See It, Say It, Sortition
A Cosmic Counterreading against the technology brotherhood
This is a section of a transcript I’m currently editing, from a recent Fau0x Salon card reading event at the Cosmic Counterreadings Symposium, part of the Cosmic Girlbosss exhibition curated by Frances Breden at Galerie im Turm in Berlin. We are about to draw the card “See It, Say It, Sortition” in a session billed as a “technofeudal card reading” and from there I lay out my thoughts on sortition in particular.
Today, we have fifty cards, which function as an oracle deck, drawing upon a lot of the themes that come out of the pedagogical and creative work that I’ve done over the years, both solo and via the 0xSalon : critical engagements between philosophy, art, new esotericisms, science, and technology.
So, we’re going to read some cards, and I will offer some possible interpretations of the cards within the context of the exhibition, and the Cosmic Counterreadings which we are here together for. I’m also very curious to tap into the cosmic collective unconscious that resides in the room with us, that we’re all channeling. If you feel called to utter, enunciate, shout out, you should feel welcome to do it!
I’ll also say something briefly about the accoutrements that adorn the cards: there’s some chain mail and there’s some green serpentine jewelry which contains uranium. Perhaps the reasons for those choices of object will become clear, but at the very least the very slight radioactivity of the uranium oxide in the uranium glass is going to help us to cosmically charge the cards for a maximally intense and appropriate preamble to today’s session.
<draw card: See It, Say It, Sortition>
Okay this needs some context. I hail from the United Kingdom: Britain, England, or whatever you want to call it. There is a weird state of societal paranoia that has been imbibed and built into that place over the last decade or so. For instance, there’s an automated voice message on the trains that says if you see something suspicious, you should call a specific number and report it.
It’s a form of surveillance, or rather sousveillance; they’re asking us to tell on each other, to act like cops to one another. The slogan is “See it, Say it, Sorted.” This is a very nefarious, if catchy, phrase. The twist here moves from “sorted” to sortition. Is anyone familiar with the term sortition? It’s just a fancy word for random sampling: the roll of a die or the spin of a roulette wheel. This card is about chance, randomness, and giving up one’s agency to a cosmic arbiter.
I often think of an old book by Luke Reinhart called The Dice Man, that I read in the 90s. It’s a novel featuring a series of interesting thought experiments where someone surrenders their agency to the rolling of dice. Imagine we have a six-sided die, and we assign outcomes or actions to the resulting numbers. Let’s say we roll a one, we go get a borek from the bakery; we roll a two, we take the train to the end of the nine line; or we roll a six, and we go and stab somebody in the street. These are the kinds of thought experiments carried out by the protagonist in this book. It was a cautionary tale about what happens when we give up our agency and place our faith in the stochastic, random, cold, and inhuman background of the cosmic. You might have heard of the cosmic microwave background, the literal background noise of the universe, which itself is variable and seemingly without pattern or structure.
It’s quite meta because, obviously, the shuffling of a card deck is itself a process of jumbling things up and returning order to chaos. The card is asking us to think about how agency might be interrupted, influenced, or overcome by the seemingly random variations of life we exist in.
One of the reasons I’m interested in sortition is because I think it’s a very practical technique, perhaps even a practical solution to the problems we face today with large polities. The image on the card is a reimagining of an ancient Greek device called a kleroterion (κληρωτήριον in Ancient Greek), which was a large stone tablet with rows of holes in it. Assisted by the rolling of dice, it was used to randomly generate citizen assemblies. These assemblies would govern first the Ionian colonies, which are now on the coast of Turkey, and later Athenian democracy itself. You can see the remnants of one in the Archaeological Museum in Athens.
The underlying political concept was the principle of isonomia: equality of political rights. There are a few people in the room (Mochu and Merve Ertufan) who have made interesting projects about this, by the way. The idea was that we could use randomness to create an egalitarian baseline for our political systems. Does jury duty work in that way here? No? Well, it does in the UK. You just get a letter, and then you have to go do sit on a jury for a trial until it’s over. Actually, the current, awful UK government are trying to do away with this now. Which is precisely why we need isonomic systems, to stop anti-democratic ghouls from destroying hard-won civic rights. In the Ionian and Athenian isonomias they were pre-selecting “approved” people from certain parts of society to go into this lottery system to form time-limited assemblies like juries: a way to balance random selection with election.
One of the reasons we might want to do that is because if you use a purely electoral democratic system – like the representative delegate democracies most nations are structured by these days – we seem to become vulnerable to cults of personality, charismatic figures, and lying, no-good, demagogues. Of course, I don’t have any specific examples of politicians like that in mind at all!
I’m interested in sortition as an anti-charismatic failsafe. This is something that could hamper a would-be authoritarian – someone who wants to rise up in the polis through the ballot box and then dismantle the system that brought them in. Now, in the 21st century, we can do this with technology instead. We can use cryptography to provide a reliable source of randomness, allowing us to do these kinds of things without stone tablets and dice. This is something I advocate for in the real world: the idea that we could fix our broken political systems with tools like this.
<draw card: Toxic Muskulinity>
Read more of that, if you care to, when the publication is out, whenever that will be. Next event things are listed below, hope to see you in one place or another. For updates, keep an eye out in the usual places (Telegram, Instagram, Twitter, here) and I’ll not to be an unrelayable narrator.
June 18/19th ::: Lecture on “Utopia & Computation” & FAU0X SALON workshop at Sonar+D, Barcelona - LINK
June 24th ::: Lecture on “Computation and The Radical” at Goldsmiths School of Computing, London 6pm - details to follow
June 25th ::: Radical Talks @ Spider Festival, Ljubljana - LINK