One has to wonder about the tautological nature of the argument: technology is like nature, which is like technology. But of course it’s not the truth-value of these arguments that concerns us here but their social meaning. Both versions of the argument convey essentially the same meaning: there is something natural about network technology; it is not simply another machine, another tool invented by humans, but an arrival at the very core of the laws of nature. So much so that nature itself recedes and is acknowledged to be nothing more than a giant computer.<sup>2</sup>
It is crucial to distinguish radical posthumanist approaches to technology, such as Michel Callon and Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, or Donna Harraway’s notion of the cyborg, to the digital discourse’s conflation of technology and nature. Posthumanism does away with the discursive dichotomy of nature and technology. The cosmology of the digital discourse is of another order: it asserts the conflation of nature and culture in reality, but it maintains the discursive power of the distinction. It claims that with network technology (i.e., at this particular historical moment) technology has become more natural. In other words, while posthumanist thinking undermines our notion of the nature-culture dichotomy, the digital discourse in fact reaffirms and celebrates this dichotomy.
I<sub>NDUS</sub>T<sub>RIAL</sub> T<sub>ECHNOLOGY VERSUS</sub> N<sub>E</sub>T<sub>WORK</sub> T<sub>ECHNOLOGY</sub>
The digital discourse is manifestly reflexive of, and responsive to, the general critique of technology, particularly the strain of dystopian critique that views technology as dehumanizing or as coming between humans and their nature, a critique most famously crystallized by Martin Heidegger (1977) and Jacques Ellul (1964; see Borgmann 1984a; Cooper 2002; Murphie and Potts 2003). In this context, and with the narrative of naturalization, the digital discourse insists on a break within the history of technology. Both Heidegger and Ellul write within a specific technohistorical context. Heidegger laments the rise of industrial technology at the turn of the twentieth century; Ellul fears large-scale technological systems enabled by the first wave of information technology in the 1950s, such as energy production and distribution. By evoking the radical break that is network technology, the digital discourse is able to incorporate and respond to this type of critique of technological utopianism and, by extension, respond to the critique of instrumental rationality in general.
Network Cosmology and the Exhaustion of Criti<sub>q</sub>ue
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