Toward a Minor Tech:Editorial
Toward a Minor Tech
Christian Ulrik Andersen & Geoff Cox
The three characteristics of minor literature are the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective arrangement of utterance. Which amounts to this: that “minor” no longer characterises certain literatures, but describes the revolutionary conditions of any literature within what we call the great (or established).
–– Deleuze and Guattari, “Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature”
The 2023 edition of transmediale explores “how technological scale sets conditions for relations, feelings, democratic processes, and infrastructures.” (https://2023.transmediale.de/). This becomes apparent in the massification of images and texts, and the application of various scalar machine techniques that try to make these comprehensible for human and non-human readers.“There is a problem with scale”, as Anna Tsing puts it, in its connection to modernist master narratives that organise life on an increasingly globalised scale (the “bigness” of capitalism). Instead, she writes, we need to “notice” the small details and not assume that these need to be scaled up to be effective. In technical fields, there is a similar problem with scale, as Big Tech dominates, with ensuing environmental damage; big computing begets big data.
Following a process of open exchanges and a three-day research workshop in London, at LSBU and KCL, this publication brings together researchers who address the problems of technological scale, thinking through the potentials of 'the minor'; or what we are referring to as minor (or minority) tech – small tech that operates at human scale (more peer to peer than server-client) and stutters in its expression and application. As Marloes de Valk puts it in the Damaged Earth Catalog: “Small technology, smallnet and smolnet are associated with communities using alternative network infrastructures, delinking from the commercial Internet.” As such, the publication sets out to question the universal ideals of technology and its problems of scale, extending it to follow the three main characteristics identified in Deleuze and Guattari's essay, namely deterritorialization, political immediacy, and collective value.
Together authors address minor tech through its relation to big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, blockchain mining, art worlds, global organisation of labour, extractions of natural resources, exploitation, energy consumption, trans-feminisms and decoloniality. Further issues that arise question, for instance, the dynamics between big data and small technology, attentive to what Cathy Park Hong calls “minor feelings” (that derive from racial and economic discrimination in society); how to bring together new material and minor cultural assemblages between humans and nonhumans, ecology, and technological infrastructure and systems; or, how this relates to minor practices and collective action.
This publication includes short articles that were written during the workshop and as a result of extensive peer exchange, and will be extended in the next issue of APRJA (http://aprja.net) to be published Summer 2023.
At the workshop, the authors and editors of this publication were joined by Marloes de Valk, Elena Marchevska, Tung-Hui Hu (at The Photographers' Gallery), and Manetta Berends & Simon Browne (Varia). The workshop and publication were supported by CSNI (London South Bank University), and SHAPE Digital Citizenship and Graduate School Arts (Aarhus University).