Ben Peters

Bio

Ben studies humanistic and social media theory, broadly understood, and enjoys his work in new media history, the critical study of information, and comparative Eastern European and American studies. He is currently a visiting fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and a doctoral candidate in Communications at Columbia University. His dissertation focuses on cold war cybernetics, or how communication become computer-compatible.

Abstract

Arendt and the Creative Toil of Counting 

Our problem, to update Arendt's phrase, lies in that not Human but humans now inhabit the earth. Ours is a question of counting. In general, the capacity to calculate, to self-reflect or feed back in the process of calculation, and thus to regularly manipulate symbols characterizes both digital and human agents online and off. In particular, this paper attempts to map three orders of counting--rote arithmetic, statistics, and probability--onto Arendt's distinctions among labor, work, and action. As a sort of compulsory cognitive labor, rote arithmetic appears to predate writing (Goody) and functionally equate neural networks with computer processors (Turing, McCulloch). Statistics, on the hand, has driven social, purposive work since at least the late seventeenth century to the contemporary collapse of finance markets.

Lastly, this paper considers that probability may be to action what statistics is to work. As a creative act itself, probability presents itself as a type of computational fiction--good to think with but better to read closely and critically. It is at once a fictive straddling of an empirical numerator over a philosophical denominator, a baffling expression of previous work (i.e. statistics) thrust upon any range of imagined futures, and a mixture of liberating possibility and certain uncertainty. In conclusion, this paper calls for fresh, critical consideration of probability as a sociotechnical mindset that fixates on the future in exchange for a (literal) chance to act.