A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things they have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.
Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
The first thing you will notice is the light. The fluorescent banks in the high ceiling are dimmed, so the light at eye level is dominated by the glowing screens set at intervals throughout the cavernous room. There are no windows, so the bandwidths have that cold otherworldly truncation. Surfaces are in muted tones and mat colors, dampening unwanted reflections. Some of the screens flicker with strings of digits the color and periodicity of traffic lights, but most beam the standard Day-Glo palette of pastels usually associated with CRT graphics. While a few of the screens project their photons into the void, most of the displays are manned and womanned by attentive acolytes, their visages lit and their backs darkened like satellites parked in stationary orbits.
Not everyone is held in the thrall of the object of their attentions in the same manner. A few jump up and down in little tethered dances, speaking into phones or mumbling at other electronic devices. Some sit stock still, mesmerized, engaging their screen with slight movements of wrist and hand. Others lean into their consoles, then away, as though their swaying might actually have some virtual influence upon the quantum electrodynamics coursing through their station and beyond, to other machines in other places in other similar rooms. No one is apparently making anything, but everyone seems nonetheless furiously occupied.
ROOMS WITH A VIEW
Where is this place? If it happened to be 1952, it would be Santa Monica, California, at a RAND study of the "man-machine interface" (Chapman et al., 1958). If it were 1957, then it could be only one place: the SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) Air Defense System run by the U.S. Air Force. By 1962, there were a few other such rooms, such as the SAGA room for wargaming in the basement of the Pentagon (Allen, 1987). If it were 1967 instead, there were many more such rooms scattered across the globe, one of the largest being the Infiltration Surveillance Center at Nakhom Phanom in Thailand, the command center of U.S. Air Force Operation Igloo White (Edwards, 1996, pp. 3, 106). By 1977 there are many more such rooms, no longer only staffed by the military, but also by thousands of employees of large firms throughout the world: the SABRE airline reservation system of American Airlines (patterned upon SAGE); bank check and credit card processing centers (patterned upon that innovated by Bank of America); nuclear power station control rooms; the inventory control operation of the American Hospital Supply Corporation (McKenney, 1995). In 1987 a room like this could be found in any suburban shopping mall, with teenagers proleptically feeding quarters into arcade computer games. It might also be located at the University of Arizona, where "experimental markets" are being conducted with undergraduates recruited with the help of money from the National Science Foundation. Alternatively, these closed rooms also could just as surely be found in the very pinnacles of high finance, in the tonier precincts of New York and London and Tokyo, with high-stakes traders of stocks, bonds, and "derivatives" glued to their screens. In those rooms, "masters of the universe" in pinstripe shirts and power suspenders make "killings" in semiconscious parody of their khaki-clad precursors. By 1997, with the melding of home entertainment centers with home offices and personal computers via the Internet (a lineal descendant of the Defense-funded ARPANET), any residential den or rec room could be refitted as a scaled-down simulacrum of any of the previous rooms. It might be the temporary premises of one of the burgeoning "dot-corn" start-ups which captured the imaginations of Generation X. It could even be promoted as the prototype classroom of the future. Increasingly, work in America at the turn of the millennium means serried ranks of Dilberts arrayed in cubicles staring at these screens. I should perhaps confess 1 am staring at the glow now myself. Depending on how this text eventually gets disseminated, perhaps you also, dear reader, are doing likewise.
These rooms are the "closed worlds" of our brave new world (Edwards, 1996), the electronic surveillance and control centers that were the nexus of the spread of computer technologies and computer culture. They are closed in any number of senses. In the first instance, there is the obviously artificial light: chaotic "white" sunlight is kept to a minimum to control the frequencies and the reactions of the observers. This ergonomically controlled environment, the result of some concerted engineering of the man-machine interface, renders the machines "user-friendly" and their acolytes more predictable. The partitioning off of the noise of the outer world brings to mind another sort of closure, that of thermodynamic isolation, as when Maxwell's Demon closes the door on slower gas molecules in order to make heat flow from a cooler to a warmer room, thus violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Then again, there is the type of closure that is more directly rooted in the algorithms that play across the screens, a closure that we shall encounter repeatedly in this book. The first commandment of the trillions of lines of code that appear on the screens is that they halt; algorithms are closed and bounded and (almost) never spin on forever, out of control.
And then the rooms are closed in another fashion, one resembling Bentham's Panopticon: a hierarchical and pervasive surveillance, experienced as an automatic and anonymous expression of power (Foucault, 1977). The range of things that the occupants of the room can access — from your medical records to the purchases you made three years ago with your credit card, from your telephone calls to all the web pages you have visited, from your genealogy to your genome — consistently outstrips the paltry imagination of movies haunted by suggestions of paranoid conspiracies and fin-de-siècle science run amok (Bernstein, 1997). Just as surely as death is the culmination of life, surveillance raises the specter of countersurveillance, of dissimulation, of penetration; and closure comes increasingly to resemble prophylaxis. The language of viruses, worms, and a myriad of other creepy-crawlies evokes the closure of a siege mentality, of quarantine, or perhaps the tomb.
The closure of those rooms is also radically stark in that implacable conflicts of global proportions are frequently shrunk down to something far less than human scale, to the claustrophobic controlled play of pixilated symbols on screens. The scale of phenomena seems to have become distended and promiscuously distributed. As the computer scientist Joseph Weitzenbaum once said, the avatars of artificial intelligence (AI) tend to describe "a very small part of what it means to be a human being and say that this is the whole." He quotes the philosopher (and cheerleader for AI) Daniel Dennett as having insisted, "If we are to make further progress in Artificial Intelligence, we are going to have to give up our awe of living things" (in Baumgartner & Payr, 1995, p. 259). The quickest way to divest oneself of an awe for the living in the West is to imagine oneself surrounded instead by machines. Whatever may have once been imagined the rich ambiguity of multiform experience, it seems enigmatic encounters and inconsistent interpretations can now only be expressed in this brave new world as information. Ideas are conflated with things, and things like computers assume the status of ideas.
And despite the widespread notion that as the global reach of these rooms has been stretched beyond the wildest dreams of the medieval magus or Enlightenment philosophe, the denizens of the modern closed rooms seem to have grown more insular, less experienced, perhaps even a trifle solipsistic. Closed rooms had held out the promise of infinite horizons; but the payoff has been ... more closure. Who needs to venture any more into the inner city, the outer banks, the corridors of the Louvre, the sidewalks of mean streets? Travel, real physical displacement, has become like everything else: you need special reservations and a pile of money to go experience the simulacra that the screen has already conditioned you to expect. More annual visitors to Boston seek out the mock-up of the fictional bar "Cheers" than view Bunker Hill or Harvard Yard. Restaurants and museums and universities and corporations and Walden Pond are never quite as good as their web sites. Cyberspace, once a new metaphor for spatial orientation, comes to usurp motion itself. No, don't get around much any more.
WHERE THE CYBORGS ARE
Is this beginning to sound like just another pop sociology treatise on "being digital" or the "information superhighway" or "the second self" or denunciation of some nefarious cult of information (Roszak, 1994)? Calm your fears, dear reader. What the world needs now is surely not another panegyric on the cultural evils of cyberspace. Our whirlwind tour of a few clean, well-lighted places is intended to introduce, in a subliminal way, some of the themes that will structure a work situated more or less squarely within a distinctly despised genre, that of the history of economic thought. The novelty for most readers will be to cross it with an older and rather more popular form of narrative, that of the war story. The chronological succession of dosed rooms is intended to serve as a synecdoche for a succession of the ways in which many economists have come to understand markets over roughly the same period, stretching from World War II to the end of the twentieth century. For while these closed rooms begat little models of closed worlds, after the fashion of Plato's Cave, the world as we had found it has rapidly been transubstantiated into the architecture of the rooms.1 Modes of thought and machines that think forged in British and American military settings by their attendant mobilized army of scientists in the 1940s rapidly made their way into both the natural and social sciences in the immediate postwar period, with profound consequences for both the content and organization of science.
Michel Foucault, 1977, pp. 211, 216: "the mechanisms [of disciplinary establishments] have a certain tendency to become 'de-institutionalized; to emerge from the closed fortresses in which they once functioned and circulate in a 'free' state; the massive, compact disciplines are broken down into flexible methods of control, which may be transferred and adapted. One can [thus] speak of the formation of a disciplinary society in this movement that stretches from the enclosed disciplines, a sort of social quarantine, to an indefinitely generalizable mechanism of 'panopticism."'
The thesis that a whole range of sciences has been transformed in this manner in the postwar period has come to have a name in the literature of the history and sociology of science, primarily due to the pioneering efforts of Donna Haraway: that name is "cyborg science." Haraway (1991; 1997) uses the term to indicate something profound that has happened to biology and to social theory and cultural conceptions of gender.' It has been applied to computer development and industrial organization by Andy Pickering (1995a; 1997; 1999). Ian Hacking (1998) has drawn attention to the connections of cyborgs to Canguilhem and Foucault. Explication of the cyborg character of thermodynamics and information theory was pioneered by Katherine Hayles (1990b), who has now devoted prodigious work to explicating their importance for the early cyberneticians (1994; 1995a; 1999). Paul Edwards (1996) provided the first serious across-the-board survey of the military's conceptual influence on the development of the computer, although Kenneth Flamm (1988) had pioneered the topic in the economics literature of industrial organization.
"Nineteenth century scientists materially constituted the organism as a laboring system, structured by a hierarchical division of labor and an energetic system fueled by sugars and obeying the laws of thermodynamics. For us, the living world has become a command, control, communication, intelligence system in an environment that demands strategies of flexible accumulation. Artificial life programs, as well as carbon-based life programs, work that way" (Haraway, 1997, p. 97).
"I am adamant that the cyborg, as I use the term, does not refer to all kinds of artifactual, machinic relationships with human beings.... I am very concerned that the term cyborg be used specifically to refer to those kinds of entities that became historically possible around World War If and just after. The cyborg is intimately involved in histories of militarization, of specific research projects with ties to psychiatry and communications theory, behavioral research and psychopharmacological research, theories of information and information processing. It is essential that the cyborg is seen to emerge out of such a specific matrix. In other words, the cyborg is not 'born,' but it does have a matrix!" (Haraway, 2000, pp. 128-29).
"A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as fiction.... The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bi-sexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense - a final irony, since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the West's escalating dominations of abstract individuation, the ultimate self untied at last from all dependency" (Haraway, 1991, pp. 149-51).
Steve Heims (1991) documented the initial attempts of the first cyberneticians to reach out to social scientists in search of a Grand Unified Teleological theory. Evelyn Fox Keller (1995) has surveyed how the gene has assumed the trappings of military command; and Lily Kay (1995; 1997a) has performed the invaluable service of showing in detail how all the above played themselves out in the development of molecular biology. Although all of these authors have at one time or another indicated an interest in economic ideas, what has been wanting in all of this work so far is a commensurate consideration of the role of economists in this burgeoning transdisciplinary formation. Economists were present at the creation of the cyborg sciences, and, as one would expect, the cyborg sciences have returned the favor by serving in turn to remake the economic orthodoxy in their own image. My intention is to provide that complementary argument, to document just in what manner and to what extent economics at the end of the second millennium has become a cyborg science, and to speculate how this will shape the immediate future.
Just how serious has the cyborg incursion been for economics? Given that in all likelihood most economists have no inkling what "cyborgs" are, or will have little familiarity with the historical narrative that follows, the question must be confronted squarely. There are two preliminary responses to this challenge: one short, yet readily accessible to anyone familiar with the modern economics literature; and the other, necessarily more involved, requiring a fair complement of historical sophistication. The short answer starts out with the litany that every tyro economist memorizes in his or her first introductory course. Question: What is economics about? Answer: The optimal allocation of scarce resources to given ends. This catechism was promulgated in the 1930s, about the time that neoclassicism was poised to displace rival schools of economic thought in the American context, and represented the canonical image of trade as the shifting about of given endowments so as to maximize an independently given utility function. While this phrase still may spring effortlessly to the lips — this, after all, is the function of a catechism — nevertheless, pause and reflect how poorly this captures the primary concerns of neoclassical economists nowadays: Nash equilibrium, strategic uncertainty, decision theory, path dependence, network externalities, evolutionary games, principal-agent dilemmas, no-trade theorems, asymmetric information, paradoxes of noncomputability.... Static allocation has taken a back seat to all manner of issues concerning agents' capacities to deal with various market situations in a cognitive sense. It has even once again become fashionable to speak with confidence of the indispensable role of "institutions," although this now means something profoundly different than it did in the earlier heyday of the American Institutionalist school of economics. This is a drastic change from the 1930s through the 1950s, when it was taboo to speculate . . .
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