Cyber Ireland

Text, Image, Culture

C. Lynch

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780230358171
• eBook ISBN: 9781137386540
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Art General
• Index: Social Sciences

Cyber Ireland explores, for the first time, the presence and significance of cyberculture in Irish literature. Bringing together such varied themes as Celtic mythology in video games, Joycean hypertexts and virtual reality Irish tourism, the book introduces a new strand of Irish studies for the twenty-first century.

1

Out With the Old, in With the Boring

In 1994, when Intel launched the Pentium processor that was central to the emergence of the personal computer as an everyday consumer product, more than half of worldwide production was based at Leixlip. Over the next decade, the Irish plant produced a billion Pentium chips.

(O’Toole, 2013)

Placed alongside the Tara Torcs, Book of Kells and Clonmacnoise Crozier in Fintan O’Toole’s History of Ireland in 100 Objects, the Intel microprocessor is transformed into an icon for the remarkable ‘rise of information technology’ in Ireland (O’Toole, 2013). In their own way, of course, all of the 100 objects are assertions of technological advancement. Whether they reflect a new age of sophistication in the hammering and twisting of gold or the dexterous production of illuminated manuscripts, all of these objects are touchstones in Irish techno-cultural evolution. In this sense, the inclusion of the Intel microprocessor in 98th position is no more than a matter of extending the timeline. More notable than the innovative nature of these objects, however, is their value as implicitly sacred artefacts. While many of the items served distinctly religious or spiritual functions, all can be read as objects of secular veneration, simply by virtue of their inclusion on the list. Reproduced in the printed book, the online exhibition, the phone and tablet apps, and available to view at the National Science Museum at Maynooth, the Intel microprocessor becomes, in a painfully literal sense, objectified by this project. Labelled, mapped and historicised by the 100 Objects initiative, the microprocessor is plucked from its hidden location within the computer and made visible in both virtual and actual museum spaces. With good reason too, it is a truly remarkable object of Irish manufacture. While the ancient objects on the list are admired for their rarity, Intel’s ‘billion Pentium chips’ seem almost ludicrously numerous. In the book and the app, the associated image is an abstract blur of blues, pinks and greens, bringing the processor in line with the objects crafted centuries earlier by inviting the reader to admire the human capacity to produce objects which are both ingenious and beautiful. Perhaps most importantly, placing the Intel microprocessor on this long chronology also serves as an insight into its future as an archaeological relic. Future civilizations, the list implies, might one day marvel at this small object of sophistication in an otherwise primitive culture, in the same way that we might view a Mesolithic fish trap or flint macehead.

While the impact of Intel and other manufacturing plants was, as O’Toole has it, ‘unimaginable’ just a generation before, Ireland’s early involvement in the computer revolution was as much driven by economic opportunity as by technological proclivity. The contributing factors which made Ireland so attractive to international investors, including tax breaks and a young, well-educated, English-speaking workforce are discussed in detail elsewhere in this book. Suffice to say here that from the late 1980s, limited industrial development and a relatively unsophisticated economic infrastructure made it uniquely possible for Ireland to ‘leapfrog into the microelectronic age’ (Foster, 2008, p.3). While the economic and political conditions which made this possible are vitally important in forming a history of the period, generalising structural overviews threaten to obscure the lasting cultural significance at an individual or experiential level. So, while the material fact that more than half of the world’s processors were produced in County Kildare in the mid-1990s is indeed evidence of Ireland’s transformed reputation in manufacture and export, it tells us very little about the correlated impact on Irish lives. As the History of Ireland in 100 Objects demonstrates, the value and meaning of any object, or even billions of them, whether a Neolithic bowl or a microprocessor, depends upon the associated narrative interpretation. With this in mind, O’Toole asks in his introduction to 100 Objects whether a ‘physical object, in our digital age, [can] still mean anything?’ (O’Toole, 2013). Since the objects collated here are used as inspiration for broad and suggestive cultural commentaries, the more pertinent question might be whether objects are, in fact, expected to mean everything in the digital age. In the simplest terms then, the Intel microprocessor becomes symbolic of Ireland’s more general engagement with cyberculture – not so much an object as a metaphor. Beyond the Irish context, the internal components of computers, the physical objects which facilitate access to cyberspace, are well-established as portals to the imagination. As Margaret Wertheim argues:

the electronic gates of the silicon chip have become, in a sense, a metaphysical gateway, for our modems transport us out of the reach of physicists’ equations into an entirely ‘other’ realm.

(2000, p.226)

While large multinational companies such as Intel, Dell and Apple are pragmatically recognised for the employment opportunities they created in Ireland, little has been done to understand the corresponding imaginative shift they initiated. As examined in this chapter, these aspects of Irish cyberculture, the way it is feared and the way it is anticipated, are explored most eagerly in one of the oldest technologies: writing. In the contemporary Irish texts explored below, the symbolic and poetic capacity of the computer as object emerges in ways which both reflect and create responses to this alternate ‘realm’ we now think of as cyberspace. For O’Toole, the selected 100 Irish objects are ultimately significant because they represent, albeit in complex ways, the people who made and preserved them. They are, in short, evidence of the Irish people’s ‘remarkable ability to invent new ways to say old things’ (O’Toole, 2013). The presence of an Intel microprocessor is, no doubt, notable precisely because it places the self-consciously new among the conspicuously old. More than that, the contrast with the objects crafted out of iron, stone and vellum acts as a reminder that newness is finite. Just 20 years after the launch of the Pentium processor, Intel’s miraculous technology which transformed the very idea of personal computers is already taken for granted.

Newness

According to Manuel Castells, newness is ‘boring’. The fact that something is new, he argues, does not make it interesting by default (Castells & Ince, 2003, p.23). Certainly, in the parts of the world where access to generic web technology has moved banking, shopping and socialising online, discussing the newness of cyberculture already seems outdated. Yet newness is undoubtedly privileged by those willing to queue overnight for the new gadget running the new operating system. While these high-profile hardware releases construct a narrative of gadget reincarnation, it is widely understood that new technologies emerge out of incremental developments. At best, ‘new technology’ is only newer and, very briefly, the newest. New or not, it is impossible to avoid the sense that cyberculture has already changed us all, and quickly. As Roy Foster observes, Ireland’s supposed transformation from rural idyll to technological utopia seemed but the work of a moment, as ‘the microelectronic age was embraced without impediment, and with one bound Ireland was modern’ (2008, p.30). Castells’ rejection of the new as boring and Foster’s scepticism of the Irish ‘Great Leap Forward’ combine here to form a warning against taking an uncritical view of ‘progress’. Access to and familiarity with communications technology has increased beyond all lay expectations. Yet, if we are already bored by the idea of computers, it is not because they are new, but because they are already so familiar as to have become prosaic. As David Bell explains, ‘computers have become an everyday, banal part of many people’s working lives, even those whose jobs are far, far away from computing’ (2007, p.133). The point is somewhat self-evident, but no less useful in framing the way we respond, not only to computers (and their components) as objects, but also to their representation in cultural forms, such as literature and film. On the one hand, computers promise futuristic capacities, as the machines we use to make life-saving scientific breakthroughs, complex calculations and sophisticated financial analyses. In reality, as Bell has it, our uses are principally ‘banal’; for all that computers can and do achieve, for most people they are machines that we use to send emails, enter data onto spreadsheets and share videos of cats.

This day-to-day experience of technology as domesticated and unremarkable is, as T. L. Taylor argues, in direct contrast to the advertising campaigns which promise apparently ‘magical technologies’:

Our relationships with technological objects are always moving closer to the mundane. In fact, we might even say these objects are always mundane. […] actual users are engaged in much more grounded practices with the technologies they encounter.

(2009, p.152)

Videogame consoles, laptops, tablet computers and smartphones provide opportunities for play and entertainment, but they are also objects of productivity and duty. These same ‘technological objects’ are our calendars, train tickets, bank statements and, in some cases, offices. As Karlin Lillington observed a decade ago, computer technology makes ‘working from home a real possibility’ (2004, p.70) for many people in Ireland in numerous professions. These adjustments in daily life may appear mundane, but they are no less significant for that. On the contrary, Castells is resolute in his assertion that the ‘information age has never been a technological matter’ and should be thought of instead as ‘a process of social change in which technology is an element that is inseparable from social, economic, cultural and political trends’ (2001, p.3). Simply, the transformation of computer technology which has led to its current status, in Castells’ terms, cannot be separated from the transformations wrought by technology. In this book, one of the key areas of concern is our reluctance, or indeed failure, to observe those correlated ‘trends’, particularly within Irish literary culture. Encounters with technology have ceased to be remarkable, so that in life, as in literature, they have become merely ‘a ubiquitous background hum’ (Lillington, 2004, p.67). Perhaps as a consequence of this, scholars of Irish literature have, to borrow Foster’s term, vaulted beyond the moment of transformation in ‘one bound’, landing directly in assumptions of the boring or mundane.

The literary texts discussed in this book have been selected based on the criteria that a future cultural historian might apply. They have all been chosen because of the contribution they make to the case that cyberculture is already a part of Irish literature and that our full understanding of this depends upon acknowledging and interrogating it. This kind of work is very much the responsibility of literary and cultural scholarship, forming part of the ‘urgent need to theorise online identity’ (Boon & Sinclair, 2009, p.99). With so many obvious overlaps, the lessons learnt from theorising fictional identity provide a sensible place to start. Literary and cultural studies also supply a number of useful frameworks for understanding responses to cyberculture, not least the tendency to divide it into the extremes of utopian, utilitarian and apocalyptic. There is surely something revealing in these limitations of the human imagination, which are themselves so familiar from literary forms. The concept of computer technology, and in particular the internet, as utopian is particularly prevalent in theories which extend beyond the purely practical capacity. Again, Castells is useful in his rejection of the internet as merely a system of computational communication and exchange, emphasising the need to understand it as an idea. The idea of the internet is paramount for Castells in making his claim that it is ‘above all else, a cultural creation’ (2001, p.33). The utilitarian response, by contrast, promotes established and practical achievements. In the field of health care, for instance, the fact that ‘surgery can be (and has been) done remotely via the net’ (Lillington, 2004, p.71) and the way the Irish education system has already been ‘revolutionized by technology’s ability to bring the world to the doorstep of all schools, courtesy of the internet’ (Lillington, 2004, p.71) are regularly cited. Despite all of the apparent advantages, apocalyptic responses, including the fear that we are all ‘in danger of losing our humanity and becoming soulless machines’ (Pastore, 2008, p.10) retain some currency for those less convinced about the benefits of cyberculture. All three of these perspectives are simply responses to the anxieties and ambitions inevitably provoked by computers. Whether our instincts lead us to praise the transformations they bring or fear the damage they might do, computers demand our attention. However, as O’Toole’s selection of the microprocessor reminds us, computers are the product of human imagination. As they come to influence us in increasingly unexpected ways, we do well to refine our responses to them as a matter of expectations. On the one hand, computers go beyond our expectations and improve upon our capacities; on the other, they confound our expectations and fall short of our plans for them. In either case, even the most boring and mundane technologies have proven transformative and provocative for Irish people. Both O’Toole’s veneration of Intel’s ‘billion Pentium chips’ and Foster’s acknowledgement of Ireland’s ‘microelectronic age’ place these global concerns within an Irish framework. They also serve to pinpoint the historical moment when cyberculture became a meaningful concept in Irish discourse. As Jason Buchanan puts it, the symbolic value of computer technology is inseparable from the Celtic Tiger as a ‘cultural signifier for progress and newness’ (2009, p.301). New money, the ‘new Irish’ and new technology characterise this era, redefining ‘the limits and borders of what could, or should, be considered Irish’ (Buchanan, 2009, p.301). In the digital age, Irish writers have taken up these ideas, meeting the challenge of making it ‘new’, just as their predecessors had a century before.

In the beginning was the code

The movement towards a mundane relationship with ‘technological objects’, as described by Taylor, grows out of repetition and familiarity. Self-evidently, the more we use something, the less novel it becomes. It stands to reason then, that even with Castells’ stricture on newness, early engagements with computers as a ‘new’ technology are more likely to be characterised by a greater degree of optimism and enthusiasm. Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin offers an insightful example of this, reminding us that the technologies we now take for granted were once breathtakingly new. Winner of the National Book Award in 2009 and the International IMPAC Literary Award in 2011 (Lennon, 2012, p.99), McCann’s novel explores the compulsions and frailties which set people against one another, as well as the achievements in art and technology with the potential to bring them together. It is a novel of multiple protagonists, some Irish, many American. Although principally set in New York, the novel ranges back and forth to Ireland and beyond to Vietnam, so that the significance of place is not limited to particular cities or countries. Indeed, one of the novel’s greatest achievements is the concealed bonds between the characters across borders of time and space. Although ‘none of the characters see all the connections that link their lives with one another’, McCann permits the reader to observe the web which links them ‘both known and unknown, both witnessed and unnoticed’ (Lennon, 2012, p.100). The connectivity which Joseph Lennon observes between lives and characters is further reinforced by the use of computers as agents of history in the novel. McCann not only historicises the internet by narrating its origins, but also awards the technology symbolic significance, presenting it as emblematic of hope and possibility, in Ireland and beyond.

McCann’s narration of the historical context in which these tools and technologies were developed restores the human to the story of computer evolution. Through characters such as Joshua, a hacker or programmer, the author presents a newness so exhilarating that people are willing to risk their lives to see it made a reality. Far from boring or mundane then, the groups of programmers who populate the novel engage with new computer technology in definitively interesting ways. Computers are ‘interesting’ in the novel in the way Mikhail Epstein uses the term, relating it ‘to the modal categories of the possible and the impossible, the probable and the improbable’ (Epstein & Klyukanov, 2009, p.79). As Lennon observes in his interview with McCann, Let the Great World Spin is themed around creation, ‘characters at their most daring, at the moments when things are beginning or about to begin’ (Lennon, 2012, p.104). None more so than the programmers and technicians ‘developing the dream of ARPANET’ (McCann, 2010, p.83). These young men are revealed by McCann’s narrative to be the fictional counterparts of those who stood at the ‘dawn of cyber-creation’ building the ‘world’s first long-distance computer network’, a project funded by the US Department of Defense and the precursor of the internet (Wertheim, 2000, p.222). Their work is a direct challenge to the previously ‘possible’ or ‘probable’, reimagining computers as bound together by ‘cables or wire connections’, permitting computers to exchange information (Landow, 2006, p.62). Originally linking just two computers between the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the Stanford Research Institute in 1969, the ‘nascent net’ grew slowly with only 61 ARPANET sites in place a decade later (Wertheim, 2000, p.223). It was, as the novel demonstrates, a military network, only becoming a ‘a global network of networks’ after the National Science Foundation’s sponsorship in 1980, leading to standardisation of procedures and the coining of the term ‘internet’ (Wertheim, 2000, p.222). Returning to this historical moment, where the internet is thrilling potential rather than mundane reality, allows McCann to reimagine the constructions of cyberspace as either utopian, utilitarian or apocalyptic, with the benefit of hindsight. For these characters, operating at their ‘most daring’, the construction of the internet evokes frontierism; the formation of the new via the erasure of the old. There is a very clear reverence for newness here and a related rejection of history. For these fictional young programmers, as with their real-life counterparts, ‘what really matters is the future, a glorious unprecedented future’ (Wertheim, 2000, p.295).

Playing war

Contemporary fantasies of the internet as a utopian technology of global information exchange tend to omit the detail that the ‘dream of ARPANET’ was as a weapon of war. These roots are revived in Let the Great World Spin, when technological supremacy is equated with racial superiority as ‘the best and brightest’ (McCann, 2010, p.83) American programmers are sent to Vietnam to combat ‘Charlie and the Viet Cong [who] didn’t have any computers’ (p.100). Already progressing towards the formative internet, their expertise is used for various auditing and planning tasks, rationalising and processing the practical business of war. Some, like Joshua, bring the realities of war into the virtual world of the screen, reducing the dead to data or, one might equally argue, raising their status by at least accounting for them. Passions for programming are transformed into patriotic obligation and prioritising the utilitarian. As the reasoning goes: ‘If you can write a program that plays chess you surely can tell us how many are falling to the gooks’ (p.84). But it is the programmers and not the ‘program’ under consideration here. Joshua’s initial disconnection from the task he works on, for instance, is emphasised through his childlike glorification in the latest equipment, a ‘room full of PDP-10’s and Honeywells’ in a ‘candy store’ of a base (p.84). His analogy acts as a reminder of his youth, but also (inadvertently) puns on the brand name; his pleasure in the well of sweet nectar, in clear distinction from the job and its ultimate consequences. Similarly boyish, Joshua’s project, the ‘Death Hack’ (p.102), sounds to twenty-first-century ears like any number of videogames in which, as Jon Dovey argues, ‘Vietnam becomes neither historical event nor media franchise but an intermedial setting for actions amenable to gameplay adaptation’ (Krzywinska & Atkins, 2007...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Out With the Old, in With the Boring
• 2. Lost in Cyberspace
• 3. Discovering Ireland
• 4. What Came First, the Chick Lit or the Blog?
• 5. The Digital Divide
• 6. Game Over
• Bibliography
• Index