This text is a slightly revised version of a lecture-performance held at the Beyond—Future Design Symposium at the ZKM in September 2018, in which the author acted as a representative for a fictious institution Kulturpessimismus pur—Institute for Critical Futures Studies. The performance followed the tradition of détournement and culture jamming through artistic prank interventions into conventional institutional presentation formats. The text of the lecture is presented here without any essential changes to its original content. See https://zkm.de/en/event/2018/10/beyond-festival-2018-future-design.

I.

In his well-known 1981 essay, “The Atomic Threat: Radical Considerations,” the famous German philosopher and writer Günter Anders introduced the notion of “inverted utopians,” referring to the inability of our society to understand the aftermath of “what we have produced.”¹ “What we have produced” here meant the far-reaching consequences of the latest technological developments and their social, cultural, ecological, and other implications. According to Günter Anders, in contrast to the “utopians,” who imagine things which they cannot produce, the “inverted utopians” simply produce things, which they can neither imagine nor whose wide-range of effects and outcomes they can possibly understand.² 

Today, almost forty years later, the problem of “inverted utopians” has reached an entirely new scale. We have become belated inverted utopians, if not even stunted inverted utopians. It is not just that we cannot realise the effects of current technological innovations on our society and what we usually call “human nature.” The problem is that most of these innovations become obsolete and get replaced by newer ones before they have even been widely perceived, distributed, or have had a chance to leave any imprint.

Today we can neither produce nor imagine our future, nor are we even able to make our reflections somehow relevant for the process of rapid technological development. We are rather confronted with some pre-fabricated visions and plans for the future, which are monopolised by business corporations, technocratic governments, and think tanks, driven by lobbyists.

The real paradox of this situation consists in the fact that, due to the on-going “algorithmisation of governance,”³ the structurally assigned decision-makers are also becoming increasingly de-subjectivised and replaced in their expertise and competence by automatised decision-making processes, based on the analysis and evaluation of Big Data and other quantifiable inputs.

The de-subjectivation and minimisation of the role afforded to human agency in processes of decision-making and planning—as enabled by machine-learning technologies—can be observed today not only in the realms of business, industry, and public administration. It has also become a tendency in the realm of “aesthetic production”—from architecture to graphic and product design.

Contemporary art and the critical humanities have, at least so far, attempted to deal with these developments through their common mode of “critical reflection.” Yet as we could see, for instance in some projects presented at the Beyond-symposium in the last three days, the production of ‘critical texts’ and ‘critical artworks’ can be also quite successfully overtaken by AI.⁴

In relation to this tendency, we confront an obvious deficiency of the truly utopian imaginary, especially in the dimension of social justice and equality. What we do observe nowadays are rather new emanations of the classical technocratic ideology in the disguise of techno-utopias.

I would like to clarify this opposition between ideology and utopia with the help of the prominent German sociologist Karl Mannheim. In his book Ideology and Utopia, published in 1936, he argues that “ideologies” represent the consciousness and ways of thinking of the dominant social groups and classes, whereas “utopias” express the needs and aspirations of the oppressed or underprivileged groups. In other words, the utopia is an intellectual approach, which intends to transcend the reality and to change the existing social order. The ideology, in its turn, strives to preserve the status quo and to permanently reproduce the existing political and economic order and power relations.⁵

Thus, the current state of the art can be defined as a crisis of the “utopian mind.”⁶ In the cultural production of the last two decades—both in its mass and “high culture”; in films, TV series, fiction, theatre, and the visual arts—we find enough examples of convincing, realistic, and well-thought through dystopias and “worst-case scenarios.” One can recall TV series like Black Mirror, Real Humans, and many other recent examples. At the same moment, one can hardly find any credible positive visions of our future and “best-case scenarios,” which could be taken seriously. The latest examples lay back to the 1960s.

One could mention here, for instance, some early writings by Stanisław Lem, and of course, for the most part, several Soviet Sci-fi authors, such as Ivan Yefremov, Kir Bulychev and others, who were very prolific in producing very detailed and pretty-convincing utopias of the communist future, ones based on social justice, equality, and the realisation of creative human potential. Unfortunately, they are almost unknown in the West, because the ideology of the prevailing political and economic order has worked hard to eliminate the traces of any positive achievements belonging to its conquered ideological opponent.

This crisis of the utopian imaginary results, on the one hand, from our experience of the realised cybernetic utopias of the recent past: more and more the world around us resembles a spooky fulfilment of Philip K. Dick’s paranoic novels, with their total surveillance and omnipotent global corporations. On the other hand, this crisis is also an outcome of an on-going “colonisation of the future,” as Fredric Jameson has put it.⁷ This “colonisation” is the result of an appropriation of a “future design” and “future planning” by a hegemonic capitalist ideology and its institutions.

In this respect, the role of artists, academic intellectuals, and cultural practitioners in a broad sense is not any longer the role of prophets or visionaries—if this ever even used to be the case—or as we all wish to believe in a kind of a self-flattering manner. We seem, like everyone else, forced both to witness and to undergo a realisation of plans and visions, which we have not contributed to, and which only represent new modes and forms of bio-politics and governmentality.⁸

That is why a substantial goal of the arts and the humanities in this situation—even if quite a utopian one—could consist in “de-colonising” and “recapturing” the future. This would imply, among other things, new desirable scenarios, which could compete with the top-down ideology proffered under the mask of the weird techno-utopias produced by the Singularity University, Tesla Inc., Google, Facebook, and their talking-heads Peter Diamandis, Ray Kurzweil, Elon Musk, and so forth. This is because the majority of these plans and visions, if they are really thought through in their ideological implications and far-reaching consequences, entail a new totalitarian ideology: a completely new scale and level of control and dominance.

These tendencies are also closely related to the popularity in the recent humanities discourse of debates on “post-humanism.” This concept should be approached much more critically today, almost forty years after it was introduced in a specific poststructuralist intellectual context.⁹ As with almost any originally emancipatory concept, it seems to have followed the same historically-proven pattern of development. The academic concept of “post-humanism,” which was a necessary critical intellectual attitude for the late twentieth century humanities,¹⁰ was quite soon fully appropriated and replaced by the ideology of “transhumanism,” which implies an unscrupulous transformation of our “human nature.” In other words, a very long life, tending toward immortality, and various “enhancements,” including genetic improvements, will be within reach, while the rest of the population will be confronted with a perspective of a “free will” euthanasia on the basis of an algorithmic evaluation of your personal data and medical insurance records or, even spookier—the state of your bank account.¹¹

II. 

After this optimistic and encouraging introduction, I would like to move on to discuss what is to be done or, at least, what can think of doing, in order to resist the re-active mode described above. What is meant here by a re-active mode? As mentioned earlier: We are confronted with some bizarre future plans and visions, which are fabricated by others and for the benefit of others. A utopia created by one group of the population often becomes a dystopia for another group. And vice versa. Our own role is in fact reduced here to that of mere witnesses; instruments and objects for the implementation of other agent’s plans.

This question is more than relevant for us as artists, intellectuals, and creative practitioners in terms of our social and economic existence as professionals within certain institutional setups and infrastructures. In the case of the arts and academic humanities we have to re-act to these changes and to cope with the decisions they inform at the level of cultural policy, educational policy, etc. In the existing institutional structures of a division of labor in relation to the future design and planning, we have no real possibility to effectively intervene in a pro-active way in the decision-making processes. Therefore, the idea of “recapturing” our future should be taken quite seriously.

To work on this problem, a group of artists, curators, and researchers I am happy to count myself as a part of an independent research platform entitled: Kulturpessimismus pur—Institute for Critical Futures Studies. Recently the Institute has acquired a new Department: The Department for Speculative Cultural Policy, which deals with the re-capturing of the strategic foresight in this field. 

This Institute is a research initiative, focused primarily on the problems and perspectives for the arts and artistic activity, which are caused by the growth of the so-called “technological underemployment” on the global labor market. One of our central research topics is into the process by which our working and leisure time are merged in digital culture, and the concomitant increasing self-precariatisation of cultural producers, which is, in fact, a symptom of larger underlying structural problems that indicate a paradigmatic shift from “work” understood as “wage labor” to an “activity” as a form of an unpaid structuring of a human lifetime in a broader social context.

The fear of an approaching state of “technological underemployment” derives first of all from the increasing digitalisation and automatisation of production processes and services, which enters different areas of activity.¹² This intervention includes both industrial manufacturing of material goods and various forms of intellectual and creative labor: from financial data analysis and software development to journalistic report-writing or product design created by special computer tools and programs.¹³ These processes challenge the entire field of art and culture, providing, on the one hand, affordable and easily manageable technical tools for mass creativity and potentially endless resources for leisure.

Thus, the “Future of Art” is deeply intertwined with the problem of the prognosticated “post-work” or the “end of work” society¹⁴ as well as with the related questions of AI and so-called “algorithmic governance.” The concept of “algorithmic governance” refers to the state of society in which important political, economic, social, and other decisions are made by algorithmically regulated systems (as opposed to human expertise) that evaluate so-called big data inputs.

This relates not only to the efficiency-oriented and optimisation-cantered decisions of the corporations, but also the public administration and strategies of the state institutions. The potential implications of “algorithmic governance” for the administration of art institutions and design, cultural, and educational policy have not been yet systematically analysed, but meanwhile this tendency became relevant also for the decision-making processes in these fields as well.

Quantitative criteria—for example, the number of applicants at a university department, an attendance of institutional events, and so on—are now the basis for the decisions about which universities and disciplines, which museums and galleries, etc., must be funded and subsidised in the future. In a certain sense, this is a further development of the previous neoliberal tendencies of quantification and thus, of an evaluation of an economic efficiency, which are applied to all the aspects of a human life.

Besides the obvious bureaucratic inconveniences, the most relevant consequence for the majority of the population consequence will be the much-discussed problem of the “end of work,” covered behind the terminological façades of concepts like “digital labor,” “creative industries,” “industry 4.0” and so on. We should now really think of the strategies that will help us to survive—survive as professionals in the arts and humanities—through this transition to the so-called “post-work-society,” i.e., the transition from traditional work as a “wage laborer” to an “activity” as a form of “free” from a need of an economic survival filling a lifetime with doing something. 

As we are by now used to hearing, artists and intellectuals are prototypical post-Fordist workers, pioneers of voluntary self-exploitation and self-precariatisation, and ideal objects of governmental practices.¹⁵ At least, according to the social theory of the last two decades. The discussions about the forthcoming “post-work society” also became omnipresent in all the displays of the public discourse, from feuilletons and talk shows to various pop-info-edu-tainment formats, such as TED-talks. According to different estimations, in the next ten to twenty years, the machines, robots, and algorithms will make superfluous from 50 to 80 percent of the currently existing jobs in the production and service sector. The “automatisation of the mind”¹⁶ will bring similar results also into still celebrated “creative industries.” 

Instead of making such a simple, socially and psychologically healthy decision, innumerable new, potentially monetizable and completely meaningless forms of employment are being created. Usually they are conceptually decorated as “immaterial labor” for “creative industries” and “digital economies,” as “knowledge production” and so on.

Thus, dozens of “bullshit jobs” are produced. As the anthropologist David Graeber described in his famous essay “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs”:

In our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs, legal consultants or corporate lawyers to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.) Yet apart from a handful of well-touted exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well.¹⁷

In a world in which less and less meaningful work is left to be done, a fantastic solution would be the following: to replace all the bullshit jobs described above by various artistic activities. And this should be done at the state level, based on a strategic decision from above.

The famous proclamation by Joseph Beuys that “Everyone is an artist!” must become—with a slight modification— the official agenda of the state employment offices: “Everyone has to become an artist!”; or, at least, an art critic or an art historian. The less gifted ones can become curators (as an occasional curator I am allowed to say that).

This is precisely because the artists and academic intellectuals are the ones who always have something to do. They represent embodied provision-of-work machines. In doing so, the problem of the employment of the growing unemployed masses would be solved for good. What a beautiful utopia, or a nightmare. The difference is never fully clear.

Footnotes

1. See Günter Anders, Die atomare Drohung. Radikale Überlegungen, Munich: C. H. Beck, 1981. ↑

2. cf. Ibid. ↑

3. See https://www.algorithmic-governance.com/. ↑

4. See https://zkm.de/en/event/2018/10/beyond-festival-2018-future-design. ↑

5. See Karl Mannheim, Ideologie und Utopie, Bonn: F. Cohen, 1929, pp. 169–170. ↑

6. Ibid. ↑

7. See Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London: Verso, 2005, p. 228. ↑

8. See Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France (1978-9), New York: Springer, 2010. ↑

9. Cf. Rosi Braidotti: The Posthuman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. ↑

10. Questioning key concepts and “anthropocentric” assumptions of classical modern philosophy, including the ideas of humanism and related definitions of the “human”, as well as the “deconstruction” of the subject as a central philosophical notion played an important role in the poststructuralist thought of the 1960-80s. See Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les Choses, Paris: Gallimard, 1966; id., “Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur ?” in: Bulletin de la société française de philosophie, 22 février 1969, pp. 75–104; also Jacques Derrida, Écriture et la différence, Paris: Seuil, 1967. ↑

11. See James Hughes, Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2004, also: Nick Bostrom and Julian Savulescu (eds.), Human Enhancement, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009; Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, London: Profile Books, 2003. ↑

12. See Constanze Kurz and Frank Rieger: Arbeitsfrei: Eine Entdeckungsreise zu den Maschinen, die uns ersetzen, Munich: Riemann Verlag, 2013. ↑

13. Cf. numerous publications on Generative Design, i.e., Julia Laub et al., Generative Design: Visualize, Program, and Create with Processing, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. ↑

14. See Andy Beckett: “Post-work: The Radical Idea of a World Without Jobs,” The Guardian, (January 19, 2018), https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jan/19/post-work-the-radical-idea-of-a-world-without-jobs. ↑

15. See Paolo Virno, Grammatik der Multitude, Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2005; see also Pascal Gielen, The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude: Global Art, Politics and Post-Fordism, Amsterdam: Valiz, 2015. ↑

16. Cf. Constanze Kurz, Frank Rieger: “Automatisierung des Geistes: Wie die Automatisierung geistiger Tätigkeiten die Arbeitswelt verändert,” deutschland.de, (January 14, 2014), https://www.deutschland.de/de/topic/wirtschaft/innovation-technik/automatisierung-des-geistes. ↑

17. David Graeber: “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs,” originally published in Strike!magazine August 2013, available online: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-on-the-phenomenon-of-bullshit-jobs-a-work-rant. ↑