Borg Bees and Cyberperennials

When Donna Haraway first began writing the Cyborg Manifesto, she included a lot of material on genetic engineering (we’re talking about the early 1980s here). And I’ve written here about Bruce Sterling’s division of cyborgs into Shapers and Mechanists, with the former using genetic shaping to produce augmented humans. Now, there are two Shaper projects in the Mad Science section of Wired Magazine, one aimed at saving bees, the other at saving our soil.

There’s something about how bees do all this free work for the planet that has always affected me. Busy bees, indeed; what would we do if we lost bee labor (just part of the economy of the natural world that capitalism simply rips off)? But then you read about the varroa, a parasite that causes huge numbers of bee deaths. According to the article, “With colony losses fluctuating around 30 to 40 percent every year, scientists and commercial interests are desperate for anything that’ll help these pollinators thrive.”

Enter Marla Spivak, an entomologist at the University of Minnesota. She found a way to select for bee behavior that would respond to the varroa threat (why do I keep thinking of the Borg?). In her work, she

used liquid nitrogen to kill a handful of baby bees inside their wax-sealed hexagonal cells. And then she waited. In some colonies, bees would never uncap the cells and clean them out. But in particularly neat-freak colonies, the corpses were gone in 24 hours or less. That’s the trait she selected for, eventually coming up with a line she dubbed Minnesota hygienic. In colonies of Minnesota hygienic bees that get invaded by varroa—an eight-legged mite that drinks bee blood and lays its eggs inside cells—the bees uncap and clean out the cells containing infected, sick pupae before baby mites grow and reproduce—a contraceptive counterpunch.

Now that breeder are using her methods, she is moving on to possibly making the better bee, focusing on the propolis that the Borg like bees use as a “a sort of collective immune system.”

So. What sort of cyborg measurements should we use to see whether this kind of work is simply restorative (restoring bees to an ability to pollinate) or augmentative (what other ‘powers’ should we select for? What possible side effects might result from such human-guided selection?).

In a second article, the problem isn’t the death of bee colonies, but it is a similar issue of the threat to systems we depend on for food. In this second case the issue is the way traditional agriculture has exhausted the soil. And the answer is the same: genetics. Here plant geneticist Wes Jackson wants to replace soil-depleting annuals with genetic versions that incorporate the virtues of perennials, plants “that build extensive root networks and healthy soil, conserve water, and recycle nutrients.” Some examples of Jackson’s work: domesticated Kernza (“a perennial relative of wheat”), perennialized sunflower-Jerusalem artichoke hybrids, and Illinois bundleflower (a native legume).

Again, this work sounds a lot more future-friendly than the usual bogus arguments for the genetic engineering of plants like GE alfalfa (recently approved by the FDA in spite of huge evidence of corruption; see my post on this). And yet…the Wired article makes it sound like it isn’t a problem with the Green Revolution or Big Ag. Hmmm. Really? They haven’t made this problem worse? Really? Perhaps it is the Wired rhetoric, but again, how would we know if this approach is being evaluated, and by what measuring stick.

Both of these projects raise the question of the genetic hybrid cyborgs that don’t happen to be human. And reading Windup Girl, one gets the distinct impression that large corporations such as Monsanto are likely to scoop up such technologies, and allow the unfree market to once again (using the Hidden Hand of profit and short term analysis where bottom lines are in money and not sustainability or even survival) determine which genetic cyborgs will flourish under which conditions.

So. How then ought we to proceed as a species intent on sustainability and survival? I keep coming back to the Jared Diamond book Collapse. Though I understand the problems with his analysis (based as it is on island populations, often on early technological ones), I keep thinking of the Vikings who starved to death and ate their calves when Erik the Red’s Greenland colony overwhelmed the tundra ecology’s ability to sustain their cattle raising culture. They starved to death because, although the nearby ocean teemed with fish, they didn’t turn to that food source. Why? Because that is what the natives ate; if Vikings began eating fish, they would no longer be Vikings.

Both of these cyborg technologies purport to solve problems that are potentially catastrophic. Neither technology addresses the obstacles to success facing such techno-solutions. And yet…it does seem that in some small spate of years, humans – humanity really – will face some profoundly difficult choices after peak oil.

I really want to believe that we will become cyborg sophisticated, and treat the two halves of this hybrid – the cybernetic and the organic – with equal care. Otherwise, we’ll be in the land of geoengineering as the best tool lying around to fix a dying planet. And I’m not sanguine about such a technology sky hook getting the job done at the 11th hour.

PS After I’d written this, I came across a short article in Discover Magazine about cyborg bees. The photo in the blog is from this article. Here is the blurb:

This orchid bee was one of 16 outfitted with a radio transmitter backpack as part of a study of the insects’ flight habits by ecologists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. “We can ask animals how they see their surroundings by observing their movement,” says lead researcher Martin Wikelski. Teams on the ground tracked the pollinators while a helicopter crew provided additional monitoring. The results, published in May, indicate that individual bees typically cover a home area of about 100 acres, but some set off on long-distance flights. One intrepid bee took a three-mile jaunt across the Panama Canal, where it spent a few days before returning home. [http://discovermagazine.com/2011/jan-feb/77]

The study in toto is called Large-Range Movements of Neotropical Orchid Bees Observed via Radio Telemetry and can be found at http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0010738

Mad Science and reading list

I am looking out at a serious snow situation. Coming down, sure, but there's also that 28 mph wind that may get up to 40 during the day. Sort of like last night when I was driving up to Kirkwood at 11 pm and the wind was blowing snow off of the drifts and whiting out my world for from one to several seconds, not a long time unless you are driving and there are these other large exoskeletal cyborgs tooling down the road.

And I'm thinking of how it was to wake up to snow, be in a very warm and cozy bed, and look for reading material (I'd cleverly put my cyborg books enough Over There that they were going to involve a cold crawl, and I'd nixed that idea in favor of Staying Under the Blankets. And lo and behold, the Wired magazine (March 2011) I'd seen previously (and which had suffered a reasonably traumatic tea spill a few weeks ago) was within arms reach. And after I'd done my New Yorker strategy (start from the back, troll for interesting images, don't commit to the sometimes imposing Table of Contents) I came across a set of so called Mad Science sidebars. And of course, they are seriously cyborgian. Here is one, and then really I have to get out there and ski.

Two images came to me as I read about chemist Zhenan Bao’s work with artificial skin: the Blade Runner scene where they make the high tech eyes, and the scene from Terminator where Reese explains that the cyborgs have real skin to fool the human detections systems (and the dogs, too; everyone knows dogs bark at the bad guys in movies, including Terminator in one suburban scene). And I thought of the prosthetic story by Damon Knight in which the guy kills the girl because he “holds” her with his prosthetic arm, which is made for lifting massive loads but not for cuddling.

Bao is making artificial skin sensitive using “pressure pixels” which are “made of stretchable, microscale organic field-effect transistors—building 40 years of advances in silicon chip design and nanofabrication into a flexible sheet.” Her skin uses a polymer called polydimethylsiloxane, or PDMS, for short, which is pressed between flexible electrodes. When we measure pressure using pascals as a unit, this material can – theoretically, the article qualifies – both detect a housefly’s steps on the skin, and do this quickly enough to pick up each step in sequence. (The article doesn’t mention whether it could here the fly scream “Help me, help me!”).

What I found fascinating was the mention of uses, which unsurprisingly talks both about restoration of function and augmentation of human ability. The first list of uses includes sensitive prosthetic hands, artificial skin-graft material for burn victims, remote-control surgical tools with haptic feedback. But the second list goes beyond replicating skin:

“We could integrate any kind of function beyond what skin already has,” Bao says. How about chemical sensors—gunpowder-sensing gloves for enhanced TSA gropes, anyone? Or biological probes to detect infections at prosthetic limb attachment points? And, yes, the potential applications for telepresence sex are self-evident.

What I find fascinating is the way such science stories inevitably move from highly technical and slow advances, to the increasinbly wide range of uses such material might be put to. And often the exact same technology is restorative (which people often feel comfortable with) and augmenting (which often conjures up revulsion and fear and not always for bad reasons).

I’ll post on some of the other Mad Science cyborg elements - cyborg perennials to save the soil, cyborg bees to defeat parasites that are decimating bee populations) after I go hit the pow, as they say (who are they anyway? But clearly “they” are the cool ones, no doubt.)

Watching the Borg Part 3

Watching the Borg Part 3

In our last installment, I talked about the Borg episode Best of Both Worlds, and the accidental but perhaps fortuitous intrusion of the film Braveheart, blaring its speeches and slaughters from my son’s neighboring MacBook. I neglected to mention that Braveheart has another connection to my son; when my wife Margann was pregnant with him, she and I went to see Braveheart at the local big screen. I’m not sure we were completely clear how, well, how LOUD the film was gong to get. In each battle scene, I could feel the intensity and power and physical pull of medieval warfare, my body moving as if being pulled by strings as the swords and pikes clashed and men and horses collided. And as I found myself shifting my shoulders and clenching my fists and leaning forward, Margann turned to me to tell me that Bailey, in utero, was doing the same, moving around like nobody’s business.

When, as a toddler, he turned out to be one of those kids who make tons of sounds, I laid all the Foley-esque noises at the feet of Braveheart. And now that he is an antiauthoritarian skater Cali dude, I blame Braveheart for his absolute desire for freedom from anything that makes unreasonable (or reasonable for that matter) demands on him and his time.

But when I imagine a future for him, and imagine any war he might find himself forced to fight, all I can think of is Hurt Locker, or Jarhead, or Three Kings, or any number of post Vietnam films that combine bizarre connectivity and mobility with the unwarrior nature of modern occupation forces (which is a huge part of what the Iraq and Afghan “wars” meant).

And I think of torture.

Technology, torture, shock and awe

In Braveheart, William Wallace is betrayed twice by the intrigue of the Scottish lords. When he attempts to meet with Robert the Bruce in Edinburgh, he is caught by the English brought to London, and sentenced to be “purified by pain,” a series of brutal tortures publicly witnessed. He shows great personal courage and control in the face of a drawn out series of bodily mutilations, ending with his famous cry of Freedom as he dies. He is beheaded, drawn and quartered, and his head set on a pike on London Bridge (the common practice for those judged guilty of treason; Shakespeare would have seen such heads as he entered London for the first time). The torture and killing of Wallace are then “communicated” to the body and mind of Robert the Bruce, who in turn redeems his own betrayal of Wallace by refusing the easy English ratification of his rule of Scotland, and instead rallies the Scottish army to push back and defeat the English in the 1314 battle of Bannockburn.

In the film’s narrative, the torture is brutal, personal, and the last act of a bitter, vicious English king. And it is the sign of a final act of sacrifice and bravery of Wallace, and confirms his status as a martyr to a cause that ultimately succeeded because of him, his vision, his words. For it is his words that Robert the Bruce speaks to the troops in 1314, and his vision of a united Scotland that ends up defeating the more powerful English army.

In the Star Trek episode, Picard is captured by the Borg, and subjected not to torture per se, but to invasive medical procedures. Part of the horror genre is the penetration of the body by the alien Other, whether it be an insectoid Giger monster as in Alien, or some other transgression against the human body or mind’s autonomy. In the original script, when we re turn to the Borg ship to see the status of Picard’s capture, there is a brief scene that was omitted in the final edit:

Moving down a row... no activity... the Borg are in their regenerative state, in their compartments... finding Locutus in a compartment, 'asleep'... a shudder

crosses his face as though a nightmare has invaded his

mind... suddenly his eyes open in a panic...

12 MATTE SHOT - THE BORG SHIP INTERIOR (OPTICAL)

An agonizing human cry echoes through the chamber...

13 A BORG IN HIS COMPARTMENT

reacts to the commotion... methodically EXITS and moves to Locutus, who resists his efforts to restrain him...another Borg joins them... together they escort him out of his compartment...

This deleted scene would have supported what is implied later, that in some sense Picard is attempting to resist the Borg takeover of his body and mind. Several times crew members try to answer the question, is there anything left of Picard in Locutus? Again, a deleted scene with Counsellor Troi would have made this explicit (she can feel him, and his pain, inside Locutus). The deletions show the writers trying to set up a classic cyborg narrative: as the human body is altered with ever more potent and intimate prosthetics, when does the human stop being “the” human and cross over into some other kind of being?

Before the Braveheart connection, I read the Borg scene as a classic kind of horrific brain experiment, much like the scenes in Firefly, or the kind of CIA research on mind control done by the worst kinds of quasi-Nazi scientists (examples here). What we do get is the technological moment when Picard is helpless to resist the invasion of his mind and body. In the Borg operating room, a montage unfolds:

Small and no different than any other area of the ship except there is a medical table...Locutus is lying on his back, conscious as one Borg prepares to use a long, probing implant device to add a bio-chip... another Borg prepares a huge mechanical arm to attach... and as we slowly push in to Locutus' face... and into his eye... a single tear is in one corner... and as the operation commences, his eyes close and after a beat, slowly, the color in his human face begins to drain further and further away until he is ashen white.

But there are two other elements here besides “horrific brain surgery” sci fi: torture, and rape. Both are evident in the way the closeup of Picard/Locutus shows his eye, and his utter immobility as he is invaded and “augmented” by Borg technology. Later we find that his DNA is being rewritten in order to make him more connected to the Borg, and that the struggle between the Borg self and the remnants of the human self have been taking place all along.

At the end of the episode, Picard is restored to his previous human self: no hand prosthetics, no facial technology with strange probing red lights, no tubes eerily entering his neck. And yet at the very end of the show, Picard goes to the window of his quarters, and looks out, a solitary figure dwarfed by the immensity of the space outside him. That space holds the Borg, and the nightmares of his time forced to not only work “for” them assimilating and murdering thousands of his fellow humans, but to literally be one of them, in body and mind, against his will, making a mockery of will itself.

Picard is a survivor, and yet he must come to terms with what has been done to him. The following episode Family is one of the least known and best written of the Next Generation scripts, as Picard after twenty years goes home to France, and ends up coming to terms with his trauma through his conflict with his jealous older brother. Picard loses his famous self control, punches his brother, wrestles with him in the mud of the vineyard like some Biblical parable, and finally laughs himself into tears at the horror he’s been trying to live with: he was made to do unspeakable things, things against his will, and he was not good enough or strong enough to resist. It is the language of rape survivors, and of torture survivors; the self must literally be remade. It is this remaking of self and identity that the show wants us to contrast with the kinds of self that are made, or thrust on one, through technological connectivity and boundary-threatening cyborg prosthesis.

What is coming toward us, as the Borg, is both the stuff of horror films (Terminator writ large as a ship and an alien race), and a prescient uncanny look at the fears we have of coming technologies circa 1991. The new technologies threaten cultures based on old forms of authority, on ideals of freedom and self determination, on possessive individualism (as Katherine Hayles puts it) and the Enlightenment subject. The scenes of such technologies are multiple; weapon systems and power sources, of course in a sci fi movie, but also medical and communication technologies, and new, nonhierarchical and distributed forms of organization that seem utterly foreign and inhuman. Much like 1984, this dystopian look at a certain configuration of technology and humanoid bodies is both harrowing in its prediction (those who torture Winston in 1984 would recognize their kin in the black ops of the CIA kidnappers, the methods of Abu Ghirab and Guantanamo, the treatment of Bradley Manning) and one side of the coin. The other side is Brave New World, which shows a future in which people enthusiastically embrace the techniques of Big Brother. Imagine the Borg coming and assimilating us, not with scary white mind probes and invasive surgery, but with cheap cell phones and laptops, blue tooth rigs, and a rhetoric of assimilation and improvement augmented with a decent ad campaign? The strange hand prosthetic forced upon Picard, with its little whirring gizmo redolent of some Monty Python skit, is reshaped as a VR glove, or a Wii controller; the gizmo has morphed into a Playstation joystick, the strange lights and red ray now the multiple buttons on the wireless controllers for an Xbox.

The fear of being overwhelmed by an alien feeling technology in 1991 was not misplaced.

Watching the Borg Part 2

Watching the Borg Part 2: of William Wallace, Edward Longshanks, and the rhetorics of assimilation.

Preface

I am reading the scripts for Best of both Worlds Part one and two, and all the while considering the uncanny, terrifying, implacable image of the Borg ship coming toward the viewer. In the next room my 15 year old son is watching Braveheart, which he rented from iTunes for four bucks. It is hard to concentrate on writing when the entire British army of Edward Longshanks is descending on the brave but outnumbered and outgunned (outarrowed?) Scotsmen. (Also the nonbattle music, absent any image, keeps reminding me of Irish Spring soap commercials).

But I’m helpless. I’m listening to the Scots talking about the English army, about how they are uncanny, monstrous, terrifying, implacable. And they were. An army of long spears, of cavalry that shook the very ground when it charged. A force of over 2,000 horses and 12,000 infantry, including a huge force armed with longbows. An imperial army, made up of humans, but humans transfigured by the garb of war, the technologies and prosthetics of battle circa 1280. On the one hand, the Scottish army in their schiltrons, armored positions with spears pointed out at attackers at various heights, and archers between the schiltron formations. On the other, the English with their mounted knights, archers, infantry spearmen. 15,000 British troops (including the assimilated Welsh longbowmen), against 6000 Scots.

Resistance seemed futile. And indeed, while initially the English were repelled by the pikes and formations of the Scots’ hedgehog-like schiltrons, eventually the English adapted their strategy, isolated the Scots formations, and rained down a sky of armor-piercing arrows onto the immobile pikemen. Once the killing was sufficient to decimate the Scots, the cavalry rode down and finished off the survivors. And yet…resistance continued. The Scots fought off the English in two separate wars (1296-1328, and 1332-1357), and remained an independent nation.

In the film version of the battle, Mel Gibson delivers his famous speech to rally the troops at the earlier battle of Stirling Bridge, rather as Picard tells the Borg that he will never surrender:

William Wallace: I am William Wallace! And I see a whole army of my countrymen, here in defiance of tyranny. You've come to fight as free men... and free men you are. What will you do with that freedom? Will you fight?

Veteran: Fight? Against that? No! We will run. And we will live.

William Wallace: Aye, fight and you may die. Run, and you'll live... at least a while. And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willin' to trade ALL the days, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they'll never take... OUR FREEDOM!

[Scottish army cheers]

William Wallace: Alba gu bràth!

["Scotland forever!"]

Army: ALBA GU BRÀTH! ALBA GU BRÀTH! ALBA GU BRÀTH!

It is a pretty great moment in the movie; it’s hard to see it for the first time and not get the chills, even if it has been replayed on my local sports radio (KNBR THE sports leader) as an audio drop in countless stupid contexts (any time a local team like the Warriors or the Raiders faces heavy odds).

And of course both Picard and Riker say as much to the Borg. But there is another scene in which Wallace meets with the French princess Isabele, who has come to negotiate in King Edward’s name. (In the film she bargains in apparent good faith not knowing that Edward has no intention of keeping his word):

Princess Isabelle: The king desires peace.

William Wallace: Longshanks desires peace?

Princess Isabelle: He declares it to me, I swear it. He proposes that you withdraw your attack. In return he grants you title, estates, and this chest of gold which I am to pay to you personally.

William Wallace: A lordship and titles. Gold. That I should become Judas?

Princess Isabelle: Peace is made in such ways.

William Wallace: Slaves are made in such ways. The last time Longshanks spoke of peace I was a boy. And many Scottish nobles, who would not be slaves, were lured by him under a flag of truce to a barn, where he had them hanged. I was very young, but I remember Longshanks' notion of peace.

Longshanks’ “peace’ is simply the assimilation of the Scots, by any means. And he uses guile, Machiavellian tactics, lies, corruption within the enemy, bribery, all the usual modes of political and economic warfare. His word means nothing unless it is forced to mean something by his inability to destroy his enemy.

And this brings us to the Borg.

The irrelevance of what has been said before.

Listen, and understand. That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.” Kyle Reese, in The Terminator, 1984.

The immense popularity of the Terminator film in 1984 certainly influenced the making of the Borg series of Star Trek episodes. For one thing, both cyborg texts play on the horror, not simply of aliens coming to kill humans, but of humans or the once-human turned into aliens, merged with boundary-invading prosthetics. Both are in effect horror films, which play upon the uncanny and inhuman aspects of the cyborg to produce a threat that seems undefeatable, unstoppable. The frisson this produces is heightened by terrifying scenes of human destruction by the machinic cyborgs, scenes made more terrifying by the lack of any human motivation or emotion. The Terminator of course is simply a cyborg assassin and thus is like many emotionless assassins in films, humans who carry out cold blooded killings with machine like precision. And while the Star Trek film shies away from showing the actual human deaths involved in the genocidal career of the Borg, the extent of the killing is on the order of the nuclear exchange shown in Terminator 2. Thus the series begins with a crater where 900 colonists once lived, and includes a scene of 350 Starfleet ships destroyed after the battle of Wolf 357, implying a death count that stretches back 7000 light years behind the Borg ship and must be in the millions.

But like the Terminator, the Borg cannot be communicated with, or rather, the communication is one-way. Even the pretence of terms (as say Edward would proffer) is missing; communication, intention of the opposite party, cultural difference, are all irrelevant. And it is this term, irrelevant, that gives the scenes of “communication” with the Borg their dramatic power. So, when Picard is captured, the Borg “speak” with that machinic voice that has become clichéd, and yet it is a voice of thousands of voices merged into one unnerving personality-free voice. Like Wallace, Picard speaks the language of resistance, of freedom, while the Borg speak an instrumental, strangely euphemistic language:

PICARD: I have nothing to say to you, and I will resist you with my last ounce of strength.

BORG: Strength is irrelevant. Resistance is futile. We wish to improve ourselves. We will add biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service ours.

PICARD: Impossible. My culture is based on freedom and self-determination

BORG: Freedom is irrelevant. Self-determination is irrelevant. You must comply.

PICARD: We would rather die.

BORG: Death is irrelevant.

Both the Terminator and the Borg speak in mechanical, emotion free tones. Both speak as if from a kind of internal, prerecorded script, or tape loop, as if programmed to respond in this minimal and yet eerily effective language. The Terminator doesn’t kill; he terminates, as in terminating a program. There is a sense of ex-terminate, of killing that is not worthy of much thought or feeling, as when humans hire someone to kill termites. It is not, in any sense of the word, personal. And this is also what makes the Borg language so effective a representative of what is frightening about living in the latter half of the twentieth and the first half of the twenty first century. Things that were previously not only important, but definitive of human culture and human beings, are not longer so. Freedom, self determination, strength, resistance, even death, no longer have meaning, in a world dominated by the kind of organization, technology, and impetus of the Borg.

This latter is an important element of the Borg series. Death means nothing to an assassin, of course, and killing is just business, a set of skills. The horror of such films resides in this contrast between a normative notion of death as the ultimate reality and meaning, and death as beneath interest and not deserving of emotion. (I often get Holocaust echoes in these films, where businesslike killing is represented). But in the case of the 1991 cyborgs, death has a new irrelevance; one can “die” and still be alive to use, to manipulation, to assimilation as material. The Borg series spends valuable screen time developing this notion: is “Picard” still alive if the Borg have taken over his body and his mind? If his skin is inhumanly white, his face half covered with prosthetics, his mind linked with and mostly controlled by a network of commands and codes? As we watch the “survivors” consider how to recapture Picard, the narrative begins to name Locutus as “that thing” in the Borg ship, as “a casualty of war,” as no longer in any way a recognizable human.

He isn’t technically dead, but that is irrelevant; he has been assimilated, entirely, his culturally specific knowledge used to hurt those he previously would have died for. What does it mean to live in a world where even death is not necessarily final?

Here I am reminded of editing The Cyborg Handbook, in which several articles commented on this; one went into the notion of “triple death” by which dead bodies are judged as to the harvestability of organs, etc; in addition, many have flatlined or otherwise technically died, only to be brought back to life by cyborg medical technologies.

So the question from watching the Borg, and listening to William Wallace, is: how is the Borg like Edward Longshanks? And how is the Borg unlike what has come before?

Edward bought many of the nobles of Scotland with land; many of these assimilated Lords were dispossessed after the first war of Scottish independence, and were much of the cause of the second war. The Borg do not buy their mouthpieces; they make them. In case this wasn’t clear, they say so:

PICARD: What is it you wish of me?

BORG: Your archaic cultures are authority driven. To facilitate our introduction into your culture, it has been decided that a human voice will speak for us in all communications. You have been chosen to be that voice.

Notice: not that person. That voice. That language. That rhetoric. And the voice is “translated” from the Borg’s nonarchaic, non-authority driven culture, to the kinds of cultures that still imagine leaders, authorities who run things. The point of this is simply to “introduce” the Borg “into” these other cultures, as one would introduce bacteria into a culture, say.

When Picard is then massively cyborgs, he is renamed Locutus (the one who speaks), and he says exactly what the Borg say, from within their rhetoric, mission, and structure:

PICARD/BORG: I am Locutus of Borg. Resistance is futile. Your life as it has is over. From this time forward, you will service... us.

The transition from human to posthuman is somehow accomplished so that any formerly effective resistances are neutralized and made irrelevant. When Locutus and Riker speak in Part two, Riker asks that they be given a chance to discuss terms, which we know is pointless. And Locutus (in the script he is no longer PICARD/BORG) says

LOCUTUS: Discussion is irrelevant. There are no terms. You will disarm all weapons and escort us to sector zero-zero-one where we will the assimilation of your and technology.

RIKER: We would like time to prepare our people for assimilation.

LOCUTUS: Preparation is irrelevant. Your people will be assimilated as easily as Picard has been.

When one tries to “read” the Borg by plugging in values (Borg as postmodern corporation or state; Borg as cybernetic technologies and their proliferation throughout the world; Borg as neoliberal imperial rhetoric backed up by technology and weapons; Borg as example of Naomi Klein’s shock doctrine, or of the shock and awe of the Iraq war “strategy”), one gets some fascinating outputs. Who are the spokespeople from these archaic cultures that have been assimilated? How does the strange Borg technology that links them all together in a nonhierarchical, decentralized way allow them to do an end run around cultural resistances? How does it make them literally inhuman?

And: why did the Borg show resonate with so many people, such that elements of the show have gone viral and are now part of the general culture?

I’ve tried your patience, I know, with the length of this writing. But let’s consider for a moment two worlds: one square, one round. One still boasting an ecosystem, one still mainly organic; the other with a completely artificial, constructed system, mainly cybernetic. One represented by archaic authority driven systems; another announcing another, apparently different driver, with no discernable human in control of it. One culture with gender difference and conflict, the other without discernable gender or reproduction.

The show asks, inside of its slightly silly cyborg tale: what would the best of both worlds look like? And what will it look like if instead we end up with the worst of both worlds? That is: the implacable terror of an Edward Longshanks, combined with the machinic powers of command and control implicit in modern technologies and institutional structures?

What indeed?

Next: William Wallace, Picard, and the experience of torture.

Blogging and the mirror world

Blogging and the mirror world

In William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition, the protagonist Cayce Pollard finds herself in London, where many of the smaller things are different enough that she begins to talk of the mirrorworld object: mirrorworld coins (bigger and heavier than American coins), mirrorworld fashion (rumpled is in), etc. The novel does a nice job of spinkling these mirrorworld details throughout, lending London an Alice through the looking Glass difference that is all the more effective for being mostly mundane.

I had a thought about blogging and blogging’s mirror world today as I was reading the paper about Japan’s crisis after the devastating earthquake and tsunami. For the last three days has been relentless, covering the unfolding nightmare in Soma and elsewhere: workers using chain saws and hand picks to dig bodies out; millions without water food heat in near freezing temperatures; the second explosion of a nuclear power containment building; a massive plunge of the stock market. Besides food, officials from the hardest hit prefectures on the northeast coast are asking for body bags and coffins.

I am sitting in my warm home with the heat at a comfortable 70 degrees because the rains came yesterday and it’s chilly out. My computer for some reason is looking especially homey right now, its aluminum ‘brick’ exterior showing the signs of long and contented use. Next to it are arrayed its technofriends: the Sony linear PCM recorder on its round silver stand; the new speakers that have been bumping Shpongle and Random Rab and the Moby remix of Michael Jackson as I worked through the last couple days; headphones and ear buds, cables, the cell phone on vibrate so I can make sure the three travelers from Miami make it all the way to the ski condo we’re hooking them up with.

These two realities – these mirrorworlds – compete with a third: the writing work I’ve been doing. If you were to read my blog, you’d see that I’m writing on cyborgs and cyborg theory: watching and analyzing Star Trek’s Borg episodes (what is that uncanny square coming toward us in 1991?); rereading the Blade Runner/Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep novel for its cyborg technologies like the Penfield Mood organ and the black “empathy” box that enables a Christ-like religious experience; using Bruce Stering to reimagine the genealogy of cyborg images into shapers and mechanists, and linking the genetic engineering elements of postwar cyborgs to an emerging ‘biopunk’ genre; being excited by the link here between Paolo Bacigalupi’s writing (The Windup Girl; Pump Six) and the cyborg history I’m trying to trace.

In all this, none of the Japanese catastrophe inserted itself into the writing. If you were to come upon this sequence of writing years from now, you’d have no idea that an unimaginably horrific event was unfolding, or how that might feel, or how it might affect the writer. It’s a little like the mirrorworld of Shakespeare’s essays: you read about Mortality, but never anything about the actual black plague that was terrifying everyone during those years of theatre closure and bodies in the street and an end of the world sky hanging over every day.

There is what we blog, and what we do not blog; what we present as ready for reading and thought, and the many things we do not present for whatever reason. I’m reading Montaigne, and the turns of his wonderful mind, and all the while knowing that this proto-blogger never shows us his wife, his meetings with Inquisition officials, his close male friendships. Not once do we sit down with him at a meal, unless the meal be all the wide array of fruitful thought and meaty discussions he serves up in his writing.

And the moral of the story is? That writing is only part of our story, always; that we focus our writing on one theme or thread in order to provide depth, or critical understanding, but that there is always another move, to breadth, to horizontality. To linking. To connection. “Only connect,” writes Forster, that consummate novelist of the sound byte. “Only connect the passion and the prose.” He meant: writing helps build connection between mirrorworlds. It helps him show women trying to connect the disparate parts of their lives and make a whole that is, in all the ways that matter, an artistic whole. Or rather a series of wholes that inevitably crumble or are altered by events, so that one must continue to shape, to make, to create.

And so dear reader you know nothing of the anger I’ve felt at the nuclear power promoters in the United States, which is always there but which now feels white hot. Nor do you know of the reflection I’ve had on this anger and rage, which I used to feel more of, and which parenting and age have either mellowed or dulled. The cyborg theme is partly important to me because I spent ten years of my life fighting nuclear power and weapons, raising awareness of how toxic both are not simply for environments but for economies and sustainable energy options. Nor do you know the bizarre feeling of reading about horror, death, despair, the detail of a small pink child's bike horribly mangled and sitting on a pile of rubble in a city of rubble. How can one simply read? And yet the words somehow give you "information" and you process them all the while knowing you are keeping feeling at bay, for now.

And in fact writing brings me around, yet again, to continue to try linking what appears on the page (or its shiny electronic sister page on the web) with what does not, for whatver reason, find its way in. And when I do make these connections, just as when we connect a circuit, I can feel the added energy as parts of my life merge, mesh, diffract. I feel the uncanny pleasure and pragmatic necessity of writing as a way of living, of fighting back against the discontenting disconnections of middle age and against life in the belly of this stupid stupefying beast that is my home nation.

I’ll get up now and move on to the other mundane things that don’t make it onto the page, but which, examined, most likely contain valuable ore. And so we live, from moments of wholeness and integration, to the whirl and fragmentation of daily life as a multiplicity of lives for most of us.