Every piece of information is a publication. It doesn’t really matter what public it addresses. The potential audience for the digital sphere, the Internet, is always the whole world. The number of copies of a publication corresponds precisely to the number of interested parties; it is measured in hits or clicks. Information that spreads without any possible restraint takes the form of a hydra.
Hydra was the daughter of Typhon, the father of all monsters, and Echidna, the mother of all monsters. She inhabited the Lernaean swamp, guarding a submarine gateway to the underworld. Her blood was poisonous; even the tracks she left were poisonous. The Greeks said that Hydra had more heads than any artist could paint. When one of them was cut off, two more grew to replace it.
In historical perspective, Hydra was the epitome of unreason, embodying the vengeful spirit of chthonic deities resentful of the Olympians’ presumption. Since then, Hydra has taken on a new form (x = xn); now, she is a monster of reason. This means that reason itself—calculated information—has become thousand-headed and thousand-eyed. Hydra’s electronic tracks cannot be deleted. Once the poison has entered the world, it is impossible to get rid of it.
A case in point is the British beautician who tweeted, with disarming naïveté, her take on world history: “If barraco barner is our president, why is he getting involved with Russia, scary.” Within a few hours, this improperly formatted opinion, compounded with foul insults, had multiplied astronomically and precipitated a shitstorm. The event was hardly gladsome for the young woman; many a pedantic commentator would gladly have torn her tongue out of her head. But all in all, it typified the wily serpent’s craft: if the modern swamp works through electronic media, cutting off one’s own head will enable a thousand more to grow in its place. Anyone who wants a lot of attention should stick his or her head out not so much to make a statement (Behauptung) as to chop it off (Enthauptung). Surely it’s no accident that ISIL, ISIS, or whatever it’s called, has adopted this very stratagem.
Nor does it matter whether the attention is positive or negative. In the end, all that matters is the number of clicks. Donning a digital cloak of invisibility, a headless swordsman can perform further decapitations with greater ease. The warrior may think himself a Hercules, but he’s already a Hydra. The essence of ressentiment spills forth: all the invidious malcontents and commentators spitting bile, basking in the light of their frankness and freedom of speech while waging a doomed war against their own, skyrocketing chances of acephalia. The shitstorm is ressentiment: a serpent always sprouting new heads according to the formula x = xn.
Social platforms exploit the economy of attention in similar ways. Here, too, self-assertion is a matter of self-decapitation. Anyone who thinks that wordlets like whew! or ugh! amount to a message is the real winner. It’s like limbo: the lower you go, the greater the glory.
Loss-free messages proliferating by the millions—in a word, virality—are the lifeblood of successful Internet-based business models. That’s no secret. The ultima ratio is to draw as much attention as possible to items for sale. Conversely, addressees—that is, users—have to divide their mental energy between as many offerings as possible. As a result, trolls, whom site administrators banish from their domain, end up putting on new masks to continue their troublemaking. The heartbeat of the Hydra—reason in its most monstrous form—follows the formula x = xn.
When the computer pioneer Alan Turing was convicted—in the name of the queen—for the crime of homosexuality and, in keeping with practices of the day, chemically castrated, he decided to leave this life behind. Like the title figure of the 1938 Disney film, he bit into a poisoned apple. But for all its eccentricity, the cryptographer’s Snow White fantasy was more than a bizarre way of committing suicide. As the metaphysics of the glass coffin, the phantasm of the living sign, it represented the idea that a prince’s kiss might yet rouse Sleeping Beauty to life again.
If we content ourselves with technical language—analog–digital conversion—to describe this magical transformation, it is easy to forget that a fairy-tale world opens up behind the looking-glass. Here, different laws hold than in reality. Even though our physical bodies must go the way of all flesh, the digitized double (xn) promises that, should we not have died, after all, we may yet wake again—anywhere, and at any time. Cryonics allows us to have our bodies frozen, in the hope that medical technology will eventually allow us to be reanimated. (Walt Disney belongs to this future race, too.) Similarly, paleovirology uses DNA to “resurrect” viruses that went extinct ages ago.
The digital simulacra ensuring human survival in multimedia form produce an uncanny effect. All of a sudden, the present is teeming with the dead—their voices, actions, and dreams. Like Snow White, they all lie in a glass coffin, just waiting to be kissed back to life. One click is all it takes. As they wander in and out of our dreams, these electronic shadows start leading lives of their own—they crawl out of their graves and block the prospect of anything new. Thus, it is no coincidence that popular culture, inasmuch as it is written and recorded, does not focus on the unfamiliar so much as it reanimates the past: stitched-together, sampled body parts are roused to life again. Elvis forever! The question of immortality will not be decided at the gates of the Kingdom of Heaven. The answer is given already, here on Earth. With this in mind, it is clear how the 9/11 attackers wrote their epitaph in the image of the burning Twin Towers: an endless loop playing over and over in our collective imagination, even now. Suicide bombing is every bit as paradoxical as the death Alan Turing chose. It proves that the other world begins in this one, here: the attacker does not perish so much as receive the kiss of life with every news cycle.
“Nuclear fission” refers to radioactive decay: the nucleus of an atom breaks down into two or more parts. When the radioactive matter achieves critical mass, it sets off a chain reaction: the process of decay releases immense amounts of energy. The energy formerly bound in the atom opens up a glowing future. It is hard not to see the process of splitting the atom at work in the formula x = xn. Per se, a digitized object is a divided object. In splitting, it is preserved as communication, a message. The process of breaking down yields radiation: matter turns into energy. In a sense, an object like this radiates beyond its own materiality: it transforms into a sign charged with energy. The digitized object represents a state of energy—and, with it, the disintegration of the material thing itself.
This connection to nuclear fission is not just a metaphor. In August 1945—shortly after the first atomic bomb was dropped—the administrator superintending the Manhattan Project, Vannevar Bush, published the essay “As We May Think.” The piece condensed the immense efforts that building the bomb had cost into tidy, intellectual terms. It had taken the coordinated work of thousands of scientists from a wide array of fields to do the job: the project exceeded the capacity of any single person (x = atomos = individual), and it could be mastered only by a shared and divided mind—a collective (xn). Indeed, as a vision for a collective knowledge-system, “As We May Think” might stand as the founding manifesto for the Internet. “A record, if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted,” Bush declared. Accordingly, he envisioned a terminal that would enable scientists to retrieve all relevant data and see it together, on a screen. It is easy to recognize the devices we use today in this vision. Only this kind of machinery—the essay declares—will allow all the intellectual energy that has been released to be bundled back together into a single thought.
When it’s said that a butterfly beating its wings at one end of the world can cause a hurricane at the other, this is not just the credo of chaos theory. It also describes the reality of our highly networked world. When an epidemic breaks out somewhere, it builds up—over the pathways of nerves and traffic interchanges—into a pandemic. It’s telling that HIV spread via the flightpaths of Patient Zero, the Canadian flight attendant who kept track of his conquests in a journal. If these records helped determine the agent of infection back then, computer simulations now make it possible not just to track avian flu, for instance, but also to calculate its spread by means of flight schedules and traffic volume—and in advance. Physical networks pale in comparison to information networking. The Internet has given rise to a social body that functions as a gigantic library, indeed, as a global nervous system; each and every neuron or node communicates with others. Accordingly, any gesture inscribed in the system can take on a viral quality. Computer viruses digitally mimic biological viruses in order to exploit gaps in security. Likewise, emotions steered by crafty marketing experts or disinformation agencies can expand into pandemic tides of agitation. Outrage! Shitstorm! Gangnam style!
Every digitized hand motion disappears into working memory; from there, it can be reproduced, modified, and optimized. Replacing human labor with the work of machines—a practice formerly restricted to industry—now includes activities that once belonged to the intellectual sphere alone. Anything that admits description as a procedure and a system of rules (that is, anything that yields x) can be replaced; this includes classifying, evaluating, and filing reports. Nor is the working memory of computers just a technological module; it also contains social labor that has been remunerated only once. In essence, then, a given computer user has a machine park at his or her disposal that is larger and more flexible than anything a nineteenth-century factory owner ever had. When an artist uses a Photoshop filter, it may appear to be a specific task, or job, but it would be more accurate to understand the activity as a kind of collective writing. What’s more, this logic does not concern only the work carried out by individuals; it affects software, too. Software is no longer single source, but a composite made up of various libraries and modules. Within every x, xn is pulsing away. Inasmuch as this intelligence is no longer located on desktop computers and in offices, but has become part of our lifeworld by way of robots and SmartThings, there is no limit to the extent of its impact. A sensor transmitting data over WiFi to an Internet server connects whatever it is monitoring to the Machine. In this way, the Machine incorporates wider and wider swaths of reality into working memory.
When machines have finally taken over all repetitive tasks, the only thing that will still count as labor will be whatever has not yet been digitized or still lies beyond the horizon of technological possibility.