Cultural Style: Software, Jamming & #DH

Prompted by some recent reading in digital humanities (aka DH), I'm bumping this to the top of the queue. It started with Scott Enderle's The Radical Potential of RDF Dimension Reduction? That took me to Miriam Posner, What’s Next: The Radical, Unrealized Potential of Digital Humanities, and that, in turn, shuttled me off to an interview in which Tara McPherson argues, "early developments in digital computing were also intertwined with shifting racial codes in the U.S. and beyond."

In the piece that follows I take up a similar conjunction, computing and race, though to a somewhat different end and with a different valence. It dates back to the previous millennium. IBM is no longer on the ropes, as it was when I wrote it, though it is a very different company, with a different product mix. But it hasn't quite regained its past glory either. That is gone, perhaps forever. There are other players in the game. The once mighty Microsoft is still mighty, but it has been outstripped by Google and, of all companies, Apple. Still, there's a basic truth stored away in these words and that truth doesn't change just because the high tech world keeps whirlin' around. You might also check out this historical fantasy in the subject of Independence Day.

* * * * *

21st C = von Neumann * Armstrong^2

Why is America the software center of the Universe?

Because it is also the Rap-Rock-Funk-Soul-Jazz-Blues

center of the Universe. What does that have to do

with the If-Then-Else imperatives of byte busting?

Technology is not just technique. It is style and

attitude. You can't write great software if your

soul was nurtured on the mechanical clockwork and

internal combustion rhythms of the Machine Age. You

must free yourself from the linear flow of

mechanical time and learn to improvise order from

the creative chaos lurking in the multiple

intersecting flows of the digital domain.

Roll over Beethoven, it's Jimi Hendrix time.

* * * * *

Cases in point: Steve Wozniak took time out

from Apple to produce rock and roll concerts.

Microsoft was co-founded by a guitar-playing

Jimi Hendrix fan, Paul Allen. Borland International

is the brainchild of barbarian jazz saxophonist

Philippe Kahn. Xerox and Apple guru Alan GUI

Kay worked his way through graduate school as

a jazz musician. Lotus founder Mitch Kapor

has taken to riding the informatic frontier

with Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow.

 

* * * * *

Now, IBM is on the ropes. Marching to the tick tock

strokes of a steam locomotive, it can't swing to the

rhythms of the Apollo moon dance. Big Blue is crying

the blues because it isn't hip enough to play the blues.

If you don't want to be dogged by the hell-hound on

IBM's tail, then baptize your brain in the soul-juice

of funkadelic jivometric drumology.

* * * * *

Still, we can't create the future from nothing.

The post-IBM world has been in the works

for a long time. In the Roaring 20s the sons and daughters

of Henry Assembly-Line Ford and Tom Light-Bulb Edison

cruised the night spots of African America dancing to the

improvisations of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway,

and all the other pioneering funkateers. Getting juiced,

they got loose, and mechanical tick tock began to die.

Their sons and daughters dug Elvis the Pelvis and blew

Bob Dylan's changing winds into the high-tech

studio wizardry of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band.

When Woodstock Nation faded into decaying

reels of audiotape and videotape the young, the hip and

the restless decided that communes were 19th

century and created the video game and PC industry.

* * * * *

Now a new cultural force has emerged on the scene.

Tempered in battle with Ronald Raygun and his

Bush League Wrecking Crew, hip hop reaches back to

the rhythms which created humankind on the African

savannas and, through digital sampling, crosses those

rhythms with our recorded musical legacy. Silicon Age

rappers insinuate body-heart rhythm into the digital

warp and woof of emerging cultural patterns. The anger

cuts through accretions of industrial armor and

creates room to grow, letting the neurons branch in new patterns.

* * * * *

That's where it all begins: the nervous system.

While the genes lay down the basic plan, the

detailed wiring is worked out through

extended and intimate interaction with the environment.

To update William Wordsworth,

the jazz child is mother to the cybernetic man.

The dancing you do at ten forms the matrix out of which you think

when you are twenty. If you grow up to mechanical rhythms,

digital dancing is unnatural.

To be a natural born child of the 21st century

you must dance at the wedding between

the soul of John von Neumann

and the science of Daniel Louis Armstrong.