The consciousness of desire and the desire for consciousness are identically the project which, in its negative form, seeks the abolition of classes, the workers’ direct possession of every aspect of their activity. Its opposite is the society of the spectacle, where the commodity contemplates itself in a world it has created.
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, thèse 53
You know I do not understand what is advertisement and what is not advertisement.
V. Nabokov, Pnin
The becoming-commodity of the world
Some mornings I wake up in a cold sweat, panting, my pulse racing, having dreamt that mathematics has left the academy and research institutes and taken up residence on social media. Then I think it’s finally time to move my own life to Twitter, where protagonists of the mathematics automation craze preach to thousands or tens of thousands of followers™. And then I remember that I actually have a pseudonymous Twitter account, followed by exactly nobody (when I announced the publication of an earlier newsletter no one noticed), that allows me to spy on mathematics in its new home. This is how I learned that proof assistants are being used in first year courses in French universities; that the AMR is widely perceived as an anti-woke fortress; and thousands of other 280-character news items to pique my curiosity. But when I’ve spoken to living Twitterers of my intention to migrate to the platform they have warned me to stay away; that it is a drug, not a news source; a ravenous hunger that can never be extinguished.
Well, I made most of that up. Making things up is what language lets you do, as ChatGPT understands™ well. Combining language with social media creates a potent generator of the kind of fake news I just composed (in 1055 characters) as well as an amplifier for any point of view, with no cost beyond complicity with Elon Musk, or someone like him, in coaxing the boundaries of legitimate discourse into whatever corporate straitjacket best fits the mood of the market. Where this leads is what you get if you combine Gresham’s Law, Moore’s Law, and Murphy’s Law:
Fake news will drive out true news twice as quickly next year as it did last year, and the worst possible consequences will inevitably follow.
The Situationists knew all about this in the 50s and 60s. Social media have radically accelerated the processes they identified at that time, which had already transmuted the real world into what Guy Debord, their leader, called spectacle:
The spectacle … is not a supplement to the real world, an additional decoration. It is the heart of the unrealism [irréalisme] of the real society. In all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choice already made in production and its corollary consumption. The spectacle’s form and content are identically the total justification of the existing system’s conditions and goals. The spectacle is also the permanent presence of this justification.… It is the self-portrait of power in the epoch of its totalitarian management of the conditions of existence. 1
Back then totalitarian managers of the conditions of existence mainly left the production and consumption of mathematics alone; it had up to that point escaped its transformation into commodity [marchandise]:
In this blind struggle every commodity, pursuing its passion, unconsciously realizes something higher: the becoming-world of the commodity, which is also the becoming-commodity of the world.2
Debord’s writing is pretty dense, so I’ll let Greil Marcus explain what this all means:
A never-ending accumulation of spectacles—advertisements, entertainments, traffic… space launchings — made a modern world… in which all communication flowed in one direction, from the powerful to the powerless.… passivity was simultaneously the means and the end of a great hidden project, a project of social control. On the terms of its particular form of hegemony the spectacle naturally produced not actors but spectators….3
Debord is not making the facile and obvious point that we become passive consumers when we glue our eyes to our screens. His theme is alienation, taken to its logical conclusion: alienation from the gestures of our own lives.
The externality of the spectacle in relation to the active person appears in the fact that their own gestures are no longer theirs but those of another who represents them to them. This is why the spectator feels at home nowhere, because the spectacle is everywhere.4
For “society” in the next paragraph, published in the Situationist International (SI) in 1966, read “social media”:
The society that has realized the optimum of separation between humans and their activity and between humans themselves unilaterally distributes images of their own world back to them as information monopolized by economic and State power. To reach a new stage of submission and equivalence to the machinery of progress, this society dreams of going beyond its fabrication of information as substitute for the deprivation of reality; it experiments with the positive fabrication of the reality of individual existence as the carrying out of existing information. Individuals must agree to recognize themselves — and, in a romantic relationship,5 each other — according to the inevitability of a supposedly free and objective code.
Or as Debord put it, more succinctly,
The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life. Not only is the relation to the commodity visible but it is all one sees: the world one sees is its world.6
Journalism as spectacle
Debord’s spectacular nightmare could still be the fate of the world of mathematics: the spectacle leaves no room for any reality other than the one it has “positive[ly] fabricat[ed].” I must stress that this vision is not to be understood as the result of a conspiracy! It’s just what happens when no outlet remains, other than social media and the media that follow their example, to register and validate what previous generations knew as our vocation or our craft.
Debord’s words and expressions come to mind when I try to make sense of how news about science is filtered. Although…
THE QUESTION OF POWER is so well hidden in sociological and cultural theory that the experts can blacken thousands of pages on communication … without ever mentioning that the communication of which they speak is unilateral, that the consumers of communication have no way of responding. Within this false communication, there is a rigorous division of labor that ends up confirming the more general division between organizers and consumers in the era of industrial culture…
(Situationist International #7, “Priority Communication”)
…to all appearances this is a golden age of mathematics journalism. Mathematics reporting in the New York Times has never been more rigorous and informative. Quanta Magazine is undoubtedly part of the power structure, however that may be defined, and its bilateral communication interface is structured like other social media, including the collection of user data, but no outlet has ever covered so much mathematics in such depth for the general reader and given so many mathematicians their 15 minutes of fame. The label “spectacle” may feel right for what we have read about the Higgs boson, or gravitational waves, or NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or functional MRI determination of what happens in your brain when you’re in love. Likewise the rapturous media coverage of ChatGPT, omitting dissonant information that can only be found on tech blogs or Twitter or on sites like thegamer.com (which themselves exist in order to create a spectacle even more consistent with social media norms).
Corporate AI demos like this aren’t meant to just wow the public, but to entice investors and commercial partners, some of whom might want to someday soon replace expensive, skilled labor like computer-code writing with a simple bot. It’s easy to see why managers would be tempted…7
However — with a few exceptions, to which we will return in a moment — the treatment of mathematics seems completely straightforward and unproblematic, the sort of thing mathematicians themselves say in our scarcely clickable native social media (blogs, like this popular one; MathOverflow; even Twitter).
So has mathematics miraculously escaped the spectacle’s gravitational pull, its “total occupation of social life”?
An evening downtown at a Triple Canopy event8 and discussion with a few of their a collaborators afterwards helped me clarify my thoughts about this seeming exception. Publishing about mathematics for the general reader has — through no fault of the writers! — absorbed the positive ethos of the TED talk: the refinement of the spectacle for inquiring minds. Research is presented as a sequence of personal triumphs leading to new units of knowledge, a progress parallel to the "machinery of progress" to which the Situationists saw society's submission. Absent is any attention to the material structures and the decision-making processes that make this possible. To get sense of what's missing, here's what Ben Davis, Artnet News's National Art Critic, had to say about "Refik Anadol’s A.I. Art Extravaganza at MoMA":
It is because Anadol has created such a purely decorative, cheerleader-ish style of A.I. art… that he received so much support along the way from the tech giants. Indeed, his positivity is probably an unstated condition of that support.
Or here is artist Erik Carter, speaking through the voice of the AI RoboCritic:
It is my belief that AI art should be seen as the junk food of the art world - cheap, fast, and fun, but not necessarily beneficial for humanity. Art should not be reduced to mere labor that can be automated.
And consider this quotation from a recent book by a colleague in Columbia’s English department:
The fact that market relations have tightened their grip on both [journalism and literary criticism] since the eighteenth century… provok[e] both journalists and academics to recall or invent a more independent past … [But] [t]here was no earlier autonomy. The critics/journalists depended on the market. They were never truly autonomous.9
Can you imagine reading sentences like those in Nature, or Quanta, or New Scientist?
Détournement and the dérive, illustrated
But once you began admitting explanations in terms of purpose—well, you didn't know what the result might be. It was the sort of idea that might … make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, … that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being… (Aldous Huxley, Brave New World)10
The Situationists did not accept the commodification of the world fatalistically. They pioneered a strategy called détournement — literally hijacking — using the structures of the spectacle to undermine its function. Do our mathematical Twitterers occupy the medium in order to subvert its subliminal message? When we submit to interviews by the online press do we ask how these media contribute to the one-way “communication … from the powerful to the powerless”? Or do we tailor our remarks to conform to a reassuring narrative of progress toward a Sovereign Good?
Ever since I read Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces I’ve kind of wished I had been a Situationist. I was 3 years old when the SI was founded and, like most 3-year-olds, I had independently discovered the principles of détournement and the dérive, “a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences,”11 when I was too small to write about it. Though I soon learned to conform to the spectacle that enveloped me, in high school in May ‘68 — the height of situationism’s influence12 — I was still drifting away from my assigned vocation by seeking the literary crowd’s acceptance.
After 1968 the situationist “critique was given up to history and the group disappeared,” according to Marcus. Those who have lived in France know that this is not quite accurate, but Marcus looked to the SI as precursors of punk rock, “the greatest thing you ever heard,” music that “desire[s] to change the world.”13 Is it just a coincidence that "the punk revival is upon us" when Silicon Valley's soundtrack is Electronic Dance Music, “the music of the twenty-four-hour hustle, the music of proudly selling out”?14 Maybe this is why I have such mixed feelings about the new media that have done so much to promote a positive vision of mathematics. Or maybe it's the cognitive dissonance of this vision, its "excessively narrow channeling of our cognitive and emotional investment down pathways that are structurally guaranteed to limit or prevent personal transformation,”15 with the "existential angst" that haunts mathematicians like Marcus du Sautoy, contemplating the grim future of mathematics in a world of AI. At the darkest moment of last October’s symposium in Toronto, Tim Gowers almost literally quoted punk’s classic motto: NO FUTURE!16
The autonomous movement of thanatos
Asger Jorn: Nothing is worse than stupidity combined with a never-failing memory.
Matthew Fuller: Although we can have doubts about the latter quality on occasion, this pair of assets is among the range of exciting features that computing offers. Computers are stupid in the sense that they do exactly as they are told. Their capacity for memory, like this function of stupefied perfect recall, is what makes them so effective for archiving, and indeed so disturbing as an agent of social control.
(from the Institute for Computational Vandalism, 2014—)
It’s no surprise, then, that it is precisely Big Tech’s incursion into mathematics that journalism presents as spectacle. Stories are timed by corporate press releases, with their “over-the-top sales pitch, lack of transparency, and dearth of peer-reviewed studies."17 The new technology's potential as “agent of social control” remains in the shadows. The problem is not with mathematics as spectacle per se, given that no other form of communication is available,18 but rather why DeepMind or OpenAI or MetaAI should have the power to decide what is spectacular. When an external actor has the resources to determine the scale and timing of announcements of landmark developments in the field, we are faced with what SI in 1966 called
The systematic expropriation of intersubjective communication, the colonization of everyday life by authoritarian mediation…19
The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living…the more [the spectator] accepts recognizing himself in the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own existence and his own desires.… the critique which reaches the truth of the spectacle exposes it as the visible negation of life…20
Don’t relinquish your agency
We're now reaching an age where algorithms are created to write scripts and to create characters and where there's this heavy reliance on algorithms to create stories that will sell … in a film market the only thing important to distributors and marketers of films is: "How is this going to be relevant to an audience if we're going to sell this product?”
That was Kayvan Mashayekh, founder of Producers Without Borders, speaking with mathematician Ed Frenkel on the stage of Marché du Film of 75th Cannes Film Festival on May 19, 2022.
[Here I had intended to address the question that discerning readers may think I was planning to evade. If spectacle was omnipresent in the ‘50s and ‘60s, how could mathematics have failed to be spectacle even then? And if it was already spectacle, when mathematics was visibly driven by the concerns of its élite practitioners, what difference does it make if this élite is replaced by an external force indifferent to the field’s established values? I was going to examine some landmark events of the time, including those that drew the contours of my own specialty. But Substack tells me I’ve run out of space, so this will have to wait.]
In response to Mashayekh’s question, Frenkel reminded the audience of Kierkegaard’s claim that “the paradox is the passion of thought, and the thinker without paradox is like a lover without feeling.”
Frenkel’s message is
Don’t relinquish your agency… to the captains of technology or … of Silicon Valley.
He is speaking from the place of authority his host invited him to occupy, the expert in mathematical thinking sharing his wisdom with the representative of an industry invaded by mathematical technology. Perhaps those in attendance expected him to teach them how to hustle in the face of the inevitable, proudly selling out while remaining stylish. Instead, when a theoretical physicist posed a question to Frenkel describing the “urge of science to tame the universe,” Frenkel made it clear he wasn’t buying it.
What is this “taming”? where does it come from? … “I want to know what’s going to happen so I want to tame it”… are there other ways to approach life? we don’t have to tame things… we just explore and enjoy and play with it.
Guy Debord, La société du spectacle, thèse 6, 24. Translation Marxists Internet Archive.
Ibid., thèse 66.
Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces, p. 99. I skipped seven kinds of spectacle between “traffic” and “space launchings.” Marcus’s book is a deep history of punk rock. I have not yet worked out whether punk rock and automated proof verification are allies or antagonists, but I’m sure there must be a relation.
Debord, op. cit., thèse 30, translation slightly corrected.
“Communication Colonized,” Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966), online translation. The text starts with a quotation from a 1965 Le Monde article on a computer matchmaking system, representing the candidates’ answers to 70 questions on punch cards; hence the allusion to “romantic relationship.” Just four years later I created my own computer dating system, with a 40-item questionnaire, for seniors at Philadelphia’s Central and Girls High; but it was blocked by an unexplained bug. By the time I realized that on the next to last card I had punched a ; instead of a : everyone had graduated and the program was left in a drawer, along with my budding career in high tech, never to be revived.
Debord, op. cit., thèse 42.
Sam Biddle, “The Internet’s New Favorite AI Proposes Torturing Iranians and Surveilling Mosques,” The Intercept, December 8, 2022
Specifically, a “discussion about the moral, aesthetic, and financial implications of text-to-image generators,” much more sophisticated and insightful than the typical discussion by mathematicians of similar developments; I’ll return to this at a later date.
Bruce Robbins, Criticism and Politics, Stanford University Press (2022), p. 82, p. 90.
Internationale Situationniste #2 (December 1958).
And the obvious reference for today’s vast movement rejecting Macron’s decision to ram through an increase in the retirement age over massive popular opposition.
Marcus, op. cit. p. 447, p. 5.
Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley, p. 66.
J.E.H. Smith, The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, p. 38.
What he actually said is that it is "[d]ifficult to see how the notion of a mathematical community could survive [the] development" of computers able to "judge what is interesting and worth proving" — which sounds very much like “No Future” to me.
Melanie Mitchell, Artificial Intelligence, chapter 13, in reference to IBM’s Watson.
Insofar as Substack is a social medium I don’t shy away from trying to make my titles clickable.
Internationale Situationniste #10, op. cit.
Debord, op. cit., thèses 2, 10.
MH - this is, as always, a brilliant essay. Speaking as a professional science writer its also perhaps the most depressing depiction I've ever encountered about the state of science/math journalism and the hurdles facing those who try to write about these subjects for a general audience. You nail what is wrong with the current state of science journalism - that it's become almost totally about spectacle and nearly always follows a TED-like narrative arc that I summarize as "onward and upward, overcoming personal hurdles to eventually triumph in the attainment of some bright shiny object of 'Truth'." This is the version of public science writing epitomized by its biggest stars - Brian Green, Sean Carroll, Brian Cox, Marcus DuSautoy, and so on – who universally present science/math as a progression of successes that make human existence 'ever better,' with its human actors, Galileo, Newton, Einstein etc, courageous heroes who fought apathy and authority to 'free us all' from intellectual error and tyranny.
The biggest actors of public science communication are not journalists, but scientists - who get by far the biggest book advances, who get lauded with lavish resources to host TV series and Podcasts, and who get vast grants to run public science events such Green's hubristically named World Science Festival. In the game of public science engagement, journalists are small fry lacking almost any power, who are almost universally poorly paid (often without health insurance or any workplace benefits), and who, in order to make a living at all, are forced to conform to the formats set by publishers, who, as you (following DeBord) rightly point out, are almost universally funded by private individuals and foundations who made their money From science and want nothing less than a critique of the enterprise.
So where does this leave us? If we believe it is important to include more people in discourses about science/math, and thus to be involved in dialogs about how these fields of knowledge and practice will be integrated into, and deployed in, our society, then how Can we proceed in the age of the spectacle? I've been trying to confront this question for 40 years in my work with public science engagement. What I've learned working on three continents over four decades, is that if one doesn't spectacularize in DeBord's sense, there are No sources of funding available. As your essay so acutely describes, this is a tragedy for our society. So how do we go forward?