Modernist Informatics

Modernist Informatics: now in 3-D. Here on the OUP stall at MSA17 in Boston, bookended by Paul K. Saint-Amour and Anne Anlin Cheng. (No pressure then, little book.)

‘It also strikes me as strange that some people seem to imagine that surveillance is some special new media problem. Perhaps it’s a variation on Virilio’s dictum that every technology programs its specific kind of accident. Every form of communication is also a particular form of surveillance. The era of the telephone is the era of the wire tap. The era of express mail is the era when the secret police moved in to the post office. Was it not ever thus?'

‘Healthy world trade. Yeah, you can prove anything with diagrams. Give me a half hour with Walt Disney and I could pay my income tax and never feel it. […] The wealthiest nation in the world, and a third of it ill-nourished. Laugh that one off with a diagram, mister.’

—Paul Rotha, World of Plenty (1943)

'For the last eighteen months I have been grappling with it, and now, just as I am letter perfect and postcard secure, behold all my labour destroyed, all my pains made ridiculous. It's the waste that vexes me. Here is a piece of information, slowly and laboriously acquired, yet absolutely useless. Nay, worse than useless; a positive hindrance. For I am just as slow at forgetting as at picking up. Whenever I want to think of your address, up it will spring, '109, Little Turncot Street, Chapelby Road, St. Pancras.' It cannot be scotched—it must lie there blocking up my brains, a heavy, uncouth mass, always ready to spring at the wrong moment; a possession of no value to anyone but the owner, and not the least use to him.'

'Lastly, there is the point of view which holds that any increase in the powers of the central government is dangerous and must be resisted. By implication these critics believe “that government is best which governs least”. History of course is against them. The whole 19th century trend towards welfare government, which has its roots in utilitarianism and the fight against slavery, demanded an increasing complexity of administration. The development of warfare, the elimination of the world frontier and the concept of the closed world, add immensely to the tasks of government. Information is only a small addition to the pile. Yet it works like the cadmium rods in the piles at Hanford, which can increase or abate the huge energy of these atomic power houses merely by being pushed in or out.'

Between steam and cybernetics lies a missing phase in the history of information culture. From the middle of the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth, the classifying and sorting operations performed in the offices and ministries of the British state slowly effected the transformation of Victorian statistics into Modernist informatics.