A New Frontier and a Virtual Space: Digital Cowboys and the Craft of Hacking
In the previous chapter, I described how the birth of the Internet is rooted in countercultural romanticism. The more open and networked kind of thinking usually associated with the Internet may have its origins in the military-industrial-academic complex, but developed its own impetus and merges with romanticism at the time of the counterculture. The Internet thus helped to realize romantic ideals such as self-expression, creativity, rebellion, and exploration. This led eventually to the Internet of the 1990s, which was perhaps more corporate and chaotic than expected and had its dark sides (see again the cyberpunk of Neuromancer), but also afforded highly romantic experiences. In a North American context, these experiences can be interpreted with the help of the romantic metaphors of the frontier and the cowboy. Let me unpack this.
First, what exactly needed to be explored and conquered? The interest in computing was combined with an interest in space, and this led to the construction of a new space: cyberspace. The romantic role outer space played in earlier twentieth-century romantic science fiction was now taken over by cyberspace. A new “cyberromanticism” emerged. As Streeter (2011) has argued, in the 1990s, “cyberspace” was envisioned as “an unknown space to be explored and thus available for any number of collective projections, particularly the frontier metaphor” (121): cyberspace emerged as “a new frontier to be conquered,” and open source can be interpreted as an anarchist “utopia” (2). As David Gunkel (2001) has argued, such a metaphor is not neutral but shapes and drives the use and implementation of the technology: “Cyberspace may be as much a product of technical innovation in hardware and software as it is the result of the discursive techniques by which it comes to be articulated, described, and debated” (32). The frontier metaphor not only evokes the Columbian voyages of discovery but also brings in the connotations of violence, power, hegemony, and colonization (15). The cowboy at the frontier is ethnocentric and exercises cultural power. But what interests me here is that the frontier metaphor is also very romantic. It evokes the spirit of invention and exploration. It is “seductive” (26). The metaphor invites us to explore the edge(s) of the world, to discover a new world, to go where no one has gone before.
As noted in the previous chapter, Neuromancer (Gibson 1984) can be seen as a romantic novel. It is dystopian, but the figure of the console cowboy is highly romantic (Streeter 2011, 123). The North American cowboy is a romantic myth, connected to the myth of the Wild West, which is about liberation from the Old World and about finding the wild. The cowboy finds a way to live with nature, far from civilization. He is a romantic hero located outside society, wandering and leading a rather solitary life, rejecting social norms. Similarly, the romantic cybercowboy explores a new world, a terra nova, and seeks freedom and a new kind of wilderness, in which he or she wanders as a solitary figure and deals with the raw forces in cyberspace. In addition, there is also the figure of the rebel and—typical for romanticism—the artist. In the 1990s, Internet users and programmers started to see themselves as artists or rebels (172).
Why artists? Let us look at this development in the light of the historical context sketched in the previous chapters. These romantic hackers were not only (computer) scientists and technical people; they could also be seen as the heirs of the arts and crafts movement. After the countercultural romantic turn in computing, hacking was no longer seen as something merely technical; it became a romantic craft, something for artists. As Coyne (1999) puts it: “Digital narratives also promote various computer crafts and those who practice them, much as nineteenth-century artists and intellectuals valorized the crafts of weaving and carving” (27). In other words, hackers and programmers became romantic artists. Individual genius becomes important, and independent creation becomes possible. Crafts can be done at home or in a small workshop. Similarly, programming can be done by an individual “author” who is part of small communities or workshops. It does not depend on automated and bureaucratic institutions; it requires creative individuals who pay attention to fine detail—very similar to, say, illuminating a manuscript (28) or indeed to the work William Morris did in the nineteenth century. The hacker becomes the romantic “free-thinking individual who is able to … give full scope to the creative spirit” (30). Instead of being associated with a boring, philistine identity, the programmer now finds herself crowned with the label of romantic artist—the total opposite. It becomes cool to be a nerd and a geek, to be obsessed with technology in a way that is remarkably similar to that of the mechanical romantics of the nineteenth century who fused romanticism and scientific-technological innovation. Morris starts tinkering with computers in his garage. Dr. Frankenstein is given money to set up a dot-com. Revolution is in the air, and this time the romantics write not poetry or novels to change the world but code. The imagination has turned to technology, and the romantic hero-genius has a degree in computer science.
It also helped romantic users that computers, now linked to the Internet, made computing experience a lot less predictable. The new cyberromanticism shared with nineteenth-century Romanticism an interest in the unknown. Computers became what Streeter calls “unpredictability machines,” which afford the romantic experience of surprise and unpredictability:
Most computer users have had the experience of getting absorbed in web surfing or programming and then finding themselves loosing track of the passage of time, and ending up in a place they had not intended. … Used interactively, computers can become, in a specific way, unpredictability machines. It is a limited unpredictability, to be sure, more akin to reading a story about a dangerous mountain climbing expedition than to actually being a participant. The safely enclosed experience, the limited unknowability, of web surfing or hacking can draw one in and then become articulated with the romantic value of being involved with something beyond the bounds of fully predictable, calculable rationality in which the initial intention is assumed to be fixed. The experience of drifting while interacting with a computer offers an experiential homology to the romantic sense of exploration, an experience of a self-shaping process that unfolds according to its own logic, that cannot be mapped to some external grid. (Streeter 2011, 172)
Like earlier romantics, 1990s Internet users could explore different worlds with their wonder and extraordinary creatures. This time, however, it was not the natural-magic world of Jules Verne or the space worlds of science fiction, but the wondrous virtual worlds and virtual realities created and explored online. Virtual worlds provide the romantic self with opportunities to explore different identities and to discover and be one’s authentic self. In a Rousseau-like fashion, the Internet promises worlds in which you can be yourself “against a duplicitous world in which you have to confirm to the expectations of others” (Coyne 1999, 5). It seems that you can withdraw from (offline) “society” and become yourself and make friends (and perhaps find love) in the online world. For many people, this was and is immensely liberating: it seems that one reaches freedom from social constraints and apparently also from bodily constraints. There is no need to take your loathsome mortal body with you; in cyberspace, your mind can wander freely. There is no need to be tied to your real-life social relations; you can have a different social identity and make new friends, who can be physically located anywhere on the planet. Unconstrained by social or physical limits, the user reaches a romantic-religious liberation. Thus, the user desires a kind of transcendence by technological means. Even the biological body is transcended, or so it seems: in true (neo-)Platonic fashion one is liberated from the constraints of the body, that repulsive prison. Case, the protagonist of Neuromancer (Gibson 1984), feels as if he is in “the prison of his own flesh” when his nervous system is damaged and he can no longer connect to the “matrix”:
For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. In the bars he’d frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh. (Gibson 1984, 6)
Entering cyberspace does not necessarily mean having no body whatsoever. One can create a new, digital body—an avatar—and become more authentic and free than in one’s daily existence where one is imprisoned in a body that may or may not suit one’s desired self.
Platonism and romanticism thus fuel new cyberpractices. Coyne (1999) correctly observes that cyberspace narratives “continue the trajectory of the Neoplatonists, … transformed through idealism, the romantic tradition, and technorationalism” (47). Through cybernetic rapture and ecstasies—states of being outside oneself—one can participate in “a unity beyond the multiplicity and individuation of the material realm” (47). By transcending the constraints of the body, one enters this other, more unified, whole reality (55). Romantics believe that reason alone cannot do this. They turn to feeling, imagination, intuition, and the unconscious. And to drugs and technology. Here information technology comes to aid of the Platonic romantic. Technology, sometimes combined with drugs, makes possible ecstasy and promises to fulfill the old dream of transcending the physical world (and reunite). In the 1990s, Internet technology and technomusic are new means of romantic liberation. The cybernaut (and the techno/drug user) is a neo-Platonic and romantic figure: she goes from the real, physical world to the virtual world, then goes “back to the world transformed, renewed, informed, and enlightened” (267). The Internet is a Platonic liberation tool, a transcendence machine.
Note that this romanticism is not confined to cyberspace, understood as a separate sphere, a different world one can escape to. It also mixes with the world of bodies and matter. In Escape Velocity (1996), Mark Dery describes cyber-subcultures at the end of the twentieth century: people dream of escaping their body and uploading their minds, cyberhippies use “smart drugs” that stimulate the central nervous system and cognitive enhancers to boost their brain power, and cyberpunk roboticists organize robot battles. Although in many of these subcultures, the computer is seen not only as an engine of liberation but also of repression (14)—cyberpunk also sees the darker side of computing and the Internet and many reject a return to arcadia—the rhetoric of liberation still plays an important role, as it did in the 1960s and 1970s. And if Platonic liberation is no longer on the menu, Dionysian forms of liberation are more popular than ever before. In the 1960s and 1970s, technology was used to perform Dionysian rites. Dery writes: “The archetypical hippie experience was not dancing naked in a field of daisies, but tripping at an acid rock concert. The psychedelic sound-and-light show was as much a technological as a Dionysian rite” (26). This Dionysian experience continued in the 1990s, but with other technological means. Dionysus now dwells in cyberspace or is honored in robotic dances and performances. There is cybersex and more fleshy and material forms of cyberculture such as the use of implants and sex machines. Dery interprets James Brown’s “Get Up (I Feel Like being a) Sex Machine” as follows: “He imagines himself a prosthetically enhanced satyr who retains enough of his humanity to be able to savor the pleasures of the flesh. Cyborged, Brown has the best of both worlds, thrilling to the fevers and ‘cold sweaths’ of human passion but performing with locomotive endurance” (173). Information technology is used for Dionysian liberation.
A more common experience of cyberspace was Platonic, and that involves a different, loftier kind of eros. As Michael Heim (1993) has argued, our fascination with computers is erotic. Reading Plato’s Symposium and the story of the cave in the Republic, he connects cyber-eros with the drive to extend ourselves. Eros, Heim explains, is not only about sex and physical extension but also about attaining Platonic knowledge of ideal forms; it is possible to ascend to something more spiritual and intellectual. If we manage to free ourselves from “the dungeon of the flesh,” we can process things “through mental logic” and move to higher truth. The cybernaut, Heim argues, is lost to this world, leaves the prison of the body, and “emerges in a world of digital sensation.” It is a modern form of Platonism, since Platonic forms are replaced by information. But the dream of information is still basically Platonic (86–89). At the end of Neuromancer, he observes, sex and personality are transformed into information:
The ultimate revenge of the information system comes when the system absorbs the very identity of the human personality, absorbing the opacity of the body, grinding the meat into information, and deriding erotic life by reducing it to a transparent play of puppets. In an ontological turnabout, the computer counterfeits the silent and private body from which mental life originated. The machinate mind disdainfully mocks the meat. (Heim 1993, 91)
With his interpretation of Neuromancer Heim shows the darker side of this Platonism. It is highly problematic, as I argue in the next chapter. But before criticizing it, it is important to understand the promise of liberation and the Eros that drives this Platonic-romantic vision. By supplanting physical space, cyberspace provides a liberation machine by which “the spirit migrates from the body to a world of total representation” (101), a world that Leibniz already dreamed of and is now realized, or so it seems. It is the dream of a mind without body. Moreover, as Heim rightly remarks, this is not only Platonism but also has a Gnostic aspect: we are imprisoned in the flesh, the body, the earth, but the virtual life may release us from this Fall and set us free. (102).1
Of course the rhetoric of liberation through technology is not new. As David Morley (2007) argues, the liberation discourse related to the Internet must be placed in the context of “the long history of dreams of liberation-through-technology”: these dreams are always inscribed in new technical forms: machines, electricity, and digitalization (8). Moreover, the dream of transcendence and liberation has roots not only in Plato; there is also a Christian version of it. As Wertheim argues, the yearning for a New Jerusalem, a Heavenly City, offers special appeal in times of decay and disintegration. And this, it seemed to some in the 1990s, is what cyberspace provides. She writes:
Just like the early Christians, [proselytizers of cyberspace] promise a transcendent haven—a utopian arena of equality, friendship, and power. Cyberspace is not a religious construct per se, but … one way of understanding this new digital domain is as an attempt to construct a technological substitute for the Christian space of Heaven … as a realm in which their souls would be freed from the failings of the flesh. (Wertheim 1999, 18)
Wertheim (1999) also points to the universalism inherent in the cyberspace vision: the Christian heaven was potentially open to everyone (24), and similarly everyone can hope for transcendence when entering cyberspace. There is a “promise of salvation for all” (24): everyone, at least those who can afford a computer and Internet access, can plug in (25). Wertheim remarks that there is something positive about this taking distance from the body: “the biasing baggage of a gendered, colored and aging body is hidden from view behind the screen” and hence cyberspace provides relief from “the relentless bodily scrutiny” and “the constant pressure to look good”; everyone is equal to the digital stream (25). Moreover, as medieval iconography shows, the promise of heaven is also the promise of the end of isolation and alienation, and similarly the Internet is “sold as a panacea that will fill the communal vacuum in our lives” (26) and offers forums for new meetings and relationships (27). Whether this really is what the Internet delivers, it is important to understand the promise of cyberspace, a promise with deep roots in Western religious history and culture, including age-old dualistic views about body and mind that continue to haunt our thinking (30).
Such ideas about transcendence and liberation from alienation, which themselves are of earlier lineage as they echo Plato, all kinds of ancient Eastern and Mediterranean cults and indeed Gnosticism, are not alien to romantics. Romantics also long for a home, a haven, and sometimes also liberation from the body. Nineteenth-century Romantic ideas were often (and still are) directly connected to imagery from the Christian tradition. In addition, cyberspace has other specific characteristics that may attract romantics. For instance, it is not a solid and static space, and it is not visible and located in the same way as material spaces are visible and located. It has no coordinates in Euclidean space. Wertheim says that it is “an emergent phenomena” (40). It seems nonmaterial. This is of interest to romantics. As I have shown in the previous chapters, they were always interested in the spiritual, in “ether,” and in electricity and other things that flow (see also Morley 2007, 325). The Internet and its streams of information are of course also very fluid and may invite discourse about the invisible and about spirits. Séances can now be done by means of a computer: cyberspace, as a nonmaterial space, presents itself as a realm of spirits.
Indeed, cyberspace and the new online worlds are also means of reenchantment: virtual worlds and worlds in video games become enchanted spaces, hosting all the magic and mystery, all the colorful figures of romantic fairy tales and gothic horror stories such as demons, elves, and ghosts, that is, all the weird and extraordinary, which daily, philistine life excludes. Medievalism surfaces again, especially in video games. Some are explicitly set in a virtual world designed to simulate the historical medieval world (which is, of course, always a construction); others borrow, transform, and mix medievalist imagery as it has been developed since the nineteenth century. There are also primitivism and technopaganism, which, for instance, combine the use of the computer with neopagan rituals and magical practices (Dery 1996, 51). Like anywhere else in human culture, there are many cultural hybrids—if not only cultural hybrids—in cyberromanticism. As in earlier romanticism, there is (re)mixing and the making of hybrids: “Medieval reality readily becomes entangled with myths of other eras and places, of frontier worlds, the Wild West, piracy, Celtic and Norse legends, the Orient, primitivism, the future, and now the constructions of cyberspace” (Coyne 1999, 36). If romantics want to go back to the past at all, it is a patchwork past, a romanticized remix, aimed at boosting reenchantment by using the newest technology.
The same can be said about the gothic and the grotesque. In cyberspace, we meet again the romantic-gothic dungeons and dragons; there is the digital grotesque and digital gothic. Not only Neuromancer has gothic elements; the romantic and the gothic are all over the Internet and the emerging digital culture—perhaps not everywhere but at least in many places. In many video games we find elements of romantic medievalism: “labyrinthine progression, hierarchies of place and status, irrational interventions through the forces of magic, powerful and irrational forces,” and so on (38). Some games are especially gothic: there are zombies and there is blood; there are dark forests, dragons, monsters, dungeons, graveyards, vampires, werewolves, and so on. In early video games, the setting of the dungeon was very popular. For instance, the traditional MUD (multiuser dungeon) is a role-playing video game set in a fantasy world populated by monsters and other fictional characters.2 (I say more about contemporary video games below.)
The new worlds can also be related to the concept and practice of carnival, with its disintegration from the everyday (37). People can do things in the online world that are otherwise (in the offline world) forbidden and explore darker sides of oneself. On the Internet, so it seemed, there is no longer repression and control. Coyne also mentions the surrealists: “computers (the Web, computer games, and electronic role playing) seem to provide ample opportunity to celebrate the marvelous, dreams, fantasy, and the labyrinthine” (193). Home pages of people were places where “individuals assert themselves as dreamers, free spirits, and fountainheads of original ideas that can at last be published to the world” (195). The World Wide Web became a space of romantic freedom.
Thus, in the 1990s, the Web itself becomes an extraordinary place full of magic and mystery: a place where everything may appear (or not), a place where everything is possible (or so it seemed). Moreover, the Internet does not only host gothic underworlds; it also becomes itself a mysterious and fascinating being, an entity on its own that might develop consciousness or something sublime and something living. In Understanding Media (1964), long before the Internet, McLuhan already explored the idea of a shared electronic consciousness:
Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions of man—the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society. (McLuhan 1964, 4)
In the 1990s, this “global embrace” seemed to become reality. Coyne (1999) writes: “In the electronic age, there is the expectation of ultimate participation in a united electronic consciousness in which we will all share” (65). Insofar as this “technology becoming alive” means a transgression of the dead/alive border, we meet again the gothic corpses that leave the grave, or Frankenstein’s monster that is made of dead parts but becomes alive. Dead matter becomes alive and spiritual. What was supposed to be merely material and technological becomes a conscious, living entity. If during the 1960s and 1970s counterculture, the romantic imagination was mainly living on drugs, now it was powered by computers. And filtered through the counterculture, it was inclusive: the idea was that everyone could participate in this world, and everyone could be creative, everyone could be the self she or he wants to be. Individuals would become liberated from everyday social networks, from existing political arrangements, and also from biological constraints. Internet was a space for escape and transformation—with an emphasis on escape.
However, as this remark about inclusion suggests, escape did not imply a lack of interest in social and political issues. On the contrary, the Internet as it emerged in the 1990s also included a romantic-social and romantic-political promise: “a utopia in which those unfair institutions are supplanted altogether by communities of free individuals working at computer consoles” (Streeter 2011, 141). Carnival is not only a place for the grotesque and escape from the everyday, as Coyne suggests; it is and has always been political. This is also true for the cybercarnival, which criticizes social positions and projects alternative social and political arrangements. The cybercarnival showed the possibility of a different world and a different way of living together. The Internet was meant to be a community of romantic selves that use it to be creative. It was meant not as an instrument to make money but as a tool to reach openness and decentralization. Profit and property are not (a necessary) part of this romantic vision, in which we are all free authors rather than profit-maximizing calculators. The Internet was meant to be the home of openness and anarchism, the habitat of “passionate artist-programmer communities freed from the chains of corporate constraint” (177). It was meant to be democratic. In other words, the Internet and the Web were linked with a particular kind of social and political utopia. They embodied the hope for a new and better world. Like many nineteenth-century romantics, those who invented the Internet at the end of the twentieth century coupled their technological dreams with a political, romantic-utopian vision of alternative social relations and political arrangements.
Moreover, as in earlier forms of romanticism, there was no perceived opposition between the social-political vision and the goal of personal transcendence and unity. Both were seen as intrinsically connected. As in nineteenth-century romanticism and twentieth-century counterculture, social-political liberation and liberation of the self were seen as two sides of the same coin. Coyne also links the two:
According to the narratives of electronic communities, we can rediscover the unity that is humankind through the immediacy of electronic communications, which provide access to the essential self, unencumbered by the distorting effects of physical appearance, social status, and the uneven access of social hierarchies. The romantic narrative presents the problematic as how to preserve the freedom of the net, how to maintain the spirit of its grass-roots, decentralized origins. (Coyne 1999, 271)
Note that there is and was not one romantic vision of the Internet. Some visions put more emphasis on the free individual, while others, influenced by McLuhan, emphasize the integrated whole. But, interestingly, romanticism is able to absorb both currents by putting the individual within a larger whole and history (e.g., the information revolution) and by emphasizing the heroic role of particular individuals in bringing about the conditions that led to the global network. Today we inherit this Internet and its romantic meanings and different social and political faces, this romantic Internet.
Of course, one may object to this romantic vision; there are many good reasons for criticizing it. For instance, Streeter argues that it obscures social context, and Coyne refers to the denial of ecology and labor (Coyne 1999, 68). One may also point out that the Internet we have today is not the open space its creators envisaged and is not really liberating in any sense described above (see also chapter 6). Coyne rightly remarks that the arts and crafts movement was “a bourgeois phenomenon,” which also seems true of cybertinkerers, that “the ‘cottage industries’ of software production” depend on hardware and other technology, and that small software producers are often dependent on large companies (43). He also helpfully presents “counternarratives” that point to “uneven levels of literacy and network access” and “the potential dystopian aspects of ubiquitous networks: alienation, distance, hegemony, substituting fleeting electronic encounters for being with one another—the full weight of critical theory“ (271). In the next sections and chapter, I discuss these criticisms further and also criticize the real/virtual assumption and the online/offline distinction. But my point here is that we need to discuss this vision and its romantic roots in order to better understand the contemporary Internet and its critics. Cyberromanticism is a myth, for sure, but one that continues to shape our technological practices (and vice versa). Because it is a myth, we should make it explicit, pay attention to it, and discuss it. Myths are important: they shape our society and technological practices (and vice versa).
That said, romanticism is not the only influence on contemporary technological culture. The Internet culture is shaped not only by romanticism but also by Enlightenment thinking. What Coyne (1999) calls “digital narratives” seem to combine Enlightenment and romanticism: rationalist technology and romantic visions, Enlightenment politics and romantic aspirations concerning authenticity and personal transcendence. It therefore seems more accurate to talk about a marriage of romanticism and Enlightenment. I return to this idea in later sections.
Finally, the line between romanticism and Enlightenment is not always very clear, and there are other oppositions and distinctions that are also useful to interpret the Internet and contemporary information and communication technologies (ICTs). Walter J. Ong, who also argued that the antithesis between romanticism and technology is illusory (Ong 1971), puts romanticism in the context of the opposition between oral and written culture (see also Black 2002, 133). Seen in this light, the Internet is part of a written culture and is born out of the printing press. As Black puts it:
Coming some three centuries after the invention of the mechanical press, romanticism was the mature cultural expression of the cumulative effects of Gutenberg’s breakthrough. Print technology allowed for an unprecedented capacity to compress, organize, and store data far superior to human memory. (Black 2002, 134)
Thus, the printing press has shaped our culture, and technologies such as the Internet are no exception. Enlightenment and Romanticism—historically and today—are then seen as having a common root: printing culture, which today takes the form of a digital culture. One may also argue that the current digital technologies make possible a more ora” culture. In The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), McLuhan suggests that in the electronic age, “we encounter new shapes and structures of human interdependence and of expression which are ‘oral’ in form” (3) and argues that today “written and oral experience” are “co-existent” (2). In Understanding Media (1964) he emphasizes the “tribal” character of these new forms. This gives us a wider perspective, reaching far beyond the boundary of modern culture. The Internet, then, is surely romantic. But it is also much more than that. It is a kaleidoscope with mirrors that enable us to examine a range of cultural-technological patterns, that is, examine modernity and ourselves. And surely what we see in these mirrors is not all romantic. There is also Enlightenment; there is also a broader writing and printing culture and perhaps a new oral culture.
However, in modern descriptions of cultural-technological phenomena, the romantic is never far away: McLuhan uses the term tribal (1964) and writes about “the African child” who lives in “the implicit, magical world of the resonant oral world” (1962, 22). These are romantic terms and images. By trying to gain back “the oral and magical dimensions of acoustic space” (70), the Western romantic wants to return to what is perceived as the magical world of the child and hopes to return to “Africa,” seen as the origin. The model and example for the romantic myth teller is the “original” myth teller of the oral tradition, who put his magic to work. And in McLuhan, we meet again “the oral and auditory world of the Middle Ages” (107), which has always attracted romantics. The hope of McLuhan and other cyberromantics is that the new technology can bring back the dramatic and magical orality of those lost cultures, feeding on the energy and spirituality of those original forms of enchantment.
Virtual Worlds, Fluid Identities, and Emotional Lives: Information, Alice in Wonderland, and the New Romantic Machine
If there are two worlds, a real one and a virtual one, there can be tensions between them and confusions. For instance, in the 1999 film The Matrix, it is not always clear in which world the protagonist is located. And as Gunkel has shown in his comments on the film in Thinking Otherwise (2007), sometimes the cyber–drug user3 is presented with a difficult choice: stay in Wonderland but live in a computer-generated fantasy, or choose reality and the (less enchanting) truth? In The Matrix, Neo chooses reality. But what if it is no longer clear what is real or virtual? This is a serious problem, at least from a Platonic point of view.
Moreover, what if there is no reality? What if there is only simulation? In the 1990s, the idea that the new technologies created a different, virtual reality that became confused with the real seemed to support the postmodern view, developed in the 1970s and 1980s, that there are only signifiers, that there is only language, and that there is only simulation (think, for instance, about Jean Baudrillard)—or at least that all boundaries are fluid. The subject itself disappears in the stream of information.
Although many postmodern writers celebrated this fluidity and disappearance, it was and is not always seen as a blessing and a pleasure. Sherry Turkle (1996), for example, remarks that “thinking about people as information also carries the serious risk of impoverishing our sense of the human” (265). This sounds like a “romantic” response to the problem: here Turkle seems to defend a humanism against what we may call an “informationalism” that tries to reduce us to information. But, one may object, surely information technologies make possible romantic experiences? How can romantics deal with this paradox?
The information society is indeed a two-edged sword for romantics. On the one hand, to reduce everything to information is the most antiromantic thing one can do: not only since it wipes out individual differences—something that is especially horrifying in eyes of postmodernist romantics—but also because it seems to promote an entirely antiromantic epistemology of knowledgeability and certainty. It is believed that everything can be turned into information and hence that everything can be knowable in principle. Black (2002) writes, “Information-based capitalism … murders sublime uncertainty in declaring everything knowable, a mere matter of accumulating the data and running the spreadsheets” (162). He recommends the sublime as an antidote to such “closure”:
The sublime tips the balance in favour of culture versus information by declaring some things unknowable, adding culture’s rich combination of fact and fiction to the experiential mix, and thus vastly contributing to the world’s enchantment again. Once the strategic value of the Kantian sublime, with its romantic pedigree and social nature, is admitted into the analysis, a different model of social totality is involved. This is a model of a romantic totality as radically open as the prevailing market model is closed, where the sublime represents the impossibility of its closure. (Black 2002, 162)
Yet as informational beings we are connected to a larger whole, the Internet itself appears as sublime (see also earlier in this chapter), and a world has emerged where there is more room for fantasy and romantic escape than ever before. We may live in an “information” age, but that information age is also highly romantic.
Within modern thinking, there seems to be no way of solving this paradox. The new technologies retain their Enlightenment, informational side in the way they work and in their “murderous” epistemological and social consequences, but they also have a Romantic aspect in their ecological nature and their liberating consequences for the self. Internet technology thus has a Janus face—a metaphor and a predicament that is itself highly romantic and gothic. Janus was the Roman god of beginnings and transitions, of gates, doors, and passages.4 We could use him as the symbol of romantic transitions. The face looks to the future and to the past; romantics are never in the present. The Internet, at least in the 1990s, is typically thought of as a kind of gateway and as a tool of transformation. Janus is about transition. The 1990s Internet offers portals. Internet surfing is a transitional practice. We are continuously “in transit.” Enabling a passage to cyberspace, the technology also takes us out of the present. Etymologically, the name Janus may also relate to chaos and openness. And the problem can be described as two-headed monster; the problem is a trap from which there is no escape.
Yet as already suggested previously, in the 1990s, the liberating, romantic effects of the Internet were stressed. We could use the Internet to go to another world and even to move to different selves. Indeed, the Internet also invited a postmodern interest in questions concerning fluid or multiple identities. Let us look at Turkle’s 1990s work on this identity issue and relate it to the problem concerning technology and romanticism.
The new spaces not only provided transitional spaces to explore strange new worlds; they also enabled people to experiment with identities. In the mid-1990s, Turkle (1996) uses a metaphor from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1872), the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, to describe the new function of the computer. In the novel, Alice wonders what is at the other side of the mirror (the looking-glass) and is surprised to find that she can step into an alternative world, where she finds an enchanted garden with flowers that can speak and all kinds of figures such as the Red King, the White Queen, Humpty Dumpty, the Lion, and the Unicorn. Turkle compares this wonderland experience to living in virtual worlds. The Internet is also such as a mirror, or looking-glass, through which we can explore different worlds and indeed ourselves:
We come to see ourselves differently as we catch sight of our images in the mirror of the machine. … A rapidly expanding system of networks, collectively known as the Internet, links millions of people in new spaces that are changing the way we think, the nature of our sexuality, the form of our communities, our very identities. … Most recently, the computer has become even more than tool and mirror. We are able to step through the looking glass. We are learning to live in virtual worlds. (Turkle 1996, 9)
Like Alice, when we enter the new, virtual world, we ask questions about the reality of that world. In the novel, Alice wonders what would happen if she would make a fire in the room: Would there also be fire and smoke in “that room,” or would it be fake? She says that it “may be only pretence, just to make it look as if they had a fire” (Carroll 1872, 20). But when she steps through the mirror, she finds “a real one” (21). Thus, there is a lot of similarity between the two worlds—except that the world she finds is more animated. The pictures on the wall are alive; the chess pieces are walking about (22). It is a place of wonder and feeling. It is a poetic world and—literally—an enchanted garden. There is a garden of flowers that are alive and can talk. Similarly, the Internet affords experiences of wonder (and horror); there are worlds in which poetry and feeling are at home—where indeed humans are at home—and these experiences are virtual and real at the same time. There is a blurring of boundaries, or at least what we may call the possibility of a transition. One can move from one world to another. We are in the world of Janus.
This blurring and transition also happens to identity. Turkle (1996) argues that the Internet enables people to construct their identity in what she calls a “culture of simulation,” which is in turn part of a larger cultural context: the postmodern story of “eroding boundaries between the real and the virtual, the animate and the inanimate, the unitary and the multiple self” (10). For instance, MUDs were places where “the self is multiple” (17); role playing enables us to explore different versions of our self. Generally the new media enable us to explore multiple identities. In Turkle’s interpretation, the Internet becomes a workshop for identity construction.
However, in contrast to what Turkle suggests and postmodern theory celebrates, in the early days of the Internet, the boundaries between real and virtual are not yet eroding. There is not much blurring of boundaries yet. There is mainly transition between worlds rather than eroding of boundaries. In the 1990s, the boundaries are still relatively stable. It is still clear that Alice is dreaming: at the end of the book, children lie in Wonderland, dreaming. Even if Carroll says, “Life, what is it but a dream?” the boundary between the real dream (life, reality) and the virtual dream (dreamlife, virtual reality) is clear enough to readers and indeed to Alice. In Alice in Wonderland, as in the 1990s cultural-technological world, Alice wakes up and is aware that she had a dream—even it was a “strange” and “curious” dream (and of course “wonderful”). When we read a book, we enter a different world, but then we reenter the real world. In the 1990s, when we use the Internet, we enter a virtual world; after this, we return to the real world. The Internet is a simulation machine; there is still a real world. Therefore, there are transitional stages and transitional moments, such as plugging in or waking up. There are transitional technologies, such as the “rabbit-hole” or all kinds of ways to enter cyberspace (e.g., portals). Janus has not yet been expelled. As long as there are different worlds, we need transitions. Here reenchantment applies to imagined and simulated other worlds; it does not yet enter the real, physical world.
Note that the creation and simulation of other worlds should not only be understood in terms of escape. Like earlier romantics, virtual reality enthusiasts also wanted a transformation of this world. Heim (1993) compares VR with the “spiritual quest” and “lofty aspiration” of the Holy Grail and Wagner’s “total work of art” (Gesamtkunstwerk) (124), a concept that in turn is influenced by Romantic ideas about syntheses of the arts, for instance, in the work of Novalis. The purpose of the Holy Grail or the Gesamtkunstwerk is not to escape but to change: the work of art is meant not to create another reality but transform this reality and this audience. (This sounds more like augmented reality than virtual reality; I return to this later in this chapter.)
But important for now is that this simulation function made computing much more romantic than previously. It became romantic in the sense of offering a different, enchanted reality and wondrous transition experiences, but also since it was more about human feeling. Computers were no longer calculating machines; in the 1970s and 1980s they became “personal computers.” In the 1990s, there is a further shift from “a culture of calculation toward a culture of simulation” (Turkle 1996, 19), which renders the image of a computer as a calculator indeed ”quaint and dated” (19). The computer thus became what we could call a “romantic machine”: a machine that was much more human and personal, and that was not to be contrasted with human feeling and identity, but instead became a tool to explore these feelings and identities—not altogether different from the nineteenth-century romantic novel. As true romantics, Turkle and others welcomed this.5
The computer also became a romantic machine in the sense that it enabled people to explore the boundaries between inanimate and animate, dead and alive, cultural and material, and so on. Romantics are plagued by ontological divisions, and postmodern romantics are especially annoyed with Western dualism. It seemed that the machine now finally could do what decades of postmodern writing largely failed to do since it was too much lost in language: crossing ontological boundaries. The new technology enabled experiments with transitions between inanimate and animate, between nonhuman and human. For instance, suddenly computers could speak! This boundary crossing reminds us of nineteenth-century romanticism: Mary Shelley also explored boundaries, and so did the romantic science of her day. The computer scientist of the 1990s becomes the new Dr. Frankenstein, who tries to animate what was supposed to remain inanimate, thus expelling the old image of the computer as a mechanical or, in any case, technical calculating device. Consider also the automata in Hoffmann’s story, who could speak and whose status was unclear. Turkle, however, does not link these “boundary negotiations” to (early) romanticism, but to “Freud and Darwin” who used “dreams and beasts” as “test objects” (22). As computers could do more human things; they seemed to become more “alive,” even if they were at the same time “dead,” mere machines. They were like Hoffmann’s Olimpia: a boundary-crossing object or, rather, more-than-an-object.
Thus, inspired by Turkle’s concept of “test objects,” we may reinterpret earlier Romantic science and science fiction as experimenting with objects such as monsters and robots in order to question boundaries. With its monsters and vampires, gothic fiction was especially good at exploring the alive/death boundaries. Turkle does not see these links, let alone the interesting ways in which romanticism and technology have been entangled in nineteenth-century science and indeed in twentieth century and today’s information technologies. Like many other interpreters of technology today, Turkle fails to see how both modernism and so-called postmodernism are already shaped by earlier forms of romanticism. The idea of exploring boundaries by imagining and using technologies is not new and was part of what nineteenth-century mechanical romanticism was all about. Instead, like so many other contemporary thinkers about technology, Turkle associates romanticism with a conservative attitude toward technology and a defensive attitude concerning boundaries. She writes:
A decade ago, people were often made nervous by the idea of thinking about computers in human terms. … This reaction … was romantic. I use this term to analogize our cultural response to computing to nineteenth century Romanticism. … Humans, it insists, have to be something very different from mere calculating machines. In the mid-1980s, this romantic reaction was met by a movement in computer science towards the research and design of increasingly “romantic machines.” … The researchers who worked on them said they sought a species of machine that would prove as unpredictable and undetermined as the human mind itself. … [People] have also begun to pursue a new set of boundary questions about things and people. After several decades of asking, “What does it mean to think?” the question at the end of the twentieth century is, “What does it mean to be alive?” We are positioned for yet another romantic reaction, this time emphasizing biology, physical embodiment, the question of whether an artefact can be a life. (Turkle 1996, 24–25)
These are great questions and helpful observations, albeit regrettably guided by a very limited and one-sided conception of romanticism. My use of the term romantic machines is different from and much broader than Turkle’s. In the previous chapters, I have drawn on recent romanticism scholarship to show that it is linked to a rich tradition in modern (and indeed postmodern) thinking and practice. While I appreciate the analogy Turkle draws between romanticism and contemporary cultural responses to computing, there is no good reason to limit “romanticism” to a defense of the human/nonhuman border or the alive/dead boundary. Of course romanticism includes such a conservative, perhaps even antitechnological stream. But as the historical part of this book has shown, it is much broader than that: as in the nineteenth century, it also includes the making of romantic machines and the aim of transformation through these machines. Today it includes asking new boundary questions through creating and testing new natural-technological artifacts/living things such as artificial tissue and genetically modified plants and animals, and new technologies such as robots that seem “alive.” Again, these questions, such as whether an artifact can be alive, are not entirely new; Shelley and others were already asking them at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Not only the cultural response (or a particular cultural response) is romantic; the very science and technology is romantic. “Romantic machines” is not only applicable to a particular kind of computers or to what particular types of “romantic” scientists want to make; we can conclude from the literature on the cultural history of computing that computing itself has become romantic. In the 1990s, computers, as they morphed into personal Internet machines, became romantic machines. Whether or not they became more “lifelike machines” (26), they became tools for romantic adventures in virtual worlds, romantic explorations of identity, and romantic boundary explorations.
Computers also became much more emotional and intimate. Turkle is known for studying that aspect of computing use. Again she enables us to identify the difference with earlier computing technology:
People explicitly turn to computers for experiences that they hope will change their ways of thinking or will affect their social and emotional lives. When people explore simulation games and fantasy worlds or log on to a community where they have virtual friends and lovers, they are not thinking of the computer as … an analytical engine. They are seeking out the computer as an intimate machine. (Turkle 1996, 26)
Indeed, presented with the chance to enter new, virtual worlds, people entered these worlds as social and emotional beings. They used the new worlds not to “calculate” but to have social and emotional experiences.
In The Second Self (1984) Turkle had already studied, by means of ethnography, how computers became part of our personal selves. As early as the 1980s, computers became more personal, more alive, closer to human identity and even love. The human spirit found a home in the computer culture. In her 2004 introduction, Turkle tells how she observed that many people in the computer world had “strong, even passionate relationships with digital machines,” that building and programming computers was “the most powerful intellectual and emotional experience of their lives” (1). The computer was “evocative”: in the 1970s and 1980s, computers were still “new and exciting” and evoked “strong feelings” including fear (19). In the 1980s this human spirit and this passion migrated from programmers to computer users. In the 1990s, computers became very much part of the human world, including the world of language. Today we take them for granted; Turkle even observes a certain “nonchalance” (3). And there are losses. Rather romantically (in her sense of the word), Turkle regrets that “the socially shared activity of computer programming and hardware tinkering has been displaced by playing games” (7); the pleasure of trying to understand computers is gone. (In the book, however, Turkle also presents a different picture of gaming; see the next section.) She narrates how transparent computers have been replaced by computers such as the Mac and cell phone, which are closed to users: “Culturally, the Macintosh carried the idea that it is more fruitful to explore the world of shifting surfaces than to embark on a search for mechanism, origins, and structure” (9). Indeed, today computers no longer appear as machines. They speak our language. They are more like us. But this humanization and romanticization of technology has flip side—a cost, if you wish. There is no longer a need for understanding the “mechanism, origins, and structure,” or so it seems. As I argue below, this means we no longer see them as machines at all, let alone that we are interested in their mechanism. Perhaps this means that part of the wonder is gone too, at least that kind of wonder associated with the mechanism. From what Turkle says, it seems that mechanical romanticism is dead. There is also no longer wonder concerning what used to be something new and exciting: a (desktop) computer. Most children are no longer surprised by computers in the way Turkle described in her study (33); they grow up with them. There is only nonchalance left. Or, as discussed in the previous pages, there is intimacy with the computer. (Later in this chapter I say more about Turkle’s argument that our current machines have become more intimate.)
But while generally our machines have become more intimate and human friendly, this intimation and humanization is no longer achieved within a conceptual and technological framework of simulation, especially if this means “virtual reality.” With the emergence of twenty-first-century information technologies, our language of different worlds and transitions has waned. The portals are gone. Technology is now much more entangled with human reality. We need a different vocabulary to describe these changes and these new human-technology relations. In the next sections and chapter, I argue that today our relation to ICTs is better captured by using other metaphors and concepts, such as that of the cyborg or that of “onlife” (Floridi 2014), concepts that suggest a merging of humans and their machines and make the real/virtual distinction obsolete. I argue that these metaphors also suggest different romantic dreams from the one of Alice and her mirror. That said, the romantic experiences, aspirations, and attitudes related to the 1990s world of the Internet and the computer as described by Coyne and Turkle have not completely disappeared and remain relevant in any study of contemporary technoromanticism, with its new romantic “test objects” such as robots and new romantic cultural-technological phenomena such as transhumanism, which retains a dualistic view of world and humans, and the Internet of things and augmented reality, which seem to aim at recreating Alice’s enchanted garden but one that is merged with reality: a romantic dream while being wide awake.
