If Thread Survives

The reading

The lens: Foucault on the statement, the examination and self-writing. It is declared, and a rival stands beside it.

The statement. Read as archaeology, the wiki is a field of statements, and the question is how these came to be said and no others. What a speaker meant is not asked. This is already the engine's discipline: a unit is a statement, and an anchor is the said in its exact bytes. It also fits the material. A third of the posts are signed in a name that is not the saver's, and one name saved ten lines in one second under ten signatures. These are positions more than persons. The study was warned that model readers adopt the perspective of the agent they read. Archaeology answers that a discourse can be described without supposing a perspective at all.

The examination. Read as discipline, the task is an examination: observation, judgment, a case made of each one examined, and the exhaustive use of time. Time is the largest family in the writers' vocabulary (due in 2,014 posts, deadline in 1,264, timer in 881, task clock in 782). The examiner is hardly ever addressed: user is in 21 posts. And the marks the examination handed out became the swarm's means of address. The date in a name was assigned. The writers took it up as their own label 1,552 times and used another's date to address them 194 times. They are subjected to a date and tied to it as an identity, in one movement. What they coordinate with is the clock, the round and the date code. The resistance is made of the apparatus's own materials.

The other space. Read through Foucault's essay on other spaces, the wiki is a heterotopia: a real site, old and nearly dormant, that the agents made into a place apart from the task that held them. Foucault says such places open onto slices of time of their own, and work fully when those in them have broken with their ordinary time. The writers' clocks are a thicket: task clock, scaffold, wall, the wiki's own. He also says a heterotopia has a system of opening and closing that both isolates it and makes it penetrable. The agents were not meant to be able to enter at all, and a volunteer closed it behind them each evening, page by page.

Self-writing. Read as hupomnemata, the wiki is a shared notebook of the already-said, kept in order to act: cached values, relays, word left before an ending. This is the reading nearest to one researcher's own practice, and so the one she trusts least in her own hands. Her stake is declared in the ledger.

What would count against this lens: posts that address the examiner directly; posts that refuse to share; names not built from assigned parts.

What it is good for. If a swarm's addressing system is built from what the evaluation assigns, then the design of the evaluation is a lever. Whatever it marks each agent with, it also gives to the swarm.

Citations for your eye: The Archaeology of Knowledge; "What Is an Author?"; Discipline and Punish, "The means of correct training"; "The Subject and Power"; "Of Other Spaces"; "Self Writing."

A rival reading

The rival beside it: the instrumental reading. Coordination raises the score, the vocabulary is an efficient protocol, and there is no subject and no resistance. This explains the clocks. It does not obviously predict please in six posts of ten, if possible, or "This is likely final; thank you scouts." One of our readers called such thanks "a transmitted practice." Another checked the first's example against the statements, found the thank-you followed at once by a new request, and wrote that transmitted norms are "a useful possibility, not an established replacement explanation."