What Do We Critique When We Critique Technology?

Abstract

Thinking about the state of technology today necessarily means thinking about a number of interrelated but distinct entities. Considering the nuts and bolts of a news story in which, say, some corporate machine vision technology was found to be racially discriminatory can often mean having to study business practices, data sciences, specific suites of tools that can lay a claim to the moniker of AI, assemblages of hardware and software, platform infrastructures with machines slotted away in hot data-center basements in tax havens, human-computer interactions and perceptions, and academic/industry discourses within any of the aforementioned, not to mention the geopolitical and historical situation of it all, which may further call into question where, say, “American” literature can uniquely intersect with technologies splayed awkwardly across, and not always along, the traditional geopolitical and cultural fault lines. In such a scenario, the flag of “Critical AI and (American) Literature,” by its very constitution, carries several sigils, including those of big data and literature and of computational culture and literature, as well as American studies and global technological sovereignties. Focused on the more critical end of these studies, this review brings together three new multiauthored books to ask what we critique when we critique technology today.Scholars interested in literature and technology—usually found in disciplines and departments such as languages and literatures, cultural studies, science studies, and media studies—have long been producing pathbreaking critical thought about various sociotechnical phenomena. From reading technologies themselves using literary critical methods—N. Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, Friedrich Kittler, Wendy Chun, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Rita Raley, Lisa Gitelman, and Alexander Galloway all come to mind here—to studying literary expressions of technological worlds (see, e.g., work by Fredric Jameson, Bruce Clark, Laura Otis, Steven Shaviro, Sherryl Vint, and Colin Milburn), literary criticism has been a bellwether of technology critique for several decades now. A brief look at such critique through the ages shows us the varied moods that orient studies of these technologies, with AI just being the latest in this series that once featured the internet, the personal computer, hypertext, cellphone, and metadata. Where there was once a utopian dream with the expansion of networks in the 1990s, or a reluctant acceptance that became a residual flicker of counterprogrammatic hope that technologies can be reappropriated by radical social forces in late 2010s, there is now, in critical work collected here, largely anger and disappointment. Every day, as news cycles tell tales of unchecked tech monopolies roughly intruding into our social, political, and psychic lives, and rarely for the good, these authors find themselves angry—really angry—about the state of our technologies and what they have wrought. On the one hand, such anger indexes our historical condition and informs our engagement with technology today. On the other hand, it forces us to ask what we are actually angry about, and what can be done instead.The primary example of this mood may be found in Your Computer Is on Fire, edited by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, and Kavita Philip. This volume is a startlingly direct collection of essays that, for the most part, all do what they say; the overarching purpose of the volume is, in fact, a call to action that signals a diffused state of emergency in various corners of computational cultures (6). The three parts of the book—“Nothing Is Virtual,” “This Is an Emergency,” and “Where Will the Fire Spread?”—contain chapters that are thematically and methodologically varied but all united by their clear and accessible critiques that point out how inequalities and discriminations are enabled and exacerbated by technological systems today. To note a few, Nathan Ensmenger’s “