§76 On the Person-ality of the Personal Computer

The relationship between mass-production and ‘the individual’ has never been straight forward. The alienating forms of labour associated with assembly-line production and environments deemed optimal for creating products en masse are largely associated with reducing the individual worker to a mere cog in a machine. However, beyond this process the commodities produced are often framed as a strange form of utilitarianism.

In a contemporary retelling of Le Guin’s ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’ (1973), the price of individual alienation can be uncomfortably justified on account of a mass good afforded at the expense of a few: namely, making availability for the ‘great multitude’ the various technologies and privileges once the reserve of a wealthy elite.*

Unlike many mass-produced commodities, a clue to the personal computer’s (PC) differentiation within this genre is in its name. Despite being mass-produced, the standardised nature of the PC is only in its computational capacity. The residing feature of this most technological of artefacts is that despite its standard, it holds a claim to be personal. **

Steve Jobs seemed to have known as much. By appropriating an Emersonian notion of genius (and its relation to mass (market) ‘recognition’) in his Stanford Graduation Commencement Address, one can read his own technological legacy as being a project dedicated to massifying his personal take on a technological potentiality. The PC can therefore be understood as both a single instance of the material realisation of one individuals’ own massified ingenuity, and in turn that which reveals itself as something that encourages an original and individuated relation by the individual that makes up the mass.

The cultural implications of the PC for the future is certainly underway, and can begin to be traced along the broad parameters of various phases of Web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 technologies. But what of the person-ality of such technologies? These are yet to emerge. However, to paraphrase Friedrich Kittler, it will inevitably be us who adapt to the machine. The machine does not adapt to us.

/Pete Watt

* Henry Ford’s first mass-produced motor car — the Model T — being a particularly archetypical instance.

** This is despite the expression ‘personal’ being a designation based on a shift in the ‘punched card era’ of computer programming which was previously reliant on large, access-restricted server rooms.

Originally published at anowmedia.com on November 23, 2018.