Skiborg 2: Helmets and the Indie Movie effect

Warning: this blog comes with two fairly big lists of songs!

For Christmas, my lovely wife gave me a helmet in the general shape and color of an old school bowling ball. It has cool padding gizmos that velcro in and out to allow it to fit even my tiny head (though I use a lower tech method of sticking a small winter hat on my head and ratcheting the helmet over that). The helmet has vents and places to secure goggles and a very comfy chin strap. It also came with a fairly thick instruction booklet which on perusal turned out to be ways to hook up the cheap Bluetooth headset with the helmet.

The helmet is specifically designed for listening to music. It has cozy ear padding which upon inspection turns out to be two velcro-apart-able compartments for speakers; the wire snakes out the back of the helmet, and connects to the music player of choice (in my case the 120 gig silver and dark gray wheel driven iPod from a couple years ago).

Now I'd never worn a helmet, not due to some principled stand on my god given right to smash my brains out on a tree, but mainly because I skied infrequently. Ok and I'm cheap. Ok and it feels really good to be hauling down a hill with the wind in your hair. But last year I borrowed a helmet and you know what? If you put headphones in it, it creates a bitchin' little sound cave of your very own.

Of course this creates some dilemmas. Music on if you are skiing with others? If you are skiing with others with sound system helmets? If you are on a lift for some minutes with others? Music off at times just to remind oneself that this is what reality sounds like without a sound track? (Those of you who know me are laughing here, but go ahead; I can hear you anyway! Cuz for the moment I am not listening to the sound track of my life).

But there is another funny element to having a sound system in a bowling ball on one's head on the top of a mountain, or sliding/gliding down it. And that is selecting the sound track to the film one is about to star in. It's a ski movie, but not just. It's a film where the protagonist is alone in the mountains, and skiing is one way we get to hear his inner thoughts about all sorts of things.

I'm only half kidding here. The soundtrack element to it all, and the fact that often one is looking out at cinematically breathtaking scenes from unusual angles (feet dangling over the tops of tall pines; eyes surveying a giant bowl of snow from the vantage of a 7600 foot ledge), all contribute to the indie movie feel of it all. And I found myself going back and forth between that movie, and the "actual" reality in which I am listening to music and skiing. Occasionally other characters would come into the movie, and later I'd think about which ones would make the cut/be remembered, and which would be seen as not contributing to the overall unit of the experience/film. Yikes!

Sometimes I worry about the truism that everyone looks realer on TV.

Anyway, the helmet allows for all sorts of mergings: a meditative playlist can generate a meditative mood, and hence meditative skiing. A rowdy mix (Dandy Warhols, the Stones, some Hendrix, some Black Keys, etc) can lead to some speedy runs, pushing that big hard turn harder, exhilaration). I began my time alone up here with the following mix:

Quietage Playlist

Home Zero 7

Besos de Sal Federico Aubele

All Apologies Sinead O'Connor

Don't Let The Sun Catch You Crying Rickie Lee Jones

Shadowboxer Fiona Apple

Peace Piece Bill Evans

Alone in Kyoto Air

Silky Delta Euphoria

Calypso Suzanne Vega

Surrender Kaskade

Casimir Pulaski Day Sufjan Stevens

I May Know the Word Natalie Merchant

Everything Is Free Gillian Welch

Little Green Joni Mitchell

Urge For Going Tom Rush

Kashf John Surman, Dave Holland, Anouar Brahem

J'ai dormi sous l'eau Air

Night Like a River HEM

I'm Going To Stop Pretending Eels

Spencer The Rover John Martyn

Treefingers Radiohead

Slow Down Morcheeba

Playground Love (Vibraphone Ve Air

Like Someone In Love Chet Baker

Windham Hill - 3 Gymnopedie

Thoughts On A Grey Day Fleetwood Mac

Bless the Weather John Martyn

In the Waiting Line Zero 7

This was a pretty fun mix for Tuesday, and made for a very chill afternoon of skiing and sitting on lifts in the ridiculous sun (I think it topped out at 50 degrees that day, total April spring skiing weather and snow conditions). In particular the instrumental pieces (Peace Piece by Bill Evans, Alone in Kyoto by Air, Gymnopedie by some Windham Hill musicians) were stunning. I remember being carried up up up by huge metal hands in the shape of chairs, and listening to Along in Kyoto, as the ground slowly fell away, the trees slowly shifted position on the mountain, clouds scudded and so on. The music set a tone that meshed wonderfully with the landscape, and took me out of my talky/thinky head for great swaths of time. And then the lift is done, you hop off and ski to the next run and make a micro-decision: change the music? Or keep?

Each of these songs, and especially the first ten which got repeated listenings, is now linked in my mind with a snowscape. And not simply that: a mindscape. Was I thinking of Arcadia? Desire? Cyborgs? Death? The quality of emotions? My Uncle Dan? My grandfather whose birthday I share? Music helps in some ways inform the arc those thoughts took/take, and helps me remember them.

I was alone in the mountains Tuesday, Wednesay, Thursday, Friday. Each day was utterly sunny, fabulously sunny. Some days were quite hot; other days stayed cool; but I will never forget those days of sking alone under that almost absurdly optimistic comb of bright sun and blue sky. So I of course on Monday night made up a new playlist dedicated to the sun. Here is what I played on Tuesday:

Ski Sun Mix:

Another Sunny Day Belle and Sebastian

The Sun On His Back Camera Obscura

Honey In the Sun Camera Obscura

Sundialing Caribou

Love The Sundays

Blister In The Sun Violent Femmes

Sunday Part I Cibo Matto

Sunday The Cranberries

Sunshine Regina Spektor

A Sunny Sky Trevor Hall

Sunshine Of Your Love Jimi Hendrix

Breath of sun kareem raihani and jazzy d feat. jimmy rage

Bright Sunny South Alison Krauss & Union Station

Sol Tapado (The Covered Sun) Thievery Corporation & Patrick de Santos

Standing in the Sun (Afterhours Chilled Mix) Brainiacs On Dope

The Sun Doesn't Shine Fatboy Slim

Rockport Sunday Tom Rush

Sunshine Sunshine Tom Rush

I Was Made For Sunny Days The Weepies

The Sunny Side Of The Street The Pogues

No Sunlight Death Cab For Cutie

The Sun Is Shining (Fire House Club Mix) Bob Marley

Sun Toucher Groove Armada

The Sun Doesn't Like You Norah Jones

Love From The Sun Gab.El

Breath Of Sun Kareem Raihani & Jazzy D

Blister In The Sun Nouvelle Vague

I Wish I Never Saw The Suneshi Beth Orton

Good Day Sunshine Beatles

Sunday Papers Joe Jackson

Sunrise Norah Jones

Sunday Table Pink Martini

In The Sun She & Him

California Sun Rancid

Sun Is Shining (Dub Version) Bob Marley

Sun Is Shining Bob Marley

Sunshine Rock Upsetters

Sunday Sun Beck

There is something wild about being the first audience for one's own mix; would it be a good ski mix? Would the sun theme augment the already wonderful sunny ski experience? Well, Right away

I knew that the first Camera Obscura song would become epic in my personal history; I've been singing it for days now. Ditto with Honey in the Sun, and the crazy duo of Blister in the Sun (that punky northwest whisper/plaint) and Sunday Part 1 (with Cibo Matto two Japanese hip hop artists aided by Julian Lennon). The Hendrix is a pretty unusual track, with Jimi covering the Cream song Sunshine of your Love and just killing it. From that to the chill track Breath of Sun is a true eclectic jump, and just when you've shifted from 60s blues jazz rock to Ibiza 2007 trance music, suddenly up comes the banjo and the dude from Union Station singing about fighting for the South during the Civil War...and you look out over these mountains and imagine them in the 1860s, and it is a whole different reality, let me tell you. The Tom Rush and Weepies songs were pretty forgettable and made the angrier songs (No Sunlight, Rancid's California Sun) necessary as brain cleaners.

I could go on: the different Marley takes on Sun is Shining (I think I sang "To The Rescue" pretty loud in the chair on Lift 2 because I saw a skier top and look around); the killer remix of Sun Toucher by Groove Armada bringing an urban set to the rural mountain with its suburban and rural patrons in their ski and board finery; Zoe Deschamel hitting those notes on the She & Him tune In The Sun. Each one was a surprise, then a provocation to thought, feeling, a merging of music and lyric with setting and weather and time of day.

A great film, impossible without my cyborg helmet.

Ski Borg 1

I'm on Day 8 of living at Kirkwood (someone texted me and called me Captain Kirkwood which seemed apropos, though I haven't sucker punched any aliens or hit on any attractive females of the species) and I've been thinking about skiing as a mundane cyborg example. Here are a few of the things I've been contemplating while sitting on lifts being carried above treetops and up onto ledges.

First, skis and boots. You put on ski boots and you instantly feel (and look) like some kind of anime monster: feet are suddenly huge, encased, like the boot of an exoskeleton. And walking in ski boots (all 300 yards to the lift, insert cat who ate the canary look here) you move in an uncanny, monstrous fashion, like a cyborg martinet, heel clicking, toes snapping down, walking become mechanical. The boot makes regular walking harder; in fact you need to learn to walk again, like some very tall baby. But then you get to the lift, throw the skis down, click in, and voila! You have become a man-machine system ideally designed for sliding, turning on snow, throwing snow crystals into the sun while slamming a hockey stop halfway down the hill.

Now a word or three about the boot/ski interface. Modern ski boots are cyborgian, no doubt; they add a prosthetic foot that links to another prosthetic "foot" (in my case a pair of parabolic K2's in orange and yellow flames that say Burnin' Love and are a handmedown from my wife, which I proudly mention to lift operators who give me grief and/or admire my sweet K2's). But the real issue is the nature of the interface. That is, up here there is a human/machine, with a brain (encased in a helmet that looks like a bowling ball; more of this later) that now reads messages from the body as it extends all the way to the tips of the skis. My body has a different proprioception; it wants to lean forward, it learns to "read" slopes and the quality of snow (from corduroy and chatter to icy Cascade cement to fluffy soft powder to warm/cold Spring skiing soft snow), and this "reading" is partly visual, but also partly a felt sense of the ski/boot/ankle/knee/hip system. The mind learns to hear the feedback from the legs and skis and adjust (now pointing down the hill, gaining speed, carving tighter turns; now traversing or paralleling the hill to slow or stop; now flashing red lights as the skis try and fail to gain purchase on an icy morning run).

This is in part obvious. And in another way it is astounding. You stand on the top of a ledge and look down and instantly perceive the landscape as though you had long thin parabolic feet. The brain is able (usually!) to be cyborg, and then to adjust when you take off your boots. (And there is a moment when you are in your stocking feet back at the ski place, and you have a funny feeling in your body and realize you are "seeing" the mountain again, feeling what it would be like to shove off and start carving below lift 4).

The interface is in this case an "inter" between one face (the face of the mountain covered with snow) and another face (the set of inches that define the places the skis hit the ground). The interface changes constantly, is complex, massively so. You are screaming down the mountain and considering the next turn, and the next...but it turns out that there are Other People skiing, and you need to take them into account, and the possibility that the snow over there may be significantly different than what you are successfully skiing on now.

I'm imagining: this is your brain. This is your brain on skis.

Now, there is another cyborg element: a kind of pleasure you can have as a human (sliding down hills of snow as a kid, sliding down a waterfall in Vermont with your brother, sliding down a hill of mud into leaves) but ramped up, adrenalized, made into an entirely new field of possibilities. The cyborg pleasure is the pleasure of the (new, entrancing, difficult, intoxicating) interface. It is a new space to play in, with new pleasures and pains, new skill sets and patterns. And while there are some utilitarian reasons for being able to ski (you live in Sweden and want to ski over to the neighbor's house for lunch; you are fighting Nazis in Finland during the war), mostly the ski borg is a cyborg of the nonutilitarian, the Arcadian.

Next skiborg topics:

1. Helmets are really sound systems.

2. Chair lifts are big metal arms for lifting humans as if they were children; that is, they do what amusement park rides do. And chair lifts are the slowing down of the pace of the day, forcing even the adrenaline junkies to do nothing, stare out at the mountains, feel the change of weather from low to high.

3. The organic part of the equation sometimes is not up to the cybernetic one. So snow boarders' wrists get broken and damaged; skiers don't break their legs as much but damage their knees and acl's.

4. As with other cyborgs, skiing is embedded in a complex set of relations, including corporate ones, environmental ones, gender, class, race. These are not innocent, or without negative impacts.

5. Finally, put a bunch of people with prosthetics onto a big mountain with lots of changes to intersect, interact, interfere, and you have an interesting temporary society. Like burning man in the snow, someone said.

Does it tell us anything to see skiers as cyborgs?

Stoppard's Arcadia, Cybernetics, and the Cyborg 1

I've been reading several books up here in the mountains, including David Golumbia's "The Cultural Logic of Computation" and (for perhaps the eighth time) Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. I promise to write more at length on both of these texts, but for the moment I want to mention that when one reads the history of cybernetics, one comes across Maxwell's Demon and the second law of thermodynamics all the time. It is as if entropy, the heat death of the universe, the irreversibility of time, all constituted not simply problems for thinkers like Norbert Wiener, but emotionally felt conflicts.

What I begin to see, as Stoppard lays out his always doubled drama, was that the attractions that Newton (and other scientists) include in their studies (gravitation, repulsion, etc) and "the

attraction which Newton left out" (sexual desire and love as a disruptive element in our lives) create a tension that itself disrupts. Desire is entropic; we suffer it, and feel more alive because of it, and iterate it just as one might iterate (as Thomasina the young female student does in 1809) an x and y equation, feeding the solution back into the equation and then solving it again, producing a graph, a picture, a sketch of feedback. And the results of such iteration in modern times - the analysis of animal populations, stock prices, weather - is that we see, as Valentine the scientist sees in the present day half of Stoppard's play, that numbers begin to behave like, or indeed represent, natural phenomenon. The language of computation, at least in Stoppard's play, does not yield order, or Order, or contol; it reveals that "the future is disorder." And in just the same way the weather is predictably unpredictable, so are we, given the other set of attractions (and here I would add not just sexual desire, but the range of emotions, aesthetic attractions, the imagined self and community and polis in predictably unpredictable orbits).

So beyond Classic and Romantic, the Two Cultures, the language of computation and the language of the attraction which computation leaves out...or rather, comprehending both, is...Arcadia. And if as Leo Mark wrote, the Machine in the Garden is a central and productive trope for American fiction and political imagination, then the Cyborg in the Garden - the Cyborg in Arcadia - may be the next iteration of this theme.

I'm off to ski. When I come back, I'll try to solve for this x and y, and I'll use other, noncomputational language, to embrace x and y. I think the result will be that for Norbert Wiener and the cyberneticists of the 50s, Arcadia turned out to be pools of counter entropy.

John von Neumann, Mirowski, and the Grand Inquisitor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fast Times at Kirkwood High

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

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

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

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

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

Why be interested in cyborgs?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cyborg Science: an initial definition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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