies they invent, and how those technologies broadcast a message about their users—weakness and strength, agency and passivity—are critical ones” (2014). Hendren doesn’t merely ask questions; she helps design and manufacture objects that respond directly to critical speculations such as “What can a body do? What needs are you interested in? Who might use which thing for what? Where might the surprises be? How might a familiar thing morph into something else altogether?” (2014). One of Hendren’s favorite objects-to-think-with is a “snap-on modular socket” that her students designed in collaboration with Chris Hinojosa, a microfluidics engineer who was born with one arm. Hinojosa had rejected the normalizing prosthetic arms that had been presented to him over the years, and he was “not looking for a fix” when he joined Hendren in her lab. That said, he was interested in a socket that could accommodate dedicated-use prosthetics

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such as a rock-climbing appendage. This is precisely what Hendren’s students designed for him, using fast-prototyping techniques. Rather than attempting to replace Hinojosa’s arm with the normalizing prosthesis, an arm with a five-fingered hand, Hendren’s cunning questioning of what a body can do allowed a “familiar thing” to “morph into something else altogether” (2014). Of particular importance here is the fact that Hendren is not trained as an engineer, but as an artist. To complicate professional labels, she also refers to herself as an impresario, a translator, a radical generalist, and even an “orchestrator of attention”—titles that require cunning more than they require expertise (2015). In fact, Hendren challenges power systems based exclusively on specialized knowledge by championing amateurism as a mode of creative and critical generativity. In a blog post on Abler, Hendren quotes at length an essay by Claire Pentecost entitled “The Public Amateur.” For Pentecost, amateurism is a form of resistance to the narrow mode of innovation that is bred by specialization. The Public Amateur is a role that requires both humility and self-confidence; one acquires knowledge in public “through unofficial means, and assume[s] the authority to offer interpretations of that knowledge, especially in regard to decisions that affect our lives” (Pentecost, 2009). Making media theory might well be mobilized in this way by producing metaknowledge about technoculture, keeping in mind that “the point is not to replace specialists, but to enhance specialized knowledge with considerations that specialties are not designed to accommodate” (Pentecost, 2009). Such a mobilization requires the courage to ignore accusations of creating “bad art and lame activism” (Pentecos, 2009t), and sufficient cunning to shift the boundaries between the useful and the useless. I will conclude this chapter with a brief rumination on a New Yorker cartoon by P. C. Vey, which I encountered while preparing a talk on “Artificial Intelligence and Ethics” for a large tech conference called True North. What makes the cartoon interesting is not so much its content but its context. The drawing depicts two mobsters strong-arming a student who is wearing a graduation gown and cap. The student’s hands are bound. His feet are cemented in a tub of concrete. As the thugs prepare to hurl the student off a dock, one of them explains their actions: “It’s not personal. The boss just doesn’t like

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seeing people in so much debt for such a useless degree” (Vey, 2018). In itself, the cartoon portrays a stereotypical attitude toward the arts and humanities. But the fact that it was wedged into a lengthy article by Tad Friend on the perils and promise of AI inspired me to transform the cartoon into a useful intervention. Rather than discussing AI and ethics at this tech conference, I took the rare opportunity to address the audience about a more pressing topic: ethos and the politics of uselessness in the tech community. In the New Yorker article, Friend distinguishes between what has been called narrow AI or artificial narrow intelligence (ANI), which performs a single utility function like predicting what books we might like to read, and strong AI or artificial general intelligence (AGI), which would exceed the intelligence of humans while performing multiple utility functions. Friend quotes chess master Gary Kasparov, who, without a hint of sour grapes after his ill-fated bout with Big Blue, predicts wistfully that using strong AI “for ‘the more menial aspects’ of reasoning will free us, elevating our cognition ‘toward creativity, curiosity, beauty, and joy’” (qtd. in Friend, 2018: 46). The problem with Kasparov’s gambit is that, as a result of our devotion to tech innovation, we might be losing the ability to appreciate, experience, or even understand forms of creativity, curiosity, beauty, and joy that Western society has come to marginalize as useless. If AI frees us from “menial” cognitive tasks, will we spend more time reading Dostoevsky, volunteering at a soup kitchen, and learning to paint? Or will we use that freedom to shop for algorithmically curated items, consume prefab media playlists, and play computer games that tap into the psychometric data we willingly give up on a daily basis? Rather than focusing on ethics then, I encourage the tech community to reflect on ethos, a concept that is well known in useless academic disciplines like philosophy and rhetoric. This concept has been built into the collaboratively written Tech for Good Declaration that emerged from the True North conference in 2018.6 The problem with ethics is that they can too easily

The following principle is a pillar of the Tech for Good Declaration, which is designed to be adopted by tech companies as a guideline for ethical practices: “Ethics are not just an afterthought, add-on, or checklist to fill out at the end of a project. In all development and use of technology, we will consider the broader social context of our products and services, and make this consideration part of our ethos. This means not only thinking about diversity of race, gender, and class, but also taking into

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be ignored during the process of design and development altogether, and can even serve as a way of hiding motives or excusing behaviors. Ethics, as they are commonly understood in the tech industry, are something you tack onto a project at the end to make sure it’s socially acceptable. Ethics is a checkbox that someone fills out in an office far away from the engineering, design, and marketing people. Ethos, on the other hand, determines why someone is motivated to develop a technology in the first place. What are that person’s attitudes and aspirations? Are they guided by profit, by utility, or by a singleminded dedication to innovation for the sake of innovation? Or are they guided by other motives that exceed the boundaries of the tech community? What is the ethos, for example, of a community or person who wants to produce a highly intelligent nonhuman agent that might very well have no practical use for its creator? This question, which is a question of trust, is why the idea of strong AI should provoke tentacular fear. Ultimately, the most effective way to make a machine that thinks like a human is to redefine what it means to be human and to think in the first place. This might be achieved by designing technologies that attempt to radically constrain what anthropologist Lucy Suchman calls situated actions (2007).7 If human societies develop an ethos that defines intelligence by ignoring or marginalizing useless things like philosophy, art, or literature—things that readily acknowledge the contingencies of situated actions and situated knowledges (Haraway, 1988)—then they will have taken a giant leap toward developing an AGI. But at what cost? It is by asking such useless questions that a person develops an admirable ethos in the first place. An ethos that is guided by what is good for others and not just for oneself. An ethos that asks, finally: Who is left out? Who is in need? What are the consequences—social,

account environmental, social, and psychological impacts. Thinking inclusively is creatively crossdisciplinary; it involves not just the sciences but also the arts.” 7 In Critical Fabulations, Daniela K. Rosner provides an excellent account of how Suchman’s theories intersect with design practice, which she supplements in reference to Haraway’s concept of situated knowledges. Rosner notes that for Suchman, “Computer scientists universalized human interpretations of plans by analogizing users with computational systems,” whereas for Haraway, “scientists justified human gender hierarchies by equating primate groups with humans” (40). Both of these issues are central for understanding the problematic nature of the race toward an AGI.

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psychological, and environmental—of my technological innovations? This is an ethos that might readily guide the practice of making media theory.

References Atherton, Kelsey D. 2015. “Watch This Box Robot Swing a Knife with a Tentacle.” Popular Science, Nov. 23. https​:/​/ww​​w​.pop​​sci​.c​​om​/wa​​tch​-t​​his​-b​​ox​-ro​​bot​-s​​wing-​​ knife​​​-with​​-tent​​acle. Biggins, Matthew. 2018. “AI Behaving Badly.” AI’s Dirty Little Secret. In Medium, Sept. 8, https​:/​/me​​dium.​​com​/s​​/ai​-d​​irty-​​littl​​e​-sec​​ret​/a​​i​-beh​​aving​​-badl​​y​​-2f4​​d66a0​​ffe9. Cassou-Noguès, Pierre. 2013. La mélodie du tic-tac et autres bonnes raisons de perdre son temps. Paris: Flammarion. Cassou-Noguès, Pierre. 2018. E-mail conversation. May 3. Clarke, Arthur C. 1974. Voice across the Sea. New York: Harper & Row. Coupland, Douglas. 2014. Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent. Toronto: Random House Canada. de Tocqueville, Alexis. 2013. Democracy in America, Vol 2. Trans. Henry Reeve. Project Gutenberg. http:​/​/www​​.gute​​nberg​​.org/​​files​​/816/​​816​-h​​/816-​​​h​.htm​. Detienne, Marcel and Jean-Pierre Vernant. 1978. Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society. Trans. Janet Lloyd. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Dolmage, Jay. 2006. “‘Breathe upon Us an Even Flame’: Hephaestus, History, and the Body of Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Review 25.2: 119–40. Ellul, Jacques. 1967. The Technological Society. New York: Vintage. Flexner, Abraham. 1939. “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge.” Harper’s, Issue 139: 544–52. Flusser, Vilém and Louis Bec. 2012. Vampyroteuthis Infernalis: A Treatise, with a Report by the Institut Scientifique de Recherche Paranaturaliste. Trans. Valentine A. Pakis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Friend, Tad. 2018. “How Frightened Should We Be of A.I.?” The New Yorker, May 14: 44–51. Grimes, Ronald. 2014. The Craft of Ritual Studies. New York: Oxford University Press. Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14.3: 575–99. Hendren, Sara. 2014. “All Technology Is Assistive: Six Design Rules on ‘Disability’.” WIRED Backchannel, Oct. 16, 2014. https​:/​/ww​​w​.wir​​ed​.co​​m​/201​​4​/10/​​all​-t​​echno​​ logy-​​is​​-as​​sisti​​ve/.

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Hendren, Sara. 2015. “Investigating Normal: Technology and Ability.” Keynote Address. Eyeo Festival. https://vimeo​.com​/134764010. Ihde, Don. 2002. Bodies in Technology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lanier, Jaron. 2010. You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. New York: Knopf. Minsky, Marvin. 1996. “Matter, Mind and Models.” MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. https​:/​/gr​​oups.​​csail​​.mit.​​edu​/m​​edg​/p​​eople​​/doyl​​e​/gal​​ lery/​​minsk​​​y​/mmm​​.html​. Minsky, Marvin. 2011. “Making the Most Useless Machine.” Interview. Web of Stories – Life Stories of Remarkable People. YouTube, Nov. 15. Accessed July 1, 2018. Mitchell, David T. and Sharon L. Snyder, eds. 1997. “Disability Studies and the Double Bind of Representation.” In The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Mitchell, Robert. 2010. Bioart and the Vitality of Media. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Ordine, Nuccio. 2017. The Usefulness of the Useless. Trans. Alastair McEwen. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books. Outaspace-Man. 2016. “Knife-Wielding Tentacle.” http:​/​/out​​aspac​​eman.​​blogs​​pot​.c​​om​ /20​​16​/03​​/the-​​knife​​-wiel​​ding-​​tenta​​cle​-b​​​uild-​​full.​​html. Pentecost, Claire. 2009. “Beyond Face.” In Public Amateur blog. Jan. 18. https​:/​/pu​​ blica​​mateu​​r​.wor​​dpres​​s​.com​​/2009​​/01​/1​​8​/bey​​ond​-f​​​ace/#​​more​-34. Peters, John Durham. 2015. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Marquard and Joanne Morra, eds. 2006. The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Sobchack, Vivian. 2006. “A Leg to Stand On: Prosthetics, Metaphor, and Materiality.” In The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future, ed. Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra, 205–25. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Suchman, Lucy. 2007. Human–Machine Reconfigurations Plans and Situated Actions, 2nd Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Sunny. 2004. “The Right Not to Work: Power and Disability.” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine, Mar. 1, 2004. https​:/​/mo​​nthly​​revie​​w​.org​​/2004​​ /03​/0​​1​/the​​-righ​​t​-not​​-to​-w​​ork​-p​​ower-​​a​nd​-d​​isabi​​lity/​. Tech for Good: A Declaration by the Canadian Tech Community. 2018. Canadian Innovation Space. https​:/​/ca​​nadia​​ninno​​vatio​​nspac​​e​.ca/​​tech-​​for​​-g​​ood/. Vey, P. C. 2018. “Cartoon.” The New Yorker, May 14, p. 51.

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Workshop Useless Box

Let’s hope for objects that raise and suspend questions, and employ them alongside objects designed to solve problems. —Sara Hendren, “All Technology Is Assistive”

Preamble In the epigraph that starts the previous chapter, I quote a line from Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society in which he quips, “In such a state, nothing useless exists” (1967: 287). As it turns out, this is only one instance out of forty in which Ellul uses the term “useless” in his book. A distant reading of The Technology Society yields the following entries on uselessness, among others: The men of classical antiquity could not have found a solution to our present determinisms, and it is useless to look into the works of Plato or Aristotle for an answer to the problem of freedom. (xxix) It is useless to rail against capitalism. Capitalism did not create our world; the machine did. (5) It is useless to appeal to culture or religion. It is useless to educate the populace. Only propaganda can retort to propaganda, or psychological rape to psychological rape. (84) Considered from the modern technical point of view, man is a useless appendage. (1967: 137)

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What the complete list of useless aphorisms reveals is a persistent cynicism about philosophy’s capacity to intervene in the technological society. This cynicism might be due in part to Ellul’s awareness that those who rule the technological society have very little time to spend uselessly on the reading of his 450-page book. What if, as a tactic to capture the attention of the technological society, Ellul made a useless machine rather than a media theory? Today, because nothing is useless if it can be commoditized, it is easy to purchase a kit that allows makers to assemble a simple replica of the Ultimate Machine. The commercialization of Minsky and Shannon’s gadget, which transforms the thinkpiece into a commodity marketed as the Useless Box, does not provoke me to abandon it. Instead, I propose that the Useless Box kit can be smuggled out of the commodity stream and into the arts and humanities curriculum, where it can be hacked to generate knowledge about technoculture. It may even be possible to make the Useless Box useless again. That said, I want to establish the Useless Box kit as the central agent in a lesson on how to make media theory. The Useless Box kit, which has been marketed by its manufacturer Solarbotics as an introductory lesson to soldering, is part of a long history of kits designed to teach technical and scientific skills to amateurs (Sullivan, 2014). One might position this kit somewhere in a genealogy that includes the Erector set (1913), the Chemcraft kit (1917), the Digi-Comp mechanical computer set (1963), and even the Gilbert Lab Technician Set for Girls (1958), which was advertised as a “career-building science set” in a pink box. More recently, the Useless Box kit is a recognizable fixture in the marketplace of DIY electronics kits sold by online outlets like Adafruit, Sparkfun, and Robotshop, among others. Like many of these kits, the Useless Box kit is deterministic in nature, designed for the assembly of only a single product. In this sense, it is more like the model car and airplane kits I used to glue together as a child, which produced many a sticky mess until manufacturers came up with snaptogether versions. That is when I lost interest. In an issue of Hyperrhiz dedicated entirely to kits, Jentery Sayers describes “the efficiency, optimization, and comprehensiveness associated with modular, ‘kit-of-parts’ construction, where the parts are treated as discrete components

 Useless Box 59

of a coherent system with a defined purpose that is often represented through a 3-D model” (2015). Inspired by Hannah Perner-Wilson’s “kit-of-no-parts,” and more specifically by the fluxkits of the 1960s, Sayers led his own students in the creation of “kits for cultural history” that “prototype speculations about the past” (2015). Like the lost history that Sayers’s project is designed to investigate, these kits are incomplete. They do not replicate the efficiencies and standardizations typical of industrial design, but rather they both embody and “demand supplementation” (2015). While Sayers’s method provides an effective tactics for opposing the empirical, consumerist logic of prefab kits, there might still be opportunities for the kit-of-parts to be mobilized as part of an oppositional politics. For this assignment, you are going to make a replica of the Ultimate Machine and hack it by heeding the “useless” words of Jacques Ellul, some of which are listed earlier. Rather than making a technical object from scratch, hacking a kit-of-parts requires direct engagement with the consumer product and the system from which it emerges. One way of thinking about this project is in terms of the difference between a manufactured scientific tool and a Heideggerian, broken-hammerish Thing.1 Another way of framing the activity is in terms of bricolage, a cunning concept introduced by Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Savage Mind: The bricoleur is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks; but unlike the engineer, he does not subordinate each of them to the availability of raw materials and tools conceived and procured for the purposes of the project. His universe of instruments is closed and the rules of his game are always to make do with “whatever is at hand.” (1962: 17)

In The Practice of Misuse, Raymond Malewitz provides a contemporary upgrade of Lévi-Strauss’s bricoleur by introducing the “rugged consumer”: individuals “who creatively misuse, reuse, and repurpose the objects within their social environments to suit their idiosyncratic needs and desires” (2014:

For a productive complication of this distinction, see Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.”

1

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Figure 4.1  The Solarbotics Useless Box Kit, 2019.

6). This Useless Box project begins with a kit-of-parts, but it relies entirely on equipping, supplementing, and deconstructing that kit with “whatever is at hand” (Lévi-Strauss, 1962: 17). Makers are asked to bend and twist the kit-of-parts logic into a product and politics that the kit was not intended to produce. In this sense, the project is less akin to a fluxkit than it is to an IKEA hack inspired by opposition to the disposability of cheap furniture. Considered within the broader context of consumer technology consumption, this project’s ultimate goal is to “temporarily suspend the various networks of power that dictate the proper use of a given artifact” (Malewitz, 2014: 7).

Instructions Order a Useless Box from one of the many online vendors at your disposal and follow the instructions provided with the kit.2 This will involve soldering

If makers prefer to manufacture their own Useless Box with a laser cutter or hand saw and parts purchased from a local electronics store or scavenged from dead media, more power to them.

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and the use of basic hand tools, most likely a screwdriver. You will then select one of the forty “useless” quotations from Ellul’s book, as sampled earlier, and allow those words to guide you in a hacking of the Useless Box. For example, what might you add or remove from the box to illustrate Ellul’s point that “The police must move in the direction of anticipating and forestalling crime. Eventually intervention will be useless” (1967: 101)? Would you make a box that predicts crime or one that detects androids like the Voight-Kampff machine in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Dick, 2007)? Would you make a box that produces a powerful electric shock, thereby forestalling the flick of the sinister switch? Or would you make a box that reflects on how algorithms used to predict neighborhood crime generate a self-fulfilling prophecy that ultimately reinforce racism?3 What would such a box look like? Rather than purchasing a kit, this assignment might simply involve the design of a critically hacked Useless Box, brought to life through drawings and critical/technical description. But I encourage readers to take the risk of confronting the object head-on. Given that this assignment is being undertaking by scholars in the arts and humanities, I would expect that it might produce mixed technical and aesthetic results, perhaps even “bad art” or crapentry, complete with globs of hot glue and objects picked up in the street. Not to fear. An amateur’s approach to making media theory can produce knowledge about the technological society that might not be accessed through the licensed channels of specialization that characterize the innovation ecology. Moreover, the crapenter’s model of technological production has the capacity to disrupt the all-too-useful model currently championed by the technological society. The assignment should come to a head as the maker reflects on how to cunningly position the box within the technological society itself so that it might serve as a form of activism. This might require rubbing shoulders with an engineering class, a start-up company, or a tech incubator. In doing so,

Naturally, there’s an Instructable for a homemade Useless Box, though it requires access to a laser cutter. http:​/​/www​​.inst​​ructa​​bles.​​com​/i​​d​/Use​​less-​​Machi​​ne​-Co​​mplet​​e​-Pla​​ns​-an​​d​​-Har​​dware​​-Need​​s/ (n.d.). 3 See Kathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy.

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you will demonstrate how making media theory can collide with Rita Raley’s concept of “tactical media,” which is not simply about “reappropriating the instrument but also about reengineering semiotic systems and reflecting critically on institutions of power and control” (2009: 16). Making media theory becomes a tactical activity when it is positioned strategically to have a direct, critical impact on these institutions.

Discussion 1. Can you think of something that is truly useless? What determines its use value? 2. This assignment required you to purchase a prefab kit online. Is there any critical value to purchasing such kits or should making media theory involve a commitment to homemade fabrication and found objects? 3. In what ways, if any, is the appendage inside the box that flicks the switch a prosthesis? Consider this question in the context of both technoutopian fantasy and critical disability studies. 4. If Arthur C. Clarke described the Ultimate Machine as “sinister,” as described in the previous chapter, what single adjective might be used to describe your own hack of the Useless Box? 5. If you could turn any famously evocative object such as the Ultimate Machine into a prefab kit, what object would you choose, and what would be in the kit?

References Dick, Philip K. 2007. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ellul, Jacques. 1967. The Technological Society. New York: Vintage. Hendren, Sara. 2014. “All Technology Is Assistive.” WIRED, Oct. 16. https://www​.wired​.com/ 2014/10/all-technology-is-assistive/.

 Useless Box 63 Instructables. n.d. “Useless Machine – Complete Plans and Hardware Sources.” Instructables. http:​/​/www​​.inst​​ructa​​bles.​​com​/i​​d​/Use​​less-​​Machi​​ne​-Co​​mplet​​e​-Pla​​ns​an​​d​-H​ar​​dware​​-Need​​s/. Latour, Bruno. 2004. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30, Winter: 225–48. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1962. The Savage Mind. Trans. George Weidenfield and Nicholson Ltd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. O’Neil, Kathy. 2017. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. New York: Broadway Books. Malewitz, Raymond. 2014. The Practice of Misuse: Rugged Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Perner-Wilson, Hannah. 2011. “A Kit-of-No-Parts.” Thesis. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. http://hdl​.handle​.net​/1721​.1​/67784. Raley, Rita. 2009. Tactical Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sayers, Jentery. 2015. “Kits for Cultural History.” Kits Plans Schematics, special issue of Hyperrhiz, ed. Helen J. Burgess and David M. 13, Fall. http:​/​/hyp​​errhi​​z​.io/​​hyper​​ rhiz1​​3​/wor​​kshop​​s​-kit​​s​/ear​​ly​-we​​arab​l​​es​-es​​say​.h​​tml Solarbotics, n.d. “Learn to Solder: The Useless Box.” Accessed July 11, 2018. https://solarbotics​.com​/product​/90020/. Sullivan, Jim. 2014. “The 5 Retro Science Kits that Inspired a Generation of Tinkerers.” Discover, October 30, 2014. http:​/​/dis​​cover​​magaz​​ine​.c​​om​/20​​14​/de​​c​/ 18-​​scie​n​​ce​-ki​​ts.

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Writing with a Soldering Iron On the Art of Making Attention

Further, the “bricoleur” also, and indeed principally, derives his poetry from the fact that he does not confine himself to accomplishment and execution: he ‘speaks’ not only with things, as we have already seen, but also through the medium of things. —Claude Lévi Strauss, The Savage Mind I can’t imagine that students today would learn only to read and write using the twenty-six letters of the alphabet.” —Friedrich A. Kittler If the cunning of Hephaestus is to serve as a behavioral model for making media theory, then his crafting of the shield of Achilles should be considered with careful attention. This magnificent shield depicts an entire cosmos, a living scene of the universe, from the starry sky to the furrows of a field, with a rich cast of humans and animals in between. Homer’s description of the shield, as translated here by Alexander Pope, has the familiar qualities of a creation story: He made the earth upon it, and the sky, and the sea’s water, and the tireless sun, and the moon waxing into her fullness, and on it all the constellations that festoon the heavens, the Pleiades and the Hyades and the strength of Orion and the Bear, whom men give also the name of the Wagon, who turns about in a fixed place and looks at Orion and she alone is never plunged in the wash of the Ocean. (483–90)

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By all means, the shield is an emblem of the crook-footed god’s skill as a maker, but the splendor of this artifact would be unknown were it not for the writing skill of Homer’s translators, an altogether different brand of maker. In the shield of Achilles, artifact and text, making and writing, come together. This is why Homer’s description of the shield is the most infamous example of ekphrasis. Making media theory might be described as an ekphrastic undertaking, one that complicates the long discourse on ekphrasis in art history. In Picture Theory, W. J. T. Mitchell pores over the many definitions of ekphrasis and arrives at a very simple formulation: “the verbal representation of visual representation” (1994: 152). Mitchell is particularly interested in the politics of ekphrasis, which seem to place the verbal utterance in a position of dominance over the silent, passive visual representation. The struggle for power between words and images is, in effect, a centerpiece of Mitchell’s life’s work on picture theory. For Mitchell, ekphrasis provides an opportunity “to expose the social structure of representation as an activity and a relationship of power/knowledge/desire—representation as something done to something, with something, by someone, for someone” (1994: 180). Literary theorist Murray Krieger has elaborated on this idea with his concept of the ekphrastic impulse. Taking his cue from Jacques Derrida’s critique of Western logocentrism, Krieger defines the ekphrastic impulse as a desire for symbolic transparency: “the semiotic desire for the natural sign, the desire, that is, to have the world captured in the word” (1992: 11). In an attempt to complicate this idea, Jay David Bolter suggests in Writing Space that digital media are fostering a revolution of “reverse ekphrasis,” an age in which all words, to keep up with the times, “must try to turn back into picture writing or pure imagery” (1991: 58). Evidently, the discourse on ekphrasis can be rather convoluted. For example, is the cosmos depicted on the shield of Achilles a form of reverse ekphrasis? The takeaway here is that making media theory does not move in a single direction—that is, from text to image or from image to text. Instead, it morphs cunningly like a cephalopod, and moves crab-like, between the making of image (or artifact) and the making of text, so that one is always dependent upon the other. One way of understanding the practices I have laid out in this book is to view them as an exploration of ekphrasis with all its complications. Making

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media theory involves converting words not only into images but also into what might be called media artifacts—and vice versa. To borrow the words of Timothy Morton, “ekphrasis can embody any sensory input, and thus it is appropriate to our multimedia age” (2007: 44). When someone asks, “How can I capture this aphorism by Jacques Ellul in a mechanical object like the Useless Box?” they are asking an ekphrastic question. The same can be said when someone asks, “How does this mechanical object I have created serve as a vehicle for writing media theory?” Elsewhere, I introduced the concept of Applied Media Theory (AMT) to define a practice of reading, making, and writing, a feedback loop of activities designed to expand the toolkit of media theorists.1 I have grown resistant toward the word Applied in this formulation, because it can breed misconceptions about making media theory as ultimately practical and useful, following a predictable teleology. But the process itself remains the same. Making media theory provides an opportunity to engage directly with the materiality of media both by fabricating objects that embody theories and by writing and rewriting theories for which such objects serve as vehicles.2 The process is designed to promote an ekphrastic, conspicuously embodied engagement with technoculture. As Jay Dolmage argues in Disability Rhetoric, “ekphrasis offers a pause and a discursive delay between image and understanding, revealing the essential differentiation and overlap of sensory engagements” (2014: 139). In order to make media theory, one must move cunningly between object and text, making and writing, a move that I describe here as writing with a soldering iron. My hope is that this chapter will help justify this method, while demonstrating simultaneously how it might look. To that end, I move now from the cosmos of the god Hephaestus to the cosmos of Godard the filmmaker. In a famous scene from Godard’s film Two or Three Things I Know About Her, Robert Jeanson (Roger Montsoret) sits in a café stirring a cup of espresso with a small spoon. His wife Juliette—the star of the film—sits nearby,

See Necromedia, especially Chapter 9, “Digital Care, Curation, and Curriculum: On Applied Media Theory” (2015). 2 The process described here is similar to the method for generating critical fabulations described by Daniela K. Rosner, which comes “with the possibility for using multiple simultaneous tools, including practices of interweaving, critical reading, and writing memos” (98). 1

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strangely distant from him. As Robert stirs the coffee, the camera closes in on its whirling, black, frothy cosmos. Enter the whispering, omniscient voice of the narrator, God-ard himself: Maybe an object is what serves as a link between subjects, allowing us to live in a society, to be together. But since social relations are always ambiguous, since my thoughts divide as much as unite, and my words unite by what they express and isolate by what they omit, since a wide gulf separates my subjective certainty of myself from the objective truth others have of me, since I constantly end up guilty, even though I feel innocent, since every event changes my daily life, since I always fail to communicate, to understand, to love and be loved, and every failure deepens my solitude. Since . . . (1967)

After this monologue, the spoon sends the cosmos whirring once again, and we cut to Juliette, who glances stoically at Robert. She plays with her wine glass, Robert takes a pull from his cigarette, a suspicious barman in cool shades reaches for the tap and pours a beer—close-up on the hands and then back to a super close-up of the coffee-as-cosmos. Since. Since I cannot escape the objectivity crushing me nor the objectivity expelling me, since I cannot rise to a state of being nor collapse into nothingness, I have to listen more than ever, I have to look around me at the world, my fellow creature, my brother. (1967)

I have taken a risk here by trying to convey in words what can only be conveyed in pictures. I was destined to fail3 from the beginning. To borrow from Foucault, “the space where [written words] achieve their splendor is not that deployed by our eyes but that defined by the sequential elements of syntax” (2002: 10). If I have failed to communicate the visual complexity of the Godard clip, I hope to at least recover it as an object-to-think-with. This scene, like this chapter, is about contemplating objects, thinking with hands, and making attention (faire attention). I was introduced to the Godard scene while enrolled in a course with Robert Ray at the University of Florida. For Ray, this scene demonstrates how

For a discussion of ekphrastic poetry as failure, see Steiner (1982).

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filmmakers use objects to direct the viewer’s attention, opening a space for poetic contemplation. The narrator self-reflexively points to this idea in his creative desire: “a new world where men and things can live in harmony— such is my aim. It is as political as it is poetic. It explains, in any case, this longing for expression. Whose? Mine. Writer and painter” (Godard, 1967). In the aforementioned scene, as Ray suggests in The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy, “the camera’s near-exclusive attention on an ordinary object (a cup of coffee) releases a lyrical meditation about subjectivity’s place in the modern world” (2002, 122). More pertinently here, Ray uses this scene to launch into a discussion of hypermedia, noting that the coffee cup is like a node in a network. Citing Marcus Novak, Ray writes, “Every image [is] an index. . . . Every node in a hypermedium is therefore an information space, a space of potential information” (Novak 1992: 231). In order to make the transition from film to hypermedia, Ray must turn this scene of contemplation, a scene that painstakingly embodies deep existential reflection, not to mention boredom, into a site of hyper attention. Thanks to the rhetoric of hypermedia, the coffee cup is no longer a gateway onto contemplative existential thought, but a node in a vast network of associations connected by hyperlinks. Back in 1995, I was excited by the transformation of the coffee cup from a dark, profound cosmos into a frenetic portal onto digital culture. Today, I am less sanguine about this seemingly emancipatory move. What we need today, more than ever, are not clickable images, but opportunities for profound and sustained attention. I don’t want to click Godard’s coffee cup and consume it in an instant—I want to sip it slowly, think with it. And I want to both make and write carefully about other objects-to-think-with. This requires learning the art of writing with a soldering iron. In E-Crit: Digital Media, Critical Theory and the Humanities (2006), I celebrated hypermedia (a nostalgic word that belongs to the 1990s) as a new mode of writing more suitable for a digital, picture-oriented culture. I want to rewrite this narrative. The notion of reverse ekphrasis, replacing words with images, was for me a liberation from what I saw as the strictures of linear textuality. Since then, I have come to understand that the humanities can engage with digital culture without turning toward the logic, rhetoric and cognitive style of hyper. In fact, what the humanities, exclusively, have to offer

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digital culture is the opposite of hyper, whether we call it linear, deep, slow, or perhaps even hypo, as in hypomnesis, the technical externalization of memory identified by Plato in Phaedrus. The hypomnesis I invoke here, in opposition to hypermedia, refers to close reading and critical writing, which are relatively slow technics for the externalization of memory. But already I have gotten ahead of myself, and now I am guilty of binary thinking. First, it would be more accurate to say that the opposite of hypo is not hyper but ana, as in anamnesis: recollection from within, remembrance that does not rely on external supports like reading and writing. Hypermnesis is merely an exaggerated form of hypomnesis; it is a proliferation of external memory that finds its apotheosis today, perhaps, in the mechanics of Google. Second, by setting up a value-laden binary between hypermnesis and hypomnesis (or between hypomnesis and anamnesis for that matter), I am engaging in the sort of dualistic thinking that led Socrates to reject the technology of writing in Phaedrus. King Thamus’s indictment of the discovery of writing has been told too many times, but I dare to repeat it again here: “The specific4 (pharmakon) which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence (hypomneseos), and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth.” What Thamus failed to see, perhaps, is that the distinction between inside (ana) and outside (hypo) is not clear-cut. As Derrida observed, anamnesis (internal memory) is always already infected with hypomnesis (externalized memory), and the two can hardly be separated.5 What’s more, and I’ll make the point here without Derridean apparatus, the acts of reading and writing themselves are conspicuously embodied acts of decoding and encoding that demand long circuits of cognitive processing. And these long circuits are essential in the production not merely of knowledge but of subjectivity itself. In a neo-Marxist manifesto entitled “Anamnesis and Hypomnesis,” Bernard Stiegler suggests that industrial society is founded on the production of

Note that the word “specific” is an archaic term that means “remedy.” Derrida suggests that Plato is not offering a general condemnation of the externalization of memory; rather, he is targeting sophistics (1981). For a more detailed discussion of this point and its relationship to digital media, see my essay in CTheory, “Taking Care of Digital Dementia.”

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hypomnesic objects that, in their efficiency, reduce the necessity for humans to retain specific forms of knowledge. For example, “the more improved the automobile becomes, the less we know how to drive—the GPS system assisting the driver in his driving will replace him altogether” (Stiegler, n.d.). In Stiegler’s brute neo-Marxist terms, industrial society represents an epoch in which “memory has passed into the gesture-reproducing machine that the proletarian no longer has to know about, but that he must simply serve, having thus become a slave once again” (n.d., Stiegler’s emphasis). This enslavement, according to Stiegler, is as much a product of the efficient externalization of memory as it is a product of the speed of this externalization. Evoking both the immediacy of filmic visualization and the instantaneity of networked communications, Stiegler suggests that “the network of light-time does away with belatedness between the seizure of an event and its reception by infinitesimally reducing the time of its transmission, [just as] the instrument of analog or digital [does] away as well with all belatedness between the event and its seizure” (n.d.). The point becomes clear if one considers, for example, the time it took me to write about Godard’s coffee scene as compared to the time it would have taken me simply to show you the scene on my handheld device. This sluggish transmission, this time taken to write, which is also the time taken to externalize my subjectivity, is crucial in a cultural milieu where every second of our day has been placed on call by a form of cognitive capitalism that, thanks to ubiquitous media technologies, is constantly vying for our attention. What the humanities have to offer digital culture, then, is a mode of resistance—in the form of deep reading and slow writing—to a hyperexternalizing social apparatus that has delegated reading and writing to efficient machines. In Proust and the Squid, an investigation of literacy and cognition, Maryanne Wolfe suggests that reading, above all, has given the human species “the gift of time” (2008, 229). As an advanced technical skill, reading gives us time to make inferences, to think analytically and critically. The reading brain engages in a slow and “profound generativity” that is difficult to achieve in more hyper, networked reading environments that promote just-in-time information access over careful rumination (Wolf, 2008: 23). The same might be said for writing. Even rote transcription, word by word, which I require

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my students to do as a mnemonic form of note-taking, provides time for contemplation and generativity.6 What’s more, my own ekphrastic effort to transcribe the scene from Godard, which Dolmage might recognize as a “a pause and a discursive delay” (2014: 139), offers the same rare opportunity to spend time generatively. By attempting to transcribe the film—to create an object “that serves as a link between subjects” (Godard, 1967)—I have engaged in what Stiegler calls a “literal [e.g., alphabetic] synthesis” (n.d.). I write in the knowledge that both the reader and I share an intimate technical capacity to read and write, and that we are both committed to taking the time for decoding and encoding, successfully or not, the object of transmission. What matters is not whether my transcription of Godard is perfectly accurate, but that I have made the attempt to convey it, and the reader has taken the time to assess my attempt, as part of a “literal” exchange of subjectivity. This entire process of exchange might be understood, in a term often wielded by Stiegler, as transindividuation.7 According to Stiegler, digital service industries can potentially short-circuit8 this process, and rob individuals of opportunities for world-building. Taking time to read and write, carefully, deeply, even slowly, is a radical intellectual and cognitive act in our ever-accelerating technocultural milieu. Why then, would one want to complicate things further by writing with a soldering iron? Recently, the rapprochement of maker culture and writer’s craft has made its way into the college classroom. In a blog post for the Digital Writing Collaborative, Maggie Melo describes her experience of turning an English 101 composition classroom into a makerspace. Driven by the critical pedagogies of Paolo Freire, bell hooks, and others, Melo has used making as a way to integrate conspicuously embodied acts into the writing classroom. The point Melo was trying to make through this exercise is that the students’ homemade jewelry, whittling practices, and cardboard models could be seen

I explore this idea more carefully with Bernard Stiegler in the interview “Bernard Stiegler’s Pharmacy: A Conversation” (2010). 7 The term “transindividuation” comes from French anthropologist Gilbert Simondon, specifically as described in his book L’individuation psychique et collective (1989). 8 This short circuiting is described rather lucidly in Stiegler’s article, “Teleologics of the Snail: The Errant Self Wired to a WiMax Network” (2009). 6

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as forms of writing. More pertinently here, she wanted to demonstrate that writing itself is a form of making: Making is writing. Writing is making. Although it doesn’t readily embody features of a makerspace, a composition classroom is a space where students discover (invention), tinker with new ideas (research), collaborate with others on their ideas (peer revision), and fail through an iterative process (revision). Whether it’s through conventional alphanumeric or even transmodal means of writing, composition continues to be the pulling together of semiotic resources to say something; to make an argument. (Melo, 2016)

I’m certain that school administrators would be suspicious of a classroom in which students learn to write by sewing a quilt out of old T-shirts. I’m a little skeptical myself, only because I am wary of uncritical adoptions of the maker culture movement, a point I will address later in this chapter. But I bring in Melo’s argument to underscore the idea that careful practices of making could very well lead to careful practices of writing. Care and the cognitive and affective modalities required to foster it are central to this discussion. I am especially interested in how critical making might lead to practices of care. In Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, Stiegler offers what might be described as an indictment of technoculture’s cognitive assault on youth by means of psychotechnological marketing technics. And yet, Stiegler surprisingly finds in digital technics both an ailment and a cure. As I have noted elsewhere,9 Stiegler’s description of technology as a pharmakon, following Plato, indicates its double-edged nature. Rather than promoting a Luddistic form of resistance to psychotechnologies of marketing, Stiegler calls for technological “first-aid kits” that will resist the “merchants of the time of brain-time divested of consciousness” (2010: 85). He makes a similar suggestion in the essay “Anamnesis and Hypermnesis,” noting that “Cooperative digital technologies can be placed in the service of individuation, providing industrial politics of hypomneses are implemented in the service of a new age of anamnesis” (n.d., Stiegler’s emphasis). The notion of service here is crucial, and I will return to it

See Necromedia, specifically Chapter 1: “Necromedia Theory and Posthumanism.”

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later in a discussion of caretaking. First, it is time to examine more closely the careful art of writing with a soldering iron. Writing with a soldering iron might first of all call up thoughts of pyrography, the technic of decorating wood or other materials by burning them with a heated implement. This is a primeval practice that was common in Ancient Egypt, and, as pyrographer Robert Boyer suggests, it was likely one of the first ways that early humans expressed themselves symbolically. All of this conjures a certain Promethean context for understanding the act of writing with a soldering iron. Above all, I want to avoid this Promethean trap and sidestep the notion of the soldering iron as a phallic icon of technical progress, the soldering iron as the enlightening torch of STEM. I want to position the soldering iron not as an instrument for the external marking of surfaces, but instead as an instrument for internal conjuration, and for making ideas congeal and solidify10 in a generative coupling of anamnesis and hypomnesis. On several occasions in my career, I have quoted the following mythic anecdote from German media theorist Friedrich Kittler: “at night after I had finished writing, I used to pick up the soldering iron and build circuits” (Griffin, Hermann, and Kittler 1996: 731). Rather than viewing this anecdote as a STEM legitimation of Kittler’s theoretical work (Kittler prided himself on being an engineer), it might be understood as a formula for thinking—one in which soldering and writing are picked up together and inextricably spliced into an engaged modality for critical action. I want to reclaim the soldering iron then, as a non-phallic and nonPromethean inducement to contemplation. To get to this point, it is useful to consider soldering within the broader history of human technics. I nearly entitled this chapter “Soldering Iron for the Hand, Critical Essay for the Face,” in reference to French anthropologist André Leroi-Gourhan’s instructive aphorism, “Tools for the hand, Language for the Face” (1993: 19–20). This simple two-part phrase encapsulates Leroi-Gourhan’s complex understanding

Note that the word soldering has roots in the Latin term solidus. From the Online Etymology Dictionary: early 14c., soudur, from Old French soldure, soudeure, from souder, originally solder, “to consolidate, close, fasten together, join with solder” (13c.), from Latin solidare “to make solid,” from solidus “solid.”

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of how humans co-evolved with technics; put simply, tool use by early humans provoked slow and steady brain development necessary for the invention of language. According to Leroi-Gourhan’s origin story, this co-evolutionary process between humans and technics (language itself being one such technic) engenders the verticality of the early human, a verticality that supports a cranium poised for additional brain growth and a jaw liberated from its primary grasping function so that it can be opened for face-to-face communication. Of course, erect posture also liberates the hands, which makes it possible for speech to be exteriorized in written symbols. Leroi-Gourhan captures this entire evolutionary process in a single word: exteriorization.11 Indeed, all technics are a form of exteriorization, and in Leroi-Gourhan’s formulation, we must conclude that the human is a technical animal. In Stiegler’s words, “the human invents himself in the technical by inventing the tool—by becoming exteriorized techno-logically” (1998: 141). The question I am asking here is whether we can be more selective about how and when to engage in technical, specifically digital, forms of exteriorization. Moreover, recalling Adriana Cavarero’s critique12 of the homo erectus trope as a figure of Western male power systems, how, for example, might our choice of technics and the origin stories we ascribe to them more carefully reflect what it means to be human and what we want humanity to be? Can we be more careful about how we invent ourselves in the technical? Leroi-Gourhan’s strikingly concise evolutionary vignette calls to mind those ubiquitous cartoon charts of the hunched ape-man, discretely transformed in four or five steps into a tool-wielding upright male with a normalized physique, sometimes dressed in a suit and tie and carrying a briefcase. Or more relevantly

Tim Ingold describes exteriorization as “a displacement or decentration of the source of operational behaviour from the physiological locus of human being” (2013: 433). This is a foundational concept for technology-based conceptions of posthumanism. See Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (2010), specifically Chapter 2: “Language, Representation and Species: Cognitive Science versus Deconstruction.” 12 See Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude (2016). Cavarero introduces the figure of the inclining mother as an alternative to the figure of the erect, autonomous, rational agent that has shaped Western thinking. I develop this concept more carefully in the Epilogue of this book, where I introduce the figure of Homo inclinus. See also my chapter “Requiem for a Digital Humanist” in After the Human, edited by Sherryl Vint (2020). 11

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in this case is the equally ubiquitous chart of the ape-man transforming itself—in a few more steps—into a human hunched in front of a computer or bent over a handheld device. I don’t want to give in to such distractions here by suggesting that digital technology ultimately leads to some form of human devolution. Instead, I am inclined to ask the following questions: What kind of cognitive developments are we stimulating with our hands today? What is the relationship today between hands, speech, writing, and soldering? Where is the poison in our various technical exteriorizations, where is the tonic, and who gets to decide which is which? This final question brings up once again the problem of binaristic thinking. Ultimately, my goal is not to suggest that the sort of cognitive activity provoked by hypermedia, for example, is the poison and that close reading and slow writing are therefore the tonic. Instead, my suggestion is that, given the spectrum of possible cognitive activities, digital service industries have created an imbalance, favoring hyper modes of cognition over those that are more calm, focused, and linear. Following what Katherine Hayles has suggested, but without invoking the binary of “Hyper and Deep” (2007), we might regain balance by concocting a careful tincture of cognitive modes.13 The real question then, is this: How might we put the concept of technical co-evolution in the service of inventing a mode of research that fosters the cognitive balance discussed here? One answer would be to splice soldering and writing together for the sake of building long circuits of transindividuation. Thinkering, a term coined by Michael Ondaatje in The English Patient (1993), and subsequently deployed by Erkki Huhtamo, gets to the heart of this problem by splicing together the notions of thinking and tinkering into a single word (2010). This clever spoonerism condenses Richard Sennett’s detailed argument in The Craftsman, where he suggests that “Western civilization has had a deep-rooted trouble in making connections between head and hand, in recognizing and encouraging the impulse of craftsmanship” (2009: 9). Sennet’s

In “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes,” Hayles imagines a form of pedagogic experiment that “might try enhancing the capacity for deep attention by starting with hyper attention and moving toward more traditional objects of study” (196).

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book was inspired in part by his mentor Hannah Arendt, who famously opposed Homo Laborans (man the laborer) with Homo Faber (man the maker) in her book The Human Condition (1958). The distinction between labor as an animal necessity and making as a form of world-building is complicated by Leroi-Gourhan’s notion of co-evolution. The mere act of seemingly useless tinkering (in the case of early hominids, tinkering with a rudimentary stone implement known as the biface) served, through an evolutionary process, as a powerful mode of world-building. Sennet suggests that Arendt seems convinced that “the mind starts working once labor is done” (2009: 7). He ultimately concludes: “Engagement must start earlier, requires a fuller, better understanding of the process by which people go about producing things, a more materialistic engagement than that found among thinkers of Arendt’s stripe” (2009: 7). While I question whether Sennett has fairly represented Arendt’s political “stripe,” I would agree with his suggestion that engagement, be it political, intellectual, or otherwise, cannot exclude the hand (or other crafty appendage, depending on the maker’s physical affordances) at work. Such engagement brings us to the art of making attention. In a small but potent book entitled In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism, Isabelle Stengers provides a cutting and urgent indictment of a technocratic form of politics driven blindly by global economic competition. She dedicates the book to those who are attempting to “learn concretely to reinvent modes of production and of cooperation that escape from the evidences of economic growth and competition” (24). As one concrete solution to the problem of “irresponsible, even criminal” growth (21)—for this is a book that offers solutions and not just indictments—Stengers suggests that we have to reclaim the “art of paying attention” (2015: 62): What we have been ordered to forget is not the capacity to pay attention, but the art of paying attention. If there is an art, and not just a capacity, this is because it is a matter of learning and cultivating, that is to say, making ourselves pay attention. (2015: 62)

Much like Stiegler’s suggestion that we should make technological “first-aid kits” designed to resist hyperindustrial “attention control via cultural and cognitive technologies” (2010: 22), Stengers’s version of “paying attention”

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involves concrete action. But this is almost lost in translation. In French, faire attention has a different connotation than paying attention. In addition to meaning “be careful,” faire attention can be translated more literally as making attention. As opposed to paying attention, which implies a financial transaction that reflects our current attention economy, making attention describes a more deliberate and productive act. Stengers’s translator has tried to capture this in the phrase “making ourselves pay attention” (2015: 22), but I would suggest that the phrase making attention is more productive. Making attention14 belongs to the same species as thinkering, an art of attention that allows us to resist the “merchants of the time of brain-time divested of consciousness” (Stiegler, 2010: 85). The problem with building an argument on the value of making is that it risks falling into the abyss of contemporary maker culture, with all its pharmakonic trouble. For example, as I discuss in Chapter 8, the ideal of a politically inflected, grassroots makerspace, a community organization designed to share tools and knowledge, has been co-opted by corporate-minded entrepreneurs who have created makerspace franchises designed to celebrate a primarily white, male, Western agenda of neoliberal individualism. Recalling Stengers, the key to positioning making as a mode of resistance is to focus attention on the politics of making. In his book Making Is Connecting, David Gauntlett finds an exemplar in “the 1970s feminist Rozsika Parker . . . [who used] embroidery as a ‘weapon of resistance’ . . . [and who can] help us to think about how making things for ourselves gives us a sense of wonder, agency, and possibilities in the world” (2011: 2). We see here some of the emancipatory language that is common in rhetorics of maker culture.15 However, Gauntlett identifies some key values of making as a form of engagement: connecting physical things together, connecting people to one another, and connecting individuals with

The problem with building an argument on the value of making is that it risks replicating the political problems and emancipatory rhetoric associated with “Maker Culture.” For more on this topic, see my chapter “The Making of a Digital Humanities Neo-Luddite” in Making Things and Drawing Boundaries, edited by Jentery Sayers 2017). 15 As Daniela K. Rosner and Sarah E. Fox suggest in their essay, “Legacies of Craft and the Centrality of Failure in a Mother-Operated Hackerspace,” some scholars “couple the category of hacking [techoriented making] with broad social change, including end-user innovation (Von Hippel, 2005) and the ‘public creativity’ afforded by the world’s educated elite (Shirky, 2010, p.212)” (560). 14

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the world by means of sharing, which is a form of service (2011: 2). This trifecta of connecting might be described alternatively as a soldering of thing to thing, of person to person, and of person to world, all for the sake of reclaiming the art of paying attention. Making media theory, as a process that involves a feedback loop between reading, writing, and making, generates a nexus of activity suitable for attentively responding and contributing to technological developments. Media theory can be put to service in the creation of objects-to-think-with that intervene directly in the production of technoculture. In this way, making media theory can engender modes of technocultural production that “escape from the evidences of economic growth and competition” (Stengers, 2015: 24), while critically and politically engaging with this modality. To demonstrate this practice of attention formation in action, I will describe two projects that my students have allowed me to share in this chapter. These projects, created in the Critical Media Lab for a graduate seminar called “Digital Abstinence,”16 are not meant to serve as ideal models or perfect exemplars, but rather, they help flesh out the technics involved in making media theory, demonstrating less abstractly what it could mean to write with a soldering iron. Basket Case is a sensor-equipped, hand-woven basket created by Caitlin Woodcock, a Master’s student who graduated from the Experimental Digital Media (XDM) program at the University of Waterloo. This project responded to the assignment of creating an object-to-think-with that focuses attention on “digital abstinence.” As an avid maker, Woodcock decided first of all to tinker with pottery and basket weaving as a way of engaging her hands17 in a thought experiment. She wanted to use this project as a way of contesting the value of speed in contemporary technoculture, an idea fuelled by her

For more information on this course, see http://digitalabstinence​.org. The term basket case itself, which is contemporary slang for a disturbed and agitated person, originated during the First World War as a dismissive way to describe quadriplegics who had to be carried in baskets. With this in mind, I will note that the conspicuous focus on hands in this chapter opens the possibility for a critique of the ableism that seems prevalent in the handy co-evolutionary theories of Leroi-Gourhan, Stiegler, and others. My point is not only that we must pay attention to such matters but also that a critical discourse on technics should not fetishize the hands. Rather, it should focus more capaciously on the ways in which we might become “hypnotized by the amputation and extension of [our] own being in a new technical form” (McLuhan 1964, 15).

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reading of Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society (1967), Bratich and Brush’s “Fabricating Activism: Craft-Work, Popular Culture, Gender” (2011),  and other readings on making and media theory. She ultimately chose to pursue a basket-weaving project, based on her research into Amish and Indigenous domestic practices. In the essay portion of the assignment, Woodcock writes, “I wanted to focus on domestic aspects because they provide the opportunity to engage with the idea of technological control through female-knowing” (2016: 2). She quotes Tassoula Hadjiyanni and Kristin Helle’s observation that “craft making and its connective abilities strengthen .  .  . and reclaim cultural and gender identities as women craft makers reestablish their role as safekeepers of tradition” (2010: 77, qtd in Woodcock, 2016: 2).18 Naturally, there is a soldering component to this project; the basket contains a Force Sensitivity Resistor (FSR) at its base and a small LCD screen woven into its rim, both of which are soldered to an Arduino Nano microcontroller.19 The end result is a basket designed to hold a handheld device, freeing the hands of the user for other activities besides texting, surfing, and gaming. When the user retrieves the device from the basket, the LCD screen displays what percentage of the basket the user could have woven during the time their hands were liberated from the device. Among other objectives, this project aims to rework some of the domestic practices of the Amish, without activating the gender hierarchy that is embedded in these practices. For this, Woodcock turns to the Amish concept of Gelassenheit, which might be described roughly as “calmness, acceptance, and yieldedness” (Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner and Nolt 2013, 98). She writes, Like the Amish values associated with Gelassenheit, crafting finds itself incompatible with the present reality of a technological society and, in order to preserve it, alternative ways of interacting with technology need to be

In Critical Fabulations, Daniela K. Rosner offers a detailed and rigorous examination of how “undervalued, feminized forms of craftwork” underlie engineering innovations (4). I regret that this excellent book was not available to Caitlin when she completed her final design projects, which involved not only basket making but also crocheting and quilting with conductive thread. 19 An Arduino microcontroller is a small open-source computer, seemingly ubiquitous in current digital DIY projects, that can be programmed to allow analog objects, like hand-woven baskets, to connect interactively with digital objects, like LCD screens. For a more formal definition, see http:// arduino​.cc. 18

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determined. Slowness does not have to remain associated with the idea of wasted time or missed opportunities. It can, instead, become a powerful vehicle for being and doing in ways contrary to the norm. (2016: 7)

The term Gelassenheit was also used by Martin Heidegger in his “Discourse on Thinking” to describe the practice of worlding. In Heidegger’s terms, Gelassenheit does not focus instrumentally on objects, but rather it “begins with an awareness of the field within which these objects are, an awareness of the horizon rather than of the objects of ordinary understanding” (1968: 24).20 Basket Case harnesses the connective and contemplative potentials of craftmaking, drawing specific attention to how we might spend our time more attentively in a culture obsessed with speed and efficiency. Out of the same class as Basket Case came Mindflux, a prototype for an Arduino-based bracelet designed by Megan Honsberger, another graduate from the XDM program who took my course on “Digital Abstinence.” The project is inspired by Buddhist prayer beads or mala beads, which can be used to count breaths or to keep track of the recitation of mantras during meditation. Buddhist rituals, which are rooted in mindfulness, can provide productive technics for relearning the art of paying attention. Aware that the term mindfulness is “a trending buzzword in Silicon Valley,” Honsberger focused the project on Buddhist traditions (Honsberger, 2016: 8). In her project essay, she included the following quote from an introductory book on Buddhism, revealing that mindfulness is not just about self-betterment, but about bettering the world through acts of attention: “the clarity of mindfulness provides the mental awareness of self and world needed for skillfully changing oneself for the better and skillfully contributing to bettering the world in which one lives” (qtd. in Honsberger, 2016: 5–6). Unlike a traditional mala bead bracelet (an object that predictably has been co-opted by fashion accessory companies such as Lokai and stripped of its value as a sacred object), Honsberger’s wearable is designed to facilitate a feedback loop of mindfulness

I am aware of the risks involved in aligning Heidegger with a feminist maker project. But I feel it is important to acknowledge how the concept of gelassenheit has informed the philosophy of technology. It might be more appropriate to reference the influence of Buddhism, which Heidegger freely appropriates in his work.

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between humans and their digital prostheses. Whenever the user of Mindflux responds to a digital distraction, “they must first touch the bracelet (via touch sensor) to make a digital LED ‘bead’ light up. As the day progresses, the user has a visual representation of how often they have performed the activity they are trying to curb” (9). The bracelet thus has the potential to serve as a sort of digital “scarlet letter,” calling attention to the user’s distracting digital rituals (Honsberger, 2016: 11). The religious connotations of this object-to-thinkwith are not lost on its creator, who suggests further that unbounded progress “fuels the fervency of faith in digital technology as an infallible tool to divine a supreme existence. And it is this devout, though unconscious, belief which in turn creates vice-like, unconscious, and . . . mindless use of digital media” (Honsberger, 2016: 2).  The title of Honsberger’s project is actually a splicing together of the words mindful and UX (User Experience). This is intended to demonstrate her awareness that the project is imbricated in a rationalist discourse on digital production in which UX is code for digital rhetoric, or the art of persuasion by means of digital technology—an art that has led BJ Fogg to coin the term captology, the study of computers as persuasive technology.21 While Mindflux co-opts the tools and technics of that world, it is not beholden to it. Put otherwise, the project is in that techno-capitalist world, but not of it. To this end, Honsberger’s work is inspired by the self-proclaimed “cyborgLuddite” Steve Mann, whose wearable inventions are designed to short-circuit technocapitalism: The Wearable Computer can then be understood as a crucial beginning to a new phase of technological development that not only extends human senses, but, more importantly, allows us, the (post) human beings, the cyborg Luddites, to reassert our autonomy over technology wherever and whenever we choose. (Mann 34, qtd in Honsberger, 8–9)

The reference to posthumanism here calls attention to where Honsberger’s project differs from Mann’s Wearcomp apparatus. In his attempt to develop “existential technology” (2001: 57), Mann ultimately celebrates the autonomous,

I examine this concept at greater length in “The Reckoning: Silicon Valley Confronts its Digital Sins” (2018).

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Figure 5.1  Megan Honsberger, MindflUX prototype, 2017.

neoliberal humanistic subject. The posthumanism Honsberger’s project brings to mind is one that focuses instead on what comes after humanism; it de-centers the human in a humbling act that connects thing to thing and self to world, and reveals the destructive side of technological progress. More than just the products of a graduate seminar, Woodcock and Honsberger’s projects were experiments in tactical media, thanks to their strategic positioning. Both were created in the Critical Media Lab, which shared space with a start-up incubator that fosters the creation of less critically attentive projects. In addition, Woodcock’s basket was hosted in the office of the University president, where it helped question the prevailing STEM-centric discourse on innovation. Moreover, projects like Woodcock and Honsberger’s respond productively to Debbie Chachra’s criticism of maker culture as a male-dominated movement that renders invisible other forms of labor, mainly caregiving. Citing Gloria Steinem to make her point, Chachra notes that We’ve begun to raise daughters more like sons . . . but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters. Maker culture, with its goal to get

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everyone access to the traditionally male domain of making, has focused on the first [i.e., raising daughters like sons]. But its success means that it further devalues the traditionally female domain of caregiving, by continuing to enforce the idea that only making things is valuable. (2015)

While I can imagine how Chachra’s immersion in the STEM world might lead to the blanket statements made in her essay, the relationship between caregiving and making is more complex than the gender binary she has assigned to it. Here, it is useful to revisit the translation of “paying attention” once again, simply to note that in French, faites attention! can also mean, “be careful.”22 Making attention aligns well with the ascetic practices of selfcare23 described by Foucault in The History of Sexuality Volume 3 as “an entire activity of speaking and writing in which the work of oneself on oneself and communication with others were linked together” (1986: 51). As Liz Kinnamon has observed, following Foucault, asceticism in ancient Greece was social in “two primary ways: first, whatever attention one devoted to the self doubled over its effects onto others . . . . And, second, care of the self was built into the social through institutional structures like schools, mentoring and teaching, spiritual services provided by philosophers to families or groups, and friendship” (2016: 193). This chapter optimistically suggests that practices of self-care can be woven into technoculture without, as Kinnamon warns, blindly serving an “entrepreneurial ethos that holds individuals personally responsible for either succumbing to or transcending structural inequality” (2016: 192). Woodcock’s project, for example, recuperates traditionally female and domestic practices of making, at once valorizing them and asserting them productively within contemporary practices of digital production. To borrow the words of Daniela K. Rosner and Sarah E. Fox, Woodcock offers a

Andrew Goffey makes this observation in a footnote of his translation of Stenger’s book. For a more developed discussion of care and making, see my book Necromedia, especially Chapter 9, “Digital Care, Curation, and Curriculum: On Applied Media Theory.” 23 As Foucault suggests in “Technologies of the Self,” “When one is asked ‘What is the most important moral principle in  ancient philosophy?’ the  immediate answer is not, ‘Take care of  oneself ’ but the  Delphic principle,  gnothi sauton  (‘Know yourself ’). Perhaps our philosophical tradition has overemphasized the latter and forgotten the former” (1986). 22

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“counter-narrative of hacking grounded in legacies of craftwork24 that disrupt conventional ontologies of hacking” (2016: 560). This sort of work can lead to questions about “who counts as innovative” (560). Honsberger’s project, on the other hand, asks us to reconsider the definition of “caregiver” not just as one who performs a service for others, but as one who is attentively open to a world-making beyond the worlds offered to us by the digital service industries. Both of these projects evoke what Steven J. Jackson refers to as “the routinely forgotten relationship of humans to things in the world: namely, an ethics of mutual care and responsibility” (2014: 231). It is not an exaggeration to draw such philosophical conclusions from the two projects described here because they are not just the product of soldering but also of writing. The process of making these projects involved carving out space for contemplative and generative consideration of technological being. As a result of this careful consideration, these students have not just made objects-to-think-with, they have also crafted ekphrastic essays. This, at last, should explain what it means to write with a soldering iron.

References Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Bolter, Jay David. 1991. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing, Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Bratich, J. Z. and H. M. Brush 2011. “Fabricating Activism: Craft-Work, Popular Culture, Gender.” Utopian Studies 22.2: 233–60. Cavarero, Adriana. 2016. Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Chachra, Debbie. 2015. “Why I Am Not a Maker.” The Atlantic. Jan. 23. Derrida, Jacques. 1981. Dissemination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dolmage, Jay. 2014. Disability Rhetoric. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Ellul, Jacques. 1967. The Technological Society. New York: Vintage Books.

Rosner develops this theme at length in her book Critical Fabulations, where she introduces a variety of evocative projects that “sit at the crossroads of innovation, technology, and craft.”

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Foucault, Michel. 1986. The Care of the Self: Volume 3 of The History of Sexuality. Trans. Robert Hurley. Toronto: Random House. Foucault, Michel. 2002. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Routledge. Gauntlett, David. 2011. Making Is Connecting. Cambridge: Polity Press. Godard, Jean-Luc. 1967. Two or Three Things I Know about Her. Performances by Marina Vlady, Anny Duperey, Roger Montsoret. Paris: Argos. Griffin, Matthew, Susanne Herrmann and Friedrich A. Kittler. 1996. “Technologies of Writing: Interview with Friedrich A. Kittler.” New Literary History 27.4: 731–42. Hadjiyanni, Tasoulla and Kristin Helle. 2010. “(IM)Materiality and Practice: Craft Making as a Medium for Reconstructing Ojibwe Identity in Domestic Spaces.” The Journal of Architecture, Design and Domestic Space 7.1: 57–84. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2007. “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes.” Profession 187–99. Heidegger, Martin. 1968. “Discourse on Thinking.” Trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund. New York: Harper and Row. Honsberger, Megan. 2016. “Mindflux: From Use to Non-User Or, Application of Micro Digital Abstinence.” Term paper, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Huhtamo, Erkki. 2010. “Thinkering with Media: On The Art of Paul DeMarinis.” In Paul DeMarinis: Buried in Noise, ed. Ingrid Beirer, Sabine Himmelsbach and Carsten Seiffairth, 33–46. Heidelberg and Berlin: Kehrer Verlag. Ingold, Timothy. 2013. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. New York: Routledge. Jackson, Steven. 2014. "Rethinking Repair." In Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, ed. Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski and Kirsten A. Foot. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Kinnamon, Liz. 2016. “Attention Under Repair: Asceticism from Self-Care to Care of the Self.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 26.2–3: 184–96. Kraybill, Donald B., Karen M. Johnson-Weiner and Steven M. Nolt. 2013. The Amish. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Krieger, Murray. 1992. Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Leroi-Gourhan, André. 1993 [1964]. Gesture and Speech. Trans. A. Bostock Berger. Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press. Mann, Steve and Hal Niedzviecki. 2001. Cyborg: Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer. Toronto: Doubleday Canada. McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: New American Library.

 Writing With a Soldering Iron 87 Melo, Maggie. 2016. “Writing Is Making: Maker Culture and Embodied Learning in the Composition Classroom. Digital Rhetoric Collaborative.” Blog post, March 4. http:​/​/www​​.digi​​talrh​​etori​​ccoll​​abora​​tive.​​org​/2​​016​/0​​3​/04/​​writi​​ng​-is​​-maki​​ng​-ma​​ker​c​​ultur​​e​-and​​-embo​​died-​​learn​​ing​-i​​n​-th​e​​-comp​​ositi​​on​-cl​​assro​​om/. Mitchell, Donald William. 2008. Buddhism: Introducing the Buddhist Experience. London: Oxford University Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. 1994. Picture Theory: Essays on the Verbal and the Visual. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morton, Timothy. 2007. Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Novak, Marcos. 1992. “Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace.” In Cyberspace: First Steps, ed. Michael Benedikt. Cambridge: The MIT Press. O’Gorman, Marcel. 2006. E-Crit: Digital Media, Critical Theory, and the Humanities. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. O’Gorman, Marcel. 2015. Necromedia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. O’Gorman, Marcel. 2015. “Taking Care of Digital Dementia.” CTheory. February. O’Gorman, Marcel. 2017. “The Making of A Digital Humanities Neo-Luddite.” Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities. Ed. Jentery Sayers. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. O’Gorman, Marcel. 2018. “The Reckoning: Silicon Valley Confronts its Digital Sins.” The Globe and Mail, April 2. O’Gorman, Marcel. 2020. “Requiem for a Digital Humanist.” After the Human. Ed. Sherryl Vint. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Gorman, Marcel and Bernard Stiegler. 2010. “Bernard Stiegler’s Pharmacy: A Conversation.” Configurations 18.3: 459–76. Ondaatje, Michael. 1993. The English Patient. Toronto: Vintage Canada. Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. The Internet Classics Archive. Ray, Robert B. 2002. The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rosner, Daniela K and Sarah E. Fox. 2016. “Legacies of Craft and the Centrality of Failure in a Mother-Operated Hackerspace.” New Media & Society 18.4: 558–80. Sennett, Richard. 2009. The Craftsman. New Haven: Yale University Press. Shirky, Clay. 2010. Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. New York: Penguin. Simondon, Gilbert. 1989. L’individuation psychique et collective. Paris: Aubier. Somerson, Rosanne and Mara L. Hermano, eds. 2013. The Art of Critical Making. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

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Stengers, Isabelle. 2015. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Trans. Andrew Goffey. London, UK. Stiegler, Bernard. 1998. Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. 1998. Trans. Richard Beardsworth. Stanford: Stanford UP. Stieegler, Bernard. 2009. “Teleologics of the Snail: The Errant Self Wired to a WiMax Network.” Theory, Culture & Society 26.2–3: 33–45. Stiegler, Bernard. 2010. Taking Care of Youth and the Generations. Trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford: Stanford UP. Stiegler, Bernard. n.d. “Anamnesis and Hypomnesis.” http:​/​/ars​​indus​​trial​​is​.or​​g​/ana​​ mnesi​​s​-and​​-hyp​o​​mnesi​​s. Steiner, Wendy, The Colors of Rhetoric. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Strauss, Claude Lévi. 1969. The Savage Mind. Trans. by George Weidenfield and Nicholson Ltd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Von Hippel Eric. 2005. “Democratizing Innovation: The Evolving Phenomenon of User Innovation.” Journal für Betriebswirtschaft 55.1: 63–78. Wolf, Maryanne. 2008. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. New York: Harper Perennial. Wolfe, Cary. 2010. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press. Woodcock, Caitlin. 2016. “Becoming a Basket Case: Resisting Technology to Preserve Craft-Skill.” Term paper, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

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Workshop Smartphone Basket

But John doesn’t hold with teaching basket weaving where the splints come ready made. He teaches basket making, beginning with a living tree. —Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

Preamble If the useless box was inspired by the boys’ club of Bell Labs, the smartphone basket seems to emerge from a more feminine source or, more specifically, from a female domestic space, as discussed in the previous chapter. This gendering of the receptacle as female is an ancient trope, common in Greek myth— from Pandora’s box to the chest that hid earth-born Erichthonius, progeny of Gaia and the errant seed of Hephaestus that Athena wiped from her leg and tossed to the ground. Moreover, in ancient Greece, receptacles played a key role in feminine rituals and more generally in domestic spaces. As François Lissarrague has suggested, objects of confinement such as boxes, clay pots, and baskets—objects that are “almost exclusively branded as female”—reflect the very confinement of women to the oikos (1995: 100). In an essay entitled “Women, Boxes, Containers: Some Signs and Metaphors,” Lissarrague looks closely at the iconography of Greek vase paintings, ultimately concluding that they depict containers as “a matter of putting away, stocking, preserving; sometimes to conceal or to hoard, in short, to exercise a control over an

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indoor private space, where women are themselves detained” (1995: 93).1 I’m not going to belabor Lissarrague’s point, which translates too neatly into a Freudian reading of Ancient Greek craft. Instead, I want to focus on the very last painting reproduced in his essay, a detail from a cup in which a Satyr is leaning so far into an open box that only his hindquarters are visible. As Lissarrague puts it in the final sentence of the essay, “The curiosity of the Satyr infringes . . . on the boundaries shaping Greek society; he cannot resist and dives, head first, in the women’s chest, even if it means losing his head” (1995: 100). It would be easy to make cavalier comments here about male academics studying women’s history with their heads in the sand—or somewhere more indecent, for that matter. But I have other intentions, for it is at the end of Lissarrague’s essay—at the point where the curious Satyr loses his head—that this chapter on baskets begins. Although I know better, I would like to think that Lissarrague’s final sentence was inspired by Georges Bataille, who wrote in the first issue of the experimental journal Acephale, Human life is defeated because it serves as the head and reason of the universe. Insofar as it becomes that head and reason it accepts slavery. If it isn’t free, existence becomes empty or neuter, and if it is free, it is a game. The earth, as long as it only engendered cataclysms, trees, and birds was a free universe; the fascination with liberty became dulled when the earth produced a being who demanded necessity as a law over the universe. (1936)

All of the calculating reason, the Freudian machinery powering the discourse on woman-as-container, comes to a halt when the Satyr becomes the Satyrbox: half-man, half-goat, half box, a formula that requires a new understanding of mathematics, one based not on logical summation, but on indeterminate becoming. Bataille’s defense of headlessness provides the first item of instruction for this lesson on basket weaving. We begin then, with an understanding of making as an activity of becoming and as an opportunity to lose our heads.

Lissarrague notes that in Lysistrata, Aristophanes plays on the words kiste, or basket, and kusthos, “a vulgar expression for the female sexual organs” (1995: 98). In a curious inversion, the word basket is more readily associated today with male sexual organs, referring to “the outline of the male genital area as viewed through pants/swimsuit/undergarment” (Urban Dictionary, 2019).

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In his book Making, Tim Ingold describes a class exercise in which students were taught how to make baskets out of willow by standing thin branches upright in the sand and weaving them together until the form of a receptacle emerged. Ingold recalls that the students were surprised by the “recalcitrant nature of the material” (2013: 22), and they finished the day with aching muscles. After all, as Ingold puts it, “there is no obvious point when a basket is finished” (2013: 23), and so the students’ work was delimited primarily by physical exhaustion. It is this interplay of human bodies and “recalcitrant nature,” the tension of muscles and willow, to which Ingold draws our attention. Rather than understanding making as an imposition of human will on nature, Ingold asks us to understand the students’ creations as an interplay of matter, as “the drawing out or bringing forth of potentials immanent in a world of becoming” (2013: 31). The students entered this project headlessly, without a prior design, and they were left to follow the directions of the materials in their hands, engaging directly with what Deleuze and Guattari (2004), following Gilbert Simondon (1964), have described as matter-flow. As Ingold puts it, “Artisans or practitioners who follow the flow are, in effect, itinerants, wayfarers, whose task is to enter the grain of the world’s becoming and bend it to an evolving purpose” (2013: 25). Ingold’s goal here is not to provide instructions for some sort of generative art practice, the woven equivalent of automatic writing; rather, he is asking makers to take account for the complex field of materials and interactions in which their activity unfolds. This is making as morphogenesis. In an essay aptly entitled “On Weaving a Basket,” Ingold suggests that “Since the artisan is involved in the same system as the material with which he works, so his activity does not transform that system but is—like the growth of plants and animals—part and parcel of the system’s transformation of itself ” (2000: 345). Ingold ultimately asks for a revision of the word making, calling instead for a practice of weaving. Whereas making regards “the object as the expression of an idea,” weaving regards the object as the “embodiment of a rhythmic movement” (2000: 346). The result is an anti-platonic understanding of fabrication in which “the forms of objects are not imposed from above [e.g., by a rational, disembodied mind], but grow from the mutual involvement of people and materials in an environment” (2000: 346). This understanding of

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making as morphogenesis might even complicate how we understand the work of a master craftsman like Hephaestus; after all, “Even iron flows, and the smith has to follow it” (Ingold, 2013: 27).2 We have come a far way then from a course in “underwater basket weaving,” an expression once used to describe any number of supposedly useless courses in the arts and humanities curriculum (Wikipedia, 2019). Basket weaving as described here has become a philosophical, erotic, and possibly ethical activity performed by individuals who understand their actions not as masters of nature, but as agents in a field of becoming. As a learning opportunity, basket weaving introduces students to the practices and politics of haptics, a form of knowing that challenges the predominant senses of seeing and hearing— the so-called distant senses—which dominate Western education. As Laura U. Marks suggests in her book Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensuous Media, haptics require a form of knowing in which bodies are conspicuously entangled, or woven, an “erotics that offers its object to the viewer but only on condition that its unknowability remain intact, and that the viewer, in coming closer, give up his or her own mastery” (2002: 90). Not surprisingly, I first came upon this quote in a book by Jack Halberstam.3 To understand making as weaving, to embrace the unknowability that comes with haptics, is to accept the possibility of failure, the possibility that our idea of what we are making may very well not materialize in ways that we hope and expect. I have encountered this disappointment many times with students whose handmade projects do not satisfy the platonic image they held in their heads when they

Here, Ingold is paraphrasing Deleuze and Guattari, who draw on metallurgy in A Thousand Plateaus to illustrate the variability of matter. Perhaps even more poignantly, Jussi Parikka calls for “a metallurgic way of conducting theoretical work” in A Geology of Media: “ambulant flows, transversal connections, and teasing out the materiality of matter in new places, in new assemblages of cultural life in contemporary technological media” (2015: 23). 3 In Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability, Halberstam applies the concept of haptics to transgender identity formation, which can involve a making, unmaking, and/or re-making of self. In Halberstam’s terms, the language of the haptic can be an “alternative to the medical, the legal, and the mediatized will to know and as a remapping of the gendered body, not around having or lacking the phallus but around manipulating and knowing via the hand, the finger, the arm, the body in bits and bits and pieces. The haptic body and the haptic self are not known in advance but improvised over and over on behalf of a willful and freeing sense of bewilderment” (2018, 92). 2

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began. But the failure they experience, if it can be called failure at all, is only the failure of a head guided by a will to mastery. Making media theory should not be understood as the materialization of platonic designs, but rather as an embodiment of becoming, a headless tension between muscle and matter, with unknowable results. When these are the conditions of fabrication, there can be no failure except in an inability or refusal to recognize making as a complex process of becoming. Understanding making as a form of haptics runs counter to rhetorics of making, already described in this book, that are complicit with technocultural logics, that understand matter as beholden to the will of a skilled craftsman, technician, or computer programmer. Making as haptics can lead to a happy acknowledgment of the limits of human mastery over nature, including an acknowledgment of our own species limitations. “The close senses,” says Marks, such as touch, smell, and taste, which index both the material world and the materiality of the body that perceives with them, insist upon mortality. Thus, a materialist aesthetics can find value in the close senses precisely for their grounded, provisional, and ephemeral character. The immanence and materiality of the proximal senses can thus be the ground of aesthetics, knowledge, and indeed ethics. (2002: 129)

As I argued in my book Necromedia, an acknowledgment of our own mortality need not be an endorsement of morbid depression but rather a call to recognize with curiosity our vulnerable entanglement in a material world beyond our understanding (2016). Therein lies the recipe for an ethics of making. In Chapter 3, I proposed that the humanities must maintain their distance from STEM disciplines so as to protect a certain degree of critical autonomy with which technology can be understood and evaluated. But as this chapter suggests, making media theory requires a negotiation between critical distance and haptic proximity, as the theorist/maker loses their head in the materiality of things. For a chapter that promotes headlessness, it seems ironic to invoke the heady theories of Georges Bataille, Gilbert Simondon, and Deleuze and Guattari. This is perhaps one of the many perils of making media theory, which asks

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makers to shuttle between the distant and close senses that unfold in the field of technocultural being. I am tempted, as I write this, to start over altogether and draw on a system of knowledge other than the European philosophical canon invoked here. Let’s consider another tradition of basket weaving then, as a way of complicating both the Greek-Freudian machinery that started this chapter and the continental philosophy that bodied it forth. When John Pigeon makes a basket out of black ash, he begins by finding the right tree and asking it for permission to be felled. Once the ash is felled, he peels the bark away and uses a hammer to loosen strips of flesh from the tree. The strips are usually a single growth ring thick, each strip signifying a year in the life of the tree. Finally, John Pigeon carefully cuts the strips into long ribbons of flexible ash, suitable for weaving. This account of John Pigeon’s interactions with a black ash tree comes from Braiding Sweetgrass, in which Robin Wall Kimmerer describes her experience of learning to make a black ash basket in a workshop with the renowned Potawatomi basket maker. Kimmerer describes how, in every step of the process, she encountered the recalcitrance of the ash, the tension between weaver and wood. As she began weaving, she noticed how the ash “resists the pattern” she was trying to impose on it, but eventually, through a process of negotiation and reciprocity, lent itself to a shape that would become a basket (2013: 152). There are many lessons for an ethical maker to learn from Indigenous knowledge,4 but among them is a consideration for the life and origins of the materials entangled in the process of becoming. “Today, my house is full of baskets,” observes Kimmerer, “They remind me of the years of a tree’s life that I hold in my hands” (2013: 154). She then goes on to consider the origins of other objects in her midst: What would it be like, I wondered, to live with the heightened sensitivity to the lives given for ours? To consider the tree in the Kleenex, the algae in the toothpaste, the oaks in the floor, the grapes in the wine; to follow back the

For a more detailed discussion of Indigeneity and material culture, see Jennifer Clary-Lemon, “Gifts, Ancestors, and Relations: Notes Toward an Indigenous New Materialism” (Enculturation, November 12, 2019).

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thread of life in everything and pay it respect? Once you start, it’s hard to stop, and you begin to feel awash in gifts. (Kimmerer, 2013: 154)

Kimmerer even traces the lineage of her metal lamp. She stops, however, when she encounters the plastic on her desk. “I can muster no reflective moment for plastic,” she writes, before tracing it back to the fossilized diatoms and marine invertebrates that were transformed, by the shifting of the earth, into oils that could be refined to produce these industrial objects (2013: 155). “Being mindful in the vast network of industrialized goods” poses too much of a challenge. “We weren’t made for that sort of constant awareness,” concludes Kimmerer, a statement that can easily be transposed onto our own frenetic digital culture (2013: 155).

Instructions The assignment outlined in this chapter asks readers to make a basket designed to hold a cell phone or perhaps more than one phone. The project is designed to provoke reflection on the materials and bodies that it summons forth. Some makers may wish to follow the example of Caitlin Woodcock, whose project is described in the previous chapter, and add a sensor and LCD display to their basket. In this case, they should carefully consider what that display will say to those who encounter it, both before and after their cell phone is placed on the sensor in the basket. I have included the source code and a wiring diagram for this purpose for the sake of documenting Caitlin’s project. Makers are welcome to draw on these digital-oriented resources, but they will likely lose their functionality over time as hardware and software protocols change. The same can’t be said for the instructions and functionality of the basket itself. There are too many types of baskets for me to land on a single model for instruction. I typically teach this workshop by having students make simple plaited baskets with strips of vinyl, upcycled from by lab’s supply of discarded street banners that advertised a tech conference. Rather than providing precise instructions on how to weave a single type of basket, I encourage readers to research basket making online and draw from one of the many sets of

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Figure 6.1  Caitlin Woodcock, Basketcase, 2017.

instructions available. But consider the source carefully. Is there a cultural or family tradition behind this basket? Better yet, rather than searching online, readers could visit a local shop or market where artisan baskets are sold, and conduct research, possibly contacting the weaver, before deciding on what kind of basket to make. Readers might even consider taking a basket weaving class at a local cultural center or even at an Indigenous community center. Whatever the case may be, it is essential to pay attention to the materials and their origins while keeping in mind the relationship between the weaver’s body, the basket, the cell phone(s) it is going to hold, and the bodies of those who will make use of this basket. When I consulted with Indigenous artist Barry Ace about this workshop, he taught me that baskets are “containers for stories” (2019).5 He learned to make

In “A Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” Ursula K. Leguin challenges the white, Western, male logic of technoscientific discourse by introducing an alternative mode of storytelling based on the carrier bag, a category that includes woven baskets (1989). In Leguin’s words, if “one avoids the linear, progressive, Time’s-(killing)-arrow mode of the Techno-Heroic, and redefines technology and science as primarily cultural carrier bag rather than weapon of domination, one pleasant side effect

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baskets by observing the weaving of elders and listening to the stories they told in the process. This workshop might work best as a communal event in which the baskets provide a medium for storytelling. Barry Ace also suggested that students should learn to make something from their own cultural heritage, rather than simply copying Indigenous basket weaving methods (2019). I provide an opportunity for reflection on this advice in the Discussion section further. The following instructions are provided for those who wish to integrate an LCD display and sensor into the basket. The list of materials, wiring chart, and code were provided by the Lab Technician of Critical Media Lab, Matt Frazer, and are reproduced here with the permission of Caitlin Woodcock. As noted already, these materials may be used (debugged, updated, and hacked) to produce a replica of Woodcock’s Basketcase project, but they are reproduced here primarily for the sake of discussion and reflection on morphogenesis. Supplies: ●●

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9V battery 9V battery clip Arduino Uno (or similar) 16x2 LCD character display or similar Force-sensing resistor appropriately sized for the bottom of a basket Breadboard Hookup wire

Wiring Chart: Note that the wiring chart given here includes a resistor between the LCD display and the power source. This may be necessary, depending on your configuration.

is that science fiction can be seen as a far less rigid, narrow field, not necessarily Promethean or apocalyptic at all, and in fact less a mythological genre than a realistic one” (1989: 170).

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Code: //As anyone familiar with coding will immediately recognize, it is practically //useless to print code in a book for someone to copy. Code found online can be //easily copied and pasted. This code would have to be transcribed line by line. //Then again, transcribing code line by line can be a very effective way to learn how to //code. #include LiquidCrystal lcd ( 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12); //Setup the LCD interface pins int sensorReading; //A variable to store the value of the sensor reading int sensorPin = 0; //Force-sensing resistor (FSR) is plugged into pin A0 //The sensor value above which the basket considers a phone to be present: //Adjust between 0 (most sensitive) and 1023 (least sensitive); int sensorThreshold = 200;  unsigned long start; //Stores the time the phone was rested unsigned long finish; //Stores the time the phone was lifted unsigned long elapsed; //Stores the difference between start and finish float percentComplete; //Stores the percentage of basket completion

Figure 6.2  Schematic for Basketcase.

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int resultDisplayTime = 5000; //Time in ms to display result //"Basket Case" is a state machine - it has different behaviours in each //of its three states: //1. Waiting   - Prompt user to rest phone, read sensor //2. Counting  - Count the number of seconds the phone has been resting, //        read sensor //3. Concluding - Show the basket percentage for a set amount of time //This variable keeps track of what state it is in int state = 1; //The code that runs once: void setup() {   lcd​.beg​in(16,2); //Set the LCD's number of columns and rows  } //The code that runs on repeat: void loop() {   if (state == 1) { //Do state 1 behaviour (waiting)    //Prompt the user:    lcd.setCursor(0,0);    lcd​.pri​nt("Rest Your Phone");    lcd.setCursor(0,1);    lcd​.pri​nt("        ");    sensorReading = analogRead(sensorPin); //Read the value of the FSR    //Check if a phone is detected:    if (sensorReading > sensorThreshold) {     //Store the time (in # of ms since power on) phone was detected:    start = millis();     state = 2; //Move to "Counting" state   }    } else if (state == 2) { //Do state 2 behavior (counting)    elapsed = millis() - start; //Subtract start time from current time    elapsed = int(elapsed/1000); //Convert from milliseconds to seconds   //Display count:   lcd.setCursor(0,0);

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  lcd​.pri​nt("Resting  ");   lcd​.pri​nt(elapsed, 0);   lcd.setCursor(0,1);   lcd​.pri​nt("        ");    sensorReading = analogRead(sensorPin); //Read the value of the FSR    //Check if the phone is removed:    if (sensorReading resultDisplayTime) {    state = 1;   }  }   lcd.display(); //update the LCD display   delay(100); //wait 100ms  }

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Discussion 1. Keeping in mind the advice of Barry Ace, noted earlier, as well as the Satyr who put his head in the women’s box, where it did not belong, consider how this assignment requires different types of appropriation, including the appropriation of a student project, the appropriation of gendered domestic craft, and the potential appropriation of cultural practices that involve basket weaving. What ethical considerations should be woven into this project? 2. Qwo-Li Driskill, a Cherokee queer theorist, has suggested that “Two-spirit critiques are a making that asks all of our disciplines and movements to formulate analyses that pay attention to the current occupation of Native lands” (2010: 87).6 In what ways might the weaving of your basket be used to embody, supplement, or challenge some of the gender and/or colonial issues raised in the chapter? 3. The project described in this chapter has the potential to immerse the maker not only in the weaving of a basket but also in the weaving of computer code. What are the similarities and differences between these two modes of weaving? Can the writing (or rewriting) of code facilitate a process of becoming-with in a way similar to the weaving of a basket? 4. Consider the first assignment in this book, in which you are asked to make homemade play dough. What would it mean to replace the basket in this project with a play-dough vessel? Could you rewrite this chapter by reflecting on pottery rather than on baskets? 5. In ancient Greece, baskets such as the kalathos, kanoun, and liknon played an important role in sacred rituals. Conduct research on these rituals, and consider how your own smartphone basket might be used as part of a more elaborate digital ritual for contemporary people. See the next chapter for Ronald Grimes’s specific instructions on how to make a ritual.

I would like to thank Jennifer Clary-Lemon for introducing me to Driskill’s essay.

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References Ace, Barry. 2019. Private conversation. April 8. Bataille, Georges. 1936. “The Sacred Conspiracy.” Trans. Mitch Abidor. Acéphale, June 24. Retrieved from Marxists​.or​g. https​:/​/ww​​w​.mar​​xists​​.org/​​subje​​ct​/an​​archi​​sm​/ba​​ taill​​e​/sac​​red​-c​​o​nspi​​racy.​​html. Clary-Lemon, Jennifer. 2019. “Gifts, Ancestors, and Relations: Notes Toward an Indigenous New Materialism.” Enculturation, November 12. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 2004. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: Continuum. Driskill, Qwo-Li. 2010. “Doubleweaving Two-Spirit Critiques: Building Alliances between Native and Queer Studies.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16.1–2: 69–92. Halberstam, Jack. 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Halberstam, Jack. 2018. Trans*: A Quick and Dirty Account of Gender Variability. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge. Ingold, Tim. 2013. Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions. Leguin, Ursula K. 1989 [1986]. “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” In Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. New York: Grove Press. Lissarrague, François. 1995. “Women, Boxes, Containers: Some Signs and Metaphors.” In Pandora: Women in Classical Greece, ed. Sarah C. Humphreys. Baltimore, MD: Trustees of the Walters Art Gallery in association with Princeton University Press. Marks, Laura U. 2002. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. O’Gorman, Marcel. 2016. Necromedia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Parikka, Jussi. 2015. A Geology of Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Simondon, Gilbert. 1964. L’individu et sa génèse phsico-biologique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Urban Dictionary. 2019. “Basket.” https​:/​/ww​​w​.urb​​andic​​tiona​​ry​.co​​m​/def​​i ne​.p​​hp​​? te​​rm​=Ba​​sket Wikipedia. 2019. “Underwater Basket Weaving.” https​:/​/en​​.wiki​​pedia​​.org/​​wiki/​​Under​​ water​​_bask​​et​_w​e​​aving​.

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I would call this comportment toward technology which expresses “yes” and at the same time “no,” by an old word, releasement toward things [Die Gelassenheit zu den Dingen]. —Martin Heidegger, “Discourse on Thinking” It may seem odd to include two chapters on so-called digital abstinence in a small book on making. One possible explanation is that the form of media theory I am proposing here is influenced by asceticism, or at least by Foucault’s framing of it, as discussed in Chapter 5. But there may be yet another explanation, which goes something like this: All media theory is neoLuddistic.  I offer this provocation not to suggest that media theory is a form of cynicism, or as in David Gauntlett’s words, “happy to show off how ‘critical’ it can be . . . [while] disregarding the feelings of users of digital communications media, who are regarded as hapless dupes of the system” (2015: 125). Rather, I am proposing that the term media theory is an oxymoron of sorts. There is nothing about the use of contemporary media technologies that elicits theoretical inquiry. As I have discussed throughout this book, the prevailing temporality of technoculture does not lend itself very well to practices that rely on slow and careful theoretical rumination. Information comes to us in 280-character snippets, not in 10-chapter books. More frequently, it comes to us in pre-digested images that require less time to process than words. Rapid cycles of planned obsolescence urge consumers to purchase new devices every few years rather than making long-term commitments of care and repair. And the devices themselves are not to be opened up like books, but instead conceal their circuits from us so as to inhibit any sort of curiosity or undue attention

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Figure 7.1  Digital Tabernacle, Steel Rails Art Festival, Waterloo, Ontario, 2014.

to what lies beneath the glossy surface. Given that media theory, like many other humanities disciplines, involves a commitment to careful knowledge formation, practices of deep reading, and slow critical thinking, it is reasonable to suggest that this field of inquiry is fundamentally neo-Luddistic. Add to this the fact that most media theory is bodied forth in linear, printoriented essays, and the argument makes even more sense. This book might be seen as an attempt to extend media theory beyond its writerly body without denying that body or attempting to transcend it. Making media theory directs attention toward technology in ways that contemporary technology is not designed to provoke. Even if the practices outlined in this book result in the production of digital artifacts rather than print-oriented essays, inasmuch as they are media-theoretical artifacts, they still bear the stamp of a refusenik. Perhaps I am being polemical, and I am certain that my logic might be questioned, but the idea of making media theory as a form of Luddism makes for a good thought experiment. Rather than resisting this label, I choose to embrace it in this chapter, which is not about the feelings of hapless users, but about the comportment of digital nonusers.

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In March 2014, I found myself standing just inside the entrance of a massive carnival tent in downtown Phoenix, Arizona, dressed in a black cassock and wearing a long gray wig. With arms outstretched, I entreated passers-by to confess their digital sins and lock away their devices in a repurposed Catholic tabernacle box. My friend and colleague Ron Broglio wore a similar disguise, supporting my efforts by preaching the Analog Word: “Know thyself—not thy selfies!” We, the Ministers of the Digital Tabernacle, had descended upon The Carnival of the Future to profess digital abstinence. This performance fills me with a sort of monkish self-loathing, perhaps in part because of the ludicrous get-up, but more so because it suspends the performers in a state of technological ambivalence, even to the point of hypocrisy. That said, I have come to understand this project, which I have since performed several times, as a wearable intervention; beyond the wig and cassock, the disguise also includes an Autographer lifelogging camera,1 worn around the neck and modified to look like a shiny black cross.2 This device allows the performers to document willing and not-so-willing penitents as they confess their digital sins, one photo for every thirty seconds. These photos were posted online for anyone to see. Why would a preacher of digital abstinence make such explicit and hypocritical use of an invasive digital device? Before tackling this question directly, it is useful to consider the broader context of digital wearables that promote forms of abstinence. There has been a notable surge recently in the invention of such devices. The most common example might be apps for the iWatch such as the Livestrong Myquit Coach or the more adventurously titled Get Rich or Die Smoking app. These products help a smoker monitor consumption, earn rewards for good behavior, and access a support network, among other functions. But they are not strictly designed for a wearable device. On the other hand, there is the QT-Watch, a

The Autographer was developed in 2013 by a start-up called OMG Life, which is now defunct. I accessed the devices on an early release basis for my own research on memory and technology. 2 This invention was inspired in part by the iBelieve, developed in 2005, which is a T-shaped appendage that fits onto the base of an iPod shuffle to turn it into a glossy white cross. The inventor Scott Wilson provided the following text to pitch his product: “Inspired by the world’s obsession with the iPod, iBelieve is a replacement cap and lanyard for your Shuffle. Now you can profess your devotion with a fashionable symbol of faith. Join the fastest growing religion on the planet” (Wilson n.d.). 1

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designated device for smoking cessation designed by a medical doctor who specializes in the treatment of nicotine addiction. Among other features, the QT-Watch sports a small button on the face with a cigarette graphic on it, used to count the number of times a user lights up during the day. A far more sophisticated device is the SmartStop, a watch-like wearable that serves as a transdermal nicotine delivery platform. As I write this, the researchers are seeking to miniaturize the SmartStop into a light wristband with Bluetooth connectivity that not only administers doses of nicotine but also links the wearer to an addiction support app much like the ones mentioned earlier. For those seeking abstinence from harder substances such as alcohol and illicit drugs, the wearables become more creative and, not surprisingly, more invasive. In 2015, researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas developed a (what looks like an Arduino-based) “Wearable biochemical sensor for monitoring alcohol consumption lifestyle through Ethyl glucuronide (EtG) detection in human sweat” (Selvam et al. 2016). The hacked-together device uses LED lights to indicate whether the wearer is in a state of “abstinence” (green), “mild alcohol consumption” (yellow), or “binge drinking” (red) (Selvam et al. 2016). Since then, more refined versions of alcohol-deterring wearables have been developed at other laboratories across the United States, including one at Florida International University that targets binge drinking on college campuses (Kregting, 2017). This particular watch-like invention “picks up vapors from the skin and sends the data to a server. If the alcohol reading is high, via an app, a designated loved one gets an alert to check in on the user” (Kregting, 2017). Meanwhile, researchers at the University of Massachussetts Medical School have tested a wrist-worn biosensor on four emergency department patients to monitor their illicit drug habits (Carreiro et al., 2015). The wearable provides real-time detection of skin conductivity, skin temperature, and acceleration. Although it was designed to study the health-related behaviors of drug addicts, and not to promote abstinence, other products are being developed for this very purpose. The start-up company Behaivior (note that the AI is not a typo), founded at Carnegie Mellon University, is developing a biosensor wearable that alerts a recovering addict when the heart rate, stress level, and even geographical location suggest that a relapse may be imminent. Rather

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than attempting to detect drug use directly, the Behaivior device is proactive; it “screens users for whether they are in a pre-relapse craving state, and therefore at higher risk of relapsing in the near future” (behaivior, n.d.). Much like the alcohol-sensing device described already, an accompanying app will allow friends or family members to access live data from the device wearer and possibly plan an intervention. Finally, an account of digital wearables that promote abstinence would be incomplete without consideration of sexual abstinence. As with smokers, there are apps designed for sex addicts, including the Abstain! app developed by Hungry Wasp LLC for Apple devices.3 Once again, these apps are not designed specifically for wearable applications; in fact, dedicated wearables that promote sexual abstinence seem to be uncharted territory. Surprisingly, my search for chastity wearables on Google did not yield a tidal wave of sites marketing chastity rings for Christian teens, but instead produced a number of links to Evotion, a company that sells 3D printed chastity belts for men. While these wearables—which look like overdetermined modernist sculptures or lingerie designed for naughty Star Wars Storm Troopers—are not digital, what’s instructive about them is that they are not designed to promote chastity at all. In fact, they might be viewed as ironic devices that harness abstinence, so to speak, for the sake of promoting a more controlled, or perhaps ritualistic access to sexual pleasure. More to the point, these chastity belts share something crucial in common with all of the other abstinence wearables discussed thus far: quite simply, they are all built on the assumption that abstinence is not a permanent condition, but a temporary state that serves a specific purpose, whether it be health improvement, legal vigilance, or sexual stimulation. In All or Nothing: A Short History of Abstinence in America, Jessica Warner defines abstinence as “a principled and unerring refusal to engage in a particular activity” (Warner 2006, xi). “Going without something for a short period of time,” suggests Warner, “is not abstinence” (Warner, 2006: xi). The

According to a post on the anti-masturbation subreddit called “nofap,” the developers of Abstain! “thought of naming [the app] Fapstronaut but decided on Abstain! to conform to the app store guidelines” (Systemride 2013).

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problem with this rigid definition—which, to be fair, is based on Warner’s account of the nineteenth-century Temperance movement—is that it does not take into account the possibility of temporary or even ritualistic forms of abstinence. Consider, for example, the words that God spoke to Aaron regarding abstinence in the mobile Tabernacle that was central to the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt: 8 And the Lord spake unto Aaron, saying, 9 Do not drink wine nor strong drink, thou, nor thy sons with thee, when ye go into the tabernacle of the congregation, lest ye die: it shall be a statute for ever throughout your generations: 10 And that ye may put difference between holy and unholy, and between unclean and clean. (Leviticus 10:9)

This is not an all-or-nothing commandment, but a site-specific form of abstinence that more closely reflects our own contemporary rituals of moderation. For example, a raging carnivore might abstain from eating meat while having a weekly lunch date with a vegan friend. Here, abstinence is integrated into a temporary ritualistic practice, much in the same way that Catholics might not eat meat on Fridays during the season of Lent, but are free to feast on Friday flesh for the rest of the year. This brings us back to Digital Tabernacle, which is an attempt to co-opt some of the discursive and ritualistic practices of abstinence specific to Catholicism and put them in the service of a critical intervention that asks people to contemplate not God, but their own digital habits. The focus on ritual here is central to my broader research on digital abstinence, which seeks in part to understand how digital devices inspire ritualistic behaviors,4 and how, in turn, new rituals might be developed to encourage moderation of digital device usage. In The Craft of Ritual Studies, Ronald Grimes provides practical advice for students of ritual, whether they are junior undergraduates or scholars seeking to integrate ritual studies into

My focus is not on how digital media can foster existing rituals, such as for example, a funeral in Second Life. For a consideration of this topic, see Ken Hillis, Online a Lot of the Time: Ritual, Fetish, Sign (2009). Ronald Grimes, to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for schooling me in ritual studies, also discusses telepresent rituals in The Craft of Ritual Studies.

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their own field of research. Frustrated with the tendency of ritual studies scholars to provide reductive or self-conflicting definitions of ritual, Grimes promotes a more experimental approach based on an ethics of care and repair, as encapsulated in the following bicycle-inspired passage: “Borrow or invent a definition and, imperfect as it is, work with it. Figure out what it facilitates and it inhibits. Repair it if you can, and keep on pedaling. If that doesn’t work, trade it in on a new model” (Grimes 2014: 190). Consider, for example, Victor Turner’s definition of ritual as “formal behaviour prescribed for occasions not given over to technological routine that have reference to beliefs in mystical (or non-empirical) power” (Turner, 1970: 19). While this techno-sensitive definition would help distinguish between digital rituals and simple user routines prescribed by designers, it ignores the fact that ritual itself is a form of technique. As Barry Stephenson suggests in his description of the Ligi or Confucian Book of Rites, “Ritual is a device and technique for generating and maintaining order, good will, and a sense of belonging” (2015: 102). In seeking to define digital ritual, it would be best to keep this concept of technique in mind, perhaps combining it with an axiom from Jonathan Z Smith: “Ritual is, first and foremost, a mode of paying attention” (Smith 1992: 103). More specifically, as Barry Stephenson puts it, ritual is “a different way of framing attention between what one is doing and what one is thinking or feeling” (2015: 84). I have chosen to pedal along with ritual theories that focus on attention because they work well in the context of digital culture, which, as discussed throughout this book, comes with its own demands on the attentional capacities of device users. With this conception of ritual in hand, I want to promote the making of new digital rituals that encourage users to pay attention in a different way than what is dictated by the consumer devices at their disposal. Grimes uses the word “counter-ritual,” noting that “Ritualists can perform ‘against,’ taking issue with, or providing alternatives to rituals that exclude them and values they cherish” (Grimes 2014: 303).5 Grimes even provides a checklist that can help

It seems appropriate here to mention the nineteenth-century Luddites, who attempted to resist technological change by inventing new rituals that fostered social cohesion, including the invention of Ned Ludd himself. For a more detailed discussion of Luddism in the context of critical digital

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suggest how new ritual actions might be invented, a process he calls ritualizing (Grimes 2014: 193). Actions can be transformed into rituals by ●●

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traditionalizing them, for instance, by claiming that they originated a long time ago or with the ancestors; elevating them by associating them with sacredly held values, those that make people who they are and that display either how things really are or how they ought to be; repeating them—over and over, in the same way—thus, inscribing them in community and/or self; singularizing them, that is, offering them as rare of even one-time events; prescribing their details so they are performed in the proper way; stylizing them, so they are carried out with flare; entering them with a non-ordinary attitude or in a special state of mind, of example, contemplatively or in trance; invoking powers to whom respect or reverence is due—for example, gods, royalty, and spirits; attributing to them special power or influence; situating them in special places and/or times; being performed by specially qualified persons (Grimes 2014: 194).

Digital Tabernacle provides one example of how new rituals might be invented to promote digital abstinence by traditionalizing, elevating, repeating, singularizing, prescribing, stylizing, and performing specific actions. The concept of inventing rituals for digital abstinence is of course not exclusive to the ministers of the Digital Tabernacle. High-tech burnouts can find solace at one of many, highly ritualistic digital detox camps that have sprouted up around the United States during the past decade. One of the most prominent retreats—Camp Grounded—offers the following rationale for a digital detox on its website, elevated by reference to “sacredly held values” (Grimes 2014: 194): In an era of constant technological acceleration and innovation, an over abundance of screen time, information overload, tech-driven anxiety, social

design, see my chapter entitled “The Making of a Digital Humanities Neo-Luddites” in Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities, edited by Jentery Sayers (2017).

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media everything, internet addiction, a constant sense of FOMO (fear of missing out), selfies, and being endlessly tethered and always available,—[sic] many have referred to us as the ultimate decelerator. We help you slow down. We remind you to look up” (digital detox, n.d.).

Similarly, in 2008, attendees of a retreat hosted by Reboot, an organization guided by Jewish traditions, conceived of the Sabbath Manifesto, described on the Reboot website as “a creative project designed to slow down lives in an increasingly hectic world.” (n.d.). As part of this mandate, Reboot also launched a ritualistic National Day of Unplugging, “a 24 hour period—running from sundown to sundown—and starts on the first Friday in March. The project is an outgrowth of The Sabbath Manifesto, an adaptation of our ancestors’ ritual of carving out one day per week to unwind, unplug, relax, reflect, get outdoors, and connect with loved ones” (n.d.). Like Camp Grounded, the National Day of Unplugging focuses on concepts like authenticity and presence, while promoting an attention to time that is not determined by technocratic demands (digital detox n.d.). Reboot even promotes a small Cell Phone Sleeping Bag designed by San Francisco–based artist Jessica Tully. This is a wearable worn by handheld devices themselves, which can be used as part of a digital Sabbath ritual (n.d.). This sleeping bag brings us closer to the conception of a wearable that might be central to the ritualistic performance of digital abstinence. A distant cousin of this bag has been marketed successfully by a San Francisco–based company called Yondr, which has invented a neoprene pouch with a magnetic enclosure designed to ensure the nonuse of handheld devices at specific events. People at the event lock their device in a Yondr case and take it with them into the venue. On the way out, they use a small unlocking station to liberate the device from the pouch. Yondr is essentially prescribing a new ritual practice that targets the attention of audiences attending a live show. Championing the catchphrase “be here now,” Yondr claims to have “a simple purpose: to show people how powerful a moment can be when we aren’t focused on documenting or broadcasting it” (n.d.). The list of performers who have used Yondr includes Chris Rock, Alicia Keys, and Guns N’ Roses. Nightclubs, schools,6 and churches are also making

I am currently conducting a research project with the Vision and Attention Lab at University of Waterloo to study the impact of Yondr on student task performance in undergraduate seminars.

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use of the product. David Sax writes in a Guardian article that Yondr, which he calls a “cell phone straightjacket,” might help us reclaim a more enjoyable, tech-free version of reality (Sax, 2016). Otherwise, “Putting screens between that reality, and our selves, instantly creates a pixilated poverty of a rich analog experience” (Sax, 2016). What Yondr demonstrates is that phenomenological questions about presence, reality, and the self—as ill-guided as these questions may sometimes be—may be plied for the sake of designing digital abstinence wearables that mobilize new rituals of moderation. Then again, one might challenge this argument by noting that the Yondr pouch is technically not wearable, nor digital, especially when compared, for example, to a product like the now-defunct Ivanka Trump Chargeable Handbag. What, then, would a digital abstinence wearable look like? Taking a cue from the rhetorical strategies of Yondr, Digital Sabbath, Camp Grounded, and other proponents of digital abstinence, students in one of my design classes pitched their concept for a product called OneWatch. This is a timepiece with only one arm that takes twenty-four hours to go through a full rotation. Students justified the design of the watch by describing it as a form of resistance to Taylorism: “In sales, factories, and athletics, the faster a person completes a task, the more they are rewarded, be it with financial bonuses, promotions, or trophies. To be more efficient at these tasks, people for generations have worked at breaking down each movement of an activity into simple mechanics or techniques that can be quickly and easily taught and mastered” (Fryer-Davis, 2017: 2). Digital technology, as the author notes, has only exacerbated this problem; wearable devices are an explicit symbol of what we have come to know as the quantified self, which is the apotheosis of Taylorism. The OneWatch on the other hand, inspired by the work of Jacques Ellul (1967) and Lewis Mumford (1934) among others, “is designed to abstract time and counter its structured nature” (Fryer-Davis, 2017: 2). The watch is not meant to be worn all day every day, but as a way of creating a special time that is not governed by efficiency. Put otherwise, when worn as part of a ritual practice of technical resistance, this wearable promotes the concept of illud tempus introduced by Mircea Eliade (Eliade, 1959: 169). The inventors of the OneWatch are attuned to the possibility that “profane temporal duration can

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be periodically arrested” through the designation of a sacred time, a time out of time (Eliade, 1959: 71). The OneWatch might best be described as a counterfunctional object, a term coined by James Pierce and Eric Paulos, who suggest that “extreme functional limitations can be a valuable source of new positive possibilities” (Pierce and Paulos, 2014: 375). For example, the designers of the OneWatch, by making the timepiece less precise than a traditional watch, are urging users to disconnect from efficiency-driven conceptions of time that can lead to anxiety, competition, and obsession with productivity (Fryer-Davis, 2017). Counterfunctional objects can be especially useful to creatively explore and possibly critique the design of contemporary technologies. In the case of Pierce and Paulos, the target object is not the smartwatch, but the digital camera. The authors have designed and tested a series of counterfunctional cameras, including the following: an Ultra-Low Resolution Camera that critiques the “overabundance of high-resolution images in a digital era” (Pierce and Paulos, 2014: 377); an Inaccessible Digital Camera that provokes the user to destroy the camera in order to access the photo data; a Capsule Camera that shows the number of photos taken but does not have a viewfinder or display, thus encouraging delayed gratification and surprise (Pierce and Paulos, 2014: 380). Drawing on language that echoes the digital abstinence camps cited already, Pierce and Paulos ask the following question: “In an age of faster, smarter and more numerous multi-functional technologies, what value can emerge based on technological absence, inability and inhibition?” (Pierce and Paulos, 2014: 376). This brings us to the Digital Chastity Belt designed by one of my MA students, Adam Cilevitz, for his final thesis project. The crudely designed wearable was hacked together by Adam, a proud crapenter, using a standard men’s belt, a clip-on phone case, an Arduino microcontroller, and parts coaxed out of a novelty electric shock pen. The user is intended to wear the belt with a handheld device inserted in the case over the pelvic region. When the lid to the case is opened, a surprising shock is delivered to the user’s crotch. Not surprisingly, this counterfunctional device produced more laughs than it did shocks, and this response adequately reflects the designer’s intentions. As

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Adam put it in an essay that accompanied the project, the Digital Chastity Belt “ambivalently comment(s) on the rhetorics of cell phone addiction and digital abstinence, while proposing a practical—if not extravagant and ironically excessive—method for framing and managing this addiction” (Cilevitz, 2015: 3). In particular, Cilevitz suggests that his project explores the pleasures and pains of handheld device usage, a concept he wryly encapsulates in the word phonamism, drawing playfully on Biblical tale of Onan, whose name has become synonymous with masturbation (i.e., onanism) (Cilevitz, 2015: 4). Cilevitz’s ethos in approaching this design project is instructive, since it characterizes a critical practice of making that explores digital culture by means of humor, irony, and above all, ambivalence. We want to heed the pop wisdom of “be here now,” but we also want to be everywhere all at once. We want to avoid appearing narcissistic, but we also want to record our experiences to share with others and store for ourselves. What’s more, we know better than to embrace naïve notions of presence, reality, and the self that are guided by a vague form of technological determinism, but at the same time, we can’t ignore that contemporary ethical, environmental, social, and health-related problems may be exacerbated by digital technologies. Digital abstinence projects provide opportunities to mobilize this ambivalence for the sake of engaging in critical reflection on technoculture. The Digital Chastity Belt, like the OneWatch and the lifelogging cross of Digital Tabernacle, is an example of how wearable devices can be designed as objects-to-think-with that promote reflection on how to comport ourselves digitally. It is essential to note that Cilevitz’s reference to “digital addiction” is also ironic and ambivalent (Cilevitz, 2015: 3)—a result of his own inability to come to terms with this pop psychological prognosis. As dana boyd suggests in It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, the term addiction is used in a cavalier fashion by teens to identify media usage habits that they might view as excessive, or more accurately, as abnormal (boyd, 2014: 85). But mainstream media leans on the specter of addiction to engage in a more technologically determinist rhetoric that sensationalizes tech-related behaviors. As boyd puts it, “It is easier for adults to blame technology for undesirable outcomes than to consider other social, cultural, and personal factors that may be at play”

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(boyd, 2014: 79). Echoing this concern, Laura Portwood-Stacer adds that the “addiction metaphor might actually work to naturalize ‘normal’ degrees of use among most of the population. Consumer culture and the corporations which power it are thus left unproblematized” (Portwood-Stacer, 2012). What’s more, by loosely applying a rhetoric of addiction to media usage habits, there is a danger of trivializing forms of addiction that are verifiably life-threatening and unquestionably destructive. For example, “Fear mongering stories,” boyd suggests, “often point to accounts of internet addiction boot camps7 in China and South Korea, where the compulsion allegedly rivals alcoholism, drug addiction, and gambling” (boyd, 2014: 78). As with verifiable addictions, it is unproductive to lay the blame on a single cause for the specific digital behaviors of an individual; when social and psychological problems are tangled up with digital technologies, it is best to consider the specific web of circumstances in which users—and more to the point here, nonusers—find themselves enmeshed. In the Introduction to How Users Matter, Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch make a point of focusing on the concept of nonusers as an important category in the sociological study of technological design and production. Most of the authors in How Users Matter decry what’s known as the top-down or “executive function” of technological design, aiming instead “to go beyond a rhetoric of designers being in control” (Oudshoorn and Pinch, 2003: 15). Oudshoorn and Pinch’s Introduction entitled “How Users and Non-Users Matter” references the work of various authors in the anthology who suggest that one way out of this rhetoric is to focus explicitly on nonusers. “Instead of representing resistance and non-use as irrational, heroic, or involuntary,” these authors argue that nonuse behaviors “should be considered as rational choices shaping the design and (de)stabilization of technologies” (Oudshoorn and Pinch, 2003: 19). Further, the authors note that nonuse is “most likely to occur in situations in which the prescribed uses and the symbolic meanings attached

A group of students in my recent course on Non-Use pitched a digital detox boot camp that poked fun at the rhetoric of Chinese internet addiction camps. Their design included a uniform for campers that was essentially an oversized Yondr case that served as a full-body prophylactic.

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to the technology by its producers and its promoters do not correspond to the gender relations, the cultural values, and the identities of specific groups of people” (Oudshoorn and Pinch, 2003: 19). This situational conception of nonuse is corroborated by Christine Satchell and Paul Dourish in their article “Beyond the User: Use and Non-Use in HCI,” where they set out “to recognize ‘the user’ as a discursive formation rather than a natural fact, and then to examine the circumstances in which it arises, the forces that shape it and the uses to which it is put” (Satchell and Dourish, 2009). They provide a framework for this approach by identifying “six forms of non-use: lagging adoption, active resistance, disenchantment, disenfranchisement, displacement, and disinterest” (Satchell and Dourish, 2009).8 The nonuse wearables I have discussed thus far seem to fit best into Satchell and Dourish’s category of active resistance. One might also imagine digital nonuse wearables fitting into any of the other categories, perhaps simultaneously. For example, the mode of resistance motivating Yondr is obviously based on a perception of handheld devices as distracting and somehow producing an inauthentic experience. But this resistance function of the nonuse device is complicated by the way in which Yondr also protects the intellectual property rights, and hence the profits, of mainstream performers.9 It would be inaccurate, for example, to suggest that users of Yondr are actively engaging in what Laura Portwood-Stacer has called “conspicuous non-consumption” rooted in a rejection of neoliberal values (PortwoodStacer, 2012). Rather, it might be more precise to label these nonusers as a disenfranchised community. The Digital Chastity Belt presents an even more complex case. While the design seems to reflect active resistance and possibly disenchantment, the overt eroticism of the device, in addition to the designer’s

Sally Wyatt provides her own categorization of nonusers in her article “Non-Users Also Matter: The Construction of Users and Non-Users of the Internet.” These include resisters, rejecters, the excluded, and the expelled (Wyatt 2003, 76). While no list of nonuser categories can be complete, I have chosen to reference the list of Satchell and Dourish as it offers a more capacious rubric for identifying nonuse behaviors. 9 As noted in a New York Times article by Janet Morrissey, “Lesser-known bands might be more hesitant to try Yondr, as many rely on fans posting photos and videos to promote their shows” (Morrissey 2016). 8

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ironic attitude, suggest instead what I would call an ambivalent resistance, motivating a critical design approach that leaves room for the designer to surrender control over the meaning and ultimate functionality of a device, for the sake of exploring a complex technocultural issue. Returning to Digital Tabernacle, I have observed that the project functions by asking participants and performers to confront not only their ambivalence toward technology but also their ambivalence toward the religious symbols and rituals that are co-opted in the process. Most importantly, all of these projects focus less on the question of how do we wear technology than they do on a much more complex and nuanced question: How do we comport ourselves technologically? The notion of ambivalent resistance bears a close resemblance to Martin Heidegger’s conception in “Discourse on Thinking” of Gelassenheit, which he defines loosely as “releasement toward things” (Heidegger, 1968: 54). Heidegger relied on this concept to compose an uncharacteristically gleeful passage about how to get along in a world of rampant technological innovation. The passage is worth quoting at length, for reasons that should become obvious to the reader: We can use technical devices, and yet with proper use also keep ourselves so free of them, that we may let go of them any time. We can use technical devices as they ought to be used, and also let them alone as something which does not affect our inner and real core. We can affirm the unavoidable use of technical devices, and also deny them the right to dominate us, and so to warp, confuse, and lay waste our nature. But will not saying both yes and no this way to technical devices make our relation to technology ambivalent and insecure? On the contrary! Our relation to technology will become wonderfully simple and relaxed. (Heidegger, 1968: 54)

Needless to say, this passage lays bare not only Heidegger’s technological determinism but also his essentialist conception of the human as a thing with an “inner and real core” and a stable “nature” (Heidegger 1968, 54). What’s more, he suggests that technical devices have a stable essence and a specific way in which they “ought to be used” (Heidegger, 1968: 54). Having acknowledged these obvious philosophical problems with the passage, what I want to rescue

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from it is a relaxed approach to technical devices that is at once ambivalent and easygoing, yet also critical and discerning. Moreover, what Heidegger describes here is a specific focus on how we pay attention to things or how we attend to attention more generally, which is a central question that can be used to guide the creation of digital abstinence devices. Rather than looking to Heidegger for wisdom, we may just as well consult the Amish, who also champion a concept of Gelassenheit that guides their adoption of new technologies. In the case of the Amish, Gelassenheit also refers to a sort of releasement, but a release toward the will of God, a letting-go that was made infamous when victims of the Nickel Mines School Shooting in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, openly forgave the violent perpetrator and made peace with his family. As Donald Kraybill suggests in The Riddle of Amish Culture, “the symbols of Gelassenheit articulate surrender, bond the community together, and mark off boundaries with the larger society” (Kraybill 2001, 54–5). When it comes to technological adoption, Amish ambivalence can lead to such interesting inventions as a counterfunctional Linux-based computer that will allow word processing and other desktop publishing functions, but will not connect to the outside world via the internet (Kraybill, Johnson-Weiner and Nolt, 2013: 316). Still, it is too easy to romanticize the Amish approach to technological adoption—a process that novelist Neal Stephenson has coined as Amistics (2015: 611)—because their tightly controlled communities are able to work within a space and time of their own design, carefully selecting technologies as they see fit, as long as they don’t negatively impact their very clear-cut value system, which is held together by a strict set of rituals. Obviously, most of us lack such a rigid set of values—nor do we necessarily want one—and few would be willing to give up electric lights in their home for the chance to live in a world without presidential Tweets. The Amish focus on rituals, such as their eight-hour communion service, which involves a confession of sins and a foot-washing ceremony, brings us back to the concept of comportment. As Ronald Grimes suggests, “Rituals model bodily comportment outside rituals by prescribing actions inside rituals” (Grimes, 2014: 307). What the Amish demonstrate is that it is possible, even within the well-oiled machine of contemporary technocapitalism, to carve out a culture that marches to

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the beat of its own non-electric drum. That is not to say that the Amish are not technical people; nor do they eschew efficiency, as the counterfunctional computer example demonstrates. But they are not afraid to resist techniques of efficiency that they deem as somehow spiritually harmful, and they do so by relying on ritual techniques that enforce the values that make technology nonuse a part of their daily lives. In The Technological Society, Jacques Ellul defines technique as “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency in every field of human activity” (Ellul, 1967: xxv). This definition still holds today, especially as we consider the focus of wearable computing on quantifying the self and integrating humans more efficiently into digital networks. But as I have already discussed in this book, it is important to recall that technics are not a recent product of human society.10 The human, following the work of André LeroiGourhan and others,11 is always already technical, thanks to our prosthetic relationship to tools. In the words of Leroi-Gourhan, “The whole of our evolution has been oriented toward placing outside ourselves what in the rest of the animal world is achieved inside by species adaptation” (Leroi-Gourhan, 1993: 20). David Wills has proposed a theory of dorsality that involves looking back to our technical origins as a way of putting our technical future into perspective. More to the point, Wills insists that “We should reserve the right to hold back, not to presume that every technology is an advance” (Wills, 2008: 6). If we adhere to the theory of co-evolution, and keeping in mind the critical discussion of prosthetics in Chapter 3, I will propose yet another polemical statement: Every technology is a wearable technology. This prompts me to ask yet another, final question: What are we wearing on our backs today, and how does this impact our species as a whole? This is not an obtuse question, but the basis for a politically inflected understanding of technology that is not driven forward blindly by a naïve conception of progress. Wearables are an overt

See, for example, Necromedia, especially Chapter 1: “Necromedia Theory and Posthumanism.” See Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (321998). Stiegler’s adoption of Leroi-Gourhan for the study of contemporary technoculture has been mobilized widely in posthumanist texts, including David Wills’s Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics, Cary Wolfe’s What Is Posthumanism (2010), Mark B.N. Hansen’s New Philosophy for New Media (2004), and my own book, Necromedia (2015).

10 11

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reminder that we are technical animals, and that we have the ability to shape our comportment by carefully selecting the techniques to which we will adapt. Bearing in mind that the etymological root of comportment comes from the French word porter (to wear)12 and to the Latin word portare (to carry) with all of its evolutionary implications, I have attempted here to develop a way to think about wearable technology and comportment at the very same time.

References Behaivior. n.d. “What We Do.” http://www​.behaivior​.com​/what​-we​-do. boyd, dana. 2014. It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Cadot, Julien. 2015. “Comment traduire wearable ? L’Académie Française nous a répondu.” Numerama, October 27. http:​/​/www​​.nume​​rama.​​com​/t​​ech​/1​​28374​​ -comm​​ent​-t​​radui​​re​-we​​arabl​​e​-lac​​ademi​​e​-fra​​ncais​​e​-no​u​​s​-a​-r​​epond​​u​.htm​​l. Carreiro, Stephanie, David Smelson, Megan Ranney, Keith J. Horvath, R. W. Picard, Edwin D. Boudreaux, Rashelle Hayes and Edward W. Boyer. 2015. “RealTime Mobile Detection of Drug Use with Wearable Biosensors: A Pilot Study.” Journal of Medical Toxicology 11.1 (March): 73–79. PubMed Central. Cilevitz, Adam. 2015. “Hands Off: Phonamism and the Digital Chastity Belt.” Master’s Thesis, University of Waterloo Department of English. Digital Detox. n.d. “About.” http://digitaldetox​.org​/about/. Eliade, Mircea. 1959. The Sacred and the Profane. New York: Harcourt. Ellul, Jacques. 1967. The Technological Society. New York: Vintage Books. Fryer-Davis, Peter. 2017. “OneWatch by Timeless Design.” Term Paper, Department of English, University of Waterloo. Gauntlett, David. 2015. Making Media Studies: The Creativity Turn in Media and Communications Studies. New York: Peter Lang. Grimes, Ronald. 2014. The Craft of Ritual Studies. New York: Oxford University Press.

This etymological link between wearables and the French word porter has caused a great deal of consternation for translators. Obviously, the French translation into portable, which literally means portable in English, and which is used to designate a laptop or handheld device, does not suffice. This issue has been explored at length by Julien Cadot, who attempted to address it, fruitlessly as it happens, with the Académie Française (Cadot 2015).

12

 Digital Rituals, Wearables, and Nonusers 121 Hansen, Mark B.N. 2004. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1968. Discourse on Thinking. Trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund. New York: Harper and Row. Hillis, Ken. 2009. Online a Lot of the Time. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Kraybill, Donald B. 2001. The Riddle of Amish Culture. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Kraybill, Donald B., Karen M. Johnson-Weiner and Steven M. Nolt. 2013. The Amish. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Kregting, Martin. 2017. “Engineers at FIU Develop Wearable Sensor to Battle Excessive Drinking.” ICT & Health, June 19. https​:/​/ww​​w​.ict​​andhe​​alth.​​com​/n​​ews​/ n​​ewsit​​em​/ar​​ticle​​/engi​​neers​​-at​-f​​i u​-de​​velop​​-wear​​able-​​senso​​r​-to-​​battl​​e​-ex​c​​essiv​​e​-dri​​ nking​​.html​. Leroi-Gourhan, André. 1993 [1964]. Gesture and Speech. Trans. A. Bostock Berger. Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press. Morrissey, Janet. 2016. “Your Phone’s on Lockdown: Enjoy the Show.” New York Times, October 15. https​:/​/ww​​w​.nyt​​imes.​​com​/2​​016​/1​​0​/16/​​techn​​ology​​/your​​-phon​​ es​-on​​-lock​​down-​​enjoy​​​-the-​​show.​​html. Mumford, Lewis. 1934. Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt. O’Gorman, Marcel. 2015. Necromedia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. O’Gorman, Marcel. 2017. “The Making of a Digital Humanities Neo-Luddite.” In Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities, ed. Jentery Sayers. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Oudshoorn, Nelly and Trevor Pinch, eds. 2003. How Users and Non-Users Matter. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Pierce, James and Eric Paulos, 2014. “Counterfunctional Things: Exploring Possibilities in Designing Digital Limitations.” Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, June 21–24, Vancouver, BC, Canada. Portwood-Stacer, Laura. 2012. “How We Talk About Media Refusal, Part 1: ‘Addiction’.” Flow Journal. https​:/​/ww​​w​.flo​​wjour​​nal​.o​​rg​/20​​12​/07​​/how-​​we​-ta​​lk​-ab​​ out​-m​​edia-​​​refus​​al​-pa​​rt​-1. Reboot. n.d. “Sabbath Manifesto.” http://www​.sabbathmanifesto​.org​/about. Salvam, Anjan Paneer, Sriram Muthukumar, Vikramshankar Kamakoti and Shalini Prasad. 2016. “A wearable Biochemical Sensor for Monitoring Alcohol Consumption Lifestyle through Ethyl Glucuronide (EtG) Detection in Human Sweat.” Scientific Reports 6 (March). https​:/​/ww​​w​.nat​​ure​.c​​om​/ar​​ticle​​s​/sre​​​p2311​​1. Satchell, Christine and Paul Dourish. 2009. “Beyond the User: Use and Non-Use in HCI.” OZCHI Proceedings, November 23–27, Melbourne, Australia.

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Sax, David. 2016. “At Your Next Concert: Stop Filming, Start Listening.” The Guardian, July 17, 2016. https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/co​​mment​​isfre​​e​/201​​6​/jul​​ /17​/m​​usici​​ans​-c​​oncer​​t​-pho​​ne​-et​​i​quet​​te​-si​​licon​​-vall​​ey. Smith, Jonathan Z. 1992. To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stephenson, Barry. 2015. Ritual: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press. Stephenson, Neal. 2015. Seveneves. New York: William Morrow. Stiegler, Bernard. 1998. Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus. Trans. Richard Beardsworth and George Collins. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Systemride. 2013. “Abstain! App.” Reddit, December 12, 2013. https​:/​/ww​​w​.red​​dit​.c​​ om​/r/​​NoFap​​/comm​​ents/​​1sr8q​​2​/abs​​​tain_​​app/. Turner, Victor. 1970. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Warner, Jessica. 2006. All or Nothing: A Short History of Abstinence in America. Toronto: McLelland & Stewart. Wills, David. 2008. Dorsality: Thinking Back through Technology and Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wilson, Scott. n.d. “iBelieve.” http:​/​/oba​​mapac​​man​.c​​om​/20​​10​/03​​/ibel​​ieve-​​apple​​-ipod​​ -homa​​ge​-ch​​icago​​-art-​​inst​i​​tute-​​museu​​m/. Wolfe, Cary. 2010. What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press. Wyatt, Sally. 2003. “Non-Users Also Matter: The Construction of Users and NonUsers of the Internet.” In How Users and Non-Users Matter, ed. Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Yondr. n.d. “Our Vision.” http://overyondr​.com/.

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Workshop Resistor Case

Multi quidem facilius se abstinent ut non utantur quam termparant ut bene utantur. (Many indeed find it easier to abstain from making use of them than to control their use and use them properly.) —Saint Augustine of Hippo, The Excellence of Marriage

Preamble During the course of writing this book, I have had the opportunity to observe a change in consciousness about smartphone usage habits. A growing awareness about how apps are designed to capitalize on psychological vulnerabilities, combined with very public scandals regarding the way large tech companies monetize the private information of their users, have placed pressure on those companies to respond. While I was writing this book, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Instagram all released apps to help people monitor their digital habits, marketed as a sign of each company’s care for the well-being of its users. Instagram’s product director of Well-Being has stated that the company wants people to be “in control of their experiences and . . . mindful and intentional about how they’re spending their time, how much time they’re spending, when they engage, how they engage” (Pardes, 2018). At the time I write this, it remains to be seen whether these developments will lead to concrete changes in their users’ habits, but I hope someone is undertaking the necessary research to find out.

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My own research focuses on the vulnerability of young people, particularly high school students, who in are encouraged by school boards in my region to bring their devices to class as part of a bring your own device (BYOD) strategy. Unfortunately, the school boards seem more interested in promoting an image of innovation, or what they call leveraging digital, rather than studying if the presence of smartphones in the classroom actually enhances education. In 2017, the Critical Media Lab and the Vision and Attention Lab at the University of Waterloo submitted a research proposal to the Waterloo Region Catholic School Board. The goal of the study, rooted in both media theory and cognitive psychology, was to test the impact of handheld devices on student learning and behavior in high school classrooms. The proposal, which was designed as part of a research agreement with Yondr, summarizes the study as follows: While policies about smartphone usage vary from school to school and teacher to teacher, there is a prevailing concern among teachers that smartphone use in the classroom creates an unwanted distraction that detracts from the overall educational and social environment. Some teachers have gone as far as implementing a “shoebox” approach, which requires students to give up their handheld devices. This method is not always effective, with problems ranging from the legal (the student owns the phone, not the teacher) and moral (the measure may be viewed as heavily authoritarian) to the logistical (will phones get damaged in the box? Where is the box kept?). One solution to this problem has been proposed by a company named YONDR (http://overyondr​.com), which has invented a lockable neoprene bag with a magnetic enclosure that can be opened with a base station controlled by the teacher. In this case, students hold on to their phones, but they remain inaccessible. The effects of YONDR in the classroom have yet to be studied, and this research will provide data to help guide teachers and administrators in the implementation of smartphone use policies. (O’Gorman and Smilek, 2018)

Perhaps not surprisingly, the school board declined our proposal. As it turns out, they were preparing to launch an unfortunately titled “Deep Learning Program” that relied heavily on the intensified integration of smartphones and other digital devices in the curriculum. As the school board’s research coordinator explained, it would seem hypocritical for the board to accept a

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study like ours just as they are moving full steam ahead with device usage. And yet teachers at the school where we planned to launch the study were clamoring for ways to cut down on the distracting presence of smartphones in the classroom. What we were proposing was not an exercise in hypocrisy, but a careful application of what, in the previous chapter, I called technological ambivalence. Rather than erring on the side of cell phone abstinence, as the French government has done recently in its own schools, the school board in my region was betting on its capacity to instill wholesome device usage habits in its students. What administrators were ignoring, however, and this was the crux of our proposal, is that the most effective use of digital devices may also include strategies of nonuse. Or to put it in more Catholic terms, “No one can use them wisely, unless he or she also is able to refrain from using them” (Augustine, 1999: 52). Of course, Augustine is not talking about iPhones—he is referring to “earthly goods,” including those goodies obtained as a result of unbridled concupiscence, a sin which he himself readily admitted. As an alternative to enforced digital prophylaxis,1 the Critical Media Lab has experimented with the design of a nonuse smartphone case that remediates some of the logistical, cognitive,2 and affective problems associated with the tabernacle, shoebox, and Yondr. The result is an object-to-think-with called the Resistor Case. Rather than using a lockable enclosure like Yondr, the Resistor Case features a flap that stays closed by means of heavy-duty Velcro. Acting as both an affordance and a constraint, the Velcro ensures that the case is not easy to open, nor can it be opened without making a disruptive sound.3 Moreover, unlike a locking mechanism, the semi-permeable enclosure signifies to the

More aggressive carceral solutions for digital abstinence range from the Cell Lock-Up box by EB brands to Garnet Hertz’s Phone Safe (2015), a lockbox with a timer that makes a smartphone completely inaccessible for a programmed period of time. A similar product called Distractagone is being crowdfunded currently by a Dutch start-up. For more on this topic, see also Pinterest, “25+ Best Cell Phone Jail Ideas.” 2 Research suggests that the smartphone separation induced by Digital Tabernacle might actually impede a participant’s ability to not only enjoy but to fully engage with the event. See, for example, “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity” by Ward, Duke, Gneezy, and Bos (2017). 3 This feature of Resistor Case makes it markedly different from the Cell Phone Sleeping Bag discussed in the previous chapter. While the Sleeping Bag evocatively anthropomorphizes the smartphone, it 1

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nonusers that they are in control of the situation. Put simply, Resistor Case promotes digital abstinence without impinging on an individual’s right to selfdetermination. Another feature of the design is the use of recycled materials. In the first iteration of the project, which was tested on over 500 Grade 8 students, the cases were made with duct tape and end-of-the-roll vinyl from an upholstery shop. Since then, we have experimented with other materials, such as juice cartons, discarded street banners, and fabric made from recycled water bottles. The use of recycled materials serves to counter the cult of the new that drives smartphone sales,4 and the case can be used as an object lesson to facilitate discussions about e-waste and the planned obsolescence of consumer technologies. Finally, Resistor Case features a small but important embellishment: a through-hole resistor commonly used for circuit building, which is inserted in the flap of the case as a decoration. The resistor serves no practical purpose as an electronic component. Instead, it is there to evoke the concept of resistance and to remind users of the inaccessible electronics hidden in the black box of their devices. The choice of materials for Resistor Case is only one facet of the entire design. The case itself promotes a DIY aesthetic—it is not meant to be manufactured in China under questionable labor circumstances, but is made instead by the individual who is going to use it. By putting the construction into the hands of the user, Resistor Case aims to mobilize the so-called IKEA effect, an “increase in valuation of self-made products” (Norton, Mochon and Ariely, 2012: 453). The presumption is that if individuals make their own digital abstinence cases, they will be more likely to value them and therefore to make use of them. Finally, the latest iteration of the case involves rivets, which necessitates the use of a hammer. This development has made for some productively disruptive workshops.

permits an ease of access that would not effectively deter those who are easily disposed to digital temptation. 4 A 2015 Gallup poll suggests that iPhone users are the most guilty of replacing their phone whether or not their old one is still functional. Fifty-one percent of iPhone owners replace their device as soon as their mobile carrier allows it, which is usually after two years (Swift, 2015).

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Figure 8.1  Resistor Case, 2018.

Resistor Case has become a start-up of sorts, with kits and related workshops being implemented at several schools around North America.5 Obviously, this project was designed with high school students in mind. That said, Resistor Case is not just for school kids. I offer some instructions for a DIY Resistor Case kit here for any aspiring smartphone nonuser who wants to experiment with digital abstinence while heeding the following words of that great confessor, Augustine: “anyone indeed can suffer want, but knowing how to suffer want is a quality of the great” (1999: 52). 

For more information, see http://resistorcase​.org.

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Instructions Supplies for the kit include the following: ●●

●●

●●

●●

●●

1 x 5”x14” strip of vinyl, sturdy fabric, or other sturdy but pliable upcycled material 2 x 4” strips of duct tape 1 x 3” strip of heavy-duty Velcro tape, width optional 1 x ½ Watt through-hole resistor, or similar Felt-tipped pen (optional)

The maker should focus on using upcycled materials wherever possible. The case can be customized by the selection of colors. Additional customization can be added by using a Sharpie to embellish the design. 1. Fold the strip of vinyl or other material and apply duct tape to the sides, creating a rudimentary case. Leave a flap of approximately 2” in length at the top, where the Velcro and resistor will go. The material can be customized by cutting it to fit your smartphone accurately. 2. Insert the resistor in the flap by poking the leads through your material, ensuring that the colorful part of the resistor lays flat against the flap. You may need to poke small holes into the material before inserting the resistor. 3. Apply one sticky side of the Velcro tape to the inside of the flap so that it covers the pins of the resistor. 4. Apply the other sticky side of the Velcro tape to the case so that the pieces of Velcro will connect when the flap is closed. 5. Press firmly to ensure that the Velcro tape adheres to the case, and test the enclosure by opening the flap. 6. If desired, decorate the case with a felt-tipped pen.

Discussion 1. Rather than making a case to control smartphone use, it is possible to download apps such as Flipd that help schedule periods of nonuse. What

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2.

3.

4.

5.

are some of advantages and disadvantages of downloading the app versus handmaking a case for digital abstinence? The last two chapters introduce a number of speculative design projects designed to promote digital abstinence. Design your own project, keeping in mind a specific audience and/or situation in which digital abstinence might be practical and/or provocative. Given the interventions into “well-being” by Instagram and other tech companies, speculate about what so-called “mindful” technology use will look like in 10, 50, or 100 years. The appropriation of Catholic rituals has been central to the design practices in the last two chapters. Invent some digital abstinence (or digital indulgence) rituals based on a different religion or culture. Satchell and Dourish have identified six forms of nonuse: “lagging adoption, active resistance, disenchantment, disenfranchisement, displacement, and disinterest” (Satchell and Dourish, 2009). Since the list is not exhaustive, try to identify some additional categories of nonuse. Consider, for example, whether nonuse might also be related to entitlement.

References Augustine of Hippo. 1999. The Excellence of Marriage. Trans. Ray Kearney. New York: New City Press. flipd. Mobile application. 2018. http://www​.flipdapp​.co/. Hertz, Garnet. 2015. Phone Safe. Digital installation art. Vancouver, B.C. http://www​. conceptlab​.com​/phonesafe1/. Norton, Michael I., Daniel Rochon and Dan Ariely. 2012. “The IKEA Effect: When Labor Leads to Love.” Journal of Consumer Psychology 22: 453–60. O’Gorman, Marcel and Dan Smilek. 2018. “Assessing the Impact of Smartphone Abstinence on Student Performance.” Research study proposal submitted to the Waterloo Catholic District School Board. January. Oudshoorn, Nelly and Trevor Pinch, eds. 2003. How Users and Non-Users Matter. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

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Pardes, Arielle. 2018. “Want to Curb Phone Use? Facebook and Instagram Have an Idea. WIRED, August 1. https​:/​/ww​​w​.wir​​ed​.co​​m​/sto​​ry​/fa​​ceboo​​k​-ins​​tagra​​m​-app​​tim​e​​-cont​​rols/​. Pinterest. 2017. “Best 25+ Cell Phone Jail Ideas.” https​:/​/ww​​w​.pin​​teres​​t​.ca/​​explo​​re​/ ce​​ll​-ph​​one​-j​​ai​l/?​​lp​=tr​​ue. Satchell, Christine and Paul Dourish. 2009. “Beyond the User: Use and Non-Use in HCI.” OZCHI Proceedings. November 23–27, Melbourne, Australia. Swift, Art. 2015. “Americans Split on How Often They Upgrade Their Smartphones.” Gallup News, July 8. http:​/​/new​​s​.gal​​lup​.c​​om​/po​​ll​/18​​4043/​​ameri​​cans-​​split​​-ofte​​n​upg​​rade-​​sma​rt​​phone​​s​.asp​​x. Ward, Adrian F., Kristen Duke, Ayelet Gneezy and Maarten W. Bos. 2017. “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity.” The Journal of the Association for Commercial Research 2.2: 140–54.

Epilogue Dirty Media

There are twenty-five forms of excretion known to man. —Christian Enzensberger, Smut: An Anatomy of Dirt What is the layer of dead matter residue that we are producing as future fossils? —Jussi Parikka, A Geology of Media It’s one of my goals to make aboriginal a dirty word. [Audience Laughter] —Taiaiake Alfred, Transcript: “Taiaiake Alfred on Native Self-Governance” * * * Smack. She has just dropped her iPhone. There it is on the hot asphalt, face down. The sharp sound of the landing tells her that the protective rubber case is not foolproof. “Trickster Otterbox,” she muses. Sure enough, when she picks up the dense rectangle and dusts if off, the thing will not turn on. She could get it repaired, but it is already three years old. The cost of repair will be more than the cost of a free device on a new data plan. In an instant, her $700 communications portal has been transformed into lifeless trash, refuse, dirt. She tinkers with it, holds down buttons to force a hard reset. No dice. The screen seems to have come undone and is lifting away from the aluminum casing by a few millimeters. She presses down on the corner that sticks out, and magically, she can now see a glitchy image. She presses harder, and the passcode screen appears, barely visible, in cloudy purple and pink. She can’t see the numbers, but her fingers know their locations. High upper left, midlow center, middle right, middle right, or 1–8–7–6. Now she’s in, and she can almost read her text messages on the fractured display. * * *

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As we know it, dirt is essentially disorder. There is no such thing as absolute dirt: it exists in the eye of the beholder. If we shun dirt, it is not because of craven fear, still less dread of holy terror. Nor do our ideas about disease account for the range of our behavior in cleaning or avoiding dirt. Dirt offends against order. —M. Douglas, Purity and Danger Where is the dirt of electronics? How does dirt inform the making of electronic materials and spaces? Electronic waste presents a crucial case study of dirt, of both how it is generated and where it is distributed. —J. Gabrys, Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics Digital is well and good. Digital is cheerful, proper, and nice. Digital is above and there, and everywhere. Analog is on the shelf, over there, underneath, suspicious, and pointless. Analog is dusty. Dirty granny natters on a landline. Backward savage sends a smoke signal. Inbred Amish bounces in a buggy. Analog is not, but digital is. Digital is mind, air, and youth. Analog is body, dirt, and death. Instead of continuing to fragment the subject, one could try—drawing on Arendt—to incline it. Instead of breaking its vertical axis into multiple pieces, one could try bending it, giving it a different posture. This could perhaps happen by inclining the subject toward the other—as the relational model allows and, from a geometrical perspective, even encourages. —A. Cavarero, Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude dirt worshipper: a racial slur toward Native Americans because they worship nature life. Dale (native american) is a dirt worshipper and sun god worshipper. #race#racial slur#dirt#worshipper#dirt worshipper —Urban Dictionary Homo Inclinus |ˈhōmō 'in-klə-ˈnəs : a large-brained hominid of the genus Homo (H. inclinus) that inhabits all continents. Unique to the anthropocene, Homo inclinus is thought to be the first ancestor of Homo erectus to lean toward the earth and engage in radical acts of care toward both hominid and non-hominid kin. —Source unknown * * *

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Later that day, she discovers that a large black paper clamp—an ACME suregrip foldback binder clip, to be precise—will hold the screen in place. Having been told she is a “clever eksà:ʼa,” she sets the prosthetically enhanced iPhone on her bedside table. She is helplessly distracted, haunted by the question of whether or not to replace this failing device with a shiny new unit. She understands the consequences all too well. Caught in this state of indecision, guilt, and regret, she can think and communicate only in fragments. * * * This year, Apple will launch three new iPhones, revamped iPad Pros, Apple Watches with larger screens, a new entry-level laptop with a sharper screen, a pro-focused Mac mini desktop computer and new accessories like the AirPower wireless charger. —Tweeted by TicToc by Bloomberg, September 10, 2018 It comes as a great surprise to people why a toilet seat, something that is in close proximity to fecal matter, is so much cleaner than the beloved phone. The answer is simple—we fear the filthiness of our toilet seats with the fervor of a thousand suns, which is why we clean it feverishly on a regular basis. Our phones, on the other hand, are with us most of the time that we don’t think much of it coming into contact with so many surfaces that could be breeding grounds for methicillinresistant Staphylococcus aureus or Escherichia coli, including restaurant tables and human hands (yes, even your very own mitts have betrayed us). —Liquipel, “Handheld Device or Petri Dish? The Disgusting Truth About Smartphones.” * * * Thanks to dead spots on the screen, the wildly popular collection of poetry she has been reading on her phone is no longer legible. Words have gone missing, fallen into the darkness. For a short while, this makes the poetry more interesting. But she gives up the effort. She was never very fond of this so-called poet anyway, thank you very much. Not to mention that there are only two ludicrous reasons why the poet became famous: (1) Her leaky period and (2) Instagram censorship. With those credentials, she thinks, anyone could become a famous poet. * * *

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Diverse Energy’s system, known as the PowerCube, runs off an ammonia storage tank, which needs to be refueled about once a month. Ammonia is the fifth-most traded commodity worldwide, making it a more easily obtained fuel than hydrogen, the typical choice to run fuel cells. —fuelcellworks​.c​om “UK Startup to Use Ammonia to Power Rural Cell Phone Towers” And so, such commodities, like all commodities, must be clean, antiseptic, possess the chemical smell of tightly bound cellophane ripe for a ceremonial unboxing. The wrap crinkles, cardboard slides, a bespoke coffin berths the hotly anticipated commodity. Once it’s out, it’s dirty. You can’t go back even if you try. Even if you clean the screen with Windex, which you must never do. Soon people will come to understand that Canada doesn’t have an Indian Problem, it has a Colonizer Problem, and that it may be that the way to a better future is not necessarily focusing effort on redefining and removing Indigenous people from the land so that corporations can exploit its “resources” for the settler population’s enrichment. —Taiaiake, “The Great Unlearning” * * * In spite of the warnings about toxic waves, she tucks it under her pillow every night. The warm vibrations lull her to sleep. But with the ACME clip in place, this would be too uncomfortable. Nor can she fit the Otter box back on. The iPhone, damaged and vulnerable, has become a fragile thing, an object that solicits care. “Send me a pic,” it buzzes from the bedside table. “Why are you so stuck up?” Secretly, she is hoping for the cell-phone-induced brain tumor, waiting for it, praying even. She wants to make him know about her diseased brain. Make him see it, recognize it, understand. She visualizes the sketchy MRI image with the radiant pink blob. She wishes she could send that picture to him now. “Here’s your pic, you dirty shithead. Skén:nen!” * * * In this context, as already hinted at some points earlier, the chemical constitution of technological culture is not to be neglected. Industrialization

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becomes a point of synchronization of the various lineages of cultural techniques. The agricultural metaphor of “culturing” is in the scientific age part of the development of chemical means of manipulating the soil. The soil can be made fertile, and the history of the geological impact of humans is also about the isolation of ingredients such as phosphorous (1669), nitrogen (1772), potassium (1807), and, later, nitrogen. —J. Parikka, Geology of Media, p. 53 Those were the days of the workshops. LED space invaders pendant, TV-B-Gone remote decontroller, Raspberry Pi-powered micro arcade cabinet, timesquare DIY wristwatch, 3D printed mini robotic arm with electromagnet, banana synthesizer, Twitter-fed mood light, punk rock leather LED collar, Gameduino singing plant, pressure activated light-up umbrella, flamethrowing jack-olantern, EEG powered typewriter, RFID cat door, anthropocenic Elmo hack, drumming midi glove, turn signal biking jacket, and galvanic skin response LED anxiety brooch. None of them came in a plastic-wrapped package. Some of them worked. All of them were ugly to behold by almost all standards. It is rather to think relation itself as originary and constitutive, an essential dimension of the human, which—far from limiting itself to putting free and autonomous individuals in relation to each other, as the doctrine of the social pact prescribes—calls into question our being creatures who are materially vulnerable and, often in greatly unbalanced circumstances, consigned to one another. —A. Cavarero, Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude * * * Some days, she leaves the phone on her bedside table on purpose and pretends she forgot it. “Sorry,” she would say, “I forgot it at home.” No one ever believes this story. She is the backward one, after all. The “Rez Girl.” On those days, she eats lunch alone, staring down at the layers of her sandwich as it disappears slowly, bite by contemplative bite. All around her, other girls tap-tap away on their devices with heads down, glancing up occasionally to mutter a few words or fire a calculated look toward another table. Today, she sits on the hill by the parking lot and tries to decode Instagram on the damaged device. A call interrupts her scrolling. * * *

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But then, he continued, the individual comes up against his non-commodity type limitations, and the most important of these is time. The commodity is not limited by time, it is neither the product nor the victim of it; always new, always glossy, always fresh, it lies there in the window, available at any moment and longing to be replaced by something even fresher. The commodity has no past, nothing but perpetual present and future, nothing will ever put an end to it. —C. Enzensberger, Smut: An Anatomy of Dirt What was left on the table after the workshop: bits of plastic tubing stripped from tiny wires, fragments of copper, three pellet-sized blobs of lead-based solder arranged in a triangle on a white piece of printer paper, two burned-out mini LED bulbs, a smattering of lead dust ejected from a solder sucker, wire snips, three paper coffee cups with plastic lids, an abandoned microcontroller with wires soldered into the wrong inputs, a transparent plastic cup with lid and straw, a small porcelain bowl containing eighteen red cinnamon candy hearts, a crumpled paper towel stuffed in a black ceramic coffee mug with a white “Accelerator Centre” logo printed on the side, a ball of crinkly cellophane, gradually expanding like a living thing, ripped from the box of a new MacBook Pro. Outside the window, another condo tower is going up. Jackhammers pound at the pavement. A backhoe is gingerly knocking huge letters off the side of a building. One by one, they fall to the ground. G-A-Z-Z B-A-R. An architectural salvage store will eventually clean these artifacts up, coat them in shellac, and sell them to the condo dwellers, thereby collecting yet another tidy profit from the growing tech community. The concept of dirt makes a bridge between our own contemporary culture and those other cultures where behavior that blurs the great classifications of the universe is tabooed. We denounce it by calling it dirty and dangerous; they taboo it. —M. Douglas, Purity and Danger Dinged, scratched, chipped, shattered. Battery loses its charge, storage is full, camera is foggy, upgrade killed it, battery won’t charge at all, cable fell apart. Punctured, waterlogged, crushed, thrown out the car window, sat on too many times, stepped on in anger. Drowned in a beer pitcher, in a lake at the cottage, in a toilet, in a public pool, in the washing machine. It’s too old, it’s embarrassing, it’s slow, it’s ugly, or its time has run out.

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Are you an abuser? This does not refer to whether you are a drug user, a dealer or something of that sort. It was a frightening question, wasn’t it? Well, this is actually pertaining to your things and gadgets and on whether you are taking good care of them or not. You carry your cellphone everyday, everywhere and they also carry germs. But this is not trying to tell you to wear synthetic or medical gloves for this matter. You just need to be responsible in keeping it safe. Do not waste your money away. Here are some taboos when dealing with your mobile phone. —www​.streetdirectory​.com, “Cell Phone Taboos” Nothing should be seen. No wood framing. No steel beams. No cell towers. No modems. No wires. And certainly not the cameras and scanners. Sand away the cracks in the drywall. Hide the heads of the screws with putty. Stuff the conduit behind the wall. Bury the cables underground. Or better yet, sink them deep at the bottom the ocean. But one must not allow oneself to be deceived; the wrappers lie; what is actually required is the absence of consumers, the elimination of the evercontaminating individual, and that is not all: the ideal underlying the total market aims not only at exterminating the living but ultimately the commodity too; the ideal would be the noiseless odourless painless absolute and instant aseptic annihilation of all things, including itself. —C. Enzensberger, Smut: An Anatomy of Dirt Everything must be seen. The dead zones. The dark corners. The hiding places. The children. The elderly. The outliers. The minorities. Flush them out of the bushes and into the light. “She was just so unabashedly strange to my British sensibility,” Wakeford later said of her recollections of Haraway in the late 1980s. “It’s like getting vertigo.” —N. Wakeford in Conversation with Daniela K. Rosner * * * She can barely hear his distant voice over the phone. The ACME clip will only do the job if it’s positioned right over the earpiece. And she can’t bear to place the cold, sharp edges of the clip against her ear. She holds the device away from the side of her head by an inch or two, pinching the sides of it gingerly between her thumb and middle finger as if it’s a dirty or contaminated thing.

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He is practically screaming at her from across the one inch gulf between phone and ear. She squints to listen. Then she gives up. Cell phones are not for talking anyway. She stands there on the grassy hill with the thing a full six inches from her ear and imagines herself lifting, floating up into the sky. The angry voice is far away now, barely a buzz, a hum. From the opposite direction of the phone, a ringing sound emerges from the centre of her skull and heads toward her left ear, mounting to a loud, sharp pitch. The world turns sideways. She drops the phone and stumbles to the grass. * * * It is rather to think relation itself as originary and constitutive, as an essential dimension of the human, which—far from limiting itself to putting free and autonomous individuals in relation to each other, as the doctrine of the social pact prescribes—calls into question our being creatures who are materially vulnerable and, often in greatly unbalanced circumstances, consigned to one another. —A. Cavarero, Inclinations: A Critique of Rectitude As part of its ongoing investigation of digital rituals, the CML invites participants to partake in a memorial service for dead cell phones and defunct digital files. Join us for a ritual laying to rest of your old handheld devices, complete with a machine-generated eulogy, a 3D printing ceremony, and an e-waste gravesite dedication. Or come and purge unwanted files, apps, and user accounts on your current device, and send them off to digital purgatory. The results of these ritual acts will be commemorated on a memorial slab displayed at the Critical Media Lab for the duration of CAFKA. Digital obituaries will be posted on Critical Media Lab’s website. Every Tuesday, June 5, 12, 19, and 26 from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.; Saturdays June 9 and 30 from 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. Critical Media Lab, 44 Gaukel Street, Kitchener, produced by Critical Media Lab. —Program for the 2018 Contemporary Art Forum of Kitchener and Area All that with which modern techniques of communication stimulate, assail, and drive man—all that is already much closer to man today than his fields around his farmstead, closer than the sky over the earth, closer than the change from night to day, closer than the conventions and customs of his village, than the tradition of his native world. We grow more thoughtful and ask: What is

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happening here—with those driven from their homeland no less than with those who have remained? Answer: the rootedness, the autochthony, of man is threatened today at its core! —M. Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking Certainly, the colonization of Canada was and is driven by resource extraction, from furs to timber, from gold to oil. But beyond the well-documented drive to extract resources from Indigenous lands, one of the most common ways that Settler Canadians perpetuate colonialism is through appropriation. Appropriation can be understood as the removal of an element of culture, a concept or idea, or a symbol or practice out of its original context, and its redeployment in a new cultural or social context for the gratification or profit of the appropriating person or group. —E. Battell Lowman and A.J. Barker, Settler: Identity and Colonialism in 21st Century Canada

Instructions For this assignment, you will make a Digital Fossilization Garden. This is a garden that contains plants, discarded electronics, and an LCD display. By means of a sensor, the display is triggered by moisture in the dirt to communicate messages about the slow decay of the garden’s consumer electronics. Gather the electronics from willing participants, and invite them to contribute to the project design. If you can, make a ritual out of the culling of abandoned electronics. The garden can be as large or small as you please, but it should be portable. Select the plants for the garden very carefully; note whether or not they are native species, and reflect on the Latinate scientific name of the plants. Finally, you must adhere to this single constraint: Do not purchase anything for the project. Although death of media may be useful as a tactic to oppose dialogue that only focuses on the newness of media, we believe that media never die: they decay, rot, reform, remix, and get historicized, reinterpreted, and collected.

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They either stay as a residue in the soil and as toxic living dead media or are reappropriated through artistic tinkering methodologies. —J. Parikka and G. Hertz, Appendix to A Geology of Media //moisture-sensor and display for fossil garden, adapted from osoyoo​.c​om */ #include #include String str; int oldmos=-1; LiquidCrystal_I2C lcd(0x27,16,2);  void setup() {   Serial​.beg​in(9600);   pinMode(3,INPUT);   pinMode(13,OUTPUT); lcd​.in​it();   // initialize the lcd    lcd.backlight(); } void loop() { int  soil_mos; soil_mos=1023-analogRead(0);//get soil moisture value from A0 pin soil_mos=map(soil_mos, 0, 1023, 0, 100); //convert moisture value in percentage format if (oldmos!=soil_mos) { // following 4 lines display moisture value to LCD    lcd.setCursor(0,0);    lcd​.pri​nt("Soil Moist.:");    lcd​.pri​nt(soil_mos);    lcd​.pri​nt("%"); } }

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This plays directly into the hands of an individualistic, entrepreneurial capitalism—one that uses precisely these “rebellious” images to promote a certain spectrum of products, especially those aimed at the youth, who are taught to crave novelty and reject what has gone before. Thus rebellion is commodified, and welcomed back into the fold. —R. Williams, “There’s Power in the Dirt” So indeed the question: how do the soil, the crust, the rocks, and the geological world sense? It is definitely a dilemma anyone deep into Alfred North Whitehead would find attractive, but let’s consider it from the perspective of media and aesthetics. —J. Parikka, Geology of Media The buds that sensed the incipient turn of the season are hungry. For shoots that are only one millimeter long to become full-fledged leaves, they need food. So when the buds sense spring, they send a hormonal signal down the trunk to the roots, a wake-up call, telegraphed from the light world to the underworld. (68) —R. Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants The political slogan I wore in the Reagan Star Wars era of the 1980s read, “Cyborgs for Earthly Survival!” The terrifying times of George H. W. Bush and the secondary Bushes made me switch to slogans purloined from tough schutzhund dog trainers, “Run Fast, Bite Hard!” and “Shut Up and Train!” Today my slogan reads, “Stay with the Trouble!” But in all these knots and especially now, where whenever that potent and capacious placetime is—we need a hardy, soiled kind of wisdom. Instructed by companion species of the myriad terran kingdoms in all their placetimes, we need to reseed our souls and our home worlds in order to flourish— again, or maybe just for the first time—on a vulnerable planet that is not yet murdered. —D. Haraway, “Sowing Worlds: A Seedbag for Terraforming with Earth Others”

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Figure 9.1  Schematic for Arduino Soil Sensor. Courtesy of Osoyoo.

Disconnection from the land is more than just the political injustice of territorial alienation. Disconnected from the land, we cannot be Indigenous. To be Indigenous you have to live out the Original Instructions and honor your basic responsibilities to your family, to yourself, to other people, and to the other nations of trees, of animals and fish and insects and the waters and winds . . . all of which speak to it is to exist in a peaceful good way as a human being in this land. —Taiaiake, “The Great Unlearning” Supplies: ●●

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Dirt or other growth medium Container: box, basket, basin, pot, and so on Plants transplanted from other gardens, fields, or grown from found seeds Discarded cell phones and/or other small electronic components LCD screen (reused from previous project) Arduino microcontroller (reused from previous project) Wire and solder (cobbled from waste discarded after a workshop) Moisture sensor (hacked from a dehumidifier or stolen from a hobby shop and returned later) * * *

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When the ringing in her ear subsides, she crawls to her hands and knees and looks down at the phone, which still glows from a caller left hanging. She reaches out and with her thumb and forefinger, pinches the curved wires that stick up like antennae, and removes the clip. Her fingernail slips easily into the small slit where the corner of the screen is lifting away. She pries it back gently and peeks into the gap. Something is moving, purring in the darkness behind the screen. She pulls a little more and a smell wafts up into her nostrils. Fried circuits, burned sage, loamy soil. The smell piques her curiosity. She pries back all the way and the screen falls away from the brushed aluminum casing, tethered by a thin, short wire. Bending lower to take in this object laid out on the grass, her eyes are swallowed by something much deeper than the contents of a cell phone. It takes her a moment to process what seems to be the rectangular depth of a dark, earthy trench. Way down at the bottom, sticky worms channel frantically into a clean-cut slab of pinkish-gray brain. She picks up the mangled phone and flings it down the hill toward the paved parking lot below. Smack. * * * “Man’s twenty-sixth excretion is himself.” —C. Enzensberger, Smut: An Anatomy of Dirt

References Alfred, Taiaiake. 2017. “The Great Unlearning.” Blog post, February 28. https​:/​/ta​​iaiak​​ e​.net​​/2017​​/02​/2​​8​/the​​-grea​​t​-unl​​​earni​​ng/. Alfred, Taiaiake. 2005. “Taiaiake Alfred on Native Self-Governance.” Television Transcript, May 14. TVO Archives. Battell Lowman, Emma and Adam J. Barker. 2015. Settler: Indentity and Colonialism in 21st Century Canada. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing. Douglas, Mary. 2002. Purity and Danger. New York: Routledge. Enzensberger, Christian. 1972. Smut: An Anatomy of Dirt. Trans. Sandra Morris. New York: The Seabury Press. fuelcellworks​.com​. 2009. “UK Startup to Use Ammonia to Power Rural Cell Phone Towers.” https​:/​/fu​​elcel​​lswor​​ks​.co​​m​/arc​​hives​​/2009​​/07​/1​​6​/uk-​​start​​up​-to​​-use-​​ ammon​​ia​-to​​-powe​​r​-rur​​al​​-ce​​ll​-ph​​one​-t​​owers​/.

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Gabrys, Jennifer. 2011. Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Haraway, Donna. 2013. “Sowing Worlds: A Seedbag for Terraforming with Earth Others.” Beyond the Cyborg: Adventures with Donna Haraway, Ed. Margret Grebowicz, Helen Merrick and Donna Haraway, 137–46. New York: Columbia University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1966. Discourse on Thinking. Trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund. New York: Harper & Row. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions. Liquipel. 2017. “Handheld Device or Petri Dish?: The Disgusting Truth about Smartphones.” Blog post, September 14. https​:/​/bl​​og​.li​​quipe​​l​.com​​/2017​​/09​/1​​4​/ han​​dheld​​-devi​​ce​-or​​-petr​​i​-dis​​h​-the​​-disg​​ustin​​g​-tru​​th​​-ab​​out​-s​​martp​​hones​/. Parikka, Jussi. 2015. A Geology of Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Streetdirectory. n.d. “Cell Phone Taboos.” https​:/​/ww​​w​.str​​eetdi​​recto​​ry​.co​​m​/eto​​day​/ c​​ellph​​one​-t​​aboos​​​-wpja​​cu​.ht​​ml. TicToc by Bloomberg. 2018. “Apple’s Planning on Revealing All of These Products by Year’s End.” Twitter, September 10. Urban Dictionary. 2008. “Dirt Worshipper.” Posted by Edgar Corral, January 20. https​:/​/ww​​w​.urb​​andic​​tiona​​ry​.co​​m​/def​​i ne​.p​​hp​?te​​rm​=di​​rt​%​20​​worsh​​ipper​. Williams, Rhys. 2016. “There’s Power in the Dirt: Impurity, Utopianism, and Radical Politics.” In Purity and Danger Now: New Perspectives, ed. Robbie Duschinsky, Simone Schnall and Daniel H. Weiss. London: Routledge.

Index Abler blog  51, 52 abstinence. See digital abstinence Ace, Barry  96–7, 101 active resistance  116–17, 129 activism  7, 52, 61, 80 adaptation  xii, 119 addiction  106, 111, 114–15 adoption  xii, 73, 116, 118, 129 aesthetics  93, 126, 141 agency  34, 51, 78 algorithms  37, 53, 61 amateurism  17, 19, 52, 58, 61 Amish  41, 80, 118–19, 132 Amistics  118 analog  71, 80 n.19, 105, 112, 132 anamnesis  70, 73, 74 Anderson, Laurie  16 anthropocene  15, 46, 132, 135 Apple  107, 123, 133 Applied Media Theory (AMT)  8, 67 Arcspace  16 Arduino microcontroller  47, 80, 113 Arendt, Hannah  77, 132 Aristotle  57 art  15–17, 138 creating bad  52, 61 digital  10 knowledge and  54 poetry as  28 theory as high form of  16 artificial intelligence (AI)  38, 39, 44–6, 53–4, 54 n.7 The Art of Critical Making  7 arts and humanities innovation ecosystem  42–4 as useless  42–4, 46, 53, 92 Useless Box  58, 61 asceticism  84, 103 assistive technologies  8–9 audiences  xii, 10–13, 43, 111, 129 Augustine, of Hippo, Saint  123, 125, 127 Autographer lifelogging camera  105

Balsamo, Anne  xi, 4–5 Barad, Karen  8, 9, 34 basket weaving  39, 79–80, 89–92, 94–7, 96, 101 Bataille, Georges  90 Beckett, Samuel  20–1 Behaivior  106–7 Bell Labs  38–40, 89 Bennett, Jane  12 Big Blue  53 Biggins, Matthew  44–5 binary thinking  14 n.5, 70, 76 Bogost, Ian  11 n.4, 18–19 Bolter, Jay David  66 boyd, dana  114–15 Boyer, Robert  74 bricoleur  59, 65 Broglio, Ron  105 Brush, H. M.  80 Buddhist prayer beads (mala)  81 building circuits  74, 76, 126 Camp Grounded  110–11 Canada  134, 139 capitalism  20, 42–3, 57, 71, 141 captology  82 caregiving  73–4 ethics of  10 Homo inclinus and  132 large tech companies and  123 making and  19, 73, 83–5 objects requiring  134, 137 Carnegie Mellon University  106 carpentry of things  18 Cassou-Noguès, Pierre  37–8, 41 Catholicism  105, 108, 125, 129 causality  18 Cavarero, Adriana  xiii, 75, 75 n.12, 132, 135, 138 cell phones abstinence  125 addiction  114

146 basket to hold a  95–6 damaged and discarded  131, 133–4, 136–8, 143 Yondr  112 cephalopods  46–8, 66 Chachra, Debbie  83–4 chastity belt  107, 113–14, 116–17 Cilevitz, Adam  113–14, 116–17 circuits building of  74, 76, 126 of cognitive processing  70 conduction and  29, 32, 33 fried  143 hidden to inhibit curiosity  103–4 media and  6, 11 Clarke, Arthur C.  38–9, 45 code  xi, 6, 82, 97–101 co-evolution  9, 75–7, 79 n.17, 119 cognitive modalities  xii–xiii, 76 colonization  12, 101, 134, 139 commodification  58, 134–7, 141 communication  xii. See also networked communications; post-symbolic communication about state of garden  139 evolutionary process and  75 fail better and  20 iPhone as  131, 133 linked to self-care  84 media and  10 outside mediator needed for  18 as threat  138 through objects  68 through the body  29 uselessness and  40 communication studies  10 comportment  103, 104, 118, 120 conduction  29–30 conductive play dough with LED lights  31 construction  14, 18, 43, 58, 126 counterfunctional objects  113, 118, 119 Coupland, Douglas  40 crafting engagement and  76–7, 80 n.18, 85 gender  20, 80–1, 80 n.18, 89–90, 101 Hephaestus  48–9, 65, 92 innovation and  80 n.18, 85

Index mastery and  19, 93 media and  12 as theorizing  14 crapenter’s model of technological production  61 crapenter’s table  21 crapentry  xi, 17–21, 27, 61 Crawford, Matthew B.  19 critical design  xi, 117 critical diffraction  xii critical making  ix, 47, 73 Critical Media Lab  8, 79, 83, 97, 124–5, 138 critical theory  11, 13 Cubbitt, Sean  15 cunning. See mētis (cunning) cybernetics  ix, 39 deep reading  71, 104 Deleuze, Gilles  91, 92 n.2, 93 Delphic Oracle  28 Derrida, Jacques  1–2, 15, 66, 70 design  7 destructive side of technological progress  83 Detienne, Marcel  47–50 Digi-Comp mechanical computer set  58 digital abstinence  118, 126, 127, 129 asceticism  103 digital prophylaxis for  79, 113–14, 125, 125 n.1 Ministers of the Digital Tabernacle performance  105 OneWatch  112–14 Resistor Case  125–9 ritual  108, 110–11 “Digital Abstinence” (seminar)  79, 81 digital addiction  114–15. See also addiction digital communications media  11, 103 digital culture  xiii, 6, 69–71, 95, 109, 114 humanities  71 digital fossilization garden  139–40 digital humanities  6–7, 10, 14. See also arts and humanities digital media  82 digital objects  18 digital production  84

 Index 147 digital rituals  82, 101, 109–10, 138. See also rituals digital service industries  8, 72, 76 Digital Tabernacle  104, 108, 110, 114, 117, 125 n.2 digital technology  76 Digital Writing Collaborative  72 dirt  xiii, 131–4, 136–7, 139, 142–3 dirty jokes  19 disability studies  47, 49–51, 62 disciplinary  7, 20, 40, 53 n.6 discursive design  xi disenchantment  116–17, 129 DIY approach  5, 58, 80 n.19, 126, 127, 135 DIY electronics kits  58 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep  61 Dolmage, Jay  50, 67, 72 domesticity  80, 84, 89, 101 Don Ihde  44 dorsality  119 Douglas, M.  136 Dourish, Paul  116, 116 n.8, 129 Driskill, Qwo-Li  101 Dunne, Anthony  xi, 7 Eindhoven corridor  16 Einstein, Albert  40 ekphrasis  66–7, 69 electricity  29–30, 32–3 elemental philosophy  11–12. See also philosophy Eliade, Mircea  112 Ellul, Jacques on technique  119 time  79–80, 112 uselessness  37, 38, 57–61, 67 embodied reception  15 engineering  6, 7, 39, 54, 59, 61, 80 n.18. See also Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math (STEAM); Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) Enzensberger, Christian  xiii, 131, 136–7, 143 epiphylogenesis  15 Erickson, Jon  13

ethics of appropriating theories  34, 101 basket weaving and  92 of care  19, 85, 109 of making  93–4 senses and  93 tech industry  44, 52–4 existential technology  82–3 experimental praxis  4 exteriorization  15, 75–6 Facebook  xii, 11, 123 fail better  20–1 failure  xi, 2–3, 17–21, 68, 93. See also Halberstam, Jack faire attention. See paying attention Farman, Jason  5 fashion  7, 81 Fazi, Beatrice  14 fear  46, 48, 54, 111, 115, 132, 133 feedback loop  x, 8, 67, 79, 81 feminism  7, 47, 78, 81 n.20 #FergusonSyllabus  4 filmmaking  10, 67–9, 71, 72 finite media  15 Flanagan, Mary  xi Flexner, Abraham  40–1 Florida, Richard  4 Florida International University  106 Flusser, Vilém  47 fluxkits  59, 60 Fogg, B. J.  82 Force Sensitivity Resistor (FSR)  80 Foucault, Michel  19, 68, 84, 84 n.23, 103 Fox, Sarah E.  20, 78 n.15, 84 Freire, Paolo  72 Friend, Tad  53 fuelcellworks.com  133–4 Gabrys, J.  132 Garden of Eden  42 Gauntlett, David  5, 9–11, 78, 103 gaze  13, 14, 43 Geertz, Clifford  40 Gelassenheit  80–1, 117, 118 gender body and  92 n.3 ethical tech practices  53 n.6

148 hegemony and  19 hierarchies of  54 n.7, 80 making and  7, 12, 80, 84, 101 objects and  89 politics of  34, 101, 116 geology of media  15 Giertz, Simone  ix–x Godard  67–9, 71, 72 Gödel, Kurt  40 Google  xii, 70, 107, 123 Grimes, Ronald  13–14, 16, 43, 101, 108–10, 108 n.4, 118 ground. See conduction Guattari, Félix  91, 92 n.2, 93 hacking counter-narrative of  85 Digital Chastity Belt (Cilevitz)  113 failure and  20–1, 78 relevant to worldbuilding  6 results  135 social change  78 n.15 Useless Box  x, 57–62 Hadjiyanni, Tassoula  80 Halberstam, Jack  1, 19–20, 21 n.9, 34, 92, 92 n.3 handheld devices  71, 76, 80, 111–14, 116, 120 n.12, 124, 138 Hansen, Mark  15–16 Haraway, Donna  xii, 2, 30, 47, 54 n.7, 137, 141 Harman, Graham  11, 18–19, 18 n.8 Hayles, N. Katherine  15, 47, 76, 76 n.13 Hegel  13 hegemony  19–20, 50 Heide, Edwin van der  15–16 Heidegger, Martin  12, 14, 18, 18 n.8, 59, 81, 81 n.20, 103, 117–18, 139 Helle, Kristin  80 Hendren, Sara  8–9, 51–2, 57 “All Technology is Assistive”  8–9 Hephaestus  17, 49–50, 50 n.5, 65, 67, 89, 92 Hertz, Garnet  6, 7, 125 n.1, 140 Hertz, Heinrich  40–1 Hinojosa, Chris  51–2 Homer  49, 65–6

Index Homo erectus  xiii, 75–6, 132 Homo Faber (man the maker)  77 Homo habilis (tool user)  xiii Homo inclinus  xiii, 75 n.12, 132 Homo Laborans (man the laborer)  77 Honsberger, Megan  81–3, 85 Mindflux  81–2, 83 hooks, bell  72 Huhtamo, Erkki  76 humanism  4, 41, 43, 46, 47, 82–3 humanities  4, 6, 7, 69–70, 93, 104 human will  13, 39, 91 hypermedia  69–70, 76 Hyperrhiz  58 hypomnesis  70–1, 73, 74 IKEA  60, 126 illud tempus  112 imitation and inspiration  28 Indigenous knowledge  94 information and communication technologies (ICTs)  10 information theory  40 “infrastructural condition”  15 Ingold, Tim  xii, 9, 75 n.11, 91, 92 n.2 innovation arts and  4, 42 craftwork  80 n.18, 85, 85 n.24 digital abstinence and  110, 117, 124 hacking and  78 n.15, 85 schools and  42, 124 specialization and  52 technological  53–5, 117 the innovation ecology  3 n.2, 42–4, 61 Instagram  123, 129, 133, 135 institutional structures  19, 84 institutions  10, 12, 62 insulating dough  32–4 internet  5, 10–11 intervention  53, 61, 105, 107, 108, 129 Jackson, Steven J.  19, 85 Jagoda, Patrick  xii Jalbert, Kirk  7 Jameson, Fredric  13 Jeremijenko, Natalie  xi, 6 The Journal on Dramatic Theory and Criticism  13

 Index 149 Kasparov, Gary  53 Kennedy, Robert F.  42 Kimmerer, Robin Wall  xii, 89, 94–5, 141 Kinnamon, Liz  84 kits  58–62, 73, 77, 127 Kittler, Friedrich A.  12, 65, 74 knowledge. See also Indigenous knowledge amateurism and  52, 61 devotion to  42–3 disciplinary forms of  19–20 ekphrasis and  66 as embodied  50 forms and structures of  1 makerspaces and  78 reading and writing  71–2 senses  93–4 specialization of  40 technoculture and  58 the useful  43 the useless  40–1, 54 knowledge formation  104 knowledge production  xi Kraybill, Donald  118 Krieger, Murray  66 labor  1, 14, 43, 50, 77, 83, 126 language  4, 29, 78 failure and  20 of the haptic  92 materiality of  13 representation and  29–30 as technic  75 Lanier, Jaron  46, 48 Latour, Bruno  11, 12, 59 n.1 Law, John  29–30 LED lights  31, 33, 34 LEGO  5–6 Leroi-Gourhan, André  12, 74–5, 77, 79 n.17, 119, n.11 Lévi-Strauss, Claude  59, 65 Ligi (Confucian Book of Rites)  109 Liquipel  133 Lissarrague, François  89–90 literature  54 Liu, Alan  7 logocentrism  14, 66 Losh, Elizabeth  4, 6 n.3

lost history  59 Lovecraft, H. P.  46 low theory  19–20 machines. See also Ultimate Machine; useless machines; Voight-Kampff machine with AI  46, 46 n.4 Basket Case  98 capitalism  57 cephalopods as  47 digital rituals  138 humans and  x, 54 literacy and  71 technocapitalism as  118 traîner  38 McLuhan, Marshall  12, 15, 29 Make Magazine  6 maker culture  4, 7, 72–3, 78, 78 n.14, 83–4 makers. See also making digital humanities  6 Gelassenheit  81 n.20 gendered inflections of term of  4–5 Hephaestus  66 rabbit as maker  9 senses  94 terminology  3–5, 27 makerspace  2–3, 72–3, 78 making  2–9, 90–3. See also critical making; makers; writing as activity of becoming  90, 92 n.3, 93 artifacts  19, 27–8 call for revision of  91 caregiving  19, 73, 83–5 ethics of  93–4 as form of engagement  14, 78–9 as form of world-building  77 gender and  7, 12, 80, 84, 101 of image (or artifact) and text  66 labor vs.  77 media studies and  10–11, 16–17, 19 mode of resistance  78 as morphogenesis  91–2 philosophy and  18, 92 politics of  4–5, 78 n.14 process of  30–1 technoculture and  8, 20, 79–80

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Index

two-spirit critiques  101 Useless Box  x value of  78, 78 n.14 writing as form of  xii–xiii, 8, 66–7, 72–3, 79 making attention (faire attention)  xii, 68, 77–8. See also paying attention Malewitz, Raymond  59 Malpass, Matt  xi Manhattan Project  41 Mann, Steve  82 Manning, Erin  30 manufacturing  2, 7–8, 51, 58–9, 126 Marconi, Guglielmo  40–1 Marx, Karl  13 mass media  10 Massumi, Brian  30 mastery  19–20 material engagement  7 materiality  xii, 13, 15, 67, 92 n.2, 93 material technoscientific critique  7–8 matter-flow  91 Maxwell, Clerk  40–1 M. Douglas  132 media, definitions of  9–12 Media Specific Analysis  15 media studies  5, 9–10, 12 medium  5, 11–12, 15, 29, 31, 65 Melo, Maggie  72–3 memory  70–1 metaphysical way in which objects are joined  18 mētis (cunning)  48–50 Mētis (mother of Athena)  48–9 mindfulness  81–2 Ministers of the Digital Tabernacle  105, 110 Minsky, Marvin  38–9, 46, 58 Mitchell, David T.  47 mode of resistance  50 moderation  108, 112 morphogenesis  91, 92, 97 Morra, Joanne  47 mortality  93 Morton, Timothy  67 Mumford, Lewis  112

National Day of Unplugging  111 neoliberalism  78, 83, 116 neo-Luddistic  103, 104 neo-Marxism  70–1 networked communications  71 new materialist theories  11 Nietzsche, Friedrich  13 nonhuman  ix, 2 n.1, 12, 21, 54 nonuse Amish  119 cell phones  125–8 as choice that shapes design  115–16 form of Luddism  104 forms of nonuse  116 n.8, 129 in schools  125–7 wearable devices  116 Yondr  111, 116, 125–6 normalcy  50 object-oriented ontology  18 objects to direct the viewer’s attention in (film)  69 objects-to-think-with  x, 125 digital distraction  82 ekphrastic essays and  85 intervene with technoculture production  79 making attention (faire attention)  68–9 prostheses as  8, 51–2 Resistor Case as  125 Useless Box as  44–6 wearable devices as  114 O’Connell, Mark  20 O’Gorman, Marcel “Artificial Intelligence and Ethics” (talk)  52 “Broken Tools and Misfit Toys: Adventures in Applied Media Theory”  x E-Crit: Digital Media, Critical Theory and the Humanities  xii, 69 Necromedia  x, 93 Ondaatje, Michael  76 OneWatch  112–14 Oppenheimer, J. Robert  41 Oppian  48 oracle  28, 29

 Index 151 Ordine, Nuccio  41–3 Ostherr, Kirsten  4, 5, 9–10 Oudshoorn, Nelly  115–16 Outa-Spacemen Knife-Wielding Tentacle  45, 45–6 Panofsky, Erwin  40 Pappas, Nickolas  28 Parikka, Jussi  15, 131, 135, 140, 141 Paulos, Eric  113 paying attention  xii, 68, 77–9, 81, 84, 101, 109, 118. See also making attention (faire attention) Pentecost, Claire  52 Perner-Wilson, Hannah  59 Peters, John Durham  xii, 1, 11–12, 15, 47, 48 pharmakon  70, 73, 78 philosopher of technology  ix philosophy. See also elemental philosophy; philosophy of technology continental  13, 94 ethos  53 making and  18, 92 prosthesis  47 self-care  84–5, 84 n.23 STEM and  44 theory compared to  13 umwelt  2 n.1 as uselessness  53, 54, 58 philosophy of technology  43, 81 n.20 phonamism  114 Pierce, James  113 Pigeon, John  94 Pinch, Trevor  115–16 Pirsig, Robert  19 planned obsolescence  103, 126 Plato  27–9, 41, 57, 70 platonic designs  93 Plato’s theory of forms  27–8 play dough  x, 27–34, 37 poets  28–30, 41 police/crime  61 political structures  28 politics

engagement and  77, 79 fabrication materials and  34 Haraway on slogans in American  141 humanities and STEM  3 of making  4–5, 78, 78 n.14 of more hack, less yack  14 n.5 territorial alienation  142 of uselessness  53, 59–60 polymorphism  49 Pope, Alexander  65 Portwood-Stacer, Laura  115, 116 posthumanism  8, 51, 75 n.11, 82–3, 119 n.11 poststructuralism  13 post-symbolic communication  46 power and control  62 power structures  47, 51 power systems  52, 75 Princeton Institute for Advanced Study  40, 41 processual acts  8 prosthesis  ix, 8, 47, 51–2, 62, 82 prosthetics  15, 38, 47, 51–2, 119, 133 prototype  6 puncept  29 pure research  40–1 pyrography  74 queer theory  34, 101 rabbit  x, 2–3, 9, 11, 12 Raby, Fiona  xi, 7 racism  61 radical otherness  2, 46, 48 Raley, Rita  62 Ramsey, Stephen  6 rapid response (pedagogy)  4 rationalism  14 Ratto, Matt  7, 8 Ray, Robert  68–9 Reboot (organization)  111 Record, Isaac  8 reflective spaces  xiii relationship of humanity to technology  5

152 religion  57, 105 n.2, 129. See also Catholicism Resch, Gabby  8 research practices  30–1, 44 Resistor Case  125–9, 125 n.3, 127 reverse ekphrasis  66, 69 rhetoric  50–1, 53, 69, 78, 78 n.14, 93, 114–15 rituals  14, 117–19 Amish and  119 Catholic  129 defined  108 defunct and abandoned electronics  138–9 digital abstinence and  108, 110–11 Luddites inventing  109 n.5 making new  109–11 mindfulness and  83–4 of moderation  107 for old devices  138, 139 paying attention through  109–10 receptacles in  89, 101 Theoria  43 wearables and  112–13 Rockwell, Geoffrey  6 Ronell, Avital  47 Rosner, Daniela K. in conversation with N. Wakeford  137 emancipatory language of maker culture  78 n.15 failure as essential ingredient  20 feminized craftwork and engineering innovations  80 n.18 hacking and craftwork  84–5, 85 n.24 method for generating critical fabulations  67 n.2 new embodied ways of knowing  xi situated actions and design practice  54 n.7 rugged consumer  59 Russill, Chris  1 The Sabbath Manifesto  111 San Francisco  20 Satchell, Christine  116, 129

Index Sax, David  112 Sayers, Jentery  4, 6–8, 16, 58–9 Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math (STEAM)  3–4, 44 Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) arts and humanities and  3, 4, 43–4, 51, 93 innovation  83 maker culture and  84 makers and  2–3 mētis  48 power structures  20 soldering iron  74 university investment in  42, 83 science policy boards  44 self-care  84 semiotic systems  62 Sennett, Richard  76–7 sensors  x, 16, 79, 95, 97–100 biochemical  106 moisture  139, 140, 142 movement  16 soil  142 touch  82 sequential logic  xiii Shannon, Claude  38–9, 45–6, 58 shield of Achilles  49, 65–6 Silicon Valley  21, 81 Si omnia, nulla  12 situated actions  54 smartphone basket workshop  89 Smith, Jonathan Z.  109 Smith, Marquard  47 “snap-on modular socket”  51 Snyder, Sharon L.  47 Sobchack, Vivian  51 social media  5. See also Facebook; Instagram social sciences  xv, 7, 30 Socrates  27–8, 70 Solarbotics  58 The Solarbotics Useless Box Kit  60 soldering  58, 60–1, 76, 79, 80, 85. See also writing source code  95. See also code Southwick, Dan  8

 Index 153 Springgay, Stephanie  30–1 Spuybroek, Lars  15–16 Squishy Circuits  31 Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy  28 start-ups  3, 20, 42, 61, 83, 105 n.1, 106, 125 n.1, 127 Stengers, Isabelle  77–8 Stephenson, Barry  109 Stephenson, Neal  118 Stiegler, Bernard  15, 70–3 structuralism  13 students’ projects  x subjectivity  71, 72 subjugated knowledge  19–20 Suchman, Lucy  54 tables  37 tactical media  62 Taiaiake, Alfred  131, 134, 142 Taylor, Sunny  50 Taylorism  112 tech community  53–4, 136 Tech for Good Declaration  53 tech industry  54 technics  34 technocapitalism  xiii, 38, 43, 51, 82, 118–19 technoculture digital abstinence  114 disciplines and  43, 47 ekphrastic engagement with  67 knowledge and  52, 58 making and  8, 20, 79–80 objects-to-think-with  79 posthumanism  119 n.11 production of  xi–xii, 3, 8, 20, 79 self-care  84 temporality of  103 useful and useless  52 youth and  73 technological control through femaleknowing  80 technological determinism  114 technological empowerment  47 technological “first-aid kits”  73, 77 technological society  61, 80–1 technology  19 as a pharmakon  73

technoscience  7 TechShop  2–3 temporality of technoculture  103 texts  10 Tharp, Bruce  xi Tharp, Stephanie  xi theories of ontogenesis  31 theory  xiii, 2, 13–18, 15 n.6, 42–3, 55, 119. See also critical theory; information theory; low theory as act of deep receptivity  14 Thing  59, 59 n.1 thinkering  xii, 76, 78 thinking critically with and about media  x 3D printing  2–3, 8, 47, 107, 135, 138 TicToc by Bloomberg  113 tinkering  17, 76–7 Tocqueville, Alexis de  42–3 tools  75 traîner  37–8, 39 n.1. See also waste time transcription  71–2 transindividuation  72, 76 tripod  17, 28, 49 True North  52, 53 Truman, Stephanie E.  30–1 Tully, Jessica  111 Turner, Victor  109 Twitter-bot Tay  44–5 Ulmer, Greg  29 Ultimate Machine  38–9, 46, 58–9, 62 University of Florida  68 University of Massachusetts Medical School  106 University of Texas at Dallas  106 University of Waterloo  42, 79, 124 usefulness  14, 39–41, 43–5, 48, 50–1, 52–3 Useless Box  58–63, 60, 67 useless machines  x, 38–9, 44–5, 58, 89. See also machines uselessness  37–43, 47 arts and humanities as  42–4, 46, 53, 92 creativity and  53 Ellul  37, 57–8, 61 leading to historical innovations  40–1 philosophy, art, or literature  54

154 vs. useful  50 value of  xi utilitarianism  41 UX (User Experience)  82 Vernant, Jean-Pierre  47–50 Vey, P. C.  52–3 Voight-Kampff machine  61 Wakeford, N.  137 Warner, Jessica  107–8 waste  xiii, 126, 132, 138, 142 waste time  37, 81. See also traîner wearables  81–2, 105–7, 111–14, 116, 119–20 Wearcomp  82 Weiner, Norbert  39

Index Williams, R.  141 Wills, David  119 Wolf, Maryanne  71 Woodcock, Caitlin  79–81, 83, 84, 95 Basketcase  79–81, 96, 97, 98 world-building  21, 30, 72, 77 writing as advanced technical skill  66, 70–2 as form of making  xii–xiii, 8, 66–7, 73, 79 self-care and  84 with a soldering iron  67–9, 72, 74–6, 85 www.streetdirectory.com  136–7 Wylie  7 Yondr  111–12, 116, 124, 125

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