Life, the Universe, and Everything

Naturally, reading about cybernetics and STS and the like reminds me of two rather famous works of science fiction: Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, and William Gibson’s Neuromancer. In the former – spoiler alert, I suppose – it’s revealed that the Earth was specifically constructed by a supercomputer to discern the Question that results in the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything (which is, of course, 42). Unfortunately, in an act of galactic eminent domain, the Earth is demolished to make way for an interstellar superhighway just before that computation was completed.

Since I first read those books as a teenager, I’ve always liked the idea that everything in the world is working unknowingly as part of some vast, impossibly complicated computer. It’s an obvious metaphor, but an appropriate one, I suppose, as we collectively endeavor to learn more and more about, well, Life, the Universe, and Everything. That we’ve recently enlisted our own supercomputers to aid us in that pursuit seems only natural. And as we rely more and more on technology to facilitate everyday tasks, Boczkowski’s analysis of STS, viewing developments in social and technological arenas as interrelated, seems to resonate with the notion of communally striving towards new and more immediate modes of communicating and understanding. Thus, Wiener’s ideas about feedback loops, self-correcting models of behavior, are a more technically-oriented way of saying humans, and the machines we design, learn through trial and error, making advancements through hiccups and small jumps, striving towards some perfect, though perhaps unattainable solution.

In that second book, Neuromancer, Gibson describes cyberspace as a “consensual hallucination,” and in the novel it is literally that: a trippy non-dimensional netherworld full of neon geometry. But in many ways, that description is apt for most forms of communication, even language at its most basic: a shared vision of something not rooted in reality, like words. In that sense, I’d argue that thinking about humans and technology as an “integrated system” (or, to use the phrase from the title of the Hayles book, to think of us as “post-humans”) is merely an extension of previous ways of thinking. Humans have always defined ourselves by our invention and tool-use – not that those necessarily separate us from other animals – and thinking of the two as a complex system is simply to think about humanity as we always have; only the vocabulary, the types of tools, have really changed.