W7/WQ—Computers, Machines, & Cyberspace
Zeros and Ones: Digital Women + The New Technoculture — Sadie Plant (1997)
nets
The growth of the Net has been continuous with the way it works. No central hub or command structure has constructed it, and its emergence has been that of a parasite, rather than an organizing host. It has installed none of the hardware on which it works, simply hitching a largely free ride on existing computers, networks, switching systems, telephone lines. This was one of the first systems to present itself as a multiplicitous. bottom-up, piecemeal, self-organizing network which, apart from a quotient of military influence, government censorship, and corporate power, could be seen to be emerging without any centralized control. Not that such lateral networks or bootstrapped systems have “an irresistible revolutionary calling . . .”
The leading corporations are now expending all their energies on processes of molecularization and virtualization, continually downsizing and turning themselves into flattened horizontal operations and, in effect, getting all such modes of activity on their side. No matter how spontaneous their emergence, self-organizing systems are back in organizational mode as soon as they have organized themselves. This conflict is inscribed in the double-edged quality of of the word itself.
[…] The techno and the digital are never perceived to run free of the coordinating eyes and hands of logic and its binary codes. But logic is nothing without their virtual plane. They are the infrastructure to its superstructure: not another order of things, but another mode of operations altogether, the matters of a distribution which is “demonic rather than divine, since it is a peculiarity of demons to operate in the intervals between the gods’ fields of action.
The Seductions of Cyberspace — N. Katherine Hayles (1993)
The Body Zone
The next time you are in a shopping mall, check out the video arcade. Most of the patrons are teens and preteens. How many are male? If your experience is like mine, nearly all. Bill Nichols has observed that the "hidden agenda of mastery and control" shaping Star Wars and military simulations is also evident in "the masculinist bias at work in video games." Both manifest the "masculine need for autonomy and control as it corresponds to the logic of a capitalist marketplace." In the struggle between control and collectivity, virtual reality is contested ground. The two major fronts for research and development are military/ government agencies on the one hand, and small entrepreneurial companies such as Autodesk and VPL on the other. While the U.S. Air Force uses flight simulators and virtual reality technology to prepare pilots for an invasion of Iraq, Jaron Lanier talks about the collaborative space created when multiple players interact to create a virtual world to which everyone contributes but that no one can dominate.
The ethical orientations that Carol Gilligan identifies with male and female enculturations operate in virtual spaces no less than on playgrounds and in corporate offices. The deep structures of virtual worlds are programmed in machine language and operate according to binary logic gates that follow linear decision paths. Layered over this deep structure is the matrix of possibilities of which the player is aware. What body form do you choose? How do you want the world to look? How do you want to interact with other players? In its collaborative aspects, virtual reality emphasizes connectivity, sensitivity to others' choices, open-ended creativity, free-wheeling exploration. It can, of course, be co-opted into masculinist ethics of competition and aggression. Even when this is not the case, the von Neumann architecture of the machine provides an underlying context of rule-governed choices that constitutes a masculinist subtext for the virtual world. It is not surprising, then, that writers who have extrapolated fictional worlds from virtual technology see them governed by masculinist ethics. Control is the dominant chord, subversion a minor but crucial intervention.
The Information War — Hakim Bey (1996)
But who cares? It’s all relative isn’t it? I guess we’ll just have to “evolve” beyond the body. Maybe we can do it in a “quantum leap.” Meanwhile the excessive mediation of the Social, which is carried out through the machinery of the Media, increases the intensity of our alienation from the body by fixating the flow of attention on information rather than direct experience. In the sense the Media serves a religious or priestly role, appearing to offer us a way out of the body by redefining spirit as information.
The essence of information is the Image, the sacral and iconic data complex which usurps the primacy of the “material bodily principle” as the vehicle of incarnation, replacing it with a fleshless ecstasis beyond corruption. Consciousness becomes something which can be down loaded, excised from the matrix of animality and immortalized as information. No longer “ghost-in-the-machine,” but machine-as-ghost, machines as Holy Ghost, ultimate mediator, which will translate us from our mayfly-corpses to a pleroma of Light.
Virtual reality as CyberGnosis. Jack in, leave Mother Earth behind forever. All science proposes a paradigmatic universalism — as in science, so in the social. Classical physics played midwife to capitalism, communism, fascism, and other modern ideologies.
Computers as Theatre — Brenda Laurel (1991)
As researchers grapple with the notion of interaction in the world of computing, they sometimes compare computer users to theatrical audiences. “Users,” the argument goes, are like audience members who are able to have a greater influence on the unfolding actino than simply the fine-tuning provided by conventional audience response. […] The users of such a system, I argued, are like audience members who can march up onto the stage and become various characters, altering the action by what they say and do in their roles.
[…] The problem with the audience-as-active-participant idea is that it adds to the clutter, both psychological and physical. The transformation needs to be subtractive rather than additive. People who are participating in the representatinos aren’t audience members anymore. It’s not that the audience joins the actors on the stage; it’s that they become actors — and the notions of “passive” observers dissapears.
In a theatrical view of human-computer activity, the stage is a virtual world. It is populated by agents, both human and computer-generated, and other elements of the representational context.
Dilemmas of Transformation in the Age of the Smart Machine — Shoshana Zuboff (1988)
In its capacity as an automating technology, information technology has a vast potential to displace the human presence. Its implications as an informating technology, on the other hand, are not well understood. The distinction between automate and informate provides one way to understand how this technology represents both continuities and discontinuities with the traditions of industrial history. As long as the technology is treated narrowly in its automating function, it perpetuates the logic of the industrial machine that, over the course of this century, has made it possible to rationalize work while decreasing the dependence on human skills. However, when the technology also informates the processes to which it is applied, it increases the explicit information content of tasks and sets into motion a series of dynamics that will ultimately reconfigure the nature of work and the social relationships that organize productive activity.
Because this duality of intelligent technology has not been clearly recognized, the consequences of the technology’s informating capacity are often regarded as unintended. Its effects are not planned, and the potential that it lays open remains relatively unexploited. Because the informating process is poorly defined, it often evades the conventional categories of description that are used to gauge the effects of industrial technology.
These dual capacities of information technology are not opposites; they are hierarchically integrated. Informating derives from and builds upon automation. Automation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for informating. It is quite possible to proceed with automation without reference to how it will contribute to the technology’s informating potential. When this occurs, informating is experienced as an unintended consequence of automation.
Red Stack Attack! Algorithms, Capital and the Automation of the Common — Tiziana Terranova (2014)
The term bio-hypermedia, coined by Giorgio Griziotti, identifies the ever more intimate relation between bodies and devices which is part of the diffusion of smart phones. tablet computers and ubiquitous computation. As digital networks shift away from the centrality of the desktop or even laptop machine towards smaller, portable devices, a new social and technical landscape emerges around 'apps' and 'clouds' which directly 'intervene in how we feel. perceive and understand the world'. Bratton defines the 'apps' for platforms such as Android and Apple as interfaces or membranes linking individual devices to large databases stored in the 'cloud' (massive data processing and storage centres owned by large corporations).
This topological continuity has allowed for the diffusion of downloadable apps which increasingly modulate the relationship of bodies and space. Such technologies not only 'stick to the skin and respond to the touch' (as Bruce Sterling once put it), but create new 'zones' around bodies which now move through 'coded spaces' overlaid with information, able to locate other bodies and places within interactive, informational visual maps. New spatial ecosystems emerging at the crossing of the 'natural' and the artificial allow for the activation of a process of chaosmotic co-creation of urban life. Here again we can see how apps are, for capital, simply a means to 'monetize' and 'accumulate' data about the body's movement while subsuming it ever more tightly in networks of consumption and surveillance.
However, this subsumption of the mobile body under capital does not necessarily imply that this is the only possible use of these new technological affordances. Turning bio-hypermedia into components of the red stack (the mode of reappropriation of fixed capital in the age of the networked social) implies drawing together current experimentation with hardware (shenzei phone hacking technologies, makers movements, etc.) able to support a new breed of 'imaginary apps' (think for example about the apps devised by the artist collective Electronic Disturbance Theatre, which allow migrants to bypass border controls, or apps able to track the origin of commodities, their degrees of exploitation, etc.).
The Book of the Machines — Samuel Butler (1872)
Reflect upon the extraordinary advance which machines have made during the last few hundred years, and note how slowly the animal and vegetable kingdoms are advancing. The more highly organised machines are creatures not so much of yesterday, as of the last five minutes, so to speak, in comparison with past time. Assume for the sake of argument that conscious beings have existed for some twenty million years: see what strides machines have made in the last thousand! May not the world last twenty million years longer? If so, what will they not in the end become? Is it not safer to nip the mischief in the bud and to forbid them further progress?
'But who can say that the vapour engine has not a kind of consciousness? Where does consciousness begin, and where end? Who can draw the line? Who can draw any line? Is not everything interwoven with everything? Is not machinery linked with animal life in an infinite variety of ways? The shell of a hen's egg is made of a delicate white ware and is a machine as much as an egg-cup is: the shell is a device for holding the egg, as much as the egg-cup for holding the shell: both are phases of the same function; the hen makes the shell in her inside. but it is pure pottery. She makes her nest outside of herself for convenience' sake, but the nest is not more of a machine than the egg-shell is. A "machine" is only a "device".'
Cyberdemocracy: The Internet and the Public Sphere — Mark Poster (1997)
Decentralized Technology
My plea for indulgence with the limitations of the postmodern position on politics quickly gains credibility when the old question of technological determinism is posed in relation to the Internet. For when the question of technology is posed we may see immediately how the Internet disrupts the basic assumptions of the older positions. The Internet is above all a decentralized communication system. Like the telephone network, anyone hooked up to the Internet may initiate a call, send a message that he or she has composed, and may do so in the manner of the broadcast system, that is to say, may send a message to many receivers, and do this either in "real time" or as stored data or both. The Internet is also decentralized at a basic level of organization since, as a network of networks, new networks may be added so long as they conform to certain communications protocols. […] If the technological structure of the Internet institutes costless reproduction, instantaneous dissemination and radical decentralization, what might be its effects upon the society, the culture and the political institutions?
There can be only one answer to this question and that is that it is the wrong question. Technologically determined effects derive from a broad set of assumptions in which what is technological is a configuration of materials that effect other materials and the relation between the technology and human beings is external, that is, where human beings are understood to manipulate the materials for ends that they impose upon the technology from a preconstituted position of subjectivity. But what the Internet technology imposes is a dematerialization of communication and in many of its aspects a transformation of the subject position of the individual who engages within it. The Internet resists the basic conditions for asking the question of the effects of technology. It installs a new regime of relations between humans and matter and between matter and nonmatter, reconfiguring the relation of technology to culture and thereby undermining the standpoint from within which, in the past, a discourse developed -- one which appeared to be natural -- about the effects of technology. The only way to define the technological effects of the Internet is to build the Internet, to set in place a series of relations which constitute an electronic geography. Put differently the Internet is more like a social space than a thing so that its effects are more like those of Germany than those of hammers. The effects of Germany upon the people within it is to make them Germans (at least for the most part); the effects of hammers is not to make people hammers, though Heideggerians and some others might disagree, but to force metal spikes into wood. As long as we understand the Internet as a hammer we will fail to discern the way it is like Germany. The problem is that modern perspectives tend to reduce the Internet to a hammer. In the grand narrative of modernity, the Internet is an efficient tool of communication, advancing the goals of its users who are understood as preconstituted instrumental identities.
The Internet, I suppose like Germany, is complex enough so that it may with some profit be viewed in part as a hammer. If I search the database functions of the Internet or if I send email purely as a substitute for paper mail, then its effects may reasonably be seen to be those on the order of the hammer. The database on the Internet may be more easily or cheaply accessed than its alternatives and the same may be said of email in relation to the Post Office or the FAX machine. But the aspects of the Internet that I would like to underscore are those which instantiate new forms of interaction and which pose the question of new kinds of relations of power between participants.
From Virtual Reality to the Virtualization of Reality — Slavoj Žižek (1996)
How then does one “think with a computer” beyond its instrumental use? A computer is not unequivocal in its socio-symbolic effect but operates as some kind of “projective test,” a fantasy screen on which is projected the field of miscellaneous social reactions.
Two of the main reactions are “Orwellian” (the computer as an incarnation of Big Brother, an example of centrallized totalitarian control) and “anarchastic,” which in contrast sees in the computer the possibility for a new self-managing society, “a cooperative of knowledge” which will enable anyone to control “from below”, and thus make social life transparent and controllable. The common axis of this contrast is the computer as a means of control and mastery, except that in one case it is control “from above” and in the other “from below”; on the level of individual impact, this experience of the computer as a medium of mastery and control (the computer universe as a transparent, organized, and controlled universe in contrast to “irrational” social life) is countered by wonderment and magic: when we successfully produce an intricate effect with simple program means, this creates in the observer — who of course in the final analysis is identical to the user himself — the impression that the achieved effect is out of proportion to the modest means, the impression of a hiatus between means and effect.
It is of particular interest how on the level of programming itself, this opposition repeats the male/female difference in the form of the difference between “hard” (obsessional) and “soft” (hysterical) programming — the first aims at complete control and mastery, transparency, analytical dismemberment of the whole into parts; the second proceeds intuitively: it improvises, it works by trial and thus uncovers the new, it leaves the result itself “to amaze,” its relations to the object are more of “dialog”
Maximum Jailbreak — Benedict Singleton (2014)
Indeed, the combination of democracy with mass production presented an influx of new constraints on the human. What his contemporaries called 'progress' was for Fedorov a system calibrated to induce and respond to impulse. The factory brought with it an environment where humans were organised around the insistent demands of the machines they tended, and an incipient consumerism comprised a mechanisation of distraction, ever shortening windows of attention. Likewise, democratic systems were prey to deformation by populism, eliminating tradition and leaving a hedonistic pursuit of temporary gratification in its place.
