cyborg insects

I've been reading some of the articles on Cyborg Insects. Here are a few; in a next post, I plan to analyze the language around these DARPA projects, and suggest that not only are some of the ideas taken from fiction, but that the main tropes of cyborg rhetoric circulate in description of cyborg insects, and serve to normalize and justify such projects and downplay their potential problematic elements.

This is from the September 2009 Harpers, page 96, Findings.

The U.S. military reported progress in its cyborg-insect program and in building robots that can power themselves by eating the bodies of those they kill; the developers have promised that all “EATR” robots will be told not to eat people.

Soooo...that should take care of the robot problem...I love that the article doesn't feel it is necessary to mention why the military would want cyborg insects, or what progress would consist of.

I have been following some of the DARPA research, especially after 9/11. Here is one article on the so-called HI-MEMS program, (Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems), from LiveScience.com:

Cornell University researchers have succeeded in implanting electronic circuit probes into tobacco hornworms as early pupae. The hornworms pass through the chrysalis stage to mature into long-lived moths whose muscles can be controlled with the implanted electronics. The research was showcased at MEMS 2008, an international academic conference on Micro-Electrico-Mechanical Systems that took place from January 13-17 in Tucson, AZ.

The pupae insertion state was found to yield the best results. The resulting moth, a microsystem-controlled insect, has a circuit board protruding from the top of its midsection. Probes are inserted into the dorsoventral and dorsolongitudinal flight muscles. CT images show components of high absorbance indicating tissue growth around the probe.

The research also indicated the most favorable and least favorable times for insertion of control devices. The overall size of the circuit board is just 8x7mm, with a total weight of about 500 mg. The capacity of the battery is 16 mAh, and weighs 240 mg.


The insect cyborgs are part of a program called HI-MEMS (Hybrid Insect MEMS), a DARPA program initiated by Program Manager Dr. Amit Lal. The ultimate goal of the HI-MEMS program is to provide insect cyborgs that can demonstrate controlled flight; the insects would be used in a variety of military and homeland security applications.A driving voltage of 5 volts causes the tobacco hornworm blade muscles (two pairs) to move for flight and maneuvering.

HI-MEMS program director Amit Lal credits science fiction writer Thomas Easton with the idea. Lal read Easton's 1990 novelSparrowhawk, in which animals enlarged by genetic engineering (called Roachsters) were outfitted with implanted control systems.

Dr. Easton, a professor of science at Thomas College, sees a number of applications for HI-MEMS insects.

Moths are extraordinarily sensitive to sex attractants, so instead of giving bank robbers money treated with dye, they could use sex attractants instead. Then, a moth-based HI-MEMS could find the robber by following the scent."

"[Also,] with genetic engineering Darpa could replace the sex attractant receptor on the moth antennae with receptors for other things, like explosives, drugs or toxins," said Easton.

DARPA had better be careful with its insect army; in Easton's novel, hackers are able to gain control of genetically engineered animals by hacking the controller chips used in their implanted control structures.

If you are interested in one dark-side view of how this kind of invention could be used by corporations for advertising, see the madcap blurbflies from Jeff Noon's excellent 2000 sf novel Nymphomation.

Notice that the DARPA plan involves not simply putting tech on an insect, but implanting teh technology early on in the insect's metamorphosis, according to Technovelgy.com:

In their solicitation notice BAA06-22, DARPA explicitly rejects research which merely results in "evolutionary improvement upon existing state-of-the-art." They are looking for more innovative proposals, suggesting that it should be possible to integrate microsystems within insects during the early stages of metamorphosis. Specifically, DARPA believes that "healing processes from one metamorphic stage to the next stage are expected to yield more reliable" implantation results. Hopefully, this will result in more sophisticated (and more reliable) bio-electromechanical interfaces, as opposed to those cheap "adhesively-bonded systems" sometimes used on adult insects.

The final demonstration goal of the HI-MEMS program is the controlled arrival of an insect within five meters of a specified target located one hundred meters from the insect's starting point. It must then remain stationary indefinitely, unless otherwise instructed. It must also be able to transmit data from DOD sensors providing information about the local environment.

Tired of working with flying insects? No problem; DARPA says that "hopping and swimming insects could also meet final demonstration goals."

Effort is required in the following areas:

1. Demonstrate reliable bio-electromechanical interfaces to insects

2. Demonstrate locomotion control using MEMS platforms

3. Demonstrate technologies to scavenge power from insects

Here notice that the key is to move from crude add-on cyborg elements to finding ways to hack and control the insect's own senses (including its sight). This links up with work I've done on mind control programs (Jose Delgado, especially) and how this work is a key element of both cyborg novels/fictions and "actual" cyborg projects. The following article "HI-MEMS: Cyborg Beetle Microsystem" develops this idea:

One specific program under Darpa is being developed by a University of Michigan team: a cyborg unicorn beetle microsystem. The aim of such systems? The article claims "The vision of HI-MEMS - insect swarms with various sorts of different embedded MEMS sensors (like video cameras, audio microphones and chemical sniffers) could penetrate enemy territory in swarms. The HI-MEMS swarms could then perform reconnaissance missions beyond the capabilities of bulky human soldiers.”

And here is the picture, worth at least a thousand cyborgian words:

Meta Cyborg 2

When I read Kevin Bell’s work on the meta cyborg, and consider the mundane cyborg, then the question is raised: what is the relation between how individual bodies are being shaped by mundane and commonplace technologies, and how bodies politic and economic are being shaped by those same technologies?

Here are some reflections:

1. The cell phone is a mundane, quotidian technology at this point. Huge numbers of people have them; they involve the users in complex technologically mediated communication (between humans machines machines humans along networks that extend across the globe); they are affecting important elements of daily life including who we communicate with, how we communicate, the speed of interactions and plans, and so on. But cell phones per se are NOT mundane; they are sublime. What is mundane is the end user or end use; what is sublime is the massive amount of capital, human labor, infrastructure, that goes into allowing the cell phone to operate in its mundane way. So there is a hybrid here: mundane/sublime; simple/hypercomplex.

2. If railroads defined corporate dominance in the US in the 19^th Century, and if we trace the implications of that national dominance all the way through the 20^th century…then what defines the model of corporate dominance in the transnational postwar world?

3. What is the meaning of “building capacity” in the sense Kevin means? Capacity building (this is the Wiki definition, though I’ve found versions of this on the first few web sites I went to) refers to assistance that is provided to societies in developing countries, which have a need to develop a certain skill or competence, or for general upgrading of performance ability. Most capacity is built by societies themselves, sometimes in the public, sometimes in the non-governmental and sometimes in the private sector. Many international organizations, often of the UN-family, have provided capacity building as a part of their programmes of technical cooperation with their member countries. Bilaterally funded entities and private sector consulting firms or non-governmental organizations, called NGOs have also offered capacity building services. Sometimes NGOs in developing countries are themselves recipients of capacity building.Capacity Building is, however, not limited to international aid work. More recently, capacity building is being used by government to transform community and industry approaches to social and environmental problems. OK got it. And it seems to often involve USAID. Soooo…what would a cyborg capacity building look like? Capacity for what? And given what my brother Ramon has told me about NGO’s in Thailand and working with local activists, what are the huge monkeywrenches that seem to get thrown into what look like win-win situations of capacity building?

4. Defining path dependence and using examples seems important here. Path dependence turns out to be a pretty mobile concept, one that has ranged from economics to social and political science and elsewhere. The so-called trivial meaning is that the path from the past turns out to affect the current realities for, say, economics. The more precise meaning is “that predictable amplifications of small differences are a disproportionate cause of later circumstances. And, in the "strong" form, that this historical hang-over is inefficient” (“Path Dependence” from Wikipedia). I think this might be an example of the latter. We have the health care system in the US that we have today because of certain historically specific contexts that later were amplified in ways that were not obvious at the time. So our current lousy highly inefficient health care system is the result of the transformation of the hospital at the turn of the century (into a place where cures for syphilis happen and where wealthy people might actually want to go), the development of a market for hospital visits during the Depression (the rise of what later became Blue Cross), and the wage freezes of World War 2 (so that companies in desperate search for labor couldn’t offer higher wages but could offer “benefits” including most importantly health benefits). This is a very large example; another might be the difference between Beta and VHS cassettes, and why VHS emerged as the winner even though it isn’t necessarily “better.” The Wiki article is useful here to me as a beginner in this. It argues that path dependency theory was originally developed by economists to explain technology adoption processes and industry evolution (hence my use of the health care example above) and has had a strong influence on evolutionary economics (e.g., Nelson & Winter 1982). It argues that many economic processes do not progress steadily toward some pre-determined and unique equilibrium (which is what neo-classical econ says) so that “the nature of any equilibrium achieved depends partly on the process of getting there. The outcome of a path dependent process will often not converge towards a unique equilibrium but instead reach one of several equilibria (sometimes known as absorbing states).” With path dependence, both the starting point and 'accidental' events (noise) can have significant effects on the ultimate outcome. One way I think of the bad or inefficient version of path dependence is legacy systems. So for example the current financial network is based on an almost archaeological model: the current networks have often been forced to build on much older software and hardware networks, which radically affects what is designed, as if one had to build one’s new house on the foundations of the previous house. This notion of lock-in seems important when we are looking at examples in which path dependence is a big problem and a cause of unacceptable inefficiency (for example when the world’s biota dies or all its humans and animals).

5. Kevin names some huge complex issues as virtual meta-cyborgs, and this needs to be developed. In what ways are these issues – the problems with the Columbia River and its water and salmon, with the horrorshow that is Israel’s treatment of Palestine, with the “skyhook” models like terraforming for dealing with ecological issues – an example of cyborgs? An example of path dependence? I think the Columbia River is a great example, partly because it is so clear that the cybernetic part of the cyber-organism is so productive: not just the dams of course, but all the path dependent systems that make up the modern history of the river, from a literal Eden of salmon (hugely, hugely valuable in terms of food source, but also for the larger ecosystem of the river and rich soil surrounding it) to a giant ditch for cooling nuclear Hanford and producing electricity to modernize the Northwest. The meta cyborg here (the notion was developed by Chris Gray I believe, though others including myself have written about it) helps us see how technological systems are part of larger systems AND radically affect what ends up happening to those other systems (not just destroyed ecosystems of water and salmon but ridiculously inefficient and counterproductive investments in nuclear weapons, nuclear energy, aluminum production).

6. Finally a key point Kevin makes is about synchronization. He writes, “Cyborg becomes the dominant mode of synchronization. Automation increases synchronization and synthetic information flow by several orders of magnitude.” I think the other point to be made here is that the concept of synchronization is key to understanding why some “cyborg” systems don’t work well in certain contexts (for example, where there needs to be a huge capacity for the work of synchronizing networks, systems, and networks of systems) and the implications of these massive and sublime but problematic networks (computer networks, cell phone and SMS networks, power grids, water systems, and so on) that hugely affect not only our daily lives but also the emergent conditions of survival.

What I love about Kevin’s analysis is that his examples are relentlessly current, seem wildly intractable, and yet demand resolution. We are trying to build the tools that will replace the ones that build some of this mess (if tool is the word I want) as well as building the kind of networks of humans and machines that can address these massive problems. This latter network is what I imagine to be a cyborg politics. It imagines that technology is hugely important, is not the only solution to global crises, and is part of a oppositional politics that must challenge most nation-state and corporate models of power.

The meta cyborg 1

While I have been exploring the mundane cyborg, Kevin Bell has been integrating the mega-cyborg figure into his work on technological systems, social capital, and why environmentalists so often lose the war even when they win the battle.

So I wanted to post the main ideas for general consideration, and then reply to them myself in a separate post.

Full disclosure: these notes are meant to accompany a presentation, so occasionally gnomic sentences need to be forgiven, or at any rate explained! ;-) Also since this is unpublished, consider it covered under the Creative Commons protection!

Kevin Bell notes on The Cyborg

What I want to get across:

· A lot of history is written as a just-so story, or as simple pathos. Both approaches abstract events from context, but the context is what matters.

· Path dependence locks down the range of possibilities.

· Disruptive transformation opens possibilities, but what gets picked up depends on what’s lying around. Often we double down on the things we already do; “hard landing” of Avery Lovins, for example (this is my own example).

· The task is to build the capacity to take advantage of windows of opportunity before things lock down again, by being the tool that gets picked up [Here I would add: the cyborg metaphor is one among a set of ways to look at the global crises facing human and organic survival; it includes I would argue some valuable correctives to how we've looked at technological and political problems previously; many of these previous ways are part of the problem and include some of the outmoded tools Kevin refers to; what the tools are which we hope we've developed enough to get picked up is the $64, 000 dollar question (and even that number is in 1955 dollars!)]

[

p Here Kevin mentioned three examples of windows of opportunity and the agents who made the most out of them: Microsoft dominates because the CEO of Digital Research went golfing at Pebble Beach. The US dominates because it was the sole survivor of World War II. Railroads defined corporate dominance in the US because national culture and identity was too weak to articulate a coherent alternative.

The global situation:

· We are entering round three of the postmodern global sustainability fight. We do not get round four, because the window of opportunity is closing. The choice is no longer one of avoiding severe consequences. It is now a question of whether we can avoid apocalyptic consequences.

· Learning from the last thirty years of failure is critical if we want to get it right this time.

The framing:

· Path dependence – when an existing infrastructure blows up, people look for whatever happens to be lying around. The task is to be the meme that wins when the opportunity presents itself.

· Cyborg – the underlying infrastructure of modern and postmodern technology, and its interaction with human culture, drives long-term outcomes. Understanding and inflecting that dynamic is useful.

Three examples of meta-scale virtual cyborg:

· Columbia River Hydro System – One of the great rivers of the world, reduced to a series of stagnant and increasingly radioactive lakes by an agricultural fantasy that was hijacked by the parasitic modernist cyborgs of global aluminum and the nuclear weapons archipelago.

· Palestine – The creation of a postmodern Panopticon (except that unlike Bentham’s version, nobody watches the watchers), and the rise of the suicide drones.

· Climate geo-engineering – Avoiding the subject by invoking the global cyborg skyhook of terraforming.

How fast has the transform been?

· An order of magnitude over the last century and a half, on top of an order of magnitude increase in population – two orders of magnitude overall. Nothing like has ever happened before. It is unlikely to happen again because we used all of the easy energy and resource base to do it.

· Accelerates after World War II in the First World because of cheap energy, US dominance, and transition to post-modern abstraction of information from context.

· Pre-modern to post-modern happened *fast* in the US – Wallace Stegner remembers old-growth forest where the Silicon Forest rises today.

What drives the transform?

· Cyborg becomes the dominant mode of synchronization. Automation increases synchronization and synthetic information flow by several orders of magnitude.

o Computer during the Manhattan project was a job description – a pretty good paying job, where women were highly valued because of a perceived attention to detail. A generation later, it is a machine. A generation after that, it is a pervasive machine. A generation after that, it is a mundane cyborg. Digital computers that were used to put humans on the moon are in your cell phone and automobiles now.

o With the pervasive replacement of slow and hierarchical information flow by near real-time and networked information flow, there are disruptive interactions with local and global human culture, with unknown long term effects.

o Railroad synchronization drove the imposition of universal time onto modern culture. In the US, time zones reflect the requirements of 19^th century railroads. There is a path dependence component here as well - the boundaries, roads, and physical infrastructure of most of the Western US were built around rail. Wyoming counties were laid out specifically for railhead access. Land ownership and usage patterns today remain dominated by the 19^th century political dominance of the railroad robber barons. The bizarre US interpretation of corporate power is a direct result of 19^th century railroad politics.

· The cult of efficiency

o A modern mindset, not a capitalist one. Lenin and Mussolini loved Taylor and Ford. The ubiquity of Fordism and Taylorism in modern economies; Taylor = human as cyborg, as part of a system,

o Discards contextually based and locally based knowledge that is not easily quantified or proceduralized. This turns out to be a huge mistake.

o Scales big and hierarchical in the modern transform. Adjusts poorly as scale reverses and networks in the post-modern transform.

· The big transformation in physically moving protons is done by 50 years ago. The big transformation in moving information and transforming biological/physical materials is still underway. We don’t know yet if that transformation can compensate for losing cheap energy and basic resources.

How it plays out – Columbia River as cyborg:

· One of the most powerful rivers on earth, reduced to a synchronized and managed series of giant ponds, linked to a continental power grid.

· No longer a natural system. Salmon, and the human cult of salmon, managed as an imperfect feature of the machine.

o Dams, under Bush, conceived as natural features.

o Some glitches – plans to make Wenatchee a deepwater port failed because of Hanford. The only remaining natural stretch of the Columbia flows past the bones of yesterday’s machinery of doom.

· Originally conceived as a source of human liberation based on a mythical Jeffersonian rural ideal, looted by emerging cyborg systems of corporate agriculture, global aluminum, and the nuclear weapons archipelago.

· The cyborg complex successfully resists attempts to manage the system to provide an opening for organic function, aided and abetted by “progressive” players unwilling to directly challenge the fundamental premise of the machine.

How it plays out – Palestinian Panopticon:

· Repurposing of both post-modern philosophy and post-modern warfare to promote ethnic cleansing. A testbed for emerging US military strategy.

· Creation of temporal and three dimensional spatial control of unilaterally defined Palestinian space, aided and abetted by a captive Palestinian pseudo-state.

· Systematic looting of scare water resources, systematic suppression of independent action.

· Responding to human-based, low technology Palestinian suicide bombers with automated cyborg suicide bombers, supported by massive and sophisticated cyborg infrastructure.

How it plays out: Terraforming for climate change

· A pivot from climate change denial to global cyborg as technology skyhook. A similar meme as GMO, but on an even larger scale.

· Allows business as usual while we wait around for the skyhook to eventually get built.

· Revives options like nuclear power without solving fundamental showstoppers.

· Kicks the can down the road.

· If ever required and actually successful, represents a fundamental transform to cyborg Earth.

Reading Leo Marx

Leo Marx's 35th Anniversary edition of his book "The Machine in the Garden" includes an Afterword that gives some context for the writing of the book: his early Socialist politics which influence the text's argument, the way he added nonliterary texts to his body of evidence, the complex relationship between literary articulations of a sophisticated pastoral and the more popular and primitivist/nostalgic pastorals, the way the root metaphors of machine and garden produce a third and contradictory even bipolar metaphor of a garden with a Machine in it. I loved the moment when he quoted Thoreau hearing the shrill whistle of a locomotive at Walden, "We have constructed a fate, an Atropos, that never turns aside." It reminded me completely of the Terminator, and the speech that Kyle Reese makes to Sarah Connor: "Listen, and understand. That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead." This is why the Terminator is the Cyborg in the Garden; it recapitulates much of what Marx argues the locomotive (and steamships, large mills, etc) stood for in imaginative fiction.

He also includes Silent Spring (written in 1961, three years before his own book was published), and mentions the moment when the new machine, Strontium-90, enters the garden and silences it. This is important since it updates what counts as the "machine" that interrupts the idyll of the modern dweller.

One interesting question about the current status of pastoral visions of America: what is the "garden" now, into which Strontium-90, nuclear breeder reactors, the BP catastrophe, etc., intrude? Can you have a Garden image in say 1985, or has Polyani's Great Transformation of the landscape by ever wider reaches of the Industrial Revolution rendered the garden an obsolete metaphor? (Hint - I don't think so. But what counts as garden now, as pastoral, as the so called "middle landscape," is only rarely identified with the nation as a whole.)

And - what is the current image of the machine that intrudes? Is it the personal computer? Genetic engineering? How would you characterize this postmodern Machine in the industrial Garden?

And - is the so called "middle landscape" now what I want to call cyborg competencies, the ability to use science and technology to continue to shape the landscape, but also the ability to not shape the landscape the way we have in the past, leaving behind blighted environments.

I'm impressed by the book despite its shortcomings (which he acknowledges in his Afterword) and am also amazed at how accurately his convention-driven analysis of the pastoral and its effects describes my current experience of cohousing (the pastoral community I live in), the tree-lined trail through the arroyo I run in, the increasingly parallel experience of love for people and love for the natural world (with its attendant ecstasies and vulnerabilities and black moments - BP being only a particularly horrific one).

My "authentic" life is run by conventions, and this is something we all sense but perhaps back away from. I like this bit of Marx's analysis (though he borrows his notion of the conventional from Harry Levin) a lot, and there is a funny vice versa here: the container of the conventional help us contain and name and thus re-member and hold patterns of emotion and experience.

OK that is enough for now; Kelsey and Rhiannon came in from a late night jaunt, and it is time to walk the dog. Next: a brief summary of Marx's main pastoral points.

700 million, 26 Billion

How many people watched the World Cup final today? FIFA estimates more than 700 million. According to Graham Dunbar of the AP in Johannesburg, it will most likely break the record for a sporting event in Spain and the Netherlands. An estimated cumulative audience of 26 billion viewers watched the 64 matches at the 2006 tournament, but FIFA is calculating the current tournament by overnight market share reports where possible.

Of course this begs the question of how many people watched online and via mobile phones. I followed many of the games online via ESPN, using their GameCast feature and reading commentary from the "announcers" and selected fans.

It is worth considering whether in the future there could be a similar focus of worldwide viewing. Imagine such an audience for a worldwide set of presentations on global warming. And as soon as I write this, I understand why this seems impossible for a political or economic genre of story, and utterly possible for an unscripted sporting event.

But the concept of a town hall meeting each month on a topic - say, water rights and access - in which people from all over the world have a chance to speak...and to speak not only for humans, but for natural systems upon which we depend for our very survival...well. I'm just saying.

Micmacs à tire-larigot

I went to the film Micmacs à tire-larigot tonight; it was the last big screenshowing in Santa Cruz, and I'd hear that it was both a great anarchist film and a film that had lots of technology in it. The theatre was reasonably full - a good sign for a foreign film - and the strong coffee I drank right before the showing helped put me in the mood for the frenetic opening sequence.

The film pits the "family' of misfits against the nonfamily of arms manufacturers, and while occasionally cloying, the plot allows for a good deal of speaking truth to power: in this case, the scene where the two competing arms dealers are tried before a surreal jury of faux Arabs in burkas while standing on a landmine and holding a rocket propelled grenade in one of their mouths. The things they say are all the things people might say if they were de

sperate and were responsible for making things like armor piercing shells and frag bombs and selling them to pretty much anybody.

It is also a fable about using the left over technologies in a different way; the film is relentless in contrasting sleek new tech with old, outmoded tech. The aesthetic is almost steampunk; the castoffs live in a magical cave under a trash heap, and take the junk of the consume society and make it into...well, into charming and entertaining art. So the funky three wheeled truck drives next to the sleek new train; the images of bombs and landmines is contrasted with the home made cannon, made for launching humans; flatscreen TVs and fireplaces that turn on with a clap in the rich guy's mansion are found wanting next to the menagerie of dancing mice, walking tables, and balletic clothing that entertain the squatters (and the film viewers, of course).

The film is firmly in the genre of Romance with a capital R; the bad guys get their just desserts, the arms companies are ruined, and all of it is done with human power and salvaged junk and Tempest-like allusions to the power of illusion and theatre.

With regard to cyborgs - well, I felt like Wall-E was playing at times, for all the loving resurrection of old machines and technologies: the manual typewriter, the baby carriage, the ancient refrigerator, the crude microphone and funky headphones turned into a spy setup, all mirror the thrown-awayness of the people in the squat. How humans merge with their technologies and for what purposes is the theme, and it is more or less a black and white fable: some ingenious machines kill people, and some are used by humans to rejuvenate people and to administer justice to those in the first category of technology.

I remembered the scene in Terminator where Reese wakes up in the present day LA freaked out by huge but mundane machines: dump trucks and backhoes. He sees them, rightfully so, as ancestors of the killing machines of the future. The postmodern Terminator technologies are, like the Terminator himself, relentless and massively death-dealing; and yet what defeats the postmodern tech is the modern Industrial tech: a factory where steel is made, where the hotter than hell vats of molten fire finally kill the killing machine. The sublime technology of yesteryear for a moment regains its sublimity, allowing for the end of a horror of technology from the future. It is as if Terminator linked up with Bill McKibben's book Enough, and brave Sarah Connors led a host of evil technologies to their ends in the honest industrial spaces that our grandfathers worked in.

Of course Micmacs has no such scene, but it does include lots of revenge on the technology of the wealth: burned sports cars, pilfered weird collections of body parts in pristine jars, racks of missiles dumped in the Seine, smashed laptops, and one bad guy car (probably German and luxury) defeated by a very large electromagnet, the kind used in junk yards. The magnet plays the role of the Terminator factory; when it hits, the guns slam to the ceiling of the car, the expensive watches of the two arms CEO's shoot upwards and trap their wrists and arms, and the whole car is lifted way off the ground, and made helpless as a beetle (no pun intended).

I was thoroughly entertained, and for once in this world of BP disasters and nuclear energy touted as "alternative" in the American Power Act (which alone has made me swear more in the last month than in the last year), I watched as You Tube brought down the death merchants, and did it by entertaining.

But go see for yourself!

Mundane Cyborg five: technological sublime and the pastoral/Arcadian

I'm looking at a few pieces of a puzzle for my cyborg book. One piece is the way we have traditionally viewed the cybernetic and the organic, the machinic and the “natural.”

In “Re-viewing Nature; Machines and Industry; Greek Revival Architecture,” Tuomi J. Forrest argues that early Americans saw both the wilderness and the city as profane and dangerous. Reading Leo Marx among other theorists, she documents the shift from Nature as “howling wilderness” to Nature as viewed by Romanticism. The natural world still evoked fear, but this fear was folded into a larger view of Nature as a sublime source of spiritual renewal. (Forrest’s piece is on the web and lovingly illustrated, and includes a terrific Bierstadt piece that evokes this American romanticism perfectly). In time, for both Americans and for Europeans like Wordsworth, technologies like the steam engine and railroad would come to vie with Nature as a source of the sublime in life. And the tension between romantic and utilitarian views of the natural world also held sway in the design of powerful new technologies like Philadelphia’s Fairmount Water Works (which the article uses as a model of technologies which merged desire for power with desire for beauty in a ‘third way” of Greek Revival architecture. Forrest writes,

Perhaps in response to human fears about the power unleashed by the steam engine and other new marvels, some manufactures sought to 'disguise' their new machines with painted and molded leaves, vines, and flowers, or with architectural motifs. This practice visually linked technology to the natural world, and with the trends such as Greek Revival architecture. And as the historian Roger Kennedy claims, the new Greek buildings occupy the desired pastoral 'middle state' "between corruption (Europe) and savagery (the West)."

The article raises a number of issues, including the way practical Americans like Franklin argued that the beautiful for democratic peoples had to be utilitarian, not ornamental as it was for the wealthy in Europe:

In the early republic, many sought to balance the value of 'usefulness' versus that of 'beauty'. As de Tocqueville noted: "democratic peoples. . .cultivate those arts which help make life comfortable rather than those which adorn it. They habitually put use before beauty, and they want beauty itself to be useful." He seems to be echoing that most practical of Philadelphians, Benjamin Franklin, who claimed "nothing is good or beautiful but in the measure that it is useful." However, as John Kasson has observed, "yet the converse was true as well: American wanted the useful to be beautiful."(142)

There is something in the cyborg that calls to us from this matrix of history, ideology, and material practice. The cyborg motions to the inner landscape as the Romantics did, and suggests that at the moment that (inner human) “nature” is being threatened by urbanization and by technology, a powerful desire for the sublime moves us toward a redefined and exalted human (the Romantics imagined we could find transcendent meaning and power in our relation to the natural world) and toward a connection with newer sublimes (from God to Nature to railroads and telegraphs and new stories of the cosmos and the microscopic).

And for Kevin’s work (Kevin Bell that is, my friend and co-conspirator), the image of a Water Works from the early 19^th Century that promises a merging of utility and beauty via Greek revival architecture, and which delivers it, but also delivers massive pollution from the mills that use this power will most likely provide him with a precursor to the transformation of the Columbia River, that “organic machine,” a transformation paved with good intentions. Here is Forrest on the outcome of this merging of power and beauty in the form of technological advancement:

The problem with this approach--the exploitation of natural resources to the detriment of the public--is another side of the Water Works' story. The system, at least for a period, was able to tenuously balance public and private needs; a public park, and public water supply benefited the entire city. The site's uniqueness and fame proved a boon to hoteliers and restaurateurs, and the dam that funneled water into the wheel houses also allowed for the passage of barges. However, the same mills that Coxe advocated ultimately destroyed the water quality of the Schuylkill. And through the mid 1800's the city bought plots of land upstream from the works in an attempt to rid the banks of the Schuylkill and the Wissahickon of the many polluting factories.

Hundreds came to marvel at the huge “gears and wheels, moving efficiently, noiselessly, and powerfully.” Yet these powerful gears were housed in a Greek temple, and Forrest argues that the entire Water Works was an attempt to merge the natural and the human in order to produce Leo Marx’s pastoral ideal.

I think this notion of utility of nature is itself corrosive of most attempts to make technological advances pastoral. This indeed is what most of the Romantics thought as well (Shelley, especially, but also Thoreau and Emerson), and it informs Heidegger’s famous essay on technology and the view of the world as simply raw material.

But I am also fascinated by our desire for power and for beauty, and the early attempt to link this utility of technology to categories of the beautiful and the pastoral, and to democratic roots of Greek revival as opposed to Roman Imperial England fascinates me.

And I’m using a slightly different terminology to address this: I’m interested not so much in the pastoral but in versions of the Arcadian. I’ll elaborate later, when it is not 1:30 am!

The entire essay by Tuomi Forrest can be found at:

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma96/forrest/ww/home.html

Mundane Cyborg four: the meaning of mundane

Well it seems time to consider the meaning of mundane in mundane cyborg.

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I originally meant mundane to contrast with the more technologically sublime versions of cyborgs: individual human/machine cyborgs, “put together” by huge efforts of doctors, bioengineers, surgeons, and so on. RoboCop is a body that has been all but killed, and reviving that body takes enormous resources, whih only a huge corporation or the government would have available. In the anime series Mobile Suit Gundam, individual humans pilot huge military exoskeletons, merging their intincts and bodily reflexes with the movements of three story building high metal bodies that fly, fire missiles, and so on. In the TV show the Six Million Dollar Man, the cyborg costs…well, $6 million! And that was a lot back in 1974 (or actually, 1972, when Martin Caidin wrote his original Cyborg novel and set the price of a machine man at six big ones).

So in a way writing about the mundane cyborg forces me to consider how to talk about these other cyborgs: the not mundane or not quotidian uses of these technologies, for example. The extraordinary, as opposed to ordinary, cyborg. I think Leo Marx’s use of the technological sublime in his book The Machine in the Garden captures part of what I am after here: according to Britannica, the term “indicate[s] a quasi-spiritual haze given off by any particularly visible and impressive technological advance. Science fiction dotes on the sublime, which ruptures the everyday and lifts the human spirit to the plateaus of high imagination. Common models of the technological sublime include railroads, photography, aviation, giant dams, rural electrification (a particular Soviet favourite), atomic power and atomic weapons, space flight, television, computers, virtual reality, and the “information superhighway.”

The irony of mundane cyborg is that mundane works against cyborg; that is, the cyborg is clearly wildly nonnatural, dangerous, a sign of the posthuman, and so on. You get the sense of the end of the human and the natural and the beginning of some very other world. But this latter telos or aim of cyborg technologies is, I argue, just as likely to come from the ubiquitous small technologies that we merge with every day: our smart phones and iPods and GPS devices and scanners and so on.

So the irony is that the mundane cyborgs will bring about the nonmundane, sublime changes perhaps more radically than the iconic sublime cyborg projects will. This is the core argument of my book.

PS. This is what happens when you use an adjective to modify a noun; you open a Pandora’s Box of other possible adjectives. So for example Chris Gray is fond of categorizing cyborgs as medical, military, sports, entertainment, and so on; also there is the meta cyborg, the intermittent cyborg (you can remove the prosthesis or prostheses), and a host of others.

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So what does mundane mean? The etymology of the word (found at etymonline.com) has to do with world or worldy:

late 15c., from M.Fr. mondain (12c.), from L. mundanus "belonging to the world" (as distinct from the Church), from mundus "universe, world," lit. "clean, elegant"; used as a transl. of Gk. khosmos (see cosmos) in its Pythagorean sense of "the physical universe" (the original sense of the Gk. word was "orderly arrangement"). L. mundus also was used of a woman's "ornaments, dress," and is related to the adj. mundus "clean, elegant" (used of women's dress, etc.)

If mondain refers to belonging to the world, then its opposite would be belonging to the Church, or to the not-this-world, to the otherworldly (which certainly applies to Terminator, and in a way to the sense that this technology is creating an/other world). And if cyborgs usually create disorder in various ways (category disorders, war and conflicts, crises between the augmented and the nonaugmented), then the mundane cyborgs would be the organic-machine hybrids that are restored to an orderly arrangement. So the newly functional prosthetic arm of an amputee from Iraq may be seen as mundane, insofar as it restores what was originally there in the world.

I found another interesting definition of mundane on Charles Hodgson’s delightful online site Podictionary. He recapitulates most dictionary definitions when he writes that “ mundane means “of the world” and when I hear people talk about things that are mundane they usually mean things that are average, undistinguished, pretty regular every day things.” But then he mentions other nontypical meanings:

• To officials of the Church, people who were mundane were “of the world” and so, non-officials of the church.
• Charles Darwin said that owls were mundane, and by that he meant they were ubiquitous, “of the world” they exist pretty much everywhere.
• Those with a broad perspective of how our planet fits into the universe used “mundane” as a synonym for “cosmic.”
• And finally, mundane has been used with the same winking acknowledgement as the phrase “man of the world” with a meaning that a mundane person was one who enjoyed their earthly pleasures.

But then he references urbandictionary, and as he slyly puts it, “entered a whole other monde.” In RPGs (role playing games), you have your online persona (mine back in the ‘90s was cybunny, before this became a real persona in the the 1999 Neopian world of Neopets) and then you have your actual name outside of the game. This identify is called your “mundane.” Hodgson points out that the definition of mundane from OED as people who are not hard core sci fi fans has been around since the late 1950s.

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This leads me to the Mundane Science Fiction movement, which appeared in the 2007 edition of Interzone magazine. I listened to an interview with novelist Geoff Ryman on the blogspot http://mundane-sf.blogspot.com/ and read around on the blogspot, and decided to just spam in the basic description from Wikipedia and a couple other sites:

Mundane Science Fiction is a sub-genre of science fiction. Inspired by an idea of Julian Todd, the Mundane SF movement was founded in 2002 during the Clarion workshop by novelist Geoff Ryman among others. It focuses on stories set on or near the Earth, with a believable use of technology and science as it exists at the time the story is written.

The central ideas are:

• That interstellar travel remains unlikely; that warp drives, worm holes, and other forms of faster-than-light travel are wish fulfillment fantasies rather than serious speculation about a possible future.

• That unfounded speculation about interstellar travel can lead to an illusion of a universe abundant with worlds as hospitable to life as this Earth. This is also viewed as unlikely.

• That this dream of abundance can encourage a wasteful attitude to the abundance that is here on Earth.

• That there is no evidence whatsoever of intelligences elsewhere in the universe. That absence of evidence is not evidence of absence -- however, it is considered unlikely that alien intelligences will overcome the physical constraints on interstellar travel any better than we can.

• That interstellar trade (and colonization, war, federations, etc.) is therefore highly unlikely.

• That communication with alien intelligences over such vast distances will be vexed by: the enormous time lag in exchange of messages and the likelihood of enormous and probably currently unimaginable differences between us and aliens.

• That there is no present evidence whatsoever that quantum uncertainty has any effect at the macro level and that therefore it is highly unlikely that there are whole alternative universes to be visited.

• That therefore our most likely future is on this planet and within this solar system, and that it is highly unlikely that intelligent life survives elsewhere in this solar system. Any contact with aliens is likely to be tenuous, and unprofitable.

• That the most likely future is one in which we only have ourselves and this planet.

Geoff Ryman has contrasted mundane science fiction with regular science fiction through the desire of teenagers to leave their parents' homes. Ryman sees too much of regular science fiction being based on an "adolescent desire to run away from our world." However, Ryman notes that humans are not truly considered grown-up until they "create a new home of their own," which is what mundane science fiction aims to do.

I think this latter sense of “creating a new home” is what I would like to do as well; that is, take a look at fictions and nonfictions that try to imagine us shaping these mundane but powerful technologies, as they inevitably and invariably shape us. (And no I am not unaware that the companies that create these technologies do so with certain shapings in mind; I’m just as clear that ubiquitous computing and SMSing are changing patterns of living and communication in ways the designers of these technologies could not have predicted).

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So the worldly cyborg is also a product of worldly processes (the greed of corporations hungry for consumers, for example, and the cynical realism of those in political power who are happy to provide virtual bread and circuses for the masses while they undermine most of the best parts of American democratic institutions and round up the usual suspects who protest the undermining). And these cyborgs look mundane; usually there is no monstrous bit poking out (though behaviors can become monstrous, as when an entire class is texting while the professor gazes out helplessly…or is this simply the electronification of students who have always been distracted from the drone of knowledge?).

Any feedback on this idea of the mundane greatly appreciated!