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Page 1: Code & Power: Discussion Notes

Code and PowerCCR 633 ::: 4/14/11

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code as writing

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critical code studies

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What shifts when writing isn’t human-readable?

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“Code is the only language that is executable, meaning that it is the first discourse that is materially affective.”

- Alexander Galloway, Protocol

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How do we split agency between humans and

machines?

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Who is doing what to whom? For whom?

How does technology reinforce or facilitate that?

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Does the context of war continue to influence these technologies?

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Heinrich Himmler

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Dr. Josef Mengele

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Nazis were not just monstrous grown-ups

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Luftwaffe Pilot

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SS-Sturmman, Wiking Division

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Not just men, either.

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Eva BraunFriday, April 15, 2011

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Irma Grese

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Senior Auschwitz SupervisorFriday, April 15, 2011

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30,000 prisoners

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19 years old

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ordinary people

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not so different from us

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who did the daily work of the Holocaust.

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LaToya:we can see nothing happens in vacuum. There is no direct link between new technologies and their consequences whether they are good, bad, or somewhere in the middle; there is always a middle man, woman, group, or human force whose will and/ or intention is the determining factor. I maintain that there is no neutral technology where there is human influence....

With this in mind, how can we re-member and learn from the ways that technology has been used in the past to oppress, or create conditions that oppress others? How might this process of re-membering inform and bring about more ethical practices in the future?

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Part 1: Eniac

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“A computer was a human being until approximately 1945. After that date, the term referred to a machine and the former human

computers became “operators.”

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“The ENIAC was then told to solve a difficult problem that would have required several weeks’ work by a trained man. The ENIAC did it in exactly 15 seconds.” The “15 seconds” claim ignores the time women spent setting up each problem on the machine. (474)

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Tim:But this story is bigger than a story of inclusion. These stories are stories of war machines. Of “megamachines,” to quote Lewis Mumford via Cynthia Haynes. And this story is about the colonial price of inclusion in the halls of power–at any position. Because no matter how utopian Vannevar Bush made the memex sound, the ENIAC girls were partaking in–helping to perfect–machines of ultimate control. Death machines. The megamachine. What price, inclusion? What price, a more technical education and job? What price, to develop technologies that stop the Nazi’s (insert any other colonial monster here) and to enable them at the same time (remembering here the Onondaga land I’m actually on as I type this)? What price, to seek to include more and more in a system that cries out for radical transformation?

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Part II: Hollerith

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Tim: all these inscription technologies, from clay tokens right up to punch cards and the ENIAC computer, have all been technologies originally developed as systems for those in power to control those without it. Whether it’s death (Hole 8), or taxes (clay tokens), technologies of inscription so often begin as systems of more efficient control.

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Tim:

How might we, as teachers of art and writing inscription, continually politicize these technologies for ourselves and students?

How might we inoculate ourselves against the silencing, the forgetting, the “oh gee, isn’t that cool?” that so often accompanies our professionalization, our technology use, our everyday practices, that we might work to be more like Minnie Bruce and excavate real use-able histories that might point us to better methods of imagination for transformation?

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