Cybernotes: A Chart to Accompany an Earlier Post

A seriation chart from N. Katherine Hayles’s, “How we Became Posthuman,” illustrating conceptual developments within cybernetics.

(See earlier post)

Autonomia Film Series

email translatingpuissance at riseup dot net for directions

“Autonomy has no frontiers. It is a way of eluding the imperatives of production, the verticality of institutions, the traps of political representation, the virus of power…Autonomy is a way of acting collectively. It is made up of a number of organs and fluid organizations characterized by the refusal to separate economics from politics, and politics from existence.”

– Sylvere Lotringer, “The Return of Politics”

We know that we have inherited concepts of life and of struggle – of revolution, really – that cohere in no way to our real experiences.  Revolution as a seizure of power, as the overthrow of one government for another, as a discreet event with a start and end date – so many ways to describe what so often amounts to little more than a type of law-creating violence. Since 2008, and more frequently since 2011,  a new intelligence has been building itself in the plazas, at the barricades, in the masked demonstrations and strange occupations. We place ourselves in this history as students of the era but also as partisans inside of it.

We would like to look at a previous cycle of struggles which took place in Italy from roughly 1969 to roughly 1977. Autonomia spread from the factories to the universities and then everywhere else. Tens of thousands of workers and young people refused the discipline of the factories and universities and fought with their union representatives to shut down production, to occupy buildings, to strike and riot, to publish text and operate pirate radios, and to spread this tension throughout the society as an everyday reality.

We’d like to visit a few films from and about this era and we would love for you to join us. The first film we will be watching is “The Working Class Goes to Heaven,” by Elio Petri.

Unfinished: “The Politics of Catastrophization”

Some scattered notes on the essay “the Politics of Catastrophization” by Adi Ophir, taken from the book “Contemporary States of Emergency.”

 

TWO TIERS OF CATASTROPHIZATION

• This phrase (catastrophization) is a neologism in pyschology which refers to an anxiety disorder in which mildly negative events are thought to have globally catastrophic effects.
• Psychologists see catastrophe as an individual disorder but politicians see “objective” catastrophes.

• A sudden rise in…the ‘volume of evils’ and an accompanying decline in the means to deal with them…a process in which natural and man-made forces and factors work together to create devastating effects on a large population. [p.60]

• We are far removed of purely natural catastrophe.
• Today, entire regions are catastrophized.
• “Catastrophization” =/= Catastrophe
• Catastrophization transforms space and time. Catastrophes leave a mark on space and time.

C = Catastrophe, C1 = Catastrophization

• In a C, space is deterritorialized and a “zone of disaster” is reterritorialized inside of it. Order crumbles, normalcy dissolves, movements and communication are reduced.
• In a C, time is marked off as a terrible present from a peaceful past “before it all happened,” and a future “when it’s over…”
• In a C, one can only imagine a “leap” into the future.
• Time is transformed into sequences of waiting for a new normalcy.
• This temporality is partly objective given the ruins and frequency of “event.” Waiting becomes torture.
• C1 is different. It is a process not an event.
• C1 is often imperceptible.
• During C1, C is imminent and therefore has not happened. This suspended state produces the urgency of an emergency but with the power of political manipulation and mythology.

• C1 is a discourse of government. But there are still two connotations:
  1. An object of interest to governors who use C1to control people, places, things.
  2. A process made to appear, take shape, and assume specific dimensions through a discourse that articulates all evil as imminently catastrophic

  These two connotations are practically inseperable.

• (1) is “objective” – it occurs when people cause massive devastation. (2) is discursive. It happens when accidents or failures or violences are named in a fashion which lends them an urgent temporality such as “humanitarian emergency,” “catastrophe,” or “natural disaster.”
• Through (2), naming and describing events, (1) can happen. Intervention and manipulation of people, places, and things.
• The discursive is not a distortion of the “real.” It is the conceptual precondition for action.
• Actual and discursive C1 may occur at the same time but there is always a gap between the two.
  

  Often, discourse records what nature, governments, and other powerful agencies have caused or have failed to do, and traces their policies and actions in the debris they leave behind. [p.64]

• Less often, discursive C1 precedes an actual event thus preparing or mitigating the events or at least pretending to.
• The gap between (1) and (2) is not only temporal. Acts or inaction may cause quick or gradual C for populations. If this is caused by government, the effects are hidden or quickly explained. C1, then, would inspect and map out these effects to create a “continuous gaze” so an emergency can be named later or can be named “on the verge.”
• In this sense, C1 is meant to redefine the “normal” as dangerous and intolerable and to mobilize assistance based on this. This is how a demand for an exceptional situation is created.

US [//THRESHOLD//] DISASTER

It may have already been crossed, with or without notice, it may be declared as imminent or too close, but in any case, by the very fact that it has been stated, invoking the crossing of this imaginary threshold is an appeal for an exceptional response. [p.64]

• C1 imposes a focal point of attention:

1. The Future
2. Unfolding
3. Protracted and not perceived

 

“Disaster lies in the future”

• Anticipation and preparedness are mobilized to ward off or survive a threat.

“Disaster is unfolding.”

• Patterns of expansion must be monitored and contained. Effects must be mitigated.

“Disaster is protracted and not perceived or experienced as such”

• The long-term deterioration or impoverished living conditions of a population must be articulated and it’s results coped with.

Discursive C1 may legitimize the political generation of a C and mobilized people to take part in it. [p.65]

• This is perceived as an attempt to mitigate effects and reallocate risk. May suspend a C by promoting surveillance over the source of a C.

LEGITIMIZATION

• By portraying an enemy as an agent of C, C1 discourse creates political tolerance for the use of catastrophic preventive repression. Example: racial discourse C1 the presence of the other and satisfies destructive force on the grounds that a race is imminently and naturally dangerous. Furthermore, the security of one group may justify, by itself, the elimination of another.

 

MITIGATION AND REALLOCATION OF RISK

• C1 discourse may be used as a “call to arms” to everyone. It designates restructuring to “decatastrophize” via the social compulsion.
  These strategies are:

1. Containment
2. Preparedness
3. Mitigation

• Demarcating a threshold forces those outside a territory into “out of focus.”

SUSPENSION

• The “out of focus” threshold serves as a border for government. If government goes there, they risk delegitimizing themselves for collusion with the enemy or for not taking care of those they abandoned.

They C1, but they wish to keep the C itself in suspension, not removing its threat or its causes, and at the same time not letting something that may be grasped as a C happen either. [p.67]

• This suspension creates collusion between the C1 forces and those producing the C1 discourse. They are normally opposed but now they share a desire to denaturalize and deactualize the C.
  Example: Israeli occupation in Palestine. Controlled C that is named as such. This naming justifies more control.

THRESHOLD AND EXCEPTION

• Discursive C1 is not the same as reflecting on a past event, ie counting dead bodies after Katrina. It is not the same as taking account, trying to understand etc.
• Since WWII, and especially since end of Cold War, C1 has been depoliticized and now appears almost only in statistical jargon.
• The common thread is the need for urgency. This presentation does not appear for analysis of “natural” conditions.
• Humanitarian groups often see stats quantitatively and use only numbers to determine urgency.Example: Tuberculosis is an emergency because it kills 2 million people per year.
• The most important feature of C1: to determine when a threshold has been crossed and to invoke exceptional action.
• Sometimes a “state of alert” is invoked before the line has even been crossed in order to avoid it. Thus, a double threshold: the emergency, and then the threat of emergency.

A legally, politically, or governmentally declared state of exception, like the humanitarian alert, is meant to avert or preempt a true state of exception. [p.71]

• NGO’s have demonopolized exceptional power away from the sovereign. In humanitarian perspective, the human condition itself is the catastrophe.
• p.71 – “complex humanitarian emergencies” are indifferent to the source of evil.
• Operationalizing humanitarian emergencies is aimed at sovereign power. It names a territory that needs to be made more governable.

11.30.2013
C. Amen

CYBERNOTES: N. Katherine Hayles’s “Cybernetics”

-Cybernetics flourished in the academy from 1940-1970 but then spilled out to become both everywhere and nowhere.
-Gordon Pask’s definition of cybernetics: the field concerned with information flows in all media.
There are three orders of cybernetics which correspond to certain years, but we are moving into a fourth.

1st order Cybernetics 1943-1960

• Cybernetics came to be when the idea of the feedback loop was joined with a modern concept of information in the 20th century. The Feedback loop is the process by which information from the past or present influences the same phenomenon in the present of future.
• Two key papers published in 1943 “Behavior, Purpose, Technology” by Roseunbluth Wiener and Bigelow and “A Logical Calculation of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity” by McCulloch and Pitts.
• Envisioned as a framework that would cover both biological and mechanical systems.
• The Macy Conferences occurred between 43-52 and focused on the legitamacy of machine-animal-human comparisons. Basic mechanical models of animals were used to draw comparisons with more complex human and animal systems.Electric Rat, Moth, Tortoise.
• ”Logical” paper proved a theorem about a neuron model to make a proposition that could be proved universal by a turing machine. Which was basically a model that could simulate the logic of a computer algorithim.
• That neurons could perform computational acts was justification for both machines and humans being cybernetic.
• Information theory of Shannon and Wiener was to decontextualize information, which took away meaning. This allowed information to be seen as a flow that could move between different embodiments and substrates.
• Lead to idea that the brain could be uploaded.
• McKay argued that context and embodiment were important. Model lost out because it was unable to be quantified at this stage.
• Contradiction of cybernetics between need for simple model for quantification and a more complete, harder to quantify model, which was richer and fuller.
• Organism/mechanism separate from environment.

2nd order Cybernetics 1960-1985

• Introduced observer as a part of the system. Book Observing Systems lol. von Foerster.
• Autopoetic Theory: Takes account of the observer in a negative way, distinguishing between what an observer can perceive and what the system produces for itself. Events outside the system can produce events inside but no information passes from environment to system. It reconnected meaning but only reflexively.

3rd Order Cybernetics 1985-??

• A virtuality.
• Media transmit, store, process information. Human and animal bodies are media. The construction of the body as informational medium takes the form of bodies closely tied with other media. The web. Smartphones.
• This doesn’t look like far off cyberspace of a constructed and limited virtual plane. Virtual information is placed over physical locations and objects. Virtuality and actuality create mixed reality through their fluid mixing and seamless transitions.
• Sterling proposes neologism “Spime” Virtual/actual entities that can be traced through space and time. Shifts from object as primary reality, to data in computational environments. The spime is “a set of relations first and always, and an object every now and then.”
• Completes Pasks definition as flows in all environments become important.
• also tries to take into account how observer is constructed socio-linguistically,
• Limit of autopoetic systems as complex systems are capable of evolving.

——-
Cybernetics reconfigures boundaries.
-1st order changed boundary between biological and machine, placed observer outside.
-2nd Placed observer into system.
-3rd Located both within complex environments through which information and data are flowing.

Fredkin claims that the universe is a giant computer
-creates reality through computational processes that at it embodies and is.
-Shift from flows to computational processes. Meaning of information only comes from processes that interpret it. Information is processual and contextual.
-Mechanisms of interpretation give context. From binary to C++ to screen to brain.
-This allows for a reintroduction of Mackays theory of information. Meaning must include “full basic symbol complex.”
-Interpretation no longer occurs only in consciousness. Becomes a multi-layered distributed activity of finding relation between local and context specific inputs and outputs.
-Breaking apart interpretation allows for partly quantifiable data.
-Sees local contexts not just as contributing to conscious thoughts but as acts of interpreting and meaning themselves. (neural responses, fatigue rates, voltage, etc.)

Then the question of what cybernetics can offer media studies comes up. Media is defined through four principles of analysis: technology, semiotics, social contexts, materiality.
-Three contributions of cybernetics to media studies
-Feedback loop joined with quantitative information flows (social contexts).
-Framework for analyzing control and communication in animals, humans, and machines (semiotics)
-Artifacts to institute these ideas. (material and technology)

In computational media cybernetics and media cocreate each other. Technologies of today place computation as the language of nature, not math.
-Complex, adaptive systems cannot be modeled by equations, but only simulations.
-Recursive feedback loops everywhere.
-Asks if computers aren’t the most ‘natural’ thing of all.

Computational media and humans coevolve to constitute one another in the technogenesis. Where this is going is in debate.
-Transhumanists like Kurzwell and Moravec.
-Brooks says it will be long, or maybe not possible to singularity.
-Fukuyama wants to police the borders between body and cybernetic technology.

Hayle argues that the singularity hypothesis downplays the enormous difference between humans and computers. Technogenesis has always been a force shaping humanity.

CYBERNOTES: Tiqqun’s The Cybernetic Hypothesis (Incomplete)

I

The history of domination is a series of master-fictions. Contrary to what is believed by most social theorists, the contemporary master-fiction is no longer the liberal hypothesis, but rather the cybernetic hypothesis.

Catholicism

1618-1648 Thirty Years War: the beginning of the skepticisms regarding the individual and society, from which the cybernetic hypothesis later arose

The Liberal Hypothesis

The Liberal Hypothesis, opposed to the religious principles of the times, was first expressed by Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees on the first day of the 18th century and later influenced Adam Smith:

Prosperity, the social order, and politics depends on the pursuit by each individual of his own interests. Private vices are the guarantees of the common good.

The liberal hypothesis assumes the metaphysics of the subject, the idea of the individual, and the idea of the society.

The “humanist pathos” proliferated since the 1940s is an attempt to keep the liberal hypothesis alive by extending it to every situation.

Period of Crisis of the Liberal Hypothesis

1. 1914, WWI began: end of the idea of the individual and the metaphysics of the subject
2. 1917, the Bolshevik “revolution”: historical contention of the liberal hypothesis
3. 1940, WWII: totalitarian self destruction brought the end of the idea of society.

Bloom and totalitarianism were the limit experiences of modernity.

Problem: The crisis of presence and the forces of decomposition destabilized the idea of social totality and society.

Question: How will society be defended?
The desire for totality was not nostalgic at this point, but forward-thinking and productive. In so far as the desire was for totality, it was related to the Holisms of mysticism, Durkheim, functionalists, and Marxists.

Goals: Modernity (whether conceived as liberalism, or as  totalitarianism, or as a regime of disciplinary powers) must be contained and suppressed by cybernetics. Escape routes that were left open by the liberal frameworks of norms, apparatuses, and natural laws — in other words, anomalous permutations that could not be anticipated by the liberal framework — must be contained by cybernetics.

The cybernetic gesture is the negation of everything that escapes regulation. In other words, the cybernetic project is the establishment of a true totality.

The Cybernetic Hypothesis

“Cybernetics” comes from the Greek word kubernesis, which means “piloting”.

Principles of the Cybernetic Hypothesis:

1. Biological, physical, and social behaviors are something integrally programmed and reprogrammable.
2. Individual behavior is piloted by the need for the survival of the system that makes it possible.
3. Cybernetics is animated by an offensive conception of politics.
4. Cybernetics integrates both normalization and regulation, which previously developed alone.
5. Cybernetics operates through both “techniques of separation” or the “police of qualities“, and “techniques of totalization” or “the social production of society“.

Foucault’s alternative genealogy of Cybernetics:

1. Found in the Hellenistic model of governance, contained within the figure of the Prince; based on (1) healing, (2) governance of others, and (3) governance of the self.
2. During the 16th century, these principles were split.
3. At the end of the 20th century, piloting became the basic metaphor for all human activity.

The Cybernetic Hypothesis as a master-fiction is best expressed in Deutsch’s 1953 The Nerves of Government:

1. Sovereign power is obsolete.
2. Government consists in the rational coordination of flows of information and decisions that circulate through the social body.
3. The following are therefore required:
   • System of information capturers
   • Systems of information handling
   • Proximity to every living community
4. Communications is therefore the source and destination of all power. [This is the establishment of a complete circuit — in other words, the end of politics.]

Cybernetics is therefore oriented against all that exists, all that lives, and all that is lasting.

II

context: cybernetics’ sites of emergence

The period between the Great Wars was characterized by the metaphysical problem of creating order out of disorder.
How could law be re-established after chaos? How could the certain be re-established after the probable?

Cybernetics is the answer to several different forms of the problem of uncertainty which arose during the 20th century:

1. (19th century) controversy between mechanist and organicist visions of the future
2. (first half of 20th century) Collapse of the scientific edifice built of Newtonian determinism
3. (WWII) How could the head of the social body be saved in the case of [nuclear] catastrophe?
4. (WWII) Military strategists could establish the position of enemy planes, but could not anticipate the behavior of enemy planes.
5. (WWII) The world was struck by a “Great Fear” of the destruction of the world and of the destruction of the species.
6. (1930s) The project of establishing a logical basis of mathematics and the project of unifying the sciences seemed doomed to incompletion.
   • (1931) Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theorems
   • with the help of Heisenberg, more than a century of positivist justifications had collapsed
   • Von Neumann’s assertion that the logical crisis of mathematics is evidence of the mark of imperfection of all human creations

cybernetic solutions

1. The cybernetic approach to the above problems is best exemplified by Norbert Weiner’s solution to the problem (4) of not only establishing the positions of enemy planes but also anticipating their behaviors. Norbert Weiner: How to master uncertainty? = How to control systems?
   
   • The problem of uncertainty is a problem of information.
   • Consider the object and subject of knowledge as parts of a whole, i.e. of a system. The problem of uncertainty in terms of information is therefore a problem of a gap of information between effective and desired behaviors.
   • Controlling a system requires the institution of optimum circulation of information, i.e. feed-back or retro-action.
   • The control of a system requires the institution of optimum communication between relevant parties.
   • Mastering uncertainty is therefore a problem of effectively representing and memorizing the past.
2. The controversy between mechanistic and organicist visions of the future (problem 1)  is resolved by the functionalist analogy between living organisms and machines, equivocated as systems.
3. Cybernetics turned out to be the best expression of the unity of the sciences (problem 5). This unity is the basis for the method of “verification” proper to the cybernetic “hypothesis”, i.e. the mutual affirmation of theory and technology.
   • (technology) 1943 Manhattan Project: simultaneous development of the atomic bomb and the modern computer
   • (theory) Von Neumann united cybernetics and computer science
   • (theory) analogy between descriptive categories of machines, living organisms, and Weiner’s categories
   • (theory/technology) The instrument of cybernetics is the Model, the visual form of reasoning, and the correspondent declaration that everything can and should be modeled.
   • (theory/technology) 1948 Weiner’s Thermodynamics: compared the effect of time on an energy system to the effect of time on an information system.
   • (theory) 1950s-1980s “Systems” metaphor, referring to the nervous system, transformed into “Networks” metaphor, referring to the neuronal network.
   • (theory) “Cybernetics is the assimilation of the totality of the phenomena that exist into brain phenomena… The mind is posited as alpha and omega of the world.”
   • (theory) Unity of life, language, and thought
   • (technology) 1960s Hebert Simons’ “thinking automaton” handled information to solve any problem
   • (technology) 1972 invention of General Problem Solver (GPS)

the cybernetician’s project

Upon understanding everything as systems, the cybernetician encounters the omnipresent problem of entropy.

“A system, to the extent that it is a system, is never pure and perfect. There is a degradation of its energy to the energy that it undergoes exchanges, in the same way that information degrades as it is circulated around.”

Cybernetics is therefore oriented against the decomposition of life, the disequilibrium of the economy, and the dissolution of social bonds.

The cybernetician’s project is to “fight entropy threatening living beings, machines, and societies, to create the experimental conditions necessary for a permanent revitalization, endlessly restoring the integrity of the whole.”

the relationship between cybernetics and capitalism

After the end of the 1960s, this “second cybernetics” is no longer a mere laboratory experiment, but a social experiment.”

The goal of cybernetics is to construct a stabilized animal society.

Assumptions/implications of the cybernetic metaphysic:

• beings operate automatically
• negation of the individual
• society is understood as a plural individual

The organic composite provides the biological model for the teleology of capital.

III

For cybernetics, it is no longer a question of predicting the future, but of reproducing the present.

from liberalism to neoliberalism; from political economy to information economy

Liberal utilitarianism, the framework of classical political economy, posits the individual as a rational economic actor.

Cybernetics privileges not the static order of classical-liberal frameworks, but a dynamic self-organization aimed at the equilibrium of the social totality.

crisis of homo economicus and classical political economy

The individual cannot function fully rationally, however, without full knowledge of his activity.
1929 – 1945: questions of anticipation, forecasting
The collapse of Smith’s economics was analogous to Newtonian physics.

1944: Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s Game Theory
“The first socio-cyberneticians showed that homo economicus could only exist on the condition that there would be a total transparency of his preferences, regarding himself and others.”
Marx, “The true law of political economy is chance.”

The crisis of 20th century capitalism was a crisis of the laws of classical political economy — this is the increasing problem of information.

Against the liberal homo economicus, Van Hayek posited his theory of spontaneous mechanisms coordinating individual choices.

sociocybernetics

Goal: Invent regulation that leaves behind macroinstitutions of the state, relying instead on micromechanisms — dispositifs. This type of regulation aims toward a decentralized re-establishment of balance.

Principles:

• The fundamental law of cybernetics is that growth and control develop in inverse proportion to one another.
• concentrate on social feedback
• accept everything as constitutive of the social totality
• understand all movement as “circular causality”
• the double-bind, where contradiction and nonadaptation merge

diffuse “second cybernetics”

After the 1960s, the word “cybernetics” has continued to disappear in favor of ‘hybrid’ words. This phenomenon represents a hesitation toward theoretical unification in favor of practical unification — the institution of an “autonomous nervous system” composed of apparatuses, oriented against the ever-present threat of the disintegration of the social totality.

The crisis of the rational economic actor was resolved by grafting economic activity onto the cybernetic promise of balancing systems.

Economics thus lost its autonomy and was instrumentalized for the cybernetic project. Economics was focused on optimal market allocation of information rather than wealth.

“The market is but the instrument of a perfect coordination of players thanks to which the social totality can find a durable equilibrium. Capitalism thus becomes unquestionable, insofar as it is presented as the best possible means of producing social self-regulation.”
[We should note here that the breakdown of macroinstitutions corresponds directly to the increasing demands for self-regulation. In other places, these shifts are described in terms of the passage from “disciplinary society” to the “society of control.”]

a new politics of the subject

The cybernetic individual is nothing more than a “feedback locus”. To achieve optimum circulation of information, the individual must become the best possible conductor of social communication — in other words, the subject must be “hollowed out.”

“It’s no longer a question of removing the subject, from the traditional exterior bonds, as the liberal hypothesis had intended, but of reconstructing the social bonds by depriving the subject of all substance.”

Principles: communication and transparency

CYBERNOTES: Concise History of Computing (Incomplete)

INTRODUCTION

• It is difficult to construct a history of computers because of the way that innovation in this field is relatively constant. A decade ago, for instance, a history of computing would have focused on companies like IBM, Microsoft, Netscape etc. But today a history would have to focus on Google, Amazon, Facebook, smart phones etc.
• There are 4 primary ideas of computing history.

THE DIGITAL PARADIGM

• “Digital” is a means of sorting in which only zeros and ones are used. This is in contrast to a 0-10 scale which humans have always used (which directly refers to the amount of fingers a person has.)
• Digital logic is binary. It has developed alongside and separately from “analog” logic since the 1930’s, when both terms were invented.

CONVERGENCE

• Some believe that computers fall in a history of convergence, where techniques, devices, machines, etc., each with their own history, have come together.
• EXAMPLE: The smart phone is a TV, a radio, a phone, a camera, a computer, a teletype…

SOLID STATE ELECTRONICS

• There is another theory that development is driven, fundamentally, by advances in electronics technologies.
• See: Moore’s Law  (From Wiki: “…the observation that, over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years.” )

HUMAN-MACHINE INTERFACE

• The idea of the “human-machine” interface or, today, simply “user interface”, concerns how humans relate to digital devices in general.
• This aspect of the development of computers concerns the questions of usability but are also existential. “How does one use this? How does this effect the user? Are humans going to be replaced by this technology? Are humans being replaced by computers in general?”

CHAPTER 1: THE DIGITAL AGE

• In Spring, 1942, the US National Defense Research Committee holds a meeting with scientists to build anti-aircraft tech. Bell Labs mathematician, George Stibitz, coined the term “digital” to refer to his contribution which used calculators to fire the gun on time. Ironically, the term referred to fingers, or “digits”, although it used binary calculations.

COMPONENTS OF COMPUTING

• Mechanical aids for counting are ancient. Pascal invented a counting machine in 1642 which was more advanced than the abacus, which had been used for centuries. In the 19th century, commercial parties began to depend on such automatic calculators.
• There are two important elements to these early calculators:

1. Automatic storage and recall of digitally coded information
2. Automatic execution of stored operations

• In the 1830’s, Charles Babbage tried to build an “Analytical Engine.” Technological forces had not yet made his vision possible. An analogy could be drawn to Leonardo’s sketches of a flying machine.

Hollerith’s Punched Card

• In the 1890’s, Hollerith invented the punch card machines to store data for a US Census. The machines used electromagnets and motors but not electricity. Eventually, electrical circuits were used. This allowed for computing to occur very rapidly. Hollerith’s punch card company was purchased in 1924 by Thomas Watson who named the company IBM.
• A fundamental trait of the digital paradigm is the ability to store information for controls and calculations.
• “Automatic control” is the 3rd component of computing (the ancestor of today’s software.)
• Jacquard invented an inside-out version of a device which had been to control machines for centuries on clocks. It has wood pegs and cylinders which rotate to carry out complex operations which let the machine know what to do. Very similar to today’s “Read-Only Memory” (ROM).

Jacquard’s “Loom”, used for textiles and punch cards.

THE TECHNOLOGICAL LINEAGE BETWEEN CLOCKS, A DISCIPLINING TECHNOLOGY INVENTED BY MONKS AND USED TO CONTROL WORKERS, AND MODERN COMPUTING POWER IS DIRECTLY CONNECTED VIA THE PUNCH CARD, BELL LABS, AND DARPA.

• Page 9:Control, storage, calculation, the use of electrical or electronic circuits: these are….what make a computer.

• The 4th element of computing is communication. In the 1960’s,  DARPA took great efforts to  reorient digital computers to be inherently networked.
• In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Telephones use analog currents in which a sound wave is transferred across a line “by analogy” to the original sound. It is not digital. During WW2, Bell Labs digitally encoded it’s first phone call: between President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill as a way of encrypting their communication.

FROM TABULATOR TO COMPUTER

Tabulation and punch card operations were almost only done by women.

• Tabulator’s keep a record of how many holes punched cards have. They are simple counting machines.
• Punch cards were initially carried between machines by humans. The number of holes per column let the machine know what operation to perform. Aside from the government, railroad companies relied heavily on this method of working.
• Later, railroads used telegraphs to coordinate which punch cards to use across a large area, between stations etc. Because of the way railroads developed as essential technologies inside of capitalism for the circulation of commodities and people, they were also some of the first to use telephones. In fact, telephone poles were initially constructed alongside railroad tracks to follow the trains between stops. Today, an extremely high percentage of fiber optic cables follow railroad tracks for the internet.
• The TeleType was invented in 1914. AT&T owned it and sold equipment to offices, governments, and militaries.

ADVENT OF ELECTRONIC COMPUTING

• Computing systems reached a peak during the Great Depression. The development of machinery for computing, for cash registers, for weighing meats and foodstuffs, and for international communication between the world wars was tremendous and rapid.

This is only mentioned briefly in this book but reflects what we already know about the compulsion of capital to revolutionize productive forces for greater and greater profit and control.

CHAPTER 2: THE FIRST COMPUTERS

Turing Machine, the theoretical prototype for the computer.

• In 1937, German engineer Konrad Zuse writes:
  

  For a year now, I have been considering the concept of a mechanical brain…for every problem to be solved there must be a special purpose brain.

• Where Zuse thought to introduce theoretical math into the development of machines, Alan Turing wanted to bring “machines” – as a concept – into theoretical math.
• The computer is the “special purpose brain” which can do whatever it is coded to do. It can hold the knowledge of particular operations and also automatically allocate storage for those operations.

THE ADVENT OF ELECTRONICS

• Throughout the 30’s, IBM and others began using electrical circuits to carry signals across distances, but not to do the actual calculations themselves.
• In 1938, an Iowa State College physicist and mathematics professor began using vacuum tubes to algorithmically solve for calculations that were highly impractical to solve by humans.
• During WWII, when research in many countries had stalled out to fight the war, the UK continued to fund a research facility called Bletchley Park. There, Alan Turing and other invented a machine called “Colossus.” The existence of the technology was hidden until the 1970’s, for nearly 30 years. The machine processed text, not numbers. It was used to decrypt Nazi communications.

FIRE CONTROL

• In 1941, Norbert Weiner, an MIT professor, began researching anti-aircraft development and research which was taking off among leading scientists around the country. He wanted to be able to predict the movements of enemy aircraft via automatic control of the machines. In other words, he wanted to develop a standard by which the machines could “know” where the planes would go.
• Two Bell Labs researchers developed anti-aircraft guns that used electrical circuits as a kind of “analogue computer.”
• The guns used a camshaft that was wrapped with wire which would run geometric analysis based on the visual observations about its target. It could thus fire accurately without a human controller. The success of these guns made the ideas of self-regulation and feedback essential to digital engineering.

THE DIGITAL PARADIGM

• During the 1940’s, many existential questions were raised concerning the role of technology in human life.
• At the end of the war, Bush, an inventor, wrote an article titled “As We May Think” which proposed the invention of the “Memex.” The Memex would store and recall lots of information very quickly and would allow its user to switch topics very quickly. This device was never built but it was an extremely influential idea for the creators of the World Wide Web.
• Weiner’s book “Cybernetics” was a very influential text. It influenced many writers who’s writings had more impact then his, including William Gibson, a sci-fi writer, who coined the phrase “cyber-space.”

THE ENIAC

• Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer
• This device had 18,000 tubes and claimed to be able to predict the path of a missile faster than the missile traveled.

Endnotes: Spontaneity, Mediation, Rupture

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