User:Ssstephen/Reading/A Prehistory of the Cloud

via subnet 10.0.0.103 on the xvm

Intimacies of the User: From the Stolen Look to Stolen Time

Stewart Brand's Dec 7, 1972 Rolling Stone article on Spacewar! Addeddate 2018-09-04 17:30:48

The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California runs a demo of Spacewar every first and third Saturday.

Added to the list of nerdy tourist destinations.

personal computing would also mean some-thing that may seem odd to a contemporary reader: the illusion that a person would be  “given the full attention and resources of the computer.” 

Becoming a more common understanding, for networks rather than individual computers tghough I guess. Are computers in-dividual?

Hallucinating senses individually 
Are in any combination, rhythmically
Shifting gears, focus upon intensity
Wait, big people a talk nobody try fuck with i-man clarity
Mind starts slippin' to familiar tracks
Bending warping, interfering with the facts
Sensory language leaves us with no habit for lying
We are hostile aliens, immune from dying

Spaceape, Burial and Spaceape.

Does the computer have my full attention? Which one? This tab. The tab with the PDF. My phone. My headphones. They are speaking to me. There are people saying things in the songs. What are they trying to say? What does it say in the PDF? I am reading and writing and listening.

More than a second
When reading the newspaper
I felt the war
I felt her exposed position
I saw myself in the picture
And I

I took a cab there to hold her
I took a plane there to feel what she felt
You make me like charity
Instead of paying enough taxes

You Make Me Like Charity, The Knife.

I took a train there to hold her. What am I trying to give. What am I trying to take. What the fuck is going on.

By spending a fraction of a second on one user ’ s pro-gram, switching rapidly to other users ’ s programs, then immediately moving back to the first program, it appeared as if the computer were responding  Figure  2.1 Spacewar!  running on a PDP-1. (The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California runs a demo of  Spacewar  every first and third Saturday.)  ©  Joi Ito, reprinted under Creative Commons BY 2.0 license. TIME-SHARING AND VIRTUALIZATION 39instantly to each user ’ s commands

What I paste is different to what I copy. I couldnt read the licence, it wasnt visible to me. I didnt read the title and page number because I told myself they weren't in the flow. Everything is in the flow. The caption for the figure, it wasn't where I expected it to be in the flow. The whole order of everything is getting looped and fed back. My notebook is open it says

I've fallen in love 
with you and I 
have no idea what 
to do about it.

What the fuck is going on. ꓤƎ it says under the laptop. I cant read the 𐤵ꓳꓶꓢ part but I know its there. I know because I have read it many times. and I also wrote it.

he  user ’ s  subject  position  is  created  not  just by software, as media theorists would assert, but by the economic system that  undergirds  whatever  relation  any  of  us  have  with  technology

Double spaces. A missing T. Genesis by Justice comes on which has a † which is almost a T. I am multi-threading. I have multiple cores. The school is closing, I can hear the announcement behind Genesis. This is the end for now.

It's two days later and it's sunny and the afternoon and I feel very different. I'm at home and not in the studio. Miles Davis' version of A Case of You by Joni Mitchell is playing. I know it from the James Blake version. Are songs in-dividual? Is music divided into songs, or artists, or something else?

Computer power is now so plentiful that we’ve stopped counting, and the minimal cost of computation seems to enable a sort of personal freedom.

Is this a shared experience? Having worked as a freelancer in for example video editing and 3D graphics, the limitations of the computers I have access to often come into play. They slow me down. They dont have enough space, so I have less security (backups) than a big company would have. Broadband speed is sold like new cars, there is pressure to upgrade. There is pressure to buy a bigger package from the hosting provider, more speed, more bandwidth. Buy more storage on your gmail account. Buy a netflix account to access data-culture. Buy a spotify account to have autonomy over the algorithm.

time-sharing seemed to restructure the very boundaries between work and leisure, public and private

Restructuring of these boundaries, is maybe more generally to do with our relationship to labour compared to in the past? Work tasks have been divided so are now more integrated into our lives, also consumption has become the model for more aspects of life allowing them to be commercialised.

how did computing come to feel personal?

What computers are involved in my experience right now? The music is playing from the speaker, connected by bluetooth to my phone, streaming data from Spotify which is most likely coming from a nearby Google datacentre (Eemshaven or Middenmeer here in the Netherlands, or maybe St. Ghislain, Belgium) via a bunch of intermediary KPN and other telecommunication connections. There is a laptop that I type this draft onto, but when I press "Save changes" it will go to the wiki also via a bunch of connections. The PDF is coming from I believe a Raspberry Pi in an apartment not too far away from where I am right now in Oude Nord, also through some intermediaries. But yes it still feels personal, the interface physically and psychologically, even emotionally.

, this shift was not simply the result of technological inno-vation; time-sharing was symptomatic of a postwar economic shift toward multitasking  and  freelancing

A vast and unseen layer inside today ’ s cloud, known as virtualization software, ensures that the data jumbled within the cloud ’ s data centers and networks appear as individual streams of data 

This is in fact an act of dividing, as well as combining. It is boundary making and storytelling. It is potential gerrymandering, divide et impera.

the sewer system: centuries before computers were invented, sewers kept each household ’ s private business private even as it extended the armature of the state into individual homes.

Re Dave Harris on "T=he Practice of Everyday Life" De Certeau: subversive practices "interrupt the accepted framework and order, which 'leaks... meaning: it is a sieve order'".

 the fact that the word  “ computer ”   had  originally  designated  the  female  operator  of  a  machine, rather than the machine itself. 

In the Rotterdam Noord telephone exchange on Vlaggemanstraat, the women were replaced by machines in 1962. This street is also near me right now, and I suspect some of my data is passing through the wires in its' basement.

man and computer are two creatures living together in intimate association, or even close union.

from J. C. R. Licklider “Man-Computer Symbiosis” (1960).

If the quasi-illicit pleasure of cinema is peering in on a scene, as if through a keyhole, the computer user initially occupied  a  similar  position.

History of cinema to computers, are there other links? Cinema is generally placed behind or before television, also a story about personalisation, individuation and the creation of intimacy.

“ two-timing ”  aspect of time-sharing opened a variety of ways for users to furtively acquire time. 

Time sharing as extraction, time stealing, time sharing as selfish and abusive.

 By making the user equivalent to his or her usage, time-sharing yoked the user ’ s labor to the labor of the computer itself. In doing so, human – computer interaction initially functioned as a management technique, as a way to fash-ion an efficient worker capable of flexibly managing time. (It is no coinci-dence that multitasking, a concept that originally came out of time-sharing, now refers to this kind of flexible work.) 

As a worker in 2023 I manage my time my self flexibly. I can relate to this.

time-sharing was often experienced as a permissive and even freeing system, for it asked users to think of the computer ’ s time as their own time

Is this a codependent, symbiotic relationship? What are the user's needs and what are the computer's? I need self-affirmation. Does this mean I have an individual self? Is "my" computer part of my identity? Is "my" virtualisation and "my" slice of the cloud's time sharing me? What parts of the government are me, or what parts of the city? Where do I stop and the computer starts, at the keys and the screen? Or is it blurrier?

 By making each online resource freely available — computer storage, processing time, content, even software — the cloud encourages the pleasur-able and quasi-illicit feeling that we are getting away with something: that we, too, have stolen time. 

Why do we want to know where our information is stored, how our data is used? Guilt maybe? Shame? Fear, curiousity?

 Simultaneously voluntarily given and unwaged, enjoyed and exploited, free labor on the Net includes the activity of building web sites, modifying soft-ware packages, reading and participating in mailing lists and building virtual spaces. 

Are you essentially being exploited if someone else is profiting? If I go to a bar or a concert and part of the reason I go there is other people, does that mean the other people are being exploited? If we went to a house party instead and no one makes a (directly financial) profit, is it still exploitation? What if two of the people at the party work together at some point in their life? The causation here is not very obvious.

Asked to manage ourselves as users, we are also asked to manage our own privacy online by negotiating with private companies:  by  taking  on  liability  for  copyright  infringement  on  reposted images, by managing whom our posts can be shared with, and even by opting in to restrictions on search results for children, in what Raiford Guins terms a culture of self-imposed filtering.

Is an alternative being posed here? If intimacy is not mediated socially through economy, what does it go through? Government control?