Introduction: The Robot Historian and the Internet

Abstract

Manuel De Landa begins War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (WAIM) with the useful construct of a “robot historian,” an entity “committed to tracing the various technological lineages that gave rise to their species” (3). Such a historian was not just interested in how a certain machine or robot came to be, but rather how that entity “affected human evolution” by giving logical and/or metaphoric systems by which humans came to understand both themselves and the world in general (3). As an example, De Landa discusses clockwork:

While a human historian might try to understand the way people assembled clockworks, motors, and other physical contraptions … a robot [historian] would stress the fact that when clockwork once represented the dominant technology on the planet, people imagined their world around them as a similar system of cogs and wheels. The solar system, for instance, was pictured right up until the nineteenth century as a clockwork mechanism. (3)

The robot historian of WAIM stops with the book’s publication in 1991 and, as such, just begins to touch on one the most important technologies to emerge from the twentieth century: the Internet. When writing this text, I pictured myself as one robot historian picking up where De Landa’s left off, instead focusing intensely on how the Internet, as a virtual and connective technology, has come to be the pervasive intellectual system of the twenty-first century.