RELIGION AND THE NET

26 February 1997


I dunno if you remember the movie Tron. I suppose that's a pointless question,
because once seen, Tron can't be forgotten. Okay, so it was made by Disney,
personally my most despised entertainment company. It cost $20 million to make -
which back in 1982 was an awful lot of money - and was a box office flop. The
critics slated it, declaring the video game better than the movie (they may have
been right). But when I first saw that film in the cinema at the age of 14 it
blew me away.

Up until that point I hadn't had much experience of computers. I had a digital
watch, which I thought was really cool, mainly because I'd been told (correctly,
as it turns out) that it had more processing power than the ENIAC. A friend of
mine had an Atari console. Another friend had a ZX81, which I coveted for no good
reason (I had no idea what I'd do with it if I got it - but then, neither did
he). And my Dad once bought an Olivetti portable home for the weekend on trial,
wondering if he should buy it to help him with his work. Wisely, he chose not to.

What was really weird about computers back then was how they could simultaneously
be so totally shit and yet so utterly amazing. It wasn't that we didn't know they
were shit - obviously they were, and obviously they weren't going to measure up
to the standard Hollywood image of a computer as some super intelligent
mainframe. We all knew that apart from the line graphics most of the special
effects in Tron were hand-painted; that was part of its charm. But at the same
time there was something tremendously exciting about these machines, something
fascinating.

Tron was the first film to capture that excitement. Not only does it have an
appalling soundtrack by the ground-breaking electronic musician Wendy Carlos
(responsible in her more creative moments for classics such as Switched-On Bach,
The Plastic Cow Goes Moooog and the soundtrack to The Shining) but it
encapsulated in its plot the saga of the next ten years of events in the American
computer industry - Tron told the future. Just check out the characters. Jeff
Bridges is Steve Jobs, the long-haired whizz kid video games player who coulda
been a contenda; his companion in RL and, ultimately, in the cyberspace battle
against the Master Programme (aka IBM) is a mild-mannered supernerd with the
oversize glasses and the steady but dull relationship. Yes, it's Bill Gates,
played by Bruce Boxleitner. Together they struggle in pre-Gibsonian Cyberspace to
overcome the Master Programme's hegemony, and by the end of the film they
succeed. And guess what happens once they've won? That's right, they take over
the company. Or at least the Bridges/Jobs machine does; Boxleitner/Gates lurks,
Microsoft-like, in the background, awaiting his turn. He gets the girl, but
that's not what he's after. He'll let Apple trash the mainframe with its personal
computer, then when the whole scene has been blown wide open he'll move in with
his dodgy software packages and clean up. It's not really a story of stealing
from the (undeserving) rich to give to the (deserving) poor, although its dressed
up to look that way. No, it's really the simple and timeless tale of the
succession of the rich. In Europe we call it History.

It just goes to show that we didn't need Gibson and Bladerunner to come along and
tell us that Cyberspace was all fucked up, that it was all about
Euclidean/Cartesian power games and Capital gone mad. Disney did it for us. Tron
is about the transition between two computer cultures, about the switch from
centralised, time-sharing mainframes to minicomputers and PCs. Industry boosters
(I wrote here as an aside "you know who you are", but John Perry Barlow didn't
show up for tonight's session) like to see this transition, this vector, as
moving positively along the axis of anarchy - of an anarchy positively valorised.
If the state is centralised control (of information, in this case) they say, and
centralised control is bad, then distributing the means of power (the information
processing machines)amongst the "people" is, it follows, good.

But even if we accept this moral spin we still have to ask ourselves: is it
really that simple? Shouldn't we try to examine the nature of this distribution a
little more closely? Shouldn't we try to find out if it's really what it seems?
To take the industry line is to swallow the idea that these transitions are
Kuhnian or Kellyian phase changes, steps the machine is taking up some
evolutionary ladder. But evolution isn't about ladders. Evolution isn't one
single process (or even two interacting ones) overcoming problems and getting
better and better and ever more honed and efficient in the process. No, evolution
is a turgid yeast of microprocesses, churning away across ever mutating fitness
landscapes, constantly spawning in every direction. Evolution is a crew of
drunken and promicuous and yet tenacious sailors clinging to the rotting deck of
a ship that's being hurled to and fro in some nightmare storm off the Cape.

So that's one thing. The second thing is that distribution is quite easily
co-opted by the State; always has been, always will be, and is in fact more
easily co-opted by the State when it is given a certain amount of autonomy -
contrast food distribution in the USA with food distribution in the USSR during
the '50s and '60s if you have any doubts about this one. In mediaeval Europe, one
of the ways in which the Holy Roman Church maintained its power base was by the
distribution of religious relics. There was an enormous trade in these relics.
From Christ's fingerbones and the Grail Cup to weeping statues and all manner of
articles supposedly belonging to one saint or another, these items migrated their
way across the continent. A church had to have a relic in order that it be
considered a holy place and receive the pope's blessing. Control over the relics
meant control over the setting up of churches, and control of the setting up of
churches meant control over the routes that pilgrims would take. And control over
pilgrims' routes was no laughing matter - during this period [11th to 15th
centuries], which roughly coincides with the great period of cathedral building
(which as an architecture of light can be thought of as a kind of cyberspace, but
more of that later) - pilgrimages were responsible for a massive movement of
people. With the churches as the chief focus of every community - economically,
as well as religiously - any movement between them involved not just piety but
trade. Control of the pilgrim roads meant control of the trade roads and, as the
saying went, "All roads lead to Rome". If you ever get the chance to visit the
Vatican, on your way to gawp at the Sistine Chapel check out the vast map room,
an immense gilded gallery in which the maps of the time are painted onto the
walls. At the centre of every map is Rome. The Catholic Church was quite aware
that distributed relics could and did mean central informational control. In
comparison with the Popes, Bill Gates is a saint!

The point is that in Tron II, possibly the greatest film never made, the
Bridges/Jobs machine is superceded by the Boxleitner/Gates machine, aka the
Microsoft machine, and the Microsoft machine is by now a war machine. But when a
religion sets itself up as war machine (and the point I want to make is that
Microsoft et al are in many ways religious instutions - it's not for nothing that
these companies call their proselytisers "evangelists" - yes, it's true, it's
even printed on their business cards) it is not itself subverted by that cute
nomadology that we're all so fond of (and which I introduced by the backdoor
earlier under the guise of "anarchy"), but rather it deploys the power of the
nomad, the power of "absolute deterrorialisation" as Deleuze would say.

But wait a minute. This is a dangerous stuff. How does a centralised, paranoid
statist structure deploy the absolute deterritorialisation of the nomad without
getting torn apart by it? Isn't this the lesson that the Mongel hordes taught the
Christians, that the Vietcong taught the Americans? That rigid structures, the
State-form, will get torn apart on contact with virulant nomadology? Well, yes
and no. The unfortunate fact is that there isn't a simple opposition here. The
state is quite capable of internalising the power of the nomad and subverting it;
it does that by doubling it - and matching it - with its own version: MIGRATION.
The migrant is always a potential nomad; it is the fluid boundary of the state,
one which is porous enough to interact with the nomad and at the same time leave
in its wake a swathe of settlement.

The character Tron, the ultimate games player, is a nomad trapped in the fluid
space of the Master Programme. The space of the Master Programme is characterised
by straight lines and infinite perspectives; Tron's space on the other hand is
characterised by fluidity, by the heuristics of the discus, his weapon of choice.
But somewhere inbetween these two tendencies we find the space of the
Bridges/Jobs machine and of the Boxleitner/Gates machine. It is the space of
overturning; it is the space of the migrant. We can illustrate this by comparing
these experiences of cyberspace to experiences of the desert. For the nomad, the
desert is a haptic space, that is to say it is ruled by tactile qualities, rather
than by lines of sight: "The same terms are used to describe ice deserts as sand
deserts: there is no line separating earth and sky; there is no intermediate
distance, no perspective or contour; visibility is limited; and yet there is an
extra-ordinarily fine topology that relies not on points or objects but rather on
haecceities, on sets of relations (winds, undulations of snow or sand, the song
of the sand or the creaking of the ice, the tactile qualities of both)." [A
Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, p. 382] Everything about
nomad space is localised and not delimited. The nomad is situated in what Deleuze
calls a local absolute, where everything is manifested locally and engendered in
a series of local operations of varying orientations.

By contrast, the space of the Master Programme and the desert of religion is
extremely visual. The State cannot negotiate the desert: it can only divide it
up, log it, record it, distribute it, embue it with a fixed and encompassing
horizon. This what Baudrillard realises in his book America, when he draws a
comparison between the American desert and cyberspace. Gibson gets it too; it's
why he calls the most dense, most paranoid structures in cyberspace"ice". Look at
the game play grids in Tron. That's what religion does: it makes theabsolute
appear in a particular place. The absolute for religion is no longer a series of
local, tactile operations but a global attribute that is subject to
manifestation. This is exactly the job that the relics did in the network set up
by the church of Rome - they were local manifestations of the global truth
embodied at the centre of the network and indeed by the network itself, the
waystations of which (today we might call them "servers") were cathedrals: vast
buildings of light whose design was meant to capture and repeat - make manifest -
the kingdom of light itself, Heaven.

So what does all of this amount to? Just that we have to be wary. The Master
Programme is, more often than not, a straw man. Religions are not embodied in
their figureheads, but in the nature of their networks, of their power
structures, of their conceptual spaces. Even as they help Tron against the Master
Programme, the Bridges/Jobs and Boxleitner/Gates machines are acting as agents
for the Master Programme's religion. They are migrants, interacting with the
nomad machine but ultimately leaving a striated space in their wake. This
structure, of the outsider who nevertheless internalises the State, often without
knowing it, is common to countless American movies. But it is more than a
cultural artefact: it is an economic strategy, a technique for the borderlands
and interzones that sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. In the computer
industry and, by extension, on the Internet - less and less a collection of
relatively discreet networks and bulletin boards and increasingly a "world wide
web" of superhighways with various spiders battling for control of the centre, a
whole range of distrbuted and semi-nomad techniques of appropriation at their
disposal - it has proved particularly successful. Although the PC came out of the
electronics industry - and therefore out of the world of videogames, digital
watches and pocket calculators - rather than out of the computer industry per se,
it has become as much a religious artefact as the Mainframe ever was, maybe more
so - at least every Mainframe was customised for a particular task. What we need
to work out is what we can do about that.


© James Flint 26th February 1997