"Endless, Multilayered, Super-Fast and Infinitely Complex Boredom: Hooray"
Matthew Fuller
What makes software jump? What words, what
styles of thought do we need to understand
running code and the multi-layered compositions
it is part of, and how, if at all, does software
establish relations with what might termed
freedom? Such questions, of how to act in and
understand complex technologies and live
situations are not unique to technology, and for
a figure by which to understand them, it is often
useful to start from the wrong place, not with
software, but with a frog. In his book Lifelines
the biologist Steven Rose describes the way in
which a number of his workmates might, whilst
sitting at the edge of a pond, compete to
describe the leap of a frog. By trade, they are a
physiologist, an ethologist, a developmentalist,
an evolutionist and a molecular biologist. Each
sets their particular disciplinary scale of
perception against those of the others. The
frog, responding not to the nattering of the
knowledge workers but to a snake spotted on a
nearby tree splashes elegantly into the safety of
a pond. The representatives of their disciplines
each in turn ascribe the 'jump event' to: the
interaction of nerves, muscles and bones
containing and releasing structured patterns of
energy and movement; learned or grown behavioural
responses; the result of the particular pattern
of growth of the organism; the action of an
inherited genetic imperative; or the biochemical
properties of its muscles.
As the ripples in the pond spread and interact
with other movements in the water, Rose's
argument is to encourage equally multivalent ways
of thinking a non-reductive biology of
life-patterns. Whilst, in his experiments on the
physiology of memory, there can be few people in
the world who have scissored as many heads off
hatchling chicks, Rose's appetite for a wet,
complex, living biology is something from which,
with all necessary irony, our understanding of
software can learn. The trick for biology as a
whole, he suggests, is to find a way of engaging
both the volition to detail entrained by
disciplinary approaches, which are in turn geared
to particular constituent scales of reality,
those of the gene, the molecule, the organism and
so on, whilst at the same time recognizing the
radical interweaving of such scales.
If we talk about freedom in relation to
software, and after having spat a few times to
clear our mouths of a word so enduringly soured
as freedom, a word that still however makes our
mouths water and tongues wag, perhaps then we
can suggest that a similar set of scales might
pertain to software. Imagine a group of people
watching a computer. One holds that what it does
is determined by the hardware, that the mineral
architecture of computing is that which sets what
is possible. Another looks to the history of
languages. They say that software is determined
by the kinds of syntaxes buildable, by logical
structures that are available in each different
environment. The third works through a critique
of the political economy of software and suggests
that what is possible in software is engineered
by the relations of property embedded in and
circulating through it. This person might
emphasize the insights of the Free Software
movement. Lastly, the fourth figure suggests
that software can only be understood by an
analysis of the user interface, by an
ethnographic querying of the signifying processes
of the machine and of its uses. What people do
with it is what establishes its quality of
freedom. Whilst these figures do not exist in
any 'clean' sense, they do represent existing
tendencies in the understanding of software and
also divisions of labour in its production.
In an aside in a classic essay in the
Actor-Network tradition, a current in sociology
emphasizing the interaction of elements in
socio-technical assemblages, Madeleine Akrich
describes the possibilities for developing an
analysis of the car. She suggests that such a
study has its natural scale. "Doubtless it could
be satisfying to paint on a broad canvas,
starting with nuts and bolts, pistons and cracks,
cogs and fan belts, and moving on to voting
systems, the strategies of large industrial
groups, the definition of the family, and the
physics of solids... ...On what grounds would
the analyst stop - apart from the arbitrary one
of lassitude? Quite apart from the indefinite
amount of time such a study would take, there is
also the question as to whether it would be
interesting." Mapping the way in which every part
of such a complex technical object simultaneously
embodies and measures relations amongst
'heterogeneous elements' might be even more
draining in the case of software.
Do we need to make this voyage through boredom?
What would it involve? A phrase which has passed
into the everyday understanding of computing,
'the combinatorial explosion' was coined in the
1973 Lighthill report into artificial
intelligence. It describes a situation where
each element in a logical puzzle needs testing
against every other part. As the number of
elements increases, the number of such
combinations rises exponentially. The problem
gets too big. This was seen to set a natural
limit to the scale of the then current programme
of artificial intelligence and the report was
used to legitimize the drastic cutting of the
number of centres involved in such research in
the UK. Such seemingly natural scales to both
understanding and 'intelligence' set thresholds
of complexity beyond which it is difficult, if
not arduously boring to go beyond. The situation
is complicated further because, as Edsgar
Dijkstra notes, "In computer programming our
basic building block, the instruction, takes
less than a microsecond, but our program may
require hours of computation time. I do not know
of any other technology than programming that is
invited to cover a grain ratio of 10^10 or more.
The automatic computer, by virtue of its
fantastic speed, was the first to provide an
environment with enough 'room' for highly
hierarchical artifacts. And in this respect, the
challenge of the programming task is without
precedent."
To map out the elements of software, at any one
of the scales embodied in our four watching
figures is therefore complicated by the question
of time. Rose sees history, the movement of an
organism in time through and as the interplay of
these relatively self-determining layers, as a
means of understanding biology without falling in
to the trap of a fetishised, eventually
dysfunctional, reductivism. A life is enacted
not in conditions of the organism's own making,
but each life generates it own combinatorial
explosion.
If we were to be unwise, to obstinately disregard
Akrich's indubitably correct warning and to try
and map out every possible element of the
catalytic web of a piece of software, at every
one of its scalar articulations, and both at the
stretches of speed appropriate to the rate of
calculation of its hardware (in its every actual
configuration) and for all the social, semiotic
and experiential combinations within which it
inheres, what might result? One can imagine
endless drifts of finely sociological boredom
being endured in the study of software. Should we
launch global and trans-generational research
institutes for the study of every instance of
some minor phone-game or for all calculations
made in Lotus 1-2-3 or the Sasser virus? Perhaps
such studies are already underway, their results
remaining as yet stupifyingly incommunicable.
What then should we watch out for and what kind
of instruments would be used? Will there be some
ideal moment of alignment between the four or
more scales at which a particular rupture or
collapse makes itself manifest?
Perhaps here there is something equivalent to the
immense mapping of interactions of the assemblage
of a car. Complex artifacts, with multiple and
parallel combination of micrometer fine parts
moving at speed can suddenly - when particular
frequencies are hit, when certain combinations of
noise, alignment, heat or other factors coincide
- mean a breakdown or worse. A cylinder
manufactured to slightly dud specifications hits
a pitch of work and it cracks: the physics of
solids align abruptly with the history of the
car's users. In software, bugs, crashes and
errors particularly in those kinds of software
interacting with those versions of the user known
as the consumer represent some of the same kinds
of interactions.
Multi-scalar alignments can also have different
kinds of results. In living systems such changes
in state and in the rate and intensity of
interaction between parts can mean the transition
to a different metabolic condition, population
changes such as speciation or extinction, or the
specialization of cells. In terms that are
understood as political, and at scales that are
both social and inter-personal, combinations of
elements may go to such highly visible boiling
points. But the way in which they also
negotiate, competitively or collaboratively
engage to sustain, lock, shift, change or break
these inter-relations between elements without
crossing such thresholds are also significant.
One such example which, of course involves the
all-too-heterogeneous car, is the imperative to
imagine feedback between the state of the
planet's ecology and the economic and technical
forms of the species that currently dominates it.
We need a better practical vocabulary than that
of reform or revolution to describe the kinds of
changes that our current ecological condition
requires, but such forms of feedback need not
only to be imagined, but to be acted upon and
made. Software seems to be an interesting place
to begin. Not only does it constitute the domain
in which the work of modeling, gathering and
number-crunching has been and can be done to
intensify time in the right direction, to speed
virtual futures up before they happen, to enable
us to act on their implications, it also provides
part of the domain which can perhaps
'out-heterogenise' capitalism and its preferred,
ownable, sources of energy.
Traveling through the immense multi-scalar fields
of lassitude that are promised for the feckless
by Akrich one notices that here and there, there
are wrinkles between the scales. one form of
knowledge demanding another to makes sense of
itself. Amidst the vast terrains of blankness
and repetition, the opportunity to find weird
little clots of association, parts biting into
each other, amidst an immense bland mapping of
uncountably similar parts a thousand elements
simultaneously freezing, crashing or engorging,
generating fissures that open up onto new
terrains, new figures of thought, and that compel
new scales and conjugations of understanding.
There is no 'natural scale' to software. Each of
the four, inevitably more, figures must
collaborate, work on itself and in liaison with
the others, recognize its occurrence within live
history. The challenge that such an
understanding of software makes is multifarious
and simply linking layers is not enough. In
certain kinds of metabolic web, previously
discrete elements network together so strongly
that they crystallize: effectively becoming one
component. Multidisciplinary models of work,
linking these scales and connecting hardware
designers, programmers, lawyers, economists,
user interface designers, sociologists and
marketeers certainly exist, they call them
corporations. But even in and between such
entities, styles of knowledge and forms of work
are hard to make monolithic. The scalar
solidarity of programmers within Free/Libre and
Open Source Software movement has spelled out one
set of ways to speak of freedom in relation to
software. At the same time, it alerts us to
other uses of the soured word: the search for
crash-proof killing machines has spurred the
partial incorporation of Linux development by the
US military; but who better, one argument goes,
to subsidize the communism of ideas? The four
scales of software sketched above suggest that
freedom must be made at other levels too.
In our travels through the endless fields of
boredom how can we tell whether we are at the
edge of some particularly interesting fold or
intensification? How can we smell out a
potential alignment of elements within scales
that promise a potential figure of freedom? What
instruments exist to decipher whether or not we
are at the edge of a moment at which everything,
at every scale, becomes crystalline and rancidly
clear, or, as figured in the debates about the
militarization of Linux, whether domination is
possibly over-stretching itself, becomes its
other in order to race fast enough against
history to keep everything the same? A similar
question could be posed about moves to apply
unsuitable patent laws to software. Is there an
algorithm by which one might calculate the
potential interactions within these four scales
of software?
First, such an algorithm would have to constitute
itself through paradox, involve a recursive
disassembly and reconstitution of the notion of
freedom itself, and an equal dose of laughter at
the notion of transcendental rules. Its tongue
in cheek rules of thumb might draw upon 'Do What
You Will', Rabelais' minimal rule-set for the
utopia Th?leme, or the libertarian's handy
slide-rule 'It is Forbidden to Forbid' and of
course there are countless others. But maxims
are not enough. Both freedom and software
require a certain lightness coupled with an
obdurate recognition that it is possible to make
something happen, that it is possible to make
leaps, at any scale. Such algorithms would be
capable of working in, amongst, and beyond, the
four scales sketched earlier, sucking their
constituent elements into unimagined conjunctions
with elements traversing other realities into
quick condensations of processing. Irreducable
to themselves, and thus also impossible to
configure as software only, perhaps we can find
those affirmative and convulsive elements and
conjunctions busying themselves or waiting in the
strange knits between layers of reality. Working
relations of capacities and energies over time,
software's structural and constitutive interplay
of constraints, affordances and invention, mean
that the figures of freedom we will require in
order to navigate boredom will have to be enacted
as much as encoded.
References
Madeleine Akrich, 'The De-scription of Technical
Objects', in Wiebe Bijker and John Law eds.
Shaping Technology Building Society, MIT Press,
1992
Edsger Wybe Dijkstra, A Discipline of Programming, Prentice-Hall, 1976
James Lighthill, 'Artificial Intelligence: A
General Survey', in Artificial Intelligence: a
paper symposium, Science Research Council, 1973
Steven Rose, Lifelines, biology beyond
determinism, Oxford University Press, 1997
(Text Originally for Ars Electronica catalogue
2005, www.aec.at With thanks to Elisabeth
Sachsenhofer and Ingrid Fischer-Schreiber)
