A Programmable World

The mandatory course Readings on Digital Culture in the Graduate Program in Architectural Design at Istanbul Bilgi University began with the introductory chapter of Charlie Gere’s Digital Culture. We will write a response paper every week. I have completed my response to the first reading.

The reading begins with the parallel development of the Industrial Revolution and capitalism. It then follows this history up to the emergence of today’s computers. It looks at how money gradually became a more abstract concept. It also examines how labor was divided into smaller and smaller units. This made labor repetitive and programmable on the production line. The ancestors of today’s computers also emerged during this period. The historical developments that led to the Turing machine and, later, to the first electronic computers are presented through a series of anecdotes. The story goes all the way back to Leibniz’s project of a universal language.

University as a Free Market

The parallel I naturally found in the reading was related to my own profession. The point-based systems we use today for academic performance and promotions reminded me of the transformation of money described in the text. Money first had a physical value. It then became a medium of exchange and eventually an entirely abstract concept. A scientific article or conference paper also has a point value. This value can even be divided among its authors. The contribution of each author is defined, as is the division of labor involved in producing the paper. On a larger scale, there are other forms of value: the number of citations a paper receives, the author’s h-index, and the impact factor of the journal. Behind all this are the publishing companies that make money by selling scientists their own papers. In the free market of science, journals are divided into categories such as Q1 and Q2… etc. The text describes the early stages of a process in which systems of abstract value began to play an increasingly important role in society. This process eventually prepared the ground for the Information Theory. The principles that allow information to be produced, transferred, and consumed as a packaged commodity gradually spread through society.

Another example from my own profession is the increasingly common system of course design. Today, a university course is built around statements called course learning outcomes, or CLOs. These statements describe what students should be able to do after completing a course. Each CLO is built around a carefully selected verb. You begin by choosing the verb from a predefined table. Then you are expected to formulate four or five CLO statements. After that, you have to show which learning outcomes are tested by which questions in your exams. You also have to explain how these competencies are measured.

Course credits are determined according to the amount of time students are expected to spend on specific workloads. Diploma and accreditation systems monitor this structure. They also require evidence that everything has been properly implemented. A university student, much like a worker in Ford’s factory, completes a body of labor that has been divided into parts. Each part is further divided into abstract and repeatable work packages. In a sense, students construct themselves piece by piece as they move through this system. The modules and pathway systems aim to break up this standardization. But they simply increase the variety of products coming out of the factory. Sedan, coupe, wagon… Credit systems such as ECTS have existed for a long time. More recently, micro-credits have become increasingly common. They make the relationship between credits, money, and courses more flexible. They organize this variety according to the logic of mass customization under late capitalism. It is almost like collecting rewards or badges in a computer game. Students take short courses and collect badges as they progress.

Techno-Feudalism?

At this point, this reminded me of Varoufakis, whom I have recently started reading. Varoufakis argues that classical capitalism, as we knew it, died after the 2008 crisis. He argues that we have entered a new period that he calls “technofeudalism.” Today’s techno-oligarchs, the familiar corporations and their extensions have become powerful actors in directing and funding universities and scientific production. It is a system in which everyone, from students to professors and rectors, seems increasingly dependent on “industry collaboration.”

We seem to move through a series of stages: abstraction, standardization, decomposition, the creation of a language, and finally the breaking of standardization through combinations. These processes appear again and again within what we call Digital Culture. In the fields that interest me, such as design mathematics, coding, and architectural robotics, they are already direct parts of the method itself. For example, the most painful stage of learning Grasshopper is what I would call “learning to design with Grasshopper.” It is difficult because you have to internalize this logic of abstraction and decomposition. You have to break your design down into standardized components. Then, you establish the relationships between them and generate variations within the same family.

Formal systems have also reappeared for me in this reading, together with Turing and the question of meaning and language. I can now understand a little better what Frege, who lived during the same period, was trying to do. In the end, what I have described here may simply be a way of defining the things that surround us and that we already take for granted. But was this logic of abstraction, measurement, standardization, decomposition, and recomposition historically inevitable? Or was it the result of a particular economic and technological order?