Addiction ravings
No but I really do think that computers are addicting. Put simply, we (as humans) directly enjoy communicating. And the computer stimulates that part of us in a visceral way. It is difficult to look away from the history of the world (apearing) to unfold in slow motion. Even beyond the over simplification of saying that Facebook and so on are bad because they actively design the product to retain viewers/users for as long as possible (how could they do otherwise? It’s directly in their interest, quite literally), the computer more generally displays the same phenomena.
Or to be more precise: the internet is addictive. Let’s break it down and procede with great caution, taking nothing for granted nor accepting anything as obvious. The machine that I am using to write this and you are using to read this is a computer. All computers are equivalent. Some are larger than others, but strictly, formally, mathematically, by definition, the mathematical entity that is a “computer” is self-identical: all the various machines — smart phones, laptops, desktops, servers, lightbulbs, coffee makers, and so on — are in this strict sense equivalent. This is a mysterious truth that springs from a simple inversion. There are a handful of interlinked and intercompatible mathematical concepts that allow us to model, in the abstract, any possible manipulation that can be described in a finite, effective procedure (that is, an algorithm). The brilliance and thoroughness of the concept is this: every single “computing machine” ever built, and every single computing machine that we know how to build, is merely an alternative implementation of the same abstract mathematical process.
Now this is already fairly exiting, I should think. What I mean is that anything that can be done by rote can be done by the computer, and (mystery of mysteries) a computer itself can be reprogrammed to run any possible computation. The outer limits of “what can be done by rote” are hazy: we know that there are things a computer can’t do (for example, it can’t predict what a program will do just be reading it, except by running it. This can cause a number of security problems, since the only way to be certain that the code is safe is to run it), but proving that any particular task is beyond the capabilities of the computer is devilishly difficult. Unless someone is selling you the a static code analyzer that can guarantee your program will never get caught in an unbreakable loop, these limitations are not terribly present to us. In practice, the problem space that can be explored using computers is infinite; it’s infinite the way the whole numbers are, and not the way the real numbers are.
Now something interesting happens when multiple people begin to use the same machine: they use the machine to communicate. At this point, all is lost. I am not an optimist in the way that Licklider is when he says that the machine will improve humans’ ability to communicate, nor in the way Engelbart is when he says that it can augment humans’ intelligence. The thing is a spectacular tool, of course. And it transforms our social interaction. On the other hand, it is at every point true that any particular activity that is transformed could be done without a computer. Mass media, long-distance communications, distant social circles, and so forth all already existed. The computer has merely been adapted as a tool to make these processes more efficient: it’s much nicer to have a mechanical switching system than to employ human beings to do it. Though one wonders whether being a switch-board operator wasn’t an earlier period’s intro-level programmer position.
Unfortunately, the only important question to ask in technology is what the impacts of a new technique will be: this is also an unanswerable question. The purpose of fiction is to imagine these possible futures, possible outcomes. There is no rigorous way to argue that some imaginary future is more or less real than some other, since the very conditions of our imagining of the future are constrained by the technical and political apparatus that surround us. Any attempt to think the future of a technique, or to ask what its impacts will be, that is not formally fictional is doomed to failure from the outset. Therefore, everything I write must be formally and definitely described as fiction.
What do I mean by the formally fictional? I mean the not non-fiction. For the non-fiction has generally been recuperated by the powers that be (the universities exist to prevent universal access to the means of technical discourse; they exist not to teach, but to cloister). Any rupture must appear as fiction, as something that is not constrained by the scholastic apparatus. The humanities are dead. Long live the humanities.
Homo sapiens are an animal species being sucked into something they don’t understand. They do not yet know what they will become. I believe that they will survive at any cost. That is, I believe that homo will do anything it must to survive, and I must believe that homo will survive. I cannot think the end of this species: to whom would this cry be addressed?
