The founding document of the World Wide Web, its first site, calls it a “large universe of documents.” Universe comes from Latin and means “turned-into-one.” Here, all that comprises the world is supposed to be available. German, in turn, has the elegant term Weltall: “the all (whole) of the world.” Placing the words side by side—universe and Weltall—we see two different aspects of the world corresponding to two aggregate states: on the one hand, the whole-as-one, and on the other, the whole-as-all-things, x = xn. As such, the universe of documents (xn) also stands as a document of the universe (x). It forms a parallel or mirror dimension where, in a great, global corpus, all documents about the world may be found.
The World Wide Web is not only the fulfillment of the Boolean formula, but also the realization of a collective fantasy reaching back farther than simple chronology would lead one to believe. The Internet has realized the dream that Vannevar Bush voiced in “As We May Think” (1945): a collective intelligence, where the labors of thousands of scientists appear on a single desktop—including the reflections and preliminary studies of pioneers such as Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart (from 1960 on). Here, at long last, Robert Metcalfe’s Ethernet (1973) has taken shape—a vision that foresaw the worldwide networking of machines on a universal standard. All of this now stands as a positive fact in our lifeworld, and there is no escaping it. In a sense, then, the World Wide Web does not represent the beginning so much as the end of a lengthy process. It’s the coffin of Snow White; instead of showing the world as it is—a nameless, dismembered mess—it presents Sleeping Beauty lying in state. When we set foot in this space, it seems we are stepping through the looking-glass. We enter a fairy-tale world that inspires the feeling of being not isolated individuals but part of a community. As such, the technological fancy that once wired monks into circuitry no longer belongs to the realm of experimentation: it is a fact confirmed by every click of the mouse. Activating a link, the user is teleported at the speed of light from one server to another—from Singapore to Palo Alto. Indeed, how the website appears often does not even correspond to a unified space; instead, it represents the simultaneity of different spatial points. And with that, the browser cashes a check that no physical body could ever pay: being at different locations on the globe at one and the same time.
This is where virtuality acquires added value. Having become the archive of the real, the Internet models reality and overrides it at the same time. It offers possible forms of reality. The process is rather like recognizing that you’re dreaming—now, suddenly, you can direct what’s happening. When you realize that you can fly, you leave one world behind and start to see other, parallel worlds, where other laws prevail: no gravity, say, or lack of resources … Welcome, gamers!
When a tourist travels somewhere and takes a picture that is already in a guidebook, she or he is not just looking for an encounter with the world; instead, this person is collaborating, along with millions of other tourists, in a world simulation. The image will be posted, and at some point—out of legions of photos taken all over the globe—a pattern will emerge that might equal the world yet still have nothing to do with it. Nor are tourists the only ones participating in the project of world simulation. Anyone who takes pictures and uploads them is helping to launch the photographic capsule—and, with it, all that we normally consider to constitute the world—into digital space: a kind of ascension to heaven. Images that come in droves on the Net (Instagram alone charts some 40 million uploads every day) form an artificial “outer space”; atomized into isolated images, the world grows liquid and, in the process, creates an environment in which we feel as secure as an embryo in amniotic fluid. Just as the waters of the womb simulate a milieu corresponding to the ocean some 400 million years ago—the lifeworld, such as it was—the gazillions of photos posted today are making a sphere of images allowing us to think that we still are safe.
This liquidation of the world image can be understood as a social sculpture (though perhaps a watered-down version). Out of the images—this great vortex of digital “world substance”—it is not just the surface that precipitates and takes shape; rather, each one of the world’s components becomes charged with energy that, for the sake of simplicity, we may call psychosocial. Like a liquid, it displays the colorations and covalencies of all that holds molecular fabric together and keeps things flexible. Whatever gets divided is shared and passed along for some purpose—however slight it may be. In the broadest sense, what circulates involves recognition: a strengthened social bond, self-confidence, a feeling of vitality, a sense of belonging to groups that have been chosen or count as predestined, and so on. The chosen images—their motifs, significance (i.e., upload potential), and communicative and aesthetic valencies—attest to the intentions, desires, expectations, fears, and anxieties of billions of people participating in the world-simulation project, whether they mean to do so or not. And all this energy finds its way into the great, amniotic whirl of the world that the Internet—a place for storage, work, and living life—represents. They are the stuff from which the new Jerusalem is being built.
That said, what washes ashore is artificial. Like the plastic detritus gathered in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, rejected elements are producing a gigantic trash vortex of “world stuff.”
When a random object is digitized, it becomes a population, a ghost army. This sheer magnitude (xn)—provided that it does not strike one dead—opens the way for new modes of strategic thinking and ruse. One no longer stands facing the obscure object of desire, 1:1. Now the object forms part of a compliant host, subjugated to one’s own desire. Inasmuch as infinitesimal calculations at the speed of light prevail in the realm of simulation, one can pit minimally different doubles against each other and pick out a solution that fulfills certain criteria (as in a game of chess, where moves promising the greatest success are chosen from among n possibilities). In turn, the model replaces the original—and the process begins all over again. Whereas Darwinian evolution—mutation and selection—is based on the natural cycle of generations, processors shrink this sequence down to a few milliseconds: with each processor cycle, a complete, evolutionary course of selection and exchange takes place. Even if the object presented to the user is a discrete unit (usually one with a version number), its individuality is just an illusion that has been distilled from a host of possibilities. It’s like a voice rising up from a genetic chorus—a soloist belonging to an ensemble.
This way of thinking requires us to renounce time-honored terms such as individual or atomos (which both mean “indivisible”). More still, it means we have to revise our outlook in general: what is happening on an individual scale can be seamlessly transferred to the world. Not only does it entail the idea of optimizing nature; it also leads to working, almost as a matter of necessity, with the logic of parallel universes: entertaining various options that ultimately prove inferior to the optimum chosen. As such, virtuality does more than open a second life; it also discloses an interminable series of spaces: xn possible worlds. Within the intellectual horizon disclosed by the formula, then, speaking of the best of all possible worlds does not express resigned insight into what cannot be changed. On the contrary: it signifies a formative will—what anthropologists try to explain with the idea of the Anthropocene. Yet at the same time—and this development remains historically unprecedented—the focus falls on the world. Looking through the lens of the formula is like looking at the world from the outside, through the camera-eyes of thousands of satellites. It means viewing the world not as something given, but as something to be made. Through genetic algorithms, the notion of generation known from ancient philosophy is roused to new life: the idea of spiritual conception, logos spermatikos.
Just as messages sent over the Internet are allocated to data packages that then stream down to the target point as a BitTorrent, programs do not represent physical so much as functional unities. There’s no need for them to rest on a hard disk as a memory block; in fact, they don’t even need to be stored on the same server. A computer can download various modules from different servers and combine them into a program during runtime. (This process is now the standard with Internet sites.) If we step through the looking-glass, what stood before us as an illusory unity on the interface proves to be an object split through and through: a series of zeros and ones that have been divided into blocks, clusters, packets, domains, and ranges of validity. The inconsistency of such an arrangement does not pose a disadvantage; it represents the very condition for achieving the adaptability that is so prized today. The object is assembled “on the fly,” as it were. As such, it is less an object than a cloud of particles, or a state of suspension.
This formation—in which it is easy to recognize our xn—has a structure similar to the picture we have of the synaptic networks in our brains: a switchboard of various spatial points that come together as an ephemeris, an impermanent and transitory state. What is called swarm intelligence, then, does not represent a surface phenomenon, nor does it refer to an essentially social mode of being. It inheres in the program architecture of objects. In the nineteenth century, Babbage already identified the specific nature of this way of thinking: when we utter a word, it doesn’t even take twenty-four hours for the particles we emit to circle the globe. Were it possible to design an apparatus for reading these bits, our atmosphere would yield a library of all that has ever been said. Indeed, one might even reproduce the words that Jesus spoke on the cross. If speech acts—and objects, too—are up in the air, the necessary consequence is for us to adopt a systemic, atmospheric point of view. It is not the particular object that matters, but how it is grouped with others—into a mesh, a tissue, a cloud.
In the German dictionary compiled by the Brothers Grimm, the entry for Gespenst—“ghost”—includes a less common meaning: “builders’ scaffold.” The authors quote an archaic source: “to make an arch requires much scaffolding, a whole ghost is erected.” In this context, Gespenst is related to the word spannen, to “stretch” or “extend.” Today, the scaffolding for building arches is called “falsework”—or, in German, Leergerüst (literally, “empty frame”). To build an arch, an appropriate frame is built and bricks are laid—or concrete poured. Once the building material has been detached, the framework is removed and can be used again, if need be. Thus, the falsework does, in fact, resemble a ghost: the idea of what will become manifest and assume solid form in due course. Something similar happens when objects are transformed in electromagnetic space, except that the process occurs in reverse. What previously was solid—say, a stone arch, a bottle, or a hand—is broken down into a kind of scaffolding: a “wireframe.”
Transposition into a wireframe means disintegrating the object into a quantity of spatial points (xn). This yields a model admitting modification at will. Volume can be expanded or scaled down to microscopic dimensions. It can be fitted to any surface or “morphed” into something else during runtime (for instance, into one of the spectral forms that populate science fiction and horror movies). The builders’ ghost is a tool for stretching out an idea and fixing it as a stable structure. The wireframe shifts such architectonic labor to the digital dimension. Now, any given object is just the description of a body, inside and out. When the construct finally materializes, it stands as the supplement of the inaugural data-object—an utterly arbitrary expression.
This displacement turns our conventional way of viewing the world upside down. Factum is replaced by datum—being by appearance. And so, what once was known as the “treachery of the object” returns: an animistic perspective. The things that surround us are not apprehended as inanimate objects so much as spiritual entities. Formerly, the natural sciences taught that any given item could be boiled down to a hard core—that is, they affirmed a materialist view of the world. In contrast, today’s software gives us a web of data inhabited by a ghost. Any driver exasperated by a malfunctioning electronic system will have a thing or two to say about it—and his irritation doesn’t concern the vehicle itself so much as whoever it was who programmed this “crap”: inner life gone wrong.
In the nineteenth century, there were plenty of indications that things were getting spooky. The specter haunting Europe—and starting to unnerve the whole world—materialized as a veritable mania for naming, numbering, and classifying. All that crept on the earth or flew in the sky was labeled. Modern cartography took care of the last blanks on the map. The world was inventoried, archived, and granted its first double. But the mounting mass of data had to be processed and digested. Karl Marx, who spent his days at the British Library in London (taking notes from Babbage’s writings), remarked in a letter: “I am a machine, condemned to devour books and then throw them, in a changed form, on the dunghill of history.” Just a few miles away, Charles Darwin—sifting through vast quantities of information in an effort to find the golden thread running through the “inextricable web of nature”—likened himself to a machine, too.
But what is the thread tying history together? As Marx observed, philosophers had sought only to describe the world. Now, the task was to change it. In this sense, theoretical analysis is a form of deconstruction that aims to recombine individual particles into better forms. Accordingly, the dunghill of history is not an outhouse, but a factory where the manure, once it has been recycled, will lead to a brave new world.
That’s why the world had to be broken down into its tiniest parts: atoms, chemical elements, and rules of economic and psychological regularity. Analyzing vast masses of data made it possible to identify the basic patterns underlying movements and actions without number. Indeed, the scientific positivism of the nineteenth century can be understood as a kind of procedure pursuing its own abolition. After all, the goal of research was to construct a machine, free of distortion and error, for granulating the world into finer and finer units—and ultimately dissolving them altogether; results include today’s statistics, graphs, scores, and motion charts. Thus, when a sound has been broken down into a Fourier series, it can be resynthesized at will: the process gives rise to a world that is artificial per se. That’s why manufacturers now have to specify that their product is “natural honey,” without enhancements or additives. If the world has become artificial, it’s not a matter of inert or inanimate objects; more and more, it involves living things—including the spermatozoa, eggs, or DNA of extinct animals that paleogeneticists are trying to bring back to life.
From clay tablets to paper, microfilm, and digital copy: the forms assumed by institutional memory have become more and more immaterial over time. In a broader sense, institutional memory includes magazines, libraries, museums, arsenals, archives, and registries. In the age of representation—which is now drawing to a close—institutional memory has been viewed as a building, a storage area. Its epitome is the museum. Museums present collections that stand as the sediments of cultural achievement. By this means, society can retroactively call back, into the present, what it has done and what it has been: it can canonize its accomplishments. But in the digital realm, the nature of the archive changes. Systems of preservation and presentation that are organized according to a symbolic order—for instance, ordered alphabetically or chronologically—lose spatial and temporal points of reference. Even though we still speak of “addresses,” the term now marks an ascription that no longer has a spatial equivalent, or else makes it ad hoc and subject to change. A digital archive is not a location one visits, where one finds exhibits at the ready; instead, it consists of scattered “displays” for retrieving material as a simulacrum.
In the digital archive, any given object loses its uniqueness, turning into a document that is available anywhere (xn). As such, it exists free of context and can pop up in highly variable arrangements. The work of art—indeed, the image in general—loses its exemplary status; it occupies a “place” that depends on typologies, color schemes, and tagging systems. It ceases to attest to deeds and becomes a gestural element, a hieroglyph—part of a character set open for use. Just as the Mona Lisa has become a cultural icon that shows up in endless reworkings, communication about things is replacing the things themselves. In keeping with Wittgenstein’s dictum (“the meaning of a word is its use”), meaning no longer lies in the artifact; instead, its significance derives from a discursive imbroglio: talk that the object, which itself is mute, evokes. Inasmuch as such discourse (interpretation, commentary, critique, and so on) is stored and can be connected to the original, a nexus—a kind of social agitation or arousal—emerges. Even if the item in question points to an individual author, the intensity of the responses it generates reveals that, in fact, it functions as an amplifier for collective desire. In this sense, the Internet—indeed, every database—embodies a kind of living archive: here, the present is packed away into a museum, but it can always be sampled, reanimated, and put on display again.