Doom Patrols
Amber Marie Jones (amj8e@faraday.clas.Virginia.EDU)
Tue, 2 Apr 1996 22:51:46 -0500 (EST)
In the beginning there was God, and God happened to have a
computer and some programming knowledge. Originally He invented a computer program that
created a universe. Once He had created a universe, He had to
find something within the universe to entertain Him. From here
God progressed to the dinosaurs, and eventually to humans. God
has apparently become bored with humans, yet instead of
replacing the race with a new breed, He has placed a
representative of Himself among the humans in order to see what
He will do. How will this new God affect the lives of these
game piece humans? According to Steven Shaviro, this God
created Microsoft. Rather than being known as God, He has
humbled Himself with the name Bill Gates.
First a personal disclaimer. There is a reason why I
dropped out of philosophy 101: I don't do abstractions. This
piece was hard for me to find importance within, as well as
hard for me to understand. Nonetheless, I have tried my best.
Okay. Information is a form of media, and like all
media, it is merely an extension of ourselves. Everything is
relative to the person who is understanding that knowledge, and
that relativity is going to change because by tomorrow, the
knowledge will have progressed further. Shaviro places the
obsession with the Web amid this ever changing pace of
knowledge. Web-fanatics spend hours upon hours linking to
various websites because they can; because the information is
always changing.
Shaviro personifies information by stating that it
wants to be free. Since information is merely an extension of
ourselves, the obvious conclusion would be that we want to be
free of structures ourselves. This does not work in society.
God did not program his players to work well without laws,
hence information has to follow its creator. Shaviro finds
Windows' way of structuring information to be tedious. The Web
is the freest form of information presentation. One can move
from link to link without having to scroll up or down or
establish pre-existing connections. (I think its interesting
that Netscape offers the forward and back buttons; almost as a
security factor for those Web users not ready to abandon the
structure of Windows). Either way, Shaviro's point that free
information would not be as intense as one would imagine is
valid. There would be no way to understand information if it
were totally free.
All of this discussion on the everchanging nature of
information could be summed up in a few thoughts. Information
changes every day, and this fact makes the world move in a
faster pace than ever before. In order to keep up with this
technology, one has to keep up with God: work 80 hours a week
and have a staff that does the same. It seems to me that the
practice of improving information is self-defeating. After
all, once Bill Gates is gone, all that will be left of him is
the fact that he created a computer monopoly. According to
Shaviro, the knowledge He has created will become outdated soon
after His death.