On Addressability, or What Even Is Computation?

tags: Computer Science Legibility

Notes

“quantum supremacy,”1 a threshold that denotes quantum computing doing “things that classical computers can’t, regardless of whether those tasks are useful.”

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addressability is one of the deﬁning technical features of computation.

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by treating computational infrastructures as “logistical media,” I argue that addressabil- ity—the condition whereby addressing, or the practice of giving a locational/ spatial index, takes place—undergirds all computing as we know it.

NOTER_PAGE: (4 0.1385083713850837 . 0.7378138847858199)

addressability as an elementary cultural technique, one that produces mechanisms for stabilizing the relationship between symbolic systems and physical locations.

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re- liable link between the addressor and the addressee is the precondition of not only computing but also Althusserian interpellation.

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addressability emerges as a key shared operational logic. It is here, more than in digits and numbers, that computational operations really take their life force.

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1. From Verbal to Networked: Some Tales of Addressing

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this com- bination is all Hermes needs to reliably trace anyone in his world.

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This divine messenger would be substituted a few centuries later by the postal system.

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The qualitative change towards exact addressing took place in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth cen- turies.

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changing or erasing the numbers became illegal.

NOTER_PAGE: (5 0.745814307458143 . 0.4903988183161005)

“in the same decade and in the same town, the origin of the card index co-occurs with the invention of the house number.”

NOTER_PAGE: (6 0.13901572805682394 . 0.32274741506646976)

this was an epistemic watershed, a new operational logic that was not just limited to house addresses.

NOTER_PAGE: (6 0.1765601217656012 . 0.23559822747415068)

Honoré de Balzac lamented the loss of secrecy amidst a civilization that “counts letters and stamps when they are posted and again when they are delivered, assigns numbers to houses, and will soon have the whole country, down to the smallest plot of land, in its registers”

NOTER_PAGE: (6 0.3845763571790969 . 0.22451994091580504)

Direct addressing had thus become not just a technical feature or a metaphor embedded in the machine but also, more crucially, an important condition for computing.

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This widespread technik of addressing underpins the whole landscape of computing and its imaginaries.

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The line between internal and external, when it comes to computational apparatuses, is tenuous at best,

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the inner life of computing starts looking very much like a play of earmarking spaces. What/who is where? What name/number does it have? How do I call it? Will it answer?

NOTER_PAGE: (10 0.14205986808726534 . 0.33899556868537667)

the same necessary condition that a machine be located for network operations then also becomes the condition of its surveillance. If a computer on a network can be located, then it will be located. In fact, anything that is addressable will be addressed.

NOTER_PAGE: (10 0.40081177067478435 . 0.29763663220088626)

If a device was unaddressable, it may as well have been useless.

NOTER_PAGE: (11 0.1567732115677321 . 0.31979320531757754)

2. From Address to Addressability: Semiotics of the Computational Address

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Addressing is best understood then not as a static feature of an entity, but a technical, material- semiotic operation that joins the two, addressee and the addressed, in an on- going relationship.

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addressability is the production of mechanisms for stabilizing the relationship between a symbolic regime and the corresponding physical substrate.

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Gilles Deleuze’s computerized control society and Michel Foucault’s civically-organized disciplinary society both appear as ex- tensions of the same regime constituted through the shared logic of ad- dressability.

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3. Address-Critical: Computing and All of Its Friends

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The earliest plans for computing, such as Charles Babbage’s plans for the Difference Engine and the Analytic Engine, used spatialized models that mimicked spaces of control.

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Babbage’s planned political machine already had a civic imaginary residing in it;

NOTER_PAGE: (16 0.6276002029426686 . 0.23485967503692765)

Differential Analyzer constructed by H. L. Hazen and Vannevar Bush at the Massachusetts Institute of Technol- ogy in the late 1920s.

NOTER_PAGE: (17 0.15423642820903094 . 0.3116691285081241)

this machine didn’t just solve the given equation through its mechanism; it kinetically enacted it.

NOTER_PAGE: (17 0.25164890918315574 . 0.344165435745938)

the analog computer itself was the stabilizing mechanism wrought by addressability.

NOTER_PAGE: (17 0.5525114155251141 . 0.5642540620384048)

this dependence on addressability followed Bush throughout his life. In “As We May Think,” Bush imagines a device to store all of one’s “books, records, and communications.” This memex, for Bush, was supposed to work primarily by means of pointers and indexical addressing techniken.

NOTER_PAGE: (18 0.19583967529173008 . 0.24372230428360414)

The peculiar use of this word demonstrates his interest in the civic mechanisms that grant reliable access to spatialized me- dia forms, continuing the task taken up by modern state apparatuses.

NOTER_PAGE: (19 0.1567732115677321 . 0.4224519940915805)

quantum computing isn’t really computing because it doesn’t work on the same fundamental rules that use classical bits.

NOTER_PAGE: (19 0.5139523084728563 . 0.2909896602658789)

Feynman couldn’t imagine a quantum computer without a computational postman.

NOTER_PAGE: (22 0.26991374936580415 . 0.17134416543574596)

the modern civic organization is deﬁnitively protocomputational in its logic, not because cities are like computers, but because computers are like cities.

NOTER_PAGE: (23 0.2658548959918823 . 0.6875923190546529)

4. The Politics of Computational Interpellation, or Why We Suffer From the Condition of Being Addressable

NOTER_PAGE: (23 0.4550989345509893 . 0.1979320531757755)

what addressability does here is a political problem as much as a technical one. One is reminded, of course, of Althusser’s ideo- logical interpellation,

NOTER_PAGE: (24 0.19533231861998984 . 0.31831610044313147)

the demand for vectorial concreteness by the policeman (“What is your address?”) is cou- pled with, and a necessary element for the enforcement of, a ﬂoating perfor- mance of authority (“Hey, you there!”).

NOTER_PAGE: (24 0.4733637747336377 . 0.5206794682422452)

need to conscript every young (working-)man and assimilate him into the state’s repressive military apparatus was what gave rise to the ﬁrst instance of exact civic addressability.

NOTER_PAGE: (25 0.5555555555555556 . 0.39512555391432796)

for the ﬁrst few years, men were the only ones who were addressable, for the logic was as much about including populations as it was about producing differential subjects via exclusionary practices

NOTER_PAGE: (25 0.6128868594622019 . 0.32865583456425407)

modern states need to know where its citizens live so cops can be readily sent,

NOTER_PAGE: (25 0.684931506849315 . 0.6432791728212703)

deletion of data in con- temporary computational systems is usually not enforced by physical alter- ation of the said data bits but by deleting their address from address tables; in other words, it is a record-keeping technique that renders data homeless.

NOTER_PAGE: (26 0.15880263825469304 . 0.6314623338257017)

the possibility of addresslessness—of being unaddressed, homeless, and/or not having a stable hail—was itself a devastating blow to those ex- cluded from the operations of modern subjecthood.

NOTER_PAGE: (26 0.3647894469812278 . 0.21565731166912852)

These techniques of addressing may not be computational per se, but they are protocomputa- tional, for their primary objective—to produce mechanisms that link the symbolic to a physical substrate—is what gives the condition of possibility of computation.

NOTER_PAGE: (26 0.4013191273465246 . 0.28877400295420974)

the zip code, for example, was introduced partially to encourage a com- putational automation of the postal system in the US.

NOTER_PAGE: (26 0.5149670218163369 . 0.22599704579025112)

Notes

“quantum supremacy,”1 a threshold that denotes quantum computing doing “things that classical computers can’t, regardless of whether those tasks are useful.”

What critical perspective can shed light on computa- tional culture as a social paradigm or a cultural technique without relying on the new, the digital, or the binary?

addressability is one of the deﬁning technical features of computation.

by treating computational infrastructures as “logistical media,” I argue that addressabil- ity—the condition whereby addressing, or the practice of giving a locational/ spatial index, takes place—undergirds all computing as we know it.

addressability as an elementary cultural technique, one that produces mechanisms for stabilizing the relationship between symbolic systems and physical locations.

re- liable link between the addressor and the addressee is the precondition of not only computing but also Althusserian interpellation.

addressability emerges as a key shared operational logic. It is here, more than in digits and numbers, that computational operations really take their life force.

1. From Verbal to Networked: Some Tales of Addressing

this com- bination is all Hermes needs to reliably trace anyone in his world.

This divine messenger would be substituted a few centuries later by the postal system.

The qualitative change towards exact addressing took place in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth cen- turies.

changing or erasing the numbers became illegal.

“in the same decade and in the same town, the origin of the card index co-occurs with the invention of the house number.”

this was an epistemic watershed, a new operational logic that was not just limited to house addresses.

Honoré de Balzac lamented the loss of secrecy amidst a civilization that “counts letters and stamps when they are posted and again when they are delivered, assigns numbers to houses, and will soon have the whole country, down to the smallest plot of land, in its registers”

Direct addressing had thus become not just a technical feature or a metaphor embedded in the machine but also, more crucially, an important condition for computing.

This widespread technik of addressing underpins the whole landscape of computing and its imaginaries.

The line between internal and external, when it comes to computational apparatuses, is tenuous at best,

the inner life of computing starts looking very much like a play of earmarking spaces. What/who is where? What name/number does it have? How do I call it? Will it answer?

the same necessary condition that a machine be located for network operations then also becomes the condition of its surveillance. If a computer on a network can be located, then it will be located. In fact, anything that is addressable will be addressed.

If a device was unaddressable, it may as well have been useless.

2. From Address to Addressability: Semiotics of the Computational Address

Addressing is best understood then not as a static feature of an entity, but a technical, material- semiotic operation that joins the two, addressee and the addressed, in an on- going relationship.

addressability is the production of mechanisms for stabilizing the relationship between a symbolic regime and the corresponding physical substrate.

Gilles Deleuze’s computerized control society and Michel Foucault’s civically-organized disciplinary society both appear as ex- tensions of the same regime constituted through the shared logic of ad- dressability.

3. Address-Critical: Computing and All of Its Friends

The earliest plans for computing, such as Charles Babbage’s plans for the Difference Engine and the Analytic Engine, used spatialized models that mimicked spaces of control.

Babbage’s planned political machine already had a civic imaginary residing in it;

Differential Analyzer constructed by H. L. Hazen and Vannevar Bush at the Massachusetts Institute of Technol- ogy in the late 1920s.

this machine didn’t just solve the given equation through its mechanism; it kinetically enacted it.

the analog computer itself was the stabilizing mechanism wrought by addressability.

this dependence on addressability followed Bush throughout his life. In “As We May Think,” Bush imagines a device to store all of one’s “books, records, and communications.” This memex, for Bush, was supposed to work primarily by means of pointers and indexical addressing techniken.

The peculiar use of this word demonstrates his interest in the civic mechanisms that grant reliable access to spatialized me- dia forms, continuing the task taken up by modern state apparatuses.

quantum computing isn’t really computing because it doesn’t work on the same fundamental rules that use classical bits.

Feynman couldn’t imagine a quantum computer without a computational postman.

the modern civic organization is deﬁnitively protocomputational in its logic, not because cities are like computers, but because computers are like cities.

4. The Politics of Computational Interpellation, or Why We Suffer From the Condition of Being Addressable

what addressability does here is a political problem as much as a technical one. One is reminded, of course, of Althusser’s ideo- logical interpellation,

the demand for vectorial concreteness by the policeman (“What is your address?”) is cou- pled with, and a necessary element for the enforcement of, a ﬂoating perfor- mance of authority (“Hey, you there!”).

need to conscript every young (working-)man and assimilate him into the state’s repressive military apparatus was what gave rise to the ﬁrst instance of exact civic addressability.

for the ﬁrst few years, men were the only ones who were addressable, for the logic was as much about including populations as it was about producing differential subjects via exclusionary practices

modern states need to know where its citizens live so cops can be readily sent,

deletion of data in con- temporary computational systems is usually not enforced by physical alter- ation of the said data bits but by deleting their address from address tables; in other words, it is a record-keeping technique that renders data homeless.

the possibility of addresslessness—of being unaddressed, homeless, and/or not having a stable hail—was itself a devastating blow to those ex- cluded from the operations of modern subjecthood.

These techniques of addressing may not be computational per se, but they are protocomputa- tional, for their primary objective—to produce mechanisms that link the symbolic to a physical substrate—is what gives the condition of possibility of computation.

the zip code, for example, was introduced partially to encourage a com- putational automation of the postal system in the US.