historiography of/on/around this internet

“my dream is a version of the posthuman that embraces the possibilities of information technologies without being seduced by fantasies of unlimited power and disembodied immortality, that recognizes and celebrates finitude as a condition of human being, and that understands human life is embedded in a material world of great complexity, one on which we depend for our continued survival.” (5)

In describing her vision of the future relations between information, theory, and theorists in terms of fantasy, seduction, and dreams, N. Katherine Hayles taps into an undercurrent of aspirational idealism that is as palpable in many contemporary examinations of the twentieth century’s evolving theories of information as in the documents and practices of the time. Most obvious in the work of futurists like Ray Kurzweil, who describes, in glowing terms, the possibility that “information-based technologies will encompass all human knowledge and proficiency, ultimately including the … emotional and moral intelligence of the human brain itself” (8) this tendency to romanticize the disembodied flow of information is also apparent within more intellectual histories. An emphasis on diffuse yet interconnected systems of information and collaboration can lead to a sensitive history that avoids valorizing a few great men at the expense of those around them, but it can also lead to a masked enactment of that very mistake.

In histories of the information age, two kinds of information sharing systems are foregrounded: the newly-invented media themselves (e.g. radio, television, and the internet), and the structure of relationships that led to their invention and dissemination. As Thomas Streeter reminds us in his history of American radio broadcasting, “the electronic media did not fall from the sky or emerge fully formed from a test tube; they are the product of knowledgeable people doing things in a concerted, organized way, with certain purposes in mind” (7). His formulation carefully acknowledges both the people and their collaboration, avoiding the trap that Hayles cautions against in her description of the “posthuman.” She uses this term as a kind of shorthand for a point of view that “privileges informational pattern over material instantiation” (2), one she locates both in theories of cybernetics and in the literary and historical documents that surround those theories. Within the historical documents, “informational pattern” may refer to the networks of theoreticians and inventors who create the media, and “material instantiation” to the individual actors within those networks.

Extrapolated into the future dystopian world of Craig Baldwin’s “Spectres of the Spectrum,” that network of innovators, experimenters, programmers, and who-knows-who-else becomes a shadowy, ill-defined enemy, a media conspiracy called the “New Electromagnetic Order” that threatens to destroy the possibility of memory. In Baldwin’s vision of the future, embodied individualism is literally destroyed by this emphasis on interconnection; information sharing leads not to productive diversity, but to assimilation. Kurzweil’s singularity is Baldwin’s nightmare. In his version of the past, eccentric inventors like Nikola Tesla are portrayed as the naïve victims of a military-industrial complex that sought to assimilate their insights and inventions while denying them either formal or financial recognition. Here, this particular kind of inter-institutional information sharing is understood as a problematic necessity, contributing to a dominant hegemony rather than preventing it.

In competing histories of that same past, the collaboration between academic institutions, businesses, and the government is figured in much more utopian terms, as a kind of open-source ideal. In Why The American Century?, Olivier Zunz writes about an “institutional matrix of sponsoring universities, professional associations, churches, corporations, state and local governments, foundations, labor unions, and others” (26), a “diffuse national research establishment,” and a “radio empire connecting science, business, and the military,” as democratizing, practical influences that “defined new possibilities” and “stood in the way of special agendas” (17-19). Even the loaded phrase “military-industrial complex,” though used only twice in the entire history, is given unusually positive connotations, described as an institution that “Americans naturally credited … for serving democracy” (166).The individuals that Baldwin celebrates disappear into the institutions that sponsored them, as in Zunz’s brief history of radio, which lauds the Navy’s influence in the development of the medium, and among private-sector innovators, names only David Sarnoff, the former head of RCA whose rapid rise up the industrial ladder can be perhaps attributed more to his people skills than his technical ones. Though the informational pattern is the focus of Zunz’s analysis, one charismatic man is still credited with having created and maintained each instance of that pattern.

A single charismatic man also lies at the center of Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture, a book that attempts to write equally about “[Stewart] Brand’s unique individual talents, the networking tactics he employed, and the increasing influence of the networks he helped build” (8). Though Turner argues that the “flourishing of nonhierarchical, interdisciplinary collaboration” he chronicles was first conceived within “a fabric of military-industrial-academic collaborations that has persisted to this day” (18), his primary focus is on the countercultural movements that spawned first the Whole Earth Catalog and then various online and business communities, culminating in Wired Magazine. These he describes as intentional communities, hand-picked groups of cultural figures that grew not out of an organic process of information exchange and cross-pollination, but out of the mind of one man: Stewart Brand. Though Turner nods to the fact that this emphasis on the network can function perversely as a hero-making rhetorical move, where “those who could most successfully depict themselves as aligned with the forces of information could also claim to be models of those forces” (260), this does not prevent him from being captivated both by Brand’s idealistic rhetoric and by the force of his singular personality.

Each of these histories struggles with the tension between historicizing the disembodied flow of information and recognizing the embodied persons who produce, transmit, engage, and utilize that information. Other writers, such as Lawrence Lessig, have focused on the material networks over which that information is transmitted, bringing physicality into their histories not by focusing on specific persons, but by focusing on the technical structures of information flow. Still, Lessig’s own cult of personality should not be ignored; within the community of those concerned with the future of the internet and copyright, he is undoubtedly more famous than most of the people he writes about. Like Stewart Brand, Lessig operates as a figurehead for a diffuse network of thinkers, capitalizing on his own personal charm and intelligence in an attempt to promote information systems that de-emphasize the individual. The paradox here is palpable, and potentially inescapable. Yet Hayles’s sense that we must attend to the complexity of embodiment is instructive here. Rather than understanding this as an imperative to isolate the individual from whom the rhetoric issues or who best embodies the ideals of a movement, we might take it as an enjoinder to attend to the multiplicity of ways in which the ideals are embodied, experiences ranging from active participants in these intellectual exchanges to the outliers who benefit from them.

cover art

There are even more now. Always a sucker for interesting cover art, I was pretty much delighted when I found this collection of fake book covers a month or two ago (maybe via Maud Newton? I'm not sure), and am delighted again to have revisited it (via Bookslut this time, for sure) today.

Of course the covers are by turns gorgeous and silly and wonderful, but I think the thing I like most about them is the fact that they (by virtue of being imitations but not quite parodies or even derivative works) do such a wonderful job of illustrating and commenting on the conventions of cover art.

Only sort of related: There's nothing quite like finding a blog you love long after its owner has stopped updating. Judge a book is gorgeous, but I'm pretty sure it's over.

clueless

Yet another reason to love xkcd.

Found this on Feministe this morning, which is a lovely example of the way that all my favorite corners of the internet connect.

While reading through the post, I kept trying to think of major moneymaking films coming out in the next year that might reinforce or undermine the statistics. The only one I could think of off the top of my head (and I admit, I don't really follow mainstream movies) is the Sex and the City movie. And while I'm not really a fan of the show, it did make me pause and consider the fact that (despite its many, many flaws), it is pretty damn cool that a show primarily about the friendship between women was so successful and has spawned one of the year's most anticipated movies.

I'd like to think it's progress, but I'll wait to pass judgment until the thing is out. After all, there's probably still time for Hollywood to find a male lead to shoehorn into top billing.

password

via Maud Newton, a list that reminds me overwhelmingly of one of the best scenes in Hackers. I don't think there's any overlap between the two lists (what are the passwords: god, sex, love, power, password and the user's own name?), but the idea is essentially the same. Humans are a remarkably predictable breed.

in french, the word for vacation is always plural

What I read on my summer vacation:

Oh, man, do I have a crush on Scarlett Thomas. I've already blogged about reading PopCo, and I plan to write something soon about The End of Mr. Y, but for vacation, I turned to her genre fiction. Dead Clever was perfect airplane reading, almost good enough to make up for being stuck in the middle seat on a red eye.

Originally published under the pseudonym of Sally Mara, We Always Treat Women Too Well isn't one of Queneau's more famous books, but I had been wanting to read it for a while. Every bit as smutty and violent as the pulp novels it satirizes, it's also ridiculously funny, and at times startlingly disgusting. In short, awesome.

Lots of Josephine Tey: Brat Farrar, The Man in the Queue, and To Love and Be Wise. As I told my mom, I only read mysteries when I'm on vacation. In response, she handed me a pile of these old paperbacks, culled from yard sales and sidewalk book stalls. She's a good mom.

Amazon has been recommending Snow, by Orhan Pamuk, to me for months. They were kind of right. I can't deny that it's a good book, smart, beautifully written and thought provoking, but, all the same, it's not really my thing.

Reading mysteries on vacation is all very well, but reading mysteries in French makes you look so much smarter. Plus, having a glossary in the back makes it easier. Hence, my dad's old copy of Tournants Dangereux, by Georges Simenon.

Last but not least, Shelley Jackson's Half Life made the plane ride back feel almost short. I saw her read from it a few months ago, and have been wanting to read it ever since. Thanks to a late birthday present, I finally go to. Now I want to read it again. Her writing is so dense and vivid and weird and wonderful; it's the kind of thing you just want to immerse yourself in.

(Next up, books I got on my summer vacation, but haven't yet read.)

break 'em

I would say that Bookslut always makes me happy, but there was a review one time that made me so angry I had to send them an email. Later that day, Jessa Crispin herself (!) wrote back, with the perfect response. She hadn’t liked the offensive phrase either, but doesn’t believe in censoring her columnists. The result was, luckily, wonderful, but there was a moment or two there when I was displeased. Hence, they mostly make me happy, where mostly is a value of just slightly more than ninety-nine percent of the time.

At the moment, though, I couldn’t love the site more, thanks to a wonderful feature on the dangers of over-specialization, a feature that urges us all to diversify our written works, and does so in a way that can’t have been calculated just to appeal to me particularly, but works as well as if it had been. Ah, the well-crafted call to be more like Carole Maso. It gets me every time.

speak, memory

Wednesday morning, I finished Mauve Desert [verdict: awesome; now I want to read it in French], and started Reading Lolita in Tehran. It seemed like a good palate cleanser between bouts of the avant-garde, and certainly appropriate to read on the fourth of July. I had also recently been reminded of it by M. Bérubé's summary of some of the controversy surrounding the book, and was intrigued enough to pull it off the shelf.

It was given to me as a gift some time ago (Christmas? My last birthday? I'm not sure.), and it seems, on the surface of it, like a book I'd like a lot. It's literary, feminist, and political, a memoir about the personal and political implications of the ways in which women can relate not just to each other, but also to books. But my disinterest in the book hinges on one single word in that sentence: memoir. It is not a scholarly text, and those who criticize it for its simplicity, readability, or careful plotting miss the point. This is pop politics, pop literature, pop feminism; it's not a carefully disguised attempt to provoke or calm anti-Iran sentiment, rather it is the story of one woman's life in Iran.

When memoirs succeed, it is because they describe lives that are unlike the readers', lives that intrigue, challenge, and surprise. A memoir should leave the reader with more questions than answers, more impetus than satisfaction. Nafisi's book is lovely, interesting, and it details a life full of literature, subversion, and unrest. It raises important questions, and whatever its agenda, I think that's valuable. That said, it has made me think more about the nature of the memoir than about anything else, and I can't help but wonder why a woman who has invested so much of herself into fiction has chosen to write not a novel, but a memoir.

She seems to be attempting to situate this book somewhere between fiction and a persuasive and personal essay, and I end up wishing she'd written either one or the other. Certainly I'm oversimplifying the above, and perhaps this is simply because I'm someone who doesn't understand the essential truthiness of the genre, but memoirs just don't do it for me. The exceptions to the rule are few, but they do, of course, include the book from which this post steals its title.