The Cultural Logic of Computation (review)

David Golumbia, a media studies professor, wants to convince those hoping to liberate the world through computer technology to turn instead to social action. To do so he pursues two parallel lines of argument. The first is that the dominant cultural discourse about computers, which he dubs "computationalism," provides legitimacy for conservative, authoritarian politics while hiding behind the rhetoric of utopian liberation. He defines computationalism as the view that "mind itself must be a computer," that "algorithmic computation" is the essence of all thought (p. 7). This supposedly revolutionary concept, Golumbia argues, just repackages old-fashioned Hobbesian rationalism, which requires the individual to submit to the authoritative reason of the state. His second line of argument is that computer technology itself is hierarchical and authoritarian in character and thus helps to impose the politics that the computationalist discourse legitimates. This will remind historians of technology of Lewis Mumford's "authoritarian technics," although Golumbia hedges on whether computers are inherently authoritarian or simply enable centralized as well as distributed power.

The first half of the book focuses on academia. It begins with a discussion of linguist Noam Chomsky and functionalist philosophers Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor, all of whom, Golumbia argues, laid the groundwork for computationalist arguments. Chomsky's openly leftist politics, however, seem to undermine Golumbia's effort to link computationalism to the right. To get around this he argues that Chomsky displayed his authoritarian streak within the institutions of the academic world, which doesn't quite satisfy. One should also note that this book is not intended to be a history, and its treatment of Chomsky, for example, only briefly glosses the historical context. The first half concludes with two chapters on the quixotic efforts by linguists, computer scientists, and librarians to treat language as a rational, hierarchical code—efforts that both reflect and reinforce computationalist ideology.

The second half of the book follows the uses of computationalism out into the wider culture and the halls of power, especially corporate power. Much like James Scott's claim in Seeing Like a State (1998) that the state erases local detail in its quest to control, Golumbia argues in chapters 6 and 7 that the computer "striates," or digitizes, a smooth, analog world, supporting globalism and corporate power as both a technology and a discourse. He cites examples such as the software underlying the triumphs of Enron and Wal-Mart. Chapter 8 argues that the sense of mastery over the machine derived by elite computer users and the ideology of computationalist rationalism both encourage individualism rather than engagement with society. The final chapter, on the other hand, links computers and computationalism to authoritarian hierarchies.

There are a number of interesting nuggets here, especially the treatment in chapters 6 and 7 of market-segmentation databases and enterprise resource planning software, both important corporate tools that are little known outside certain areas of the business world. But some problems of execution hurt the book's clarity. The structure does not clearly signal the technological and cultural strands of the argument, leaving it up to the reader to put together the pieces. Some passages feel repetitive, and there is one outright duplication (pp. 9 and 205). The early chapters, especially, are unforgiving to those unfamiliar with linguistics and computer science. Terms such as "Strong AI" and even acronyms like "CFG" (context-free grammar) appear without explanation. Though Chomsky is a key figure, his linguistic ideas are never laid out for the reader.

Golumbia also makes several efforts to link computationalism to rightwing politics that come across as forced. For example, computationalism supposedly aligns with fundamentalist Christianity because they share "the belief in a quasi-platonic world out there that transcends the human social world" (p. 78). Though Golumbia concedes in several places that computing is a flexible technology that can be bent to democratic as well as authoritarian ends, he never admits that rationalism or computationalism might be flexible ideologies. But by dividing the world starkly into rationalist authoritarians on one...