Ted Byfield on Sat, 24 Apr 2021 19:02:29 +0200 (CEST)


[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: <nettime> deep humanities initiative

I have a few thoughts: the first has to do with these one-off comments about "deep," the second has to do with the gender aspect of this thread in just five messages long. They're related, in a way. 
(1) DEEP
Somewhere in my piles of scribbles I have some notes for an essay on the poetics of "deep." tl;dr: no, *do* forget web, pockets, and Europe. Those associations are fine, but there are better ways to approach this kind of thing than a couple of guys dashing off whatever comes to mind. 
One of my favorite mini-methods for just-add-water cultural analysis is 
Google's autocomplete — say, what it coughs up if you type in "deep 
a", "deep b", "deep c", etc. 26 searches is boring, but its rote, 
mechanical quality forces you to look at what other people are thinking. 
In this case it's pretty funny (part of me wants to say *deeply 
ironic*), because you're staring the problem right in its face: what do 
millions, maybe billions of people mean when they think "deep"?

There are several ~layers of meaning, but I'll just get to a few:


One is older, and has a miscellaneous quality because "deep" is literal: 
"deep pockets," "deep ocean," "deep end," etc. They're not so 
interesting, though "deep sleep" is one of them, and it was probably a 
basis for later, more metaphorical notions of deep."

Then there's another layer where the marketing kick in, and you start to 
see more metaphorical phrases like "deep conditioner" or "deep tissue 
massage." This second layer is less miscellaneous because the marketing 
has a focus, the human body. In this sense, "deep" takes on a new, 
latent meaning through an implied contrast — not just with a 
traditional antonym like "shallow", I think, but with something more 
like "superficial." It's not so explicit in this context, but this turn 
came with gendering — I think because commercial representations of 
bodies tended to focus on women first, and conveyed a sort of 
double-bind message: your body is a chronic problem / this product will 
fix or maintain it /  turn your body into a promise. Lather, rinse, 
repeat, as they say.

I'll fast-forward past a bunch of other mutations in the micro-poetics 
of depth, rooted in things like the rise of certain styles of 
audio-production (especially in "industrial" music), "deep ecology" 
(first used in 1973 but only widely adopted in English in the '90s), the 
rise of aerial and satellite surveillance (which promoted a vertical 
perspective that made high-resolution a matter of "depth," and not just 
in the optical sense of depth of field — see William Burrows's seminal 
book on space-based intelligence, _Deep Black: Space Espionage and 
National Security). But those things would all need essays in their own 
right, some of which have been written.

One sign the poetics of depth was catching on was the glut of movies and 
TV in the '90s: Star Trek — Deep Space Nine, Deep Cover, Deep Impact, 
Deep Blue Sea, Deep Rising, The Deep, etc, etc.

For me, the key shift was the use of "deep" to describe statecraft or 
the appearance of it. The obvious reference is the "deep state," which 
was first used in Turkey in the '90s, and a decade or so later started 
to become a staple of US political vocabulary — probably an 
interesting history of how that happened, but one that'll likely never 
be written. But part of the reason it worked is that "deep" had been a 
staple in paranoiac rightist ideas about "deep cover," "sleeper cells," 
and "Manchurian" this and that — some of which vaguely referred not 
just to anti-Soviet ideas but also to anti-Chinese kookiness about 
"brainwashing," dating from the Korean War. That background might 
explain why the name of a '72 porn movie was adopted as the pseudonym 
for the Watergate informer "Deep Throat" in the same year.

There were other, more progressive uses, like Pauline Oliveros's phrase 
"deep listening," which was both a pun. IIRC see coined it around '90 or 
so after a recording experiment in some subterranean chamber — but it 
also referred to a more deliberate but also open focus, which is related 
to emerging ideas about "immersive" experiences — another implicit 
reference to depth, but one that also tacitly invokes intensifying 
modernist ideas about rising distraction (cf. the 2016 self-help book 
Deep Work about avoiding distraction). I think Oliveros probably was 
tapping into the kinds of thinking that characterized ideas like "deep 
ecology," with their emphasis on forms of connection and engagement that 
eluded conventional and technocratic ways of slicing and dicing the 
world.

Also: Deep Thoughts is the name of the computer in Hitchhiker's Guide to 
the Galaxy, which probably accounts for a huge swath of "deep" names in 
tech, even if the bros don't know it (let alone know it was a joke).

So those are the main clusters of cultural noise that were available or 
in the air when tech bro culture started to tag things as "deep": deep 
web (not to be confused with the dark web), Deep Blue (the chess-playing 
computational system), deep neural networks (DNNs), deep linguistic 
processing (DLP), deep dream (AI-based image generation), deepfakes, 
Deepmind (an AI company), Deep Nostalgia (dumb app that animates old 
photo portraits). These things are pretty different, in that they tap 
into different parts of these histories; but they're all pretty the same 
because they're all "deep," right?

Once the bros got involved, it became obligatory to call everything 
"deep." For example, "deep learning" was a stated goal of ML/AI 
researchers — it doesn't have anything to do with what we'd 
traditionally associate with deep knowledge, it's just the kind of low 
bar with a high name that tech culture loves (like "artificial 
intelligence"). So you can tack "deep" on to pretty much anything, and a 
huge swath of people will take it seriously. If I started talking about 
"deep papier mache," an alarming number of people would assume I meant 
some serious, more fundamental understanding of the it as a history, 
medium, practice, whatever, but it's just a phrase I made up.

(2) GENDER, SORT OF


When I saw Anya's encouraging remark, in contrast to the more negative 
one-liners, I was like 😔, especially because it felt like I'm part of 
the kind of pile-on that's made Nettime such a problematic space.

I love this if they are really working to impose a structure within 
the creation of software and the random, unexplored consequences 
decisions made by most (mainly white men) people creating it.
It’s an extremely unfriendly environment to anyone but young white 
men, as Silicon Valley culture believes the lie that the most money 
will be made from the idiot zuckerbergs model, when in reality most 
successful startups are created by people with experience.

The Silicon Valley culture, and by necessity the software et al 
created by it, is extreme capitalism with profit prioritized above all 
else, and F the humans who haven’t pillaged everyone else and gotten 
too rich to be tolerated.

Unfortunately, like I said, the initiative looks like it capitulates to 
that kind of culture rather than challenging.

It might make real sense at SJSU as an internal strategy for promoting 
certain forms of knowledge and study, but when a document like that 
escapes that orbit it becomes ridiculous. It can be both things at once.

Cheers,
Ted

On 24 Apr 2021, at 3:10, Geert Lovink wrote:


And do not forget the term 'deep Europe', one of the many inventions 
coming from the nettime scene… neither East nor West or 
continental… https://v2.nl/events/deep-europe/view 
<https://v2.nl/events/deep-europe/view>

Geert



On 24 Apr 2021, at 8:36 am, Michael H. Goldhaber 
<michael@goldhaber.org> wrote:

Is it more closely related to the “deep state” or to “deep 
pockets “? Both?

#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: