Optimizing the Earth

Thursday 1 October 2020

article

The task is simple: find the shortest route between two data points, two vertices on the mesh. In the world of computer science, problems like this have well-defined monikers; in this instance one might think of the Travelling Salesperson Problem (TSP) or a variant thereof.1 For travelling salespeople, the problem is how one might get from vertex A to vertex Z (potentially passing through vertices B through Y en route) and back again using the optimal path – put simply, this is a problem concerning an economy of motion. Clearly, for both the salesperson and – more importantly – their employer, travelling along this route should be as quick as a flash; time is money, after all.

So, let us consider the surface to be travelled upon, what I’ve called here the ‘mesh’. The problem of the travelling salesperson has been applied to fields as diverse as genome sequencing, microchip architecture and logistics. The mesh is a DNA strand; the mesh is a PCB; the mesh is the ocean, the highway or the Earth; but for the travelling salesperson such distinctions do not really matter, these surfaces are one and the same. As we will see in a moment, the material substrate is subordinate to the logic of the route and the economy of motion.

How do you get from Chicago to New York and back again using the optimal path? A committed salesperson, perhaps in a truck, drives around the Allegheny Mountains as fast as they can. A truly innovative salesperson simply drills straight through them. Why optimize the route when you can optimize the mesh?

In the early 2010’s, the high-frequency trader Daniel Spivey secured $300 million in funding from venture capitalist James Barksdale to tackle this kind of optimization problem. However, the salesperson in this equation was not a truck-driver but instead a beam of light, a data-package, and in their briefcase one can find messages, commands and contracts for consumption on U.S. equities markets. Before Spivey’s intervention the journey from Chicago to New York takes this data-package around 8 milliseconds – for Spivey and his business partners, we can assume, it is self-evident that in this economy of time such a journey is too long, too expensive.

In order to rectify this situation Spivey used the $300 million to put together a team which could create a new fibre-optic cable, a new route, which would run through the landscape (the mesh) as directly as possible. As Donald MacKenzie writes in his article ‘Drilling Through the Allegheny Mountains’: “To speed construction, 125 teams worked in parallel, in places even creating what are essentially little tunnels through the rock of the Allegheny Mountains.”2 The resultant route or ‘dark fibre’ cable shaved 1.3 milliseconds from the journey, an undoubtedly attractive differential for traders looking to reduce their latency into the U.S. markets. After all is said and done, the costs – whether financial or ecological – of drilling through the mountain are negligible when considering the profits that can be gained through this kind of optimization.

Here we can see inscribed in the sandstone of the Allegheny Mountains, Marx’s observation that: “Capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier...” 3 regardless of whether that barrier is an ancient, geological formation or the boundaries of the speed of light. What we today tend to call the Anthropocene could very well be characterised as precisely this reversal of the problem of the travelling salesperson – a reversal in which the material ‘surface’ or ‘mesh’ to be traversed is manipulated, distorted and retooled to fit the employer’s idealised route.

Yet, if this picture is indicative of the anthropocene, where can we see the anthropos in the frame? The human element seems noticeably absent from such a brave new landscape. Indeed, in this strange mutation of the TSP, the salesperson has morphed from a truck-driver into a beam of light; and similarly, the customer converted into microprocessors executing automated programs thousands of times a second. As Alberto Toscano notes in his essay ‘Gaming the Plumbing’: “The fastest trading chip executes a transaction in 740 nanoseconds (or 0.00074 milliseconds) while human reaction time to a visual stimulus is around 190 milliseconds.”4 In the time it takes the human component of the system to register whether a single message has been sent from Chicago to New York, over 20 more such messages have made the trip.

Toscano’s observation that such algorithmic activity takes place well below the perceptual threshold of the human agent leads him into a general meditation on the ‘social life of algorithms.’ He writes: “The bodily space of the [trading] pit leaves its marks even in the most impersonal of rules. A market algorithm isn't simply an automated rule, it is also a 'social space', a device that is both conditioned and conditioning. Mechanisation is not a uniform process, but the outcome of a contest of knowledges and strategies.”5

The somewhat speculative capacity for sociality (or at least the facilitation of social activity) within these hyper-digital market systems beyond ‘our’ perception might therefore suggest a form of agency (or indeed, life) at play which deviates from that which is strictly human. From this perspective at the very least, we might then want to revise the label of our new epoch from the rather short-sighted Anthropocene to something more in-tune with all of the agents exhibiting a geo-historical force.

In his often collaborative work on this topic Jason Moore, along with others such as Raj Patel and Donna Haraway, describes the Capitalocene as a kind of ‘provocative periodization’ which encourages us to understand capitalism “not just as an economic system but as a way of organizing the relations between humans and the rest of nature.”6 In a twin gesture, they highlight that the logic which undergirds the Capitalocene also serves as the legitimating force for such a distinction between ‘the human’ and ‘the natural’ at all. In an article for The Journal of Peasant Studies, he writes: “The whole thrust of capitalist civilization develops the premise that [‘we’] inhabit something called Society, and act upon something called Nature.”7 Except in our reading, through the examples provided by Toscano and others, this Society (this ‘social life’) no longer even comprises the human element but has been further abstracted into a playground of bits and bytes.

This is, to use another phrase of Toscano’s, a ‘real abstraction’8 – as Moore writes: “Humanity/Nature is consequently not only violently but practically abstract. These are real abstractions…”9 Our travelling salesperson is rendered out as an actually existing force (or agent) on the Earth through the Capitalocene’s wanton incapacity to view Society/Nature as a historically contingent construction, with all of the financial and ecological violence that such a title suggests. As Jean-Francois Lyotard summarised in a characteristically pithy statement: “Capital does not govern the knowledge of reality, but it gives reality to knowledge.”10

And indeed, for some theorists, such as Lyotard, this concept extends beyond the simple accumulation of capital and stretches out into a metaphysical order. In his 1991 book, The Inhuman, Lyotard addresses a similar set of issues – albeit, of course, in an entirely different lexicon. For him this drive towards negentropy, complexity or ‘complexification’ through the proliferation of ‘real abstractions’ is simply called Development. In The Inhuman he explains: “‘Development’ is the ideology of the present time, it realizes the essential of metaphysics, which was a thinking pertaining to forces much more than to the subject.”11

For Lyotard, “the ‘ultimate’ motor of this movement is not essentially of the order of human desire”; and this observation displaces the received wisdom that an economic system which behaves on the scale described here is guided simply by a “thirst for profit”. Instead, he proposes that the real abstraction, the agency or the force at work consists rather “in the process of negentropy which appears to ‘work’ the cosmic area inhabited by the human race.” Moving even further, he describes this force almost as a kind of virus, suggesting that “one could go so far as to say that the desire for profit is no doubt no other than this process itself, working upon the nervous centres of the human brain and experienced directly by the human body.”12

The purpose of drilling through the Allegheny Mountains then, is not to reap the profits of a diminished latency time, not to optimize the route for our travelling salesperson, but rather to generate the resources to simply do more drilling. The social life of the algorithm operates on an expansionist logic seeking to extend, it would seem, all the way into the Earth and out the other side, to punch a hole into orbit. As the contemporaries of Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari noted in their 1972 book Anti-Oedipus: “This [schizophrenic] tendency is being carried further and further, to the point that capitalism with all its flows may dispatch itself straight to the moon: we really haven't seen anything yet!”13

In the end, as Lyotard writes, there is only a single limit posed to this ideology of Development, and that is the ‘life of the sun’. He writes: “The anticipated explosion of this star is the only challenge objectively posed to development. The natural selection of systems is thus no longer of a biological but of a cosmic order.” 14

At this point, then, we seem (finally) to have reached a limit. A moment to pause, to break from this infectious, circuitous, inhuman logic and reflect on the ‘simple’ task we set out from; i.e. the shortest route between two paths. The logic of this journey, from New York to Chicago, or from the TSP to the heat-death of the Earth seems perfectly encapsulated in the maddening intervention of the High-Frequency traders at the Allegheny Mountains – in the ‘optimization’ of the mesh qua mountain as a contribution towards the development of the real abstraction of the Capitalocene.

However it is only by understanding the scale of this thought as it stands that we can begin to reframe the question. The actual task, for us, as artists, activists, animals and anthropos is to problematize this form of problematization without moving into a reactionary space which rejects such technology tout-court. Perhaps the question then becomes how we might ‘optimize’ the Earth (the ‘mesh’) not for the necromantic service of Capital but rather for the Earth itself? Not for an abstract language of trade-routes and salesmen, but for a really real world of migrations, both human and nonhuman?

This essay was written for the publication Energy Systems accompanying Well Projects' 2020 programme of the same name. Energy Systems sought to find ways of replacing ‘network’ orientated capital accumulation and socio environmental exploitation with ‘metabolisms’ which are orientated toward reciprocal models of coexistence.

It was reworked as a paper and presented alongside Eva Sajovic's Plantscapes exhibition during a symposium at 198 Contemporary Arts & Learning.

Footnotes

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem ↩

  2. Donald MacKenzie , Daniel Beunza , Yuval Millo & Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra (2012) DRILLING THROUGH THE ALLEGHENY MOUNTAINS, Journal of Cultural Economy, 5:3, p. 287 MacKenzie ↩

  3. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch10.htm ↩

  4. https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/gaming-plumbing-high-frequency-trading-and-spaces-capital ↩

  5. ibid. ↩

  6. https://roarmag.org/magazine/moore-patel-seven-cheap-things-capitalocene/ ↩

  7. Jason W. Moore (2017): The Capitalocene, Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis, The Journal of Peasant Studies. p.7 ↩

  8. Alberto Toscano (2008) The Open Secret of Real Abstraction, Rethinking Marxism, 20:2, 273-287 ↩

  9. Jason W. Moore (2017): The Capitalocene, Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis, The Journal of Peasant Studies. p.8 ↩

  10. Jean-Francois Lyotard (1991): The Inhuman. p.71 ↩

  11. Emphasis my own. Jean-Francois Lyotard (1991): The Inhuman. p.6–7 ↩

  12. Jean-Francois Lyotard (1991): The Inhuman. p.71 ↩

  13. Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari (1972): Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus. (https://libcom.org/files/Anti-Oedipus.pdf) p.34 ↩

  14. Jean-Francois Lyotard (1991): The Inhuman. p.7 ↩