Tony D Sampson

Tony D. Sampson is reader in digital media culture and communication based in East London, and deals with philosophy, digital culture and new media. His work focuses on an unconventional intersection where political analysis meets the theoretical aspects of digital media and social behaviour, shaping the world of our contemporary era. Writing on substantial components like viruses, virality in communication, contagion and behavioural imitation, the brain and neuroculture in this “rotten world” built on an accelerated bond of technology and ideology of value and profit driven markets, Sampson catches, with a forward looking attitude, some “substantial issues” of the clash between control and technology, society and individual or collective freedom, shaping him not only as a brilliant new media theorist but as an essential political thinker as well. To scan his new book ‘The Assemblage Brain’ (Minnesota Press, 2017) is therefore urgent to understand the important challenge we will face in a very near future

A radical new theory of the brain bridging science, philosophy, art, and politics

Tony D. Sampson unravels the conventional image of thought that underpins scientific and philosophical accounts of sense making, providing a new view of our current time in which capitalism and the neurosciences endeavor to colonize the brain. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, Sampson calls for a radical critical theory that operates in the interferences between philosophy, science, art, and politics.

Once upon a time, neuroscience was born. A dazzling array of neurotechnologies emerged that, according to popular belief, have finally begun to unlock the secrets of the brain. But as the brain sciences now extend into all corners of cultural, social, political, and economic life, a yet newer world has taken shape: “neuroculture,” which goes further than ever before to tackle the profound ethical implications we face in consequence.

The Assemblage Brain unveils a major new concept of sense making, one that challenges conventional scientific and philosophical understandings of the brain. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, Tony D. Sampson calls for a radical critical theory that operates in the interferences between philosophy, science, art, and politics. From this novel perspective the book is structured around two questions: “What can be done to a brain?” and “What can a brain do?” Sampson examines the rise of neuroeconomics in informing significant developments in computer work, marketing, and the neuropharmaceutical control of inattentiveness in the classroom. Moving beyond the neurocapitalist framework, he then reestablishes a place for proto-subjectivity in which biological and cultural distinctions are reintegrated in an understanding of the brain as an assemblage.

The Assemblage Brain unravels the conventional image of thought that underpins many scientific and philosophical accounts of how sense is produced, providing a new view of our current time in which capitalism and the neurosciences endeavor to colonize the brain.

Reviews



‘Tap my head and mike my brain’; Tony Sampson’s new book might silently echo Pynchon’s famous lines, but this is also an original, inspiring, and theoretically savvy take on the culture of the affective brain, from sciences to business, cybernetics to political power. Warmly recommended.
—

Jussi Parikka, author of Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology


The Assemblage Brain provides a much-needed critique of the black-box, computational brain that has been a staple in philosophy, science, and the arts and connects the dots between recent innovations in science, dystopian literature, and theoretical developments in contemporary philosophy.
—

David Gunkel, author of The Machine Question: Critical Perspectives on AI, Robots and Ethics

A new theory of viral relationality beyond the biological

In this thought-provoking work, Tony D. Sampson presents a contagion theory fit for the age of networks. Unlike memes and microbial contagions, Virality does not restrict itself to biological analogies and medical metaphors. It instead points toward a theory of contagious assemblages, events, and affects. For Sampson, contagion is not necessarily a positive or negative force of encounter; it is how society comes together and relates.

Sampson argues that a biological knowledge of contagion has been universally distributed by way of the rhetoric of fear in the antivirus industry and other popular discourses surrounding network culture. This awareness is also detectable in concerns over too much connectivity, such as problems of global financial crisis and terrorism. Sampson’s “virality” is as established as that of the biological meme and microbe but is not understood through representational thinking expressed in metaphors and analogies. Rather, Sampson interprets contagion theory through the social relationalities first established in Gabriel Tarde’s microsociology and subsequently recognized in Gilles Deleuze’s ontological worldview.

According to Sampson, the reliance on representational thinking to explain the social behavior of networking—including that engaged in by nonhumans such as computers—allows language to overcategorize and limit analysis by imposing identities, oppositions, and resemblances on contagious phenomena. It is the power of these categories that impinges on social and cultural domains. Assemblage theory, on the other hand, is all about relationality and encounter, helping us to understand the viral as a positively sociological event, building from the molecular outward, long before it becomes biological.


Tarde and Deleuze come beautifully together in this outstanding book, the first to really put forward a serious alternative to neo-Darwinian theories of virality, contagion, and memetics. A thrilling read that bears enduring consequences for our understanding of network cultures. Unmissable.
—

Tiziana Terranova, author of Network Culture


Impressive and ambitious, Virality offers a new theory of the viral as a sociological event.
—
Brian Rotman, Ohio State University

For those of us increasingly reliant on email networks in our everyday social interactions, spam can be a pain; it can annoy; it can deceive; it can overload. Yet spam can also entertain and perplex us. This book is an aberration into the dark side of network culture. Instead of regurgitating stories of technological progress or over celebrating creative social media on the Internet, it filters contemporary culture through its anomalies. The book features theorists writing on spam, porn, censorship, and viruses. The evil side of media theory is exposed to theoretical interventions and innovative case studies that touch base with new media and Internet studies and the sociology of new network culture, as well as post-representational cultural theory.

Contents: Foreword, Sadie Plant. On Anomalous Objects of Digital Culture: An Introduction, Jussi Parikka and Tony D. Sampson. CONTAGIONS. Mutant and Viral: Artificial Evolution and Software Ecology, John Johnston. How Networks Become Viral: Three Questions Concerning Universal Contagion, Tony D. Sampson. Extensive Abstraction in Digital Architecture, Luciana Parisi. Unpredictable Legacies: Viral Games in the Networked World, Roberta Buiani. BAD OBJECTS. Archives of Software--Malicious Codes and the Aesthesis of Media Accidents, Jussi Parikka. Contagious Noise: From Digital Glitches to Audio Viruses, Steve Goodman. Toward an Evil Media Studies, Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey. PORNOGRAPHY. Irregular Fantasies, Anomalous Uses: Pornography Spam as Boundary Work, Susanna Paasonen. Make Porn, Not War: How to Wear the Network's Underpants, Katrien Jacobs. Can Desire Go On Without a Body?: Pornographic Exchange as Orbital Anomaly, Dougal Phillips. CENSORED. Robots.txt: The Politics of Search Engine Exclusion, Greg Elmer. The Internet Treats Censorship as a Malfunction and Routes Around It?: A New Media Approach to the Study of State Internet Censorship, Richard Rogers. On Narcolepsy, Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker. Notes. About the Authors. Author Index. Subject Index.

This chapter articulates the dynamics of spam, viruses, and other related ‘‘anomalies’’ as constituent parts of new epidemiological worlds ‘‘created’’ by the business enterprise. This refers to a change in focus from the objects that are contagious to environments – whether social media or urban space – that are designed to appropriate such contagiousness as a milieu feature. We focus here on the specific creative capacities of dysfunctionality in the production of network environments, and how ‘‘learning’’ from the irregularities of normalized communication adds new flesh to this world. We discuss how much of this new know-how concerning the productive powers of the anomalous is filtered through the cultural circuit of capitalism: ‘‘a feedback loop which is intended to keep capitalism surfing along the edge of its own contradictions’’ (Thrift 2005: 6).

This article analyzes the visual operations of contagions and their material aftereffects. Data visualizations and diagrams have played a key role in the visual culture of the contagion, and this article explores especially two recurring themes: curves and simulations. The article addresses the data diagrams that describe and predict, advise and control actions during the pandemic. The authors argue that these curves and simulations are also crucial epistemic and aesthetic occurrences that produce the long tale of the epidemic as it pertains to a variety of actions from policy making to affective responses. Furthermore, the text investigates the theme of the operational loop to help us grasp statistical curves and simulations as part of a multiscalar logic of the epidemic image and to discuss the temporal modalities of these various images and diagrams. The article also includes David Benqué’s speculative diagrams of contagion loops that present an artistic response to the theoretic...

Tony D. Sampson is Reader in Digital Culture and Communication in the School of Arts and Digital Industries (ADI) at the University of East London, where he directs the EmotionUX lab, supervising research on the cognitive, emotional, and affective aspects of user experience. In 2013, he co-founded Club Critical Theory, an organization dedicated to the application of critical theory in everyday life in Southend-on-Sea, Essex. Tony is the author of Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks and The Assemblage Brain: Sense Making in Neuroculture, both from the University of Minnesota Press. He blogs at viralcontagion.wordpress.com. The editors of this special NANO issue are delighted to have the opportunity to talk with Tony about how his work touches on issues of imitation and contagion—a loaded term unpacked within his 2012 book.

In this talk I will expand on the idea of noncognitive capitalism briefly introduced in my book Virality (Minnesota, 2012). There I attempted to grasp some of the conditions of network capitalism through a "resuscitation" of Gabriel Tarde's imitation thesis. In short, Tarde was fascinated by the brain sciences of his day, and as such, he theorized base social relation (repetition-imitation) as "unconscious associations", or in other words, social networks of mostly hypnotized brain cells. Here I will rethink what we might now call neuroculture and ask to what extent avenues of current brain science are coming together with capitalist enterprise to shape contemporary social relationality. I will contend that the looming shadow of neuroculture provokes a series of questions. The first (what can be done to a brain?) explores the interwoveness of often conflicting cognitive and behavioural neuroscientific research, the attention economy and work in the digital in...

Tony D. Sampson is reader in digital media culture and communication based in East London, and deals with philosophy, digital culture and new media. His work focuses on an unconventional intersection where political analysis meets the theoretical aspects of digital media and social behaviour, shaping the world of our contemporary era. Writing on substantial components like viruses, virality in communication, contagion and behavioural imitation, the brain and neuroculture in this “rotten world” built on an accelerated bond of technology and ideology of value and profit driven markets, Sampson catches, with a forward looking attitude, some “substantial issues” of the clash between control and technology, society and individual or collective freedom, shaping him not only as a brilliant new media theorist but as an essential political thinker as well. To scan his new book ‘The Assemblage Brain’ (Minnesota Press, 2017) is therefore urgent to understand the important challenge we will face in a very near future

Tony D. Sampson University of East London INTRODUCTION: FOUR INTERVENTIONS Log on to the internet or visit a militant Islamic bookshop and within a few minutes you will find enough inspiration in CDs, ranting sermons, DVDs, for a hundred suicide bombs. It swirls across the Islamic world as an expression of rage against the West for the invasion of Iraq, support for Israel, and for Western dominance of the world economy... It is only when the vast majority of law-abiding Muslim societies reject the cultural virus of suicide bombing and cease to glorify it that this plague will burn itself out.[1]

This paper argues that a return to a theory of crowd contagion can potentially provide a valuable resource by which to think through the operations of the global. In short, the question of how certain events ‘go global’ can be usefully approached by acknowledging how they ‘go viral’. Yet, although popular discourses, particularly those dependent on the purported virality of internet memes, have been quick to grasp something of the logic of globalization, what spreads, and how it spreads, is all too often analogically reduced to the workings of an evolutionary code which problematically fixes contagious phenomena to stringent biological laws. Global virality is alternatively grasped here by way of a convergence between Gabriel Tarde's society of imitation and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concepts of assemblages and communicable ritornellos. This approach is intended to draw attention to the persistence of often small and mostly unpredictable perturbations and shock events that can, on rare occasions, become large-scale contagions. Referring to the recent example of Obama-love, the paper aims to provide a differently orientated ‘diagram’ of virality, which is neither exclusively biological nor social, but rather positioned at a junction point between the two. This is a diagram of global contagion increasingly put to work by those seeking to exploit the pass-on power of connected publics, but also, as Tarde argued, a diagram with extraordinary revolutionary potential.

The study explores arguments concerning the concept of the informal economy and makes the case that new media technologies, or more broadly, information and communication technologies (ICTs), as a socio-economic phenomenon, tend to be exploited in the same way as other economic activities by those actors that operate in the informal economy. Moreover, this exploitation tends to show similar patterns in terms of growth and ownership concentration. In this context, the study analyses the patterns and tendencies that transpire when informal actors exploit ICTs. It aims to question the validity of the neoliberal paradigm that portrays informality and new media technology as a creative process that requires deregulation. The article is based on a field study carried out in Venezuela between 2003 and 2004.

Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari‟s (1994) methodology developed in their swansong, What is Philosophy?, this article deploys its own conceptual persona: the Neosomnambulist or new sleepwalker. Not to be mistaken for an actual living person, the Neosomnambulist is utilized so as to bring concepts to life. In this case, what the sleepwalker gives life to are spatiotemporal zones of indistinction that pervade the digital now.

This article contends that what appear to be the dystopic conditions of affective capitalism are just as likely to be felt in various joyful encounters as they are in atmospheres of fear associated with post 9/11 securitization. Moreover, rather than grasping these joyful encounters with capitalism as an ideological trick working directly on cognitive systems of belief, they are approached here by way of a repressive affective relation a population establishes between politicized sensory environments and what Deleuze and Guattari (1994) call a brain-becoming-subject. This is a radical relationality (Protevi, 2010) understood in this context as a mostly nonconscious brain-somatic process of subjectification occurring in contagious sensory environments populations become politically situated in. The joyful encounter is not therefore merely an ideological manipulation of belief, but following Gabriel Tarde (as developed in Sampson, 2012), belief is always the object of desire. The disc...

A radical new theory of the brain bridging science, philosophy, art, and politics Tony D. Sampson unravels the conventional image of thought that underpins scientific and philosophical accounts of sense making, providing a new view of our current time in which capitalism and the neurosciences endeavor to colonize the brain. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, Sampson calls for a radical critical theory that operates in the interferences between philosophy, science, art, and politics.

This article explores the video games industry as part of what has become known as the "cultural industries" (Hesmondhalgh 2002), using Latin America as a case study. We suggest that the video game industry possesses a political economy that responds to the same principles ...

This paper argues that a return to a theory of crowd contagion can potentially provide a valuable resource by which to think through the operations of the global. In short, the question of how certain events ‘go global’ can be usefully approached by acknowledging how they ‘go viral’. Yet, although popular discourses, particularly those dependent on the purported virality of internet memes, have been quick to grasp something of the logic of globalization, what spreads, and how it spreads, is all too often analogically reduced to the workings of an evolutionary code which problematically fixes contagious phenomena to stringent biological laws.

Global virality is alternatively grasped here by way of a convergence between Gabriel Tarde's society of imitation and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concepts of assemblages and communicable ritornellos. This approach is intended to draw attention to the persistence of often small and mostly unpredictable perturbations and shock events that can, on rare occasions, become large-scale contagions. Referring to the recent example of Obama-love, the paper aims to provide a differently orientated ‘diagram’ of virality, which is neither exclusively biological nor social, but rather positioned at a junction point between the two. This is a diagram of global contagion increasingly put to work by those seeking to exploit the pass-on power of connected publics, but also, as Tarde argued, a diagram with extraordinary revolutionary potential.

INTRODUCTION: FOUR INTERVENTIONS

Log on to the internet or visit a militant Islamic bookshop and within a few minutes you will find enough inspiration in CDs, ranting sermons, DVDs, for a hundred suicide bombs. It swirls across the Islamic world as an expression of rage against the West for the invasion of Iraq, support for Israel, and for Western dominance of the world economy... It is only when the vast majority of law-abiding Muslim societies reject the cultural virus of suicide bombing and cease to glorify it that this plague will burn itself out. [1]

In this so-called age of networks, human communication is, it seems, increasingly redefined as a media virus. In the military rhetoric of former CIA operative, Robert Baer (above), it is indeed difficult to tell apart the medium from the virus. The greatest information network of all, the internet, has become, as Baer tells us, part of a "deadly virus" that spreads radicalization far and wide by way of a somewhat mysterious, "inspirational" connection with the societies it infects. Even old ways of doing communication are becoming part and parcel of this swirling viral media ecology. The fearsome biological analogies and medical metaphors Baer, and other propagators of the War on Terror, readily exploit are nonetheless part of a far wider and potentially divisive epidemiological social paradigm. In computer network security, for example, there is a comparable (and interwoven) War on Viruses which has transformed the internet into an immunological network infrastructure that defines to a great extent what you can and can't do online. [2]

Significantly though, not all media viruses are dependent on fear and anxiety. In marketing circles, specifically those dedicated to digital networks, virals and memes are the buzzwords of choice. The success of YouTube videos and social gaming on Facebook are, for example, measured in terms of a virality based on joyful encounters, sometimes verging on obsessive and compulsive engagement. Indeed, network scientists and marketers claim to have learnt lessons from observing biological and digital viruses: lessons that some claim exceed mere analogical or metaphorical relations and point toward new universal models of contagious social influence and infectable consumer mood. [3] Evidently, the problem for communication theory is how to approach the many dimensions of the universal media virus. Intuitive as it may seem, its virality lacks substance. It is like a noise that contaminates the binary opposites of the established communication model without prejudice. In the age of networks, senders and receivers and information and meaning are all susceptible to contagion.

Recently however, in network theory, the notion of microbial contagion has offered a refreshing alternative to established communication theory insofar as the non-human microbe is reckoned to be synonymous with the network humans connect to. To be sure, it is the microbe that links up the individual nodes of the network transforming them into a collective social body. [4] Yet, problematically the microbe may not go far enough in terms of grasping the virality of communication. It certainly shares a lot in common with Baer's deadly virus in as much as it relies on an indistinct and divisive biological analogy to explain how nonhuman virality connects to an intensely human social medium.

This essay presents four interventions intended to redirect theoretical attention away from the medical discourses that underpin microbial contagion theory. [5] Although ostensibly discrete, each intervention is intended to probe the analogical artifice between the human and nonhuman by way of a Tardean monadological understanding of "social form" composed of emotional vectors and affective contagious encounters. The first intervention concerns what it is that spreads through infectable social media. Here both Gabriel Tarde's refusal to analytically separate psychological and biological realms from the wider social-physical world (of which they are both a part), and a more recent neurological understanding of the political unconscious, come together to foreground the importance of shared feelings in determining social influence. Yet, although feeling fear seems to be endemic to recent politically motivated contaminations of a population, there are other much-overlooked affects, like love, which are equally catching. Secondly, the essay confronts the deterministic thinking which seems to underline decidedly mechanistic interpretations of what spreads. This is equally evident in the analogical focus on microbes and memes as it is in a tendency in network theory to award agency to an emergent collective social consciousness.

The third intervention questions the validity of the network as an appropriate epidemiological diagram when evidently its standardization of space through nodes and edges tends to freeze out the temporality of epidemic events and accidents. This is, I contend, a "diagrammatic" problem at the center of contagion theory which can be interestingly re-approached via Tarde's insights into economic crisis and celebrity culture. Lastly then, the essay focuses on a distinctive Tardean trajectory evident in contemporary capitalist business enterprise which looks set to exploit consumer mood and guide intention by targeting the mostly unconscious neurological absorption of human and non-human affective contagions.

These four interventions draw upon a resuscitation of crowd contagion theories dating back to the late nineteenth century. Such a revival is not without its problems, not least because of the negative notions it attaches to social collectivity, conformity, obedience and vulnerability. However, unlike the extreme conservatism of his contemporary, Gustave Le Bon, in a series of publications, Tarde forwarded an epidemiological diagram which arguably provides a much clearer understanding of social relation outside of the reductive limitations of organic social category, and at the same time probes between the artifice that divides biological and psychological phenomena from social theory. [6] In these texts Tarde sets out an approach that would go on to greatly influence Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour (among others). But as I aim to show in my work, he is much more than a mere footnote to assemblage and actor network theory.