James Cortada: The Digital Hand v. 2 (2006)

“The largest institutions in the [film] industry – the studios – were the earliest users of computers for the same reasons as in any other industry, to control costs of accounting and other back-room data management. Outsourcing payroll was a common applications in the 1950s and 1960s, while accounting operations remained fairly primitive until the late 1960s. During the 1970s, however, the studios were using computers to facilitate distribution and marketing, such as modeling where to exhibit movies. At 20th Century-Fox Film Corporation, for example, management began using a mid-sized IBM computer (IBM System 370 Model 135) in 1977 to help select which theaters to use. . . . [The] creative activities in this fundamentally creative industry were just as subject to normal business managerial factors as in any other. It is an important (if obvious) comment to make because so much of the literature on the role of the digital in movies is about the creative side – special effects and animation – without a tip of the hat to the owners of the studios who demand fiscal responsibility, especially as the studios became the properties of nonmovie companies. In the case of Paramount, for example, its holding company, Gulf + Western, required the studio to report its expenditures and other financial data on a daily basis in conformity to G+W’s corporate reporting standards; hence, accountants dragged their heavy desk-sized 3741s around to filming locations.” The first volume of "The Digital Hand" focused on manufacturing, transportation, and retail industries. This volume surveys financial, telecommunications, and media industries. As in the previous volume, Cortada works through each industry, describing the introduction and effect of computers from the 1950s to the present. The scope and detail of the book is exhausting, and only someone like Cortada, who has been a consultant and/or manager at IBM for decades and therefore had long-term access to IBM's non-public archives and their market studies and sales information, could produce such a book. Despite being closer to the "service" sector of the economy, the industries studied in this volume followed the pattern of adopting computing technologies established in the previous volume. In most cases, a few businesses would invest in a computer in the late -1950s, usually to help with accounting and office back-room processes; computers would increasingly become industry standards for these applications over the 1960s; new ways of using digital information and creating products/services using computers appeared in the 1970s; and the personal computer in the 1980s and the Internet in the 1990s led to radical changes in many of the industries or their products. An important point that is repeated in this text is that the more visible computer "revolution" of the 1980s and 1990s was largely made possible by the incremental adoption of computers in the 1950s-1970s.
The section on the book publishing industry is of particular interest for literary scholars. Appearing here as merely an industry among industries, publishing and its experience with computers takes on a less singular appearance. Far before the debates about the value and future of electronic literature or the death of the book, publishers were integrating computers into their accounting and inventory operations, and then into printing and editing. Although media theorists may want to shock traditional humanists with the claim that the creation of books is now thoroughly digital, such a claim should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the incorporation of the computer into the whole spectrum of production in the economy. In addition to studies on the nature of digital texts, we need further study of the impact of the digital on the book publishing industry (study that goes far beyond easy claims about automation and cost-reduction). For example, Cortada points out that in many industries, production previously determined was retail sold. But with the integration of computers into retail, providing point-of-sale feedback, and into distribution systems, allowing more flexibility in what is delivered, retail (and even customers) play a greater role in determining what is produced. How, then, were the books that were published and their sales affected by this incorporation of a computerized information infrastructure into the publishing industry?

Martin Campbell-Kelly: From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog (2003)

[Business software] SAP R/3 “runs the back offices of half of the world’s 500 top companies. . . . An estimated 1.5 million workers around the world used R/3 in their primary job function. If overnight R/3 were to cease to exist . . . the industrial economy of the Western world would come to a halt, and it would take years for substitutes to close the breach in the networked economy. Were Microsoft’s products to vaporize overnight, it would take only days or weeks to find substitutes, and the economic disruption would be modest.” Another volume of the high quality MIT Press series on the history of computing, Campbell-Kelly's book is a history of the software industry. Software industry, not software. As a result, little attention is given to the technical details of software, major innovations in programming and how they changed the use of computers, and certain periods, such as the early years of the computer (1945-1960) when hardware and software were not totally distinct. The volume is still helpful for providing a necessary history of the industry that has historically supported the most ephemeral and immaterial aspect of computing: its software and programs. During the 1950s and part of the 1960s, early computer manufacturers tended to include software with their machines for free as a form of marketing aimed at making computers enticing to users. They encouraged user groups that shared programs and knowledge in programming, and most of the additional programming was performed by the users themselves through their large teams of in-house programmers. During this period, a small number of software contractors competitively bid on expensive government projects such as the SAGE air defense system, providing high-cost, unique applications. During the 1960s, in addition to providing software, what would now be called the software industry provided a number of alternative resources, such as service bureaus that could be hired to do a company's data processing, facilities managers that would come in and run a company's computers, and teleprocessing computer utilities, which would allow multiple customers to access a single mainframe using telephones. With the explosion in the number of computers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, custom programming was no longer viable, so manufacturers started offering general packages that would be used by a wide variety of customers. In 1970, IBM decided to "unbundle" its software, which involved no longer including its software for free with its hardware. IBM continued to offer its operating systems and other systems software for free (or rather, tacitly incorporated the cost into the price of the computer), but opened up the field for other vendors to offer applications software. During this period, the idea of the software "product" emerged, which has remained until today. In the late 1960s there was a bubble of investment in software company stocks, but this crashed in the early 1970s, and the software industry remained fairly stagnant/steady during the 1970s due to limited funding opportunities, but exploded again in the early 1980s with the birth of the personal computer. Campbell-Kelly throughout wants to refute the image of Microsoft dominating and representing the entire software industry. He pays particular attention to the software firms that provided programs for corporations during the mainframe era and those that have provided the non-Microsoft-Office products that are essential for contemporary businesses using personal computers. He brings forth an industry that has provided the information infrastructure for American corporations over the last 50 years, an industry that remains along with its programs largely hidden from the public's sight.

William Gibson: Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988)

"Gentry was convinced that cyberspace had a Shape, an overall total form. Not that that was the weirdest idea Slick had ever run across, but Gentry had this obsessive conviction that the Shape mattered totally. The apprehension of the Shape was Gentry's grail. . . . But Slick didn't think cyberspace was anything like the universe anyway; it was just a way of representing data. . . . So how could figure the whole matrix had a particular shape? And why should it mean anything if it did?" Another exception to my sci-fi boycott (see my blog on Gibson's "Count Zero" below). As in all of the Sprawl trilogy, very little actually happens in the novel. Most of the narrative is composed of preparations and waiting, small epiphanies, and the concluding action that is spread over multiple chapters and perspectives. Constantly shuffling through small chapters, each focused on one of the five main characters, Gibson seems to partake in the action/thriller genre while also fragmenting it into a more reflective and discontinuous form. This make his descriptions of the experience of living in a world of data-obsessed corporations and cyberspace as important, if not more so, than the more typical science fiction plot about the matrix seeking some mystical/alien other. In his two most recent novels, that kind of sci-fi plot is simply dropped, allowing Gibson to devote his talents to describing how we inhabit a world increasingly composed of the digital and its representations.

James Cortada: The Digital Hand v. 1: (2004)

"It is time to look at computer applications not just as a series of technological innovations applied in novel ways but also as a series of business and user choices and actions that in turn influenced how people lived and worked. In short, the study of the history of computer applications is far more than a story of technology, science, or engineering; it is the larger story about business practices, the nature of economic activity, and about how people spent vast amounts of their time both at work and in their private lives. . . . since the majority of computer usage during the twentieth century occurred in work settings, and work settings in turn are in companies within industries, looking at industry-centric applications offers a new and open window into the history of computing, business activities, the nature of work, and effects on the economy, society, and the individual. In short, it is the next logical step in understanding the profound role of the digital on the United States." The first of a three-volume work on the history of computing, Cortada's book is an essential survey of the application of computers to business processes. Rather than studying the technology or the businesses producing it, Cortada studies when computers were installed by various industries and what business applications they were used for most often. Nearly all other computer histories describe the machines, innovations, and the major vendors, but give little picture of how computers were being used. Cortada's book shows that computers had a widespread effect on the American economy far before personal computing or the Internet. From accounting to payroll to inventory control, computers were integrated into the key functions of a wide variety of businesses between 1950-1970. That is to say, perhaps the real impact of computers on America has been through the creation of an information infrastructure that has enabled the growth and transformation of business we have seen over the last half century. It is through the non-dramatic and mundane application of computers to common or everyday business practices that computers did the most to alter the course of twentieth-century history. Or as Cortada's title indicates, if the invisible hand of the free market (as described by Adam Smith) was replaced by the visible hand of management and the corporation (Alfred Chandler's claim), then computers have extended and transformed that visible hand, becoming a universal and essential element in the control of businesses and the economy. Most of the book consists of case studies of industries rather than individual firms or the overall economy. For those not coming from a business background, it may be hard to recognize and appreciate the complex dynamics Cortada identifies in how industries adopted information technologies. Not only were mainframe computers usually absorbed into corporations, but those corporations were involved in the competition, associations, and standards of industries. To understand when and how computers were applied to business functions therefore requires careful attention to these more abstract realms of the economy.

Thomas Watson Jr.: Father, Son & Co. (1990)

"The computers we were building were the very epitome of modern technology - on the inside. But on the outside they were about as exciting as a collection of filing cabinets. Meanwhile everything else about IBM looked obsolete. I wanted to make IBM's products, offices, buildings, brochures, and everything the public saw of our company exciting and modern." This memoir by Thomas Watson Jr., who was president of IBM during its crucial entrance into commercial computing, presents the executive perspective on IBM and the creation of a computing industry. It begins with Watson Jr. describing his father's rise in IBM, then describes his own belated entrance into the firm after a youth as a playboy/prodigal son, and finishes by giving the insider's view of IBM's domination of the field of computing. Throughout, the Oedipal conflict between Watson Jr. and Watson Sr. is projected onto IBM's path into computing, with the younger Watson priding himself on being more in touch with the future of computing than his father was. There is something amusing about the computer revolution being focalized through such a banal conflict, the most important technological development of the century being directly affected by the fights within the family. In contrast to the business histories of IBM, which give more details on changes in the activities and divisions of IBM (see the Emerson Pugh book below), and to the technical histories, which analyze the machines closely (see my Bashe et al. review below), this memoir presents the history of IBM as a series of executive decisions by Watson Jr. and Watson Sr. This perspective is undeniably limited, especially in a corporation as complex as IBM became by the late 1950s, and Watson Jr. throughout comments on the difficulties of executive management in remaining cognizant of the actual operations of the firm. Although Watson Jr. was quite liberal and prided himself on committing IBM to the social good, questions of labor and fair competition remain filtered out of the narrative. But if one is to consider the history of a corporation such as IBM and recognize the contingent direction it took, the executive perspective and executive decision making are important factors to observe, as this book does. This is both because specific executive decisions (not all of them though) did have crucial consequences for the success of the organization (for example, the commitment to the IBM System/360, which nearly bankrupted IBM) and because the executive perspective filtered down to the rest of the corporation and into the public through a host of communication channels, having numerous effects across the firm. While decision were of course made throughout the entire firm, the decisions discussed in this book highlight how little the corporation resembled its popular stereotype as an impersonal machine.

Don Delillo: Players (1977)

"We knew we would do something. Rafael wanted to disrupt their system, the idea of worldwide money. It's this system that we believe is their secret power. It all goes floating across that [Stock Exchange] floor. Currents of invisible life. This is the center of their existence. The electronic system. The waves and charges. The green numbers on the board. This is what my brother calls their way of continuing on through rotting flesh, their closest taste of immortality. Not the bulk of all that money. The system itself, the current. That's Rafael. The doctor of philosophy approach to bombing. 'Financiers are more spiritually advanced than monks on an island.' Rafael. It was this secret of theirs that we wanted to destroy, this invisible power. It's all in that system, bip-bip-bip-bip, the flow of electric current that unites moneys, plural, from all over the world." New Yorkers Lyle and Pammy Wynant lead a well off but empty existence, increasingly spending their leisure time locked in their home watching television. Pammy works in one of the World Trade Center towers for a firm called the Grief Management Council, which profits from the flow of grief across modern society. Lyle works on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. The first third of the novel describes their affect-less and alienated lives, in particular singling out television as both responding to and contributing to the emptiness of their existences. Lyle obsessively switches channels while watching television, and dreads the minutes that pass between turning off the set and falling asleep. Pammy hangs out with her two gay friends, latching onto their dream of moving to Maine because it provides the image of her life being on the verge of changing. Delillo's style throughout is cold and distant, an icy modernist detachment that reflects his character's (lack of) personality. The narrative shifts, however, when someone is murdered right next to Lyle on the Stock Exchange floor. Lyle begins a personal investigation and comes across a terrorist group interested in attacking the "system" of global finance. He contacts the group and begins to prepare to help them carry out a second attack, though he may actually be working to gather information for the police. Pammy finally travels to Maine with her gay friends, but becomes too psychologically and sexually involved in their domestic difficulties. Ultimately, both Lyle and Pammy fall out of the "pattern" of their normal live, which points them towards a deeper meaning that remains a step beyond their grasp. Delillo is eerily prescient about terrorism and world trade. Pammy accidentally goes up the wrong World Trade Center tower on her way to work, and to her, "the towers didn't seem permanent. They remained concepts, no less transient for all their bulk than some routine distortion of light." At the same time, terrorists in the novel are striking at the Stock Exchange because it remains one of the few remaining material sites of world trade that can function as a target, a place where somehow the system of money might be disrupted. One of the terrorists fears there "is a master plan to eliminate prominent targets. To go underground. Or totally electric. Nothing but waves and currents talking to each other. Spirits. So, the thing should be hit to whatever extent, now." What Delillo has done is compellingly diagnose a logic of terrorism grasping to adapt itself to the functioning of global finance. With the de-materializing of the flows of capital, terrorism turns to symbols as targets, with ambiguous results. Terrorism seems to mimic its adversary, becoming a decentralized and finally unknowable global network.

William Gibson: Count Zero (1986)

"He'd used decks in school, toys that shuttled you through the infinite reaches of that space that wasn't space, mankind's unthinkably complex consensual hallucination, the matrix, cyberspace, where the great corporate hotcores burned like neon novas, data so dense you suffered sensory overload if you tried to apprehend more than the merest outline." Having been stunned by Gibson's two most recent novels, "Pattern Recognition" and "Spook Country," I made an exception to my boycott of science fiction. Those two novels are set loosely in the present, focusing not on imagined technologies but on the cutting edge of contemporary research and development. It's hard to say whether their persuasive account of the present is the result of Gibson's inability to be anything less than two steps ahead of the technological curve, or in that the present has finally caught up with the ideas Gibson has been working through for decades. "Count Zero," however, is the loose sequel to "Neuromancer," continuing that book's themes of cyberspace cowboys caught in corporate intrigues. I don't know if commenting on the novel's depiction of cyberspace or the "matrix" would be of any use at this point, especially after the rather popular film series that completely stole its best ideas from the trilogy of which this book is a part. Far more interesting to me is Gibson's representation of deadly corporate competition over the defection of a scientist and how cyberspace functions as a vital information infrastructure for different corporations. Pushing those topics further would lead one away from focusing on more personal or interactive elements of cyberspace, as illustrated in the novel's descriptions of navigating the dense data of the matrix, and lead one to reflect more on the businesses creating and often using information technologies. As in most of Gibson's novels, the conclusion seems to weave together the novel's different narrative strands too smoothly, revealing the substantial weaknesses of the thriller genre Gibson is reworking. Whereas Gibson's dense, jargon- and brand-filled sentences are innovative, the larger structures of his novels remain frustratingly conventional. The novel demonstrates a kind of mainframe nostalgia, as the artist everyone in the novel is searching for is revealed to be a discarded corporate mainframe AI that has been programmed to combine the remnants of a corporate dynasty's belongings into Joseph Cornell-like boxes. The computer's obsolete core memory becomes an emotive artifact, just like the cast-off goods it uses to create art.

Bernard Stiegler: Acting Out (2003)

“This was, then, how I undertook to practice philosophy, as the experience of a silence in which a voice arose, as a soliloquy sustained by the hypomneses of writing, anamnesically reconstituting language as that which does not allow itself to be understood except through the trial of a cloistered asceticism and an absolute solitude, language that is rarely produced in the dialectic of a dialogue between tow, in the social dialectic, which has almost always become, today, unfortunately for us, pure chatter, if not a system of cretinization.” In the first lecture, Stiegler recounts how he was “called” to philosophy while serving a five year prison sentence (although he mentions an “act” that led to his incarceration and eventual philosophical “acting out,” he never names or discusses his crime). The lecture is a beautifully written account of how when deprived of exteriority (and therefore potentially of interiority), Stiegler used the bare minimum of mnemotechnologies in a disciplined routine of reading and writing to produce practices of signifying that would allow him to continue to individuate while in prison. The lecture makes it clear how deeply Stiegler’s work draws from Gilbert Simondon on individuation (and makes it evident how necessary an English translation of Simondon is at this time).
The second lecture puts forth Stiegler’s critique of contemporary mass media and capitalism. He argues that in order to achieve economies of scale, contemporary “hyperindustry” has aimed to “hypersynchronize” the flux of consciousness of the “we,” converting them into a “they,” an audience and target market. But “Mnemotechnologies put to work by cultural industries are nothing but the industrial exploitation of the fact that memory is always artifactually produced. In the twentieth century, memory becomes the object of systematic industrial exploitation because markets become accessible through the metamarket of consciousness.” Stiegler’s truly groundbreaking reading of Leroi-Gourhan and Heidegger in “Technics and Time” is deployed here to refine (I wouldn’t say revolutionize) the well known critique of the culture industry. Stiegler doesn’t name or engage with the thinkers of the culture industry one might expect him to (I believe Stiegler discuss Adorno elsewhere, but Virilio on the loss of horizon and Debord on pseudo-individuality in the spectacle are also looming influences, both theoretically and tonally. Oddly, the American sociologist Vance Packard is cited more often here.). This is rhetorically understandable, but it risks allowing an undervaluation of what he contributes to the critique as well as leaves him vulnerable to the numerous objections to the critique that have been set forth over the last few decades. Because the Simondon is not available in English, I’m not sure how Simondon positions his ideas about the individuation of the we in regards to Sartre’s work on practical multiplicities. When Stiegler, drawing directly from Simondon, claims the culture industry replaces the individuating “we” with the consumer “they,” he basically repeats Sartre on the group-in-fusion disintegrating and becoming a serial collective targeted by marketing (see the section in his “Critique of Dialectical Reason” on radio). I think there is a productive, but perhaps confusing, tension between the concepts of “totality” and “tendency” at work in the book. When describing hyperindustry, Stiegler often makes the strong claim about the total control of this industry, aligning himself with Adorno & Horkheimer at their most pessimistic points. But because he focuses on hyperindustry’s investment in memory, he provides a complex argument about the mass media providing mass secondary retentions that then create a “tendency” towards certain primary retensions, an “averaging” out of the differences between individuals. How one evaluates that gap between the totalizing aims of the system and the tendencies of the consciousnesses it produces would seem to be rather subjective. Stiegler is quite pessimistic, whereas those like Michel de Certeau might see in that gap a space for an everyday creativity and critique. Near the end of the lecture, Stiegler, like most media theorists, points to the internet as a “privileged terrain of combat,” a place to transform the synchronizing totality of the culture industries, though he notes that the internet is already being integrated into the “industrial retention system.” But if the culture industries are able to integrate the internet, it makes me wonder whether they are operating on different principles than those discussed in this book. Though he briefly mentions “just in time” production, Stiegler seems to be describing throughout a Fordist model of mass production based upon, as he explicitly points out, economies of scale (this was clearly Adorno’s concept of the culture industry’s mode of production). Even if one describes post-Fordist production as merely marketing “pseudo-distinctions” or relying on “pseudo-individualized” consumers, I’m not sure how well hypersynchronization describes the kind of splintering (both spatially and temporally) of both production and consumption one sees in it. Capitalism’s fluid ability to incorporate the internet would seem to indicate that industry is already operating on a much more minute, discrete, and ephemeral production of synchronizations. Hypersynchronization instead would be reserved for the global stock market. Some of the most innovative recent work on capitalism and temporality has focused on finance, not production and consumption, discussing not just the temporal linking of different economies but the production of real-time representations of the global market. How the time of finance links up with the time of industry and how both are dependent on information technologies is something I hope Stiegler examines elsewhere.