What are the wires?
What is a physical body? The body is an object; it is existence in a form too impure to store the gods within us. Now remember. Blood-stained history, greed, hunger, desire—desire for sex, to dominate, for fame. Humanity. From that body all desire is born and from it the ego does not disappear.As desire is present; Humans will fight to fulfill the desires of their bodies. This will not end. There is no future. You must awaken. Awaken your soul. Rid yourself of the body now.
We are SCRATCH—the migrate to electronics movement. We are disciples of God here to bring your soul from your body and lead you to the infinite sea of electrons.
I have long ignored the wires, preferring to focus instead on the past and how we came to be. My thoughts have been that what the new revolution entails is an exaltation of prior trends. We see that the first wires were not a new mode of existence, they were prototypes in forms and built on the basics of communication as ritualized transmission.
Yet, the wires entail a vast difference of intensity that has become all-encompassing. They have seen the democratization of new means now as even the homeless are brought into the fold. The wires are a public sphere, prior, they were only private lines of communication. Even if this is like water boiling, still it is water; thus still it is man at the centre.
The earliest wire was the dispatch, another operating as conduit; at times a pigeon. We are used to reading birds—pointing to fish as omens of some event—but reading life is more complex. We send a man with a message, they are the conduit of will, and enable a new action at a distance from a source.
Action at a distance is the existence of a world beyond the immediate, that is, it depends on a world mediated from imagination or representation. This is apparent in action at a distance in time; where we plan for one thing and imagine when or where and so on. Yet, the first form here was not planning. It was timing.It was egocentric and it contemplated on an immediate possibility.
Place is represented by the possibility entailed, the kitchen is at once place and path. Here the impossible is important and is explored as by the philosophy of art. In this, we handle a bare thing, it seems. This differs, from the contemplation of an immediate possibility.
The object, exists at first as a bundle of possibilities; it is perceived as separable from the ground, for instance, and hence as an object, by the imagined possibility of its separation. We generalize from that with which we have experience and thus understand objects beyond those with which we have immediate experience. The object, in this sense, is an aspect of extension unto itself.
The button is not separate from an object, though it may be separable. Still, we consider objects in terms of the technical and their aspects. The keyboard is a technical object unto which buttons are but aspects. Yet, I may tear these buttons from it. I might eat one if I wished. I do not use 'NumLk'—why not eat it, if I'm feeling peckish.
The technical object is then constituted according foremost to it's activity. Somehow, the keyboard is no less for losing this key, it was not entailed by activity thus far or in it's imagined future; yet perhaps, and this is imaginable, perhaps I might need use of this key some day. Of course, I can map the key from elsewhere, I imagine, but it is not unimaginable that it may one day be needed.
Nonetheless, from my perspective the keyboard is the same. The keyboard does not exist as an object itself, but, as a channel for activity. This is the nature of all buttons, and applies across the board. The technical object is defined by its form, that is, the shape according to which I must conform if my will is to flow through the channels it enables:
The hydroelectric plant is not built into the Rhine River as was the old wooden bridge that joined bank with bank for hundreds of years. Rather, the river is dammed up into the power plant. What the river is now, namely, a water power supplier, derives from out of the essence of the power station.
This is our relation to the wires, for we are determined according to the technical object.It is that into which we flow as the Rhine does unto the power station. What is determined by this form, and today, what it is—for the wires differ from an ordinary technical object. The wires are technical object and encyclopedia in one, that is, in Simondon's sense; what is this mode of existence then?
Each capable of reading and of understanding possesses the vault of the world and of society. Magically, every man is master of every thing, because he possesses the vault of the whole. The cosmos, once enveloping and superior to the individual, and the social circle constraining and eccentric with respect to the power of the individual, are now in the hands of the individual, like the globe representing the world which emperors carry as a sign of sovereignty.
This is not a true reversal, for this is at once held and all-encompassing as we enter into the screen and see within its terms. We feel ourselves to be all powerful but this is so only from the ease with which we move; at the edges, the abyss beyond design— we never notice this; it would be like noticing, with irritation, that I have no wings.
The tool, thus channels our activity by the maintenance of possibilities. A tool remains impermeable except as necessary to direct will through it.It is thus that it acquires efficiency over ordinary action. If the hammer is no use to untwist a screw, then we might as well use our fingers— the screwdriver is designed as a conduit for our will over precisely this end.
That everything looks like a nail when all you have as a hammer, thus the tool entails some element of perception ordinarily more in the sense of presence than representation. The tool in hand determines the appearance of our environment according to its design; not absolutely, but as determined by the context through which we understand it. With hammer in hand we see more nails.
Yet the wires are something else, as they do not determine by presence but representation. The wires entail also the mechanical reproduction of presence, i.e., representation. This is not only that the image is mass-produced according to certain schemas but also that its interpretation follows a similar heuristic from the internal point of view. We are conditioned en masse to see a certain way.
The wires determine far more strictly than the technical object which merely highlights aspects as presence according to its nature. The wires determine in a constitutive sense, that is, they entail a creation ex nihilo—and thus, the exclusion of all exceeding this determination. Of course, the image which results is nevertheless represented as presence to its perceiver:
Whatever is received is received according to the nature of the recipient.
This is so both ways, and it is this mutual dependence that constitutes the determination and freedom of the wires. We receive of them according to our nature, in which we are the feminine and they the masculine principle; and they receive of us according to ours, in which we are the seminal and they the generative. Keyboard and screen are as intermediaries entangled in this process.
There are other ways, of course, that all this might be mediated. The keyboard and screen are not necessarily so, as the placement of letters is arbitrary (QWERTY) and arguably inefficient by virtue of being outmoded (cf. Dvorak). There are other ways, other worlds of representation and activity. Virtual reality is one such, as is 'artificial intelligence' in the form of Siri or Alexa.
These forms entail specific modes of representation, as the keyboard, a screen, or Siri, by voice; and yet they may further be intertwined within a wider network of supplementary technical objects. We do not exist here simply in relation to a technical object as these are formed technical ensembles which we inhabit.
The technical ensemble today populates and partly constitutes the world as presence, and within this, it provides further, for the world as representation.It is to this end, representation, that the ensemble is directed. Yet, this is not merely the representation of images or sounds, even meanings. The whole is instead oriented towards the representation more broadly, as much images as possibilities.
The word processor not only represents the text which you enter but also the possibility to alter it. The email represents not only that send but also that which we may receive. These are all, as outlined prior, according to the nature of the recipient.Thus, as the device conforms to our form, as to human aural frequencies or the English language so we conform ourselves to it also.
When sending an email, there exist certain rules of recognition embedded in the device which determine the form of its possibility. All of this is obvious: you must enter your message here, put the address there (hence must have an address), etc. You cannot exceed these bounds, for the wires entail only such as is provided in their design. They are thus characterized other than by embodiment.
The immediate world is determined foremost by our embodiment, but according to the wires we are something else entirely. Here we are not ourselves, but, as of the Rhine earlier, are determined according to the essence they embody. Thus, within the wires, we become them, and are rendered in line with their form.
You cannot touch me here, can only see. I am cold and lifeless, but for the traces thrown off in my movement, again, that is, according to the nature that provides for this existence. I am the wires—or, here, words. We must remember that this form is not new, as I am much the same here as I otherwise might be by form of paper or inscribed stone; I am dead and distant.
What is lost in this? There is, for one, the restriction of possibilities, according to the nature of the intermediary. The means by which we may effect action at a distance limits this. One may send a message by the weakest man, but one might not so well send threats; better a Bulgarian than a man from San Francisco.
Yet still, there is something absent in that this entails not presence but representation, as thus the intermediary excludes all exceeding that for which its design provides. Currently, my face is abstract indeed, dead shapes upon a page, but some designs may offer more than this; it may be possible to take this quite far until the representation and presence are visually indistinguishable.
Still, then, can you touch or smell? Suppose we mastered even this? all was thus transmitted and represented. And what of the environment? the wind and other objects? all which constitute the particularity of space. Of course, all this may be represented too. What then might still be missing?
"In the air-ship—" He broke off, and she fancied that he looked sad. She could not be sure, for the Machine did not transmit nuances of expression. It only gave a general idea of people—an idea that was good enough for all practical purposes, Vashti thought. The imponderable bloom, declared by a discredited philosophy to be the actual essence of intercourse, was rightly ignored by the Machine, just as the imponderable bloom of the grape was ignored by the manufacturers of artificial fruit. Something "good enough" had long since been accepted by our race.
Our dreams are far beyond that of Forster, though to his credit he dreamt this in 1928. Yet, even supposing we may represent the nuances of facial expression, that these are so mentioned means they are not imponderable. The point is that we may represent that which we know, that which we may think to represent. Of course, what could lie beyond this? We do not know.
We know the wires today render man impoverished, but what of their end? They tend towards some perfection, yes, but we know nothing of this final form or it's relation to that prior. The whole is an aesthetic decision and amounts to the debate between transhumanism and whatever the others are. The others do not exist as clear idea but stem of reaction against this line.
The same is so with all things, as none think to oppose a thing until somehow prompted. Thus, conservatism, as a self-conscious movement, arose only in response to the advances of liberalism. The two constituted each other, and thus further determined the content of their doctrines. They do not exist alone, but are defined by the mirrored aspect at the centre of their relations.
This is the distance between Land and Kaczynski — an aesthetic difference. Not aesthetic in the sense of a Kantian disinterest, no, it is of infinite interest. At base, all is aesthetic in this sense, that is, all is taste. This points to two facts: firstly, that it is unconscious; and secondly, that it is subjective. Where are truth and freedom here?
You have been determined, as by Providence, to have a certain taste, and at this I might ask a simple question: Has anyone ever convinced you that a painting was beautiful? When previously you thought otherwise? They say that love may come after marriage, and perhaps this is so, but first impressions are important—thus we are trapped between contradictory images.
And they, saying: 'Such is an elephant, such is not an elephant; such is not an elephant, such is an elephant,' hit each other with their fists, and with that, monks, the King was pleased.