Toward a Minor Tech:Toward a Minor Tech:Yu-5000
Time enclosures and the scales of optimisation: from imperial temporality to the digital milieu
Keywords
imperial temporality, digital object, optimisation, enclosures, progress
A crisis of time in the digital milieu
There’s this phenomenon that has been referred to as “a crisis of time” which may be summed up by the often-cited paradox where “the more time we save, the less we have” (Rosa, 2015: 16). The longer story you might have already been familiar with, the one that you may already be living out, goes something like this: our technologically advanced society is overflowing with tools, both digital and mechanical, that allow us to do more in less time. Communicating with anyone at any distance is easy and uncomplicated. Automation technologies mean repetitive tasks are undertaken by machines so that the work left to humans may be creative, fulfilling, and rewarding. It seemed for a moment that we may finally be lifted from the state of alienation reviled by those waxing philosophical on the state of labour, that we might find time for the pursuit of a good life beyond the socioeconomic confines of our contemporary moment (Srnicek, 2015: 7).
Of course, that’s not how the tale unfolds. Despite the many advances in technology that we’ve experienced in the last century, the promises of automation lie unfulfilled as its claim of emancipation from mundane work is eaten up by an insatiable economic need for growth (Lovink, 2019: 84). Even with all the conveniences that digital technologies offer, we’re left feeling short on time, both in the cadence of the day-to-day and in the span of a lifetime in its entirety, where “life is short” remains an uncontested idiom amongst us earthly beings confined to mortality. Equally, there is a pervasive feeling of standstill, where the experience of a perpetual present emerges from the constancy of update, a present that is not held accountable to a past and does not have a future to work towards.
This sensation of time shortage, poverty, and lack, is exaggerated in the digital milieu. The term “digital milieu”, borrowed from Yuk Hui’s On the Existence of Digital Objects, describes the current milieu of “multiple networks… connected together by protocols and standards” (Hui, Yuk 2016, 26). It moves from “the notion of system to the notion of the associated milieu proposed by Simondon as a response to the rampant advance of industrialization” (Ibid, 221), an important distinction that captures an undercurrent of commercial value which we will see is a pretext for optimisation. In the digital milieu, time is rendered at once negligible and infinite. The negligibility is due to the incredible speeds at which information is processed such that waiting feels intolerable and instantaneity is expected (Crary, 2013). Its infinitude is due to the perceived perpetuity of digital media, premised on the supposed endurance of decentralised, unchanging informatics (Groys, 2016). This archive of knowledge is understood to be built on the mythical backbones of a system made to detect and withstand nuclear threats (Abbate, 1999), a characteristic that also feeds into the feeling of standstill.
The intensification of these changes renders a time that is without presence and a present that is without time, lacking past and future. Time scales are stretched and squeezed to the point of disappearance, experienced and expressed in various ways that hint at a crisis of time, such as Berardi’s study of an impotence that denies us the ability to imagine alternative futures (2017). Time thus becomes paradoxically both negligible and perpetual in the wake of digital technologies, where its negligibility stems from the incredible speed at which information can be processed, leading to a perceived instantaneity of digital services and imperceptible loading times (Crary, 2013), while its perpetuity is based on the supposed endurance of decentralised, unchanging informatics (Groys, 2016), an archive of knowledge built on the mythical backbones of a system made to detect and withstand nuclear threats (Abbate, 1999).
Time and technology have been widely studied throughout the past few decades, from Stiegler’s repositioning of technics as time in the exteriorisation of memory (1998) to Harvey’s space-time compression where machines shrink our sense of distance and its relation to time (1990), to theorists writing about the ways photographic and film technologies introduced new and asynchronous timelines (Solnit, 2003; Mroz, 2012). Processes of acceleration are often cited as the underlying cause of this crisis of time (Rosa, 2015: 21), guiding technological evolution and proliferation. However, this does not account for the particularities of the digital, nor does it acknowledge the preconditions that enforce its singular directionality. What is missing from the equation, I argue, is the logic of optimisation, which manufactures a forward-thrust orientation that affects digital society at every level.
Optimisation, as it surfaces in the digital, emerges from the contested histories of progress and improvement to result in what I term an enclosure of time, paralleling the land enclosures of medieval Europe and colonised terrain to mimic the same process of privatisation. Optimisation, I argue, is inextricable from our socioeconomic realities just as it habituates end users of digital technologies to reconfigure collective experiences of time. This paper thus aims to explore how these historical instances of optimisation transmute into the digital and investigate whether it is possible to escape the logic of optimisation in the digital milieu.
Optimisation, politically and digitally
A definition of "optimisation" must first be established before such an investigation can proceed. Generally, “optimisation” is understood as a way to make the best use of something. This definition may initially appear benign; however, it does not hold up under scrutiny, for both the words "best" and "use" may be politically and culturally charged such that "optimisation" becomes polemical when ideas of what constitutes "best" and “use” deviates. As outlined in Sarah Ahmed’s What's the Use?: On the Uses of Use, usefulness is analysed as a framework that is capable of shaping phenomena. Whereas what is considered to be the “best” uncontroversially deviates depending on the value system used to judge that which is under consideration, to use is to turn something into a goal-driven tool, infusing it with a purpose (Ahmed, 2019: 23) or else stripping that something of subjectivity (ibid: 5). The two words are tied to one another causally, where “to use one’s faculties more is to become better at something, with betterment understood as a molding, as being shaped by function” (ibid: 92). Their joint directionality (ibid: 45) is what embeds the particular directional logic into optimisation, the same logic that I argue originates in the beginnings of capitalism and finds its current iteration in the digital.
In its digital applications, what appears to be a harmless way to describe processes aimed at fulfilling specific ends results in the preclusion of other frameworks through which labour, culture and history may be understood. This is evident on many levels of digital technology, from code to end user. On the level of code and software, optimisation means the qualification of code as beautiful, becoming an object of aesthetic admiration when it boasts the least number of lines of code necessary to execute a function or run a programme. As noted by Galloway: “The concept of optimization is important to algorithmic aesthetics… To optimize a system means to increase its efficiency, to eliminate redundancy, and to exploit advantages” (Galloway 2021: 324).
As we see from the above quote, optimisation shares characteristics with the concept of efficiency. However, there exists a break in our moment of data surplus where a more all-encompassing logic underlies the digital, the same logic which aims for longevity, hyper-synchronisation and other technical processes that include but also exceed the scope of efficiency. According to Halpern and others, "[i]t was once the imagined limits to resources and energy that shaped industrial conceptions of efficiency, energy, and labor power. In the early twenty-first century, data capitalism changes this formula by putting the derivative before the source. Derivation takes the place of extraction, and where there was efficiency, there is now optimization" (2022: 205).
Efficiency also overlooks the prerequisites of functioning digitality; namely the abstraction necessitated by the operation of digital technologies. On a structural level, what differentiates digitality from mechanical processes is an abstraction of information into discrete units (Galloway, 2021: 24). In computer science, abstraction means only relevant information from a group is extracted to be used. It allows optimisation to occur in algorithmic entities to a degree that mechanical objects would not be subjected to (Kramer, 2006). When optimisation occurs on the level of code, it is not simply the processes that become altered, but the digital object themselves, which are understood as “objects that take shape on a screen or hide in the back end of a computer program, composed of data and metadata regulated by structures or schemas” (2016: 1).
To expand on how optimisation alters digital objects due to the digital’s reliance on abstraction, we might look at an example of a JPEG image file on a webpage. To optimise such a file means to decrease its size by stripping it of certain data whilst still making it discernible and enjoyable as the image to a human viewer. This is done so that webpage loading times are faster, helping it rank higher on search engines such as Google. Pages that load slower have an increased bounce rate, which means it is in the commercial interest of Google to make pages and their components load quickly.
The reason that a JPEG image, or any digital object made of data, can be compressed, is because it can be abstracted into data continually until it reaches the level of machine code, to then be recomposed into the final object. This final object exists insofar as it performs the function of information transmission, such as the JPEG image file which conveys visual information to a viewer. In the case of optimising a JPEG file, one might convert it to a PNG or SVG file if there are vectors involved, fundamentally changing the underlying structure of the file. It may involve ridding the file of unnecessary metadata, or else resizing it so that the file which surfaces an image on the webpage is smaller, but perhaps stretched to the same size of the container it is meant to take up. In every case, and in cases that extend to digital objects of other types, the object itself is transformed (Jackson, 2023).
Beyond code and moving towards the digital culture that emerges from our prevalent use of digital technologies, optimisation also appears frequently on the level of interface, which again owes itself to commercial value. Search engine and social media optimisation is an ever-changing set of conventions that give posts and pages a better chance of being seen by internet users (Killoran, 2013), dating apps and selling platforms offer advice on how to make oneself appear more appealing to attract potential suitors or buyers (Degan, 2023), and optimising for “scannability” is now key to digital communications (Sutter, 2015). This feeds into the ethos of hustle culture and self-optimisation, a shared occasion amongst entrepreneur-influencers and outmoded slogans that tell us to rise and grind, of the habits of successful people that we’re told to aspire to, or of the bootstraps that we should be picking ourselves up by.
In each of the above cases, the directionality of optimisation is indicative of commercial value, whereby profit margins are expanded through the varied processes of optimisation. This can also be observed in the commodification of time in the network society, as described by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, who explains that “value is generated online, and networks are valuable because information has become a commodity” (2016, 117). From digital objects to influencer culture, commercial value becomes the bottom line for optimisation. Whilst it is difficult to say whether optimisation on the level of code seeps into the culture of optimisation that is exchanged on digital interfaces, its presence indicates that optimisation is an inextricable aspect of digitality on multiple levels.
Progress, improvement, and time enclosures
How did we end up at a point where optimisation is not only normalised but has become the standard that both industry and society strive for? To explore this question, I'd like to revisit a point in history where the beginnings of this logic started to take shape. Although the term “optimisation” entered into popular lexicon fairly recently, its logic notably mimics the historical drive of progress, which informs the ideologies that have led to the desecration of peoples, cultures, and land. Progress, according to Azoulay, is “a destructive force, a movement, a condition embedded in temporal and spatial structures that in the course of a few hundred years has shaped the way we relate to the common world and narrate our modes of being together” (2019:21). It “conditions the way world history is organized, archived, articulated, and represented” (2019:11) such that even in the centuries after the initial violence of dispossession and plunder, the narrative often told is one that claims such actions to be ultimately justified.
Related to progress is the concept of "improvement", which offers a way to understand the histories tied to land and primitive accumulation of capital, as a forebear of present-day neoliberalism. Improvement is a “working towards” that denotes both motion and direction, similar to optimisation. Historically, this term comes up in documentation about land improvement, a process of privatisation that might find synonymous threads in land developments of today. Improvement is also one of the pillars of Locke’s theory of property, which has been rebuked for its justification of English settler colonialism (Arneil, 2020).
Prior to the land developments of today and before capitalism spread across Europe and the rest of the world, medieval Europe was, for the most part, feudalistic. This meant there existed a sharp divide between feudal lords and the peasant class. The transition into the new economic system involved centuries of direct and indirect violence and bloodshed in order to set the stage for what Marx termed the “historical preconditions” of capitalism. Feudalism, circa the 5th to 12th century, was marked by agrarian labour, where peasants under serfdom worked for feudal lords, and it was to them that a share of their produce was given in exchange for military and other protections. By no means was it an egalitarian system, but there were certain freedoms afforded to serfs such that a move away from this way of life was met with emphatic resistance. According to economic historian Michael Perelman, the classical political economists of the 17th to early 19th century “understood that market society required strong measures in order to coerce large numbers of people to join the market revolution.” (Perelman, 2007)
Under Feudalism, both privately owned and common land existed. As a part of the preconditions for capitalism, communal land had to be eliminated. If peasants and labourers had any land to their names, it was only to subsidise what meagre living they earned. As 19th-century Scottish reformer Robert Gourlay once wrote, “It is not the intention to make labourers professional gardeners or farmers! It is intended to confine them to bare convenience” (ibid, 2007).
During the transition from feudalism to capitalism, land improvement surfaces in two ways: in the initial changing of wild landscape into arable land, and in the enclosure and privatisation of land. The disintegration of common land contributed to drastic changes across agriculture and industry, where “enclosure changed agricultural practices which had operated under systems of cooperation in communally administered landholdings… between 1750 and 1830 in England more than 4,000 enclosure Acts were passed. The process continued through the 19th cent. until there were hardly any open fields remaining.” (Cannon, 2009). As the years wore on, enclosures at new speeds began to take place as value extraction became understood through the aspect of time management. “While enclosure was a long-standing rural practice, it began to take on a qualitatively different scale and scope. Not only did the pace of enclosure, in many parts of England, begin to accelerate, but also it was often undertaken without agreement.” (Blomley, 2007).
Enclosures led to more exaggerated inequality, where “primitive accumulation… was not simply an accumulation and concentration of exploitable workers and capital. It was also an accumulation of differences and divisions within the working class, whereby hierarchies built upon gender, as well as “race” and age, become constitutive of class rule and the formation of the modern proletariat.” (Federici, 2014: 63–64). Thus, these social divides are part of capitalism’s genetic makeup, found in the first instances of privatisation.
While enclosures are an event of centuries past, their legacy of improvement and progress remains such that we might consider enclosures as an adequate term to describe the processes that surface in relation to the crisis of time, where privatisation of time in the digital milieu to extract commercial value parallels the privatisation of space that occurs in the histories of land improvement and enclosures. I thus term this particular conflation of temporal loss and technological evolution time enclosures, in order to evoke the historical socioeconomic modes of operation that lead to those of our current lived reality to offer a framework through which the crisis of time may be analysed, which speaks specifically to issues of property, value, and privatisation in relation to optimisation and progress.
Imperial temporality
Under the dominion of progress, colonial expansion became the next obvious step. Whilst most former colonies have transitioned into neocolonial or post-colonial relations with their oppressors, the legacy of Western colonialism exists to this day in less and more obvious ways. Yet such histories are often relegated to a past that has been shut away so that those who actively fight against the perils of present-day imperial violence or who deal with the fallout of these events are made inaudible (Azoulay, 2019: 78).
This shutting away of certain histories as a thing of the past is requisite of what Azoulay terms imperial temporality, through which “the violent processes of impoverishing and dispossessing people… are obscured by the ideology that poverty is… an attribute of such people”, where “the violent imposition of resource monopoly is converted into the allegedly beneficent and necessary regime of law and order” (ibid: 77). Imperial temporality, thus, follows the “imperial movement of progress”, a linear motion that denies those outside of Western sovereignty the opportunity to reopen their histories, pronouncing certain cultures an event of the past that has had its final chapter. Under imperial temporality, the only way to move is forward, and the events of yesterday are accepted to have been done for the sake of progress and an assumed moral objectivity.
For Azoulay, to undo imperial temporality, one must rid the bookends of colonialism as a stark beginning and end to instead focus on the operators of colonialism that persist into the present. These bookends can also be understood as time enclosures of a larger scale, enclosing on histories to mutate them into objects that may be collected and categorised. The operators, and thus the forces that maintain these colonial bookends, include cultural institutions such as museums and archives, which continue to sustain particular narratives of what belongs to history and what is a living culture (ibid: 88).
The artefacts stolen or traded from their original contexts to be placed behind glass and cut off from the flow of history close off the chapters of past cultures such that the one narrative of progress by any means necessary is all that remains. It exemplifies the particular telos of progress that disallows the possibility of alternative socioeconomic landscapes or imaginaries where, after Mark Fisher, Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (Fisher, 2009: 2). And it’s this thread that we see surface as optimisation in the digital milieu.
The digital age
Carried forth into the current era of computational capitalism, imperial temporality continues to permeate the logic of digital technologies and media at every level, whereby the only trajectory possible is forward, however that can be achieved. Progress transforms into optimisation under the primacy of the digital so that the same logic weaving through imperialism informs how technologies evolve, where an imperial temporality both sustains and is sustained by the digital milieu.
Discourse on digital technologies often looks at its underlying structure, such as Soon on the metaphor of the “flow” of data in network technologies (2016). Others take into account the systemic issues that the usage and proliferation of such technologies lead to, such as Crary, who writes on the speeds at which information is processed, habituating end users to make wait times intolerable (2013), or Lovink, who traces the overall depressive state of individuals today to the wide use of social media (2019). Seldom have theorists explored the ways in which the underlying structure of digitality relates to pervasive socioeconomic systems, with one of a few exceptions being Alexander Galloway. He makes this connection by outlining how object-oriented programming, which most of Big Tech operates on, resembles in name and logic the popular yet often criticised philosophy of Object Oriented Ontology that has been accused of an ahistoricism endemic to neoliberal policies. Such an affiliation may be nothing more than coincidental, but Galloway points out that if the philosophies ideologically underpinning this world mimic the languages that structure our reality, then such philosophies are both epistemologically suspect and politically retrograde (2013).
Continuing on Galloway’s trajectory, the concept of an imperial temporality complicates neoliberalism’s ahistoricism by presenting histories that are consigned to an untouchable past and that sustain differential politics. In understanding digitality through this framework, imperial temporality becomes evident in the way datasets are extracted and maintained, similar to archives that conserve certain histories as that which have both beginning and end so as to be effectively an object of the past. Equally, the underlying framework of ownership, extraction and labour value can be identified in digital processes, such that the same methods of industrialism can be overlaid onto the digital industries of today, with data understood as value.
Related to optimisation, imperial temporality entwines with digitality’s very makeup to alter experiences of time through abstraction, as outlined above. A key component of digitality, abstraction allows digital objects themselves to be optimised, making them lighter, faster, crisper or whatever is necessary for the highest level of value extraction. This differentiates from previous management programmes, such as Taylorism, where the method of value extraction centred on incentivising more labour for less time (Braverman, 1975). As Galloway says, “Ever since Marx indicted exchange value and alienation, progressive movements have looked with scepticism at the domain of abstraction and optimization” (Galloway 2021, 211).
Tertiary protention and the experience of optimisation
Optimisation in digital technology also means the ability to retain information and anticipate future instances. This is especially relevant when we consider the advances in digital technologies as the volume and quality of predictive and generative AI increase. In considering the implications of such technologies on experiences of time, I look to the concept of tertiary protention to better understand how futurity and are digitality entangled.
Protention is the anticipation of the next moment in phenomenology, coined by Edmund Husserl, in contrast to retention as the mechanism of memory. As explained by Yuk Hui, there are primary and secondary protentions, “the primary protention being the anticipation of the immediate coming moment… and the secondary protention being anticipation or expectation based on past experience” (Yuk Hui, 2016: 221). Because of our reliance on technology, especially digital technologies through which our communications are mediated, Hui proposes a third type of protention.
The tertiary protention, according to Yuk Hui, refers to how “in our everyday lives, technology becomes a significant function of the imagination” (Yuk Hui, 2016: 221). This may be contrasted to Bernard Stiegler’s tertiary retention, a designation of technology as the exteriorisation of memory (ibid: 222). In today’s society, digital technologies more than habituate their users to become the very means by which time is experienced. Under the logic of optimisation, it is not farfetched to propose the possibility that our collective imaginations are guided directionally towards an undetermined goal, as with all actions in digital processes.
The optimisation of digital technologies means imagination becomes subject to an exterior mechanism that constantly reforms for the sake of lighter digital loads, more efficient processes or immutable data structures with the pulse of commercial value surging through each. The introduction of predictive and generative machine learning leads to further complications where the effects of technology exceed the processes and build of machines to a territory where our imaginations are entirely subject to the functionality and the corresponding outputs of these technologies, and “in terms of the logical capacities and operations of machines” (ibid: 223), mirroring Galloway’s concern for how code parallels political organisation.
Tertiary protention considers the use of data analysis for statistical predictions, activating digital objects from the purview of retention through algorithmic processes. Examples abound in today’s society, from the automated coffee machine that Hui uses to illustrate this, to the large language models that provide viable routines for those who are after specific diets or bodily results. With optimisation, digital processes mimic seamlessness so that tertiary protention is increasingly difficult to detect, thus difficult to refute. Tertiary protention in terms of scale means both the ability to recall information thanks to artificial, exteriorised retention and the immediacy of output through the incredible speeds of external processing feed into the altered experiences of time, enclosed through the perpetuity of the present that disallows other futures and its negligibility, where the next moment is always already here. Privatised, optimised, and enclosed, time in the digital milieu ceases to flow with the tempo of experience, running counter to circadian cycles and diurnal rhythms and the metronome of care beyond the scope of commodity, scaling beyond human temporalities and amplifying the crisis of time.
Minor tech and optimisation
How might the logic of optimisation be countered, and is it something that can be abandoned whilst digital technologies remain an inextricable part of our everyday lives? Whilst I cannot provide a definitive answer, I want to offer a few examples of digital projects that rethink the logic of optimisation. One such project, contrary to the aesthetics of algorithms that aim for efficiency and fewer lines of code, is Winnie Soon and Geoff Cox’s Aesthetic Programming, a handbook which rethinks methods of “learning to program as a way to understand and question existing technological objects and paradigms, and to explore the potential for reprogramming wider eco-socio-technical systems” (2021). It has the potential to mitigate the directional logic of computational thinking that habituates learners of programming, instead galvanising critical thinking in its stead. Artist Ben Grosser also provides tongue-in-cheek responses and examples of minor tech that could counter the issue of scale in the crisis of time. His project Minus is a finite social media network where users are given 100 posts for life (2021). He also wrote on Twitter, “my new chat AI, called Enough, is a small language model that draws on a one-parameter pre-trained corpus—the smallest in history—and answers every question with the same response: ‘No.’”
Minor tech, thus, holds the potential to resist the uncontested trajectory of optimisation. It opts not for commercial value, to do and reach the most in the least amount of time, but to provide another pathway into the digital. These projects don't promise to reconfigure our entire relationship with the digital and its logic of optimisation, nor do they attempt to redress the enclosure of time, but what they offer, instead, are ways to re-enter the digital milieu with fresh concepts that are not built on the temporalities of old, nor its preexisting logic of progress, goal-orientation and directions. Although they act as small instances of refusal, their very presence indicates the possibility of alternative modes of being and a fissure that may be pried open in order to reclaim digitality as a method of resistance.
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