TURING’S CONCEPTUAL MACHINE 图灵的概念机器
In the late 1930s Alan Turing, a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, published a paper entitled ‘On Computable Numbers with Application to the Entscheidungsproblem’. ^(1){ }^{1} It was a response to part of one of a number of proposals by the German mathematician David Hilbert. Hilbert wished to cast all mathematics in an axiomatic structure, using the ideas of set theory. From the beginning of the twentieth century on, he proposed a number of programmes that would achieve his aim. In the 1920 os he put forward his most ambitious of these programmes, in which all mathematics was to be put into an axiomatic form, the rules of inference to be only those of elementary logic. He proposed that a satisfactory system would be one which was consistent, in that it would be impossible to derive both a statement and its negation, complete, in that every properly written statement should be such that either it or its negation should be derivable from the axioms, and decidable, in that any statement or its negation should be provable by an algorithm. The completeness part of this programme was shown to be unworkable by the German mathematician Kurt Gödel who, in 1931, demonstrated that there was no system of the type Hilbert proposed in which integers could be defined and which was both consistent and complete. The impact of this discovery, which is known as ‘Gödel’s incompleteness theorem’, was great and its importance goes beyond mathematics 在 20 世纪 30 年代末,剑桥大学国王学院的学者阿兰·图灵发表了一篇题为《可计算数及其在决策问题中的应用》的论文。这是对德国数学家大卫·希尔伯特提出的多个建议之一的回应。希尔伯特希望将所有数学置于公理结构中,利用集合论的思想。从 20 世纪初开始,他提出了多个旨在实现这一目标的计划。在 1920 年代,他提出了其中最雄心勃勃的计划,计划将所有数学置于公理形式中,推理规则仅限于基本逻辑。他提出,一个令人满意的系统应当是自洽的,即不可能同时推导出一个陈述及其否定;是完备的,即每个正确书写的陈述应当能够从公理中推导出其本身或其否定;并且是可判定的,即任何陈述或其否定应当能够通过算法证明。 该程序的完整性部分被德国数学家库尔特·哥德尔证明是不可行的,他在 1931 年证明不存在希尔伯特所提出的那种可以定义整数的系统,并且该系统既是一致的又是完整的。这一发现被称为“哥德尔的不完备性定理”,其影响深远,重要性超越了数学
to encompass broader questions of systems and systemization. The decidability part of the programme was also undermined by the simultaneous work of Gödel and Turing. In order to approach the question Turing imagined an entirely conceptual machine, which could be configured to be in a number of different states. He based this idea on the typewriter, which can be configured to write in either upper or lower case. The difference was that Turing’s machine could be configured in an infinite number of states. He also imagined his machine having a writing head, like a typewriter key, which could write and erase marks on an infinite tape. The tape would contain spaces that were either marked or blank. The writing head could move up and down the tape in either direction. It could also read whether the space on the position contained a mark or was blank. The machine could be configured to undertake a number of different actions according to what it found. With the appropriate configuration almost any mathematical problem could be solved, but certain problems were effectively unsolvable with such mechanical processes. By devising his universal machine Turing proved that mathematics was not decidable. Turing’s virtual machine worked for him inasmuch as, as a kind of philosophical toy, it enabled him to conceptualize and solve the problem with which he was concerned. He also went some way in conceptualizing the modern computer, by positing a binary machine that could be configured in any number of different states. ^(2){ }^{2} Turing was able to use his purely theoretical ideas about calculating machines during the War when he developed methods and technologies for decrypting German U-Boat signals. This work in turn led to some of the first modern electronic binary digital computers. Turing’s Entscheidungsproblem paper is widely regarded as one of the first conceptualizations of such machines, and one of the keystones of the development of digital technology. But it is fascinating as much for the past to which it alludes, albeit unconsciously, as for the future it anticipates. In a sense it contains, in minutiae, many of the elements 22 Digital Culture 涵盖更广泛的系统和系统化问题。该计划的可判定性部分也受到哥德尔和图灵同时工作的影响。为了接近这个问题,图灵设想了一种完全概念化的机器,可以配置为多种不同的状态。他的这个想法基于打字机,打字机可以配置为大写或小写。不同之处在于,图灵的机器可以配置为无限多的状态。他还设想他的机器有一个写头,像打字机的键,可以在无限的带子上写和擦除标记。带子上会有标记或空白的空间。写头可以在带子上上下移动,朝任一方向。它还可以读取当前位置的空间是有标记还是空白。机器可以根据它发现的内容配置为进行多种不同的操作。通过适当的配置,几乎可以解决任何数学问题,但某些问题在这种机械过程中实际上是不可解决的。 通过设计他的通用机器,图灵证明了数学是不可判定的。图灵的虚拟机器对他起到了作用,因为作为一种哲学玩具,它使他能够概念化并解决他所关心的问题。他在概念化现代计算机方面也迈出了一步,假设了一种可以配置为多种不同状态的二进制机器。图灵能够在战争期间利用他对计算机器的纯理论想法,开发解密德国潜艇信号的方法和技术。这项工作反过来导致了第一批现代电子二进制数字计算机的出现。图灵的《决策问题》论文被广泛认为是对这种机器的首次概念化之一,也是数字技术发展的基石之一。但它的迷人之处在于它所暗示的过去,尽管是无意识的,以及它所预见的未来。在某种意义上,它在细节中包含了许多元素
from which digital technology and digital culture developed. 数字技术和数字文化由此发展。
Turing’s thought experiment is of particular importance for the development of modern computers in that it was intended to be a universal machine. Though a number of electronic calculators had been produced these were mostly dedicated devices, capable only of specific hardwired operations. In contrast, Turing’s imaginary device was, in theory at least, able to be programmed to undertake any mathematical problem. The idea of a universal machine had already been imagined by predecessors such as Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, and work by George Stibitz, Konrad Zuse and Claude Shannon and others made its practical realization more feasible, but Turing’s particular vision had a conceptual coherence lacking before. As mentioned before, Turing was able to conceive of the idea of the universal machine through the example of the typewriter, which can be configured in two different states, upper and lower case, using the same keyboard. On one level Turing’s use of the typewriter was merely expedient: it was a readily available tool that Turing himself used, albeit erratically. ^(3){ }^{3} He was undoubtedly concerned simply to find some device that could act as a model in conceptualizing a solution to the problem he was addressing. It is almost certain that Turing had little interest in the social and cultural implications of his choice. Yet the technology he chose, and that was so readily available to him, was in fact deeply embedded in a network of social and cultural meaning, one derived from contemporary capitalism. Thus it is possible to see how capitalism offered the context in which the computer could develop. 图灵的思想实验对现代计算机的发展具有特别重要的意义,因为它旨在成为一台通用机器。尽管已经生产了许多电子计算器,但这些大多是专用设备,仅能执行特定的硬件操作。相比之下,图灵的想象设备在理论上至少能够被编程以解决任何数学问题。通用机器的概念早已被查尔斯·巴贝奇和阿达·洛夫莱斯等前辈设想过,乔治·斯蒂比茨、康拉德·楚泽、克劳德·香农等人的工作使其实际实现变得更加可行,但图灵的特定视野在概念上具有前所未有的一致性。如前所述,图灵能够通过打字机的例子构思出通用机器的概念,打字机可以使用同一个键盘配置为两种不同的状态:大写和小写。在某种程度上,图灵使用打字机只是出于方便:这是一种图灵自己使用的现成工具,尽管使用得并不规律。 ^(3){ }^{3} 他无疑只是关心找到某种设备,以便在构思他所解决的问题的方案时作为模型。几乎可以肯定,图灵对他选择的社会和文化影响兴趣不大。然而,他所选择的技术,以及对他来说如此容易获得的技术,实际上深深植根于一个社会和文化意义的网络中,这个网络源于当代资本主义。因此,可以看出资本主义提供了计算机发展的背景。
THE DIVISION AND ABSTRACTION OF LABOUR AND CAPITAL 劳动和资本的分工与抽象
Invented in the late nineteenth century, as a response to the burgeoning information needs of business, the typewriter standardizes and mechanizes the production of language, reducing the elements out of which it is composed to abstracted signs (illus. 1). ^(4){ }^{4} In this it 在十九世纪末发明的打字机是为了应对商业日益增长的信息需求,它标准化并机械化了语言的生产,将其组成元素简化为抽象符号(图 1)。
is a paradigmatic product of the system in which it was developed. Like the typewriter and, by extension, Turing’s device, the operations of capitalism are fundamentally predicated on abstraction, standardization and mechanization, to ensure that it can operate as a universal machine, capable of treating disparate phenomena as equal and interchangeable. This is found in its emphasis on the exchange value of commodities, rather than their use value, the introduction of credit, paper money, and ‘fiduciary’ money, the division of labour into discrete and repeatable parts, and the standardization of components. This abstraction enables the flow of goods, money, and people crucial to capitalism’s continuous quest for expansion and profit. It also allows for the integration of machinic assemblages, including physical machinery, such as the steam engines and spinning jennys of the early nineteenth century, and factories, in which workers were bound to machines and their work is regulated like machine-like processes. One result of this is that under capitalism signification is no longer anchored to stable, embodied meanings. Goods are no longer valued for their material 是其发展体系的典范产品。像打字机以及图灵的设备一样,资本主义的运作在根本上依赖于抽象、标准化和机械化,以确保它能够作为一种普遍机器运作,能够将不同现象视为平等和可互换的。这体现在对商品交换价值的强调,而非使用价值,引入信用、纸币和“信托”货币,将劳动分工为离散和可重复的部分,以及组件的标准化。这种抽象使得商品、货币和人流动,成为资本主义不断追求扩张和利润的关键。它还允许机械组合的整合,包括物理机械,如 19 世纪初的蒸汽机和纺纱机,以及工厂,在这些工厂中,工人被束缚于机器,他们的工作像机械过程一样受到规范。这导致的一个结果是,在资本主义下,符号不再锚定于稳定的、具体现实的意义。商品不再因其物质而被重视。
1 A Remington typewriter, after 1874 . 一台 1874 年后的雷明顿打字机。
and embodied usefulness, but instead for their exchange value. The value of money no longer refers to its intrinsic worth as metal, or what it might represent in stocks of gold. Wealth is in liquid form rather than tied to ownership of land. The complex web of feudal social relations is replaced by the ‘cash nexus’. Workers are regarded as abstract labour power. Thus signification itself becomes autonomous, and signifiers move independently from the world of material objects. As Karl Marx analysed in the first section of Das Kapital, the commodity is at the heart of capitalism’s capacity to operate in abstract terms. Marx shows how, in order to be circulated, commodities have to be considered in terms of their exchange value. This is a form of ‘semiotization’ in that the commodity’s physical and material character ceases to be of account in relation to its capacity to circulate, as a sign, within a capitalist society. ^(5){ }^{5} As long as a commodity is circulating thus it can be considered in terms of its comparative value against other commodities. Labour too is considered a commodity in that it too is exchanged for money. 而是为了它们的交换价值。货币的价值不再指其作为金属的内在价值,或它在黄金储备中可能代表的价值。财富以流动的形式存在,而不是与土地的所有权相联系。复杂的封建社会关系网络被“现金纽带”所取代。工人被视为抽象的劳动能力。因此,符号本身变得自主,符号与物质对象的世界独立移动。正如卡尔·马克思在《资本论》第一部分中分析的,商品是资本主义以抽象方式运作的核心。马克思展示了,为了能够流通,商品必须以其交换价值来考虑。这是一种“符号化”的形式,因为商品的物理和物质特性在其作为符号在资本主义社会中流通的能力面前不再重要。只要商品以这种方式流通,它就可以与其他商品的比较价值进行考虑。劳动也被视为一种商品,因为它也被交换为货币。
Turing’s imaginary device not only invokes the typewriter, one of the paradigmatic information technologies of nineteenth-century capitalism, but also, in the tape and writing head assemblage, the very model of the assembly line. Moreover, the algorithmic method which his machine was intended to automate is itself a model of the division of labour, which, as both Adam Smith and, later, Marx realized, lies at the heart of efficient capitalist production. Smith begins The Wealth of Nations with his famous description of the manufacture of pins, an operation divided, according to Smith, into eighteen different parts, each of which can be undertaken by a separate labourer. ^(6){ }^{6} In this manner a far greater number of pins can be produced per person than if one worker undertook the whole process of manufacture for each pin. The division of labour also allows each individual action to become a repeatable and interchangeable sign. Codified in this manner, the operations of production can be more easily understood and controlled. This can 图灵的想象装置不仅唤起了打字机这一十九世纪资本主义的典型信息技术,还在磁带和写头的组合中体现了流水线的模型。此外,他的机器旨在自动化的算法方法本身就是劳动分工的模型,正如亚当·斯密和后来的马克思所意识到的,这一模型是高效资本主义生产的核心。斯密在《国富论》中以他对制造别针的著名描述开篇,这一操作根据斯密的说法被分为十八个不同的部分,每个部分都可以由一个独立的劳动者来完成。通过这种方式,每个人可以生产出远多于一个工人为每个别针完成整个制造过程的数量。劳动分工还使得每个单独的动作成为可重复和可互换的符号。以这种方式编码,生产操作可以更容易地被理解和控制。
2 A Jacquard silk-weaving hand-loom, the first machine to use punchedcard programming, 1810. 一台雅卡尔丝绸织机,这是第一台使用打孔卡编程的机器,1810 年。
help reduce reliance on expensive skilled labour, and living labour altogether. 帮助减少对昂贵熟练劳动力的依赖,以及对活劳动的依赖。
This can be seen in one of the first (and most celebrated) examples of automation, in which the division of labour was embodied in a machine (illus. 2). Joseph-Marie Jacquard’s pattern-weaving loom of 1804 controlled the lifting of each of the warp threads for each pass of the shuttle through a system of wooden cards punched with holes. The actions of the human weaver were codified and converted into marks on the wooden card, which were then ‘read’ by the machine in order to repeat them. The Jacquard Loom can be understood as an early attempt to reduce the costs and difficulties of employing living labour, by embodying the labour process in fixed capital. Though embedded in an artisanal paradigm, it anticipates not only automation but the whole development of labour management in which workers’ actions become discrete and interchangeable, and in which individual skill ceases to be of account. 这可以在自动化的第一个(也是最著名的)例子之一中看到,其中劳动分工体现在一台机器中(图 2)。约瑟夫-玛丽·雅卡尔于 1804 年发明的图案织机通过一套打孔的木卡片控制每次梭子通过时每根经线的提升。人类织工的动作被编码并转化为木卡片上的标记,然后被机器“读取”以重复这些动作。雅卡尔织机可以被理解为一种早期尝试,通过将劳动过程体现在固定资本中,来降低雇佣活劳动的成本和难度。尽管嵌入在手工业范式中,它不仅预示着自动化的发展,还预示着劳动管理的整体发展,在这种发展中,工人的动作变得离散和可互换,个人技能不再重要。
One of the first theoreticians of labour management was the mathematician Charles Babbage (illus. 3). In a number of works, 26 Digital Culture 劳动管理的首批理论家之一是数学家查尔斯·巴贝奇(插图 3)。在多部作品中,26 数字文化
3 The computer pioneer Charles Babbage (1791-1871) in 1860. 计算机先驱查尔斯·巴贝奇(1791-1871)于 1860 年。
studying the postal system, the railways, and especially in his On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, ^(7){ }^{7} Babbage examined ways of making manufacturing efficient, economic and rational. Following the work of Smith he promulgated the economic advantages of the division of labour, as well as the increased use of machinery in manufacturing. This directly inspired the work for which he is now most famous, his development of early computing machines. From 1822 right up to his death in 1871 Babbage was engaged in building, or trying to build, machines, the ‘Difference’ and ‘Analytical’ engines (illus. 4), that are recognizably prototypical computers. His initial reasons for building the ‘Difference Engine’ concerned the efficient production of mathematical tables, used both at sea and in industrial production. Babbage had come across the table-making project of Baron Gaspard de Prony in France, which had employed the division of labour advocated by Smith in The Wealth of Nations. Prony had divided the work of generating such tables into a number of small simple tasks distributed among many human ‘computers’. Babbage realized that this technique could be automated and persuaded the government to fund the Difference 研究邮政系统、铁路,尤其是在他的《机械与制造经济学》中,巴贝奇考察了提高制造业效率、经济性和合理性的方法。在斯密的研究基础上,他宣传了劳动分工的经济优势,以及在制造业中机械使用的增加。这直接激发了他现在最著名的工作,即早期计算机的开发。从 1822 年到 1871 年去世,巴贝奇一直致力于建造或尝试建造被公认为原型计算机的“差分机”和“分析机”。他建造“差分机”的初衷是为了高效生产数学表,这些表在海上和工业生产中都被使用。巴贝奇了解到法国的加斯帕尔·德·普罗尼男爵的制表项目,该项目采用了斯密在《国富论》中倡导的劳动分工。普罗尼将生成这些表的工作分成多个小的简单任务,分配给许多人工“计算员”。巴贝奇意识到这种技术可以自动化,并说服政府资助差分机
4 Charles Babbage’s 查尔斯·巴贝奇的 4
Analytical Engine, 1871. 分析机,1871 年。
Engine, which was comparatively simple, being intended only to calculate and print out such tables. The second, the ‘Analytical Engine’, had it been completed, would have been programmable, and able to calculate any formula, and to compare numbers and decide how to proceed with the operation it was performing. The engines were modelled on industrial machinery and built using the same techniques. But they also invoked the newly emerging digital technologies of control. Babbage intended employing the punched cards used by Jacquard in his loom as a method of programming his Analytical Engine. What Babbage hoped to achieve for his Analytical Engine is less extraordinary than some of the ideas of his colleague Ada Lovelace (illus. 5). She remarked that the Analytical Engine ‘can arrange and combine its numerical quantities exactly as if they were letters or other general symbols’. She also suggested that the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of ‘any degree of complexity or extent’. Remarking on the use of punched cards as used in the Jacquard Loom she wrote 'We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves. ^(8){ }^{8} Though Babbage did not think of employing his engines in pursuit of efficient 引擎相对简单,仅用于计算和打印这样的表格。第二个“分析引擎”如果完成,将是可编程的,能够计算任何公式,并比较数字,决定如何进行其正在执行的操作。这些引擎是以工业机械为模型,采用相同的技术建造的。但它们也引入了新兴的数字控制技术。巴贝奇打算使用雅卡尔在其织机中使用的穿孔卡片作为编程其分析引擎的方法。巴贝奇希望为他的分析引擎实现的目标并不如他的同事阿达·洛夫莱斯的一些想法那样非凡(见插图 5)。她指出,分析引擎“可以像处理字母或其他一般符号一样,准确地排列和组合其数值”。她还建议该引擎可能创作出“任何复杂程度或范围”的精致和科学的音乐作品。 她评论使用在雅卡尔织机中的穿孔卡片时写道:“我们可以恰当地说,分析机编织代数图案,就像雅卡尔织机编织花朵和叶子一样。”尽管巴贝奇没有考虑利用他的机器来追求高效
manufacturing, he embodied a link between calculating machinery and rational industrial management that has never since been broken. Both his calculating machines and his management theories were responses to burgeoning capitalism, which was producing the need for ways of dealing with ever-greater amounts of information, and for more efficient and rational ways of producing profits. These twin needs, information processing and rationalization, have permanently linked the development of calculating machinery with the development of modern capitalism, in all its protean forms. Indeed one might argue that, though manufacturing processes did not generally use machinery for control purposes until the twentieth century, processes of mass production and the division of labour clearly evolved within a paradigm of machine logic, one later developed by Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford. 制造业中,他体现了计算机械与理性工业管理之间的联系,这种联系至今未曾中断。他的计算机器和管理理论都是对蓬勃发展的资本主义的回应,资本主义产生了处理日益增多的信息和更高效、理性地获取利润的需求。这两种需求——信息处理和理性化——永久性地将计算机械的发展与现代资本主义的发展联系在一起,后者以各种变幻莫测的形式存在。实际上,可以说,尽管制造过程在二十世纪之前通常不使用机械进行控制,但大规模生产和劳动分工的过程显然是在机器逻辑的范式内演变的,这一范式后来由弗雷德里克·泰勒和亨利·福特发展。
At a deeper level Babbage’s dream of a machine capable of responding without prompting from outside resembles the very basis of the market. As formulated by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, this became the canonical expression of the ideology of classical capitalism. Central to Smith’s argument was the notion 在更深层次上,巴贝奇梦想中的一种能够在没有外部提示的情况下作出反应的机器,类似于市场的基本原则。正如亚当·斯密在《国富论》中所阐述的,这成为了古典资本主义意识形态的经典表达。斯密论点的核心是这一概念。
5 Babbage’s protégée and programming pioneer Ada Lovelace (1816-52), c. 1844. 5 巴贝奇的门徒和编程先驱阿达·洛夫莱斯(1816-1852),约 1844 年。
The Beginnings of Digital Culture 29 数字文化的起源 29
of the market as a self-regulating system. The Wealth of Nations can be, and has been, read as the description of a vast self-regulating machine, that of a free market, which with the minimum of state interference, relies on the famous ‘invisible hand’, 9 which would lead to commodities finding their appropriate value. The computer-like nature of free-market capitalism led the historian Fernand Braudel to suggest that the ’ market’, the system by which goods are exchanged for money, was 'the first computer mankind ever had, a self-regulating machine that would itself ensure the equilibrium of economic activities. ^(10){ }^{10} Such ideas were already being embodied in machines at more or less the same time as Smith was writing The Wealth of Nations. His contemporary James Watt developed a number of modifications to contemporary steam technology that enabled more work to be done with the consumption of less fuel. Among these was the ‘Governor’, a device based on a mechanism seen on a mill by Watt’s partner Matthew Boulton. The Governor is a device that steam pressure causes to rotate centrifugally. If it rotates fast enough it is designed to rise. In doing so it will release the pressure causing to rotate. Thus it governs the pressure generated by the steam engine. The Governor is the first practical self-regulating technology, and acted as a paradigm for later conceptions of self-regulation such as those of Norbert Wiener, the developer of the concept of Cybernetics. The publication of The Wealth of Nations and James Watt’s production of his first large machines coincide almost exactly, though this can only be considered as, in the words of Otto Mayr, ‘evidence of the interdependence of the socio-intellectual with the technical activities of a culture’, rather than evidence of any determinate influence in either direction. ^(11){ }^{11} 市场作为一个自我调节系统。《国富论》可以被视为对一个庞大的自我调节机器的描述,即自由市场,在最小的国家干预下,依赖于著名的“看不见的手”,这将使商品找到其适当的价值。自由市场资本主义的计算机般特性使历史学家费尔南·布罗代尔建议,“市场”,即商品与货币交换的系统,是“人类拥有的第一个计算机,一个自我调节的机器,能够确保经济活动的平衡。”这样的思想在史密斯撰写《国富论》时,已经在机器中得到了体现。他的同时代人詹姆斯·瓦特对当时的蒸汽技术进行了多项改进,使得在消耗更少燃料的情况下能够完成更多的工作。其中之一是“调速器”,这是一种基于瓦特的合作伙伴马修·博尔顿在磨坊上看到的机制的装置。调速器是一个蒸汽压力使其离心旋转的装置。如果它旋转得足够快,它会被设计成上升。 通过这样做,它将释放导致旋转的压力。因此,它控制着蒸汽机产生的压力。调节器是第一种实用的自我调节技术,并且成为后来的自我调节概念的范例,例如诺伯特·维纳(Norbert Wiener)提出的控制论概念。亚当·斯密的《国富论》和詹姆斯·瓦特(James Watt)生产的第一台大型机器几乎完全同时发布,尽管这只能被视为,正如奥托·迈尔(Otto Mayr)所说的,“社会智力活动与文化的技术活动相互依赖的证据”,而不是任何方向上确定性影响的证据。 ^(11){ }^{11}
Steam power also inspired the development of thermodynamics, one of the paradigmatic scientific discourses of the nineteenth century. Thermodynamics dominated not just science and technology, but even conceptions of labour and political economy. It also made its mark in theology, philosophy, and popular culture. But latent 30 Digital Culture 蒸汽动力还激发了热力学的发展,热力学是十九世纪典型的科学话语之一。热力学不仅主导了科学和技术,甚至影响了劳动和政治经济的观念。它还在神学、哲学和大众文化中留下了印记。
within it the beginnings of another paradigm can be discerned, that of information, which would come to take a similarly dominant role in the twentieth century. The first law of thermodynamics was codified by the German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz, then 26 years old, in a famous lecture given at the Berlin Physical Society in 1847 . Helmholtz constructed a full mathematical formulation of the concept, which could be applied to mechanics, heat, electricity, magnetism, physical chemistry and astronomy. In essence Helmholtz stated that energy can be neither created or destroyed, and that there was a fixed amount of energy in the universe. This formulation was crucial not just in the development of thermodynamics, but in the move from a general conception of the universe in mechanistic terms inherited from Newton, to one in which energy is the dominant aspect. Rudolf Clausius and William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin of Largs) independently developed the second law of thermodynamics. Clausius’s version of the second law states that energy may not lose quantity but it does tend to lose quality. Clausius realized that, without outside aid, heat could only move from a hot reservoir to a cold one and not vice versa. Clausius coined the term ‘entropy’, from the Greek for transformation, to describe what he saw as the universal tendency towards equilibrium, or in other words towards a situation in which energy is distributed equally in a system. In a lecture of 1894 the German physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, inventor of statistical mechanics, compared entropy to ‘missing information’. In this passing statement he prefigured the relation between entropy and information that would comprise a vital aspect of how information came to be understood. In the next century this insight would become the basis of Information Theory and be of crucial importance to the development of telecommunications, computers, genetics, and Cybernetics. ^(12){ }^{12} 在其中可以辨认出另一种范式的开端,即信息的范式,这在二十世纪将占据同样主导的角色。热力学第一定律由德国科学家赫尔曼·冯·亥姆霍兹在 1847 年于柏林物理学会的一次著名演讲中确立,当时他 26 岁。亥姆霍兹构建了这一概念的完整数学公式,可以应用于力学、热、 电、磁、物理化学和天文学。亥姆霍兹的本质观点是,能量既不能被创造也不能被毁灭,宇宙中存在固定的能量总量。这个公式不仅对热力学的发展至关重要,而且在从牛顿继承的机械论宇宙的一般概念转向能量占主导地位的宇宙中也起到了重要作用。鲁道夫·克劳修斯和威廉·汤姆森(后来的拉尔格斯的凯尔文勋爵)独立发展了热力学第二定律。克劳修斯的第二定律版本指出,能量可能不会减少数量,但确实倾向于失去质量。 克劳修斯意识到,在没有外部帮助的情况下,热量只能从热源流向冷源,而不能反之。克劳修斯创造了“熵”这个术语,源自希腊语的“转变”,用以描述他所看到的向平衡的普遍趋势,换句话说,就是能量在系统中均匀分布的状态。在 1894 年的一次讲座中,德国物理学家路德维希·玻尔兹曼,统计力学的发明者,将熵比作“缺失的信息”。在这一简短的陈述中,他预示了熵与信息之间的关系,这将成为理解信息的重要方面。在下一个世纪,这一见解将成为信息理论的基础,并对电信、计算机、遗传学和控制论的发展至关重要。 ^(12){ }^{12}
Capitalism can operate as a self-regulating system because of the emergence of the ‘money commodity’. The latter serves as a form against which all other commodities can be valued and which 资本主义能够作为一个自我调节的系统运作,是因为“货币商品”的出现。后者作为一种形式,使所有其他商品都可以被评估。
allows for universal exchangeability and thereby abstraction. By the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century much of the money in circulation was in paper form, as cheques or banknotes, known as ‘fiduciary’ money. From this it was a short step to ‘fiat’ paper money, notes that are issued on the fiat of the sovereign, and are legal tender representing so many units of a currency, but are not promises to pay something else, such as a precious metal. Though nominally connected to the value of a material substance, gold or silver, fiduciary paper money started the process completed by fiat money, of turning money into a pure sign. The concept of paper money led to extended debates in the nineteenth century that concerned not just questions of finance, but wider issues relating to the nature of signs in general. The idea that a sign could stand for and act in place of what it is supposed to represent was a cause of anxiety. An American cartoon of the 1870 showed a rag doll next to a notice declaring that it is ‘a real baby by Act of Congress’, being offered a piece of paper upon which is written ‘This is milk by Act of Congress’, while on the wall there are a number of pictures, including one of a house inscribed with ‘this is a house and lot by act of the architect’, one of a cow, similarly declaring ‘this is a cow by act of the artist’. Beneath is a banknote saying ‘this is money by Act of Congress’. Here it is possible to see prefigurings of both our current concern with virtuality and simulacra and of the anxieties such concepts generate. The transformation of money into sign enabled capitalism’s development and expansion, by greatly facilitating the operations of credit and the transfer of capital. Only recently with the increasing use of e-money and the concomitant rise of e-commerce has the dematerialization of money been fully realized, but, as the above suggests, it is immanent within, and necessary for, capitalism’s operation. 允许普遍的可交换性,从而实现抽象。到十八世纪末和十九世纪初,流通中的大部分货币以纸币的形式存在,如支票或银行票据,被称为“信托”货币。从这一点出发,转向“法定”纸币只是一步之遥,这些票据是由主权者的法令发行的,作为法定货币代表一定单位的货币,但并不是对其他东西的支付承诺,如贵金属。尽管名义上与物质实体的价值(如黄金或白银)相关,信托纸币开始了由法定货币完成的过程,将货币转变为纯粹的符号。纸币的概念引发了十九世纪的广泛辩论,这些辩论不仅涉及金融问题,还涉及与符号本质相关的更广泛问题。符号能够代表并代替其所应代表的事物的想法引发了焦虑。 一幅 1870 年的美国漫画展示了一个布娃娃旁边有一则通知,声明它是“根据国会法案的真实婴儿”,并被提供一张纸,上面写着“这是根据国会法案的牛奶”,墙上挂着几幅画,包括一幅房子的画,上面写着“这是根据建筑师法案的房子和土地”,还有一幅牛的画,同样声明“这是根据艺术家法案的牛”。下面是一张钞票,上面写着“这是根据国会法案的钱”。在这里,我们可以看到对我们当前对虚拟性和拟像的关注的预示,以及这些概念所产生的焦虑。货币转变为符号使资本主义的发展和扩张成为可能,极大地促进了信贷的运作和资本的转移。直到最近,随着电子货币的日益使用和电子商务的同步兴起,货币的非物质化才得以完全实现,但正如上述所示,这在资本主义的运作中是内在的,也是必要的。
Such abstraction resonated with developments in areas such as mathematics and logic. The work of self-taught mathematician George Boole in formulating symbolic logic would become a crucial element in the future development of information technologies. 这种抽象与数学和逻辑等领域的发展产生了共鸣。自学成才的数学家乔治·布尔在符号逻辑方面的工作将成为未来信息技术发展的关键要素。
Boole made a number of brilliant contributions to mathematics, but his most famous was to be found in his books The Mathematical Analysis of Logic ^(13){ }^{13} and An Investigation of the Laws of Thought. ^(14){ }^{14} In these works he successfully applied algebraic methods to logic, thus allowing logical relations to be calculated in a mathematical manner. One of Boole’s insights was that his algebraic logic worked using only two numerical values, 1 and 0 , which could stand respectively for the universe and nothing. Within Boole’s system it is possible to deduce any result from these terms, the variables x,y,zx, y, z etc. and the standard operators,+-xx+- \times. Boole’s symbolic logic was highly influential on later generations of logicians and mathematicians, and indirectly contributed to the conception of the modern digital computer. More directly, Boole’s logic also contributed to the development of binary switching systems for telephone switchboards before the Second World War and, after, to the building of logical circuits. Much of the work examining the applications of Boolean logic to telephone switching relays was undertaken by MIT student Claude Shannon, who was also largely responsible for the post-war development of Information Theory. 布尔在数学上做出了许多杰出的贡献,但他最著名的贡献可以在他的书《逻辑的数学分析》和《思维法则的研究》中找到。在这些著作中,他成功地将代数方法应用于逻辑,从而使逻辑关系能够以数学的方式进行计算。布尔的一个见解是,他的代数逻辑仅使用两个数值,1 和 0,分别代表宇宙和虚无。在布尔的系统中,可以从这些术语、变量等以及标准运算符中推导出任何结果。布尔的符号逻辑对后来的逻辑学家和数学家产生了深远的影响,并间接促进了现代数字计算机的概念。更直接地说,布尔的逻辑还为第二次世界大战前电话交换机的二进制切换系统的发展做出了贡献,战后则为逻辑电路的构建提供了支持。 许多研究布尔逻辑在电话交换继电器应用的工作是由麻省理工学院的学生克劳德·香农进行的,他在战后信息理论的发展中也发挥了重要作用。
Boole’s work in Symbolic Logic was, in fact, anticipated by the seventeenth century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, who was one of the most important and influential thinkers of his period, and whose interests ranged across science, mathematics, politics and metaphysics. Starting with his Dissertatio de arte combinatoria of 1666 , ^(15){ }^{15} he was concerned with the dream of a perfect, logical language. To this end Leibniz worked on a number of schemes involving the use of numbers to represent concepts, which could then be manipulated to determine whether statements were true or false. This was paralleled by his interest in calculating machines, which he built, and which he saw as being able to undertake some of these logical processes of induction, as well as his development of binary notation. His ambitious programme for logic proved to be unrealizable in both practical and philosophical terms. It also marked a return to 布尔在符号逻辑方面的工作实际上是由十七世纪的哲学家戈特弗里德·莱布尼茨所预见的,他是那个时代最重要和最有影响力的思想家之一,兴趣涵盖科学、数学、政治和形而上学。从 1666 年的《组合艺术论》开始,他关注于完美逻辑语言的梦想。为此,莱布尼茨研究了多种方案,涉及使用数字来表示概念,然后可以对其进行操作以确定陈述是真还是假。这与他对计算机的兴趣相辅相成,他自己制造了计算机,并认为它们能够进行一些归纳的逻辑过程,以及他对二进制记数法的发展。他的逻辑雄心勃勃的计划在实践和哲学上都被证明是不可实现的。这也标志着一种回归。
formalism that was problematic to other philosophers of the time, reacting as they were to the formal logic of Aristotelianism. Though after his death his work in logic and language was largely neglected in favour of other aspects of his work, he is now seen as having anticipated many of the developments surrounding computing. His intention to formalize thought in a logical system clearly anticipates both the development of programming languages and of Artificial Intelligence. This, along with his interest in calculating machines, has led to his being regarded as a kind of grandfather of the computer age. His interest in the formal structure of thought can also be seen as anticipating contemporary projects such as Structuralism that themselves are concerned with structure. Though Leibniz’s ideas clearly prefigured many current developments, he did not, in fact, make any direct contribution to the history of the computer. Apart from other factors, his considerations on logic and language were mostly in private papers, which were not widely known to the late nineteenth century, by which time many of the ideas he discussed had been developed further independently. 形式主义在当时对其他哲学家来说是一个问题,因为他们对亚里士多德主义的形式逻辑作出了反应。尽管在他去世后,他在逻辑和语言方面的工作在很大程度上被忽视,转而关注他工作的其他方面,但现在人们认为他预见了许多与计算相关的发展。他希望在逻辑系统中形式化思维,显然预示了编程语言和人工智能的发展。这一点,加上他对计算机器的兴趣,使他被视为计算机时代的“祖父”。他对思维形式结构的兴趣也可以看作是对当代项目(如结构主义)的预见,这些项目本身也关注结构。尽管莱布尼茨的思想显然预示了许多当前的发展,但他实际上并没有对计算机历史作出任何直接贡献。除了其他因素外,他对逻辑和语言的考虑大多是在私人文件中,这些文件在十九世纪末并不广为人知,而到那时,他讨论的许多思想已经独立进一步发展。
ABSTRACTION, COMMUNICATION AND REPRESENTATION 抽象、沟通与表现
The necessity of enabling the circulation of signs of various sorts led to the development of increasingly sophisticated information and communication technologies. Some of these developed out of the demands of contemporary warfare. In the late eighteenth century, field armies had grown larger, weapons had become more elaborate and administrative needs increased accordingly. 'Napoleonic warfare required an apparatus of command, control and communications more advanced than anything previously attempted. ^(16){ }^{16} One result was the development of more complex and flexible systems of communication than had previously been possible or necessary, leading, eventually, to the first electric digital technology. The electric telegraph (illus. 6) was developed more or less simultaneously in 各种符号流通的必要性促使了信息和通信技术的不断发展。这些技术中的一些是应现代战争的需求而发展起来的。在十八世纪末,野战军规模不断扩大,武器变得更加复杂,行政需求也相应增加。“拿破仑战争需要比以往任何时候都更先进的指挥、控制和通信设备。”其结果之一是发展出比以往更复杂和灵活的通信系统,最终导致了第一代电数字技术的出现。电报(插图 6)几乎同时被开发出来。
34 Digital Culture 34 数字文化
6 ‘The Telegraph’ song-sheet cover. Written and performed by George Leybourne (1842-84, also known as ‘Champagne Charlie’) in the 186os. 《电报》歌曲单封面。由乔治·莱博恩(1842-1884,亦称“香槟查理”)在 1860 年代创作并演唱。
THE TELEGRAPH, 电报,
the 1820 and ‘30s, by the British scientists Sir Charles Wheatstone and Sir William Fothergill Cooke, and the American painter, Samuel Morse. Morse developed an intricate code involving sending short signals for numbers, which could then be looked up in a codebook. Morse’s colleague Alfred Vail developed a far more practical system involving sending combinations of short and long signals to represent letters of the alphabet. This was named (rather unfairly) Morse Code. The electric telegraph and Morse Code were first widely adopted as a solution for the ‘crisis of control’ in what was then possibly the most complex system ever built, the railways. Both in Britain and the United States the early railways were troubled by large numbers of accidents as well as problems with efficiency, mostly owing to the difficulty of coordinating different trains on the same line. The telegraph offered a means of coordinating and organizing the railways, thus initiating one aspect of what James Beniger calls the ‘control revolution, ^(17){ }^{17} which for Beniger represents 1820 年代和 1830 年代,由英国科学家查尔斯·惠斯通爵士和威廉·福瑟吉尔·库克爵士,以及美国画家塞缪尔·莫尔斯共同发展。莫尔斯开发了一种复杂的编码,涉及发送短信号表示数字,然后可以在密码本中查找。莫尔斯的同事阿尔弗雷德·维尔开发了一种更实用的系统,涉及发送短信号和长信号的组合来表示字母。这被称为(相当不公平地)莫尔斯电码。电报和莫尔斯电码首次被广泛采用,作为当时可能是最复杂的系统——铁路——的“控制危机”的解决方案。在英国和美国,早期的铁路因大量事故以及效率问题而困扰,主要是由于协调同一线路上不同列车的困难。电报提供了一种协调和组织铁路的方法,从而开启了詹姆斯·本尼杰所称的“控制革命”的一个方面, ^(17){ }^{17} 对本尼杰来说,这代表了
the nineteenth-century beginnings of the ‘Information Society’, commonly supposed to be a more recent phenomenon. 十九世纪“信息社会”的起源,通常被认为是一个更近的现象。
The combination of railway and telegraph was also an important component of the beginnings of modern commodity capitalism. Increased communications both encouraged the growth of markets, and changed the nature of those markets. In the United States in particular, the telegraph, along with the railroad, enabled a radical shift from local markets’ conditions of supply and demand to national markets’, in which the price of goods responded to national conditions. As James Cary points out, the telegraph evened out markets in space, and placed everyone in the same place for purposes of trade, thus making geography irrelevant. ^(18){ }^{18} In effect the telegraph was responsible for the development of widespread futures trading, trading in time, rather than arbitrage or geographical price differences. But in order for such a condition to be realized other conditions needed to change. According to Cary 'the development of futures trading depended on the ability to trade or circulate negotiable instruments independently of the actual physical movement of goods. ^(3)^(19){ }^{3}{ }^{19} What was traded was information rather than actual products. To begin with this meant the warehouse receipts from grain elevators along the railroad line, which were traded instead of the grain itself. In order to facilitate this kind of trade, products had to be standardized and homogenized so that they could be bought and sold without inspection. Cary continues to suggest that this process of divorcing the receipt from the product can be thought of as ‘part of a general process initiated by the use of money dots\ldots the progressive divorce of the signifier from the signified, a process in which the world of signifiers progressively overwhelms and moves independently of real material objects’. ^(20){ }^{20} 铁路和电报的结合也是现代商品资本主义起步的重要组成部分。通信的增加既促进了市场的增长,也改变了市场的性质。特别是在美国,电报与铁路一起,使得地方市场的供需条件向国家市场发生了根本性的转变,在国家市场中,商品价格响应国家条件。正如詹姆斯·凯里所指出的,电报在空间上平衡了市场,使每个人在贸易中处于同一位置,从而使地理变得无关紧要。实际上,电报促成了广泛的期货交易,进行的是时间上的交易,而不是套利或地理价格差异。但为了实现这种情况,其他条件也需要改变。根据凯里的说法,“期货交易的发展依赖于能够独立于实际商品的物理移动进行可流通票据的交易或流通。”所交易的是信息,而不是实际产品。 首先,这意味着来自铁路沿线粮仓的仓单,这些仓单被交易而不是粮食本身。为了促进这种交易,产品必须标准化和同质化,以便可以在不检查的情况下买卖。卡里继续建议,这种将收据与产品分离的过程可以被视为“由货币的使用引发的一般过程的一部分 dots\ldots ,即符号与所指之间逐步分离的过程,在这个过程中,符号的世界逐渐压倒并独立于真实的物质对象”。 ^(20){ }^{20}
Other methods of allowing signs to circulate were developed at the same time, including photography. Jonathan Crary points out that the photograph was the most significant, in terms of cultural and social impact, of the ‘new field of serially produced objects’ that 同时,其他允许标志流通的方法也在发展,包括摄影。乔纳森·克雷里指出,摄影在“新领域的系列生产物”中,在文化和社会影响方面是最重要的。
characterized modernity. ^(21){ }^{21} As he puts it: 'The photograph becomes a central element not only in a new commodity economy but in the reshaping of an entire territory in which signs and images, each effectively severed from a referent, circulate and proliferate. ^(22){ }^{22} Crary explicitly compares the photograph to money, both being homologous forms of social power in the nineteenth century, and ‘totalising systems for binding and unifying all subjects within a single global network of valuation and desire’. ^(233){ }^{233} (The capacity to produce a number of images from the same negative made the photograph more mobile, but only in a limited sense. Other technological solutions were needed to allow photographs to be reproduced in large quantities, and thus to circulate widely and freely. Attempts to transmit pictures by telegraph were made as early as 1843 , but were not of high enough quality to succeed commercially. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century a number of methods for cheaply producing printing blocks from photographs were developed, which were rapidly and enthusiastically adopted by newspapers. The most famous and successful of these techniques was halftone, developed by Frederick Ives of Philadelphia in 1883 and refined by Max and Louis Levy a decade later.) 现代性的特征。 ^(21){ }^{21} 他这样说:“照片不仅在新的商品经济中成为中心元素,而且在重塑整个领土中,符号和图像在其中有效地与参照物割裂,循环和繁殖。 ^(22){ }^{22} Crary 明确将照片与货币进行比较,两者在十九世纪都是社会权力的同类形式,是‘将所有主体绑定和统一在一个全球价值和欲望网络中的整体系统’。 ^(233){ }^{233} (从同一底片生产多张图像的能力使得照片在某种程度上更具流动性,但仅限于此。需要其他技术解决方案来允许照片大量复制,从而广泛自由地流通。早在 1843 年,就尝试通过电报传输图片,但由于质量不够高而未能成功商业化。在十九世纪最后一个季度,开发了多种从照片中廉价生产印刷版的方法,这些方法迅速而热情地被报纸采用。 这些技术中最著名和成功的是半色调,1883 年由费城的弗雷德里克·艾夫斯开发,十年后由马克斯和路易斯·莱维进行了改进。)
According to Crary the development of photography is enabled by a rupture in understanding concerning the physiology of vision, in which the corporeality of the observer becomes of account in the act of seeing.This also laid the ground for research into the 'persistence of vision. This derives from work done in the early nineteenth century into after-images, which showed that images persisted in the optic nerves after what was being looked at was no longer visible. One result of this research was a proliferation of optical devices, which exploited persistence of vision to create the illusion of movement. These included the kaleidoscope, the phenakistiscope, the zoetrope (illus. 7) and the thaumatrope. These devices are digital in that they divide the continuous motion involved in an action into discrete elements. They clearly anticipate and prepare the ground for 根据克雷里的说法,摄影的发展是由于对视觉生理学理解的破裂,使得观察者的身体性在观看的行为中变得重要。这也为对“视觉的持续性”的研究奠定了基础。这一研究源于 19 世纪早期对残像的研究,显示出在所观察的物体不再可见后,图像仍然在视神经中持续存在。这项研究的一个结果是光学设备的激增,这些设备利用视觉的持续性创造运动的幻觉。这些设备包括万花筒、幻影图、走马灯(插图 7)和魔术圆盘。这些设备是数字化的,因为它们将一个动作中的连续运动分割成离散的元素。它们显然预示并为此做好了准备。
the cinema, which relies exactly on the persistence of vision they exploit, but also the coming of digital media, which would employ similar techniques involving discrete elements. 电影院正是依赖于他们所利用的视觉持续性,但也依赖于数字媒体的出现,后者将采用类似的技术,涉及离散元素。
The invention of the telegraph and photography, along with the accompanying sense of the general dematerialization of signs, led to anxiety about the relation between language and meaning. The early nineteenth century saw a plethora of books and magazine articles about ciphers, secret writing, and cryptography, a phenomenon Shawn James Rosenheim has identified as the beginnings of what he calls ‘the cryptographic imagination’, which, for him, underpins literary modernity. Perhaps the most visible cultural manifestation of interest in the cryptological is the development of the detective story. ^(24){ }^{24} This genre, which first emerged in the early nineteenth century, concerns the decoding of cryptic signs, usually by a gifted individual. Exemplary of the genre are the Sherlock Holmes stories by Conan Doyle and the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe’s fiction in 电报和摄影的发明,以及伴随而来的符号去物质化的感觉,引发了人们对语言与意义之间关系的焦虑。十九世纪初,关于密码、秘密写作和密码学的书籍和杂志文章层出不穷,肖恩·詹姆斯·罗森海姆将这一现象视为他所称的“密码想象”的开端,而这种想象在他看来是文学现代性的基础。或许,对密码学兴趣的最明显文化表现就是侦探故事的发展。这个流派首次出现在十九世纪初,涉及到神秘符号的解码,通常由一个天才个体完成。该流派的典范是柯南·道尔的福尔摩斯故事和埃德加·爱伦·坡的作品。坡的小说中
7 Zoetrope, c. 1860 - one of the earliest digital visual technologies. 7 走马灯,约 1860 年 - 最早的数字视觉技术之一。
38 Digital Culture 38 数字文化
particular evidences a fascination with a world full of signs that can be decoded and an anxiety, or even despair, about the ability to uncover the true nature of things. 特定的证据显示出对一个充满可以解码的符号的世界的迷恋,以及对揭示事物真实本质能力的焦虑,甚至绝望。
CAPITALISM AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY 资本主义与信息技术
The later nineteenth century saw the development of new digital office technologies, intended to manage the increasing, and increasingly complex, amount of information with which business was confronted as a result of its massive expansion under the aegis of monopoly capitalism. These included machines for calculation, sign production and tabulation, such as cash registers, calculating machines, filing systems, tabulating machines and typewriters. Each of these devices answered the need of an increasingly complex capitalist system to produce, circulate and control signs and to render other phenomena into signs, for those purposes. Calculators, such as the Comptometer developed by Felt and Tarrant (illus. 8), the Adder-Lister from Burroughs Adding Machine Company, and cash registers, such as those developed by National Cash Register, helped businesses and shops manage their affairs in ever faster and more intricate markets. Many of the companies responsible for manufacturing and marketing these devices were later involved in the burgeoning computer industry that emerged after the Second World War. Most famous was C-T-R or the Computing-TabulatingRecording Company, which Thomas Watson Sr joined after he was fired from his position as general manager at National Cash Register, and which was renamed in 1924 by Watson, International Business Machines, or as it is still known today, IBM. 十九世纪后期,新型数字办公技术的发展旨在管理因垄断资本主义的巨大扩张而导致的日益增加且日益复杂的信息量。这些技术包括用于计算、标志生产和制表的机器,如收银机、计算机、档案系统、制表机和打字机。这些设备满足了日益复杂的资本主义系统对生产、流通和控制标志的需求,并将其他现象转化为标志。计算器,如 Felt 和 Tarrant 开发的 Comptometer(图 8),Burroughs Adding Machine Company 的 Adder-Lister,以及 National Cash Register 开发的收银机,帮助企业和商店在日益快速和复杂的市场中管理事务。许多负责制造和销售这些设备的公司后来参与了第二次世界大战后兴起的蓬勃发展的计算机产业。 最著名的是 C-T-R,即计算-制表-记录公司,托马斯·沃森(Sr)在被国家现金注册公司解雇后加入了该公司,并于 1924 年由沃森更名为国际商业机器公司,或如今天仍然所称的 IBM。
The tabulating machine (illus. 9) was developed in response to one of the main issues of industrialization. One of the results of the Industrial Revolution was a great movement of population from agrarian communities to urban centres. This had the effect of producing both a new kind of individual and a new mass society. 制表机(图 9)是为了应对工业化的主要问题之一而开发的。工业革命的一个结果是人口从农业社区大规模迁移到城市中心。这导致了新型个体和新型大众社会的产生。
8 Advertisement for the Felt and Tarrant Comptometer, c. 1915. 8 费尔特和塔兰特计算器的广告,约 1915 年。
The new free-floating individuals were no longer subject to the old forms of power, and new decentralized techniques of control and discipline were needed. Michel Foucault writes of the power of examination and documentation as an essential part of the mechanisms of discipline. ^(25){ }^{25} Subjects began to be defined by a 'whole series of codes of disciplinary individuality that made it possible to transcribe by means of homogenization the individual features by the examination. ^(26){ }^{26} This process, which enables ‘the formalization of the individual within power relations’, makes it possible to 'classify, form categories, to determine averages, to fix norms. ^(27){ }^{27} It also allows the circulation, comparison and transmission of such data, within institutions and disciplines. This had two effects, the constitution of the individual as a describable, analysable object and his or her placing within a comparative system. 新自由浮动的个体不再受旧有权力形式的约束,需要新的去中心化的控制和纪律技术。米歇尔·福柯写到,审查和文档的权力是纪律机制的重要组成部分。 ^(25){ }^{25} 受试者开始被定义为一系列纪律个体的代码,这使得通过同质化的方式能够通过审查转录个体特征。 ^(26){ }^{26} 这一过程使得“在权力关系中对个体的形式化”成为可能,从而能够“分类、形成类别、确定平均值、固定规范”。 ^(27){ }^{27} 它还允许在机构和学科内流通、比较和传递这些数据。这产生了两个效果:个体作为可描述、可分析的对象的构成,以及他或她在比较系统中的定位。
Through such means people became, for the purpose of social control, discrete signs, both individual and homogenous, about whom information could be transmitted, circulated, manipulated 40 Digital Culture 通过这种方式,人们为了社会控制而成为离散的符号,既是个体的也是同质的,关于他们的信息可以被传递、流通和操控
9 The Hollerith tabulating machine, 1890 . 霍勒里斯制表机,1890 年。
and compared. Perhaps the largest scale example of such endeavours is the Census, the ten-yearly enumeration of a country’s population. The first censuses took place in the United States in 1790 and in Britain in 1801. By 1880, in America at least, the problem of gathering and collating the large amount of information required was proving insurmountable, at least by the means then available. These were the conditions that provoked the development of the tabulating machine, one of the major technical developments on the way to the modern electronic computer. A young engineer, Herman Hollerith, designed a system using punched cards similar to the sort used by the Jacquard Loom and proposed by Charles Babbage for his Analytical Engine. Each person was represented by a card. Facts about them were noted by holes punched in the card. The power of Hollerith’s system was that the information could be tabulated and sorted and counted mechanically. Complex concatenated sorts could be undertaken, cross-tabulating different data. Hollerith’s tabulating machine is an exemplary product of the disciplinary, 并进行了比较。或许这种努力的最大规模例子就是人口普查,即每十年进行一次的国家人口统计。美国的第一次人口普查发生在 1790 年,英国则在 1801 年进行。到 1880 年,至少在美国,收集和整理所需的大量信息的问题已被证明是难以克服的,至少在当时可用的手段下是如此。这些条件促使了制表机的发展,这是通往现代电子计算机的主要技术进步之一。一位年轻的工程师赫尔曼·霍勒里斯设计了一种使用打孔卡片的系统,这种卡片类似于雅卡德织机使用的卡片,并且是查尔斯·巴贝奇为他的分析机所提出的。每个人都用一张卡片表示。关于他们的事实通过卡片上的打孔来记录。霍勒里斯系统的强大之处在于信息可以机械地进行制表、排序和计数。可以进行复杂的串联排序,交叉制表不同的数据。霍勒里斯的制表机是这一学科的典范产品。
10 Vannevar Bush and the Differential Analyser (a powerful analogue calculator), 1920 s. 10 瓦尔尼瓦尔·布什和差分分析器(一个强大的模拟计算器),1920 年代。
panoptic society described by Foucault. Within his system people are made visible as pieces of digital data. They are individuals, but their individuality is rationalized and normalized in a system of signs that also homogenizes them as a mass, and makes them interchangeable and manipulable as data. Widely adopted by insurance companies and railways, Hollerith’s machine is the first direct ancestor of the modern computer. The tabulating machine industry became one of the bases of the future computing industry via companies such as IBM, and it was also one of the technologies exploited in the 1920 and ’ 30 during research into the possibilities of calculating machines for scientific research. Hollerith’s invention also helped found a connection that continues unabated to this day, between digital technology and methods of surveillance, control and discipline. 福柯所描述的全景社会。在他的体系中,人们作为数字数据的片段被可视化。他们是个体,但他们的个性在一个符号系统中被合理化和规范化,这个系统也将他们作为一个整体同质化,使他们作为数据可以互换和操控。霍勒里斯的机器被保险公司和铁路广泛采用,是现代计算机的第一个直接祖先。制表机行业通过像 IBM 这样的公司成为未来计算行业的基础之一,同时也是在 1920 年代和 30 年代研究科学研究计算机器可能性时所利用的技术之一。霍勒里斯的发明还帮助建立了一种至今仍在持续的联系,即数字技术与监视、控制和纪律的方法之间的联系。
Hollerith’s invention enabled the management of large amounts of data with an unprecedented degree of efficiency. It made possible great advances in the development of sophisticated calculating machines, such as Vannevar Bush’s Differential Analyser (illus. 10), designed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1930, of which Alan Turing was aware. In the following decade the very first digital electronic calculating machines, as well as Turing’s conceptualization of the universal machine, described above, were 42 Digital Culture 霍勒里斯的发明使得以空前的效率管理大量数据成为可能。这为复杂计算机的发展带来了巨大的进步,例如范尼瓦·布什在 1930 年于麻省理工学院设计的微分分析仪(插图 10),阿兰·图灵对此有所了解。在接下来的十年里,第一台数字电子计算机以及图灵上述的通用机的概念化相继出现。
developed. In Germany Konrad Zuse (illus. 11) built a digital calculating machine called the Z1 in 1938, while in 1939 in the United States John V. Atanasoff and his student Claude Berry built the ABC or Atanasoff-Berry Computer, also electronic and digital. In 1939, building on his experience in using IBM accounting machines, Howard Aiken, with the collaboration of IBM, started to develop a calculating machine, the Harvard-IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, also known as the Harvard Mark I, which was to be followed by three more machines, the Marks II, III and IV. In the same year George Stibitz built his Complex Number Calculator, which used Boolean logic to calculate. None of these machines were computers in the modern sense, in that they lacked the capacity to store data, or in some cases were hard-wired to perform one task. But all were close to the modern conception of the computer. 在德国,康拉德·楚泽(插图 11)于 1938 年制造了一台名为 Z1 的数字计算机,而在 1939 年,美国的约翰·V·阿塔纳索夫和他的学生克劳德·贝里建造了 ABC 或阿塔纳索夫-贝里计算机,这也是电子和数字的。1939 年,霍华德·艾肯在使用 IBM 会计机的经验基础上,与 IBM 合作开始开发一台计算机,哈佛-IBM 自动序列控制计算机,也称为哈佛马克 I,随后又开发了三台机器,马克 II、III 和 IV。同年,乔治·斯蒂比茨制造了他的复数计算器,使用布尔逻辑进行计算。这些机器在现代意义上都不是计算机,因为它们缺乏存储数据的能力,或者在某些情况下是硬连线以执行单一任务。但所有这些机器都接近现代计算机的概念。
It was in this period that Turing published his Entscheidungsproblem paper, which anticipated the future development of digital technology. At the same time two other essays were published that were unwittingly prescient about the future of digital technology and culture. One was by the German Marxist philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin, called 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, ^(28){ }^{28} and the other was an entry for the Encyclopédie française written by English novelist Herbert George (H. G.) Wells, entitled ‘The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopedia. ^(29){ }^{29} In his essay 在这个时期,图灵发表了他的《决策问题》论文,预见了数字技术的未来发展。同时,还有两篇论文不经意间对数字技术和文化的未来进行了预言。一篇是德国马克思主义哲学家和批评家瓦尔特·本雅明所写,名为《机械复制时代的艺术作品》,另一篇是英国小说家赫伯特·乔治(H. G.)威尔斯为《法兰西百科全书》撰写的条目,题为《永久世界百科全书的构想》。
11 Konrad Zuse and colleague at work on one of the first digital computers in his parents’ front room, late 1930 s. 11 康拉德·祖塞和同事在他父母的客厅里工作,研发其中一台最早的数字计算机,时间是 1930 年代末。
The Beginnings of Digital Culture 43 数字文化的起源 43
Wells proposed what he called a Permanent World Encyclopaedia, involving the 'collection, indexing, summarising and release of knowledge’30 by a ‘centralised world organ’ working on a ‘planetary scale’ to pull the mind of the world together. ^(31){ }^{31} Wells saw the technical means to realize this idea in the newly developing field of micro-photography. For him the capacity for endless reproduction and wide circulation afforded by photography was a 'way to world peace that can be followed without any very grave risk of collision with the warring political forces and the vested interests of today.3. ^(32){ }^{32} Thus for Wells the technologies of reproduction offered the possibility of going beyond the antagonisms of contemporary politics and towards a global community united under a ‘common ideology’. By contrast Benjamin saw mechanical reproduction as a means of resistance, rather than unification. In his essay he suggested that the mechanical reproduction of works of art detaches them from the domain of tradition and enables them to be reactivated for different purposes. ^(33){ }^{33} For Benjamin this meant art could stop being based in ritual and tradition and instead be based in politics, thus, in particular, enabling a deritualized art to combat the fascist aestheticization of politics through the politicization of aesthetics. ^(34){ }^{34} (Benjamin’s more antagonistic vision of technology’s potential political role reflected his status as a German Jew, for whom the threat of Fascism and Nazism was real and immediate. Three years later, at the age of 48, he died at the Franco-Spanish border, while fleeing Nazi-occupied France.) 威尔斯提出了他所称的永久世界百科全书,涉及通过一个“集中式世界机构”在“行星规模”上进行“知识的收集、索引、总结和发布”,以将世界的思想汇聚在一起。威尔斯认为,在新兴的微摄影领域中找到了实现这一想法的技术手段。对他而言,摄影所提供的无限复制和广泛传播的能力是一条“可以在不与当今交战的政治力量和既得利益发生严重冲突的情况下追求的世界和平之路”。因此,对威尔斯而言,复制技术提供了超越当代政治对立、朝向一个在“共同意识形态”下团结的全球社区的可能性。相比之下,本雅明则将机械复制视为一种抵抗的手段,而非统一。在他的文章中,他建议,艺术作品的机械复制使其脱离传统领域,并使其能够为不同的目的重新激活。 对于本雅明来说,这意味着艺术可以不再基于仪式和传统,而是基于政治,从而特别使去仪式化的艺术能够通过美学的政治化来对抗法西斯主义对政治的美学化。(本雅明对技术潜在政治角色的更对抗性视野反映了他作为一名德国犹太人的身份,对他而言,法西斯主义和纳粹主义的威胁是真实而迫在眉睫的。三年后,48 岁时,他在逃离纳粹占领的法国时死于法西哥边境。))
THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR 第二次世界大战的后果
Though it is likely that a universal digital computing machine would have emerged in time, circumstances forced its development more rapidly than might have been the case. By the 1930s war was clearly imminent. Its nature was clearly going to be dictated, in part at least, by recent technological advances in ballistics, telecommunications 尽管普遍的数字计算机最终可能会出现,但环境迫使其发展速度比预期更快。到 1930 年代,战争显然即将来临。其性质至少在某种程度上将受到近期弹道学、通信技术等技术进步的影响。
and weapons of mass destruction. Radio, for example, with its ability to transmit messages through the air without the aid of wires, had been invented in the 1870 s by Marconi. This presented an unprecedented set of challenges. In conjunction with the greater mobility made possible by the development of the internal combustion engine, it transformed warfare. Commanders and troops could signal to each other without the necessity of laying physical lines of communication. In theory at least this greatly increased the flexibility and capacity of movement of armies. But this freedom came at a price: the enemy could easily intercept any signal broadcast by radio. In the beginning of this century European governments began to see both the possibilities and dangers of radio communication and prepare appropriate ways of tackling them. Attention began to be paid to cryptography and cryptoanalysis, the sciences of encoding and decoding messages (illus. 12). Among those involved in this work was Alan Turing. It was Turing’s mathematical expertise, rather 和大规模杀伤性武器。例如,无线电以其通过空气传输信息而不需要电线的能力,在 1870 年代由马可尼发明。这带来了前所未有的挑战。结合内燃机的发展所带来的更大机动性,它改变了战争。指挥官和部队可以相互发信,而不需要铺设物理通信线路。至少在理论上,这大大提高了军队的灵活性和机动能力。但这种自由是有代价的:敌人可以轻易拦截任何通过无线电广播的信号。在本世纪初,欧洲各国政府开始认识到无线电通信的可能性和危险,并准备相应的应对措施。人们开始关注密码学和密码分析,这些是编码和解码信息的科学(图 12)。参与这项工作的包括艾伦·图灵。正是图灵的数学专长,
12 A three-ring Enigma cypher machine in its wooden transit case, 1930s. It was used by the Germans during WWII to encode and decode secret transmissions to U-boats. 一个三环恩尼格玛密码机,装在木制运输箱中,1930 年代。它在二战期间被德国人用来对潜艇的秘密传输进行编码和解码。
The Beginnings of Digital Culture 45 数字文化的起源 45
than his ability to imagine machines, that brought him to Bletchley Park, the British Government’s top secret centre for analysing encoded signals intercepted from the enemy. There his interest in both the abstract world of mathematics and the practical one of mechanical and electrical engineering served him well. Through the commitment and intelligence of Turing and others the German codes used in radio transmissions were broken (illus. 13). ^(35){ }^{35} The extraordinary demands of complex cryptoanalysis led to radical and innovative solutions involving mechanized calculating devices, capable of running through possible solutions with unprecedented speed (illus. 14). A number of such devices were built during the War, and by the end engineers had started to explore the possibilities of electronics. The problem with these machines was not in the electronics, but in the mechanical components, the relays and those used to ingest the paper tape that contained the data, so that it might be read. The solution was to store data internally, in electronic form. Such work led eventually to the machine that might be considered to be the first proper digital computer, the Manchester Mk 1 (illus. 15). It was built and designed by researchers working at the Royal Society Computer Laboratory, then housed at Manchester University. It exploited a method of storing data using cathode ray tubes, designed by F. C. Williams and T. Kilburn at Manchester 他的想象力和机器的能力使他来到了布莱切利公园,英国政府分析从敌方截获的编码信号的最高机密中心。在那里,他对抽象数学世界和机械与电气工程的实际世界的兴趣得到了很好的发挥。通过图灵和其他人的承诺与智慧,德国在无线电传输中使用的密码被破解了(图 13)。复杂的密码分析所带来的非凡需求促使了涉及机械计算设备的激进和创新解决方案,这些设备能够以前所未有的速度运行可能的解决方案(图 14)。在战争期间建造了多种此类设备,到战争结束时,工程师们开始探索电子学的可能性。这些机器的问题不在于电子元件,而在于机械部件、继电器以及用于读取包含数据的纸带的部件。解决方案是将数据以电子形式存储在内部。这项工作最终导致了可以被视为第一台真正数字计算机的机器,曼彻斯特 Mk 1(图)。 它是由在皇家学会计算机实验室工作的研究人员建造和设计的,该实验室当时位于曼彻斯特大学。它利用了 F. C. 威廉姆斯和 T.设计的使用阴极射线管存储数据的方法。基尔本在曼彻斯特
13 The ‘Bombe’ codebreaking machine at Bletchley Park, 1943. 1943 年,布莱切利公园的“博姆”破译机。
46 Digital Culture 46 数字文化
14 Wrens operating the ‘Colossus’ computer at the British code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park, 1943. 1943 年,14 名女海鸥在布莱切利公园的英国破译中心操作“巨人”计算机。
University. The Manchester machine, which was in service in 1948, has a strong claim to be the first electronic digital computer in the modern sense because of its capacity to store data. Soon afterwards the electronics firm Ferranti (illus. 16) collaborated with Manchester University to produce a properly engineered version of the machine, which became the basis of one of the first commercial computers. 大学。曼彻斯特机器于 1948 年投入使用,因其存储数据的能力,强烈声称是现代意义上第一台电子数字计算机。随后,电子公司 Ferranti(图 16)与曼彻斯特大学合作,生产了该机器的一个经过合理工程设计的版本,这成为了第一批商业计算机之一的基础。
In fact the British developments described above, though possibly leading to the first actual modern computer, were less historically important than similar developments in the United States. This is partly because much of the British work was not known about until later, owing to security considerations, and partly because, after the War, the us was far more prepared to invest in research into computing machinery. Nevertheless, through links within the small community of those interested in such developments on both sides of the Atlantic, the work of Turing and others in Britain became known and appreciated. The importance of this work is in its conception of digital technology being concerned not so much 事实上,上述英国的发展,尽管可能导致了第一个真正的现代计算机,但在历史上并不如美国的类似发展重要。这部分是因为英国的许多工作由于安全考虑直到后来才被人们所知,部分原因是战后美国更愿意投资于计算机械的研究。尽管如此,通过大西洋两岸对这些发展感兴趣的小社区之间的联系,图灵和英国其他人的工作得以被人们知晓和认可。这项工作的意义在于它对数字技术的构想并不那么关注于
15 The Manchester Mk 1, June 1949, the first fully electronic stored-program computer in operation, built by Professor Max Newman at Manchester University. 15 曼彻斯特 Mk 1,1949 年 6 月,第一台投入使用的全电子存储程序计算机,由曼彻斯特大学的马克斯·纽曼教授建造。
simply with calculation but rather with the manipulation of symbols. In this it anticipated much of how computing would later develop, which would not necessarily have been obvious at the time. 不仅仅是通过计算,而是通过符号的操作。在这方面,它预示了计算机未来的发展,这在当时并不一定显而易见。
In the United States the impetus to develop digital calculating machines derived from a different set of requirements. The need to generate the unprecedented numbers of ballistic tables, describing the angles at which artillery needed to be fired in different conditions, gave new impetus to pre-war computer projects, and in doing so led to the construction of one of the first modern computers. Before the War such tables were generated by hand. Almost immediately it was finished in 1944, the Harvard Mark I was enlisted for the war effort to calculate ballistic tables. Similar uses were made of Bush’s Differential Analyser, and Stibitz’s Complex Number Calculator technology, by then incorporated in a series of machines built at Bell Labs, known as the Bell Relay Machines. Later in the War similar machines were used in the Manhattan Project for the unprecedentedly complex calculations involved in the building of the atomic bomb. The twin demands of ballistic tables in the War and the Manhattan Project for building the Atom Bomb led to the building of another candidate for the title of the first modern computer. By 1943 it became evident that the production of ballistic 在美国,开发数字计算机的动力源于一套不同的需求。生成前所未有的弹道表的需求,这些表描述了在不同条件下炮兵需要发射的角度,为战前的计算机项目注入了新的动力,并因此导致了第一台现代计算机的建造。在战争之前,这些表是手工生成的。1944 年哈佛马克一号几乎立即完成后,被征用来为战争努力计算弹道表。布什的微分分析仪和斯蒂比茨的复数计算器技术也被用于贝尔实验室建造的一系列机器中,这些机器被称为贝尔继电器机器。战争期间,类似的机器被用于曼哈顿计划,以进行建造原子弹所需的前所未有的复杂计算。战争中对弹道表的双重需求以及曼哈顿计划对建造原子弹的需求,导致了另一台有资格被称为第一台现代计算机的机器的建造。到 1943 年,生产弹道表的需求变得显而易见。
48 Digital Culture 48 数字文化
tables had fallen so far behind that new and faster means of production were needed. The Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania was approached, since it was known that several of its staff, including engineers Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, were interested in electronic calculating machines. The Moore School presented an idea for constructing called the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer or ENIAC. The ‘and Computer’ in the name represented Mauchly’s belief that the machine should be capable of more general tasks than simply undertaking numerical integration, which is what interested the military authorities. ^(36){ }^{36} 表格已经落后到需要新的、更快的生产方式。宾夕法尼亚大学的摩尔电气工程学院被联系,因为已知其几位员工,包括工程师普雷斯珀·艾克特和约翰·毛克利,对电子计算机感兴趣。摩尔学院提出了一个名为电子数值积分计算机(ENIAC)的构建方案。名称中的“计算机”代表了毛克利的信念,即该机器应该能够执行比单纯进行数值积分更一般的任务,这正是军事当局所感兴趣的。
The construction of ENIAC was further encouraged by the involvement and interest of the Hungarian emigré mathematician John von Neumann, who was involved in the Manhattan Project, and who saw that digital computing might be the solution to the mathematical complexities of A-Bomb design. ENIAC was actually completed in 1945 , too late to take any active part in the War. It was vast, expensive and, in comparison to electromagnetic machines, very fast. It was not quite a computer in the modern understanding, since it lacked any data storage. But it was an electronic, digital calculating machine, and as such is an important object in the history of modern computing. One of its most valuable contributions was to demonstrate the far greater speeds achievable with ENIAC 的建设得到了匈牙利移民数学家约翰·冯·诺依曼的参与和关注的进一步鼓励,他参与了曼哈顿计划,并认为数字计算可能是解决原子弹设计数学复杂性的问题。ENIAC 实际上在 1945 年完成,太晚而无法在战争中发挥任何积极作用。它庞大、昂贵,与电磁机器相比,非常快速。它在现代理解中并不完全算是计算机,因为它缺乏任何数据存储。但它是一台电子数字计算机,因此在现代计算历史中是一个重要的对象。它最有价值的贡献之一是展示了可以实现的更高速度。
The Beginnings of Digital Culture 49 数字文化的起源 49
electronic digital means as against those possible with comparable analogue electromechanical technology. Furthermore Mauchly’s insistence that it should be a machine capable of more general tasks than those needed for ballistics invoked the idea of the computer as a universal machine, which, despite being implicit in Turing’s influential pre-war paper, was not widely appreciated. The ENIAC led to the EDVAC, the ‘Electronic Discrete Variable Computer’, which was able to store data, and which also inspired a document entitled ‘First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC’. In this paper the now standard logical structure of modern computers was first articulated, comprising of a memory unit, storing both data and instructions, an arithmetic unit, input and output units and a control unit. It was the capacity to store data electronically that demonstrated that such devices could be universal machines, which could be programmed to perform different operations. This configuration became known as the ‘Von Neumann architecture’, after John von Neumann, whose name graced the report as its main author. 电子数字手段与可比的模拟机电技术相比。此外,莫克利坚持认为它应该是一种能够执行比弹道学所需的更一般任务的机器,这引发了计算机作为通用机器的概念,尽管这一点在图灵影响深远的战前论文中隐含存在,但并未被广泛认可。ENIAC 促成了 EDVAC,即“电子离散变量计算机”,它能够存储数据,并且还启发了一份名为《EDVAC 报告初稿》的文件。在这篇论文中,现代计算机的标准逻辑结构首次被阐明,包括一个存储数据和指令的存储单元、一个算术单元、输入和输出单元以及一个控制单元。正是电子存储数据的能力证明了这些设备可以是通用机器,可以被编程以执行不同的操作。这种配置被称为“冯·诺依曼架构”,以约翰·冯·诺依曼的名字命名,他是该报告的主要作者。
The simultaneous development of the Manchester Mk 1 and the ENIAC marks the beginning of the digital age, in that they are the first computers in the modern sense: digital, binary machines capable of storing data and of being reconfigured to undertake different tasks. The proximate cause of their emergence was the War with its unprecedented demands for complex calculation at very great speed. But, as this chapter has shown, they are also the embodiment of capitalist modernity, with its emphasis on abstraction, exchangeability and self-regulation. Turing’s conceptual machine, capable of being reconfigured in an infinite number of different states, is the perfect, idealized model of capitalism as a universal machine, in which different phenomena, labour and commodities are homogenized in order to be exchanged, manipulated and distributed. 曼彻斯特 Mk 1 和 ENIAC 的同时发展标志着数字时代的开始,因为它们是现代意义上的第一台计算机:数字化、二进制的机器,能够存储数据并重新配置以执行不同的任务。它们出现的直接原因是战争及其对高速复杂计算的前所未有的需求。但正如本章所示,它们也是资本主义现代性的体现,强调抽象性、可交换性和自我调节。图灵的概念机器能够以无限多种不同状态重新配置,是资本主义作为一种普遍机器的完美理想模型,在这种模型中,不同的现象、劳动和商品被同质化,以便进行交换、操作和分配。