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# Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age The Spirit of Networks
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Network technology seems to be telling Kelly about nature. To grasp the enormity of the contemporary technological revolution, Kelly situates it on a historical axis that begins a few billion years ago: “It took several billion years on Earth for unicellular life to evolve. And it took another billion years or so for that single-celled life to evolve multicellular arrangements” (Kelly 1998, 6). But these multicellular arrangements, he explains, yielded very limiting forms of life, since cells had to be directly connected to each other in order to work in coordination: “After another billion years, life eventually evolved the first cellular neuron—a thin strand of tissue—which enabled two cells to communicate over distance” (6). This, he says, was a quantum leap in the possibility to create more diverse and sophisticated forms of life. In a language that echoes the biblical scene of creation, Kelly recounts, “Life quickly exploded in million different unexpected ways, into fantastic awesome varieties, until wonderful life was everywhere.” After this short detour into natural history Kelly makes a clean break back to technology and concludes, “Silicon chips,” he says, “linked into high-bandwidth channels are the neurons of our culture” (6).
This is not simply a metaphor, a projection of a natural science discourse over a technological screen. For Kelly, the silicon chip is an extension of living organisms and squarely fits into the history of the natural world. Previous chapters of this book paid close attention to the actual dynamics and forms attributed to the network in the digital discourse— complexity, decentralization, spontaneous order, and so forth. What we need to pay attention to here is the epistemological level of the argument, in which (a) information and communication are defined as the essence and teleology of nature and (b) a direct, unproblematized, and undialectical transference between nature, technology, and society is made.
The transformative power of technology, Kelly says, is true for any technological paradigm, like the steam engine or electricity, and the same goes for network technology. The reason why Kelly is ready to put so much weight on network technology as transformative and why he is ready to surrender completely to technological determinism—to embrace it, in fact—is because he is able to conceive network technology as the end of technological history. Not, of course, that this ends the cycle of innovation; quite the contrary, technology, its improvement, and further application to every sphere of life are central to the digital discourse. Rather, he sees in network technology the final paradigm of technology. That is because technology—a human creation, a product of human culture—has finally took the shape of nature itself. The paradigm of network technology inaugurates a science and technology that follow the rules of nature, replicating the way biological systems work, sustain themselves, and evolve. After taking a long detour from these natural rules (emblematic to the unnatural technological paradigm of the industrial era), human civilization has come full circle, finally joining the bandwagon of nature.
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Network technology is benign, transformative, progressive, and inevitable, according to the digital discourse, not simply because it affects human life in positive ways but, more fundamentally, because it is natural, that is, it follows the way things work in nature. Its transformative capacity ensures that society and social formations become better, its structures more adaptable, its potential more fulfilled, and its economy more workable. It also suggests that any intervention in the workings of this technological paradigm is not only futile (the force of natural elements—like a flood, or tornado—is too powerful for humans to resist) but also reactionary. Instead, it suggests that at a social level we should be doing all we can to facilitate these transformations and to accept pitfalls and difficulties arising from network technology as temporary, necessary, and unavoidable obstacles on the way to a brighter horizon.
Unsurprisingly the story of network technology is traced back to nature in the digital discourse. Likewise, the story of nature is told as the story of information and communication; both histories are interwoven. To put it more bluntly, what is traditionally thought of as natural history, dissociated from human history and culture, is retold in the digital discourse as the history of informational codes and network communication, which itself is dissociated from human history. Hence, information and communication become the real teleology of nature, society, and technology. Thus, insights from nature and technology are transplanted to the social field. Our economy, Kelly argues, is only now moving out of the multicellular level: “By the enabling invention of silicon and glass neurons, a million new forms are possible. Boom! An infinite variety of new shapes and sizes of social organizations are suddenly possible” (Kelly 1998, 6). By assuming a direct, causal, and deterministic link between technology and society, and by insisting on their semblance to nature, Kelly constructs a framework where the political dimensions of social structures—in this case, the economy—are uprooted and altogether excluded and where the social is reduced to the technological.
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Another theme in the digital discourse that shifts freely between the three levels—nature, technology, and society—pertains to complexity. I have taken up the issue in depth in Chapter 3. What interests me here is again not the substantive argument but its technologistic epistemological underpinnings. Recall Kelly’s observation regarding the emergence of dumb chips and their interconnection into a rational smart network. Kelly affirms this by a reference to nature. Since this network model can be found in both nature and in technology, the analogies are interchangeable. In the space of a few sentences Kelly shifts back and forth between the two:
A personal computer is like a single brain neuron . . . When linked by the telecosm into a neural network, these dumb PC nodes create that fabulous intelligence called the World Wide Web . . . dumb cells in our body work together in a swarm to produce an incredibly smart immune system, a system so sophisticated we still do not fully comprehend it . . . Dumb parts, properly connected into a swarm, yield smart results (Kelly 1998, 13) . . . The surest way to smartness is through massive dumbness (Kelly 1998, 14) . . . Everyday we see evidence of biological growth in technological systems. This is one of the marks of the network economy: that biology has taken root in technology. And this is one of the reasons why networks change everything. (Kelly 1998, 32)
It is obvious that the use of the language of nature and biology to explain technology and society is not simply metaphorical but points to a conflation of these worlds in reality. In this case, the social (economy) and the technological (which underlies the networking of the economy) are understood to be overtaken by nature. The crux of this depoliticizing narrative comes from the anchoring of the social in the technological, which in turn is anchored in the natural.
The formidable, socially transformative power of network technology— more than previous technological paradigms—rests, according to the digital discourse, not only on technology being more natural but also on culture being more technological. Kelly makes a distinction between previous technologies and current network technology in terms of their dominance in society. Up until the midtwentieth century, says Kelly, technology was almost entirely separated from society, or, rather, society was autonomous from technology; technologies merely “enhanced the prevailing culture” (32). Technologies could therefore be ignored, since they occupied the periphery of society; they “did not penetrate the areas of our lives we have always really cared about: our network of friendship, writing, painting, cultural arts, relationships, self-identity, civil organizations, the nature of work, the acquisition of wealth, and power” (32–33). But with the advent of the digital revolution, “technology completely overwhelmed these social areas” (33). As Kelly succinctly puts it, “Technology has become our culture, our culture technology” (33).
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But how did that happen? Why had technology become so central and embedded in our life? How did it come to be “the campfire around which we gather” (33)? Kelly’s answer is that technology “has become more like us. It’s become organic in structure” (33). This argument resonates with the themes raised in Chapter 6: by being more organic and natural, technology is able to resonate with humans more fully. The arguments then ultimately circle back to nature: our culture is technological, our technology biological, our biology informational. Technology can no longer be thought of in social terms as something that humans construct and that therefore follows a social logic. Network technology “behaves more like an organism than like a machine” and is much better understood as part of nature (33).
TECHNOLOGY AND THE INEVITABILITY OF NATURE
As David Nye shows in his study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century technological narratives in America, the naturalization of technology meant that technological—and the ensuing social—transformations were seen as inevitable: “The narratives naturalized the technological transformation of the United States so that it seemed an inevitable and harmonious process leading to a second creation that was implicit in the structure of the world” (2003, 6). In a similar fashion, the naturalization of network technology and the informationalization of nature are reiterated in the digital discourse.
In “The Big Picture” (Hillis 1998), natural history becomes a teleological story that culminates with the advent of information technology. In this long and evolutionary process, “cells evolved an information processing mechanism . . . the genetic code of DNA” (Hillis 1998). Since the biological is understood to be, in essence, informational, information (or knowledge) is portrayed as the protagonist of this natural history: “With DNA came an evolutionary advantage: knowledge, as genetic recipes, could accumulate from generation to generation” (Hillis 1998). Then there was the great transformation from single cells to cells cooperating and creating a community, not unlike a communication and information network. The article goes on to unfold this history until it reaches the time of human civilization with its most sophisticated means of communication—language. Here the ontologies of informational nature and information technology converge and reach their zenith. All sorts of information and communication technologies, the article argues, “are all specialized mechanisms we’ve built to bind us together” (Hillis 1998). The evolution of living organisms, as well as that of technological machines, has an ontology and teleology—a communication, cooperation, and cohesion of disparate parts. In this framework, network technology is seen as the pinnacle of that evolutionary development and as essentially bent on fortifying natural tendencies. It is thus also essentially benevolent.
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In another piece that puts together natural, technological, and social history (Gilder 1998), the author upholds information as the underlying building block of the universe, the key to life: “Ruled by DNA codes, cells are chiefly a symbol system governed by information theory. Codes precede chemistry and are not reducible to it” (Gilder 1998). The foundation of life, according to this, is information, not substance; the secret of life is encapsulates in information, in immaterial codes. This is true in nature, it is by construction the essence of information technology, and, as we will further see, this should and would (given technological determinism) ultimately be the blueprint for society.
The convergence of technology and biology is tackled head on in a special issue of Wired, “Living Machines” (Wired editors 2004a). The opening article outlines the basic premises of that approach: “Scientific advances point to a startling conclusion: The nonliving world is very much alive” (Meyer 2004). This, according to the article, is true for all sorts of nonliving human creations (“markets and power grids have much in common with plants and animals”). But more important, this is true for network technology: “We’re beginning to discern life processes at their fundamental level, and as we re-create these processes in silico, we’re starting to see how they work in inorganic settings. It turns out that many of life’s properties—emergence, self-organization, reproduction, coevolution—show up in systems generally regarded as nonliving” (Meyer 2004). “Computer programs,” the author says, “procreate, too. Genetic algorithms mimic biology’s capacity for innovation through genetic recombination and replication, shuffling 1s and 0s the way nature does DNA’s Gs, Ts, As, and Cs, then reproducing the best code for further recombination” (Meyer 2004). With these properties now being built into network technology “the line between organisms and machines is beginning to blur” (Meyer 2004). The author gives an example of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Programmed with simple rules, the UAVs are able “to direct themselves better than any dispatcher could” (Meyer 2004). The UAVs are networked and self-taught: “If one is shot down over Afghanistan, all drones everywhere gain improved responses to that form of attack.” Not surprisingly, this technological sophistication has been known in nature for ages. The way UAVs work “is precisely how bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics, only faster” (Meyer 2004). So far the metaphor is restricted to nature and technology. To conclude the trinity, another link is added—the social realm. “Oddly enough,” he says, “our growing knowledge of life processes could have its biggest impact in the social sciences. Social systems, after all, are made up of interacting agents, i.e., people. When we become adept at applying these insights to the social sphere, we’ll be able to run simulations that reveal, say, the conditions under which Iraq would reconstruct itself. At that point, the new science of life will help us not only live better, but live better together” (Meyer 2004).
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What the digital discourse suggests is that social affairs are guided by a logic similar to that which governs systems of information and communication in both nature and technology. Alas, this similarity is not simply metaphoric and suggestive (as, for example, in the case of complexity theory. See, for example, Urry 2003). The argument is much stronger here, suggesting that social dynamics should follow those of nature. Moreover, it offers the practical medium through which such change is to take place—network technology. Network technology is seen as a medium between nature and society, facilitating social change in accordance with the laws of nature. The special feature on “Living Machines” ends with a call for arms—“Evolve” (Wired editors 2004b)—that sums it all up in a big crescendo and urges society to keep up with technology and nature: “A lot can happen in a billion years, but look closely and you’ll see the same dynamic at work in every system, and at every scale.” Whether it’s “microbiology or geopolitics,” the underlying dynamics are the same (Wired editors 2004b).
The direction of argumentation may change: technology might be seen as following the logic of nature or vice versa. In an essay entitled “The Computer at Nature’s Core” (Channell 2004), the author turns the table to suggest that rather than technology being like nature, scientists are now gaining insights about nature from technology. Scientists increasingly “explain natural phenomena by invoking such man-made artifacts as the computer” (Channell 2004). Like information technology, the natural world “is the result of a series of yes-or-no choices that take place at the level of quantum mechanics” (Channell 2004). Hence, to understand how nature works, one needs to carefully examine computers. And indeed, “research into quantum computers has implied that matter itself processes information . . . This has led some in the pure research world to the controversial claim that the universe itself is governed by the laws of computation and is, in fact, a computer . . . the field of systems biology is explicitly predicated on a computational model” (Channell 2004).
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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.2
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.
INDUSTRIAL TECHNOLOGY VERSUS NETWORK TECHNOLOGY
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.
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It is not technological utopianism per se that the digital discourse advocates but a new utopianism based on a new technological paradigm.
Moreover, even within the technological paradigm of Toffler’s Third Wave there are transformations so that not all information technology is created equal. I have pointed out already in Chapter 5 the shift in emphasis from information and communication toward the network as the central locus of contemporary technological revolution. Another fault line was drawn in the mid-1980s between the promise of big, centralized, mainframe computers (which have failed and gave us technocracy) and the personal computer (PC), which was construed as the carrier of a new promise of liberation (Dean 2002, 79–113). While both were in principle the same information technology, the PC was construed as the opposite of the supercomputer and, in fact, as a response to the pitfalls of the centralized computer. The latter accounted for an increasingly centralized, hierarchical, controlled, and technocratic society; the former promised to deliver a more decentralized, dehierarchized, and freer society.
The narrative regarding the naturalization of technology allows the digital discourse to reject a naïve, unreflexive version of technological determinism and technophilia. Those have been abundant in modern Western culture, perhaps even more so in American culture (Nye 1994; Segal 1985). As a general stance technological utopianism has been criticized through and through. Machines yielded greater productivity, yet they did not bring about the emergence of a “leisure society”; food processors chopped vegetables faster than women, but they did not necessarily liberated them from the toils of house labor (Cowan 1985; Wajcman 2004). How in posteuphoric times can the digital discourse still put so much trust in technology? The answer has a lot to with the naturalization of network technology. The construction of this narrative projects the message that the digital discourse is not duped by technology per se but rather specifically enthuses about network technology. Hence the recurring distinction in the digital discourse between network technology and industrial technology, specifically in regards to the measure of how natural these two technological paradigms are. In this formulation, industrial technology is constructed as the “Other” of network technology, upholding the positive “transforming fire” (Kelly 1998, 1) of digital technology vis-à-vis the negative effects of industrial technology and affirming the digital discourse’s optimism in network technology.
It is in this context that the digital discourse insists on a fundamental break between industrial, mechanic, analogue technology and the new network technology. Yes, concedes the digital discourse, with all the benefits of Second-Wave technologies, in the language of Alvin Toffler, its utopian promises have failed, and its damages were overlooked.3 But Third-Wave technologies are a new story, and utopian dreams regarding their emancipatory and progressive potential are right to be rekindled. This mindset has already been quite ingrained into our common sense and language, where network technology is habitually referred to as “high”-technology, asserting its superiority vis-à-vis good old (but full of false promises) “modern,” “heavy,” or “industrial” technology.
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The clear distinction between old and new technology is based in the digital discourse on the assumed compliance of the latter with the laws of nature. Nicholas Negroponte asserts that cyberspace and information networks “look and feel . . . much more biological, taking [their] character more from flora and fauna than from the unnaturally straight-line geometry in artifacts of human design” (Negroponte 1997). Negroponte is able to distinguish between two types of technology—natural and unnatural—and by that he achieves two goals: first, naturalizing and reifying network technology and, second, fending off a generalized critique of technology; technology might not have been emancipatory and benevolent in the past, but that is only because it has been unnatural. That has now changed with network technology.
Theologizing Technology: Technology as Transcendence
The rhetorical association of technology to nature evokes not only “truth,” “reality,” and “inevitability” but also appeals to our sense of transcendence as well and to the perception of nature as a secular sublime (Nye 1994). Technology, according to the digital discourse, is the locus of transcendence. By transcendence I mean here not only the overcoming of social conflicts and human ordeals by technological means (this type of “profane transcendence” was discussed in previous chapters) but also a more metaphysical experience of technology as elevating humans and the social to a realm beyond the mundane. According to the digital discourse, information, communication, and computing are not only the bases of contemporary society; they are metaphysical and transcendental as well.
AND GOD CREATED COMPUTERS
In a special issue of Wired about the intersection of science and religion, Kevin Kelly proposes that the universe, God, and its creation are all a computer. The title of the article—“God Is the Machine”—puts this assertion quite bluntly. Evoking the opening verse of the bible, the subtitle reads, “In the beginning there was 0. And then there was 1.” Thus
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Kelly reflects “on the transcendent power of digital computation” (Kelly 2002). A few of the naturalizing themes of the digital discourse are reiterated in this article as well. But they are now set in a different, transcendental context, and so their meaning is also changed. Life, Kelly says, is made of numbers: “Biology, that pulsating mass of plant and animal flesh, is conceived by science today as an information process . . . hard matter is information as well . . . [The physical world is] incorporeal. . . . everything . . . in the universe [is] . . . made of nothing more but 1s and 0s. The physical world itself is digital . . . Every it—every particle, every field of force . . . —derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely from binary choices, bits. What we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes/no questions” (Kelly 2002).
We have seen that type of assertions above. But Kelly now takes this “world-as-information” argument a little further, arguing for a new science, which Kelly terms “digitalism,” which suggests that “the universe itself is the ultimate computer—actually the only computer” (Kelly 2002). Digitalism’s attempt to understand physics as “a form of computation” opens the door, according to Kelly, to a new cosmology, a new understanding of nature and being, and ultimately a new theology: “From this perspective [that is, digitalism], computation seems almost a theological process. It takes as its fodder the primeval choice between yes and no, the fundamental state of 1 or 0. After stripping away all externalities, all material embellishments, what remains is the purest state of existence: here/not here. Am/not am. In the Old Testament, when Moses asks the Creator, ‘Who are you?’ the being says, in effect, ‘Am’. One bit. One almighty bit. Yes. One. Exist. It is the simplest statement possible” (Kelly 2002).
Binarism, or digitalism, that is, the expression of reality as strands of 0s and 1s (or more accurately, as a state of existence or inexistence), is the ultimate model of reality (which in effect means it is not a model at all but reality as such), a universal language. Hence, it is divine. God, which knows reality for what it is, knows digitalism. Kelly seems to find in the Bible confirmation for digitalism. God’s reply to Moses evidently vindicates digitalism as the ultimate reality. (And incidentally reveals the creator to be a programmer, or at least well conversed in the digital language.) But one should not really be surprised—after all, if God has created this world, he had to be a programmer. To be God is—quite literally—to play a programmer. Here is how the work of God-cum-programmer is presented by Kelly: “All creation, from this perch, is made from this irreducible foundation [0s and 1s]. Every mountain, every star, the smallest salamander or woodland tick, each thought in our mind, each flight of a ball is but a web of elemental yes/nos woven together” (Kelly 2002).
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