Günther Anders writes about machines and the logic of machines in a style that perfectly matches the contemporary internet. Perhaps no other pre-internet theorist has such a worked-out sense of iterative machines and their consequences. Anders begins with the nuclear bomb as a machine with profound consequences for humankind but it is the grouping and iteration of machines in general (‘the machines’) that holds his attention, a matrix logic that easily includes the ‘innocent’ machines of the web. Machines as Anders describes them threaten ‘globicide’, and do so only because of iteration. It is iteration that makes of the machines a ‘mute’ omnicidal event and wave. No simpler proof is needed than the writing of Anders for the guiding link between machines and the absencing of humankind.
The main principle of the machines is that they go into decline and become parts of larger machines. Like the mathematical movement of reflection, which involves each new infinity de-prioritizing the one just below it in an imagined hierarchy, iteration lands us in a situation of mechanical (but not necessarily bad) infinity. The mechanical infinity of the machines raises the colloquial question of where an end will come from, namely, where will it all end? Encountering the machine, for example in a moment of irritation, we talk to it. Or rather, we express a specific form of rage the machines seem the unique site of. The principle of iteration renders visible what Anders calls ‘a completely different kind of “end”’. The machines iterate into larger machines to the point where only an absolute end can end their iteration. But another way of putting this is that, only the principle of iteration (‘the iteration’) makes visible this end. The iteration is itself globicide.
A completely different kind of end begins to take place in the machines. This is why Anders wants us to put our eyes out. Only the removal of eyes will suffice when it comes to this other end. Only the removal of eyes will allow us to see what all this means. Being in relation to the machines means I can, if I so choose, follow the principle of iteration all the way to the end, but not without first admitting that a completely different end is what we will find there. This is why Anders says our imperative is to anticipate (anticipate!) and to imagine (imagine!). Being part of ever larger machines, large language models for example, opens me to what ‘the ultimate consequences of the consequences of the consequences of the consequences of my actions will be’. Such extreme responsibility (four-times-removed) is not at all the inner consciousness of the consumer, for several reasons Anders will parse. It is the taking responsibility for the iteration itself at its far end.
We arrive quickly at the idea that everything is a function of omnicide. Or rather, to speak more strictly within the language of Anders, ‘the iteration’ is itself a function of globicide. Searching about in the history of recent and not so recent thought, there are few formulas of this kind of urgent precision. The function of ‘the iteration’ is to allow us to see that the ultimate meaning of even the most modest gesture of manual or creative production is in fact ‘genocide’. We should not hesitate to call it ‘genocide’, in just this way, or whatever other name can express the seriousness of this threat to humans. The chain of consequence expresses itself directly everywhere throughout the online world and its machines.
That this be the case is of course demoralizing, because anyone who yields and surrenders to the idea is dispossessed of the ability to continue acting in general. It is the latter that has already happened. Things are so bad we can only ask, where will it all end? And we do so without even the slightest desire to see what that question means. ‘The internet’ is only the mute admission of that question. ‘The internet’ is the most fatal machine because it gives us no indication whatsoever what its far consequences are. The logic of machines for Anders is precisely this incapacity. The machines are mute, he says. They give no indication at all as to what they are doing. ‘The internet’—only one phase in the history of the machines, but indicating the final one—appears as a page, a screen, a blink, a feed, a refresh, a piece of content. ‘The internet’ gives no commentary on its relation to consequence and iteration. It acts as if no such relation exists. ‘The internet’ can hardly be distinguished from a calculator or a painting. We use the machines with incredible ease, and they appear to be the most available objects. Yet their mode of presence is a type of extreme anonymity that maps exactly onto the destruction of humankind. The internet machines do not show what they are, and there is no real expression for this. ‘The internet’ is the most opaque thing that will ever exist. It is opacity itself. These modern machines are the most featureless things that can come to be. They are speechless to an extreme degree, and this is why Anders makes the specific move of asking us to imagine and not negate their very being. It is only imagination and not the Hegelian negative that allows us to ‘see’ what hides itself in the machines, iterated always to the literal end.
Anders states that everything he formulates is being formulated too soon. Too soon because the monothematicism of his work is always too much for us to agree to. Everything is a function of globicide. But it is too soon for that. It will always be too soon to cognize that meta-attenuation. The repression (a ‘forgotten thinker’, and so on) of the Anders mono-thesis is, remember, written into the machines as such. The machines cannot and will not say what they are, and so what they are is automatically cast aside as erroneous. All my formulations, we imagine Anders saying, are variations on a single theme, and that theme is the iteration of machines as globicide. You will not want to hear this. You will hate the machine in place of knowing the iteration, you will do this till the end.
Imagine, says Anders, that all you do is part of the machines of globicide. Okay, we say, and think of contemplating just that. But imagine even more that the work of Anders is a rhetorical machine in which everything is the same at every point. Rather than flat, such a principle of fractal monotony might be weirdly unpredictable, since every part of a text like The Obsolescence of Man (1956-1980) might be read in the same way, using the same key of reading. Everything is a function of globicide—is the only principle that might allow the time savings that save life.
Since the work of Anders is radically fractal and says the same at every point, let us go back and keep repeating. ‘The iteration’ is his main theme and not the nuclear as such (Hiroshima being a first empirical impetus). It is the iteration that fractally repeats throughout his work such that we can expect to find it everywhere. In a subsection of The Obsolescence of Man literally called ‘The Iteration’, Anders talks about meaning and ‘the iteration of meaning’. Unsurprisingly, meaning only has (pragmatic) meaning for us because we refuse the domain of imagination and anticipation. Meaning has a normal sense precisely because we do not think about the chain-link of consequence through to global suicide. But this means that the real meaning of ‘pragmatic’ meaning is the Real of ‘the iteration’.
Anders extends obsolescence in all directions. It covers everything in the exact same way the iteration does. Traditional ethics are obsolete because they entail the assumption of future time in which agents, actions and so on provide some kind of measure. For Anders there is no such future. The assumption is just that, a weak temporal fallacy in which humanity gets to play the game of being co-historically ethical. This is why morality is also obsolete in the cultural field. Anders is a thinker, and perhaps the only one, who faces up to a kind of New Now. An absolute now. The thought of iteration-globicide is definitive for Anders precisely because it includes humans of today in a future business that is already here. The now of globicide is never followed by anything else, and this is why Anders can say he never deserts. For those who recognize that today is tomorrow, the impossibility of desertion becomes palpable. The end-time as Anders thinks it can no longer be followed by another stage. Today is today. Today is today because everything, including an unforeseeable tomorrow, is a function of naked apocalypse.
All this leads Anders to write the sentence: ‘The epoch of changing epochs no longer exists after 1945.’ Tomorrow is now obsolete. There is no epoch after this epoch, no turning. Today already? Only today.