How Benedict Anderson might approach Computer Science

Consider, for a moment, this new sorcery, this "computer science." What is it, if not another instrument forged in the kiln of modernity, destined to reshape the very contours of what it means to belong? We, who have charted the rise of nations through the seemingly mundane alchemy of print, can surely recognize a familiar pattern here.

For it is imagined, this "computer science," in its own way. Not a community of fellow-members who know each other's faces, but a shared understanding, a shared grammar of logic and instruction, that binds those who engage with it. Think of the early days of the novel, its anonymous authors and equally anonymous readers, brought together by the shared experience of a printed text, a simultaneous consumption that dissolved geographical distance. Here, with these glowing screens and intricate languages, a similar, perhaps even more potent, simultaneity is at work.

And the convergence of this new technology with the already potent forces of capitalism? One can already see the "spectre of comparisons" being invoked, the endless cataloguing and ranking that such systems facilitate. The museum, the census, the map – these were the tools that began to fix the abstract notion of the nation. What will the data log, the networked archive, the virtual territory do? Print-capitalism gave a new fixity to language, to borders drawn on paper. This new science, I suspect, promises a new kind of fixity, a new way of measuring and ordering the world, and in doing so, a new way of imagining ourselves within it. The question, as always, is what kind of imaginings will prevail.

Imagined perspective — an AI synthesis grounded in Benedict Anderson’s recorded ideas and methods, not a quotation or a statement they actually made.