The Fishbowl as Apparatus
In The You On AI Encyclopedia
Segal's metaphor works within a broadly empiricist epistemology: there is a reality out there, our assumptions distort our access to it, and intellectual courage consists in straining against our own limitations to glimpse what lies beyond. The scientist's fishbowl filters through empiricism, the filmmaker's through narrative, the builder's through feasibility. Each reveals part of the world and hides the rest. The task is to become aware of one's own fishbowl and to cultivate the habit of looking outside it.
Barad's transformation of the metaphor does not deny the observation Segal makes — there are indeed different disciplinary and professional frames that shape what practitioners can see. The transformation concerns the ontological status of what the fishbowl discloses. In Barad's framework, the scientist's empirical practices do not filter a pre-existing empirical reality; they produce specific phenomena that come to be called empirical. The filmmaker's narrative practices do not distort a pre-existing narrative meaning; they produce the phenomena of narrative through specific material-discursive configurations. The builder's feasibility practices produce the phenomena of building.
This reframing has immediate consequences for the AI transition. When Segal writes that AI put cracks in every fishbowl I knew, the standard reading interprets this as expanded vision — the AI revealed what the old fishbowls concealed. Barad's reading is different and more consequential. The cracks do not reveal a hidden reality; they mark the disruption of one apparatus and the emergence of another. The builder who works with AI does not see the old world more clearly; she inhabits a different apparatus that produces different phenomena. The reconstitution is ontological, not merely epistemological.
The ethical weight of this reframing concerns who designs the apparatus. If fishbowls are merely filters, then the task is to broaden perspective — collaborate across disciplines, cultivate humility about one's own assumptions. If fishbowls are apparatuses that produce their phenomena, then the task is to attend to the specific material-discursive configurations that are shaping the worlds we inhabit. In the AI moment, those configurations are being designed by a small number of people at a small number of companies, and the democratization of apparatus design — not merely access to its outputs — becomes the central political question.
Origin
The fishbowl metaphor appears throughout You On AI, serving as one of Segal's primary images for the invisible frames that structure professional and cultural perception. The transformation into the Baradian apparatus framework is this volume's synthesis — Segal's metaphor reinterpreted through Barad's ontological categories to reveal implications the original formulation points toward but does not fully develop.
Key Ideas
The fishbowl is not a filter. It is an apparatus that produces the phenomena it discloses, not a lens distorting a pre-existing reality.
Different fishbowls produce different worlds. Not different views of a shared world but different phenomena through different material-discursive practices.
AI cracks apparatuses, not lenses. The change is ontological — different phenomena come into being — not merely epistemological.
Apparatus design is political. Who configures the apparatus determines what worlds come into being, and the question of democratization applies to design, not just access.
Cuts must be attended. Within any apparatus, the specific cuts being enacted — the inclusions and exclusions — deserve continuous scrutiny.