Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound

1. Indistinguishable from Magic: Invisible Interfaces and Digital Literature as Demystifier

1  Indistinguishable from Magic Invisible Interfaces and Digital Literature as Demystifier The twenty-first century will not have the same craving for media. As a matter of course, they will be a part of everyday life, like the railways in the nineteenth century or the introduction of electricity into private households in the twentieth. —Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of the Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means Invisible, Imperceptible, Inoperable If the twenty-first century does not have, as Siegfried Zielinski writes in the chapter epigraph, a craving for media, it is because media, by way of interface, are steadily making their way toward invisibility, imperceptibility, and inoperability. We cannot crave whatever is ubiquitous. As I describe in this section, contemporary claims about ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) as the definitive technological innovation of this century— supposedly, the third wave of computing, which replaces desktop computing and whose devices are seamlessly embedded throughout our everyday environment—consistently tout the invisibility of its interfaces as providing us with a more natural, more direct, inherently better way to interact with our computers and more generally with the world around us. Without attention to the ways in which interfaces are anything but invisible in how they frame what can and cannot be said, however, the contemporary computing industry will continue unchecked in its accelerating drive to achieve the perfect black box not only through the latest ubicomp devices but also through parallel developments, such as so-called Natural User Interfaces, Organic User Interfaces, and even the now widely 2 Indistinguishable from Magic prevalent multitouch interfaces. All of these interfaces share a common goal underlying their designs: to efface the interface altogether and so also efface our ability to read, let alone write, the interface, definitively turning us into consumers rather than producers of content. By contrast, with a critical eye on interface, a growing body of digital literature courts difficulty, defamiliarization, and glitch as antidotes to this receding present . Mark Weiser, the reputed father of ubicomp, originally believed that this mode of computing was an antidote to windows and desktop computing—now, we need digital literature as an antidote against what ubicomp has become. Though this chapter focuses on invisible interfaces of the present and near future, as well as works of digital literature that disrupt this insistent drive toward invisibility, for the moment it is instructive to turn to the mid-1990s. This time period acts as a hinge that opens, in one direction, onto the subject of this chapter and, in the other, onto the subject of chapter 2, the turn from the 1970s’ philosophy of open hardware/software to themid-1980s’ideologyoftheuser-friendlyviaclosed hardware/ software—a hinge that I hope demonstrates how we can wield media archaeology as a conceptual knife that cuts into the present and the near future, not just, in the sense of Zielinski’s deep time, into the past, as in archaeology’s digging in and around a historical context for a hole in the ground or the archaeological record. In 1995 Friedrich Kittler declared, “There Is No Software ,” as the logic of the computing community dictated that “in a perfect gradualism, DOS services would hide the BIOS, WordPerfect the operating system, and so on and so on on.”¹ So while writer Rob Swigart noted in 1994 the gradual disappearance of the metaphorical desktop from his awareness— asserting, “That is the real danger. . . . Unless we pause from time to time to consider how these metaphors work to create boundaries . . . they will control us without our knowledge”— just a year later there would be no software at all.² Pivoting from the mid-1990s toward the present-future, not only does software obscure hardware, but interface obscures software. Indistinguishable from Magic 3 We no longer have access to digital tools for making; instead, we have predetermined choices. Ideally, the seamlessness of ubiquitous computing devices will make even choice itself recede into the background. In this imagined near future, things will simply happen and we will simply do. Thus, continuing in the direction of Kittler’s 1995 essay, while Steven Johnson’s 1997 Interface Culture was prescient in many different respects, one of his central claims was, “The most profound change will lie with our generic expectations about the interface itself. We will come to think of interface design as a kind of art form—perhaps the art form of the next century.”³ Although this...