exactly 4 years ago, one of the texts I wrote for one of the doctors that I ended up never really got started with a quote from Norbert Wiener, the father of a foundational concept of a whole way of understanding our relationship with technology. A concept that sounds like black screens today, MS-DOS and without metalinks web, but that made us dream so much and so nice. I mean cybernetics . I know, I am a romantic, coming to this now that it's really cool are the emergent phenomena is an anachronism. I do not (and also languages \u200b\u200bapart, the two are closely related).
Wiener
The reference to the text took a Xabier Barandiaran, who was a member of the deceased and unrepeatable Metabolik, laboratory Leioa hacker. Xabier also spoke of Donna Haraway, the cyborg theory, the architecture of information protocols and unavoidably political texture of computer code as a grammar as a system of signs. The text was titled "Digital Activism and telematics. Power in cyberspace. v.1.1 " and is still 100% recommended reading (and not just archaeological interest). I say this because the world of which I speak is no more, I have swallowed the two-point-zero, social networks and democratization (sic) access to technology, but what is said and wrote in those IRC channels and those mailing lists, it remains imperative to understand in some depth what we call knowledge society (and I advised that I was going to put old rock).
was expected but I was equally excited: Chapter 6 of "The Biotechnology Century "by Jeremy Rifkin is devoted to cybernetics and in particular the process of mimicry between the language of computers and biology. Both were created around the same time and inspired each other. If Internet, with its ramifications mutants and intelligences connected, so like a living system, it is because as a language of cybernetics emerged while modern theories on the functioning of organisms. The metaphors and the words used to explain both phenomena are contemporaneous.
In 1953, seven years after some engineers put up the first computer to work at the University of Pennsylvania, the ENIAC-Francios James Watson and Crick announced they had discovered the double helix of DNA, opening the door to the secrets of the inner world of biology. Metaphors and expressions taken from the new field of cybernetics and information science, still in its infancy, spoke of the helical nature of genes as a code programmed chemical information needed to decipher.
Rifkin seems to suggest that the influence was unilateral, the cybernetic language towards the biological. Personally I doubt it is impossible to know when accurate historical and generate an idea how to express it. I think more prudent to think that just two groups of concepts emerged at a time, influencing one another. In any case, from that moment when you begin to root the idea that reality is not a linear concatenation of causal events (a causes b) as previously thought since the Enlightenment but a dynamic interaction between changing elements. For the first time you start thinking the world as a set of integrated flow systems , which is exactly how living organisms function and computers.
For biology, this new semantic universe had a specific result, also from a semantic, but not only. Until then to describe the activity of organisms biologists speak of "behavior" but from the emergence of cybernetics began to speak of "performance." The difference is striking: it is not much to say that something behaves x "to say that" x is performing. " While behavior is a descriptive word, performance (which comes from engineering) is an evaluative term, which introduces a trial in terms of effectiveness.
Where do I go? At the root of Soft Power 'm reading many scientific papers. Of course, I do it from a perspective that is not the orthodox science of man but of cultural criticism. Science is convinced that her way of telling the world is absolutely objective. We know that no, that research projects are very costly and only for that reason, the decision of what is researched and what not, and in which direction (to test what things) is strongly influenced by sources of funding. If Bayer pays you, you better find something to sell, for instance idiot. We know that science, like all fields of knowledge, their historical, social, ideological.
But it is also the problem of language. We can only think what we can imagine and can only imagine from the system we already have representation. When I read scientific texts surprised me almost religious faith with which they use words such as whether a term may contain completely the reality to which it relates. It's a philosophical debate (and poetic) old, but apparently most scientists go about describing the world do not know. The problem is that scientists have much more power than the philosophers who, at best, end up teaching metaphysics or if they are lucky and very hard, writing a book they just read their peers.
Rifkin's book is fine as an introduction to biotech. Packed with information useful information on what is happening now in laboratories and on the genesis of the biotech-deterministic mindset. It only finds the man is a conservative who has the gall to mention even once to Donna Haraway, together with Wiener, another reference is the header to think the new cyborg. It's a shame. And now, I'm going to have a beer.
The picture is of Jon Mikel, the youngest participant of the workshop do it yourself cell engineering that made the subRosa in Soft Power.
For biology, this new semantic universe had a specific result, also from a semantic, but not only. Until then to describe the activity of organisms biologists speak of "behavior" but from the emergence of cybernetics began to speak of "performance." The difference is striking: it is not much to say that something behaves x "to say that" x is performing. " While behavior is a descriptive word, performance (which comes from engineering) is an evaluative term, which introduces a trial in terms of effectiveness.
Where do I go? At the root of Soft Power 'm reading many scientific papers. Of course, I do it from a perspective that is not the orthodox science of man but of cultural criticism. Science is convinced that her way of telling the world is absolutely objective. We know that no, that research projects are very costly and only for that reason, the decision of what is researched and what not, and in which direction (to test what things) is strongly influenced by sources of funding. If Bayer pays you, you better find something to sell, for instance idiot. We know that science, like all fields of knowledge, their historical, social, ideological.
But it is also the problem of language. We can only think what we can imagine and can only imagine from the system we already have representation. When I read scientific texts surprised me almost religious faith with which they use words such as whether a term may contain completely the reality to which it relates. It's a philosophical debate (and poetic) old, but apparently most scientists go about describing the world do not know. The problem is that scientists have much more power than the philosophers who, at best, end up teaching metaphysics or if they are lucky and very hard, writing a book they just read their peers.
Rifkin's book is fine as an introduction to biotech. Packed with information useful information on what is happening now in laboratories and on the genesis of the biotech-deterministic mindset. It only finds the man is a conservative who has the gall to mention even once to Donna Haraway, together with Wiener, another reference is the header to think the new cyborg. It's a shame. And now, I'm going to have a beer.
The picture is of Jon Mikel, the youngest participant of the workshop do it yourself cell engineering that made the subRosa in Soft Power.
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