Climbing out of the Abyss: On Tearing Objects, Injecting Values, and Automating Work
This essay is an expanded discussion following Vilém Flusser’s unpublished essay On Being Subject to Objects in which he argued that the human is split between what is and what should be, living in the abyss between phenomena and values. By turning branches into sticks and rare minerals into data centers, the human makes a vain attempt to produce things to climb out of its abyss while increasingly becoming subject to its own cultural objects. Following a media materialist approach, the essay highlights the material dependencies of seemingly immaterial systems like artificial intelligence. The more elaborate our cultural objects become, the harder it is to trace them back to the geological conditions that made them possible, while their reliance on what the Earth can provide only deepens. Flusser identified two phases of cultural production: the first, choosing values and imagining what phenomena should become, and the second, the physical work of forcing phenomena into those values, turning them into cultural objects. His optimistic approach to automation suggested that if machines could take over the second phase, humans might finally attend to the first. Today, automation is far from what Flusser believed it would be. Rather than separating value-oriented thinking from mechanical execution, automation has made the second phase less visible but more pervasive, distributed across underpaid labor, energy grids, and extraction sites, deepening our entanglement with natural resources and pushing us further into the abyss we desperately try to climb out of.
