Devs and the Culture of Tech - Part 1
Technocratic Determinism
For me, the 2020 television series Devs, really gets Silicon Valley.
For someone intensely interested in Silicon Valley, as both an embodied historically situated place and as an ideology, I haven’t actually watched a great deal of media about the place. Films such as The Social Network and The Circle and TV shows like Silicon Valley never seemed to engage with what tech culture is about as far as I understand it. They told the stories that already existed in techs own representations about itself. The awkward genius that changed the world. The tech campus work culture that took over your life. The drive to change the world that some ‘bad apples’ may take too far. Often what is under examination in these stories is the individual or interpersonal, a focus on the efforts of sometimes flawed superhumans that give rise to world-changing tech. These kinds of narratives, whilst popular, make it difficult to think of tech on a more structural and ideological level. This is why the last few years mainstream reporting on tech seems to me to have been a stream of surprised pikachus as somehow and unpredictably yet another tech company turns out to be doing evil shit.
Devs upon its surface might seem to suffer from the same issue. It is a story about a tech company, Amaya, run by a singular-minded owner developing a technology that threatens the stability of society. On its surface it fits the trope of the individual tech-genius driven by higher things. This however, is simply the foundation in order to tell the actual story of Devs, which is about technocracy, technological determinism and the ideology behind tech.
About Devs
I’ll pretty much be spoiling all of the best moments of Devs in this series of posts/essays/rants, so be warned and act appropriately.
The ostensible story of Devs focuses on Lily, a software engineer working for the quantum computing company ‘Amaya’. Amaya is situated somewhere around San Francisco, its brutalist office campus nestled within a lush redwood forest typical in what you’d expect a tech campus to be, distinguished only by the gigantic statue of a young girl, Amaya, that looms over the buildings and tree tops. When Lily’s partner and co-worker Sergei is promoted to join Amaya’s special secretive ‘Devs’ team, he disappears completely, only to show up on CCTV a few days later committing suicide by self-immolation beneath the giant statue. Lily, needing answers, starts digging and a story of conspiracy and intrigue unfolds.
In any other piece the story above would be the focus, the centre of the narrative, however this story layer of Devs is far less interesting than the philosophical layer it supports. This layer of the narrative is centred around Amaya’s CEO, Forest, and his closest employees working on the Devs project. The project itself is to build a predictive analytics system to end all predictive analytics systems. Forest’s system is built upon the idea that everything that has happened, and will happen, has already been predetermined by the laws of cause and effect. Like a universe sized pool table, the first ball was hit and now every other ball is bouncing around the table. This means, for Forest, that with enough data and computing power it would be possible to precisely predict the exact position of each ball at any point in time.
This is represented in the series by the Devs project’s ability to follow that chain of cause and effect back and forth and then perfectly simulate a specific moment in time and space, visualising it on a large screen as millions of tiny dots that coalesce into a live moving scene. This is not why Devs is a great representation of Silicon Valley. Whilst the quantum computer is apparently rather true to reality in the way it looks, the tech itself is a complete fiction. What is distinctive about Devs is its use of this setting to explore techs ideological fetishising of determinism, abstraction and the drive to render reality through the model of computation, at reality and humanity’s detriment.
Rational Murder
Despite the beauty of the pool table metaphor, as we join the story the Devs team is struggling to actually make reality fit their theory. Their prototype based on Forest’s deterministic approach isn’t producing sufficiently coherent results. Noise and static in the visualisations indicate an imperfect simulation, an indeterminacy in exactly what, when pointed at a specific time and place, should be rendered. At this moment, rather than rethink their premise entirely, the team is optimistically continuing their work, presumably hoping to make enough incremental improvements to get the simulation they want. To be fair, we the viewer also don’t know any better. Let they who have actually built a quantum computing reality simulator cast the first stone.
We get the first inkling of the centrality of determinism to Devs in the very first episode. Forest, Amaya’s CEO, says to ‘soon to disappear Sergei’ quite plainly “the universe is deterministic…the marble rolls because it is pushed, the man eats because he’s hungry, an effect is always the result of a prior cause”. We live on a prescribed life running on invisible tramlines he says, dispassionately - whilst it may feel like we have free will, subjectivity, the capacity to make decisions, it is all an illusion.
Forest speaks with the objective tone of the rational man who, whilst proclaiming something terrible, does so with a detachment meant to communicate his rationality in opposition to the presumed irrational emotionality of someone who does not want to accept the ‘objective truth’. Forest understands reality is deterministic, he has overcome the emotional irrational urge to deny it and so has, through his intellect, elevated himself. Forest therefore forgives Sergei for the corporate espionage he just committed, he has rationalised it as something outside of Sergei’s control, his actions pre-determined from the moment the first pool ball was struck. This speech isn’t for Sergei’s benefit though, because Forest knows Sergei will be dead in the next few minutes. Forest needs to re-assert that the world is deterministic to absolve him of the fact that Forest is responsible for arranging Sergei’s murder.
Determinism is a key feature of Silicon valley culture and well documented since the 1990s. When the Science and Technology studies scholar Langdon Winner (1997) wrote about the ‘cyberlibertarian’ movement he began with what he considered their most central characteristic - determinism. Specifically a variant of determinism known as Technological determinism.
"The first and most central characteristic of cyberlibertarian world view is what amounts to a whole hearted embrace of technological determinism. This is not the generalized determinism of earlier writings on technology and culture, but one specifically tailored to the arrival of the electronic technologies of the late twentieth century. In harmony with the earlier determinist theories, however, the cyberlibertarians hold that we are driven by necessities that emerge from the development of the new technology and from nowhere else” (Winner, 1997:14)
Whilst a deterministic view may think of all things as a wave of cause and effect generally, the technological determinist positions technology as that cause. All of human society and action exists in response to the necessities of accommodating or adapting to technological developments. Social change only occurs because technological change precedes it. With technological change so central in this worldview, any self-determination by humans is either diminished, or in more extreme cases, eradicated altogether.
A hard deterministic view will see technological developments as a process of uncovering as prior technological discovery begets the next like some inevitable Civ tech-tree. Even a softer approach will see technological development as the product of rationality and efficiency, a response to a human need or an incremental improvement of a process. Under this framework a technology is not the product of messy irrational human affairs and therefore questionable, but emerges from an objective process of either an inevitable result of cause and effect - we discovered atomic energy and thus atomic weaponry was unlocked - or as the product of rational people pursuing the objectively best outcomes.
In part this way of thinking comes from a narrowing and narrativising of history. Works like Alvin Toffler’s ‘Wave Theory’ that reduce the complexity of human history down to a linear realisation of major innovations, from the plow to the factory to the internet, suggests that because hindsight allows us to draw a line backwards from one to the other, that the line must always have been there, and therefore also stretches out in front of us.
This may sound like a benign approach to thinking about human history. Certainly it’s not an uncommon view - it is one that is reinforced every time we uncritically talk about fully self-driving cars, universal AI gods or colonising space as an inevitability. These narratives are often based purely on a speculative charting of the necessary technological pre-requisites to achieve such a thing, without considering that just because we can conceive of it, doesn’t mean it is an inevitable stop along Forest’s tramline. For science and technology scholars, it is a relatively common way of thinking about technology not because it is objectively true, but because it is a useful narrative to existing structures of power. Progress as a concept becomes closely tied to the products of the market rather than other less favourable indicators. You may desire secure food, shelter and health but you do have an iPhone and three social media accounts, and isn’t that a marvel.
Technological determinism not only legitimates power, it also obscures it. Technology becomes depoliticised, detached from economic, social and political capital both in its use but also in where it comes from. Whether avenues of research get pursued, whether there is investment in development and production, whether there is an expected demand, whether key gatekeepers think it looks super frickin cool or not, all play into the history of technological discovery and effect.
This is something that academics studying technology and society have understood since the 1970s. Technology is a social product and therefore a political product. Technological determinism however reduces that complexity, simplifies it and abstracts it as inevitable. By claiming technology as the only thing that matters and as an inevitable timeline of progress, it obscures all the decision-making, power and inequities involved in the construction of that timeline. Similarly it simplifies reality into an abstracted model, and then expects reality to conform to it. Social relations become relations in a database, creativity becomes the most probable arrangement of pixels, knowledge, understanding and judgement become information retrieval and calculation.
Technological determinism also allows one to avoid responsibility. If a technology and its effects were inevitable, there is little point blaming those that built or championed it. The best we can do is prepare humanity for the technology’s arrival and, even if we foresee significant costs to a technology’s introduction, we are either destined to, or duty bound to bring it about, so we best get used to it. Like Forest absolving himself of his actions, technological determinism allows us to evade responsibility and deflect from the human decision making taking place even whilst we hand-wring about the inevitable destruction brought about.
Together, this inevitability, abstraction and evading of responsibility also legitimates the anti-humanism behind tech culture. The positioning of humans as lesser than technology, as passive to it and the denigration of human capacities for reason, emotion and intuition.
“In the writings of cyberlibertarians those able to rise to the challenge [of adapting to new technology] are the champions of the coming millennium. The rest are fated to languish in the dust” (Winner, 1997: 15)
For me Devs acts as a great illustration of these three key features of a technologically determinist mindset: the abstraction and simplification of reality; the evading of responsibility for the pursuit and consequences of that simplification, and the underlying anti-humanism beneath it all.
In my next post I’ll look at how Devs illustrates this drive to simplify and abstract the complex, and to re-order the world into its model.
References
Winner, L. (1997). Cyberlibertarian myths and the prospects for community. ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society, 27(3), 14–19. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Retrieved February 29, 2020, from http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=270858.270864