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.

It also connects to this opacity argument that Stiegler made and which we continue to encounter.

I’m not opposed to the idea that our cultural objects reflect our cultural ideology. I’m drawn to Althusser’s concept of the ISA and how the arts are part of an ideological state apparatus of sorts, even if the arts are not directly state-sanctioned but for software to reflect ideology is to go beyond cultural artifacts and into the very tools that culture uses to make its artifacts. I wonder about this idea that software is, as Galloway says, “never viewed as is, but instead is…driven into hiding by still larger globs of code. Hence the principle of obfuscation” (325). and how that relates to neoliberalism. Does neoliberalism obfuscate? Sure, though different models of government, predating computers, have been opaque too, right? And how much do we “view as is” in general? If that’s one of the characteristics of code, then there must be something else that is actually viewed as is and I’m straining to think of an example because I’m not sure what “as is” is. Nothing is “as is,” there’s always a man behind the curtain, or a sausage grinder behind the deli display.

So, if the opacity of technology isn’t an analog for neoliberalism, then what is the connection between code and neoliberalism? As Scott pointed out in seminar, “neoliberalism” is a very vague term that is used to say “you know, that stuff that our government does that I don’t like.” Chun even mentions, briefly, the punch-cards (supplied by IBM) that the Nazis used to organize their eugenics program. Could code be fascistic instead of neoliberal? Anecdotal, but futurist art is very popular on the web forums that coders (or would-be-coders) frequent in. (Reddit comes to mind.)

And couldn’t it be that punch-cards (and related technologies) made fascism possible?

Aden writes about Chun’s rhetorical question about surveillance and documenting one’s own life. He’s right about it being a good question but isn’t that how ideology always works, regardless of the form government takes? It isn’t that it forces you to do X, but that it normalizes X and compels you to do X of your own accord, or at least think it is of your own accord.

I guess my question is, what does neoliberalism do differently than other forms of government, what does software do differently than other mediums, and how are the two intertwined? I know that is what Chun and Galloway are trying to get to but I’m not seeing the thread, though I doubt that is their failure. Perhaps there’s a lot of static on the line between Galloway, Chun, and me. Other Response:

I’m not sure if Wendy Chun is trying to break down the dinstinction between analog and digital media when she asks what analog media is an analog to. However, I do find that to be an interesting question and I think of how much of the reverse is true. My computer has “files,” “folders,” and “windows.” The digital seems to be more concerned with being an analog of “analog” media than “analog” media seeks to be an analog to…well, what is it an analog to?

At the same time, Chun mentions noise, a term we discussed in lecture last week. In this manner, digital seems to try to distance itself from analog as much as possible. When I take a picture with my digital camera, analog photons hit the sensor. The sensor is constituted of millions of tinier sensors, arranged in a grid. The photons excite the sensors, but they are packed so closely to the other sensors next to them that they can cause some excitation to spill over, resulting in noise in the picture. This digital picture has noise, given to it by the process of converting analog to digital, however, the picture’s relationship to noise is minimal after that fact. (One could argue the noise is eliminated.) The picture becomes a set of ones and zeros and, unless there is corruption of the file, which is exceedingly rare these days, the ones and zeros that constitute that image on the memory card of my camera, are identical to the ones and zeros when I transfer it to my computer, in which two hard drives are set up in a RAID configuration that makes each hard drive a mirror of the other (lest one fails), and the ones and the zeros are identical when I copy the pictures to the cloud. Digital wants nothing to do with noise. What noise seeps in is a troublesome artifact of the analog world it inevitably has to interact with.

So, when Chun talks about how our digital media is more ephemeral than we think it is, I have to contest this notion. As I described, my pictures are stored on my mirrored hard drives, copied onto the cloud, and I even (being a ridiculous archivist) have a hard drive with copies that a friend keeps with me. The cloud company could go out of business or suffer some bizarre server error that makes my pictures disappear, and my apartment could catch fire that same day, resulting in the death of those drives, but the pictures, those ones and zeros, would still exist.

Maybe I’m being too literal about this but I don’t get from Chun how our archival abilities aren’t radically less ephemeral than the “analog” media that we used to store memories on in the past. I’m also starting to question the opacity that she and Kittler mentioned as something distinct about new media. Sure, I don’t understand exactly how my DSLR’s sensor data is processed by the software into an image file, or even how double-clicking that image file results in the photo appearing on my monitor, but we don’t really understand any media that thoroughly, do we? I have no idea what the specific chemical and physical processes are that cause silver halide and paper to become a childhood image of me blowing candles out on a cake. What is ink made of? How is the plastic of the pen made? I don’t know what the process undergirding my pen is, so how is digital different?