What if everything is getting less efficient? And what if that’s by design? The widely held belief that the revolution in computing has been largely guided by a pursuit of ever-greater efficiency relies on industrial era concepts ill equipped to describe much of the work that computers actually do and why it’s valuable. The talk considers the possibility that central processes of the computational economy are structured precisely around the creation of inefficiencies—with immense consequences for notions of work, value, and meaning. Concentrating on central recent developments in cryptographic hashing algorithms, cloud computing, and machine learning, the talk will contend with the prospect of an informational economy driven by work for work’s sake.

Jeffrey West Kirkwood is Associate Professor of Art History at Binghamton University, NY. His research and teaching concentrate on theories of media in culture, science, and philosophy. He has written for Critical Inquiry, October, Grey Room, Texte zur Kunst, Zeitschriftfür Medien -und Kulturforschung (ZMK), OSMOS, Idiom, and Jacobin in addition to a number of collected volumes. During the 2020-21 academic year he was a fellow at Cornell University’s Society for the Humanities, and he has twice been a fellow at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy (IKKM) at the Bauhaus University. His book Endless Intervals: Cinema, Psychology, and Semiotechnics around 1900 (Minnesota, 2022) examines a shift in the understanding of mechanical stops, breaks, and pauses that laid the groundwork for digital technologies and revolutionized theories of the human psyche. He is currently at work on a book about technical and cultural practices of encryption and their effects on concepts of value and meaning.

If you are interested, we kindly ask you to briefly register under benedikt.merkle@uni-weimar.de.