No Subject

H: I see... I think.

DDT: But what irritates me is when these mathematical formulae are
used to report on the psycho-social realm in the media, or on the
bottom of bills sent through my door or on urgent requests for
humanitarian aid. The resulting mathematical systems get built into
monstrous images accumulated from their poorly conceived calculation.

H: So are you saying that these mathematical models, used outside of
their purist application, are as agendaed as any nudie pic or black
yardie gangster appearing in the morning paper or as agendaed as the
software that will write up this interview?

DDT: Yes.

H: Is this new? Are there any differences between the modern maths
and the maths used in previous centuries?

DDT: In the 1950s new social situations required the handling of a
great many pieces of interlocking information. Before 1946 a person
computed with pen and paper. Ten simultaneous equations and ten
unknowns and you'd be grown. Twenty equations in ten unknowns and you
were dead. The possibility of making concrete the abstract
formulations of econometrics etc required the computer, so of course
it's not the same.

H: Sorry, maybe I'm a bit stupid or something. What was the difference?

DDT: The old models that were applied in the physical sciences and
were tested over the centuries. The new ones have been rushed into
the service of economics, sociology, politics, language, law and
healthcare with very little critical forethought.

This is creating powerful applications, churning their way through
day and night, through field value after field value of non numerical
questions. Pentium processors heating up to their maximum efficiency
ceiling, and for what?

H: What?

DDT: The highly questionable assumption that problems in economics,
sociology, politics, language, law and healthcare can be solved by
quantification and computation.

H: Isn't this a direct descendant from the numerical modernism of
before 1946, which has clearly failed to deliver any real social
progress other than the software to run shoponline.com, or a whole
host of stress dynamics that gave us unliveable highrise buildings
thrust on the poor?

DDT: Basically yes. But I'm not going to apologise for previous
generations. Numerical modernism had good intentions. It proposed
that, if society can be reduced to a set of psycho-social statistics,
then the poor and underprivileged would be exonerated from causing
their own misery and would be able to prove how impoverished they
were.  On this basis they would rationally request, from the wider
society generally and social elites in particular, that they should
have a larger share of the wealth and health of society.

H: But no thought was given to how they might say this.

DDT: I thought that was why media and communications study was set
up. To find out why it didn't work!

H: Anyway, let's keep to the subject in hand...wasn't there a more
radical formalist doctrine set up by the ultra-mechanistic
materialists that stated: mathematics, because of its internal states
of truth and falsehood, can be used to penetrate areas of the
psycho-social and provide proof of their true states?  And in proving
them, expose them to rational thought, the scientific mind and the
justice of reason?

DDT: That's true. There was a more formalist hardline strain before
1946 but, after that, the problem with the dogma remained the same.
Many psycho-social studies of society have non-numerical parameters.
Let's look at an example: are black populations in the world the
poorest? This can be answered with numerical parameters as long as
there is some overriding criterion such as money. But even with this
example it's banal not to question value systems across cultures and
the dollar is just one particular system of value... anyway I'm
getting off the point. The same question but with 'why' in front of
it - 'why are black populations in the world the poorest?' - has no
numerical parameters at all and so the statistics are crap.

H: I see. So a lot of the statistics that are quoted down the pub or
at the bus stop should have never been formulated because not all
questions have a mathematical base. And to even ask the question is
corrupt in itself.

DDT: It does not stop there. It's popular confidence in these
mathematical models that underpins people's ability to extend their
thinking beyond their own concrete knowledge of the world that
surrounds them. As you say, people quote numbers all the time.

H: Ok, so what kind of systems are at work?


Tafnus sat up glared  at my naivete.

DDT: It's the standard deviations, correlation coefficients that are
spat out of Turing machines and held in the fists of the uncritical
and of the procedurally corrupt.

H: What's that?

DDT: Bosses computers, running mathematical simulations and data
mining, make monstrous social images rise up, which are formulated
from these corrupt computations. The images are then used as vices
with which to squeeze out of us every last drop of complicity with
the conclusions of the social investigator.

H: I understand that models of social investigation motivate us to
make society move on, progress, get richer, get healthier, and that
all is flux and must be optimised through the premonitions of the
best correlation coefficients that money can find and so on, but what
can be done? It's growing at a exponential rate.

DDT: Look! The reliability of these models rests on discrete critical
application. Removed from this context these models become the
scaremonger's tools of fear for the apocalypse or, less dramatically,
become the misinformation that hides the mistakes and incompetences
of powerful elites. The computer lives by precise recipes, precise
algorithms, abstract and general programs wherein the significance of
what is done becomes secondary to the act of doing it.

H: I see...this procedural corruption is the mask of formalism
through which the world administers social disorder, reduced to an
orderly set of data with odd numerical discrepancies to be tidied up.
But what do you think can be done about it?

DDT: You might argue that these models, when used out of context or
when the criterion is inappropriate, are having a damaging effect
upon the world. But, frankly, that is boring and not enough.
Mathematisation will increase anyway. What we need is a critical
engagement with these models, to tear them from their original
context and aim them at arbitrary events, images and other
manifestations.

H: So what does this have to do with scene at the moment?

DDT: You and your cronies seem to be skirting round the edge of the
debate. Faking a website here, making a statement about agendaed
software there, and sometimes - if we are really lucky -  making
excessive computerisation fun. But what holds back the scene is the
reliance of its work on social, political, cultural, formal or
economic value and validity. Work should refuse all these forms of
meaning, in any cultures, social or economic systems in existence now
or at any time in the past or future whatsoever.

H: What, give up on commenting on the world around us?

DDT: Yes. Perfect art has but one single aim and that is to reproduce
the image of its innate uselessness, to form a void that
disintegrates everything before it through irritation. Commenting is
for the chattering classes.

H: So the work remains critical?

DDT: Disintegrate everything. Work should aim to disrupt as much
sensible workings of society as possible through an invigorating
tasteless, aimlessness, wasting of time and resources. The only use
of computers allowed should be that of a thoroughly aimless one and
the only use of theoretical and material items and practises allowed
should be a useless one.


William Blake

The Institute for Post Predictive Computing

<Perl Programmer>:<Sometimes Visionary>

W.Blake@scotoma.org


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