Transformers transform human-readable material into a huge network of weighted vectors, a material structure that appears as opaque and impenetrable to us humans as a stone. Only the decoders allow something human-readable to emerge from these structures. The astonishing, startling thing: the generative power lies in the opaque interior, the incomprehensible digital materiality that constructs meaning. The retranslation into the human language or image, almost looks like a concession to the gray matter of the biological brain, which is perhaps not needed at all.

If you are allowed to look over the surgeon’s shoulder during a brain operation, you don’t see any language, musicality, knowledge, motor skills or imagination. You see - from the outside - gray matter that looks the same everywhere. The magic happens on the inside, in the structure. Our intelligence, creativity and emotions are encoded in that matter.

In this sense, matter is the opposite of passive: it encodes intelligence, initiates thoughts, structures action, and executes it. Intelligence is encoded material—both physically and digitally. And thus, the material operation of the surgeon is one that touches intelligence and the potential for action itself: A cut in an identical-looking area of the brain’s gray matter may mean that a memory or ability is no longer accessible, or that a limb can no longer be controlled. Perhaps only a particular spark of subjective creativity disappears—and this disappearance itself goes unnoticed by everyone, including the affected person.

 identity and subjectivity, intelligence and the ability to act are not abstract, otherworldly categories; they are materially encoded and defined. It is this connection between material and activity that defines and contours our world not only within the skull, but also in all other materials understood as passive or non-living. The activity of a brain, tree, stone, river, swarm, or cloud becomes comparable at this level and gives us a hint as to how we could also handle and understand digital material.

Despite misleading terms like “intelligence”, this digital matter of AI is very different from our gray matter.

— excerpt from Digital materiality

the mode of existence (Souriau [1954] 2009; Latour 2013) of digital artifacts: What does becoming digital imply for an artifact? How to qualify the dynamic of becoming digital?

we chose to tackle the digital materiality from the more dynamic angle of the material, which we define as the matter mobilized in activity and which is transforming as the interactions between the craftsman and the materials unfold.

STS scholars have given renewed importance to the materiality of information, revealing the machines and invisible workers (Star 1991; Denis and Pontille 2012) that allow them to function— as well as the protocols and organizations that support them (Bowker et al. 2010).

These works also question the understanding of information and the digital as an intrinsically fluid content that is ontologically distinct from and superior to materiality.

information as the result of concrete operations from which it cannot be dissociated. The question “what is digital information made of?” can be reformulated into another question: “how is digital information produced?” The answer rests on the study of the sociotechnical networks that participate in shaping information and constitute its eminently material being (Denis and Pontille 2012).

Digital information is indeed difficult to grasp. Understanding it often means understanding the pipes, machines, invisible work, protocols, classifications, and standards through which it is produced and flows, with particular attention to collective data shaping.

Understanding what a thing is made of thus equates to unfolding the operations that shape and maintain the sociotechnical network that underlies the existence of this thing

[!NOTE] Digitality Materiality of digital can be analyzed through its making process.

— excerpt from digitalSTS

![[3_digitalSTS_Unfolding-Digital-Materiality.pdf]]

![[MANUSCRIPT_materiality_in_the_digital_age_Browaeys_PUG_2019_intro_EN.pdf]]