computing power and social authority

Ron Eglash

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

eglash@rpi.edu

Paper delivered at American Anthropological Association, SF Nov 2000

When Terabyte Makes Right: The Changing Role of Computing Power in the Social Authority of Simulations

Computational models play an accelerating role in many powerful social locations. They sneak into our medical decisions, speak loudly in the global warming debate, invisibly determine the rates we pay for insurance, locate the position of a new bridge in our city, plot the course of our nation’s wars, and testify in the courtroom both for and against the defense. As anthropologists concerned with the relations of technology and society, it is tempting to take simulations on their own terms, and engage them on the basis of accuracy or realism. While I think such investigations are utterly necessary and valuable, I want to take a different tack. This paper will outline some of the reasons why we should look for alternatives to the accuracy critique, and explain why the relation between computing power and social authority is an important example for such alternatives.

When we focus on questions of simulation accuracy, several problems arise. First, we frequently end up putting categories of the Real on the ethical side, and categories of the Unreal on the unethical side. This tendency to fall back on modernist morality, one which mimics the Christian story of the fall from the Garden, or Rousseau’s dichotomy between nobility of the natural and the evils of artifice, is in most cases accidental. Lets take, for example, graphical representations of the human body, such as the Visible Man project. Investigations of such anatomical simulations are immediately queried for all the right reasons – how the social construction of the technical happened, who benefits, how it influences the viewer’s experience, and so on. But inevitably there rises what Wahneema Lubiano calls “the ghost of the real” -- we are haunted by some element of the pre-virtual past (almost literally in this case by the donor of the body, a 39 year old prisoner who was executed by lethal injection in Texas (cf. Waldby 1996)). Despite the best intentions of these writers, in the end their simulation critique implies an ethics of the Real. Even Sandy Stone, well known for her commitment to virtual communities and identities, ends her often-cited essay with the line “No refigured virtual body, no matter how beautiful, will slow the death of a cyberpunk with AIDS..” Again the real haunts us; critiques of simulation accuracy or realism tend to move us toward an essentialist or luddite framework.

The second problem with accuracy critiques is that they focus on symptom rather than cause. Ostensibly, one could correct the inaccuracy, and then we would have nothing to complain about. But most critics have a loftier goal in mind: they are really trying to show how a social elite has managed to cast a “purely objective” simulation in its own interests. That is, the analysis shows us that the simulation is not just coincidently inaccurate, but that in fact the inaccuracies systematically bias the simulation in favor of dominant groups. A private corporation, for example, may use a simulation to bolster its claim that their pollution has minimal environmental impact or low health hazards. By focusing on the accuracy or realism of the simulation, we lose sight of the original goal: we focus on getting the American Petroleum Institute to use the right equations rather than asking how they managed to control the truth-making abilities of simulation in the first place. What is the relationship between social power and computing power, and how might we change those relations?

Lets begin with the technical definitions for computing power. On the one hand, the mathematical theory of computation has precisely defined what we mean by saying that one system is more powerful than another. The least powerful system is a finite state automaton, the next level in power is a push-down automaton, and the greatest in power is a Turing machine. But this formal definition for computing power, collectively termed the Chomsky hierarchy, is strangely absent in the world of commercial computing. There are two reasons for this disconnection. First, there is the quite sensible and responsible distinction that contemporary computing systems are too complex for such unitary assessment; that in fact we have to have an empirical approach because different computing systems are good at different things. Second, there is the rather suspect way in which the social authority of computing power requires an unfettered ability to make its claims. Lets now look at three categories for this slippage: speed, interactivity, and memory.

First we have the simulations which produce special effects for Hollywood movies and television commercials. Computing power here is almost entirely a question of processing speed, due to the computational requirements of high-resolution graphic simulation. Movies like Terminator II and Jurassic Park were milestones in visual simulations of physical movement; so much so that they are treated like NASA projects whose “spin-offs” are for the general benefit of humanity. Special effects wizards have now become frequent speakers at mathematics conferences; for example the creator of the wave in the movie Titanic recently appeared for National Mathematics Awareness Week. Often the visual spectacle of their virtual realism is a much greater audience selling point than plots or acting; in fact, it is precisely this uncanny ability to manipulate reality that becomes the proof of computing power. When the coca-cola corporation spends 1.6 million on 30 seconds of airtime during the super bowl, it is no surprise that supercomputing is at the center of their message. Like the Marxist observation that “money is congealed labor” (Haraway), special effects are congealed computing. The power to command reality to do your bidding is sexy, even if it is only a virtual reality. Marshal Mcluhan’s theme that the medium is the message was always too deterministic for my taste, but I am willing to make an exception in the case of computational advertising, where the cliché that “sex sells” has been augmented by the sexiness of simulacra.

Second, we can find a similar account of simulation’s sex appeal in the rise of multimedia computing, particularly for websites. Here the measure of computing power is most often presented in terms of “interactivity.” Yet the formal definition for interactive, as could be produced through the Chomsky hierarchy, is never brought to bear. As anthropologist Ken Fleischmann points out in his analysis of web media, rather than measure interactivity in terms of two-way mutual dependencies, commercial competition depends on an “interrealism effect” that substitutes flashy video streaming or other one-way gimmicks for user control of the simulation. Such multimedia attempts to create the effect of interactive experience without relinquishing the producer’s control over the simulation. Meanwhile, the informational limits of interactive computing power – the bandwidth of the communication pipeline – is carefully doled out in accordance to social standing, with the most powerful using high-speed fiber-optic conduits of Internet II, lesser citizens using cable connections on Internet I, and the poorest segments of society making do with copper telephone wires – truly a “trickle-down” economy of interactivity.

Third and finally, there is computing power in terms of access to memory: professional simulations using large databases, often employing an agent-based framework that allows massively parallel interactions, such as genetic algorithms based on Darwinian or Lamarckian evolution. The epicenter for this activity has been the Santa Fe Institute, where mathematicians like James Crutchfield have been admonishing researchers in the field of “Artificial Life” for their supposed willingness to put public acclaim over formal results (Helmreich 1999). Crutchfield is on the losing side of the battle: he is forgetting that science is a social construction, and thus those who are able to exploit computing power – the artificial life folks – will be able to exploit the social power that can define the contours of the field. To take another example, science historian Donna Haraway expressed great surprise when she learned that critical sections of the Human Genome Project were being run out of Los Alamos labs: what in the world was the modernist location for transuranic elements doing with the postmodern quest for trans-species organisms? The answer was computing power: whether modeling nuclear reactions or nucleic acid, the social authority of science requires the computational authority of machines.

In sum, these three factors – computing speed, computing interactivity, and computing memory – both define the technical dimensions of simulation’s computing power, as well as its social counterparts. Indeed, we can think about them in terms of information equivalents: Computing memory is comparable to social memory, interactivity is comparable to social discourse, and computing speed is comparable to social rhetoric. Thus we see the rhetorical power of special effects, the discursive power of interactive websites, and the mnemonic power of large-scale simulations.

What can be done about this alliance between computing power and social authority? Looking at the changes in computing power over time, we can see both stable and unstable elements. For example, the public face of computing power is typically portrayed as the steady increase in computing speed per dollar, often encapsulated in Moore’s Law, which posits that the number of components (ie transistors) on a chip will double every 18 months. But privately chip manufacturing companies agonize over strategies to maintain this pace (cf Synopsys, Inc. 2000).

Contrasting elite versus lay public access to computing power through time makes this precarious stability even more apparent. The earlier modeling efforts secured elite access through expertise: even if laypersons were offered access to a timesharing system, they preferred the shallow learning curve of a wordprocessor—it was the user-unfriendly interface of text-based UNIX that separated the hackers from the hacks. This barrier did not become compromised until the advent of the graphical user interface (GUI) in the late 1970s. During the mid 1980s this sparked an unusual moment of lay access; thus the creation of popular simulations such as SimCity during that time. But by the early 1990s a gradient of computing power began to re-solidify in which the “cutting edge” of elite computer simulations could leverage truth claims in ways unavailable to the “trailing shadow” of the lay public’s computer power. The introduction of techniques such as agent-based modeling and genetic algorithms have established trajectories which tend to re-stabilize this relation between the cutting edge and trailing shadow. Yet new technological opportunities continue to arise. We have recently seen the birth of the LUNIX movement, of Napster’s challenge to the recording industry, the free software movement, and other quasi-popular appropriations. How can we take advantage of these challenges to the social authority of the cutting edge; of these glimmers of light in the trailing shadows? What would it take to make the technologies of Napster more than just cheap music for middle-class undergrads and wired magazine mavens?

I want to suggest one specific example of an alternative approach, which I refer to as “Participant Simulation.” Attempting to merge the accountability of participant observation with the computing power of simulations, participant simulation is a methodology for providing direct involvement of the people affected by the simulation in its fundamental design.

Some of you are probably familiar with my first attempts at participant simulation from the African Fractals book; let me conclude with an example of participant simulation from more recent research on Native American culture. The Shoshoni-Bannock tribe, now located on a reservation in Ft. Hall, Idaho, have purchased some of the surrounding ranch land for return to its natural state. Shoshoni biology teacher Ed Galindo has pioneered innovative techniques for restoration of the local ecosystem, most importantly re-introduction of salmon. Working with various community members--Mr. Galindo and other local teachers, students, and tribal culture representatives--we are creating an agent-based simulation that can model natural and social features of Shoshoni life in past, present and future. The simulation promises innovative approaches to historical anthropology in its abilities to run "counter-factuals" -- to see what history might have been like if certain events or processes had been different. Most importantly it provides the opportunity to translate the indigneous knowledge systems -- which included botany, zoology, astronomy, and number and geometric patterns -- into the framework of contemporary science education (see http://www.rpi.edu/~eglash/eglash.dir/nacyb.htm for examples).

In a recent meeting we brought together the model that my RPI computer science students had created, which was clearly influenced by their subculture of MUDs, Moos, and Dungeons and Dragons, with students and teachers from the Sho-Ban school. As we munched on salmon jerky the Shoshoni students quickly proceeded to tear the entire model apart, at one point making an indirect but pointed connection to the caricatures of Native Americans in sports mascots. The new model that resulted from that meeting is unlike anything I have seen before, and I’m not even sure we understand how to create it, but that is both the challenge and promise of participant simulation. Rather than say that the Shoshoni have culture and the programmers have technology, this process helps us illuminate the culture of programmers and the technology of the Shoshoni; it aims to replace the one-way bridge of “digital divide” discourse with a two-way exchange.

In conclusion, the social authority of simulation follows the gradient of cutting edge and trailing shadow, stabilizing what might be gains for popular use by always putting that promise for equality in the near future. But we can also see ruptures in both technical and social dimensions of these relations, new opportunities to reconfigure both social and computational power. Participant simulation offers one such alternative, striving to be both loyal to its modernist roots in the democratic ethics of participation, and to its postmodernist critique of authenticity and realism.

References

Helmreich, Stefan. Personal communication, 1999.

Stone, Allucquére Rosanne. "Will The Real Body Please Stand Up?: Boundary Stories About Virtual Cultures". in Michael Benedikt, ed.: Cyberspace: First Steps. MIT Press.

Synopsys, Inc. 2000 “To the Rescue of Moore's Law.”