Class and gender in computation

In order to address this question it is first important to know what sort of period in history that is exactly being talked about here. This is the mid 19^th century it is a time where there is a central change being brought about in the way people think, in the sense that there is a new viewpoint of looking at life, the mechanistic viewpoint one where actions are being replicated and simulated. To understand the social structure at this point in history is also important to the essence of the argument because this is the primary reason as to why the way in which people are thinking is changing. This is an era where there is an over dependency on the skill of artisans, whose skills though valued high are not shared as they are a closed knit group. So this is the sort of transient society that Babbage and other innovators of the time are living in. Now the central idea that drove Babbage to the point of obsession was mechanization, in a society that was artisan dependent he wanted to bring in the idea of mass production to replicate the unique set of skills that these artisans had in machines and to make these machines ‘intelligent’ in the sense that to render the human input going into the machine invisible. This is the factory production ideology that Babbage was obsessed with, to the extent that he planned on mechanizing the functionality of the human mind itself only in this case it was the people who do computations who are being replaced. Now what is important here is to see that the common link between computation and intelligence and manufacturing, in both these cases there are distinct classes of people there is the designer or the factory manager who has authority and has complete surveillance over the actions of the people under him or in the case of a machine designer a panopticon view of all the individual components that go into his final product. And then there is the working class which is not really ‘intelligent’ because those functions is taken over by the machine and who take care of an infinitesimal part of the entire manufacturing/computing process and as a result have no clue about what exactly is the big picture and what exactly their actions surmount to on the large scale. It is the designers who wield the true intelligence and power and monitor the working class, they maintain each individual component of their assembly process under constant surveillance and believe that the work force/individual components have to be maintained under strict discipline and it is only then that any sort of work will be accomplished. And finally there is the substituted human component be it the artisans or the computers who have their skills simulated to such an extent that individuals with a fraction of their skill can perform tasks with better accuracy and at a far greater quantity and this a class full of people holding great resentment towards the idea of industrialization.

To see the mark of gender it is important to realize that computation and intelligence had its similarities to weaving in the sense that the earliest punchcard technologies took their inspiration from the mechanics of weaving and just as weaving became more and more mechanized so did computation and the process of intelligent thought. And weaving was initially viewed as a method of female compensation, essentially a feminine activity and this is the link that gets established between computation and feminism. Just as the notions of feminism were initially obscure and came to light only in the twentieth century on a similar scale the notions of mechanized thought, computational science and intelligence only in the latter half of the twentieth century. Due to is similarity with the weaving machines which were essentially rooted in feministic ideals, the initial computational machines which were seen as an embodiment of this ideology were also seen as feministic. So the roots of computation has its origins as a feministic embodiment.

BY 

Vivek Subramaniam

AE09b031

Refrences

1. Simon Schaffer on Babbage

2.Sadie Plant on Lovelace