Like Todd, I am straining to think of an example similar to Nakamura’s example of the Navajo’s cultural artifacts being used by Fairchild for giving the work to people of that culture. The coltan that goes into our phones is mostly mined in Central Africa, but do the companies try to say there is something about the Congolese that makes them especially natural fits for mining? Does Foxconn believe that there’s something essential about the Chinese that makes them good at manufacturing iPhones? I don’t think so, but it’s also worth keeping in mind that the Fairchild Plant existed in the 60s and 70s when the ideology of racial essentialism was rarely challenged by the general public. Yet, I think a residue of that ideology can be found in the way even liberals often talk about Mexicans as “hard workers” like there’s some essential trait of the Mexican that makes them better at manual labor.

However, the bigger point I took from Nakamura is the “platform,” the thing we take for granted (or aren’t even aware of) that makes our technological objects work. Scott, Noah, David, and me talked about game engines while playing Journey. Or the black boxes that Scott has provided for us for many of our p5js projects. There’s a saying that garners a lot of confused looks this far north that “Nobody wants to know how the sausage is made.” We don’t want to see the labor that goes into the chip and the tech companies have been kind enough to keep all of that covered up for us so that we just think of the laborers are faceless clean room dancers instead of people for which anti-suicide nets have to be set up for when the hours and pay lead them to want to jump off the roof of the plant they work at.

But this is not unique to computer chips, is it? Nakamura talked about Fairchild’s focus on Navajo textiles as part of what made them well-suited to make computer chips but what about the Chinese, Vietnamese, Malaysian workers who actually make (almost) all of our textiles now? Their labor is just as hidden from us as those who work for Apple or Intel, so what makes the computer laborers different? That isn’t rhetorical as I have no answer.

I also wanted to pick up on Aden’s response to Sterne. I’m especially fond of the fact that he brought up Superstar, which we watched in Shaviro’s class last semester. There really was something that felt cool about seeing this banned video and part of that aesthetic experience absolutely was that the quality was shitty. The VHS copy of a copy tracking lines and contrast so low that the boundaries between objects on the screen are made ambiguous, all of this makes it feel more like seeing something that “they don’t want you to see.” There’s something I would mistrust about an bluray of Superstar. In fact, Aden mentions the found footage genre and I honestly lose all immersion when the clarity of high-end 1080p equipment is plastered on the screen.

Sterne’s bootleg aesthetic also brought to mind the 90s Calvin Klein ads that were staged like stag films and which caused so much controversy that Calvin Klein pulled the ads. You can see them here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZVk21Pco-c. In them, you have a person standing in some shady basement with gauche wood paneling and a dingy carpet, being shot on what looks like low-grade 16mm film stock, which all gives it a 1970s vibe. You have an unseen man interviewing the actor/model with porn-like interviewing skills “Where are you from? What are you wearing?” and amateur responses like “I’m not sure what to do?” Meanwhile, the camera zooms in and out and pans without purpose, as if somebody is testing the settings while shooting. The aesthetic was intentionally “lo-fi” as a move away from the avant garde black-and-white ads like the 1987 “Obsession” ad that Saturday Night Live lampooned. (original ad here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=de1vyikBnsg SNL spoof here: http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/compulsion/n9633) In this way, CK’s stag ads are not unlike the glitch art that Sterne mentions at the end of his chapter: “For in practice, they consider a limit as something that produces representation, rather than interfering with it” (48). There’s something of a punk “authenticity” to the refusal to use the highest fidelity technology available. Detroit’s own Jack White is the epitome of this, insisting on using anachronistic performing and recording technology. The argument is that such refusal for high-fidelity is verisimilitude. But it is not a result of the FCC restricting frequencies or poor implementation of networking blades causing internet traffic to slow down, but an aesthetic choice, which doesn’t seem to work within Sterne’s interweaving of compression and infrastructure.

There are two games I want to talk about specifically, in different (but perhaps not completely dissimilar) ways: Depression Quest and Hurt Me Plenty.

Programming this week was perhaps one of the more frustrating weeks. It didn’t help that I had missed the previous week’s class (Food poisoning, if you desperately wanted to know.) but I had felt like I was hitting a cognitive wall for a while. Maybe I rested on my laurels too much. The first few weeks were a breeze and folks were asking me for help and I felt sovereign. (Okay, hyperbole.) But now, I am having to tell people that I can’t help because I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.

I wrote a response before reading the blogs, which is a silly way to go about things since what you want to talk about inevitably changes when you read the blogs. So, I’m going to leave my original response at the bottom, which is more about Chun and analog vs. digital as well as her discussion on memory because I have a question about ideology, which is what a lot of my classmates are zeroing in on. With good cause since that is Galloway’s focus.

I want to connect the reading to my experience in programming this week. In the introduction, Chun makes mention of the history, now no longer true, of software being uncopyrightable because it was not considered a creative expression. I don’t think I’m saying anything controversial, especially with this crowd (my fellow Media Theory travelers) when I say that it very much is a creative expression. There is an elegance in good code that isn’t radically different from the elegance of a good song, or poem. (I presume the latter because I, like Scott, am not that familiar with poetry.)

On the blogs, commenters fell, generally speaking, into one of two camps: Haraway or Stiegler. In terms of Haraway, two major themes sprung up: Haraway’s politics and Haraway’s connection to or lineage from McLuhan. It seems the former is the more fertile ground for discussion–probably always the case with politics. As we picked up the thread of McLuhan in seminar, the conversation seemed to fizzle, and there’s not much in terms of explicit lineage between McLuhan and Haraway, so we’ll record the highlights of this thread below, but it seems as if the political was more generative terrain for discussion.

This week the dailies actually intimidated me. I wasn’t sure how arrays work. Actually, I still don’t. But I found ways to work around them. I worked on the dailies a bit, and when I got frustrated, I laid down and worked on it in my mind as I fell asleep. It’s interesting how a bit of distance can give you the answer.

Donna Haraway has fascinated me and frustrated me ever since I first read her manifesto four years ago. I was incredibly relieved to find that, while there are still swaths I find confusing, I feel like I’m getting a picture of how irony, and the cyborg as ironic, allow her to maneuver around binaries like human/machine human/animal and nature/culture. What is still a bit murky to me is how she connects this back to identity politics and what it offers as an alternative to identity politics. That said, I will speculate.

One thing that helped me understand was Donna Haraway’s brief mention of ecofeminist Carolyn Merchant’s Death of Nature, in which Merchant argues that patriarchy coded nature feminine and that industrialization’s rhetoric about taming nature strengthens patriarchy’s demand to subjugate woman. She is arguing that this still keeps us in a binary of nature/culture and man/woman, binaries which she wants to smudge the lines between, and once we do that, then we have to question our lines between animals and humans and humans and technology. It feels a bit like she’s dissolving Renaissance humanism and its insistence on humans as discrete and separate entities that exist along with technology and nature, but are not penetrated by it, do not comingle with those outside forces.

I’m on board so far. This is Hegel, is it not? (I don’t know; most of my knowledge of Hegel is second-hand) My smartphone is not something that diminishes my ability for memory, as that alarmist Atlantic article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” laments, nor does it augment my memory abilities like transhumanists would argue. It is part of me. It’s like a Snickers bar. I’m not me when I’m hungry. I’m not me when I don’t have a smartphone. Because “me” is a fickle concept. Am I my body? Which one? The one when I was seven? The one when I was twenty and didn’t have a gut? The one that was hungover Saturday morning? There is no unified and static body. Am I my personality? Again, which one? The optimistic kid, the cynical adult, the cranky guy you would be unwise to wake up before 10am, the one a half hour after popping a Xanax, the one in a panic attack minutes before taking the Xanax? Again, there’s nothing static. My memories? Memory is fickle. We all misremember stuff, we forget stuff, we change our perspectives on those memories. Nothing we can rely on.

I want Diana Rosenberger to know that I actually enjoy helping with coding and that I hope I make sense when I try to help. As she knows, that’s the whole thing about teaching is that anxiety when you know a thing but am unsure of if you can effectively articulate it so that another person can know a thing.

I want to talk about Guyau. I want to ask what exactly his position is on consciousness and the phonograph/brain memory analogy. If I could ask this, and get a suitable answer, then I feel like this might be the foundation for which I would be able to ask Kittler, who definitely doesn’t agree with Guyau, what his position is on consciousness and the phonograph/brain memory analogy. Which is all a coy way to say that I am attempting to “specify what I don’t understand.” Here’s a quote that got my attention: “A memory consists in the awareness, first, of the diminished intensity of an impression, second, of its increased ease, and third, of the connections it entertains with other impressions. Just as a trained eye can see the difference between a copy and the original, we learn to distinguish memories from impressions and are thus able to recognize a memory even before it has been located in time and space.” Is Gutau saying that human memory is similar to phonograpic memory except that we’re aware of the fact that we are seeing a copy of the master whereas a phonograph doesn’t give any damns if it’s the master or the copy? That doesn’t seem right since it seems a bit obvious, no? Or is it? The phonograph emits a different noise with the poor copy, scratches and pops, than it does with the master. What if our “consciousness,” our ability to differentiate master from copy is just an illusion and all we’re doing is reacting to the stimuli of copies with different “sounds” than we do to other copies?

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