Watching the Borg part 1

Watching the Borg Part One

For those of us who watched Star Trek The Next Generation, the episodes containing the alien threat called the “Borg” were some of the best science fiction we’d ever seen on television. And for those of us who study cyborgs and narratives that discuss human-machine hybridity, the Borg shows, especially the two part episode "The Best of Both Worlds," are a treasure trove not only of viral quotations (“Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.”) but of images and conflicts that bear analysis and are a source of both enjoyment and terror.

The first part of Best of Both Worlds aired during the week of June 18, 1990, and was an immediate success. And then…the waiting commenced. Three full months. I remember the couple weeks leading up to the concluding episode, Best of Both Worlds Part 2, as taking forever; the show was that gripping.

Here I could provide a detailed plot summary, but for now I just want to remind readers of the salient points of Part 1. The Borg are a race of cybernetic organisms, or cyborgs, who sport multiple mechanical prosthetics that link them to each other. In the world of restoration vs. augmentation, the Borg are augmented with a vengeance. If they were ever simply human, that time has passed; none are without the monstrous-looking facial implants, wires and cables running from head to neck and back, inhuman lights and readouts announcing the cybernetic elements of the otherwise organic humanoids.

The Enterprise answers a distress call and discovers an entire colony which turns out to have been destroyed, or “assimilated,” by the Borg. When the Borg cube (their “ship” is a huge cube, perhaps the least aerodynamic “ship” in the history of representation) is discovered in Federation space, the Enterprise moves to intercept it; the Borg demand that Captain Picard surrender, and move to cut the Enterprise apart. The Enterprise escapes briefly, but soon is found and boarded. Picard is kidnapped, and the Borg move off to attack Earth.

2

I want to name a set of points I want to make regarding the Borg, and perhaps explain the viral nature of their fictional fame.

First, there were certainly cyborg films before this. The first Terminator, RoboCop, were both made in the 80s, and Terminator 2 was being filmed in 1990 and was released the next year. These films imagined cyborgs as one-offs, more or less; they were monsters of augmentation, but they were a single cyborg, wreaking havoc. In some ways they were just the new monsters on the block; Terminator for example is a pretty straight up horror film, just happening to have an interesting side premise (nuclear war caused by military AIs run amok; future war fought against cyborgs and drones). But the Borg combined the specificity of the cyborg iconography from the 80s with the image of many many cyborgs linked by communication networks seemingly implanted in their bodies and dominating their actions. This horrific linking is part of what makes them more terrifying; they borrow insectoid horror from films like Alien (and from sci fi novels like Ender’s Game, where Earth must fight hordes of insect-like aliens with advanced weaponry).

Second, where the Terminator is a killing machine, the Borg are…what? They have no personal grudge or survival danger that appears to motivate them. But their impact is total; the first evidence we see of them is a huge crater where an entire colony, an entire city of 900, used to be. Everything is gone; it is the Romans destroying Carthage and salting the ground. The away team asks if the coordinates are accurate; when told they are “in the center of the city,” they gaze stunned at the prospect: an immense grand canyon like cavity. It is a moment both of utter speechlessness (nothing is said for the rest of the scene) and of an awful sublimity (the perspective is vast, dwarfing the mere humans with their tiny devices blinking). This is nothing a single body could do, even one augmented as Terminator. This is a different scale of horror. And this is not simply in terms of destruction; it also refers to power and speed of their technology; the first encounter with the Borg (in Season 1) took place 7000 light years away from Federation territory.

What can do this kind of damage? Several things point to the uncanny elements that link the Borg to what is about to descend on the 1990s. First when we see the Borg ship, it looks a lot like…well, like a corporate headquarters: huge, square, with the thousands of windows that a huge modern office building would have. Second, its crew are massively linked by telecommunications devices, so much so that they seem to actually be devices. Third, the logic of the Borg seems incomprehensible to humans. The Borg come to a civilization, and simply announce that they will “assimilate” the culture, which means somehow taking it “into” its body, and then destroying what is left. Resistance is indeed futile; the Borg bring an overwhelming amount of power and force and terror to their victims, raining shock and awe on them, not least of which is the seeming lack of reason for doing so.

Now consider the 1990s. The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the virtual end of the Cold War radically alters the familiar landscape of geopolitical conflict. The Reagan cold war 80s is morphing into the neoliberalism of the 90s, with the penetration of capital markets through the world, especially in China. The 90s saw the ebb of Cold War and the resulting power vacuum filled by the “winning” side’s overwhelming use of linguistic force to push ideas such as free markets, the efficiency of Western models of commerce, consumption and consumer choice, individualism, and so on. This did not mean, of course, the end of war and violence; the 1990’s saw the eruption of the Congo Wars, the first Gulf War, the war in Chechnia, and the variously named wars in Yugoslavia, the Rwandan Genocide, the Taliban gaining control of Afghanistan, and the Somali Civil War.

In addition, the 90s saw the rise of the Internet, and the beginning of the massively wired world we now live in. For many years the Internet was relatively private network of military and academic researchers and private companies and government. In a sense it might as well have been 7000 light years away from most people in the world. The 90s saw the emergence of the World Wide Web project of Tim Berners-Lee, with its nascent browser and wide reach. By 1996, this was no longer the case; the Internet was a common word, previously hidden or private networks were assimilated into the “inter-net,” and during the last half of the 90s “traffic on the public Internet grew by 100 percent per year, while the mean annual growth in the number of Internet users was thought to be between 20% and 50%. (see Coffman, K. G; Odlyzko, A. M. (1998-10-02). The size and growth rate of the Internet. AT&T Labs). The Borg-like growth of the Net is based not on a centralized and hierarchical plan, but on the relatively decentralized nature of the net (born, at least partly, of its original need to survive a nuclear attack).

My point is that the Borg appear from nowhere looking like a massive corporation bent on assimilating all cultural difference, using wired and wireless communication technologies that allow them instantaneous communication with each other in accomplishing the “prime directive” of overcoming resistance and literally in-corporating cultures, economies, peoples, and spaces.

The second point is that the episode Best of Both Worlds has what is known as a B story line: the conflict between Riker, the first mate of the Enterprise, and a younger female upstart, Lt, Shelby, a Borg weapons expert who both covets Riker’s job and clearly expects him to accept a captaincy (he’s been offered one but hasn’t taken it, begin conflicted about leaving the Enterprise “team”). When I first began “reading” the Borg episode, I saw the main conflicts as alien assimilationist Borg vs. autonomous Federated humans and allies, and secondly, a story of gender (Riker threatened by Shelby; Shelby acting “masculine” within a male dominated world, out-manning and un-manning men around her).

However, I watched the show yet again the other night (on a Polish site with Polish subtitles and strange ads for Internet involving a cartoon cat ignoring a mouse opening the fridge behind her and throwing masses of food out of it; the cat is licking its lips at the cheap internet-friendly cell phone advertised Pozniej 908 zt!). And I found that, there is certainly an issue of “other” in terms of gender; Shelby comes at Riker like the Borg come at humans, with no guilt or shame about wanting his job and dismissing his reluctance to move up the ladder. But it is this latter ladder element I now see; it isn’t simply gender, but the way Riker and Shelby are part of a corporate-like structure (well it IS the Enterprise after all) in which they are vying for positions. Admiral Hansen (who is “championing” Shelby as the up and coming talent) describes Shelby’s way of “cutting through” the work of others, “getting us on track,” and deserving of “a wide latitude.”

So while the Borg’s wide swath of destruction is readable as the uncanny power of the new wired, netted, and Evil Empire free corporation, the plot arc of the B story is the same kind of corporate dynamic within the Enterprise, resulting at first in inefficient conflict and an anti-meritocracy (authoritarian Riker is enraged at Shelby’s perceived disrespect and is constantly hemming her in, clearly betraying the supposed meritocracy of the Enterprise and hurting the joint cause of finding some answer to the Borg). The resolution of their conflict, based both on gender and on the corporate competition of the 80s and 90s.is the show’s ideological answer to the Borg within.

On Penfield Machines, Philip Dick and Cyborgs 1

Some brief cyborg reflections on the Penfield Mood Organ in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick.

I had read about Wilden Penfield back in the 1990’s when writing my dissertation; in particular, I was interested in the through line of research on brains, early abuse of “research” by the military and others, and applications to cyborg narratives. Penfield is a fascinating character; he began his surgical career studying epilepsy, and early on was befriended by David Rockefeller. Later the Rockefeller Foundation funded his Montreal Neurological Hospital.

I forget the book where I first learned of Penfield’s amazing surgeries, in which he stimulated the brains of conscious patients with electricity. The patients then responded, and slowly Penfield began mapping areas of the brain. In particular he mapped the sensory and motor cortices and found links between them and limbs and organs.

I remember reading about him stimulating parts of the brain, and having patients identify memories, smells, etc. Here is a reenactment of one of his famous stories, the “burnt toast” surgery:

http://www.videos.com/play/M18380073-1/cognition_penfield/dr_wilder_penfield_i_can_smell_burnt_toast.html

To “reproduce” this experiment you can go here:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/tryit/brain/

And going along with the 1954 theme (my date of birth, and that of THEM! The film I just wrote about), he published his Epilepsy and the Functional Anatomy of the Human Brain in that year, along with the maps mentioned above. One thing I did not know what that his famous experiments of restimulating memory occurred in less than five percent of his patients (Wikipedia).

In Philip Dick’s 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Penfield is mentioned on the first page, as the name of the so-called “mood organ.” I still remember loving this conceit by Dick; you wake up and program the mood organ in order to feel what you want to feel, or are supposed to feel given what you are about to do. So he feels merry when he wakes up, unlike his wife, who is unmerry, grumpy, bitter, sharp. When he moves to reset her Penfield, she says,

“Keep your hands off my settings.” Her voice held bitter sharpness. “I don’t want to be awake.”

He is merry; she is unmerry. He has dialed merry; she feels angry. But when his merry attempts to get her to set her machine on high enough so that she will be glad to be awake is rebuffed (they have a marital spat, and she lays into him for being crude, a cop, a hired murderer) he “felt irritable now, although he hadn’t dialed for it.”

In Dick’s wonderfully jaundiced vision of the future, Penfield and his kind have pioneered the mapping of the brain so that it can be manipulated by users to achieve norms – contentment, happiness, “businesslike professional attitude. The trouble is, these settings are in fact wildly contrasting to the post apocalyptic world of the novel, in which humans “prepare” to go outside with lead codpieces, the air is still radioactive from a nuclear war, most animals are extinct, and most humans have emigrated to other planets. In fact, those who don’t emigrate degenerate; at any moment, the poisoned atmosphere can turn a normal person into a “special” (distorted genes making it illegal for one to reproduce; mental failure making one a “chickenhead” like the character Isidore).

The entire opening sequence of husband and wife waking up, getting into an argument, and “making up,” are all a wicked Swiftian satire on machines we use to alter our attitude toward the world. The cyborg element of this is obvious and disturbing: if we can map the mind, and we can locate the seat of the emotions, then we can alter what we feel regardless of what we perceive. This “control” is more or less the Holy Grail for many of the scientists, like Delgado, who did “research” in the field of electronic brain stimulation. Penfield was not such a man (in fact he comes across as quite a wonderful human being), but his work for Dick was emblematic of the kind of mind and brain control Dick was terrified of.

Is the Penfield Mood organ the TV of the postapocalyptic future? In many ways the mood organ looks back on the TV as a cousin, and in fact Dick mentions TV as another source of conflict:

Then he bent to turn on the TV.

From the bedroom Iran’s voice came. I can’t stand TV before breakfast.”

“Dial 888,” Rick said as the set warmed. “The desire to watch TV, no matter what’s on it.”

I don’t feel like dialing anything at all now, “ Iran said.

Then dial 3,” he said.

“I can’t dial a setting that stimulates my cerebral cortex into wanting to dial. If I don’t want to dial, I don’t want to dial that most of all, because then I will want to dial, and wanting to dial is right now the most alien drive I can imagine...”

In Dick's cyborg future, beyond shock treatment and lobotomy and pharmacology, we have the ability to alter our basic emotions and moods, and this device is a consumer device, more or less the "toaster" model that Apple has for its products (that is, an iPod should be as simple to use as a toaster). The opening scene of a novel that is purportedly about humans and androids/replicants is full of this notion of cyborg control of one's mind, and of others' minds as well. In case the reader might have missed the import of this fight between man and woman over technologies that allow us to escape our actual, messy emotions caused by the uncontrollable in our world, the fight ends not with dialing ecstatic sexual bliss, but with "594: pleased acknowledgement of husband's superior wisdom in all matters." Dick wants to link this mood organ qua emotional self manipulation with the nightmare that loss of clear connection between mood and reality have wrought: patriarchal nightmares of total war, ecological destruction, planetary exhaustion. That TV has this futuristic cousin implies that this is a role TV plays in Dick's 1968 present, and in ours as well.

Another cyborg point: in the novel, the The Voight-Kampff empathy test is used to attempts to identify androids and distinguish them from human beings. It is a 60s version of a biometric ID system, based on autonomic responses to questions that in 'normal' humans automatically generate an empathic response.

"I'm not a peace officer," Rick said. "I'm a bounty hunter." From his opened briefcase he fished out the Voight-Kampff apparatus, seated himself at a nearby rosewood coffee table, and began to assemble the rather simple polygraphic instruments...

"This" - he held up the flat adhesive disk with its trailing wires - "measures capillary dilation in the facial area. We know this to be a primary autonomic response... This records fluctuations of tension within the eye muscles.

The irony is that humans themselves have seriously flattened empathic abilities, partly due to the degraded social and environmental world they suffer. They need machines to feel, and in classic Dick paranoid writing, it isn't always clear who is an unempathic android and who is an apparently unempathic human being. The flattening of affect for cyborgs is almost a universal theme (especially in Mars Plus, Pohl's book about a cyborg designed for a Mars mission, but of course Arnold's Terminator is reasonably affect-free and notably unempathetic).

Of course the test is a kind of Turing test, and part of what makes Dick such a wonderful writer is that the biometric tests for androids are fallible, and can be designed around. Again, writer after writer encourages us to focus as much on the organic as the cybernetic, and to consider both the technical ways we alter mood and adjust consciousness (from drugs and alcohol to television and iPods to shock treatment to religion to meditation techniques) and the organic nature of emotions and empathy. One might also consider the difference between technologies for altering mood, and techniques; direct manipulation of the brain may be on the horizon, and yet may prove to be as seriously problematic as drugs; mice that find a way to hit a bar that stimulates the pleasure centers, hit the bar early and often.

Cyborg/essay

The cyborg/essay

1

When I was in college – heck, when I was in graduate school in the 80’s – I read books and articles, xeroxed stuff, wrote in longhand and typed it up on an electric typewriter. I have no, repeat no, nostalgia for this process. It pretty much sucked for me. I typed slowly, badly, mistyped a word for every six I got right, and plodded along well behind my thought process. When a paragraph was typed it was practically as if I’d set it in type, a la Ben Franklin; it would take what seemed like a huge amount of effort to introduce whole new sentences, not to mention new ideas or revisions. I can even remember m hands poised above the keyboard, knowing that what I’d written was, if not something I completely disagreed with, at least something I’d moved on to qualify, reconsider, think better of. Should I stop and handwrite the new stuff and then go back and type again? What time is it? How much energy do I have? And often the paper would go out with me knowing it was not the best representation of my own thoughts. (Yes I know this is always already the case with all writing, but it is different to send out your work knowing the paper was at C and you’d gotten at least to C.2 or even D).

On the other hand, the typewriter was more or less mute. It sat there as a testimony to my bad skills as a worker bee, but it never vibrated to let me know that someone, somewhere, was thinking of me and trying to contact me. (If it had, that would have been the moment to consider what things I’d put in my body that evening). It never morphed, like something out of Kronenberg’s 1983 cult flick Videodrome, into a television set that reached out to grab me or swallow me or invite me into its suddenly more real than real interior.

In other words, it didn’t act like my MacBook.

2

Montaigne more or less invented the modern essay, or essai. I love essay because I love the way multiple meanings inhere in the word and thus in the writing of essays. The noun essay (as taken by Francis Bacon in imitation of Montaigne as translated by the Elizabethan Florio) means trial, attempt, and comes from the Late Latin exagium "a weighing, weight," from L exigere "test," from ex- "out" (see ex-) + agere (see act) apparently meaning here "to weigh." The writer “acts out” in writing ideas or perceptions not already polished and formed and edited; in writing them down (and out) writers discover if they have merit, but also, discover where they go, how the act of writing takes them from this to this to this. Essay also means "to put to proof, test the mettle of," late 15c., from Middle French essaier, from essai. In English we now use the spelling assay to get at this meaning. So when we attempt some set of ideas in an open form such as the essay, we allow the ideas to be weighed, assayed like ore, to see if we have found gold, or fool’s gold, or both.

The irony of this origin of essay is that for many hundreds of thousands of students in the United States and elsewhere, “essay” has come to mean the opposite: a constricting form by which you show your English teacher you know how to write five paragraphs that include a main idea, topic sentences that refer to (one of three parts of) that main idea, and “development” that often prescribes at least one or two details to support the topic sentence. It bears the same relationship to actual essays that the “compulsories” in competitive ice skating (figure eights, etc etc) have with the breathtaking ice performances of the open round. No one televises the compulsories, is what I’m saying here. And no one would read the five paragraph essays as a product, unless they were content with a pretty elementary level of writing and thinking.

3

The reason I want to talk about “cyborg” essays and cyborg/essay is that the wandering view point of Montaigne’s wonderful, self contradicting, serpentine writing process has a parallel in the wandering I do when I sit down to write with my badly named “laptop computer.” Really it is a Videodrome portal to multiple realities, the Internet and its Tao of 10,000 things, its instant messaging and Facebook apps that alert me to someone somewhere in the world wanting my attention, its music library capable of playing 101 gigs of music for 50.5 days in a row, its Skype link and photo library and Burning Man widgets and Remote desktop connection to other servers.

So. I began working on my writing the other night, and was looking at the origins of cyborgs and cybernetics. This came out of my dissertation; I am trying to revise the way I introduce the notion of the cyborg in proto-cyborg short stories of the forties and fifties, and in the writings about cybernetics that come from this period. This led me to consider an essay by Porush titled The Cyborg was a Bomb, in which he argue the connection between the atomic bomb and the cybernetic revolution which was in its was every bit as dangerous – perhaps more so – to the living breathing world of humans and animals.

It occurred to me that so many of the superheroes from this period get their powers from atomic or nuclear accidents. Spiderman (bit by a radioactive bug), the Thing from Fantastic Four, The Hulk…and I wondered how this played for adults and children of the fifties and early sixties, living out the endgame of World War 2 and the atomic shadow cast over the entire planet by the Cold War’s arms race. I am more or less one of those kids (born in 1954) and I have memories of waking up at night from dreams of protecting my family from Russians who were climbing the hill behind my house from Route 91. I remember in the dream feeling that I could kill other humans if I had to protect my mom and dad, and the feel of an automatic weapon in my hand as I perched on the crest of the hill and laid fire down at the demonic invaders.

This led me to wander the web looking for evidence of other comic characters; in particular, I was looking for any sign of radioactive rabbits (since my net avatar name since 1992 has been cybunny, well before NeoPets, and my nickname since 1980 has been Rabbit). I found what I was looking for:

The comic came out in 1955: a starving lonely rabbit gains super powers after eating a carrot from a carrot patch containing uranium. Later on in his career, he changed his name to Atomic Bunny.

These Charlton comics are, imho, unbelievably bad, and I knew this as a kid reading tons of comics (usually in the very old school Springfield Mass. barber shop my dad took us to for our biweekly buzz cuts). But I found lot of other examples of fifties fascination with how we might alter the organic body, via radiation and drugs. The comparison of Atomic Rabbit with Atomic Mouse (whose potent image tops this blog) is relevant here, in the words of Toonopedia’s Don Markstein:

[Atomic Mouse] too, got his super powers from doubly forbidden fruit by today's standards — drugs and radiation. But while both their power-enhancers were as radioactive as can be, Mouse's was more blatantly a drug. He got his super powers from U-235 pills, whereas Rabbit's U-235 carrots could be passed off as good nutrition, like Atomictot's vitamins and Popeye's spinach. But while Popeye of the E.C. Segar comics ate lots of spinach for strength through nutrition, the animated Popeye treated it like a drug, getting a huge rush from it and sometimes, just for emphasis, sucking it in through his pipe. [http://www.toonopedia.com/atomicrb.htm]

In my dissertation I talk about the move in the fifties from direct assaults on the abject bodies of the institutionalized (shock treatment, lobotomy) to the more humane application of psychopharmacology (the tricyclic antidepressants discovered in the early fifties, beginning with chlorpromazine). In fact, the “fathers” of the cyborg, Nathan Kline and Manfred Clynes, were part of what has been called the “explosive birth” of psychopharmacology during this period, working at Rockland State Hospital in New York, and the original cyborg article from 1960 shows the powerful influence of this new exciting door into altering human behavior and consciousness. In fact, the Wikipedia article on chlorpromazine asserts,

The introduction of chlorpromazine into clinical use has been described as the single greatest advance in psychiatric care, dramatically improving the prognosis of patients in psychiatric hospitals worldwide; the availability of antipsychotic drugs curtailed indiscriminate use of electroconvulsive therapy and psychosurgery, and was one of the driving forces behind the deinstitutionalization movement. [“Chlorpromazine,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorpromazine).

Notice the crazy ride here; the internet allows one to move quickly from topic to topic, in a associative way, much as Montaigne’s essay form allowed him to think outside the very clumsy box of 16^th century thought and writing (with its elaborate medieval argument forms based on pedantic use of authorities, that is, the authority of the Church).

This associative element then is “disciplined” by the acting out of the associations in writing, that is, in the open essay form of this blog. And I haven’t even remotely touched on all the association that were taking place during this small selection of moves made possible by my Videodrome machine that doubles as a writing tool.

This blog/essay form allows for a weaving of materials not normally connected, and for a wider scope of argument that then is open to “assay” or testing. Are these links useful, informative, productive? Are some simply not relevant, or distracted surfing of the web? I want to argue that to understand how we as humans reacted both to the Atomic bomb as a mega-cyborg tool (and used only by massive nation-states like USSR and the US and a few others, rather like the Gundam in later Japanese sci fi anime) and to the other cybernetic products that would produce the image and discourse of the cyborg, we need to weave a web of multiple sources, including popular ones. We need to deploy cultural criticism of these materials because they show how rarefied discourses from science and technology are represented to very wide ranges of people (including especially children, but also including otherwise critical adults who may be ideologically blindsided by cultural narratives).

Next: after Atomic Rabbit, THEM!

Windup Girl, Terminator Seeds and Monsanto Alfalfa

I've been following the recent Monsanto GMO Alfalfa flap closely, especially since I just finished the book The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi. The short version: Monsanto was able to get FDA approval for their GMO alfalfa in the face of what ought to have been overwhelming (and rightfully so) regulatory obstacles. Like testing. And recusion of conflict of interest. And corruption.

For two good articles see “Why Monsanto Always Wins,” by Mike Ludwig, Tuesday 22 February 2011 < http://www.truth-out.org/why-monsanto-always-wins67976> and “USDA Approved Monsanto Alfalfa Despite Warnings of New Pathogen Discovered in Genetically Engineered Crops” by Mike Ludwig, Friday 25 February 2011 <>.

Windup Girl reads like an indictment of Monsanto and its ilk (Astra Zeneca et al) from a future whose agriculture has been irrevocably damaged/destroyed by corporate/genetically modified foods, especially monopolies on seedbanks. In the novel, and in a couple short stories as well (The Calorie Man especially) Bacigalupi pictures a world after the end of cheap fossil fuels. The energy sector may have collapsed to an astounding degree (the energy of wound springs, with some industrial oomph, are the main form of energy in the world; coal is expensive and clearly tied to the global warming nightmare that has come and has flooded New York and other vulnerable cities and lands). But in addition, the multinational corporations like Agri-Gen control all the biotech patents for plants and these now form the basis for the world economy. The problem? Once the cheap fossil fuel ran out, the multinationals (based clearly on Monsanto, DuPont, Astra-Zeneca etc) moved in and cornered huge parts of the market for seeds, so that no farmers can farm using their own seeds without retribution. The result? A global collapse as unforseen diseases ravage the GMO crops, and scientists (using computers that suck huge amounts of expensive energy) barely stay ahead of the next devastating mutation of viruses and plant diseases.

This world is pretty damned grim. It turns out that some other tensions, like ethnic and colonial tensions. are made worse by scarcity and the effects of rapacious corporate food capitalism.

The novel does for a future look at Monsanto what the book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man does for the US State Department: it shows the utter violence, greed, and ruthlessness that are regularly brought to bear on second and third world countries in pursuit of market control, and thus political control. I also found myself picking up Naomi Klein's excellent book The Shock Doctrine, and leafing through it thinking that her notion of "disaster capitalism" is both accurate and suggestive. Beginning with Chile, the US has first benefited from producing "disasters" like the overthrow of allende, and then applied similar techniques to actual disasters like Katrina and the Sri Lankan tsunami, and to foreign policy application of "shock and awe" in Iraq and Afghanistan. Wikipedia includes a summary of the Irish Times review, which "offers a précis for Klein’s central argument—that the neoconservative project is not about "implanting of democracy" but a repressive prescription for the maximising of global profit for a small elite. "Neocons see the ideal ratio of super-rich to permanent-poor as consistent with an uber-class of business oligarchs and their political cronies from the top 20%". The remaining 80% of the world’s population, the "disposable poor", would subsist in "planned misery" unable to afford adequate housing, privatised education or healthcare."

This view of the world is consolidated in The Windup Girl, in ways the neocons cannot even imagine. For their world view has been forced onto not only governments but environments, ecosystems, with unimaginably horrific results. The two "prequel" stories that Bacigalupi wrote, "The Calorie Man" and "Yellow Card Man," can be found in his collection Pump Six and Other Stories. Both books are published by Night Shade Books.

A very quick Haraway blog:

1. In the series Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, Togusa talks with a forensic specialist called Haraway. I'm not sure Donna would subscribe to what "Haraway" is saying, though I think she'd appreciate the philosophical tone and length of reasoning here (the character talks for almost two minutes straight about robots, gender, artificial life). And I'm pretty sure Donna would be surprised to find that "she" smokes!

Here is the link from Ghost in the Shell:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S25YpTaowsU&feature=related

As an aside, my mix played Return to Innocence as I typed about the Ghost in the Shell program. I love the serendipity of databases.

2. There are several "mashups" of Donna's manifesto on YouTube and elsewhere. According to Wikipedia, "Digital mashups represent a new phase in the re-use of existing works not so much conceptually as in ease of use. The creation of digital media formats such as ASCII text, Redbook audio, JPEG images and MPEG video has made it far easier for potential mashup creators to create derivative works than was the case in the past, when significant technical equipment and knowledge was required to manipulate analog content."

While there are all sorts of issues with mashups, including Jarod Lanier using them as examples of why the net is counter-creative, I am imagining them as a cyborg writing. So much of what we write owes much of its life to what has been read or written before, and not by us; in addition, the cyborg manifesto is not simply collaged, but integrated into popular culture products, making the pop product deeper and the potentially complex ideas in the Manifesto more accessible. My favorite mashup is one that overlays the manifesto with clips from Ghost in the Shell. Here are links:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHePdqzIpN8

Other interesting reworkings of Haraway can be found here:

http://vimeo.com/6131354

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDUFpPibuMs

and here is one in Spanish that is fascinating

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fI6jAQJXmy0&feature=related

Donna Haraway 1

On January 28th at UCSC’s College 9/10, I attended “Messing with Haraway,” a surprise goodbye to Donna Haraway, who is retiring at the end of the spring quarter after a long and successful career. The event was very much in the spirit of Donna’s work: eclectic, funny, serious, international. Scholar friends of Donna’s from all over the world Skyped in to a huge screen; there were musical numbers, testimonials, short presentations and mashups, and even a pagan style ritual with animal sounds, a cast circle, and cool masks.

My friend and colleague Chris Gray and I did a short bit for Donna using Wordle, to ask questions about what it might mean to talk about “machine reading.” Chris talked about the DARPA attempt to use machines to “read” the huge amount of intelligence information and make decisions about what is important; I showed large Wordle graphs of Donna’s key works (including her Manifesto for Cyborgs, The Promise of Monsters, and Situated Knowledge) and attempted a Donna-like reading of a Ford advertisement featuring King Kong and son.

Originally Chris had a joke to tell: that I was “one of the few people to leave Histcon voluntarily.” Both of us are Donna’s students; Chris’s witticism is that Donna helped Crystal transition from street activist to academic, and helped Rabbit transition from academic to street activist (though I was more or less on that road already; it is partly what prevented me from spending enough time on my HistCon work, to be honest).

Our performance/talk was called “Humans and Machines Read the Cyborg Manifesto. Here is how we described out project:

Perhaps there are no misreadings of a text, but there are strange readings, and strange appropriations. A text is a technology and its reception can be quite complex. We will consider various machinic interpretations, that is readings of the Cyborg Manifesto that are generated by digital technologies. Of course, these readings are framed by the humans that program the bots/engines/algorithms involved, so they actually are a manifestation of “cyborg reception”-- a new and special case of audience reception studies. We want to go beyond pure human analysis and beyond the classic version of the discussion (who agrees and why; who disagrees and why) and ask how do human-machine systems experience something like the Cyborg Manifesto now? When you search for it what do you find? What do its different organs look like distributed across the Internet, and does this much larger map of the manifesto and its iterations tell us anything interesting or useful?

To explore these questions we will use “Donna Haraway's "Manifesto for Cyborgs" to generate a number of hits and images for analysis.. We hope to make manifest one kind of cyborg reception: how an author and her work are cut up and distributed through cyberspace, and that the algorithms for “reading” her are mostly machinic, although also partly human.

The performance was only 5 minutes, so we cut a good deal of the original proposal. That meant focusing on Wordle and not on two other machine reading sites: our friend Andruid Kerne’s dynamic collage software, CombinFormation, (http://ecologylab.net/combinFormation/), and the site Gap Minder [http://www.gapminder.org], with its visual representation of data, in particular, the spatial and colorful representation of world health and wealth since 1810, and also a representation of CO2 emissions since 1820.

The idea was to begin asking questions about human readings, machine readings (or “readings” if you will), and of course, combinations of the two.

In preparing the presentation (and an article we hope to develop), I showed Chris a quotation by Jarod Lanier from his book You Are Not A Gadget:

It’s early in the twenty-first century, and that means that these words will mostly be read by nonpersons – automatons or numb mobs composed of people who are no longer acting as individuals. The words will be minced into atomized search-engine keywords within industrial cloud computing facilities located in remote often secret locations around the world. They will be copies millions of times by algorithms…They will be scanned, rehashed, and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers into wikis and automatically aggregated wireless text message streams. Ix

Lanier calls this “vast fanning out” of his words the “lifeless world of pure information.” And he contrasts this with the tiny number of “real human eyes” which will not only decode the words, but intersect with people who have identities: “You have to be somebody before you can share yourself.”

I think it is interesting that he looks at the ways machines “read” instrumentally (for example, the Google “reading’ of my email that triggers the algorithms that link my words with a possible advertisement), AND he looks at ways humans don’t “read” like a human, but rather like mobs who thrive on anonymous insults; meanwhile these people themselves are being “read” as their interaction with Lanier’s words allow data aggregating technologies to “find correlations between those who read my words and their purchases, their romantic adventures, their debts, and soon, their genes.” Again, the verb “to read” is undergoing some radical morphing, and understanding this will be a key part of our coming analysis.

So we then wanted to ask: does a Wordle representation of the most important words in a text (here, two of Donna’s important essays) count as reading in any sense of the word? Does this help us read the essay differently? BTW, Wordle is “ a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.”

Here are a couple of the Wordle images, the first Donna’s essay Situated Knowledges, and the second her Cyborg Manifesto:

During the presentation, we asked the assembly to guess which of Donna’s essays we were representing. It was interesting to see how wrong the first few guesses were, and how quickly people caught on (of course you’d have to have actually read the essays in order to make educated guesses!). You can see also that the cyborg essay was crucially about women, more so even than cyborgs; and you can see that her other essay is much less about women per se, though it is crucially about feminist practice. Also the layouts both prevent a more “rigorous” comparison of terms (for example we could simply order them from large to small and provide numbers for the occurrence of each word) and allow for a spatialization of terms that offer different kinds of conjunction and proximity.

One thing I found fascinating was that after the event, I spoke with Donna about her 1997 interview with Wired. In I think 2009, well after the article was published, the author Hari Kunzru posted the entire interview online [http://www.harikunzru.com/archive/donna-haraway-interview-transcript-1996]. When I told Donna this, she predicted that the Wired interview and the entire interview would be significantly different. In particular, she imagined the latter interview would include much of the feminism that the Wired interview seemed to erase. But when I went back and ran the two articles, neither emphasized woman, women, etc. I haven’t told Donna this yet, but the upshot seems to be that the image of Wired as editing out the feminist bits seems wrong, at least on a first (machinic) reading! I think in the interests of space, I’ll post these two Wordle bits on a separate blog page!

There’s much more to say here, both on machinic reading and on Donna herself. In my next post, I hope to give an overview of Donna’s work, and why it is important to me, drawing on the extended interview in the book How Like a Leaf.