Analog
Metadata
- Author: Robert Hassan
Highlights
For example, the German school of thought called “philosophical anthropology,” which studies the human-technology relationship, argues, broadly, that far from being distinct from technology, we humans are embodiments of technology.
The cyborg is the evolving human integration, taking place over many hundreds of years, with gradually more complex forms of technology. From the use of false teeth, devised by the Romans, to the invention of spectacles, which dates from the 1300s, and from the pacemaker that regulates the heart, first implanted in the 1950s, to the Wi-Fi signal that enables access to networked digital technologies, the body and technology have been assimilating for a very long time.
the technologies we create also shape the ways that we think and act in the world, and this, in turn, influences the kinds of technology we further invent and use. And on the process goes, in a historical-evolutionary cycle.
All this talk of the “loss of the real,” however, is rather vague. And that’s our first problem. Analog presents itself to us today as something—an experience or process—that’s hard to put a finger on. And because we can’t properly identify it, we call it “nostalgia” or “retro.” Which doesn’t tell us very much.
This is a wonderfully romantic idea that seeks to be true to an analog ethos in a way that most vinyl records today (pressed from digital master copies) aren’t. Nonetheless, market economics will dictate that a box set of Mozart’s complete “Parisian” works on seven discs, conducted by Fernand Oubradous in 1956, would cost you around US$3,500 from Hutchison’s Electric Recording Company. Hutchison says, “It’s not about vinyl … it’s about a whole philosophy.”3 Indeed.
The path of “analog” in the Ngram plot tells us something. It tells us that as a word declines in frequency in our print culture, it declines also as a part of our language, written and spoken. It follows that its decline in language means the decline as a concept, as an idea, as a recognized component in the meaning-sharing that written and spoken communication sustains. The result is that as analog begins to disappear as a mode of knowledge, it therefore is even more difficult to comprehend.
The distinction between digital and analogue representation is philosophical before it is technical —Chris Cheshire, “The Ontology of Digital Domains”1
usually fond ones either based on personal experience or generated as nostalgia-by-proxy from watching perennial reruns of pre-1990s TV shows or films that depict a comparatively recent predigital life. Selective they may be, but analog memories contain an undoubted lack of antipathy toward the technological form and function they represented—and
Armed with a movable antenna the putative viewer could try to catch the unruly signal and hope to find a sweet spot that would steady the image and soothe the angry white noise. With the digital signal, there is only a helplessness, a disconnect not only with the signal but with your relationship with the technology.
from Arnold Gehlen, a contemporary of Martin Heidegger of the German philosophy of technology school. Gehlen wanted to take the early philosophical debates into another arena and up to another level of inquiry. He wanted to think about the separation question not only from the perspective of philosophy but also from that of anthropology, or the study of man in the past and present.
“Analog machines,” writes Estévez, even complex ones such as trains or ships, have operations that “simulate processes that people had seen before in nature and in their own bodies.”
For Estévez a key characteristic of analog technology is one whose “activity crosses time and space in a visible way that allows us to grasp the link between a movement and its effect, the process, the continuity.”
As Gregory Bateson, an early theorist of digitality, argued, an analogical system is continuous, while a digital system is discontinuous.
There is no “continuity” in respect of digital’s logical activity and nothing in respect of a historical process of iteration that we can trace back to more ancient human technological and anthropological roots.
Future humans nay look at technology as their own heritage. Is this why youbger generations usually adapt better to tech?
Human mastery over technology in this respect achieves what Gehlen called replacement technique—technologies such as airplanes or submarines—that act in place of organs or capacities not naturally possessed by humans. McLuhan’s other dictum,
Very much the premise of Horizon Zero Dawn.
Similarly, the guitar and vocals of, say, Leadbelly, or the middle-register soprano of Maria Callas, the argument goes, is better on vinyl than on CD. A vinyl recording, the smell of a new printed book, or even the crooked unpredictability of the sinewy long-wave radio signal finding its way to the analog receiver are said by many—and perhaps unconsciously thought to be so by more—to be something authentic.
Authenticity has been an analog renaissance keyword that has attached itself in the popular mind to a widening range of cultural practices that connote the rediscovery of another, better, and more authentic way. We see it in practices such as craft beer, freshly brewed (not instant) coffee, repairing things, reusing, recycling, DIY, and much more.
Carol Wilder asked in her essay “Being Analog.” Wilder wondered, “What is it about the analog that is so seductive, so persuasive, so ‘real’?”11
Linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson popularized an understanding of the role of metaphor in how humans communicate their awareness of the world to each other. In their book Metaphors We Live By, they wrote that “metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.”
That the metaphor was a “desktop” was a should-have-been-worrying signal about what the real aim of the personal computer revolution of the 1980s was about. It was about business, and the revolution was a business revolution that swept up the world.
Writing therefore instilled upon human consciousness a perception for the passage of time, and as we will see later, this acquired a technologically enhanced facility that would directly enable the invention of the clock, another major analog technology that has had inestimable effects on our species and on the world in which we live.
The rhythms of the seasons, of diverse ancient customs, and what social historian E. P. Thompson called the “task oriented” ways of marking and experiencing time were replaced by the clock-timed “working day,” by payment by the hour, and by the conversion of time into a tradeable commodity that could be bought, sold, saved, wasted, or lost.9 Benjamin Franklin famously stated that “time is money.”
Software, in modern parlance, is a set of instructions that allows a process to begin and continue along a preset path with minimal or no human involvement. This is also automation. And automation automatically places a space, a breach, between human and machine.
First, Jacquard’s loom brought a central prototype of analog technology into the logic of modern machines and, by extension, into modernity and industrialization. The punch-card system has a direct connection with the technology of writing in that it was information, knowledge, abstracted from the heads of people and stored in time and space as a fixed and endlessly replicable extension.
something perhaps that motivated Descartes in his thinking that the body is analogous to the machine and therefore that the most perfect technology possible is the ultimate analog of ourselves—a thinking and moving robot.
Machine automation—having the machine do the work, in whole or in part—nullifies, in whole or in part, the active part of the human in the ancient resonant interaction with technologies that has characterized the relationship since the very beginnings of our species.
In plainer language, Marx becomes the first to identify a quintessentially modern malady, something that would have a profound influence on systems of thought ranging from sociology and psychiatry to economics and politics: alienation.
Does being the one who programs defeat the alienation?
Yet it has never worked out that way. Industrialized societies are today blighted by a double alienation of joblessness and underemployment for many millions, and by those in the overworked stratum, numbering also in the many millions, who have little time for anything other than a work process that blurs the boundaries between work and leisure, home, and workplace.
The sudden mechanical punctuated strike of the typewriter contrasted starkly with the ruminative flow of the pen; the typewriter encouraged a binary decision, to depress the key or not; whereas the pen with its store of liquid ink, held by surface tension in the nib, or in a small reservoir in the fountain pen, was a more latent and nonmachinic technology.
Our familiar word “electricity” was coined in 1646 by Thomas Browne, who, incidentally, was a serial wordsmith and much venerated by Samuel Johnson for having “augmented our philosophical diction” with an astonishing 775 neologisms attributed to him in the OED, including, and interestingly for our purposes, “cryptography” and “computer.”
The telegraph is analog in the classical physics sense in that it has relations of continuity or flow.
It was the inhuman scale of telegraphic communications that constituted the revolutionary break with our ancient interaction with technology. Marx’s phrase the “annihilation of space by time” to describe the new communications of the age meant more than New Yorkers “knowing” that Krakatoa had been obliterated a few hours previously. It was a process of shrinking that cut deep into the human-technological relationship that was built on contiguity and resonance.
electricity powers machines, whereas electronics enables them to make decisions.
In it he envisaged that “Mechanically extended Man [sic]” would “set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria, and perform the evaluations,” whereas computers would do the all the routine work but under ultimate human control.12
McLuhan duly turns his attention to what he sees as the hidden negative: “To a large degree our co-presence everywhere at once in the electric age is a fact of passive, rather than active, experience.”
The electronics revolution was therefore an effecting of what Michel Foucault would call “docile bodies,” or “subordinated cogs”—within a society-wide state of “automatic docility.”15 But as is a common feature of technology history, this was a process of subjugation that went largely unnoticed due to our collective investment in the ideology of technological progress.
Such passive or semi-passive watching affected cognition and psyche by consuming content that was basically an illusion, what McLuhan called a “heightened human awareness” of the world based on nothing more than a flickering or blurry analog signal from an unseen source that conveyed, once more, the effect of something magical to many of its watchers.
Electronics makes the flow of television, from production to consumption, much more manipulable and controllable from the source. This is important. Such technical efficiency, a main criterion of which is commercial efficiency, or the capacity attract and retain the viewer with a steady stream of watchable and compelling stimulation, means that there is little or no time to properly reflect on what is seen as information and knowledge, be it a 20-second advert for toothpaste, an hour-long version of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or a three-minute news story from Walter Cronkite about “pacification” measures in Dinh Tuong province in South Vietnam. By contrast, words on paper, such as in a newspaper, magazine, or book, were fixed in time and space. The reader could take their time and read closely and reflect on the information.
A play was performed in a particular theatre at a set hour. The difference in broadcasting is not only that these events, or events resembling them, are available inside the home, by the operation of a switch. It is that the real programme that is offered is a sequence or set of alternative sequences of these and other similar events, which are then available in a single dimension and in a single operation.”
And in a precursor of our present age of misinformation, disinformation, and “alternative facts,” late electronic analog media technologies were sophisticated and complex enough to produce a real-time global village that encompassed billions of people in shared experiences of a representationalized world, a world of primarily visual culture and a world contrived primarily as spectacle.
What would on its own be an intolerable level of alienation, he argued, was leavened by the very act of consuming itself: the buying of “things” that would fill the psychological space opened up by alienation. Alienation was tranquilized by the spectacle, constituting the circus that would come with the bread.
Guy Debord, a 1960s revolutionary and mordant critic of the televisual consumer society, saw alienation as the fundamental effect of new technologies in the service of passive consumption. What would on its own be an intolerable level of alienation, he argued, was leavened by the very act of consuming itself: the buying of “things” that would fill the psychological space opened up by alienation. Alienation was tranquilized by the spectacle, constituting the circus that would come with the bread.
He blasted the ethereal and insubstantial form of this reality: “For the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence … illusion only is sacred, truth profane.”
The 1972 games in Munich were set to follow the same Olympic script, but another reality unexpectedly broke through with the taking of Israeli hostages by Palestinian terrorists. However, the power of television to commodify, integrate, and spectacularize soon asserted itself, and the murder of the hostages and the killing of the Palestinians by the West German authorities became a global televisual news drama—one watched on television by the terrorists themselves before their deaths—and was manufactured in real time into the global spectacle of the year.
Brand, praises “McLuhan’s assertion that computers constitute an extension of the human nervous system,” but this, he cautioned, “is just one aspect of these new understandings about communication.” It concludes: “Society, from organism to community to civilization to universe, is the domain of cybernetics.”
What Silicon Valley was selling was its own distinctive idea of libertarianism, distinctive in that it claimed that freedom was possible not through laws, or the writings of a particular philosophy, but through the application of computer systems to your life. What they were selling was computation as technology of freedom. That’s how radical it was.
As humans we invent and shape our tools, and these reinvent and reshape us in an ongoing interaction.
Cf Wired magazne; how does our need for privacy and expanding convolution of locks affect us?
In 1985, Bernard Stiegler, a German philosopher of technology, wrote, “A line was crossed when [our] brains were made to operate with digital information, without analogy with their origin.”
The problem for modern society was the privatization of knowledge (as information) that was being sequestered within commercial databases to be stored or sold as commodities. Another problem was the ceding of control of such knowledge, not only to the proprietary servers of corporations but to the machines themselves, functioning fundamentally as autonomous actors, as slaves not to humans but to the self-learning algorithms that drive them.
“We” weren’t crossing a line, so much as digital technologies—computerization—was colonizing our personal and social spaces, armed with promises of a bright future if we adapted to the needs of what was (and still is) a business revolution.
What are the implictions of this ln human centric software? I imagine human centric software to be small tooling, craft software, smll batch that helps indovidually or at most jn small grouos.
the “line was crossed” as computerization and automation duly occupied large swathes of economy, culture, and society—as well as the private realm of the individual. Our bodies and brains were indeed “made to operate with digital information,” but in ways and with effects that were barely considered beyond a soon-to-be-hegemonic Silicon Valley–inspired boosterism.
Sigmund Freud, in his Civilization and Its Discontents of 1930, had already analyzed our complacency toward technological development and the generally unchallenged belief in progress that went with it. His diagnosis was that “Man [sic] has … become a prosthetic god,” meaning that by extending the body and mind through new technologies, we have come to see ourselves as masters of the world.
A diminishing direct physical involvement with technological processes stems from the fact that with every major development in automation, from the Jacquard loom to cloud computing, we become correspondingly unable to assert control over the direction, effects, and externalities of the technologies deployed into the world.
It is only now that are we are coming to realize, albeit vaguely, that this colonization is also an open-ended “decrease” of “practical agency” as Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger phrase it in their book, Re-engineering Humanity.7 They argue that we “cede control over our desires and decisions” to automated algorithmic methods that we do not understand, and which find no equivalences in nature such as we find with analog technology.
We’re nowhere near the film’s dystopic vision, but every day we move in that direction as we cede sovereignty and control to processes of automation and computerization that few of us asked for, but became quickly dependent on, like the mobile phone and its burgeoning app economy, Wi-Fi connectivity, online shopping, social media, instant messaging, and the myriad fruits from an invisible tree of automated production and services that magically drops life’s necessities onto our laps.
This technological structuring and linearity give shape and expression to the ordering of the mind. It’s called narrative thinking and is something that we learn not only through literacy, but also by means of the literate cultures into which we are born. This is constantly reinforced through the ways that we communicate with each other in speech as well as through writing and reading. Narrative structures are based around stories.
Seen in this way, writing and reading is a powerful interactive technology. It gave us belief systems to hold to, the concepts of knowledge and truth, and the idea that science and democracy begat progress and justice.
Notably this is something we cannot undo.