The Allure of Machinic Life, But Not Until the Red Fog Rises

"In the early era of cybernetics and information theory following the Second World War, two distinctly new types of machine appeared. The first, the computer, was initially associated with war and death--breaking secret codes and calculating artillery trajectories and the forces required to trigger atomic bombs. But the second type, a new kind of liminal machine, was associated with life, inasmuch as it exhibited many of the behaviors that characterize living entities--homeostasis, self-directed action, adaptability, and reproduction. Neither fully alive nor at all inanimate, these liminal machines exhibited what I call machinic life, mirroring in purposeful action the behavior associated with organic life while also suggesting an altogether different form of 'life,' an 'artificial' alternative, or parallel, not fully answerable to the ontological priority and sovereign preprogatives of the organic.""The streaks running down the stucco front of the Palmyra were black, but that wasn't surprising because it was bang in the middle of the rough end of Earls Court, and everything was black round there. Once, like the others in the street, it must have been a family house, but as far back as people could remember it had always been known as a hotel called the Palmy, the last two letters of its name having tired and dropped out of the game. Weeds sprouted out of the cracks in its roof and raddled Victorian portico, and it looked what it was, a fifth-rate rooming-house with a heavy turnover in transients much frequented by the bailifffs, plain-clothes filth, and debt collectors. It was the kind of place where the week's rent always fell due the day the rain came down, when depression drifted into the room like smoke under a door and the money ran out."