formalizations in Mars & Medak 2019
scale.
The libraries and the universities followed a similar path. As the world became a
project, the aggregation and organization of all knowledge about the world
became a new frontier. The pioneers of library science, Paul Otlet and Melvil
Dewey, consummating the work of centuries of librarianship, assembled index
card catalogs of everything and devised classificatory systems that were powerful
formalizations of the increasingly complex world. These index card catalogs were
a ‘precursor of computing: universal paper machine’, (Krajewski, 2011), predating the ‘universal Turing machine’ and its hardware implementations by
Konrad Zuse and John von Neumann by almost half a century. Knowledge thus
became universal and universalizable: while libraries were transforming into
universal information infr
ical political movements in which
students play a central role spread across the world: the US, Czechoslovakia,
France, Western Germany, Yugoslavia, Pakistan, and so on. The institution
becomes a site from which and against which mass civil rights, anti-imperial,
anti-nuclear, environmental, feminist and various other new left movements
emerge.
It is in the context of exodus and autonomy that new formalizations and
paradigms of organizing knowledge emerge. Distributed, yet connected. Built
from bottom up, yet powerful enough to map, reduce and abstract all prior
formalizations. Take, for instance, Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu that introduced
to the world the notion of hypertext and hyperlinking. Pre-dating the World Wide
Web by a good 25 years, Xanadu implemented the idea that a body of written
texts ca
cyberculture’ (2010), the links between autonomyseeking dropouts and early cyberculture in the US were intimate.
Countercultural ideals of personal liberation at a distance from the society
converged with the developments of personal computers and computer networks
to pave the way for early Internet communities and Silicon Valley
entrepreneurialism.
No less characteristic of the period were new formalizations and paradigms of
technologically-mediated subjectivity. The tension between the virtual and the
real, autonomy and simulation of autonomy, was not only present in the avantgarde’s playful takes on mass media. By the end of the 1950s, the development of
computer hardware reached a stage where it was running fast enough to cheat
human perception in the same way moving images on film and television
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