John von Neumann, Mirowski, and the Grand Inquisitor

Thought I'd post some bits on John von Neumann here today. I first read about him in Steve Heims' book on Norbert Wiener and von Neumann. One reviewer of the book suggested that Heim characterized him as "a distant dabbler in the technologies of death." Everyone talked about him as a genius, but also as distant (though a great joker), and perhaps not quite human.

He formalized the theory of quantum mechanics, helped design the atomic bomb, and was central to the conception and development of the electronic computer (Mirowski 97). But as Mirowski argues, he also continued to critique neoclassical economics, and brought "cyborg science" to the discipline.

His early experiences with Marxism in Hungary (for three months in 1919) led him to a lifetime hatred of Marxism and Soviet communism. And coupled with his notions of noncooperative game theory, this leads him to pretty grim political stances, such as promoting a preemptive atomic strike against Russia in 1950: "If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say at 5 o'clock, I say why not one o'clock?" At this point Russia had had the atomic bomb for less than a year. Since he didn't believe that political control of the atomic bomb was possible, he felt "at least initially...that world domination by the United States was the logical consequence of the atomic bomb."

I recall reading a terrific article by David Porush called I think "The Cyborg was a bomb" which argued that the cyborg era is crucially affected by the atomic bomb and its (sorry) fallout. And this again points to the way attitudes toward science and technology intersect with attitudes and practices of politics and economics. He truly felt that pure mathematics followed a laissez-faire kind of economics: not social planning or notions of applications for the math, but free exploration of mathematics, would ultimately lead to unknown uses. von Neumann argued that "Successes [in science] were largely due to forgetting completely about what one ultimately wanted, or whether one wanted anything ultimately...And I think it extremely instructive to watch the role of science in everyday life, and to note how the principle of laissez faire has led to strange and wonderful results." (quoted in Mirowski 101). Notice how this attitude - completely defensible in one sense (think of how much American science has been hurt by the short term vision of the government, cutting money for primary research and focusing on applications lo these many misguided years). And yet apply it to genetic engineering, or the family of nuclear weapons and energy, and you get a very different kind of laissez faire: one that "lets" the military adopt a super-imperial attitude toward the rest of the world, with all the paranoias and secrecy and terror this implies.

I read Mirowski and von Neumann and think of Dostoevsky, writing on the Grand Inquisitor, a piece that has always haunted me (for I truly believe it; I believe that many of the Popes were minimal on faith and maximal on control). Cybernetics, a la von Neumann, is about communication and/as control; the result is a 1950s whose leaders were like the Inquisitor, knowing that the pablum they were offering to the public to keep them happy was just that. The real existential political questions of all powerful leaders, especially those who control large militaries and other potent technologies, is whether it is ever possible to imagine a cooperative element to the "game" of political and military confrontation, control over resources and land.

Many have noted this element of the fable. The Wikipedia article on Grand Inquisitor mentions Tony Kushner's play Only We Who Guard The Mystery Shall Be Unhappy, Chomsky's reference in his book Necessary Illusions, and Huxley of course in Brave New World Revisited. But the one that I think is most connected to von Neumann type game theory is the X Files third season finale, "Talitha Cumi," where Cancer Man and Jeremiah Smith square off. I think X files captures the postwar paranoia and secrecy well.

One last comment here on von Neumann and the fifties: if it is true that his influence lies heavily on modern economics and on modern computing, it is worth noting this influence includes a legacy thought system based on a game theory that may be toxic to any notion of cooperation among the human states/tribes for common survival.

PS most people read The Grand Inquisitor as a separate thought piece. In the original novel The Brothers Karamazov, the subsequent chapters more or less comprise "answers" to the questions about the existence of God and the nature of freedom and political control (the wiki article mentions this). What few recall is the chapter that precedes this one, which I was amazed and moved by when I first read the novel as a young man. It sets up a world in which all would be well, as long as one child could be tortured. This inclusion of torture (Dostoevski himself was tortured by the Czar's police as a dangerous liberal) I think is crucial to the argument.

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

EL wire (electroluminescent wire)

Tonight I ran at and then after dusk, the dark coming down fast and complete like the largest velvet curtain on a stage.

I wanted my terrier Cliff (or Cliftopher, as Bailey sometimes calls him) to see me and run to me in the dark and not get eaten by a coyote (him, but also me) and so I grabbed my purple EL wire (electroluminescent wire) and stuck one end in my pocket and wrapped it around my neck in coils (somehow I imagined the electrical version of those African necklaces that stack under the chin) and put the light on solid (not blink not strobe) and ran.

My relationship with cars and pedestrians was different; cars never didn't see me I believe, and ditto for those walking their dogs in the dark (and thus not scaring said dog walkers by rushing onto/by them in the dark while running). And when I looked sideways I saw the briefest reflection of my own light in my glasses, and also the tiny aura of light being cast by the torso-length strip of EL.

Of course Burning Man is some few days away, and suddenly I thought of that 40,000 metropolis which is not but which shall soon be, and the sheer amount of light people rock at dark (for very very good and utilitarian, as well as costume, reasons). Somehow if i can see you, and better yet, if I can see you and your color and wiring shapes suggest that you are not a threat and possibly an entertainment, this is more friendly making than if we are in dark places sliding by each other with that fear that clings to the unseen and unknown.

Lighting is one of those categories that is both utterly mundane (what style of light fixture should we get? you never want nice things! these steam punk lights are just what we need for the anteroom and the parlor!) and utterly, well, utterly nonmundane (imagine the changes in human beings when they could see after the sun went down, see in their homes and then on their streets; imagine the worship of light a la the Franciscans, the Impressionists, the great photographers). I imagined for a moment people filling in a third position at night; not known, and not invisible/threatening/unknown, and then...unknown but lit.

Of course using EL at night says a) you may be a burner, to those who know burners, and b) you are not operating by the usual rules of life after dark. Also, c) you may be in the circus, or a circus, and therefore something entertaining may happen. What else does it signify and what would it look like if people began to link up by lighting themselves? What would tribal lighting look like?

Finally, I had a vision of what my Burner jacket for this year should look like: EL wire on the back, in the shape of

@

I'm currently doing small amounts of research on what it might mean to wear a sign that indicates where so many things are at. And I'm curious to see what people might make of this mundane symbol when it is lit at night, hovering five feet off of the desert floor and moving.

So, the mundane cyborg of light, circulating in a simple technological loop but a more complex and complicated cultural loop.

Oh. And in case you needed to know, here are some of the names by which the @ goes:

apenstaartje - Dutch for "monkey's tail"

snabel - Danish for "elephant's trunk"

kissanhnta - Finnish for "cat's tail"

klammeraffe - German for "hanging monkey"

papaki - Greek for "little duck"

kukac - Hungarian for "worm"

dalphaengi - Korean for "snail"

grisehale - Norwegian for "pig's tail"

sobachka - Russian for "little dog"

The Wiki article has a huge list of such names, and points out that:

"On the final episode of the second series of BBC Radio 4 show The Museum of Curiosity, recorded in London on 19 May, 2009 and broadcast on 8 June, 2009, author Philip Pullman added the category of "things that were invented for one purpose, but are used for another" to the museum's collection. As an example, Pullman referred to @."

But what I was most intrigued by was the notion that this @ symbol, included on the 1885 American Underwood typewriter keyboard, had such an exciting second career as an email God (beginning in 1971, with programmer Ray Tomlinson as the man behind the symbol). The Wiki article argues that the @ is often perceived in other languages as denoting "The Internet", computerization, or modernization in general.

So I think writing the @ in EL is the way to begin conversations about cyborgs, the Internet, the modern, technology, and the nature of writing with light.

Altered Carbon and cyborg/s (as) literature

Richard Morgan's book Altered Carbon (2002) is the first book of a trilogy located on Earth (and elsewhere) in the 25th Century. Chris (Gray recommended it as a terrific sci fi book that includes a lot of cyborg references, so I'm about 175 pages into it. Here are a few observations, and a concluding reference to how I'm hoping to use novels as part of my work on cyborgs.

1. First of all, the premise of transferrable memories/identities is central to the book. The core of a person resides in their "cortical stack," and this can survive "death" of the current body (or "sleeve"). When someone dies, their stack is stored; in addition, when someone breaks the law, "prison" means more or less being out of sleeve circulation. So you can be stored for say 180 years. The book's first chapter (after a violent, death filled prologue), begins with the line "Coming back from the dead can be rough." I had to work to allow the book its initial tone, and not see instead the Austin Powers scene where he comes out of frozen storage with his giant mane of fake chest hair and goofy re-entry jokes ("I have no Inner Monologue!!"). But the novel does a good job of offering up both a realistic vision of humans inhabiting different bodies/selves, and a metaphor for how current technologies already seem to allow this morphing, shifting sense of self/selves.

2. I'm particularly aware of any hybrids that appear in novels about cyborgs, and one main hybrid here is that of the noir detective novel with the futuristic sci fi novel. Of course this is old hat since William Gibson, but what I'm fascinated by isn't the hybrid so much as how it inflects the view of technologies, and the various uses to which they are put. So when we ourselves begin to inhabit the main character and follow his thinking and experiences (rather as a sleeve, of course), we see through the eyes of the noir detective/man of thought as well as action. We are cynical about many of the uses of technology, and rightfully so; we assume that people are lying to us, or have their own agendas that are never fully clear, and that is also true of organizations: the United Nations Protectorate, the web of influence enjoyed by the wealthy, the police, the military, and the shadowy paramilitary group called the Envoy (the main character is/was a member).

It almost seems that the noir atmosphere and skin/sleeve is useful for looking at technology skeptically and with a eye to abuses and manipulation. The book's jacket blurbs "While divisions in race, religion and class still exist, advances in technology have redefined life itself." This noir frame allows these divisions to show the different ways technology works; also, just as with the original noir narratives, the protagonist (and by extension the reader following the protagonist) doesn't have a choice about following out the trail of injustice, horror, and all too human perversions that technology both promotes and alters in its own image. Torture can be virtual; sales blurbs can be broadcast directly into one's brain; and this allows the narrative to counter some of the other possible stories about futuristic technology: that it will somehow trump human drives for power, that it will be mostly positive, that it will reflect some dream of Progress.

This can also be a bit suffocating. There is this cynical and massively unjust world, and the reader of technology can only do her best to make her way through the mostly unjust uses of technologies, avoiding the mass media that is Bread and Circuses, and try to maintain something like a personal code of ethics.

3. One last observation: drugs. As in Gibson and many others novels by cyberpunks and the sci fi storytellers that followed, drugs are more integrated into daily life, but especially in the lives of those on the edges of society: not just the underclass, but hackers, private investigators/ex military tough guys (like Case in Neuromancer), assassins, prostitutes, etc.

In Altered Carbon, there are many references to neurachem, which appears to be a hybrid systems of drugs over which one has some control (so that the hero [cranks] "up the neurachem" in order to hear or react with superhuman or more than human ability. The training of say a Navy Seal, but merged with neural chemicals that augment this training; and this is somehow both stored in the cortical stack/core of a person and also does or does not appear in the sleeve.

This is a trope that appears over and over: the future hero is part ninja, but some of that ninja response is chemical. And this also transcends military or macho uses; in Altered Carbon, when the wife of the ultra rich meth (for Methuselah, i.e., a very wealthy person who has occupied many many sleeves, perhaps 250 years old) seduces the noir hero, her body has been altered to emit something called Merge Nine, an "empathin" which allows one to feel what the other body is feeling. So sex is a feedback look in which one's own arousal merges with and is multiplied by the arousal of the other. The description of this set of more or less cliched sex acts (pages 93-97) imagines that actual drugs can allow a literal empathy:

Above me I felt her mouth gasp open, and knew the empathin was working its way into my sleeve's brain, tripping dormant telepath instincts and sending out feelers for the intense aura of arousal that this woman was generating. Knew, as well, that she would be beginning to taste the flesh of her own breast in my mouth. Once triggered, the empathin rush was like a volleyed tennis ball, building intensity with every rebound from one inflamed sensorium to the other, until the merge reached a climax just short of unbearable.

Often the sex in cyborg novels is either dehumanized or mechanical; here, the description over several pages hovers between a paen to augmented sex and a sense that one must pay, in various ways, for using technologies to recreate empathy where it hasn't been (organically?) grown or developed.

4. Finally, reading this novel against several other cyborg novels such as George Alec Effinger's When Gravity Fails, Bruce Sterling's books Schismatrix and Distraction, and Gibson's Neuromancer, I find that I'm looking for categories and tropes that emerge. One key one: attempts to imagine a world in which technologies that would horrify or bewilder us are considered mundane.

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.