The City of Non-Existent Humans

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Kirschner, Carolyn; Greenall, Tom and Marcaccio, Roberta. 2017. 'The City of Non-Existent Humans'. In: Imaginaries of the Future: Utopia After the Human. Cornell University, United States 11 - 12 April 2017. [Conference or Workshop Item]

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Abstract or Description

Abstract:
In 1904 the noted Austrian philosopher Alexius Meinong (1853-1920) published his Theory of Objects, in which he argues that non-existent things, and even impossible things, should be included in any proper taxonomy of objects. Meinong’s theory derives from the empirical observation that it is possible to think about something—such as a unicorn for instance—even though it does not exist in a real-world context. Since we can refer to such things, they must have some sort of “being”. Thanks to a passage in William C. Kneale’s Probability and Induction (1949), the ontological realm of such non-existent entities become known as “Meinong’s Jungle”. But in today’s posthuman world where the distinction between the real and the virtual—the existent and the non-existent—is increasingly uncertain, how might we expand the realm of Meinong’s Jungle to include a rapidly expanding population of non- existent humans? How do humans, whether existent of not, fit within this particular realm, and how might they interact with it?

In February 2014, Facebook revealed that between 5.5 percent and 11.2 percent of its users were fake. At the time, this meant at least 67.65 million fake profiles. Phishing bots, hacking tools and website scrapers are just some of the so called ‘users’ of our world wide web that have no physical human controlling their every click. Billions of these user impersonators autonomously crawl the internet for a plethora of reasons, exerting considerable influence and generating vast amounts of capital. Between 2012 and 2013 the number of non-human users on the internet increased by 21.5 percent, essentially reducing humans to a minority online. These fake users now represent 61.5 percent of all internet patrons.

On the premise that these non-human entities clearly demonstrate an ontological being (one that is as tangible, quantifiable and influential as Meinong’s non-existent objects), and in line with recent calls for the registration of these so-called “electronic persons” by the European Parliament’s Legal Affairs Committee, this paper presents a speculative design proposal for a city of ambiguous reality inhabited solely by non-existent humans. Located in Akademgorodok, a district of Novosibirsk, Russia, the site for this thought experiment is a former Naukograd (science city) that has been described by Russian online newspaper Russia Beyond the Headlines as “The Last Soviet Utopia”. The project re-imagines this former “closed city” as a deregulated, extra-state, free zone in which a new architecture and urbanism emerges to accommodate a growing population of non-existent people. Like the equivalent financial free zones that are often experienced only through low quality, high resolution, hyperreal visualizations, this posthuman city of questionable reality becomes a major player on the global stage.
Deploying techniques of critical design and speculative design fiction, the project uses film, simulation, visualization and conventional architectural representation to explore the nature of the “utopia” that might emerge, in the absence of humans, in this posthuman, post-truth context.

Session:
Into the Void – Death and Non-Existence

Presented as part of ‘Utopia After the Human’, the Fifth Symposium of the ‘Imaginaries of the Future: Historicizing the Present’ Leverhulme International Research Network.

Item Type:

Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)