Finally, after a long wait, Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology is out! In a way, it acts as a sequel to Digital Contagions that mapped the tactical bordercrossings between the discursive fields of biology and technology - and how such crossings where mobilized as part of the emergence of security software culture.
Insect Media is not so directly related to contemporary network culture, but works on that topic through a detour. It asks the question: why is our digital network culture so enthusiastic about insects, and related animal metaphors and models? But the solution offered starts from the 19th century birth of modern entomology and technological culture, moves through various artistic and cultural historical case studies, and investigates various aspects of modern communication practices and theory through the point of view of the insect and the non-human animal.
In this sense, it is anti-McLuhan, and works to reveal another geneaology of modern media; instead of media being extensions of Man, media are radically non-human, and extensions of a variety of other capacities of perception, movement and communication than that of the intelligent human being.
In one passage, I call this "bestial media archaeology":
"Bestial media archaeology, as addressed in this book, is a means by which to look at the immanent conditions of possibility of the current insect theme in media design and theory; to question the supposed newness of the coupling of (seemingly) simple animal behavior with media technologies; to look for the longer duration of this phenomenon; to present important case studies of this history of insect media that do not merely represent the past of this specific “idea” but offer important philosophical interventions into how we habitually think about media, technology, and the conjoining
and differences of animal and nonorganic life." (xv)
In terms of social media culture, the notions of swarms, hive minds and collective intelligence in distributed networks have been harnessed as part of the business discourse of the 21st century. Even if originating as part of the 1990s cyberenthusiasm for the Internet, they gained another chance during the recent years of Web 2.0 when finally the amateur spirit at the core of the Internet project was discoverd as a possible revenue stream. As analyzed by many network theorists including Terranova, the harnessing of free labour as part of the Web 2.0 logic was part and parcel of this neobiologism of networks. Web 2.0 rediscovered sociability; the chattering, relating, friend-seeking, affective and non-rational but emotional human being who shared, talked, commented and contributed. Suddenly such bad subjects of 20th century as anarchism and communism were part of the web 2.0 capitalism discourse.
I do not touch on this aspect of the incorporation of insects into the political economy of web 2.0 and social media culture - the neobiology such an integral part of the building of the new business models around harnessing collaboration into profit. Others do that much better, and people such as Michel Bauwens and Dmitry Kleiner are experts in talking about social media and its difference from the more radical peer-to-peer cultures. (See a good summary of such differences here).
If I would have written one more chapter, it definitely would have been about political economy of the insect - a further contribution to the debates how such ideas feed into a creation of a capital of sharing, a new form of commu-capitalism, or new socialism (cf. Kevin Kelly on this topic.) This is where the processes of crowdsourcing, exemplified for example in the Amazon's Mechanical Turk, are exemplary of such cognitive capitalism which really does not translate intuitively as "intelligent" work, but more based on lower cognitive level processing and perceptional capacities. The old intelligence-instinct division so crucial to the insect debate of late 19th and early 20th century (including for Bergson) is to an extent one way to make sense of the variety of cognitive capacities. In the midst of discussions concerning cognitive capitalism in social media culture, we need more low-level understanding of cognition that in most cases is more or less automated, affective, and, well, less intelligent than we like to think it is. The Worker (capitalised in the Mechanical Turk discourse like part of a gigantic global human ant nest) engages in Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) but at the same time, these are such tasks at the fringes of human capacities and technological automation. Easy for us humans, difficult for the machines: evaluating search results, selecting product categories, etc. Semantic web can always be outsourced to humans, it seems.
Hence, at the core of the mathematically refined, technologically polished and scientifically based cultures of network communication lies something very stupid. The insect is a good figure to think technological cultures through "affect" and milieu-bound nature of our cognitive and perceptual capacities. We are not insects, but a lot of the stuff we do is mindless, or at least automated. Network culture and its politics is not always a politics of reflection and decision-making, but of relating, automating, affective labour, and much lower level modes of sociability, relating and being in the world.
Below a table of contents of the book:
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Insects in the Age of Technology
1. Nineteenth-Century Insect Technics: The Uncanny Affects of Insects
2. Genesis of Form: Insect Architecture and Swarms
3. Technics of Nature and Temporality: Uexküll’s Ethology
4. Metamorphosis, Intensity, and Devouring Space: Elements for an Insect Game Theory
Intermezzo
5. Animal Ensembles, Robotic Affects: Bees, Milieus, and Individuation
6. Biomorphs and Boids: Swarming Algorithms
7. Sexual Selection in the BioDigital: Teknolust and the Weird Life of SRAs
Epilogue: Insect Media as an Art of Transmutation
Notes
Index
320 pages