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

Does appearing intelligent to an interlocutor equal being intelligent? If a human perceives her software interlocutor to be human, does that necessarily imply that the software is intelligent? Thus, for example, the Wired article asks can “a computer use trickery to emulate human responses without being intelligent? What did ‘intelligence’ really mean?” (Platt 1995a). And vice versa, if humans are administered the Turing test, would they easily and unanimously pass for humans? This brings up all sorts of awkward reflections about the distinction between humans and computers, which undermine the essentialist, modernist foundations of what it means to be human.

These reflections clearly preoccupy the author as he gets ready for an annual contest in search of the most intelligent software. The author will take up the role of a collaborator—an interlocutor that judges would have to distinguish from a computer program—that is, a placebo. As the human collaborators prepare for the test, they are instructed by the contest’s organizers: “You must work very hard to convince the judges that you’re humans . . . You shouldn’t have any trouble doing that—because you are human.” But the instructor later goes on to shake their confidence in their inherent humanness: “You are in competition,” he tells them, “not only with the programs, but with each other . . . One of you will be presented with an award for most human human. And one of you will be ranked the least human human” (Platt 1995a). What this suggests is that being human (either for a computer software or a human) is a measurable skill (of which one can possess more or less) and not a dichotomous quality (which one either inherently possesses or not). Moreover, humanness is rendered a quality, or a characterization that is independent of the subject commonly referred to as “human,” quantifiable, and—as we’ll see below—can potentially be either present or absent in humans and in technology. Humanness, in other words, is performative.

As the author fears getting last in the contest and appearing the least human human (possibly even less human than a computer program), he ponders about his humanness, or what we might call his H.Q., his “Humanness Quota”: “I’m going to do whatever it takes to seem totally, 100 percent human when we start chatting online. But this raises some weird questions. I am human, so why should I need to fake it? Is it possible for me to seem more human than I really am? And if so, what’s the best strategy?” (Platt 1995a). Perhaps this very kind of reflexivity with which he engages might undermine his efforts to look human: “if I try to seem more human, I’ll end up seeming less human” (Platt 1995a). Along the lines of postmodern understanding of identity, humanness— like any other identity—is construed in the digital discourse to be constructed, precarious, and performative, not given and essential. Different individuals can be more or less human. For example, the author describes another collaborator in the contest, Linda, as “friendly, spontaneous, outgoing—the absolute antithesis of ‘computer geek’.” These qualities, he adds, make her a sure candidate “to win the ‘most human human award” (Platt 1995a). This statement also elucidates its opposite: being a computer geek makes a person appear more like a computer program and less like a human. Hence, being human is an identity to be constructed and performed and is malleable to quantitative manipulations.

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Given the relatively unadvanced stage of development of artificial intelligence, the contest features a “light” version of the Turing test: the discussion between interlocutors (judges, on the one hand, and computer programs or human placebos, on the other hand) is not open ended but limited to a subject chosen in advance. Topics include classical music, the Rolling Stones, and the authors’ topic of choice: cryonics (the freezing of corpses). The first question the author is asked by the judge (“What is the difference between cryonics and cryogenics?”) puts him in an awkward position, threatening to expose his precarious humanness: “There’s no way I can give a human-sounding answer to a question as dry as this. To seem human, I need to show emotion—but if my emotions are excessive compared with the question, the effect will be false” (Platt 1995a).

To be human, in other words, entails performing as one, convincing others of your humanness, and for that reason one is required to uncover and adhere to the laws that underlie a successful performance. In that sense, both humans and programmers of artificial intelligence engage in a similar project: constructing a human object (or better yet, a simulacrum of a human). Under conditions of disembodiment—with no human body to serve as an identification card for admittance—both can fail. Thus, for example, at that particular year’s contest, no computer program was able to convince the judges of being human. But neither did all humans. The aforementioned Linda, described as a “friendly, spontaneous, outgoing” human—was rated by the judges to be the least human among the collaborators. Three of the judges, in fact, mistook her for a computer program (Platt 1995a).

Network Unconscious

The chapter thus far has highlighted the dominant narratives of the digital discourse regarding the commensurability of humans and technology, such as cooperation, integration, and assimilation. Nowhere in the digital discourse is this fusion between humans and technology more evident than in the realm of the most private and intimate experiences. In these cases, the integration of technology into the human psyche seems the most welcomed and complete. It is here, according to the digital discourse, that we can most evidently no longer talk of the utilization of technology by humans but of full absorption; it is here that humans seem to “vanish into” computers (Brown 2004). I will discuss this narrative of the digital unconscious through the analysis of two items in Wired.

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T_ECHNO_LOGICA_L MAST_ERY OF DR_EAMS

The artwork in “Found” (Kaplan 2005) depicts a person sound asleep. A banal, quotidian scene complete with soothing bluish bedding, a bedside table, and an electric alarm clock. But once again, as in “Time Warp” mentioned previously (Brown 2004), this familiar scene is a setting for a much more disquieting posthuman fantasy. Attached to the man’s forehead are two electrodes presumably connected wirelessly to the radio on the bedside table. This, however, is not a regular radio, but a device, manufactured by Sony, called a “Dreammachine.” It is in fact a computer that runs “dream scenario” programs in the sleeper’s mind. In this case, the person has chosen to run a “romantic thriller” (Kaplan 2005). The dreamer not only chooses the general story to be immersed in but also controls various variables within the dream. In this case, for example, he chose to have Scarlett Johansson and Elijah Wood as “celeb avatars“—that is, as protagonists in his dream. He also chose to experience the events of the dream from the “viewpoint” of a “first person,” to set the “action level” to medium and the “titillation level” to high, and to turn off “parental control.” Finally, the device allows the sleeper to set the level of “emotional intensity” (Kaplan 2005). In addition to running the dream program over the sleeper’s mind, it is clear from the diagnostic meters on the device (featuring an electroencephalogram reading and determining the sleep stage) that the device is interactive and can read the vital statistics of the sleeping person.

This is a fantasy, of course, but a fantasy of what? What can it tell us about the ontology of the network human in the digital discourse? In this fantasy, the postmodernist, poststructuralist undertones are evident, involving the withering away of two structuralist assumptions: that signs stand for real referents and that there is a distinction between subjects (or subjective and internal experiences) and objects (or objective and external realities). In this fantasy scene one can control one’s dreams. Rather than expressions of the psyche, an arena for the unconscious to surface, dreams are here construed as entertainment brought about by information technology, spectacles to be screened and watched. In the modernist and structuralist framework, dreams are seen as the epiphenomenal signs of a much more stable and deep human essence (such as the unconscious). As such, dreams are an internal realm where anxieties, unresolved conflicts, and other unconscious forces are reflected and can therefore also be worked out and resolved.

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In this fantasy, dreams do not stem from some internal reality. Instead they are seen as free floating symbols, a simulacrum, standing for nothing but themselves. The sleeping protagonist in the photo still experiences a dream in the form of visual signs, but in this case these are external signs imported from without. If computers and the unconscious, network technology and mind, are essentially one and the same thing—computational hardware that produces informational software—what difference does it make where dreams come from? If both are information processing machines, what difference does it make what the source of one’s dreams is? In other words, the digital discourse cannot define a qualitative, substantive difference between the dreams produced by human unconsciousness and those managed by the “Dreammachine.” In fact, the only difference becomes quantitative: which of these two informational processing machines does it better? As the Wired fantasy clearly shows, on this leveled playing field the computer is superior to the human mind in allowing more control over the spectacle and the emotions it evokes and the control over dream scenarios, protagonists, and events. It renders dreams a truly interactive experience.

In this fantasy the external domain of network technology, or cyberspace, penetrates humans’ most intimate and personal spaces through information. (In this context it seems significant that the subject matter of the protagonist’s dream is clearly sexual. Given that in the modernist Freudian discourse sexual content predominates the unconscious, this makes the statement in the artwork doubly poignant: rather than seeing sex as a foundational motor of human behavior, and hence as a key to self-understanding, sex in the artwork is construed as a spectacle, a tool of satisfaction, and a commodity for consumption). In the digital discourse, cyberspace is seen not as an external entity to the human self but as constitutive of it, specifically, because of its capacity to augment experiences. Network technology helps construct or produce these experiences—and in turn, construct the human self—in ways that offer more control and interactivity and are therefore more empowering. No longer slaves of their Freudian Ids, humans are now promised technological mastery over their unconscious. The penetration of network technology into our innermost spaces is therefore welcome with open arms.

As this occurs, two corollaries follow, uncovering other aspects of the digital discourse on the new network human. As the dichotomy between internal and external is dismantled, dreams become prepackaged, standardized, and commodified just like movies and video games. One can therefore buy a dream, just as the protagonist in the artwork chose to purchase a “romantic thriller.” The second corollary is the rationalization of sleep (and dream) time. One of the data discs laying around the side table in the artwork is titled “Learn Farsi in 7 Nights” (Kaplan 2005). If dreams can be reconstrued as the internal processing of (external) information, one might as well process other forms of information. Sleeping hours, the scene suggests, can be used not only for entertainment but also for more industrious tasks, such as learning a foreign language. To recall a theme developed in Chapter 4, the blurring of the distinction between work time and leisure time is here even more complete and intimate; through the penetrating capabilities of network technology, even sleep time can be instrumentalized and rationalized; even the unconscious can be rendered a space of production.

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INTERNA_L EXPERIENCE THROUGH EXTERNA_L MEANS

The triumphant narratives about the possibilities of augmentation and rationalization of human experience through information technology are succinctly captured in another piece in Wired magazine, this time expressed as a prediction rather than a mere artistic fantasy from the eminent filmmaker Steven Spielberg. Prefacing an interview with Spielberg is a two-page illustration and an epigram featuring a quote from the interview. The epigram reads, “Someday the entire motion picture will take place inside the mind. It will be the most internal experience anyone can have” (Kennedy 2002). What is striking about this quote is not simply the prediction that someday such a technological feat will be possible, and not even that such development is seen as positive and desirable—as such, it is yet another expression of the fantasy of total immersion of technology and human mind. What is particularly striking here is Spielberg’s use of language, deeming such an experience, should it occur, an “internal experience” (Kennedy 2002, emphasis mine).

Spielberg’s use of the concept of “internal” to refer to such an experience is quite counterintuitive, since the source of the experience—by Spielberg’s own logic—is clearly external to the mind, as the interview and the illustration that accompanies the epigram make clear. In the interview, Spielberg is asked about the future of technology and storytelling. He says in reply, “The technology may give us far better tools to communicate our stories. The technology may also provide a theater of the mind. Someday the entire motion picture may take place inside the mind, and it will be the most internal experience anyone can have: being told a story with your eyes closed, but you see and smell and feel and interact with the story” (Kennedy 2002). Spielberg leaves no room for doubt: the source of what he predicts to be the utmost internal experience—like a dream, perhaps—is external; the mind will feel what the computer projects.

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The illustration that accompanies the epigram is even more revealing, further uncovering the blurring between “internal” and “external” in the digital discourse. It features a schematic profile of a human head, the likes of which is frequently used to educate about the neurophysiology of sight. Taking the eyeball as a starting point, we see a reverse still image of an iconic scene from the movie Casablanca. At the other end, on the brain, or the mind, is a “projection” of the same image upside down and much enlarged. This would be the conventional direction of the mind processing an external image. But what this illustration suggests is that “seeing,” according to the futuristic scenario painted by Spielberg, is merely a reflection of the images coming not from an external source but from the brain (the reverse direction is indicated by the spiraling arrows). By any measure, “seeing” a movie this way would also be a very external experience, since the signs will still be produced externally—by a storyteller, a programmer, and by information technology—and transmitted to the human mind.

Spielberg’s word choice is not a mistake; quite the contrary, it has been chosen by Wired’s editors to adorn the two-page introduction to the interview precisely because it is such compelling language. That Spielberg is able to denote such experience as internal is a testimony to a breakdown of the very distinction between internal and external in human experiences in the digital discourse. Such modernist language seems incompatible with the new subjectivity and its new experiences, inextricably tied with information technology. As such, these experiences are at one and the same time external and internal, taking place at the technological and the psychological realms. For what does it mean for the network human—a conflation of human and technology—to have an internal experience if his experiences are processed, transmitted, and perceived by both mind and machine, if his identity and consciousness is distributed among several computational machines? His existential sensibilities, lived experience, and identity become intricately bound with technology; his innermost experiences are rationalized and technologized by external machines.

Conclusion: Between Self and the Net

According to the digital discourse, in the information society, humans can no longer be understood as separate from technology. From the molecular level to the realm of lived experience, from the body to psychic life, from the human mind to cyberspace, human beings in the most technologically advanced regions of the world have been inextricably fused with network technology. Under these new circumstances, humans can no longer be thought of within the framework of humanism as distinct from technology but instead as network humans. Network humans are commensurable with network technology. This means that they are conceived in terms of network technology, that they are able to get into intimate relations with them, and, finally, that network technology resonates with the true essence of humanity.

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The commensurability between humans and network technology is made possible, according to the digital discourse, because of the revolutionary nature of network technology. The underpinnings, characteristics, and architecture of network technology—such as binarism, information, communication, flexibility, and adaptability—echo the essence of humans. This commensurability allows for new forms of interaction and convergence between humans and network technology to take place: humans can be further technologized and instrumentalized, technology can be humanized, and the hybrid entity of the cyborg can be constructed.

Since the mutual transference between humans and network technology is rendered unproblematic in the digital discourse, network technology is also seen as more conducive to bringing out human qualities associated with the humanist critique of capitalism: underdetermination (or nonessentialization), flexibility, and multiplicity. In the digital discourse, the conflation of information technology and humans, conceptually and practically, is seen as a means for human augmentation and emancipation. It is not simply that to be human is inextricably tied to information technology; human experience is augmented by technology, and human potentials are unleashed. Since network technology and humans are perceived as having a shared essence, network technology is seen in turn as the ideal conductor for human’s liberating potentiality.

These narratives are weaving a spirit of networks for a post-Fordist society. Humans are reconceptualized to fit their place in the new mode of production and a new society: contrary to the Fordist human characterized by spatial and temporal bodily presence and by physicality, the post-Fordist human is characterized by virtuality and disembodiment. The post-Fordist human—her body, mind, and identity—are informational, flexible, and multiple.

Set within the framework of this book, the digital discourse on the network human is seen as a response to the humanistic critique of Fordist society concerning authenticity. It rejects and transcends the overdeterminist and essentialist conception of the human in Fordist society. Network technology is conceived as materializing a response to the humanist critique of capitalism regarding authenticity, creativity, and self-expression; network technology complements the network human. In the digital discourse the relationship between humans and network technology (resulting in the network human) is set in contrast to the relationship of humans and industrial technology (resulting in industrial human).

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FROM IND_USTRIA_L H_UMAN TO N_ETWORK H_UMAN

The construction of the industrial human during Fordism—while allowing smoother integration of humans into the industrial machine—is seen in retrospect in the digital discourse as a hindrance to human emancipation and growth because it did not resonate with the true essence of humans but, in fact, suppressed it. During industrialism, the flexibility of the human body, mind, identity, and unconscious encountered stifling machines. The interaction of humans with machine followed the rigid rationale of command. It was not, in fact, interaction at all. In the best case, humans utilized technology by command, and, in the worst case, humans themselves were co-opted into the technology, becoming cogs in the system. With network technology humans have a much deeper interaction, which results in fusion, integration, and merging, and in the construction of a new subjectivity. The blurring of the boundaries between humans and network technology allows for a more meaningful, emancipatory, and natural interaction of humans with technology and unleashes the emancipatory potentials of humans.

We should recall here how the disciplining of humans to industrialism in general and Fordism in particular has been conceived by Gramsci. It is precisely this sort of analysis at the beginning of Fordism that the digital discourse continues and responds to (short of Gramsci’s critical thrust). It is precisely Gramsci’s concerns that are presumed in the digital discourse to be overcome by network technology. It is therefore quite instructive to juxtapose the digital discourse’s construction (and celebration) of the network human with Gramsci’s critique of the industrial human, a reading that reveals the extent to which the network human is constructed as a response to the industrial human. In “Americanism and Fordism” (Gramsci 1971), written originally in the 1930s, Gramsci says that,

the history of industrialism has always been a continuing struggle (which today takes an even more marked and vigorous form) against the element of “animality” in man. It has been an uninterrupted, often painful and bloody process of subjugating natural (i.e. animal and primitive) instincts to new, more complex and rigid norms and habits of order, exactitude and precision which can make possible the increasingly complex forms of collective life which are the necessary consequence of industrial development. This struggle is imposedfrom the outside, and the results to date, though they have great immediate practical value, are to a large extent purely mechanical: the new habits have not yet become “second nature.” (Gramsci 1971, 298, emphasis mine)

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At the heart of the creation of a new industrial human, Gramsci identifies a process of suppression of humans’ natural disposition by external means. The digital discourse on the network human directly responds to these concerns by suggesting that network technology responds to, and augments, the already-existing “first nature” of humans as flexible, informational, multiple, and so forth. What is more, with network technology this “struggle,” as Gramsci puts it, is no longer imposed from the outside, since the ecology of network technology resonates with humans’ internal characteristics. The network human offers a new subjectivity that transcends the boundaries between humans and technology and, in turn, transcends the limitations of the Fordist human. In the process, technology and technological reason are even more deeply internalized into our understanding of what humans are, and into human practice.

Unlike the digital discourse’s celebration of the network human, Gramsci points to the social coordinates underlying the process of technologizing humans both discursively and practically. Referring to the forefather of scientific management, Gramsci says, “[Frederick] Taylor is in fact expressing with brutal cynicism the purpose of American society— developing in the worker to the highest degree automatic and mechanical attitudes, breaking up the old psycho-physical nexus of qualified professional work, which demands a certain active participation of intelligence, fantasy and initiative on the part of the worker, and reducing productive operations exclusively to the mechanical, physical aspect” (302). Here again, the digital discourse’s narrative regarding network technology as unleashing “active participation of intelligence, fantasy and initiative” (302) in the network human is further elucidated.

Gramsci’s analysis of Fordism elucidates a critical point: humans are constructed and transformed through the productive process and through the technology that dominates this process. (It is no surprise, then, that through the discourse on technology human nature is also “uncovered.”) It is transformed in such a way that renders humans malleable to and compatible with the new productive process and the broader social arrangements it entails.

Fordism entailed a new approach to (and a new technology of) the labor process—indeed to the technologizing of the labor process—that Henry Ford fathered and implemented. Ford’s introduction of the assembly line, together with the introduction of Frederick Taylor’s scientific management, revolutionized the labor process by creating a division of labor within the factory. Taylor (1967) intensified the process of the rationalization of production by transforming the continuous process of work and the embodied character of skills into discontinuous and disembodied segments. Those autonomous units could then be individually perfected (first by creating an increased division of labor and, ultimately, by automation), as well as rearranged over time and space. Taylor’s idea was to abstract labor by (a) treating humans as machines (in the positive sense of the term, that is, as programmable, measurable, adaptive, malleable, and so forth) and improving, or technologizing their physical skills as workers; and (b) reformulating the whole process of work as information so that it can be completely rationalized and be performed by machines (Robins and Webster 1999, 87–108; Mattelart 2003, 37–40). Mass production and mass consumption, the large-scale bureaucratic corporation, and the deepening rationalization of the work process—staples of Fordism—have been enabled by technology and—to no lesser degree—with the reconceptualization of humans in accordance.

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Thus, for example, in contrast to the digital discourse’s discovery that humans are essentially about information, during Fordism, it was energy that was constructed (or “discovered”) as the commensurability unit between humans and technology. With Fordism, we witness the emergence of what Anson Rabinbach calls The Human Motor (1992). Rabinbach shows how the emergence of the discourse on the human motor was conjoined with the dominant scientific and technological transformations of the time. Helmholtz’s discovery of the laws of energy as the underlying operational rules of the universe and their construction as universal and abstract entities were central to a revolution in the perception of humans as machines for the extraction of labor power. This discourse had led to the emergence of a new science of labor—the most renowned practitioner of which was Taylor—that in turn led to new bodily practices involved in the labor process. Rabinbach is pointing out to a dialectical relationship, which results in a new social totality:

With the invention of the steam and internal combustion engines . . . the analogy of the human or animal machine began to take on a modern countenance . . . [T]he eighteenth-century machine was a product of the Newtonian universe with its multiplicity of forces, disparate sources of motion, and reversible mechanism. By contrast, the nineteenth-century machine, modeled on the thermodynamic engine, was a “motor,” the servant of a powerful nature conceived as a reservoir of motivating power. The machine was capable of work only when powered by some external source, whereas the motor was regulated by internal, dynamic principles, converting fuel into heat, and the heat into mechanical work. The body, the steam engine, and the cosmos were thus connected by a single and unbroken chain of energy. (Rabinbach 1992, 52, emphasis mine)

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