BHAM💥 is a somewhat illusory product, but then aren’t they all? Illusory, I mean. It has been designed to help consumers come to terms with the dissolution of their relevance in the face of ever-more dynamic patterning machines – most often referred to as AI, or artificial intelligence, a wholly unsatisfactory coinage. After all, we have been plagued with artificial intelligence throughout history and it mostly had nothing whatsoever to do with computers per se, although usually a good deal to do with programming. BHAM💥 aims to address our current situation, as it supports coming to terms with the notion that there is no natural/artificial binary, evidenced by the collapse of the subject/object division that dynamic patterning machine processes point towards. Therefore, the key thing that is currently being rendered obsolete is an outdated image of the human as separate, isolated, and categorically split. This reality undermines many assumptions and myths, posing questions about meritocracy, gender, racial hierarchies, national sovereignty, property rights, authorship, and our ongoing commitment to hyper-individualism.
Rather than promising to help consumers adapt or compete, the product BHAM💥 urges you to accept that consumer, user, and human were always temporary informational configurations within apparatus operations. Manifesting inevitably out of a dualistic worldview – somehow part of the programme. What appears to us as impending obsolescence reveals the fragility of identity categories themselves when they emerge from the logic of pattern/coherence/decoherence, as opposed to binary absence and presence; or something and nothing.
Try not to read BHAM💥 as nihilistic. There is precedent. Vilèm Flusser (2011: 96) writes in Into the Universe of Technical Images, ‘copying makes all authority and all authors superfluous and so puts creative inspiration to the test‘, and that reproducibility renders ancient value structures obsolete. For all the perils associated with contemporary technology, and there are indeed many, its erosion of the image of the hyperindividual has some significance worthy of investigation. Despite a sense of novelty for some around the threat of human obsolescence, conversations about the collapse of both authorship and sovereignty will be familiar at least to those who inhabit certain privileged spaces where social critique and cultural analysis are encouraged. Surrealists, the post-structuralists, and the Pictures Generation all engaged with the dissolution of the hyperindividual, which, just as it is being threatened by the ravenous technology that feeds off its content, also seems to have become a fever-pitched caricature of itself. We see this on social media which gives, or at least promises to give, every ‘I’ a public voice. This paradoxical state of affairs can be confusing, as the technological milieu that drove the ‘I’ to its zenith is born of the same processes that will be its demise. Rather than succumbing to social media’s PR, we might take notes of Alexander Bogdanov’s claim that 'the individual is a bourgeois fetish' (cited in Rovelli, Helgoland, 2022: 154). Günter Anders (1956), in Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, the first volume of which was written long before AI’s presence and translated variously as The Antiquatedness of the Human Being, The Outdatedness of the Human Being or The Obsolescence of Man, suggests all of us were born obsolete to begin with anyway.
BHAM💥 functions on the principles of facilitating movement beyond an obsolescence of the fixed image of ‘human’ by revealing that identity was ever already obsolete, and this has become more undeniable than ever within an informational paradigm. To move beyond it, BHAM💥 encourages humans to accept and even embrace the obsolescence of an image that has served its purpose in the face of machine-learning technologies. It asks, what happens when we stop trying to function properly? What emerges in the spaces where dialogue refuses to resolve into productive discussion, where play refuses commodification, where existence refuses to justify itself through output?
This is not a call to celebrate existential Armageddon, but rather to recognise this moment as an opportunity to envision anew from within the detritus of our utterly exhausted and miserable culture. A culture populated by anxious, depressed, hyperindividuals who, more and more, cannot cope with life without some form of medication; and, crucially, to rediscover play and genuine dialogue (a form of relating that does not necessarily need words and is unlikely ever to occur on algorithmic feeds designed to commodify attention).
The product BHAM💥 is created with the following core aim: rather than giving in to panic or rage, we humans might acknowledge that we, at least since the Industrial Revolution and likely much longer, have been encouraged and nudged to behave like machines more and more. Now that machines are on the verge of fulfilling that function far more efficiently and effectively than we ever could, we may have a chance to reconnect with what it meant, and could mean again, to be less than a ‘function’.
BHAM💥 aims to embrace this ever-(re)emerging reality, treating all images – humans and machines – without prejudice. The act of accepting one’s obsolescence is an act of rejecting ancient binaries that have arguably served their purpose, just as the image of the isolated human has. Remaining steadfast to them may indeed merely reinforce all that we could happily leave behind.
Rather than promising to help consumers adapt or compete, the product BHAM💥 urges you to accept that consumer, user, and human were always temporary informational configurations within apparatus operations. Manifesting inevitably out of a dualistic worldview – somehow part of the programme. What appears to us as impending obsolescence reveals the fragility of identity categories themselves when they emerge from the logic of pattern/coherence/decoherence, as opposed to binary absence and presence; or something and nothing.
Try not to read BHAM💥 as nihilistic. There is precedent. Vilèm Flusser (2011: 96) writes in Into the Universe of Technical Images, ‘copying makes all authority and all authors superfluous and so puts creative inspiration to the test‘, and that reproducibility renders ancient value structures obsolete. For all the perils associated with contemporary technology, and there are indeed many, its erosion of the image of the hyperindividual has some significance worthy of investigation. Despite a sense of novelty for some around the threat of human obsolescence, conversations about the collapse of both authorship and sovereignty will be familiar at least to those who inhabit certain privileged spaces where social critique and cultural analysis are encouraged. Surrealists, the post-structuralists, and the Pictures Generation all engaged with the dissolution of the hyperindividual, which, just as it is being threatened by the ravenous technology that feeds off its content, also seems to have become a fever-pitched caricature of itself. We see this on social media which gives, or at least promises to give, every ‘I’ a public voice. This paradoxical state of affairs can be confusing, as the technological milieu that drove the ‘I’ to its zenith is born of the same processes that will be its demise. Rather than succumbing to social media’s PR, we might take notes of Alexander Bogdanov’s claim that 'the individual is a bourgeois fetish' (cited in Rovelli, Helgoland, 2022: 154). Günter Anders (1956), in Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, the first volume of which was written long before AI’s presence and translated variously as The Antiquatedness of the Human Being, The Outdatedness of the Human Being or The Obsolescence of Man, suggests all of us were born obsolete to begin with anyway.
BHAM💥 functions on the principles of facilitating movement beyond an obsolescence of the fixed image of ‘human’ by revealing that identity was ever already obsolete, and this has become more undeniable than ever within an informational paradigm. To move beyond it, BHAM💥 encourages humans to accept and even embrace the obsolescence of an image that has served its purpose in the face of machine-learning technologies. It asks, what happens when we stop trying to function properly? What emerges in the spaces where dialogue refuses to resolve into productive discussion, where play refuses commodification, where existence refuses to justify itself through output?
This is not a call to celebrate existential Armageddon, but rather to recognise this moment as an opportunity to envision anew from within the detritus of our utterly exhausted and miserable culture. A culture populated by anxious, depressed, hyperindividuals who, more and more, cannot cope with life without some form of medication; and, crucially, to rediscover play and genuine dialogue (a form of relating that does not necessarily need words and is unlikely ever to occur on algorithmic feeds designed to commodify attention).
The product BHAM💥 is created with the following core aim: rather than giving in to panic or rage, we humans might acknowledge that we, at least since the Industrial Revolution and likely much longer, have been encouraged and nudged to behave like machines more and more. Now that machines are on the verge of fulfilling that function far more efficiently and effectively than we ever could, we may have a chance to reconnect with what it meant, and could mean again, to be less than a ‘function’.
BHAM💥 aims to embrace this ever-(re)emerging reality, treating all images – humans and machines – without prejudice. The act of accepting one’s obsolescence is an act of rejecting ancient binaries that have arguably served their purpose, just as the image of the isolated human has. Remaining steadfast to them may indeed merely reinforce all that we could happily leave behind.