You are the founders and core members of DISNOVATION.ORG. Set up in Paris in 2012, it is a collective that bridges the fields of art, research and technology. You develop artistic provocations to help post-growth thinking take off in our society. Particularly, you challenge the dominant paradigm that technological development necessarily leads to human progress. As artists fueling the debate on growth capitalism, do you feel like you are pushing the boundaries of your own discipline?
It’s always hard to know if you’re properly pushing the boundaries of your own discipline. Over the last decades there have been lots of attempts to bring artists and scientists together. The reason for this is that the challenges that are emerging from technological advances and hyperindustrialisation are very difficult to grasp in their entirety, not just by the public, but also by researchers. Modernity and modern science developed in silos and we don’t really have the social techniques or cultural institutions that can bridge them. Now that we face big challenges like climate change or global recessions, we need everybody. We need everybody’s information. If we are pushing boundaries, then perhaps it is because we started to produce works that go beyond merely illustrating science or creating narratives about science. We started to work with science – not just about it – and with scientists to integrate and even shape research. Sometimes we can help to reframe a complex issue by offering an experiential proxy, like a physical, sensorial or intellectual experience, that is unavailable to scientists who use information mainly in written form. Sometimes we can make a shortcut between things that scientists are not allowed to do in the purely scientific process while, as artists, we are comfortable moving between simplification and provocation. That being said, we try to produce works that are robust enough to be submitted to scientific scrutiny so that scientists take them seriously enough and they actually use them in communications between themselves. That’s how we hope to support the interdisciplinarity that everyone is talking about, but that’s so hard to bring into practice.
Modernity and modern science developed in silos and we don’t really have the social techniques or cultural institutions that can bridge them. Now that we face big challenges like climate change or global recessions, we need everybody.
Scrapyard of Babel: solving our biggest problems requires finding a single language.
Illustration made using Midjourney.
As a collective you openly relate to hacker culture. In fact, ‘disnovation’ stands for ‘disobedient innovation’. In 2015, you published The Pirate Book as a thought experiment on intellectual property by showcasing how cultural content is shared, distributed and experienced outside the boundaries of economy, law and politics. Even though private ownership of intellectual creations was enshrined in law to promote innovation, it turns out it can also hinder progress. Can you give some recent examples where pirate culture made a useful contribution to society?
Let us first turn this question around: when has piracy of cultural content been proven to be an actual problem for society? In the cultural sector, it is well-studied that, for instance, the people that are pirating the most content are also the people spending the most on content. So the people that are downloading the most games, movies or music have been statistically proven to be buying the most DVDs, concert tickets or t-shirts. The framing of cultural piracy as a real issue is something designed and pushed by large corporations that make their business out of cultural ownership. Yet innovation is almost always built on cultural commons. In her book ‘The Entrepreneurial State’, the Italian-American economist Mariana Mazzucato makes it clear that a lot of the innovations that we are led to believe as coming from creative entrepreneurs or private companies are actually built on public funding. The iPhone, for example, although developed by Apple, is completely built on many different core technologies like microchips, touchscreen displays or GPS that have been developed over long periods of government funding. Essentially, publicly funded science is converted into private profit through the creation of products and services. Cultural pirates, or people disobedient in terms of copyright, are just asserting the fact that creativity is a social product that is produced for free. Interesting examples in terms of contribution to society include Brazilian president Lula da Silva’s decision to break the patent on an AIDS drug and make an inexpensive generic version available to his people, the peer-to-peer platform Sci-Hub that provides free access to academic papers and makes science available to everyone, and the ‘La Cura’ project where Salvatore Iaconesi – who was a friend of ours – attempted to create an open-source standard for cancer diagnostication while using his own brain tumor as an experiment.
The framing of cultural piracy as a real issue is something designed and pushed by large corporations that make their business out of cultural ownership. Yet innovation is almost always built on cultural commons.
One of your digital art installations, the Predictive Art Bot, uses natural language processing to automatically identify and combine keywords from the latest media headlines. By stimulating an unrestricted association of ideas, you emphasize the uncontrolled power of mass media to influence our thinking. With powerful algorithms tailoring content to our supposed user profile, we can get caught in ‘echo chambers’ where we are only exposed to a very limited set of ideas. This artificial monopoly on our attention is heavily monetized and sometimes even weaponized. Do you think a technological solution could exist to fact-check content or avoid hate speech without jeopardizing free speech?
When it comes to factuality in our media, we have to understand the etymology of the word ‘fact’, which is ‘factum’, Latin for ‘made’. So the actual occurrence of something is not a fact. The fact is made by humans and essentially always just a version of the occurrence. The Canadian philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously said: ‘All news is fake’. The process of media production manufactures the news. Every fact is made, every fact is fake. So you need to ask yourself questions. Is a fact made by somebody you think you can trust? Do you like the fact simply because it is made by somebody you like? Do you accept the fact simply because it is made by somebody who could make you lose your job? Technology will never provide a solution for this. Artificial intelligence (AI), for instance, always draws from a body of historical data or ‘corpus’. So AI works from within all the bias that already exists in society. Developing a fair AI would thus require a fair society that is able to (re)produce historical fairness into the corpus. Another important consideration is that, in our communications today, some of our most valuable conversations happen in for-profit spaces. It’s like meeting in a shopping mall for a meaningful discussion. What’s even worse is that these spaces even benefit from outrage, frustration or stress because they keep you online. As long as the profit model demands that people be entertained in a positive or negative way, to stay on these platforms as long as possible, it’s difficult to address issues like fake news or hate speech. We created the Predictive Art Bot as a kind of provocation to our peers in the tech-arts space, to question to what degree artists are just reacting to the latest technology and have lost their autonomy, if they ever had any. At the same time we were also interested in taking it a bit further as an inhuman way of producing ideas. Such machine-made texts can become a source of inspiration when they push an idea into weird corners where our human mind would not easily go. Obviously, today you can do a lot more with ChatGPT, but it functions in a similar way.
Echo Chambers: a matrix with people stuck in their own limited views.
Illustration made using Midjourney.
Your publication ‘A Bestiary of the Anthropocene’ is a compilation of creatures and creations of our era, in between the natural and artificial. Some specimens are designed on purpose, like Cavendish bananas, others are the by-product of human activities, like radioactive mushrooms. Ranging from everyday items to absurd and often disturbing concepts, it is an unignorable testament of the massive scale on which humans have interfered with their biological and geological surroundings. Looking at all this evidence, how strong do you think the case is for technological answers to climate change or biodiversity loss?
A recurring theme in de-growth, post-growth and ecological economics is that there are so many fundamental, transformational changes to be made in the social and political space before any technological changes become truly prevalent. First, we need to look at how we organize our lives, our schooling and teaching, our cities, the circulation of goods, and so on. Afterwards, If we still believe technology is absolutely necessary and relevant for such change to happen, we have to look critically at how such technologies are made. Are they made for profit? Are they public technologies? Are they made to last and be reused? Are they modular? Andrew Feenberg, an American philosopher and technology critic, makes a crucial point on why certain technologies are chosen among many possible alternatives. Our common sense makes us believe that technologies succeed because they are good, efficient at their job. The history of technology, however, paints a different story. Usually, at the beginning, none of the alternatives work really well by the standards of a later time. The superiority of a technology actually follows from the original choice to invest sufficiently in a technology over its alternatives and the result of further investments. So how do we make that choice? Feenberg argues that not just technical requirements – such as the fit within the current technical environment – are considered, but under capitalism, the profit and growth imperatives prevail. Without a critical framework, technological solutions will never amount to much more than patches for a highly flawed system. As long as we have seemingly infinite amounts of cheap energy, enough places to dump all our waste, and are willing to sacrifice people’s lives and destroy entire ecosystems, we can cover up our failures – and even have a profitable economy. If we would be solving our problems on a social and political level, we will probably end up with some real solutions, but also with less financial profit for the investor class. Until then, technological fixes are simply a low-involvement escape from fixing real issues.
If we would be solving our problems on a social and political level, we will probably end up with some real solutions, but also with less financial profit for the investor class. Until then, technological fixes are simply a low-involvement escape from fixing real issues.
Too Little Too Late: we cannot fix our society’s problems simply with technology.
Illustration made using Midjourney.
Already in 1969, in his book ‘Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth’, Buckminster Fuller warned us of our industrial development and how we are foolishly spending the energy savings of billions of years in a split second of astronomical history. According to him, fossil fuels are for use only in ‘self-starter functions’ while our ‘main engine’ should operate exclusively on the daily energy income of wind, tide, water and sun radiation. He also spoke of the urgent need for a realistic economic accounting system. In terms of energy, that brings us very close to your ‘Energy Slave Tokens’ project. Let’s suppose we adopt energy as the ultimate currency in our economy. How do you think that would disrupt our society?
The Energy Slave Tokens translate the fossil fuel that is needed for everything we do into human labor equivalents as if we were to physically work for the same energy quantity. When you start to reflect on your life in these types of energy blocks that are needed to support it, you are bound to encounter the materiality of your lifestyle within the biosphere. Our interest is not to create a currency that could actually be used for transactions but to confront the reality of our energy dependency and guide transition thinking. So when we talk about moving away from fossil fuels, how would that change the way you live from day to day? To what extent will we be able to replace our energy supply with energy from other sources than the fossil fuels which we formerly got so very easily and inexpensively? Imagine we create a real, functionable currency based on energy or labor. The main question would be who controls this currency. What if it’s owned by a state actor that uses it in order to maintain the same wealth disparity in our society? Any kind of device can be used for good or bad. We are also very concerned about responsibilisation or simply putting the burden on individual people or consumers to change their behavior. Yes, every consumer action has an impact, but no impact is greater than the impact on the industrial, state and even military level. As long as the vision for our society will come top-down from an elite – mostly business – class of the population, it will always be the same stuff: growth, investments, returns, leveraging risks, and so on. If we truly want to transition towards a de-growth or post-growth society, we need to offer people some kind of optimistic prospect for the future with a responsible prosperity that, at the same time, is realistic to achieve. We cannot just be talking about cutting down this, limiting that, or being thrifty all the time. That’s just not a vision that’s going to marshal the mass movement that we need today. Without a positive narrative, people just become individualists. ‘There’s no future for everybody, so I’ll just take care of myself’, is what they think then.
We cannot just be talking about cutting down this, limiting that, or being thrifty all the time. That’s just not a vision that’s going to marshal the mass movement that we need today. Without a positive narrative, people just become individualists.