Golumbia: This book is not about computers. It is instead about a set of widespread contemporary beliefs about computers -- beliefs that can be hard to see as such because of their ubiquity and because of the power of computers themselves. More specifically, it is about the methods computers use to operate, methods referred to generally as computation.
Neal Stephenson: It wasn't just some silly adding machine or slide rule. Leibniz actually thought about symbolic logic and why it was powerful and how it could be put to use. He went from that to building a machine that could carry out logical operations on bits. He knew about binary arithmetic. I found that quite startling. Up till then I hadn't been that well informed about the history of logic and computing. I hadn't been aware that anyone was thinking about those things so far in the past.
Golumbia: In a time of the most extreme rhetoric of cultural change -- which does not, at the same time, accompany a concomitant recognition of the possibilities for radical cultural difference -- the need for resistance to the rhetoric of novelty seems especially pressing, not least when such claims are so often based on willful avoidance of the existence of analogous phenomena in the recent historical past. Networks, distributed communication, personal involvement in politics, and the geographically widespread sharing of information about the self and communities have been characteristic of human societies in every time and every place: a burden of this book is to resist the suggestion that they have emerged only with the rise of computers. In a familiar phrase whose import we sometimes seem on the verge of forgetting: the more things change, the more things stay the same.
From the archive: It is ironic: people don't notice that noticing is important!
Golumbia: I am convinced that from the perspective of the individual, and maybe even from the perspective of informal social groups, the empowering effects of computerization appear (and may even be) largely salutary. But from the perspective of institutions, computerization has effects that we as citizens and individuals may find far more troubling. Here, computationalism often serves the ends of entrenched power despite being framed in terms of distributed power and democratic participation.
From the archive, on the culture of the new capitalism: The widespread use of enterprise systems has given top managers much greater latitude to direct and control corporate workforces, while at the same time making the jobs of everyday workers and professionals more rigid and bleak.
The Cultural Logic of Computation | Excerpts I | 
