The Dialectics of Digital Collectivity

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The Dialectics of Digital Collectivity

• Harry Halpin
• University of Edinburgh
• http//www.ibiblio.org/hhalpin

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The Californian Ideology

• The greatest obstacle in understanding digital
  technology is the promise of the utopian
  technological future, which far from illuminating
  technology, merely serves as an ideological
  closure that masks the material and cognitive
  relationship between humanity and technology.
• Dubbed Californian Ideology by Barbrooke.

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The Return of History

• The negation of futurism can be found in what
  Jameson terms in The Political Unconsciousness
  the one absolute and we may even say
  'transhistorical' imperative to always
  historicize.
• It is precisely this failure of technology to be
  historically understood allows it to be
  identified as a miraculous autonomous essence.

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Objectification and Dialectics

• From Hegel emerges the central mechanism of the
  dialectic, the notion of objectification.
• The notion of objectification is far from
  idealistic, but instead is a purely material one,
  the creation of objects by the externalization of
  modes of abstract thought.

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Dialectics and Technology

• As articulated by Andy Clark, is that these
  externalized tools can then be internalized so
  that the tool itself is part of our being,
  incorporated into ourselves in such a seamless
  way that we do not even recognize it as a tool.
• Since the initial externalization of our thought
  as technology is always wanting in comparison to
  the problems thrown our way by the world (and the
  problems created by the technology itself), even
  after we have internalized the technology we must
  then externalize technology again.

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Time, Space, and Collectivity

• The dialectic of collectivity and individuality,
  and the dialectic between time and space.
• The former dialectic allows ever richer sharing
  between humans mediated by their externalized
  tools, and so their own sense of self becoming
  moving from individual to collective. The latter
  dialectic between time and space subsumes
  temporal-spatial dimensionality at bequest of
  ever lower latency of the human and the machine,
  and so their increasingly tighter coupling.

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Time-Sharing The First Moment

• The first moment in the technological dialectic
  towards ever decreasing latency between humans
  and machines was the creation of interactive
  computing by McCarthy through time-sharing that
  took advantage of the fact that the computer,
  despite its centralized single processor, could
  run multiple program at once in a non-linear
  fashion, so instead of idling while waiting for
  the next program or human interaction, in moments
  nearly imperceptible to the human eye, it would
  share its time among multiple humans.

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The Moment of Space The Net

• This led Licklider, inspired by symbiosis in
  the natural world, to get a position as director
  of the IPTO (Information Processing Technologies
  Office) at ARPA to push an agenda of man-machine
  symbiosis by funding a network of time-sharing
  computers.
• Licklider's lieutant Bob Taylor and his successor
  Larry Roberts contracted out BBN to create the
  Interface Message Processor, the hardware needed
  connect the various time-sharing computers across
  the USA.

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Man-Machine Symbiosis

• The fig tree is pollinated only by the insect
  Blastophaga grossorun. The larva of the insect
  lives in the ovary of the fig tree, and there it
  gets its food. The tree and the insect are thus
  heavily interdependent the tree cannot reproduce
  wit bout the insect the insect cannot eat wit
  bout the tree together, they constitute not only
  a viable but a productive and thriving
  partnership. This cooperative "living together in
  intimate association, or even close union, of two
  dissimilar organisms" is called symbiosis.
• Man-computer symbiosis is a subclass of
  man-machine systems. There are many man-machine
  systems. At present, however, there are no
  man-computer symbioses. The purposes of this
  paper are to present the concept and, hopefully,
  to foster the development of man-computer
  symbiosis by analyzing some problems of
  interaction between men and computing machines,
  calling attention to applicable principles of
  man-machine engineering, and pointing out a few
  questions to which research answers are needed.
  The hope is that, in not too many years, human
  brains and computing machines will be coupled
  together very tightly, and that the resulting
  partnership will think as no human brain has ever
  thought and process data in a way not approached
  by the information-handling machines we know
  today. Licklider, 1960

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The Moment of Collectivities

• Via time-sharing, users could share resources,
  and digital collectivity emerged for the first
  time.
• The network was to defeat the confines of space,
  and by its ability to encompass all networks via
  the software of TCP/IP to create the
  universalizing Internet.

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The Human Augmentation Project

• Engelbart, one of Licklider's researchers,
  realized that one of the the primary reasons for
  the high latency between the human and machine
  the interface of the machine itself, as the
  keyboard was at best a limited channel for
  machinic communication. In the course of
  meticulous experimentation in search of low
  latency, Engelbart invented the mouse.

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Engelbart and Collective Intelligence

• Man's population and gross product are increasing
  at a considerable rate, but the complexity of his
  problems grows still faster, and the urgency with
  which solutions must be found becomes steadily
  greater in response to the increased rate of
  activity and the increasingly global nature of
  that activity....

by "augmenting human intellect" we mean
increasing the capability of a man to approach a
complex problem situation, to gain comprehension
to suit his particular needs, and to derive
solutions to problems. Increased capability in
this respect is taken to mean a mixture of the
following more-rapid comprehension, better
comprehension, the possibility of gaining a
useful degree of comprehension in a situation
that previously was too complex, speedier
solutions, better solutions, and the possibility
of finding solutions to problems that before
seemed insoluble
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Xerox PARC

• The temporal dimension returned for as soon as
  many users logged onto a single time-sharing
  machine the latency between each individual user
  and the machine increased.
• The vision of the personal computer invented at
  Xerox PARC sought to resolve this contradiction
  by giving each user his own high-speed personal
  machine whose latency would be uniform,
  regardless of time of use.

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Atomization and the Ethernet

• Yet the personal computer sacrificed the
  important functions of networking and
  collectivity that existed in time-sharing
  machines.
• Ethernet, local high-speed networking of
  personal computing, allowed the personal computer
  to go beyond its individual isolation, so letting
  computers join networks and establish
  collectivity without the drawbacks of
  time-sharing.

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The World-Wide Web Universalizing Information
Space

• With both the personal computer and the Internet
  permeating society, Tim Berners-Lee of CERN
  invented the World Wide Web as a universalizing
  information space, created by a singular naming
  convention that subsumed the chaos of previous
  Internet software.

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Web 2.0 Collectivity on the Web

• However, the hypertext web had few authors and
  many users, and was an individualizing
  experience. This was superseded by the Web 2.0,
  which is merely the development of the Web to
  allow contribution and modification, and so
  making the Web a truly collective space.
• The Semantic Web hopes to make the Web a truly
  universal space by giving URIs to things not
  accessible on the Web.

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Latency and the Self

• With ever lower latency provided by the
  penetration of wireless and broadband, the
  universalizing information space of the Web is
  now a constant feature of our form of life, and
  our knowledge is more and more externalized and
  common.

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Against Embodiment

• Could it be that the humanist individual is a
  historical notion, not even a coherent
  transcendental and biological category.
• So that the focus on embodiment as in having a
  body and in having irreducible context is
  ultimately a reactionary notion?
• After all, coffee-cups are embodied.

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The Future of Collectivity

• Collective Intelligence as the seamless social
  power of what Pierre Levy defines as a form of
  universally distributed intelligence, constantly
  enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting
  in the effective mobilization of skills.
• Which might just be our last best hope today in
  the face of ecological and social collapse.

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Late Capitalism

• Technology is the concretization of our social
  relationships, which have gone from being
  post-human (Hayles) to anti-human (Althusser).
• Due to this lack of self-consciousness,
  collective intelligence is today held in check by
  more primitive social forms of the late
  capitalism and the accompanying ideological form
  of modern techno-futurism.

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Questions?

• Merci!