Last year, surgeons removed my grandad’s left leg below the knee. He has had the daily symptoms of diabetes for as long as I can remember. A visit to my grandparents’ house as a child meant being fascinated and unnerved in equal measure by insulin needles on the kitchen table, insulin needles piercing his belly.
My grandad is an engineer. He was a car mechanic when he was younger, he worked in a steel mill, he was a maintenance guy at hospitals. His garage is really just a workshop, with a half dozen of those huge tool cabinets, full of every size and configuration of spanner and wrench. When I was young, most of my visits there involved assembling something and playing with it. He was a hobbyist photographer: he turned his shed into a darkroom and developed pictures of street lamps in the snow.
How the language baked into the foundation of computing shapes the internet…
Deleuze and Guattari defined the rhizome as a challenge to the root-tree structure epidemic in critical thought. Since this seminal definition, the ontological structure (or lack thereof) of the rhizome has been readily applied to the internet. In its comparisons to a rhizome, the internet has been identified as an assemblage of connections that defy the problematic binarism inherent in the root-tree structure. However, challenges to this application of the rhizome are prominent. In this essay, I will explore just one of these challenges: examining the hegemonic nature of the English language as it applies to the computer, the basic building block of the internet. First, I will outline the privileged position of the English language in the basic architecture of the components of the internet, from the machine level to the level of programming language and internet protocol. Then, I will argue that this contradicts Deleuze and Guattari’s basic edict that a rhizome has no ‘hierarchical modes of communication and pre-established paths’ (1459), and that instead, this hegemonic power of English has formed the internet into only a partial rhizome, if not a solid structure constructed and continuously policed by discourse.