Earth-that-was got used up.
We moved out -- terraformed and colonized hundreds of new earths; some, rich and flush with the new technologies; some, not so much.
In The Windup Girl, we are plunged into a fraught and difficult world: energy collapse and environmental disasters have changed the shape of the planet, swamping its coastal cities and destroying our capacity to travel or move freight at high speeds. Add to this a series of genetic-engineering screwups that lay waste to the world's crops and trigger wave after wave of punishing plagues, and the rise of midwestern American genetic engineering cartels that control the world's supply of plague-resistant GM crops.
Anderson Lake is one such Calorie Man, working undercover in Thailand, a rogue state where generippers reverse-engineer the food cartels' sterile crops and combine them with carefully hoarded genetic material from the Thai seedbank. Anderson lives in Bangkok, undercover, running a factory nominally involved in the manufacture of experimental windup springs that can compactly and efficiently store the energy pushed into them by GM elephants. He is the hub around which many stories spin: that of Hock Seng, a former wealthy Malay Chinese who has fled an ethnic purge and now runs Anderson's factory; that of Jaidee, the Tiger of Bangkok, a hard-fighting, uncorruptable shock-trooper in the Thai environment ministry; and Emiko, a "new person" manufactured in a Japanese vat to be a perfect servile helper, abandoned by her owner to the brothels of Thailand, where she is cruelly mistreated.
The Windup Girl is a story about colonialism, independence, mysticism and ethics, sex and loyalty, and the opposing forces of greed and empathy.
http://boingboing.net/2010/02/17/the-windup-girl-2010.html
5. First, I found Damon Young’s book Distraction. He’s a youngish Australian philosopher, not a self help dude, so I was curious and clicked onto his site, which offered the following description in a font called Futura, which in itself is worth a visit to the site:
About Distraction
Most of us struggle with distraction every day: the familiar feeling that our attention is not quite where it should be.
But what is distraction?
In his lucid, timely book, Damon Young shows that distraction is more than too many stimuli, or too little attention. It is actually a matter of value – to be distracted is to be torn away from what is worthwhile in life. And for Young, what is most worthwhile is freedom: not simply rights or legal liberties, but the capacity to patiently, creatively craft one’s own life.
Exploring the lives of such luminaries as Henri Matisse, Karl Marx, Seneca and Henry James, Young exposes distraction in work, technology, art, politics and intimacy. With warmth and wit, he reveals what is most valuable, and what is best avoided, in the pursuit of a life of one’s own.
Click here to read about distraction on the BBC news. Click here to read an extract in Australia's Age newspaper.
So of course I clicked here to find out about distraction on BBC. And I clicked the other here to read an excerpt.
And all of this clicking and moving around and reading around before I'd even proceeded to the second book I'd decided to check out. I even read the comments at the end of the BBC Magazine article, which is another form of reading altogether. (Once I went to a TED site on prosthetics forwarded to me by my good friend Kevin, and proceeded to read for an hour or so the many many comments written first on the talk, and then on other comments, and then back to earlier comments or to the actual talk itself. Did I learn anything from this distracted reading? Hell yeah! In fact, it felt like the kind of search and deconstruct operation that I love the Net for.
6. I liked the gist of Young's argument, which is both oh so familiar (I am after all writing on the same topic and using many of the same rhetorical moves) and, well, deliciously distracting and entertaining. Here is a bit of his writing, reflecting on that moment when, on vacation in Greece, he interrupts his reverie and presence in beauty to take a cell phone call from his mum:
To recover from the distractions of the technological age, what's required is a more ambitious relationship to our tools - one that promotes our liberty instead of weakening it. If we can't escape technology, we can certainly enforce its limits, and our own. We can defer to the comforting noise of iPods, or we can seek moments of quiet attention and reflection. We can accept the stress of 24-hour availability, or we can reclaim our own rhythms. (I can answer the mobile phone, or savour Ithaca's salt and cyclamen.)
At the heart of these choices is a concern for what's humanly valuable: what encourages vitality, creativity, liberty, and perhaps even happiness. There are no simple tricks for achieving this; no quick fixes. We have to step back from urgency and familiar habit, and reconsider what we want from life, and why. We have to give up on the easy necessities of technology, and forge some of our own. We must be what the unthinking machines can never be: the custodians of ourselves.
There is a lot to like in his analysis, including the notion that there is a rhythm to our current machine-heavy lives, and there are other rhythms that are possible, and that we haven't quite gotten control over the music of our cyborg lives yet.
But this process of moving through a series of very fast searches, reads, clicks, and leaps is part of that rhythm, one I like and which maddens me. And this is the distracted cyborg in me, the one that loves that I can cover so much ground in so few minutes (as opposed to reading one sustained argument or book for an hour or two). I like hopping around things (you may have noticed my name is cybunny, and most friends call me Rabbit), and I like speed, and I also like the opposites of these things: the beauty of sustained observation or long periods of reading; the way things like sports creates a disciplined body that is focused and achieves moments of excellence; the slowing down of the organism, at a slow cooked and slowly enjoyed meal, or walking down a trail and noticing the pace of walking as opposed to driving or biking.
This is what he means by being the custodians of ourselves. Unintentionally, he might also be referring to the custodians who clean up after messes are made, which can also happen with loss of focus, trying to do too many things at once, and so screwing up on all of them.
7. And so I went back to the earlier list, and found these two compelling titles:
Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winired Gallagher
Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age by Maggie Jackson
And I stopped myself from going and finding out what others may have said about these books and arguments. Instead, I prepared to go upstairs and find my 15 year old and see if he is indeed reading after a night of distracted (and ADDish) listening to parts of at least 30 songs, watching Family Guy, and sitting with me at our (slow cooked and delicious home made chicken soup) dinner for at least eight minutes.
But I'd be lying if I didn't say that part of me was wandering back to what sounded like a familiar topic: the downsides of technology, the way technology itself now gets in the way of thinking technology use through, and the always already nostalgic dream of focus, attention, rapture that comes from living in sustained and reflective moments, strung together like pearls.
As they say in Firefly (another wonderful distraction): shiny.
I gotta go.
One of the obvious moves in cyborg literature is from prosthetics (arms, legs, exoskeletons, eyes) to technologies that interface directly with the mind. I am thinking of the Gibson Neuromancer trilogy, with its jacked-in hackers, but there are tons of examples. And in keeping with the theme of augmentation and amputation, there is something lost or in the shadows regarding mind/machine links.
Firefly caught my eye partly because one of the characters, River Tam, is a disturbed character (erratic, schizophrenic, exhibiting signs of mental illness and/or instability) who has been the subject of horrifying brain experiments at a supposed school for the high achieving called The Academy. As the FireflyWiki explains,
The Academy was actually a scientific installation (likely funded by the Blue Suncorporation)... Blue Sun still considers River their property, and they will stop at nothing to get River back. Unfortunately, exactly what River is now remains uncertain. River's brain was operated on countless times while The Academy had her in its clutches, and she was treated for all intents and purposes like a laboratory animal. Simon was able to perform diagnostic tests and now knows for certain that, among other things, they cut into her brain multiple times. They even stripped her amygdala, which is a part of the brain used to control emotional responses and 'filter' incoming information. As he describes it: "She feels everything; she can't not.
In my dissertation, I discuss the 1950s technologies of lobotomy and shock treatment, as shadow narratives of cybernetics. A frightening amount of brain "research" (in particular, the funded work of Jose Delgado and others of his ilk) crossed over into searches for mind control and even torture. Wikipedia accurately describes Delgado's work thus:
Much of Delgado's work was with an invention he called a stimoceiver, a radio which joined a stimulator of brain waves with a receiver which monitored E.E.G. waves and sent them back on separate radio channels. This allowed the subject of the experiment full freedom of movement while allowing the experimenter to control the experiment. The stimoceiver could be used to stimulate emotions and control behavior. According to Delgado, "Radio Stimulation of different points in the amygdala and hippocampus in the four patients produced a variety of effects, including pleasant sensations, elation, deep, thoughtful concentration, odd feelings, super relaxation, colored visions, and other responses." Delgado stated that "brain transmitters can remain in a person's head for life. The energy to activate the brain transmitter is transmitted by way of radio frequencies." (Source: Cannon; Delgado, J.M.R., "Intracerebral Radio Stimulation and recording in Completely Free Patients," in Schwitzgebel and Schwitzgebel (eds.))
Firefly does a remarkable job of showing the terrible effects of what was done to River, and also of parsing out in bits and pieces the story of how and why these things were done. One sequence shows her in a dream sequence at The Academy, filmed through a gauzy soft filter; the lovely teacher walks up to her and puts her finger on River's forehead, and suddenly the scene shifts to a researcher pushing a needle into the forehead of a screaming River as we see her trussed up like a monkey in some hideous experiment.
In Firefly there is a connection between the organic brilliant mind (in the show River's brother is a brilliant doctor, top 3% of his class; but River is shown to be the genius, early on the smarter) and a "science" that is interested in a variety of ways to control and manipulate actual minds, especially ones already "super" human. She is driven mad by their efforts (much as some subjects in the 50s and 60s were made much worse by lobotomies, shock treatment, and even Nazi-like experiments), turned into a machine/killer (a la The Manchurian Candidate), and apparently also deprived of her ability to filter things (and so both a "reader" of others' minds, and someone unable to block out the thoughts/emotions of others, including the dead). I think Whedon is trying to say that all powerful governments, like the Alliance in the show, want to control minds, and will be prone to finding ways to do so (modern torture techniques derive in part from work on brains and minds done in the 60s by doctors working for the CIA). And he is saying that it is not impossible that the brain can't be augmented (River "knows" things she shouldn't know, like martial arts and how to read thoughts; her journey is a lot like Jason Bourne's journey in The Bourne Identity, with similar questions: how do I know this?) but that societies that practice Alliance type control (including control over how the history of the rebellion is taught to children) will enact sciences of the mind that bear out their priorities. The show has a definite critique of eugenics Nazi-style, and implies that this kind of control can shift from the individual (performed on River) to entire societies (the horror revealed in the move follow up Serenity about the planet Miranda and the social experiments there gone genocidally wrong).
Of this kind of dilemma, Whedon has said, "nothing will change in the future: technology will advance, but we will still have the same political, moral, and ethical problems as today."
Mundane Cyborg: more on phantom ring, or “who put the Oh! in Neuroplasticity?
Today I was listening to NPR’s radio show Fresh Air, when V.S. Ramachandran's Tales Of The 'Tell-Tale Brain” came on. I’d heard Dr. Ramachandran interviewed before; he is a neurologist at the University of California, San Diego. He was talking about his new book, The Tell-Tale Brain, which cites case studies that
“illustrate how people see, speak, conceive beauty and perceive themselves and their bodies in 3-D space.” The interviewer wanted specifically to know about something I’ve grown quite interested in: the issue of “"phantom limb" and what it reveals about both the mind, and (potentially) about how our minds may react to prosthetics that are not originally limbs but which may begin to act that way.
The interview (which can be found at http://www.npr.org/2011/02/14/133026897/v-s-ramachandrans-tales-of-the-tell-tale-brain) focused on a few core ideas. First, many people who’ve lost limbs and/or had them amputated suffer from chronic phantom pain. Originally scientists thought the pain was caused by peripheral nerves (and nerve damage) near the lost limb. But Ramachandran proposed that phantom limb pain might be caused by changes in the brain. He says in the interview,
[It] was based on an idea that there's a complete map of the body's surface on the surface of the brain. So every point on the body's surface has a corresponding point in the brain. Now the curious thing about this map is, even though it's continuous, the face area of the map is right next to the hand area instead of being near the neck where it should be.
Several things interested me about what he found:
1. Ramachandran found that the brain can literally remap pain can “refer” to another place, so that touching a blindfolded amputee’s face revealed that the amputee felt the touch as touching their phantom limb.
2. This means that (as is assumed now, but was controversial until very recently) that the brain is constantly remapping itself, and is not so fully determined at birth. Our brains aren’t as genetically fixed as we thought; instead, he asserts, “Even the basic sensory map in the brain gets completely reorganized in a matter of weeks. This challenges the dogma that all medical students are raised with that no new connections or pathways can emerge in the adult brain. That was news 10 or 15 years ago. Now it's widely accepted." I’m not sure what he means here; in other words, is it trauma that reorganizes the brain this quickly, or does this happen as a matter of course? I assume the latter. But regardless, the extreme example of phantom limb may reveal something fundamental about not only our brains, but their relation to our limbs and perhaps by extension (no pun intended) our prostheses.
3. What I am interested in, here, is the possibility – or perhaps the likelihood – that our almost constant interaction with technologies like “smart” cell phones and laptops may also remap the brain in nontrivial ways.
I found a lot of anecdotal data on phantom vibrations, phantom ring, vibranxiety. Right around 2006 and 2007 several articles in the popular press began to notice a trend in cell phone users. When Web developer Steven Garrity wrote about it in his blog, he got over 30 responders also citing the phantom sensations. (See the USA Today article at http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2007-06-12-cellphones_N.htm. A Guardian article at approximately the same time comments on the similar nature of the phantom “hearing” of your cell phone’s ringtone. Obviously we are surrounded by cell phones with similar tones, but it turns out some of the sound issue has to do with our ears: “Certain sound registers - about 1,000 and 6,000 Hertz - are more easily caught by the human ear, and therefore more likely to stimulate a response.” And the term phantom ring is defined at UrbanDictionary.com, more or less as a common annoyance.
One theory behind both the phantom ring and phantom vibration is that its origins are physical: nerve damage, for example, or muscle memory. Another set of theories focus on psychological factors; the cell phone represents/creates a psychological need in us, a need to be connected. (Hence the preponderance of articles that describe the feeling as anxiety, though I don’t experience it that way, and I don’t imagine others all do, either). A third theory has to do with how we “learn” to perceive important new signals in our environment. Jeffrey Janata, director of the behavioral medicine program at University Hospitals in Cleveland, calls it "hypothesis-guided search." We are learning to pick out sensations of our phone vibrating, and this “leads you to over-incorporate non-vibratory sensations and attribute them to the idea that you're receiving a phone call." Alejandro Lleras argues that we set what he calls perceptual filters, and this setting is imperfect. His calling such phenomenon “false alarms” made me think of times lately when I thought I heard m name being called in a noisy environment (a café, a public square). I also remember my cousin Kevin listening to his new Beatles album on headphones back in 1975; when John sings the lines “she’s so……heavaaay,” he heard “she’s so…..KEVIN!” This happens three times in the song, and the third time he grew alarmed, jumped up (it was late at night), opened his attic bedroom door, and proceeded to fall down a very steep set of stairs. And then his mother and grandmother really DID call his name!
The connection I am wondering about, the one that Ramachandran is exploring with his work in the neuroscience of phantom limb pain, is neuroplasticity. This is what Doctors Janata and Ramachandran argue: the brain is able to form new connections in response to changes in the environment. Not surprisingly, the metaphor Janata uses is “wired,” as in the brain becomes wired to the regular sensation of the cell phone vibrating. He goes on to say that "Neurological connections that have been used or formed by the sensation of vibrating are easily activated. They're over-solidified, and similar sensations are incorporated into that template. They become a habit of the brain."
So if the brain can remap itself, create templates/filters (another metaphor) that then become habitual, the phantom vibration might lead to other discoveries about the ways we interact with, and adjust to, continual use of a whole panoply of gadgets and mundane prostheses. The cybernetic organism here would be one in which Kate Hayle’s notion of embodied knowledge is accurate; we incorporate our phones and laptops, and this incorporation is literally embodied in the brain’s neuroplastic response. Not only is the cell phone not simply a tool we use; it may be an example of a wide range of shifts in the human brain generated by the increasingly intimate connection of humans and postwar machines.
