It's well known that Leibniz was among the first philosophers to explore the digital world. Not only did he help invent the binary system - on which all our computers are based on - and invent some of the earliest calculating machines that we know of, but he was also a well known proponent of the ars combinatoria: the art of 'combinatorics', or combining simple things to yield complex things. For Leibniz, this 'art of combinatorics' would, if done well, provide us with nothing less that 'the truths of reason', which would simply be 'reduced to a kind of calculus'. Calculus, incidentally, being another one of Leibniz's inventions (developed in parallel with Newton).

(Drawing of one of Leibniz's early calculating machines)

All this is fairly standard story telling (read this it's great!), and is one of the reasons Leibniz is frequently cited as one of the fathers of the modern world. However, one aspect of Leibniz's thought that struck me pretty hard was his theorization of subjectivity, which as it turns out, almost exactly parallels the kind of subjectivity involved in surfing the internet. Basically, Leibniz's theory of subjectivity is this (I'm playing a bit fast and loose here): subjectivity is a point of view upon the infinite, where things which are 'closer' to us are 'clear and distinct', and things that are 'further way' are 'obscure and confused'.

Importantly, for the Leibinizian subject, the totalility of the world is always 'in view', even if, at the farthest reaches, things end up being obscure (the Leibinizian world is 'flat': there is strictly speaking no 'horizon' beyond which things fall out of view; only objects further and closer away - more obscure or more clear - from a point of view). The seeming existence of time and space, for instance, are merely artefacts of the fact every subject occupies a point of view, and does not see the whole of the world in a clear and distinct manner (he refers to them as 'well-founded phenomena' that are, at the end of the day, illusions). Crucially, for Leibniz, the point of view constitutes the subject and not the other way around. For Leibniz, it's not that the world is 'relative' the to subject: the subject itself would not exist without the point of view provided by the world itself. Leibnizian subjectivity in this sense is almost entirely 'passive'.

What's striking about this is that the subjectivity of the internet surfer is basically exactly this. If one imagines the net as a vast, interconnected web (as it kinda is), surfing the web is basically having a 'point of view on the infinite': every point or page on the web is, in principle, accessible from every other point and page, and to move through the web is to occupy a certain position within the web. And just as with Leibnizian subjectivity, it's not that the web is 'relative' to one's point of view, but that one's point of view upon the web is constituted by the particular page one is looking at at any point in time (each page is like a window upon the whole). And surfing too also has a similar passivity to the Leibinizian subject.

The Leibnizian strictures on space and time apply here too: the fact that it takes time to move through the web, and the fact that we cannot explore all of it 'at once', is a function of our being confined to viewing only a limited number of pages at a time. The web itself is, in some sense, timeless and spaceless (everything is 'there', ready and waiting to be stumbled upon), and the experience of temporality and spatiality is a function of the limitation of our (internet) subjectivity, and not of the web. And space and time of the web are also 'well founded phenomena', even if, at the end, they remain, illusory. Anyway, just some fascinating parallels I was thinking about, given that there's been alot of focus on Leibniz's contribution to computing, and not a great deal of attention paid to how his theory of subjectivity is bound up with those same interests.