ABSTRACT
Whereas automated machinery offloaded the social labor of production onto mechanized infrastructures, automated media seek to offload culture itself onto artificial intelligence and data-driven forms of social sorting and decision-making. The result is what might be described as an ongoing process of social de-skilling accompanied by the dis-embedding of key decision-making processes from the forms of social life and social interaction upon which they rely. The attempt to abstract core elements of human culture from the realm of social interaction (by offloading them onto automated information systems) makes it easier to misrecognize and ignore the underlying forms of social interdependence and recognition that enable the formation of shared or common interests and understandings. This social de-skilling is the result of what the chapter describes as the “cascading” logic of automation that characterizes the contemporary information environment: automated information collection generates so much information that only automated systems can meaningfully organize it. Once sense-making becomes automated, the next logical step is toward automated response, which, in turn, promises to surpass the capacities of human subjects. If automated machinery displaced human labor, automation targets the figure of the subject. The remainder of the book considers the implications of this displacement for the ways we think about knowledge, judgment, and politics.
