Ten minutes on March 3, 2008
Ten minutes on March 3, 2008
I’ve been thinking about something called the mundane cyborg. What I mean is that in films and novels the cyborg character is usually pretty extreme: ice-climbing implants in one’s feet in Elizabeth Lynne, Darth Vader’s elaborate breathing apparatus and helmet and prosthetic hand (ditto for Luke), eye implants and neural jacks and all that. The result is a character that is very memorable, extremely able or powerful in some way. RoboCop is an extreme example of this, as is Steve Austin, the $6 million man. Both have been in horrific crashes and their bodies are massively re-engineered.
However, I’m also interested in the mundane intimate relationships we have with our technology. For example, I have had an asthma inhaler for 20 years now, and I could probably count on one hand the number of days I spend without one in my pocket. It is perhaps the way hunters felt about their flintlocks: necessary to survival. It isn’t a cinema-friendly technology, and no movies are likely to be made about cyber-asthmatics, but it meets a critical test: when I don’t have it I feel something is missing which is part of me. If amputation is too strong, try something else: the inhaler, a little red plastic L shaped tube which slips around a metal canister with a plastic nozzle, is most definitely NOT THERE when it is not there, and the brain feels it before it knows it and the hand goes to the pocket to feel for it even though it knows it is not there.
Of course there are other mundane technologies. The credit card. Going into the world without your link to money, your ability to enter the vast salmon stream of shopping and purchasing, your ticket to ride, is possible; many do it each day. But for me, I’ve had a credit card in my back pocket for 20 years as well. It is like the inhaler; with it, I can often instantly right things that have gone wrong. Without it, I am shut out of an increasing number of places.
And the cell phone, it goes without saying, cannot be left behind or else one goes without saying, at least saying to distant fellow users. And glasses. Mine are not strong, I am a recent adopter (I need them to read signs while driving, and it helps to see round plastic objects coming toward my face at high speeds), so occasionally I get partway down the street before I realize they are no longer an embodied augmenting device comfortably sitting on the bridge of my nose.
The key thing is that you feel a massive missing, a disturbance in the Force. You feel dis-Organized, as your peripheral organs are not with your body. Without my cell phone I often feel amputated, as if I have lost a key limb that enables much of my communication. Your body has as it were grown over these foreign objects, so that they are part of the body’s force field, its magnetic signature. They could of course be embedded, ‘truly’ cyborg and not just intermittent intimate paraphernalia. But m point here is that this would not make a difference that makes a difference; quite the opposite. We see all these cyborgs with their implants and alterations and imagine we are not them; the opposite is the case. We are slowly becoming cyborg, and the implications are enormous, dramatic, and yet we turn our gaze to the Terminator and away from so much of the real action.
Oh one other thing before I shut down my body for the night, or rather put it to sleep like a laptop. Some prosthetics like cars enable organs like feet to do the impossible, to go from LA to Santa Cruz in under 6 hours, like the Seven League Boots from fairy tales. And this is a truly amazing power with all sorts of implications. Not everyone in the fairy tale makes good use of the powers the old woman or man gives them. But my point is: as you drive your Seven League Boots cars, those exoskeletons running on dinosaurs or corn, yoru actual legs do nothing. Now that we have eliminated the clutch in most cars, they do so little it is easy to say that they have been as it were amputated, or put into a kind of paralysis, so that they lose function. And we then have to go to the gym to use other machines that exercise our legs so we don’t lose the function machines have taken away in order to lend us magical powers.
My image of people and cars can be seen in Darth Vader, the dark father, the dark knight. When he is dealt his mortal blow, his son is by his side, and Vader asks Luke to take off his helmet. Inside is a shockingly white, partial head, withered and ill-looking. It is the price of the Dark Side, perhaps, but also the price of the technology. No matter how many mitochlorians you have, it appears many bodies need to be taken out and run like a pony, put through their paces, appreciated for the finely wrought machines they are. The same pride that flows down the arm or leg flows strangely but truly into the glove, the cleat, the disc that leaves the world of the body and carves meaningful runes in the air. The hunter hefts her knife and lovingly slides her fingers along its blade, and the blade lets the hand feel its sharp knowledge of knives.
Is a cell phone a knife or a car? Or both? Or neither?
I’ve been thinking about something called the mundane cyborg. What I mean is that in films and novels the cyborg character is usually pretty extreme: ice-climbing implants in one’s feet in Elizabeth Lynne, Darth Vader’s elaborate breathing apparatus and helmet and prosthetic hand (ditto for Luke), eye implants and neural jacks and all that. The result is a character that is very memorable, extremely able or powerful in some way. RoboCop is an extreme example of this, as is Steve Austin, the $6 million man. Both have been in horrific crashes and their bodies are massively re-engineered.
However, I’m also interested in the mundane intimate relationships we have with our technology. For example, I have had an asthma inhaler for 20 years now, and I could probably count on one hand the number of days I spend without one in my pocket. It is perhaps the way hunters felt about their flintlocks: necessary to survival. It isn’t a cinema-friendly technology, and no movies are likely to be made about cyber-asthmatics, but it meets a critical test: when I don’t have it I feel something is missing which is part of me. If amputation is too strong, try something else: the inhaler, a little red plastic L shaped tube which slips around a metal canister with a plastic nozzle, is most definitely NOT THERE when it is not there, and the brain feels it before it knows it and the hand goes to the pocket to feel for it even though it knows it is not there.
Of course there are other mundane technologies. The credit card. Going into the world without your link to money, your ability to enter the vast salmon stream of shopping and purchasing, your ticket to ride, is possible; many do it each day. But for me, I’ve had a credit card in my back pocket for 20 years as well. It is like the inhaler; with it, I can often instantly right things that have gone wrong. Without it, I am shut out of an increasing number of places.
And the cell phone, it goes without saying, cannot be left behind or else one goes without saying, at least saying to distant fellow users. And glasses. Mine are not strong, I am a recent adopter (I need them to read signs while driving, and it helps to see round plastic objects coming toward my face at high speeds), so occasionally I get partway down the street before I realize they are no longer an embodied augmenting device comfortably sitting on the bridge of my nose.
The key thing is that you feel a massive missing, a disturbance in the Force. You feel dis-Organized, as your peripheral organs are not with your body. Without my cell phone I often feel amputated, as if I have lost a key limb that enables much of my communication. Your body has as it were grown over these foreign objects, so that they are part of the body’s force field, its magnetic signature. They could of course be embedded, ‘truly’ cyborg and not just intermittent intimate paraphernalia. But m point here is that this would not make a difference that makes a difference; quite the opposite. We see all these cyborgs with their implants and alterations and imagine we are not them; the opposite is the case. We are slowly becoming cyborg, and the implications are enormous, dramatic, and yet we turn our gaze to the Terminator and away from so much of the real action.
Oh one other thing before I shut down my body for the night, or rather put it to sleep like a laptop. Some prosthetics like cars enable organs like feet to do the impossible, to go from LA to Santa Cruz in under 6 hours, like the Seven League Boots from fairy tales. And this is a truly amazing power with all sorts of implications. Not everyone in the fairy tale makes good use of the powers the old woman or man gives them. But my point is: as you drive your Seven League Boots cars, those exoskeletons running on dinosaurs or corn, yoru actual legs do nothing. Now that we have eliminated the clutch in most cars, they do so little it is easy to say that they have been as it were amputated, or put into a kind of paralysis, so that they lose function. And we then have to go to the gym to use other machines that exercise our legs so we don’t lose the function machines have taken away in order to lend us magical powers.
My image of people and cars can be seen in Darth Vader, the dark father, the dark knight. When he is dealt his mortal blow, his son is by his side, and Vader asks Luke to take off his helmet. Inside is a shockingly white, partial head, withered and ill-looking. It is the price of the Dark Side, perhaps, but also the price of the technology. No matter how many mitochlorians you have, it appears many bodies need to be taken out and run like a pony, put through their paces, appreciated for the finely wrought machines they are. The same pride that flows down the arm or leg flows strangely but truly into the glove, the cleat, the disc that leaves the world of the body and carves meaningful runes in the air. The hunter hefts her knife and lovingly slides her fingers along its blade, and the blade lets the hand feel its sharp knowledge of knives.
Is a cell phone a knife or a car? Or both? Or neither?
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