Unfaithful Cyborgs by Andrea Hairston

Pan Morigan and Andrea Hairston

Pan and I had a blast at Wiscon. We have now recovered from traveling across the country. (Two weeks to get over flight cancellation and midnight bus rides!)

My mind is still stirred up from the panels, the Guests of Honor, the hallway rants, the family reunions--the ghosts and spirits too, whispering in my ears. I was lucky to be on the CYBORG IDENTITIES Panel  with Sunny Moraine, Scott E. Gould, and Lettie Prell. We had a marvelous conversation with an engaged, articulate audience about the legacy of Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto.

Sunny Moraine mentioned a man who went offline for a time period and didn’t find the real life nirvana that supposedly awaits those who unplug. I’ve been thinking about this anecdote and our confused relation to technology. The Internet is often viewed as the CAUSE of good or evil effects—mass addictive zombie behavior or successful revolution against oppressive regimes. The Internet as an effective tool facilitates revolution perhaps and also allows addiction (we get a dopamine hit for those I Likes), but CAUSE? That’s a powerful word.

The Internet is mythologized and mystified, maligned and worshiped. It brings wonders and joys and is also calibrated for predatory capitalist monetizing of humans as commodities. The Internet facilitates creative exchange across land and sea, shrinks time and space, and offers us public access to each other. Big Data is a treasure trove for pattern freaks, and human beings are serious Pattern Masters! (Read the Octavia Butler books for a SF meditation on this.). However, despite reverent claims for Big Data, information isn’t wisdom, and Smart Devices shouldn't make us lazy and dumb. We need struggle and serendipity; we need mistakes. Convenience is highly overrated and a wicked marketing tool. Information isn’t knowledge or wisdom. Abstract formulations aren’t the same as concrete experiences--everything can’t be written as an algorithm. But Online experiences are as much a part of REALITY as any other experience.

We are cyborgs, animals incorporating our tools/technology into our bodies and altering/creating the universe we inhabit and that produces us. Story is one of our most powerful, world changing, universe altering technologies! The story of the Net is magical, mythic.

Are we getting the stories we desire?

Do we have the technology we want?

I need a Smart Device that doesn’t interrupt my flow, that supports my creative capacities—not one that replaces them with the paint by numbers version. I need Smart Devices that challenge me and other folks to go beyond comfort zones and like minds to engage in a radical reckoning with difference.

Perhaps our tech and tech platforms are dominated by the same empire ideologies that allowed for colonization of the planet (and contribute to the ongoing destruction of diversity— deadly empire monoculture)?  So what are we doing with that?

In her Manifesto, Haraway notes that Cyborgs “are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins.”

We make the meaning. So what are the ideologies behind, around, running through the Internet? How do we choose to use the Net, to structure it? The Net has never been neutral.  However, a predatory capitalist calibration of our technology is not inevitable--it is not the last word.

I’ll be considering unfaithful cyborgs in my next novel, Archangels of Funk.

SF tropes and the ever-shifting edge of reality

Once in a blue moon I wake up from a dream so soaked with a sense of reality that it feels less like a dream I've just had then a memory of something I've recently done. Oddly enough such dreams tend to be sfnal in character. While I'm in them, I have no perception of their being sfnal-- that only comes after I've woken up.

Such was the case this the morning. In my dream, I was writing an article on a trip I'd just to the moon for a magazine' the article would be comprised of an text, photos, and video clips. I'd decided that the article would focus on a researcher who'd been there for 23 years-- since the beginning of the settlement-- studying kinetics. In my dream, I kept reviewing the video clip of my conversation with her, in which she spoke of her distress at being dumped by her HMO-- which had been covering her for all the 23 years she'd been working on the moon-- because her health problems were different to those of women her age on earth. The image of this woman speaking is the most vivid image of my dream: she is wearing a white lab coat of course, over silk the color of autumn leaves, and small dangling earrings, and has enough ray in her hair and lines and wear in her face to be in her 50s or 60s were she to have been living all that time on earth, though I acknowledged that living in lunar gravity she might well be a good deal older. Thinking about her face, which seemed oddly familiar, after waking, it occurred to me that she might be modeled on Susan S, a dancer I'd know in the early 1970s, suitably aged. (With a personality considerably toned down.) She was someone I hadn't seen or even thought of for years and years. I'd already written the part of my article about how pedestrian travel to the moon actually was, and how surprisingly populous the place seemed, and how though the hotel accommodations were a bit cramped, weren't that much more expensive than hotels in major cities in the US. Etc. All very ordinary, even pedestrian. Which was why my article was focusing on this woman and her difficulties, partially a consequence of her never having budged from the moon for 23 years.

Mulling over the peculiar realization that my most real-seeming dreams tend to be sfnal, it struck me that coherence combined with strongly delineated detail is what makes such dreams feel real. And of course the realization that one is dreaming can occur in any kind of dream-- for me, most often in unpleasant dreams that up until that point feel very real but that I'd like not to be real. The realization is never reasoned (as in: oh, this doesn't make sense, so it can't be true-- not making sense is perfectly normal in dreams). It's when I wake up that I marvel at how coherent and real-seeming the sfnal dream had been-- after that moment of disjunction when I grasp that no, this was a dream, and not something in my actual memory. (Sometimes in fact I am imbued with a partial belief in it as memory for a long time after the dream-- as in dreams about a story I once wrote that I somehow lost and forgot about until I came upon it in a box of old papers-- a part of me somehow feels that that story must be around somewhere, and longs to see it, read it, remember it. I don't feel that way about sfnal dreams, of course, because my mind has identified them as sfnal and thus impossible as memory.)

The thinness of the membrane distinguishing the sfnal from reality has become something of a preoccupation with me lately. I know I've often said over the last ten years that I often have trouble distinguishing reports of real-life behavior and speech from satire, but it occurs to me that despite being accustomed to technological innovations that were once purely sfnal now being materially incarnate in our lives, I still find myself astonished at the thinness of the line between fiction and reality. Consider these three items appearing in the Seattle Times over the last few days:

--State's first case of 'zombie bees' reported in Kent. Honeybees, previously immune to parasitic flies called Apocephalus borealis or scuttle flies-- native to the US and apparently common-- have lately begun to be infected by them. Here's the article's description of the infection:

The fly's life cycle is gruesomely reminiscent of the movie "Alien" — though they don't pose a risk to people. Adult females, smaller than a fruit fly, land on the backs of foraging honeybees and use their needle-sharp ovipositors to inject eggs into the bee's abdomen. The eggs hatch into maggots. "They basically eat the insides out of the bee," [biologist John] Hafernik said.

Previously, these flies had only been known to infect wasps and bumblebees. They've now infected 80% of the hives in the Bay Area, and have made an appearance in South Dakota. This is particularly alarming, given the recent plummeting of honeybee populations all over the United States. The irony, of course, is that the scuttle flies are native to North American, while the honeybees are imported (or "invasive"), while the sharp point of relevance is that most pollination of fruit and vegetables is performed by honeybees. Why, you may wonder, are infected honeybees called "zombie bees"? "Unlike healthy bees, which spend the night tucked up in their hive, infected bees fly after dark and tend to congregate at lights. Hohn noticed bees buzzing around the light in his shop, flying in jerky patterns and finally flopping on the floor." (There's a video available with the Seattle Times article.) If you're interested in the knowing more about "zombie bees," check out Hafernik's website ZombeeWatch.org.

 --And then there's the article on the California legislation, which Gov. Jerry Brown signed yesterday, allowing "autononmous" or driverless cars in California.

"Today we're looking at science fiction becoming tomorrow's reality - the self-driving car," Brown said. "Anyone who gets inside a car and finds out the car is driving will be a little skittish, but they'll get over it."

Google Inc. has been developing autonomous car technology and lobbying for the regulations. The company's fleet of a dozen computer-controlled vehicles has logged more than 300,000 miles of self-driving without an accident, according to Google. "I think the self-driving car can really dramatically improve the quality of life for everyone," Google co-founder Sergey Brin said.

Autonomous cars can make roads safer, free commuters from the drudgery of driving, reduce congestion and provide transport to people who can't drive themselves, such as the blind, disabled, elderly and intoxicated, Brin said. "I expect that self-driving cars will be far safer than human-driven cars," Brin said.

Brin predicted that autonomous vehicles will be commercially available within a decade. He said Google has no plans to produce its own cars, but instead plans to partner with the automobile industry to develop autonomous vehicles.

Why is it that this seems much more sfnal to me than smartphones do? I suppose it's because it strikes me as in some ways a more conscious technological development than the by contrast feckless, sometimes frivolous development of all the silly gadgets that distract rather than assist us. Autonomous cars seem hands-down more socially utilitarian and have the tremendous potential of saving many, many lives (and prevent many, many personal bankruptcies due to the catastrophic medical costs and chronic disability that attend most serious traffic accidents. Our (in this case visibly administered) culture tends to oppose sensible solutions for serious, large-scale problems (for instance, affordable health care). The politicians, venture capitalists, and financiers who determine which technologies are brought into existence prefer to support the development of weapons, tools of surveillance, and gadgets and toys big corporations can endlessly "upgrade" to technology that is unglamorously utilitarian. (Here in the US, from infancy most individuals imbibe their values primarily from the advertisements they consume.) Or else they're simply whacko gimmicks based on dubious notions of coolness, like Argentinean publisher Ererna Cadencia's use of ink that vanishes from books two months after the date of purchase. (The idea is that disappearing ink will force consumers to read the books they buy, in a timely fashion. It's supposed to be for the authors' benefit, though I have to say that I myself would hate to see my books vanish and be unavailable for future rereading: rendering books into utterly disposable entertainment.)

--The third item doesn't report on a piece of new technology, but rather on an almost seismic shift in attitude. (Like parasitic creatures wielding ovipostors, infected organisms, and driverless cars, certain attitudes, too, can be sf tropes.) In this case, the shift in attitude is striking for being found in a rather conservative source, the editors of the Seattle Times, who have a long history of endorsing Republicans, which in Washington State can mean way off the spectrum of the local norm. They certainly consider themselves a voice of the mainstream. Four days ago, they published an editorial urging the approval of Initiative 502-- to legalize, regulate, and tax marijuana. Many, many people have been urging this for a long time, including former Seattle Police Chief Norm Stamper. Many conservatives have even urged it. Nevertheless, US jails are crammed with offenders of the prohibition against marijuana use and sale. The editorial is reasoned and reasonable.

What would legal marijuana be like? Consider what has happened in Seattle. The city has become a sanctuary for medical marijuana, with aboveboard dispensaries. Recreational marijuana is readily available in Seattle on the illicit market, and users of small amounts are no longer prosecuted. For several years, recreational marijuana has effectively been decriminalized in Seattle, and there has been no upsurge in crime or road deaths from it.

Virtual decriminalization resulted from the force of broad public pressure on prosecutors here in King County. Several years back, while I was performing Superior Court jury service, the prosecuting attorney conducted a discussion among the jury pool of which I was a member about drugs as part of the voir dire for a drug prosecution. About three-quarters of my fellow potential jurors expressed the opinion that marijuana use ought to be decriminalized. (The prosecutor, by the way, was resigned rather than surprised by this opinion.) I read in the Seattle Times not long after that prosecution policies were going to be changed to be more in line with public opinion. I was struck by this. I'd always assumed that jury service was largely a waste of my time, since jurors have in recent years been forbidden the democratic exercise of nullification, a traditional alternative for jurors faced with rubber-stamping unjust outcomes. After that, I wasn't so sure.

The fact is, we are constantly adjusting what is real, what could be real, what probably won't ever be real. Sfnal tropes have a lot to do with the process. But I'm particularly interested these days-- because of my nearly finished novel in progress, "Deep Story"-- in what becomes real,as memory, in an individual's brain, and what the coherence of narrative has to do with the process.

 My absence over the last month from this space, by the way, has been due to a family emergency followed by illness. I'm on the mend now, though I'm still a bit shaky and weak, which forces me into making frequent retreats back to bed. I hope to resume regular posting soon.

ETA: I see that the Seattle Times has actually endorsed Obama-- and that they did so last time around, too. Pardon my misperception.

How the world works now

Last week Niall Harrison called attention to Benjamin Rosenbaum's post (and the ensuing discussion in the comments) on what Niall calls The Wages of Nostalgia. (I've only just read these today.) In his post, Ben says he suspects that what is being labeled "nostalgia" for old tropes commonly used in sf is actually an expression of a "covert, unacknowledged hatred of the present [that] shows up simply as indifference to how the world actually works now." For "how the world works now" Ben seems to have in mind mainly early 21st-century communications technology. This seems an updated version of what I was irritated by in the early 1990s,  where (always male) characters several centuries from now enjoyed themselves by eating a "good steak dinner" (T-bone or Porterhouse steak with baked potato and salad) accompanied by bottle of red zinfandel followed by coffee, a cigar and brandy, where women were sex objects or mothers and never plausible colleagues. It was precisely the aestheticization of 1950s white middle class culture (with all its stifling gender norms) that drove me nuts. Here Ben complains about a character who, as he says, could only exist in 2011 (but is set in the 26th century):

When this guy takes a vacation, he is completely isolated from his friends and family. He is able to avoid the awkwardness of having conversations with them which he will not remember. He is able to simply retreat into silence. So apparently in 2511 not only do they not have blogs and Facebook and twitter and IM, they also do not have anything that comes after that, anything that makes us more interwoven with each other, that erases place more. They have simply gone back to the way it was before our social topography was reshaped by electronic networks.

Not to belabor the point -- the story, which purports to be set in 2511, is actually set in roughly 1985, i think.

And why did this not bother me while I was reading it, only to make me angry on the bicycle, later?

Because I grew up reading SF stories written before 1985. I grew up reading rediscovered-lost-colony-FTL stories in which the protagonists got lost in the woods, and it was fun. It didn't occur to me then that they would have GPS cell phones. It was easy, this morning, to simply forget the world of today, and read as if I was in 1985.

But on some level this is morally bankrupt.

As I say, I can sympathize with this kind of irritation, because it's akin to the irritation I've felt about those middle-class male tropes idealizing 1950s suburban culture. (The judgment-- "morally bankrupt"--needs a bit unpacking: I'm not sure I'd go so far, on the face of it.) But in spite of knowing that irritation well, I had to laugh. Really, I just had to laugh. Especially after I read the comments. I mean, here I am, living in the early 21st-century US, in the circumstances known as "late capitalism," in which the technological infrastructure is fragmented, fragile, and prone to frequent breakdowns and cellular coverage is absent in certain parts of Washington State and internet service is crappier than it was fifteen years ago. And where for the last twenty-four hours my home internet connection has been flaking out on me (i.e., largely unavailable, perhaps because someone at the cable company fiddled with a setting that is affecting our hub but not apparently anyone else's). For a while today it looked as though I might have to go out to a cafe to get some pressing email correspondence out. (I was thinking it would be like making a run to the post office used to be.) This flaking out is not a rare occurrence. Not to mention that the various computers I own are always crashing. (& let us not get on the subject of printers! or fax machines!) We all of us spend a huge amount of time coping with a constant flow of "updates" to keep the many bits of software our computers run on going. Our computers are always failing us. Getting tech "support" is usually unsatisfying, and often means waiting on hold, listening to a repeated four-note pattern plonked out on a piano for a half-hour or even hour before getting a tech who doesn't know enough to fix complicated problems (since if he-- somehow it's always a he-- did, he'd in a better paying job and not on a cable company's frontlines fobbing off customers). Never has technology been so unreliable. And don't get me started on viruses. Or spam and phishing. Or email getting "lost in the ether."

Everyone likes to quote Moore's Law when talking about technology. Well here's Duchamp's Law: under late capitalism in the US, the more advanced the computer or communications technology is, the less reliable it's likely to be and the more prone to frequent breakdowns. (Maybe you live in South Korea or other places where the government subsidizes basic technology. I hear there are more than a dozen places in the world with reliable, fast internet service. Duchamp's Law doesn't apply to those places. But Seattle isn't among them. Nor any city in the US.)

What happens to Ben's 2011 guy when he vacations on the Olympic Peninsula, say at La Push, on the coast, or somewhere in the Cascades? (I.e, somewhere one to four hours by car from Seattle.) His cell phone ceases to work, that's what. Maybe he'll have purchased a cute little GPA gizmo from REI, but maybe not, because maybe, like Ben, he'll assume his cell phone will give him all he needs. Or what if he crosses the border into Canada and discovers that his iPad or iPhone won't work because his cellular coverage ceases when he leaves the US? (Unless, of course, he's wealthy enough to think nothing of obscene roving charges.) The more cut-throat our economic system becomes and the more advanced our technology, the less likely it is to work. And that doesn't even get into the frequency of power outages during wind storms (which are common where I live) or ice storms or hurricanes or when transformers blow (which they seem to be doing more often than they used to). Rechargeable batteries are convenient, but they don't last long when the power outage lasts more than a few hours.

I would add, more personally, that I of course could never be characterized as a "2011 guy." (Assuming that "guy" is intended to be gender-neutral, as I am.) See, technology is uneven--unevenly adopted, unevenly affordable, unevenly used. I don't use Twitter. I just don't have time. (Hell, you all can see what a terrible job I do trying to keep this blog from stagnating!) At the moment, I'm about two months behind on reading my RSS feeds. Even when I'm on "vacation" I usually don't have time to be on Facebook much. I can barely keep up with my email, and as for voice mail, well, I so seldom use the telephone that I can't remember to check for messages and so usually listen to them days after they've been sent. There are so few hours in the day, you see. And I can't help it, my body seems addicted to sleeping at least a portion of them. You may say this is an age thing, and there'd be some truth to that. (I know it's age that has prevented my ever even thinking of texting-- I took about ten years to get a cell phone of my own at least partly because I can't use it without putting on my reading glasses.) I do, of course, take both a netbook and an iPad (as well as a Sony reader) with me on vacation, at least partly because I'm as compulsive a Google Search user as anyone I know. But I know very well that on vacation, especially, the internet will be out of reach.

Here's another aspect of uneveness: I have several friends, of varying ages, who have resumed sending me letters written on paper through the USPS. Why? Because they associate email with their jobs. And their relationship with me is personal. Yes, they do have cell phones and email addresses. One of them has a Facebook account (and we are not "Friends") and uses her iPhone to text. But print letters feel to them private and personal and one-to-one in a way that social media can't be. Is that old-fashioned or nostalgic of them? Perhaps. It will be interesting to see if private one-to-one relationships of that sort go the way of the do-do bird. I myself, looking back, am amazed to think of how in earlier decades of my life I'd spend a couple of hours every day writing letters to friends and acquaintances. (But then, literate people had been doing that for centuries.) I don't do that now. The arrival of the mail, even before I became a writer, was an important moment in my day. Somehow, I've never imagined a character in one of my stories living that way. I have often, though, made private "social" relationships part of my fiction, regardless of the technological context. Is that nostalgic? The answer to that depends on whether we think private social relationships are/will continue to be part of the way the world works. Yes, a lot has changed in the last thirty years. I just don't have a grip on what exactly is being phased out. 
 
If there's one thing I'd like to say about Ben's 2011 guy, it's this: showing characters using technology without a continual stream of interruptions to technology is idealistic beyond belief. Why don't most sf stories show characters routinely having to grapple with the banal, mundane breakdowns we all have to cope with in our real 21st-century lives? Why does everything work like magic in sf (except, of course, when the plot requires a communication failure for the author's purposes). Why don't they routinely show how uneven access to technology is? How our world works is as much a story of how it doesn't work as how it's supposed to work.