Notes on Coincedences
Whereas Turkle’s self-described “sociology of superficial knowledge” concerns itself with the computer as an “evocative object” (what she sometimes designates an “information object”) lodged in a methodological shift from looking at “the things the computer does for us… to what using it does to us”, Ceruzzi’s equally paradigm busting effort weds what he calls a “systems approach” to “a social constructionist approach” welded onto the backbone of military industrial cum corporate financing of the architectural hardware giving us Spacecraft and Silicon Valley. Their moments of coincidence are less coincidences than syntheses, in other words, between the subjective and objective sides of a tale neither quite names directly. Given that, it’s tempting to make “hackers” the third term that completes this triangulation, as that medium neither bracketing off the objective machinations and ramifications of combat between the “rule based transparency” of machine code and assembly languages against the gestural opacity of graphical interfaces (oh specters of surface/depth models!) played out conceptually in commercials as Apple vs. PC, per Turkle; nor the subjectless mapping of logical structures fed by military-industrial capital seeking (without quite knowing it at the time) technologies to wed ROM and RAM into that single SAGE-like (Hello, Thomas!) machine that will send home the hordes of women missing their card punchers and cluttering up the workrooms of pharmaceuticals, insurance conglomerates, the IRS and universities Ceruzzi traces: but something else entirely, that hoped-for interface between the two that effaces naïveté and missiles alike in becoming the subject of its own object.
The trouble is that in grasping that “entirely” we tend to lose its “something else.” The hopeful politics of Turkle’s hacker aesthetic of “transparent algorithms” (15)—contained in the slogan “just as the computer is available to understanding, so should be the political world” (163), with its implicit metaphysics pitting an artificially intelligent and wizard-like posthumanism against the mechanical specs of an utterly determinist Marxism as merely so many drab instances of “Pandemonium” versus “the Lovelace model”—disappears inside the computational slips producing the triumphant dictum “if we are machines, we are human” (277). If along the way we get glimpses of something else—“Consciousness is just a feeling of thinking” (266); “It is I” (from a Catholic, no less!) (269); “What is most valued and most beautiful is what is most freely constructed” (230); “We construct our own minds” (231)—the game is given away during the seventh inning stretch when “Lady Lovelace’s dictum begins to have a different feel when obedience means autonomy” (256). We are stuck with that old bugaboo of metaphysics, in other words: whose machine/autonomy is it, i.e. who owns the labor inside the hardware letting us think so? And curiously, if perhaps predictably, the breakdown becomes visible in the humanism stuck inside aesthetics: “saying that a computer ‘decided to move a queen by adding’ is a little bit like saying that Picasso ‘created Guernica by making brushstrokes.’ Reducing things to this level of ‘local’ description gives no satisfying way to grasp the whole” (248). Fleshing out this debate fully would jeopardize our present schematic reduction of things to neat categories, but nonetheless and really: if he didn’t make the painting with brushstrokes, then what did he? And how far have we gotten, really, if to talk the materials of aesthetic production is to, ah, localize our accounts of human agency in ways that betray global accounts of, what, genius? And then where and who is this dispenser of stuffs of genius to whom obedience is autonomy, pray tell, and what’s the going rate?
Meanwhile, while we were away wondering who dropped the curtain covering up the brushstrokes than whose sum the painting is greater, we left behind the business of converting the architecture of rooms themselves and the people in them to the architecture of hardware just as fast as Capital and Science can make it happen, preferably before the Soviets get there first. The drama of Ceruzzi’s account is of course the drifting free of software from hardware that is the paradoxical result of the initial struggle to reconcile data with operations in one place: the stored-program computer. What is fascinating here is the inscription within our construction of the technology itself of that founding division of social labor between manual and intellectual, experience and speculation, material action and theoretical know-how. Get them in one place under a universal operating system, and all your problems will be solved: this is the map that finally maps Roger Mexico’s points onto Slothrop’s stars, jettisoning Poisson and his uselessly precise distributions once and for all in an equation (destined perhaps to be called “Swanlake’s Symmetry”?) that stops and explains the rockets randomly falling in City Paranoia “all over the fucking East End, you see” (Gravity’s Rainbow, Viking 162). Except, no, wait, now we have this pesky ghost in the machine (that might in fact be the machine itself, or at least not readily separable from it) that seems to have a mind of its own, or something we feel inclined to call a mind, preferring the comforts of Ethos to the immiseration of Telos. Especially when the latter keeps turning out to be no more teleological than, say, the weather, or what the Markets “did” today:
“In October 1968 a conference was convened in Garmisch, Germany, with the provocative title “Software Engineering.” The conference marked the end of the age of innocence, a realization that a ‘crisis’ in software production would not end soon but could—and had to—be managed… That the conference was sponsored by NATO further revealed software engineering’s distance from computer science, which was centered in the universities. Conference organizers had recognized that computers were responsible for systems that put human lives at risk, including the military systems employed at NATO… In December 1968, under pressure from the U.S. government, IBM announced that the following year it would ‘unbundle’ its software; that is, charge separately for it instead of combining its costs with that of hardware systems. One of the first products it began to sell was also one of the most successful in the history of computing, its Consumer Information Control System (CICS), which it offered on a tape beginning in July 1969 for $600 a month. Software remained ethereal, but now it could be bought and sold. The effect of that decision was to open up up the field of software to comercial vendors, who would now be driven by the powerful and unforgiving forces of the free marketplace… Although not made in response to the crisis, the decision by IBM to sell its software and services separately from its hardware probably did even more [than the development of new and better integrated high-level programming languages to replace the quickly becoming obsolete COBOL and FORTRAN] to address the problem. It led to a commercial software industry that needed to produce reliable software in order to survive. The crisis remained, however, and became a permanent aspect of computing. Software came of age in 1968; the following decades would see further changes and further adaptations to hardware advances.”
-A History of Modern Computing, Paul Ceruzzi (106-8)
If it seems a little cheeky to break off in medias res mocking the Real Metaphysica of Capital with a lengthy quotation from a history of technology, we must admit we are feeling a little cheeky. But some symptoms appear so at home on the surfaces of things we feel they need no symptomologists. And while we feel safe in confessing our suspicion that it will turn out to be true to say something like “What we really see in the drifting free of software from hardware in Ceruzzi’s account is the drifting free of finance capital from its industrial base, producing the postmodernity we’ve come to know and love” and study in classes, complete with our confusions of leisure and labor, pleasure and production, software/hardware/mind/body dubbed cybernetics, we are not yet sure we are sufficiently equipped to make the claim. So tune in next week, dear readers! And yet, lest we be accused of chicanery for leaving our analysis open-ended this way (we haven’t yet finished the book, after all), let us leave you with a few keywords, Amazon word-cloud style, nouns rendered so many Legos with which to construct your own obedience here beneath the increasingly sweltering Logos:
1968, October, July, software engineering, computer science, crisis, NATO, IBM, Consumer Information Control System, “human lives at risk”
Compute!
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