Who May Save the Axolotls?

I was at a friend’s opening at the Kunstgewerbemuseum. It was well attended despite it being the second evening of Berlin Art Week with its myriad other openings. I was surprised to see an old colleague, recently retired scion of the Berlin Media-Philosophy / Media-Theory scene, watching one of the videos of axolotls with great attention. I hadn’t seen him much since he had retired, but I saw he still looked snappy in a slim suit, entertaining another visitor who stood beside him.

He had helped me stage a part of my exhibition FEEDBACK at the Humboldt University where he had presided, and I have maintained an appreciation for him, as a person but also as a thinker, though in the latter case, I rarely agreed with his approach or arguments, we could always connect on philosophical principles. He is a hyper-modernist who wanted to divorce thinking from human beings generate a completely an-anthropic philosophy.

After the speeches from the curator and artist, we found ourselves downstairs at one of the standing tables, de rigueur at events such as these, he wanted to speak about artificial intelligence. “What was the message of artificial intelligence?” he asked me. I responded that we needed to examine the effects that ubiquitous availability and implementation of machine learning were manifesting in the people around us. We discussed the crisis in the legitimacy of the bourgeois institutions, academy, museum, government, especially the inability of rationality to effectively address the environmental crisis.

I provoked him by saying that if AI could find a way to solve the climate crisis, we would never know, because it would be so bad for the prevailing profit models, leveraged on disaster, war and disease. AI will only ever be emancipated in under socialism. A great tragedy of the current age is how, Germany, for example, is ideologically depriving itself of a bright, scientifically advanced future. The principles which defined Germany such as excellence in engineering and technology, in both theory and practice were being sacrificed in the very unscientific aim of stopping China’s rise.

It seemed to me deeply ironic that my interlocutor, one of the foremost proponents of the autonomy of thinking, would disregard the progress in mathematics, chemistry, physics etc. which is taking place in China today, with a dismissive sneer of the word “authoritarian”. Whatever one thinks about its government, German scientists could only benefit from more exchange with Chinese scientists, and that the objective of challenging or even hobbling China’s technological and scientific program is not only scientifically unethical, but profoundly self-defeating.

Sadly, for me, my interlocutor deflected my proposals with a weary elan. China is “state capitalism” and a dictatorship. “Science is science,” I countered, Chinese chemistry is Western chemistry, there need be no distinction, and it is impossible to contend that whatever “authoritarianism” one my attribute to the Chinese government somehow taints the findings of its scientists. In a truly Western sense of the autonomy of science, there should be a defiant solidarity between European and Chinese scientists for the emancipation of each and the true flourishing of the promise of science.

There was no rational response to this. Rather, he invoked my friend Yuk Hui’s notion of “techno-diversity.” Traditional Chinese technology was categorically different, and China should develop “their own” notion of technology, the nascent ones, which Hui, following Needham, articulates in his book “the Question Concerning Technology in China.” This is a colonial position. The natives should keep to their own, folksy, forms of knowledge, charmingly and harmlessly locked up in holistic cosmologies which preclude massive scale mechanization and automation and the modernizing effects of these.

To be fair, my interlocutor was open to my accusations, and listened thoughtfully, because, after all, what difference did it really make what two older white dudes conclude at a standing table in the basement of a rather stuffy brutalist museum in Berlin? I knew that he would reconsider his position, but I was struck by how even a deep thinker such as he, would have contented himself with the position that China must rather be stopped, confronted, and subordinated than allow its emancipatory project guide a hopeful path forward for all science and technology.

Is it just a deep-seated sense of European superiority that makes educated people easily dismiss all the great scientific advance which is talking place in China today? Are only strong-willed individualistic Europeans really able to ensure that science is used for good and not ill? History argues otherwise. The present project of stopping China’s rise is another cynical and murderous ploy on the part of the capitalist classes to avoid addressing climate crisis and environmental degradation, in the interest of maintaining the hegemony of their system of global exploitation.