"In merely terrestrial terms, programming the environment means, first of all, a kind of console for globalthermostats to pattern all sensory life in a way conducive to comfort and happiness. Till now, only the artist has been permitted the opportunity to do this in the most puny fashion. The mass media, so called, have offered new material for the artist, but understanding has been lacking. The computer abolishes the human past by making it entirely present. It makes natural and necessary a dialogue amoung cultures which is as intimate as private speech, yet dispensing entirely with speech."
-McLuhan, War and Peace in the Global Village, 1967
Professor Mark Hansen (Duke) talked to Trent last
Thursday. He was setup by his many admirers in the room as a sort
of "new media" guru. But he was not some blissed out prophet,
telling us how it is or what we should be doing or what we're all
missing, but instead he just proved a very small truth in very
great detail.
Fekete described this small truth as "updating
McLuhan" and described it as the "ongoing technogenesis of the
human-being." But Hansen, himself paraphrasing Johnny Bored-dough,
put it best as: mathematics is "the structure of media that we can
master without understanding it."
By no means is this a new phenomenon or limited to
mathematics. When I spoke with John Muir about this, he quickly
pointed out that people drive their cars with a minimal
understanding of what to do if it breaks down. It becomes obvious
with digital media though because we have artists and digital
content providers at he top of the game but with no real knowledge
of how the ones and zeros that actually create their content work.
And since the time of McLuhan, the goal of a medium has been to
conceal how it works. Pay no attention to the man behind the
machine. Jesse Brown in his first edition of CanadaLand tells the
story of how he was told that no one wants to listen to a show
about how the business of media works.
Now Hansen does think this is problematic, but not for any
of the whiny social reasons we hear from old dogs forced to learn
new tricks. No, his principle example is stock traders trading on
futures and how it has lead to several collapses in the underlying
structures of a capitalist economy. Traders stopped needing to do
the actual math involved, and instead did the math on a preset
data sheet via their computers. It was a process of
objectification, turning social conditions into numbers on a data
table. This becomes a problem because the future is not so easily
predicted and social conditions are not actually numbers. When
traders reach the end of their formula, they haven't actually
predicted the future and acted upon it n the present but fulfilled
a problematic framework.
For Hansen, the underlying Platonic assumption is that
math is a static realm of forms, untouched and unchanging. Instead
he studies Whitehead, who wants to make math a process. Math as a
contextual creature that is effected by history and personal
experience of it. So the formula of the past you have used to
predict the future is not the same formula required once you reach
that future.
The problem with not knowing the code when you post your
selfies on the facebath or recreate Indiana Jones on the LudeTube
is not a problem at all. This has been going on for ages, before
the infinite space of digital media. The problem occurs when you
are making actions in the present that assume you know what the
future is going to be, on the authority of an unchanging
mathematical formula. There is a scene in Capitalism, A Love Story
where Michael Moore seeks out a simple answer to: What are
Futures? And finds many traders blowing him off and one that
spends a great deal of time with multiple formulas that in the
end, explain nothing. McLuhan describes this as speech becoming
obsolete, as in the systems that run a global capitalist economy
cannot be translated into natural language, whereas something like
the internet has being translated into natural language as its end
product.
Technology is our best friend. We grew up together and
share a great deal of memories and thoughts. But it is folly and
plunder to suggest that we need to know everything about them in
order to be friends. Unless we are going to dream inside of their
subconscious (Inception) of course....
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