“We’re already bored with what hasn’t happened yet,” declares a stanza in poet Vincent Toro’s latest collection Hivestruck. Throughout the book, Toro grapples with a central imperative of the techno-politics of our age: that the digital tools and realms we frequent have changed us as individuals and a society in ways that are evolving so fast that we barely recognize the evolution. It’s only by looking back through the onslaught of incremental innovation, he suggests, that we begin to notice that the future we’re being sold is more advertising than advancement.
“No one uses those formats anymore, don’t you know,” his carnival barker narrator chastises at one point, pitching the next upgrade to we hapless rubes. “They’re mad outdated.”
Born in New York of Puerto Rican descent, Toro’s previous work tended to focus on matters pertaining to the Latin American struggle, particularly in relation to immigration and the border. With Hivestruck he opens his lens somewhat, exploring the more universal implications of technology, if with a frequent Latinx bend.
“Text without context” is destroying our ability to discern reality from mirage, he argues, diminishing our ability to react to the actual issues that exist beyond the technological smokescreen. “I can fix it all by posting on your wall” becomes the naïve creed of the day as problems and their solutions grow so remote that we interact with them solely via social media. And even digital protest is barred when the “boss tells me not to take a position on what I observe.”
As Toro explains in the following Q&A, the solution is to pull back the curtain on the technopoly’s grand dysillusion.
Where did the poems in Hivestruck come from?
That’s the big mystery, right? Where do poems come from? I think most of my poetry is born from tension and conflict. Something is burning in me because I am torn about something, or something has hurt me or someone else in the world, or I am perplexed by some affliction or problem. With the Hivestruck poems, the tension that birthed them came from that paradox of technology bringing magnificent things into the world while also inflicting a lot of damage to our psyches, our communities, and our environment. I wanted to understand my own complicated feelings about the tech boom (and my own complicity), why I felt simultaneously thrilled and troubled, fascinated and exhausted. When I am conflicted by something, my instinct is to learn more about the thing that is troubling me. I learn primarily by reading and researching, and also by making art.
The technopoly has us all living in the Wizard of Oz. We are dazzled by the technicolor magic of it all. Because we are dazzled, we forget to stop and ask how it all happens. It takes an astute little Toto to help us see that there is a man behind the curtains who is pulling levers and turning knobs to keep creating the illusion that keeps us mesmerized. I realized I didn’t really know much about how the technology we use actually works. I wanted to understand the thinking behind what has been created, who created it, and why these things were made this way and not another way. I spent about ten or so years reading books on computers, technology, and social media. While reading, I collected language, ideas, images, lyrical fragments, and questions. As a kinetic way of processing what I was learning, I took this raw material and started shaping it into the poems that eventually grew into a book.
The duality or tension between an appreciation for the modern digital life and a fear of it was definitely what stood out to me most.
I would say that the duality you speak of is the spine of the book, though I might use the word “apprehension” rather than “fear.” That tension, that duality, was the root of my motivation to write Hivestruck. The process of researching for and writing the book brought me to the understanding that the duality you speak of is not so much a matter of appreciating or fearing a digital life. The primary conflict seems to be (as it always seems to be) about humanity’s obsession with creating inequality. The technologies that make up the operating system of our digital world are all man made and man managed. And I am using the word “man” deliberately, as the tech industry is still very much overwhelmingly male, straight, and white. The hardware and software we use has been imbued with the history and value system of this very homogeneous, hierarchically fixated subculture of men. As a result, our digital world as we know it has become a more sophisticated social stratification machine. So what we end up with is progress tainted by greed and corruption and colonization of (virtual) territory. The outcome is magnificent breakthroughs in telecommunication and medicine suffused with the rise of surveillance culture, ecological crisis, and the largest economic disparity in recorded history. All this is to say that when I started this endeavor I thought I was grappling with a duality related to the technology itself, and ended up with the sense that the duality was a matter of the human condition. I came to see technology as a multivalent metaphor for what humans do to each other, and to ourselves.
What is “Latinxfuturism”?
Latinxfuturism is an ever expanding constellation of art and literature that employs elements of both science and science fiction to explore Latinx and Latin American identity, culture, and history. Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) is sometimes considered a godfather to this movement and aesthetic, but it can be traced back at least as far back as Mexican writer and inventor Juan Nepomuceno Adorno’s short story “A Distant Future,” written in 1862. As with other artistic movements, Latinxfuturism is essentially a mode of knowledge production and culture making. It draws from science and science fiction distinctly for the purpose of confronting issues particular to Latinx and Latin American people. At the center of that venn diagram of Latinx issues is colonialism. Latinxfuturist works tend to respond to, critique, examine, and attempt to dismantle our colonial situation and its adjacent problems of race, gender, migration, dictatorship, capitalism, and environmentalism. So, for example, space exploration takes on a different connotation in Latinxfuturist work, as it is instead perceived not as exploration but space imperialism, as in Agustín de Rojas’ space travel novel A Legend of the Future. It is an art that seeks to imagine alternate realities for Latinx people that might provide us with a path to transcend – and even eradicate – colonialism and fascism. Other Latinxfuturist books like Edmundo Paz Soldan’s Turing’s Delirium and Rita Indiana’s Tentacle help our gente to envision our own survival and possible liberation on our own terms.
Adjacent to this, another primary characteristic of Latinxfuturism is the theory of the hybrid as formulated by Latin American thinkers such as Silviano Santiago. Latinx and Latin American people are by definition hybrid beings, the product of both benevolently voluntary and violently imposed racial mixing. Our life in the Americas is a hypercomplex experiment born of the colonial project from which has sprung a rhizomatic array of communities, languages, histories, foods, inventions, governing systems, and cultural practices. We’re basically Brown Star Trek IRL. A quintessential work of Latinxfuturism is the film Sleep Dealer. Sleep Dealer synthesizes our urban with our rural lives, tackling the issue of borders and the exploitation of Brown labor by depicting a world where our gente from south of the U.S. border are made into “sleep dealers” that export their labor from a futuristic maquila to el Norte via cyberspace. They work in El Norte but their bodies remain in the south where there is also a crisis of mass dehydration because el Norte has stolen and fenced off all major sources of potable water. Citizens trying to reclaim the water are policed by other Brown folks from the U.S. who are assigned to protect the water from their kin in the south. Essentially you have Brown folks on both sides of the border laboring and fighting against each other all for the benefit a virtually invisible (white) entity that controls all of them. Eventually, though, the gente on both sides come to realize who the real enemy is and decide to help liberate each other by hacking the system that has held them captive. Sleep Dealer is puro Latinxfuturism.
In “A Brief History of My Screens” you describe the many screens you’ve owned. While reading it I was struck by how each screen iteration always seems state of the art, but only a few years later looks at times almost laughably outdated. What do you think of this passage from cutting edge to obsolete? Is this what you later call “addiction to the upgrade”?
Absolutely! Addiction to the upgrade is necessary to maintain the technopoly. Drug dealers have to make you dependent on their product, right? A defining strategy of the entities that make and maintain our hardware and software is “planned obsolescence.” I was a little shocked to learn in my research that these big tech companies actually have future products lined up and ready for the next 10-15 years. So whatever the most current model of your phone is, for example, that company already has the next three or four upgrades all ready to sell to you. They also build the devices to have a laughably short shelf life. If they were to simply put out the most advanced technology they have and make those devices well, they wouldn’t be able to generate the kind of revenue they want to get from you over the next several years. They need you on the hamster wheel of purchasing upgrades so the investors are happy with their portfolios year in and year out. But this steady churning out of new products with upgrades is contributing massively to our current ecological crisis. But no one is willing to stop that practice and slow things down, because everyone is addicted, everyone wants their dopamine hit. The companies want their dopamine hit that comes from the profits being shot into their bloodstreams, and the consumers want the dopamine hit that their consumption will bring them. This is why I open the book with the poem “Such Acceleration Produces Fusion…” I am hoping people will slow down to observe how our addiction to what is next and what is new is impacting both our present and our future.
At some point you write “Nothing is an exact science. Everything is an art.” Can you elaborate on this?
Oh… this could get very “meta” right now if I am not careful. Okay, lines like this one are born out of my fascination not only with ambiguity in language, but also with how language can get tangled up in its own tricksterism to create strange loops such as the one Douglas Hofstadter presents in his mind boggling text Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid:
The following sentence is true.
The preceding sentence is false.
Hofstadter uses this to illustrate the Epimenides Paradox and the effects of self-referential language in our consciousness and our coding. For me, it functions as a kind of zen koan. Koans are constructed to dismantle conventional logic in ways that allow us to think in more expansive and surprising ways. The thing is, trying to explain a koan to someone else dilutes the power of the koan, because their point is for the reader to meditate on it and come to their own meaning. Lo siento if it seems I am being elusive in my response. There is so much of my work I am all too eager to speak at length about, but with this one I just don’t want to rob any readers of the satisfaction of digesting the line in a way that allows them to build their own unique and personal bit of knowledge. The line was constructed to be read in countless ways that are dependent on the reader’s own experience and world view, their own sense of what the words “nothing” and “everything” and “science” and “art” might mean to them. But I would love to hear what it means to you (and other readers).
Social media is a major theme throughout the book. What are your thoughts on the benefits and drawbacks of social media?
I mean, high speed communication is clearly quite useful to us. Elderly folks can see and talk to their families across great distances without having to travel, which can be more difficult to do as we age. Not to mention the bureaucratic red tape of our political borders also makes such travel even more difficult. Telecommuting to work means less carbon emissions from driving. Social movements are aided by the technology for purposes of organizing and relaying information to large groups of people quickly, as we have seen with the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matters, and #Metoo, for example. Social media platforms have brought people together from across long distances, which has allowed marginalized groups to build solidarity around each other’s causes. Doctors and sciences can share discoveries and information almost instantly, allowing us to respond to environmental and health crises much faster, thus saving more lives. These are just a few of the ways I see these applications aiding human experience.
The problems with social media are maybe not as easy to see, which is why we give ourselves over to these platforms so fervently. As I see it, the problems with social media are rooted not in the tools themselves but in the people we have agreed to bestow with responsibility of building and managing these platforms. Those who currently control these systems have turned social media and the internet into a massive engine of surveillance to police populations of people. As we are slowly coming to realize, the algorithms that steer social media are not neutral, self-driving, unbiased entities. They are programmed by a very specific group of humans who have a very specific worldview. As such, they program the algorithms to proliferate content that suits their own agendas while silencing the voices of those who think and live counter to their agendas. Social media is in essence a censorship engine, but because most people don’t think about how the algorithms are designed and who is designing them and to what end, they don’t fully understand that some information is being withheld from them and other information is forcefully being flooded into their feeds, and that this is entirely deliberate, that it is other humans making these decisions for them. One major decision that was made for us by tech industry elitists is that these platforms will be geared toward advertising to us rather than to the free and fair exchange of information and ideas. These elitists have very much decided that misinformation is good for their own purposes, that they have the right to suppress online voices of dissent. And they don’t even have to be openly opposed to equity, their algorithms will perform the work of creating inequities for them, so they don’t have to be held accountable when crisis and backlash occurs. These are very real problems with tangible consequences (as we have seen with the 2016 election, for example). Documentaries like The Social Dilemma have helped more people become aware of this problem, but for the most part, far too many people still use these platforms without understanding how much personal information they are surrendering, and to what extent their views and decisions are being steered by a system that privileges the steward’s of this technology to the detriment of absolutely everyone else.
What do you think about AI?
Well, let’s start with the fact that it cannot think. What is being marketed to us as Artificial Intelligence is very much not intelligent at all. Noam Chomsky nailed it when he called “AI” just a massive plagiarism engine. This again goes back to my concern about which humans have been bestowed with the power to control the tech industry. They have chosen to use their power to redux the colonial project, to claim territory and shape the world in their image, to plunder all of the information we share, all of our intellectual property, to create systems that absorb our books, our films, our texts, our paintings and lay claim to it under the banner of their brands. This is why the stakes felt so high during the writers and actors strikes from last year. The unions were actually working to defend their constituents (and to some extent, all of us) from having their lives’ work stolen by these companies. I have colleagues who found out, entirely by accident, that their books were being scanned and uploaded to these plagiarism engines without their permission. The alleged “AI” systems are built entirely upon pillaged materials, as was the case with the first colonization and subsequent colonizations.
At the level of being a tool, some of these systems might prove to be helpful for research and experimentation in select fields. But for the most part, right now what we are seeing is a massive marketing campaign to sell snake oil, because these systems cannot think. The bait and switch is that we’ll agree to surrender our information and intellectual and creative property so that this new “intelligence” will make our lives easier, but the product they are advertising is not the product we end up buying. Truthfully, even if the product did come as advertised I would still have concerns, because of its cultural impact. In my work, in the field of education, we are dealing with massive fallout from all of this, as “AI” is being marketed to them as the solution to their academic worries. So the “AI” industry makes money off of the students who are already paying an exorbitant sum for their education, only for them to find that these machines can’t really provide a solution to their problems. From the other end, the “AI” marketing campaign has worked to incite panic in the hearts of educators so they can sell us tools, books, applications, lectures, and workshops on how to manage “AI” in their classrooms. Essentially the predatory nature of the current “AI” industry is playing out in real time in my field. Students, educators, and institutions are being exploited as we are converted into new revenue streams for big tech. Their coffers are fed. The damage to our education system is rendered collateral damage in the tech industry’s agenda.
I want to be clear about what I am saying, because I don’t deal in binaries. I am not against “AI” (even though the “I” is a misnomer). It’s clear there are also some exciting things being done in the field, and these technologies have great potential to help build a better world. But the potential for breakthroughs should not seduce us into giving these companies absolute power over our lives. Tech industry elites should not continue to be given carte blanche to exploit us. Their past and current actions make it clear that new and different leadership is needed, leadership that is more diverse in its representation, leadership that is more compassionate, leadership that does not have profit driven, colonial tunnel vision, leadership that has had an education in the humanities.
Do you worry about the future, or are you more optimistic? At one point you quote Kurzweil, who is about as unabashedly optimistic about the future as they come.
It is a very human thing to worry about the future, so of course I worry. But I have a good deal of optimism about it all, too. It’s not a binary and it is not an either/or proposition. I possess both optimism and worry in me to varying degrees and at different times. It’s true, I do quote Kurzweil in Hivestruck, but the poem where I do so was intended to be quite satirical. As I see it, Kurzweil’s unabashed optimism is steeped in his position of privilege as a straight white male. His SWM optimism appears to be quite myopic about how technology exacerbates economic disparities and helps to further marginalize communities of color that are kept without access to certain technologies. It seems to overlook how technology breakthroughs are readily used to further exploit laborers in the Global South, how “computing purposely heightens power differences,” as Mar Hicks writes in “Sexism is a Feature, Not a Bug,” how search engines and surveillance technology have been coded with racist biases (as Safiya Umoja Noble articulates in her research), how mass production of tech products have contributed to our current ecological crisis. It takes a whole lot of privilege to not have to see these other outcomes of the technopoly while instead focusing on how we can upload our dads to the cloud.
That said, my optimism outweighs my worry, because my optimism is not rooted in hardware and software. My optimism is rooted in my love for humanity. Within my own lifetime, I have seen so much human progress that has been guided by the intention of our being better to each other. I am a student of history, and human history is replete with evidence of progress sprung from mass movements and individuals committed to social justice. My optimism is not one built on Kurzweilian fantasy, but on what humans have already shown we can do to heal and to liberate ourselves and each other. So, yes I have copious worries about the technopoly, pero like I have much more optimism about our ability to imagine and construct a better world, one where technology is used to improve the lives of all humans rather than to replicate and further entrench age old hierarchies and inequalities.
