One last question, how did Texas fare during the war?

Texas is still there but Spanish is a lot more popular.

This is more entertaining than cable.

When I first saw Metropolis (disregarding the socialist overtones and focusing instead on the transformation of the human experience in the face of advancing technology) I identified modern reverberations of the story in the world around me. Later when I saw The Matrix for the first time, all those dystopian concerns resurfaced, joined by a new monster: solipsism. -But that's enough to write an entire post for some other day.

I, like many people I know, spend a lot of time in front of a computer. As a daily work experience, this is a recent development in human history. It's a natural progression though. If the industrial revolution separated work into assembly line steps, and therefore separated people from each other via specialization of labor, then it also began to divide people by language and experience of every day work. The industrial revolution marked our linguistic, experiential separation in work, so the information age is the physical separation phase- we no longer even have to be in the same room, or even country with our co-workers. New communication technologies can be seen as a way for us to become more connected to each other, but as Forster's story illustrates it also enables further erosion of our shared human experience. There is something very important, but pre-linguistic about being in the same place at the same time physically experiencing something with other people. People aren't quite people to me unless I've actually met them in person. Otherwise they're a series of emails or blog postings that may or may not be written by the same person or even a person at all. In all seriousness, I honestly feel like there's something dehumanizing about spending all this time in front of computers.

Now, before the cops bust down the door to the secluded cabin in the woods from where I write this, my defense: I'm not saying that technology advances at our expense or that it must be destroyed. What we are and what we are not- they both co-evolve in response to one another. In The Machine Stops, Forster builds a vision of humanity separated into a honey-comb structure maintained by "The Machine". He describes how it came into being and the story itself is about a major event in The Machine's evolution. We don't live in a honey comb (though cubicles seem eerily appropriate to point out), or in slime-filled pods, but we do live in nations, in communities, in workplaces and corporations. All of these require us to sacrifice some degree of identity and human connection to accommodate the requirements of the organization. We become less human and more citizen, more employee, more church member.

I realize this may look like a completely scatterbrained rant at this point but bear with me. Understanding Computers and Cognition got me thinking more about the role of language and communication in social and biological systems, and how that relates to what I do, which is write software. Computers in this book are seen as merely a part of a system of social interactions between humans. (Think of a network protocol layer diagram- then add a layer with picture of a person sitting at a computer terminal at the top. Then add another layer with that person's manager above it, and so on.) This perspective has helped me to stuff all the Metropolis-conjured demons away for the time being.

There's a phenomena in biology I once read about called endocytosis, and I think it illustrates (in a wonderfully self-similar kind of way) how individual people become part of larger organisms like corporations, countries, cults, and political movements. Here's the theory: Mitochondria existed as independent single-celled organisms prior to their incorporation (the endosymbiotic hypothesis -EST) into larger organisms. (Similarly, people existed alone and in small tribes or families prior to the rise of organizations and civilization.) Mitochondria don't have all the DNA necessary to code the proteins they need, but these are provided by the host cells in which they live. One implication of the EST is that mitochondria used to have the ability to produce all these proteins when they existed independently, but evolved inside host cells to the point where their role specialized so much that they discarded those parts of their DNA and have become dependent upon host cells for survival. This is of course a symbiotic relationship and not something I view as inherently negative. The point is that nature provides an example of how an individual living entity may become part of a larger living entity, and that evolutionary pressures will alter both in the process to the point where they become dependent upon each other for survival. As an urbanite in an industrialized nation, I have evolved to specialize (like mitochondria have) in my production capacity for software development, and to depend on city services and utilities in order to survive. Drop me off in the middle of an African desert and I will die. Likewise: Austin, the city-organism of which I am a part, has evolved to expect a tax base of highly paid software professionals in order for it to survive. (Bwuahahahahha ha ha ha ...sob)

Stretching a little further, think of DNA as a language describing chemical interactions that sustain life in biological systems. It's a set of symbols which may be strung together, manipulated and interpreted in various ways by the cells in which it is encoded. The DNA specifies what compounds are to be produced under various circumstances. These compounds are necessary for the various cell functions to cooperate and sustain the life of the cell. The DNA is a description of the commitments between cell functions, and the commitments are bound by the laws of nature.

The US Constitution is the DNA of a governing body. It describes the structure of relationships between citizens and the government in the same way that DNA describes the structure of relationships between chemicals and the living cell. Both the governed and government are bound to this commitment by the social contract and the principles of democracy.

ERP software is a strain of DNA for business processes. It describes the relationships between business functions, employees, resources and so on. Of course businesses existed prior to ERP, but software is a convenient crystallization of documented and undocumented business rules. There was GAAP, inventory control, linear programming for operational efficiency, reporting and all that, but ERP was an attempt to bring all those things under one encoding system- one set of standard contracts or commitments- that any business could rely on. Sort of like endocytosis for business processes.

In both cases of law and software, we are dealing with the language of commitments, and this language is to organizations what DNA is to cells. The language of commitment (written or otherwise) is the DNA of an organization. It describes the structure of relationships between its constituents, and thus the structure of the organization itself.

What has all this got to do with Forster's story? In The Machine Stopped, Forster repeatedly makes reference to "The Book", which is a book treated somewhat like the Christian Bible. The Book has all the rules for how people are to conduct themselves as part of The Machine. It is the DNA of The Machine, and its inhabitants are actors in its cells. When in a state of panic during a failure of The Machine, the characters helplessly consult The Book. This is of no help because the book is only there to instruct humans in how to sustain The Machine, not how to live outside of it when it fails. They are forced to leave their cells and come into contact with each other and their natural environment. Because they have co-evolved within The Machine for so long, this situation turns out to be catastrophic. The air is deadly to them. This failure of The Machine is breakdown in the commitment encoded in The Book. These people become mere apoptotic bodies floating in the dark, while the evolution of natural humanity that The Machine rejected so long ago continues to live above ground.

So I look around and start to think about what The Book represents in my life. What macro-societal-metabolic processes am I responsible for? Which ones am I dependent on? Which ones look like they're threatening to break down? What is the nature of the various Machines or organizations to which I belong? Do I passively recite and act on instructions in all this organizational DNA, or am I capable of mutating it? Living outside of it? To what degree am I compromising my humanity in order to be part of something bigger than myself?

Sort of on this topic: This looks like a great movie: The Corporation. I would love to see it but I might have to settle for reading the book. The idea is that if the legal fiction of Corporation-as-Citizen (they get constitutional protections like due process, but none of the other responsibilities of citizens) is given the same psych evaluation given to actual human beings, they often turn out to be psychopaths.

Ugh. I'm gonna go watch TV.