Virtual machines?
Consider a machine. Levers. Pulleys. Engines. Computers.
Each has a design that deploys rules of nature to consistently generate a result. Fuel. Flame. Combustion-> Movement. Friction. Ratios.
There are more abstract machines— social machines like organizations. There is no clear conception of “what an organization is” or natural laws on “why they work” but some do and some don’t. Just like other machines. It took many failed attempts at flight before success. But with social machines, organizations, the lack of natural laws on human interaction has led to some uncertainty.
There are even more abstract machines that exist virtually, basic ideas or logics that turn inputs into outputs, maintains order, so on. Democracy is one. There are social implementations of the virtual machine of democracy: Phoenix, Arizona, the United States, Ancient Greece. These actually existing machines because of the lack of natural laws of mass social behavior and the inherited value of freedom in its design create some uncertainty. Some fail, some don’t.
The virtual, or abstract machine, is what I am curious about today. Think of the basic logic behind democracy. Not why, or what, but how the idea of democracy works. Participants are assumed to have freedom. Because of this freedom there is conflict. Right? If everyone got along all the time, are people really free? No, so because people are free there are conflicts of interest which democracy mediates through representation. A vote is an abstract representation of your interests. Because voting is an actual mechanism that only represents ones interests, it is never perfect and through the voting problems arise for those who get their way and those who don’t get their way. Hence the need for more democracy. The logic behind democracy is self reifying… it is a logic that, if followed, strengthens itself by justifying its own existence with an inability to question the assumptions of the logic. How does a free people collectively decide that they do not have the decision to freely decide?
Facebook is another example. By assuming people want to know what is going on with other people, and that there is a general interest in those other going ons, how do people that are on Facebook find out that other people aren’t interested and neither are they?
What I hope to convey is that the successful modes of knowledge dissemination and communication are abstract, virtual, machines that reify their own existence.
The hope is that we can identify ‘lines of flight’ or gaps in the logic that allows for an escape. But instead of destroying the machine, we hope to assemble a larger machine that leverages these lines of flight into it’s own logic— a machine of machines… An ecosystem for scholarship.
