The technological default of race

On page 24 of The Electronic Revolution, Burrough's notes that "when the human nervous system unscrambles a scrambled message this will seem to the subject like his very own ideas which just occurred to him, which indeed it did." This type of coding of the subject (taken as the subject of a scientific experiment, taken as a subject, i.e., one who possesses subjectivity) is relevant in the virus metaphor particularly in light of the advent of the retrovirus, a viral agent that carries its genetic material in the form of RNA which can then utilize reverse transcriptase (retro-) to augment the chromosomal DNA of the host. These viruses propogate themselves by hijakcing the DNA replication mechanisms of the host cell to produce more of the retrovirus, which then gets its DNA integrated in the neighboring cells, and the pattern repeats itself. AIDS is the most popularly known retrovirus, a disease which has had the power to define populations, affecting their phenotype: the American gay man as vector, a label which has since transferred popularly to people of African descent, American and otherwise. Fanon writes in the opening pages of The Negro and Language that "the black man who has lived in France for a length of time returns radically changed. To express it in genetic terms, his phenotype eundergoes a definitive, an absolute mutation" (p. 19).

This coding practice of language, explored by both authors assigned for this week, is applied differently by both. I will focus on Burrough's use, since it pertains to use of technology as traditionally understood--a mechanical and/or electrical apparatus. There is a given availability to technology in Burrough's populist text: "No, 'They' [the users of this technology] are not God or super technicians from outer space. Just technicians operating with well-known equipment and using techniques that can be duplicated by anyone else who can buy and operate the equipment." (p. 25) He argues for an availability of technology to the masses, but this is the only true mention of any class consideration in the text itself (with the major exception of those in power as a class versus the subjugated people). To be able to afford and use the technology is given, and the appeal to the readership of the text to try out these experiments which "any numer can play" further enforces this point.

However, throughout the rest of the text the class argument is made through the assumption of ideas about race. On page 9 the appeal is to the "white race" as the target audience of language-as-virus. The mythology of the Garden of Eden "was a white myth." Growing off of this, Burroughs states that "this leads us to the supposition that the word virus assumed a specifically malignant and lethal form in the white race... the virus stirs uneasily in all your white throats." "Whiteness," defined by Burroughs, is given to be the technological default of race and race relations. This stems from a post-colonial theory and history. It is the white man who is the creator and subject of technology, and is the one constantly represented by this technology (white faces on TV, in positions of power, talking about their expertise, broadcasting it to "white" audiences). This is implicit in the history of the photography of racial types, where the images of a certain individual came to be representative of an entire race, and were used to establish hierarchies of race (race and its aesthetics, assembled in a linear devolution from the Caucasian to the African to the ape). This history cannot be escaped or theorized away, contributable to the power of the written language, which Burroughs points out. Scrambling as a revolutionary technique also has the dangerous consequence of eradicating difference: "Everybody doing it, they all scramble in together and the populations of the earth just settle down in a nice even brown colour. Scrambles is the democratic way, the way of full cellular representation. Scrambles is the American way" (p. 36).

What happens when the subaltern appropriates "white" technology? Do they scramble their "difference" (non-whiteness) with the technological default? Is there a (Third) World Wide Web? Is there a revolutionary potential to technology that applies equally to all "races," or is there an inherent danger to non-white "races" that does not exist for the "white man?"