Penfield Mood Organ and Fukushima

1

I”ve been considering the machinery of emotion lately. Some of this came from rereading Philip K Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In that (admittedly grim, even for Dick) too near future look at San Francisco, the world has suffered a massive nuclear exchange, and many have left earth. Those who are left live in a world where radiation slowly poisons everyone, where animals are mostly extinct, and where the androids made for those who went into outer space sometimes come back. Of course many of you have seen Blade Runner, which elaborates some but not most of Dick’s plot and hardly any of his vicious satire.

Most people in the novel seem beaten down. Depressed. But there’s a machine – the Penfield mood organ, a machine for artificial brain stimulation – that you can use to feel differently. You can set the machine at night so that in the morning, you’ll feel like going to work; in fact, you are looking forward to it! There’s the setting for “businesslike professional attitude” and one for “awareness of the manifold possibilities open to me in the future.” There’s a setting for wanting to watch TV no matter what’s on; there’s a setting (#3) for wanting to use the mood organ. (For a longer post on the Penfield mood organ, Penfield himself, and cyborg mind control, see http://cybunny54.blogspot.com/2011/03/on-penfield-machines-and-cyborgs-1.html)

The wife of Rick Deckard (the main character, played by Harrison Ford in the film) is named Iran; she finds a way to outwit the Penfield and find a setting for six hours of self accusatory depression. Besides the obvious gender satire (guys are supposed to be upbeat, hey! Even in a vast irradiated wasteland! And women are not only moody and sad but somehow seek this out, invite it in…) the novel imagines humans trying to confront ecological and social collapse. As Iran speaks, this (utterly natural and appropriate) emotion of despair is interrupted by the TV:

Her voice had become sharp with overtones of bleakness as her soul congealed and she ceased to move, as the instinctive, omnipresent film of great weight, of an almost absolute inertia, settled over her.

He turned up the TV sound and the voice of Buster Friendly boomed out and filled the room. “—ho ho, folks. Time now for a brief note on today’s weather. The Mongoose satellite reports that fallout will be especially pronounced toward noon and will then taper off, so all of you folks who’ll be venturing out—“

Despair, false optimism, depression, escape. And later in the novel there are representations of religious awe and transcendent Empathy (often accessed, by the emotionall stunted Earth humans, using an empathy machine that allows one to “be” the Jesus character Mercer).

The one emotion that isn’t offered for dialing, or very prevalent in the novel? It’s the one we should feel, retroactively, toward those who steer us toward such a future.

Anger.

2

"History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of man." Blue Oyster Cult, Godzilla

So all of you folks who’ll be venturing out…here is a link to show the plume of radiation leaving Japan:

www.tinyurl.com/radcloud

See those numbers? No, they are cut off. And what do the colors mean? See that unnerving progress? Can you "read" what this is telling you?

It is a wild time. I talked with a friend who said she was going outside in the radioactive rain. The news is both announcing each new discovery of radiation from the plant, and each new reassurance that the amounts are miniscule. Both are of course correct: there are trace amounts of radiation that are not the stuff of running screaming from, and there are news moments when it seems as if the powers that be are making this stuff up. So days after the first Fukushima reactor failed, the Japanese government raised the legal limit of radiation considered safe. And the pronouncement of the “ area of concern” surrounding the plant was met almost immediately with Greenpeace reports that radiation levels outside that area were way beyond anyone’s notion of “within tolerances.”

For many reasons, I began reading more and more reports coming from the plant. I was in my misspent youth an antinuclear organizer, as many of you dear readers will know. But in addition to this long time engagement with the Terminator-like “industry that won’t die,” I am also writing on cyborgs, on human intermingling with technology and technoculture. And on cybernetics, the study of command and control in animals and machines. And on the ways that critical technologies – such as medical tech, power production, war technology, and so on – are narrated in fiction and in the media.

So of course my first take, as I look at the burning reactors and the horrific set of circumstances that led to the crippling of the plant, is: why? Why would the Japanese of all people take such a huge gamble on nuclear power, Atoms for Peace, the idiot brother of the atomic bombs that fell, with such horrifying and education results, on its soil and people?

John Feffer of World Beat (Tuesday, March 29, 2011Vol. 6, No. 13) addresses just this question. Outwardly, he argues, Japan appears orderly and stereotypically risk averse. Yet Japan has built 54 nuclear reactors on some of most seismically active tectonic plates in the world. And this bet was on the rise: the Japanese government was planning to move from 30%nuclear energy, to 40 percent by 2017 and 50 percent by 2030.

Now we are facing some of the same dilemmas as Japan did: a country facing dependence on oil and natural gas imports, for one. Making nuclear power one of the “alternative energy options” (as the industry and its political allies began asserting at the beginning of the Obama presidency) and claiming it as a safe alternative to fossil fuels (and thus carbon-footprint friendly) is what the US is doing now and what Japan has done.

Feffer puts several gambles together, to paint a picture in which the nuclear industry, Japanese military expansion and collusion with the US, and its bubble-that-burst economic greed of 25 years ago:

Of course, it's only…a sector of the society that constructs nuclear plants on active fault lines, builds up a powerful and potentially aggressive military machine in a region that is still deeply suspicious of how Japan uses its power, and deregulates the economy to create a kind of pachinko capitalism that rewards the few and impoverishes the many. In this sense, an oligarchy of gamblers holds sway over the majority of cautious Japanese.

The trouble with gambling is that when the players overplay their cards consistently, when the line between bluffing and lying is blurred, and when they do it with the collective finances of other people (ie Japanese citizens)…then we shouldn’t be surprised to find that the leades knew about most of the problems all along. Who is to blame?

Is it the gamblers at Tokyo Electric? In 2002, Tokyo Electric admitted to falsifying repair reports at its nuclear facilities for two decades. Then, in 2007, it confessed again that it continued to conceal what had been going on, including six emergency stoppages at the Dai-ichi nuclear power station in Fukushima and a seven-hour-long "critical" reaction at Unit 3, one of its six reactors. And this doesn’t even get into issues of the spent fuel rod vulernability, nuclear waste storage safety, or betting huge amounts of the Japanese energy production on plants that absolutely cannot be allowed to fail, and yet which cannot be made fail-proof.

Or is it the gamblers in the Japanese government, who “knowingly constructed structurally inadequate nuclear facilities. The world's largest nuclear facility, the Kashiwazaki Kariwa, sits on a fault line that generates three times the seismic activity it can withstand. Dai-ichi could withstand only a 5.7-meter tsunami, not the 7-meter wave that eventually overwhelmed it.” Should the governmental regulators have known that a 7 meter wave was possible or even likely? You’d like to think they thought that one through before building.

Whichever you pick (go ahead, pick ‘em both), you can see how keeping the real dangers of these plants secret for so many years might not lead to full disclosure of the threat now. And that is what has happened. There are workers who will probably die from their heroic efforts to prevent a worsening of radiation inside the reactors; there are children and elderly who will die from having had the bad luck to live too near the plants, even thosue outside the official “unsafe” zones; and there are people in other countries who will look up and wonder about the falling rain.

What happened in fact was that the Japanese health ministry responded to the worst nuclear power catastrophe since Chernobyl by…raising the exposure limits for teams of workers at the radiation- leaking plants. The legal limit previous was 100 millisieverts (mSv); workers on March 23 were laying cable to get powere into the Number 3 reactor’s turbine building when they were exposed to “between 170 millisieverts (mSv) and 180 mSv of radiation.” This is below the new limit of 250 mSv, which was raised to allow workers to remain in the buildings; this move was, according to Yukio Edano, the main government spokesperson, “was taken on the advice of experts.” (McCurry).

3

“All we have to fear is fear itself.” FDR

“A reading from the book of Punter, chapter four: all we have to fear, is Me.”

Firesign Theatre

Cyborg theory tells us that while we may want to focus on technologically tricked-out human bodies (such as, for example, humans in Rad suits tromping around radioactive pools in exploded nuclear facilities), there are other cyborg fish to fry. We are more like the Borg, tied to each other and to our multiple technological life support systems of power, water, and so on.

In the show, the Borg are surprisingly blasé about what would appear to us as threats. When an away team from the Enterprise boards the Borg vessel, the inhabitants walk right past them like zombies. It isn’t until the away team tries to interfere with the ship that the Borg slowly begin to move toward the threat.

Why is this? Well, I have a theory. The Borg are all listening to mainstream media from Japan and the United States, content conveniently provided by Borg-sized corporate entities and their political servants. What they are hearing is: the radiation is of no concern. It isn’t at high levels. These limits were over-careful to begin with. There are no similarities between the Japanese nuclear reactors and those in the United States.

Those weird headsets and eyepieces the Borg all sport? Direct feeds from Fox News, Tokyo Electric, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and nuclear industry lobbyists.

I’ll give an example of what I mean. When the nuclear crisis at Fukushima was a few days old, I found myself searching articles at the Christian Science Monitor, one of the more respected papers in the United States. The article itself, “Reports: Lax oversight, 'greed' preceded Japan nuclear crisis (March 16, 2011),” was quite good.

The author, Stephen Kurczy, builds a case that “both the United Nations' nuclear watchdog agency and the Japanese government failed to properly ensure the safety of the country's nuclear power industry.” Likening Fukushima to the BP disaster, he says the two show “how poor government oversight of an industry that allegedly cut corners to turn higher profits can spawn an environmental disaster.” Evidence includes General Electric’s containment vessel design, which they sold to the Japanese despite three decades old safety concerns. (here GE plays the role of BP). Kurcz also cites Russian nuclear accident specialist Iouli Andreev, who blames both private corporations and the IAEA for failing to learn from Chernobyl. He points out that after Chernobyl, the nuclear industry did everything they could to hid the event, to bury it. This is precisely what Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has done consistently, as recently as last June, when “a reactor at Fukushima I lost electricity and saw a dangerous drop in cooling water, Bloomberg reported.”

And while the IAEA, TEPCO, and the various multinational corporations involved with the Fukushima reactors are all complicit in the crisis, the supposed governmental regulators are themselves cozy with the nuclear industry, and government/industry partnership in nuclear is the norm. (The article points out that TEPCO and the Japanese government teamed up to successfully sell nuclear power plants to Vietnam. ) And international agencies like IAEA have little or no teeth and often promote nuclear corporate activity instead of regulating it.

Wow, I thought. Terrific article: hard hitting, critical of the entire set of nuclear actors and gamblers. And since – this was the 16^th – the crisis was being called “worse than Three Mile Island, “ I was attracted by the companion article touted in the sidebar as Three Mile Island, Fact and Myth.” Well, I thought, perfect; I’ll remind myself of the details of the TMI accident, and see where the similarities and differences are.

The article was written by A. David Rossin, former assistant secretary of energy for nuclear energy (1986-87), and dates back to 1989. 1989? WTF? But I read on, half hoping for a reasonable discussion. Nope.

Turns out the big issue at TMI wasn’t the threat of a core meltdown, or radiation leaks. It was the overreaction of the media, including CBS, and the overreaction of the Pennsylvania governor, who suggested that pregnant women and children be evacuated. They just didn’t have the understanding of the situation that experts, such as Harold Denton of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), had: there was no danger of a hydrogen bubble explosion. And now (that is, in 1989), the country is saddled with – get this – not dangerous nuclear plants, or with their fuel rods swimming in crowded pools, but with unwarranted NRC “emergency planning rules” for reactors. This included reactors being built at Shoreham and Seabrook. The real problem at TMI was alarmist reporting, leaders caving to political pressure to protect vulnerable citizens, and an unreasonable reliance on “local people” and not the designated government spokesperson. He cites a MIT report that analyzed coverage of TMI and found that “the coverage to have been relatively calm and generally factual until noon on Friday. But once the evacuation was announced, the emphasis turned to what local people were saying, worst-case scenarios, charges of cover-up, and visions of disasters. Commentary, much of it alarmist, took over from reporting.”

And so who really died? The poor plants, Shoreham and Seabrook. And what risk was covered up? “ The key questions of future risks from curtailing or giving up on nuclear power were hardly raised at all.”

This is the article that people will certainly go to, in order to understand the comparison with Three Mile Island. And with both too much information to absorb, and with the soothing sounds of “it’s all ok go back to sleep we have it under control” the individual cyborg citizens will return, zombie like, to their wired glass cocoons. Hey, check this out: "Godzilla" is trending on Twitter!

4

I could cite many more articles that kept asserting that things were under control in Japan, getting better, making progress…only to be swept away by the horrific unfolding of actual real events in Fukushima and the surrounding countryside. These articles implicitly and explicitly blame average people for being foolishly fearful of small amounts of radiation; one article even lampooned the average person’s usual source of knowledge about atomic radiation, pop culture. In the article “Nuclear radiation in pop culture: more giant lizards than real science,” the CSM connects the misinformation from popular films about nuclear radiation with the fearful responses to the Japanese nuclear crisis.

As examples the article cites Godzilla and THEM! (see my blog on this film), the Hulk and Spiderman. (Those of us in the comic book know would be able to add quite a few more comic heroes who got super by getting super irradiated). And now that we know that public knows little or nothing about actual radiation, it makes sense to interview someone like Mel Schiavelli, “president of Harrisburg University of Science and Technology in Pennsylvania, near the Three Mile Island power plant.” Yup, that’s where I’d go to get an impartial view. Sicne people don’t know facts, pop culture plays on this. “We are in a 24-hour news cycle now, and the media has to fill it with something, and fear helps do that,” he notes, adding that “nothing built by human beings will ever be 100 percent perfect.”

But, he adds, a better understanding of the science involved would help the public understand how to properly balance risks. “We are going to run out of oil someday,” he points out, “and then what?”

I guess we’ll learn to properly balance those risks he is talking about.

5

Ok I’ve got my Penfield Mood Organ version 2.0. I’m looking out my window at the air, thinking of how there is no such thing as safe levels of radiation, of how it accumulates, of how according to Harvey Wasserman, people will most certainly die, as did from TMI, and as many others died from radiation and then again from the coverups of their deaths and the causes of those deaths. I’m thinking of the spent fuel rods sitting in their crowded baths in San Luis Obispo, at the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, which is situated near a major earthquake fault. I’m thinking about the span between December 2009 to September 2010, when according to USA Today, “In at least 24 instances, U.S. nuclear power plants did not report equipment failures to the government.” The reason? The NRC explained it was just “poorly written rules” and that there are other rules "that effectively encompass reporting all defects" and so "plants are operating safely." Sound familiar? I’m thinking about the nuclear industry’s response to the Japanese crisis: the Nuclear Energy Institute responded to Fukashima by sending experts, by promising to investigate our own potential nuclear problems, right? Oh wait, no. They sent rafts of lobbyists to Washington, to brief hundreds of congressional staffer and hundreds of members of Congress in the first five days. For them, the real crisis is the growing movement to call for a moratorium on building nuclear power plants; that is a crisis they know how to address, with green power: $1.7 million for lobbying in just the last year. Along with the utilities and other pro nuclear groups, the nuclear power Borg spent “$54 million on lobbying last year and employed 12 former members of Congress as lobbyists, according to an analysis by The Sunlight Foundation, which tracks money in politics.”

And I’m thinking of President Hopebama, who has consistently supported nuclear plants despite their dangers and their nasty tendency to cost overruns, who spoke within days of the Japanese horror reassuring Americans that nuclear power was on the agenda, exactly parroting the industry’s main talking point: they will reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And so, as it becomes clear that no utility would ever build one of these things on their own in a “free market,” last month our President submitted in his 2012 budget a proposal to spend another $36 billion in federal loan guarantees for new nuclear plants.

I’m thinking of these things, and of what just happened in Japan, and why previous accidents happened. I’m thinking of the Gulf Spill, of day after day when it became abundantly clear that the cause was greed, short sightedness, lying, lack of any real regulation, day after day of watching BP try one strategy after another to fix the crippled technoscientific monster, and was reminded again and again of the same images of futility and failure as one after another the huge reactors at Fukushima failed and the responses were pitifully inadequate. As if Fukushima was really Godzilla.

But it isn’t Godzilla. It is the sum total of decisions made by some for all. It is the result of gamblers who are, let’s face it, suffering from an addiction. But they have my money, and my life, and the money and life of millions of their fellow citizens, stacked at the table. Fuck it: put it all on black.

I look out the window at the night sky, the same sky that cups our fragile globe, and I think of the new improved Penfield Mood Organ2.0

The newest setting?

Anger. Or more accurately, “Anger turned into effective political action.”

I’m pushing that button now.

Note: I will submit all the references for this essay soon. But I've got to sleep now. Goodnight and good luck...

The Gap

Kirkwood March 29, 2011

At about 3:15, I was flying down the bottom of 10 (well, really one of the runs: it felt like I was skiing from the very top of the mountain all the way down to the bottom, that big long bomber run you remember for a while). The snow up top was amazingly slow, given how steep the ledge was, and how steep the pitch just below The Wall. But then, about halfway down, I got the confidence to carve harder and faster, and so the run down to Off The Wall (the bar patio of choice, at the bottom of 5/6 lifts) was just pure fun and adrenaline. As were some other runs today: the ditch off of 11 again, the big ups and downs on those walls, and also every run on the groomed stuff off 11 and 5.

I skied down popped out of the skis and walked out onto the patio, which was literally baking in the sun. There are a bunch of tables and chairs, but I love the actual ski lift/bench at the back, so I plopped down there and gazed lazily at the scene: a black and white spaniel lapping water, a very cute girl saying the spaniel’s name over and over in a kind of annoying overly cute way, an easygoing table full of late 50 early 60 somethings, some party-people-looking dudes laughing and catching the large amount of rays falling on us. The mountain was still busy, the lifts not closing for 45 minutes or more; people coming in off the mountain, that look on their face: weather plus runs plus exhilaration plus blue sky = endorphins agogo.

A guy came up and sat next to me on the bench; his big old German shepherd ambled with him on leash, and sat in a dignified way beside him. Which made it all the more hilarious when a few minutes later he then tried to climb up between us on the bench. He didn’t make it, and his owner – John – who had been talking to him sotto voce th entire time, asked him what he thought he was doing. It’s just the kind of thing dog owners do, and I thought of my own dog at home, running with him in the sun behind cohousing…so there we were, two dog owners, and we struck up a conversation about…wait for it…dogs!

He mentioned right away that the dog had been despondent because the other dog in his life had recently died, or rather been put down. He said the disease and then said it was sort of like doggy aids, pretty grim attack on the immune system. From there we talked of less heavy things – aging, the way German Shepherds have been misbred – until the spaniel caught sight of the shepherd and wandered over to have a sniff and a looksee. John said “often it is little dogs that are the most aggressive” when the spaniel jumped back at the sudden turn of the shepherd’s large head. Over came the spaniel’s owner, and there we were, three dog owners at the top of the world, a bowl of blue overhead and the sun absolutely pouring down, everyone drinking beers and lazing and having that post ski moment. And all was right with the world, and God was on her throne.

I loved that the spaniel’s owner (a local I’d met last time I was up here, on a wild night at the Tower Bar) was worried that when he took a run, someone might run off with his dog. “She’s my kid, she’s my girlfriend right now, I don’t have a girlfriend, but I’ve got her, she never complains and loves me.” And I heard all the sweetness there and the irony too of course, but the love of the animal shining through.

Up in the sky a contrail going straight up. Like someone drawing on the sky. The plan just hauled up and up, and the contrail seemed to come right out of the top of a big old magnificent pine up on the slope.

Well we were a little cluster and so approachable and a guy came up looking for sunscreen (a little after the fact as both of us laughed at) and the spaniel guy clued him in to where you could get sunscreen at the ski shop. We were having that kind of talk that you don’t have as much anymore; people outside, with or without dogs, but not going anywhere for the moment, no one rushing off or giving the impression of being busy busy busy. I almost heard us lapse into southern drawls.

Finally the spaniel and owner ambled off. John and I talked and the talk came round to his owning a place up there, and his daughter 13 on the Kirkwood ski team, and how he’d retired and right after that came up to ski and tore the crap out of his ACL. But – he rehabbed, and now he was biking hard, and feeling great; he’d skied on the ACL with no problems. I thought about my knee and about rehab and ultimate and how the slow process now has the patina of a religious pilgrimage to the Land of Not Having and then Regaining A Knee. We sat and his words came into me and were productive that way, making a deeper space internally for me, while also letting him lay out the story for himself as well as me: the tear, the frustration (not only no skiing but no biking, no way to do That Sport You Really Love And Can’t Do Without).

And I heard about his other dog, the smartest one he ever had, and how when they’d put the dog down his wife and his daughter had a rough time, a really rough time, and how the Shepherd had too, all of his family mourning the animal that they loved and that clearly was part of them. And how his wife got ill and they sold their business in the Bay Area and moved up to Kirkwood to live. I asked how that was for the teen (not perfect but she was managing) and the wife. And he told me all the things she loved about the area, the wildflowers, the birds, hiking around, finding evidence of settlers and wagon trains and early inhabitants of the lake below the mountain. And I could here the love in his voice, shining through, a thing so lovely at the time that I marveled at it.

We talked for a while, a slow long while, and then he left for home and I went to fetch my snow boots, change, and head to the General Store for the four keys to happiness for today: whole milk (for coffee and hot chocolate and mochas), Tylenol (I’d run out of Magic Pills for the potential headache and body ache of skiing), Green & Black Organic 67% Dark Chocolate infused with Arabica coffee, and a big 24 ounce Pepsi (I blame Pete for bringing Cokes, which I respond to more or less the way Pavlov’s dogs responded to his whistle). Putting on my boots meant taking off the heavy ski boots, which is always a small but important pleasure of skiing; today however for whatever reason (the slow easy burn of the afternoon, the promise of a good meal and a cold beer in my future, the knowledge that I was no longer a Lift 10 virgin) each boot slid off and my feet emerged and this felt way better, way more delicious and pleasurable, than would seem possible. In the midst of boot ecstasy, I looked up to see a guy looking at me, so we started talking. Today was his first day of sking after a bad injury. Knee. I started to think perhaps the universe was telling me something, not necessarily predicting a knee injury, but underlining the Jesus like parable of the old guy and the slope. How’d you do it I asked? And of course it wasn’t skiing; in fact, he fiftied it. I explained: fiftying it means you injured it not really doing anything at all. Fortying it means you were doing something you always do and this time you sprained your ankle or twisted your back seemingly from nothing. He laughed and said he was doing some contractor work, plumbing and kneeling in a bathtub, and he got up. Bang. Knee made a bad noise. Surgery. And – voila – today, after having had surgery in frickin’ January, he was back, skiing The Wall twice and skiing Palisades and everything off Six. And that look on his face, that one, I totally understood, because that was my face too: trashed knee for me since August, a long slow rehab with plenty of worry and no ultimate and skiing coming up. September, October, November and the knee was still not right, even though I was praying to the rehab gods and making the Statiions of the Rehab Cross and being a very good patient.

And now here we were, both of us trading that story that includes months of material in a few sentences, but which each of us is the perfect audience for.

Boot on. Still a slight buzz from the luxury of putting on snow boots instead of walking the 250 yards home to Timber Ridge in ski boots. The sun seemed improbably high in the sky. All the concepts from the books I’ve been reading were percolating, my brain delighting in the pok pok of the process as a part of my mind cycled through topics for writing today, tonight, tomorrow, the next month: Hamlet’s Blackberry, Distraction, Computationalism and neoliberalism, the Mundane Cyborg and the Fukayama decidedly not mundane nuclear crisis. And one other idea: the gap.

I want to leave you with this idea, and hope that you consider it as a strategy for having slower, deeper days. The very shortened version of the gap is: in his book Hamlet’s Blackberry, William Powers remarks on a phone call to his mom. He’s late, she’s cooking dinner, he pulls out his phone. When he hits her speed dial number up pops a picture of her, one that – as he looks at it – he realizes he really likes. One that captures something essential and lovely about his mother. They have what he calls their very typical I’m late conversation, “it’s Kabuki now,” and then she says she’ll hold dinner. And then they sign off. And:

“I take the phone from my ear, glance again at the photo, then hit “END” and watch it disappear. Driving along, I feel an unexpected surge of emotion. I’m thinking about how fun it always is to spend time with my mother, how lucky I was to be born to such a warm, companionable person…As the minutes pass and I drive along, these thoughts about my mother flow into new ones…For a while, the car is a floating cloud of filial affection and, well, joy. It’s extraordinary, this feeling of time out of time. Everything dreary and confusing about my quotidian life has dropped away. I’m not rushed, cornered, inadequate creature I often feel like. I’m absorbed in these memories which seem to come from a place both beyond me and deep inside me, as if far and near, outward and inward, have come together in a new harmony.”

Now his book is about how cell phones and other digital devices have had a profound effect on us; how we have become busy busy busy, always connected and always distracted, disconnected from our internal worlds, the worlds of depth, lost in a sea of outside and external stimulation. Yet here is a wonderful mment where the phone allowed this powerful connection to happen. How, he asks,did it do that?

And his answer, a few pages later, is great. In between, he goes into a long side discussion of cell phones, of overhyped Steve Jobs talks and the iPhone ballerina who twitters and blogs behind the curtain during performances. But at the end of the day, what made the cell phone experience profound was the gap:

“…the real magic of these tools, the catalyst that transforms them from utilitarian devices into instruments of creativity, depth, and transcendence, lies in the gap that occurred between my phone call to Mom and the powerful experience that followed, That gap was the linchpin, the catalyst. It allows me to take a run of the mill outward experience and go inward. It is the same for every kind of digital task. If you pile them on so fast that screen life becomes a blur and there are no gaps in your connectedness, you never get to that place where the most valuable benefits are. We’re eliminating gaps when we should be creating them.”

Today after skiing and before shopping and writing (writing at least partly on cell phones, distraction, and cyborg competences in using prosthetics), I had that gap. It wasn’t a phone call; rather it was an afternoon of skiing by myself, often in a blur of turns and physical exertion. And perhaps you, dear reader, can fill in a gap of your own, one that allowed you to access that Arcadian space, which exists between phone calls, between busyness at work and busyness not at work.

Happy gapping!

Cyborg Bees 2

My last post got me thinking about Borg bees. After all, if you can introduce liquid nitrogen into a hive, and then select for the colonies that clean up corpses quickly, you can (apparently) help bees defeat an enemy that seems every bit as nasty as the Borg. The varroa are mites that lay eggs inside bee cells and drink bee blood. Even the borg more or less assimilated in nice clean craters, none of this vampiric horror genre for them. Would bees ultimately survive the varroa? Are you willing to bet the ranch (in this case, the things bees do that allows for things like plants, or ranches for that matter) that they would? This is the kind of cyborg gambit that is more and more a staple not only of sci fi but of responses to emergent problems in plant and animal species.

And if you can create another kind of cyborg bee, one with a radio transmitter backpack, then you can track them. In the study I cited, “Large-Range Movements of Neotropical Orchid Bees Observed via Radio Telemetry,” 16 neotropical orchid bees outfitted with transmitters were tracked. Why do this? The reasons are numerous:

1. Bees are arguably the most important pollinating groups for flowering plants.

2. Radio telemetry overcomes previous problems with tracking such bees.

3. Accurate tracking may help scientists “make testable predictions concerning mutualisms, bee biology and parasitism, and the remarkably rapid radiation of angiosperms.”

4. Bees are now seen as doing ecological work (the article calls this “insect ecosystem service”). Because this work is threatened by human interference, we need to document the services and their importance, as well as the places we can address human and other threats to bees as service workers.

I was a little stunned, reading this article, to discover the number of insects that have been tracked using radio telemetry: “carpenter bees, beetles, Mormon crickets, and migrating dragonflies.”

And I found the branching series of articles cited by this one to be increasingly alarming about bee population declines. One, by Cameron et al, “Patterns of widespread decline in North American bumble bees,” found that the “relative abundances of four species have declined by up to 96% and that their surveyed geographic ranges have contracted by 23–87%, some within the last 20 y. We also show that declining populations have significantly higher infection levels of the microsporidian pathogen Nosema bombi and lower genetic diversity compared with co-occurring populations of the stable (nondeclining) species. Higher pathogen prevalence and reduced genetic diversity are, thus, realistic predictors of these alarming patterns of decline in North America, although cause and effect remain uncertain.”

As I read on, I was amazed to see that the bees themselves only weighed a few times what the transmitters weighed, and so the results obviously are possibly compromised by this (would the bees have travelled farther or differently absent their heavy insect High School with textbooks backpacks?). And once again I was reminded that science isn’t always using rare materials; here the cyborg bees

were fitted with small (300mg) radio transmitters (Sparrow Systems, Fisher, IL, 2 radio pulses per second, 378 MHz, antenna length 42mm) at the dorsal thorax using minute amounts of a combination of eyelash adhesive (Andrea glue, American International Industries, Commerce, CA) and superglue (Krazy Glue, Elmers, OH).

Yup, crazy glue and eyelash adhesive. And off they flew, one right across the water to the Panama Canal for a daycation before returning to his normal ‘home’ range.

The third kind of cyborg bee doesn’t wear a backpack, but will be responsible for their contents. An article at Ghacks.com reports that a company called Insentinel is training honeybees to sniff tiny concentrations of suspicious chemicals.

In each case, the bee is somehow altered for some reason, using technologies that range from clearly insect-machine to a less machinic, more “shaper” use of technology (selecting, training, etc). And in each article there is both a “gee whiz” element, and a notion of taking an individual body or hive and altering it for human purposes. However, if we move to a slightly larger cyborg unit,we can see that the bees are part of a huge and complex cybernetic system of flowering plants, declining bee populations, human factors such as environmental toxins and even (purportedly) cell phone/Wifi interference.

This move from the individual cyborg bee to the cyborg problems faced by bees, whether Borged or not, is often what is missing from the popular media representations of bugs with attachments (like the military’s experiments in flying beetles as recon cyborgs) . The larger context s are often not seen as examples of a cyborg society, in which the bee is always/already technologically affected whether or not a radio is superglued on its back.

And the larger context is grim. Americans depend on honeybees from California and Florida; according to popular articles like ABC news’ “Honeybees Dying: Scientists Wonder Why, and Worry About Food Supply,” about a third of our food depends on bee pollination. [http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/honey-bees-dying-scientists-suspect-pesticides-disease-worry/story?id=10191391&page=2].

But in 2009 “almost 29 percent of the bee colonies in the United States collapsed, say scientists who surveyed commercial beekeepers and brokers. That's slightly less than the 36 percent loss in 2008 and the 32 percent counted in 2007, but an informal survey just finished suggests that the die-off continues.” And of course the causes are very difficult to track, and may be multiple. The effects are easier: more bees dying, more expense in restocking bee numbers by beekeepers, resulting in more expensive almonds, apples, soybeans, strawberries. And animals feed on pollinated crops, so there is a multiplier effect on costs there as well.

So the bees are part of a complex that includes natural elements (mites, viruses, funguses) and potentially human/technological ones (pesticides and other toxins; electromagnetic radiation from cell phones). And they are undervalued workers in a ecological service economy that includes many many insects. A study by Christopher Mullin of Penn State found a wide variety of pesticides in hives, and though no one toxin seemed concentrated enough to be lethal, the fact that there were 98 pesticides and metabolites is obviously of concern.

At the end of the ABC article on honeybees, a beekeeper refers to bee population collapses in Europe and India. He is quoted as saying,

"In many ways we view honeybees as an indicator species," like the proverbial canary in the coal mine, he said. "We don't know what's going on. And we all share the same earth.

As we use more and more cyborgian methods to investigate bees and even intervene to help them survive, I can’t help see the irony of the situation: over the course of the Industrial and post – Industrial revolutions, we’ve created a cyborg society that is woefully ignorant about the value of the damage we do to the organic half of the cyborg society equation. And the massive cyborg bodies we’ve built, Borg-like constructions called transnational corporations, continue to chew up resources and ignore feedback loops from a wide range of systems in danger of collapse.