The Smartness Mandate

Over the last half century, "smartness"—the drive for ubiquitous computing—has become a mandate: a new mode of managing and governing politics, economics, and the environment.

Smart phones. Smart cars. Smart homes. Smart cities. The imperative to make our world ever smarter in the face of increasingly complex challenges raises several questions: What is this "smartness mandate"? How has it emerged, and what does it say about our evolving way of understanding—and managing—reality? How have we come to see the planet and its denizens first and foremost as data-collecting instruments?

In The Smartness Mandate, Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell radically suggest that "smartness" is not primarily a technology, but rather an epistemology. Through this lens, they offer a critical exploration of the practices, technologies, and subjects that such an understanding relies upon—above all, artificial intelligence and machine learning. The authors approach these not simply as techniques for solving problems of calculations, but rather as modes of managing life (human and other) in terms of neo-Darwinian evolution, distributed intelligences, and "resilience," all of which have serious implications for society, politics, and the environment.

The smartness mandate constitutes a new form of planetary governance, and Halpern and Mitchell aim to map the logic of this seemingly inexorable and now naturalized demand to compute, to illuminate the genealogy of how we arrived here and to point to alternative imaginaries of the possibilities and potentials of smart technologies and infrastructures.Acknowledgments vii
Prologue: Welcome to the Smart Planet ix
Introduction 1
1 Smartness and Populations 33
2 Demo or Die: The Zones of Smartness 73
3 Derivation, Optimization, and Smartness 121
4 Resilience 167
Coda: From the Smartness Mandate to the Biopolitical Learning Consensus 219
Notes 231
Bibliography 271
Index 297“With precise focus and provocative paradoxes, The Smartness Mandate is written on behalf of the futures of planetary intelligence and how they might emerge from the present myopia.”
—Benjamin Bratton, University of California, San Diego
 
“In a critical synthesis as constructive as it is sharp, Halpern and Mitchell deftly historicize and surgically demystify the data-driven ‘smartness’ that governs today’s biopolitics, from options trading to ‘resilient’ cities. This book couldn’t be more timely.”
—Reinhold Martin, Columbia University and author of Knowledge Worlds: Media, Materiality, and the Making of the Modern University
 
“If you think digital technologies are ‘smart,’ think again. This book delves into the material underworlds and logics of smartness, bringing its agencies, operations, and outcomes into relief. Richly evocative and political, the book delivers a vital planetary warning.”
—Lisa Parks, Distinguished Professor of Media Studies, University of California-Santa BarbaraOrit Halpern, Lighthouse Professor and Chair of Digital Cultures and Societal Change at Technische Universität Dresden, is the author of Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945.
 
Robert Mitchell is Chair and Professor of English, as well as Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory, at Duke University. His books include, most recently, Infectious Liberty: Biopolitics between Romanticism and Liberalism.