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 19th Century, and if we trace the implications of that national dominance all the way through the 20th 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.
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