journal of digital research & publishing - The Sydney eScholarship ...

1 P M J O U R N A L O F D I G I T A L R ESEARCH & P UBLISHING
So my physics teacher brought into class several balls of different sizes and a very large
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gravity that existed in space. Then the balls were placed on different areas on the sheet
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plane. By the end of the experiment there were multiple dents in the sheet, some of which
were small, some larger, and some larger yet having being caused by two balls combined
weight. This sheet of material can be used to represent the fabric of the internet bent,
dented and impressed upon by the actual world.
This visualisation of the gravitational plane of the universe can be transposed upon the
philosophy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a German philosopher from the 17 th century,
who described all of matter as universal. Leibniz’s postulated that there are folds in the
plane of universal matter that form the objects that exist. Therefore everything can be
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This essay applies Leibniz’s philosophy of folds to the actual world. A plane that interacts
with the objects that sit upon it will be presented as an analogy to understand digital
culture, namely the internet, imitating the folds of actuality. This essay argues that
Leibinez’s philosophy implies that all representations are copies of the folds that claim the
universality of objects. Therefore the copy of any fold is a copy that encompasses all reality.
Consequent implications of this theory will be explored with regard to the copy culture
that arises from the structure of the internet.
The Fold
Leibniz’s philosophy is an attempt to understand the world in a way that is antithetical to the
reductionists point of view commonly held by modern scientists. A reductionist argument
would claim that the world can be understood by atomisation – breaking the world down to
its smallest unit and understanding it. This understanding of the parts would then be used
to comprehend the whole. So the scientist would progress from the subatomic particles,
to the atom, the elements, to the molecules and so forth. This reductionist philosophy
assumes a distinction between parts entails a separatist concept that dictates absolute
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and his contemporary René Descartes who wrote ‘[that] all matter existing in the entire
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