Re: Don't be evil

After reading your post, Andrew M., something became clear to me about Deleuze, CODeDOC, and Pold/our discussions of interface. I think that what frightens Deleuze about a company’s “soul” is, at least in part, the seductiveness of an interface that seems to be tailored to the individual. At first I couldn’t understand why Deleuze would wax nostalgic for the days of factory-like impersonality, until I began to think about Google. Perhaps Deleuze recognizes a trend in “society” that we have been examining in new media: when the interface of a set of code is sufficiently fluid, we forget that we are not controlling the essence of the code itself, but just the manifestation of that code at work. In an operating system, I am not opening a folder when I double click an icon- the code is opening that folder. Perhaps even more perversely: when I “friend” someone on facebook, I’m not making a friend- I’m sending out chunks of code. As is evidenced by our means of referring to our interface actions, however (I opened the folder, I friended her on facebook), we as a society are not actively differentiating between interactions with interface and interpersonal actions. The good news for Deleuze, though, is as you say: our gut tells us something about interfaces in society that we don’t perceive as quickly in cyberspace. When Google tells us “Don’t be evil,” the first thing we do is become suspicious. We know how multinational companies work, and we know about their primary interests. Google is not an inherently “moral” company- it’s a corporation. We also know that Google didn’t tailor our homepage to our specifications out of concern for our interests- they wrote some code that allowed us to choose which things we have highlighted. The fact that we know this instinctively, though, speaks to the difference between a company’s “interface” and an OS’s. Perhaps we are more gullible online, but that is not a prescription for our non-digital lives. Furthermore, our digital lives, it seems, are becoming increasingly transparent. I loved the CODeDOC display. I loved it that I had to scroll through (and even read!) the code before I could see the interface, and I loved it that one theme could elicit so many different kinds of code writing, linguistic creations and interfaces. If huge corporations are transparent to us, and digital art is becoming more and more transparent, then I think we might be out of hot water.