Scrawled in Wax

This is of course doomed to fail. If this electronic network of information and people is, as I say, emblematic of the postmodern, then all attempts to define it - to find its philosophy or its guiding principles, its unchanging rules with which to make sense - will be like trying to pin down a constantly moving, ethereal, amorphous nothing. But such is the postmodern situation, and so, it is this ultimate impossibility that necessitates the provisional attempt - that in the absence of objective laws, all we can do is put forward an opinion to watch it shift and settle in the mass. If we are lucky, the mass stretches, accommodates, challenges and responds. So, in the overlap between the web and modern philosophy, perhaps we will find something to hold on to…

1) Ideas are not fixed objects but processes. First, we suggest an idea. We shape it, craft it, think through it and then, of course, we hit ‘post’. A day later, we return to it, realising that we missed one obvious thing, and using some form of “[Update]“, we add to, adjust and augment our thoughts. The concept or the idea online is not an object that one picks up or ‘communicates’, but a process, a thing always in flux. It is constantly morphing and metamorphosing, changed not just by its author, but by the responses to it, to the way in which it is disseminated, filtered and ultimately transformed as it moves through the network. An idea is not something to grasp - it is the thing that never sits still.

2) Truth is an abstract concept that exists in the virtual centre of all opinions on a topic, even those that are contradictory. These opinions are not all equal but are, rather, organised according to hierarchies of power. What is ‘reasonable’, what ’seems true’ is what speaks the language of power, what accords with the ideological and economic strands that run through and weave the text-ile of the network. Opinions that exist at opposite ends of the spectrum all work to define the truth of an idea; it is precisely the contradiction that enables the concept of truth, the organisation of knowledge into the true and the false, the good and bad. Obviously then, truth is always in flux, but it is not freely floating and it is not easily changed. Behind each statement of truth are the echoes and traces of millennia of ideas, and they weigh heavily on each statement, pushing it, shaping it, distorting it through the lens of a given paradigm.

3) On the screen, there are always words behind words and ideas behind ideas. An allusion to hyperlinks? What is this, 1997? No, but on the screen, everything is temporary and all words and all ideas are linked in a chain to other words and other ideas. Like a dictionary - in which all words are defined through other words, the chain of meaning never ending - the network’s reliance on language means that words and ideas are both sustained and defined by the existence of other words and other ideas. What do terms like ‘blog’ and ‘Web 2.0′ mean except for the plurality of connected ideas, the echoed refractions of meaning that circle like a cloud around them? The internet is inter-text and exists only by and for other words and other ideas.

4) There are no beginnings. Origins are fictions. There is no Original Post. You think that’s air you’re breathing? Let us not confuse chronological origins with philosophical ones. Of course, the internet began and of course posts are written in time. But the original post, the one that we all first link to, did not generate itself. It too is formed of other links, of other strands. It is only written because things before it were written and those origins are also themselves chimeras, false beginnings that deny the possibility of pure, untouched starting points. The network operates - and is indeed sustained - through circular logic. And so…

5) On the ‘net, the copy precedes the original. What is original is lost the moment it is created, the hierarchy of time inverted by the hierarchy of meaning. You can never return to the original just as you can never return home. The proliferation of copies renders the authentic beginning impossible, unreachable, incomprehensible. The mass of copies comes to dominate so that, in consciousness, it is the copy that comes before the thing it is a copy of. The reproductive, link-based nature of the internet means that copy effaces the real and, indeed, effaces the possibility of the real. To quote Baudrillard, “illusion is no longer possible because the real is no longer possible”.

6) The internet is always-already plural. All expression is a singular subtraction from this plurality. This is what Deleuze and Guattari call the n-1 state of mind: that the norm is the infinitude of possibility and the work - the blog post, the website - is, rather than the starting point from which multiplicity begins, a singular subtraction from the always-already plural, but one instance derived from the anarchic multiplicity. Dualism is not the model of the web, where one leads to two and two leads to many. One enters the overdetermined infinite and merely finds a finite moment in which to temporarily breathe - then you return to the norm of the infinite mass that you will never know.

7) It is words that control the author, not the author who controls words. Counter-intuitive? Sure. The point is that, more than in any other arena, on the internet the author disappears behind words. As they are replicated a thousand times, reblogged in an infinite chain in which there is no real origin and no beginning, the author becomes a mere abstract organising principle. We try hard to attach a name, but the name itself becomes a ghost, but a label for the ideas not the person behind them. There is no author online; the network writes authors into being.

Have something to add? Want to challenge me? Want to yell at me for wasting your time? Hit the comments and rant away…

[Update]: I just don’t have time for a full-fledged response right now, but Kevin Kelly engages some of these ideas in a new post called “Humanity’s Identity Crises“.