Satellite Uplink

The Information Culture from 1960 to the Present

The history of the information culture is the history of information socialism. The first vacuum tube computers were built by the US Government, in order to process the mathematical equations for the atomic bomb. Federal programs subsidized much of the early growth of the US computer and telecommunications industries. Most software languages, email, and the Internet were created by public-minded computer hobbyists, coders and scientists, not greed-head entrepreneurs hustling bogus stock options. Nor would the information revolution ever have happened without the mass universities created by Federal programs in the 1960s. Though the US curtailed its public financing of the computer industry in the 1980s, other countries have poured vast resources into high-technology research and design. This class will track nearly forty years of information culture, from the earliest cyborg narratives to state-of-the-art 3D videogames, in order to find out where the information culture came from, and where it might be going in the future.

1. The Body Electronic

The information culture was one of the most unexpected spin-offs of the Cold War imaginable. While Charles Babbage had already designed a theoretical prototype of a computer as early as 1830 century (the so-called “analytical engine”, complete with the functional equivalent of memory and a microprocessor), and while calculating engines of various kinds had existed since the 1880s, the information age did not take off until the 1940s. Simply, the design and production of computers required a vast and complex division of labor between scientists, researchers, designers and engineers. In the mid-1940s, the US military-industrial complex became a permanent feature of the US economy, comprising around one-tenth of annual economic output. Ironically, while Pentagon contracts were crucial in spawning the computer revolution, the information culture also became one of the earliest hotbeds of resistance to the US Empire. Hackers invented their own coding tools and cultural rituals, creating the earliest videogames and anticipating many of the major innovations of the video culture of the late 1960s.

Media

Forbidden Planet Fred Wilcox (US) 1954. (Robbie the Robot sequence)

2001 Stanley Kubrick (US) 1968. (Moon landing sequence)

Texts

Nova Express (1964) William S. Burroughs

Theory

Spacewar, J.M. Greatz (article)

The Cold War and American Science, S. Leslie (excerpts) 1993

The Closed World Paul N. Edwards (excerpts) 1996

Targeting the Computer Kenneth Flamm (excerpts) 1987

How We Became Posthuman N. Kathryn Hailes (excerpts) 1999

2. Beyond the Cold War

With the advent of the 1970s, the Cold War began winding down, and the countries of the European Union and East Asia began to catch up with their erstwhile US mentor. The mainframe computer began to give way to the minicomputer, and eventually to the microcomputer, while the very first home console gaming systems went on sale. The early 1980s were a pivotal moment in the history of the videogame. This was the moment Nintendo’s arcade classic, Donkey Kong, jumpstarted sales of its console system. From that point on, game software would drive sales of game hardware, instead of the other way around.

Media

Westworld Michael Crichton (US) 1973. The classic android flick.

Solaris Andrei Tarkovsky (USSR) 1973

Futureworld Richard Heffron (US) 1976. More paranoid androids.

The Terminator James Cameron (US) 1984.

Texts

Neuromancer William Gibson (1984)

3. Videogame Culture: From 2D to 3D

With the arrival of true 3D gaming in the early 1990s, videogames became one of the hegemonic art-forms of the post-Cold War or multinational era. The breakthrough game here was id Software’s legendary Doom (1993), a pulse-pounding action thriller created by Id’s immensely talented co-founders, John Carmack and John Romero. Doom not only inaugurated the age of 3D levels and map designs, it also sparked the rise of multiplayer gaming. The pace of gaming innovation accelerated noticeably thereafter: the high-tech console systems arrived in the mid-1990s, PC classics such as Half Life and Max Payne arrived in the late 1990s, and the next-generation console systems arrived at the turn of the century. This gave rise to some astonishing works of art, equal in depth and complexity to anything in the canon of the novel, cinema or video.

Texts

Behind the Silicon Curtain Dennis Hayes 1989

The Cathedral and the Bazaar Raymond

Chapters 5-7 in Satellite Uplink (“The 3D Videogame”, “The Black Widow’s Lair” and “Stargate Helsinki”)

Article on John Romero

Media

The Matrix Wachowski brothers 1999

Half Life Valve Software 1998

They Hunger Neil Manke (Canada) 2000-2001

Max Payne Remedy Software (Finland) 2001