from"The Path is a Network"
by Erik Davis

Today it is mighty hard to swallow grand tales of teleology and universal goals; with postmodernists to the left of us and hardcore Darwinians to the right, the evolutionary perfectionism of a Teilhard de Chardin goes down like tepid science fiction. Nonetheless, our global civilization continues to bank on the revolutionary promise of progressive technological change, a quintessentially modern perspective that may nonetheless draw from deeper springs. In essence, the notion of historical evolution is a quest narrative. Before Joachim of Fiore loosed the myth of progress into the bloodstream of the Christian West, men told tales of a hero, with a thousand and one faces, restlessly seeking a redemptive goal: the golden fleece, the elixir of immortality, the holy grail. Whether taking form as Gilgamesh, a Round Table knight, or Ulysses, the man of many devices, the hero plunges ever forward, riding his vector of yearning, though his linear track often leads him into the traps and cul-de-sacs of an ensnaring nature he must constantly resist. Salvation is not within but ahead: a finger of land on the distant edge of the sea, an unearthly silver light piercing the mulchy forest gloom.

I suspect that one of the reasons that the story of technological progress continues to hold such power is that it literalizes a quest myth we can no longer take seriously in ourselves. Machines articulate and define themselves against the messiness of organic nature, a world whose laws and limits they both exploit and conquer through control, manipulation, and speed. As David Noble has shown, the Western image of technological progress draws from profoundly Christian notions of dominion and millennialist perfectionism. The errant knight has morphed into a machine-man, his grail now the Singularity that SF writers and visionary engineers claim lies just over the horizon, a blazing point of technological convergence that will finally master the rules of the known.

If the relentless vector of technological development embodies a heroic narrative of power, mastery, and self-definition, what does it mean that this ultimately phallic quest now finds itself in a chaotic postmodern techno-jungle characterized by the massive and impossibly tangled intersection of networks? The networks that have come to dominate so many technological, scientific, and cultural discourses and practices — communication webs, cognitive neural nets, interlinked computers, parallel processors, complex institutional frameworks, transnational circuits of production and trade — are not linear vectors or stable expressions of control. They are complex weavings, criss-crossed webworks, complex fabrics of unpredictable and semi-autonomous threads. The network is a matrix, a womb, the mother-matter that spawns us all. But the matrix was always wired. Despite its biological roots, the word itself came to denote a host of technological tools and practices: a metal mold or die; a binding substance, like cement in concrete, or the principle metal in an alloy; a plate used for casting typefaces; a rectangular grid of mathematical quantities treated as a single algebraic entity; of and, of course, the dense pattern of connections that link up computer systems. The matrix forms the context for emergence; it is the medium, the motherboard, through which events, objects, and new linkages are grown.

Obviously, today's technological matrices cannot simply be characterized as "feminine" spaces or the rebirth of dame nature's modus operandi. Such systems are perfectly capable of sustaining linear goals of individual aggrandizement, hierarchical control, and patriarchal power-plays — not to mention war. Nonetheless, if we allow ourselves a sip or two of zeitgeist liqueur, it seems hardly coincidental that the network becomes a dominant technological archetype at the same time that society hosts the rise of environmental activism, deep ecology, Gaia hypotheses, and goddess religion, to say nothing of the extraordinary success of modern feminism, which has unleashed women in the workplace and generated a sustained critique of the oppressive social arrangements that for so long sustained the West's pretensions of enlightened progress.