I quit.

I’m not going to post anymore. In fact, I’m converting to Neo-Luddism. It’s just so depressing to read this without feeling like we missed the boat in the early 1990s: Rheingold called for virtual communities relying on an anarchic gift economy with alternative media outlets and De Landa called for augmenting man’s faculties rather than sloughing off humans. What happened?

The answer, which De Landa seems to outright ignore, seems to be capitalism. I tried to lay out his periodization but I had trouble because it seems like he fails to account for the role of capital (or if you’re Dyer-Witherford, labor). Is there such a thing as a militaristic-determined narrative? De Landa claims, “Interactivity, the passing of the machinic phylum between humans and computers, was developed both as an intellectual goal by visionary scientists and conquered in battle by the hackers” (226). It’s not about connecting or informating, it’s about interfacing better with machines? It seems he forgets the struggle between labor and capital when he claims, “Logistic considerations regarding the procurement of manpower are behind the drive to get humans out of the loop” (229). Even his move from the mercenary of the clockwork age to the patriot of the motor age seems to elide some pretty important changes in subject-formation and geo-political organization which can’t be so easily chalked up to militaristic ambition.

Clockwork Age	Motor Age	Distributed Network Age
Geared Mechanisms	Sequential Procedures	Parallel Procedure (Non-Sequential)
Aristotelian Syllogism	Boolean Calculus	Pandemonium
War of Attrition	War of Annihilation	War of Machines?
Mercenary	Loyalist / Patriot
Aristocratic Military	Meritocratic Military
	Panopticon	Panspectron
Batch-processing	Time-Sharing	Hypertext
Gears	Thermodynamics / Steam	Integrated Circuit

De Landa stands at a fork in the road: “The future of interactivity would depend on the events that took place at that surface of contact: the computer screen could be turned into a new method of enslaving people or transformed into a means to ‘augment man’s intellect’” (220). Machine as prosthesis or substitute? This seems to be the same struggle between Marx’s Grundisse and The Fragment of Machines, which sees all variable capital eventually becoming fixed capital; and Virno’s General Intellect, which reinterprets Marx and notes the importance of humans. Hardt explains the latter’s position, “Interactive and cybernetic machines become a new prosthesis integrated into our bodies and minds and a lens through which to redefine our bodies and minds themselves” (“Affective Labor” 95)

I think De Landa’s most interesting point comes toward the end of the reading when he explains the importance of the Pandemonium, reminding us of the importance of adaptability and the emergent properties we read about in Terranova’s fourth chapter. “Pandemonium is such a machine concrete enough to allow the control of physical processes, but abstract enough to allow the spontaneous emergence of order out of chaos” (229). De Landa goes on to note the paradox at the heart of the military’s attempts to create autonomous weapons: “The software control structure with the least amount of central control, the Pandemonium, is the only one that works for the purpose of creating true Artificial Intelligence” (230).