Rhiz-o-matic

The perfect computer is a digital brain that resembles and replicates mental processes at every level. Look at the file browser on your computer and you will find a hierarchical organization: folders within folders within folders, all answering to a master system (aptly known as the root) that you never see. Deleuze and Guattari define this as an arborescent system, a problem in the conception and organization of information specific to Western capitalism. They write:

Arborescent systems are hierarchical systems with centers of significance and subjectification, central automata like organized memories. In the corresponding models, an element only receives information from a higher unit, and only receives a subjective affection along preestablished paths. This is evident in current problems in information science and computer science, which still cling to the oldest modes of thought in that they grant all power to a memory or central organ. (Deleuze and Guattari 16)

And they are correct, when it comes to the organizing principle of individual machines. Computers mirror not only our brains but the hierarchical social structure we have created to govern our thoughts and actions. But what happens when a potentially infinite number of such machines collude to produce a network that we call the Internet? The Internet does not adhere to the arborescent system. Instead, it may be the essential rhizome. Deleuze and Guattari have many definitions for what a rhizome is and twice as many for what it is not, but we will consider the following: “A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles” (Deleuze and Guattari 7). The Internet has produced itself as a machine capable of escaping hierarchical organization, and this is a phenomenon we do not understand.

There is a distinction between the Internet as machine and a specific computer machine. The Internet as machine is undeniably Kafkaesque, functioning in an opaque and illegible way to produce and reproduce itself. The computer, on the other hand, is somewhat more comprehensible because we can easily trace and explain its every action; it is contained. What they share is a system of digital memory, a universal language. For now, computers are designed to connect to the Internet but can still function otherwise, but the Internet does not exist without computers.