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 ;-) Also since this is unpublished, consider it covered under the Creative Commons protection!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!)]

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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.