Rhizomes, Databases, and Heidegger

[rax]

The title makes this sound boring, but bear with me. It's going to be ridiculous and really boring instead. Also I am submitting this as homework but I am writing it primarily for this audience and my class can deal with it. (Also this is an attempted edited version from what I posted last night, particularly in the last two paragraphs.) So:

Deleuze

Comments

[rax]

I didn't know Delany wrote on rhizomes! I would love to read that, and will track it down if it's not easy for you to find. Thanks!

[gaudysalamander]

I'm not sure I followed any of that except the data structures analogy (Yes, child nodes are called leaves if they have no children of their own) but it was fun to read.

Noting that I don't actually understand what half your words mean, just on a style note, I think the analogy that roots turn into fascism came out of nowhere. Actually, the whole second half of that paragraph feels really rushed, especially compared to the loving descriptions of data models earlier in the piece.

[rax]

Yeah it would definitely be worth splitting that last paragraph and fleshing it out some more. If I have time to revise this before submitting it (...we'll see), I'll do that. Thanks!

[rax]

Quiet morning at work so I fleshed it out a bunch. It's still not perfect, but hopefully it explains a bit more (and introduces another confusing concept at the end but trying to define all of D&G is a fool's errand and/or dissertation). Thanks again!

[sylvanstargazer]

To find rhizomes in digital data in most contexts it might take stepping up a level of abstraction, to RESTful data organization. The Internet seems like super classic version of this. It is still made up of individual bodies, though, providing motivation and replication to the larger organism (have I mentioned my theory that the singularity has come and we just don't recognize it because we can't define consciousness and we're busy serving as the endocrine system of the Internet? I was really annoyed at a singularity panel when I came up with this, but so far it's proving a reasonable framework for understanding which social media applications will succeed

[sethg_prime]

The rhizome description reminded me of replicated databases.

[rax]

Huh. Maybe rhizomes are the cloud? I'm not sure how I feel about that.

[sethg_prime]

I think cloudishness and replication are orthogonal. You can have replicated data outside the cloud (e.g., if you have a computer on your desktop with a bunch of disk drives and turn those drives into a RAID array), and you can have a cloud without replicated data (e.g., if you are using cloud services to get computer-power-on-tap rather than for data storage).

Cloud computing is “in” because, now that fast Internet connections are cheap (by First World standards), it is often more cost-effective to contract out the whole messy business of keeping a physical server running, keeping it connected to the Net, backing up data, etc., then to make someone on your own staff responsible for all that. There’s probably something Marx-like to say about this trend, but I’m not sure how it fits into the D&G schema.

[csbermack]

I follow relatively little of either, but it reminds me of the conflict over what kind of version control system to use. There's a thing... I blank on the name but I bet you know it... where instead of a centralized database that contains All The Knowledge, and when you take a copy you then later have to compare it to that database (which conveniently uses terms like "trunk") before you add your knowledge

[greyooze]

I think you are thinking of git, and you're right, it's a pretty good example of a rhizomatic database