The Personal is Political
The computer game, Spacewar. Titillating, no?
So we learn via Paul Ceruzzi (A History of Modern Computing) that the notion of introducing the personal computer to the mass public doesn’t fully ignite until some journalist from Rolling Stone sees a bunch of academics at Stanford sitting around playing a computer game- Spacewar. To play games, to have fun, on a machine that costs thousands of dollars is, Ceruzzi points out, to use such machines in a highly “personal” way, outside such standard usages envisioned by those corporate and military minds fueled by bureaucratic and punched-card logic.
In a way, Ceruzzi’s narrative about the rise of the PC is quite moving: unable to arrive via top-down means, it is “hobbyists” and what we might think of as the first hackers who dictate the inevitable trend toward personal computing. Yet in the background, as if begrudgingly, we see brief glimpses of hordes of women laborers tinkering with the integrated circuitry for these devices. The technology has advanced from vacuum tubes to transistors to silicon chips, but one thing that still hasn’t changed is the practice of exploiting the cheap labor of marginalized groups. Somehow, I just can’t see computer gameplay as ultimate freedom, at least not yet.
Hey Julieht,
This is a great post–what a pic! if that isn’t too obscene a thing to say, given what it can’t help saying–and I’m glad you followed that thread through the Ceruzzi. I’m inclined to think the glimpse is less begrudging–it’s glancing, but no more or less so than that which briefly takes in and passes over eg DEC’s practices of getting their customers (including all those pasty white male hackers) to design and build their products for them. Which isn’t to disagree, but just to say I think Ceruzzi’s efforts to tell the tale of the military industrial cum corporate boys making the go go years go, whilst filtering the linear narrative through the net and detritus of those laid waste and/or gobbled up in its wake, is pretty convincing. Even if not finally satisfactory on all counts: the hordes of women laborers you so carefully document here are in fact (presumably) the same data clerks to whom the IRS fed the background sounds of card-punching machinery to maintain productivity after the fateful switch to transistors I quotated. Or at least I imagine they are: it doesn’t get said, though it hardly goes without saying…
Thanks for the link to that documentary as well. I’m totally watching it this weekend.
[...] to wed ROM and RAM into that single SAGE-like (Hello, Thomas!) machine that will send home the hordes of women missing their card punchers and cluttering up the workrooms of pharmaceuticals, insurance [...]
Notes on Coincedences « Mean Density Is Constant said this on May 5, 2008 at 6:56 pm