Attanucci Timothy

Beth David

Brenner Summer

Breuning Olaf

Buchina William

Bunnell Dave

Coronato Petra

Dantini Michele

Doutreluingne Pauline

Doy Gen

Ferrante Denise Palma

Foxwell Adam

Fresco Jacque

Gavron Assaf

Glaser Bruno

Goldwyn Mara

Guo-Qiang Cai

Hill Patrick

Horvitz David

Hugo Pieter

Idnert B. Zlatan

Kempenaers Jan

Lin Tao

Maisel David

Maximishin Sergey

Mendoza Connie

Minx Rua

Morrison Rachael

Neutelings Jan

Nielsen Nikolaj

Okón Yoshua

Patt Lise

Petrovszky Konrad

Rameau Max

Rau Milo

Roc Ailen

Shapiro Alan

Situ Studio

Small Gary

Thompson Cosette

van Haarlem Dr. Michiel P.

Vanden Eynde Maarten

Wei Chen

EDITORIAL
Rachel de Joode
Emilie Florenkowsky
Hili Perlson
Anja Wiesinger

DESIGN
Aleksandar Todorović
CODING
Veit Wießner
Anja Wiesinger

META MAGAZINE
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A New Computer Science is Underway Interview with Alan Shapiro by META’s Anja Wiesinger

Interview with Alan Shapiro by META’s Anja Wiesinger

During a recent visit to Berlin, Alan Shapiro met up with META contributor Anja Wiesinger to share his vision of a pragmatic-utopian enterprise project which operates on friendship and radical program code.

At a talk you gave at the Berlin project space General Public in December 2009, you said that, being an American, you’d pursue your ideas by founding a company. On the other hand, in your text on Cultural Citizenship published in the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies (IJBS), you chide American culture for being too money-driven and criticize the egoistic individualism that stems from capitalist society. This seems like a contradiction to me.

Alan Shapiro: It’s quantum physics sociology, a double-reality, not a contradiction. In my two essays on America at IJBS (the other one is Re-discovering the Baudreality of America), in my writings on baseball and casino gambling and American Slang, in my book on Star Trek, in what I wrote about Charles Lindbergh’s courageous flight, I am laying the groundwork for a new American Studies. American Studies, by the way, is a promising academic field in Germany. I gave a lecture recently in that department at the University of Oldenburg. The founding works of the new American Studies are Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and Jean Baudrillard’s America (and perhaps also the book by Bernard-Henri Lévy).

My double-approach to America of critique and celebration has its precedent in both of these great inspiring works. Both authors criticize American hyper-capitalism and hyper-conformity in the same way that I do. Yet they both see a great hope for human liberation in another dimension of America. Star Trek, baseball, the desert, gambling in Las Vegas, fast food finger lickin’ good, Slang I’ve no idea what you just said, film as life and life as film, photo snapshots of Niagara Falls, Manhattan skyscrapers engineered by my father Murray Shapiro, driving in the semiotic wasteland of the golden calf neon gods, smash hits on the Chrysler stereo, strip malls parking lots Wal-Marts, heat wave, riding the Greyhound bus, heroic deeds of aeronautics and astronautics, new technologies up the kazoo—all understood and written about in a certain way—this is the positive side of America. DeLillo, Auster, Pynchon, Boyle, and Jason Starr. Philip K. Dick and Samuel R. Delany. I start with what Baudrillard intuited about America, and expand on that.

Regarding what I said about business at the two Berlin events organized by Shintaro Miyazaki and Andreas Lange, respectively, one should not take it too literally. Everything that I say and write is based on the philosophy of deadpan humour. Peter Sellers. I’m completely serious, on the level, but at the same time not. This is my here sincerity. That’s how you deal with a world of Lies, Inc.

When I met Baudrillard at the ZKM (Center for Art and Media) in Karlsruhe in 2004, he told me in a whispering tone that his work is indeed about changing the world, not just criticizing it. And I love him like a father, in the name of the father I proceed, so it’s like he stung me like a bee that day, and in a way now I’m stuck with this responsibility.

Unfortunately for me, Lyotard, Lefort, Castoriadis, Derrida, Nancy, Habermas, and Kroker all said similar things to me when I had conversations with them. We aren’t going to change the world with a Communist Party or an anarchist uprising on the barricades, so in my essay Play Don’t Work in a Pragmatic-Utopian High-Tech Enterprise, I propose a new interpretation of Marxism. The agency of change would be a sort of Apple or Google radicalized by art, philosophy, and critical social theory. If such a pragmatic-utopian company operated in America, it would then want to connect with all those ecstatic things about America that I write about and engage with: the enumeration listed and iterated above.

So it would be very different from business-as-usual. It’s a far out utopian vision to be sure. Yet at the same time, it seems to be in the historical cards, it seems to be preparing itself to happen, to dump a phrase-construction from the non-English portion of my mind. The odds against it happening, as Mr. Spock recently reported to me, are exactly 7.643 to 1. Yet the Mets won the 1969 World Series.

I wrote in Play Don’t Work that the two basic principles of the radical pragmatic-utopian high-tech enterprise should be friendship and “not working.” There are a hundred different levels of friendship, so who knows exactly what that will mean, it has to be experimented with and figured out in practice. Being against work as it is constituted today is fundamental. Something is deeply wrong with our workaholism, and our structural inability to provide artists and other creative people with a decent living. But I certainly don’t mean that we should not work at all. We should integrate play and work in a new way, as many people already do, and as my daddy taught me. I am quite a hard worker myself.

You suggest a work ethic that is reminiscent of the first new media economic boom of the 1990s. Ten years after the crash of digital technologies, you say that there is a next wave coming. What will be different than before?

No, I haven’t said that at all about work ethic. With all their progressive thinking and practice in certain areas, no major technology company has ever questioned the Protestant work ethic that underlies our cutural and economic system. Since I have seriously read Karl Marx, Max Weber, and Jean-Paul Sartre, it falls to me to be the guy who’s questioning it. Almost every company in the world today forces its white-collar employees to work well in excess of 40 hours a week. This is primitive and barbaric, as advanced alien civilizations encountered by Captain Kirk or Captain Picard’s Enterprise would say.

Since new media and new technologies are essentially about creativity, I believe that it is possible for a company to take a totally different approach: quality not quantity. Creativity, play, individual freedom, and variety of activities can be worked up into a new connection with productivity. Instead of assuming that only drudge work can achieve productivity. My perspective on virtual reality is also different from ideas about virtual reality that were widely articulated in the 1990s.

Those 1990s ideas tended towards dreaming of VR as an escape from conventional physical, corporeal, and spacetime reality. What we can try now is to take a different approach, that of embodiment. That’s why I speak about the virtual-slash-real. I spoke about this at the event in Frankfurt organized by Steve Valk, where dancers from ID_Frankfurt performed while I talked about embodiment in computer games. That’s one reason why I’m very interested in Steve’s Social Choreography, and why I think that dancers and athletes are important for our new conception of the virtual-real. Virtual technologies should enhance reality, not replace it or escape from it. We don’t want to be consumerist couch potatoes.

In your essay Cultural Citizenship in Contemporary America, you talk about the paradox of affluence. Very briefly, it affects the satisfaction of individuals within society. Something that is considered a social advancement loses its value once too many people share the same experience. Like, for example, higher education. What is the point that you are trying to make? Translated into the realm of technology, isn’t this a matter of scalability? The more complex a system is the greater the danger becomes that it is going to break…

I took the “paradox of affluence” from the economist Fred Hirsch, his book Social Limits to Growth (a book from 1976, which happens to be the same year as the publication of Baudrillard’s major work Symbolic Exchange and Death). This is about the social or environmental “conditions of use” of any good or experience which people desire.

The more people attain to a certain level of professional or vocational education, the less value that education has in the scramble for jobs. The more people acquire homes in the suburbs, the more the suburbs are transformed and gradually attract all the problems and blight of the city. The more tourists flock to a locality, the more that locality takes on the qualities of universal tourism and loses much of what it was. “Conditions of use” deteriorate as use becomes more widespread.

The search for Cultural Citizenship has limits, and becomes involved in paradoxes of overuse. Economic growth is desirable. We have to figure out how to sustain growth without destroying the planet and ourselves. It annoys me when social critics and green fundamentalists say they are against growth, that is too negative. I am against economic growth in the way that it is currently being mindlessly practiced by the ruling version of monopolistic capitalism.

I think that there is such a thing as green fanaticism, especially in Germany. Plastic is one of the great inventions of the 19th century, and of modern civilization. But the upscale German organic (Bio) supermarket chain named BASIC doesn’t sell plastic bags, only paper and cloth ones. But a paper bag with a handle can easily break and the great stuff you just paid dearly for falls onto the street while you’re walking home.

You are right, Anja, about the importance of the challenge of scalability. This is switching from thinking about the problem of the paradox of affluence to thinking about the solution. We had an aristocratic leisure class, as Thorsten Veblen wrote about in his classic sociological work, then we tried to spread affluence to the masses, and we ended up with McHouses, and the McDonaldization and Disneylandification of all of society.

So the question is: how do we achieve a mass culture of prosperity that isn’t so dumbed down like what we have built up so far? One aspect of searching for the answer is paradoxically that we should investigate what is positive about McDonald’s and Disneyland, and not be so quick to dismiss them.

What’s your approach towards a new computer science?

Alexis Clancy and I have defined 22 concrete software development projects: code to be written primarily in Java and in an extension of Java, projects which, when taken together, would constitute the New Computer Science. We have written the architecture and design of these projects in a first iteration. The next step is to start writing the code and simultaneously deepen the design document. I’ve written a little bit of new computer science code already, but we would need capital investment from at least two sources before being able to go forward. We would have to be able to pay the programmers on the team.

I studied the History of Ideas at Cornell University. That’s my core education. Then I spent 15 years as a practicing software developer. Then I reflected upon what computer science is in the context of the history of ideas, and came to the view that computer science has not yet really taken into account any ideas beyond the 17th century. So-called computer science is not yet a science. So far it is just computer engineering. It is based on 17th century philosophy and scientific method. To bootstrap itself, work on the New Computer Science will proceed in two dimensions. One dimension is the writing of code. The other dimension is the project of the comprehensive rethinking of the entire classification system or categories of knowledge in the West (beginning with the division between the natural sciences and the human sciences). In the contemporary academic-university scene, there is much talk of interdisciplinarity. Yet in one important sense, interdisciplinarity is hypocrisy. If the existing categorization of knowledge is so obsolete that interdisciplinarity is allegedly required, then what is really required is a complete reinvention of the appropriate categories of knowledge. If, in order to obtain valuable knowledge, we need to span several disciplines, that only shows that what we really need is a major project to rethink what the categories of knowledge should be.

The professors who promote interdisciplinarity who have jobs, money, power, and prestige in the existing university system are the watchdogs of the established order (Sartre’s friend Paul Nizan. wrote brilliantly about this in 1932), conservatively resisting the real advancement of knowledge. The goal of the work of the “interdisciplinary” dimension of the New Computer Science is to establish the path that we will walk that leads to the invention of the new gay sciences (Nietzsche).

Alexis Clancy: For 14 years I have been exploring the one thesis—a correlation between Fermat’s Last Theorem and Möbius Topologies. More than a decade ago. the Incompleteness Theorems of Kurt Gödel crept in and married themselves to said thesis. And it has all become a matter of Narrative—the overwhelming question, for me, has come to be: “What’s the best way to tell a mathematical story knowing, that, in all probability, an ultimate story does not exist?” And, drawing mostly on my Irish cultural bias from Celtic symbols that have existed 1500 years BCE right up to the modernist writings of Flann O’ Brien, I have concluded that this “best way” is to tell three stories; three origins, three types of number, three types of infinity, three types of Time. Other comparative investigations of indigenous universal models have reinforced this notion.

With specific relation to the “New Computer Science” and investigation of Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime models inspired a course of dialogue between myself and Alan that brought forward the “Three Clock Paradigm”—the core paradigm of the New Computer Science. It holds that three clocks of different types running in the same vicinity can instantiate “Fertile Time”—just as the “World” is instantiated by the three nodes of the Dreamtime model. One of the most important properties of this “Fertile Time” space is the capacity for “creative evolution” within its bounds. Further radical properties are realized when two “Time Triangles”—two instances of Fertile Time overlap (i.e. in the case of a device running the “New Computer Science” and its user) - generating a “Star of David Effect” and the instantiation of the hexagonal 7-Space… A higher synthesis…

From the point of view of my own research, Niamh’s Gasket is the most important as it represents best how I work—I tend to “see” the mathematics first and then apply extant or invented notation to render the vision in a mathematical expression.

You say that today’s program code still follows the tradition of early modern mathematics. Are you referring to Descartes?

What we can say for now is that the New Computer Science, no longer an engineering and techie discipline, will be intimately related to art, literature, languages, sociology, psychology, music, dance, ecology, spirituality, theology, mathematics, quantum physics, history, semiotics, and grammatology. The profession of programmer should be redefined from the ground up to include these fields. We are especially interested in the aesthetic and sociological dimensions of software. And we will take a novel approach. Literally novel—literature, narrative, fiction, poetry, dramaturgy, and performance will all have an important status in the rethinking of knowledge, and in the software code, that is the New Computer Science. The technology of resemblance to be realized on the basis of new 20th century mathematics (Gödel, Schrödinger, Riemann) provides an alternative answer to the question of how do we deal with the problem of complexity.

Within the existing computing paradigm, in order to deal with a complex problem, you break down the problem into smaller, more manageable parts. This is essentially the Cartesian Method of Descartes. But it is impossible to apply the Cartesian Method to quantum-mechanical generalized complementarities like the wave-particle duality or the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Whereas the Cartesian method may work for mechanical systems, it cannot be of much use when we aspire to the creation of something that is living. Our goal in the New Computer Science, similar to the Artificial Life movement, is to create software as semi-living entities.

The more correct approach corresponding to a breakthrough into 21st century science is to identify relationships of similarity, to find SAMPLES or PATTERNS that capture something of the vitality and complexity of the whole without breaking it down in a reductionist way.

We need a new technique that augments the inheritance mechanism of Object-Orientation. In addition to inheritance, we will have analogies or resemblance between the software instance and the “blueprint” software classes which furnish the possibilities of what the instance can do. The highest-order analogy, defining the base of operations of this subsystem, is the idea of the software instance having a choice, having existentialist freedom, rather than being determined by available template attributes and data. Choice is inaugurated by Incompleteness. Incompleteness is inaugurated by Choice. Choice is inaugurated by the Möbius Twist and the Aleph Operator. This is what Alexis has seen: a divine pattern perceived through the perceptual media known as textuality. Incompleteness is at the foundation of the architecture of a radicalized Object-Oriented class inheritance hierarchy. Whereas Descartes and Leibniz (before Deleuze wrote about Leibniz) in the 17th century wanted to deduce a system of knowledge starting from a few certainties (an axiom-based system), WE WILL START WITH INCOMPLETENESS (integrated at an axiomatic level).

Opposing components cannot be in the same place within the model in a given frame. In our frame, there exists, within the field, three further fields which lie outside of our understanding: the two “gaps” and the “jump.” These elements are strictly analogous to Incompleteness. Alexis calls this “Topographical Incompleteness.” If we decide to populate the “gaps” with some other, smaller potentialities, we will find the same thing within the frame again—more pairs of “gaps”—in a sense self-similar, or understood as “Fractal Incompleteness.” Voila.

What’s your position on technological implants and cloning?

I am very influenced by the cyborg theory of Donna Haraway, which is a feminist theory. As in Star Trek, life does not have to be biology based. I am very happy to get technological implants in my body, as long as they are really designed for me as an individual, and I am not getting the same device as ten million other people. Am I in favor of cloning? It depends on who is being cloned. Before we ask the question about biological cloning, we have to ask the question of cultural cloning.

In America, most people have the goal just to be like everyone else, to be a cultural clone, based on a set of models and codes and formulae. This is the contemporary version of Tocqueville’s society of conformism. Let’s become clear first that we are living in a society of cultural cloning before we start to talk about biological cloning. I am totally in favor of biological cloning if the people who we clone are really individuals. I would clone great artists, great scientists, and great writers who really have an important and valuable body of experiences and knowledge in their Dasein. So the life projects of these individuals can be continued, even if they have cancer or something. This position on cloning is shown very well in the recent science fiction film Moon, starring Sam Rockwell.

In your early essay Society of the Instance, you express a fascinating thought: you say that object-orientated program languages like Java, for example, are the new “artificial languages” of seductive power—what Baudrillard would call a new system of virtualization. In addition, you equate software objects with physical and social objects that curiously “combine a Platonist ingredient (software classes equate transcendental signifiers) and a deconstructionist ingredient (the free floating signifiers, unending, undecidable, auto-referentially recursive discourse in the hierarchical, (deinstituting, subclassing chains)”. This seems to explain the cultural logic of late capitalism, because you identify the late-capitalist mode of production with instantiation (creating an object of a class): a successor to alienation, reification, simulation, and the spectacle. In other words: the “rational” object escapes its own logic. Why has this seminal essay remained so unknown until now? Do you think that in this double movement lies an emancipative power?

I am not a professor at a university, so I do not have any institutional power or, for example, a university press that publishes my books. When I first started publishing, in the late 1990s, I thought that Arthur and Marilouise Kroker would help me, since they claimed to be working in the spirit of Baudrillard, and it is obvious that I am dedicated to thinking within the space that Baudrillard opened up (although, being of a younger generation, I am more knowledgable about new media and new technologies than he was). I assumed that the Krokers were worthwhile gatekeepers to cyber-cultural academic publication, as they appeared to be. At first the Krokers helped me. They published essays of mine on CTHEORY and in their book Digital Delirium. But after that, they rejected several essays that I sent them, including Society of the Instance.

And CTHEORY has never mentioned the book Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance to its readers. Not even one time. So the Krokers seem after all to be operating within the usual academic prejudice that Star Trek is too low-brow to be worthy of consideration. Whereas it is really an engagement with Star Trek that is going to get the entire radical cyber-critical theory scene unstuck. Academics like the Krokers have liked their science fiction avant-garde: Blade Runner or the Alien series. I am very grateful to Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. for writing a lengthy review-essay of my book on Star Trek in the journal Science Fiction Studies.

Yes, of course I think that the Platonist-deconstructionist hybridity that I describe in Society of the Instance is an emancipatory movement. It is the very structure of the commodity-form today, and its reversibility. This is the path to the re-enchantment of the world, undoing the disenchantment, bureaucratization, and iron cage of rationalization that Max Weber talked about.

Do you agree with Paul Virilio’s critical view of contemporary telecommunications technologies as having a destructive effect on spacetime?

One of the major developments in new technology at the moment is the ubiquitousness of cell phones and of personal digital assistants and iPads. I see this as a very negative development for us. It’s a form of self-surveillance and mutual surveillance, and it’s being done in the context of after September 11, where there is security paranoia about everything. The way that cell phones are being used is that my friends and family and co-workers are keeping track of me and keeping tabs on me all the time. Where am I right now? What am I doing? What am I thinking? Twitter and people reporting what they are doing in the course of a day. It’s coming to the point where there will be so much of this surveillance information available that anyone can find out where was I between noon and 2 pm the day before yesterday. No secret love affairs anymore.

What would hybrid love—love among the cyborgs and androids—look like?

On polysexuality, I would ask the question what is sexual liberation, referring to works such as Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization. My position is that sexuality is a desire, not an identity. I think that this is consistent with Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, with various science fiction utopian novels, with Haraway’s cyborg theory, and with Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. How does the system, invented in the 1970s, of straight-gay-lesbian-bi-trans, hinder the sexual liberation of the majority? How can digital, virtual/real, and virtual reality technologies lead us more towards the perspective of desire? How is the majority already secretly resisting the commodity system (Baudrillard)?