[spectre] Connection Machines

[Eric Kluitenberg]

CONNECTION MACHINES

by Eric Kluitenberg


Editorial Notice

This essay was written for the forthcoming “Book of Imaginary Media”,
which will be published by Uitgeverij De Balie in the Fall of 2005. The
essay builds on a text called “A First Introduction to an Archaeology of
Imaginary Media”, which was written for the mini-festival organised by
De Balie, Centre for Culture and Politics in Amsterdam in February 2004.

The lectures of the project along with a selection of essays and other
materials that formed the context for this event can be found on-line in
the Dossier Media Archaeology on the website of De Balie. The dossier
includes full length video documenttation of the lectures by Siegfried
Zielinksi, Erkki Huhtamo, Klaus Theweleit, Bruce Sterling, Zoe Beloff,
Edwin Carels, Timothy Druckrey, and John Akomfrah.

http://www.debalie.nl/archaeology

The Book of Imaginary Media is currently scheduled for release in
September 2005, and will include a DVD with a.o. a ‘son et lumiere’
version of Peter Blegvad’s stage play “On Imaginary Media”, as well as
invited works by a selection of distinguished cartoonists on the theme.
The book furthermore contains new texts by the participants of the
original event.

- eric


----------------------


Connection Machines


By the time the German Catholic mystic Heinrich Suso published his
manuscript "Horologium Sapientiae" (Wisdom's Watch upon the Hours), most
commonly dated to 1339, mechanical clocks had made their way in civic
life throughout Europe's major cities. Late in the thirteenth century
the mechanical clock had appeared in monasteries belonging to the
Benedictine order and it was used to mark the 7 canonical hours of the
day to call for collective prayer. The clock spread to the civic sphere
in the fourteenth century featuring as a public timepiece in the tower
of many a European city's town hall. Its function also changed: The
clock had become the central medium structuring and ordering the life
and communication of late medieval city dwellers.

Suso's thinking was very much informed by the juxtaposition of the
erratic temporal nature of earthly human affairs, versus the divine
order of Eternal Wisdom of the Christian God he revered. With the spread
of the clock in religious and social life the entire world system of
earthly life, the passing from day to night and from night to day, and
the movements of the heavens, came to be seen as the visible signs of
the divine clockwork that ruled and governed earthly existence. Suso
structured his book as a series of imaginary dialogues between Eternal
Wisdom (his god represented by the virtue Eternal Wisdom) and himself,
divided into 24 chapters following the 24 hours of the day [1]. It was
Eternal Wisdom that instilled order in this heavenly clockwork, and the
mechanical clock was the medium for ordinary man to bring his life into
unison with this divine order.

The construction of Suso's imaginary medium is twofold: First he
portrays the world-system as clockwork as one giant communication medium
set in motion and guided by the invisible hand of Eternal Wisdom, which
thus "communicates" divine order to the human subject. The mechanical
clock then translates this divine order into perceptible form and
becomes a medium for the lesser mortal to establish contact with the
divine order, most notably by the call to prayer at regular intervals
according to the canonical hours -the original purpose of the mechanical
clock.

In Suso's mystical vision, which became highly popular throughout Europe
in the 14th century, the clock is a connection machine, a medium to
co-ordinate not only the affairs between humans, but also between the
human and the divine. In the centuries following Heinrich Suso's
mystical imaginations of the divine clockwork, the idea that technology
compensates for the deficiencies of human conduct remained vividly
alive. As society became more secular, the emphasis shifted away from
its divine orientation towards the mediation of more worldly human
affairs, and yet a certain mystical inclination never left the realm of
technological invention.

Modern Machines

The great historian and philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford relates
the regularity of monastic life and the central role that the mechanical
clock came to play in organising it from the thirteenth century onwards,
more or less directly to the development of modern capitalism. The
regularity of the division of the day into even time segments in the
Benedictine monasteries, punctuated by the call to collective prayer
prefigured in many ways the organisation of collective labour in the
Ford factories. The ticking of the mechanical clock might thus almost be
likened to the humming of the modern production line.

In his seminal work Technics and Civilization from 1934 Mumford writes:
"(..) The habit of order itself and the earnest regulation of
time-sequences had become almost second nature in the monastery. (..)
So one is not straining the facts when one suggests that the monasteries
- at once there were 40,000 under Benedictine rule - helped to give the
human enterprise the regular collective beat of the machine; for the
clock is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours, but of
synchronizing the actions of men" [2].

With the spread of the mechanical clock from the monastery to the
cities, and its subsequent miniaturisation and massification, worldly
and spiritual life in Europe were integrated in a uniform time regime.
For centuries to come the clock would become the ultimate connection
machine, organising and binding the lives of millions into an integrated
social, economic, and religious system.

The high-point and simultaneously the endpoint of the reign of the
mechanical clock can be traced to the middle of the 19th century, when
the invention of the telegraph allowed the first real-time [3]
transmission of a time signal across vast distances, and ultimately
around the globe. The demands of an industrialised society and the
expanse of international trade relations made the deployment of the
required infrastructure (transatlantic cables) economically viable. This
in turn necessitated the adoption of a uniform world-wide time standard.
Through a series of "World Conferences on Time" the Greenwich Mean Time
standard (in 1884) [4] became the new global time regime as we know it
today. Telecommunications, rather than the mechanical clock, would take
over the role of connection machines supporting the new global time
regime and its attendant social and economic structures.


Technological Transcendence

It is difficult to escape the economic rationale that favoured the rapid
development of telecommunications technology from the mid nineteenth
century onwards. The continued expansion of global trade created the
social and economic context for this particular breed of technology to
flourish. Yet, if we rely exclusively on this all too obvious economic
explanation for the rise of contemporary electronic connection machines,
deeper layers of motivation that inform the creation and the wider
adoption of these technologies will continue to elude us. To grasp these
rather hidden motives it is necessary to excavate some of the seemingly
irrational undercurrents that accompany much of the visible history of
technology, and thus to probe more deeply into the realm of the
mythological.

Invention and imagination are relatively closely linked, as concepts and
as functional principles of human endeavour. It will come as little
surprise then that the dividing line between inventiveness and the
imaginary is ambiguous and often porous. In popular culture the inventor
is usually portrayed as the semblance of a delirious maniac, rather than
a rational man of science. Positive examples of this typology might be
the absent minded personalities of Disney's Gyro Gearloose, or Dr. Emmet
Brown in the Back to the Future film series. A rather darker shade of
character is beautifully exemplified by the corrupted scientist Duran
Duran in Roger Vadim's cult-classic movie Barbarella, which he based on
the French comic strip by the same name created by Jean-Claude Forest in
1964.

Yet, when considering the extraordinary transformations in daily life
brought about by the incessant drive for technological development in
the industrialised world, such hard facts are rarely ascribed to the
ravings of a lunatic. It is all the more intriguing then to see that
some of the most infamous names in the history of technological
invention derive their inspiration from deeply irrational, mythological,
and even outright mystical sources. Indeed, the history of technology is
littered with unfounded claims about the future (and the role of
particular technologies in that imaginary future), misconceptions,
arbitrary assertions, and inherently mythical beliefs about the
immediate and longer-term significance of the machinic contraptions that
emerge from the inventor's laboratory. Ironically, in many of these
accounts the rhetoric of scientific rationality is emphatically employed
to propagate preposterous, highly opaque, and sometimes deeply mystical
ideas.

Since none of these claims made by seminal figures in the recorded
history of technology has proven sufficient reason to rewrite that
history, nor to discredit the status of these individuals within this
specific historical trajectory, it would follow that the resident belief
structure that feeds these ideas extends far beyond the immediate
surroundings of the historical protagonists of obfuse techno-mysticism.
However, the aim here is not to somehow marginalise the significance of
these early visionaries in the course of technological development.
Rather, I would like to argue that their prominent place in the history
of technological invention came about not so much despite the fact that
they subscribed to highly mythological imaginaries, but exactly because
of their mystical inclinations.

Such a complex set of relationships between invention and the imaginary,
between inventor and consumer of the final product, and between
technological inventions and their social and economic context, cannot
be written off as the eccentric idiosyncrasies of the "mad inventor" -
that emblematic archetype of popular culture. Popular imaginaries
require a willing clientele (preferably an eager one...!) to sustain
themselves over time. The imaginary product, in other words, has to
fulfil real-world needs to survive, regardless of whether these needs be
actual or imagined.

It would require a lengthy study into the history of technology to
"excavate" the various lineages and discontinuities in the development
of imaginary media and imaginary machines.  I would like to concentrate
here on two of the most prominent representatives in the history of
technological invention, who exemplify emblematically the porous
boundaries between inventiveness and the imaginary; Nikola Tesla (1856 -
1943) and Thomas Edison (1847 - 1931). Their prominent position in
recorded history means that their life and activities are well
documented. Furthermore, Tesla and Edison shared a predilection for
being outspoken public personalities. They were also contemporaries, and
they even came head to head in the late 1880s in the so-called "War of
Currents" [5] dispute.

What is of particular interest here is the structure of the arguments
used by both Tesla and Edison to propose intensely speculative ideas for
new communications devices and their application areas. Edison and Tesla
worked at a turning point in history when the emphasis in the
technological imaginary moved away from the pre-electronic metaphorical
connection machines of the Suso-type, towards something much closer to
the contemporary electronic cult of wireless connectivity.


Nikola Tesla and the Wardenclyffe Tower

The Serbian / Croatian inventor Nikola Tesla (1856 - 1943) is credited
for some of the most important breakthroughs in electrical engineering.
Among over 700 patents filed by Tesla were the Tesla coil, an induction
coil widely used in radio technology, a telephone repeater, the rotating
magnetic field principle, the polyphase alternating-current system,
alternating-current power transmission, patents for wireless
communication, radio, fluorescent lights, and an electrical induction
motor. In 1884 Tesla had come to the United States to work for the
Edison Company. His employment with Edison, however, ended in bitter
conflict, and both parties went on to consider the other as a competitor.

Tesla's biography is momentous and begs the question whether such a life
is produced by the wild genius he obviously was, or rather that his
'wild genius' resulted from his eventful and at times dramatic life
story. Reading the fascinating biographies written about Tesla it
becomes increasingly clear that it is very difficult to separate the
many practical inventions he produced from his singular and
idiosyncratic obsessions in life. He worked feverishly on new energy
devices, communication media, information and energy transmission
systems, and more generally on what McLuhan would probably call the
birth of the electrical age. The practicality of his ideas seemed only a
consideration in as far as he was necessitated to create the proper
working conditions (space, support, investments) to pursue his singular
ideas about the electrified future of mankind.

Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower, or 'Tesla Tower' might be considered both
his most grandiose design, and his most catastrophic failure. Tesla was
offered an opportunity to build what most likely was originally
conceived as a communications tower, on a piece of land in Shoreham Long
Island. The main investor in the site James S. Warden gave the tower and
the area his name. He envisioned it as the beginning of a future radio
city to be called Wardenclyffe-On-Sound. Tesla started working on the
facility in 1900 and construction started in 1901. However, by 1905
Tesla for various reasons ran out of money. Construction was halted and
staff were laid off, while the facility still did not function properly.
A long period of unclear ownership conditions followed and in 1917 the
tower itself was finally disassembled. Tesla meanwhile, seeing his
biggest project ever fall apart, suffered a severe mental breakdown.

There are many competing theories how the tower and the facility should
have been operated. The most mundane explanation of its designated
purpose was to create a worldwide wireless communication system and
radio broadcasting facility: A second station would be set up on the
southern coast of England to receive and respond to transmissions.
However, Tesla envisioned other, more important uses of the system he
was building. He was convinced that the facility would be able to
transmit wirelessly not only communications and radio signals, but also
electrical power. After the failure of the Wardenclyffe project Tesla
continued to work on his ideas and on prototypes that would enable the
wireless transmission of electrical power.

Again, there are unclear and competing accounts concerning the results
of Tesla's ideas and experiments. According to some of these accounts he
was able to light electric bulbs and other devices over longer distances
without the use of conducting wires. Tesla's idea was supposedly to
distribute electrical energy in a wireless manner through the air in the
sparsely inhabited American countryside. People would be able to receive
this electrical energy cheaply via antenna's on their roofs. But other
claims go further and connect the Wardenclyffe facility to its use as a
weapon that would be able to produce bursts of electrical energy over
vast distances, comparable to the effects of ball lightning or
electromagnetic fireballs. Consequently, the withdrawal of life-saving
funding for Tesla's work and the final decomposition of the tower in
1917 are explained as US government interventions aimed at reserving
this possible military technology for classified research and preventing
the sensitive technology from falling into the wrong hands (the German
empire or the Bolsheviks in Russia - who staged their successful
revolution in the same year the tower was taken apart -, were likely
candidates).

Tesla himself made a bold proposal for what the tower facility should be
able to achieve and demonstrate as a principle. In his vision the earth
itself could be used as a giant conductor to transmit electrical energy
on a global scale with minimum energy loss. The earth's large
cross-sectional area could provide a low resistance path for electrical
impulses, which could be electrically resonated at pre-determined
frequencies. The main obstacle was the need to set up the transmission
points where the earth's coil could be charged. Once in operation,
electrical energy could simply be culled from the earth by drilling a
collecting rod into the soil. The planet would thus act as a giant
battery, and practically free electrical energy would be available
instantly anywhere on the planet!

The most speculative explanation of the Tesla Tower's purpose, however,
introduces a distinctively different reading of both the facility itself
and Tesla's incessant singular preoccupations. According to this largely
undocumented theory the Wardenclyffe tower was not primarily an earthly
communications and radio transmission device, nor was it a global
provider of free electricity. Rather, the tower would serve as a giant
resonating and communications mechanism to reach the spirits of the
deceased, a global transceiver of psychic energy and communication. Both
Tesla and Edison expressed at various stages in their life a keen
interest in and adherence to psychic phenomena, and both socialised in
spiritist' circles. One admittedly highly speculative explanation for
Tesla's preoccupation with the occult could be found in his early life,
when through a dramatic chain of events he was the cause of his older
brother's horse-riding accident, which proved to be fatal. Tesla
remained filled with grief and guilt throughout his life, and repeatedly
alluded to the insignificance of his own achievements in the light of
what he imagined his older brother would have been able to achieve, had
he lived. Was Tesla seeking contact with his brother who had passed away
too early, was he seeking absolution of his life-long sense of guilt?

In his 1908 essay The Future of Wireless Art, Tesla writes about the
Wardenclyffe Tower as a true visionary:

"It is intended to give practical demonstrations of these principles
with the plant illustrated. As soon as completed, it will be possible
for a businessman in New York to dictate instructions, and have them
instantly appear in type at his office in London or elsewhere. He will
be able to call up, from his desk, and talk to any telephone subscriber
on the globe, without any change whatever in the existing equipment. An
inexpensive instrument, not bigger than a watch, will enable its bearer
to hear anywhere, on sea or land, music or song, the speech of a
political leader, the address of an eminent man of science, or the
sermon of an eloquent clergyman, delivered in some other place, however
distant. In the same manner any picture, character, drawing, or print
can be transferred from one to another place. Millions of such
instruments can be operated from but one plant of this kind. More
important than all of this, however, will be the transmission of power,
without wires, which will be shown on a scale large enough to carry
conviction." [6]

His remarks are uncannily familiar to the early 21st century reader,
used as we are to the (fraudulent) promotional narratives employed by
the vendors of wired and wireless electronic communications services.
Later, once the irreversible demise of the Wardenclyffe project had
become clear to him, Tesla's tone turns bitter and disappointed.
Interestingly, he attributes the 'grandesse' of his scheme (i.e.,
wireless global communication, worldwide free electricity, the planetary
earth-battery, wireless transmission of electricity through the air, and
a wireless electrical cannon) to "a simple feat of scientific electrical
engineering", and its demise to the inability of the public (and his
investors) to follow the lead of the visionary inventor. His words
reveal the compulsive character of the vision he tried to pursue:

"It is not a dream, it is a simple feat of scientific electrical
engineering, only expensive, blind, faint-hearted, doubting world! [...]
Humanity is not yet sufficiently advanced to be willingly led by the
discoverer's keen searching sense. But who knows? Perhaps it is better
in this present world of ours that a revolutionary idea or invention
instead of being helped and patted, be hampered and ill-treated in its
adolescence, by want of means, by selfish interest, pedantry, stupidity
and ignorance; that it be attacked and stifled; that it pass through
bitter trials and tribulations, through the strife of commercial
existence. So do we get our light. So all that was great in the past was
ridiculed, condemned, combated, suppressed, only to emerge all the more
powerfully, all the more triumphantly from the struggle." [7]


Thomas Edison Phones the Dead
(1847 - 1931)

Besides being a professed materialist (philosophically speaking) during
the early stages of his professional career, Thomas Edison was also a
shrewd businessman with a keen sense for the potential practicality of
the ideas he was working on. His business skills may equally have helped
assure him a prominent place in history, as did his genuine intellectual
gifts. In this sense the typology that may be drawn of the young Thomas
Edison seems to stand in marked contrast to the wilder imaginations of
his contemporary Tesla.

Although Edison's biography reads significantly less momentous than
Tesla's, his life also appears to have been characterised by the
continuous presence of the occult. His parents were reportedly
spiritualists, and Edison, though a professed atheist in his early
years, seems to have enjoyed a life-long interest in the occult and the
paranormal. These interests included a firm belief in psycho kinesis
(the ability to move objects 'merely' by mental powers), Extra-Sensorial
Perception (ESP), and in his early thirties he dabbled in the writings
of a certain Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, a prominent protagonist of
theosophy. All these metaphysical liaisons are documented in detail in
various biographies of Edison, and a concise summary of Edison's forays
into the supernatural can be found in Martin Gardner's essay "Edison,
Paranormalist" for Skeptical Inquirer. [8]

Gardner in fact digs up quite a number of startling quotes by Edison
that illustrate the ambiguous nature of his relationship to the
paranormal. It seems that Edison moved ever further away from his early
radical materialist positions as his life progressed. Finally, when
facing death, various reports and public interviews suggest that he was
working on a communication device with "the afterlife", or the departed,
though actual designs for such a device, sometimes referred to as the
"psychic telephone", were never recovered, nor any experimental devices
for that matter. It has, however, made Edison a particularly popular
reference for the extensive international Electronic Voice Phenomena
(EVP) movement, a loose association of groups and individuals who are
thoroughly convinced that it is possible to receive the murmuring of the
dead by means of electronic devices. EVP advocates even go as far as to
believe that much of what we hear on off-station frequencies, and which
we tend to interpret or discard as static or mere noise, are in fact the
voices of the dead, clogged and meshed-together, attempting to reach out
to us lesser mortals across the rifts separating life from death. [9]

In October 1920, Edison gave an notorious interview to B.C. Forbes for
the American Magazine entitled "Edison Working on How to Communicate
with the Next World" (Forbes later went on to establish Forbes
Magazine). In this interview Edison claims to be working on an
electrical device to communicate with the departed. This is later also
confirmed by one of his laboratory assistants, but never corroborated
with hard evidence in the form of working notes, sketches or actual
physical devices. The question here is, were Tesla and Edison outdoing
each other in bold claims to tap into that newly emerging phenomenon,
the product of the real-time society of electrical speed, the attention
economy? It cannot be ruled out that both, already media-savvy men, put
out bogus claims that spurred the public imagination, referencing the
supernatural with their costly technological ventures. Even Edison,
though less so than Tesla, could not do without broader public support
to ensure sufficient financial support for his operations, and although
he was less strapped for cash than Tesla, he might have tried
pre-emptively to ensure continued public interest in his explorations.

In an article in Scientific American (October 30, 1920) by Austin
Lescarboura's entitled "Edison's Views on Life after Death", Edison
spells out his otherworldly concerns in more detail:

"If our personality survives, then it is strictly logical and scientific
to assume that it retains memory, intellect, and other faculties and
knowledge that we acquire on this earth. Therefore, if personality
exists after what we call death, it's reasonable to conclude that those
who leave this earth would like to communicate with those they have left
here.
(...)
I am inclined to believe that our personality hereafter will be able to
affect matter. If this reasoning be correct, then, if we can evolve an
instrument so delicate as to be affected, or moved, or manipulated . . .
by our personality as it survives in the next life, such an instrument,
when made available, ought to record something."

It sounds convincing enough that Edison was pursuing a genuine interest
here. And unlikely as it may seem for someone taking such a strongly
anti-metaphysical stance at the outset of his professional career, there
are further grounds to suspect that Edison might indeed have 'succumbed'
to the illusion that an electronic communication device to establish
contact with the dead might truly be feasible. Edison started to believe
in the existence or at least possibility of a disembodied soul,
something that a radical materialist strictly rejects seeing the soul as
nothing more than the product of the proper organisation of the body,
and the brain in particular. Through Henry Ford, founder of the Ford
automobile factories and spiritual father of modern scientific
management, Edison became acquainted with the fake magician Howard
Reese, who claimed to possess the power of Extra-Sensorial Perception
(ESP). Edison was so deeply convinced that Reese's powers were genuine
that he went on to defend him in print even after Reese had been
publicly exposed as a fraud.

Gardner notes that it was Edison's self-conception as a rational man of
science, who was too intelligent to be fooled by a cheap-trickster, that
reinforced his belief in Reese. Similar overtones can be heard in the
quote above: "If our personality survives, then it is strictly logical
and scientific to assume that it retains memory, intellect, and other
faculties and knowledge that we acquire on this earth". Exactly because
his method of observation and analysis is 'strictly logical' and
'scientific' it cannot be wrong or misguided. The afterlife, formerly
the strict domain of mystic and religious cults, now becomes a new
terrain for scientific analysis and logical deduction. It seems that
this mere act of transference to another domain of analysis is enough to
convince Edison that the object of his curiosity is no longer fictional.
This is also reflected in another quote from the article in Scientific
American:

"Certain of the methods now in use are so crude, so childish, so
unscientific, that it is amazing how so many rational human beings can
take any stock in them. If we ever do succeed in establishing
communication with personalities which have left this present life, it
certainly won't be through any of the childish contraptions which seem
so silly to the scientist."

What is startling is not that one of the most prominent figures in the
history of modern (Western) technological civilisation can make such a
dramatic philosophical turn-around and become deeply immersed in
mystical obscurities. In fact, it makes Edison suddenly appear all the
more human, because he exposes his own fragility. Suddenly he is no
longer the shrewd businessman, the brilliant inventor, the ruthless
egocentric. Here we see a man faced with the inevitability of his own
life coming to an end, struggling with the insignificance of his own
inventions when confronted with the ultimate boundary, and longing
desperately for transcendence. And of course he resorts to what he knows
best to achieve it, technological invention.

What is starling here is rather the appropriation of the language of
scientific rationality to his mystical project. Edison makes a desperate
attempt to bring his all too human desire for transcendence over death
in line with his lifelong project of 'technoscientific rationality'
[10]. By reframing the afterlife as a scientific question, Edison tries
to redress his irrational desire as a scientific problem. The myth is
not that of the afterlife, but rather the suggestion of science and
rationality in the very question he so desperately tries to resolve.


The Long Now Clock

Technological transcendence involves time and measurement as two poles
at either end of its ambivalent union. The clock introduces the even
measurement of time, yet it does not transcend the scale of a human
life. Some clocks, of course, survive their makers and their owners, but
most disintegrate within a lifetime or within a few generations. Some
time-pieces are kept alive only thanks to the great effort of their
owners. Technological transcendence therefore requires a more profound
temporal perspective than traditional clocks can offer.

A group of scientists, engineers, and enthusiasts in the United States
has started working on the realisation of such a deliberately profound
perspective, the 10,000 Year Clock. The original incentive for the
project came from computer scientist Daniel Hillis, the principal
architect of the Connection Machine, a ground-breaking design for a
parallel computing device pioneered by Hillis and applied widely in the
field of high-performance computing. Hillis noticed in his extensive
professional career that the emphasis in technological development and
in society at large was shifting towards an infinitely shortened
time-span, brought about by the continuously increasing speed of
information processing machines. Although this strategic acceleration is
crucial to the short-term success of any society in the face of
international competition, Hillis and others became increasingly
concerned about the possible implications of this preoccupation with
ultra-short duration.

They started to think about a project, or a series of projects, that
could shift public attention away from the immediate towards the longer
term, and embarked on a rather surprising mission. They concluded that
it was necessary to construct a technological edifice that would serve
from the outset as a mythological object and that would be in stark
contrast to the contemporary drive for the real-time. The edifice became
the 10.000 Year Clock, a mechanical clock that ticks away 10,000 years,
one tick per year, bonging once a century, and displaying a mechanical
ballet once every thousand years. Although this clock is not made for
eternity it transcends the subjective time frame, and if finally
realised it would very likely transcend every conceivable cultural frame
of time. In this time-bridging immanence it can be considered a truly
transcendental edifice.

The task of preparing the clock project and other similar undertakings
has been entrusted to the Long Now Foundation. The necessary funding has
apparently been secured, a plot of land to host the clock has been
acquired, and a design of the clock is finished. It would seem that
nothing now stands in the way of the clock being put into operation. The
project's website [March 14, 2004] quotes Hillis describing the starting
point of the clock project as follows:

"When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the
year 2000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about
  what would happen by the year 2000, and now no one mentions a future
date at all. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my
entire life. I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that
gets people thinking past the mental barrier of an ever-shortening
future. I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical
clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year,
bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium.

Such a clock, if sufficiently impressive and well engineered, would
embody deep time for people. It should be charismatic to visit,
interesting to think about, and famous enough to become iconic in the
public discourse. Ideally, it would do for thinking about time what the
photographs of Earth from space have done for thinking about the
environment. Such icons reframe the way people think". [11]

Transcendence here, as in so many other cases in Western technological
history, is imagined as a machine. To transcend the timeframe of human
life and experience inevitably points towards the eternal, and within
that to the divine. The Long Now clock seems to be yet another imaginary
medium whose prime intention is to unite daily human affairs with
eternal wisdom, regardless of whether this eternal wisdom is given the
name "god" or "nature".


Compensation Machines

As noted earlier popular technological imaginaries are sustained by a
willing clientele (preferably an eager one). The ideal clientele for the
promise of technological novelty is perhaps a desperate one, i.e., one
that is not primarily interested in 'objectifying' its relationship to
the new technological objects, or making 'sensible' assessments of these
technological objects, and the imaginaries that accompany them.

Looking back at the wonders of technological invention and the bright
futures they promised in the past, we are often struck by a sense of
disbelief that such silly narratives could be taken seriously at all.
That the earliest computer games, or pre-GUI computer systems could once
be the objects of such intense delight may seem laughable now. Could not
the inadequacy of these primitive technological systems only be admired,
either through the prism of mental disorder, or under the sway of a
grand narrative according to which today's inventions were but the first
stepping stones towards that magnificent future of limitless possibility?

Are the early adopters and trend followers of such technological
novelties all befallen by some form of mental disorientation? What
constitutes this extraordinary mesmerising quality of the technological
sublime?

There is little point in taking a derogative stance here. The sense of
an eternal return of the same techno-futuristic meta-narratives is too
strong. The scale of involvement and investment (not least in hard cash)
is too large. The excessive nature of the techno-imaginary embrace,
bordering on the brink of sheer desperation, runs too deep to be
discarded as the misguided preoccupations of a few simple minds. From
the earliest unfounded expectations about the cultural literacy building
capacities of television to the hype of virtual reality technologies in
the early 90s, the Dotcom mania in the later 90s (turning Dot Bomb in
2000), and the subsequent 'great telecom crash' [12] - soon to be
followed by the demise of 3G [13] - the public and professional
investment is simply too large to marginalise the deep-seated belief in
the saving grace of contemporary connection machines, and treat it as a
social fringe phenomenon.

As with cars, clothes, real estate, or briefcases, new communication
devices and technological gadgets are objects of social distinction.
Owning the right item, rather than the merely functional one, confers
status. Furthermore, certain communication technologies do provide
actual economic, and private or social benefits. Also, the revenues made
on stock markets in the 1990s with technology funds have been highly
beneficiary for some shrewd traders and a very few companies. All these
incentives can explain part of the excitement that characterised the
later 1990s, and part of the willingness to put up the cash for it. But
it can never provide sufficient grounds to explain the degree and the
intensity of the excitement, let alone the measure of personal and
corporate / institutional investment, and the inevitable but still
astonishing destruction of capital that was to follow.

The involvement of such vast numbers of people ready to buy (into) what
the market has to offer, and the readiness of venture capitalists and
institutional investors to put up the required capital to fuel the
dotcom and telecom manias, points far beyond the merely practical, the
functional, even the rational. A certain form of existential frenzy
appears to be involved in creating the right conditions for this modern
day version of Tulipomania [14] to emerge. The term 'technological
sublime', which has achieved some currency in recent debates on
technological culture, even though it has come to mean several rather
incommensurate things, actually points in an interesting direction to
analyse these recent forms of popular delusion.

There are a number of different understandings of the philosophical
concept of the sublime, from Longinus' literary interpretation to Kant's
almost cognitive concept of "Analytik der Erhabenheit", and more
recently Lyotard's transformation of Kant's theory of the Sublime as the
unrepresentable. Most productive for current purposes, however, is the
theory of the 'existential sublime', whose arguments have
paradigmatically been laid out by the eighteenth century philosopher and
statesman Edmund Burke (1729-97) in his study on aesthetics "A
Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful" of 1757. [15]

Privation, horror, and delight

Burke maintains that there are passions that stir the soul to a far
greater degree than those aroused by the experience of beauty. These
passions are not of a singularly positive nature. Yet, they bring about
intense sensations of pleasure and they seem intimately connected with
our innermost existential experience. What's more, these sensations
appear to follow on necessarily from one another in a particular order,
under specific conditions, and they always seem to involve an ambiguous
mixture of pleasure and pain.

The progression of these sensations and the experiences they give rise
to, necessarily follows a similar pattern, according to Burke, that of
privation, horror, and delight. He introduces the term 'delight'
specifically to indicate a distinct sensation of pleasure far more
intense than the experience of beauty. His theory can best be explained
by considering the existential fear of darkness, which in contemporary
terms can be considered a genetically imprinted instinctive reaction to
the absence of light, connected with an inborn sense of self-preservation.

Burke observes that the deep-seated fear of darkness results from
privation of light, and he points out that this fear is of an
existential nature. When light is taken away altogether and for an
indefinite period of time, this privation gives rise to the fear that
the darkness might prevail without end, and in absolute darkness we are
surely destined, as biological creatures, to perish. Prolonged darkness
heightens the fear of the end of life to the threshold of absolute
panic, of horror. The confrontation with absolute darkness is the
confrontation with an experiential rift, a non-space and a non-time. It
is the confrontation with the very principle of death itself, and such a
confrontation mobilises the sense of self-preservation more than
anything else in life can.

When light is finally reintroduced, and the existential fear, resulting
from the threat of darkness without end, is put at bay, a tremendous
sense of relief engulfs the mind. The reintroduction of light confirms
the fact that life has not come to an end. The lost connection to the
world of the living is restored. The removal of this existential pain,
the end to horror, produces a feeling of pleasure much stronger than any
possible experience of the beautiful, exactly because of its existential
nature. Such a singular sensation required a new name, and Burke named
it 'delight'.

The experience of what we would now call 'the existential sublime' is
not restricted to any particular domain. It appears across different
forms of experience. What it retains from one domain to another is the
adherence to the particular structure of sensation of privation, horror
and delight.

Analysing different domains where the experience of the existential
sublime may be found, Burke touches upon the theme of "Society and
Solitude". He observes that "society (..) gives us no positive pleasure
in the enjoyment; but absolute and entire solitude, that is the total
and perpetual exclusion from all society, is as great a positive pain as
can almost be conceived. Therefore in the balance between the pleasure
of general society, and the pain of absolute solitude, pain is the
predominant idea. But the pleasure of any particular social enjoyment
outweighs very considerably the uneasiness caused by the want of that
particular enjoyment". [16] And this is to him no small matter. The
pleasure of general society, of contact with others, is even stronger
than the fear induced by the threat of absolute solitude. The threat of
an entire life of solitude, Burke concludes at the end of his
observation, "contradicts the purposes of our being, since death itself
is scarcely an idea of more terror" [17].

The basic structure of the experience of the sublime in relation to
solitude and human contact follows the structure of the experience of
privation of light, fear of darkness, and subsequent delight, discussed
above. Privation of contact, if that privation is complete and of
indeterminate duration, induces the existential fear of absolute
solitude - a fear that is in fact of 'scarcely less terror than that of
death itself!' When this threat of 'absolute' solitude is put at bay,
the removal of the privation of contact gives rise to an enormous sense
of relief, an almost absolute delight in the pleasures of general
society, of contact with fellow human beings, with family, friends, and
loved ones, even with colleagues, or simply with other people suis generis.

Here is a practical application of this theory. Most mobile phone
conversation begin with the words: "Where are you?". This question is in
itself entirely pointless, since the very fact that it is uttered in a
telephone [18] conversation means that presence of both parties in the
same space is not available, while for the conversation their actual
location is irrelevant [19]. It therefore points beyond the immediate
situation, maybe towards future action (a meeting), but certainly to a
set of implicit existential fears and desires. The question "Where are
you?" actually speaks a multitude of other messages, "We are not
together", "I want to be with you", "I miss you", "I'm on my way to you,
but I can't wait until we actually meet", "Even though we're not
together I want to speak to you", "I'm afraid not to find you where I
expect you", "I desire you", "Please do not forget about me", "What if
we never find each other, what if we never meet again?", "I 'm afraid to
be alone", "Please don't leave me (alone)!", "I feel lonely", "I'm
afraid of solitude", are just some of the modalities of this existential
outcry we hear around us daily as we move through public spaces, on
busses and trams, in trains, in corridors and on the street, in meeting
places, airports, stations, waiting rooms, sometimes even in the public
lavatory.

The phrase "Where are you?" is first and foremost the expression of an
existential anxiety, but it also already implies its immediate
resolution, not in the future meeting that puts the fear of absolute or
relative solitude at bay, but already in the very moment of its
utterance. The call being answered, even in the absence of a reply, the
confirmation of contact established with the designated addressee,
instantaneously infuses the mind with relief. Privation of contact had
instilled the fear of solitude, and the removal of this privation of
contact through the telephone connection produces an intense and
immediate sensation of delight. The threat of the fear of solitude, a
fear imbued with scarcely less terror than the idea of death itself, is
relinquished at the click of a few buttons, real-time consolation - a
highly addictive apparatus!


"Experiences"

In the web campaign "Experiences" [20] SonyEricsson introduces six
stories ("experiences"), six imaginary scenario's where their new 3G
[21] mobile phone comes into action, exploiting the wireless multimedia
capabilities of the new device and the broadband mobile communication
networks. The stories present daily situations, which the potential
consumer can easily identify with; stories that reflect the "mobile
lifestyle" of the potential customers, or attune to a high pitched life
in the international business community.

Although many of the narratives used are highly predictable; see the
unseen, transmit your images in real-time, connect to people you would
otherwise miss, share information and 'experiences', play games
together, etcetera..., one story ("Bedtime story") reveals a keen
understanding of the psychological insecurities that drive the use of
mobile communication technology as a compensatory apparatus.

It is break time in the big city and we follow the musing of a manager,
dressed in typical middle-managers attire, working far from home in a
business district of functional high-rise buildings. There is no clear
indication in which city the story is situated, it could be anywhere on
the planet. If we hadn't decoded it yet, there is a text version that
accompanies the flash animation, which builds on the story with
associative images and sounds. The text explains that this manager is
working far from home. Back there, at home, it's his little daughter's
time to go to sleep, but he is not there to read her a bedtime story, or
sing her a lullaby.

The new multimedia phone comes to the rescue. From the business park he
starts to photograph the fluffy clouds in the beautiful blue sky behind
the towers of commerce. With the images he constructs a story that is
transmitted real-time to his daughter's bedroom, and we see her watching
it unfold on the laptop (with wireless internet connection). His wife
sends the pictures back to him (with her multimedia phone); the little
girl reading the digitised clouds and finally falling asleep

The text is full of mystification and play on the subliminal desires of
transcendence of the separation implicit in the scenario. Some quite
literal: "you wish you could be there with them", and "you're missing
your wife and child", while other suggestions are more sophisticated,
planting keywords in the narrative that ascribe values to the story and
the device that lead away from its lowly technical function and the
commercial purposes of the advertisement (i.e., selling the new phone to
'early adopters' at a much too high introductory price). "With a flash
of inspiration and with just a few clicks you capture your vision...",
and, "you've written a wonderfully magical story", and then more overt
again "It's almost as if you were there with her". And gratification is
instant: "Your instant reward is an e-mail back from your wife" - the
picture of the sleeping girl that "inspires you for the rest of the day".

The text of the advertisement story is in fact remarkably similar to a
dialogue in Peter Blegvad's stage play "On Imaginary Media", between the
characters A and B about creation, effort and inspiration:

A - "So, you want media that will make bringing into being effortless?

B - And instant. Inspiration comes so slowly to us mortals, that's why
in allegories she is depicted as travelling by turtle.

I want imaginary media that will put skates on Inspiration's turtle.
I want media that will remove all obstacles to the immediate
gratification of my every whim". [22]

And of course we do not merely share text, images and voice, but
'experiences', implying that what is sold is not a product, but rather
that an experience is created for you. The text ends with three more
keywords, "Touching from a distance", by sharing images you are supposed
to share experience more directly "than words ever can..." and you can
share a moment "no matter where in the world you are" - the death of
distance. Finally everything can be personalised, you can "be yourself",
literally according to the ad, and what is more, you can "share your
character". The new medium enables the sharing of that aura of
personality that produces mind, spirit and persona, your character, not
just empty words, images and text or data. How this metaphysical
transformation is achieved is of course not explained, it is merely
suggested...

Technology as Myth

Myth, Roland Barthes taught us long ago [23], is a second order
semiological system. Second order because mythological meaning is always
superimposed over the historical existence of any event, object or
person. Thus, beyond mystification myth serves many other purposes and
performs other roles. The function of myth is always at least two-fold:
to superimpose and to hide.

For myth to work it has to estrange the object, person, or event from
its historical existence. The original significance of the mythical
object has to erased in order for the myth to be able to take hold of it
and use it as clean projection surface for a whole new range of
significations. The second order signification ascribed to the object of
myth transcends its own existence here and now. Often these mythical
significations are gathered from an extended, suggested, or even a
purely imaginary past that can then be projected into the future.
Although the new significations superimposed by myth are often
mystifying, they are never arbitrary.  Myth is entirely strategic in
character. It serves an agenda and a purpose. It is never neutral,
although in what any particular mythology communicates it will always
deny its own strategic character by appearing 'natural'.

The superimposition that informs the mythologies of various forms of
connection machines discussed so far is the dream of technological
transcendence. This almost archetypical Western mythology can be read as
a compensation complex, where technological apparatuses of various kinds
are expected, believed or suggested to alleviate a wide spectrum of
human, biological, and social deficiencies - as if 'at the flick of a
switch': a true Deus-Ex-Machina, a magic spirit that resides inside the
machine. This magic, which in itself remains unexplained, is supposed to
abolish distance (physical, but also emotional distance), provide
knowledge and insight, give inspiration, create a 'new economy',
establish new forms of politics, make things free (of cost),
reinvigorate community, include the excluded, bridge cultural divides,
enhance or rather reduce mobility, create a global consciousness, it
should be able to transcend the confines of time, and even cross the
divide between the living and the afterlife, or serve as a mediator of
the divine. In short the mythology of new technology is the promise of
the ultimate compensation machine, realising all that is humanly
unachievable.

It is not very difficult to decode the strategic interests behind the
eternal return of the mythology of new technology. The rise and fall of
the New Economy has been a clear case in point. Today we understand why
insignificant start-ups were blown up out of proportion, so much so that
the Dutch proverb of "Windhandel" (to trade on the wind) became a highly
popular and apt characterisation. From the viewpoint of financial
speculation the hype of new technology around the rapid expansion of the
internet as a public access medium was the perfect opportunity for a
well-established trade game. Hype the start-up company and buy into the
stocks before they actually reach the market, wait for the hype to reach
culmination point, cash in at the right moment, and take home incredible
gains. For the speculator it is completely irrelevant whether the
start-up company has any real economic, technological, or innovative
potential - the only relevant question is whether it is believed to have
that potential on the stock market.

These traders could then rely on the age-old human flaw of greed to do
the rest. As the hype grows, more inexperienced and amateur investors
hit the market and start buying into the attractive offers of the New
Economy's emerging markets and players, looking for a quick profit,
oblivious to the risks, or simply blinded by greed. The scheme is
astonishingly simple and effective, and can be applied anywhere:
biotech, security, tulips - as long as there is an 'emerging market' and
new players that can be sold off as the promise of the future, all the
necessary ingredients are at hand.

What is more difficult to understand about the impressive series of new
technology crashes around the turn of the millennium (the Dotcom, New
Economy, and Telecom crashes) is their sheer volume and the breathless
eagerness of multitudes to be part of the game. Also very large
institutional investors, consultancy firms, politicians, and the wider
public were ready to invest in the myth of growth without end ("The Long
Boom") and perpetual productivity gains (which actually turned out not
to exist anywhere else than in the high-tech industry itself, and could
simply be explained from growing economies of scale resulting exactly
from the very willingness of the rest of society to buy into the
mythical status of the new technologies). Why did so many people by-pass
all sound judgement, and how was this unprecedented destruction of
financial and human capital possible in the first place?

It seems that a deeply rooted belief in technology as a compensatory
apparatus, a machine that can transcend the limitations of the merely
human, has played a crucial role here. Machines have become not only the
mediators of the divine, but in their mythological significations the
complexity of the new machineries and their extraordinary transformative
powers in society and in the private lives of an ever growing portion of
the global population, have become the abstract embodiment of the
divine. It is a system of belief that assumes a new 'naturalised'
status, in which technology is not seen to be driven by will or
interest, but is increasingly regarded as a matter of fact, much like
the forces of nature. The enormous popularity of biological metaphors in
the speculative writings of new technology protagonists of the mid 1990s
[24] testifies to this 'naturalised' status of emerging technologies.
Society itself is no longer seen as the interplay of strategic
interests, conflict, and power, but is regarded as an emerging property
of the interaction of abstract forces that operate outside of anybody's
will or interest. However, the projection of this public image has been
largely a deliberate affair, driven by a variety of strategic interests,
so much is clear post-WorldCom, post-Enron, post-World On-line. As
Barthes noted long before all this, myth is depoliticised speech, and
the politics have been effectively washed away by the metaphor of
nature. The purpose of the naturalisation of the mythical object is to
make it appear neutral, matter-of-fact, indeed "natural", and thus
unquestionable.


Eric Kluitenberg
Amsterdam, May 2005


Notes:

1 - The ability to register 24 EVEN hours in the day was an important
innovation brought about by the mechanical clock.
2 - Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, New York, Harcourt Brace,
Jovanovich, 1934 / '63, pp. 13-14.
3 - Immediacy: according to Paul Virilio electronic telecommunication
technology introduces a new precedence of time over distance, where in
the immediacy of transmissions with the speed of light distance is
dissolved on the level of communication and replaced by the rule of
real-time: the immediate.
4  - The International Meridian Conference Washington DC, USA - October 1884
5 - A fairly informative article about the War of Currents can be found
here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Currents
6 - Nikola Tesla: "The Future of the Wireless Art," in: WIRELESS
TELEGRAPHY & TELEPHONY, Walter W. Massie & Charles R. Underhill, 1908,
pp. 67-71]
7 - Nikola Tesla, Wardenclyffe - A Forfeited Dream.
8 - Martin Gardner: Thomas Edison, paranormalist, in: Skeptical
Inquirer, July-August, 1996
www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2843/is_n4_v20/ai_18535410
9 - The image of Lethe clearly does not seem to apply in this
imagination of the underworld.
10 - Seeing all, knowing all, realising all - according to Jean-François
Lyotard.
11 - www.longnow.org
12 - Leading cover story of The Economist, July 18, 2002.
13 - This has yet to happen (March 2005)
14 - A speculative frenzy in 17th-century Holland over the sale of tulip
bulbs.
15 - Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas
of the Sublime and Beautiful, London, 1757, cited here from: ibid,
Penguin Classics, edited by David Womersley, Penguin Books, London,
1998, pp. 49 - 200.
16 - Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 1757/1998, p. 90.
17 - ibid. p. 90
18 - tele - from a distance
19 - Presence of the signal is in fact much more important - "Do you
have range and credit?", would be a far more relevant question to ask at
the outset of a mobile phone conversation.
20 - http://www.sonyericsson.com/experiences
21 - 3G: Third Generation or UMTS wireless network communication
technologies
22 - Peter Blegvad, On Imaginary Media, stage play written for the
Archaeology of Imaginary Media project of De Balie, Amsterdam, February
2004.
23 - Roland Barthes, Myth Today, in: Mythologies, Vintage Classic
Editions, London, 1993 (orig. Paris, 1957), pp.109-159
24 - Kevin Kelly's book Out of Control (New York '94) is one of the most
outspoken examples of this trend - see also: www.kk.org/outofcontrol/.