FLOW

The Internet is a mechanism of late capitalism. In a digital, economic system the standards for labor and value have radically changed. Tiziana Terranova explains that monetary value comes from knowledge rather than labor and workers are valued for their knowledge work. The lines between work and leisure blur in a desire to be continuously producing subjects. On the Internet the desire to produce is linked by reciprocal movements between knowledge, labor, and culture embedded within the larger flows of the late capitalist system. This paper argues that the Internet is a structure that channels flows of information, making subjects possible through the experience of existing within a system that they voluntarily sustain and consume through free labor. One of the possibilities in this relationship is that workers have freedom and agency within such a confining system because of the voluntary nature of free labor. I am going to focus on the aspect of subculture combining Terranova’s argument, in “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy” (2000) with Tara McPherson’s article, “Reload: Liveness, Mobility, and the Web” (2005). The two articles agree with each other that flows of information structure the web and produce subjects, however Terranova’s argument opens up the possibility for freedom and agency within that system. 

The knowledge workers of subcultural movements maintain the Internet through voluntary, immaterial labor. Terranova explains that immaterial labor, or free labor, is work that determines culture, such as artwork, fashions, and tastes. In postindustrial societies, to be productive subjects one must engage in this work, although this work was not previously considered work in industrial societies. The conditions for immaterial labor involve a creative and open environment. The worker for a digital economy, Terranova notes, “achieves fulfillment through work and finds in her brain her own, unalienated means of production” (37). This culture of exchange encourages workers to continually engage with free labor since work flows interchangeably between its inception in an interior subculture and its absorption into exterior cultural trends.

The capitalist privileging of an individual worker’s knowledge plays towards the market desire for creative production. A subject voluntarily works due to the desire to produce. Such a desire is the fundamental well of production within capitalist economies. In capitalist economies, knowledge is considered collective. Terranova writes that workers of subcultural movements collectively produce knowledge that capitalism controversially channels into the system. Channeling of knowledge then becomes subsumed by larger cultural flows and is considered value for capitalism. The knowledge worker does not particularly realize that collective cultural labor produces capital. The productive activities of a collective group, for example a music blog where independent artists post their music, can then be taken up by capitalism. The free labor of posting independent music is exploited and collectively embraced by late capitalism as systems extract as much value as possible from this free flexible and collective labor.

The temporality of the Internet encourages collaboration among knowledge workers due to its specific flow of time that creates the illusion of coherency. While Terranova ignores the dimension of a workers experience of using the web, it becomes central for McPherson’s argument. McPherson terms this actual physical participation, the users’ sense of “volitional mobility” (202). Volitional mobility is the controlled liveness of the web that eludes choice for its users. The Internet, as a dynamic system, is in the realm of uncertainty, however its technological infrastructure produces a feeling of certainty. The fragmented postmodern subject is given the illusion of coherency through the experience and actions of surfing the web. McPherson describes the experience of using the mouse as “an expression of our movement and our will. We are increasingly aware of ourselves as databases, as part and parcel of the flow of information” (203). As part of the flows of information, the presentness, liveness, and mobility of the web become embodied in the user. The freedom and choice felt on the Internet’s “frenetic, scrolling now” (201) incites the user with a passion for agency, and thus creative production. This desire to creatively produce in a capitalist society is intertwined with the Internet’s temporality, forming a subject situated in a specific kind of subjectivity and network of capital.

The Internet is a cultural form sustained and supported by a two-way flow between the Internet and knowledge workers. While flow can be limited through blockages at the level of infrastructure - the limitations in current technology – these challenges inspire flow’s ability to adapt and relocate on new curvatures, infinitely inspiring creative production. The flexibility of the system allows for movement. As it is channeled into capitalism it becomes structured into that system as a form of monetary value. The work behind that subcultural movement, motivated by an individual consumer culture, then becomes part of the flows of capital. The subcultural movement becomes a fashion trend of the masses marked by the illusion of uniqueness and individuality. This transformation towards personalization, that McPherson describes, is like the transformation of oneself that the web promises. Flow on the Internet is crucial to think of in that it produces subjects, as well as, Terranova explains, renews ‘human intelligence’ capacity to reproduce. ‘Human intelligence,’ as a commodity value, is then connected to systems of identification of the consumer.

While Terranova describes the system of flow, McPherson writes about the users’ individual experience. Taking them together, we get a dual flow of identity and participation. The possibility of this system of identification allows for agency and freedom. Terranova explains how free labor both “sustains and exhausts” (51) the flow of capitalism. This sustaining and exhaustion gives the user agency since the knowledge worker is a consumer within the system, as much as a producer. McPherson sees the web as circulating flows of culture that are structured by the rhythm of the machine-like technology of the Internet. The limitations of that system allow for liberty in moving between the institution and autonomy; this experience of mobility inspires workers to feel the illusion of agency and freedom. Capitalism is a dynamic system that is dependent upon the vein-like system of flows that workers simultaneously flow from and support.

Helladildonics: The Shortcomings of Teledildonics and their Social Networking Sites

Ted Nelson coined the term “teledildonics” in 1974 to refer to a combination of technologies that allows users to feel presence and engage in sex at a distance. Two social networking websites, HighJoy and Sinulator, attempt to foster community among users of remotely manipulated sex toys. Each site sells essentially the same hardware: a dildo with various programmable spinning and vibrating functions; and a sheath that records the speed and pressure of that which thrusts into it. The many conceptual possibilities of teledildonics are impaired by the introduction of a mediating technology. The teledildo as a new media object fails as an integral part of an online sexual community, a facilitator of sex in all its emotional complexity, and as the enabler of a truly private act. This paper will first provide a history and account of teledildonics, including speculation about the reasons for its relative unpopularity; then, the paper will turn to an analysis of teledildonics in relation to its status as a new media object, user/technology interactions, and the conceptual issues of vulnerability, control, voyeurism, and surveillance.
HighJoy advertises itself as “online dating and social network” with “audio/video text chat capabilities.” An account provides access to the chat and message board, and includes a profile of one’s characteristics and preferences, public bulletins, friends, messages, and a private “backdoor” section. Even if the site were fully functional (it is not nearly), its features do not comprise a networked public by Daynah Boyd’s criteria. Limited publicity and searchability, not to mention barely operable software and shoddy web design, may account for HighJoy’s apparent unpopularity: scanty membership and minimal message board activity hardly encourage or demonstrate participation. There are few opportunities to even initiate dialogue (or sex) with anyone. Thus, strong ties that form social groups, and weak ties that attract those groups to one another, are nearly impossible to create.
Perhaps HighJoy is in a liminal state of existence, its growth stalled until the “perceived risks of adoption” of its technology and associated practices are lessened and its round of “first adopters” can attract critical “early adopters.” The ultimate obstacle to HighJoy’s success, therefore, is either that its first adopters are simply too deviant to draw attention to it, or that the sex toys themselves, crucial components to involvement in the HighJoy community, are prohibitively expensive for web users who are only casually curious. Users signed up only for a couple’s membership, allowing only a one-to-one connection between two partners, inhibit the growth of a community by severely limiting the possibility of weak ties and bridges to form. The unfamiliarity of teledildonic devices is evidenced by HighJoy’s small user population and the toys’ relatively steep price.
A closer look at the technology itself reveals a problematic “newness.” Teledildonics as a new media object are new because of their programmability and mobility. These devices, composed of rubber and plastic, attached to a computer wirelessly or through a USB cord, are a hybrid of cultural definitions of cybersex and a computer’s interpretation of how to simulate sex. The desire for cyberspace is the desire for a separation between flesh and mind. It is an escape from real life’s banalities and woes of the body. Donna Haraway in her “Cyborg Manifesto” explains this desirable no-place of mind that muddies the boundaries between mind and body, technology and humans, and the real and unreal. Cybersex differs from teledildonics—teledildonics introduces a physical object as a third term to the two-party interaction of cybersex. Teledildonic devices are new media objects that bridge the gap between real life and virtual reality.
The mediation of sex through virtually controlled objects is teledildonic technology’s attempt to produce the experience of sex in the symbolic space of cyberspace. Julian Dibbell in his essay, “Rape in Cyberspace,” describes an object oriented virtual reality of LambdaMOO (Multi-User Domain, Object Oriented). In this MOO, virtual reality meaning is found in the gap between real life and virtual reality. In order to participate in this disembodied world, the body becomes the mind. LambdaMOO’s exterior relationship to technology allows this disembodiment. Technology enables the existence of LambdaMOO, but it is indifferent to the system and the user. In contrast, teledildonics has an interior relationship to technology. Technology then is intrinsic to the communication and sexuality of teledildonics.
This changing relationship between the mind and body in relation to teledildonic devices is a two-way communication between users and devices. The software interface of HighJoy’s teledildonic devices demonstrates their primary existence as machines. The focus of interacting with a HighJoy-enabled toy’s interface is on the utility of the action—this reveals that the interface “does not stem from an aesthetic tradition, but from an engineering tradition”. Rather than allowing for—or requiring—the simulation of a penetrative sex act, HighJoy’s interface encourages a “mimetic model” simply of manipulating a vibrating sex toy. In short: this is not sex.
Users must have a certain degree of openness in order to participate with teledildonic devices and with another user. The body of the user is extremely vulnerable when using teledildonics. The physical nature of teledildonic devices implicates both the new media body and the biological body. The user’s body is split, a contested site of pleasure and fantasy. As in Thomas Keenan’s essay, “Windows of Vulnerability,” the open relationship described between windows and light is like the open relationship between users and computers. Windows that look out onto the world, rather than frame a scene, present a view from a distance. In our technological age, our windows are computer screens, framing an unbounded interiority that allows for information to come through, but at a distance from the user. Teledildonics works because of the distance between device/user and screen. Information is able to come through the computer screen and device; there is still the illusion of a private space because of this two-way interaction between users.
HighJoy.com has the capability to use tracking surveillance to monitor the frequency, duration, variety, and other aspects of user interaction for statistical information. Surveillance of this nature poses direct access to sexual activity (in user connections, chat conversations, profile information, etc.) that advances to define digital voyeurism by coding and decoding teledildonic commands.
In the parallel way that Philip Agre cites surveillance applicably shifting from the political to the commercial, the concept of teledildonics shifts surveillance to an ultra-personal form of capture, which goes beyond simple interpersonal verbal communication toward an interaction that translates the digital into the physical. Thus, by surveilling these objects’ keystroke commands over the HighJoy network, you are viewing a representation of physical action that someone is experiencing as sex, breaking the barrier between code and experience, and recontextualizing the act of intercourse.
Sex is not synecdochically definable by the argot of social conduct, unlike many social or public interpersonal communications. To design a realization of sex in digital language is to not only counter-intuitively dissect the act of sex itself, summing inconsequential parts of a climactic whole, but to purport that this distinctive act can be expressed through impersonal, digitized communication and recreated after limitless electronic mediation. This dissection represents a new form of capture that exceeds Agre’s epistemological and ontological definitions by requiring an arbitrative, evincive language that facilitates both the execution and memory of teledildonic interactions . Yet with this coded language of teledildonics, what then are the implications of being able to track, surveil, and ultimately capture a digital act of intimacy?
While voyeurism and surveillance, embodiment and isolation are in play across multiple virtual contexts, teledildonics specifically poses them in the framework of the most intimate entanglement of bodies and technologies. It is therefore a valuable site for articulating the contradictions and complications of cyberspace more generally. Howard Rheingold saw dildonics as a form of communication rather than just a physical act. The social networks that enable teledildonics fail in their communicative aspects. The hardware and software acknowledges that this new form of sexual communication through a synthetic object is a vulnerable act. The new media body is a disembodied body that interacts in virtual space with a program and device it does not control. Therefore, the failure of teledildonics lies in illusion: an illusion of community, sexually traversable distance, and ultimate privacy on the Internet.

Megan Goetsch, Michael Fruta, Steve Hall

Navigable Space and Its Participants

Today many people find themselves sitting in the dark behind the glow of a television or computer screen for countless hours navigating through the space of a video game or the internet. Lev Manovich describes this navigation through virtual space as a form of new media. As a form of media there is a user and an interface, for example in the virtual navigable space of video games like Doom and Myst. Baudrillard looks at theme parks, such as Disneyland, to discuss physically simulated virtual spaces. This paper will examine the analogous relationship for the participant in each of these virtual spaces. Specifically how both of these weightless, simulated spaces are determined by the individual trajectories of its users.

First this paper will look at Manovich’s formulation of navigable space as a new media that splits a user. Next will follow a discussion of Baudrillard’s theory on Disneyland concerning a physically divided visitor of virtual space. These two theories of virtual space come together on the topics of usership and incoherent space. In virtual space, the user works and plays at creating a coherent subject for which our fragmented reality does not offer.

Navigable space makes the category of space a form of new media. Manovich describes new media as “graphics, moving images, sounds, shapes, and texts that have become computable; that is, they comprise simply another set of computer data.”[i] As a form of new media, navigable or virtual space calls for the user to experience or operate space. However, that user’s doing of space splits the viewer between his or her avatar in Myst and his or her corporeal being holding the mouse. In Myst we move through various activities granting us into higher levels, while in Doom the player is able to manipulate and build upon the system. These tactile activities create a haptic space within the video game as the player holds the mouse and plays.

While obviously Baudrillard’s discussion of Disneyland concerns a physical virtual space, his points resonate with Manovich’s video gamer. A similar experience occurs with visitors to theme parks. Upon entering the gates of the park, the participant leaves behind him or herself in reality and becomes a character absorbed by the reality constructed around them. Baudrillard writes about how Disneyland is an imaginary, a play of illusions about American space: “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation.”[ii] The visitor to Disneyland takes on the reality of a subject in America, thus enforcing actual subjectivity outside of Disneyland. Yet the exterior subjectivity has become a form of hyperreality or a simulation of reality that appears more real than reality.

These two theorists come together over the dividedness of usership in these virtual spaces. In theme parks there is a physical distinction between the outside and the inside, the visitor enters and leaves the park grounds. In video games or virtual space the player is abstractly outside of reality, and therefore the player internalizes the reality of the simulation in his or her play. This internalization of the virtual is our “virtual mobilized gaze,”[iii] in the words of Anne Friedberg. This mobile gaze formulates that the work done online or in Myst, as navigators, produces space. Baudrillard would consider this an effort to create a coherent totality for which reality does not offer. Disneyland does not offer a real totalized space, as much as the separate levels of Doom. No matter how actively the participant engages that space, he or she is only navigating through a set of discrete objects or levels.

Another point of contact is that both theorists see space as no longer a coherent totality. To make up for this failure in coherency and this split subjectivity, the player in virtual space becomes the event of the game or the park. In virtual games, the player accesses information through the tool of individual navigation. This personal visualizing of information is necessary for the game to continue. Space is no longer systematic and coherent space of the past.  In the dense matrix of objects that radiate isotropically in navigable space, the player chooses how to manage his or her space. In this sense, Manovich’s navigable space is a non-space similar to Baudrillard’s simulation. Simulation, for Baudrillard, is a real that is not real, that is not even representative or modeled after a real, but a set of referentials. The navigator builds and alters reality by choosing his or her own trajectory through sets of discrete objects. The player never and controls the game, but believes otherwise during navigation of those referential objects of reality.

When the game turns off, the internet browser closed, or the theme park gates locked, the user’s trajectory ends and returns back to reality. The split user is left fragmented between reality and hyperreality. However, navigable space is not a closed system, but an open network, a matrix of freedom and control. Since we decide our personal trajectories and space forms around that course, our inbetween state is relieved in navigable space. Although it does not piece together reality for us and may be a mere distraction, in navigable space we play at coherent subjectivity and get a break from our broken identities.

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[i] Manovich, Lev. “Navigable Space.” The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2001. Pg 20.

[ii] Baudrillard, Jean. “The Precession of Simulacra.” Simulacra and Simulation. Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1994. Pg 12.

[iii] Manovich, Pg 274.

Complicity in an Age of Simulacra

This blog entry is an exercise in decomposing a text using Barthes method described in pages 1-29 of S/Z.

Barthes’ method for deconstructing a text is described “in the cinematographic sense” (12) implying the dynamic, visual practice of such a decomposition. With slow motion, in a step-by-step practice, Barthes seeks the renewal of multiple entrances into the text (called stars). These stars systematically digress and reverse the structure, code, or order of writing by highlighting specific units of reading or blocks of signification, also known as lexias. Barthes’ method is poststructuralist in its rethinking of subjectivity and the space of a text. It allows the text to be plural and denies the naturalness that glosses the classic text with its single origin of meaning. This method is focused on the play with codes that structure text.

The passage to be broken down is the third passage from Stuart Moulthrop’s essay “You Say You Want A Revolution? Hypertext And The Laws Of Media.” 

The title is fitting for this essay because it explores the subjectivity, freedom, and control within hypertext. It calls for the rethinking of the space that we experience and live within. Although The Beatles were singing to the revolutionary sixties-youth generation, in the context of hypertext Moulthrop is calling for a similar radical or oppositional action that will transform the space of hypertext.

The passage is of interest because it discusses the ideological consequences of complicity with hyperreality.

Those ideological consequences stem from the connotation of complicity: collusion or involvement with something, often in relation to an illegal activity. This connotation is in fact a reversal of how society views technology because it highlights a conscious relationship with technology. In reality technology is transparent and we are unconscious to our relationship with it. Moulthrop is questioning our shady involvement to bring forth a more conscious knowledge of how technologies work upon us.

In order to break down and open up this concern in the text, I will enter the text through the word “patina.”

Barthes method into the text is through connotation, otherwise known as the namable trace of a certain plural of the text. Since all actions are culturally coded, I found it fitting to use a personal trace I found in the text that relates to my own experience with the text.

“Patina” is found in the line: “A patina of thought, of signifiers, of ‘connections,’ now lies on everything the mind touches in its Gnostic(noo)sphere…”. I chose this entry point because while reading the text the word patina referenced Frederic Jameson’s comments on Andy Warhol’s painting “Diamond Dust Shoes.” From this personal nodal point, I will seek to open up a “stereographic space” for the passage to exist within.

Stereographic space described by Barthes is a space where the origin of a text has been lost within the already written and the codes of writing converge. For a hypertext, stereographic space is the convergence of visual and cultural reference points from the text, as this blog entry attempts to display.

THESIS: Although Moulthrop sees ideological consequences with our complicity with technology, I will work to prove that our complicity allows for creativity within the system. To prove this point, I will use Barthes’ step-by-step method of starring a text. This method breaks down Moulthrop’s third passage in order to explore and expose the hypertextuality of text and the possibilities such a structure has when one plays within the system.

My analysis will work on two levels: the meta-textual (looking back onto my method of analysis in relation to classic essay form) and the hypertextual (the substance and examples to support my analysis through the blog form). The above introduction is in a broke down textual essay form. The course of the essay will follow passage 3 of Moulthrop’s essay. The next section is the work to prove my thesis using references, Barthes, and Moulthrop, however I will use hypertext as opposed to textual essay form. The conclusion to my essay is both a closing and opening due to the complex nature of hypertext.

Disclaimer: I must take a moment here to discuss my relationship to technology. Complicity with technology is undone when the user fails. In this text, the moments where the technology fails displays my own limitations within the structure of the blog. My personal interest in the patina of thought within Moulthrop's passage comes from this idea that my relation to and use of technology is itself worn down by my own inability. Patina allows for a coherent unity with the code of technology because I can explore the issues of surface, duration, and materiality within technology. Below I explore these technological and cultural patins that I found in Moulthrop's text.

PATINA OF THOUGHT

My work of starring must begin by discussing the immanence and innocence of text in both Barthes and Moulthrop. Moulthrop quotes Ihab Hassan: “ 'immanence' or the intertextuality of all life. A patina of thought, of signifiers, of ‘connections,’ now lies on everything the mind touches in its Gnostic(noo)sphere…”(172). This quote comes from his book “ The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture.” Hassan, an Egyptian literary theorist, is bringing forth the crucial issue with text and hypertextuality: the innocent nature of the inherent correlations within text. For Barthes, intertextuality is connotation – both the starting point of code and the point where the plurality of the text can be released. For Moulthrop, in hypertext this immanence is the all-encompassing engagement the user has with technology based upon technologies functionality and usefulness. The relationship between technology and user awards the innocent or neutral gloss to technology. This gloss is also a way to interrupt that mythical belief. A user's every action is coded by it the structures of technology, but the user operates within the text. If the user plays with the code, as if in a game, then the structure starts to reverse itself. Our complicity with the code allows for this play.

Patina is the visible structure of the code and hypertext is the code beneath that gloss. I have an image of my notes structuring this essay because these are the hypertext of my thoughts, glossed over by the textual essay form of this blog entry.

Intertextual connections are at the same time everywhere and nowhere.

Looking at Jameson’s analysis of Andy Warhol’s painting, “Diamond Dust Shoes,” delves into what the patina of a medium does to the observer or user of the code. Although this example is in the realm of visual art it brings forth the issue of viewership with hypertext and the materiality of technologies interface. Jameson is discussing the death of the object world in the postmodern era since Warhol’s "Diamond Dust Shoes" have the deathly quality of commodity fetishism in late capitalism. The diamond dust or patina produces an image that can be only read as a set of texts or simulacra. The shoes have no originals and the Diamond Dust shimmers over this deathly substratum of Warhol’s photographic image.

 Nature has been lost and as viewers we replace it with an attractive decorative gloss. Warhol’s shoes are a set of dead objects, a set of texts used to produce a spatio-temporal position for us as viewers. As postmodern viewers we comply with the gloss of the interface because the reality behind it cannot be imagined or we do not wish to imagine it.

This reading has brought up three important places to explore within Moulthrop’s piece in relation to complicity: how the patina or gloss of the interface structures codes that makes up technology (if this is true, then how is our interaction with technology coded?), the fact that all units of meaning are simulacra (what is meaning?), and the empty or deadness’ of these structures that highlight our fears of complying with technology.

 The postmodern condition calls for us to play within the system.

The naturalizing gloss over technology must be “manhandled” or interrupted as Barthes describes in order to find the plurality of a text. As users or readers we must play with the shifting and repeating signifiers of the text in order to reveal and reverse the structure of code. The debate on media art is interesting to look at in relation to the diamond dust of technology. One side defines media art as the creation of new codes or severe manipulation of existing codes that reveal the glossed over hypertext. For example the Whitney Biennial Exhibit “CODeDoc” from 2002 is described as a “reverse look at ‘software art.’” On the other side is the “remix” generation that finds abstracting and reorganizing already existing codes as media art. For example the debated work of mash-up musicians, seen on blogs and sites such as www.bootiesf.com. This debate questions the status of using versus creating code in order to critique the system. Here lies the question of originality in the system. For Barthes, any denial of naturalness or interruption of the system is the work of starring a text. What we must question now is Michael Heim’s point: “[in]magnetic code there are no originals.”

The meaning we gather from text is simulacra. Postmodern space Hassan describes as the “Gnostic(noo)sphere” (or in other words an esoteric space of nothingness) that meaning disseminates from. As Moulthrop says technology can quickly transmit, duplicate, and assemble new knowledge structures from these simulacra. Although the structure may be new, it is not original. We experience nostalgia for the past in our current reality. This nostalgia is powerful and lets interfaces gloss over the code that defines them. The immediacy of knowledge transmits non-original, empty meaning that we believe as reality. Moulthrop calls this the “infinitely convoluted system of discourse.”

Looking at the music video “Star Guitar” by musician Shinichi Osawa explores the creation of new knowledge structures from duplicates and the viewer’s experience receiving those new, remixed images. Musically, Osawa is remixing two other artists, Au Revior Simone and The Chemical Brothers, with electronic music technology. Visually, the video displays infinitely multiple and duplicating images that follow the beat of the music. Every element has been abstracted and remixed from other originals. Our viewing experience is lost within the structure of this cinematic, all-encompassing, coded space.

Moulthrop finds this experience with technology critically depressing because of the confusing space of subjectivity and individuality within the system where we are complicit with technology. Moulthrop worries that as users we will become servants to the machine, hopelessly abandoned to simulation. 

 

It is the anxiety that Jameson discusses in relation to the death quality of objects in Warhol’s “Diamond Dust Shoes.” The idea that all meaning, interaction, and knowledge is from an empty mirror, only ever looking back at the viewer. It is the danger of never finding our individuality again, but only the simulacra of our subjectivity.

This point is shown in the video “The Machine is Using Us.” This video displays all that has been discussed above: the play within the system allowed by and limited by our compliancy with technology. This video hits at our ability to be creative and play within technology as it repeatedly points to the places within normal interactions on the web users are able to view the framework behind the interface. The play with hypertextual writing within various well-known interfaces accompanied by electronic music signifies a progression or journey through the complexity of the web. However, it is a journey we are able to take if we play technologies game. The title however breaks this feeling of the power within the web by bringing the viewer back to his or her fear that in fact these possibilities are using us since we are users of them. Such a reversal between viewing experience and connotation of the machine describes Moulthrop’s anxieties and fear of our complicity.

Moulthrop’s reference to Baudrillard opens up the stereographic space to bring the text back together with its opening argument on complicity. Quoting Baudrillard brings to mind simulacra, simulation, and counterfeits. These references refer to the core of the ideological consequences with complicity: the fact that all has become simulacra. Baudrillard’s quote, from Simulation, describes the totalizing space of technology, illuminated and dynamic, where Moulthrop understands the postmodern user to be lost. Baudrillard’s cites the theater to explore the possibility of this totalizing space as a space for users to play with technology. Just as Barthes writes about the best possible space to observe the multiple meanings of the text, Baudrillard is calling for a stereographic space.

Interestingly Moulthrop connects back to literature at the end of passage 3 by referencing a famous Shakespearian quote from the play As You Like It Act 2, scene 7, 139-143. By referencing literature, Moulthrop is citing the literary theory of a single text. However, the plurality of that quote comes forth from Barthes method. 

The actual quote is:

“All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts…”

While Moulthrop flips this classic text into hyperreality with his version: “If all the world’s a simulation, then we are but simulacral subjects cycling through our various iterations, incapable of any “radical” or “oppositional” action that would transform the techno-social matrix.” Moulthrop is critical of complicity with technology and so his call back to literature appears a nostalgic move towards the innocence of reading. In that harking back, Moulthrop creates just the stereographic space where users become actors, acting out various roles within a complex space defined by a code or language game. Yet the idea that as users we are nothing, but simulacra ourselves is what worries Moulthrop about this stereographic space.

This worry brought me back to a photographic project I did a few years ago referencing Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled Film Stills” series. This project was my first attempt at self-portraiture and became a project of making myself into simulacra. Cindy Sherman’s work depects film stills without an actual origin movie. My acting out of her acting out is an example of the “precession of simulacra” that Baudrillard believed defined our modern age.  Barthes would argue it reveals that “the code is a perspective of quotations” (20). The work of systematically digressing the reading of my project brings forth the code that structures the form of my own subjectivity.

GLOSS – STRUCTURE OF CODE

GREAT RISKS – DEATH, EMPTINESS

MEANING IN POSTMODERNITY – SIMULACRA

POSSIBILITY: EXPERIENCE WITH WORLD

I would like to end this exploration into hypertextuality and the ideological consequences of complicity with technology with the idea of subjectivity based on affinity. Our subjectivity may no longer be secured because it is in constant movement. Barthes called for this movement and play in order to get at the plurality of texts. The technology constrains us within its code, but leaves us free to play within that structure. The creation of knowledge and creativity has not been lost to the code, but as users we reveal that those very things are coded by the structure. As much as we use the machine, the machine uses us, and so we cycle through the system. Moulthrop's third passage opens with the question it closes with - the problem of simulacra. As a passage within an essay, Barthes method of reading has explored the circulation and repetition of this signifier in the text. As with our experience in the world where work never comes to an end, this ending leaves off with space for further questions or interpretation, but I will close it here. 

Moulthrop's Passage 3

This problem of complicity grows especially acute where media and technologies are concerned. 

Hyperreality is as much a matter of writing practice as it is of textual theory: as Michael Heim points out, "[i]n magnetic code there are no originals" (162). 

Electronic information may be rapidly duplicated, transmitted, and assembled into new knowledge structures. 

From word processing to interactive multimedia, postmodern communication systems accentuate what Ihab Hassan calls "immanence" or "the intertextuality of all life. 

A patina of thought, of signifiers, of 'connections,' now lies on everything the mind touches in its Gnostic (noo)sphere. . . ." (172). 

Faced with this infinitely convoluted system of discourse, we risk falling into technological abjection, a sense of being hopelessly abandoned to simulation, lost in "the technico-luminous cinematic space of total spatio-dynamic theatre" (Baudrillard, _Simulations_ 139). 

If all the world's a simulation, then we are but simulacral subjects cycling through our various iterations, incapable of any "radical "or "oppositional" action that would transform the techno-social matrix.