Hacking Cyberspace

David J. Gunkel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367096403
• eBook ISBN: 9780429979712
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In Hacking Cyberspace David J. Gunkel examines the metaphors applied to new technologies, and how those metaphors inform, shape, and drive the implementation of the technology in question. The author explores the metaphorical tropes that have been employed to describe and evaluate recent advances in computer technology, telecommunications systems, and interactive media. Taking the stance that no speech is value-neutral, Gunkel examines such metaphors as "the information superhighway" and "the electronic frontier" for their political and social content, and he develops a critical investigation that not only traces the metaphors' conceptual history, but explicates their implications and consequences for technological development. Through Hacking Cyberspace, David J. Gunkel develops a sophisticated understanding of new technology that takes into account the effect of technoculture's own discursive techniques and maneuvers on the actual form of technological development.

1
Terra Nova: The New Worlds of Cyberspace

Today another frontier yawns before us, far more fog-obscured and inscrutable in its opportunities than the Yukon. It consists not of unmapped physical space in which to assert one’s ambitious body, but unmappable, infinitely expansible cerebral space. Cyberspace. And we are going there whether we want to or not.

Barlow 1994, 1

If a new world were discovered today, would we be able to see it? Would we be able to clear from our minds the images we habitually associate with our expectations of a different world to grasp the real difference that lay before our eyes?

Calvino 1994, 1

If a new world were discovered today would its contours conform to our understanding of “world” and “discovery"? Would it take place as a taking of place? Would it supervene as an uncovering and drawing into appearance of that which had been covered, hidden, or withdrawn? Would this new geographic possibility conform to these determinations that are as much a part of the Columbian voyage as the modern scientific enterprise? And could this conformity be anything other than the trace of a certain violence that endeavors to uncover everything through the illumination of enlightenment and seeks to establish every different domain as a new world that is determined as the opposite and other of an old world?

This chapter embarks upon an exploration of what recent technical and popular discourses have called “the new world of cyberspace.” It will investigate the legacy, logic, and consequences of this complex metaphor that appears to connect cyberspace to the Columbian voyages of discovery and the larger network of European expansionism.¹ Employing this particular metaphor to describe the significance of cyberspace is not without utility. The association designates the encounter with a previously unknown environment where little has been determined and the opportunities and perils appear to be immeasurable. This understanding hardwires cyberspace into a network of available meanings, which render it somewhat familiar and approachable. The metaphor, however, is not without significant limitations and consequences. “New world” not only links cyberspace to the Columbian adventure but communicates the exercise of power that is implied in the seemingly neutral act of discovery. This comparison, therefore, is not innocent but establishes a complex interaction between new communication and information technologies and the cultural systems of Western colonialism and European expansionism.

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All words, in every language, are metaphors.

McLuhan and McLuhan 1988,120

The employment of the metaphor “new world” in order to designate and explain advances in communication and information technology does not commence with cyberspace or the Internet. At the beginning of this century, for instance, Charles Horton Cooley (1962 [1901]) had proclaimed a new world in the wake of late- nineteenth-century electric communication (i.e., telegraph and telephone): “We understand nothing rightly unless we perceive the manner in which the revolution in communication has made a new world for us” (65). Sixty-one years later, Marshall McLuhan (1962) generalized Cooley’s perception, arguing that all communication technologies, “whether it be alphabet or radio… present men with a surprising new world” (23). The recent extension of this concept to the various technologies that compose what is called cyberspace is manifest in the discursive gestures that have been employed by researchers, theorists, and journalists. “In the rhetoric of the virtual realists,” concludes Benjamin Woolley (1992), “this ‘nonspace’ was not simply a mathematical space nor a fictional metaphor but a new frontier, a very real one that was open to exploration and, ultimately, settlement” (122). The popularity and general acceptance of this frontier rhetoric is evident in the appointed subtitle to a special edition of Time magazine (25 July 1994), “The Strange New World of the Internet: Battles on the Frontier of Cyberspace.” This title not only employs the imagery of “new world” and “frontier” but in doing so demonstrates the extent to which these concepts have become common and colloquial. In designating its edition in this fashion, Time was not introducing a nomenclature. The periodical was capitalizing on a discursive trope that had already been established and deployed in the field of telecommunications technology and information systems since the introduction of the telegraph.

The majority of publications employing the metaphor of the “new world” in order to explain and describe cyberspace do so uncritically. Timothy Leary (1999), for example, identifies Christopher Columbus as the first cyberpunk. Although Leary recognizes contemporary efforts to reevaluate the implications of the Columbian voyages of discovery, he quickly dismisses them as the dictates of the “Political Correction Department” (371). For Leary, as for many cyberspace enthusiasts and researchers, Columbus remains unproblematically one of the essential role models for technological discovery, invention, and exploration. This association informs all kinds of discussions and writings about cyberspace. John Perry Barlow (1990), cofounder of the appropriately named Electronic Frontier Foundation, has situated the Columbian encounter with the American continent as the immediate precursor to the experience and exploration of cyberspace: “Columbus was probably the last person to behold so much usable and unclaimed real estate (or unreal estate) as these cybernauts have discovered” (37). And “The Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age,” a publication of the Progress and Freedom Foundation that bears the signatures of some of the most influential of the digerati, projects this Columbian lineage both backward and forward in time, encompassing not only the seafaring exploits of ancient Greek mariners but also the conquest of the American West and outer space: “The bioelectric frontier is an appropriate metaphor for what is happening in cyberspace, calling to mind as it does the spirit of invention and discovery that led ancient mariners to explore the world, generations of pioneers to tame the American continent, and, more recently, to man’s first explorations of outer space” (Dyson et al. 1996, 297; italics in original). In these and a large number of similar cases, the metaphors of the frontier and the new world are employed to name and describe not only the vast potential of cyberspace but the experience of exploration and discovery. For this reason, they are unquestionably seductive, especially for American audiences. They connect the nebulous concept of cyberspace to a number of familiar and generally celebrated images concerning discovery, boundless exploration, and national identity. These same metaphors, however, are also undeniably problematic. At the same time that they have been circulated in writings in and about cyberspace, they have been, in other parts of contemporary culture, submitted to a wholesale reevaluation and critique. As Mary Fuller and Henry Jenkins (1995) point out, “one has to wonder why these heroic metaphors of discovery have been adopted by popularizers of the new technologies just as these metaphors are undergoing sustained critique in other areas of culture, a critique that hardly anyone can be unaware of in the year after the quincentenary of Columbus’ first American landfall” (59).

Woolley’s Virtual Worlds (1992) is one text that approaches these heroic metaphors of discovery with some skepticism. In a consideration of the origin of virtual reality technology, Woolley makes the following comment concerning the mythology of cyberspace research: “Its creation myth is filled with the rhetoric of invention and discovery, of ‘founding fathers’ and ‘pioneers.’ Technologists, being mostly American, are fond of titles that evoke their New World heritage” (40). Although Woolley explicitly marks the association of cyberspace and its enabling technologies with the rhetoric of exploration and frontierism, his brief statement remains nothing but an indication of the affiliation. He does not probe either the rationale or the significance of this fondness of the technologist for titles that evoke new world imagery. The logic that informs and animates the curious association between cyberspace and frontierism, however, has been submitted to examination in Simon Penny’s “Virtual Reality As the Completion of the Enlightenment Project” (1994). In a brief subsection, entitled “VR and Colonialism,” Penny not only connects cyberspace to the history of European expansionism but situates technology as the defining principle of the Euro-American frontier:

Technological development has always defined the location of frontiers. Me dieval principalities were limited in scale by the speed of communication and the rate at which troops could be deployed. The Atlantic coast of Europe remained the edge of the world (to Europeans) until explorers were liberated from coast-hugging travel by accurate navigational technologies and robust ships. The American West was claimed and held only once the steam locomotive, the telegraph, and the conoidal bullet combined into one technological complex. More recently, the space race advanced as soon as the technology was available. With geography filled up and the dream of space colonization less viable every day, the drive to the frontier has collapsed on itself. The space remaining for colonization is the space of technology itself. No longer the tool by which the frontier is defined, the body of technology is now itself under exploration. (237)

Although Penny suggests intriguing historical connections that situate cyberspace within the context of the European and American colonization of space, he does not pursue an analysis of the significance or repercussions of this genealogy. In other words, Penny argues that the colonialist project extends to cyberspace but does not investigate the general implications or significance of this extension.

One text that does take the next step, engaging in a critical examination of the consequences and repercussions of the collapse of the Euro-American concept of the frontier into the very material of technology, is Fuller and Jenkins’s “Nintendo® and New World Travel Writing: A Dialogue” (1995). This discussion not only traces structural similarities between the navigation of video-game cyberspace² and the exploration and colonization of the Americas but attempts to develop modes of inquiry that address the general significance and consequences of this curious and pregnant confluence. The object of their analysis, however, is not technology per se but metaphor: “We felt it might be productive to take seriously for a moment these metaphors of ‘new world’ and ‘colonization’” (59). Metaphor, as it is commonly understood, is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them. Taking metaphor seriously, as demonstrated by the dialogue between Fuller and Jenkins, means locating, tracing, and critiquing the transference of meaning initially developed in New World Travel writing (i.e., the Diario of Columbus, Walter Raleigh’s Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Beautiful Empier of Guiana, and John Smith’s True Relation of Such Occurances and Accidents of Noate As Hath Happened in Virginia) to the narrative techniques and technologies of cyberspace. For Fuller and Jenkins (1995), therefore, the metaphors of the new world do not constitute mere figures of speech but are a potent mechanism for the production of meaning and the ongoing struggle over significance. A similar analysis is espoused by Ziauddin Sardar’s “alt.civilizations.faq: Cyberspace As the Darker Side of the West” (1996). This essay, which proposes to examine the association between cyberspace and “Europe’s imperial past of political and cultural conquest” (Sardar and Ravetz 1996, 5), not only critiques the employment of “colonial metaphors” but argues that “cyberspace is the newly discovered Other of Western civilisation, and it will be subjected to the same treatment that the West handed out to all other non-Western cultures” (Sardar and Ravetz 1996,6). Like Fuller and Jenkins, Sardar takes seriously the metaphors of the new world and frontier, demonstrating that such metaphors import into cyberspace various information and assumptions about space, conquest, and power that are not without problematic historical precedents. In this way, Sardar’s text takes a traditional and accepted approach to the critique of metaphor, demonstrating not only the limitations of the metaphor’s configuration but exhibiting its often unacknowledged connotations.

Despite this unique attention to the implications and ramifications of the metaphors of new world and colonialism, the texts of Fuller and Jenkins and Sardar inevitably encounter structural difficulties that threaten to undermine their procedures and conclusions. Although both texts identify and critique the new world metaphors circulating in and around cyberspace, they do so by employing the very metaphors they question. For example, Fuller and Jenkins (1995) state the following concerning the status of their own dialogue: “This work is a confessedly exploratory attempt at charting some possibilities of dialogue and communication” (58, italics added). Fuller and Jenkins’s (1995) discussion, according to their own descriptions, examines the metaphors of new world and colonialism, which includes, among other things, the concepts of exploration (59) and chartmaking or mapmaking (66–67). The investigation of these concepts, however, is accomplished through a dialogue that readily confesses that it employs the concepts of “exploration” and “cartography” as descriptions of its own methodology. Consequently, what Fuller and Jenkins address in their discussion is also a constituent of the way they discuss it. In other words, they employ in their discursive practice the very metaphors they endeavor to critique and submit to questioning. A similar complication is manifest in the subtitle to Sardar’s text, which employs the very imagery the text investigates and contends. Nominating the essay the “Darker Side of the West” puts in play the conceptual oppositions of white and black and light and dark that are not only part and parcel of Western ideology but inform the racist assumptions that Sardar critiques in the traditions of European colonial conquest and cultural domination. Consequently, Sardar, on the one hand, critiques the metaphors of lightness and darkness that are appropriated from a specific European tradition and uploaded into cyberspace and, on the other hand, is somehow compelled to use these very metaphors to describe the significance of this critique. There is, therefore, a crucial gap or apparent self-contradiction between the what and how of the analysis, between what the text manifestly means to say and how it is nonetheless constrained to mean (Norris 1982, 3).

It is tempting to explain and account for these difficulties by calling them “practical contradictions.” Doing so, however, would have the general effect of neutralizing the texts’ analyses and undermining their timely and insightful conclusions. The situation, however, may be more complex and nuanced than it first appears. For designating these occurrences with the name “practical contradiction” already assumes that the metaphors of the new world and the frontier can and must be surpassed through the discursive practices of the texts that compose and coordinate their investigation and critique. In other words, such a decision presumes that there already exists something like a purified form of literal or nonfigurative discourse that is able to communicate the implications of metaphor without having to employ metaphor, especially the metaphor that is submitted to critical evaluation. Recent work in rhetoric and the philosophy of language, however, suggests that the situation may be otherwise. Mark Johnson and George Lakoff’s Metaphors We Live By (1980), for example, argues that metaphors are not merely figures of speech or discursive decorations but the very mechanism of all possible conceptual thought: “Our ordinary conceptual system… is metaphorical in nature” (3). If Johnson and Lakoff are correct, and recent publications in rhetoric and philosophy tend to affirm their general position,³ then not only is the operative difference between the literal and metaphorical critically suspended, but, as Derrida (1976) formulates it, “there is nothing that does not happen with metaphor and by metaphor” (8). Through the mobilization of this insight, the analyses of Fuller and Jenkins and Sardar do not immediately resolve into practical contradiction but demonstrate the fact that the examination of metaphor cannot take place or be produced without metaphor. This alternative conceptualization, however, implies several consequences for this and any subsequent analysis that endeavors to take seriously the role and function of metaphor.

If there is indeed nothing that does not happen with and by metaphor, then any statement concerning metaphor necessarily takes place by metaphor. In this way, any critique of metaphor is immediately and inextricably involved in a circular configuration wherein the mode of investigation cannot avoid or escape what is investigated. What is necessary in these circumstances is not to break out of this circular figure by deploying or developing some form of “literal discourse” or “proper meaning” but, as Briankle Chang (1996) argues following the precedent supplied by Heidegger, to enter into the circle in the right way (x). Entering the circle of metaphor in the right way involves, on the one hand, affirming that nothing happens without metaphor and, in doing so, recognizing that the analysis of metaphor must already use and cannot avoid employing what is analyzed. It means, therefore, a mode of inquiry that would, as Chang (1996) describes it, “replace the naïve empiricist picture of the inquiring mind as a tabula rasa, or empty receptacle, with the hermeneutical principle of interpretive embeddedness” (x). On the other hand, entering this circle also involves taking seriously the metaphors by which the analysis is produced, permitting the procedure and results of the investigation to impinge upon and affect the mode by which the investigation is developed and presented. In other words, the method of the investigation cannot be restricted to or quarantined from the object of its investigation. The examination of metaphor, therefore, not only does not escape the space of metaphor but must make space for a reflective, performative recoil in which the conclusions made about metaphor come to be introduced into the manner by which these conclusions have been generated.

The following examination both follows and extends the precedent established in the work of Fuller and Jenkins and Sardar. That is, it endeavors to take seriously the metaphors of the frontier and new world that have been emplo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Prolegomena—Hacking Cyberspace
• 1 Terra Nova: The New Worlds of Cyberspace
• 2 Ars Metaphorica: The Computer as a Device of Communication
• 3 Veritatem Imitari: Virtual Reality and the Deconstruction of the Image
• 4 Lingua Ex Machina: Computer-Mediated Communication and the Tower of Babel
• 5 Corpus Amittere: Cyberspace and the Body
• 6 Ecce Cyborg: The Subject of Communication
• Appendix: Deconstruction for Dummies
• References
• Index