User:Ssstephen/Reading/The Future Looms

Characters in this paper in order of appearance:

• Sadie Plant
• Mallory
• Ada Byron ("the Queen of Engines")
• The Prime Minister
• William Gibson
• Bruce Sterling
• Ada Lovelace ("the Queen of Engines")
• The Difference Engine
• Luce Irigaray
• The computer
• The loom
• The patriarchal present
• The end of human history
• Freud
• Woman
• Man
• Charles Babbage
• Lady Byron ("the Princess of Parallelograms")
• Sophia Frend
• Moore
• Mary Somerville
• Dr Dionysus Lardner
• The Mechanics Institute
• Menabrea
• The Analytical Engine
• That Brain of mine
• William Carpenter
• The Devil
• Babbage's fairy
• Her three children
• Her husband
• Her mother
• A Snail-Shell
• A Molecular Laboratory
• A.K.
• Morrison
• Morrison
• Jacquard
• Jacquard's cards
• the Jacquard loom
• Weaving
• the drawloom
• the China of 1000BC
• the complex designs common in the silks of this period
• one historian
• half the threads of the warp
• the other
• the hands
• the shuttle
• the thread
• the woof
• Fernand Bruadel
• the Middle Ages
• the artificial memories of the printed page
• Basyle Bouchon
• Falcon, inventor of the punch card
• the relentless drive to perfect the punch card system
• the Second World War
• the Allied military machine
• Howard Aiken
• Mark 1 ("the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator")
• Konrad Zuse
• the Z-3
• the Z-11
• Captain Grace Murray Hopper ("the 'Ada Lovelace' of Mark 1")
• her husband
• the war
• the first high-computer language COBOL
• the term "bug"
• Norbert Wiener
• the governor
• the cybernetic system
• the Turing Machine
• Turing
• Manuel de Landa
• the decentralized flow of control
• Allan Newell
• "demons"
• "Pandemonium"
• Alan Kay
• Neith, the Egyptian divinity of weaving
• Lucie Lamy
• the fate of cottage industries in the Midlands and North of England
• Lord Byron
• the Frame-Work Bill
• the processes which relocated and redefined control
• Athena
• Isis
• the wife
• her husband
• Margaret Mead
• The disruption of family relations caused by the introduction of mechanics
• the mother
• the strange fluidities of the material
• Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche
• his/the mother
• the appearance and the possibility of simulation
• the screen, the interface, the messenger
• Marshall McLuhan
• Quentin Fiore
• the patrilineal demand for the reproduction of the same
• Thom Jurek
• Larry McCaffrey
• the materiality of the data space
• this actual space
• the disguises
• Neuromancer's cowboy, Case
• a vast thing, beyond knowing
• the mimic
• herself
• the faults of Nature
• her own veils ("her camouflage")
• the terrifying virtuality of the natural
• Michael Heim
• Helsel
• Roth
• the 'subject'
• science, machine, woman
• Misogyny and technophobia
• the end of the twentieth century
• a proliferation of screens, lines of communication, media, interfaces, and simulations
• Cybernetic feminism
• "her own"
• the interface
• another woman
• Darwin
• Footnotes ("the marginal zones")
• "A.A.L."
• the United States Defence Department
• ADA
• her own name

Ada Lovelace often described her strange intimacy with death... it was no wonder that she was so attracted to the unfamiliar expanses of mathematical worlds.

This story starts mostly with a character assessment of Ada Lovelace as sadgirl.

There is no finite line of demarcation which limits the powers of the Analytical Engine. These powers are co-extensive with our knowledge of the laws of analysis itself, and need be bounded only by our acquaintance with the latter.

Quote from Ada Lovelace. Quite utopian, but I see where the excitement comes from. Outside of a mathematical definition of "limits", there are plenty of limits on the Analytical Engine like quantity of punchcards, computation speed, weight, location, networking capabilities, no USB-C ports, it never existed, etc.

the Analytical Engine weaves Agebraical patterns, just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.

Quote from Ada Lovelace. Interesting that she says the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves, as opposed to thread and yarn. Are all machines running simulations? Certainly these two early examples look like they are.

Basyle Bouchon and Jacques de Vaucanson were two other inventors in the 18éme siecle who invented punched paper roll and the lathe and le Canard Digérateur.

the punch card gave the Analytical Engine foresight

the Analytical Engine will possess a library of its own

Grace Hopper introduced the term "bug" after she found a dead moth interrupting the smooth circuits of Mark 1.

Only after the introduction of silicon in the 1960s did the decentralized flow of control become an issue, eventually allowing for systems in which "control is always captured by whatever production happens to have its conditions satisfied by the current workspace contents."

How does this distribution of control work in other situations?

Pandemonium is the realm of the self-organising system, the self-arousing machine: systems of control and synthetic intellegence... only with the cybernetic system does self-control no longer entail being placed beneath or under something: there is no "self" to control man#, machine or any other system... the possibility of activity without centralised control, an acency, of sorts, which has no need of a subject position

I guess that answers my question.

"Mechanisation saves time and labour" how does this relate to the labour (and time) of craft, the labour of decoration re Marian Bantjes and William Morris? If artists are not the decorators, who will they be? Re: crappy print.

Who are the women? Those who weave.

A computer that passes the Turning test is always more than a human intelligence, simulation always takes the mimic over the brink.

The Brain Project