Future from Structure?

Instrumental rationality, which co-developed with industrial rationalisation, is far more problematic today because of its scale and ubiquity. Determining ‘expectations’ of how ‘objects in the environment’ should behave (Weber 1978), it equates these expectations with ‘givens.’ As members of the Frankfurt School argued half a century ago, a process of reasoning/calculation devoid of any relation to embodiment or a thing/being’s embedded- ness in the environment, has totalitarian tendencies (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972). Their crucial insight – that the instrumentalising power of automation is the automation of power – is decidedly not trivial, as can be seen from the widespread use of predatory machinic procedures that automate difference control and anomaly detection, perpetuating racism, sexism, and classism, in examples ranging from medical diagnostics to crime prediction. The sequence-locked computational method of reasoning here amounts to pre-emption from procedure or ‘future from structure’ continuing the mantra of industrial rationality: progress and productivity, in a far worse – because automated – way. However, over-determination is also accompanied by unprecedented complexity, embroiled scales of magnitude, and, for humans, impossible-to-grasp temporalities, such as the vertiginous speed produced in high frequency trading. In other words, it is accompanied by indeterminacy. Tracing, on the one hand, the co-development of computers and neurosciences and the role plasticity therein (Malabou 2019) and, on the other, contemporary theories of computational indeterminacy (Hui 2019), this paper discusses the fourth industrialisation’s use and production of the future. It does so in four phases: 1) it reappraises probability calculations, based on such methods as contextual mapping, scenario modelling, Popper's fallibilism, and Wolfram’s cellular automata; 2) it compares these methods to obtained ‘results’; 3) it explains why we need to look beyond the purely instrumentarian conceptualisation of the future (Zuboff 2019); and 4) it pinpoints the socio- economic and phenomenological import of the source-product ambivalence.