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37
EXONET
Bogna Konior
A theory of the exonet is an archive of all the times when computation as
an outside, an inhuman logic, or an invasion appears in human thought.
It proposes that thinkers who, by a historical contingency, found themselves invaded or otherwise experiencing turbulent circumstances not of
their own making provide us with tools to grasp this truth. As a framework, it redirects us toward the long game of history, where human
agency or interiority might not be central and where machines might
displace humans as the main driver behind technological evolution. The
theory proposes that those who had to think under conditions of forced
displacement or alienation were best placed to foresee this.
Though we are accustomed to calling the computing technologies that
run both our political economies and intimate relations “the internet,”
this familiar term may obscure inhuman and exterior processes at play.
Originating in the 1970s, the oft-used term internet combines the word
network with the prefix inter, denoting “reciprocal, mutual.” It also presages that personalization or a certain focus on interiority would become
one of digital culture’s defining features, implied in multiple terms associated with Web 2.0: personal website, social media, profile, avatar, “the internet of you.” In 2006, Time magazine famously named “You” the Person
of the Year, with the tagline, “You. Yes, you. You control the Information
Age. Welcome to your world.” This was quite a tone shift from the Time
cover of 1993, which read, “Machine of the Year: The computer moves
in.” These two taglines capture the trends that dominate our discussions
around the internet. Does it belong to us or to computers? Are we using
computers or are computers using us?
In 1991, Donna Haraway already described this shift of scale from
inner to outer in life sciences after computation. Where the central
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BOGNA KONIOR
figure was initially a person, it shifted to systems: human relations become
sociotechnical systems management, organism becomes population, human
becomes communication.1 From posthumanism and nonanthropocentric
philosophy to occult conspiracies, the field of media and technology
studies has already considered that the internet might be the outside,
the external, the unknown. Or, to cite David Bowie, “The internet is not
a tool. It’s an alien life form.”2 A theory of the exonet begins in the stars
in an even more literal sense. The immediacy, speed, and instantaneous
character of online communication belies deep spacetime or outer space
repertoire—“the heaven and earth that had to be moved,” in the words
of Ingrid Burrington—for the internet to exist.3 To investigate its actual
hardware composition, its relation to the oil, coal, and rare earth minerals from which we build computers and create electricity, one must begin,
as Reza Negarestani writes, “with the twilight of hydrocarbons and the
very dawn of the Earth.”4 We may begin with the trees that compressed
their dead bodies into fossil fuels, later to be found by smart monkeys
(our ancestors), who used these corpses to create energy, which in time
might compute itself into intelligence. The circle of (outer) life. As Benjamin Bratton puts it, “After billions of years of evolution, complicated
heaps of carbon-based molecules (that includes us) have figured out some
ways to subcontract intelligence to complicated heaps of silicon-based
molecules (that includes our computers).”5 The terraforming project that
is the internet now comes full circle: what came of the trees and the soil
will nest back in them, as smart cities designers envision a “trillion-sensor
world in which bridges, trains, flowers and animals, and even internal
organs are filled with tiny sensors, each transmitting data directly to one
another or to the cloud.”6
This material theory of computation as a deep time ecology takes a
more immediate historical grounding during the Cold War, when many
of those who worked on bringing the internet to fruition were also
involved in SETI (the search for extraterrestrial intelligence) and METI
(messaging extraterrestrial intelligence) projects, which focused on definitions of inhuman intelligence and communication. In the 1970s,
computer scientist and astronomer Jacques Vallée chaired the National
Science Foundation, participating in the development of PLANET, one
of the proto-internet systems that predated instant messaging chat apps
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by many years. Vallée went on to become, arguably, the highest-profile
ufologist in the world. The connections between the development of artificial intelligence and the search for extraterrestrial life are even more
numerous, with pioneers like Marvin Minsky involved in both SETI and
early AI.7
These ecological and outer space parallels have already received
attention—and there are many other theories of technology as externality—but I want to introduce another layer of the exonet. The development of the internet during the Cold War meant that for the supposed
losing side, in eastern and southern territories of Earth, the advent of this
technological explosion was experienced as an external imposition—the
arrival of a promised savior or an alien invasion of an occupant.
In my native country of Poland, the internet was presaged by poets,
mystics, and political theorists who had long been accustomed to dealing
with determination from the outside in territories routinely subjected to
the whims of empires. In the mid-nineteenth century, when Poland was
occupied for more than a century by Russia, Prussia, and Austria, poet
Adam Mickiewcz wrote The History of the Future, which he then rewrote
and burnt multiple times, eventually destroying it completely. He saw
from his invaded country that everywhere was to become occupied by
technological abstraction. The manuscript included early visions of the
internet, described as a network including mirrors, balloons, and satellites designed for instantaneous transmission of information. Mickiewicz
also imagined a computational monarchist governance of the future,
with citizens living under isolated information domes, with land outside
available only to the rich.
The idea of technology as a foreign imposition is especially present in
postcolonial or postimperial contexts. Under the Soviets and the British,
as is often true of regions under colonial or imperial occupation, seized
territories were like “free zones of technological and social experimentation, laboratories where modernisation happened with dazzling speed,
[an] imperial future shock at a speed that made resistance futile.”8 Two
experiences of the outside coincide: occupation and also invasion by the
inhuman logic of technology. (Proto)technological thought in territories
external to the official history of the internet is often relegated to the
section of culturally situated and contextual information relevant only to
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historians, but I take it as philosophically universal. Some thinkers, from
the position of exteriority, saw technology as an exteriority. From the
condition of being under occupation, they saw more clearly that technology was a certain outside logic. But this concept might serve us well in
thinking about our future as a species, where we may be displaced from
our own history in favor of machines. “The outside” can be both the
actual political foreignness of occupation and also an inhuman order of
history that they were able to grasp through a specific historical contingency. In this convergence of long-term trajectories of human technobiological evolution—from the stars to the future of intelligence—and
the historical contingency of occupation, we may find theories about
communication, alienation, otherness, and externality, which, though
historically situated, are universally applicable.
To give just two examples, in the work of Polish intellectual Stanisław
Lem and Chinese sci-fi writer Liu Cixin, theories of communication and
evolution are presented in narratives of war, contingency, and invasion,
mirroring the histories of their respective countries when the information revolution was taking off.
In Summa Technologiae, a study of technobiological evolution by
Stanisław Lem, the trajectory of humanity is entangled with the evolution
of intelligent systems.9 If humans are containers through which the evolution of life plays out, eventually to be discarded, he asks, could humans
equally be the containers through which the evolution of technologies
plays out? Summa speculates on the creation of artificial reason external to humanity, where machines evolve beyond their initial humancentered purposes. In parallel to Catholic theology, which stresses the
unknowability of the universe, Lem writes about a “gnostic machine,” an
early model of artificial intelligence governed by opaque, indecipherable
logic.10 How could we, he asks, automate science and metaphysics by
creating technologies that operate at the limit of human comprehension,
rather than imitating human-level cognitive functions, which are prone
to failure? What if a machine could remove humans from the knowledge
production process?
Such a machine, Lem writes, would be the very opposite of the machines
imagined by the Soviet occupier. Alongside technologies, Soviet sci-fi was
a tool for the promotion of a futuristic “ethical imperialism based on a
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romantic, rhetorical, nineteenth-century vision of humanistic values in
full control of science and technology.”11 In contrast, Lem proposed that
technologies alienate humanity from the center of history—that they create unfamiliar, external, autonomous zones where even communist ideology cannot penetrate, despite its appetite to subsume everything under
its internal causes. It wouldn’t be an overinterpretation to say that Lem’s
recurring theme of technological systems evolving to full autonomy and
bypassing humans entirely originates from a specific Polish theology and
also from his position as a Pole caught in the midst of the AmericanSoviet technological race, which happened over Poland rather than in
Poland. Under the Soviet occupation, Poles practiced resistance by rejecting technology in favor of local and folk traditions and by embracing
technology’s inhuman logic against the Soviet Promethean and humanist imagination. In the vision of the Soviet Communist Party, technology
was something to be controlled and tamed. For Lem, the inhuman logic
of externality was much preferable to the human-made ideology he had
to live under.
In parallel, Liu Cixin’s trilogy Remembrance of the Earth’s Past abounds
in ideas about the nature of communication and its connection to processes larger than human social rituals.12 China prides itself on the longest
history of astronomy—investigating the outside—and currently invests
resources in extraterrestrial communication. Even today, the phrase 天
命 (tianming), “the mandate of heaven”—a legitimacy from the outside,
but also “destiny”—is used to describe whether Chinese rulers have the
right to rule. In Liu’s novels, whose opening scenes also are set during the
Cold War and the transition to computational communication technologies, communication itself is a means of warfare enveloping the whole
cosmos according to predetermined patterns dictated by the heavens,
beyond human control. At the center of this comprehensive imagination
is the “dark forest theory,” which posits that communication, because
it reveals our existence to others, is a sign of stupidity rather than intelligence. Intelligence stays silent to avoid being attacked. Though it would
take too much space to explain fully here, the dark forest theory results
from Liu’s understanding of the laws of thermodynamics and the principles of entropy, which boils down to this proposition: existence is structured following the logic of invasion and defence, so strategies around
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communication are crucial. Everything that happens is predetermined
by the laws of complexity and entropy, putting everyone on a collision
course sooner or later. This theory of communication as camouflage, espionage, silence; staying on the outside, in the shadows, in the externality
and the blind spots; is also a theory of the exonet. Though Liu’s books
are not about the internet, they give us tools for developing a theory of
the exonet as an extraction mechanism, grand in scale, and for outlining
automated dynamics tied to online communication, where human intent
or any specific meaning invested into communication does not matter.
In the dark forest theory, Web 2.0 is just another method of war: it
incentivizes the production of complexity through compulsive communication and interaction and dissipates entropy later through conflict.13
On a personal, intimate, neurobiological scale, the internet is a technology for instantaneous and impulsive communication, engaging our primary social needs, ones that we can hardly control. On a larger scale,
though, it serves the same function as war: colliding people, producing
conflict and therefore complexity, and distributing entropy. Each user is
reduced to a conflict- and complexity-producing node in the network,
but the process itself is automated and pays no heed to human intent.
Even if the function of Web 2.0 seems to be the circulation of meaning
and messages, to computers humans are not as important as the memes
that they carry. Just like in Lem’s narrative, ultimately, humans are just
carriers for the evolution of another logic entirely.
Are we using computers or are computers using us? The answers may
well come from those who historically felt used or had to operate in the
shadows beneath the web of history. Not heroes, but lurkers. After the
fall of the USSR and when Deng Xiaoping was in power in China, in
early cyberculture texts in the 1990s, the internet was celebrated as a
medium of openness, freedom, human rights, and political change, but
simultaneously feared as the herald of an inhuman, machine logic. Activists celebrated it as a new public sphere, but philosophers painted it as an
occult, dangerous place. Cyberculture drove a phase of globalization, but
what was at the wheel? Notably, the Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit
proposed that, with the ascent of computer culture, humans would summon an inhuman logic, opening up dimensions beyond.14 Do we hold
the wheel (internet) or does the wheel hold us (exonet)?
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In The Dust of This Planet, philosopher Eugene Thacker describes three
scales at which to think about the relationship between humans and the
outside, which we can use as three scalar models for thinking about computation.15 The first is the world for us, “the world that we, as human
beings, interpret and give meaning to, the world that we relate to or feel
alienated from, the world that we are at once a part of and that is also
separate from humans.”16 In parallel, the computer for us could be the
seemingly domesticated computer, a digital culture experienced mostly
through content and meaning, symbols, words and semiotic exchanges
circulating through the network—what comes to mind first when we
hear “the internet.” The second is the world in itself, an inaccessible state
of existence outside of us, which nevertheless becomes immediate and
accessible through ruptures such as natural disasters. The world in itself is
what immediately precedes us grasping it in our perception. It is all that
is before a hurricane is formed; we grasp it through predictive models and
scientific inquiry; we catch glimpses of it, as if in a submarine shining
light onto the mysterious creatures of the deep ocean. The computer in
itself might be climate modeling, technological explosions, or the singularity, however you chose to define it: where computation helps us
glimpse the processes larger or longer than us and, upon grasping them,
we recalibrate our sense of ourselves. Finally, there is a spectral and speculative world without us, a complete subtraction of the human “in a nebulous zone that is at once impersonal and horrific.”17 The dark forest, the
gnostic machine, the exonet: something else computing us. The three
models escalate: world-earth-planet, the scale moving from personal and
social to scientific to cosmological, from internal to external.
A computer without us, another term for the exonet, is a concept through
which we may think of computation without humans, perhaps in a futuristic projection but also as a theoretical lens, to remove human agency
from our understanding of technological causality. The computer without
us then exists through its cosmological connection to deep time and deep
future. It stretches across temporality and scale, in its fossil fuel history
and the projected hypothesis of computational intelligence reshaping history and evolution. As is often neglected, those who experienced history
and technology as exogenous and external saw it first. They already saw
how it extricates, extracts, and extorts—and what might wait at the end.
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NOTES
1. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New
York: Routledge, 1991), 44.
2. Laura Sydell, “David Bowie, The Internet Visionary,” NPR, January 12, 2016.
3. Ingrid Burrington, “How to Deploy Infrastructure in Just 13.8 Billion Years.” Keynote at the O’Reilly Velocity Conference in Berlin, 2019, https://www.oreilly.com
/radar/how-to-deploy-infrastructure-in-just-13-point-8-billion-years/.
4. Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (New York:
Re:press, 2008), 16.
5. Benjamin Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2016), e-pub.
6. Bratton, Stack.
7. For more information, see Daniel Oberhaus, Extraterrestrial Languages (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2019).
8. Ivan Csicsery-Ronay, “Lem, Central Europe, and the Genre of Technological
Empire.” In The Art and Science of Stanislaw Lem, ed. P. Swirski (Montreal: McGill
University Press, 2006), 133.
9. Stanisław Lem, Summa Technologiae (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1964).
10. Further discussed in Bogna Konior, “The Gnostic Machine: Artificial Intelligence in Stanisław Lem’s Summa Technologiae,” in Imagining AI: How the World
Sees Intelligent Machines, ed. K. Dihal and S. Cave (Oxford: Oxford University Press),
forthcoming.
11. Csicsery-Ronay, “Lem, Central Europe,” 142.
12. Liu Cixin, Remembrance of the Earth’s Past (The Three Body Trilogy), trans. Ken
Liu and Joel Martisen (Tor Books, e-book). The dark forest theory is first described
at length in the chapter “Year 205, Crisis Era” in The Dark Forest, the second installment of the trilogy, though the characters discuss it throughout the novels.
13. What I am theorizing here follows from Bogna Konior, The Dark Forest Theory of
the Internet (Flugschriften, 2020).
14. Cybernetics Culture Research Unit, CCRU Writings 1997–2003 (London: Urbanomic, 2017).
15. Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy, vol. 1 (London:
Zero Books, 2011).
16. Thacker, Dust of This Planet, 4.
17. Thacker, Dust of This Planet, 4.
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Contemporanea
A Glossary for the Twenty-First Century
Edited by: Michael Marder, Giovanbattista Tusa
Citation:
Contemporanea: A Glossary for the Twenty-First Century
Edited by: Michael Marder, Giovanbattista Tusa
DOI: 10.7551/mitpress/14911.001.0001
ISBN (electronic): 9780262378093
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2024
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