| Ted Byfield on Sat, 24 Apr 2021 19:02:29 +0200 (CEST) |
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| Re: <nettime> deep humanities initiative |
(1) DEEPSomewhere in my piles of scribbles I have some notes for an essay on the poetics of "deep." tl;dr: no, *do* forget web, pockets, and Europe. Those associations are fine, but there are better ways to approach this kind of thing than a couple of guys dashing off whatever comes to mind.
One of my favorite mini-methods for just-add-water cultural analysis is Google's autocomplete — say, what it coughs up if you type in "deep a", "deep b", "deep c", etc. 26 searches is boring, but its rote, mechanical quality forces you to look at what other people are thinking. In this case it's pretty funny (part of me wants to say *deeply ironic*), because you're staring the problem right in its face: what do millions, maybe billions of people mean when they think "deep"?
There are several ~layers of meaning, but I'll just get to a few:One is older, and has a miscellaneous quality because "deep" is literal: "deep pockets," "deep ocean," "deep end," etc. They're not so interesting, though "deep sleep" is one of them, and it was probably a basis for later, more metaphorical notions of deep."
Then there's another layer where the marketing kick in, and you start to see more metaphorical phrases like "deep conditioner" or "deep tissue massage." This second layer is less miscellaneous because the marketing has a focus, the human body. In this sense, "deep" takes on a new, latent meaning through an implied contrast — not just with a traditional antonym like "shallow", I think, but with something more like "superficial." It's not so explicit in this context, but this turn came with gendering — I think because commercial representations of bodies tended to focus on women first, and conveyed a sort of double-bind message: your body is a chronic problem / this product will fix or maintain it / turn your body into a promise. Lather, rinse, repeat, as they say.
I'll fast-forward past a bunch of other mutations in the micro-poetics of depth, rooted in things like the rise of certain styles of audio-production (especially in "industrial" music), "deep ecology" (first used in 1973 but only widely adopted in English in the '90s), the rise of aerial and satellite surveillance (which promoted a vertical perspective that made high-resolution a matter of "depth," and not just in the optical sense of depth of field — see William Burrows's seminal book on space-based intelligence, _Deep Black: Space Espionage and National Security). But those things would all need essays in their own right, some of which have been written.
One sign the poetics of depth was catching on was the glut of movies and TV in the '90s: Star Trek — Deep Space Nine, Deep Cover, Deep Impact, Deep Blue Sea, Deep Rising, The Deep, etc, etc.
For me, the key shift was the use of "deep" to describe statecraft or the appearance of it. The obvious reference is the "deep state," which was first used in Turkey in the '90s, and a decade or so later started to become a staple of US political vocabulary — probably an interesting history of how that happened, but one that'll likely never be written. But part of the reason it worked is that "deep" had been a staple in paranoiac rightist ideas about "deep cover," "sleeper cells," and "Manchurian" this and that — some of which vaguely referred not just to anti-Soviet ideas but also to anti-Chinese kookiness about "brainwashing," dating from the Korean War. That background might explain why the name of a '72 porn movie was adopted as the pseudonym for the Watergate informer "Deep Throat" in the same year.
There were other, more progressive uses, like Pauline Oliveros's phrase "deep listening," which was both a pun. IIRC see coined it around '90 or so after a recording experiment in some subterranean chamber — but it also referred to a more deliberate but also open focus, which is related to emerging ideas about "immersive" experiences — another implicit reference to depth, but one that also tacitly invokes intensifying modernist ideas about rising distraction (cf. the 2016 self-help book Deep Work about avoiding distraction). I think Oliveros probably was tapping into the kinds of thinking that characterized ideas like "deep ecology," with their emphasis on forms of connection and engagement that eluded conventional and technocratic ways of slicing and dicing the world.
Also: Deep Thoughts is the name of the computer in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which probably accounts for a huge swath of "deep" names in tech, even if the bros don't know it (let alone know it was a joke).
So those are the main clusters of cultural noise that were available or in the air when tech bro culture started to tag things as "deep": deep web (not to be confused with the dark web), Deep Blue (the chess-playing computational system), deep neural networks (DNNs), deep linguistic processing (DLP), deep dream (AI-based image generation), deepfakes, Deepmind (an AI company), Deep Nostalgia (dumb app that animates old photo portraits). These things are pretty different, in that they tap into different parts of these histories; but they're all pretty the same because they're all "deep," right?
Once the bros got involved, it became obligatory to call everything "deep." For example, "deep learning" was a stated goal of ML/AI researchers — it doesn't have anything to do with what we'd traditionally associate with deep knowledge, it's just the kind of low bar with a high name that tech culture loves (like "artificial intelligence"). So you can tack "deep" on to pretty much anything, and a huge swath of people will take it seriously. If I started talking about "deep papier mache," an alarming number of people would assume I meant some serious, more fundamental understanding of the it as a history, medium, practice, whatever, but it's just a phrase I made up.
(2) GENDER, SORT OFWhen I saw Anya's encouraging remark, in contrast to the more negative one-liners, I was like 😔, especially because it felt like I'm part of the kind of pile-on that's made Nettime such a problematic space.
I love this if they are really working to impose a structure within the creation of software and the random, unexplored consequences decisions made by most (mainly white men) people creating it. It’s an extremely unfriendly environment to anyone but young white men, as Silicon Valley culture believes the lie that the most money will be made from the idiot zuckerbergs model, when in reality most successful startups are created by people with experience.The Silicon Valley culture, and by necessity the software et al created by it, is extreme capitalism with profit prioritized above all else, and F the humans who haven’t pillaged everyone else and gotten too rich to be tolerated.
Unfortunately, like I said, the initiative looks like it capitulates to that kind of culture rather than challenging.
It might make real sense at SJSU as an internal strategy for promoting certain forms of knowledge and study, but when a document like that escapes that orbit it becomes ridiculous. It can be both things at once.
Cheers, Ted On 24 Apr 2021, at 3:10, Geert Lovink wrote:
And do not forget the term 'deep Europe', one of the many inventions coming from the nettime scene… neither East nor West or continental… https://v2.nl/events/deep-europe/view <https://v2.nl/events/deep-europe/view>GeertOn 24 Apr 2021, at 8:36 am, Michael H. Goldhaber <michael@goldhaber.org> wrote:Is it more closely related to the “deep state” or to “deep pockets “? Both?
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