Code - 0s and 1s

[remeber to say that the arguments here are far too crude, populist and biologically determinist, and does feminism a disservice]

In Zeros + Ones (1997), Sadie Plant states the obvious in that: all computers translate information into the zeros and ones of machine code. She analogously thinks this reflects the 'orders of Western reality' (1997: 34) and lists an endless string of logical codes: including on and off, something and nothing, sense and nonsense, this and that, here and there, inside and outside, active and passive, true and false, yes and no. Her concern is to further relate this to sexual politics (remember the full title of her book is Zeros + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture): male and female, penis and vagina, all make 'lovely couples' she states with irony (1997:35). Although 'it takes two to make a binary' (and set up the heterosexual paradigm), clearly inequalities are expressed in the tendency to privilege one side of the equation over the other - with positive and negative attributes accordingly. For the purposes of Plant's book, Ada Lovelace makes a glorious exception to the rule with her mathematical prowess (indeed, perhaps the University of Plymouth should be persuaded to rename the Charles Babbage building as the Ada Lovelace building?). In mathematics, ones and zeros are numbers of equivalent status.

The example of Alan Turing adds further interest (and breaks out of the potential heterosexist binary of the book up to this point) and challenges the tendency to privilege man over machine - following the dialectical logic of master and slave. She quotes Turing in saying: 'the intention in constructing these machines in the first instance is to treat them as slaves, giving them only jobs which have been thought out in detail, jobs such that the user of the machine fully understands in principle what is going on all the time' (1997:88). However, in dialectical style, the potential exists for the slave to turn the tables. It is the 'masters who are likely to be replaced' by the machines and thus for the most part a rearguard action is induced to stop machines taking control and enslave them. Common understandings of A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) have been governed by the conviction that the machine merely reflects the intelligence of the programmer and is slave to this principle - what might be better described as 'artificial stupidity' (1997: 89). So despite Turing's understanding that 'as soon as any technique becomes at all stereotyped it becomes possible to devise a system of instruction tables which will enable the electronic computer to do it for itself' (1997: 88), old models of thinking have been retained. This is thoroughly ideological. Based on models of cognition and centralised processing, computers have tended to be thought of as replacement brains rather than more organic systems (see Steve Grand's Cyberlife research for more on this) and as such remain as stupid as their programmers despite their potential to do otherwise - sounds like the ideological state apparatus at work. In contrast, the machine might learn quite independently. Furthermore, Turing's vision of an autonomous generative system has by now extended to account for systems that are thoroughly life-like in their own terms. 

The famous Turing Test (1950) sought to measure whether a machine might pass for a human, and perhaps not surprisingly, it is relatively easily proved even with a fairly crude system. Another well-cited example is Eliza (1966) built by Joseph Weizenbaum, that acts in the manner of a psychotherapist and is surprisingly compelling despite simply working from a series of keyword responses (have a look at the online version, if you don't know it already). Plant cites Bladerunner (1984) as an illustration of an advanced test where the only indication of artificiality is a tiny flicker in the eye's iris with response to close questioning. In this story too, the worker-slaves have begun to ask questions themselves of their lot. The ability to imagine this differently, or creativity, is itself embedded in the 'wayward system' in its 'failures to carry out instructions and refusals to be bound by them' (1997: 95). As although 'it has always been said that "computing machines can only carry out the purposes that they are instructed to do. This is certainly true," writes Turing, "in the sense that if they do something other than what they were instructed then they have just made some mistake" [...] on the contrary, "the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works"' (1997: 95).

The intelligence of Turing figures here too. Humans do not necessarily follow the rules as prescribed and in the context of the war effort this was useful but under more peaceful conditions rather threatening in itself ('normal' reproduction was thrown into crisis in the war in many ways in fact). Plant cites Foucault, as she puts it, himself too both a byproduct and a renegade from the reproductive process. Foucault described a system of control where 'bio-power' is not centralized but dispersed: 'organized as a multiple, automatic, and anonymous power [...] this network 'holds' the whole together and traverses it in its entirety with effects of power [... it] is not possessed as a thing, or transferred as a property; it functions like a piece of machinery...' (1997: 98-9, in Discipline and Punish). Humans in this way, might be thought of part-machines, but one that (like a replicant) thoroughly believes in its own sense of autonomy and creativity. Thus Turing used his equipment in unconventional ways (excuse the laboured joke) and uncracked codes that others couldn't understand but that served to endorse the idea that he was also a cracked code in himself, eventually found guilt of 'gross indecency' in 1952. Here the historical facts collapse into bizarre allegory. First of all, he was proscribed oestrogen to reduce his sexual urge, under the dubious logic that to all intensive purposes he was female - this was a reversal of earlier judgements to give gay men testosterone to make them more male, yet ironically making them sex machines (presented here is another binary: not male-female but more accurately testosterone-oestrogen). (For what is probably a more accurate - and certainly more scholarly research version of events, see Andrew Hodges' Alan Turing: The Enigma. In this book, 'intelligence' is expanded to include human feeling, which results in Turing's suicide). 
Plant concludes the Turing story: 'Two years later he was dead [...] "By the side of the table was an apple, out of which several bites had been taken." And this queer tale does not end here. There are rainbow logos with Turing's missing bytes on every Apple Macintosh machine.' (1997: 102)

NOTES

On cybernetics: (link to end of Castells)

Wiener's Cybernetics: Communication and Control in Animal and Machine (1948) was among the first to describe autonomous systems - more specifically, some device that allows the machine to govern or regulate itself. The key distinction (from clockwork machine for instance) is that the machine contains a sensing mechanism allowing external factors to be received and acted upon. What is essentially described is a feedback loop and this has a long history and is clearly present in some industrial processes. An even earlier reference is Ktesibios's 'regular' a water clock (C3rd B.C.) - arguably the 'first non-living object to self-regulate, self-govern, and self-control... the first self to be born outside of biology... a true auto thing - directed from within' (1997:157, Plant quoting Otto Mayr, The Origins of Feedback). With hindsight, it is now obvious that organic and technical (or animal and machine) processes are analogous and similarly contain self-organising functions (see Kevin Kelly's Out of Control, to name but one example). Now, self-organising systems have become much more complex and are arranged in multiple networks. The double helix of DNA was discovered in 1953, illuminating how artificial life, and genetic algorithms binding together biology and technology irreversibly. Plant explains: 'Any remaining distinctions between users and used, man and his tools, nature, culture and technology collapsed into the microprocessings of soft machines spiralling into increasing proximity: molecular lives downloading themselves into software systems, intermingling with the microprocessors and the bugs in the systems of machine code, finding new networks on which to transmit their instructions and codes...' (1997: 244-5) evoking the wet dream of Roy Ascott's 'moist media'.
The digital revolution has paralleled cybernetics, chaos theory, complexity and connectionism. Plant says that the implications of quantum mechanics is that molecules can be in two places at any one time, and yet computers are still being developed and being understood along old mechanical lines (1997:254). (this is my argument too of course! oops) Thus Turing's universal machine is thoroughly turned over by quantum computing. This fits her argument in that binaries are no longer appropriate and that particles are 'neither one nor two' (1997:255).

See sue owen text.



On solidity:
When a solid is heated its molecules vibrate with energy, beginning to obey fluid behaviours (Plant, 1997: 165-6).

On McLuhan:
Technological change induces a feeling that 'the future will be a larger or greatly improved version of the immediate past' says McLuhan revealing that the present is seen through a 'rear-view mirror' that conceals the extent of change (Plant quoting McLuhan from The Gutenberg Galaxy, 1997: 182). This describes the syndrome that Castells describes of change being recognised in general terms but old paradigms and institutions remaining in tact. 
 
 

Add:
Quantum computing - conventionally a bit, the building block of a compuetr exists in one of two states - 0 or 1. Quantum computers change this rule and a quantum but can exist in three states - 0 or 1 or both.
(Simon Bone and Matias Castro, 'A Brief History of Quantum Computing', http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~nd/surprise_97/journal/vol4/spb3/)