Protocols are never neutral. As writers such as Shoshana Zuboff (‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’) and Kate Crawford (‘Atlas of AI’) have argued, contemporary computational systems are entangled with extractive economies, asymmetries of power, militarized infrastructures, and regimes of behavioral control. We are often presented with the futuristic PR vision of artificial intelligence as an immaterial or autonomous mind, but in reality it is a vast material apparatus together with the social relations it produces – an apparatus built from exploited human labor and mineral extraction.
Because the digital age made the general public aware of just how much our lives are entwined with machines, often at the expense of the natural world, this age is now primed for a renewed era of ecological thinking and action. And because the praxis of ‘critical analysis’ plus ‘critical action’ can take many forms, artists, experts and practitioners have a vital role to play in shaping both how we direct our energies and how we define the boundaries of our collective imaginary. One such novel engagement with our unique times could be to begin contemplating what are the autonomous ecologies that are being produced by these machines, and how we can ensure they are a net positive to an interspecies commons.
If ‘Protocol Art’ is to become more than an aestheticisation of networked systems, it must also confront the economic and political conditions from which protocols emerge: platform capitalism, techno-imperialism, labor exploitation, and ecological degradation. To write or intervene in protocols today also means to question who owns them, who benefits from them, whose labor sustains them, what futures they make (im)possible.
Art, traditionally playing a vital role in stimulating the imagination, now more than ever is needed to stir the mind. We would argue that what is needed now are new and benevolent ecologies – as much as critiquing dubious effects on existing ecologies. While ecosystems erode and the line between man and machine is being increasingly blurred it is the perfect time to work to understand, and ultimately intervene, in these strange rules of the existential games that we play.