Table Of ContentTHE SMARTNESS MANDATE
THE SMARTNESS MANDATE
ORIT HALPERN AND ROBERT MITCHELL
THE MIT PRESS CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS LONDON, ENGLAND
© 2022 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Halpern, Orit, 1972– author. | Mitchell, Robert, 1969– author.
Title: The smartness mandate / Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell.
Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2022] | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022000690 (print) | LCCN 2022000691 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780262544511 (paperback) | ISBN 9780262371957 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Artificial intelligence—Industrial applications. | Artificial
intelligence—Philosophy.
Classification: LCC TA347.A78 H34 2022 (print) | LCC TA347.A78 (ebook) |
DDC 006.3—dc23/eng/20220528
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022000690
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022000691
CONTENTS
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
Excursus 2.1: Smart Electrical Grids 105
3 DERIVATION, OPTIMIZATION, AND SMARTNESS 121
Excursus 3.1: Smart Extraction 147
Excursus 3.2: Smartness, Finance, and Racial Capitalism 156
4 RESILIENCE 167
Excursus 4.1: The East Kolkata Wetlands 203
Excursus 4.2: Possible Futures of the Smart Forest 211
CODA: FROM THE SMARTNESS MANDATE TO THE BIOPOLITICAL
LEARNING CONSENSUS 219
NOTES 231
BIBLIOGRAPHY 271
INDEX 297
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Orit Halpern would like to thank the Haus der Kulturen der Welt for
support and for a forum for the early research. She also would like to
thank the AUDACE program of Les Fonds de Recherche du Québec, the
Graham Foundation, the Digital Now Architecture and Intersectionality
Mellon Program at the Canadian Center for Architecture, and the Max
Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin for their support for
the research in this book. Particularly, Lorraine Daston and David Sep-
koski at the Max Planck Institute offered a supportive environment and
an intellectual milieux for developing these ideas. In Canada, Yuri Furu-
hata and Marc Steinberg were important interlocutors and inspirations
for this text. Joshua Neves was critical in creating multiple opportunities
and forums to workshop this research. Alessandra Ponte was a collabora-
tor and teacher on all matters of landscape, environment, and industry
4.0. Nanna Bonde Thylstrup offered a residency, workshop opportunities,
and inspiration for thinking about digital data in Copenhagen. Claudia
Mareis, Kenny Cupers, and Johannes Bruder in Basel, Switzerland, all
deserve mention for producing a space for rethinking of design, technol-
ogy, and politics. Orit also would like to thank Ned Rossiter and Brett
Neilsen for the many opportunities to work on logistical and big data
infrastructures globally, and Jonathan Roberge for input and editorial
assistance in developing the material on the Atacama and Chile. Ezekiel
viii Acknowledgments
Dixon- Román gave invaluable input concerning resilience and race, and
Sudipto Basu provided research assistance in Kolkata. Finally, she could
not have completed this work without the support and constant encour-
agement of her family: Tal, Atara, Mordechai, Iris, and Galia Halpern.
Robert Mitchell would like to thank the Haus der Kulturen der Welt for
supporting an early version of some of these arguments, and the Hanse-
Wissenschaftskolleg Institute for Advanced Study, Delmenhorst, Germany,
for a fellowship that helped to make this book possible. He also is grateful
to Inga, Kaia, and Nankea for their patience and encouragement.
We would like to thank the editors of Grey Room for their enthusiastic
reception and publication of an early version of our introduction (Grey
Room 68 [2017]: 106–1 29). In several of our case studies we draw on data pre-
vio usly published in the following: Orit Halpern, “Resilient Natures,” So cial
Text, November 24, 2020, https://s ocialtextjournal. o rg/ p eriscope_article
/ resilient - natures / ; Orit Halpern, “Planetary Intelligence,” in The Cultural
Life of Machine Learning: An Incursion into Critical AI Studies, ed. Jonathan
Roberge and Michael Castelle (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 227–
256; and Orit Halpern, “Golden Futures,” Limn, no. 10 (January 2019):
107– 114, https:// limn . it / articles / golden - futures / . We thank MIT Press for
its support of this book, and the three anonymous press reviewers for their
constructive, encouraging, and helpful comments.
PROLOGUE: WELCOME TO THE
SMART PLANET
Event horizon
“a point of no return”
“a boundary beyond which events cannot affect an observer on the opposite
side of it”1
On April 10, 2019, the first image of a black hole was presented to
humanity (figure P.1). To produce this miracle, scientists and engineers
from a team spanning the globe turned the earth itself into a vast sensor.
They called this earth-a s-s ensor the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). Only
a dish the size of the planet itself would be sensitive enough to collect
weak electromagnetic signals from more than 50 million light-y ears away
and, through this activity, provide empirical evidence for one implication
of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
When the image was released, it circulated at literally the speed of light
across that most human and social of networks, the internet. Comments
online ranged from amazement to frustration that the black hole seemed
to look just like we thought it might: “Awesome,” “amazing,” “mystical,”
and “capable of making humans fall in love” jockeyed with “anticlimac-
tic,” “Really?,” and “It looks like the Eye of Sauron from The Lord of the
Rings.”2 Perhaps, the latter commentators seemed to be suggesting, the
visual output of the process of turning our entire planet into a sensing
x Prologue
P.1 First image of a black hole, April 10, 2019. Source: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
https:// www . jpl . nasa . gov / edu / news / 2019 / 4 / 19 / how - scientists - captured - the - first - image
- of - a - black - hole / .
technology was simply an artifact of computer graphics algorithms—t hat
is, merely another stereotypical image that drew on and recalled long-
standing Western cultural tropes of radically alien and powerful forces. By
combining mythic and aesthetic conceptions of outer space and the power
of the gods with the dream of scientific objectivity and a form of vision
enabled by technology, the image of the black hole brought together two
disjunctive temporalities: on the one hand, this event image crystallized
a new imaginary of planetary (and even post-p lanetary) spaces fully inte-
grated through data and machine sensing; on the other hand, the event
image mobilized very old conventions of what extreme nonhuman alter-
ity might look like, returning us to the legacies of myths and gods.
However one wants to understand the scientific truth of this image, we
argue that the image itself provides evidence of a radical reformulation
of perception and cognition. This image presents the figure of the termi-
nal limits of human perception even as it also embodies a new form of
