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Control : digitality as cultural logic
Franklin S., The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2015. 240 pp. Type: Book (978-0-262029-53-7)
Date Reviewed: Feb 10 2016

The advent and growth of digital technology has radically changed our society, and the title of this volume leads the reader to anticipate a reasoned, documented account of this important cultural influence. Instead, the volume is a tract for Luddite Marxist ideology, betrayed from its early pages by the frequent belittling of “capital,” a uniformly negative assessment of the impact of digital technology, and emphasis on “valorising” an increasing span of human activity. (I didn’t know the verb “valorise” before this volume. It comes from the noun “valorisation,” which was invented to translate Marx’s technical term Verwertung, describing the process of converting human effort into monetary value.) The book’s last six words would have served readers as a more candid title: “Capitalism in the age of control.”

The author may object that I have not understood his book. This is not an easy book to understand. It is written in that dialect of English peculiar to some disciplines in the humanities that delight in obscurity and never condescend to use a short, common word when arcane jargon lies ready to hand. Franklin would rather address a “problematic” than solve a problem, prefers “imbricate” to “overlay,” and uses “epistemic” as a noun. But if I understand him correctly, he is trying to say three things. First, there is a fundamental conflict between the new, digital way of viewing the world (which involves discretization and selection) and the true, continuous nature of reality. Second, this perspective leads to a shallow, selective view of people that exploits and marginalizes them. Third, it is the duty of class warriors to take action against this insidious evil. The argument is supported not by primary data and original insights, but by extensive commentary on a wide range of like-minded authors.

Franklin realizes that the ill effects he traces to the advent of the computer were active before the first computers appeared. The first part of the book, “Digitality without Computers,” explores antecedents to which these social evils can be traced. The Jacquard loom, Babbage’s calculating engine, and artillery targeting systems provide artifactual precursors of modern computers, while the cybernetics movement and general systems theory exemplify a growing desire to describe all of society in terms of the control theory developed to support targeting technology.

The book’s second part, “Digitality as Cultural Logic,” describes the impact of modern computers. Its first chapter deals with the necessary omissions in representing any system for computer manipulation, advancing the claim that digitality curtails, abbreviates, and selectively excludes much of the richness of human experience. The second chapter focuses on evidence of the spreading infection of digitality in literature, mostly by reviewing Gilles Deleuze’s analysis of the development of works by Samuel Beckett. The final chapter explores the dehumanization of people into programmable objects attested in modern cinema and interactive computer games.

There can be no question that the tools we use leave their mark on our culture, and a responsible analysis of these influences would be a fascinating study. This volume fails on two counts. First, it rests on a defective view of reality. Second, it is historically naive.

Existentially, the debate over whether the world is discrete or continuous goes back much farther than the computer, originating in the Greek notion of atoms. Two discoveries of the 20th century show that Franklin’s facile characterization of reality as continuous is an oversimplification. The development of quantum theory forces us to grapple with a dualism between discreteness and continuity in the very fabric of reality. The most clearly continuous aspects of reality persist only while it remains unobserved, and collapse to discreteness once people interact with it. The discovery of DNA shows that the most basic mechanisms of human life, and indeed of all life, are intrinsically discrete, and manipulated by a mechanism that resembles nothing so much as a digital computer. The development of digital mechanisms does not force reality into an unnatural grid of discreteness. Rather, it mimics the fundamental engines of life.

Historically, efforts to discretize human experience did not start with the computer, or with Babbage or Jacquard. Franklin notes in passing that the alphabet itself discretizes language, and the alphabet dates to the second millennium before Christ (BC). Franklin’s criticism of modern data mining for reducing people to abstract categories falters when one considers the extensive use of abstract categories, such as “fool,” “wise person,” “sluggard,” and “diligent person,” to make generalizations about people in Hebrew wisdom literature of the first millennium BC. His complaints about the newly deleterious effects of symbolic representations neglect the rich history of symbolic abstractions dating back to Aristotle’s square of oppositions (ca. 350 BC) or the elaborate hierarchical ontology developed by Porphyry (ca. AD 300), among others. These examples show that discretization, summarization, classification, and simplification are not newcomers to human culture, but intrinsic to human consciousness. This insight does not mean that their effects are benign. Certainly, treating people as instances of categories rather than as individuals can lead to unjust and abusive conditions. But this malicious behavior is not new, and it is not the fault of the computer. It is intrinsic to the human condition.

These observations will doubtless have little impact on acolytes of Marxism, who will appreciate the incestuous attention that Franklin lavishes on their growing canon. But before they accept his arguments and the call to action against digitality with which his book ends, they might want to ask him: Did you use a computer to compose this text?

Reviewer:  H. Van Dyke Parunak Review #: CR144157 (1604-0253)
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