DATELINE–The PC Revolution

Our culture is twin sibling to technology.

But this pairing is becoming parasitic and, quite soon, will mean the death of the half that we call culture; i.e., human culture.

But division is our national past time. Wage work is now the law of the land. Work is never begun nor is it ever finished. Time is simply marked in arbitrary intervals which correspond neither to the harvest nor to the season, but to the steady microbeat of production and consumption, of suppliance and exploitation. During some of these artificially created increments, one must earn a living. During the rest, one must kill time.

The Walkman™ brought a spring to its users’ steps. Individuals in headphones marched to work imagining that the beat driving their bodies was theirs alone. Automatic Teller Machines, or ATMs, put the girl from the bank out on the street. Tammy the Timeless Teller was an automated lady of the evening, working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. She waited ever ready for customers to insert their cards and conduct their transactions within the protection of her anonymous but available embrace.

Technology in those days was easy to recognize. We could call it by name. Sociably enough, it even possessed a gender. But like a master criminal who has taken pains to obscure and rearrange his identity, technology has digit by digit obliterated its own fingerprints and other identifying marks.

Technology is fading into the simulated grain that serves to remind us of what woodwork once was. Once upon a time we could read a machine like an open book, its very design would speak to us about how it might be used, repaired, even customized. The pursuit of miniaturization, surpassing even the cult of speed, proved an irresistible aphrodisiac with its frenzy of fission and guarantee of unending progression. After all, while utility and efficiency may have thresholds and limits, “smaller” is a simple mathematical operation.

“Our aim is miniaturization of everything … Technology is endless.”
Akio Morita, Chairman of Sony Corp. In a fraction friendly world, every unit is divisible.

We receive our dividend in the forms of planned obsolescence, specialization run amuck, and indeed the personal computing revolution. On rare occasions a remainder will creep into our rounded and conformed results. We catch a glimpse of the smooth operation of antiquated machines, the life of the renaissance man, revolutionaries and minstrels heading back to the land. Remainders, reminders, outliers.

So divide, personal technology has. And it has dispersed itself widely with a drive for survival reminiscent of the transmission of seed-heavy spores or rapidly metastasizing cells.

No longer can we roll up our sleeves and find out what makes machines tick, for the machines have been replaced by silent, and often hidden electronic devices. We cannot fix technology in time or space. We cannot fix technology in our garages or workshops. In an age of mechanical means, the ends –outlines – of body and machine were easily discernible; written in skin, metal, stone. In an age of electronics and, now, personal computers, the borders between tool-user and tool are being eroded, permanently erased.

In the place of this most basic distinction between humans and their inventions emerges the nebulous third term of the “interface". Computers have exploded open the possible meanings and uses of the interface. Today, the “object” that we call the (computer) interface is clearly half-machine half-human in both design and logic. We are not talking about the interface in terms of labels and markers: there is a radical difference between an engine part being labeled “oil gauge” and an icon which – somehow, invisibly, fantastically – corresponds to the liquidation of a family’s bank account or the pictorial representation of a sick person’s so-called genetic structure.

The interface blurs the line between machine and man precisely in its purpose as “go-between"; as an automated version of a human action or a moral decision-making process. In this late stage of the game, it is possible to buy so-called “software” that will allow a manager to better manage his or her employees. Likewise, a “blocked” writer can come to another “piece of software.”

The well-known Java™ revolution began as an effort to insinuate programmable logic boards into household appliances. The goal of this project was to render the pliable technology of the computer invisible by hiding it underneath layers of convention rather than plastic. The inexplicable drive towards smaller and smaller electronic components is only the proverbial tip of the iceberg: our fetish for miniaturization can only be realized, ultimately, with devices “small” enough to fit within the most obscure crevices of human consciousness; within the shadows of our social and personal, political and emotional lives. Our overt fascination with so-called nanotechnology is nothing but a ruse, a wild goose chase. “Smaller” is simply a more palatable tag than “closer.” We are more happily diverted with an interface the size of a television set than we would be with a cell-sized circuit board. The physical or hardware shell around “closer” technology is mere residue; a very technical, existential remainder. The least common denominator is, nonetheless, the interface. That nebulous, amorphous, shifting device most true-to-itself when left to its own devices.

We desire a world of rules and regulations incarnated neither in juridical law nor the long arm of the law; instead, we seek the science-fiction of a world ordered by the concealed techno-logic of ATM’s and surveillance cameras; televisions with sufficient “programming” to suit your least articulated fantasy and telephonic equipment that ensures you are never alone, never elsewhere, never lost, never past. When computers have disappeared into the habitual (i.e., the habit-forming), the interface will take the place of human interrelations: that is to say, the mirrored screen will take the place of the open door or window. The “closer” machine will become the arbiter of our personal will just as “personal technology” is already being marketed in terms of “personality” (e.g., translucent beepers, sport walkmen, business laptops, chic cellular telephones).

But it is the P.C. revolution that most deserves to be revisited, reevaluated. The personal in “personal computer” is by no means solely an indication of ownership or utility. It is, instead,a hint of things to come. The era of weight loss “systems” and debt management services has us all locked in to the same signal: the body is a machine to be studied, medicated and “worked out” while the policies which govern human beings are dictated by the logic of spreadsheets and algorithms.

We are enveloped by technology only large corporations can design, build and repair. The only hope for the survival of human culture – whereby life is lived in the company of fellow human beings – is to resist the insinuation of companies into our everyday life.

Say no to the company-made personal digital assistant unless you want to say yes to a life of solitude… …a life of solitude, that is, shared with your personal computer.