Behavioral design of so called »persuasive computer technologies« is the result of a merger between psychology, economics, and computer engineering. The article discusses its genealogy from the strategic response of military, governmental, and academic players to the general problem that the behavior of complex systems such as humans, societies, or markets is difficult to predict, and that controlling these complex systems means shaping them by designing their technological and social environments.

What is really behind the recent accusations of postmodernism being responsible for preparing the current populistic argument about alternative facts? Based on Bruno Latour’s »Why has Critique Run out of Steak? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern«, this article discusses the genealogy of truth- and evidentness critique before and after the beginnings of the computer. This will lead to the realization that before all critique concerning truth and evidentness there is already a distrust in the human intellect which (...) comes to an alleged end in the early drafts of artificial intelligence as well as in the outsourcing of intellect into adaptive machine-systems. It is not by accident that Herbert A. Simon refers to Arthur Schopenhauer’s Welt als Wille und Vorstellung in his standard reference work The Sciences of the Artificial from 1969 when he states that the world resembles more of an artificial, imagined one than a natural. Different from the 19th century, the computer simulation these days promises insight into the complexities of human behaviour that have until now been understood only incompletely and insufficiently. The result of machine-based critique is an economic-technological complex in which rationality is no longer interpreted as the function of the subject but as the function of the machine, while politics is reduced to the level of affect. (shrink)

Worum geht es in den aktuellen Vorwürfen, die Postmoderne hätte den aktuellen populistischen Diskurs um alternative Fakten vorbereitet? Ausgehend von Latours Elend der Kritik diskutiert der Artikel die Genealogie von Wahrheits- und Evidenzkritik vor und nach den Anfängen des Computers. Dabei lässt sich zeigen, dass vor aller Wahrheits- und Evidenzkritik zunächst ein Misstrauen in den menschlichen Intellekt steht, welches in den frühen Entwürfen künstlicher Intelligenz und der Auslagerung des Intellekts in lernende Maschinensysteme ein vermeintliches Ende findet. Nicht zufällig ruft Herbert (...) A. Simon 1969 in seinem Standardwerk The Sciences of the Artifical Arthur Schopenhauers Welt als Wille und Vorstellung auf, wenn er schreibt, dass die Welt viel mehr eine künstliche, vorgestellte als eine natürliche sei. Anders als im 19. Jahrhundert verspricht jedoch nun die Computersimulation Einsichten in bisher unzureichend verstandene Komplexitäten menschlichen Verhaltens. Das Resultat dieser maschinellen Kritik ist ein ökonomisch-technologischer Komplex, in dem Rationalität nicht mehr als Funktion des Subjektes, sondern als Funktion der Maschine interpretiert und das Politische auf die Ebene des Affektiven reduziert wird. What is really behind the recent accusations of postmodernism being responsible for preparing the current populistic argument about alternative facts? Based on Bruno Latour’s »Why has Critique Run out of Steak? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern«, this article discusses the genealogy of truth- and evidentness critique before and after the beginnings of the computer. This will lead to the realization that before all critique concerning truth and evidentness there is already a distrust in the human intellect which comes to an alleged end in the early drafts of artificial intelligence as well as in the outsourcing of intellect into adaptive machine-systems. It is not by accident that Herbert A. Simon refers to Arthur Schopenhauer’s Welt als Wille und Vorstellung in his standard reference work The Sciences of the Artificial from 1969 when he states that the world resembles more of an artificial, imagined one than a natural. Different from the 19th century, the computer simulation these days promises insight into the complexities of human behaviour that have until now been understood only incompletely and insufficiently. The result of machine-based critique is an economic-technological complex in which rationality is no longer interpreted as the function of the subject but as the function of the machine, while politics is reduced to the level of affect. (shrink)

The article, speaking from the double perspective of media history and political aesthetics, discusses the impact of behaviourism and early computer technology on the design of learning environments in the United States after the Second World War. By revisiting B. F. Skinner’s approaches to behavioural techniques and cultural engineering, and by showing how these principles were applied first at US design departments, and later to prison education, it argues that cybernetic and behavioural techniques merged in the common field of design (...) and education. Behavioural design of the 1960s and 1970s furthered the cybernetic dream of total control over the world by addressing the learning environment rather than the individual, and operated within a space of possibility that was governed equally by technology and aesthetics. Behavioural design can therefore be understood as a political technology. (shrink)

The essay deals with the brief yet significant correspondence between Martin Heidegger and Werner Heisenberg throughout the year 1953 that culminated in Heidegger’s lecture “Die Frage nach der Technik”. The letters and Heidegger’s accompanying thoughts about the production of scientific evidence by means of media technology and mathematics provides a missing link between the genesis of Heidegger’s own philosophy of technology and the history of modern physics. The correspondence indicates the struggle of both philosopher and physicist to understand each other (...) but also Heidegger’s awareness for the necessity of an interdisciplinary discourse on technology within the nuclear era. One of Heisenberg’s letters worked through by Heidegger with crayons is published here for the first time. (shrink)

Behavioral design of so called »persuasive computer technologies« is the result of a merger between psychology, economics, and computer engineering. The article discusses its genealogy from the strategic response of military, governmental, and academic players to the general problem that the behavior of complex systems such as humans, societies, or markets is difficult to predict, and that controlling these complex systems means shaping them by designing their technological and social environments.