Digital Being

Abstract

The digital ensemble has no clear beginning. As Deleuze and Guattari point out, it’s a question of connections, and the connections that produced the difference that we recognize as the digital ensemble are many. Certainly the late 1940s can be identified as a point of emergence, though already before this the general expansion of control technologies in the century preceding it certainly forms part of its trajectory (Beniger 1986). More significant is the current merging of biology and technology by way of the digital ensemble (Arthur 2010; Clough 2008; Thacker 2004), which perhaps indicates that it’s difficult to understand the digital ensemble as anywhere else than in its early formation. The digital ensemble’s encounter with all aspects of the industrialized mechanical ensemble, its politics, economics, and culture has been nothing short of revolutionary in many respects. The possibility of doing new things, whether positive or negative, stating new things in all areas of the economy, whether in medical science, engineering, finance, and areas such as biotechnology and nanotechnology, was only enabled by the use of digital technologies and the new connections they made possible. Even those who are seemingly far removed from having to deal directly with any such machines (whether by choice or not) are to some extent regulated and constituted by them.

Technology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of the production of social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions that flow from those relations.

(Marx 1990, 493)