First #15: Systems Ultra
Making sense of complex systems — what they contain, communicate, and conceal
Turning our perception of complex systems from a top-down infrastructure that is invisible and neutral — into an embodied assemblage, entangled with the world beckoning us to grapple with its ideology
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📺 Watch “Death, and how tech forgot about mortality” (35 minutes, with subtitles). I gave this talk last November at ffconf in Brighton. My talk examines online existence, the fragility of digital infrastructures, and the frequency with which digital services cease to exist before their users. The next conference will be on Friday 14 November — sign up to be notified of when the Call for Speakers opens, and when tickets go on sale.
📅 On Monday 17 March 18.30-20.00 (CET) / 17.30-19.00 (GMT) I will be part of Round Table on the Future(s) of Masculinity hosted by Jenny Grettve & Thyr Björnson. This free event is part of an initiative by WomenCouncil.world that is exploring new forms of governance rooted in care, wisdom and long-term thinking. If Jenny’s name is familiar, it is because I reviewed her fantastic book Mothering Economy last year. Tickets available now.
I am surrounded by systems. As I write, my central heating system has flickered into life.1 So far, 2025 has been sniffle-free because my immune system has ensured I have not (yet) fallen victim to a seasonal cold. Allow me a moment’s nostalgia as I reminisce over my first-ever job as a systems analyst. In the course of writing this article, I will consult somewhere between five to ten books from one or more of my bookshelves — the reason I can find these books so easily is because I have a system for arranging them.
Systems Ultra: Making Sense of Technology in a Complex World (Verso, 2024) by Georgina Voss has an original approach for delving into the meaning and makeup of complex systems.
System — a word we use so often, that we have lost sight of its true meaning. When you repeat the word, what first comes to your mind? Maybe you think of a computer system — a slim all-in-one desktop or wafer-thin laptop. Perhaps you are thinking of rows of cabinets full of computer servers humming away in a datacentre, hidden from public view. Maybe a system is captured by the visual elements we interact with on a screen — in this cloud-computing age, we don’t need to bother ourselves with where our data goes or how a system actually works.
Systems are not just hardware or technological infrastructure. The more we observe how systems are used, we unravel the reality of how they encompass the people who use them and the actions they must take to manage the flow of information.
Voss opens Systems Ultra by taking us on an immersive journey through histories and philosophies that have informed our understanding of complex systems. From astronomy to philosophy and biology, humankind has observed systems at work in natural and manufactured environments. Cybernetics attempted to find the nexus between biology and technology, albeit one with patriarchal imaginings.
Systems are pervasive, and in the current technology industry, their perceived transparency and neutrality reduce our critical ability to grapple with the power dynamics that bolster their continuance.
Legacies
I remember the first time I went to an airport. It is a sense of awe that has never left me decades later in adulthood. I am often transfixed as thousands of passengers throng around me, rushing to and from their gates. Harassed business travellers checking and re-checking their departure screens. Deep down there are many aspects of an airport’s infrastructure that cause me to marvel — the scale and complexity of the hundreds of systems working in unison to make an airport work: how many miles of ethernet cable must there be in a single terminal? How do all of these pieces of checked baggage find their way to their destination? How are rosters designed to ensure the right amount of cabin crews are always in the right place?
One of the early sociotechnical history lessons recounted to us in Systems Ultra is the story of flight. Or rather, the story of controlling commercial flights as they grew into a mass transport and leisure industry. The problem of making sure the growing number of planes didn’t crash into each other was too big to ignore: How do you paint lines in the sky, when there are no physical barriers to keep planes a safe distance apart?
“The system of air traffic control is one of distributed intelligence, where consciousness is parcelled out between ground and sky. This distribution continues within the control centre itself. As the first Newark staff worked as a collective entity, air traffic controllers moved in harmony with their surroundings, overhearing each other's phone calls and chatter, fingers touching keyboards and paper, extracting and synthesising a patchwork of information from their local environment.” — Systems Ultra, pg. 85
No matter how granular the data, the fidelity of graphics, or the realism of animation, a system is only a representation of what exists in the real world — and for an air traffic control system, this proves to be a fiendishly difficult problem, because there are competing viewpoints that have very different interests, each tugging the system designer in opposing directions as they try to determine which viewpoint should prevail.
Each competing set of eyes has an interest in determining how an airplane’s movement is traced. On the ground, air traffic control needs to regulate the distance between planes and ensure they follow pre-agreed routes — ultimately to avoid one plane crashing into another. In the air, pilots and crew rely on their instruments and communication with air traffic control to wayfind and stick to an agreed path. So these are just two diverging sets of priorities — two views which in turn represent differing interests in what is mapped and how these data points should be presented.
Throughout Systems Ultra, Voss brings us along as she gets to grips with sprawling systems of increasing size and complexity around the world. From Eurocontrol (Europe’s centre responsible for the Safety of Air Navigation), container shipping ports in Rotterdam, to alternative electronic payment systems that serve as the backbone to companies exhibiting at the Adult Entertainment Expo (America’s largest pornography trade expo) — as Voss peels back the layers, the imprints exposed gesture towards the power dynamics inherent in actors influencing any system. We are asked, in the tradition of Donna Haraway, to reject the myth of disembodied viewpoints because technological ecosystems often prefer we let them remain undisturbed.
“Once a complex knot is tied, it becomes difficult to untangle it” — Systems Ultra, pg. 70
Complex systems are subject to pressures both from the interior and exterior, often leading to downstream effects that are difficult to predict. One decision to standardise the size of a shipping container reconfigures the shape and size of ports leading to the rerouting of global commerce. Visa and Mastercard deciding that payments from certain porn merchants are no longer to be associated with their brand soon find themselves becoming arms-length arbiters of permissible content porn to a degree of specificity they surely never expected. Zooming back, back, further back — we begin to perceive the size and complexity of the systems we encounter. One change here creating unpredictable ripples over there.
Zoom out
One insight gleaned from Systems Ultra stays with me — and is especially informative for these turbulent technological times we find ourselves traversing:
“Language implicates reality: the ideas we attach to things become things in the world. ” is that any systems are a suggestion of what they might be in future. We use metaphors to describe things that elude our grasp, and fictions and metaphors allow an imaginary concept to be legitimated. These metaphors and stories are produced in a crucible of time, place, and culture. These narratives are hugely influential in the design, regulation, and reception of large-scale technologies and infrastructures. They shape how we expect the world to work.” — Systems Ultra, pg. 11
Invisible and perceived as neutral, it is no wonder the muscles we have for critically examining the origin, ideology, and power of systems are atrophying — and this is in no small part due to the way the language of technology is used. If you are a systems engineer, you write code to be run on a set of servers deployed in a linear fashion that has observable effects in an application. If you are a product designer, you perceive the problem you are solving as one that affects an archetypical individual who is using a single instance of an application to achieve a single goal.
“The language around systems is neutral, describing structure and behaviour — but, as we've seen, there are powerful culturally-mediated meanings attached to what we expect of systems. Visceral, embodied interactions and paying attention to the weird ways in which systems puncture the world are incredibly important but need to be coupled with awareness of the power relations that course through them.” — Systems Ultra, pg. 25
Systems Ultra resets the view we ought to take when considering the use and meaning of systems in the world. We are urged to “see the ways [systems] poke out through the world with all of their strange textures and ludic weirdness” (pg. 180). We need to break away from the atomic conception with which we frame technological work because it curtails our linguistic and cognitive ability to perceive the expanse of how systems interact with the world.
We need to spend a bit more time away from our screens because we might see for the first time what a system can do, out there in the real world.
Systems Ultra: Making Sense of Technology in a Complex World by Georgina Voss (Verso, 2024, 224 pages)
More from Georgina Voss
In “How To See What's Not There”, presented at The Conference in Malmö in August 2024, Georgina Voss unfurls the complexity of sprawling technological systems, the frustrations and limitations of exerting control (with varying degrees of success) and the shrinking agency that workers feel slipping from their grasp — all told through the making of Jurassic Park. The parallels may not be immediately obvious, but I strongly encourage you to watch this in full!
Explore further
Listen
A seemingly insignificant design decision — to standardise a packaging unit — has reverberated around the world, reshaped ports and rerouted supply chains. In Son[i]a #377. Charmaine Chua from the Radio Web MACBA podcast, a logistics researcher, discusses containerised global shipping and asks what economies in the Global South would look like if they could be untethered from an infrastructural reliance on the Global North. This interview is a reminder that systems, aside from their materials, have a politics. This podcast is not published on Spotify, so you may be able to find it on other podcast platforms, or you can stream directly from MACBA’s website. Published 18 July 2023, lasting 1 hour 46 minutes.
Transcripts are available for Inside Porn’s Star Chamber.
Watch
Considering the embodied viewpoint inherent with air traffic control systems, Voss writes in Systems Ultra that “an elevated perspective is not a totalising one” (pg. 66). We accept the God’s eye view suggested by such deployments, but we cannot ignore the military origins or territorial expansion that has guided the demarcation of maps and their notable landmarks.
Sophie Dyer and Sasha Engelmann co-lead the experimental feminist project Open-weather, and continue to ask searching questions about the patriarchal motives inherent in mapping and the visualisation of the air. At the Sonic Arts Biennial in 2022, they ask “What does it mean to collectively image the Earth, and in doing so, reimagine it?” and in doing so present an alternative way of understanding our relationship to space and its visual representation.
Read
Deep Carbon by Joana Moll (Research Values, 2018)
E-cologies part 1: The in-terra-net by Alis Oldfield (Heliotrope Journal, 2020)
The Pay Off: How Changing the Way We Pay Changes Everything by Gottfried Liebbrandt and Natasha De Teran (Elliott & Thompson Limited, 2021, 320 pages)
How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex: An Unexpected History by Samantha Cole (Workman, 2022, 278 pages)
Inside the secret, often bizarre world that decides what porn you see by Patricia Nilsson and Alex Barker (FT Weekend Magazine, 2022)
‘This can’t be real’: Grubhub promotion turns New York City restaurants into a ‘war zone’ by Wilfred Chan (The Guardian, 2022)
The Alchemy Lecture: Borders, Human Itineraries, and All Our Relation by Dele Adeyemo, Natalie Diaz, Nadia Yala Kisukidi, and Rinaldo Walcott, introduction by Christina Sharpe (Alchemy by Knopf Canada, 2023, 151 pages)
How infrastructure works by Deb Chachra (Transworld Publishers, 2023, 320 pages)
I am writing this review early in January.