Prof. Dr. Ben Peters
Benjamin Peters is Associate Professor of Media Studies at the University of Tulsa and author of How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (The MIT Press, 2016) and editor of Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society and Culture (Princeton University Press, 2016). Raised in the midwest, he has also held fellowships at Yale, Harvard, and Columbia Universities, where he earned his PhD. He has also taught at New York University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He is generally interested in the complex media historical and theoretical sources of the information age, especially how computing, broadly understood, takes shape differently across space, time, and epistemic power. Current projects concretize these in specific studies of critical global computing, comparative network history, death narratives for information age heroes, and larger histories of neuro-hubris, among others. More information at benjaminpeters.org.
FORSCHUNGSPROJEKT (Sommersemester 2019)
The Computer is Not a Brain: How Smart Tech Lost the Cold War, Outsmarted the West, and Risks Ruining an Intelligent World
My plan this summer is to complete a draft of the scholarly book project tentatively titled The Computer is Not a Brain: How Smart Tech Lost the Cold War, Outsmarted the West, and Risks Ruining an Intelligent World. This project will be the first nonfiction book to describe for a general scholarly audience how and why “smart media” have made idiots out of the West in the literal Greek sense of private persons. This history of smart media argues that the industrialized West has “smarts” upside down. It charts the rise and international diffusion of cold war military research that advanced the dawn of “smart computing technology” that attributed success to an individual’s capacity to outsmart another—the consequences of which have shipwrecked both our current media and natural environments.
Drawing on previously uncovered archival and scholarly sources in America, northern Europe, and the former Soviet Union, it charts a twentieth-century history of how research and public talk about intelligence and machinery has mistakenly translated the vices of yesterday’s cold war rationalist—strategic self-interest, networked nations, mental machismo, and even (trickily) open-mindedness—into the virtues of today’s online personas. It asks: What does the computer-brain analogy reveal about its maker, and why was the human brain held up as a model for computer processing (how did the “i” get in the iPhone)? How has “smart”—a near-cognate for the German for “pain” (Schmerz, as in “Ouch, that smarts”)—come to decorate our prized smartphones, smart cars, smart cities, smart algorithms, etc., and in turn shape the dreams and fears of modern life, and at what cost? This timely history and analysis about how the industrialized West has fashioned smart media brings to light timeless historical insight central to the humanities—about our changing sense of the mortal self, cooperative and competitive intelligences, and the sources of our current global environment crises. This same narrative also lays a foundation for detoxifying our media environment and rebuilding a more humane future for our often foolishly smart species.
This book lays out a unique and longer narrative on-ramp for the broad general interest in the field of “smart tech”—artificial intelligence, machine learning, learning algorithms, and feminist criticism of Silicon Valley’s toxic “brogrammer” culture. This project draws together diverse scholarly resources for backlighting a global stage for the smart media drama with scripts predating the cold war. In the process, it challenges how the history of technologized individual intelligence (the private brain, the talking head, the serial processor) emerged out of the collaboration of research groups. In all, it aims to show how digital media become so smart and at once so toxic while also reclaiming a foundation toward a more humane and intelligent media environment.
My plan this summer is to complete a draft of the scholarly book project tentatively titled The Computer is Not a Brain: How Smart Tech Lost the Cold War, Outsmarted the West, and Risks Ruining an Intelligent World. This project will be the first nonfiction book to describe for a general scholarly audience how and why “smart media” have made idiots out of the West in the literal Greek sense of private persons. This history of smart media argues that the industrialized West has “smarts” upside down. It charts the rise and international diffusion of cold war military research that advanced the dawn of “smart computing technology” that attributed success to an individual’s capacity to outsmart another—the consequences of which have shipwrecked both our current media and natural environments.
Drawing on previously uncovered archival and scholarly sources in America, northern Europe, and the former Soviet Union, it charts a twentieth-century history of how research and public talk about intelligence and machinery has mistakenly translated the vices of yesterday’s cold war rationalist—strategic self-interest, networked nations, mental machismo, and even (trickily) open-mindedness—into the virtues of today’s online personas. It asks: What does the computer-brain analogy reveal about its maker, and why was the human brain held up as a model for computer processing (how did the “i” get in the iPhone)? How has “smart”—a near-cognate for the German for “pain” (Schmerz, as in “Ouch, that smarts”)—come to decorate our prized smartphones, smart cars, smart cities, smart algorithms, etc., and in turn shape the dreams and fears of modern life, and at what cost? This timely history and analysis about how the industrialized West has fashioned smart media brings to light timeless historical insight central to the humanities—about our changing sense of the mortal self, cooperative and competitive intelligences, and the sources of our current global environment crises. This same narrative also lays a foundation for detoxifying our media environment and rebuilding a more humane future for our often foolishly smart species.
This book lays out a unique and longer narrative on-ramp for the broad general interest in the field of “smart tech”—artificial intelligence, machine learning, learning algorithms, and feminist criticism of Silicon Valley’s toxic “brogrammer” culture. This project draws together diverse scholarly resources for backlighting a global stage for the smart media drama with scripts predating the cold war. In the process, it challenges how the history of technologized individual intelligence (the private brain, the talking head, the serial processor) emerged out of the collaboration of research groups. In all, it aims to show how digital media become so smart and at once so toxic while also reclaiming a foundation toward a more humane and intelligent media environment.
FORSCHUNGSPROJEKT
Against Intelligence
My project, tentatively titled Against Intelligence, takes on the dawn of computing and its smartest communities since 1870, not 1970. An extension of my previous books, this project contends that the long twentieth-century has fundamentally misunderstood computing and subsequently much of the problems besetting the current information age—and that a first step toward addressing those issues lies in our language. Namely, the computer is not like the human brain; I seek to disassociate that empirically mistaken metaphor for processing from computing discourse and its formation in the midcentury politics of the mind (strategic, open, individual, and usually male). Some attention will be paid to investigating the death narratives haunting some of the "great men" of the information age and their ongoing search for technology-extended mortality. Instead, I seek a radical reclamation of intelligence (not quotients but quorums) in media tech discourse. To this end, the project examines the communicative turn to computing by examining how a series of small groups discovered, debated, and generated some of the most enduring and thorniest problems of the information age. Such problems of mortal minds are situated in a series of generative interdisciplinary “thought labs” often found in the dashes of the military-industrial-academic complex and their objects. Some include the coterminous emergence of neuroscience models and network schematics, the late nineteenth century American pragmatist preoccupation with logic and grace, the name-worshipping cult and graduate seminar behind early Soviet set theory and modern probability, the modern evolutionary synthesis of biology and statistics in Dobzhansky's labs, the postwar Macy Conferences on Cybernetics, the Ratio Club in London, and the Dartmouth Conferences on artificial intelligence, among others.
In the light of these materials, I am particularly interested in following several organizing questions such as the historiographical potentials and pitfalls of small group computing history to pioneer a middle way history that focuses on neither captains of intellect nor captains of industry; a critique of the role of death in continental philosophy and the potential to recover alternatives in computing discourse (such as birth, generation, simulation, modeling, world-making, rendering, processing; as well as alternatives to the mind-computer analogy); and the operations by which computing research institutions have negotiated and repurposed, often for their own gain, private concerns about mortal minds and other forms of "smart media."