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2 Daemonic Interfaces, Empowering Obfuscations

Interfaces, in particular interactive GUis (graphical user interfaces), are widely assumed to have transformed the computer from a command-based instrument of torture to a user-friendly medium of empowerment. From Douglas Engelbart's vision of a system to "augment human intellect" to Ben Shneiderman's endorsement of "direct manipu- lation" as a way to produce "truly pleased users," GUis have been celebrated as enabling user freedom through (perceived) visible and personal control of the screen. This freedom, however, depends on a profound screening: an erasure of the computer's machinations and of the history of interactive operating systems as supplementing- that is, supplanting-human intelligence. It also coincides with neoliberal manage- ment techniques that have made workers both flexible and insecure, both empowered and wanting (e.g., always in need of training). 1

Rather than condemning interfaces as a form of deception, designed to induce false consciousness, this chapter investigates the extent to which this paradoxical combina- tion of visibility and invisibility, of rational causality and profound ignorance, grounds the computer as an attractive model for the "real" world. Interfaces have become functional analogs to ideology and its critique-from ideology as false consciousness to ideology as fetishistic logic, interfaces seem to concretize our relation to invisible (or barely visible) "sources" and substructures. This does not mean, however, that interfaces are simply ideological. Looking both at the use of metaphor within the early history of human-computer-interfaces and at the emergence of the computer as meta- phor, it contends that real-time computer interfaces are a powerful response to, and not simply an enabler or consequence of, postmodern/neoliberal confusion. Both conceptually and thematically, these interfaces offer their users a way to map and engage an increasingly complex world allegedly driven by invisible laws of late capital- ism. Most strongly, they induce the user to map constantly so that the user in turn can be mapped. They offer a simpler, more reassuring analog of power, one in which the user takes the place of the sovereign executive "source," code becomes law, and mapping produces the subject. These seemingly real-time interfaces emphasize the power of user action and promise topsight for all: they allow one to move from the

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local detail to the global picture-through an allegedly traceable and concrete path- by simply clicking a mouse. Conceptually drawn from auto navigation systems, these interfaces follow in the tradition of cybernetics (named after the Greek term kybernete for steersmen or governor) as a way to navigate or control, through a process of blackboxing.

Because of this, they render central processes for computation-processes not under the direct control of the user-daemonic: orphaned yet" supernatural" beings "between gods and men ... ghosts of deceased persons, esp. deified heroes."2 Indeed, the inter- face is "haunted" by processes hidden by our seemingly transparent GUis that make us even more vulnerable online, from malicious "back doors" to mundane data gather- ing systems. Similar to chapter 1, this chapter thus does not argue we need to move beyond specters and the undead, but rather contends that we should make our inter- faces more productively spectral-by reworking rather than simply shunning the usual modes of "user empowerment."

Interface, lntrafaith

Interactive interfaces-live screens between man and machine-stem from military projects, such as SAGE discussed in chapter 1. SAGE, according to Paul Edwards, was "a metaphor for total defense," a Cold War project that enclosed "the United States inside a radar 'fence' and an air-defense bubble."3 Edwards describes SAGE as both based on and the basis for the world as a closed world, "an inescapably self-referential space where every thought, word, and action is ultimately directed back toward a central struggle."4 (The opposite of a closed world is a green world, in which "the limits of law and rationality are surpassed.")5 SAGE began as a uni- versal cockpit simulator, but quickly evolved into a real-time network of digital computers, designed to detect incoming Soviet missiles. Unfortunately, yet not atypi- cally, it was obsolete by the time it was completed in 1963 due to the introduction of intercontinental ballistic missiles. Despite this, SAGE is considered central to the development of computing because it fostered many new technologies, including digital real-time control systems, core-memory devices, and most importantly for this chapter, graphical user displays.

These graphical CRT interfaces were simulations of an analog technology: radar (see figure 2.1).6 Divided into X-Y coordinates, these displays allowed the users- military personnel tracking air space-to deploy a light pen to select potential hostile aircraft tracks. This user's control of the interface and the system depended on a selective mapping that filtered as much as it represented, reducing all air traffic to blinking lines. Because of this direct real-time contact between user and computer, SAGE and the test machines associated with it are widely considered to be predeces- sors to personal interactive computing, albeit discontinuously (they were initially

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Figure 2.1 SAGE operator at console, 1958, National Archives photo no. 342-B-003-14-K-43548

displaced by mainframes).7 This screen, however, was an input device for the user, not for the programmers/coders, who produced taped programs that operators would load and run.

Interactive operating systems, key to making screens serve as part of an input system for all users (thus chipping away at the boundary between user and program- mer), also stemmed from military funding, in particular projects related to artificial intelligence (AI). Interactivity entailed giving over to the machine tasks that humans could not accomplish. As John McCarthy, key to both AI and time-sharing operating systems (OS), explains, the LISP programming language, used in early AI projects, was designed "in such a way that working with it interactively-giving it a command, then seeing what happened, then giving it another command-was the best way to

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work with it. 118 Interactivity was necessary because of the limitations of procedural programming and of early neural networks. That is, by the 1960s, the naivete behind John von Neumann's declaration that "anything that can be exhaustively and unam- biguously described, anything that can be completely and unambiguously put into words, is ipso facto realizable by a suitable finite neural network" was becoming increasingly apparent.9 Since exhaustive and unambiguous description was difficult, if not impossible, one needed to work "interactively"-not just automatically-with a computer. The alleged father of the Internet J. C. R. Licklider's vision of "Man- Computer Symbiosis" encapsulates this intertwining of interactivity and human fal- libility nicely. Describing the partnership between men and computers, Licklider predicts, "man-computer symbiosis is probably not the ultimate paradigm for complex technological systems. It seems entirely possible that, in due course, electronic or chemical 'machines' will outdo the human brain in most functions we now consider exclusively within its province. 1110 Similarly Jay Forrester, the force behind SAGE's development, contended, "the human mind is not adapted to interpret[] how social systems behave ... the mental model is fuzzy ... incomplete ... imprecisely stated. 1111 The goal, then, was to develop artificial systems to combat human frailty by usurping the human.

Given this background and the ways in which the screen screens, the emergence of user-friendly interfaces as a form of "computer liberation" seems dubious at best and obfuscatory at worst. So, why and how is it that interactive systems have become synonymous with user and machine freedom? What do we mean by freedom here? What do these systems offer and what happens when we use them?

Direct Manipulation

The notion of interfaces as empowering is driven by a dream of individual control: of direct personal manipulation of the screen, and thus, by extension, of the system it indexes or represents. Consider, for instance, the interface to Google Earth. Offering us a god's eye view, it allows us to zoom in on any location, to fly from place to place, and to even control the amount of sunshine in any satellite photo. Google Earth, however, hardly represents the world as it is, but rather a more perfectly spherical one in which it hardly ever rains (even when the Google Earth weather layer shows rain), and in which nothing ever moves, even as time goes by. Viewing these divergences from reality as failures, however, misses what makes this program so compelling: the actions it enables, the kind of dynamic mapping actions, the "top sight"-overview and zooming-it facilitates.

Google Earth, and interactive interfaces in general, follow in the tradition of "direct manipulation." According to Ben Shneiderman, who coined the term in the 1980s, "certain interactive systems generate glowing enthusiasm among users-in marked

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contrast with the more common reaction of grudging acceptance or outright hostil- ity." In these systems, the users reported positive feelings, such as "mastery" over the system and "confidence" in their continuing mastery, "competence" in performing their tasks, "ease" in learning the system, "enjoyment" in using it, "eagerness" to help new users," and the "desire" to engage the more complex parts of the system. Changes in visibility and causality seem central to the creation of a truly pleased user, in par- ticular, "visibility of the object of interest; rapid, reversible, incremental actions; and replacement of complex command language syntax by direct manipulation of the object of interest-hence the term 'direct manipulation. 11112

Crucially, Shneiderman posits direct manipulation as a means to overcome users' resistance: as a way to dissipate hostility and grudging acceptance and instead to foster enthusiasm by developing feelings of mastery. Direct manipulation does this by framing the problem of work from the perspective of the worker-more precisely of the neoliberal worker who decides to work-and by replacing commands with more participatory structures.13 Direct manipulation is thus part of the "new spirit of capital- ism" that the French sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello outline in their book of the same title. This new spirit of capitalism fosters commitment and enthu- siasm-emotions not guaranteed by pay or working under duress-through manage- ment techniques that stress "versatility, job flexibility, and the ability to learn and adapt to new duties. 1114 As Catherine Malabou notes, in such a system "'the leader has no need to command,' because the personnel are 'self-organized' and 'self- controlling."115 In such a system, Malabou underscores, drawing from Boltanski and Chiapello, flexibility is capitulation and normative, and "everyone lives in a state of permanent anxiety about being disconnected, rejected, abandoned." 16

Not surprisingly, the term direct manipulation also draws from cognitive psychology: George Lakoff and Ben Johnson use the term in relation to Jean Piaget's argument that infants "first learn about causation by realizing that they can directly manipulate objects around them." 17 That is, infants' repeated manipulations of certain objects are key to their eventual grasping of causality: that doing X will always (or usually) cause Y to happen. Relatedly, Lakoff and Johnson argue that interactions with objects also ground metaphor, since "interactional properties are prominent among the kinds of properties that count in determining sufficient family resemblance."18 Shneiderman also offers examples of direct manipulation outside (or at least at that point outside) of computer interfaces, most importantly the steering wheel of a car:

Driving an automobile is my favorite example of direct manipulation. The scene is directly visible through the windshield, and actions such as braking or steering have become common skills in our culture. To turn to the left, simply rotate the steering wheel to the left. The response is immediate, and the changing scene provides feedback to refine the turn. Imagine trying to turn by issuing a LEFf 30 DEGREES command and then issuing another command to check your position, but this is the operational level of many office automation tools today. 19

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Direct manipulation is thus a metaphor based on real-time analog technologies, such as a drive shaft, and their integration into a visual system. (These analog technologies, which linked steering wheel to car wheel in a mechanical cause-and-effect relation, of course are themselves being replaced by computerized drive shafts.) HCI's version of direct manipulation is never "direct," only simulated, and the mastery, as Shneider- man notes, is "felt" not possessed. This emphasis on feelings, however, reveals that the visibility of the object of interest matters less than the affective relationship established though rapid, reversible, incremental actions.

Brenda Laurel has argued this point most influentially in her classic Computer as Theater. According to Laurel, direct manipulation is not and has never been enough, and the strand of HCI focused on producing more and more realistic interface meta- phors is wrongheaded.20 People realize when they double-click on a folder that it is not really a folder; making a folder more "life-like" (following the laws of gravity, having it open by the user flipping over the front flap, etc.) would be more annoying than helpful. What does help, though, is direct engagement: an interface designed around plausible and clear actions. Direct engagement, Laurel contends, "shifts the focus from the representation of manipulable objects to the ideal of enabling people to engage directly in the activity of choice, whether it be manipulating symbolic tools in the performance of some instrumental tasks or wandering around the imaginary world of a computer game." This ideal engagement "emphasizes emotional as well as cognitive values. It conceives of human-computer activity as a designed experience"21- an experience designed around "activities of choice" or, more properly, making these activities feel like activities of choice.

As a designed experience, Laurel astutely insists, computer activity is artificial and should remain so.22 That is, fabricating computer interfaces entails "creating imaginary worlds that have a special relationship to reality-worlds in which we can extend, amplify, and enrich our own capacities to think, feel, and act."23 The computer inter- face thus should be based on theater rather than psychology because "psychology attempts to describe what goes on in the real world with all its fuzziness and loose ends, while theatre attempts to represent something that might go on, simplified for the pur- poses of logical and affective clarity. Psychology is devoted to the end of explaining human behavior, while drama attempts to represent it in a form that provides intel- lectual and emotional closure."24 Importantly, Laurel's argument, even as it condemns metaphor, is itself based on metaphor, or more precisely simile: computers as theater. It displaces rhetorical substitution from the level of the interface (objects to be manip- ulated) to the interface as a whole; it also makes the substitution more explicit (simile, not metaphor).

Laurel's move to theater is both interesting and interested, and it resonates strongly both with Weizenbaum's parallel between programmer as lawgiver/playwright dis- cussed previously and with Edwards's diagnosis of the computer as a metaphor of the

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Action

Character 0 Q) 3 UJ Thought ::J ee. ca u () :\ii Ill Language c Qi UJ m 1ii E Pattern

Enactment

Figure 2.2 Causal relations among elements of quantitative structure. A reproduction of Brenda Laurel's illustration in Computers as Theater, 51.

closed world, a term also drawn from literary criticism.25 The Aristotelian model Laurel uses provides her structuralist theory with the kind of emotional and intellectual closure she contends interfaces should create: clear definitions of causality, of the means to produce catharsis and, most important, of theater-like interfaces and computers-as following laws."26 Clear, law-abiding causality drives every level of Laurel's system (see figure 2.2): action is the formal cause of character and so on down to enactment; enactment is the material cause of pattern and so on up to action.

Because events happen so logically, users accept them as probable and then as certain. Consequently, this system ensures that users universally suspend their dis- belief. This narrowing also creates pleasure: the creation and elimination of uncer- tainty-the "stimulation to imagination and emotion created by carefully crafted uncertainty" and the "satisfaction provided by closure when action is complete"- Laurel contends, drives audience pleasure.27

The fact that users are not simply the audience, but also the actors, makes causality in computer interfaces more complicated. Thus, the designer must not simply create "good" characters that do what they intend (character, she argues, is solely defined by action), but also create intrinsic constraints so that users can become good char- acters too and follow the "laws" of the designer. 28 The designer is both scriptwriter and set designer: Laurel's description of the designer's power seems less extreme than Weizenbaum's; however, Laurel's vision-focused on the relationship between designer and user, rather than programmer and program-is not less but rather differently coercive. In Laurel's view, the constraints the designer produces do not restrict freedom; they ensure it. Complete freedom does not enhance creativity; it stymies it. Addressing fantasies by gamers and science fiction writers of "magical spaces where they can invent their own worlds and do whatever they wish-like gods," she argues that the experience of these spaces "might be more like an existential nightmare than a dream of freedom":

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A system in which people are encouraged to do whatever they want will probably not produce pleasant experiences. When a person is asked to "be creative" with no direction or constraints whatever, the result is, according to May, often a sense of powerlessness-or even complete paralysis of the imagination. Limitations-constraints that focus creative efforts-paradoxically increase our imaginative power by reducing the number of possibilities open to us. 29

A green world, in other words, in which action flows "between natural, urban, and other locations and centers [on] magical, natural forces" produces paralysis and night- mares. Yet constraints-the acceptance of certain interface conventions as self-enforced rules-enable agency and an arguably no less magical feeling of power: a sense that users control the action and make free and independent choices within a set of rules, again the classic neoliberal scenario. (The goal of interface design, Laurel tellingly states, is to "build a better mousetrap.")30 To buttress this feeling of mastery, discon- certing coincidences and irrelevant actions that can expose the inner workings of programs must be eliminated. For users as for paranoid schizophrenics (my observa- tion, not Laurel's), everything has meaning: there can be no coincidences but only causal pleasure in this closed world.

Laurel's conception of freedom, however, is disturbingly banal: the true experi- ence of freedom may indeed be closer to an existential nightmare than to a pleasant paranoid dream. Indeed, the challenge, as I argue in Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics (2006), is to take freedom seriously, rather than to reduce it to control (and thus reduce the Internet to a gated community). Freedom grounds control, not vice versa. Freedom makes control possible, necessary, and never enough. Not surprisingly, the system Laurel describes-focused on getting users to suspend disbelief and to act in certain prescribed ways-resonates widely with definitions of ideology.

Interfaces as Ideology

To elaborate on an argument I have made before, GUis are a functional analog to ideology.31 In a formal sense computers understood as comprising software and hard- ware are ideology machines. They fulfill almost every formal definition of ideology we have, from ideology as false consciousness (as portrayed in the 1999 Wachowski Brothers' film The Matrix) to Louis Althusser's definition of ideology as "a 'representa- tion' of the imaginary relation of individuals to their real conditions of existence."32

According to Althusser, ideology reproduces the relations of production by "'constitut- ing' concrete individuals as subjects. "33 Ideology, he stresses, has a material existence: it shapes the practices and consciousness of individual subjects. It interpellates subjects: it yells "hey you," and subjects turn around and recognize themselves in that call.

Interfaces offer us an imaginary relationship to our hardware: they do not represent transistors but rather desktops and recycling bins. Interfaces and operating systems

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produce "users"-one and all. Without OS there would be no access to hardware; without OS there would be no actions, no practices, and thus no user. Each OS, in its extramedial advertisements, interpellates a "user": it calls it a name, offering it a name or image with which to identify. So Mac users "think different" and identify with Martin Luther King and Albert Einstein; Linux users are open-source power geeks, drawn to the image of a fat, sated penguin (the Linux mascot); and Windows users are mainstream, functionalist types perhaps comforted, as Eben Moglen argues, by their regularly crashing computers. Importantly, the "choices" operating systems offer limit the visible and the invisible, the imaginable and the unimaginable. You are not, however, aware of software's constant constriction and interpellation (also known as its "user-friendliness"), unless you find yourself frustrated with its defaults (which are remarkably referred to as your preferences) or unless you use multiple operating systems or competing software packages.

Interfaces also produce users through benign interactions, from reassuring sounds that signify that a file has been saved to folder names such as "my documents," which stress personal computer ownership. Computer programs shamelessly use shifters- pronouns like "my" and "you"-that address you, and everyone else, as a subject. Interfaces make you read, offer you more relationships and ever more visuals. They provoke readings that go beyond reading letters toward the nonliterary and archaic practices of guessing, interpreting, counting, and repeating. Interfaces are based on a fetishistic logic. Users know very well that their folders and desktops are not really folders and desktops, but they treat them as if they were-by referring to them as folders and as desktops. This logic is, according to Slavoj Zizek, crucial to ideology. 34

As mentioned previously, Zizek (through Peter Sloterdjik) argues that ideology persists in one's actions rather than in one's beliefs: people know very well what they are doing, but they still do it. The illusion of ideology exists not at the level of knowledge but rather at the level of action: this illusion, maintained through the imaginary "meaning of the law" (causality), screens the fact that authority is without truth-that one obeys the law to the extent that it is incomprehensible. Is this not computation? Through the illusion of meaning and causality-the idea of a law-driven system-do we not cover over the fact that we do not and cannot fully understand or control computation? That computers increasingly design each other and that our use is-to an extent-a supplication, a blind faith?

Operating systems also create users more literally, for users are an OS construction. User logins emerged with time-sharing operating systems, such as UNIX, which encourage users to believe that the machines they are working on are their own machines (before this, computers mainly used batch processing; before that, a person really did run the computer, so there was no need for operating systems-one had human operators). As many historians have argued, the time-sharing operating systems developed in the 1970s spawned the "personal computer."35 That is, as ideology creates

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subjects, interactive and seemingly real-time interfaces create users who believe they are the "source" of the computer's action.

Real-time Sourcery

According to the OED, real time is "the actual time during which a process or event occurs, especially one analyzed by a computer, in contrast to time subsequent to it when computer processing may be done, a recording replayed, or the like." Crucially, hard and soft real-time systems are subject to a "real-time constraint." That is, they need to respond, in a forced duration, to actions predefined as events. The measure of real time, in computer systems, is their reaction to the live; it is their liveness-their quick acknowledgment of and response to our actions.

The notion of real time always points elsewhere-to "real-world" events, to user's actions-thereby introducing indexicality to this supposedly nonindexical medium. That is, whether or not digital images are supposed to be "real," real time posits the existence of a source-coded or not-that renders our computers transparent. Real- time operating systems create an "abstraction layer" that hides the hardware details of the processor from application software; real-time images portray computers as unme- diated connectivity. SAGE, for instance, linked computer-generated images to lines on a screen; unlike in the case of radar images, there was no "footprint" relation between screen and incoming signal. As RealPlayer reveals, the notion of real time is bleeding into all electronic moving images, not because all recordings are live, but because grainy moving images have become a marker of the real. 36 What is authentic or real is what transpires in real time, but real time is real not only because of this indexicality- this pointing to elsewhere-but also because of its quick reactions to users' inputs.

Dynamic changes to web pages in real time, seemingly at the bequest of users' desires or inputs, create what Tara McPherson has called "volitional mobility." Creating "Tara's phenomenology of websurfing, 11 McPherson argues:

When I explore the web, I follow the cursor, a tangible sign of presence implying movement. This motion structures a sense of liveness, immediacy, of the now ... yet this is not just the same old liveness of television: this is liveness with a difference. This liveness foregrounds volition and mobility, creating a liveness on demand. Thus, unlike television which parades its presence before us, the web structures a sense of causality in relation to liveness, a liveness which we navigate and move through, often structuring a feeling that our own desire drives the movement. The web is about presence but an unstable presence: it's in process, in motion. "37

This liveness, McPherson carefully notes, is more the illusion-the feel or sensation- of liveness, rather than the fact of liveness; the choice yoked to this liveness is similarly a sensation rather than the real thing (although one might ask: What is the difference between the feel of choice and choice itself? Is choice alone not a limited agency?). The real-time moving cursor and the unfolding of an unstable present through our

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digital (finger) manipulations make us crane our necks forward, rather than sit back on our couches, causing back and neck pain. The extent to which computers turn the most boring activities into incredibly time-consuming and even enjoyable ones is remarkable: one of the most popular computer games to date, The Sims, focuses on the mundane; action and adventure games reduce adventure to formulaic motion- restricted activities, yet the delights of interpreting these interfaces by interacting with them makes them pleasurable and never-ending. This volitional mobility, McPherson argues, reveals that the "hype" surrounding the Internet does have some phenomenological backing. This does not necessarily make the Internet an empower- ing medium, but at the very least means that it can provoke a desire for something better: true volitional mobility, true change.38 Crucially, this fostering of a belief in true change-in the ability to change, in the direct causality between one's actions and a result-is programmed into the interface. That is, change, rather than being a radical act, is now the norm; we click, we change.

Interactive pleasure does not simply derive from a representation of user actions in a causally plausible manner; it also comes from "user amplification." Lev Manovich explains "user amplification" in terms of the Super Mario computer game: "When you tell Mario to step to the left by moving a joystick, this initiates a small delightful nar- rative: Mario comes across a hill; he starts climbing the hill; the hill turns to be too steep; Mario slides back onto the ground; Mario gets up, all shaking. None of these actions required anything from us; all we had to do is just to move the joystick once. The computer program amplifies our single action, expanding it into a narrative sequence."39 This user amplification mimics the "instruction explosion," described in the previous chapter, central to higher-level programming languages (one line of high- level code corresponds to more than one line of machine code). User amplification also maps our actions to movements on the screen.

In essence, real-time interfaces map user actions to screened changes, making our machines seem transparent and rendering our screen into a map. Maps dominate interfaces, from our "desktop" to the clickable image maps on web pages, and map- ping-the act of making and outlining connections-drives our actions online, from creating social maps based on Facebook friends to following links within web pages. Julian Dibbell has argued eloquently that online spaces are themselves essentially maps, that is, diagrams that we seek to inhabit.40 Maps and mapping are also the means by which we "figure out" power and our relation to a larger social entity. Touchgraph's mapping of relationships between Facebook photos, Amazon books, and web pages, for instance, allegedly reveals the hidden interconnections driving consumption and social bonding (see figure 2.3).

The much celebrated theyrule.net, which allows users to map connections between people on company boards, exemplifies this notion of mapping as a form of ideology critique (see figure 2.4).