#the difference engine

Time Travel Question 60: 19th Century III and Earlier

William Gibson must be so fucking done, he's spawned two genres, one (cyberpunk) that has been co-opted by the very systems of he was putting on blast, and the other (steampunk) turned into a quirky and unserious little subculture with the occasional foray into satire

i have three (3) tragic women from history that i think everyone ought to know more about and they are, in no particular order, louise augustine gleizes (a hysterical patient in 1800s paris), alice kober (got heart-wrenchingly close to cracking linear b in post-war new york), and ada lovelace (world’s first computer programmer)

In The Difference Engine, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling combine their efforts to produce a darkly disturbing ‘alternate history’ of the nineteenth century. Gibson and Sterling describe Victorian England, with a twist: Charles Babbage’s difference engine, the first computer, is immensely more powerful and pervasive than it was in our real time line. Gibson and Sterling take the repressed, disciplined society which first invented the Panopticon, and give it massive computing power. The result is, as one might expect, horrifying. Citizens are given numbers and ID cards (rather as they are in many actual contemporary societies), and the Victorian government maintains vast stores of computerized data on all of its subjects. A good example of this computerized Victorian disciplinary regime is the Quantitative Criminology section of the Central Statistics Bureau: ‘The QC section was a honeycomb of tiny partitions, the neck-high walls riddled with asbestos-lined cubbyholes. Gloved and aproned clerks sat neatly at their slanted desks, examining and manipulating punch-cards with a variety of specialized clacker’s devices.’ Surely this vision of well-disciplined workers in a vast, cubicle-riddled office building is quite familiar to any citizen of the West in the late twentieth century. But somehow it becomes more sinister when Gibson and Sterling project it back into the nineteenth century. Gibson and Sterling perform the admirable service of making the carceral society that we take for granted into something slightly strange, and in so doing they increase its susceptibility to analysis and critique.

Started reading The Difference Engine. 

The factory might have given us the millionfold productivity increases that yielded the Industrial Revolution, but it achieved those gains by chaining us to machines, deskilling the artisan and turning him into a cog in the factory, stripped of judgment and dignity and disconnected from the rhythms of his spirit and the world around him.

Victorian filmmaking (clackers)

The King stood, yanked the documents down, cast them onto his padded floor. ‘You see, sir, it don’t really matter a hang what nonsense is blithered and babbled on these bills! The secret truth is, that bills is endless by their very nature, regular as the tides in the Thames, or the smoke of London. London’s true sons call London ‘The Smoke’, you know. She’s an eternal city, like your Jerusalem, or Rome, or, some would say, Satan’s Pandaenonium! You don’t see the King of the Bill-Stickers worrying for smoky London, do you? Not a bit of it!’