Wesley Cooper

Chapter 7 Internet Culture Wesley Cooper

for surfers, a commercial space much in need of Introduction zoning, the mother of all Swiss Army knives, a tool palette for artists, a lucid dream or magic, a The internet is a magnet for many metaphors. telephone or newspaper or holodeck, a monster It is cyberspace or the matrix, the “information that has escaped DARPA’s control, the Linux superhighway” or infobahn or information hair- penguin, sliced bread, an addiction, the Grand ball, a looking-glass its users step through to Canyon, and on and on. meet others, a cosmopolitan city with tony and Before attempting to think through these shady neighborhoods, a web that can withstand metaphors, it is worthwhile to note at the outset nuclear attack, electric Gaia or God, The World that we regular users of the internet are only a Wide Wait, connective tissue knitting us into a minority, even in societies that have passed group mind, an organism or “vivisystem,” a petri through industrialization and are now exploring dish for viruses, high seas for information pirates, economies in which information technology has a battleground for a war between encrypters and become central. There are important technical, decrypters, eye candy for discreet consumers of moral, and political issues about conversion of a tsunami of pornography, a haven for vilified this minority into a majority, including whether minorities and those who seek escape from stulti- that would be a good thing, whether it is fying real-world locales, a world encyclopedia required by fairness, how much priority should or messy library or textbook or post office, chat be given to information technology in develop- “rooms” and schoolrooms and academic confer- ing countries especially relative to processes of ences, a vast playground or an office complex, a industrialization, and so forth. It is clear, how- cash cow for the dot.coms, The Widow Maker, ever, that desire for connection to the Net is not training wheels for new forms of delinquency a minority taste, something only for a military or practiced by script kiddies and warez d00des, a academic elite, but rather it corresponds closely wild frontier with very little law and order, the to the enormous demand for the ubiquitous com- glimmer in the eyes of virtual-reality creators, a puter itself at every social level. So the prospect workshop for Open Source programmers, a poll- of a global electronic metropolis, in which citizens ing booth for the twenty-first century, a market- can reliably be expected to be netizens, is not an place for mass speech, a jungle where children idle dream, or nightmare. The internet is so new are prey, a public square or global village, a mall that we don’t know yet whether it has an Aristo- or concert hall, a stake for homesteaders, a safari telian telos of some benign or malign nature, or

92 Internet Culture whether instead it will always be a loose and that the self is an outmoded social construct, disjointed Humean thing, evading every attempt and so forth. Postmodernist theory should be to discern an underlying unity. sharply distinguished from postmodern culture. Although the internet is bringing us together, The latter, however it is to be characterized in it also keeps us apart in two general ways. First, detail, is a large social fact; the former, whether time spent online is inevitably time spent in a it is true or false or meaningful or nonsensical, is greater or lesser degree of detachment from one’s precisely a theory; one can be a participant in physical surroundings, including local others. postmodern culture without espousing post- Second, the connection to distant others is itself modernist doctrine. Interpretations of postmodern a form of detachment, as coolly a matter of busi- culture, including many insightful ones, point to ness as online banking or as etiolated a form of the need for a theory of personhood and personal sociability as a chat room. The major issue about identity that does full justice to the changes in the former is simply time management. Almost us, and gives us a way of thinking constructively everyone has decided that local detachment is all about them. Many different disciplines, from right, because we do it when reading, watching philosophy to psychology, from linguistics to television, listening to music, and so forth. But sociology, from anthropology to literary studies, there are still questions about how internet use should converge so as to develop such a theory. will impact on these other forms of detachment, The internet is changing our relationship to for instance in reading less or, worse, less well. nature, not only in the way that postmodernist The latter issue is more complex. Detachment theorists emphasize, by “thickening” the layers of from distant others can be valued for purposes of images that mediate our perception of the external efficiency, as with banking, or because it affords world and our interactions with it, but also by anonymity to members of unpopular subcultures, starting to lessen the stress on nature caused by as with some chat rooms, or because one happens the technologies of the industrial revolution. The to find that level of sociability to one’s liking. two are related. The thickened layers can include There is not anything evidently wrong with any the images that constitute the emerging tech- of this, putting criminal or pathological cases aside nology of teleconferencing, and the lessened – hacking into banks, planning terrorist attacks, stress, we have reason to hope, will take the escaping from life, and so on. Perhaps the major form of reduced environmental damage caused issue about online detachment will have to do by planes, trains, and automobiles; alternatives with its transformation as more “bandwidth” gets to fossil fuel will depend, either at the research piped into our ever more versatile computers, stage or in implementation, on digital techno- giving them audiovisual and even tactile powers logy to harness the energy of the sun, the wind, to create experiences that are very different from hydrogen, and so forth. The layers can include invoking File Transfer Protocol from a command the electronic paper that is clearly visible now line to send scientific data from node A to node B. on the technological horizon, and the relief for The internet is also changing us. Users of the nature will be felt by our forests. The power of internet are not the people they would have been computer modeling should also be mentioned, a in the absence of the computer revolution. At new way of representing the world that is prov- one level this is a truism: experiences change us. ing its value for understanding, monitoring, and But many interpreters of postmodern culture, controlling natural processes, from the human the culture of postindustrial societies particularly genome to the weather; it is changing the way as influenced by information technology such as traditional sciences are undertaken as well as the internet (and computers, CDs, etc.), detect a birthing relatively new sciences such as cognitive change in us that is understated even by emphas- psychology, artificial intelligence, and nanotech- izing that our personalities have become differ- nology. These changes in the images or representa- ent. Some of these interpretations are pretentious tions that we rely upon are introducing social babble, including much theorizing that passes as changes as well, ranging from less reliance on postmodernist philosophy or psychology when the amenities of cities for educational and enter- it opines that there is nothing outside the text, tainment purposes, to new forms of populism as

93 Wesley Cooper groups organize on the internet despite lack of be . . . the thinking that inquires into the truth access to high-cost tools. The great engine of of Being and so defines man’s essential abode acculturation, schooling, is now producing genera- from Being and toward Being is neither ethics tions for whom computer use is second nature, nor ontology” (1977: 87). This chapter returns a presence in the classroom since the first year. to Heidegger under the heading of dystopian This large fact presents a challenge to the exist- inherence, making the case that Heidegger’s ence of a “mainstream culture,” since this gen- philosophy of technology does indeed betray a eration will be influenced by such various cultural significant value commitment, contrary to its aim forces that even the cultural fragmentation occa- at something more profound, a commitment that sioned by the 500-channel television will only undermines its authority as a model for under- hint at the upshot. Let this thought be the back- standing the internet. ground to the question whether the internet and The general Heideggerian idea of a value information technology not only are having im- inherent in technology is instanced in the state- pact on the larger culture, but also whether they ment that the high technology of factory farming, have a culture of their own. or “agribusiness,” is inseparable from a bad way of relating to nature, understanding it, and treat- ing it simply as something to be processed in wholesale fashion for satisfaction of human Internet Culture? appetites. Heidegger’s idea has been adopted mainly by dystopian theorists like his translator Is there internet culture, something more sub- Michael Heim, who argues in The Metaphysics stantial than shared mastery of the email or of Virtual Reality that the “Boolean logic” of chatroom “smiley,” or is that an oxymoron? Is the computer marks a “new psychic framework” the internet a tool, or something more? Is the that “cuts off the peripheral vision of the mind’s internet improving education or corrupting it? eye” and generates infomania (1993: 22, 25), Is the space of cyberspace a place to explore as he indicates in the following passage. utopian possibilities, or a wrecking yard for traditional culture, or something as neutral with Note already one telltale sign of infomania: respect to questions of value as a screwdriver? the priority of system. When system precedes These are some of the questions that a philosophy relevance, the way becomes clear for the of internet culture should address. The answers primacy of information. For it to become to be found in a large and diverse literature on manipulable and transmissible as information, the subject are classifiable as utopian, dystopian, knowledge must first be reduced to homogen- or instrumental. A utopian view sees the internet ized units. With the influx of homogenized as good, perhaps profoundly so, or at least good- bits of information, the sense of overall signi- on-balance. As dystopian, it is profoundly bad ficance dwindles. This subtle emptying of or at least bad-on-balance. And as instrumental, meaning appears in the Venn diagrams that the Net is a tool, perhaps merely a tool or at graphically display Boolean logic. (1993: 17) least a tool that does not harbor profoundly good or evil values. Heim’s profound or inherence dystopianism The notion of profundity in this trichotomy may be contrasted with on-balance or simply acknowledges the influence of Martin Heidegger balance dystopianism, exemplified by Sven on the philosophy of technology, especially his Birkerts’ The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Read- The Question Concerning Technology. Many inter- ing in an Electronic Age, and particularly by the preters of the internet have borrowed from him cost–benefit analysis of the computer revolution the idea that a technology can be inseparable from that he provides in the following passage. a value commitment. Heidegger would not have liked the term “value.” In “Letter on Humanism” We can think of the matter in terms of gains he writes, “Every valuing, even where it values and losses. The gains of electronic postmodern- positively, is subjectivising. It does not let beings: ity could be said to include, for individuals,

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(a) an increased awareness of the “big bionic convergence is a matter of words. The picture,” a global perspective that admits the meanings of “mechanical” and “life” are both extraordinary complexity of interrelations; stretching until all complicated things can be (b) an expanded neural capacity, an ability to perceived as machines, and all self-sustaining accommodate a broad range of stimuli simul- machines can be perceived as alive. Yet beyond taneously; (c) a relativistic comprehension of semantics, two concrete trends are happening: situations that promotes the erosion of old (1) Human-made things are behaving more biases and often expresses itself as tolerance; lifelike, and (2) Life is becoming more engin- and (d) a matter-of-fact and unencumbered eered. The apparent veil between the organic sort of readiness, a willingness to try new situ- and the manufactured has crumpled to reveal ations and arrangements. that the two really are, and have always been, In the loss column, meanwhile, are (a) a of one being. What should we call that com- fragmented sense of time and a loss of the mon soul between the organic communities so-called duration of experience, that depth we know of as organisms and ecologies, and phenomenon we associate with reverie; (b) a their manufactured counterparts of robots, reduced attention span and a general impati- corporations, economies, and computer cir- ence with sustained inquiry; (c) a shattered cuits? I call those examples, both made and faith in institutions and in the explanatory born, “vivisystems” for the lifelikeness each narratives that formerly gave shape to subject- kind of system holds. (1994: 3) ive experience; (d) a divorce from the past, from a vital sense of history as a cumulative or The inherent value for Kelly is the value of a organic process; (e) an estrangement from vivisystem, as revelatory of a hidden connection geographic place and community; and (f) an between the natural and the mechanical. Kelly’s absence of any strong vision of a personal or focus on vivisystems is comparable to historian collective future. (Birkerts 1994: 27) Bruce Mazlish’s reconstruction of how we have overcome the fourth discontinuity, between our- Note that the distinction between inherence and selves and machines, the earlier discontinuities balance dystopians concerns the form of argu- having been overcome when Copernicus showed mentation rather than conclusions about the tech- that our earth was not the center of the universe, nology, which may be similar. Heim would agree when Darwin showed that man did not have a with Birkerts that, as the latter writes, “We are at privileged place in creation, and when Freud a watershed point. One way of processing informa- showed that our rationality is not so perfect as tion is yielding to another. Bound up with to set us apart from the other animals. Kelly’s each is a huge array of aptitudes, assumptions, vivisystems allow Mazlish’s point to be put and understandings about the world” (1994: 27). positively, in terms of continuity rather than dis- But Heim has an extra reason for that conclu- continuity: the range of manmade and natural sion, the profound one about the “infomania” vivisystems reveals the continuity between our- value inherent in the new technology. selves and machines. Heidegger’s idea, this extra reason, can be Vivisystems figure in the version of James extended to utopianism. An inherence utopian Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis that Kelly endorses. about the internet, on this extension, is one who This is the hypothesis, that, in Lovelock’s words, believes that there is something good about it “The entire range of living matter on Earth, beyond a simple toting up of gains and losses. from whales to viruses, from oaks to algae, could For instance, Wired magazine editor Kevin Kelly’s be regarded as constituting a single living entity, Out Of Control: The New Biology of Machines, capable of manipulating the Earth’s atmosphere Social Systems, and the Economic World theorizes to suit its overall needs and endowed with facult- the internet as a vivisystem, and as such an ies and powers far beyond those of its constitu- instance of, in his words, ent parts” (Kelly 1994: 83). (Kelly is quoting from Lovelock’s The Ages of Gaia.) Although [t]he overlap of the mechanical and the life- there may be controversy about whether Gaia is like [that] increases year by year. Part of this an organism, Kelly thinks there should be no

95 Wesley Cooper doubt that, as he writes, “it really is a system that brains can be replaced by their Turing- that has living characteristics. It is a vivisystem. machine essence: we will be brought back to life It is a system that is alive, whether or not it as programs suitable for generating the virtual- possesses all the attributes needed for an organ- reality renderings that capture our lived experi- ism” (1994: 84). Gaia is not only alive but it is ence, with the unpleasant bits trimmed away and coming to have a mind, thanks to the internet desirable additions inserted, perhaps additions and other networking technologies. Kelly makes from program-based future societies, if we can the point in dramatic language. tolerate the culture shock. The details can be found in Frank J. Tipler’s The Physics of Immor- There is a sense in which a global mind also tality and David Deutsch’s The Fabric of Reality. emerges in a network culture. The global mind This much will serve to introduce a frame- is the union of computer and nature – of work for understanding internet culture and telephones and human brains and more. It is a the theorizing that surrounds it: the utopian/ very large complexity of indeterminate shape dystopian/instrumental trichotomy and the governed by an invisible hand of its own. We balance/inherence dichotomy. The stage is set humans will be unconscious of what the global for a critical illustration of balance utopianism, mind ponders. This is not because we are not in the next section; then inherence dystopianism; smart enough, but because the design of a and then inherence instrumentalism; and fin- mind does not allow the parts to understand ally some concluding remarks, including some the whole. The particular thoughts of the caveats and qualifications about the framework global mind – and its subsequent actions – just bruited. will be out of our control and beyond our understanding. Thus network economics will breed a new spiritualism. Our primary difficulty in comprehending the Balance Utopianism global mind of a network culture will be that it does not have a central “I” to appeal to. No headquarters, no head. That will be most The advent of the internet took Sherry Turkle exasperating and discouraging. In the past, by surprise. She had published The Second Self in adventurous men have sought the holy grail, 1984, describing the identity-transforming power or the source of the Nile, or Prester John, or of the computer at that stage of the computer the secrets of the pyramids. In the future the revolution. Reflecting on her experience and the quest will be to find the “I am” of the global experience of others with the new Apple and mind, the source of its coherence. Many souls IBM PC computers, she conceived of the rela- will lose all they have searching for it – and tionship of a person to her computer as one-on- many will be the theories of where the global one, a person alone with a machine. By 1995, mind’s “I am” hides. But it will be a never- when Life on the Screen appeared, she was writ- ending quest like the others before it. (1994: ing about something quite different, “a rapidly 202) expanding system of networks, collectively known as the internet, [which] links millions of people Another inherence-utopian vision incorporates in new spaces that are changing the way we think, the internet’s group mind as only a minor fore- the nature of our sexuality, the form of our com- shadowing of an end-of-time God, intelligent munities, our very identities” (1995: 9). life connected throughout the universe, as a Though Turkle speaks neutrally here of result of colonization of space (and so forth). It “change” in these matters, she fits into the will tap into the energy created by gravity’s “utopian” category of her trichotomy between “divergence towards infinity” in the Big Crunch utopian, apocalyptic, and utilitarian evaluations so as to reproduce all past experience in massive of the internet. The computer is a new and computations that generate the requisite virtual important tool, most assuredly, but the internet realities. Construing our brains as virtual reality makes it “even more than a tool and mirror: We generators themselves, these theorists prophesy are able to step through the looking glass. We

96 Internet Culture are learning to live in virtual worlds. We may zone. For instance, a player who manipulates a find ourselves alone as we navigate virtual oceans, character or avatar in an online virtual reality unravel virtual mysteries, and engineer virtual such as a Multi-User Dungeon (MUD) is dis- skyscrapers. But increasingly, when we step tinctly located in that zone. By contrast, traveling through the looking glass, other people are there to Rome or viewing someone’s movie about as well” (1995: 9). Whereas apocalyptic theorists Rome, even when doing so is “virtually like diagnose this as stepping through the looking- being there,” is safely on one side or the other glass to cultural impoverishment or a new form of the real/virtual line, awakening no awareness of mental illness, Turkle theorizes the new experi- of the zone being constructed and explored by ences by reference to colonization of a new land. Turkle’s colonists. This metaphor of colonization should be Second, constructing identity involves some- understood carefully, however, as she is not sug- thing like the notion of a dimension as it was gesting that Sherry Turkle, sociologist and MIT just introduced: although Turkle is distinctly on professor, should be left behind in favor of a the “real” side of the real/virtual continuum, new life as the cybernaut ST on LambdaMOO. she now builds her identity partially by reference That suggestion comes from an extreme form of to dimensions of herself that owe their existence inherence utopianism about the internet, or it to activity in the border zone. To the degree is the equally extreme suggestion of inherence that MUDing is important to her, for instance, dystopian theorists, like Mark Slouka in War of to that degree it is constitutive of who she is. the Worlds, who diagnose the internet experi- This is a high-technology application of the gen- ence as equivalent to wholescale departure from eral principle that we are self-defining creatures. everyday reality. More in Turkle’s spirit is the It is not the idea that crossing the postmodern thought that a new dimension of human life is divide has somehow destroyed personal identity. being colonized, and although that raises a host Although some psychologists and sociologists of new issues about budgeting time and effort, adopt the conceit of speaking this way, it is no and even about physical and mental health, Turkle more than acknowledging the complexity of self- is not proposing that it be undertaken in the definition in modern society; or else this way of spirit of these extreme forms of utopianism. speaking falsely equates personal identity with She does indeed characterize her colonists as a soul-pellet or Cartesian Thinking Substance, “constructing identity in the culture of simula- in which case it is broadcasting the stale news tion,” in a cultural context of “eroding boundar- that such conceptions of the self are largely dis- ies between the real and the virtual, the animate credited. Turkle discusses the phenomenon of and the inanimate, the unitary and the multiple Multiple Personality Disorder, and it may be that self” (1995: 10), a context in which experiences MPD is more common because of the stresses on the internet figure prominently but share a of modern life, and not because, say, the medic- cultural drift with changes in art, such as the alization of human experience leads us to find postmodern architecture that the cultural critic mental illnesses today that weren’t there yester- Fredric Jameson studies; science, such as research day. But constructing identity is, and always has in psychoanalysis and elsewhere inspired by been, distinct from going crazy, even when the connectionist models of the mind/brain; and building material is a new high-tech dimension. entertainment, such as films and music videos in This is not to say that Turkle always gets this which traditional narrative structure is hard to exactly right. Setting out some of her interviews discern. Constructing identity in the culture of with students who play MUDs, she writes that simulation – our postmodern culture, as Turkle “as players participate, they become authors not interprets it – involves two closely related ideas. only of text but of themselves, constructing new First, there is the idea that we are newly aware selves through social interaction. One player says, of a rich continuum of states between the real and ‘You are the character and you are not the char- the virtual, the animate and the inanimate, the acter, both at the same time.’ Another says, ‘You unitary and the multiple self. A boundary that are who you pretend to be.’” Analyzing these may have been a sharp line is now a complex interviews, she continues, “MUDs make possible

97 Wesley Cooper the creation of an identity so fluid and multiple down from high-level programming languages that it strains the limits of the notion. Identity, to assembler to machine language, and wanting after all, refers to the sameness between two to know as well the engineering architecture of qualities, in this case between a person and his the hardware. (Hackers who loved to code but or her persona. But in MUDs one can be many” knew little about hardware were called “soft- (1995: 12). The short path out of these woods ies.”) By contrast the consumer computers that is to deny that a person and his or her persona were brought to the market in the mid-seventies are identical: you are not who you pretend to to early eighties, first by Apple and then by IBM be, but rather you are pretending to be some- and many others, made computers accessible one in such a way as to call upon your verbal, far beyond the military, industry, and academe. emotional, and imaginative resources to accom- For Turkle the Apple Macintosh’s graphical plish the pretense. user interface, as well as its presenting itself One of Turkle’s major themes is the trans- as “opposed and even hostile to the traditional ition from modern to postmodern culture, modernist expectation that one could take a which she glosses as follows, beginning with a technology, open the hood, and see inside” set of ideas that have come to be known as (1995: 35), are crucial developments, giving “postmodernism.” the computer massive popular appeal to many who preferred “horizontal understanding,” of an These ideas are difficult to define simply, but operating system’s or an application’s interface, they are characterized by such terms as surface over depth. “decentered,” “fluid,” “nonlinear,” and “opaque.” They contrast with modernism, the The power of the Macintosh was how its classical world-view that has dominated West- attractive simulations and screen icons helped ern thinking since the Enlightenment. The organize an unambiguous access to programs modernist view of reality is characterized by and data. The user was presented with a scin- such terms as “linear,” “logical,” “hierarch- tillating surface on which to float, skim, and ical,” and by having “depths” that can be play. There was nowhere visible to dive. (1995: plumbed and understood. MUDs offer an 34) experience of the abstract postmodern ideas that had intrigued yet confused me during my intellectual coming of age. In this, MUDs The massive growth of internet culture, from its exemplify a phenomenon we shall meet often roots in the MIT/ARPANET connection and the in these pages, that of computer-mediated UNIX/USENET connection, into the behemoth experiences bringing philosophy down to earth. we see now, turned on the fact that a lot of (1995: 17) people want to be pilots, not mechanics. Turkle acknowledges that even her beloved It does so, Turkle suggests, because the trans- Macintosh ultimately requires the skills and tools ition from modernism to post-modernism, from of modernist culture, but it strove to make these the early post-Second World War years onward, “irrelevant” to the user, and in this way “the tools is paralleled in the world of computers by a trans- of the modernist culture of calculation became ition from a culture of calculation to a culture layered underneath the experience of the culture of simulation. For those caught up in the war of simulation” (1995: 34). This is an important effort, like John von Neumann, the new com- point, and one that she may not have developed puters were objects to calculate with, specifically sufficiently. The culture of simulation requires a to make the staggeringly complex calculations modernist spine. It requires technicians to keep that would tell whether an implosion device its computer network running, for one thing, would detonate an atomic bomb. Even the relat- but it also needs inventors and theoreticians to ively carefree hackers at the MIT AI Lab in the explore its possibilities. More generally, it needs fifties and sixties were privy to this culture, a background of a world that is external to its prizing what Turkle calls “vertical” understanding rapidly thickening layers of images and other of the computer: understanding it all the way representations, a world that is best disclosed by

98 Internet Culture the sciences, in contradistinction to the post- technocratic bureaucrats who are concerned modern conceit that there is nothing outside only with efficient administration. There are in the text, that science is just one among many fact two fallacies here. First, efficient administra- narratives in an anarchic cacophony, etc. Often tion with respect to programming might be put enough to counsel attention, modernist values to the service of organizations that are devoted consort with plain truths. (This of course rejects to human rights and opposed to technocratic the postmodernist theoretician’s notion that truth manipulation of citizens. To suppose the con- reduces to what passes for true, which is a func- trary to is to commit the simple Frame Fallacy. tion of which community’s values you subscribe Additionally, Evans makes an unwitting philo- to.) The plain truth of science’s superior track sophical pun – a fallacy of equivocation – on record consorts with the modernist value that the term efficiency. The two fallacies blend in a discerns a hierarchy in which science ranks higher spectacular howler. than, say, wishful thinking in its power to reveal Evans’s Psychology and Nihilism: A Genealo- the nature of things. The plain truth that there gical Critique of the Computational Model of Mind is an external world consorts with the modernist argues that “technocratic rationality” is a secret value of depth, in this case a depth beyond our value presupposed by the computer model of images, symbols, and other representations. The mind, which he takes to be the model that defines modernist value of prudence, of rational self- cognitive science and cognitive psychology. His interest which gives equal weight to each mo- fear (“the crisis of modernity”) is that conscious- ment of one’s life, consorts with the plain truth ness itself “might be reduced to just those para- about personal identity that I canvassed earlier. meters necessary for the continued reproduction The value and the fact are not the same: one can of restrictive and univocal social, cultural, and eco- grant that there is personal identity through time nomic systems” (1993: 2). In this way the com- and rational concern about it, without embrac- puter model of cognitive psychology “serves the ing the modernist conception of prudence that interest of the new technocratic elite by emulat- requires one to be a shepherd, so to speak, for a ing their style of thinking” (1993: 7). Assimilating whole human life. For instance, it is not irra- us to machines, cognitive psychology implicitly tional, on certain conceptions of rationality, to denies those cultural values that affirm and celeb- severely discount one’s distant future. But such rate life, and consequently it is “nihilist.” conceptions aren’t those that have had influence Evans’s main argument is as follows. in building our senses of ourselves and our social institutions, like social and medical insurance. Because we can precisely state its properties, Those reflect modernist values. we shall use the Turing machine as our for- malization and the idealization of “analytic discourse.” Like analytic discourse, the Turing machine divides its subject matter into a set of Inherence Dystopianism discrete entities, maintains a strict separation between its program (language) and the domain over which it operates (the same pro- A leitmotiv of some dystopian critique is a fal- gram can imitate many different machines), lacy: an inference from features of computation adheres to an ideal of transparency in its code to features of the media that the computation and in what it codifies, and subordinates its enables. Call this the Frame Fallacy, after the subject matter to the achievement of a pre- mistake of inferring from the fact that a movie is established goal that requires no change in the made up of discrete frames, the conclusion that basic rules and symbols of the Turing machine’s the experience of watching a movie is the experi- own program (the ideal of “domination” or ence of a series of discrete frames. “administration”). For both analytic discourse For instance, Fred Evans makes observations and the Turing machine, the ideal is to trans- about the algorithmic character of computation form everything into an “effective procedure,” and infers from this that computer scientists and this is exactly the task of technocratic ration- and cognitive psychologists are in league with ality. In more historical terms, the Turing

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machine transforms the “clearness and distinct- heaved and folded up in a third. But clearly ness” dictum of Descartes into “imitatable by technological information is the most pro- the Turing machine.” (1993: 64) minent layer of the contemporary cultural landscape, and increasingly it is more of a At bottom, this argument is a bad pun. Evans is flood than a layer, a deluge that threatens to erode, suspend, and dissolve its predecessors. equivocating on “effective procedure,” between (1999: 2) cost-effective administration on one hand, and algorithm on the other. It is the same sort of mistake as supposing that, since the Bank of This has led some disciples of Borgmann to Montreal and the bank of the Saskatchewan River eschew all digitally recorded music, insisting are both banks, it must follow that they both on listening only to live performances. Another make financial transactions. Effective procedures example of inherence dystopianism leading to in the sense that interested Alan Turing are fea- blanket evaluations is Neil Postman’s Technopoly: tures of mathematical reasoning, not features of The Surrender of Culture to Technology, which administration of people. Evans’s mistaken in- indicts the United States as a “technopoly,” ference from features of computation to features along with “Japan and several European nations of the research communities that make use of that are striving to become Technopolies as them is egregiously abetted by his equivocation well” (1993: 48–9). A Technopoly does no less, on “effective procedure.” according to Postman, than eliminate “alternat- One reason to be wary of utopian or dystopian ives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley inherence theories is that they encourage a tend- outlined in Brave New World” (1993: 48). ency toward blanket denunciation and renunci- An object lesson about the wholesale approach ation of the internet, or the blanket opposite, can be drawn from Richard Bernstein’s analysis when what is needed is a piecemeal evaluation of the father of dystopian theories of high tech- of this or that use of it, this or that tool that nology, Heidegger. In “Heidegger’s Silence?: is enabled by the internet metatool. A striking Ethos and Technology” Bernstein makes the case contemporary instance of the blanket approach that the great German philosopher’s brief but is the Montana philosopher Albert Borgmann’s active support of Hitler and the Nazis, during position, in Holding on to Reality, that digitally the 10-month period when he served as Rector generated information is incapable of making of the University of Freiburg between April 1933 a positive contribution to culture, but on the and February 1934, is symptomatic of a philo- contrary threatens to dissolve it, by introducing sophical failing that expresses itself in what he information as reality to compete with the picture said and did before and after those 10 months, of the world that is drawn from natural informa- notably in his silence about the Holocaust after tion (information about reality, as in weather the war, when there were no longer any serious reports) and cultural information (information doubts about the full horror of the Nazi regime. for reality, as in recipes for baking things). “But we are delivered over to [technology] in the worst possible way,” Heidegger writes in The Question Concerning Technology, “when we The technological information on a compact regard it as something neutral; for this concep- disc is so detailed and controlled that it addresses us virtually as reality. What comes tion of it, to which today we particularly like to from a recording of a Bach cantata on a CD is do homage, makes us blind to the essence of not a report about the cantata nor a recipe technology” (1977: 91). – the score – for performing the cantata, it is According to Bernstein’s account of the link in the common understanding music itself. between his biography and his philosophy, Information through the power of technology Heidegger conceals and passes over in silence steps forward as a rival of reality. the importance for the Greeks, specifically Today the three kinds of information are Aristotle, of phronesis, the state of the soul that layered over one another in one place, grind pertains to praxis. He refers to a discussion by against each other in a second place, and are Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics that has “special

100 Internet Culture importance,” but his reference is partial and one- corpses in gas chambers and extermination sided, bringing out the role of techne in relation camps, the same as blockading and starving of to poiesis, as sketched above, but not tracking nations [it was the year of the Berlin blockade], the full discussion, which Aristotle summarizes the same as the manufacture of hydrogen in the following passage. bombs. (cited in Bernstein 1992: 130)

Then let us begin over again, and discuss these Bernstein understands this grotesque passage states of the soul. Let us say, then, that there as a natural expression of Heidegger’s reaction are five states in which the soul grasps the against the “correct” definition of technology truth [aletheia] in its affirmations or denials. as a neutral instrument which can be used for These are craft [techne], scientific knowledge benign ends of increased food production or [episteme], [practical] intelligence [phronesis], the malignant end of extermination of human wisdom [sophia], and understanding [nous]... beings. (cited in Bernstein 1992: 121) But if we focus on the essence of technology Bernstein asks, “Why should we think that the then these differences are “non-essential.” The response that modern technology calls forth is manufacturing of corpses in gas chambers more to be found by “re-turning” to techne and poiesis, fully reveals the essence of technology . . . rather than phronesis and praxis?” He objects Unless we fully acknowledge and confront the that Heidegger does not even consider this pos- essence of technology, even in “manufacturing sibility, writing that “[t]he entire rhetorical con- of corpses in gas chambers,” unless we realize struction of The Question Concerning Technology that all its manifestations are “in essence the seduces us into thinking that the only alternative same,” we will never confront the supreme to the threatening danger of Gestell is poiesis. It danger and the possible upsurgence of the excludes and conceals the possibility of phronesis saving power. (1992: 131) and praxis” (1992: 122). Bernstein urges that our destiny rests not solely with the thinkers and Bernstein concludes that the deleted passage is the poets who are guardians of the abode in not simply some insensitive remark but rather a which man dwells, but with the phronesis of necessary consequence of the very way in which ordinary citizens’ contribution to public life. The Heidegger characterizes Gestell, as an unconceal- possible upsurgence of the saving power may ment that claims man and over which he has be revealed in action (praxis) and not only in no control. He sets out a formulaic pattern in “poetic dwelling.” Heidgegger’s thinking, Bernstein asks again, “Why is Heidegger blind to those aspects of praxis and phronesis high- a pattern that turns us away from such “mun- lighted by Taminiaux, Gadamer, Arendt, and dane” issues as mass extermination, human Habermas?” He agrees with Habermas’s sugges- misery, life and death, to the “real” plight, the tion: that Heidegger is guilty of “a terrible intel- “real” danger – the failure to keep meditative thinking alive . . . It is as if in Heidegger’s lectual hubris” when he suggests that the only obsession with man’s estrangement from proper and authentic response to the supreme Being, nothing else counts as essential or true danger is to prepare ourselves to watch over except pondering one’s ethos . . . It becomes unconcealment. clear that the only response that is really Bernstein next draws attention to an unpub- important and appropriate is the response to lished manuscript of the 1949 lecture that became the silent call of Being, not to the silent The Question Concerning Technology, which con- screams of our fellow human beings . . . when tains the following passage that has been deleted we listen carefully to what he is saying, when from the published text. we pay attention to the “deepest laws of Heideggerian discourse” then Heidegger’s Agriculture is now motorized food industry – “silence” is resounding, deafening, and damn- in essence the same as the manufacturing of ing. (1992: 136)

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Bernstein’s analysis and conclusions suggests a of us. Those whom you would have in your moral critique of utopian and dystopian theories ideal world are also free to imagine and relocate, of internet culture. Although none of the theories perhaps to a world of their own imagining. There I have reviewed is so damned by its inherence could be an incessant churn of relocation, all arguments as Heidegger’s, which blinded him to worlds being ephemeral, or some stable worlds the specific evil of the Holocaust, yet a Postmanian might emerge in which everyone would choose to anti-Technopolist may be blinded in parallel remain. There will be no one in a stable associ- fashion to something good or bad about this ation who wants out, and no one will be in whose or that specific aspect of American culture; a presence is not valued by the others. Libertari- Borgmannian may be blinded to something anism may be bad politics, but its conception of specifically good or bad about some digitally utopia is a plausible model of the internet. generated artifact; and a gung-ho cybernaut of The claim that inherence instrumentalism the Leary persuasion may be blinded to the makes to being “value free” is provocative, defy- old-fashioned pleasures of embodiment. ing a post-Weberian tradition of deconstructing such claims with a view to revealing hidden value commitments, an argumentative strategy that bears Heidegger’s imprimatur, as noted above. Inherence Instrumentalism It may be helpful to clarify the claim with an analogy to a box of paints and a variety of paint- Turkle’s category of utilitarian interpretation ings made with them, some of them good paint- understands the internet as a tool. The version ings, some of them bad, some of them so-so. It scouted here under the rubric of inherence would be a logical error, a “category mistake” in instrumentalism interprets the internet as essen- Rylean terminology, to evaluate the box of paints tially a metatool for creating tools. This general as a good, poor, or so-so painting. It is not a idea derives from Robert Nozick’s discussion of painting at all. Classification of the internet as a a libertarian utopia in Anarchy, State and Utopia. metatool aims at a similar conclusion. Corres- Although he did not have the internet in mind, ponding to the variety of paintings in the ana- what he says there about a framework for utopia logy is the variety of content on the internet. transfers quite naturally to the internet, as well as None of this content is value free in the sense having greater plausibility there than in political that is being reserved for the internet as a philosophy for the real world. metatool. Content in the middle of the con- The internet does not have a culture of simu- tinuum from poor to good might be deemed lation, on this metatool account, because it is a value free in the sense that it excites no judg- tool for creating a variety of subcultures, some ments of praise or condemnation with respect to of which may fit Turkle’s description of internet this or that value; such internet content might culture, some of which will not, not to mention be described as bland. But the sense in which the variety of internet activity, like setting up a the internet is value free is not like this. Rather, webpage for lecture notes, that does not amount it is like the freedom of the box of paints from to creating a subculture. The internet is the Swiss being judged a good, bad, or so-so painting. It Army knife of information technology. is not a bland painting, and the internet is not Libertarians sometimes think of utopia in this bland internet content, on the inherence instru- way: ideally, everyone would be free – would mentalist account. Inherence dystopians and have the Lockean “natural right” – to migrate utopians purport to find something deeply good or emigrate as he or she chose. The worlds that or bad about the internet, but on an instrument- result from such to-ing and fro-ing they call alist diagnosis either they become so deep that associations. Acknowledging that there is no they loose touch with the truth, as illustrated by single world that’s everyone’s perfect cup of tea, the attempt to tie the computer inevitably to a the libertarian is inspired by a utopia which is a society of technocratic administration, or else they set of possible worlds, with permeable borders, are guilty of a part–whole fallacy, judging the in which one world is the best imaginable for each whole internet by some of its uses. Even if all

102 Internet Culture uses had some bad value or effect X, that would channeled by physical neighborhood, and with the ground only a balance-of-reasons judgment that development of automatic translation software a one should or should not use the internet, great obstacle to cross-cultural friendships, namely depending on whether X outweighs the good lack of a common language, is being removed. value or effect Y. New motivations and organizational structures for work are being discovered on the internet, notably the “open source” initiative associated with Linus Torvalds, Eric Raymond, and a legion Conclusion of true hackers, showing how psychic rewards can replace monetary ones in high-quality soft- To illustrate once more the dystopian/ ware development within the internet milieu; if instrumental/utopian continuum and the work is understood as paid employment, con- balance/inherence vectors that can be traced tributions to such software development is not by reference to it, consider the changes being work, whereas if it is understood as activity that wrought in work and leisure by the computer is instrumental to some further end, such as a revolution. Offices have been transformed by new Linux kernel, it is work calling for a high the computer over the past two decades, while level of skill. This raises the question whether web surfing, computer gaming, and internet the suffusion of IT into work and leisure will chatrooms have become significant leisure activit- eventually lead to their transcendance in “mean- ies. As recent events in Afghanistan testify, even ingful work” that is pursued because of its war, that most regrettably necessary form of work, intrinsic motivations, not extrinsic ones such as must be fought with sophisticated information money. Is there something about information technology in order to achieve success in the technology that makes it inherently amenable to battlefield of the twenty-first century; the leisure meaningful work? The case could be made that activity of correspondence is migrating from the will do so by following a negative and a positive pen and the typewriter to computer email, a trans- path. The via negativa is the elimination of ition from manipulating matter to manipulating “agonistic work,” work that one would gladly digital bytes that is as significant as any preceding avoid if it weren’t necessary. The via positiva is revolution in communication technology. Despite the creation of attractive environments in which the uneven track record of “dot.coms,” business one is always able to work “just as one has a activity on the internet is starting to take giant mind.” Marx had such an environment in mind strides; new communities are being formed on when he speculated about the higher stages of the internet, like Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs), communism, in which the division of labor char- Internet Relay Chat (IRC), and so on, online acteristic of capitalism has been overcome and “third places” between work and home that one’s distinctively human powers are fully real- allow users of the Net a respite from the demands ized, without the compulsion of necessity. In of office and household. Work as traditional as The German Ideology he made the point like this: farming is becoming reliant on the boost to organization and efficiency that computers make For as soon as the distribution of labor comes possible; games like chess, go, poker, and bridge into being, each man has a particular, exclus- are just as likely to play out on the internet as in ive sphere of activity which is forced upon him physical spaces. Computers and the internet are and from which he cannot escape. He is a opening up new employment opportunities, new hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical tools, and new media for artists; correspondingly, critic, and must remain so if he does not want creating and maintaining a personal webpage has to lose his means of livelihood; while in com- become an art that many pursue in their free munist society, where nobody has one exclus- time. Telecommuting and teleconferencing are ive sphere of activity but each can become becoming more widespread, with potentially accomplished in any branch he wishes, society enormous implications for city design and trans- regulates the general production and thus makes portation systems; making friends is no longer it possible for me to do one thing today and

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another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to be monitored carefully in order to make prac- fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the even- tically wise choices about its use. As the “Mount ing, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, Carmel Declaration on Technology and Moral without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, Responsibility” observed in 1974 in its eighth shepherd, or critic. (Tucker, ed., 1974: 124) article, “We need guardian disciplines to mon- itor and assess technological innovations, with Add to Marx’s flight of fancy the thought that especial attention to their moral implications” information technology will be the means by (Hester & Ford 2001: 38). No technology is which “society regulates the general production,” morally neutral if that means freedom from moral and you have a form of inherence utopianism evaluation. But there is no inherent reason why about IT. However, given the failure of com- that evaluation should be pro or con. mand economies in real-world tests such as the USSR, Heideggerian inherence dystopianism may recommend itself instead. IT will have taught Acknowledgments us, on this account, to view nature as so much “standing reserve” and not even the overcoming I wish to thank Luciano Floridi for invaluable of the division of labor will protect us from a philosophical and editorial comments about mental architecture that we should want to avoid. earlier drafts of this chapter. Another inherence-dystopian option argues that a core value of our civilization, to which our self-respect is inexorably tied, is agonistic work; References IT, by showing us how to eliminate such work, will have the unintended consequence of remov- Bernstein, Richard. 1992. The New Constellation: ing the bases of our self-esteem. The aspect of The Ethico-political Horizons of Modernity/ technological determinism is noticeable in these Postmodernity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [For three options. An alternative is the outlook that graduates; a lucid exposition and critique of Karl Popper advocated in The Open Society and Heidegger’s philosophy of technology.] its Enemies and elsewhere, which views with Birkerts, Sven. 1994. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate suspicion ideas about the necessity of history’s of Reading in an Electronic Age. London: Faber unfolding and recommends instead that oppor- & Faber. [For the educated public. It evokes the tunities for change be monitored for unintended depth and inwardness that reading can obtain, consequences, so that choices can be made that and expresses concern about the future of read- reflect knowledge of where change is going ing in an information age.] wrong. The current debate about genetically Borgmann, Albert. 1999. Holding on to Reality. modified foods is an example of such monitor- Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [For gradu- ing; it also illustrates a tendency for inherence ates and ambitious undergraduates. He makes an engaging case for focal values in life that keep us voices to emerge at the dystopian and utopian close to nature and our communities.] extremes. Deutsch, David. 1997. The Fabric of Reality. The Popperian outlook may be viewed as Harmondsworth: Penguin. [For graduates and contributing to an inherence-instrumentalist ambitious undergraduates. He brings virtual interpretation of internet culture, wherein the reality to the center of his interpretation of metatool character of the technology acknow- quantum mechanics.] ledges dystopian fears and utopian hopes with Evans, Fred. 1993. Psychology and Nihilism: A respect to particular content. At the metalevel, Genealogical Critique of the Computational Model however, the internet is neither good nor bad of Mind. New York: SUNY Press. [For graduates. nor in-between; at the level of specific content, This is an interpretation of cognitive psychology it may be any of these things. The Popperian inspired by Nietzsche.] contribution theorizes the internet, not as his- Heidegger, Martin. 1973. “Overcoming meta- torical inevitability to be deplored or valorized physics.” In The End of Philosophy. New York: holus-bolus, but rather as a locus of possibilities, Harper and Row. [For graduates. Bernstein draws

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on this essay for his interpretation of Heidegger’s New Haven and London: Yale University Press. philosophy of technology.] [For graduates. This is an historian’s scholarly ——. 1977. “Letter on humanism.” In Martin account of the convergence between humans and Heidegger, Basic Writings. New York: Harper and machines.] Row. [For graduates. Bernstein draws on this Nozick, Robert. 1974. Anarchy, State and Utopia. essay for his interpretation of Heidegger’s philo- New York: Basic Books. [For graduates. This is a sophy of technology.] remarkable defense of libertarianism that poses ——. 1977. The Question Concerning Technology. hard questions for liberals and Marxists, while New York: Harper and Row. [For graduates. This painting a minimal state as a veritable utopia.] is the inspiration for many interpretations of Popper, Karl. 1971. The Open Society and its En- technology in recent decades.] emies. Princeton: Princeton University Press. [For Heim, Michael. 1993. The Metaphysics of Virtual the educated public. This is his contribution to Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [For the war effort in the Second World War, tracing undergraduates. He writes vividly about how we communism and fascism to philosophical roots are being transformed by information technology, in Plato, Hegel, and Marx.] and about the long-term prospects for virtual Postman, Neil. 1993. Technopoly: The Surrender of reality.] Culture to Technology. New York: Knopf. [For Hester, D. Micah and Ford, Paul J. 2001. Com- the educated public. This is an articulate call puters and Ethics in the Cyberage. Englewood, to arms against the influence of technology on NJ: Prentice-Hall. [For undergraduates. This is culture.] typical of many accessible anthologies of essays Slouka, Mark. 1995. War of the Worlds. New York: on technology and computers from authors in a Basic Books. [For the educated public. He argues variety of fields.] that computer games like MUDs are making us Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, or, The lose touch with reality.] Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Tipler, Frank J. 1994. The Physics of Immortality. Duke University Press. [For graduates. This is an New York: Doubleday. [For graduates. Deutsch important source of theory about postmodernism.] (see above) draws on Tipler for some of his Kelly, Kevin. 1994. Out Of Control: The New Bio- cosmological speculations.] logy of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic Tucker, Robert C. 1972. The Marx–Engels Reader. World. New York: Addison-Wesley. [For under- New York: W. W. Norton & Co. [For graduates. graduates and the educated public. This is imagin- This is typical of many anthologies of Marx’s and ative, mind-stretching scientific journalism about Engels’ writings.] convergence of the natural and the human-made.] Turkle, Sherry. 1995. Life on the Screen. New York: Lovelock, James. 1988. The Ages of Gaia: A Bio- Simon & Schuster. [For the educated public. This graphy of our Living Earth. New York: W. W. is an indispensable interpretation of the cultures Norton. [For undergraduates. Kelly (see above) that have grown up around the computer.] weaves Lovelock’s ideas into his vision of where Woolley, Benjamin. 1992. Virtual Worlds. Oxford: the Earth is heading.] Blackwell. [For the educated public. This is a witty Mazlish, Bruce. 1993. The Fourth Discontinuity: The and philosophically informed series of essays on Co-evolution of Humans and Machines. matters pertaining to virtual reality.]

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