Mundane Cyborg 3: Skyhooks and Cranes, Networks and End Users

Mundane Cyborg 3: Skyhooks and Cranes, Networks and End Users

1.

Full disclosure: I’m writing this surrounded by a menagerie of machines. This lamp, for example, has that old school lampshade that diffuses light so that I can read the five books surrounding my laptop and so that Margann (my wife squinting over a big colorful puzzle looking for pieces – more or less what I’m about, if I think about it) can have that puzzling satisfaction of putting pieces together, feeling with the hands the tiny sound of a piece snapping into its perfectly designed place.

The lamp is pretty mundane, but lamps arguably changed the way people all over the world live, and certainly whales know the cruel realities of humans addicted to their lamp oil.

The circle of light cast by the light shines on the laptop (the aluminum brick MacBook with its lamp-backlit keys), the cell phone (LG NV Touch, with its kind-of-smart phone features and virtual keyboard), the camera (a Canon PowerShot with its animal-snout lens and three cyborg eyes), the SanDisk micro card reader, the two sets of headphones (one healthy, the other deaf in one ear). And signs of other mundane and ubiquitous technologies: AA batteries (for the iPod portable speakers), keys (for Kevin’s Audi, for my Honda Civic hybrid, for Claire’s old school Honda with the stick). And two sets of eyeglasses (wraparound Oakleys and black sleek Hieros) that gaze eyelessly at me gazing at them.

And I can imagine writing with a lamp near, glasses nearby, at a table empty of these smart sleek machines. Perhaps there’s a cup of hot tea, a pear, a philosopher’s skull, with its memento mori shape, its carpe diem eyes.

2.

Kevin Bell (he of the Audi mentioned above) is in the Galapagos, and so when I wanted to follow up on a conversation we were having about skyhooks, and Daniel Dennett, I surfed. Dennett’s 1995 book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, made a huge impression on Kevin, and he often refers to its main ideas when we talk technology. Basically, Dennett argues that natural selection is an algorithmic process; the process of evolution is not something humans can appropriate (that is, humans can’t really “evolve,” can’t direct their own evolution in the precise sense of the word, though there are many similarities between biology’s evolution and engineering, and between biological and cultural evolution). In the course of making his case, Dennett uses an interesting technological metaphor: cranes vs. skyhooks. A skyhook in this scheme isn’t possible; you can’t pull something up by nailing a hook to a cloud. But a crane, now that is a real, and realistic, technology for pulling things up. In fact, if you have a crane, and put a crane on it, and a crane on that…well, you can pull something up pretty high.

Here Dennett wants to say that when we are trying to explain something, for example how the earth came to be designed the way it is, we can build up our explanation using cranes and avoiding skyhooks, or we can get greedy and try to imagine a skyhook so that we don’t have to build up our explanation carefully, crane by crane. A good example of a skyhook would be the argument for Creationism or Intelligent Design; it doesn’t build on a series of simpler, lower layers, but uses the ultimate skyhook, God. Science done well is based on cranes, which we use to build more complex structures than cranes, but which themselves are not difficult to explain.

Kevin uses the notion of skyhook a lot, and lately we’ve been applying it to the American Power Act, which I partially blame for the amount of swearing that has been coming out of my mouth in the last few months. Climate change, global warming, the need for control over carbon emissions…these are no longer easily fobbed off on hysterical scientists and anti-progress Luddites and business-hating environmentalists. So instead, we (well to be honest, the people that have a spot at that table in the back where they write the laws: corporations, the government with its huge military and its collusion with much of corporate America, even big box environmental groups like NRDC and EDF who should know better) now have a bill that makes nuclear power an alternative energy source, that gives money to coal and oil as if it were their birthday and we gave them a fucking pony…

See? There’s that swearing again.

Anyway, the notion of some magical and huge technological fix for something as complex as global warming is what Kev refers to as a skyhook. Nuclear power is a sky hook (regardless of what people like Richard Rhodes and Stewart Brand and James Lovelock may say) because it is not based on a sober and realistic assessment of the steps required to make it actually work as a major energy source (never mind the implications of nuclear waste and nuclear proliferation). Imagining the U.S. building hundreds of nuclear breeder reactors all over the continent, using Japan and France as our shining examples…nope, not gonna swear.

But then I did that surfing thing, to see where skyhook came from, and got to the Wikipedia site that offered this definition:

Skyhooks are a theoretical class of cable based techniques intended to lift payloads to high altitudes and speeds. The name skyhook is a reference to an imaginary hook that hangs from the sky. Plausible near-term proposals for skyhooks include designs that employ tethers spinning at hypersonic speeds for catching payloads from very high speed, high altitude aircraft and placing them in orbit.^[1]

There are also hypothetical skyhooks that are intended to be used for non-rocket spacelaunch into orbit, for example, a space elevator.

So then of course I needed to surf to Space Elevator, where I came across the history of a specific sky hook. The original space elevator was inspired by the Eiffel Tower; in 1895 Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky imagined a tower build into space and ending in a celestial castle in geostationary orbit. An alternative Russian design in 1959 proposed a geostationary satellite to lower a cable to earth using a counterweight to keep the cable motionless. This concept was first named a skyhook by Americans:

In 1966, Isaacs, Vine, Bradner and Bachus, four American engineers, reinvented the concept, naming it a "Sky-Hook," and published their analysis in the journal Science.^[11] They decided to determine what type of material would be required to build a space elevator, assuming it would be a straight cable with no variations in its cross section, and found that the strength required would be twice that of any existing material including graphite, quartz, and diamond.

Reading the article was pretty fascinating and alternately ridiculous and sublime: it included an Earth-based space elevator well over 38,000 km (24,000 mi) long. a counterweight “that would be slowly extended out to 144,000 kilometers (90,000 miles, almost half the distance to the Moon),” thousands of shuttle trips, and manufacturing party of the cable from asteroid ore. Later promoters of the concept include Hans Moravec, Arthur C. Clarke (in the novel, The Fountains of Paradise), Charles Sheffield (The Web Between the Worlds), Robert A. Heinlein (Friday), and Kim Stanley Robinson (in the popular 1993 novel Red Mars).

So Dennett’s notion of skyhook is in a way wrong; it isn’t after all something that can’t exist. Rather, consider the massive mobilization of resources it would take to build a space elevator skyhook; imagine the problem it is meant to solve; imagine the other projects or solutions that would have to take a backseat in order to allow something of this scale to proceed.

The early cyborg article (Astronautics 1960) parallels the early skyhook proposals (1966) and both lie, I would argue, in the shadow of the Manhattan project (and in a less dramatic way, in the shadow of the massive war effort in the U.S. from 1940-1945, producing an unparalleled yoking of the military, Big Science, regulated labor, corporations, and the state that gave us a Liberty ship a day and a permanent war economy). Skyhooks have always been around (from God explanations to stories about hundred league boots to projects to use atomic weapons to blast canals in the go go Fifties. In writing about cyborgs, I want to consider that the image of the monstrous Cyborg of Clynes, or RoboCop, or Terminator, is necessarily a product of huge resources and monomanical focus of these sources on one single body.

The mundane cyborg is not antithetical to this, but notices that while the networks of mundance and ubiquitous technologies are themselves the product of massive resources (the Internet as a child of DARPA and the government, the vast networks that support (often badly) the individual cell phone and allow it to be smart), the way the technology appears to individuals is mundane, exciting, apparently controllable. My mobile phone and my automobile give me unparalleled mobility; the implications of this “freedom” are not as obvious. It is this phenomenon that I want to explore in the mundane cyborg.

Another way to say this: the end users seem freer, but the networks that support this freedom are not free, and in fact redesign vast areas of the planet.