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# Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age The Spirit of Networks
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To make the leap between human thoughts and computer activity plausible, “thoughts” are equated in the digital discourse with “neural activity,” which in turn, is equated with “digitalism.” Thus, for example, at the end of a trial session with Nagle, the experimenter renders the sounds of the neural activity audible on a loudspeaker. The author then comments, “A loud burst of static fills the room—the music of Nagle’s cranial sphere. This is raw analog signal, Nagle’s neurons chattering. We are listening to a human being’s thoughts” (Martin 2005, emphasis mine). The brain’s neural signals might be described here as analog, but it is precisely because they can also be thought of as equivalent to the computer’s digital signals that the two can be unproblematically juxtaposed. That is the only way to connect these neural signals (or “thoughts”) so easily with information technology, which is also based on the neural-like activity of binary units. This, according to the digital discourse, is the conceptual and practical level where humans interface with information technology, and this is how the corollary conclusion of the author can be asserted: in the final analysis, this neural activity is human thought. To the degree that thought and consciousness are reduced to neural activity, they can also be understood in terms of information technology.
The digital discourse offers a more general theory of consciousness based on a distinction between the content of thought and its media of production, transmission, and reception—that is, between software and hardware. This is very much in line with the foundations of information theory laid out by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver in 1949, a theory that largely underscored information technology and paved the road to its development (Shannon and Weaver 1948). According to this theory, human brains can be likened to computers. This narrative of the brain-as-computer (and vice versa) is well known and has indeed become a staple of public discourse and popular culture. Underlying such theory of consciousness—based on the comparison of brains of computers—are two forceful assumptions about the human mind and human consciousness. Not only does it assume a disjuncture between, and independence of, media and content, brain and thoughts, hardware and software, instrumentality and substance, means and ends, but also a hierarchy between them. Both of these assumptions are central to the new conception of the network human.
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These two assumptions underlay, for example, the story about Mattew Nagle in Wired. The author takes the “hardware”—the brain—as a starting point to ponder about consciousness. “Roughly the size of deflated volleyball,” he says, “your brain weighs about 3 pounds. Its 100 billion neurons communicate via minute electrochemical impulses” (Martin 2005). This hardware, according to the author, this network of neurons, then produces a variety of “software,” or thoughts: “From this ceaseless hubbub,” he says, “arose Ode to Joy, thermonuclear weapons, and Dumb and Dumber” (Martin 2005). The article presumes thoughts and consciousness to be by-products of the mechanics (or rather electronics) of the brain and, as such, to be analytically, temporally, and structurally secondary.
They are secondary in another sense as well: while the (“hardware”) brain is universal and value-neutral (an instrumental means; “software”) thoughts are contingent and subject to judgment. The same bundle of neurons, with the same binary operation, is shared by all humans; it is presocial and precultural. It is in this sense that it is hardware: stable, robust, and unchanging. Software, however, is more ephemeral, contingent, fleeting (a thought might “spring to mind” or “slip one’s mind”), and diverse; it is cultural, infinite (one can always come up with new thoughts, new content), and subject to tests (in juxtaposing Ode to Joy and Dumb and Dumber the author of the article clearly exercises here his Kantian critique of judgment). The corrolary is that the brain, the computer-like brain, is the unchanging, ahistorical essence of the human mind and human consciousness. It is this dichotomy, and this hierarchy between brain and mind, neurons and consciousness, that allows the author to suggest that the “the consciousness problem”; that is, the question of how “electricity and meat make a mind,” which has been puzzling scientists for almost a century, has reached at least a partial resolution with scientists now being able to “listen in on—or alter—brain waves” (Martin 2005).
Humans Are Computers, Too
In the digital discourse, the unchanging hardware (“brain”)—not the contingent software (“thoughts”)—is seen as the locus of human essence. This comes out very clearly in a story in Wired reporting on the development of a new type of lie detector (Silberman 2006). In this story, the disjuncture and hierarchy between brain and consciousness and the ability of full commensurability between the brain and computers (as two types of binary hardware) reaches an ironic moment where the brain unwittingly colludes with the computer, bypassing human consciousness (and human agency) altogether. The novelty of the new lie detector lies in the ability of the new technology to go “deeper” into the brain to get, as it were, to the “heart” of where lying really takes place.
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This new method is compared with the old, analogue lie detector—the polygraph. The latter measured surface, bodily phenomena such as heart rate and rising blood pressure. These measures change with increased levels of stress and, in turn, indicate whether the person is lying. The polygraph assumed a link between stress and lying. The problem with this assumption, the author says, is that “Sociopaths who don’t feel guilt and people who learn to inhibit their reactions to stress can slip through a polygrapher’s net.” The new lie detection technology, the fMRI, “should be tougher to outwit because it detects something much harder to suppress: neurological evidence of the decision to lie” (Silberman 2006).
The new technology goes to the “source code” of lying, bypassing the conscious human and undermining his agency. The story is accompanied by brain images produced by the fMRI, which supposedly distinguish a truth teller from a liar (Silberman 2006). The article interprets them thus: “When someone is telling the truth, the areas of the brain shown here in green become active. If he is lying, the parts of the brain shown in red display even more activity” (Silberman 2006). By human-machine commensurability and by establishing a direct link between the human brain and a computer, we can eliminate the soft, superficial, weak human epiphenomena and go directly to the hard, essential elements of humanness. Humans might sell a lie as truth to another person; brains, however, cannot pull the same trick on computers. The partnership of brain and fMRI gets rid of another human agent, the polygraph reader. In the new method, reading is done by the computer in order “to eliminate one major source of polygraph error—the subjectivity of the human examiner” (Silberman 2006). This method effectively establishes computer-to-brain communication, eliminating the subjectivity and agency of humans.
Since the essence of humans lies in their brains (i.e., in them being ultimately informational and computational devices), and since, as such, they can be incorporated into computers, information technology is understood in the digital discourse to partake in the construction of human selves. This point can again be exemplified with the story of the aforementioned Matt Nagle. As a cyborg, an entity conflating a human with information technology, Nagle, the article insists, is more than simply “part biological, and part silicon, platinum, and titanium” (Martin 2005). Just as information technology is incorporated within him, part of him is externalized to a computer.
The identity of the cyborg is presented in the digital discourse as a matter of construction not unlike any other identity; it is not a natural and direct derivative of the hybridization with technology, just as sexual or gender identities are not direct and unproblematic derivatives of one’s genitalia. To become a cyborg, Nagle had to learn how to use his new computer “organs” and to adopt new ways of thinking, or a new mindset, inextricably intertwined with information technology. Hence, after having the operation that meshed together flesh and metal in his body, he went through a series of “encounters” with the computer. At first, the researcher “asked Nagle to think left, right, then relax” (Martin 2005). The monitors reveled that the computer clearly picked up the neural activity. That was Nagle learning to use BrainGate.
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But these encounters were as much about training the computer as they were about training Nagle; the computer had to be acquainted with Nagle. The reporter describes the following: “I watched [as the researcher] takes Nagle through a typical training session. He tracked Nagle’s mental activity on two large monitors, one of which displayed a graph of red and green spiking lines. Each spike represented the firing of clusters of neurons. As Nagle performed specific actions in his mind’s eye . . . the electrodes picked up the patterns of nearby neuron groups. Then BrainGate amplified and recorded the corresponding electrical activity. Over dozens of trials the computer built a filter that associated specific neural patterns with certain movements . . . The machine was memorizing Nagle’s characteristic neural firing patterns” (Martin 2005). This mutual training and learning cannot be underestimated. Since as the machine and the human form mutual recognition and become acquainted with each other they become, according to the digital discourse, indistinguishable, they merge into a singular, posthuman entity, a cyborg.
DISTRIBUTED SELF
For the cyborg Matt Nagle, being entails a close interaction with information technology. The author captures this narrative succinctly after a short conversation with Nagle: “What are you thinking about when you move the cursor? I asked. ‘For a while I was thinking about moving the mouse with my hand,’ Nagle replied. ‘Now I just imagine moving the cursor from place to place.’ In other words, Nagle’s brain has assimilated the system. The cursor is as much a part of his self as his arms and legs were” (Martin 2005, emphasis mine). Together with the computer, Nagle forms a network, and so he, too, becomes networked and distributed among various computational devises: his brain, BrainGate, and so forth. That is true both in functional terms and in terms of his sense of self and identity.
The digital discourse on the network human mimics some of the postmodern sensibilities regarding identity, particularly ideas regarding the constructed and nonessentialized character of identity. But paradoxically, perhaps, the digital discourse also carries strong essentialist assumptions that are closely linked with network technology. According to the digital discourse, network technology resonates with the essence of humanness. Only this essence is now presumed to reside in the human hardware (i.e., the brain) rather than the software (i.e., personality, character, and so forth). This anchoring of human ontology in the brain is manifested, for example, in a story about skills of the informational elite, “Revenge of the Right Brain” (Pink 2005).
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This article is adapted from a book titled A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age (Pink 2006). The author argues that, with the further advent of the information revolution, workers in the West will increasingly have to rely on conceptual skills associated with the right hemisphere of the brain rather than those associated with the left hemisphere. The left hemisphere, which features “computer-like logic, speed, and precision” and “handles sequence, literalness, and analysis” dominated the skills of knowledge workers of the last three decades. But its importance in the West is now undermined by outsourcing (“foreigners can do left-brain work cheaper”) and information technology (“technologies are proving they can outperform human left brains”). To find new sources of wealth creation, knowledge workers in the West have to switch on their right hemisphere, which “takes care of context, emotional expression, and synthesis” (Pink 2005). What is distinctive in this analysis is the dissociation of human consciousness into two distinct entities and the association of one to computers. This dissociation is even more evident in the illustration that accompanies the article (Pink 2006). The illustration can in fact be read as a most precise and direct expression of the spirit of networks. The left brain represents the critical stance of the spirit of network against the human condition during Fordism: bureaucracy, uniformity, impersonality, boredom (represented with a gray-blue monochrome), lack of personality and creativity (all workers look exactly the same), lack of flexibility (represented by straight lines, and the closed and suffocating office space). The right brain represents the new spirit that responds to the humanist critique: personal expression, liberation, creativity, joy, the blurring of leisure and work, exploration, and eroticization. Moreover, the historical shift in capitalism is represented here quite directly as the escape of people form the left brain to the right.
To the extent that network humans start to understand their self as such, they also begin to understand themselves in terms of network technology. Thus their personal qualities and characteristics take the form of the technology. This is evident, for example, in the case of connectionism as a prime and valued quality of the network human. Much of the power and prestige of the network human stems from her skills of what Boltanski and Chiapello term connexionism (2005, 362). Esther Dyson— described in Wired as “the most powerful woman in computing,” and “The intellectual of computer analysts”—is celebrated in particular for her networking skills. As she acknowledges, “Some people like to do the work. I just like putting people near each other” (Borsook 1993).
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The network human does not produce as much as he or she brings together and catalyzes the creation of assemblages of disparate nodes in the network. Stewart Brand, for example, publisher of the Whole Earth catalogue and an iconic member of the digerati (see, for example, Turner 2006) is described as “a starter of things, an intellectual pies piper with a knack for bringing together people from a wide swath of disciplines” (Hafner 1997). These new types of people, able to transcend disciplinary, professional, and bureaucratic boundaries and bring together disparate nodes, are referred to in the digital discourse as “The Connectors” (Howe 2003): “Meet the hypernetworked nodes who secretly run the world . . . In a computer network, a node performs the crucial task of data routing, playing digital matchmaker to packets of information. In a social network, a node is the person whose PDA runneth over with people they met once on an airplane” (Howe 2003). The network structure creates and is dependent on a new type of social actor whose prime practice is to make connections: the network human.
Network Identity
The type of cyborg represented by Nagle—a nearly science-fictional character of flesh and bolts—is only a borderline case of a much more universal phenomenon shared by an increasing number of humans. To recall Haraway’s contention, we are all cyborgs, and we are increasingly so with the widespread dissemination of network technology. According to the digital discourse, in the digital era humans cannot be understood independent of network technology. Information technology is no longer a tool to be utilized but a component of our innermost realms; it also becomes a central axis of human identity. It is here, in the realm of identity, reflexivity, and self-understanding, that commensurability of humans and network technology is most dramatically revealed to be understood not only in instrumental and pragmatic terms but also in quasi-essentialist terms. Humans are understood in the digital discourse to be not simply like network technology but to be themselves networked entities.
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A crystallized and systematic articulation of the conflation of network technology and human identity can be found in two articles focusing on the work of Sherry Turkle. The article “Sex, Lies and Avatars” (McCorduck 1996) asserts the compatibility of network technology with the essence of human identity. Both, it contends, are postmodern. In contrast to modernism, which is concerned with form and essences and “assumes that beneath any surface exists a timeless and placeless truth,” postmodernism, according to the article, presumes that “no unitary truth resides anywhere.” For postmodernists, “there is only local knowledge, contingent and provisional . . . The surface is what matters, to be explored by navigation, not by opening up the hood and peering inside . . . Postmodernism celebrates this time, this place; and it celebrates adaptability, contingency, diversity, flexibility, sophistication, and relationships—with the self and the community” (McCorduck 1996, emphasis mine).
That this language, capturing the spirit of postmodernism, bears such an uncanny resemblance to the discourse on network technology is hardly incidental (a resemblance that does not evade the author of the article, who comments that this list of characteristics “sounds like the World Wide Web? Like your favorite electronic game?” [McCorduck 1996]). Turkle’s argument regarding the fit of network technology to the spirit of the time underlies the article. Modernism, Turkle says, is “the spirit of the Tofflerian Second Wave“—that is, industrialism. Postmodernism, in contrast, is “the spirit of the Third Wave,” a wave, according to Toffler, brought about and defined by information technology.
Here the notion of a break within the history of information technology (discussed in Chapter 5) is reiterated: information technology sprouted from the industrial, modernist world and was reproducing its centralized, hierarchized, system-oriented characteristics, but it developed and was indeed revolutionized in such a way as to enhance personal freedom and unleash human potentialities (see Dean 2002, 79–113). As mainframes—that is, the large, centralized machines of the early days of computing—the article upholds, computers were modernist, but with the introduction of the personal computers, “computing slipped into postmodernism.” Now, with the advent of the Internet, “computing continues its postmodern odyssey . . . to the most dramatic extreme: the creation of online communities containing online personae. With its screen surfaces, its learning by doing instead of learning the rules first, its hypertext . . . computing now is as postmodernist as it gets. It’s characterized, as Turkle puts it, by ‘the precedence of surface over depth, of simulation over the real, of play over seriousness’ . . . Computing also offers pluralism, different things for different people” (McCorduck 1996).
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How does this bring to bear on human identity? In the weak version, the article suggests that humans now form their identity through information technology. This is in line with the technology-shape-society argument (see Chapter 1). But one can also read a stronger argument, according to which human identity is always already informational and networked and has therefore found its match with information technology, since both share a common essence. This argument assumes an ahistorical, essentialist human nature. The author reflects on the compatibility of human identity and information technology through Turkle’s personal biography, thus exemplifying and affirming it: “In Life on the Screen, she [Turkle] describes a shy, English-speaking Sherry, who, to her astonishment, is replaced in Paris by a much more assertive and self confident French-speaking Sherry. This self-transformation was happening inside language . . . And it was language—slippery, ambiguous, elusive, potent—that would be the construction materials of the Internet, too” (McCorduck 1996). According to Turkle, information technology, specifically cyberspace, becomes the site through which human identity is both constructed and uncovered. Postmodern theory becomes the discursive glue that ties these two moments together. In multiple passages the fit among postmodernist philosophy, human identity, and network technology is asserted:
Turkle’s study of Lacan . . . was preparing her for a future she couldn’t anticipate: a future represented by computing. Computing would offer her endless moments of sweet epiphany, when theories that had seemed right but abstract were suddenly right and manifest . . . Constructing the self with language and the notion of permeable boundaries? There it was on the screen. You could almost substitute computing for the terms of Lacan’s manifesto . . . computing is what brings postmodernism down to earth . . . the computer has transformed the knotty difficulties of postmodern theory into the trivially obvious . . . [Turkle’s] findings—that identity isn’t fixed but variable and fluid—are very postmodern. And those findings are based on what’s actually happening [in cyberspace], not on philosophical speculations . . . What in other contexts has seemed like the gibberish of postmodernism—decentering (oh, you mean multiple users), intertextuality (oh, hypertext), fragmentation (oh, me in the Parenting conference, me in the Eros conference), blurring (oh, object-oriented languages)—is rendered clear at last . . . Postmodernism. Right in front of you. Your laptop embodies new ways of thinking, carries you to them (or them to you), and opens you to them. People use the Internet as “a significant social laboratory for experimenting with the constructions and reconstructions of self that characterize postmodern life”. (McCorduck 1996)
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THE CO-EVOLUTION OF HUMANS AND COMPUTERS
Turkle, according to the article, argues that as we interact with network technology we become more like it. Or rather, who humans are becomes entangled with what network technology is. This is the thrust of another article in Wired written by Turkle herself. Turkle’s main argument is that “computers are not just changing our lives but changing our selves” (Turkle 1996).2 She begins her article with an answer to the question posed in the title—”Who Am We?”—that asserts her multiplicity: “There are many Sherry Turkle.” She explains how this multiplicity is reflected, facilitated, and augmented by network technology. Here, for example, she makes this point with reference to the Windows operating system: “Windows have become a powerful metaphor for thinking about the self as a multiple, distributed system” (Turkle 1996). Later she adds, “Those boxed-off areas on the screen . . . allow us to cycle through cyberspace and real life, over and over. Windows allow us to be in several contexts at the same time—in a MUD, in a word-processing program, in a chat room, in e-mail . . . The self is no longer simply playing different roles in different settings at different times. The life practice of windows is that of a decentered selfthat exists in many worlds” (Turkle 1996, emphasis mine) Turkle quotes one of her research subjects saying, “Now real life itself may be . . . just one more window” (Turkle 1996). Turkle, then, sees computers changing our identity in the direction of more versatility, flexibility, instability, and multiplicity and celebrates this transformation.
According to Turkle, as computers have transformed so did human identity. Today human identity is very different from the one produced under modernist conceptions of computing. Under modernism, the computer was seen as a “calculating machine,” as the essence of a “linear, logical model,” a model that, according to Turkle, also prevailed in the discourse of “economics, psychology, and social life” (Turkle 1996). This conceptual framework has now changed: “Programming is no longer cut and dried,” and it is no longer about “calculation and rules.” Instead, “The lessons of computing today have to do . . . with simulation, navigation, and interaction . . . Today’s computational models of the mind often embrace a postmodern aesthetic of complexity and decentering” (Turkle 1996).
Through the interaction of humans with computers, these technical and technological changes now bring to bear on the self-conception of humans as cyborgs and on their identities as networked and distributed. Referring to the culture of MUDs (multiuser dungeons—a type of multiplayer online game and one of the sites for Turkle’s empirical studies), Turkle says,
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As players participate, they become authors not only of text [which is how the game is played] but of themselves, constructing new selves through social interaction. Since one participates in MUDs by sending text to a computer that houses the MUD’s program and database, MUD selves are constituted in interaction with the machine. Take it away and the MUD selves cease to exist: “Part of me, a very important part of me, only exists inside PernMUD,” says one player. Several players joke that they are like “the electrodes in the computer,” trying to express the degree to which they feel part of its space. (Turkle 1996, emphasis mine)
MUDs also give “people the chance to express multiple and often unexplored aspects of the self,” and so Turkle argues that “MUDs imply difference, multiplicity, heterogeneity, and fragmentation” (Turkle 1996).
DO HUMANS STILL EXIST?
The cyborg in the digital discourse represents a conflation of humans and technology and, in that sense, impinges on the modernist notions of the human as an autonomous entity, a subject and an agent. But, as we have seen above, there is another variant to that narrative where the equation of humans and computers brings up the possibility of a completely “humane” technology—that is, a technology that is human in the modernist sense: reflexive, autonomous, and having (at least the sense of) free will. As mentioned previously, this is not merely an exploration of a science-fictional fantasy world but an opportunity in the digital discourse to ponder what it means to be human in a networked, mediated civilization. That computers can be equated with humans, and may someday be just like humans, brings up a question that the following article asks in the most straightforward manner: “What’s it mean to be human, anyway?” (Platt 1995a).
At the background of this question are not only metaphorical comparisons between humans and computers but attempts at constructing intelligent machines, or artificial intelligence: computer programs that are as intelligent as humans. Such attempts have brought up a pragmatic question: how does one decree that such a program is indeed as intelligent as a human? The paradigmatic epistemology, and its corollary methodology in the digital discourse, is the Turing test, named after Alan Turing. Turing, a computing pioneer, suggested that a computer program can be said to be intelligent if its human interlocutor was unable to distinguish this program’s utterances from those of a human.
The Turing test and its underlying assumptions regarding the essence of what it means to be human are often contested (see Hayles 1999):
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