New Histories of Computational Personhood: An Introduction

Abstract

New Histories of Computational Personhood:An Introduction Kris Cohen (bio) and Scott C. Richmond (bio) In the 1960s, a chatbot simulates paranoia. Some twenty years later, a group of women computer scientists document the misogyny that saturates their professional lives, using bureaucracy's own tools to try to force institutional change. In the 1950s, a programmer teaches a computer to write little queer love letters. In Silicon Valley—long before it earned that name—a wealthy eccentric who earned her fortune selling rifles holds séances while inventing the speculative, neo-colonial real estate tactics that would eventually become the Valley's distinctive milieu. And, in the middle of one of the most famous demos in the history of computers, an engineer and his screen are both ready for their close-up. The histories we have convened in this dossier all find ways of narrating the history of computing that displace the familiar story of computing as one of white male audacity. The litany of "pioneers" is familiar: Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, Vannevar Bush, J. C. R. Licklider, Douglas Engelbart, Alan Kay, Steve Jobs—and, of course, the familiar billionaire trio now committed to leaving the Earth behind: Elon Musk (space!), Jeff Bezos (space!!), and Mark Zuckerberg (the metaverse?!). In part, this story is familiar because it is ongoing; those people have and do wield world-shaping power. Also ongoing are attempts to temper that power through the work of counterexample about how, for instance, black and brown and queer and trans people have long been involved in computing.1 All of these important counternarratives teach [End Page 158] (and re-teach) us that computing has never just been an arena for white men to act authoritatively. But in ways that are worrying and themselves familiar, these two ongoing histories need each other: white male audacity turns out to need its counterexamples in order to game the politics of diversity and inclusion. The representational politics of the counterexample needs white male audacity until the moment that audacity has been definitively displaced or destroyed. And none of us are holding our breath. In order to move outside the gravity created when example and counterexample, narrative and counternarrative orbit each other, the essays in this dossier experiment with historiographical method. Refusing to presume what computing is, might be, or might have been, each essay lets its historical objects both loosen and proliferate in order to tell different stories of how we got to where we are. All are in search of new kinds of relevance, beyond biography, devices invented, and units sold. One way to hold these experiments together is to say that they all address not media or computers, but computational personhood. If personhood itself has a history, what role have computers and computation played in this history? In what ways has computation itself tried to mimic prior historical modes of personhood, and to what extent has it sought to intervene in those histories? We've invited the authors in this dossier to help us develop and elaborate our sense of what computational personhood is and what questions it can generate for media studies and the history of computing. Computational personhood gives a provisional name to the ways in which computation—not only our computational technologies but also the economic, ordinary, practical, and aesthetic impacts of computing—elaborates forms of life, modes of experience, and structures of subjectivity. It also names how, in a tweak to the temporality of representational politics, all persons are made, eventually, to be intimately compatible with computing. Computational personhood is not, therefore, a fixed structure so much as a labile infrastructure, a crucible of experimentation. Far from an elite club, it is an open invitation. This is why Christine Goding-Doty refers to race and racialization as an event more than an identity.2 Structures of domination, of course, endure, and often they wield the power of exclusion and inclusion. But to the extent that lives are now lived in relation to always-on networked computation, computational personhood has developed a complex repertoire of power and subjectivization around the dynamic of inclusion. In the face of an industry that has invented unthinkably ambitious forms of domination...

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