The entire virtual life of societies in which postcapitalist conditions of seduction prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of software instances. Everything that was previously either venerated or rejected in the fixated mirror stage by the ideologically constituted ego as fetish system of commodities, structurally sustaining panoply of consumer objects, or imposing spectacle of images has dissolved away into an uncharted virtual reality of the real time instantiation (or permutable, momentary actualization) of modeled and coded, flexible, extensible, beautiful software “objects.” My investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a software instance, and the process of instantiation into an (objectless) “object” (little unit of distributed artificial intelligence) of what is known in the theory and cultural practice of object-oriented programming as a software class.
Object technology today embraces everything from object-oriented languages and engineering methods, object-oriented databases, and distributed communications middleware for the Object Web (standardized CORBA / Java or Microsoft’s Component Object Model) to the Unified Modeling Language project spearheaded by Rational Software Corp., integrated development environments for building Windows applications like Delphi and Visual C++, moving world 3D graphics authoring systems, and advanced MIT Media Lab research in AI, nanowearable computing, autonomous agents, and artificial life.
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