Capitalism, modernity
Enclosure, privatization of the commons,
classes based on labor, ownership of the land, and the means of production,
the division of labor Adam Smith’s pin factory
division of the body and corporeal action into temporal units (Taylorism)
the substitution of human labor by machines
One response: LUDDISM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diggers_%28True_Levellers%29#Theory
belief in economic equality, cultivation of common land
Luddites Early 19th century textile workers, sabotage in the workplace, riots
1811 mythical leader Ned Ludd, destroying textile frames clashes with army death or
Australia
Ironic relation of the early computer to the LOOM (Jacquard), elements of Babbages,
difference and analytical engines (mill, store) resemble the process of early capitalism
Luddism
Nicols Fox, Against the Machine: The Hidden Luddite Tradition in Literature, Art and
Individual Lives
Steven Johnson, Against Technology
Frankenstein, Romanticism, Arts and Crafts, transcendentalism, agrarian back to the
land movements
Counter-culture of 1960’s
Unabomber
WTO protests
The cycle of technological invention, role of society
We are addressing the role of culture, play, liminality, giving shape, coming to terms
Brian Winston, “Introduction: A Story from Paradise”
Epigraph from Walter Benjamin in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” on Paul
Klee’s painting Angelus Novus
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Klee image and bio on Klee
http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/?p=1163 bigger image
“A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move
away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his
wings are spread. This is how one perceives the angel of history. His face is towards the past.
Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon
wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and
make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in
his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly
propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows
skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
Effect on individual lives, overwhelming, catastrophic
Winston’s project—a correction of the notion of “revolution” applied to information
and communications technologies
His evolutionary model of “invention”, continuity over three centuries
The primacy of the social-against technological determinism
Slower pace of change
Regular pattern of innovation and diffusion
MODELLING CHANGE
Innovation as performances of scientific
COMPETENCE as the level of knowledge as acquaintance with or mastery of any department
learning in a society
Possibilities grow with growth of scientific understanding of electricity, electro-magnetism,
optics
TRANSFORMATION CYCLES
Stages of technological performance
1. Ideation gets idea, formulates problems involved and hypothesizes a solution
The idea of the telegraph, telephone, television existed long before the “invention”
2. Prototypes
Why are some abandoned? Why are many created simultaneously?
Agency of supervening social necessity acceleration of prototyping
A prototype rejected (Ronald’s working telegraph in 1816), lack of supervening
necessity
B accepted partially fulfills a need (daguerreotype)
C parallel prototypes, use for a secondary purpose (electromagnetic waves, radio waves)
D partial prototype machines which do not function effectively (Bell’s telephone)
3. “Law” of supervening necessity railroad requires telegraph; the corporation and the
office require the telephone Acceleration of transformation
4. Invention (determined socially) the Hall of Fame—a prototype is accepted (not
necessarily the best one)
Law of suppression of radical potential (“law” in that it recurs over and over again)
5. Diffusion: Braking of transformation, arresting the flow, self-protection of existing
institutions, including corporations, STRUGGLE
A production
B spin-offs video games from microchips
C redundant devices
“Corporation” performative critiques
Struggle to change society; culture as the realm of possibilities, the subjunctive, the ordering,
significant or meaningful