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"If the relentless vector of technological development embodies a heroic narrative of power, mastery, and self-definition, what does it mean that this ultimately phallic quest now finds itself in a chaotic postmodern techno-jungle characterized by the massive and impossibly tangled intersection of networks? The networks that have come to dominate so many technological, scientific, and cultural discourses and practices — communication webs, cognitive neural nets, interlinked computers, parallel processors, complex institutional frameworks, transnational circuits of production and trade — are not linear vectors or stable expressions of control. They are complex weavings, criss-crossed webworks, complex fabrics of unpredictable and semi-autonomous threads. The network is a matrix, a womb, the mother-matter that spawns us all. But the matrix was always wired. Despite its biological roots, the word itself came to denote a host of technological tools and practices: a metal mold or die; a binding substance, like cement in concrete, or the principle metal in an alloy; a plate used for casting typefaces; a rectangular grid of mathematical quantities treated as a single algebraic entity; of and, of course, the dense pattern of connections that link up computer systems. The matrix forms the context for emergence; it is the medium, the motherboard, through which events, objects, and new linkages are grown. ." |
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excerpt from TechGnosis: Myth, |
