Clinton, I'm so glad you wrote this. I think most talk about net.history today is wildly wrong and often stupidly ridiculous, but it shows there was goofiness back then, too. There's no excuse to ignore copyleft in '95 (during which time I was distributing "Linux95" bumper stickers written in the Microsoft font), or to think that DOS was in the public domain. The first release of Jim Hall's GPL'ed DOS came out a year before, but that's really besides the point.
Turkle might have interesting insights into users of technology, but her reliance on psychoanalytical (nonfalsifiable) and Foucauldian theories renders her overall conclusions suspect. She writes as if “technology” were a force outside human agency. She embraces a belief in humanity buffeted by technology, as if it were a natural force like the weather. She appeals to our natural resentments about things we don’t personally control without interrogating our agency in creating and using technologies.
Also she discriminates among technologies: she ignores the history of tech moral panics (electricity was once thought to lead to rape!).
It is precisely the helplessness you describe that motivates my own attempt to inform people of the agency they could take up, if they wanted to. The fact that most people just want an easy-to-use machine and don’t want to actually confront such a direct and uncompromising test of their skill and knowledge as computers offer is, I’ll say, well described in psychoanalytic terms! It’s ego! Everyone harbours pet theories about stuff they can’t test or verify directly: diet, health, who killed JFK, etc. But a computer in hands, when you’re trying to fix it, either works or does not. And nothing you can do will fix it except upping your own game and knowledge. Everyone loves to study, but nobody likes being tested unless the test is literally shaped like a video game. Turkle isn’t alone in excusing her assumed readership from any responsibility over technology in their lives, and thus amplifying helplessness. She’s just adopting the norm for this sort of discourse.
For better or worse, Turkle's career began with a concentration on French theory and a focus on Deleuze and Guattari and the like (see here https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=83WNYauOa5AC&oi=fnd&pg=PA508&dq=turkle+anti+psychiatry+france&ots=EFEDdskGxw&sig=_X5Mr_vt6Rg-wxhmPmFdqq6yWnc#v=onepage&q&f=false). So she is definitely not overly concerned with the technical knowledge around computer OS. I do get the computer nerd exasperation in the same way I as a geek for the actual technical mechanicals of car manufacturing think some of the geopolitically-oriented and high theory views in the 1980s of concepts like small-batch products and how Just-In-Time production could be taken in a Japanese vis-a-vis American context were blind to some of the almost autistic specifics of manufacturing (in a way that actually mattered as you describe here with computers). That being said, I almost think her more theoretical background has enabled her ideas to have a long tail and apply across different iterations of the internet. Certainly on the notion of identity she was uncannily sagacious and stands heads-and-shoulders above almost all academic commentators in part because she wasn't ideologically motivated. Also, if you can grok Anti-Oedipus you can sort of grok anything in the humanities fields. Great piece
Foucauldianism at its worst can tautological or can be taken to a paranoid or unhelpfully nonspecific extreme, but IMO the reverse trend in "Cult Studs" to hail the supposed resistance and agency of the audience or salute the cultural products as an expression of that is much more inaccurate
Sure—that’s the Foucauld many of my colleagues embrace. But Turkle’s Foucauld is the deterministic version.
And the fan studies people buy into agency as including having power over creators—sometimes to a creepy extent. They valorize some bad behavior in the name of agency!
Agree strongly that the valorisation of the notion of agency as a good in and of itself, almost in order to attempt to debunk structuralist accounts or cock a snook at them, just totally breaks down when it comes to creators or actual people in general. “I’m rebelling against a structure” by cyberstalking a K-pop star……definitely absurd. But it would be a caricature to suggest sophisticated poststructuralism sees every subject constituted in 2026 the way a structuralist might argue a subject was in 1960s Fordist France (and even then I personally think the likes of Althusser were oversimplifying to a great extent). If you think we are not to a great extent overdetermined in our social position and upbringing in a material context, you are being kind of silly. The resort to “innate ideas” of gender, race etc among identitarians speaks to the extent people, out of affective narcissism, will do anything to refuse the reality media, upbringing, and culture impacts them and determines their personality and decisions, much more than “pre-loaded software” or their own free will (although this doesn’t give one reasonable excuses to not develop discipline a work ethic etc to the extent they can and policymakers should never incentivise a view of personal responsibility as inadequate or bad as a result)
Clinton, I'm so glad you wrote this. I think most talk about net.history today is wildly wrong and often stupidly ridiculous, but it shows there was goofiness back then, too. There's no excuse to ignore copyleft in '95 (during which time I was distributing "Linux95" bumper stickers written in the Microsoft font), or to think that DOS was in the public domain. The first release of Jim Hall's GPL'ed DOS came out a year before, but that's really besides the point.
Turkle might have interesting insights into users of technology, but her reliance on psychoanalytical (nonfalsifiable) and Foucauldian theories renders her overall conclusions suspect. She writes as if “technology” were a force outside human agency. She embraces a belief in humanity buffeted by technology, as if it were a natural force like the weather. She appeals to our natural resentments about things we don’t personally control without interrogating our agency in creating and using technologies.
Also she discriminates among technologies: she ignores the history of tech moral panics (electricity was once thought to lead to rape!).
It is precisely the helplessness you describe that motivates my own attempt to inform people of the agency they could take up, if they wanted to. The fact that most people just want an easy-to-use machine and don’t want to actually confront such a direct and uncompromising test of their skill and knowledge as computers offer is, I’ll say, well described in psychoanalytic terms! It’s ego! Everyone harbours pet theories about stuff they can’t test or verify directly: diet, health, who killed JFK, etc. But a computer in hands, when you’re trying to fix it, either works or does not. And nothing you can do will fix it except upping your own game and knowledge. Everyone loves to study, but nobody likes being tested unless the test is literally shaped like a video game. Turkle isn’t alone in excusing her assumed readership from any responsibility over technology in their lives, and thus amplifying helplessness. She’s just adopting the norm for this sort of discourse.
For better or worse, Turkle's career began with a concentration on French theory and a focus on Deleuze and Guattari and the like (see here https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=83WNYauOa5AC&oi=fnd&pg=PA508&dq=turkle+anti+psychiatry+france&ots=EFEDdskGxw&sig=_X5Mr_vt6Rg-wxhmPmFdqq6yWnc#v=onepage&q&f=false). So she is definitely not overly concerned with the technical knowledge around computer OS. I do get the computer nerd exasperation in the same way I as a geek for the actual technical mechanicals of car manufacturing think some of the geopolitically-oriented and high theory views in the 1980s of concepts like small-batch products and how Just-In-Time production could be taken in a Japanese vis-a-vis American context were blind to some of the almost autistic specifics of manufacturing (in a way that actually mattered as you describe here with computers). That being said, I almost think her more theoretical background has enabled her ideas to have a long tail and apply across different iterations of the internet. Certainly on the notion of identity she was uncannily sagacious and stands heads-and-shoulders above almost all academic commentators in part because she wasn't ideologically motivated. Also, if you can grok Anti-Oedipus you can sort of grok anything in the humanities fields. Great piece
Yes, her work filters everything through Foucault—everything is a power relationship, human agency is barely present.
Foucauldianism at its worst can tautological or can be taken to a paranoid or unhelpfully nonspecific extreme, but IMO the reverse trend in "Cult Studs" to hail the supposed resistance and agency of the audience or salute the cultural products as an expression of that is much more inaccurate
Sure—that’s the Foucauld many of my colleagues embrace. But Turkle’s Foucauld is the deterministic version.
And the fan studies people buy into agency as including having power over creators—sometimes to a creepy extent. They valorize some bad behavior in the name of agency!
Agree strongly that the valorisation of the notion of agency as a good in and of itself, almost in order to attempt to debunk structuralist accounts or cock a snook at them, just totally breaks down when it comes to creators or actual people in general. “I’m rebelling against a structure” by cyberstalking a K-pop star……definitely absurd. But it would be a caricature to suggest sophisticated poststructuralism sees every subject constituted in 2026 the way a structuralist might argue a subject was in 1960s Fordist France (and even then I personally think the likes of Althusser were oversimplifying to a great extent). If you think we are not to a great extent overdetermined in our social position and upbringing in a material context, you are being kind of silly. The resort to “innate ideas” of gender, race etc among identitarians speaks to the extent people, out of affective narcissism, will do anything to refuse the reality media, upbringing, and culture impacts them and determines their personality and decisions, much more than “pre-loaded software” or their own free will (although this doesn’t give one reasonable excuses to not develop discipline a work ethic etc to the extent they can and policymakers should never incentivise a view of personal responsibility as inadequate or bad as a result)
wait what words can't you post? feel free to DM me
autoexec.bat, config.sys. Very weird. It blocked the post until I removed them.
Sorry for alerting you in this annoying way it took me like an hour to figure out lol
strange, lemme see whats up. i assume some security measure gone awry
Ty!
If Substack’s servers have a config.sys file than we’ve got a major issue on our hands lmao.
hah it ended up being cloudfalre blocking things on our behalf, we told them to knock it off.