KNHaylesmymotherwasacomputer

"If you had to give a name to the whole apparatus, what would you call it?" "Hmmm;' Waterhouse says." Well, its basic job is to perform mathematical calcu­ lations-like a computer." Comstock snorts, "A computer is a human being:'

Intermediation Textuality and the Regime of Computation new languages. The development of code by relatively small groups of technical specialists, and the tight integration of code into commercial product cycles and, consequently, into capitalist economics distinctive characteristic of technologically developed societies;language plus code.

three principal discourse systems of speech, writing, and digital computer code. (Saussaure, Derrida, and code various authors)

code as performative practice

Computation can take place in a variety of milieu and with almost any kind of material substrate Turing machine. The computational regime continues in the tradition of Turing's work, a process that starts with a parsimonious set of elements and a relatively small set of logical operations. Instantiated into some kind of platform, these compo­ nents can be structured so as to build up increasing levels of complexity. cellular automata.

computation does not merely simulate the behavior of complex systems; it is envisioned as the process that actually generates behavior in everything from biological organisms to human social systems. Computational as metaphor and means. feedback loops that connect culturally potent metaphors with social constructions of reality, resulting in formulations that imagi­natively invest computation with world-making power. ░The Second Self and Life on the Screen, Sherry Turkle :such feedback loops can dra­ matically influence how people perceive themselves and others. Interactions kids with int. toys. young man, comments, "Reality is not my best window."

second kind of feedback loop, Computational Universe is linked with an imagined future through which anticipa­ tion cycles to affect the present. the initiative to reorganize the U.S. military to pursue "network-centric warfare."(abandon a centralized command/control structure in favor of a highly mobile and flexible force, from platform-based strategies to "network-centric" structures in which units are seen not as independent actors but as "part of a continuously adapting ecosystem. (network-centric warfare marks a "fundamental shift" in military thinking) high-performance informa­ tion grid combined with interoperable sensor and engagement grids.self-synchronization

░ code (a synecdoche for information )░

Doyle ■ "'Uploading: the desire to be wetware, makes possible a new tech­ nology of the self, .... Uploading seems to install discursive, material, and social mechanism for the anticipation of an externalized self,affected by, addicted to, the future

Greg Egan's "subjective cosmology" trilogy: Quaran­ tine, Permutation City, and Distress. feedback cycles between human cog­ nition and the Computational Universe function to construct the nature of both reality and human beings.

Slavoj Zizek's analysis of the symptom

The third way in which the Computational Universe functions indeterminably as means and metaphor is through its current status as a provocative hypothesis that has neither won wide consensus nor been definitively disproved

The regime reduces ontological requirements to a bare minimum. computation requires only an elementary distinction between something and nothing (one and zero) and a small set of logical operations. un­ predictable surprises created by the simulation as it is computed. the Regime of Computation provides no foundations for truth and requires none

as the rules for any system can be viewed as corresponding to a program, so also its behavior can be viewed as a computation" (Wolfram)

The Economy of Information

the bodies within texts

thermodynamics and the formation of the liberal subject

If, as Ostman predicts, people could make whatever they desire virtually without cost, private property would cease to be meaningful.Along with the demise of private property would go an idea of selfhood based on the notion that in the first instance one owns oneself, a proposition that C. B. Macpherson has called posses­ sive individualism and that he identifies as foundational to liberal philosophy

Robert Markley points to the ecological and social costs involved in developing a global information network James's "In the Cage;' written in 1898, explores intimations of an information regime through telegraphy Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer El­ dritch, making drugs a communication technology. James Tiptree's "The Girl Who Was Plugged In