LITMIR.BIZ

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      John von Neumann tried to formalize the whole problem of decision and decidability with game theory. If we can simplify the stakes and certain tricky concepts such as rationality, utility, and information, then decision can be a science. Following Philip Mirowski, Steyerl argues that the difficulty of human decision-making was resolved in economic theory by taking humans out of the equation.¹⁷⁷ If the rationality of humans is a problem for economic theory, replace humans with computation, with rational nonhumans, and let them loose on the world. “It is striking how much reality has been created as a consequence of different iterations of game theory.”¹⁷⁸

      Steyerl: “The point is that games are not a consequence of computers making the world unreal. On the contrary, games make computers become real. Games are generative fictions.”¹⁷⁹ Steyerl borrows my term for this: we live in gamespace.¹⁸⁰ “So, regardless of whether humans ever were ‘rational’ in the way game theory assumed, a lot of people have now been trained to understand rationality in this way and to imitate its effects.”¹⁸¹ Gamespace becomes more real, because more rationalizable, than the world it was supposed to model. And we are now all inside it, along with everything else.

      For a while, we were all obliged to pass online reverse-Turing tests to prove to machines that we were something like a human. Captcha, which made you write out letters you saw in a fuzzy picture, tested whether you could impersonate a human to a machine, not whether a machine can impersonate a human to a human. This is no longer necessary now that Google has a scripted operation that models what a human is.

      Computational models can decide not only whether you are human enough to be online but what you will want to do when you get there and what you will like. These models have an aesthetic dimension, in that they model your taste as a kind of ideal form and serve you with things that are like what it presumes you are like. In everyday aesthetics as in economics, models rule. Whether it’s a fashion model or a financial algorithm, the universe of forms is a sort of Platonist ideal that becomes the world, becomes gamespace.

      Only the art world appears to have a solution to this. Attempts have been made to manage art algorithmically, such as ArtRank, which advises investors on which art to buy based on its proprietary metrics. But more usually, the autonomy of the art world banishes the ideal, the model, the beautiful form, from the world and quarantines it in museums. Where once the avant-gardes wanted to unleash the beauty of art on life, we may now count it as good fortune that at least one species of ideal, elegant, beautiful form is kept separate from the world—that of art.

      Looking back out at the world from the quarantine of the museum, the task for humans is now to understand how machines picture the world. “Maybe the art history of the twentieth century can be understood as an anticipatory tutorial to help humans decode images made by machines for machines … Mondrian is perhaps an unconscious exercise for humans trying to learn how to see like a machine.”¹⁸²

      Museums are not what they used to be, however. In Benedict Anderson (or before that, in Harold Innis), the space of a nation-state could be regulated by the space-binding media of printed newspapers and also by the time-binding media of the museum.¹⁸³ But the national museum is now flanked by other phenomena. Consider Freeport art storage, where art remains permanently in transit—and duty free. One facility is reputed to hold thousands of Picassos. It’s an art world example of what Keller Easterling calls extrastatecraft—a kind of secret museum, a “luxury no man’s land.”¹⁸⁴

      Or consider the documents to be found in WikiLeaks that may show that the architect Rem Koolhaas was in negotiations to design a museum for the Syrian government. His office will not confirm their authenticity. Many dictators now favor contemporary art museums, biennales, and art fairs as a way to look fashion-forward in the dictator world. The national museum may have once provided some sort of temporal anchor for the modern state, but the contemporary art museum can’t perform that purpose. Following Peter Osborne, Steyerl sees contemporary art as a proxy for a kind of transindividual junktime.¹⁸⁵ They are a proxy for the nonexistent global commons. It’s like the commons, but out of harms’ way—autonomous.

      “Seen like this, duty free art is essentially what traditional autonomous art might have been, had it not been elitist and oblivious to its own conditions of production.”¹⁸⁶ Here Steyerl builds on Peter Bürger’s famous critique of the failure of the avant-gardes and suggests a little of what might be culled from the wreckage.¹⁸⁷ But we have to keep in mind art’s conditions of possibility now: dictator’s contemporary art foundation, arms dealer’s tax shelter, hedge funder’s trophy, art student’s debt bondage, aggregate spam, leaked data, unpaid precarious labor, all accumulating as value in the freeport.

      Steyerl frankly takes advantage of a position in the art world, whose simulated autonomy is doubled edged. The art world is a point from which to observe the destruction of many features that were once characteristic of a certain modern, capitalist world and the installing of some other mode of production and control, still based on exploitation and oppression, but of an algorithmic and derivative rather than disciplinary and industrial kind. Both the autonomy of the art world and the disruption of the historical world may yet, in subtle, minor ways, be dialectically reversible. Their negation of the world might be negated in little ways.

      On the side of art, Steyerl wants to stay close to what Gregory Sholette called the dark matter of the art world, such as all the invisible affective labor performed by gallery assistants, curatorial assistants, interns, art students, and the like.¹⁸⁸ She even defends the International Art English that has sprouted out of the billion art world press releases now pouring into our inboxes. Steyerl has a thing for low genres, and the art world press release, written by the assistant or the intern, is surely one of the lowest.

      Steyerl’s knack for rethinking very low genres reminds me of the work of Lisa Nakamura, particularly when Steyerl looks at romance scams, that subset of internet scam where the scammer gets the mark to fall in love with them and then takes their money. Steyerl reads them through Thomas Elsaesser’s work on melodrama, a form all about impossibility, delay, submission, and repressed or forbidden feelings.¹⁸⁹

      The romance scam comes with customized products from a hyperprivatized culture industry, targeting those excluded from metro dating markets as too old, too fat, or too much a parent. Race and empire play a role, as the scammers are often from outside the metropolitan world. As does language, as translation software might be used to produce an odd semblance of English or some other metropolitan language. To Steyerl, these are “languages from a world to come.”¹⁹⁰ After all, there’s usually a trace of hope in any epistolary form.

      Such moments are rare. The internet is no longer a space of possibility. It became, we are told, the best of all possible worlds. The internet, like cinema, like all the preceding technical gods, is dead. The internet is now surveillance, free labor, copyright control, troll-enforced conformism. As for cinema: “Cinema today is above all a stimulus package to buying new televisions, home projector systems, and retina display iPads.”¹⁹¹

      Where the cinema became the core of a specialized culture industry, the internet rewires all of production and circulation, subjecting the making of things to the control of information protocols. Steyerl: “What kind of corporate/state entities are based on data storage, image unscrambling, high-frequency trading, and Daesh Forex gaming? Who are the contemporary equivalents of farmer-kings and slave-holders?”¹⁹² I call them the vectoralist class. Where the capitalist class owned the means of production, the vectoralist class owns the vector of information. That is the ruling class of our time. What I think Steyerl’s perceptive vision offers us (to update Fredric Jameson) is not the cultural logic of late capitalism but the algorithmic logic of early something else.¹⁹³

      Reality is now made of and by images and models designed for computers and sometimes even by them.

      Improbable objects, celebrity cat gifs, and a jumble of unseen anonymous images proliferate and waft through human bodies via WiFi. One could perhaps think of the results as a new and vital form of folk art, that is if one is prepared to completely overhaul one’s definition of folk as well

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