Paper short abstract

This paper examines recent pleas for a “critical ethnomethodology” in light of a reverse-engineered and replicated proto “AI” system, namely Calvin Mooers’ Zator® machine, developed at MIT in the 1940s and 1950s. Thereby, the paper outlines a performative critique of quotidian “AI” labelling today.

Paper long abstract

In Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway (2016) highlights two problems associated with “technological determinism” (on its curious persistence, see Wyatt 2008). The first problem concerns a “comic faith in technofixes” (2016:3-4). The second problem, more serious, finds its routine expression in a “game-over attitude” with respect to alternative scenarios (ibid.), effectively “locking in” the future in the name of one technology, system, or process. In response to Haraway’s twofold concern, this paper examines recent pleas for a “critical ethnomethodology” (e.g., Scheffer 2021) in light of a reverse-engineered proto “AI” system, namely Calvin Mooers’ (1951) Zator® machine, a mechanical information retrieval device, developed at MIT in the 1940s and 1950s (Ceruzzi 2019). What did we learn from reverse engineering and, in fact, rebuilding a physical replica of that “low tech” machine, including its “coding scheme for edge-notched cards” (ibid., p. 69)? To address this question, the paper first revisits Garfinkel’s and his students’ texts (e.g., Wood 1969) on Mooers’ “Zatocoding” and “[library] catalogs” as providing ethnomethodological alternates to formal accounts of “practical action and practical reason” (Garfinkel 2002:128). Second, the paper brings to bear its technical insights from machine rebuilding, and multiple keyword searches in a single database, on critical inquiry into current uses, if not corporate abuses of “AI” (e.g., friendliness scoring at Hamburger places). In short, our mid-20th century detour contributes to a performative critique of quotidian “AI” labelling today, as a provocative gesture in (digital) STS (Woolgar 2004; Vertesi & Ribes 2019), if not “critical ethnomethodology” indeed.