Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age The Spirit of Networks

D’Urbano’s artwork renders the human body a suit, which in turn renders the human body. The model therefore covers her naked body with cloths that uncover her naked body. In other words, the artwork does a work of uncovering by covering, a work of reflexivity, a “movement whereby that which has been used to generate a system is made, through a changed perspective, to become part of the system it generates” (Hayles 1999, 8). In that movement, the rug under the very distinction between covering and uncovering is pulled. As the suit covers the naked body only to reveal the naked body, this artwork also undercuts the distinction between internal and external. As the text complementing the artwork observes, this work “blur[s] the line between inner and outer” (Moreno 2002). The suit, designed as an external membrane, a “second skin” that covers the first one, offsets its purpose and reveals the internal, first skin.

The artwork undermines another set of distinctions cherished in the humanist discourse of modernity. The body on the suit may look real and natural, but it is really a simulated, produced body. The body, the locus and marker of the human subject, has in this artwork become an object, but a quasi-object at that. However simulated, mediated, and pixelated the body is, it still retains a quasi-subjective quality (we can still claim to have seen her naked!). The subject (or a part thereof) can be objectified, while retaining its subjective qualities.

Furthermore, to make the movement between subject and object, between the real and the simulated—between humans and technology— the body should be conceived as comprised of, or reducible and translatable to, signs, or information. It is this understanding of the human body and humans in general, as an informational entity that is, as we will see below, key to bridging the gap between information technology and humans and making their conflation plausible.

If the symbolic reproduction of the artist’s body as a suit is cautiously titled by Wired “Second Skin” (Moreno 2002)—presumably to distinguish this simulated skin from the first, real skin—another artwork featured in the magazine goes further in questioning the distinction between the real and the simulated, the natural and the manufactured, the human body and technology. The artwork is featured in another regular section in Wired, entitled “Found: Artifacts from the Future.” As the title suggests, “Found” features commissioned artworks that directly engage with a recurring theme of the magazine: technological utopianism (and, rarely, technological dystopianism). The artifacts and their artistic rendering are usually playful and amusing; they represent a fantasy. But a fantasy of what? And what can these fantasies tell us about the ontology of the network human according to the digital discourse? The artwork featured in the June 2002 edition of “Found” is particularity illuminating in the context of the perception of the network human (Bodow 2002).

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At the center of this work is a small package designed with the iconography of an existing and popular household object: a box of Band-Aids (Bodow 2002). But unlike the real Band-Aid, which is an external object meant to facilitate the healing of damaged skin, the futuristic product featured in “Found” offers a solution that brings the very distinction between the “artificial” product and the “natural” skin into question. The imaginary product is branded “Quick-Skin” and offers “Self-Grafting Bandages.” The pronouncements on the package describe the product as “healing wounds with living tissue”; promise that it “starts replacing damaged skin on contact”; and enthuse about “30 percent faster grafting!” Since both the “first” and “second” skins are made of “living tissue,” the very distinction between internal and external, original and imitational, real and simulated, becomes insignificant. As the photo on the package and the samples lying around reveal, while the material may be synthetic in the formal sense (alluded by the maker’s name “Plastex Inc.”) the validity of the dichotomy between synthetic and organic is brought under scrutiny. Thus, for example, one pronouncement on the package promises “25 nerve receptors/cm² for seamless sensory networking” (Bodow 2002). This seamlessness implies the complete erasure of difference between the (synthetic) graft and the (organic) skin once Quick-Skin has caught on; if the synthetic material works as if it were a real skin (in terms of look, sensation, and function), then it is real. In other words, the definition of the body in the digital discourse becomes pragmatic and instrumental (rather than, for example, transcendental or lyrical).

T_HE C_{OMMENSURABILI}T_{Y O}F H_{UMANS AND} T_ECHNOLOGY

Analytically speaking, this is the preliminary task of the discourse on network humans: to insist that network technology and humans are of the same order. The distinction between humans and network technology is blurred and flattened in the digital discourse by placing both humans and technology on the same plane and suggesting that both are paradigmatically and essentially the same. On this plane they might not be quantitatively the same (e.g., a computer processor might be quicker than humans at calculations; a robot may be less competent in visual skills), but qualitatively and ontologically they are perceived to be of the same kind. This narrative of humans and technology sharing the same plane allows for a seamless and frictionless transference between them, a shared discourse of concepts, categories, and imagery where humans (and human qualities and characteristics) can stand for computers and vice versa. By undermining claims for substantive difference between humans and network technology, two scenarios become possible: the commensurability between humans and technology and their conflation.

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These are not the same as a third, more traditional narrative regarding humans and technology: utilization. In this narrative humans use machines, and there is therefore a clear distinction and hierarchy between humans and machine, subjects and object. The narratives of commensurability and conflation, on the other hand, transcend the narrative of utility by asserting a deeper similarity between humans and network technology. They presuppose a deeper sense of mutuality, interchangeability, and interactivity. Not only do humans utilize network technology, but also, to a large degree, they are similar to it.

The narrative regarding the commensurable nature of humans and network technology is most evident in the plethora of images that make the transition between technology and humans seem smooth, unproblematic, and natural: “seamless,” as the expression goes. Let me exemplify this point with three advertisements for digital cameras. It is noteworthy that the three advertisements, for three different companies, appear in the same issue of Wired, a testimony to the prevalence of this narrative in the digital discourse and to the homogeneity of its imagery.

While the three advertisements recount essentially the same narrative of the commensurability of humans and information technology, they offer varying degrees of the possibilities of conflation between humans and machines. The first advertisement is dominated by the face of young man pointing a digital camera, ready to shoot a photo. The text, laid out near the eye unoccupied with the camera reads, “careful, this eye may become jealous” (Olympus 1999). While the allusion here is that the camera’s visual competence is as good, or better, than the visual aptitude of the human eye, the human-technology distinction still dominates the scene. The serene, warm-colored, smiling face of the man, with its naturally curved contours is set in contrast to the cool, metallic, machine-like colors and straight-lined contours of the digital camera.

The second advertisement goes a little further in conflating humans and technology. Here the protagonist of the advertisement is the camera rather than a human. But the human is nevertheless there as an ideal, since the featured camera is purported to be “so smart, it’s nearly human” (Kodak 1999). The human—or rather a human quality—is “captured” by the camera; its eye peeks behind the camera’s lens. This time, the warm colors are shared by both the camera and the human. Like the previous advertisement, the camera is anthropomorphized and is assumed to have human qualities. The camera’s superior ability to perceive reality visually is equated with that of a seeing human. (And the caution appearing in the previous advertisement is affirmed: the eye might indeed get jealous, as the camera’s visual ability does rival it.)

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The third advertisement takes the immersion of humans and technology one step further. In contrast to the previous advertisements, where the camera is featured front and center, in this advertisement the camera seems to be missing from the scene altogether. Instead, a woman’s face overflows the page, dominating the scene. Her face is flooded with a cool, bright blue light, which diminishes much of her “humanness” and gives her a semihuman (and perhaps semi–science fictional) look. A closer look into her eyes—the most expressive and revealing elements in the face, the “gateways to the soul”—reveals that they are actually “made of” digital cameras. The slogan for this advertisement reads, “Change the way you see the world” (Sony 1999a), which imbue the digital camera with the ability of “seeing.”

HUMANIZING TECHNO_LOGY_, TECHNO_LOGIZING HUMANS

By focusing on the technological, visual skill of humans, what these advertisements are doing, to a greater or lesser degree, is to flatten out and diminish the distinctions between humans and technology. Digital cameras are perceived as seeing organs to the same extent that humans are seen as organic cameras. The very distinction between organic and synthetic, nature and culture, created and manufactured—in short, between instruments and technology on the one hand and humans on the other hand—is diminished by focusing on the instrumental and technical aspect of the human body.

The digital discourse positions humans and technology on the same plane, hence lubricating, as it were, the channels of transferability and commensurability between them. An advertisement for Sony further exemplifies this point. The advertisement features four sequential fullpage images. The first features a blue-lit woman’s face with camera eyes, and the text reads “see it.” The next two images follow the visual style of the first. In the second image components from an audio device are grafted onto a woman’s face, and the text reads “hear it.” And in the third, the back of a human’s head is adorned by a slot into which a memory card is inserted, and the text reads “think it.” The fourth page resolves the mystery of the preceding hybrids by exclaiming “stick it,” featuring various information technology gadgets (Sony 1999b). This advertisement admittedly sells memory cards and electronic equipment, but it also propagates an idea: that the richness of humans’ senses, experiences, and intellect can be easily transported and recreated with information technology;

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that visual and auditory sensations, as well as thought, can be uploaded on, and downloaded from, humans and information technology.

The body in the digital discourse is perceived as an instrument, the material and functional levels of which can be increasingly rationalized and denaturalized, as something that can increasingly be artificially manufactured, or virtually represented, rather than naturally created, in a word, as technology. As humans—their bodies, their functional abilities, and their characteristics—come to be seen as objects and technologies, the prospect of a modular construction and reconstruction of machine-like humans and human-like machines comes to the fore in the digital discourse. One scenario brought up by the objectification of the body is the manufacturing of technologies (organs and body parts) to be incorporated into humans, as the subtitle of “Regrow your own” (Kahn 2003) cheerfully proclaims, “Broken heart? No problem. New liver? Coming right up.” (The image on the cover of the September 2000 issue of Wired tells of another fantasy of meshing humans with machines; see Cover 2000). Clearly this smooth transferability is seen as empowering and liberating.

The other side of the coin of the objectification of the body is the prospect of producing human-like robots, “Humanoids” (Capps 2004), or “Robosapiens” (D’Aluisio 2000). An exemplary article in this vein offers a catalogue of technological projects currently underway or in planning stages that “might one day add up to an android just like the rest of us” (Capps 2004). The six-page catalogue presents a dissection of this future robot into muscles, hands, expression, lips, skin, eyes, ears, nose, stomach, and legs.

It does not make much difference that these are futuristic presentations or that the digital discourse also asserts that the human body is still superior to robots on many counts. What is crucial here is that as we are presented with human-like machines, we are also encouraged to think about humans as machines. That is, we are set within a dual framework of instrumentality and commensurability. Instrumentality pertains to seeing the body as a technology, a functional tool, and an instrument; commensurability pertains to the ability to see humans and technology as interchangeable and conflatable. Robots are therefore central in the digital discourse not only because of their potential service to humans but also, more importantly, because robots—as a discursive category—play a central role in redefining the identity of humans. As such, they dot the digital discourse and are often reported on in Wired in the context of interaction and conflation rather than utilization. This is evident, for example, in the words of an MIT scientist in the introduction to “The Humanoid Race” (Capps 2004), who predicts that “within five years, robots will cross a critical threshold, becoming partners rather than tools—in other words, we’ll have friends, not appliances” (Capps 2004).

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And on emotional and conceptual levels, this threshold seems to have already been crossed; in the digital discourse robots are already recognized as humans. “The Humanoid Race” (Capps 2004) features nineteen different robots, with each receiving a personal representation (i.e., not as a type, but as a particular): each has a distinctive look and a distinctive name (such as Jerry and Asimo). But they are all—after all—robots; part of “the family of post-man,” to paraphrase the title of the famous 1950s MoMA exhibition (Steichen 2002).

To the degree that humans, and specifically in this case their bodies, are seen as technologies, they are also instrumentalized and commodified. They become things, objects that can be evaluated quantitatively (in terms of price and performance) and, in turn, be improved, enhanced, altered, and purchased. As instruments, human beings also become a means; a clear break from an Enlightenment humanist notion of humans as carrying substantive and unqualified worth as subjects and as ends in and of themselves.

One of the most theoretical articulations of this posthuman stance is put forth by Donna Haraway, whose thought is featured in “You Are Cyborg” (Kunzru 1997). Haraway’s basic thesis, according to the article, is that “the realities of modern life happen to include a relationship between people and technology so intimate that it’s no longer possible to tell where we end and machines begin.” She prefers, therefore, to speak of cyborgs rather than humans. For Haraway, the technologization of the body entails not only the physical internalization of technology into the body but also the “idea of the body as high-performance machine”—that is, the instrumentalization of the body.

Haraway sees no moral dilemma concerning the “cyborgization” of humans. Referring to the use of performance-enhancing drugs in sports, “Haraway could hardly see what the fuss was about. Drugs or no drugs, the training and technology make every Olympian a node in an international technoculture network just as ‘artificial’ as sprinter Ben Johnson at his steroid peak” (Kunzru 1997). Haraway refuses to differentiate culture (or nurture) from nature, since she refuses to see the body as natural in the first place. “Haraway’s world is one of tangled networks—part human, part machine; complex hybrids of meat and metal that relegate old-fashioned concepts like natural and artificial to the archives” (Kunzru 1997).

Not only is the cyborgization of humans untroubling, but also, for Haraway, this reconceptualization of humans as networks is liberating, particularly for women. The cyborg is a “symbol of feminist liberation, since it undercuts the naturalistic ideology that legitimizes women’s inferior social position. “Women for generations were told that they were ‘naturally’ weak, submissive, overemotional” and so forth. “If all these things are natural, they’re unchangeable . . . On the other hand, if women (and men) aren’t natural but are constructed, like a cyborg, then, given the right tools, we can all be reconstructed” (Kunzru 1997).

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This, according to the article, is also the main thrust of cyberfeminism, which promotes the idea that “in conjunction with technology, it’s possible to construct your identity, your sexuality, even your gender, just as you please” (Kunzru 1997). One of the most obvious and intrusive realm of technologizing of the human has been genetic engineering, where “we are becoming the objects of our own technological processes” (Simpson 1997) and where “man create[s] man in his own image” (Rohm 2004).

Haraway, and cyberfeminism in general, see the liberating potential of the discourse on the network human in rendering humans malleable and flexible, readily available for continuous, multiple, and ad hoc deconstructions and reconstructions according to some nonessentialist and extranatural code. In the absence of any essentialist natural code, the theoretical question then becomes, What is the external code for the construction of the human? As we will see below, it is the characteristics of the network—as constructed in the digital discourse—that come to dominate the understanding of humans.

N_ETWORK MIND

What the digital discourse suggests is that the intensity and profound level of interaction between humans and technology may imply that we can no longer speak of interaction, which assumes the independence of two entities and assigns technologies the role of objects and humans the role of subjects. Instead, the digital discourse suggests, we are witnessing the merging of humans and network technology into a singular entity; or to turn this proposition upside down, we see the emergence of a new subjectivity comprised of both humans and technology.¹ This idea receives an eloquent representation in an artwork featured in Wired. The black and white photograph by artist Matthew Pillsbury depicts a quotidian moment in the life of the network human: a dining table inside an apartment, with three laptop computers on top (Brown 2004; Figure 6.2). Both the title of the artwork and the complementary text initially suggest a straightforward depiction of a trivial scene. The work is entitled “Penelope Umbrico and Lila and Rebecca Cohn,” and the text suggests that it “captures a mother and her daughters as they check email, send instant messages, and tend to their virtual pets over the course of a half hour” (Brown 2004).

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But something weird goes on in this otherwise banal representation, expressed by two visual dimensions that seem to dominate the scene: a dimension of clarity and blurriness, and a dimension of lighting and shading. As for the first dimension, the clearest objects in the photo are those that are the most immobile, the “hardware,” as it were: the walls, the hanging lamp, the plants, and the three laptop computers. In contrast to these, the computer users look blurred, fuzzy, and almost nonexistent. As for the second dimension, while the apartment is generally dark, the two centers of extreme brightness (or “overexposure”) in the photo are the three computer screens, and the three heads of the people using the computers.

The combination of these two visual dimensions creates an image of great poignancy: the banal, calming scenario of this home is a background to a much more disquieting drama that takes place in its midst—that is, of humans merging with their computers. This is obviously not a physical merging but a merging of software: human consciousness merges with cyberspace. The different physical shape of humans and computers is only a cover-up for a convergence of similarities—their consciousness. As the complementing text asserts, in this artwork, “subjects don’t just stare at their computer screens, they vanish into them. Pillsbury’s work . . . demonstrates how humanity and technology are intertwined” (Brown 2004). Thus, humans vanish into their computers, creating a seamless flow of consciousness between the two and, in fact, constituting each as nodes in a network. As this happens, the independent subjectivity of humans is undermined; their consciousness and thoughts are fundamentally intertwined with the machines they use. This not only makes humans quasi-subjects but also endows machines with a quasi-object status as well (Latour 2005).

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It is worthwhile at this point to pause and emphasize the full significance of this likening of humans to machines. In the digital discourse, this likening is merely a prelude to a much more profound claim: that humans and network technology are commensurable to such a degree that they can merge into unity. This likening should not be underplayed as merely metaphorical; rather, it is substantive and, hence, instructive of the horizons opened up by such a discourse. Consider a more common metaphor: “time is money.” To treat this maxim—immortalized in eighteenth-century America by Benjamin Franklin—strictly as a metaphor implies that time has similar characteristics to money in that both are quantifiable, malleable to manipulation (such as loss or accumulation), dear, finite, and so forth. As a metaphor, “time is money” imbues time with a very particular set of meanings (associated with capitalism) rather than alternative sets of meanings.

But that maxim carries an even heavier cultural significance. Once time is shown to be commensurable with money, once proper practices are introduced by which time can really be translated into money, then this can no longer be treated as a mere literary metaphor; rather, it becomes an instrumental and practical equation. Thus, for example, time becomes money (i.e., it can be translated into money) in the most pragmatic and instrumental sense under the specific conditions of capitalism, which, as both Marx and Weber pointed out, is conditioned by the emergence of wage-labor. As Marx has shown, time becomes particularly crucial under capitalism, where value that can be diverted to capital accumulation rather than reproduction comes from the difference between the total hours of work and the hours needed to create the value required for their own reproduction—that is, their wages. Marx calls this difference surplus value. This “trick”—translating the laborer’s (work)time into the capitalist’s capital—is only possible with the commodification of labor—that is, with the creation of wage laborers who are compensated for their time and not for the market value they actually produce.

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Hence, in the historical context of its coinage, Franklin’s maxim is not merely a metaphor regarding the essence of time but an ideology, at one and the same time revealing and concealing the realities of capital accumulation under capitalism and its connection with time. “Time is money,” then, is rendered a strong metaphor when these very different entities are shown in practice to be commensurable. To tie this back to our discussion here, the discursive intensity and potency of a metaphor increases (and becomes practical) when some form of commensurability is pointed out and some channel by which the commensurability of humans and network technology can be materialized.

How is the commensurability between humans and network technology possible according to the digital discourse? The answer, as we have already begun to see, is that both humans and network technology share the common denomination of being essentially informational machines. Thus, humans and network technology are commensurable through the media of information. This commensurability through the medium of information (or more precisely the medium of binarism or digitalism) allows the connection of humans to technology. Thus, for example, the digital discourse renders the brain a “hardware” on which “software,” or “programs,” are run. Thus, whether the hardware is made of neurons or wires, and whether the program is run by a string of binary neural activity or electric signals, becomes insignificant. Unsurprisingly most of the stories in Wired that feature the narrative of commensurability focus on the brain as a site of interconnection between humans and machines: the brain is referred to as a “humans-machine interface” (Freund 2004), and the process of interaction is referred to as “brain-computer interface”(Martin 2005) and “neural interfacing” (Branwyn 1993).

DISEMBODIED CONSCIO_USNESS

But in the digital discourse, the brain is often just an entry point (and a euphemism) for a more substantial discussion concerning the core elements of being a network human: thought, mind, consciousness, and unconsciousness. “Mind Control” (Martin 2005), a story about a cyborg, is instructive in uncovering the digital discourse’s underlying assumptions regarding the human mind and its compatibility with network technology. The story focuses on Matthew Nagle, a quadriplegic, paralyzed from the neck down, and the first person to use BrainGate, a system that allows him to manipulate information on computers solely with thought. The system is comprised of an array of microelectrodes that are implanted in his brain and register its neural activity. A computer processor then recognizes the patterns associated with arm motions and translates them into signals on a computer screen. Simply put, the system bypasses and substitutes body movements hitherto needed to execute informational commands from brain to computer (such as moving a computer mouse with one’s hand), rendering human-computer interaction more direct and disembodied.

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