Storming the Gates of Paradise (10 page)

I went to another demonstration at Lockheed Missiles and Space Corporation, the region’s biggest employer and the prime contractor for Trident missiles, where there were no sidewalks, no focal points, no public spaces. In some sense, protest and community had been designed out of the place, and the workspace too had been suburbanized. Interestingly, many of the Silicon Valley corporations are based on “campuses,” attractive, diffused, pseudodemocratic spaces that belie the traditional corporate structure within most of them, a design that originated with the not very parklike Xerox PARC. Diffuseness seems to have become an irreversible condition, in which both the consciousness and the place for consolidating individuals, for community, are virtually impossible. Suburbia represents an early triumph of such diffusion, and the new technologies often seem to further it. Suburbia is a landscape of privatized space, of the division of home from work, with the scenes of production both industrial and agricultural (and now informational) separated from those of consumption, a sequestering that has progressed with the shift from the public space of shopping streets to the private space of shopping malls.

There is the decentralization of anarchist direct democracy, in which power is everywhere; and the decentralization of postmodern control, in which power is transnational, virtual, in a gated community, not available at this time, in a holding company, incomprehensible, incognito—in a word, nowhere. Mrs. Winchester’s house is also a maze whose center was nowhere, and here it is important to distinguish types of mazes as well. The original myth of a maze centers on the one Daedalus built at Crete to hide the monstrous result of Queen Pasiphaë’s union with a bull, the Minotaur. Later mazes, such as those on the floors of many medieval churches, symbolically compress and reconstitute pilgrimage, and the
maze functions not as a tangle in which to lose things but a mandala in which to find them (the artist Paul Windsor recently mocked this tradition with a giant sand painting at the San Francisco Art Commission Gallery, which merged Tibetan and Hopi mandalas with the microchip). These mazes often have only one route to the center. The maze at Crete and that of the Mystery House apparently have no center; as such, they are types of the new landscape of the suburb, the multinational, the subcontracted and subdivided, the faces of nowhere, in which it is impossible to get found.

Here it is important to distinguish the actual tools generated in Silicon Valley and its sister sites from the visions of their implementation. Computers and the information they manipulate are the means to many ends; in one of these, they are an end in themselves. In its most dematerialized state, Silicon Valley is a blueprint for a future: in this future, outside has disappeared, the maze has no exit. The world of information and communication online, much hailed as a technological advance, is also a social retreat accompanying a loss of the public and social space of the cities; a loss of the aesthetic, sensual, and nonhuman space of the country; a privatization of physical space; and a disembodiment of daily life. A central appeal cited for the new technologies is that their users will no longer have to leave home, and paeans accumulate lauding the convenience of being able to access libraries and entertainments via personal computers, which become less tools of engenderment than channels of consumption. This vision of disembodied anchorites connected to the world only by information and entertainment, mediated by the entities that control the flow, seems more nightmarish than idyllic. Postulated as a solution to gridlock, crime on the streets, the chronic sense of time’s scarcity, it seems instead a means to avoid addressing such problems, a form of acquiescence.

There is another maze, another landscape, that has bearing on the tangle of Silicon Valley. The multimedia mazes resemble the maze of Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths,” in which a Chinese assassin finds out the secret of his ancestor’s chaotic novel and missing maze—the two are one.

Ts’ui Pen must have said once: I am withdrawing to write a book. And another time: I am withdrawing to construct a labyrinth. Every one imagined two works; to no one did it occur that the book and the maze were one and the same thing. Almost instantly I understood: “the garden of forking paths” was the chaotic novel; the phrase “the various futures (not to all)” suggested to me the forking in time, not in space. . . . In the work of Ts’ui Pen, all possible outcomes occur; each one is the point of departure for other forkings.

An extensive but finite number of forks can be represented on an interactive CD or laser disc, but they do not reproduce life, in which the unimaginable is often what comes next. The greatest tragedy of the new technologies may be their elimination of the incalculable—the coincidences and provocations and metaphors that in some literal sense “take us out of ourselves” and put us in relation to other things. To live inside a mechanical world is to live inside plotted possibility, what has already been imagined; and so the technologies that are supposed to open up the future instead narrow it. I am not arguing for existentialist freedom with this difference between inside and outside, only for an unquantifiable number of paths in the latter, a too predictable course in the former.

Much recent attention to the use of interactive media proposes that it makes passive viewing become active engagement. What is interesting about these products is that they map out a number of choices, but the choices are all preselected (and, with the rare exception of work by artists such as Lynn Hershman, the choices have little to do with meaningful decisions). That is, the user cannot do anything, go anywhere the creator has not gone before; as usual with computer programs, one must stay on the path and off the grass (by which analogy hackers do get off the path, a subversive success that keeps them in the park). We could chart the game as a series of forks in the road, in which each choice sets up another array of choices, but the sum total of choices have already been made. Thus, the audience becomes the user, a figure who resembles a rat in a conceptual version of a laboratory maze. The audience-user is not literally passive; he or she is engaged in making choices, but the choices do not necessarily represent freedom, nor this activity thinking. Participating is reduced to consuming. The ur-game, Pac-Man,
made this apparent: the sole purpose of the Pac-Man icon, a disembodied head-mouth, was to devour what was in its path as it proceeded through a visible maze.

Perhaps what is most interesting about this form of interactivity is its resemblance to so many existing corridors of American life, in which a great many choices can be made, but all are ultimately choices to consume rather than to produce. About a decade ago, the 7–11 chain of convenience stores ran a series of television ads whose key phrase was, “Freedom of choice is what America is all about.” The ads echoed a pervasive tendency in the culture to reduce freedom to the freedom to choose from a number of products, to the scope of the consumer’s ability to consume. Perhaps it is not surprising that consumption should become the metaphor for democracy in a country that has long had little but representative democracy: that is, the ballot too is a kind of Garden of Forking Paths and not an open plain on which to roam and encounter. By the time the political process has reached the voting booth, all the real choices have been programmed in, and the voter becomes a consumer. Few genuine choices remain, and the act of voting becomes the act of acquiescence, an endorsement of the maze as an open field. The laboratory maze through which the rat moves is one metaphor for it. Another is supplied by the critic Norman M. Klein in an
Art issues
article on virtual reality: “VR is reverse Calvinism—predestination posing as free will. In that sense, VR may be as old as the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a new consumerist form of metaphysical redemption.”

The real landscape of Silicon Valley seems wholly interior, not only in the metaphor of the maze and the terrain of offices and suburbs but also in the much promoted ideal of the user never leaving a well-wired home and in the goal of eliminating the world and reconstituting it as information. Again, what disappears here is the incalculable, this time as the world of the sensory and sensual, with all the surprises and dangers that accompany it. In all the hymns to information, little is said about the nature of that information or the ability to use it; one pictures the empty trucks of metaphor hurtling down that information highway. Thinking
is an aesthetic occupation, a matter of perceiving relationships and resemblances between things on many levels that defeat computerization because they are aesthetic, not rationalistic; the sensual world is necessary to it as grounding and inspiration, and as parallel. Computers can reason, but they will never really imagine, because the incalculable of the body is forever beyond them, though it may be simulated with increasing complexity—toward what end?

Understanding works largely by means of metaphors and analogies—the incalculable relationships between bits of information—and the way those metaphors and analogies are drawn from the nonconstructed world. The most obvious examples are expressions:
stubborn as a mule, dumb as two sticks, pigheaded, dog breath, pussy, cock, cuckoo, horse sense, drones, worms, snakes in the grass, aping the gentry, bovine, donkey’s years
. There are also shared (but fading) fables: the ant and the grasshopper, the tortoise and the hare, the dog in the manger, and a million coyote stories, which provide animal analogies for human dispositions, moralities, and fates. The microcosmic macrocosmic metaphors are particularly important, and they’re most immediately obvious in geography metaphors: the foot of a mountain, the bowels of the earth, a river’s mouth, the heart of the forest, tree limbs, even the soft shoulders of roads. (For a minor example, in
Tristes Tropiques
, Claude Lévi-Strauss compares speaking of his research to an unreceptive audience to dropping stones down a well, an analogy few would be likely to make nowadays.) The majority of figures of speech that make the abstract concrete and the abstruse imaginable are drawn from animals and organic spaces. It’s the animal world that makes being human imaginable, and the spatial realm that makes activity and achievement describable—career plateaus, rough spots, marshy areas. And it’s the image of the maze that’s gotten me through all the aspects of Silicon Valley I’ve approached thus far, and the approach to a specific landscape in California that’s made it possible to articulate some effects.

Computers are significant for their lack of metaphor: their processes don’t resemble organic processes, and only the crudest analogies can be drawn. Instead, they provide imaginatively sterile terms that are projected back onto organic life; we can be made to resemble them more easily than they can be made to resemble us. (It’s interesting that another machine-age invention, the superhighway, was
used as the metaphor for information circulation systems and even more interesting that the information highway already has “gridlock.”) I wonder if generations of being without contact with such undeveloped spaces and nonhuman beings will eventually diminish English into a kind of blanked-out newspeak, a machine language, which has already appeared as the shorthand on networks, the disembodied platitudes of electoral politics, and the starkly denatured language of inner-city rap with its license-plate number-letter combos, police codes, and so on.

All those metaphors are ways of navigating the way things span both difference and similarity; without metaphor, the world would seem threateningly amorphous, both identical with ourselves and utterly incomprehensible. The anthropological theorist Paul Shepard writes, “Humans intuitively see analogies between the concrete world out there and their own inner world. If they conceive the former as a chaos of anarchic forces or as dead and frozen, then so will they perceive their own bodies and society; so will they think and act on that assumption and vindicate their own ideas by altering the world to fit them.” The loss of a relationship to the nonconstructed world is a loss of these metaphors. It is also loss of the larger territory of the senses, a vast and irreplaceable loss of pleasure and meaning.

Finally, even nowhere has its twin: everywhere. Silicon Valley has become a nowhere in the terms I have tried to lay out—an obliteration of place, an ultimate suburb, a maze in which wars are designed, diversions are generated, the individual disembodied. But the physical landscape of Silicon Valley is now everywhere, not only in the attempts to clone its success but in the spread of its products and its waste throughout the globe, the outside world being ravaged by the retreat to the interior.

If you imagine a computer not as an autonomous object but as a trail of processes and effects and residues, which leave their traces across a global environmental maze, then it is already everywhere. The clean rooms in which poorly paid chip makers were exposed to toxic chemicals are now subcontracted out in the Southwest, Oregon, and the third world, so there’s a little of the valley there. The waste that was leaching through the once fecund earth of Silicon Valley is leaching
still, and more of it is leaching around the globe. Some of the chemicals used to clean the chips have been peculiarly potent ozone-depleters (though most Silicon Valley firms have switched over to other compounds), so think of the upper atmosphere too; and the landfill where the packing and shipping material goes; and the electrical generating station your computer is plugged into and its energy sources (coal, hydropower, nuclear, geothermal, natural gas?); think of the networks it may be hooked into; think of the corporations whose pockets it lined—but don’t picture pockets, the money is in imageless cyberspace—and the stock markets where their shares are traded; think of the forests the manuals are printed on; think of the store that sold it; think of where it’ll be dumped when it’s rendered obsolete, as all computers have been.

These are the tentacles, the winding corridors, the farthest reaches of Silicon Valley, and the hardest to imagine. It is the scene of the crime that has vaporized, and resisting an unlocatable and unimaginable crime is difficult. One of the principal challenges for environmentalists is making devastation that is subtle and remote seem urgent to people with less vivid imaginations. Another is finding a site at which to protest (which is why Greenpeace has largely relocated from actual sites to wherever the media can be found). And the ultimate problem of the landscape of Silicon Valley in its most abstruse, penetrating, and symbolic forms is that it is unimaginable.