(I started researching the material below in 2018 and had mostly given up for lack of success in confirming the historical sources. Yet considering the times we live in, it seems relevant and necessary to pass along these fragments and unfinished investigations in the hopes that someone else might undertake a proper study of Vincent Hollier, who by all accounts was an interesting fellow and an important pioneer. I was able to make email contact briefly with Hollier in early summer 2020, yet he didn't respond in depth to my interview queries and I decided not to pester him further. Hollier passed away last month at the age of 77.)
First, the basic coordinates. Anthony Wilden published a book in 1972 called System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange. A lost gem that few people read anymore, System and Structure is an unclassifiable cocktail of cybernetics and continental theory that contains one of the first significant philosophical reflections on the digital and the analog.* Wilden's book would go on to influence another key text in this discourse, "Shame in the Cybernetic Fold" by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank. In fact I first learned of Wilden's book by reading Sedgwick and Frank's essay.
Now the important part: Inserted as an appendix between chapters seven and eight of System and Structure is a six-page graphical essay by one Vincent Hollier titled "Appendix II: Analog and Digital" (196-201). Hollier's appendix is significant because it is one of the earliest instances of Digital Studies composed by an African American.
My colleague Charlton McIlwain has written on the history of African Americans and computing in his book Black Software, extending that history earlier than one might expect, while also undoing the notion that Black Americans were mostly non-participants in computer history. Perhaps the story of Vincent Hollier might add another page to that history. Is Hollier's the first work of Black Digital Studies? I'm no historian. And certainly the quest for origins is a fruitless endeavor, if not also politically suspect. Regardless, Hollier's graphical essay is doubtless an important early contribution from an era with a relative paucity of archival sources. Continue reading
Does disorder have a politics? I suspect it must. It has a history, to be sure. Disorder is quite old, in fact, primeval even, the very precondition for the primeval, evident around the world in ancient notions of chaos, strife, or cosmic confusion. But does disorder have a politics as well? As an organizing principle, disorder achieved a certain coherence during the 1990s. In those years technology evangelists penned books with titles like Out of Control (the machines are in a state of disorder, but we like it), and The Cathedral and the Bazaar (disorderly souk good, well-ordered Canterbury bad). The avant argument in those years focused on a radical deregulation of all things, a kind of full-stack libertarianism in which machines and organisms could, and should, self-organize without recourse to rule or law. Far from corroding political cohesion, as it did for Thomas Hobbes and any number of other political theorists, disorder began to be understood in a more positive sense, as the essential precondition for a liberated politics. Or as the late David Golumbia writes in Cyberlibertarianism, the computer society of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries culminated in “the view that ‘centralized authority’ and ‘bureaucracy’ are somehow emblematic of concentrated power, whereas ‘distributed’ and ‘nonhierarchical’ systems oppose that power.” And, further, Golumbia argues that much of the energy for these kinds of political judgements stemmed from a characteristically ring-wing impulse, namely a conservative reaction to the specter of central planning in socialist and communist societies and the concomitant endorsement of deregulation and the neutering of state power more generally. Isaiah Berlin’s notion of negative liberty had eclipsed all other conceptions of freedom; many prominent authors and technologists seemed to agree that positive liberty was only ever a path to destruction. Or as Friedrich Hayek put it already in 1944, any form of positive, conscious imposition of order would inevitably follow “the road to serfdom.” Liberty would thus thrive not from rational order, but from a carefully tended form of disorder.