Escape Velocity (46 page)

md: But in the larger sense your politics are less libertarian than Darwinian; the individual ego is of far less consequence to you than it was to Ayn Rand.

308 Mark Dery

hm: Well, individuals (as they exist today) only have a very short lifetime and consequently only have a very small part to play in the big story; if some individual dies-if/ die-it's not going to affect the vs^hole story very much. I think the view^ taken by Richard Daw^kins in The Selfish Gene-that we're Rube Goldberg contraptions w^hich our genes have managed to assemble, w^hose primary purpose is to make more genes-is a very useful way to look at the nature of humanity.

Of course, the notion of an "I" with motivations and future plans could be abstracted from the living form initially [cobbled] together by its genes and installed in some other machine without the genes having any part in it anymore. And then there's the concept of abstracting the overall biological and cultural evolution of a population, which is yet another level of abstraction that goes beyond the pains and tragedies and joys of individual people and has a story of its own. That, too, has a dynamic that can be tinkered with and that's the biggest story that I can comfortably encompass at the moment. To me, it's the most important one, because if the survival of the overall process is jeopardized, then you've lost all the little parts of the story. In time, the really interesting things about humanity will be carried on in a new medium.

Obviously, the discourse of posthumanism that Moravec, the Extro-pians, and the Mondo essayists take literally is bathed in political and philosophical associations. Moreover, its popular appeal suggests that what began as scientific speculation is well on its way to becoming secular myth; the imaginary technologies that would make "downloading" possible are in theory made out of microchips, but for many they function as metaphors and speak to mythic needs.

End-of-the-millennium science fictions about disembodiment through "downloading" and re-embodiment in the "shiny new body of the style, color, and material of your choice" (one of Moravec's factory options) are daydreams that began as nightmares. David Skal theorizes that the space invaders who terrorized earthlings in fifties creature features gave shape to the information anxiety beginning to nibble at the American subconscious. Bug-eyed and bulbous-headed,

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they present an image of intense and unbearable visual-mental overload, a description that may have more relevance to the unprecedented level of media bombardment (mainly by television) in the '50s, than to any possible physiology of extraterrestrial beings. . . . [T]hese new creatures anticipated not the violent rending of the body but its withering and atrophy. The future was about watching images and processing information; the eyes and brain were the only useful parts of the human form left.^^'

Earlier, in 1948, Norbert Wiener had drawn parallels between organisms and machines. Both, he said, used on-ofF switches in their information processing (neural in one case, electromechanical in the other) and both used "feedback loops"-circular processes beginning in the nervous system, emerging as output through muscular activity, and cycling back into the nervous system through sensory input-to interact with their environments. By the late sixties, the cybernetic society's definition of humans as information-processing systems had given rise to the creeping fear that computer culture would ultimately reduce human beings to brains floating in nutrients, wired for sensation. The villains in the 1968 Star Trek episode "The Gamesters of Triskelion" were brains under glass, sustained by machines; only by titillating and tormenting captive humans could such effete, bodiless creatures vicariously experience long-lost emotions and bodily sensations.

In recent years, the image of the brain without a body—or, better yet, a "downloaded" mind without a brain-has been appropriated by posthumanists, for whom it is a symbol of godlike immortality and power rather than an embodiment of humanist anxiety.

Vinge argues that the infinite, everlasting superminds who inhabit his "post-Singularity world" would be Gods by the physicist Freeman Dyson's definition: "God," argues Dyson, "is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension."^" Moravec imagines the subsumption of "downloaded" cyberbeings into a "community mind," omniscient and omnivorous, which spreads "outwards from the solar system, converting non-life into mind" through some form of data conversion.^" This process, suggests Moravec, "might convert the entire universe into an extended thinking entity."^^"* In Nerdvana, all is cerebration; the

dominant term of the body/mind dualism has vanquished its detested opposite forever.

For many of posthumanism's critics, such images are fatal seductions, glossing over the fact that issues of powder are anchored in the physical bodies of the governed, at least for the forseeable future; the abstract calculus of commerce and politics, together w^ith the ethical issues raised by advanced technologies, become personal and palpable when they intersect w^ith bodies, especially our ow^n. Allucquere Rosanne Stone, the director of the Advanced Communications Technology Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, argues.

There's a kind of rapt, mindless fascination with these disembodying or ability-augmenting technologies. I think of it as a kind of cyborg envy. . . . The deep, childlike desire to go beyond one's body. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Certainly, for the handicapped, it can be very liberating. For others, who have the desire without the need, there can be problems. Political power still exists inside the body and being out of one's body or extending one's body through technology doesn't change that.^^^

In her essay "Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?: Boundary Stories about Virtual Cultures," Stone asserts, "No matter how virtual the subject may become, there is always a body attached," reaffirming the importance of "keeping the discussion grounded in individual bodies."^^^

Vivian Sobchack, a cultural critic and feminist film theorist, needs no convincing on that point. In "Baudrillard's Obscenity," her smart, tough response to the French postmodernist's essay on Crash, she brings us jokingly back from the disembodied rhetoric of posthumanism to her own, intensely personal here and now, where she is convalescing after major cancer surgery. Sobchack calls Baudrillard to account for his "naively celebratory" rhapsodies about the penetration of bodies by technology in Ballard's novel, which Baudrillard reads as a cyborg future beyond good and evil in which wounds and other artificial orifices take their place alongside natural ones as possible sites of sexual pleasure and where sex, in turn, is only one of many conceivable uses for such interfaces.^" Forcing her reader to confront the painful reality of the twelve-inch scar on her left thigh, a memento of the surgery that removed a cancerous tumor, Sobchack notes,

There's nothing Hke a httle pain to bring us (back) to our senses. . . . Baudrillard's techno-body is a body that is thought always as an object, and never lived as a subject. . . . [H]e's into the transcendent sexiness of "wounds," "artificial orifices". . . . But sitting here hving that orifice, I can attest to the scandal of metaphor. . . . Even at its most objectified and technologically caressed, I hve this thigh-not abstractly on "the" body, but concretely as "my" body.^^^

Sobchack bridles at Baudrillard's celebration of the end of what he calls the "moral gaze-the critical judgmentalism that is still a part of the old world's functionality" and the advent of an affectless, postmodern sensibility for which the "incisions, excisions, scar tissue, gaping body holes" left by violent collisions with technology are little more than erogenous zones for cyborgs.^" "The man is really dangerous," she observes, tartly wishing him "a car crash or two":

He needs a little pain (maybe a lot) to bring him to his senses, to remind him that he has a body, his body, and that the "moral gaze" begins there. ... If we don't keep this subjective kind of bodily sense in mind as we negotiate our technoculture, then we . . . will objectify ourselves to death.^^°

Historically, objectification is often a prerequisite to repression or worse. In Nazi Germany, deportees arriving at Auschwitz were shorn and tattooed with ID numbers whose true purpose was an open secret:

And as they gave me my tattoo number, B-4990, the SS man came to me, and he says to me, "Do you know what this number's all about?" I said, "No, sir." "Okay, let me tell you now. You are being dehumanized."^^'

When we objectify ourselves-our own bodies-we enter the numb, neon nightmare of Crash, where people are "mannequins dressed in meaningless clothing" and only a violent collision can jolt them back to their senses.^^^ The social critic Walter Benjamin foreshadowed just such a world

in the early thirties when he noted that mankind's "self-ahenation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order."-^^^

Posthumanists such as Vinge and Moravec fulfill the premonitions of Benjamin and Sobchack when they contemplate the disappearance of humanity from the assumed perspective of smart machines. It appears that neither thinker has much in common with the Extropians after all, since the sympathies of both men lie not with the individual ego, self-transforming or otherwise, but with the ultra-intelligent machines they believe will render Homo sapiens obsolete. Moravec delights in humanist-baiting pronouncements about the self-assembling automata he predicts will put DNA out of a job, and Vinge suspects humans may not survive his postevolutionary singularity:

If you do create creatures that are smarter than you, they become the principal actors. ... If we got in their way, whether they'd rub us out or use some other solution would probably depend on the expense.'^^'*

Whether or not the posthuman futures imagined by Moravec, Vinge, and others are likely to come true, and what humankind's fate will be if they do, are brainteasers for AI experts, futurologists, perhaps even chaos theorists. Meanwhile, we might consider (since few seem to be doing so) the immediate social, political, and ethical implications of posthumanism, specifically Homo Cyber's reduction of the hody-his or her body, as Sobchack insists-to an organic machine. As Andrew Kimbrell points out.

The idea that we are biological machines has consequences. Consider: What rights adhere to a biological machine? What duties and obligations are owed a biological machine? What dignity and love should be given to a biological machine? The whole constitutional system of rights, duties, and respect is based on the old-fashioned idea that we are reverable persons, not machines.-^^^

Moreover, he notes, the dehumanization of societal outsiders that has so often been a prelude to their exploitation or extermination has been

extended to the natural world, which Kimbrell argues was desacralized "before we moved in to destroy it."^^^ In that light, the fantasies of postevolu-tionary space migration entertained by Stelarc, Burroughs, Moravec, and the Extropians exhibit what Andrew Ross calls the "technohumanist contempt for a planet that, once exhausted, will then be left behind."^^^ In a Whole Earth Review forum devoted to the question "Is the Body Obsolete?" the computer programmer and cybercultural theorist Yaakov Garb wonders.

Why . . . are we so eager to disown the material substrates of our lives in a time when the fabric of our world-from soil to ozone layer-does actually feel like it is disintegrating? Why, as toxins and radiation trickle into the most fundamental recesses of our cells and ecosystems, is there such enthusiasm for self-sufficient space colonies, disembodied intellects, and cyborg futures?^^*

Thomas Hine notes, in his discussion of Moravec, that the roboticist's prediction that "self-reproducing superintelligent mechanisms" with our cultural DNA will "explode into the universe, leaving us behind in a cloud of dust,"

make[s] the unthinkable survivable. It argues that there is life after life. It is reassuring that if humans make the Earth uninhabitable for themselves as organisms, it will still be possible to continue by other means. Nuclear war need not be an obstacle, or death of any kind. There can be lifeboats for our minds.^^^

As Hine hints, it is equally likely that we are not, as the painter and William Burroughs coconspirator Brion Gysin was fond of remarking, "here to go." Perhaps we are here to stay, in these bodies, on this planet. The sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson, who holds the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professorship of Science at Harvard, argues that the Earth is "finite in many resources that determine the quality of life" and that, simultaneously, "scientists theorize the existence of a virtually unlimited array of other planetary environments, almost all of which are uncongenial to human life.''^'^^ He warns,

Many of Earth's vital resources are about to be exhausted, its atmospheric chemistry is deteriorating and human populations

have already grown dangerously large. Natural ecosystems, the wellsprings of a healthful environment, are being irreversibly degraded. . . . Earth is destined to become an impoverished planet w^ithin a century if present trends continue. Mass extinctions are being reported with increasing frequency in every part of the world.^^'

The sobering assessments of scientists such as Wilson imply that even cyberculture has its limits, and no one likes limits, least of all Michael G. Zey, a management professor and the executive director of the Expansionary Institute in Morristow^n, New Jersey. In Seizing the Future: How the Coming Revolution in Science, Technology, and Industry Will Expand the Frontiers of Human Potential and Reshape the Planet-a book whose title takes corporate futurology to the carnival midway-Zey maintains that

humanity does not have to choose between progress and the health of the environment. ... As the Macroindustrial Era evolves, society vsdll simultaneously tap the potential of its own inventions and utilize technology to improve the environment.^^^

The gloomy forecasts of Wilson and his ilk, he asserts, are nothing more than anti-growth, anti-technology fearmongering based on "sketchy" evidence: "Humanity is about to overcome scarcity, biological restrictions, and nature itself."^^^ Zey, prophet of a hyperventilating "hyperprogress," derides the idea of "living in balance with nature"; he is a diehard defender of the Old Testament article of faith that