Nicholas Negroponte, in Being Digital, describes a network of machines
that communicate intelligently with each other (213-14): if company is
expected for dinner, the refrigerator might remind the car to stop at the
grocery and liquor stores and the radio might warn it of possible
traffic delays.
It's not out of the question: the WWW already has us watching machines
through other machines. Perhaps not as glamorous as nanotechnology's dream of
machines observing and repairing other machines to our cyborg advantage,
it still pushes us to think about the fascination we have with
watching machines on the Web.
Guattari explains our relationship with machines differently:
Desire machines, aesthetic
creation machines, are constantly revising our cosmic
frontiers. As such, they have a place of eminence in the orderings
of subjectivation, which are themselves called upon to relay our old
social
machines that are unable to follow the efflorescence of machinic revolutions
that are causing our
time to burst apart at every point (Guattari 26-27).
The end result is something more significant than a determination of who
goes to the grocery store--Guattari's argument is that the way our machines
change force us to change the way that we interpret/create the universe
around us. It's ostensibly an argument that machines force us to re-author
what's around us, and at the same time constrain
who is allowed to re-author and to what extent.
