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The Cultural Logic of Computation

4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 9 ratings

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Advocates of computers make sweeping claims for their inherently transformative power: new and different from previous technologies, they are sure to resolve many of our existing social problems, and perhaps even to cause a positive political revolution.

In
The Cultural Logic of Computation, David Golumbia, who worked as a software designer for more than ten years, confronts this orthodoxy, arguing instead that computers are cultural “all the way down”―that there is no part of the apparent technological transformation that is not shaped by historical and cultural processes, or that escapes existing cultural politics. From the perspective of transnational corporations and governments, computers benefit existing power much more fully than they provide means to distribute or contest it. Despite this, our thinking about computers has developed into a nearly invisible ideology Golumbia dubs “computationalism”―an ideology that informs our thinking not just about computers, but about economic and social trends as sweeping as globalization.

Driven by a programmer’s knowledge of computers as well as by a deep engagement with contemporary literary and cultural studies and poststructuralist theory,
The Cultural Logic of Computation provides a needed corrective to the uncritical enthusiasm for computers common today in many parts of our culture.

Editorial Reviews

Review

The Cultural Logic of Computation is a brilliant, audacious book. It might be described as a rollicking, East Coast version of Alan Liu's The Laws of Cool-- or one part Laws of Cool, one part Seeing Like a State, with more than a dash of Baudrillard and Virilio for brio. Golumbia's argument is that contemporary Western and Westernizing culture is deeply structured by forms of hierarchy and control that have their origins in the development and use of computers over the last 50 years. I look forward to pressing this book on friends and colleagues, starting with anyone who has ever recommended The World is Flat to me.”Lisa Gitelman, author of Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture

The Cultural Logic of Computation is a fascinating and wise book. It takes us with great care through the history of the computational imagination and logic, from Hobbes and Leibniz to blogging and corporate practice. Its range includes the philosophy of computation, the ideology of the digital revolution, the important areas of children's education and education in general and glimpses of brilliant literary insight. Required reading for the responsible citizen.”Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

“Golumbia is no Luddite; he readily admits that computers have brought a wide range of benefits to society. His chief purpose, though, is to demonstrate that these benefits come at the cost of accepting the technophilic ideology, and changing how we perceive our own essence as human beings.”
Rob Horning, popmatters.com

“A work to be read as rawly new in the brute force with which it confronts the disavowed fatal flaw in a contemporary academic disciplinary formation: here, the intractably cultural First Worldism of digital media studies...[A] meticulously crafted polemic.”
Brian Lennon, Electronic Book Review

“This is a thought-provoking book, full of interesting ideas that would be valuable to teachers and researchers in the area of contemporary culture...The work should also appeal to general readers who are interested in computerization's effects on culture.”
R. Bharath, Choice

About the Author

David Golumbia is Associate Professor of Digital Studies in the English Department and the Media, Art, and Text PhD Program at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harvard University Press (April 30, 2009)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0674032926
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0674032927
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.25 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.25 x 1 x 9.25 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 9 ratings

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4.4 out of 5 stars
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Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on September 15, 2013
    If you need help making a purchasing decision about this book, then the author's statement is all you need to know:

    "computers can even be used by anti-knowledge libertarians to try to completely deceive amazon readers"

    If you wish to *read* the book, and form an opinion over how much you *agree* with it, then you should decide whether or not you wish to purchase the book, then purchase it, and then review it here.

    That said, I am familiar with the author's arguments, do not agree with all of his conclusions, and while currently reading it, I think it was a great purchase.
    7 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on May 1, 2021
    Thanks.
  • Reviewed in the United States on January 2, 2022
    This is a good book! I appreciate Golumbia's critical analysis of computers, discourse about computers and their respective impacts upon society and politics. His book is technical at times, philosophically. Overall though, this is well presented and makes a lot of sense.

    Chapter six has an interesting political and cultural criticism of Age of Empires 2 and Civilization which was fun to read. Golumbia calls Civilization "anti-history," which makes sense in my experiences with the more recent games.
    This was a fun read. It covers a lot of subjects. Even though it was written in 2008, this is relevant in 2022. The tech criticism is necessary.

    5/5
  • Reviewed in the United States on July 19, 2011
    David Golumbia does not like computers. Toward the end of The Cultural Logic of Computation, after lumping computers and the atom bomb into a single "Pandora's Box" of doom, he observes:

    "The Germans relied on early computers and computational methods provided by IBM and some of its predecessor companies to expedite their extermination program; while there is no doubt that genocide, racial and otherwise, can be carried out in the absence of computers, it is nevertheless provocative that one of our history's most potent programs for genocide was also a locus for an intensification of computing power."

    This sort of guilt by association is typical of The Cultural Logic of Computation. Much of the the book focuses on political issues that don't bear on "computation" in the least, such as a tired attack on Thomas Friedman and globalization that adds nothing new to Friedman's already-long rap sheet. Golumbia spends ten pages criticizing real-time strategy games like Age of Empires, complaining:

    "There is no question of representing the Mongolian minority that exists in the non-Mongolian part of China, or of politically problematic minorities such as Tibetans and Uyghurs, or of the other non-Han Chinese minorities (e.g., Li, Yi, Miao). A true Hobbesian Prince, the user of Age of Empires allows his subjects no interiority whatsoever, and has no sympathy for their blood sacrifices or their endless toil; the only sympathy is for the affairs of state, the accumulation of wealth and of property, and the growth of his or her power."

    The critique could apply just as easily to Monopoly, Diplomacy, Stratego, or chess.

    His actual excursions into technical issues are woefully uninformed. A surreal attack on XML as a "top-down" standard ends with him praising Microsoft Word as an alternative, confusing platform and application. He hates object-oriented programming because...well, I'm honestly not quite sure.

    "Because the computer is so focused on "objective" reality--meaning the world of objects that can be precisely defined--it seemed a natural development for programmers to orient their tools exactly toward the manipulation of objects. Today, OOP is the dominant mode in programming, for reasons that have much more to do with engineering presumptions and ideologies than with computational efficiency (some OOP languages like Java have historically performed less well than other languages, but are preferred by engineers because of how closely they mirror the engineering idealization about how the world is put together)."

    Golumbia also associates "geeks" with "straight, white men," insulting 19th century programmer Ada Lovelace, gay theoretician Alan Turing, and the vast population of queer and non-white programmers, linguists, and geeks that exists today.

    Beyond the technological confusions, Golumbia's philosophical background is notably defective. The book is plagued by factual errors; Voltaire is bizarrely labeled a "counter-Enlightenment" thinker, while logicians Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege somehow end up on opposite sides: Russell is a good anti-rationalist (despite having written "Why I Am a Rationalist"), Frege is a bad rationalist. (He also enlists Quine and Wittgenstein to his leftist cause, which I suspect neither would have appreciated.) He thinks Leibniz preceded Descartes. He misappropriates Kant's ideas of the noumenal and mere reason.

    So it is not simply the technological material that is the problem. The quality of even the academic, philosophical portions of the book is dismaying, and the general lack of evidence and citation is egregious.

    For contrast, Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software (Routledge Studies in New Media and Cyberculture) (Routledge) is an excellent and rigorous examination of some of the political and social issues around software and software development, strong on both the technical and philosophical fronts. I would urge anyone looking at Golumbia's book to read it instead.
    48 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on March 14, 2019
    David Golumnia’s cultural survey of computation and the digital is a very interesting, pressing critique of many of today’s most unthinking affirmations of computation—in all its iterations. Avoiding the trappings of technophobia, Golumbia’s critique of computation is not a critique of the centrality of computers per se, but rather of the hegemonic logic in which computation arranges life. Criticizing several movements in analytic philosophy, cognitivism, and functionalism, Golumbia moves capably from theory to history. Occasionally the book is limited by its ‘guilt by association’ arguments. Chomsky’s linguistics, for example, is criticized bizarrely for being appreciated in so-called ‘imperial’ cultures like Japan and Korea (without much explanation). Still, Golumbia manages to cover much important ground here, and brings the question of computation to a much needed investigation of surveillance and data mining.
    2 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on January 10, 2014
    The author states his book is an antidote to the problem where :
    "computers can even be used by anti-knowledge libertarians to try to completely deceive..."

    The modern computer revolution is very much the result of the culture changing activities of Libertarians and those informed by libertarian perspectives. One only has to spend a few minutes on the web or at sites such as [...] to see that this is part of a larger cultural project to empower each person and promote knowledge, the SMILE agenda of the last half-century.

    Golumbia has a book that after suggesting L/libertarianism is doing the reverse goes on to ignore its role. He proceeds to associate computers and the web with an array of cultural criticisms, or purported lacks, as a critique.

    This gives the impression that Golumbia's book might itself be best described as, in his words, an anti-knowledge deception that diverts one from the yet to be fully documented story of massive and enormously rapid cultural improvement.
    6 people found this helpful
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