The Matter with Matter: New Materialist Theory and the Internet of Things PDF

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The Matter with Matter: New Materialist Theory and the Internet of Things Internet of Things: Philosophy 3-5 July 2014, Yorke St John University Video presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzXglBnjCAw As the name suggests, the Internet of Things is bringing attention back to things: from the...

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The Matter with Matter: New Materialist Theory and the Internet of Things Miranda Bruce

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The Matter with Matter: New Materialist Theory and the Internet of Things Internet of Things: Philosophy 3-5 July 2014, Yorke St John University Video presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzXglBnjCAw

As the name suggests, the Internet of Things is bringing attention back to things: from the objects of the everyday to the objects of war, people are thinking about how to make things talk more to each other—and us—to make meaning. For social scientists, critical theorists and philosophers, this poses a lot of immediate concerns or questions about the political and philosophical significance of the IoT. For example, the distribution and evolution of labour along racial, gender, or geographical lines; the nature of power between first and third world countries; the nature of the digital divide; the impact on expressions and concepts of identity; and so on. All these kind of questions are concerned with what kind of future the IoT is helping to create—and therefore, with what kind of possibilities are being created in the present. But there’s something missing from these approaches: a focus on the possibilities that are present in the materiality of the IoT. What do I mean by materiality? I don’t mean just the “user experience” or “user interfaces” of IoT. Rather: how is it that objects exert their existence, thingness in the IoT? What ontological challenges does the IoT make to our classical frameworks of understanding and our relationships to objects? What I’m interested in here is how we can approach these problems without falling into the usual framework of sovereign human who grants meaning to passive objects. Even our most familiar social constructionist approaches are somewhat lacking here, as they still imply a human who constructs and a world that is constructed. So I’m going to talk about how we can think about the IoT in terms of matter—how are we thinking about the material aspect of IoT, and what new or different ways could we be thinking about it instead? I’d like to start with an old idea: Think about a block of clay and a sculptor: usual ideas about matter is that, before the clay is sculpted by the artist, it is formless. It only gains meaning, presence, legitimacy and life after it has been given an intelligible form. This is an example of hylomorphism: a term from Aristotle to denote the relationship between being and forms—where structure is something that is given to form through being. It has been used as a metaphysical starting point for much philosophy and social theory, whether or not that’s been acknowledged. What does hylomorphism have to do with the Internet of Things? The parallel of hylomorphism we’re seeing with the IoT is that data is seen as the clay: machines/sensors collect data, to be shaped/sculpted by algorithms and interfaces to be made meaningful. IoT is being advocated as a way to remove humans from object interactions (as is the point of m2m and why it was created for industrial production decades ago) and, when humans do interact with objects, the objects will report meaningfully about their passage through space and time. For example, in 2010 the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers trialled a clip-on sensor for construction workers, which collected data on how much vibration the workers experienced. The sensors warned the workers when they had met the legal limit of exposure, and reported the movements of workers and their equipment to an external server. The database then calculated work processes that were efficient and adhered to work health and safety standards. And so businesses, coders, and consumers alike are poised as those who will determine the mould that the data will be sculpted into. And more thought is being put into the abstract of how data will be moulded, than the material events that make up “data procurement”. This is the level that a lot of criticism of the IoT is happening on – and it’s the level I want to question. Of course, I’m not the first to think along these lines. There have been developments in social theory in recent decades that question this very assumption of matter and capacity. What I’m

thinking of in particular is the New Materialist turn. New Materialism is a theory that’s developed recently over the last decade or so, and shares a lot of links with Affect Theory. New Materialism tries not to have a set of maxims, but as a whole it does emphasise a non-anthropocentric approach. Which means it doesn’t just pay attention to other organic lifeforms— but also non-organic ontology and agency. It focuses on how all kinds of matter are an organising and agential part of existence. So, going back to the sculptor example—how would something like New Materialism look at it? First: it would argue clay as a material is not inert. In fact, it has a very specific molecular makeup, it has specific responses to stimulus, it acts on other bodies in particular ways: for example, it dries out human skin and hardens under high temperature. So instead of passive matter being acted upon by an active life form, the meeting of clay and sculptor is actually an encounter between material bodies, each with their own agency and capacities. New Materialism might then go on to argue that the capacity to transform that emerges in a specific encounter is immanent within objects, rather than always-already determined from the outside. What this approach does is bring attention to the thingness of things, and gives the assemblages of objects in events a liveliness and complex dynamic. This implies a bigger discussion of methods and practices, which I don’t have time for here. Instead, I’ll finish up by focusing on what every problem starts with: questions. With New Materialism in mind, what other questions can we ask when we think about the IoT? Rather than “What is the IoT?” or “What is a thing?”, ask instead “What can the IoT do?” What kind of potentials does something like Google Glass open up? How does the capacity to interface with objects in new ways change how we can interface with anything at all? If the production of internet-connected objects is going to create an even greater demand for labour and materials from developing countries, as well as the space and technology to recycle unconnected or un-connectable objects, how will these massive material forces exert themselves? How will they actively resist the world? How can we formulate ways of resisting with objects, so that we can formulate different and new assemblages of things? Now, the apparent danger of a New Materialist method is that it can ignore the structural forces (like racism or capitalism) that can, and do, exact very real and very ongoing harm on populations. But I’m not suggesting we abandon constructionist methods—what I’m suggesting is a more complex, less human-centric, more lively, and much more sensitive approach to ontology. Essentially, what I’m calling for is a better approach to capacity. If we view capacity as something exclusively sentient or human, and based on pre-existent categories of things like race, class or gender, then the social scientist’s job of trying to explore the nature of an event, its real conditions of emergence, can result in an analysis that ignores the forces that give real shape to the event and its ultimate structure and representation. When we shift our attention to the capacities of these new material assemblages, then we can ask different and more complex questions about the effects and potentials of the IoT....