The most important role of technology is its ability to reduce the complexity of our lives. There are many procedures that designers can apply to achieve this goal. After a deeper analysis of the problem, one process presents itself that could be a candidate for a universal mechanism of why technology that reduces complexity is so effective. That mechanism is increasing abstraction, which more and more disembodies and distances complexity in order to give our intellect an inter-face (Czech roz-hran-í, literally a between-edge) to the multi-layered network of relations between things. Let us call this process of abstraction transduction, as a bow to two giants of French philosophical thought: René Descartes and Gilbert Simondon. As a reminder, by transduction Descartes meant the process carried out by the pineal body (pineal gland), which connected body and mind, whereas Simondon in his ontology used transduction to designate the process of individuation directed towards a meta-stable individual that emerges from the depths of an undivided virtual layer of reality containing the potential for actuality.
The simplest way to imagine the concept of technology as the reduction and abstraction of complexity is, for example, making fire and programming.
If a prehistoric human wanted to warm up his meaty prey so that it tasted better and so that heating it removed bacteria, he needed to make a fire. At first he waited for nature, for lightning to strike. Then he learned to keep a fire that nature had started. After some time he learned to make it himself. Further towards the present, we described the chemical reaction behind fire. Last but not least, we found out that setting H2O molecules oscillating by means of microwaves leads, as a side effect, to the production of heat and the warming of lunch. A single button on a microwave oven is an interface to the complicated innards of the oven. There is no need to know the laws of physics or to exert physical force to make a fire. Through technology, heating food has become a theoretical-verbal act of keeping a semiotic symbol and its associated function in verbal memory.
Turing’s thesis of the Universal Machine, which with simple mechanisms should be able to “compute” by computational processes everything that can be formalised into a string of some symbols, foreshadowed the possibility of separating the close connection of hardware and software. For the first electric and later also digital computers, however, their functioning remained for the time being closely tied to the composition of their physical components. In the beginning, programming had two distinct parts. The first part was analytical-mathematical, during which it was necessary to work out at the theoretical level how to set that enormous machinery, spreading over several rooms, in motion. Once this theoretical part was done, it was necessary to implement the theory in the physical reality of the computer by rewiring connections. This rewiring meant following the theory rigorously, remembering where the individual connections were and connecting the cables as required. This cognitive act very much resembles memorising a semiotic symbol (a position, a cable label) and its associated function.
It was a woman, the programmer Kathleen Booth, who designed the first abstract layer above the physical implementation of code – assembly language –, which made it possible to communicate with the computer by means of primitive but still powerful operations of moving the contents of memory from one place to another, jumps, conditions and so on. Another woman, Grace Hopper, raised communication with the computer to something that really came close to communication. She designed the first programming language COBOL, so popular in large corporate circles, for as a relatively declarative language it abstracted away the complexity of implementing algorithms, and it was now more important to think about what the computer should do rather than how to do it. With the arrival of the C language, the declarative philosophy of programming languages was pushed into the background in favour of imperative languages, in which every step of the computer had to be described in relative detail; yet this higher-level programming language already benefited from its abstraction, higher even than that of assembly languages.
Higher-level programming languages were followed by the emergence of the text interface of the command line and the keyboard as an input device. Perhaps here for the first time we can speak of interaction with the computer, for computers, in an endless feedback loop, reacted to the commands the user entered. This concept of feedback was also used in the first graphical interface. Now the inner machinery of the computer, for example a change in the contents of the main memory, could be set in motion by a mere click of a button. The management of the technological assemblage was reduced to the management of a two-dimensional visual space. Programming languages of course did not die out, and in many cases they are still the best way to communicate with a computer and make it do the things we require. Yet higher and higher-level programming languages, including the return of the declarative form of programming, mean a monumental evolution in the way we interact not only with the computer but with the whole assemblage of computers, networks, the internet of things and, last but not least, many parts of our technologically mediated lives. All of this is now, in most cases, hidden behind buttons, and with a growing tendency we are beginning to really communicate with the computer, just as was once the dream of popular science fiction stories. Digital assistants such as Siri or Cortana (let us note the gender) are now one of the most natural forms of interaction: verbal communication.
On the one side, let us imagine the technological machinery, all those material objects, networks and connections that someone had to design and build. On the other side, there is us as users. These two sides communicate with each other through the interface, which performs the function of translation, or transduction, whereby two incompatible sides are able to communicate with each other. The interface, as the most generally conceived intermediary, both process and entity, that which is in the liminal space between, levels out, erases, connects and corrects their incompatibilities. In this way the interface is a process of transduction (translation). To humans and to inanimate entities alike, it provides two basic functionalities: the reduction of complexity and the extension of abilities. Paradoxically, the reduction of complexity seems, at least for humans, to be a prerequisite for the extension of abilities.
As a hypothetical equation of the interface we can write the following: interface = reduction of complexity = transduction = extension of abilities
Since that reduction of complexity and extension of abilities happen through the interface, we could perhaps simply say that the interface is a medium in the McLuhanian sense, as an entity-process whose basic nature is constant interaction with other entities and translation between them.
Although McLuhan spoke of the extension of our mind as one of the effects of a medium, I have so far not been able to discern in his work an inclination towards the idea that an equally important function of the medium, and therefore also of the interface, is the reduction of complexity, which is perhaps not a separate function of the interface but rather the other side of the same coin.
And perhaps not; perhaps extension and reduction by means of the interface are two strategies independent of each other. And that is why they would deserve names of their own. For lack of invention, I think that for the time being the terms interfacial extension and interfacial reduction will do.
It is precisely interfacial extension and interfacial reduction that are, in my view, the successful strategies of the Western world. But they also bring their own problems with them. McLuhan already said that the Western world is too oriented towards what he called “figure”, that is, the surface of things, at the expense of “ground”, the depth or background of things and, for McLuhan above all, of media. This background of the medium is the form itself, whereas the content of the medium is trivial and, for McLuhan’s analysis, an insignificant “surface” of media. McLuhan diagnosed a problem of modern, technology-dependent society.
My view is that the use of technology (which McLuhan used synonymously with media) inevitably leads to the strategies of interfacial reduction and interfacial extension. We use technology so that we no longer have to deal with the complicatedness of certain things or processes. That is why we create an interface that hides this complexity and provides us only with the functions and mechanisms that are relevant in our eyes.
Sooner or later, however, we forget that the interface is merely a (re)presentation of something that exists separately from the interface itself. But what is the interface a (re)presentation of? Of something that did not exist until then; it is an imaginary framing of a certain technological complexity of the world; the interface, in all its forms, is a synthetic mental image, or rather a cognitive map of the way we think about the world. That is also why, rather than an entity, a thing or an object, the interface appears to be a relation between a human being and the world. A relation, however, that did not exist until then, which makes creating an interface a creative act par excellence, for under its wings it synthesises the world of matter and the world of ideas and, on the basis of a certain ideology, creates a new relation to technology and, through it, to the world.
The interface allows us more and more to manipulate our physical world by means of the word. One day interfacial reduction and interfacial extension will reach such a level of abstraction that it will be enough for one of us to say: “let there be light”.
Before such a time comes, I predict that the era of the dominance of mathematical-logical thinking is ending and a privileged period of the Word, of verbal intelligence, is beginning once again. This does not mean that formal languages such as mathematics will not be needed, but in most cases they will become the technical side of the method of discovering new interfaces. Designers will then take over this technical potential and create a real interface that will allow them, but also the non-technically oriented yet verbally gifted part of society, to use the interface to control a larger and larger part of the sociotechnical assemblage that Benjamin Bratton calls The Stack.
Culture and society also belong to the Stack, and the strategy of interfacial reduction can have a negative influence on them. For that reduction is always lossy compression. This means that from the interface alone it is not possible to recover the whole complexity by reverse engineering. But if we do not take the trouble to trace back, as far as possible, the original complexity hidden behind the interface, reality will more and more be shaped by the interface alone. It will become simplified and distorted, and it will be harder and harder even for otherwise very intelligent people to speak or write about the real complexity of the world, for they will grow too used to the comfort of interfacial reduction.
If I am not mistaken, the interface creates its own ideology, which deforms more and more inwards, so that, figuratively speaking, only the essential elements, its building blocks, are squeezed out of it. The complex and organically interconnected world will become a universe of interfaces collapsing into themselves, as it were, like black holes. Ideologies will become simpler and easier to tell apart from one another. Is it possible that this will lead to a very strongly polarised society that will fall apart from a holistically organic whole into hermetically separated circles, social bubbles?
Do we pay an intellectual and social tax for being users of technology and of the strategies of interfacial reduction and extension, which put us into a schizoid state in which, on the one hand, we are capable of much more, but we are becoming more stupid, much like a first-year university student who watches lots of YouTube videos and thinks that the quantity of what he has seen makes him a more educated and deeper thinker than his professor?
Perhaps McLuhan was right. Verbal intelligence is too superficial, too interfacial. Words are also an interface, for they divide holistic reality into discrete (digital) pieces. Perhaps our blindness, our failure to understand that naming does not equal the real complexity of reality, has led us astray. Even though verbal intelligence has brought Western society a great deal, it has turned us away from a holistic conception of the world, so common in other communities, for example in many African states and, last but not least, in the remaining indigenous traditions.
In the beginning was the Word, true, but before it was Intelligence. To confuse the two is not wise.