Core Response: Castrated Multics

http://article.olduse.net/4743@Aucbvax.UUCP

There seems to be a general consensus across this week’s readings that operating systems perform—at least allegorically (Galloway, 329)—as ideologies. While the authors address issues of labor and technocapital they also point to software’s embedded heteronormative values and the potential for queering supposedly neutral code. Perhaps the most explicit engagement with computational heteronormativity is Kara Keeling’s proposal for a Queer OS, that “seeks to make queer into the logic of ‘an operating system of a larger order’ that unsettles the common senses that secure those presently hegemonic social relations that can be characterized by domination, exploitation, oppression, and other violences” (Keeling, 154). While there are certainly powerful heteronormative forces at work in existing operating systems, queer potentials have been present within computation from the start. Wendy Chun, for instance, provides a fitting analysis of false causality related to command execution: “Source code as fetish, understood psychoanalytically, embraces this nonteleological potential of source code, for the fetish is a genital substitute that gives the fetishist nonreproductive pleasure (Chun, 313). The theme of nonreproduction, or rather non-heteronormative reproduction, is picked up and complicated in Adrian Mckenzie’s discussion of Linux: “As an event, Linux is complex in ways that the popular narratives of the ‘cloning of Unix’ (Himanen, 2001; Moody, 2001; Lohr, 2002) occlude. The authorizing context for Linux includes gendered and classed practices which usually remain unremarked” (Mckenzie, 82). While Linux perpetuates heteronormative values, it is simultaneously born from queer methods (i.e. cloning). Going back even further, Unix (pronounced eunuchs), which was developed from a much more unwieldy platform called Multics, an earlier collaboration between MIT's Project MAC, Bell Telephone Laboratories, and General Electric Company's Large Computer Products Division. The image above references the contested narrative behind Unix’s name and whether it was an intentional pun (i.e. “castrated Multics”). Relatedly, I was struck by the readings’ recurring references to Alan Turing, who despite developing advanced computational systems and being a recognized war hero, was later subjected to chemical castration because of his sexuality. Is this parallel a pure coincidence? Were the developers of Unix aware of Turing’s tragic treatment? If so, did the circulation of this narrative influence the engineering process: “communications in shared spaces count as externalities” (Parikka, 37). I am curious about how even the names of our operating systems declare the discursive values of their formative contexts, which then likely infiltrate the code itself.