Fast Times at Kirkwood High

I'm up at Kirkwood, in a kind of space capsule ski place. Outside blizzardy, inside the fireplace turns on with a switch, as does the shiny new red tea kettle (thanks Margann!) on its round plastic black base plugged into the wall.

Except yesterday was a tough day for our space ship. The roof started leaking, with ten feet of snow on top of it; water found its way down the wall, across the joist, down the other wall; the joist began dripping, so we too our kitchen and put it under the leaks. Then the water found its way to the floor below; repeat kitchenware on floor, towels. The space ship has a non Star Trek Engineering room, which is a closet into which is shoved lots of tanks and boxes and wires and copper tubing and switches. You can't get in to see the gauge on the hot water heater; again, if this were Star Trek, we'd need a race of aliens who bend in impossible ways and are about four inches thick to get around and see what's what with our dilithium crystals and impulse engines.

So when the hot water ran out we found out that hot water also heats the place; thus our spaceship had no heat or hot water, and I discovered this standing in cold water in three places (bath shower other shower) and got grumpier than usual for me and stood in front of the working nonnatural fireplace and warmed up in my towel. Yes, I took a heat bath.

This leads me to a quick post before I go off to ski: when Ray Bradbury wrote his 1950 story The Veldt, he imagined both smart houses, and a kind of virtual reality nursery where things go horribly wrong. Up here at 8000 feet where it can snow ten feet in a short time, the smart house can turn out to also be stupid. Why? Not because we can't design new buildings to work in snow; of course we can. But the economics of the system whereby such buildings are designed, paid for, and built, filters everything; it is a network with lot of places to go terribly awry. This isn't new news, but it should give us pause when we talk about "technology" to remember that the invisible systems - discursive, economic, cultural - allow a ski place built in the 1930s by volunteers from the Sierra Club to outlast and outperform a building built over 7 years in the 21st Century costing many mucho dinero.

But that fireplace heated the entire downstairs, even if it is a cyborg fireplace.

Why be interested in cyborgs?

Well I am at 8000 feet, looking at a quiet fire flicker behind its glass window. I had a memory: coming to California for the first time in 1976 as a graduate student at Stanford, I landed in a house with two fellow grad students in Atherton. I was lonely and missed my friends and felt like if I heard "have a nice day" one more time in my present noir sensibility things could get ugly. So I walked to a terrific bookstore in Menlo Park (no longer there, sadly), lost myself in titles and authors, and then walked in the chill twilight to a restaurant with a fireplace. I got some food and sat next to the fire and began to feel better...and then this guy came up and TURNED OFF the fire. I was stunned. I was now seriously in California (fires in New England in 1976 tended to be, well, fires, involving something we called "wood").

I don't thing the guy turned to me and said have a nice day, but he might as well have.

That was 1976, right around the time Pohl was writing Man Plus about cyborgs going to Mars, and Martin Caidin was writing Cyborg, the novel that became the basis for The 6 Million Dollar Man. "Nature"is more and more controlled and controllable; the shock of discovering this where you didn't expect it makes you consider where else the order of the "natural" is subordinated to the order of the technosocial, so that technology becomes our nature and the natural world is always already massively hyphenated by human technologies and effects.

Tomorrow I'll get on a ski lift and go up a mountain and look out over a world of snow and generators, wonderfully engineered ski boots and forests of dark green pine, houses like toys seen from on high and a lake that hides its pipes and effluents and oil slicks and compromised biota. And I'll wonder how, even if humans wanted to, could we strike that balance between our manipulation of the earth's resources and complex systems, and the sustenance of those resources and systems.

So right this minute I have two books in front of me: Gregory Benford's Beyond Human: Living with Robots and Cyborgs, and N. Katherine Hayles' How We Became Posthuman. Benford's book is written in a clear and lively fashion, something like the voice and style I'm reaching for in my own writing; Hayles' book is a powerful, dense examination of cybernetics, of literary representations of cybernetic organisms and their ilk, and of informatics, defined as

the technologies of information as well as the biological, social, linguistic, and cultural changes that initiate, accompany, and complicate their development (Hayles 19).

I'm going to leave this post with a question: why should we care that much whether we are becoming cyborgs, or whether robots and/or dematerialized human bodies begin to populate a changing posthuman landscape?

The answer has something to do with cybernetics' obsession with notions of control. The answer also has something to do with what I am calling "machine time," the notion that as we interact more, and more closely, with all sorts of boundary-breaking technologies, we begin to run at machine paces, and several machine paces at that (the pace of a car when we drive our exoskeletons around; the pace of packets flying down the alleys of cyberspace when we drive our laptops /they drive us; and so on).

And we should care partly because for good and ill we are leaving a world that I (born in 1954) can barely recall; much will be forgotten about that past, and the focus on how we are changing into cyborgs, mundane and otherwise, is partly a mirror for how we were, the kinds of control previous humans desired and executed. We were always partly made by our tool use; we have always been slightly crazy monkeys, open to the idea that the magic in the cave painting connected to the juju we felt running at the prey, and connected as well to the spear or bow in our hand. In a wildly more complex world, what counts now as the spear? As the prey? As the cave painting? And how is this analogy no longer very apt?

Cyborg Science: an initial definition

I'm writing a book based on my dissertation. Hey there's a new idea! ;-) I'm currently looking at the genealogy of cyborgs and cybernetics, and reading Philip Mirowski's amazing and at times overwhelming book Machine Dreams: Economics as a Cyborg Science.

He defines Cyborg Science in the early going, and I thought I'd post that definition here. In the book it is acccompanied by a very rich description of how cybernetics was affected by the discourse of thermodynamics and Maxwell's Demon, but this is a handy list for starting to think through the way cybernetics leads to cyborgs and to the later notions of cyborg sciences:

In his book Machine Dreams, Mirowski basically argues, don’t worry that cybernetics never “worked”. Instead he suggests that while cybernetics “never attained the status of a full fledged cyborg science” instead it “constituted the philosophical overture to a whole phalanx of cyborg sciences.” And so “The more correct definition would acknowledge that a cyborg science is a complex set of beliefs, of philosophical dispositions, mathematical preferences, pungent metaphors, research practices, and…paradigmatic things all of which are then applied promiscuously to some more or less discrete preexisting subject matter or area” (12).

He then goes on to suggest 6 main features to specific this definition.

1. Cyborg sciences depend on the computer as a paradigm object for everything from metaphors to assistance in research to embodiment of research products. Part of what makes this interesting: cybernetics early on married the computer. Also computers are themselves straddlers of the divide between the animate and the inanimate…and so cyborg sciences make use of this fact in order to blur those same boundaries in the areas of expertise.

2. Cyborg sciences breach ramparts between Natural and Social, Human and Inhuman. Before ww2: social scientists wanted to reduce the Social to the Natural. This includes neoclassic economics. But they mostly left barriers between the two intact. Nature and its ontology were not affected by reductionism of Social to it. But after WW2 “a cyborg intervention agglomerates a heterogeneous assemblage of humans and machines, living and the dead, active and the inert, meaning and symbol, intention and teleology, and before we know it, Nature has taken on board many of the attributes formerly attributed to Society, just as Humanity has simultaneously been rendered more machinelike.” 13

3. In Cyborg science the sharp distinction between ‘reality’ and simulacra also becomes less taken for granted. Von Neumann at Los Alamos: simulations of hydrodynamics, turbulence, and chain reactions were first uses of the computer. This led to using Monte Carlo simulations which then came to be discussed as on a par with more conventional experiments. Note the idea that the simulation and gaming is an experiment. Here is a key quote: “von Neumann belieed that he was extracting out the logic of systems, be they dynamical systems, automata, or “games”; thus manipulation of the simulation eventually came to be regarded as essentially equivalent to manipulation of the phenomenon.” 14 Thus the computer comes to utterly change and dominate what counts as normative science; a good example is nuclear weapons testing (Gusterson, Edwards). Edwards has a good point: so much of the Cold War military technology was based on simulations (15). Galison is an important source here. Computers go from being simply fast calculators, then an instrument, then a stand-in for nature itself. Turing test is a version of this: a simulation with general assent is good enough.

4. Fourth: heritage of distinctive notions of order and disorder rooted in physical thermodynamics.

5. Cyborg science makes into physical concepts terms like information, memory, and computation. In particular, Katherine Hayles shows that Shannon had to divorce information from any connotations of meaning or semantics, and instead associate it with “choice” from a preexistent menu of symbols. Memory becomes a holding pen for accumulated message symbols. At a certain point the holding pen needs to be “flushed” because of computer processor constraints; Mirowski argues that this is important: we associate this loss of memory with the destruction of “information” and the increase of entropy. This is a set of metaphors which displaced the older energetics tradition. He argues that this isn’t just metaphors and just so stories; it is why cyborg sciences treat information as an entity with ontologically stable properties, which preserves its integrity under various transformations. 16 Notice this: it also suggests that the self is a core pattern of “information” which could survive transition to say a simulated self. This is the key conceit in Greg Egan’s book Permutation City.

6. Key to cyborg sciences; from image of lone inventor to a new breed of science manager, born in crisis of WW2 and fortified by foundation and military sponsorship. “The new cyborg sciences did not simply spontaneously arise; they were consciously made.” 17 What happened? Science managers recruit scientists from physics and math and pair them off with collaborators from the life sciences and/or social sciences [note here the importance of cybernetics as a flag for this kind of collaboration and aggressive assertion of overlap]; give lots of money and hierarchical model; then go out and outline solutions to a problem bothering some patron. “Cyborg science is Big Science par excellence” and the military model is huge: logistics of research, yes, but also the conceptual structures of these sciences, the rationale of C3I (Command, Control, Communication) as generating the questions asked and solutions proposed. Why this blurred ontology of cyborg sciences? The need of the new sciences to “subject heterogeneous agglomerations of actors, machines, messages and…opponents to a hierarchical real-time regime of survellance and control.” 17 (Galison; Pickering; Edwards). Once again the issue of control is a huge one and Wiener is simply the beginning of ways in which control is the shadow of most of this science. It isn't just that the military is a huge patron but that military and WW 2 styles of organization evolve into the modern science lab.

One last note: he doesn't include this in the list, but Mirowski talks a lot about the shift in the status of sciences, so that Physics is king in the 19th Century, but is succeeded by Biology in the 20th. Biology is where the action is (DNA, molecular biology, and so on) but he shows that these sciences take off because of the cyborg science technologies and (just as importantly) gestalts that develop post WW2. And Biology ends up being hugely affected by concerns from physics; lots of physicists move from physics proper to other disciplines, and bring ideas and concepts (like entropy and Maxwell's demon and the notion of negative entropy