Ten minutes on June 6, 2008
Ten minutes on June 6, 2008
Iron Man and mundane cyborgs
So I saw the film Iron Man finally. Bailey had his last day of school yesterday, and then the Achievement Night was at 6PM, so we had some time to, if not kill, at least toy with. Bailey’s attitude toward school is less than enthusiastic, and since he lives so far away, it has been nearly impossible to establish friendships with the few boys he has liked at his school. So watching him walk up to the car on the last day, I wondered if he would feel the joy of Summer Vacation, or the bittersweet feeling of leaving something you’ve done for a long time behind. He immediately picked a fight with me and had no patience whatsoever for about fifteen minutes. Luckily, I am a Jedi dad, and so used my mind tricks to not make things worse, and soon we were tooling down the highway and he was telling me a story about an invention, and we got to Pacific Grove and there is was: the Lighthouse Theatre, in all its restored art deco movie palace glory. Park the car, go in, movie starts in ten minutes, repark the car, trade out the shades for indoor glasses, buy the requisite drink, and kick back in the fully functional recliner chairs.
First day of summer kid done with school dad done with school, his own and kid’s. Cyborg movie in the afternoon. Deep breath – oooooo, yeahhhhh!
Full disclosure: I read Iron Man when I was seven, in Jimmy’s Barber Shop. My dad would go there and take me, and then my brother and me, and we’d get the serious Catholic buzz cuts, the ones that last for months and that make you look disturbingly like a camp survivor, as in refugee or concentration, not summer. But I loved going there, partly because it was one of those Male Mysteries that I always wanted to find but never did, quite. My dad had gone there as a kid! And so everyone knew him, all the old guys from the neighborhood, and he’d talk to them and they’d establish that comforting patter of saying not really anything but jointly invoking the old days, to everyone’s real pleasure. And my brother would go and be afraid (at least that is my memory) and he’d sit in the horse chair, the kid chair with the horse head and saddle, and I think he cried some and my dad and the other men would try to do non-feminine things to soothe him, like talk gruffly and in the “you’re ok little man” style. Which I still find adorable, though that probably isn’t the word I’d use with them.
Anyway Jimmy had one of those barber shops with a long long mirror and three chairs, and at the back of the room there was a huge rack of comic books. All comic books. No Time Magazines or small print newspapers to pollute the glorious tsunami of super heroes, all read and reread until the covers were ripped and all the pages slightly smeared and the corners worn. Reading those comics, you felt you were part of a community of readers, others who had gone before you, so it didn’t matter that you weren’t the first to read this version of The Submariner. Instead, you were a kid and you got to read them all for free, as many as you could slam until Dad had his haircut and Billy had his and it was time for your own depilatory experience.
I liked Iron Man. I liked Tony Stark, the whole suit thing, the glowing disc, the notion of the business guy with a cooler backstory. I liked the problems and conflicts they’d throw in to make things interesting. I liked the nonsense words that Kirby and Lee threw in to signify Epic Battles, though I can’t remember the ones from Iron Man (my favorites were from Sgt. Rock – the machine gun budda budda budda, sniper shots k-ping, krak). I didn’t quite get the playboy thing, but I sensed that Tony was kind of like James Bond, the guy who had it wired in all parts of life, but who risked all of that to fight the Evil that was beyond the skills of mere mortals. And apparently this Evil just keeps coming. You’re never done with Evil, because just when you’ve overcome the odds to beat down Evil Guy With Crazy Weapons #5, and you are thinking, hey, time to take a short vacation, maybe fix things on the home front with the secretary and the girlfriend, bam! Here comes Evil Guy With Crazy Weapons #6. It’s like Mr. Incredible says in the interview that starts the eponymous movie: “No matter how many times you save the world, it always manages to get back in jeopardy again. Sometimes I just want it to stay saved, you know?”
That has got to be frustrating, I imagine.
Anyway, I will end with my beginning, which is the figure of the cyborg. Tony Stark as Iron man is a cyborg as we have come to know it: an individual human with extraordinary prosthetics that enable him/her/it to be a kind of super hero with Superhuman Powers. We have seen lots of these kinds of cyborgs: the Six Million Dollar Man, RoboCop, Terminator. They are the Only One of their kind; they are involved in dramatic Action featuring Evil Ones that threaten to destroy the world. Often they are based on the moral world of Superman and his superhero family from D.C. comics (the paterfamilias of big comic companies, originally Detective Comics from 1934), or the more interpersonally fraught, wisecracking heros from Marvell (the comic series that I, personally, based much of my early identity-making on, for better or worse).
Thus we tend to see the figure of the cyborg as larger than life, as either threatening the ‘human’ or saving it, but in both cases the cyborg is somehow not human because of its technological additions. It is forever apart, and that affects its psychology. Like Mary Shelley’s monster in Frankenstein, it has an outsider mentality that both scars it and offers it a potent drive.
But more and more I am thinking about the other kind of cyborg, what I have been calling the mundane cyborg. That is, instead of massive technological interventions on one human body, using the formidable resources of the state, the military, and Big Science, the mundane cyborg is us, as we are changed and reinvented in our use of myriad smaller technologies: cell phones, cars, personal computers and computer games, mp3 players, myoelectric arms, cochlear implants, Jarvic hearts and pacemakers, virtual reality arcades, online courses, blackberries, rfid chips, smart classrooms and smart consumer electronics and smart houses and toy lions and tigers and bears with chips that let them move and growl. Instead of a defining moment where we become Iron Man, or RoboCop, we move imperceptibly toward being cyborgs one tiny insect bite of technology at a time. Late capitalism’s rejuvenation by niche marketing combined with the increasing pace of life and human fascination with machinery has meant a massive invasion of organic life, but in tiny increments for each person.
So this is what I am interested in now, in parallel with the more extreme cyborg dangers that military people will increasingly look like Transformers, or that in two generations everyone will have sockets in their neck for inserting software, or regularly change sex/gender, or boast multiple implants that allow us to see and sense inhuman, or superhuman, areas of the spectra.
I don’t mean this to be a “run from your toaster it’s alive” kind of fear segment of popular technology writing. I am trying more to see how we can be more skillful not only in using the technologies modern capitalism has given us, but also how we can begin to shape the overall life that these prostheses are attached to, and to be more selective in the ones we become, ahem, attached to. And as we approach a world where energy is not necessarily available to all, and where environmental degradation will threaten to make us all cyborgs in the sense of beings able to live in inhospitable environments (the first notion of cyborgs was enabling astronauts to adapt to conditions in space and on other planets), this question of smaller technologies and our use of and by them will become even more important. I like the notion that we develop these rich communication systems and social networking technologies, and then use them to…well, use them to co-produce the next reality show, featuring new hybrid cultures, new basic ethical units where animals and plants and the biosphere have standing and voices, where we move more electrons and less protons, tend the Garden we’ve inherited, respect the work evolution has done, and continue the recent human experiment with identities, psychologies, titrating happiness and respect and gratitude in shaping our collaged lives.
Which is, after all, another way of saying, save the world.
Iron Man and mundane cyborgs
So I saw the film Iron Man finally. Bailey had his last day of school yesterday, and then the Achievement Night was at 6PM, so we had some time to, if not kill, at least toy with. Bailey’s attitude toward school is less than enthusiastic, and since he lives so far away, it has been nearly impossible to establish friendships with the few boys he has liked at his school. So watching him walk up to the car on the last day, I wondered if he would feel the joy of Summer Vacation, or the bittersweet feeling of leaving something you’ve done for a long time behind. He immediately picked a fight with me and had no patience whatsoever for about fifteen minutes. Luckily, I am a Jedi dad, and so used my mind tricks to not make things worse, and soon we were tooling down the highway and he was telling me a story about an invention, and we got to Pacific Grove and there is was: the Lighthouse Theatre, in all its restored art deco movie palace glory. Park the car, go in, movie starts in ten minutes, repark the car, trade out the shades for indoor glasses, buy the requisite drink, and kick back in the fully functional recliner chairs.
First day of summer kid done with school dad done with school, his own and kid’s. Cyborg movie in the afternoon. Deep breath – oooooo, yeahhhhh!
Full disclosure: I read Iron Man when I was seven, in Jimmy’s Barber Shop. My dad would go there and take me, and then my brother and me, and we’d get the serious Catholic buzz cuts, the ones that last for months and that make you look disturbingly like a camp survivor, as in refugee or concentration, not summer. But I loved going there, partly because it was one of those Male Mysteries that I always wanted to find but never did, quite. My dad had gone there as a kid! And so everyone knew him, all the old guys from the neighborhood, and he’d talk to them and they’d establish that comforting patter of saying not really anything but jointly invoking the old days, to everyone’s real pleasure. And my brother would go and be afraid (at least that is my memory) and he’d sit in the horse chair, the kid chair with the horse head and saddle, and I think he cried some and my dad and the other men would try to do non-feminine things to soothe him, like talk gruffly and in the “you’re ok little man” style. Which I still find adorable, though that probably isn’t the word I’d use with them.
Anyway Jimmy had one of those barber shops with a long long mirror and three chairs, and at the back of the room there was a huge rack of comic books. All comic books. No Time Magazines or small print newspapers to pollute the glorious tsunami of super heroes, all read and reread until the covers were ripped and all the pages slightly smeared and the corners worn. Reading those comics, you felt you were part of a community of readers, others who had gone before you, so it didn’t matter that you weren’t the first to read this version of The Submariner. Instead, you were a kid and you got to read them all for free, as many as you could slam until Dad had his haircut and Billy had his and it was time for your own depilatory experience.
I liked Iron Man. I liked Tony Stark, the whole suit thing, the glowing disc, the notion of the business guy with a cooler backstory. I liked the problems and conflicts they’d throw in to make things interesting. I liked the nonsense words that Kirby and Lee threw in to signify Epic Battles, though I can’t remember the ones from Iron Man (my favorites were from Sgt. Rock – the machine gun budda budda budda, sniper shots k-ping, krak). I didn’t quite get the playboy thing, but I sensed that Tony was kind of like James Bond, the guy who had it wired in all parts of life, but who risked all of that to fight the Evil that was beyond the skills of mere mortals. And apparently this Evil just keeps coming. You’re never done with Evil, because just when you’ve overcome the odds to beat down Evil Guy With Crazy Weapons #5, and you are thinking, hey, time to take a short vacation, maybe fix things on the home front with the secretary and the girlfriend, bam! Here comes Evil Guy With Crazy Weapons #6. It’s like Mr. Incredible says in the interview that starts the eponymous movie: “No matter how many times you save the world, it always manages to get back in jeopardy again. Sometimes I just want it to stay saved, you know?”
That has got to be frustrating, I imagine.
Anyway, I will end with my beginning, which is the figure of the cyborg. Tony Stark as Iron man is a cyborg as we have come to know it: an individual human with extraordinary prosthetics that enable him/her/it to be a kind of super hero with Superhuman Powers. We have seen lots of these kinds of cyborgs: the Six Million Dollar Man, RoboCop, Terminator. They are the Only One of their kind; they are involved in dramatic Action featuring Evil Ones that threaten to destroy the world. Often they are based on the moral world of Superman and his superhero family from D.C. comics (the paterfamilias of big comic companies, originally Detective Comics from 1934), or the more interpersonally fraught, wisecracking heros from Marvell (the comic series that I, personally, based much of my early identity-making on, for better or worse).
Thus we tend to see the figure of the cyborg as larger than life, as either threatening the ‘human’ or saving it, but in both cases the cyborg is somehow not human because of its technological additions. It is forever apart, and that affects its psychology. Like Mary Shelley’s monster in Frankenstein, it has an outsider mentality that both scars it and offers it a potent drive.
But more and more I am thinking about the other kind of cyborg, what I have been calling the mundane cyborg. That is, instead of massive technological interventions on one human body, using the formidable resources of the state, the military, and Big Science, the mundane cyborg is us, as we are changed and reinvented in our use of myriad smaller technologies: cell phones, cars, personal computers and computer games, mp3 players, myoelectric arms, cochlear implants, Jarvic hearts and pacemakers, virtual reality arcades, online courses, blackberries, rfid chips, smart classrooms and smart consumer electronics and smart houses and toy lions and tigers and bears with chips that let them move and growl. Instead of a defining moment where we become Iron Man, or RoboCop, we move imperceptibly toward being cyborgs one tiny insect bite of technology at a time. Late capitalism’s rejuvenation by niche marketing combined with the increasing pace of life and human fascination with machinery has meant a massive invasion of organic life, but in tiny increments for each person.
So this is what I am interested in now, in parallel with the more extreme cyborg dangers that military people will increasingly look like Transformers, or that in two generations everyone will have sockets in their neck for inserting software, or regularly change sex/gender, or boast multiple implants that allow us to see and sense inhuman, or superhuman, areas of the spectra.
I don’t mean this to be a “run from your toaster it’s alive” kind of fear segment of popular technology writing. I am trying more to see how we can be more skillful not only in using the technologies modern capitalism has given us, but also how we can begin to shape the overall life that these prostheses are attached to, and to be more selective in the ones we become, ahem, attached to. And as we approach a world where energy is not necessarily available to all, and where environmental degradation will threaten to make us all cyborgs in the sense of beings able to live in inhospitable environments (the first notion of cyborgs was enabling astronauts to adapt to conditions in space and on other planets), this question of smaller technologies and our use of and by them will become even more important. I like the notion that we develop these rich communication systems and social networking technologies, and then use them to…well, use them to co-produce the next reality show, featuring new hybrid cultures, new basic ethical units where animals and plants and the biosphere have standing and voices, where we move more electrons and less protons, tend the Garden we’ve inherited, respect the work evolution has done, and continue the recent human experiment with identities, psychologies, titrating happiness and respect and gratitude in shaping our collaged lives.
Which is, after all, another way of saying, save the world.
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Ten minutes on June 6, 2008.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.converger.org/mt/mt-tb.cgi/53
Leave a comment