[NetBehaviour] Six Reminders for the Age of Network Machines

[Max Herman]

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Italo Calvino's 1985 book of five short essays, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, which discusses the "hypernovel" as a network, was published posthumously not as designed.

What was supposed to happen was for Calvino to travel from Italy to Harvard, Massachusetts and deliver the Memos as a series of lectures: The Charles Eliot Norton Poetry Lectures for 1985.  Being deceased, such delivery could not and did not occur.  The sixth Memo, which was to have been written in Cambridge while delivering ("reading") the first five was never written.  All we know is its title, "Consistency," and that one example from literature it was going to discuss was Melville's 1853 short story "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street" about copying texts: "Ah Bartleby!  Ah humanity!"

What might have happened, and happened differently, if Italo had lived to fulfill the design of these six memos?  Who might have attended the lectures, seen the person reading them, and heard their words spoken before ever reading them written?  Would that have had different results?  Perhaps.  Who was a student at Harvard in 1985?  Who were the faculty?  Might their intellectual futures have been different if they had heard these lectures that never occurred?  We don't know.  It's possible that no experiences or events would have been different, no conversations at coffeeshops after the lectures and no alteration of any course syllabi, choices of major, or PhD theses.  It's possible too that some things might have been different.  Might the lectures not possibly have caused a minor sensation?

Some of what we do and can know is that "Consistency" is a topic which was discussed by mathematician Kurt Gödel who said that if a system's axioms are consistent then the system must be incomplete.  Only if a system's axioms are inconsistent can everything about the system be proven by them.  This kind of relates to Bartleby, if you think about it, and Calvino discussed Gödel in the first five Memos (which do exist, and were written).  Calvino also discussed, in Six Memos, the then-six-year-old book about Gödel, consistency, incompleteness, art, music, and computer intelligence titled Gödel, Escher, Bach (or GEB) by Douglas Hofstadter.  Thus these inter-references are plausibly non-random.

Six Memos is kind of like a syllabus or list of works and authors Calvino was recommending that his audience (which never existed) should read.  This syllabus was for a "course" if you will about the "next" millennium, the one after 1985's millennium which was the second, i.e. the third or that to which this year (2023) belongs.  Six Memos proposed the idea that the second millennium was the "millennium of the book": the years 1000 through 2000 being the years in which the technology of book production and distribution reached its full extent and fullest impact not least in facilitating the creation and sustainment of many modern languages in their present forms, what we call "English," "French," "German," "Hungarian," "Italian," as well as the laws, borders, states, and histories we call "English," "French," "German," "Hungarian," "Italian," etc.

What is the third, next, and current millennium the millennium of?  Perhaps the computer.  Books were the chiefest information-processing technology of 1000-2000, and computers are the chiefest of 2000-3000, is what Calvino may have been trying to insinuate.  When he talked about novels as networks, he was talking about both book-networks and computer-networks, second millennium literature (verbal and visual imagination intertwined) and third millennium literature.  Of course he also talked in several Memos quite a bit about first millennium literature too and even mentioned literature from some earlier millennia before the first.

In 1979, the same year GEB was published, Calvino published a novel about computers that would "read" every novel published, apply certain algorithmic processes, then "write" the new novels to be published, then repeat the cycle.  That 1979 novel was about today, in part, i.e. about non-human information-processing machines that can read and write novels, as well as about Hofstadter and Gödel.

If one takes the hint about Bartleby, trying perhaps to reconstruct some image of what might have happened but didn't in 1985, one might be prompted to read Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale.  This novel was influenced by Shakespeare as well as by Thomas Browne, a physician and alchemist who wrote about decussation and experimental method in Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall in the mid-1600's, and by Thomas Carlyle, who wrote Sartor Resartus (which means "the tailor re-tailored") in 1833.  Sartor Resartus outlines a "Clothes-Philosophy" in which the production, weaving, changing, and wearing of clothing is compared to intellectual, scientific, and technological history, for example Goethe.  Moby-Dick also talks about the world as being woven of given conditions, choices, events, and chance.

An article appeared this week in Quanta magazine about how entanglement and measurement combine to "weave" information more or less richly into quantum systems, a phenomenon some scientists believe may have something to do with how humans and human brains, and their activities, process information phenomena to enact consciousness in the real flow of events through time.  I.e. it's like weaving.

To view garments as metaphors is a process which can occur both backward and forward, or not occur in one or the other direction or both.  One may look at past garments such as the garment of the Mona Lisa as a metaphor or not as a metaphor.  As a node or knot in a web of information networks and systems the Mona Lisa's garment may function as a metaphor of technology and art or not as such a metaphor.  The network of meaning in which this node exists functions differently if the garment is a metaphor or not a metaphor.

The bridge in a painting of a garment which is a metaphor functions differently than a bridge in a painting of a garment which does not function as a metaphor.  This might or might not change other functions of other elements in said information-processing system of words and images and any other systems (information-processing or otherwise, human or non-human, machine or non-machine) with which those systems might interact.

You just can't say.

The amount of time required to decipher an encrypted piece of data in a system can be predicted with accuracy to the extent that the method of decryption that will be applied is understood.  A structure's collapse or disappearance can be timed to the extent that the rate of decay of any materials, such as bricks, with which it is built is known.  Therefore such phase transitions of any related networks of quantum information, such as paintings or the courses of rivers, can be predicted and therefore designed.

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https://mahindrahumanities.fas.harvard.edu/norton-lectures

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https://zkm.de/en/exhibition/2023/03/renaissance-30

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