- The App ’ s real installed size varies somewhat with each device.
- See for example the Qualcomm Tricorder XPrize. http://tricorder.xprize.org/. From the site ’ s promotional copy: “ Imagine a portable, wireless device in the palm of your hand that monitors and diagnoses your health conditions. That ’ s the technology envisioned by this competition, and it will allow unprecedented access to personal health metrics. The end result: Radical innovation in healthcare that will give individuals far greater choices in when, where, and how they receive care. ”
- One version of this platform of and for nonhuman Users of Apps and App markets is partially articulated as the industrial Internet. See Jon Bruner, “ Defining the Industrial Internet, ” O ’ Reilly Radar, January 11, 2013, http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/01/defining-the-industrial-internet.html.
- A variation perhaps on the death of affect. See Boris Groys, “ Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction, ” E-Flux, no. 4 (March 2009), http://worker01.e-flux.com/pdf/article\_49.pdf, and Groys, Google: Words Beyond Grammar (Hatje Cantz: Berlin, 2012).
- During a personal conversation about this essay, “ Religion in the Age of Digital Reproduction, ” Boris Groys offered an argument regarding what he took to be the political theology of Google. It was an anecdote about some of his Islamic students in Germany. His argument, developed in this short essay “ is that the digital logic of infinite reproducibility (not of a substantial image as in mechanical reproduction, but of a binary substance that is itself nothing but a potential formal pattern) is well suited to a flattening of the affect of religious experience into a kind of rote, mechanistic exercise whereby the mere execution of a ritual program constitutes a supposedly successful theology. Most of his students, he said, had not really studied the Koran nor, he presumes, experienced much of anything we might take to be an ecstatic vision of transcendent truth through it or any other religious medium. Instead those who fancy themselves radicals merely download entire radical websites, largely unread, and store them on their laptops. The implication is that they needn ’ t be enthralled by the theocratic utopian energies of the actual particulars, but merely to possess the imagery-discourse there contained, regardless of any unnecessary affective experience, and that this is not only sufficient but preferred. Simpler.
Groys ’ s remark, however, as distant from or attuned to the actual intentions of his students it may be, is telling in the intellectual attitudes that it inverts. Foucault ’ s fascination with the function of Islam for the Left, not so much as a model of communitarian equity but simply as a wedge in the door keeping the conceptual possibility of radical political difference from slamming shut, was to see in political Shi ’ ism a heterological alternative to the cynical European Liberal doxa. It is also a (perhaps more learned) variation on the predictable tendency to romanticize (both positively and negatively) the presumed depth of faith and conviction of jihadists, radicals, and especially suicide bombers. For this, “ we ” who are too cynical to believe in anything other than fatal self-interest and the impossibility of something other than capitalist realism are in awe of the resolved single-mindedness of “ their ” unwavering fanaticism. Their naivet é , so unencumbered with the burden of postmodern nuance and ambivalence, signifies the remaining possibility of actual, ecstatic effervescent experience in the direct midst of global malaise. As Slajov Ž i ž ek jokes, “ they have faith for us ” in perfect inverted symmetry of our own secular disenchantment. But this is perhaps very wrong. Quite apart from Mumbai, the suicidal assignment can be seen as the expression not of certainty but of doubt, not as sacrifice but as evasion. While the bombers themselves have doubts, their suicide becomes a way of confirming their belief: “ If I kill myself in this way, I can calm my doubts and prove, even to me, that I do believe. ” The act does not happen because of the belief; the belief is retroactively testified by the reality of the act: from radical conviction to autonomic nihilism to an eventual leap of faith.
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