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Digital Automation and Affect
A Parisi text on digital automation and affect that makes control legible as networked modulation rather than centralized command.
Archive condition
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Core idea
The essay argues that automation reorganizes feeling as much as labor or thought. Affect becomes a crucial relay through which information networks steer bodies and environments.
Cybernetic feedback, computation, and digital mediation are folded together so that control appears as diffuse recalibration. Automation is presented as an affective ecology, not only a technical toolset.
That matters because it gives the control section a strong account of modulation. Virotechnical spread has to be paired with the environments that tune and register it, and this essay does that work directly.
How to read this text
Start with the early discussion of control and feedback, then move into the sections where affect is tied to digital automation.
Watch how the text moves away from command-and-obedience models toward continuous recalibration. That is the conceptual hinge.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 2
Digital Automation and Affect Clockwork automata, but also motor automata, in short, automata of movement, made way for a new computer and cybernetic race, automata of computation and thought, automata with control and feedback.
Definition · paragraph 8
Digital Automation and Affect 167 action of the “dark precursor”;15 what is not yet known is not what is non-accessible to thought, but rather what advances from a virtual field of potentialities entering the field of possibilities and probabilities.
Definition · paragraph 10
Digital Automation and Affect 169 means that initial conditions can be reproduced ad infinitum. The form of automation that concerns us here was born with the Turing machine, an absolute mechanism of iteration based on step-by-step procedures.
Definition · paragraph 12
Digital Automation and Affect 171 For Turing, the incomputable determined the limit of computation: no finite set of rules could predict in advance whether or not the computation of data would halt at a given moment or whether it would reach a zero or one state, as established by ini- tial conditions. This halting problem meant that no finite axiom could constitute the model by which future events could be predicted.
Definition · paragraph 4
Digital Automation and Affect 163 The condition of the being of the sensible is thus determined by the uncertainties of events, changing the rules of thought. In other words, to think is a matter of contingency in which affects and percepts are activated by the capacities of a body to feel.
Appears in sections
Control, Virotechnics, and Swarm Systems Primary section
Control processes, viral language, swarms, and abstract dynamics as a media-theoretical cluster.