The optimized future and the problem of taking responsibility
Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: White on White (1918). MoMA, New York.
In Red Pill: A novel (Knopf, 2020), Hari Kunzru composes a particularly sharp image of one of the possible futures most consistent with trends already underway. The diagnosis is filtered through the gaze of the novel's narrator-protagonist, a New York–based writer who arrives on a fellowship at a residency at the Deuter Center in Wannsee (Berlin), from where he observes the political, technical, and cultural universe surrounding him:
“We face, I wrote, an immeasurable risk: that is, one impossible to quantify. The indirect effect of something that will sooner or later eclipse everything else. I wrote about plagues, melting glaciers, flooded cities, and millions of people fleeing; a future in which universal human values will be devoured by a cruel tribalism. I wrote about a system that will eventually dispense with public policy altogether and replace it with the art of negotiation: a black box that is omnipresent and yet invisible to those who do not take part in the game. There will be no checks and balances, no right to appeal the negotiators' decisions, no 'rights' of any kind, only the raw exercise of power.”
It continues:
“I wrote about how our senses will begin to deceive us. As the old world gives way to the world of code, and the only tangible trace of the Anthropocene era is a cloud of dust and suffocating heat, each technological advance will make human intuition less reliable. The machine does not share humanity's goals. Artificial agents will have priorities and intelligences that are not aligned with our interests. Our capacity to measure and quantify everything has brought with it the slow but steady loss of aura, the end of the illusion of exceptionalism inherited from a religious worldview that placed humankind above the rest of the world […].”1
There is no spectacular dystopia in this passage, no abrupt rupture of the political order. It depicts a managed, administered, technically reasonable future, one that is functional for those who concentrate effective capacity for action.
The key, it seems, lies in the promise that accompanies technique itself: the idea that optimization can replace decision, that calculation can suture contingency, shifting onto systems a set of burdens that once required speech, exposure, conflict, responsibility, dispute, and the assumption of consequences. This algorithmic black box functions as the support for a very specific desire: not to decide, not to know fully. Not to take responsibility. Here the concept developed by Pfaller and later by Žižek under the name of interpassivity becomes useful, a particular form of delegation in which something acts in our place, allowing us to continue functioning without fully assuming the weight of that action.
That future is desirable for a large share of the powers that be. Decisions continue to generate strong distributive effects, yet they appear as inevitable, neutral, systemic outcomes; technically justified or simply derived from the normal operation of processes. This shift from government by principles to government by procedures is what Pierre Legendre identifies in the empire of management; the contemporary erosion of the symbolic frameworks that once sustained authority and transmission. Power becomes more effective as it sheds the need to explicate its foundation or to stage itself in a public scene where a Third could operate. It functions without an instituting principle, relying instead on devices that administer effects without producing reference or assuming responsibility.
In this sense, the question of mediations runs through the entire problem. Mediation is the condition that prevents technique from becoming a silent substitute for politics; this is precisely why it is attacked, discredited, and reduced to an unnecessary obstacle; presented as an inefficient or obsolete remnant that ought to be eliminated (deliberation, representation, political responsibility, explicit conflict; meetings, signatures, hearings, avenues for complaint).
Is there an alternative? Yes: accepting that no optimization can substitute for the act of taking responsibility.
What does that mean? (Re)building those mediations, and revaluing slow, conflictual, and sometimes clumsy instances, now read as inefficient, that are precisely what make possible a form of coexistence not grounded in the illusion that others (or systems) decide on our behalf.
How? By assuming that this alternative is an uncomfortable and conflictual practice, one capable of opening fissures in a future that, precisely because it is desirable for “the powerful”, must be contested in its concrete modes of everyday operation. Where frictions are deliberately introduced: situations in which something is actually decided, with identifiable responsible actors, explicit criteria, and real possibilities of challenge; in the persistent struggle over language that names those decisions as situated choices (rather than inevitable outcomes); by interrupting the comfort of “the system's result” and restoring to political practice its dimension of exposure, conflict, commitment, and shared responsibility.
— E.
All translations of the quoted passage are my own, based on the Spanish edition of the novel (Caja Negra, 2023).↩