Over the past few years numerous scientists, authors, and journalists have produced a complex and diverse collection of ideas in relation to recent technology. We hope to assemble these strands of thought into a Carrier Bag of Tech. 

Today’s tech overlords – the Musks, Ramasvanys, Altmans, Schmidts, Bostroms, or Mostaques of this world – relentlessly push their narrative of superhuman tech powers. Their narrative of  so-called Superintelligence, blockchain windfalls and victorious Manhattan bro-jects is overrepresented in the media and public discussion.

In contrast, the often meticulous work of gathering, sorting, composing, thinking, arguing, and publishing, is often pushed aside as inferior technology. We would like to emphasize this perspective on technology, debunking various hype cycles and the myth of glorious creative destruction via digital technology.

Carrier bag of Tech? To introduce this concept we need to take a step back and build on the author Ursula K. Le Guin.For the  suggestion to read Le Guin the authors would like to thank Lena Brüggemann who co-curated an intensive program on speculative fiction in 2015. All cites are from Le Guin, Ursula K. 1986. “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” In Women of Vision. Essays by Women Writing Science Fiction, edited by Denise Du Pont. In 1986 she wrote a short essay, The carrier bag of Science Fiction, building on the anthropological concept of a Carrier Bag Theory of Human Evolution by feminist author Elizabeth Fisher. This concept looks into a time of becoming-human in which early hunting men supposedly built spears, blades and other sharp and combative instruments. History is overflowing with these stories. Instead, the Carrier Bag Theory insists that: “the first cultural device was probably a recipient… Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier” (Guin 1986, 2). However, in writing history and stories, it seems that narratives centering combative sharp instruments prevailed over the carrier bag as a narrative device.

Le Guin, the science fiction author, who asks why sci-fi stories seemingly need heroes and combat, suggests a different approach to writing about the future: “I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us” (1986, 3). While Le Guin acknowledges that some part of a story may also contain conflict or struggle, she is primarily interested in describing processes, not (violent) solutions. “That is why I like novels: instead of heroes they have people in them,” she writes.

So why do we suggest applying the Carrier Bag Theory to thinking about tech and beyond? The myth of technology is tragic. From Le Guin’s perspective technology builds on “hard” sciences, “founded upon continuous economic growth”. Technology appears as a heroic triumph even when it leads to tragedy. “The fiction embodying this myth will be, and has been, triumphant (Man conquers earth, space, aliens, death, the future, etc.) and tragic (apocalypse, holocaust, then or now)”(1986, 4).

The current narrative of tech – a combustive mix of fission and fossil propaganda, fiction and finance –  provokes a renewal of the Carrier Bag Theory. Not only can we see the tragedy of heroic tech repeat, for instance through AI’s origins and use as a technology of war, the energy and resource scarcity caused by the industry, or its function as a trap siphoning up and privatizing other peoples’ labour, affect, time, and materials.

We can also challenge the unequivocal narratives that come with it: ‘it will take over our jobs’, ‘it will become faster than human thinking’, ‘it solves … problem’, ‘it leads to full automation’, or ‘there is no alternative to developing AGI’ in the scope of an AI arms race.

Instead of focusing on these often weapon-centric tropes it makes sense to look into tech´s Carrier Bag, into the statistical processes that condense data towards interpretable results, into the social relations that are encoded in data or networks, into the facts of maintenance and infrastructures, into tech’s effects on the planet and its life forms, and into the people who produce and adapt this technology and end up governed by processes extracted from their own labour. A lot of people have already started creating Carrier Bags, but it seems that their narratives get eclipsed by the blinding lights of heroic tech mythology again and again.

This brings us to one last point. At the end of her essay Le Guin suggests: “Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast stack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story” (1986, 4). The same approach could be taken not just for science fiction as a genre, but for the science-fiction-infused narration of current day technology. With more and more urgency we need to tell another, non-heroic, fact-and-material based story of technology, a Carrier Bag variant of it, a “way of trying to describe what is in fact going on”. In the end, this cautious and doubtful strand of thought is inherently scientific, unlike the mythological one pushed by the industry and their absolutist leaders.

Hito Steyerl and Francis Hunger

Carrier-Bag.net is a research project within the class for Emergent Digital Media at AdBK Munich.

Credits

Homepage title image: alternative echelons by amy pickles, film, 2020 (performed by Christina Karagianni, George Rallis, Merve Kiliçer, amy pickles. Sound, Max Franklin. Director of Photography, Ana Buljan. Special thanks to Lichun Tseng).

Post-production credits: Kristina Cyan, Naho Matsuda, Guillaume Menguy, Vasili Vikhliaev