Comments on: Financial & Cybernetic Abstractions

By: Gabriel

Gabriel — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

How about:

A window (of varying degrees of transparency);
An escape route;
A private workspace/ sandbox (which you can legitimately retreat to while ‘at work’;
A ladder of possibilities;

… and now I have to go back to work :o)

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

A shaping metaphor for an increasingly atomistic public culture?
A tool for ersatz intimacy?
A way to reshape/redefine intimacy entirely? I mean this in the sense that perhaps it’s a little too arch of me to call it ersatz intimacy–if it can change our epistemology, perhaps it can change or reconstitute our emotional needs as well.
I’d take Gabriel’s point further and say that it can be an insurmountable wall. The opposite of a window or a communicator. A place to hide. And, it occurs to me, a place to hide that looks very like a tall, ramparted fortress. I can go out in public with the laptop and never be approached by anyone for anything. I guess it picks up on the idea of badge. A badge that says “I am not available for social intercourse.”

By: Charlie

Charlie — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

How about an augmentation of the self, an extension of the mind? Tools are often thought of as augmentations, but most generally we think of their use within the physical realm. Now, maybe this ties to “a tool for abstraction,” but I *feel* as if there’s more to it.

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 17:00:00 +0000

Interesting stuff. The window metaphor is clearly apt, but has interesting parallels to realist notions about language and how it can “transparently” (or not) represent the world — and interesting ideas, as well, about the limitations of the window’s placement and things one can never see through it if it’s on the wrong side of the house — and so hence embedded within your wall, Chris.

I’m interested in the idea of it being a “tool” for “ersatz” intimacy, as well, and the ways it might “reshape” intimacy. As silly as I think Sherry Turkle can sometimes get, she’s got smart stuff to say about online interpersonal relationships, which leads me to suggest that people don’t “work” on intimacy, so it wouldn’t be a tool any more than a loveseat would be a tool for intimacy: but it could be the social space in which an intimate (since I think there’s more than one kind of intimacy) relationship is manifested. I’m not talking about something as literalist as Gibson’s cyberspace here, but almost a Burkean rhetorical space.

Charlie, a cyborg-style “augmentation” of the (embodied) person that ignores Cartesian mind-body dualisms? It feels instrumentalist, but the more I think about it, the more I like it. Does abstraction have to deny the body?