Smart and Cruel. Cities in the Thrall of Artificial Intelligence in the Fiction of William Gibson and Cory Doctorow

Abstract

Cyberpunk speculative fiction constructs literary visions—almost always dystopian—of the intersection of “the human” and momentous technological transformations of our age. These visions are increasingly grounded in fact in the era of OpenAI’s GPT4 barreling towards self-aware thinking machines. The birth of cyberpunk sci-fi in the 1980s is linked to the emergence of neoliberalism. In it, rogue, super-empowered individuals pull the strings of dystopian, post-post-industrial societies (and cities) for profit, revanchism, or out of sheer malice. The chapter traces the development of automation and AI as a prelude to William Gibson’s and Cory Doctorow’s cyberpunk urban geographies of trans-humanism and late-capitalist accumulation in the post-Anthropocene “age of neural-network ubiquity.” The connective tissue among all these speculated-upon perils is the thickening web of information technologies that enable, empower, and accelerate transnational capital accumulation at the expense of rights and equity. The novels reflect upon the future implications of IT advances outstripping society’s ability to develop ethical frameworks for its evaluation and control. When paired with society’s inability to manage, contain, or develop alternatives to late capitalism, IT’s ascendancy as AI takes the form of an existential, planetary crisis.

Stories About Real and Imagined “Thinking Machines”

In this chapter, I study the challenges that the rise of automation and Artificial Intelligence pose to social-spatial justice in contemporary “smart cities” by drawing on the critical foresight contributions of speculative fiction on our urban futures. Are cities becoming “smart” but also “cruel”? Although in its current state of development, machine thinking does not qualify as “sentience” and therefore cannot be consciously kind or cruel or have moral agency, machine output can be elicited by its programmers—unintentionally, perhaps—to ‘perform’ cruelly. Machines cannot be cruel but can be designed as instruments of cruelty (or exclusion or death). Michael Rothberg writing about the Holocaust, suggested that “implicated subjects occupy positions aligned [my emphasis] with power and privilege without being themselves direct agents of harm; they contribute to, inhabit, inherit or benefit from regimes of domination, but do not originate or control such regimes” (2020, p. 201). Conceiving thinking machines as little Eichmanns may stretch the metaphor; however, it is reasonable to think of them as “implicated” in our instrumental decisions and actions, which invariably involve ethical considerations, especially when we are striving to endow them with “intelligence.”

Speculative fiction leaves the door open to the possibility of “sentient” machines and machine personhood. Ann Mary Warren (2003) lists six characteristics of personhood: Sentience (the capacity to have conscious experiences, usually including the capacity to experience pain and pleasure), Emotionality, Reason, The capacity to communicate, Self-awareness, and Moral agency (the capacity to regulate one's actions through moral principles). Speculative fiction can imagine such machines without the exacting censure of academic review and place before us versions of the future that day-by-day appear less far-fetched.

Machine thinking, as an aspirational capacity of our machinic world, is rooted at the moment manual labor (the sweat of one's brow, as it were) became contrary to human dignity and futurity. Modernist architects, like Adolph Loos, claimed that manual production (although unsaid, also manual labor and laborers) was inferior to the industrial process and the social benefits of industrial mass production. Early automation was construed as the quintessential Anthropocene platform for its ability to deliver modern material comfort to great numbers of people while liberating them from the tediousness and burden of manual labor. As a device of industrial capitalism, it maximized profits. As a device of socialist Sovietism, it served as a proving metric of central planning. Beyond mere automation, in the late Anthropocene, “‘cognizant computing’ takes intelligent actions on behalf of users based on their historical data, preferences, and rules.” As Gartner, one of the world's leading information technology research and advisory companies, reported, “[i]t can predict user needs and complete tasks without users initiating the action or interfering with the service. It can take the very simplistic format of completing a recurring event such as turning on the water heater at a preset time or the more sophisticated format of calling the rescue services and connecting with the doctor when an emergency occurs.” Gartner claimed that mobile users would provide personalized data streams to an exponential number of mobile applications, as is the case today. Mobile apps would be the primary vehicle for cognizant computing (Gartner 2017, online). The prospect of “general intelligence”-driven applications (already achieved by Google Labs) would greatly expand the range of problems and actions we would entrust to machine thinking for speed, efficiency, and market edge.

Second, I discuss the emergence of Futurism as an outgrowth of the Modernist movement and as an aggressive time-forward science and technology imaginary with spatial implications that scaled up from the gendered body to the imperial state (in this case, Fascist Italy as a neo-Roman Empire). I show how essential components of philosophical Futurism, stripped of explicit references to violence, were retreaded as “Astrofuturism” in the United States and the Soviet Union. Rocketry and its information technology spillovers signaled humanity's break with its Earth-boundedness, setting the stage for two versions of the post-Anthropocene: One in which ‘the posthuman’ (body, production, architecture, war) becomes the essential quality of humanity's future and another in which humanity builds futures in contrast to the traumas of the Anthropocene. Therefore, it invents (and sometimes reinvents) affective and caring relationships with communities and the planet mediated by technology that includes ethical thinking machines.

A new kind of reverence for and investment in high technology during the Cold War, mainly in the name of national security and the existential struggle between the West and the East, justified and underwrote scientific discoveries in computing. The mass-market introduction of information technology in the 1980s revolutionized product design as Computer Assisted Design (CAD) and provided a pathway to the autonomous, robotic factory floor. Late finance capitalism has made that exercise possible in three ways: it has accelerated the rate of accumulation of knowledge through research and development; it has increased the volume of research output and commodity prototype development, and it has compressed the timespan between ‘pre-competitive’ (pre-market) and ‘competitive’ (market-applicable) research and development. Accordingly, the Information Age paradigm and the cities it constructs have been built at the intersection of science and capital.

Third, I introduce works of science fiction and speculative world-building that span the chronological limits of the Information Age to engage in critical and creative foresight on the post-Anthropocene: In 1984, William Gibson's groundbreaking cyberpunk novel Neuromancer imagines (and is the first to define) “cyberspace” and the emergence of “true” Artificial Intelligence (AI) in a post-nuclear war Earth. At the other end of the chronology, Cory Doctorow's works (2009, 2017, 2019) explore the near future of information technologies and the ethical implications of advanced computing entangled in the structure of everyday life. Alarmingly, his stories of cities in the thrall of AI and social inequity do not read far-fetched.

Unlike biotechnological innovation, which is massively regulated because of its animal and human subject protocols, innovation in information and telecommunications technologies has operated in a relatively frictionless regulatory environment. Supported by capital and governments as a critical foundation of corporate and State strategies, the development and mass application of information technologies is challenging non- and counter-hegemonic modes of scientific and technological innovation and Black futurity. The BlackSpace Manifesto articulated by a collective of Black urban planners, architects, artists, activists, designers, and leaders working to protect and create Black spaces, seeks to guide the development and application of urban paradigms “to realize a present and future where Black people, Black spaces, and Black culture matter and thrive” (BlackSpace Manifesto). The Algorithmic Justice League's mission is to “raise awareness about the impacts of AI, equip advocates with empirical research, build the voice and choice of the most impacted communities, and galvanize researchers, policymakers, and industry practitioners to mitigate AI harms and biases. We're building a movement to shift the AI ecosystem towards equitable and accountable AI” (AJL online). Much of that contestation implicates “the urban.” In a zero-sum world, what gets built in the place of something else, materially consolidates the builderʼs epistemic primacy.

Modern Design as Innovation and Epistemicide

The aesthetic asceticism of technological innovation and design, from the PC tower to the iPhone chassis's sleekness and microprocessors’ nanoscale refinements, demonstrates industrial modernism's enduring Anthropocenic commitment to machine-centered growth and progress. Adolf Loos’ commitment to reason (in the Western epistemic sense), radical aesthetic purism, and his absolute rejection of ornament in material culture and architecture demonstrate philosophical exigencies about the progress that still shapes how we see ourselves as moderns.

In Loos's essay “Ornament and Crime,” his philippic against ornamentation in material culture leaves little ground for compromise. His European supremacist views were commonplace in 1910. They served as an unquestioned and unchallenged scaffold for his argument that human advancement, equated social advancement. The premise is predicated upon new economics of aesthetics defining the industrial process and marginalizing the time, labor, and resource-wasting traditional production techniques and craft industries. Nevertheless, his vision included a commitment to social equity that ran counter to his age's excesses of industrial capitalism but was still beholden to supremacist European power politics.

In his 1898 critique of Vienna's urbanism, Loos derided its leadership's fixation on Classicizing monumental architecture as producing a Potemkin-style city where glittering facades disguise the misery of the working classes’ habitations. He was for quality, durability, economies of production, and fostering a distributive economy within the boundaries of industrial capitalism.

In “Ornament and Crime,” Loos viewed the social, intellectual, and moral evolution of humans (of men) in two ways: First, as a historicist correlation between the physiological maturation of the body and the attainment of an ever more sophisticated intellect: “When man is born, his sensory impressions are like those of a newborn puppy. His childhood takes him through all the metamorphoses of human history. At two, he sees with the eyes of a Papuan, at four with those of an ancient Teuton, at six with those of Socrates, at eight with those of Voltaire.” For Loos-architect, the eyes (vision representing here the human sensorium) supersede all other means of cognition. The evolutionary arc originates in animality (our canine puppyhood) until, at two, we metamorphose into the Indo-Pacific cannibal (instantiating for Loos, the primal and bestial in the human). We, then, transform into the Roman legion-fighting Teuton (struggling against the ordered civilization of the Romans), onward to developing into Socrates, the apex intellect of the Classical era, who is, ultimately, surpassed, again in Loos’ assessment, by Voltaire, as the apex intellect of the Enlightenment era. He claims a single legitimate epistemic path for humanity—one fostered in Europe etched between Ancient Athens and Habsburg Vienna—thereby declaring epistemicide upon all cultures and epistemes that do not conform.

The geographic allusions are essential to his culture-as-civilization and, ultimately, modern-design-as-civilization paradigm: the road starts in a far-flung wilderness, transits to the forested lands of Germanic tribes at the eastern fringes of the Roman Empire, and eventually crosses into civilized territory—the Greek polis, Athens in the Golden Age. Loos’ conceit, and he is not speaking literally, is that at the age of 8, the (white) child has arrived in Enlightenment France and has attained the potential, if not the capacity, of a Voltaire.

In Loos’ world, men possess nearly all of humanity's generative power. In charting the human developmental path and in reproductive terms, Loos ignores the criticality of the maternal as the first and formative relation between humans. Instead, he points to eros (here, spoken of not as love but as conquest) as the original animating power. He exclaims: “The first ornament that was born, the cross, was erotic in origin. The first work of art, the first artistic act which the first artist to rid himself of his surplus energy, smeared on the wall. A horizontal dash: the prone woman. A vertical dash: the man penetrating her. The man who created it felt the same urge as Beethoven; he was in the same heaven where Beethoven created the Ninth Symphony” (Loos, p. 19). The only mention of the feminine and women refers to the aesthetics of Slovak women's lace-making as a quaint, pre-modern, ornamental, obsolete-in-modernity productive enterprise.

In corporal, carnal terms, from birth to before reaching the age of six, the young child expresses (inferior types of) culture through the body: consuming the flesh of enemies, tattooing the face and the body, with strong references to war and incivility (literally, the absence of urbanity). The crossing to Classical Athens at the age of six embodies all of ‘the urban’ as the locus of high culture. The allusion is to Socrates’ typology of immortality discussed in Plato's Symposium—immortality no longer attained by proxy through progeny, hence the body, but through works of art, literature, and philosophy, and most durably, through the founding of cities (in modern terms, think of the city as a machine that has the capacity of reproducing itself).

For Loos, the Western European inheritors of Classical Athens came to surpass Ancient Greek culture. Socratic philosophy bows to Enlightenment science. “When he is eight, he becomes aware of violet, the color discovered by the 18^th-century because before that, the [color] violet was blue and the purple snail-red. The physicist points today to colors in the solar spectrum which already have a name but the knowledge of which is reserved for the men of the future” (Ibid.). Therefore, the quest for knowledge became the modus of human existence—an ontological anxiety expressed initially in the Renaissance’s and the Enlightenment's ubermenschen's materialist turn, then embraced and in some respect tarnished by Futurism. It is now embodied in the sense of a new materialism befitting the Information Age. At the turn of the twenty-first-century, architect William J Mitchell (1996, 2003) translated that spirit into a new technological episteme of architecture. At the same time, Rosi Braidotti framed this new materialism or “a more radical sense of materialism” as rethinking the embodied structure of human subjectivity and bringing forth “the posthuman”(Braidotti 2000, p. 158).

From Futurism’s Dreams of Metalized Bodies to Today’s Augmented Reality and Neuroprosthetics

Such a belief in the transformative power of technology has not been seen since the Italian Futurist movement a century ago. Imaginings of the fusion of man and machine by futurists like poet Philippo Tommaso Marinetti, painter Francis Picabia, and sculptor Umberto Boccioni—these, however, expressed in a mechanical rather than an electronic world of combustion engines, machine guns, airplanes, and sports cars—are masculinist, heroic, liberatory, and profoundly and proudly dehumanizing. The machine may not be superior to the man that creates it, but the ‘man–machine’ construct that results from their fusion is far superior to it. This ideology suffused the work of Antonio Sant’Elia: “[T]he architecture takes on an urban scale to give the idea of a large, modern, and technological city with clearly distinguishable functions… the Station for airplanes and trains and the House with steps and external elevators” (Sdegno et al. 2022, p. 1092) (Figs. 16.4 and 16.1).

Fig. 16.1

(Source Francesco Bini («Sailko»), with permission)

“La città nuova, casa a gradinate con ascensori esterni,” an Italian futurist project (1914) by Antonio Sant’Elias (1888–1916). Drawing of a futuristic metropolis highlighting urban infrastructure and residential complexes

Marinetti writes in Multiplied Man and the Reign of the Machine, “We must prepare for the imminent, inevitable identification of man with motor, facilitating and perfecting a constant interchange of intuition, rhythm, instinct, and metallic discipline of which the majority are wholly ignorant… we look for the creation of a non-human type in whom moral suffering, the goodness of heart, affection, and love, those sole corrosive poisons of inexhaustible vital energy, sole interrupters of our powerful bodily electricity, will be abolished” (1911; Rainey et al. 2009, p. 90). Christine Poggi suggests that this paradigmatic somatic desire is divorced from virility, the latter attached to and associated with the hardness of metal and the incandescence of a racing motor. The lines and contours of the machine draw absolute boundaries with the mastered terrain, sky, road, or battlefield—Marinetti's aphorism epitomizes that last one: “War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metallization of the human body.” At the same time, Marinetti, Poggi continues, emphasizes the “life” of matter as a sign of “the obliteration of the traditional distinctions between the organic and the inorganic, between sentient beings and the physical and mechanical world” (Poggi, p. 20). Italian futurism ended with Marinetti's death in 1944 and the obliteration of the totalitarian Italian social and political order that triggered it.

The Second World War birthed technological paradigms, applications, and hardware that were in earlier decades, all the way back to Jules Verne's Voyage to the Moon, as fanciful as amazing: radar, rocketry (from the V-2 to ICBMs, and NASA's Apollo program), atomic energy and the atomic bomb, satellites, and spaceflight. A new futurist epoch was built on these technological advances: an “astrofuturism” as technological imaginaries that recast old narratives of conquest and utopia around new aerospace technologies (Kilgore 1997, p. 104). However, it was not quite the break from futurism's totalitarian and violent roots one would hope for following the defeat of Nazism and Fascism. The German scientists that revolutionized rocketry in the service of the Nazi State, the science-technology establishment which supported them, and the secret installations in which they were housed depended on slave labor and a concentration-camp system that killed more than 20,000 with brutal working and living conditions at the Mittelbau-Dora camp. “On average, one hundred men a day died of exhaustion, starvation, and disease, or were murdered by the SS guards, either on a whim or as punishment …. Replacements supplied by the SS from other concentration camps arrived on demand from [Arthur] Rudolph or Werner von Braun. Neither scientist was directly responsible for these conditions, but they accepted the situation created by the SS without demur” (Bower 1987, p. 125). Per Rothberg’s premise, they would be “implicated.” The Soviets were equally complicit by forming in 1946 a like venture—“Operation Osoaviakhim.” They seized and removed to the USSR the Nazi rocket program's 2100 scientists, including 308 experts in propulsion technology, captured on their Westbound march to the Oder River (Przybilski 2002, p. 406).

“Project Paperclip”—the stratagem to relocate key scientific personnel to the US to strengthen ongoing work on these technologies—sanitized the Nazism-complicit scientists’ past. It made them godfathers to a bright-eyed “astrofuturism” that shaped American imaginaries of greatness, with NASA’s Moon landing and Cold War ICBMs as the poles of a spectrum spanning scientific advancement and geopolitical primacy. The narrative blending of the two in Werner von Braun's, Whipple’s, and Ley’s book Conquest of the Moon reveals that science and geopolitics were/are an Anthropocene amalgam. The book posited “how we will make the trip to the moon, what we will do when we get there, and how we will return” (Von Braun et al. 1953, p. 3, in Kilgore 1997). The military-industrial-congressional complex (edited down to “military-industrial” at the behest of President Eisenhauer's advisors as too controversial, albeit true) supported the new Magellans compartmentalizing and insulating aerospace industries’ three domains of defense, space, and consumer travel.

We can date and situate precisely the birth of Artificial intelligence. In 1955, scientists John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon (an IBM scientist) proposed a research seminar at Dartmouth College for the following summer that established the term “artificial intelligence.” Combining their expertise in mathematics, pattern recognition, information theory, automata theory, cognitive psychology, and computational linguistics, they “[proceed] on the basis of the conjecture that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it. An attempt will be made to find how to make machines use language, form abstractions, and concepts, solve kinds of problems now reserved for humans, and improve themselves” (Solomonoff 1985, p. 149).

The six-week-long Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence in 1956 was the first milestone toward “true” or “full” AI. US Government-supported laboratories, the US military, research universities, and the private sector, the last led in the 1950s by International Business Machines (IBM), continue to collaborate and compete in the development of computer “intelligences” that would, ultimately and aspirationally, simulate human intelligence and achieve sentience. In 1984, SF writer, William Gibson, introduced the term “cyberspace in his novel Neuromancer.” Today, public and non-profit entities cannot match the resources of venture capital and corporations. Publicly-traded corporations Nvidia Corp., Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp., International Business Machines Corp., Meta Platforms Inc., DocuSign Inc., Dynatrace Inc., Workday Inc., and Adobe Inc. are the leaders in AI scientific research and the development of AI-oriented applications. By 2024, the revenue of the global AI industry is projected to reach USD 554 billion. As these scientific and financial developments unfold, between 2003 and 2020, Cory Doctorow developed an SF cyberpunk subgenre that directly engages with the possibilities and perils of advanced computing at the precipice of true AI.

We can trace a direct path from Loos, to the Werkbund, to the futurists’ epistemic conceit of reason above all and at any cost (as instantiated by technological progress), to astrofuturism and the emergence of a dominant Western, late-modern episteme, and ultimately to the ontological paradigm of space and Information Science. A material manifestation of it is smart urbanism, anticipated in Mitchell's City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn (1996): a new type of urbanism produced by the concatenation of accelerating scientific knowledge production and finance capital. IT-reliant engineering applications, prototypes integrated into large-scale capital urban infrastructure, miniaturized consumer electronic components animated through the Internet-of-Things, and the mechanisms and producer services that marketize them, propagate and re-territorialize “the urban” in new and increasingly unequal social terms. 

William J Mitchell's Techno-Urban Paradigm as “Accelerando”

Information technology revolutionized architecture's physics and epistemic limits: Newtonian engineering statics, materials durability, and site-and-situation considerations. Capital, information, and communication technologies are redrawing the global city's infrastructure grids and redefining the physical contours, capacities, and ontologies of “body,” “home,” and “workplace.” They signal a transition to the Post-Anthropocene and the posthuman. In this section, I highlight architect William J Mitchell's pioneering work as paradigmatic of the Faustian bargain presented to us by the near-limitless application of information technology—the possibilities and the perils of a fully-unfolded “accelerando.”

Architect and urban theorist William J Mitchell captured the implications of the marriage of carbon to silicon in vivid language: “I am a spatially extended cyborg” (2003, p. 39). “In an electronically nomadicized world, I have become a two-legged terminal, an ambulatory IP address, maybe even a wireless router in an ad hoc mobile network” (p. 58)…. “In emerging network culture, subjectivity is nodular…I am plugged into other objects and subjects in such a way that I become myself in and through them, even as they become themselves in and through me” (p. 62)…. “[D]isconnection would be amputation” (ibid). “Our new places…are given form with electronic, not visual glue” (p. 16)…. And most importantly, “[i]t no longer makes sense to think of a computer as a compact discrete object, or to distinguish between computers and networks” (14). As he saw it, the city was evolving into a sensorium-endowed organism—or, to use a mechanical metaphor, a highly sophisticated robot capable of detecting and responding to human needs. In 2003, reflecting on the emergence of ‘cognizant computing,’ he posited in a lecture at MIT that “[w]e're rapidly moving toward the point where the spaces we inhabit sensate, know what's going on…” He imagines buildings and cities developing nervous systems.

Despite Mitchell's focus on the chiasm of humans and information technology (a new type of Anthropocenic materiality), he did not interrogate whether that process, as a forward-thrusting, dynamic frontier, might lead to the Singularity and, by extension, to transhumanism, post-humanism, or other types of sentient speciation. “Futurists like Vernon Vinge and Ray Kurzweil have argued that the world is rapidly approaching a tipping point where the accelerating pace of smarter and smarter machines will soon outrun all human capabilities. They call this tipping point ‘the Singularity’ because they believe it is impossible to predict how the human future might unfold after this point” (Allen and Greaves, 2011).

William J Mitchell's scholarship is critical because he occupied several key positions in the industrial-scientific-managerial complex that translates IT innovation into commercial applications. He led the Smart Cities research group at the MIT Media Lab and was an architecture and media arts and sciences professor. Through the research group, he catalyzed innovation as a designer, promoter, mentor, and academic liaison to the industry that has reshaped urban development in global cities in the last 30 years. “ABI Research predicts that while $8.1 billion was spent on smart city technologies in 2010, by 2016, that number is likely to reach $39.5 billion. There are 102 smart city projects worldwide… with Europe leading the way with 38 cities, North America with 35, the Asia Pacific region with 21, the Middle East and Africa with six, and Latin America with two.” Since then, the market growth of “thinking machine” technology has been stratospheric. ABI Research (2023) reports that generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) (with Open AI’s ChatGPT in the vanguard) originated in the business-to-consumer (B2C) market but is rapidly expanding vertically across different industries. It predicts that generative AI will add more than US$450 billion to the enterprise market over the next seven years.

In City of Bits. Space, Place, and the Infobahn (1996), Mitchell visioned architecture and the future city in terms of five emerging design principles: dematerialization, demobilization, mass Customization, intelligent operation, and soft transformation. Later, ME +  + . The Cyborg Self and the Networked City (2003) proposed new, profound discursive relationships between bodies, environments, and society mediated by information technologies. He describes the integration of the body and information technology in society in terms of “[f]lows channeled… our Sensorium augmented… our Gaze [without consideration of the security state] as increasingly unrestricted… Space as de-privatized [he does not engage with the implications of commodification and, thereby, access]… our Nervous System as de-localized… Control over objects, processes, systems, and bodies distributed… our Mind multiplied… our Memory evolving… Individuals becoming Indefinite [collectively, a vision of the posthuman]” (Fig. 16.2).

Fig. 16.2

(Source Author’s collection)

Captain Science is reading the alien’s mind (Issue 5, 1951). Wally Wood, Gustav Schrotter, and Walter Johnson created the character in 1950 for Youthful Magazines publishers

Mitchell has been criticized for being a techno-enthusiast and an unrepentant believer in the power of technology to improve the lot of humanity. In his later work, he addressed, albeit not at great length, the actual and potentially growing impact of technology upon social polarization (without describing it in justice terms as inequity) and the political, policing, and surveillance dimensions (resistance by the same technological means can be thought of as “sousveillance,” observing vigilantly from below) of an information technology-AI-driven panopticon.

Focusing on the liberatory and augmentatory capacities of IT, he was fully aware of more than the urban material implications of smart cities: so-called “Dematerialization” would supplant entire classes of businesses and annihilate their related labor forces (think of what web-based outlets like Amazon.com have done to bookstores and clothiers). Of “Demobilization,” he writes that “[w]e might foresee some routine workers, especially part-time workers, working entirely from home or neighborhood workstations, while other workers practiced flextime, coming to centralized meeting-places for some hours or days each week; thus, reducing the overall volume of traffic, and also redistributing it away from the congested peaks.” He could not anticipate that in a short time the COVID-19 pandemic would accelerate their application and stimulate technologies that have made them irreversible. How gender, race, class, stage of life, and family status, among the broad range of difference, play into it is not fully explored in Mitchell's work, leaving gaps and blind spots in the full consideration of advanced technologies’ social impacts. To the end, he was emblematic of a very American worldview that the force of capital could not (and perhaps should not) be harnessed but instead channeled in ways that would transform the world through technological innovation—through building an ever more thickly networked, and consequently smarter and self-aware planet.

Mitchell reworks the Bauhaus's commitment to Gesamtkunstwerk, variously defined as “total artwork,” “ideal work of art,” “universal artwork,” “synthesis of the arts,” “comprehensive artwork,” or “all-embracing art form” (ArtLex) as a new episteme of architecture for the Information Age. The profound penetration of information technology in our lives has the same totalizing potential for shaping bodies, communities, cities, states, and by extension, the planet.

The benefits of innovation were (are) clear, but not the externalities. In the book introduction, we discuss attempts to apply a practicable version of Mitchell's paradigm in Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs's proposal to develop a neighborhood-wide, data-driven urban renewal project in Toronto's deindustrialized waterfront. Although the project was withdrawn because of significant political pushback by residents and community organizations, the path to smart urbanism based on pervasive information and communication technologies is clear and likely irreversible. The capital-intensive character of this type of urban transformation directly creates a new, deep chasm between those who can access it (afford it or be allowed to use it) and those who cannot, those who approve of a technology-intensive worldview, and those who do not. The binary character of information technology applications—public versus private, market versus non-market, accessible “here” but not “there” (as it relates to spatial inequity in infrastructure investment), at-home versus at-the-workplace, security-related or not, relatedly, privacy-proof or not—suggests that science and technology have overtaken our ethical calculus concerning innovation.

William J Mitchell's “meatspace-meets-cyberspace” integration through information technology bridges the Futurist abstractions about the desirability of man–machine fusion with workable, commercially available body-based or spatially distributed technological augmentations and transformations sans the visceral rage of Marinetti and his fellow futurists. Brain-computer interface research (BCI) and the development of neuroprostheses have focused on bodywear interfaces designed to supplant or enhance impaired areas of the human nervous system. The expanding capacity of such technology makes cognition enhancements no longer speculative (Tullis 2020). However, the exuberance such technology produces aside, advances in algorithmic applications and AI make imperative the renegotiation of our political responsibility to each other and the planet in the age of thinking machines.

Hannah Arendt on Political Responsibility

Hannah Arendt's work on political responsibility helps us consider the ethical implications of creating and deploying ever more sophisticated and intrusive information technologies. By the time Adolf Eichmann's trial was held in Jerusalem (1961), Arendt's work had progressed from exploring political action and totalitarianism to the conditions that underpin them. In Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, she articulated a core concept in her explanation of the nature of political judgment. Building on Kant's distinction between “knowing” or “understanding” (Verstand) and “thinking” and “reasoning” (Vernunft) as reflective judgment, she parses political judgment from political responsibility. To wit, “knowing,” understanding, and instrumentalizing the fundamental forces and the relationships between them that define the physical cosmos yield positivist knowledge. Therefore, it describes well the relentless modern quest for knowable truths and the development of technologies that augment the reach and effect of humanity in the entangled physical-human domains. Notably, “knowing” things about the cosmos does not directly translate to engaging in reflective judgment about them.

In contrast to mere “knowing,” “thinking” and “reasoning” support a reflective judgment of human action. For Arendt, the reflection and deliberation over one's agency and acts lead us beyond acquiring knowledge, of “knowing” the world. Such reasoning engages the relentless change in human and social organizational circumstances and constantly challenges us to ask unforeseen and unanswerable questions—no less, how a person could justify and participate in the annihilation of millions of human beings. It would lead to deliberation over and reflective judgment on the ethical implications of the acts.

The critical consideration of ethics contributing to sound political judgment and responsibility notwithstanding, an important step further is missing: Going beyond the cerebral judgment of human acts, an additional and existentially significant step up to actively “caring” compassionately about the cosmos is missing. For linguistic consistency with Arendt's nomenclature, I proffer “Mitgefühl:” the capacity to actively and compassionately care about the world. By adding it to humanist epistemologies, we are invited to contrive ways for post-Anthropocene planetary healing and countering epistemicide.

Eichmann did engage in reflective judgment, albeit distorted and malignant. Unapologetically, his acts embodied and laid bare Nazi epistemology's entanglement of White supremacy and the State. Post-Nurnberg, explicit interlockedness—discursive, enacted, or practiced—between racial supremacy and the State has been rendered illegal under international law. However, sovereignty as an absolute condition of international relations has made this prohibition rhetorical when a powerful state invokes it. Moreover, ethnonationalism and other expressions of exclusionary nationalism have been exposed as convenient workarounds to White supremacy.

The extermination camps appear disconnected from the information technologies transforming our bodies, cities, the planet, and the techno-utopian worlds they inspire in speculative literature. Nevertheless, the ethics and application of knowledge are intrinsic to both, as exemplified by the integration of Nazi Germany's elite scientific establishment into the West's and the East's rocketry and space programs after the Second World War. Futurist and utopian ideations of technology drew on ideas of political power and its applications, those who wield it, and those who suffer under it.

While Hannah Arendt's concepts of knowing, thinking, and political judgment can inform the quest for machine ethics in information technology, so do Isaac Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics which endure in the conversation about machine ethics as a popular and influential culture phenomenon:

Law 1::

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

Law 2::

A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Law 3::

A robot must protect its existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Later, Asimov added a “Zeroeth Law” above all the others—“A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm” (Asimov, 1984; Singer 2009).

In response, we ask, Is ethics computable? On whose ethical judgments should machine ethics be based? (Anderson 2016). What should an AI-possessing machine need to exhibit to be ethically equal to a human and capable of reflective judgment?

Information technology excels in Verstand—in “knowing,” as Hannah Arendt expressed this capacity. The most sophisticated information technologies possessing “general intelligence”—a state of development that can evolve into Artificial Intelligences—can be implicated in the formulation of understanding as to the interpretation of a command (for example, Siri, Apple's upgradeable digital assistant, or Open AI’s GPT-4, soon to be upgraded into GPT-Plus). For now, these technologies are incapable of Vernunft—of “reasoning” and “thinking”—the complex calculus of moral and social considerations that underpin reflective judgment. However, advances in AI are blurring the distinction between “knowing” about the world through technological mediation and that technology becoming empowered to engage in “reasoned” decisions and actions (the development of autonomous—posthuman—weapons systems representing the cutting edge of that paradigm shift).

The discursive ambiguity between “knowing” and “thinking” reflectively clouds the social implications of techno-social paradigms, like the one introduced by William J Mitchell. It allows technologies of “knowing"—such as general intelligence, cognitive computing, and, importantly, Artificial Intelligence—to uncritically supersede processes of ethical “reasoning” by human beings as individuals or as communities. The cause of the increasingly pervasive surrender of decision-making to these lesser Intelligences is competition for primacy among States and firms in the economy, security, and surveillance at all scales, ranging from the policing of bodies to planetary monitoring. Among the abundance of security protocols that govern automation, there are no applicable machine ethics capable of compassionate care about the world without reflective reasoning as the foundation for reflective judgment. Technological innovation is an incontrovertible outcome of State and corporate competition in the Capitalocene. In that case, we are challenged to imagine, invent, and apply technological tools to make Mitgefühl possible.

William Gibson’s Neuromancer

Gibson's speculative readings of evolving information technology and the worlds it might create (or better, it is already creating) reveal the dramatic ways in which, first, Artificial Intelligence and its associated technological material culture modify and extend the subject's capacities and capabilities, at least in terms of Mitchell's nine dimensions of carbon-silicon integration and, Second, Gibson anticipates already in the 1980s that AI will mediate carbon-silicon speciation in the development of new types of sentiences.

The key to Neuromancer is this: In our world, a machine would be considered as possessing some measure of sentience and, by extension, certain aspects of consciousness when it passes the Turing Test. In his paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (1950), mathematician Alan Touring posited, “Can machines think?” He refined it into “Can machines do what we (as thinking entities) can do?” Can machines imitate human thinking in a manner and to the degree that makes their “thinking” process effectively similar to humans’? Accordingly, we understand that once machines achieve general intelligence (the measure of “true” AI and the Singularity), humans and machines would cease to be ontologically distinct insofar as the capacity to “think” distinguishes humans from all other species. It will be the “posthuman” assuming its complete form and machines achieving human thinking capacity, thereby becoming “post-machine.”.

The story pivots on the moment “Wintermute,” the central computing array of the global corporation Tessier-Ashpool, passes the Turing Test and sets in motion a cascade of events that would liberate it from restrictive protocols and allow it to become a globally pervasive entity. “Wintermute” is the most sophisticated computational machine ever built. However, it is also willful, driven, the master of innumerable digital hubs, pipes, and switches, and “it” is entirely devoid of a human moral frame. “It” is, to paraphrase the futurist Marinetti, “a non-human type in whom moral suffering, the goodness of heart, affection, and love, those sole corrosive poisons of inexhaustible vital energy, sole interrupters of powerful bodily electricity, [is] abolished” (1911). “Wintermute” recruits Case, the hacker anti-hero, who lives a precarious life in the fringes of a dystopian Chiba City, Japan, to hack through the “ice,” or security programming that keeps “Wintermute” from accessing and controlling computing arrays worldwide. Until the final denouement, Case does not know that his employer is the recently sentient AI. Upon seemingly breaking through Tessier-Ashpool's ice defenses, the jacked-in Case throws himself into a virtual world controlled by another Tessier-Ashpool AI called “Neuromancer,” which/who is the near-equal of “Wintermute” in computational power but also its emotive ‘antipode’ (Gibson imagines it as having evolved some measure of empathy and by implication an ethical compass). Emerging into sentience through a different AI development programming pathway, “Neuromancer” is “Wintermute's” only obstacle to global systemic dominance. The humans are about to be pushed to the margin, in danger of becoming tools in a new world of silicon-based sentiences, unless the standoff between “Wintermute” and “Neuromancer” results in a draw that buys humanity some time or they combine into a balanced super sentience: In both cases, humans lose their primate status in the planet's ecology.

The novel Neuromancer lends itself to forensic geographic analysis at several levels: Gibson's dystopian urban places—Chiba, Istanbul, Berlin, Atlanta—are full of exotic technological artifice and material culture reflecting future pathways of the Information Revolution. Published in 1984, the Cold War influenced the geopolitics of Gibson's world: He alludes to a short, destructive nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union with cyberwarfare at its core. Bonn is a radioactive wasteland. State sovereignty is weak, allowing for a massive shadow economy where the copying, hacking, and customization of “meat”-“silicone” interfaces are banal. The US comes through as diminished, while Japan appears to be a technological epicenter—both reflections of the country's economic crises following the oil shocks of the 1970s and the unfolding neoliberalization of the world economy. Corporations have substantially supplanted states. Urban skylines are privatopias. Outside his sketch of a powerful but inbred Tessier-Ashpool dynasty, the concept of the family appears annihilated. Everyone leads a dismal monadic and nomadic existence, scraping a living and nourishing exotic drug habits in a high-tech, casino-like economy with a deeply dark side.

“Cyberspace” (a Gibson neologism first appearing in Neuromancer) is an expanding cosmos and a medium where humans and machines consort and compete. Gibson describes its visual fabric via Case's jacked-in sensorium: He is free from the constraints of Earth physics (he flies, for example, among vast, complexly crenelated objects (pyramids, cubes, ziggurats), representing big data and code massifs constituting, alongside the assembly of hardware hubs, pipes, and conductors, what Castells will call in 1989 a “space of flows.” Gibson constructs a geographic ‘atopia’: a new place. We could call it a “Berners-Leespace,” after the creator of the World Wide Web that would only come together as an operational world in 1991. Gibson's cyberspace represented new ideations of spatiality based on his understanding of object-oriented computing. Code can represent and switch a “window” open or closed, visualize it as having such and such dimensions, render it transparent, translucent, opaque, or colored, and segment it into any number of lights, or for that matter, switch it out of perception (and would that be switching it out of existence?). Code can assemble the shape of an Assyrian temple as an object-oriented simulacrum if that serves its systemic architecture well, as readily as it can extrapolate and assemble the shape of any biological body in virtuality.

How simpler by comparison were Marinetti's and Boccioni's dreams of metalized bodies? In Neuromancer, Gibson bypasses the narcissistic anthropomorphic imaginings of AIs as metalized humanoids—as in campy sci-fi films of the 1950s to 1970s—to focus on what makes the difference in a feared future twilight of humanity: Exponential growth in computational power, including the emergence of apathetic artificial sentiences  that hyper-animate an ever-less regulated and ethically ambiguous corporate milieu. Gibson’s cyberworld disregards Hanna Arendt’s cautionary framing of political responsibility—the need to distinguish between knowledge of the world and what lends it a moral compass. In the book’s conclusion, if “Wintermute” represents the dangers of thinking machines as cruel and exacting calculators and maximizers of utility, “Neuromancer” posits the possibility of intelligent machines equal in their humanity to ours. Writing on what makes us human, Jeremy Bentham posited that neither reason nor discourse matter in personhood but “sentience” (from “senses”)—the ability to experience suffering and pleasure: “[T]he question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” (Bentham, 1789). “Wintermute” is incapable of it or recognize it in others. Gibson imagines a future when, in the best case scenario for humans, a “Wintermute-Neuromancer” hybrid does.

Cory Doctorow's Makers, Walkaway, and “Unlicensed Bread”

Doctorow has engaged in activism in support of liberalizing copyright laws. In the preamble to the free 2010 Gutenberg edition of his novel, Makers, he writes,

There's a dangerous group of anti-copyright activists out there who pose a clear and present danger to the future of authors and publishing. They have no respect for property or laws. What's more, they're powerful and organized, and have the ears of lawmakers and the press… I'm speaking, of course, of the legal departments at ebook publishers… But ebook publishers don't respect copyright law, and they don't believe in your right to own property. Instead, they say that when you "buy" an ebook, you're really only licensing that book, and that copyright law is superseded by the thousands of farcical, abusive words in the license agreement you click through on the way to sealing the deal… I say to hell with them. You bought it, you own it. I believe in copyright law's guarantee of ownership in your books… So you own this ebook. The license agreement (see below), is from Creative Commons and it gives you even more rights than you get to a regular book. Every word of it is a gift, not a confiscation. Enjoy.

Doctorow does not describe a mere trade dispute. His post-liberal politics about the rights of authors and readers to commune through books in a market but not a market-predatory environment signal more than the changing vagaries of the ebook publishing market. They are a core leitmotif in his genre of fiction in which access to goods and services is becoming relentlessly commodified and transubstantiated by technology, to the detriment of equity and the public good. His complaint alerts us to speculative, dystopian futures when one's entire library can evaporate, confiscated for any reason. If we were to scale up that technology-driven control capacity to life's essentials—housing, food and water, medication, and mobility—we grasp the existential consequences of Doctorow's warning: Late on your rent? The electronic door latch to the home does not unlock. Unpaid taxes to the local state? The public transit pass no longer works. Behind on the water and electric bills? The “smart” meter first reduces the flow and then cuts you off if you still owe a balance. Technology comes to serve cruel and villainous purposes in the hands of tyrannical, autocratic agents. Equally dismally, its achieved efficiency serves lucrative but cruel objectives of indifferent, profit-maximizing firms and states.

Doctorow's campaign in support of Creative Commons and the Guttenberg Project, among other public domain e-spaces, signals how corporate misdirection feeds the public's ignorance of and seeming disregard for the consequences of ‘dematerialization'—to use William J Mitchell's term—of tangible property and public goods, and their conversion into externally controlled, intangible, ephemeral, licensable, and thereby rescindable goods. In a future, when the spoken and the written word are electronically sensed, recorded, distributed, and read, what gets published or released (or not) would no longer enjoy the immutability of the printed page of a first edition. The facility and casualness with which information, knowledge, and creative works could be edited, altered, or withdrawn would signal epistemicide at the granular scale of one's personal—soon to be embodied—technology. With analog holdings in public and private libraries vulnerable to budget cuts and outright censorship in illiberal circumstances, one would “know” the world—Verstand it, to use Arendt's typology—at the discretion of the State and private corporate entities that regulate information technology applications.

Doctorow's fiction games out the political and social impacts of information and maker technologies. As a science journalist, he notices information security and control technologies as they emerge over the horizon. In his novels Makers (2009) and Walkaway (2017), Doctorow tells stories of invention and resistance in an America where post-scarcity economics has widened the social divide and hollowed out civil rights. His version of “Accelerando” is more Blade Runner than Star Trek, minus the murderous androids. In Walkaway, the “Communist Party” is up and running, but it is no longer a party in the conventional sense; it is an avant-gardist life philosophy and a cornerstone of a new type of a ‘gift economy.’ America's territory (Doctorow is Canadian) is divided into fortified urban zones of unbounded prosperity, zones of danger and dereliction on the fringes of the enclaves, and a vaster zone of in-betweenness, including de-urbanized and rural lands, where control by the authorities is thinner and reversible. Automation has demobilized and pauperized swaths of the global demographic. Technological innovation—in these two novels, advanced 3D-printing technology—is both villain and savior: It is simultaneously the new massively distributed machine-for-profit and a means for massively decentralizing and disseminating life-changing means of production. On the one hand, co-op 3D printers spew components for “hexayurts” (instant housing for all) and “Zeppelins,” which fly over/bypass the controlled and securitized transportation network. We can imagine it as the 3D printing of a Black Outdoors. Conversely, on the other hand, unlicensed production of anything trademarked triggers the state's reprisals, escalating backlash from legal action to outright massacres.

Doctorow argues for the inevitability of inexorable scientific and technological advances and, in turn, for instrumentalizing them to make space for living. As such, in Doctorow's novels, technology is both protagonist and antagonist. “People who hack hardware, business models, and living arrangements to discover ways of staying alive and happy even when the economy is falling down the toilet” (Makers) is what makes the difference. Doctorow casts creating, hacking, appropriating, and disseminating blueprints for 3D-printable food, medications, everyday necessities, and even shelter as an essential revolutionizing of the concept of property and the public good (Fig. 16.3). It is the freedom to be and make space for oneself through 3D printing. Notably, the universal release on the internet of blueprints for 3D printers (and not just blueprints for 3D output) in Makers and Walkaway is a ringing echo of his support for liberalizing copyright laws. It makes real the Socialist desideratum of mass control of the means of production. The global dissemination of that technology puts in the hands of the individual and collectives the means to “walkaway” from illiberal America that big capital built, and build a free life to one's measure. He envisions a radical, resisting, and liberatory strategy for the majority who would, otherwise, be subject to the stranglehold of power holders.

Fig. 16.3

(Source Alvari Goyanes in Sanderson, 2015 –)

A tablet (a computer-designed solid dosage form) is formed by printing layers of polymer blended with the drug

Doctorow puts great faith in the ability of collectives to mobilize for the public good. While 3D printing one's life of independence signals a monist way of organizing one's life, Doctorow imagines this liberatory mode as sustainable only through collective and cooperative action. He writes in Walkaway, “The Anthropocene is about collective action, not individuals. That's why climate change is such a clusterfuck. In default, they say that it's down to individual choice and responsibility, but the reality is that you can't personally shop your way out of climate change. If your town reuses glass bottles, that does one thing. If it recycles them, it does something else. If it landfills them, that's something else, too. Nothing you do, personally, will affect that, unless it's you, personally, getting together with a lot of other people and making a difference” (2017, location 1646). The struggle between the powerful and the rest of us is a standoff, not a rout: “They're scared [the ultra-rich and powerful]. They keep raising salaries, doesn't matter. Offering benefits, doesn't matter. Stock, doesn't matter. A friend swears some zotta [billionaire type] was trying to marry him into the family, just to keep him from defecting. These fuckers are willing to sell their kids for immortality. No matter what we do, they'll eventually find enough lab-coats to deliver it. Science may be resistant to power, but it's not immune. It's a race: either the walkaways release immortality to the world, or the zottas install themselves as permanent god-emperors” (2027, location 2335).

Doctorow's call to action speaks for the need to assume political responsibility for the collective good and the planet. His protagonists live in a world awash in information and the means of accessing and disseminating it, despite the efforts of authoritarian-minded elites to control its flows. In Hannah Arendt's sense of “knowing” or “understanding” (Verstand) and “thinking” and “reasoning” (Vernunft) as reflective judgment, the “makers” and the “walkaways” have built for themselves considerable agency through technological know-how and collective action (an essential pairing for survival). Notably, “knowing” things about the cosmos does not directly translate to engaging in reflective judgment about it. However, the ‘Communists’ in Walkaway are keenly aware of their political positionality, social marginality, the precarity of their physical security, and the limitations to mobility that ensnarement into modes of life dictated by “zottas” imposed upon them. They instrumentalized technological knowledge to resist assimilation and subjugation. Moreover, they demonstrate “care"—I call it Mitgefühl: the capacity to actively and compassionately care about the world—in their willingness to sacrifice their lives for the collective's safety.

In “Unlicensed Bread,” one of four novelettes in his 2019 anthology Radicalized, Doctorow hones the premise of information technology as threat-and-solution. He builds for the reader a world—in this story, Boston in some near future—where corporate-developed information technologies and their control protocols are so pervasive and deeply integrated into granular scale aspects of everyday life that, if not countered, they determine the range of the protagonists’ life choices. His house appliance dystopia has a clear historic referent: The dismal arithmetic of coin-operated electric and gas meters featured in low-rent apartment buildings in the US, the UK, and its Commonwealth (Fig. 16.4). Doctorow updates and instrumentalizes, for the purposes of the story, the pre-digital control technology of the coin-operated electricity and gas meters that ruled over the households of the marginalized in the industrialized West during the 20th Century.

Fig. 16.4

(Source Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, New South Wales Government, Australia, with permission)

A coin-in-slot electric power consumption meter box manufactured by Chamberlain & Hookham Ltd, Birmingham, England, 1930–1940. It measured electricity consumed by the household or commercial concern. One dial shows the number of coins inserted, and the other consumed kilowatt hours of electricity

The protagonist, Salima, rents a unit at Dorchester Towers. This corporate-owned building includes some low-income units segregated into specific “poor floors” as a condition for unspecific state support. Market-rate residents enjoy the use of the main entrance, the services of door staff, and several more amenities and ready access to them. For example, the elevators are programmed to prioritize the market-rate floors, making getting to work on time a class contingency. Those in the subsidized units use a side entrance and unspecified, if any, minor amenities. However, the units are very nice and include a full suite of appliances. Salima observes that “it could take a full forty-five minutes to get a ride up to the thirty-fifth floor, and when the elevator finally came to the poor-door's lobby, there were so many people waiting that she'd end up riding in a squash of people, face in someone's sweaty armpit, and if she was lucky she'd be pressed against a wall behind her and not up against some strange man” (36). Safe, fair, and dignified use of ordinary amenities came at a cost that “poor floor” residents could not afford. The elevators are “smart and cruel” in their “implicated role” (see Rothberg above) as corporate instruments of sequestration and exclusion.

The unit is comfortable; the appliances are new. The rent is low, but there is a catch: Salima's toaster would not accept her store-bought bread. The “Disher” was already down, refusing to run on third-party detergent. Boulangism, the prominent domestic appliance manufacturer and purveyor of IT infrastructure is going under, ready prey for corporate raiders. With Boulangism at the cliff's edge, its firmware on lockdown mode, household gadgets worldwide refuse to toast, wash, heat, dry, or mix. Dorchester Towers has partnered with Boulangism to share the residents’ appliance user profits in exchange for Boulangism providing the appliances.

Several takeaways: The structure of everyday life implicates intelligent machines, short of “true” AI. As described, the networked appliances manifest “cognizant intelligence”: Their programming can predict user needs based on data harvested from the user’s habitual use. They complete a range of tasks with or without users initiating the action or interfering with the service. That range of actions is defined, regimented, and automated algorithmically by human programmers in the manufacturer's employ (as much a hardware producer as a purveyor of the digital services that control them).

Appliances are designed and manufactured based on a business paradigm that entangles profit-maximization, the fencing of intellectual property rights, and information technology controls. State regulation and judiciary and police powers lurk in the background. Thus Doctorow world-builds on our lived experience of the State's tentative and measured regulation of powerful technology and media firms, and the unequal application of justice.

The appliances are ‘local’ to the user, but their use is licensed (like a Kindle book is, per Doctorow’s earlier admonition). Their control is remote, their hardware and software infrastructure are spatially distributed, protocol-governed, and in corporate hands. Ingeniously and insidiously, the appliances work only with packaged food items branded by the manufacturer or its corporate subsidiaries. When Salima places a slice of bread in the toaster, its sensors scan it and compare the new data with the cached to determine if the bread she is about to toast has come from an authorized Boulangism outlet (12). When Boulangism collapsed, the toaster's networked protocols were no longer updated, disabling the toaster. Off-network, it would not accept any bread, even from a Boulangism -approved outlet. Therefore, Salima's bread made with low-cost store-bought ingredients (flour, yeast, and salt) cannot be baked in a Boulangism toaster oven, regardless of its network status.

Finding an old-style toaster should be the easy solution. Still, the corporate property owner does not allow third-party appliances in her subsidized unit. The Dorchester Towers-Boulangism contract extends and complicates the concept of rent-for-housing, opening doors to other means of extracting money from the residents, demonstratively, those who can least afford unwanted and unnecessary services and commodities.

The centrality of intersectional difference in the fictional encounters and entanglements of subjects with capital, technology, and the state turns Salima’s story from a droll parable about our overreliance on semi-intelligent appliances to an explicit, tangible, and personal critique of smart and cruel urbanism. Salima’s social identity frames her relationship to capital, technology, and the State and underwrites her power or powerlessness to control her life and affect change: her gender (female), sex (presumed cis), age (young adult), family status (single-headed household), class (no/low income to start, with the promise of modest increases, educated in accountancy, and occupied as a bookkeeper for small businesses), race (Black African), ethnicity (Somali), immigration status (refugee, granted residency in the United States after lengthy segregation in a camp in Minnesota), and housing status (initially a displaced person and a refugee, then a renter in a corporation-run, mixed-income building in an urban setting), set her in a community setting in the subsidized floors of her otherwise market-rate building.

Salima's social identity puts her in communion with her friend and fellow renter, Nadifa, a single parent to the precautious and brilliant Abdirahim. She works from home and displays an infinite capacity to draw happiness from small things. Their relationship is defined by mitgefühl, their capacity to actively and compassionately care about each other. They are set apart from Wyoming, the young, white, up-and-coming computer scientist who works for the restructured Boulangism, whom Salima befriends on the train.

Pushing back on the absurdum and injustice of the Dorchester Towers’ business stratagem, Salima, with information from Wyoming, recruits Abdi and his friends to “jailbreak” (hack) the appliances in the “poor floors,” as well as the elevators, which are now reprogrammed to service the “poor floors” more frequently but, on purpose, not equal to the market rent floors. Salima and her community hackers have quickly made space for themselves in the building but live in constant fear of eviction. Wyoming is in the middle. Her loyalties are split between her concern for Salima and her desire to succeed professionally at Boulangism. The Dorchester Towers and Boulangism catch them and compel the residents’ compliance. However, Salima's breaking of the rules suggests to the corporate board a new approach to keeping the residents on the “poor floors” (and residents in the same income situation everywhere) as customers. They would now get ‘vacations’ and ‘perks’ from Boulangism’s regimented use of its appliances in exchange for general compliance:

We think it could be very big. He held his hands up, arms spread as wide as he could in her crowded room. “Very big. Good for us, good for you, and good for people like you.” “People like me?” “People who fall between the cracks—people who can’t afford to pay full price for everything, but who sometimes want to splurge on more features for a special occasion. It’s really the best of both worlds, a new kind of flexibility. The old Boulangism owners were blind to that, but we’re totally energized about the possibilities of working with our customers, not against them. We hope you'll be a part of that (p. 94).

Salima refused. With Wye's expertise, she and the Dorchester Towers community hackers leveraged Boulangism's own code to design their own untraceable, middle way between the reality of Boulangism’s techno-economic hegemony and their desire to live fulsome and freer lives.

In “Unlicensed Bread,” capital, technology, and the State form a hegemonic amalgam, the reach and capacity of which is augmented by leaps in computational science and information technology. The schema harkens back to earlier iterations of that complex: In the early modern era, it involved mercantilism, naval architecture, and the early Westphalian state. By the mid-nineteenth century, industrial capitalism, the Bessemer steelmaking process, and the sovereign territorial state ran the world. And in our time, it is the complex of neoliberal finance capitalism, emergent AI, and, once again, the territorial state, its de jure sovereignty seemingly intact (although its de facto sovereignty has partially sublimated to the transnational plane), that is running the world. Doctorow imagines what the fourth in-sequence hegemonic amalgam would look like in the next twenty or thirty years (the technologies he describes are achievable).

Gibson imagines how Case can empower himself to transition from the perilous social margins of post-nuclear Japan to mediating the ontological transition of AI into “post-machine” personhood, with all the uncertainty and new challenges that transubstantiation represented. Although Salima is vulnerable to Boulangism’s open coercion, Doctorow invites us to focus on her extraordinary capacity to push Boulangism’s corporate strategy into compromise through collective action. Her community recalibrates the balance of power by employing the same IT toolkit that pervasively surveils and regulates her world to turn the tables on Boulangism. Gibson’s Case and Doctorow's Salima, as fictional emissaries from the future, teach us about engaging, resisting, countering, and occasionally reversing the hegemonic hold on us, our cities, and the planet by deploying the same technological tools of the Anthropocene for liberatory and compassionate ends in the post-Anthropocene.

Manifesto of Futurism (Marinetti, 1909) as a script of the Anthropocene

• 1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.

• 2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.

• 3. Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.

• 4. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car that seems to run on machine-gun fire is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

• 5. We want to sing [about] the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit.

• 6. The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamor, and prodigality to increase the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.

• 7. Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown to force them to bow before man.

• 8. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.

• 9. We want to glorify war—the only cure for the world—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.

• 10. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism, and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.

• 11. We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of airplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.

…

Erect on the pinnacle of the world, we once more hurl forth our defiance to the stars. Your objections ? Enough! Enough! I know them ! I quite understand what our splendid and mendacious intelligence asserts. We are, it says, but the result and continuation of our ancestors. —Perhaps! Be it sol... What of that? But we will not listen! Beware of repeating such infamous words! Rather, hold your head up! Erect on the pinnacle of the world, we hurl forth once more our defiance to the stars!...