Preface to the ongoing novel on big data, "B1T B0T"
Among the throng of the disillusioned, gadget-prone, unemployed youth loosely confederated by a purpose given to them by hacktivist heroes in the wholesale rejection of government and corporate control over personal data, something far more sinister had been revealed. Those same hacktivist heroes, those computer libertarian outlaws that yanked the curtain of secrecy from the states of the world to reveal the extent of data collection were themselves proponents of an ideological agenda of rampant individualism. More sinister still was the gradual realization among these same angry youth, that their actions had for so long supported the aims of the state, their consumer behaviour reproducing the very same wretched working conditions in the most destitute of places on earth and contributing to their lack of employment opportunity. They priced themselves out of the job market as a result of buying things cheaply and in abundance.
The digital tools of their limping and confused revolution added ever more burden upon an ailing environment they claimed they wanted to heal. Their digital behaviour in profile management and the revision of their own digital records was little more than the devolution unto the individual of what was once the function of the state and corporate-controlled media: memory management. Whether it was by the Wilder Penfield experiments or in the way the media reshaped traumatic events to convey a more simple if not false story that contradicted the actual events themselves, this was no longer necessary in the auto-regulating control mechanisms installed within each and every individual under the guise of freedom of choice, flexibility, mobility, and the individual freedom to buy.
So many of these youth had laboured in service of an ideal, to reclaim the noble image and ideal of the Great Citizen. But that ideal never existed in the first place. It was a phantom history created by the minds of marketing professionals and agents of social engineering. The people had, for well over a century, always been consumers first, guided in their choices and driven by desires that were given material form.
Those consumer products of democracy and true freedom floated upon the sludge of the oppression of others, permissible violence, environmental destruction, the privatizing of all that was once public, the glorification of disloyal and mercenary financial heroes, the massive buy-in that an educated populace was anything more than an inflated cash system of ceremonial credentialization.
Enfolding this entire system in an ethereal, electric wrap is power, the complex, growing, arterial mesh that energizes what occurs inside is the steady pulse of data.
For those few who clandestinely tease secrets out of this mesh, who have the sharp ears to pierce the static, the individuals and systems inside are made to dance. With nothing more than data, at a considerable scale or size, we need only observe and measure. Vast data vitiates the requirements for critique or guesswork. The new digital positivism does not rise like some imposing monolith to cast its shadow over the world it governs, but instead rises up inside and through every limb of individuals and systems, feeding off a teeming supply of data. Countless invisible wires sluicing through every organism, every object, titrated into central processors and tended by data buccaneers.
Consider, if you will, the solitary bit, not set in an environment awash with semi-orderly electrons, and itself not even configured as one or zero. What can we say of it? Like Being and Nothing in the work of G.W.F. Hegel, it is purely conceptual without determination. The bit must be determined by what it is not in order to have become a particular bit, such as one or zero. This basest of units is the currency of what is now called information, and information is the measure of the relative order of a system. We say relative here because one would be hard pressed to find a system so pure that it is perfectly ordered or disordered outside of mathematics. It is simply by a bit of convention that eight bits makes the byte. However, each of those bits would have to possess a value of either one or zero. In thinking about that solitary and undetermined bit, we are not rushing off to say that it is a qubit, i.e., the superposition of one and zero, but considering the bit absolutely devoid of either so that it remains ambiguous, undetermined, and unthinkable.
For some who subscribe to a kind of digital atomism, the entire universe is composed of bits. Others, who eschew such binaries as vulgar may also point up the metaphysical difficulties that arise from the consequences of such a view, that God and Universal Computer are identical. That Life is a Program, and the only reason we cannot predict the future is not because we lack access to all the variables to make the computation, in a Laplacean thought experiment, but because the program is running at the fastest possible speed. Life, the Program, unfolds each of its steps at a pace that cannot be exceeded. This, too, calls up an arsenal of objections.
Baruch Spinoza, the 17th century Dutch rationalist philosopher, came close to this view of God as Computer by stripping God of free will, but it is perhaps to G.W.Leibniz’s credit that this idea of the universal computer is plugged into the human imagination with his theory of the monads, each of them separate, semi-autonomous units, like bits, that are arranged in the best of possible ways.
From the bit now are erected vast empires when once they were to be fashioned from the raw earth. The bit is not the crude substance of timber, coal, iron ore. The bit is the high symbol of choice, and so negligibly small, forming a delicate embroidery where on each web is a chain of decisions. Altering just one amplifies the effect all throughout that linear sequence, seeding micro-events at each discrete step.
A bit forms part of a simple list of instructions, more like a gene than an atom.
Consider, if you will, the bot. An entire history of automata springs up on its many simple machines, from the Greek myths where Hephaestus forges his own humanoid machines up through various mechanical apparatuses that refilled toilets, wrote letters, bowed, turned, and operated with clockwork autonomy. Today, the bots have been miniaturized; they are, in effect, programs composed of several bits that are tasked to do a variety of digital chores such as indexing the web or producing human-like text that ever more passes the Turing Test.
The digital tools of their limping and confused revolution added ever more burden upon an ailing environment they claimed they wanted to heal. Their digital behaviour in profile management and the revision of their own digital records was little more than the devolution unto the individual of what was once the function of the state and corporate-controlled media: memory management. Whether it was by the Wilder Penfield experiments or in the way the media reshaped traumatic events to convey a more simple if not false story that contradicted the actual events themselves, this was no longer necessary in the auto-regulating control mechanisms installed within each and every individual under the guise of freedom of choice, flexibility, mobility, and the individual freedom to buy.
So many of these youth had laboured in service of an ideal, to reclaim the noble image and ideal of the Great Citizen. But that ideal never existed in the first place. It was a phantom history created by the minds of marketing professionals and agents of social engineering. The people had, for well over a century, always been consumers first, guided in their choices and driven by desires that were given material form.
Those consumer products of democracy and true freedom floated upon the sludge of the oppression of others, permissible violence, environmental destruction, the privatizing of all that was once public, the glorification of disloyal and mercenary financial heroes, the massive buy-in that an educated populace was anything more than an inflated cash system of ceremonial credentialization.
Enfolding this entire system in an ethereal, electric wrap is power, the complex, growing, arterial mesh that energizes what occurs inside is the steady pulse of data.
For those few who clandestinely tease secrets out of this mesh, who have the sharp ears to pierce the static, the individuals and systems inside are made to dance. With nothing more than data, at a considerable scale or size, we need only observe and measure. Vast data vitiates the requirements for critique or guesswork. The new digital positivism does not rise like some imposing monolith to cast its shadow over the world it governs, but instead rises up inside and through every limb of individuals and systems, feeding off a teeming supply of data. Countless invisible wires sluicing through every organism, every object, titrated into central processors and tended by data buccaneers.
Consider, if you will, the solitary bit, not set in an environment awash with semi-orderly electrons, and itself not even configured as one or zero. What can we say of it? Like Being and Nothing in the work of G.W.F. Hegel, it is purely conceptual without determination. The bit must be determined by what it is not in order to have become a particular bit, such as one or zero. This basest of units is the currency of what is now called information, and information is the measure of the relative order of a system. We say relative here because one would be hard pressed to find a system so pure that it is perfectly ordered or disordered outside of mathematics. It is simply by a bit of convention that eight bits makes the byte. However, each of those bits would have to possess a value of either one or zero. In thinking about that solitary and undetermined bit, we are not rushing off to say that it is a qubit, i.e., the superposition of one and zero, but considering the bit absolutely devoid of either so that it remains ambiguous, undetermined, and unthinkable.
For some who subscribe to a kind of digital atomism, the entire universe is composed of bits. Others, who eschew such binaries as vulgar may also point up the metaphysical difficulties that arise from the consequences of such a view, that God and Universal Computer are identical. That Life is a Program, and the only reason we cannot predict the future is not because we lack access to all the variables to make the computation, in a Laplacean thought experiment, but because the program is running at the fastest possible speed. Life, the Program, unfolds each of its steps at a pace that cannot be exceeded. This, too, calls up an arsenal of objections.
Baruch Spinoza, the 17th century Dutch rationalist philosopher, came close to this view of God as Computer by stripping God of free will, but it is perhaps to G.W.Leibniz’s credit that this idea of the universal computer is plugged into the human imagination with his theory of the monads, each of them separate, semi-autonomous units, like bits, that are arranged in the best of possible ways.
From the bit now are erected vast empires when once they were to be fashioned from the raw earth. The bit is not the crude substance of timber, coal, iron ore. The bit is the high symbol of choice, and so negligibly small, forming a delicate embroidery where on each web is a chain of decisions. Altering just one amplifies the effect all throughout that linear sequence, seeding micro-events at each discrete step.
A bit forms part of a simple list of instructions, more like a gene than an atom.
Consider, if you will, the bot. An entire history of automata springs up on its many simple machines, from the Greek myths where Hephaestus forges his own humanoid machines up through various mechanical apparatuses that refilled toilets, wrote letters, bowed, turned, and operated with clockwork autonomy. Today, the bots have been miniaturized; they are, in effect, programs composed of several bits that are tasked to do a variety of digital chores such as indexing the web or producing human-like text that ever more passes the Turing Test.
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