In the beginning was the word and the word was with God, now as the twilight of the God's annunciate a new epoch of digital idols we gaze toward a future in which the last chapter of humanity will perhaps declare; in the end there was the code! The enigma of the utterance is now encoded in the binary sequence which bodies forth its mystery in ever new forms of technology. For all their seeming differences however, both the utterance and the code share one common trait in that they can be defined as: language. If the two forms of expression seem incommensurable it is because they emerge from different vectors of human destiny. It is the utterance which heralds the presencing of humans in the world, while it is the code which perhaps signals our species disappearance.

More then ninety percent of all encoded messages are now that of machines addressing other machines, the other ten percent is the encrypted communication of human subjects addressing each other or indeed addressing machines. Yet, this “regime of computation” (Hayles) which represents nine tenths of all communication transfer on the planet remains below the awareness of the average person engaged with technology. The fact that almost the entire global flow of information is encrypted in a language which remains transparent to our conscious awareness, yet is a medium which shapes our very perceptions of the world renders software "ideological speech". (Wong)

The shift in dominance of language which addresses other human beings to a language with addresses both humans and intelligent machines presents a historic rupture in the structures which make the world intelligible. And like all ruptures in the epochal consciousness, the schism opens a crevice through which the old godhead vanishes and a new metaphysical structure emerges.

The interview which a link is provided is between Arthur Kroker and Katherine Hayles is one between two of the most enlightening thinkers today on the subject of technology, culture, and the post-human future. I would recommend downloading the interview for a probing exploration of : the differences between post humanism, trans-humanism and the regime of computational, software as ideology, the terror of the code, a comparison of the code and Saussurean signifiers, Derridean Grammatology, the deconstruction of the humanist liberal subject, metaphysics of information science, and the all and all promises and perils of the new science of information.

The conversation Between Professor Kroker and Professor Hayles can be found at:

http://www.pactac.net/pactacweb/web-content/video44.html

Arthur Kroker is the Canada Research Chair in Technology, Culture and Theory at the University of Victoria BC. His latest book is The Will to Tehnology and the culture of Nilhilism,in which he explores the future in the language of technological destiny. Presenting Martin Heidegger, Karl Marx, and Freidrich Nietzsche as prophets of technological nilhilism, Kroker argues that every aspect of contemporary culture, society, politics is coded by the dynamic unfolding of a "will to technology"    

Below is an Amazon review of Hayles latest book My Mother was a Computer:

N. Katherine Hayles is the John Charles Hillis Professor of Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of three books, including How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, and the editor of Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

We live in a world, according to N. Katherine Hayles, where new languages are constantly emerging, proliferating, and fading into obsolescence. These are languages of our own making: the programming languages written in code for the intelligent machines we call computers. Hayles's latest exploration provides an exciting new way of understanding the relations between code and language and considers how their interactions have affected creative, technological, and artistic practices. My Mother Was a Computer explores how the impact of code on everyday life has become comparable to that of speech and writing: las anguage and code have grown more entangled, the lines that once separated humans from machines, analog from digital, and old technologies from new ones have become blurred. My Mother Was a Computer gives us the tools necessary to make sense of these complex relationships. Hayles argues that we live in an age of intermediation that challenges our ideas about language, subjectivity, literary objects, and textuality. This process of intermediation takes place where digital media interact with cultural practices associated with older media, and here Hayles sharply portrays such interactions: how code differs from speech; how electronic text differs from print; the effects of digital media on the idea of the self; the effects of digitality on printed books; our conceptions of computers as living beings; the possibility that human consciousness itself might be computational; and the subjective cosmology wherein humans see the universe through the lens of their own digital age. We are the children of computers in more than one sense, and no critic has done more than N. Katherine Hayles to explain how these technologies define us and our culture. Heady and provocative, My Mother Was a Computer will be judged as her best work yet.