Nick Montfort: Twisty Little Passages (2003)

"Interactive fiction, that type of computer program exemplified by the text adventure, was a significant part of the early computing experience and has been a major current in electronic literature. Works in this form became the first best-sellers on PCs during the early 1980s, and have clearly influenced software engineering, interface design, online communities such as MUDs and MOOs, and other forms of digital and nondigital media." Montfort's book is the first study of "interactive fiction," a specific type of electronic literature/cybertext that is distinguished by its requirement that "interactors" have to type language (that is, literally contribute to the writing of the text) in order to traverse the work (unlike, say, hypertext, in which navigation can occur through clicking links). The genre emerged in the mid-1970s with the famed Adventure game, became even more popular with Zork, became commercialized on the personal computer in the 1980s, and then (due to the commercial shift to graphic games) became the provenance of a small community of independent producers in the decades since. Montfort claims interactive fiction continues to be an important form of electronic literature, despite its commercial and popular eclipse and apparent obsolescence in an era of increasingly complex graphics. There isn't any argument in Montfort's book. He begins by clearly defining interactive fiction and provides a non-controversial vocabulary for discussing it. The bulk of the book is a chronological history of interactive fiction, largely consisting of descriptions and appreciations of the innovations of different works. I suppose interactive fiction is as worthy of book-length study as any other literary sub-genre, but it's unfortunate Montfort doesn't present a more compelling argument about how language works in interactive fiction (i.e., a discussion of "command words") or a closer examination of the software and databases used to create fictional worlds (the algorithmic suturing of different "rooms") or even a strong case for the value of non-graphic electronic literature (which should have an obvious appeal to traditional literary scholars).

Immanuel Wallerstein: World-Systems Analysis (2004)

"True crises are those difficulties that cannot be resolved within the framework of the system, but instead can be overcome only by going outside of and beyond the historical system of which the difficulties are a part. To use the technical language of natural science, what happens is that the system bifurcates, that is, finds that its basic equations can be solved in two quite different ways. We can translate this into everyday language by saying that the system is faced with two alternative solutions for its crisis, both of which are intrinsically possible. In effect, the members of the system collectively are called upon to make a historical choice about which of the alternative paths will be followed, that is, what kind of new system will be constructed."
This is an introduction to world-systems analysis, the cross-disciplinary investigation of what we would now call globalization, though by "world" Wallerstein refers more to the tendency of a system to function as trans-national "world" than to any claim about global unification. Drawing heavily on the work of Fernand Braudel on structural time/the long duree, Wallerstein's work focuses on the capitalist world-economy, which rather than having a world-empire (which would potentially interfere with capitalist interests) has had a series of world-hegemons, with the U.S. being the latest (and perhaps the last for this system). Due to a number of factors, including the events of 1968 and an increasing price squeeze, Wallerstein claims the current world-system is approaching a crisis, and will have to choose between what he calls "the spirit of Devos [neoliberalism] and the spirit of Porto Alegre [the movement of movements]." World-systems analysis should be distinguished from Niklas Luhmann's systems theory. Whereas Wallerstein emphasizes a single system, Luhmann (drawing from his mentor Talcott Parsons) emphasizes structural differentiation, in which there are economic, legal, and government systems that each have their own frame/codes of meaning. For Luhmann, there is no world-totality, overarching system, or even a center to society - merely the coupling of these differentiated systems. As a result, there can be no grand crisis/bifurcation for Luhmann, whose work is far more detached than Wallerstein's. Framed as an introduction, this book provides frustratingly little on Wallerstein's conception of a "system" or his understanding of capitalism. The introduction and the final chapter nicely overview the theory and present his account of the current crisis. But the chapters in-between consist of a generalized description that offers little to anyone with a basic background in economics, sociology, and history (especially those concerned with Marxist and post-colonial topics). Although world-systems analysis has been opposed to Marxism because it removes the proletariat and production from being the engine of history, the account in this book of the sovereign state and its relation to businesses has been better presented in numerous Marxist works, especially Mandel's "Late Capitalism" and the work of Michel Aglietta. Wallerstein's argument about the hegemony of liberalism up to 1968 also feels too simple, and his neutral summary of "anti-system" movements such as feminism and Black Nationalism feels too pat. Financial speculation pops up in the final chapter as one factor in the current crisis, but it (and information infrastructures, biopower, etc.) is completely absent from the earlier historical account of capitalism. I presume Wallerstein's other books do address these matters with more care, so there is little reason to read anything more than the bookends of this text.

William Gibson & Bruce Sterling: The Difference Engine (1991)

"[T]he execution of the so-called Modus Program demonstrated that any formal system must be both incomplete and unable to establish is own consistency. There is no finite mathematical way to express the property of 'truth.' The transfinite nature of the Byron Conjectures were the ruination of the Grand Napoleon [computing Engine]; the Modus Program initiated a series of nested loops, which, though difficult to establish, were yet more difficult to extinguish. The program ran, yet rendered its Engine useless!" This collaborative fiction imagines how history would have changed if Charles Babbage's famed Difference and Analytic Engines had been successfully built in the 19th-century, ushering in a mechanical computing era. Prior to the beginning of the narrative, the new computing technology allowed a scientific ideology to take over England, with the former Luddite-sympathizer Lord Byron changing his stance and violently putting down any resistance to the development of machinery. Because the computing "Engine" was invented prior to the business adoption of automated data processing, the computing revolution is used to automate factory production and provide data to an increasingly intrusive surveillance state. The book itself describes the search for a mysterious box of punched cards, which contain an unknown program that threatens to overturn the current "Engine" regime. Irreverently portraying historical figures (Ada Byron, Keats, Babbage, etc.) and attentive to the anarchist strains of the period, the style of novel strongly resembles Thomas Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon" and "Against the Day" (though neither Gibson nor Sterling seem to have mastered the period's idiom as well as Pynchon). Also like Pynchon, Gibson and Sterling amplify the 19-century's obsession with order, or rather capitalized Order in the most metaphysical/scientific sense. In their revisionist history, English nationalism comes to center around that Order as embodied in the computer. But just as London is disrupted by anarchic violence throughout the book, this ideal of Order becomes undone by the increasing complexity of the computing Engines. The book ends by gesturing towards the creation of a mechanical AI, which through emergence would render the world of the narrative obsolete (the chapters are framed through ekphrastic descriptions of daguerreotypes, displaying a nostalgic yearning for the simplicities of the 19-century's concepts). But despite the fragmentation of the narrative and its mediation through descriptions of photographs and, at the end, various records, the world of the book remains quite knowable, revealing that while Order/Chaos have been thematized throughout, they remain safely contained within the narrative, unlike in Pynchon's work.

Sven Spieker: The Big Archive (2008)

"The nineteenth-century archive across a variety of disciplines - from historiography to the natural sciences - had a lasting impact on early-twentieth century art. Rather than endorsing the nineteenth century's confidence in the registration of time, however, members of the twentieth-century avant-gardes critiques and ultimately dismantled that confidence: first, by pointing out that contingency and chance may affect the archive's operations literally at every level (Marcel Duchamp); second, by compiling collections of moments of rupture that elude the archive (early Surrealism); and third, by challenging the Newtonian underpinnings of the archive's topography and its optical correlatives by way of film (El Lissitzky, Sergei Eisenstein). In all these instances, the archive functions both as a laboratory for experimental inquiries into the nineteenth century's irrational underside and as an elaboration of a type of visuality to which archivization is key." This is a nice survey of the avant-garde's incorporation of bureaucratic writing genres, machines, and systems (the latter primarily being the archive). Focusing on the relation between art and archive provides Spieker a way of re-framing certain exhausted debates about art and writing, art and institutions/museums, art and photography, art and memory. In particular, discussing the topography of the archive and the procedures of archival systems allows Spieker, like Bernhard Siegert in his account of the literary "postal system," to spatially reconfigure what could be an excessively self-reflexive or medium-specific argument. Jacques Derrida's "Archive Fever" and Friedrich Kittler's" Discourse Networks" are major influences or predecessors for this book, but they are primarily addressed in the footnotes. I feel Spieker therefore repeats Kittler more than is necessary (or at least doesn't show as explicitly as he could how the archival "system" could encompass, operate through, or even transform the media specificities Kittler describes) and doesn't always engage with Derrida's insights on an "arche-violence." But this neglect ultimately pays off by leaving space for the fresh insights Spieker provides on well-known figures of the avant-garde as well as recent European artists such as Gerhard Richter and Sophie Calle. Spieker takes seriously the bureaucratic reference in the early Surrealist's "Office of Surrealist Research," examines how Duchamp's ready-mades display their own contingent archivization, compares the archival "unconscious" to Freud's mystic writing pad, and highlights how post-Soviet states have a much more negative or paranoid understanding of the archive than their Western European counterparts. The U.S. context (Rauschenberg and Joseph Cornell in particular) is suprisingly absent, but those absences perhaps reinforce Spieker's argument about the central importance of the archive to twentieth-century artistic practices.

Emerson Pugh et al.: IBM's 360 and Early 370 Systems (1991)

IBM's “first three computers – the 701, 650, and 702 – had set a precedent by differing widely in their data formats and instruction repertoires. For good reasons involving costs and intended usages, the 701 designers had stressed arithmetic speed, the 702 designers character-handling convenience, and the 650 designers low manufacturing cost. Once the pattern was set, designers had little difficulty in finding additional reasons for distinctiveness. As a result, by 1960, IBM was marketing six kinds of solid-state computers, none of which could interchange programs." An 800-page sequel to the volume on IBM's early computers I discuss in an earlier blog, this book is a relentlessly detailed technical history of the development of IBM's System/360 computer, which was announced in 1964 and began to be delivered in 1965. The System/360 was one of the most influential computer architectures ever, and would be the industry standard up until the late 1970s (its late 1960s successor, the System/370, merely refined the System/360 architecture). IBM's early systems (as well as its competitor's) each had different architectures, and therefore their programs and peripherals tended not to be compatible. When customers switched between systems, they often lost their existing programs and had to heavily invest in retraining both their programmers and support staff. The System/360 was planned to be a line of computers that would be both upward- and downward-compatible and run on variations of the same OS/360 operating system. This meant programs run on the cheapest and weakest computers could be run on the most expensive and powerful, and the reverse. IBM also standardized its input-output (I/O), allowing the modular expansion of systems by a more standardized line of machines. As has been often noted, IBM's total commitment to developing the System/360 was an enormous gamble that nearly bankrupted the firm, especially since there were many obstacles to achieving full compatibility of computers. But having succeeded, IBM and the rest of the computer industry became "locked-in" for over a decade to the System/360 architecture, with both manufacturers and customers having invested too much in the current designs to consider any radical changes in computers. Like its predecessor, this book is extremely detailed and borders on being unreadable. This is partially because one of the authors insists on providing educational and occupational histories for every manager, engineer, and technician mentioned. This admirably contrasts with histories that single out only a few geniuses as worthy of biographical investigation, but it results in hundred of pages of biography for figures that few will find of individual interest. The penultimate chapter presents the best history of computer terminals I have read, showing how the development of random access disk storage led away from batch processing to singular queries. The development of time sharing and remote access also led to the increase in terminals, which at first were often IBM Selectric Typewriters, which could be used to input and output data as well as be switched into being regular typewriters.

Wendy Chun: Control and Freedom (2006)

"Control-freedom, which is intimately experienced as changes in sexuality and race, is a reaction to the increasing privatization of networks, public services and space, and to the corresponding encroachment of publicity and paranoia into everyday life. The end of the Cold War has not dispelled paranoia but rather spread it everywhere: invisibility and uncertainty - of the enemy, of technology - has invalidated deterrence and moved paranoia from the pathological to the logical. This twinning of control and freedom subverts the promise of freedom, turning it from a force that simultaneously breaks bonds and makes relation possible to dream of a gated community writ large." Chun's primary goal is to demonstrate the incoherency - even self-contradictoriness - of recent popular discussions of freedom. Rather than striving for liberty from discipline, today the desire for freedom drives a quest for what would seem to be its opposite: security and control. We are convinced that in order to be free (on the internet, in a world of terrorism, etc.), control is necessary. The reverse is also true: the development of more controlling laws and technologies is understood as the foundation for freedom (one might cite any number of George W. speeches to illustrate this). Though it does not receive the full treatment it deserves, Chun briefly turns at the end of the book to Jean-Luc Nancy for a model of a more radical form of freedom. She argues Nancy "helps us to imagine a nonautonomous freedom beyond control, and his insistence that freedom can enable both good and evil helps us assess the dangers of freedom. Freedom cannot be reduced to something innocuous" (I would add that someone like Paolo Virno might be even more pertinent). Yet Nancy's ontology, in which "Freedom is a spacing," would seem difficult to map onto Chun's privileging of fiber optics cables as a figure for global connectivity, and Chun's gesture to Nancy remains merely a gesture. Much of Chun's book could be described as an analysis of the dominant rhetorics of different historical periods of the internet. She discusses the early internet fears about pornography in the home, then turns to the internet's later erasure of racial difference online (paradoxically through multicultural advertisements), and moves on to the question of voyeurism and autonomy in relation to the infamous webcam girls of the early 2000s. One of the more distinct chapters juxtaposes readings of William Gibson's "Neuromancer" and the Japanese anime "Ghost in the Shell." Discussing Gibson's novel and "high-tech Orientalism," she demonstrates how the pleasure of exploring the unknown exotic city is mapped onto navigating cyberspace - that the latter depends upon the former for its attractiveness (otherwise, as Gibson presumably knows, cyberspace would be not much more fascinating than a corporate archive). But rather than rest with that point - which risks condemning too quickly Gibson's work - Chun shows how Japanese manga and anime participates in a similar kind of Orientalism, with Japan as primary and either America or Hong Kong as the exotic other. As one can see in Quentin Tarantino's "Kill-Bill" films, this mutual exoticizing, once it reaches a second or third reiteration, can take on a complexity that reproduces yet also drastically transforms (and perhaps even overcomes) the long history of Orientalism, or at least blocks any simplistic account of that Orientalism. Perhaps Chun's most important point is that a great deal of time and money has been invested in software so that it can buffer its users from the reality of the internet. User-friendly software hides the fact that even when we are not surfing the web our computers, if online, are in constant communication with a wide network of computers (and therefore vulnerable to infection or surveillance). She claims, "the notion of Internet communications as private is a software effect." Drawing from one of her earlier essays, she compares software to ideology, as the former interpellates individuals as autonomous "users" and represents a relation to the unknown hardware upon which the software/ideology runs.

Espen Aarseth: Cybertext (1997)

"The effort and energy demanded by the cybertext of its reader raise the stakes of interpretation to those of intervention. Trying to know a cybertext is an investment of personal improvisation that can result in either intimacy or failure. The tensions at work in a cybertext, while not incompatible with those of narrative desire, are also something more: a struggle not merely for interpretive insight but also for narrative control. . . . The cybertext reader is a player, a gambler; the cybertext is a game-world or world-game; it is possible to explore, get lost, and discover secret paths in these texts, not metaphorically, but through the topological structures of the textual machinery." Aarseth lays out a theory of "ergodic" literature - works in which "nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text." He spends a great deal of his time fending of what he considers literary criticism's tendency to colonize emergent media and conceptualize and judge them according to traditional literary terms/values. Elsewhere he has objected to the tendency to reduce games to narratives. Here he spends more time attacking Brenda Laurel's conception of the digital text as a computerized drama. While ergodic texts show elements of narrative and drama, they cannot be fully understood through these concepts, and, more importantly, should not be designed according to them. For Aarseth, ergodic literature does not refer to any unified medium or genre, but rather to certain kinds of "communicational strategies of dynamic texts." The term includes print-based works such as the "I Ching" and Queneau's "Cent Mille Milliards de Poemes" and computer-based works such as Michael Joyce's "Afternoon" and video games. Aarseth knows his semiotics, easily poking holes in the terminologies of his fellow new media theorists, and produces a complex "data matrix" to prove the robustness of his own typology. After the initial explanation of ergodic literature and his take-down of the critical competition, he explores particular types of cybertexts, including hypertext, MUDs, and adventure games. Partially because the book is already dated, I didn't find these studies consistently helpful (a fate he acknowledges is likely in his humble conclusion). Aarseth distinguishes between "scriptons" (the string of signs "as they appear to readers") and ""textons" (the string of signs "as they exist in the text"). In Queneau's "Cent Mille Milliards de Poemes," there are only 140 textons, but these can be arranged into the vast number of scriptons indicated by the work's title. Prior to, or alongside, the reader's perception and interpretation of the poem (i.e. the phenomenology of reading), the text undergoes a transformation. It is clear how computer-based works such as hypertexts and video games dependent on underlying code or databases can be compared to Queneau's piece, since in all cases the reader/user is called upon to "complete" the work through the assistance of the machine. Yet Aarseth is quite aware the distinction between textons and scriptons, and even between scriptons and the reader's interpretation of those scriptons, can all be deconstructed, so that each level contaminates the others. The use of "non-trivial effort" to mark the border between ergodic and non-ergodic literature risks privileging a dubious understanding of the "materiality" of the text or the reader's "physical" intervention in the text over signifying practices that cannot be so easily ontologically grounded. I believe ergodic literature therefore can be only a provisional and strategic term.