In Search of Liveness

The common denominator of all our concerns

Some years, it takes me quite a bit of random wandering and many false starts before I figure out the themes I’m unconsciously orbiting. This year has been particularly bad, but nearly halfway through, I think I have my three lighthouse themes for the year. No wonder my wanderings this year have felt like a chaotic three-body problem orbit. Nobody should try to orbit three themes at once if they can help it. Especially not unconsciously. It’s very nauseating.

The first theme is liveness. The second theme is bug-fixing, which feels in some ways like a natural dual to liveness (since, at a trivial level of connection, fixing bugs restores liveness to complex systems). The third theme is haunting, which can be understood as a disembodied liveness. I mean haunting not in an occult sense, but in the analytical sense of hauntology. It seems obvious in hindsight, but to make sense of the hot theme of embodiment, it makes sense to look at disembodiment. I have Sam Chua and the participants of the workshop I just helped facilitate in Bangkok to thank for drawing my attention to haunting as a useful lens.

I sense there are deeper links among the three themes, which might involve debugging Heideggerian ideas and exorcising Heideggerian ghosts to get at.¹ I’ll save bugs and haunting for future essays. This essay is about liveness.

The idea of liveness is not just an emergent focal theme of my own current interests. It feels like the focus of all currently widespread and urgent-seeming concerns shared by many.

Our anxieties around emerging computing technologies revolves around their alien modes of liveness, which can seem to feed on our own modes. Our cultural anxieties and fears revolve around declining liveness in traditions and grand narratives we are attached to. The so-called meaning crisis is a search for individual and intersubjective liveness undertaken between the Scylla of coercive life-scripts and the Charybdis of enervated post-industrial scriptlessness. The unraveling of institutional and state capacities around the world is an ongoing hemmorhaging of ancient pools and lakes of liveness. Anxieties related to the climate revolve around the displacement of familiar and “natural” modes of planetary liveness by unfamiliar, “unnatural,” and possibly unsustainable Mecha-Gaiazilla forms. An overarching concern with liveness — with worlds dying and being born — defines the Gramsci Gap.

I see the word itself pop up with increasing frequency in other people’s writing, though I’ve been wary of using it myself until now because it is a fraught word. I’ve been particularly leery of using it in the organic, vitalist way it is often used, and have been casting about for a satisfying machinic, non-humanist understanding of liveness, of the sort embodied in an elemental form by a mechanical clock. I now have one, which I’ll share in a bit. We will be exploring liveness in a universalist, contraptiony way. No vibes allowed, especially culture-specific ones (we’ll use a term I made up in 2017, sentiment superstate, if we need to talk about vibes, and go deeper with hauntological tools). In this essay, which kicks off a new series, I’ll be delving into the the vibe sentiment superstate of the Gramsci Gap.

The concept of liveness helps us articulate why we seem to want and pursue the things we do these days. Increasingly our angst revolves not around what or how questions, but why questions, concerning primal desires and motivations. And these why questions always seem to reduce to a search for viable forms of liveness at every scale from chips to civilizations. All angst seems reducible to liveness insecurity. There is something very foundational about this. The desire to be alive precedes any other kind of desire, even if it must sometimes be bootstrapped somewhat arbitrarily starting with higher-level desires. And this search for liveness really is characteristic of the period that started around 2015. The 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, and early 2010s did not feel like a planet-wide search for liveness at all scales. At least not the parts and scales I was immersed in. It did not feel like everything and everybody was constantly trying to either recover a fading liveness, or conjure up new and fragile kinds of liveness. Liveness before 2015 was like water, something you could take for granted and forget about.

What is liveness, how do we know if it is present, and how can we tell when it is emerging, cohering, or draining away?

A machinic perspective on our world at all scales, from literal clock-like simple machines and infrastructures to civilizations and planet-scale liveness, is I think the most illuminating one to adopt.

Talk centered on machines in 2025 will inevitably be shaped by concerns relating to intelligent machines, so I want to assert upfront that liveness is not intelligence. At best, there is an dependency relationship between the two qualities, which I’ll try to unpack.

So even though the question of whether a machine of any sort is intelligent might seem more urgent and pressing, I’m more interested in whether a machine (physical or conceptual) is alive. In many critical ways, a mechanical clock sheds more light on that matter than an LLM. A bacterium — viewed as a machine rather than as an entity designated by vitalist fiat as living — sheds more light than a human genius racing an LLM to the death.

In our always-on protocolizing world, it is also tempting to conflate liveness with the “uptime” of particular life-sign signals, ranging from heartbeats and transactional blockchain clocks to trade flows and streaming broadcasts, to narratives small and grand. Such signals can serve as useful observables, especially for infrastructural forms of liveness that have a tendency to retreat from view, but should not be conflated with liveness itself. They are fingers pointing at moons.

To peek ahead a bit, liveness is a process condition that emerges through, and as, an evolving entanglement of memory and time. The bumper-sticker version of my account of liveness is: a process condition in which time tells memory how to grow, and memory tells time which way to point.

---

The Contraptions Book club May pick is The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe by Elizabeth S. Eisenstein. Discussion starts May 25.

---

Liveness as Process Condition

Liveness, tautologically, is the state of being alive. All life, both natural and artificial (in the sense of Conway’s Game of Life for instance), possesses liveness, but contra vitalism, not everything that possesses liveness is life. For a while, I was hopeful that Bergson’s idea of elan vital might shed light on liveness, but now I am inclined to regard it as just naive vitalism with extra steps.

If we are aiming for non-tautological characterization, I suspect it is best to start by thinking of liveness as a possible condition of certain processes, not a property of a particular class of entities or systems we arbitrarily designate as living. We can then ask what characterizes that condition.

Being attached to an entity-centric view of liveness seems to lead to seductive and charismatic but fundamentally flawed notions like Samo Burja’s notion of “live players” — a concept I was briefly seduced by, but am now convinced is dangerously, perhaps fatally misleading. Live-player theory is just uncritical idolatry with extra steps.

Understood as a process condition, liveness may jump across material entity and identity boundaries in unsettling ways. When we speak of Moore’s Law jumping from Intel to TSMC circa 2013 for example, that’s a particular uniquely identifiable instance of liveness leaping across continents, cultures, and histories in a way that disrupts associated memories and temporalities on both sides of the leap. Reading the history of TSMC can and should alter your likely US-centric understanding of even the early history of Moore’s Law. Morris Chang has suddenly been revealed by recent events to have been there all along, right from the beginning, haunting the story. Understanding this results in a historical revisionism operation that rewrites our collective technological memory in powerful and necessary ways, resulting in Morris Chang and Taiwan playing a much more active, early, and central role in the narrative. Our memory of Moore’s Law has been reoriented.

But even without such obviously radical narrative ruptures and reorientations that raise or lower the status of contending charismatic entities, liveness defines entities rather than being defined by them. This is why it is a mistake to subordinate the former to the latter. “Players” appear live or not depending on how liveness is flowing or shifting course in their environments.

I just encountered a very clear example of this effect, in the just-concluded TV show Andor, which serves as a 2-season prequel to the movie Rogue One, which itself is a prequel to A New Hope. I think most Star Wars fans would agree that Andor is probably the best bit of storytelling in the extended universe. It is is the story with the most liveness.

I rewatched Rogue One again after finishing Andor, and was struck by how my response to the movie had been subtly but decisively altered by the show. When I first watched it, the character of Jyn Erso seemed like the protagonist and that of Andor Cassian like a sidekick. This time, the roles seemed reversed. That’s some powerful refactoring of perception, when a prequel genuinely alters how you view the thing it is a prequel to.

But the effect was deeper. In the larger Star Wars cosmology, Jyn is a character of almost-mythic proportions, a sort of minor member of the Skywalker tier of demigods, while Andor (like Din Djarin the Mandalorian) is a character of human proportions. One of the fascinating things about the evolution of the Star Wars is the gradual shift from mythic-scale to human-scale characters in the storytelling; from special people to strange rules. This seems to have really pumped up the liveness of the universe. The grander epic-arc movies seem curiously enervated now, once you’ve been immersed in the more intense liveness of the better TV shows. The epic-scale characters now almost seem like sideshow cartoons in the universe that was created for them. I need to update my old Epics vs. Lore thesis in light of this observation I think.

Anyway, the takeaway from that little Star Wars sidebar is that liveness is a property of a process — storytelling in this case — and as it flows and reflows, the apparent being-locked liveness of entities can change radically. Apparent live players can get flattened into cartoons, and vice-versa.

While in many cases, liveness and entity persistence coincide, constituting the “life” of an entity regarded as “alive,” the two are not the same, and the process condition is the more basic phenomenon. Indeed, the disembodied “phantom heads” of powerful leaders, as a client of mine once put it, can “haunt” organizations long after they are dead or departed, as the ghost of Steve Jobs still haunts Apple. This hauntological understanding of liveness is not vitalist. This sort of liveness can prosaically exist, distributed across many minds and processes, even if it is notionally associated with a single human. The Steve Jobs Process really is still live and running at Apple, because if never was co-extensive with the individual being of Steve Jobs. It was a vibe sentiment superstate covering the mutualist intersubjectivity of a largish sub-Dunbar cabal around Steve Jobs, with Jobs himself constituting only a small, if highly visible, part of it. The myth really was larger than the individual. Similarly, the Bezos process is still running at Amazon, even though he has departed. In both cases, the liveness is not at the level of the individual entities most obviously associated with it.

The classic exchange between Ducard (Liam Neeson) and Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) in Batman Begins points to this idea in a rather on-the-nose way:

Henri Ducard: …A vigilante is just a man lost in the scramble for his own gratification. He can be destroyed, or locked up. But if you make yourself more than just a man, if you devote yourself to an ideal, and if they can't stop you, then you become something else entirely.

Bruce Wayne: Which is?

Henri Ducard: Legend, Mr. Wayne.

In fact, as I’ll argue, one test for liveness is the ability of a process to sustain a certain amount of observable and legible entity-hood within itself, but not too much. When the entity captures the liveness, the liveness dies. The process must ride the tension between being and becoming while resisting reduction to either. When that happens, living legends are born.