Iron Man 2 as a cyborg fable

Last night I worked with my son on an exam about World War 1 for quite a long time. We went over the Mandate system, reparations, the War Guilt Clause, the Schlieffen Plan. So when our neighbor asked if we wanted to watch Iron Man 2, we took a welcome break, threw the textbook down, and went to watch Robert Downey Jr. test his blood toxicity for almost the entire movie. Since most of the people watching knew I write about cyborgs, I asked the assembled – two parents, three teenage boys – to be on the lookout for cyborg themes. My son replied “yeah we’ll be sure to watch for the way exoskeletons make us stronger.”

First of all, it is sort of funny that my 15 year old knows the word exoskeleton, and probably not from me. Second…well, it is interesting, isn’t it, that Iron Man 1 & 2 are both kinds of fables about technology, the kinds of exoskeletons we don, and the purposes for them? At one point before a Senate committee, the sleazy senator played by Gary Shandling demands that Tony Stark give his weapon-cyborg system to the US military. And Stark replies that it isn’t a weapons system, it is a kind of prosthetic. He is making a cyborg argument, and only half of it; of course it CAN be a weapon system. In fact, when the action scenes start, a lot of the subtlety (well what passes for subtle in a blockbuster) of the film’s anti-militarist, anti-proliferation stance is lost. We just want to see battles between new kinds of superheros in flying armor. Or at least the 15 year olds seem to take this position.

So it was with interest that I came across the article “When Power Armor Makes You a Cyborg.” [http://io9.com/5743585/when-power-armor-makes-you-a-cyborg], which asks the question “But what happens when the armor changes you?” The article samples some film and a lot of gaming cyborgs, and concludes – as I do – that these technologies are not simply “tools” to be used by good guys for good and bad guys for bad. Instead, the armor or exoskeleton effects the user’s personality. Consider how people change when they get behind the wheel of a car, especially certain cars (SUVs, offroaders, high performance cars). But the article focuses on people who become cyborgs WHEN they put on their power armor prosthetics. So Darth Vader doesn’t count (already was a cyborg).

The article focuses on Iron Man the comic hero, not the film hero:

You could definitely argue that Tony Stark becomes a cyborg the moment he needs his arc reactor in his chest to keep his heart beating. But several times in the comics, Tony's gone a lot further towards cyborg-hood. In particular, in one storyline, Tony gets injected with Extremis, a techno-organic virus that rebuilds Tony's body — and gives the ability to link to any computer on Earth. With his upgraded technology, Tony has the Iron Man armor inside his body, until nanobots bring it out of him.

In the comic and in the film, Tony Stark begins as a selfish narcissistic playboy, and ends up “more” human than he was (though still with flaws like alcoholism). The technology forces him to realize his vulnerability (this is particularly true in the film) and that of others who may need what his now-necessary cyborg prosthesis can deliver. Hence the way the armor comes "inside."

In contrast, the anime and manga series Evangelion feature a number of Iron Man-like suits, called mecha or gundam. This is a cyborg post-apocalyptic action story that features hostile space beings called Angels, and a paramilitary organization called Nerv which fights them. Evangelions are giant mecha or cyborg suits worn by teenage pilots, “plain human kids,” from the Nerv, including the hero, Shinji Ikari.

Unlike Iron Man, the Evangelions or EVAs highlight the neurological link that the human teens have with their cybernetic prostheses. This constant linkage with the prosthetic has implications:

in the second [Evangelion] movie…we're told over and over again that if Shinji Ikari and the other pilots descend too deep inside an EVA, they will change and become something no longer human. And this keeps happening, with the pilots evolving into something post-human in the process.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Ever since the earliest cyborg stories like No Woman Born, the addition of a cyborg shell or a new metal/cybernetic body chances the human. Something metal affects the female protagonist of No Woman Born, and she no longer has prototypical 1940s “female” emotions. Yet this was seen (at least in one reading of the story) as a potentially positive thing for the woman who had been burned horribly in a fire, and who before that had been more or less controlled by her two male handlers (husband, manager).

In the anime series of Evangelion, the goal is (according to the io9 website) Shinji’s goal is “to merge with his EVA,” after which "Shinji's mind will evolve beyond individuality in its merge with his EVA." This notion of merging with the prosthetic can also be seen in the film and manga Ghost in the Shell, with its ongoing story of how the cyborg body of Major Motoko Kusanagi seems to flatten her emotions while enabling her to perform superhuman bionic acts. And in the end of Ghost in the Shell, Motoko merges with a bodiless AI called the Puppetmaster, and responds to a call from a ghost-like being that inhabits the entire Internet and offers Motoko new powers and transcendent knowledge. Because she is cyborg and not simply human, this appeals to her, as a logical extension of what she already feels.

In Iron Man 2, the arc reactor that powers Tony Stark and keeps him alive is also poisoning his blood with its metal, Palladium. Of course, the technophilic film shows Tony inventing a new element that allows him to survive and keep his cyborg powers. But the notion that our prosthetics infect us, one way or the other, and lead us past a particular notion of “human,” is found in most cyborg stories.

Let’s end with this: unaugmented humans are, themselves, poisoned with elements of their (prosthetic) identities. They are not inevitably more capable of emotion, or better. In some ways cyborg stories, and their cyborg protagonists, make this poison visible.

My friend Pax's blog

I've been reading my friend Pax's blog "your passport to complaining." (Find it at http://paxus.wordpress.com/). Pax and I are old friends, and have both been anti-nuclear activists. So it is with great interest that I am reading his nuclear blogs, and wanted to share a few of the highlights.

First is his concept of being "information rich." When Pax was organizing in the Czech Republic against Brno and other reactors, he needed to be able to compress arguments because the translators were going to spend twice that long in taking his words and making them Czech-friendly.

Second is the notion, possibly obvious but often not acted upon, that "The media people always come with a story, they have written at least part of the story before they arrive. We are supposed to prove that some thesis of the story is write." In Pax's case the media story is that "the tsunami-earthquake of 3/11 was as transformative event for Japan as 9/11 was for the US." The role of a good information rich media wrangler is to challenge this story enough to make your own points dramatic, and to avoid being made part of a packaged story that contains and domesticates whatever you say, including radical challenges to said story. So Pax's line is that whereas 9/11 "permitted the civil and legal rights of many US Americans and even more internationals to be violated," he hopes 3/11 will help the Japanese people to act boldly to get rid of toxic nuclear power, as the Germans have. Here the information rich add-on (did the media get how huge the German and Swiss moves to get rid of nukes are?) tilts the story on its ear. Wait - are nations actually doing something based on Fukushima?

The Swiss and German stories are to say the least underreported in the mainstream/corporate US press. And at the end of the day, coherent stories and not overly listy arguments are more likely to be successful in getting a wide range of people to begin rethinking how we get energy. The Swiss phase out of nuclear is quite slow (2034) but the halt of new plants in two countries that are seen as technology-savvy is huge. If they imagine it can be done without nukes, well, maybe there is something to this notion. And it provides a counterweight to the huge propaganda push to see nukes as carbon-friendly alternatives to dirty coal and the awful natural gas options.

So it is important to be information rich, to be constantly updated and do your homework (when I was at Stanford, as activists we always tried to do our homework, to really educate ourselves not just with antinuclear facts but also counterarguments, and to have every person involved as aware as possible). But it is also HUGELY important to have a coherent story. This is why ever nuclear story is a story about coal. About global warming. About consumption. About peak oil. About governments that govern in the name of corporate profits, and about moving those governments toward governing for survival.

Pax says as much in a blog on German responses to nuclear power: "Nuclear power only survives thru a collection of interlinked paradoxes: The denial of the link between civil and military nuclear programs. “Confidence” that high level waste can be managed, when ever nation has failed for decades. Claims that new reactors are economic or even will be “too cheap to meter” while it is really “too expensive to matter.”

These paradoxes don't stand up very well to scrutiny, which is why it is so valuable to keep shining a light into these dark places.

One last point: Pax lays out the German commission's findings on the future of nukes:

1) The 8 closed reactors will remain closed

2) The 9 younger reactors will be closed by 2022

3) Since civil and military nukes cant be separated, they are calling fro the reform of the IAEA

4) Waste storage locations more than Gorleben need to be located and waste must be retrievable.

[Here is the Greenpeace full press release]

Pax's point isn't simply that this supports anti-nuclear positions, but that before Fukushima this policy would have been UNTHINKABLE except for...wait for it...radical anti-nuclear activists. Second, his language here is terrific: "This is Fukushima’s very expensive silver lining. While closing the reactors will grab the headlines, it is points 3 and 4 which dare to touch key nuclear paradoxes that are especially important."

He then lays out the problem of having the UN's nuclear watchdog IAEA caught between supposedly promoting "safe" nuclear power and on the other hand preventing proliferation of nuclear weapons. Except for China, all the nuclear states got weapons from reactor technology: India, Pakistan, Israel, South Africa. So when you see who wants to sell reactors to Iran, you need to see that they are selling the ticket to the nuclear weapons club. PS guess who was selling nuclear reactor technology to Vietnam? Wait for it....TEPCO. In a partnership with the Japanese government.

So the information is rich, but it usually is not valuable unless places in a story, in this case, a story about the paradoxes of nuclear energy. And...the story gets more complex as it winds outward (nukes, to energy in general, to use of energy, to obstacles in front of any solution to energy issues, to immense difficulty in getting political unity to do anything) the story has to stay coherent, clear and simple enough to convince.

Can we do it? My friend Chris, at the end of a lot of reading on evolutionary psychology, has come to the conclusion that we are, in the end, crazy monkeys. I think we need to see, really see, how bad things can get. And, like, evolve. Or evolution will move on without us.

William Gibson, Dr. Satan, and cyborgs

I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of humans and technology, and whether novels – particularly cyborg novels, or novels that emphasize human-machine symbiosis and integration – are useful for predicting the future.

One thing struck me: a lot of the early cyborg fiction emphasizes physical invasion. The early Clynes astronauts surgically remade beyond what is recognizably human, the similar cuttings and pastings of human and monstrous in Cyborg, the 6 Million Dollar Man, RoboCop, Man Plus…all these have a lot of surgery in them. And for that matter, so do may of the cyborgs in William Gibson’s novels.

I found Gibson’s one piece of writing specifically on cyborgs at:

http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/archive/2003_01_28_archive.asp. It is called “In the Visegrips of Dr. Satan (with Vannevar Bush) and it is (like Gibson’s other nonfiction work) clever, funny, and insightful. (I still love his piece “Disneyland with a Death Penalty’ about Singapore).

Gibson gave the talk at the 2002 Vancouver Art Gallery show on cyborgs called The Uncanny. His main points:

1. We often get things wrong. So in the shows like the1940 Republic serial called THE MYSTERIOUS DR. SATAN, there are proto-cyborgian robots who are controlled by Dr. Satan’s remote control giant knife switch. Gibson watched it in the early 1950s as a kid, and so was about to learn about “the electronic brain,” but most postwar sci fi was about the rocket ship and not the electronic brain.

2. Second, Gibson talks about “Steam Engine Time”: “The observable fact that steam, contained, exerts force, has been around since the first lid rattled as the soup came to a boil. The ancient Greeks built toy steam engines that whirled brass globes. But you won’t get a locomotive ‘til it’s Steam Engine Time.” Ditto with an electronic brain; you could maybe put it in a factory to make stuff, but you wouldn’t connect it to a typewriter and a TV (like the one at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York). So the electronic brain in a robot, robots in general, and space ships didn’t seem to be where the interesting work lay. It makes you wonder: what aren’t we able to see? What about our time isn’t steam engine time yet, for some ensemble of technologies?

3. Instead for Gibson, the sci fi of the 60s was interesting because it involved the politics of perception, which he connects in retrospect to various evolving ideas of the cyborg. I think he is thinking of books like The Ship Who Sang (with a human mind embedded in a rocket ship). The line I most like about this is: “There’s a species of literalism in our civilization that tends to infect science fiction as well: it’s easier to depict the union of human and machine literally, close-up on the cranial jack please, than to describe the true and daily and largely invisible nature of an all-encompassing embrace.” This is what I am onto about the mundane nature of so much “cyborg” technology and evolution.

4. And so the real cyborg, for Gibson, isn’t the organic being with a positronic brain, or Arnold, or any of that. Not even the cyborgs in his own novels. Instead, he makes the move that Chris Gray has made about the meta-cyborg:

“The real cyborg, cybernetic organism in the broader sense, had been busy arriving as I watched DR. SATAN on that wooden television in 1952. I was becoming a part of something, in the act of watching that screen. We all were. We are today. The human species was already in process of growing itself an extended communal nervous system, then, and was doing things with it that had previously been impossible: viewing things at a distance, viewing things that had happened in the past, watching dead men talk and hearing their words. What had been absolute limits of the experiential world had in a very real and literal way been profoundly and amazingly altered, extended, changed. And would continue to be. And the real marvel of this was how utterly we took it all for granted…The world’s cyborg was an extended human nervous system: film, radio, broadcast television, and a shift in perception so profound that I believe we’re yet to understand it. Watching television, we each became aspects of an electronic brain. We became augmented.

5. So why don’t we see this? Why don’t we see that we already were linked into networks of extended nervous systems before the full development of the Internet that sealed, or is sealing the deal? Because “We are already the Borg, but we seem to need myth to bring us to that knowledge.” And the myth is the set of cyborg narratives that help us bring this largel invisible phenomenon into focus.

6. And so finally, past rocket ships and a world of robots (for whom we have had all these sci fi explorations of ethics and so on), past the humanoid cyborg figures that we seem to need but which are in their own way versions of those Dr Satan robots…we have a world where the reality of the cyborg is much richer and less figurally clear than we imagine:

“Interface evolves toward transparency. The one you have to devote the least conscious effort to, survives, prospers. This is true for interface hardware as well, so that the cranial jacks and brain inserts and bolts in the neck, all the transitional sci-fi hardware of the sci-fi cyborg, already looks slightly quaint. The real cyborg, the global organism, is so splendidly invasive that these things already seem medieval. They fascinate, much as torture instruments do, or reveal erotic possibilities to the adventurous, or beckon as stages or canvasses for the artist, but I doubt that very many of us will ever go there. The real cyborg will be deeper and more subtle and exist increasingly at the particle level, in a humanity where unaugmented reality will eventually be a hypothetical construct, something we can only try, with great difficulty, to imagine -- as we might try, today, to imagine a world without electronic media.”

Gibson’s piece gets at the limits of so many popular culture images of “the” cyborg, and allows us to move past the necessary but not sufficient myths about human-machine interfaces. It allows us to imagine the whole “Drone Wars” scenario playing out in Afghanistan and Israel and elsewhere as a cyborg narrative; it lets us also predict that many of the ways we figure (or represent, or embed into a tellable tale) “the” cyborg will be plain wrong. And that the “steam engine time” for organic-machine hybrids of the future may well move beyond humans to insects, plants (GMOs, pharming), and entire biospheres (geoengineering, in all its superscary Big Tech gory glory).

Freedom and Discipline

When I was a young lad of 20 I first read Alfred North Whitehead. I read Science and the Modern World; Process and Reality; and The Aims of Education, a collection of Whitehead's lectures to Cambridge and Harvard students between the years 1912 and 1928. At the time I adored Science and the Modern World for its clarity and the sense of a new kind of history, one that integrated science and technology into that other history of wars, great men, and empires. And I loved the essay from Aims entitled "The Rhythmic Claims of Freedom and Discipline." If I were to skip the complicated and abstract way Whitehead gets from his philosophy of reality...wait let's just try out one idea. Whitehead is trying to speak of value. He says that "'Value' is the word I use for the intrinsic reality of an event." (Science in the Modern World, 93). And for White head an event is the fundamental datum of reality (Mellert). Mellert goes on to say:

Actual entities can best be understood as "drops of experience" (PR, 23) in space-time. They are both the subject that grasps other experiences and the new reality constituted by those experiences. Whitehead introduces the term "prehension" to illustrate this dual idea. The word "prehension" is related to the more traditional word "apprehension." Both are from the Latin "to take." But whereas the latter implies a subject taking hold of an object, Whitehead's term attempts to transcend this subject-object distinction. It implies a subject taking account of an object in a way that makes the latter a constitutive element of the subject as subject. It is a way of suggesting a real relatedness of subject to object, not just a relation of reason.

This is a complex way of saying that education, or the "real" education most professors and some students idealize and quest for, must somehow incorporate older notions of wisdom, notions of integrating the drops of experience into the making, literally, of oneself and the way one perceives the world. Thus, freedom is the positive term for bringing new ideas and senses of things in, prehending the drops of experience and allowing a new term or structure in. And Discipline is the negative term; it allows us to make de-cisions, from the root for cutting (cision, as in incision). Thus we are always cutting (though Whitehead said we can hold this cutting as a reminder of what has been not included) and always including, and these two processes need each other in order for us to learn anything, but especially to learn to learn.

One last thing. Whitehead said that all learning must begin with a stage of Romance. We are excited by what we are learning, we find pleasure in what we are finding out. (In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the eponymous teacher distinguised e-ducation, out of I take with in-struction, into I thrust). Education involves a romance that what we are learning may be said to be already inside us, in our capacity for learning. Yet the freedom of Romance also includes the de-cision to focus on this and not those areas of learning.

After Romance comes the stage of Precision. And yet this stage also depends on Freedom: the discipline we seek is in some ways self-discipline,and the way we learn self discipline is to exercise it in a condition of freedom, to see why it is valuable and where.

Finally we move from Precision to the stage of Generalization. Here we move from knowing one or two things more or less precisely, to applying our e-ducation to a wider world that includes our everyday actions and speech acts:

"After all," Whitehead writes, "the whole affair is merely a preparation for battling with the immediate experiences of life, a preparation by which to qualify each immediate moment with relevant ideas and appropriate actions. An education which does not begin by evoking initiative and end by encouraging it must be wrong." (Aims of Education, 37).

If I think about it, this rubric works nicely for the teaching of writing. At the beginning is both a Romance of freedom (as the student brainstorms, casts about for likely topics, examples, stories, arguments). But this Freedom is limited by the need for de-cision of a specific topic and specific points. Next we begin to learn precision with writing (and this is what gets lost so much when students make only so much progress and then write no more in college) and to make stronger arguments and write stronger, more coherent and varied types of essays. Finally we imagine that the habits of thought, of critical ability and the need for examples and support of points and imagination, all can and hopefully are generalized to nonwriting events, to the Big World out there beyond the writing classroom.

I began this thinking I would write about the way Whitehead's claims for freedom and discipline along a process of education mirror my own sense that our lives right now are more centrifugal than centripedal. And that these categories mirror those of reading theory, Wolfgang Iser's claim that reading moves back and forth for comprehension between a "wandering viewpoint" that moves off the page to bring in content from outside the text (extreme reactions, connections with other texts or events, emotional responses, associations) and "consistency building" (the way a reader keeps comparing what she is reading now with what has gone before, to continually recreate a consistent version of what one is reading,whether a narrative or an argument).

The results of educations that veer too far from the rhythmic claims of freedom and discipline, and that neglect an initial sense of Romance or pathos (why should I care about this?) are likely to be the kind of education provided by No Child Left Untested. Whitehead's aim was to attack "dead knowledge," and I believe that in his complex philosophical term-heavy way, he was trying to imagine what live knowledge, knowledge held by the living for the purposes of living, would look like.

I'm just getting to the point in my teaching sabbatical where this question becomes interesting to me again. Romantic, even.

See Mellert, Robert B. "Searching for the Foundations of Whitehead's Philosophy of Education."http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Educ/EducMell.htm

Rhetoric and Science Fiction

Just finished watching the first two episodes of Firefly again. When I first saw it, I was completely captivated by the notion that we could terraform large numbers of planets, and yet not colonize them in the exact same ways. So much representation of the future is as if Starbucks were a space corporation: most high tech futures are wildly uniform, with shiny interiors and lots of glass and chrome and so on.

The idea that space would be a variable place, technologically, is both wildly genre-breaking (rebels in a Firefly-class cargo rocket-ship robbing a train; Wild West meets the Final Frontier) and likely (why wouldn't we reproduce the same wildly unfair distribution of wealth and technology as we currently do?). So: there are the central planets, and the outer ones; the fascistic Alliance (military clothing style, but also means of control and ethics-free politics) and those outside of the Alliance (see unfair distribution of wealth and technology).

My friend Chris Gray once said the best political theory lies in novels. And I thought about this today while thinking about the sci fi I've been reading and watching: Firefly, Star Trek (the recent J J Abrams prequel, as well as Star Trek: Next Gen), The Windup Girl, Pump 6. Let's take The Windup Girl. In the 23rd Century, according to Wikpedia,

Global Warming has raised the levels of world's oceans, carbon fuel sources have become depleted, and manually wound springs are used as energy storage devices. Biotechnology is dominant and mega corporations like AgriGen, PurCal and RedStar (called calorie companies) control food production through 'genehacked' seeds, and use bioterrorism, private armies and economic hitmen to create markets for their products. Frequent catastrophes, such as deadly and widespread plagues and illness, caused by genetically modified crops and mutant pests, ravage entire populations. The natural genetic seed stock of the world's plants has been almost completely supplanted by those that are genetically engineered to be sterile.

This is interesting to read, as a summary, but it is the narrative about Anderson Lake (the AgriGen agent in Thailand) and the others that allows for the three elements of rhetoric to emerge:

1. Ethos: the novel finds a way to make the future extrapolation of current biotech and industrial practices realistic, and possible. The coherence and horrifying detailed enactment of this potential future is what gives the novel - and its implicit political argument - such ethos, that is, authority.

2. Logos: the way this world emerged out of the one we now inhabit is logical; the causes of successive disasters in food, in climate change, and in political inability to deal coherently with these disasters all come across as not only rationally, but even likely. The novel thus comprises an argument about corporate control of genetic engineering and biotechnology, and the dystopian results not only for the recolonized Third World and the South but also the so-called First World and the North.

3. Pathos: the specific dramatization of characters involved in this world, as well as the readers identification with characters who suffer at the hands both of the ruthless biotech corporations, and also at the hands of the history that included our own time's inept policies, all make us feel something: horror at what will have been lost, anger at those who caused and promoted such a world, grief at the world humans may inherit.

Good theory and good popularizations of science also do this; they hit all three of these marks.

Today I imagined using the internet to form a space for scientific debate in a number of areas vital to human and biological survival: genetics, energy, etc. In these areas, a wider range of people could weigh in than the usual suspects (writers of popular science books; journalists of science and technology; industry PR people; political parties and individuals) and create a second tier of science and technology small d democracy.

I guess first of all, it would be great to ask the question David Nye asks: should "the market" fund technology development? And a corollary: facing global disaster due to climate change, and facing economic disaster due to the unsustainable practices of late capitalism and its oligarchic zombie corporations (which are like the Borg and the Terminator: huge square and you can't reason with them) how can we pull our science and technology research out of military development and find ways to direct our resources at species survival?

It is interesting how few science fiction books have faced the ugly futures staring humans in the face. Biopunk novels like Windup Girl are one genre that doesn't shy away from this; another is the dystopian/utopian sci fi genre (novels like le Guin's The Dispossessed and Sterling's Shaper/Mechanist series). What would a lively discussion of the real consequences of our science and technology practices look like on the Net? And could it link classrooms and listservs and political movements using not simply stripped down argumentation, but the fuller rhetorical resources of novels?

Recently I finished William Powers’ book Hamlet’s Blackberry, and I’ve blogged a little about it here. Powers’ argument rang true for me, and I think for many of his ideal readers, those of us who came to the digital age having already experienced the pre-digital, analog age of books without Kindles and screens without Internets attached to them. (I suppose the real test would be those who grew up with screens that were designed to keep bugs out of your house, and not screens that could have bugs build into them).

To whit: we are too busy. We are too connected, all the time. We are becoming superficial, a nation of titty Tweeters and fanatic Facebookers. We lack depth in most of what we do. We are always distracted. Life moves by way too fast, even when we try to slow it down. We are becoming addicted to our electronic prosthetics. And in order to confront this, we need to find ways to disconnect from the 24/7 connected lifestyle, literally (days off from the internet and cell phone) and figuratively (turning to thoughtful mentors like Plato, Seneca, Ben Franklin, Thoreau and Emerson for ways to balance our lives, find depth and grace and peace, and achieve the “good life”).

I in fact have been writing about these very themes. I love Facebook in a limited, “let’s not get too involved” kind of way; I post albums, glance at what my friends and my “friends” (those of the second third and fourth circles of friend/acquaintance-ship so familiar to the socially networked) are saying, or commenting on. I don’t Twitter (something offputting about a word whose base is twit) but you can see twitter behavior in a lot of my texting: I do text-ku (short poems in text), I send slices of my day to selected friends and family, I encourage those select few to send amusing pictures and anecdotes, I keep tabs on my 15 year old skater teen (sometimes by texting his friends, who apparently have not left their phone at home or failed to charge the damn thing).

In short, I am the one my other less connected self warned me about; I’m the ideal audience for Powers’ reading- and history-enhanced argument. And yet. Perhaps it was Powers using Ben Franklin to teach me about positive rituals in my life. I teach Franklin, and my students often love his apparently straightforward list (made at a tender age) for achieving moral perfection: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality and so on. I couldn’t help thinking of Gatsby, and his Franklin-like list of moral improvements as he tried to ascend the class system and gain entry into the Good Life of the roaring 20s. It is the whole notion of self improvement, of self-help, that Franklin helped start, or put his American and quaker stamp on. Perhaps it is unfair to saddle this most humorous and sanguine of Founding Fathers with the paternity of The Dance of Anger and Codependent No More.

And then today I came upon a terrific article in The Nation (Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/159279/my-monster-my-self-nicholas-carr-and-william-powers) on both Powers and Nicholas Carr (author of a similar polemic against the Internet generation, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains). The author, Gary Greenberg, does everything I’ve done: seen the validity of the criticism; interrogates the self-help-iness of the genre; identified his own epiphany regarding cell phones (in this case, as a therapist, the moment he takes the everpresent cell phone from a 15 year old named Kate in his office). In fact, his epiphany sets up the point I want to emphasize:

“Why?” she demanded.

“Because I have a really hard time concentrating when you’re distracted,” I said. “I keep wondering what’s going on on your phone, and I figure that whatever it is must be more interesting than what’s going on in here.”

“Well, that’s for sure.”

“I’m certain that’s true,” I said. “Nothing here can compete with what’s on your phone. But sometimes we have to pay attention to less interesting things.” I reached out my hand, and she put the phone in it. It was warm and moist. I thought I could feel the indentation of her fingers on its rounded edges. “It seems almost like this phone is part of you,” I said as I put it on my desk. “Like another limb or something.”

“No duh,” she said. “It is.” She held my eyes. There was no shame or defensiveness in them now, let alone fear. Just contempt. It wasn’t the first time a kid had made me out to be a fossil…But the gap between Kate and me wasn’t cultural or political in origin. It had to do with different ideas about what kind of creatures we are. My comment, which I’d made for no particular reason, hadn’t told her anything she didn’t already know—that she was in some fundamental way different from me, and from the rest of the grown-ups with whom she had to share the planet. We had only four limbs. She had five, and with that extra appendage she could reach out of her tiny, bounded self and into the whole wide world—or at least the world that could blink to life on her screen.

His point is that both Powers and Carr preach to the converted, to those who sense a loss as well as a gain with cell phones and laptops and all of it. They aren’t wrong. Their points about pre-digital practices, especially the self-creating practice of (a certain kind of) reading, are well taken. But the Kate generation may or may not find these nostalgias for a time when reading could happen without any possibility of YouTube or MySpace or the digital tweet of a cellphone bird…well, they may or may not find them simply nostalgic, like wishing we hadn’t had Reagan or destroyed most of the best parts of the New Deal.

Instead, Greenberg replays a kind of Digital Divide, one in which authors like Power, like Carr, like – well – like me, can’t really delve into the heart of some universal Cyborg with a cell phone, because my cell phone is grafted onto my analog skin, and the seams show. Whereas…there is no seam on my son’s skin, no seam between him and the cell phone and Facebook. We are like prosthetic gods, as Freud said, but perhaps what is prosthetic for me has become organic, in important ways, for my son’s generation. And as the article ends, it makes a potent point: the generation for whom 24/7 connectivity is as natural as radio and television were for me will not have these regrets, but ones of their own, different ones:

Our future selves may have Bluetooth implants and pointed thumbs and, who knows, eyes on the tops of their heads. What are prostheses for us will have grown seamlessly onto them, but they will have new seams to contend with. Self-help may no longer come in the form of books, but it will be necessary all the same, for those future selves will have their own discontents, their own monsters, their own lost pasts to mourn.

What do I think of this argument? I think it has some power; it matters what self is writing the self help book. But I also think that my experience of having lived in an analog world may also have something to offer to those who are fish in the waters of connectivity. If we were to draw a Venn diagram, there would be some significant overlap of cell phone use and abuse, video games and their discontents, the always already sense that distraction, like our shadow, follows us down the avenue. And when we are alone and feeling blue, we’ll do what Plato, Seneca, Franklin, McLuhan and the rest have done: we’ll use language, even if augmented cyborgian language, to find our way home, and know it for the first time.

The Dynamo, the Virgin, and the Corporation

Yesterday I was writing about Carroll Purcell’s social history of technology in the United States, and I mentioned the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, also known as the Chicago Century of Progress Fair. I went online to see if I could find the photography book he cites, and was rewarded with this link:

http://www.chicagohistory.org/history/century.html

GM Building, 1933 Chicago Fair

The fair was truly modern/modernist in several ways. It was branded well. The art deco posters asserted that even in the midst of the Great depression, a cleaner, easier, happier, more scientific and modern life for all was just around the corner. The spaces were massive, epic odes to what modern humans can build; we can reproduce the streets of Paris, the temples of Asia and South America. The towering ultramodern structures were both daunting and inspiring; look what kinds of thing are possible if only “we” work together on a common vision! Of course, the we in this case was mostly corporate America; the Jetsons-like buildings veer uncomfortably close (in hindsight perhaps) to the Brutalist architecture of Mussolini and pals. And yet this architecture was built as a fair, a place with a familiar midway, so that the average Joe and Jane could see in miniature what Science was capable of. Live babies in incubators! Synthetic rubber tires cast in front of a throng of admirers!

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When Henry Adams wrote his masterpiece The Dynamo and The Virgin, about seeing a huge electricity-producing machine for the first time at the great Paris, he was, as Michael Steiner has written, both appalled and fascinated:

During the last days of the 1900 Paris Exposition, an aging American re- turned time and again to the great Gallery of Machines. Like a moth to a candle, 62-year old Henry Adams was lured to the exhibit, mesmerized by the titanic power of its pulsating pistons. It was here that the historian experienced a shock of recognition, a dark epiphany that had been stewing in his soul. After spending his life searching for a sense of purpose in human affairs, Adams was stunned to realize as he stood beneath these implacable behemoths, that blind mechanical forces controlled history. Prostrate before the forty-foot dynamos as an early Christian "trembling before the Cross," Adams recognized that he and others had become helpless "creatures of force, massed about central power-houses" and that modern science had unleashed uncontrollable forces of mass destruction.

I want to connect Adams’ epiphany, which is often connected with the Age of the Atomic Bomb, to the institutions behind the Virgin and the Dynamo. Adams loved the Virgin and saw the great cathedrals as the apex of medieval and human greatness. All that human labor, that capital, that stone, that grandeur of design and vision, brought together as a monument to a culture’s greatest achievement! And yet: what institution lay behind these monuments and this nexus of labor and material and art? A holy and wholly Roman church, whose combination of Roman imperial organization and Christian absolutist claims to knowledge and power in this world and the next as well. A church that was catholic in its claims to domination, and apostolic in its will to impose and subject the rest of humanity to this claim. It is easy to oversimplify the medieval world, and to demonize it as opposed to the supposedly more open Renaissance (which after all carried its own forms of political terror and organization). And yet, when I think of the damage done in the world in the name of my religion of origin, Roman Catholicism, I honestly shudder.

The Ford Building, 1933 Chicago Fair

And what institutions were behind Adams’ dynamo, and the great scientific machines of the 1933 Chicago fair? By 1933, it was clear: though the federal government in the United States was funding a great deal of scientific research, and was on the verge of massing science and technology and industry and the military in one huge project called World War 2, the institutions behind the Dynamos of the 20^th Century were corporate. The huge futurist buildings of the Chicago midway were ads for corporate America writ in stone and steel: GM, Ford, Chrysler, Sears. And as Purcell and others show, the U.S. government, even under the worst moments of the Depression and currently in the face of ecological devastation, has never shown much real interest in regulating the corporate interests that now control much of what counts as scientific “progress.” World War 2 brought what had never been before: governmental coordination and regulation of industry in the service of a larger goal. That that supra-corporate goal happened to be war is nontrivial; the government continued this overarching coordination with a permanent war economy, one that (as in World War 2 and the wars that followed) lined the pockets of private corporate interests, even as other forms of technological innovation were more or less run by private interests for private gain to the detriment of public good and public say. Genetic engineering, radio and later telecommunications, energy resources, transportation, all have followed the model that terrified Adams and seduced the fairgoers of Chicago.

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Bhopal, 2010

What happened to this overarching belief in Progress, a belief and a hope that was maintained in the face of 20^th century horrorshows of economic collapse, unrestrained urbanization and suburbanization, the paving of the country, and the development of weapons of mass destruction? Steiner writes,

Since the last Chicago World's Fair, fewer and fewer people would will- ingly surrender to the machine, and few would see anything other than crude satire in such statues. Since World War II, according to Leo Marx, a spectacular string of mishaps has given birth to widespread "technological pessimism." The ghastly efficiency of Auschwitz and the devastation of Hiroshima in 1945 were swiftly followed by the arms race, Vietnam, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Bhopal, the Exxon oil spill, the Space Shuttle explosion, acid rain, global warming, and ozone depletion. Ironically enough, the American West, with its pock- marked, tear-stained terrain of testing sites and dumping grounds, remains a prime setting for technological ecocide. Such tragedies of science run amok have eroded the long-held hope that technology will create a perfect world, though Marx wisely observes that the rise of "a new, dematerialized kind of power" through electronic technologies may keep more subtle forms of the progressive faith alive.

Steiner’s list is missing one example, of course: Fukushima. The Dynamo as Die-namo. Big Science, big as the corporate temples of the Chicago fair, merged with corporate and governmental cooperation to produce cheap-oil levels of power where oil is not cheap.

If hope for many lies in visions of a progress-enhancing Internet, personal computers, Twitter social revolutions and cell phone directed democracy marches, then the old material forms of progress – big dams, big dynamos, rural and universal electrification, washing machines for all – have over time become things we both imagine to be natural (many have not ever lived without any of these things) and at the same time tainted (the mass push to consumerism begun in the early 20^th Century and continuing along each successive wave of technological innovation turns out to have a dark side).

I imagine a realistic Century of Progress fair now, 1911 – 2011. The Ford building shows the human effects of Taylorism and mass production lines; the great banks all have massive Brutalist facades that show the two murals: one the official line on Progress, the other the series of frauds, corruptions, Ponzi schemes, and their human results, along with the political influence of the banks that allow them to lie cheat steal and then get bailed out by the same people they robbed.

And alongside the brutalist facades, alternative images of science, of technology, of the things that have made life much better for most people, of the unintended consequences of well intended technologies and most importantly, of the striving to learn from these consequences. And thousands of photos of those, now and in the recent past, who tried and are trying to take leadership roles in learning these lessons, and changing what we – we humans, and the corporate and governmental we who wield power over technological change – will do tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

Works Cited:

Steiner, Michael. "Parables of Stone and Steel: Architectural Images of Nostalgia and Progress at the Columbian Exposition and Disneyland," American Studies 42 (Spring 2001): 39-67.