access/ownership

I found Hayles’s most interesting articulation of the effects of cybernetics and the posthuman state to be the replacement of presence/absence with pattern/randomness (29). The concept of life as information as pattern opens the human boundary past the epidermis. Since cybernetic systems are “constituted by flows of information,”(84) a blind man’s cane an extension of the blind man. Thus cybernetics doesn’t only equate humans with machines, it extends the human. Despite Hayles’s problems with Wiener’s “transformation of embodied experience, noisy with error, into the clean abstractions of mathematical pattern,”(98) in which, Hayles argues, the differences in the embodied experience are ignored and ultimately lost, this border-crossing allows for the blurring of human boundaries. Although she is wary of the devaluing of the material, she concedes that “the contrast between the body’s limitations and cyberspace’s power highlights the advantages of pattern over presence.”(36) Implicit in this statement is the internet’s acts as a powerful extension of the human; human is internet and internet is human.
This reconceptualization of human boundaries demands a redefinition or new understanding of self-hood (279). The extension of the human via the internet, or more basically the concept of human as information in a larger web of information seemingly disrupts human freewill and agency.

The internet is an obvious example of access replacing ownership (39) and therefore pattern replacing presence, but I’m interested in the implications of this trend on the material as well as immaterial. In reconfiguring conceptions of ownership as ‘access’ to information, we could simultaneously reconfigure human relationships with more traditional material commodities, such as land and material production—a new post-capitalist theory to accompany a post-industrial era?