Postmodernism Is Cyberspace

Guest post

I spent the better part of a year, from the summer of 2017, in a protracted, debilitating psychosis. Rather recklessly, I decided to try and build my relation to the world from the ground up rather than seek institutional support—that is the main subject of my blog, LessMad.

I wasn’t unprepared. A long-standing interest in many varied ideas in psychology, art criticism, cognitive science, and technology has equipped me with many very good theories as to how the inner and outer worlds are related and how thinking “works.”

In putting theory into practice, however, the larger challenge emerges: how to socialize and return to a society that largely does not understand these things? In a nutshell, society is postmodern. The outer world is too confusing, and individuals and culture, at large, are seldom securely seated within it.

By the time Silicon & Charybdis was out, I was sure I knew why this was so: I have written elsewhere that postmodernism is cyberspace. What was far more difficult was comprehending why the material causes of postmodern conditions are so widely unacknowledged. This is more baffling when one realizes that the effects of these causes are so widely noticed, angrily argued over, and studied.

Fortunately for me in my time of weakness, this was a question Marshall McLuhan had also struggled with and, I believe, largely answered in terms of earlier media.

That is, the ability to model huge swaths of our material and social world in computers has lead to the post-modern condition wherein our lived, day-to-day experience is largely grounded in these mostly-invisible models. The pushing of this Jacquard-loomed rug under our feet affects nearly all aspects of our psychological development and well-being.

The post-modern condition—the embodied sensation (and subsequent logical justifications) that the ground of reality is gone and that everything is basically relative—has a specific material cause: computers. Or, more specifically, computer content putting computers themselves in eclipse. It is precisely that computers themselves are ignored, are subordinated to their useful applications in symbolic manipulation, which is messing up our collective and individual sense of reality.

Now I’d like to take a slightly different tack. I’d like to claim that post-modernism is all play, all the time. This is not to contradict my first definition of post-modernism as cyberspace, but rather to make a corollary. Cyberspace is a nested Matroyshka doll of animated conceptual models, or simulation. In other words, cyberspace is play within play within play within play… to arbitrary, socially-constructed limits of recursion.

By 1970, as people began adopting Marshall McLuhan’s phrase “the global village,” he had already declared the term obsolete. Over at the McLuhan’s New Sciences blog, Cameron McEwen has helpfully gathered quotations demonstrating the term which would replace it, “the global theater,” was developed out of a preceding metaphor term from McLuhan’s goodie-bag of probes, the proscenium arch.

If you aren’t familiar with the term, the proscenium is the sides and top of the frame of theater stage, the wall out from which the curtains are opened and closed.

In 1957, in the 17th part of Explorations 8 (also published as Verbi-Voco-Visual) McLuhan considered the effects of the “psychodynamics of print” on liturgy, or “Christian ritual” in church.

The Jesuits were the first to establish a form of education which took the individualist and militant aspect of print into account. Correlatively they were very enthusiastic for the spectacular and visual quality of liturgy which we know as the “Baroque” in which the congregation becomes spectator…

The very idea of a single audience looking at a single scene or action through a proscenium arch, so typical of the Renaissance, so unmedieval, is the pure projection of the form of the printed page into drama. The dramatic unities naturally become a serious problem for spectators of such an easel-painting world. By contrast the medieval stress was for cycle plays simultaneously performed as at a circus…

The printed word made every reader Pope, Priest and King in his private silent world.

We see here the idea of the print-made individual as spectator viewing a framed-scene from outside, as an audience member would in a theater. McLuhan may have first encountered this metaphor in Wyndham Lewis’ The Dithyrambic Spectator, which developed this image out of Jane Harrison’s Ancient Art and Ritual.

The savage ritualist dancing mass is gradually overcome by the growing mass of silent spectators, seated upon the cold marble of contemplation, on the one hand (in the spectator-place), and the even more formidable innovation of a stage on the other. For the spectators knew that the dancing ritualistic savages were ‘men-of-action.’ They knew that ‘the ritual dance was a dromenon, a thing to be done, not a thing to be lookd at.’ But they were getting cold upon the marble seats of contemplation. They wanted something to look at. (For in a sense a spectator is a man-of-action too. Only his way of acting is to look. That is why he is called a spectator, of course.)
—Lewis’s The Diabolical Spectator & The Dithyrambic Spectator, page 224.

Early cyberneticists, each a “Pope, Priest and King,” originally talked about computers as implicitly existing outside of the systems which they modeled or governed. A factory which was to be automated would be a factory imposed upon from without, from a higher level of abstraction. The relation to spectating, and thus theater, is perhaps most artfully demonstrated in the title of Richard Brautigan’s 1967 poem of cybernetic meadows, forests and ecologies, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.

Adam Curtis’ documentary of the same name provides a dramatic narrative the breakdown of this clean theatrical division. That is, between controller and system, or between audience and performer. Curtis’ anecdotes come from the realms of economics, environmentalism, and politics. But N. Katherine Hayles, in How We Became Posthuman, animates the theoretical and practical struggle for cognitive science in understanding governing systems as part of the system they govern.

The problem is that of recursion, perhaps most famously explored in Douglas Hofstadter’s 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach.

A Theater in a Theater in a Theater…

Take these two metaphors—the Russian nesting dolls on the one hand, and the proscenium arch which divides a theater on the other—and you get at the psychological form of cyberspace.

As I laid out in my presentation last year to the Free Software Foundation, the layers of the computer stack present continuous and discontinuous graduations of meaning between the high-level and the low-level of the whole devices. By high and low-levels, I mean what we tangibly sense from artistic “content” of the input/output interfaces, or cyberspace, and what physically exists as the material medium-itself, which is a box of plastic, glass, metals, semiconductors, and other rarefied materials.

The computer as a whole object is seldom perceived. Terry A. Davis, creator of TempleOS, spent years in adolescence studying every layer of his Commodore 64 computer, using the PEEK and POKE commands of Commodore BASIC to directly put bits and bytes into the RAM, address hardware, and write machine code for the Motorola CPU inside. This is a simple example of understanding the computer tangibly as a whole—a sense of mastery which, as I’ve expanded on elsewhere, Terry spent the remainder of his life fighting a holy mission to maintain in the face of more complex machines.

I believe that the existing legal protections for Free Software, which allow us to own and control our computers, must be preserved and enforced for the sake of our continued liberty and sense of agency—even if the majority of people will not understand computers in any precise way. Even as post-modernity and its effects linger and renew.

Each layer of the computer stack is a discrete area of play and learning. You can learn how to use the apps. You can learn how to use the OS and install and uninstall apps. You could learn to make apps. You could learn to make languages to write apps in. You could learn to make system tools to manipulate the OS. On and on it goes—each layer interfacing with the next. But where there are forced discontinuities—where the pathway down breaks off—there is a barrier erected against your very senses, your very perception. What lays beneath is a black-box.

Your brain’s natural capacity to turn parts into whole is destroyed. The fabric of your subjective world is rent with a singularity: a black hole into which your rational thought is sucked, and your most abysmal fears may be projected. If you can’t know what your computer is as a whole device than it could be doing anything. We’ve barely had a few decades with these things and such opacity is driving us mad: you really think we’ll last centuries with this man-made, artificial uncertainty?

So many people study actively chemistry or physics or biology or health-sciences like nutrition in order to understand the world beyond our senses. They try to see how molecules and proteins affect our digestive tract or our metabolism or our muscle growth. There is a sense of connection between all these domains to explain the human body and the relation to our food, or to sunlight, or to medications.

Computers are not widely and popularly explored this way because the web has been artificially broken! Your very experience with them tells not your rational mind, but your body that there is no connecting or adding up all the pieces of what you hold in your hand. You feel more capable of studying the chaos of biology, for heaven’s sake, than a thing entirely designed by living, highly rational humans! That helplessness is a cultural artifact. You are robbed of the ability to playfully learn the real deal—what you’re allowed to learn is a sandbox floating in a void. Cyberspace is vast via ignorance—just as shopping malls and the Netflix interface feel vast because you become lost while browsing them.

You can play with a computer forever. But you’ll never beat it. And you can play at life for your entire life without ever feeling you’ve gained control. That’s post-modernity. And it’s because some of the layers of the nesting doll you’re trying to assemble have been taken from you, by design.

Hard Recipe

I know I’m giving you a very hard recipe for finding grounding in this world. But the labyrinths of perception should be followed in and out. And if you can’t get down the stack of the computer you can own technically, you can at least go down the history of that stack backward through the past narratively. That’s why my focus is on computers. They are abstract, but tangible too. That history can be yours to discover, through reading of human stories and triumphs. Books like Tracey Kidder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Soul of a New Machine from 1981 will teach you more about computers technically than any coding academy or university course. And it will do so precisely because it will let you understand the machine not as an abstract object, but as something open to your senses of touch, sight, and sound.

The world is being divided among the layers of theater which seperate us along the computer stack. I haven’t even mentioned the network stack—the layers between the local computer you own, and the remote “cloud” computers you interact with every day. The longer you remain out of touch with the way our global theater is constructed, the more you’ll be in an unfair, recursive, artificial power relations of audience and actor.

The end goal is to exist as a human walking on the face of an imperfect globe, surrounded by other humans and a bunch of machines and wires. I’m impatient of psychological and philosophical speculations from within the heart of this baroque machine of exploiters and victims. Of voyeurs and exhibitionists. Appreciation of the full stack of computers, vertically and horizontally, is a prerequisite to considering our situation clearly. Of telling stories that take place in our setting.

Otherwise, everything is a game in someone else’s arena—a play in someone else’s theater. Growth within the confines and contours of someone else’s petri dish. The early cybernetic fallacy that computers exist outside the world they govern is not metaphysically true. But it is very psychologically effective—and not to your advantage.

When I talk to you, I want to talk to you as a person in the same world—not as someone breaking the fourth wall. Because life is not play—and reasoning that assumes that it is, is madness to me.