A number of theorists have located the essential elements of the third wave of cybernetics in the bio-informatic movement of Artificial Life; the “female” flows, intensities, and turbulence of cyber-capitalism and the post-disciplinary “society of control;” or the fractal and viral stage of “fourth order” simulacra where “values” radiate in all directions with a cancerous virulence. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles identifies the transition from the second to the third wave in the surpassing of the principle of self-organization to that of evolutionary processes in lab-created unicellular life, robotic entities, or computer software “digital organisms” that lead to the sudden leap forward or surprises of emergence and mutation. The new life-form as a whole has properties not calculable by summing its parts nor predictable by following the steps preceding its origination. Artificial Life is a computational paradigm for biology and a biological paradigm for software engineering. The bio-informatic professional might be qualified in areas like immune system computing and genome programming. Self-replicating computer programs are said to be “alive,” according to Hayles, through the rhetoric of biological analogies regarding complex behavior, diversity regulation mechanisms, and their abundance of “interacting adaptive agents.” With Artificial Intelligence, human beings were still the measure for the techno-scientific project, since the stated goal was to build machines emulating human qualities. With Artificial Life, the goal is to “evolve intelligence within the machine through pathways found by the ‘creatures’ themselves.”
The “narrative” claim that self-evolving software is alive is associated with the ongoing redefinition of life in technoscience and the wider techno-culture. It is a strategy of self-promotion by prominent practitioners in the field who seek “to establish Artificial Life as a valid, significant, and exciting area of scientific research.” It is a self-fulfilling prophecy by way of the mutual influence between binary terms like virtual and real, information and embodiment, and nonliving and living that results in the “dumbing down” of each latter term. “Human intelligence is itself reconfigured in the image” of complex adaptive systemic behavior, processing speed, or decentralized android “perception and action.” For “computational universe” physicist Edward Fredkin, “reality is a software program run on a cosmic computer.” (Fredkin, “Digital Mechanics: An Information Process Based on Reversible Universal Cellular Automata”, in Physica D, 45) In this triumph of the formula and gaze into the real at the level of its smallest constituent units (John von Neumann’s cellular automata of elementary on-off switches), reality and life are defined by their information.
The material-discursive climate of techno-culture has reached the point where it is possible to make statements about silicon-based life-forms or software as a living organism, and it sounds reasonable. In the same way, it is possible and reasonable in science fiction-driven technoscience and the star trekking of science for physicists to adopt the rhetorical strategy of making claims about the realization of teleportation, time travel, and faster-than-light speed. These assertions are in effect true within the “language games” that have been established.
Artificial Life is a second instance of Life — but this time not on Earth. According to ALife luminary Christopher Langton of the Santa Fe Institute, “the evolutionary trajectory that did in fact occur on Earth is just one out of a vast ensemble of possible evolutionary trajectories.” (Christopher Langton, Artificial Life, MIT Press) There are infinite permutations of potential biologies. Evolution could be restarted, but this time with slightly different initial conditions. The celebrated “taking the next step of evolutionary intelligence” in the engineering of our robotic successor species is really a jumping out from evolution’s trajectory. It is humanity’s self-detachment from the real into the possibilistic realm of “all possible worlds” and “all possible life-forms,” played out on a computer. One can choose one’s rules, or remain in the abstract state of all possibilities continuing to be possible. For N. Katherine Hayles, a crucial component of the contemporary techno-cultural paradigm shift is the machine becoming the model for understanding who we are, thus transfiguring the human into the posthuman. But the computational fascination is more a dispersal than a model. It is the strange attractor of the universal machine and the infinitely recombinant. It implies the quintessential opposite of an ecological worldview that seeks to protect this life and this ecosystem on this planet.
From Entropy to Turbulence
In a brilliant article entitled “Heat-Death: Emergence and Control in Genetic Engineering and Artificial Life,” Luciana Parisi and Tiziana Terranova characterize the passage to the third order of cybernetics in terms of a techno-scientific rethinking of the relationship between useful information and entropy. In Norbert Wiener’s first order of cybernetics, information is defined in opposition to useless entropy conceived as randomness and noise. Second-order cybernetics is an intermediate phase that focuses on “autopoietic” or self-making systems preoccupied with their own perpetuation. It has no major impact on the re-conceptualization of the problem of entropy and uncertainty. In the third wave of cybernetics – or the contemporary technosciences of genetic engineering, complexity theory, molecular biology, and Artificial Life – there is a realization that entropy must become useful for work in the form of turbulence, chaos, and “female” flows. The second law of thermodynamics, conceived during the Industrial Age, stipulates that, in an isolated system, heat-energy dissipates and “useless” entropy increases with the arrow of time. “Thermodynamic” systems recharge themselves with energy from the outside, and discharge leftover energies and disorder as “refuse.” In the paradigm shift to hypermodern science, complexity and uncertainty must be rethought as productive.
Michel Foucault’s disciplinary society of the “molding of fluids into solid, hierarchical, and thermodynamic formations” gives way to Gilles Deleuze’s society of control, which is all about the management of flows. The interest in turbulence unleashes the potentiality of indefinite production and signification for the era of free-floating bio-cybernetic capitalism, with its global financial transactions and money circulation via electronic impulses. The disciplinary society is marked by confinement and separation; stress on inorganic processes and the movement of solids; the irreversibility of accumulation and expenditure sequences; the hierarchical organization of organs in the organism; and the primacy of the question of death and “the end.” The “homeostatic” body of the bounded self seeks stability and equilibrium. This male body constantly “shores itself up” with and against external stimuli, and discharges energy to stave off death. The post-disciplinary power described by Deleuze “operates in a space of flows;” emphasizes organic life and liquidity; and is deeply concerned with beginnings. The “turbulent, not in equilibrium” female body reappears noticeably in the society of control in its affinity with the molecular movements and relations of forces, and the material “composition of differential elements” and particles that define the origins of life. “Knowledge of the mechanics of fluids” is key to the elaboration of strategies of “management of the society of flows.” It is foundational to technosciences like genetic engineering and Artificial Life.
For Parisi and Terranova, Artificial Life is a laboratory for putting to work the turbulent machine of life, and developing “mechanisms of control which are adequate to the management of flows.” “ALife practitioners use simulations of biological life to formulate new strategies of control which are more adequate to the liquid space of informational capitalism.” Artificial Life is seminal and symptomatic of the wider techno-cultural absorption at this specific historical conjuncture with friction-free fluidity and the search for an original-operational definition of life. For third-wave cybernetics, “life does not tend towards entropy,” but rather towards fruitful complexity bearing the promise of the highly valuated surprises of emergence and mutation. Third-wave emergence takes the place of first-wave homeostasis and second-wave autopoiesis. The “unpredictable yet indefinitely mutating process” sought by Artificial Life opens up the vista of incalculable, “infinite production.” Whereas Mr. Spock’s logical, information-processing intelligence serves the project of warding off entropy and death, Seven of Nine is an unexpected birth within chaos and turbulence, embodying the hope for reverse cyborg resistance in the challenging duality of becoming human / Becoming-Borg.
An Undecidable Double-Strategy
Many of the modes and strategies of resistance claimed to be commensurate responses to the third order of cybernetics are not aware enough of their concordance and containment within an overall historical movement of advanced capitalist techno-culture. While their advocates are still fighting the last war, the system has already self-reformed in ways parallel to and appropriating of these practices. Performativity is too close to the floating logic of identities and differences. The subversive flow of energies is too near to the cyber-fluidity and infinite production generated by modulated chaos and turbulence. The rhizomatic metaphor is too similar to the virtuality and multiplicity of the web. Schizo-analysis is too proximate to the “out of control” system’s own schizophrenia. The lines of flight of discovering one’s own desiring-machine are adjacent to the ecstatic vectors of quotidian cyber-consumerism. At least this is one hypothesis. “Exactly what Deleuze and Guattari see as the answer may be merely subsumed within its doubling in late-capitalism and the production of simulacra — images of desire, reproduced and circulated electronically as nothing in themselves, merely to parade as the real. If postmodern desire is nothing but a massive poststructural sign-slide, then desire itself becomes simulation.” (M.W. Smith, Reading Simulacra, SUNY Press, 2001) The second hypothesis is that the strategies of desire are the best ones available and are truly radical. Which of the two hypotheses is correct? As in the quantum physics Uncertainty Principle, the answer is undecidable. These strategies are a necessary part of a double-movement. Also required are seductive engagements with “where people really are,” Trojan horse maneuvers, and the staging of outriding simulacra. There is an urgency for profiles of the cyborg in reversibility, and the nomad in reversion. We need cognizance of simulation and hyper-reality, and recognition of the otherness of objects and technologies.
Third-Order Computing Paradigm
Associated with the third wave of cybernetics is a new computing paradigm of Artificial Life or complex adaptive systems. Software is architected and designed in relation to organic principles of self-organization and evolution rather than non-organic structures and hierarchies. These life-based systems emphasize autonomous agents without a directing layer, strange attractors, and the appearance of emergent behaviors. They have the features of unpredictability, mutability, nonlinearity, rule diversity, fuzzy functionality, and chaotic instability. (Chris Lucas, “Complexity Philosophy as a Computing Paradigm”, talk presented at the “Self-Organising Systems Future Prospects for Computing” workshop held at UMIST Conference Centre, 1999) They tend to operate in a state of non-equilibrium that is “at the edge of chaos.” Data storage structures have non-discrete holistic forms and connections. Programming languages acquire self-modifying capabilities. Computing systems coinciding with the third order of cybernetics have properties affiliated with genetic algorithms, cellular automata, and neural networks. The hyper-dynamic software makes leaps to new “attractor structures” that can in turn mutate into yet further configurations.
Bug, Virus, Worm, Phage
One of the first uses of Artificial Life terminology to describe an aspect of computer software and networking was a laboratory occurrence recorded by pioneering U.S. Naval computer scientist Commodore Grace Murray Hopper, known as the “mother of the computer,” in her September 9, 1945 research diary. While still holding the rank of Lt. Junior Grade, the future co-inventor of the Y2K-bug-infested COBOL programming language was assigned to the Harvard University-IBM-Navy-Air Force Bureau of Ordinance Computation Laboratory Project, where she learned to write and debug code. On a late summer afternoon in Cambridge, MA just after the Second World War, Lt. Hopper and her colleagues discovered a dying moth caught in a multiplicational circuit relay of the Mark II Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator. One of the team’s hardware specialists removed the meddling insect with a pair of tweezers. It was put on display in the Naval Museum in Dahlgren, VA, and later in the National Smithsonian Institute Museum in Washington, D.C. In her Lieutenant’s Log (stardate unknown), Hopper wrote of the “first actual case of a bug being found.” She noted that the electromechanical digital computer had been “debugged.” (Fred Shapiro, “The First Bug: Exposing the Myth Behind the First Bug Reveals a Few Tales”, in Byte, 1994)
The term “bug” to designate an equipment problem or minor technical difficulty was employed by electrical and mechanical engineers as far back as the 1870s. But the humorous and graphically explicit Grace Hopper story upgrades the collective association of small anthropod organisms and flawed technology from imaginary or metaphorical to the status of semio-materially concrete (Haraway) and aesthetically hyper-real (Baudrillard). The legend of the “moth in the machine” inspires widespread use in general techno-cultural parlance, beyond its previously restricted currency in certain scientific-technical circles, of the word “bug” to refer to any defect in hardware or software. The apocryphal tale of the “real insect” in the electromechanical relay captures the transition from the law-based, bounded knowledge of the modernist scientist to the rule-dependent, borderless narrativity of “postmodernist” techno-culture. An application-oriented etymology is blind to this turn, and instead sees the inverse movement from engineering-general to computer-specific.
David Gerrold, author of The Original Series episode The Trouble With Tribbles and the novelization of The Next Generation’s pilot episode, Encounter at Farpoint, coined the term “virus” to refer to a damaging computer program that “self-replicates within a host” in his 1972 science fiction novel When H.A.R.L.I.E. Was One. “You know what a virus is, don’t you? The VIRUS program does the same thing.” Once a computer is infected with the destructive VIRUS agent, it methodically sends random strings of numbers to its multiplexed dial-out modems, incessantly trying to reach other guileless computers around the clock and globe. It then transmits its self-duplicating instructions which attach to and attack an operating system. VIRUS is a self-mutating, metabolically inert software. It became quickly autoimmune to the effects of the high-priced VACCINE “patch” that its human developer sold to the desperate victims of his nefarious vandalware. The second release edition of When H.A.R.L.I.E. Was One, reissued by Ballantine/Doubleday in 1988, self-erases, with anti-virus-like efficiency, the novel’s subplot about the VIRUS program (which was a cited SF story within an SF story).
In his 1975 dystopian SF novel The Shockwave Rider, about a national electronic information web that induces mass conformity, John Brunner introduced the term “worm.” A worm is a self-reproducing program that spreads like wildfire across computer networks, endlessly copying itself and eating up processor and disk space everywhere it extends. The data-gathering tapeworm is designed and given netlife by protagonist Nicholas Haflinger in an act of revenge against the powerful men who run the simulation-of-surveillance system. The auto-disseminating software releases secretive and classified information, normally available only to well-heeled elites, to ordinary citizens. “You have the biggest-ever worm loose in the net, and it automatically sabotages any attempt to monitor it… There’s never been a worm with that tough a head or that long a tail! Already it’s passed a billion bits and it’s still growing. It’s the exact inverse of a phage — whatever it takes in, it adds to itself… It can’t be killed. Not short of demolishing the net!”
Shortly after 6 PM on November 2, 1988, Robert Tappan Morris, a Cornell University computer science graduate student, inspired by Shockwave Rider and the architecture of its tapeworm program, unleashed the Great Worm. Morris’ criminal invention was a self-propagating parasitic Internet invader that interrupted U.S. government, military, university, and commercial online activities for weeks.
In the 1990s, viruses and worms became major topics of concern for personal computer users, network administrators, and security consultants. An industry of anti-virus software, shielding boot sectors and file systems, permanently updated and available for downloading in real-time, prospered. Virus protection services evolved into liveware, algorithmically evincing the same polymorphic flexibility as the harmful creatures which they pursued. Internet immunology and helminthology experts received board certification. A virus depended on some kind of user action, such as naive willingness to open an e-mail of unknown origin. A worm perpetuated itself automatically across interconnected virtual machines or distributed networks unguarded by firewalls. In 2028, two years after baseball great Harmon “Buck” Bokai broke Joe DiMaggio’s all-time record of hitting safely in 56 consecutive games, and two years before the birth of warp speed inventor Zefram Cochrane, the “phage” (short for bacteriophage) proved to be especially virulent in its rampant unsolicited modifying of database records and personalized-demographic profiles. The “mockingbird” chatterbot or daemonbot subgenus learns through adaptive evolution to intelligently mimic the knowledge pragmatics and “natural language” performativity of any netizen’s e-mail correspondents and virtual reality chat room interlocutors. The user is seduced into the gyratory dance of proxied affective lifestyle agents and emergent Artificial Life perceptrons believed to be “as good as real.”
For Baudrillard in The Transparency of Evil, the third order of cybernetics corresponds to what he calls the fractal or viral stage of fourth-order simulacra. In this post-simulation epistème or “epidemic of simulation,” value – if that term is still appropriate – radiates in all directions in a cancerous metastasis. There is “no relationship between cause and effect, merely viral relationships between one effect and another.” All spheres pass into their free-floating, excessive, and ecstatic form. There is a general promiscuity of sexuality without sex, politics without stakes, communication without sense, and information without truth. There is universal commutability of all terms. All processes operate in a void and proliferate for their own sake. The infinitely small repeats itself through mere propagation, contiguity, and chain reaction. Everything, even the most banal, is subject to aestheticization, made into a semiotic sign, or launched into the pure circulation of images.
It is an aleatory universe of eccentric and singular quantum effects, of perpetual appearances and disappearances. But there is, in this extreme situation, a way forward. Uncertainty is the order of the day, but it is always a dual – not plural or multiple – uncertainty. It is the moment of duality in uncertainty that is most interesting. For each event in radical uncertainty, there are two contradictory yet equally tenable hypotheses in a duel. In hypermodern science, it might be the measuring of the velocity and position of an electron, whether light is a wave or particle, or whether a certain variable in a complex systems process is a cause or an effect. To resolve the duality, David Deutsch’s many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics assumes a pre-existing parallel universe for each optional path of an “undecided” quantum particle! In media hyper-reality, the dual uncertainty might be the question of which candidate won the 2000 Presidential election, if an announced terrorist threat is “authentic,” or whether the official explanation or the “conspiracy theory” of September 11, 2001 is true. Both hypotheses regarding the “event” are sufficiently plausible and “true.” They are made “true” in simultaneity by the uncertainty field of government and news media discourse. Does the event have “reality” or do the images and signs that refer to it constitute its reality? A duel confrontation between these competing hypotheses must take place. It is a seemingly “impossible exchange” that must become possible again.
It is the reciprocal challenge and play of apparently contrary theses, of the thing and its opposite, subject and object, that provokes thought or creativity, writing or art. Radical uncertainty and impossible exchange must be sustained. In what seems to be chance or randomness, there is destiny or stakes. A certain otherness comes to us from elsewhere, from the world. We must open ourselves to it. I must confront and open myself to the other. In alterity, metamorphosis, becoming, the sovereign passion, and the assymetrical seduction, immovable positions loosen into “weak signs” that engage each other. There is the duel / dual relationship of challenge between life and death, good and evil, masculine and feminine. This playful and confrontational duality – between Kirk and Spock, human and Vulcan Spock, Spock and the Horta, Kirk and Finnegan, Kirk and the Gorn commander, Weak Kirk and Evil Kirk, Pike and Vina, Nancy Hedford and the Companion, Picard and Dathon, Data and Lore, android and human, Sisko and the wormhole aliens, Janeway and Seven of Nine, becoming human and Becoming-Borg – is, for me, the fascination and essence of Star Trek.
