Autonomy as Matter of Design: Imagining Total Configurations for the New Machinism

Rather than an accidental feature of who and where we are, autonomy is a matter of design. Increasingly embedded in our environments, computational technologies challenge our sense of distinct spheres of experience, which in turn are characterized by equally distinct aesthetic and communicative practices. In the actuality of experience, these distinctions have, and have been, collapsed, a consequence of deliberate design strategies around computation-as-ambience, data-driven economies, and invisible interfaces. Innovation idioms around ‘intelligent’ infrastructures – smart home, smart factory, smart city – frame and facilitate the acceleration of an algorithmicization of our core cultural techniques, of the ways in which we explore, organize, and remember what we do and who we are. As ‘autonomy’ becomes the rallying cry of a new machinism, the extent of our individual and collective self-determination is linked to the design of the socio-technical systems that structure and sustain our communicative practices. Which is why the exploration of this linkage between human and machinic autonomy calls for an elaboration of ‘total configurations’ (Dieter Rams) of the situation in which we find ourselves, above and beyond the critical engagement with specific technologies employed to build a world of machinic socialities and subjectivities. This essay imagines a matrix to bring together the design of socio-technical systems with a philosophical sense of design as the ‘unfolding of contradictions’ (Gui Bonsiepe), a matrix to facilitate analysis and reflection of what we do, and who we become, as we embed values in algorithms, data bases, and interfaces that are meant to operate on their own, empowering and exhausting us at the same time.