*In this issue, Arthur Kroker has been reading a visionary Greg Bear novel from the 1980s, which seems like quite an up-to-date thing to do if one is a political scientist.
_____________________________________________________________________
CTHEORY: THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 37, NO 1
*** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net ***
BLUESHIFT SERIES 07/14/2015 Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
_____________________________________________________________________
**********
DIY BODIES
**********
_____________________________________________________________________
Dear Readers,
This is the third in a series of excerpts from ~Surveillance Never
Sleeps~. The third chapter is titled "DIY Bodies," and will be
available in full at CTHEORY on July 23, along with the rest of the
monograph.
Kind regards,
Arthur and Marilouise
=====================================================================
~Arthur and Marilouise Kroker~
There is a new DIY body in town, one which might not have the
cultural pedigree of the shock tattoo, the slippery word, or the
enigmatic yet subtle shift of modified bodily appearance, but a
version of the DIY body that already belongs to the future for the
simple reason that it comes to us directly from a future, dreamed
about, obsessed over, but not yet practically realized. Visible signs
of the new DIY body are everywhere: *smart apps* that track caloric
expenditure, distances walked, miles run, rhythms of sleep, of sex,
of friendship, of rage, of cheating lovers lost and won; *dusty
clouds of data* that rise from the travelled earth of every footstep
of the DIY body as it crunches its way into some unknown database
along the way; and invasive but usually undetectable *sociobots* that
break the surface of the skin, all the better to gently manipulate
perception, to shape imagination, and, perhaps, even to take up
permanent residency in the wasteland of the psyche. While the DIY
body to which we have long been habituated represented the lovely
unpredictability of individual choice playing itself out across the
surface of skin, gender, and sexuality, the new DIY body comes to us
with a self that has already split: part-human/part-data. In fact,
the body that lives in the tension of this fatal split may be the
only lingering remnant of the human, since the "self" seems to have
recently departed towards the gathering horizon of artificial
intelligence, synthetic biology, robotic technology–towards, that
is, the larger movement of the "quantified self." When the rising
city of the quantified self breaks away from the wilderness of the
unquantifiable body we can know for certain that those data clouds
are also harbingers of troubles ahead for the question of human
subjectivity and, with them, the eclipse of the intuitive, the
ineffable, the instinctive, the numerically unintelligible but the
emotionally knowable. Putting on the synthetic skin of the new DIY
body with its extended sensors, creative apps, helpful prosthetics,
and enabling augments is, of course, only the first step in modifying
the body right out of itself in the direction of the Singularity
Event.
Waiting for the Singularity
—————————
The streets of San Francisco are crammed these days with creative
social media startups, many waiting, it seems, for technological
rapture–the much-anticipated and longed-for singularity event when
artificial consciousness finally undocks from human intelligence to
usher in a new future of computers literally with (artificial) minds
of their own and human minds as so many data points supporting the
indefinite expansion of the lifespan promised by synthetic biology,
nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence.
If biblical prophecies are any kind of guide, the triumph of
artificial consciousness will initiate unpredictable, morphological
changes of state across the fabric of space and time. The new force
of ubiquitous computing may be violently rent with Big Data on one
side and soon-to-be left behind Luddites on the other; relational
processing will sweep across the land, and the body itself will
finally be able to abandon its natural ties to flesh, skin, and bone
in favor of the bliss of the fully quantified self.
First prophesied in the writings of Vernon Vringe, first digitally
realized by Raymond Kurzweil, currently Chief Engineer of Google, and
first given explicit social expression by Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf,
the coming of the technological singularity is at once the ecstatic
promise and utopian hope of all those scientists, technologists,
engineers, graphic artists, social media marketers, designers, and
programmers who have dedicated their very bodily lives to the
proposition that data is the new us.
Since its political inception, the theme of waiting for the messiah
has long been the core eschatological trope of American society. From
the first landing at Plymouth Rock by the early Puritans and the
evangelical revival meetings that spread like prairie fire across the
American midlands of the spirit in the nineteenth century to late
twentieth-century invocations of religious visions of those to be
either anointed or left behind in the days of apocalypse, the spirit
of the messianic, with its troubled doubling of transcendence and
despair, has long been native to American identity. Consequently, it
comes as no particular surprise that in these, the early sunrise
years of the twenty-first century, just when the dawn is lifting on
the shadows of the past, Northern California is witness to the birth
anew of the spirit of rapture, this time detached from previous
concerns with religion and politics, and provided with a powerful
digital expression in the form of technological rapture.
On the surface, the rhetoric of this latest American revival movement
is delivered in the deliberately arid form of technocratic
ambition–an "Internet of Things," the "quantified self," "A
Data-Driven Life"–but scratch the surface of the covering rhetoric
and what springs to mind are all those unmistakable signs of the
spirit of rapture. Everything is there: a theology of technology
driven by an overwhelming conviction that the vicissitudes of
embodied experience are subordinate to digital transcendence; the
will to extend life either by uploading the human mind into its AI
machinic successors or by passionate faith in the born-again body of
artificial DNA; the doctrine of data as a state of (code-driven)
grace; and conversionary enthusiasm for the fully quantified life.
While many different perspectives gather under the revival tent of
technological rapture, one common theme remains: an abiding faith
that technological society is quickly delivering us to a future
inaugurated by a singularity event, that epochal time in which
intelligent machines take command with promises of a mind-merger with
a data world that is fluid, mobile, relational, indeterminate. Though
skeptics standing outside the circle of technological rapture might
be tempted to reduce its enthusiasm for data delirium to the larger
figurations of the form of (technological) subjectivity necessary for
the functioning of digital capitalism, that would surely overlook the
fact that the contemporary will to technology is itself driven by a
more radical eschatological promise, namely that the will to data has
about it the tangible scent of finally achieving what the project of
science has always promised, but never delivered–human relief from
death, disease, and bodily decay. While Francis Bacon's emblematic
treatise _Novum Organum_ may have been the first to so confidently
link the project of science and the heretofore quixotic quest for
immortality, it was left to a contemporary techno-utopian visionary,
Raymond Kurzweil, (_The Singularity is Near_) to transform Bacon's
ontological ambition for science into a practical strategy for
better–that is, extended–computational living:
This merger of man and machine, coupled with the sudden
explosion in machine intelligence and rapid innovation in gene
research and nanotechnology, will result in a world where there
is no distinction between the biological and the mechanical, or
between physical and virtual reality. These technological
revolutions will allow us to transcend our frail bodies with all
their limitations. Illness, as we know it, will be eradicated.
Through the use of nanotechnology, we will be able to
manufacture almost any physical product upon demand, world
hunger and poverty will be solved, and pollution will vanish.
Human existence will undergo a quantum leap in evolution. We
will be able to live as long as we choose. The coming into being
of such a world is, in essence, the Singularity. [1]
At first glance, this is only the most recent expression of the Greek
myth of hubris, this cautionary tale concerning the ineluctable
balance between excessive pride of purpose and mythic punishment
meted out by always-observant gods. Adding complexity to this
reinvocation of the myth of hubris, that vision of Singularity is, in
actuality, a doubled expression of hubris. First, there is the sense
of technological overconfidence involved in breaking beyond the
traditional boundaries of the specifically human in order to speak of
the new epoch of "man and machine," that is, fully digitally
interpolated subjects in which the specifically human merges with the
extended nervous system of the cybernetic. Here, the merely human is
replaced with the technologically enabled posthuman as the
fundamental precondition for the Singularity. With the sovereign
expression of technological posthumanism, the stage is set for the
futurist release of all the pent-up excess of expressions of
scientific determinism and technological fundamentalism that have
been gathering momentum for some five centuries–transcending bodily
limits, eradicating illness, ending poverty and hunger, and vanishing
pollution. In its basics, this version of technological futurism,
with its doubled sense of hubris and complicated alliance of recoded
bodies, nanotechnology, genetic determinism and artificial
intelligence is a creation myth–"the coming into being of such a
world is, in essence, the Singularity." With techno-futurism, we are
literally present at a digital rewriting of the Book of Genesis with
all that is implied in terms of (re)creating the body for smoother,
and perhaps safer, passage through the often-turbulent event-horizon
surrounding the black hole of the Singularity towards which
(technological) society is plunging. While the DIY body may have the
"Internet of Things" as its necessary digital infrastructure and the
"quantified self" as its ideal expression, what drives it forward,
animating its design and inspiring its constant creativity, is, in
the end as in the beginning, the specter of the coming Singularity as
its core creation myth. Curiously, in the same way that Heidegger
once noted that the question of technology can never ever be
understood technologically–that we must travel furthest from the
dwelling-place of technology to discover its essence–the concept of
Singularity, while evocative of the language of science and powered
by digital devices, is something profoundly theological in its
inception.
Of course, given the sheer complexity of contemporary global society
with its mixture of recidivist social movements, global climate
change, fully unpredictable human desires, economic turbulence, and,
of course, changing rhythms of bodily health and the many diseases of
the aged and the sick, Kurzweil's vision is startling, less so for
its naivety than for its feverish embrace of an approaching
technological state of bliss–transcendent, teleological, and
terminal. *Transcendent* because its overriding faith in machine
intelligence, nanotechnology, and gene research is premised on the
imperative of "overcoming our frail bodies with their limitations."
Here, unlike the Christian belief first articulated by St. Augustine
in De Trinitate–with its division of the body into corruptible flesh
and the perfect incorporeality of the state of grace–the newest of
all the Singularities is intended to lead to a new heaven of
computation. *Teleological* because this vision of the new
Singularity invests the will to technology with a sustaining, indeed
inspiring, purpose: overcoming the unknown country of death. And
*terminal*, because this is also a philosophy of end times, certainly
the end of the human species as we have known it, but also the end of
easily distinguishable boundaries between the "biological and the
mechanical, or between physical and virtual reality." As Kurzweil
states: "The Nanotechnology Revolution will enable us to redesign and
rebuild–molecule by molecule–our bodies and brains for the world
with what was interesting, going far beyond the limitations of
biology." [2] The end, therefore, of the biological body as we have
known it and the beginning of something very novel: the merger of
natural biology with its surrounding environment of technologies of
the post-biological–artificial intelligence, nanotechnology,
molecular science, and neurobots. As to be expected, in return for
the sacrifice of a natural biological cycle of life and death, the
creation myth framing technological rapture has promises of its own
to keep: a fully realized future of "living indefinitely" with
nanobots streaming "through the bloodstream in our bodies and
brains," telepathy in the form of "wireless communication from one
brain to another," improved "pattern recognition" by overcoming the
inherent limitations of natural cognitive evolution in favor of
"brain implants" [3] marking the inception, then triumph, of
"nonbiological intelligence." In effect, the vision of technological
rapture is visualized as a marvelous, ready-made (AI) toolbox for
constructing DIY bodies.
When Singularity Intersects with Human Multiplicity
—————————————————
While singularity theory provides a highly creative, futurist account
of events likely to happen when machinic intelligence surpasses the
biological limits of human cognition, the reality is that singularity
is less futurist than something already deeply historical. One of the
key tendencies of early twenty-first-century experience is that we
may already be living in the midst of the predicted turbulence and
exponential rate of change associated with the Singularity. With
astounding advances in robotic technology, drones that are soon be
invested with ethical autonomy in making closed (cybernetic) loop
decisions concerning the "disposition matrix," relentless mergers of
the worlds of society, politics, and economy with artificial
intelligence, genetic biology, and nanotech intrusions on the
biological, the Singularity–the merger of the biological and the
artificial–is a decidedly contemporary phenomenon, one that is
complex, intersectional, exponential, and fractured: 3D printing is
capable of virtually replicating the world of material objects;
research labs have announced the emergence of synthetic biology
premised on artificial DNA; robotics has shed its mechanical skin in
favor of taking up habitation in the neural networks of information
society; and the specter of a globalized surveillance network is made
possible by the eerily animate presence of complicated systems of
nonbiological intelligence associated with data mining. While
narrowly technocratic perspectives may like to predict the
approaching dawn of a new future of Singularity–with its decidedly
unrealistic projections concerning new utopias of health, life-spans,
wealth and unfettered knowledge–we, the first living subjects
actually present at the fateful encounter between the biological and
the artificial, understand at the granular level the real-world
consequences that follow the Singularity. When the information blast
disrupts the social, when artificial DNA effectively resequences the
story of natural evolution itself, when the triumph of code works to
reinforce existing inequalities in labor, business and politics,
then, at that point, we can recognize that the (technologically
envisioned) Singularity actually expresses itself in the language of
human multiplicity.
Scenes from the Event Horizon
—————————–
Life by Numbers
—————
Until a few years ago it would have been pointless to seek
self-knowledge through numbers. Although sociologists could
survey us in aggregate, and laboratory psychologists could do
clever experiments with volunteer subjects, the real way we ate,
played, talked and loved left only the faintest measureable
trace. Our only method of tracking ourselves was to notice what
we were doing and write it down. But even this written record
couldn't be analyzed objectively without laborious processing
and analysis.
Then four things changed. First, electronic sensors got smaller
and better. Second, people starting carrying powerful computer
devices, typically disguised as mobile phones. Third, social
media made it seem normal to share everything. And fourth, we
began to get an inkling of a global superintelligence known as
the cloud. [4]
Gary Wolf, "The Data-Driven Life," _The New York Times Magazine_
Palpable signs that we are already living in the midst of the
Singularity are provided by the growing cultural appeal of what has
been described as the "Quantified Self Movement." In this scenario,
bodies strap on their mobile prosthetics, digitally tattoo themselves
with an array of wearable electronic sensors, calibrate their social
media lives by complex, flexible forms of digital self-tracking made
possible by those new clouds of digital cumulus drifting across the
global sky, and turn the previously unmeasured, untracked, and
perhaps even unnoticed into vibrant streams of shareable data.
Essentially, the surface of the body, as well its previously private
interiority, is transformed into GPS data in the greater games of
augmented reality. Except this time, data bodies are not so much
using mobile phones to scan graphics that open onto a previously
invisible world of graffiti, games, and advertising, but envelop the
body in a big gif (graphics interchange format) of its very own–a
digital penumbra of numbers about eating, sleeping, loving, working
that provide an electronic shadow for tracking bodily activities.
Suddenly, we find ourselves living in an age of the body and its
digital shadow, this complex cloud of hyper-personalized data points
not just accumulated by mobile bodies as they track their way through
life but always spinning away from the body in fantastic
reconfigurations of comparative data bases that may be perfect
receptacles for social sharing but are also measuring points for
better individual living.
Thought in purely astronomical terms, the quantified self movement is
like a *protostar*–a dense concentration of "molecular clouds where
stars form." [5] Here, the newly emergent data self quickly throws
off qualitative cultural debris from its past, thus committing itself
to the daring gamble of seeking to quantify the unquantifiable, to
literally construct a DIY body, one measurement at a time, that takes
close account of lessons to be learned, data to be shared,
measurements to be undertaken, numbers to be calculated, results to
be reflected upon, activities to be improved, upgraded, overcome, by
its digital double–*life by numbers*. In any event, for a society in
which complex mergers between machine intelligence and human bodies
are underway, one important adaptive response on the part of an
always flexible human species is to transform subjectivity in the
direction of that which is required for smooth admission to the end
times of technological singularity. If the language of power is data,
if the language of connection is convergence, and if the privileged
value is speed, then what could be better than a coherent,
comprehensive, and creative plan for reproducing a form of "self"
that eerily mimics the etymological meaning of data as "thing-like"?
Refusing the intuitive, throwing off the ineffable, and breaking
forever with the imaginary, the quantified self movement reverses the
traditional order of human subjectivity by making the thing-like
character of quantifiable data both the precondition and goal of
individual identity in the age of nonbiological intelligence. Unlike
traditional Christian monasteries that provided physical shelter in
good times and bad for the idea of the sacred and its associated
religious institutions, the quantified self movement promulgates, in
effect, a new order of digital monasticism that puts down roots in
the psychic dimension of human subjectivity itself. With *being data*
its primal act of faith, with the meticulous, even obsessive,
*calculation of life's quanta*–be it empathy, happiness, sex, or
cardiovascular health–as its social practice, and with *meetups* of
members of the quantified self movement as its mode of confessional,
this new monastic order heralds the eclipse of traditional
expressions of human subjectivity and the triumphant emergence of the
thing-like–the "data driven life" as the form of (technological)
self now taking flight at the dawn of the Singularity.
But wait. If you were to attend one of the global quantified self
meetups–and they are everywhere now–the reality is most likely the
opposite. The overall thematic might be the quantified life, but what
resonates is the sense of individuals trying to find themselves,
perhaps puzzled by the complications of daily life, and attempting as
best they can, one self-confession at a time, to put the whole thing
together for themselves by talking and sharing data. For example,
each participant has five to ten minutes to discuss three core
predetermined questions: "What did you do? How did you do it? What
did you learn?" [6] It is as if network communications are not so
much about the cold indifference of relational data points, but about
its actual content, that whole stubbornly individual, always
vulnerable, terribly anxiety-prone mass of highly individuated
individuals. There is definitely a general yearning for
self-improvement in the air, definitely a sense that the basic themes
of Norman Vincent Peale's _The Power of Positive Thinking_, with its
homage to projected self-confidence and adaptive behavior, has
escaped the power of the written text and taken up an active alliance
with proponents of the quantified life. Or maybe it's something
different. Perhaps talking by data is the most recent manifestation
of Dale Carnegie's _How to Win Friends and Influence People_, with
its insightful strategies for winning other people over to your own
way of doing things by first and foremost winning yourself over to
yourself.
Indeed, if one of the key characteristics of contemporary times is
the seemingly relentless progression of robots towards becoming more
human, it is equally the case that many humans may be in pursuit of
bodies suited for better robotic living, namely the "data-driven
life." In his visionary statement of life by numbers, Gary Wolf
begins with the essentially theological insight that the uniquely
human qualities of fragility, precariousness, and forgetfulness,
while perhaps acceptable in the epoch of the pre-digital, should now
rightfully be dispensed with as the original sin of the data-driven
life. According to this visionary of life by numbers, "humans make
errors. We make errors of fact and errors of judgment. We have blind
spots in our field of vision and gaps in our stream of attention. . .
These weaknesses put us at a disadvantage. We make decisions with
partial information. We are forced to steer by guesswork. We go with
our gut. That is, some of us do. Others use data." [7] Perhaps, but
then maybe Wolf hasn't read Nietzsche's _Thus Spoke Zarathustra_,
with its constant refrain about the cold indifference of nature, the
absolute lucidity and absolute coldness of that indifference
particularly in the face of rationally calculated human purpose. For
the quantified self, data is the newest expression of nature. Which
just might mean that the storytelling that data evokes also has about
it a very real sense of lucid indifference even in the face of human
intentionality. We might want things to be different, but data
reveals the real story. It is the cold eye surveying the subjective
messiness of human experience, the indifferent scale of values taking
calculated measure of all things, from calories burnt and sleep
cycles altered to the rise and fall of financial fortunes at the
speed of high-frequency trading. Or is it? Maybe in the end what
lends the austere concept of data such seductive power is less its
pure etymological meaning as the "thing-like," than something else
entirely, namely that like everything else–feelings, body images,
social connections, cultural knowledge, work experience–there really
is no such thing as pure data, no empty signifier floating freely
outside of a complicated, dense field of intersecting relationships.
In this case, when data plunges into the posthuman condition, when
data expresses its supposedly cold judgments in all those quantified
self meetups, there can be such a powerful sense of yearning in the
air precisely because advocates of life by numbers–whether from the
tech community or not–are always complicating the numbers by private
anxieties, specific intentions, and complicated feelings. That is
what the confessional storytelling at all those meetups are all
about–not so much, in the end, life by numbers, but life itself. It
is perhaps precisely in the equivocal meeting of cold data and
passionate yearning, in this strange mixture of human desire to
control the complexities of social experience by numbered tabulations
and data's lasting indifference to the illusions of control, that we
can also begin to discern future intimations of life by numbers, that
we are committing ourselves anew to an approaching era of absurd
data.
Tweaking Neural Circuitry
————————-
But why should the technological drive towards the "data-driven life"
remain forever on the outside of the body, enabled by apps that
create self-generating loops of information guiding behavioral
modification? What would happen if the desire for self-tracking was
finally liberated from the body's exterior surface, migrating inside
the body generally and becoming fully interior to the brain
specifically? What if one day the human brain could be lit up from
within by means of advanced bio-technological devices that would
suddenly draw into visibility that which, until now, has remained the
subject of intense speculation and passionate conjecture, namely the
possibility of tracking the brain's complex neural circuitry and thus
potentially enabling a new era of the DIY brain–one that involves
tweaking the human nervous system. An insightful report by Robert Lee
Holtz titled "Mysterious Brain Circuitry Becomes Viewable" provides
this comment:
At laboratories in the U.S. and Europe, scientists are
wrapping the brain in soft sheets of microscopic sensor
circuits, lighting it up within using cell-sized diodes,
turning it into a wireless transmitter.. . . Scientists
even found a way to make an entire brain transparent–all
the better to study the weave of neurons and synapses that
make up the scaffolding of the brain.
Scientists want to transform these comparatively crude
brain maps into detailed renderings that can document how
the human brain's 100 billion neurons–as many cells as
stars in the Milky Way–instantly link in circuits through
trillions of pathways. [8]
As one scientist noted, the possibility of threading light-emitting
diodes into the soft matter of the brain means that "tiny seeds of
light can be injected to activate special networks of light-sensitive
neurons.. . . It provides a recipe for delivering all sorts of
advanced technologies, such as integrated circuits down in the
brain." [9]
The brain as a "wireless transmitter" or "integrated circuits down in
the brain"? That seems to be a scientific prescription for a cinema
of neural apocalypse in which technologies of behavioral modification
move from the outside of the body to the core of its cerebral cortex.
No longer, then, a requirement for quantified self meetups–with
their contagious techno-enthusiasm for tracking metrics of all
kinds–but, in this scenario, silent meetups of integrated circuits
that are downloaded directly into the previously untrackable universe
of human neurology. What possibilities yet undreamed, what future
still unimagined would suddenly become viable if data
tracking–presently focused on that which leaves only the "faintest
measureable trace"–would deliver its advanced technologies in the
form of integrated circuits hardwired to the motherboard of the human
brain.
The overall goal of neurological modification, actually reshaping the
neural circuitry of the brain, is the essence of the DIY bodies of
the future. Light up the neural circuitry of the brain, use "tiny
seeds of light" to "activate networks of light-sensitive neurons,"
remake the brain as a "wireless transmitter," and we are instantly
living in a newly emergent world of affective neuroscience: augmented
intelligence, cybernetically enabled emotion, operant conditioning of
neurological depression, technically facilitated happiness–a world
of genetically improved senses. Neuroscientists motivated by dreams
of genetically modifying the neural circuitry of the human species
have already formed the usual alliance with large-scale commercial
interests invested in ambitious plans to harvest neural circuitry for
accelerated capital accumulation. Similar to most other spectacular
digital launches, this double alliance of science and business around
tweaking neural circuitry is motivated, in the first instance, by an
ideology of facilitation. Who wouldn't prefer for their children, if
not for themselves, the heretofore impossible utopia of neural
circuitry that could be effectively modified to deliver improved
intelligence, health, emotions, and physical appearance? Download
integrated circuits into the brain and human neurology would be
quickly rendered the first and best of all the cognitive apps of the
future, ready to practically realize the most recent advances in
robotics, genetic biology and nanotechnology. It would be as if
technological rapture took possession of neural circuitry and
delivered the integrated brain to the ecstasy of singularity.
However, the other side of the ideology of (neural) facilitation is
the presence of integrated circuits that take command. In this sense,
once neural circuitry has been lit up by those "tiny seeds of light"
and once "special networks of light-sensitive neurons" have been
activated and their neurological structure diagnosed, the result is
likely to be brain matter dangerously overexposed and, in fact,
perhaps fatally vulnerable. What and who, then, will be the DIY
bodies of the future? How will issues related to class, race,
ethnicity, and gender play themselves out in the approaching universe
of reengineered neural circuitry? And what happens when the
previously invisible region of human neurology with "as many cells as
stars in the Milky Way" abruptly moves from its sheltering darkness
to the bright lights of scientific probes that want, above all, to
explain the complexity of "all those millions of pathways"? From
sometimes harsh historical experience, we know well that questions of
visibility and invisibility are never simply reducible for their
explanation to the question of technology. Who and what will be
brought into visibility has always been an essentially political
determination. Equally, who and what will remain cloaked in
invisibility, and thus rendered exterior to traditional rights of
human recognition, also involves prior political settlements
concerning issues bearing on prohibition, exclusion, and disavowal.
All this is, of course, studiously screened away by purely
technological analysis determined to finally achieve the elixir of
all scientific ambition–lighting up the soft matter of the brain in
order to probe its neural contents with integrated circuits. Here,
the accelerating speed of technologies of (neural) facilitation
easily outpaces contemporary deliberative reflections on the fate of
the human nervous system first fully objectified and then harvested
by the command language of affective neuroscience. As William Leiss,
a futurist philosopher of genomic science, once asked: "Are we
ethically prepared for this?" Are we ready, ethically ready, for the
coming order of neural modification, with its tweaking of the human
nervous system, first as a way of facilitating an improved human
situation (albeit for some) and ultimately to assume full neural
command of that which was previously unmeasureable, untrackable,
invisible?
Remote Mood Sensors
——————-
As if to accelerate the process of lighting up the brain and thus
bring the full complexity of its neural circuitry into a greater
visibility, a cutting-edge five-year research program has recently
been announced with the aim of creating in the near future remotely
controlled mood sensors, ostensibly for controlling depression and
anxiety, that can be inserted directly into the brain. [10] Again,
following doubled logic of facilitation and command, the ethical
justification for such prototyping is made in terms of bringing
urgent medical relief to traumatized soldiers suffering the long-term
effects of post-traumatic stress disorder. Given that the mood
sensors will be operationalized with possibilities for remote
control, it might also be hypothesized that a bio-technological
device of this emotional magnitude may also align itself very
smoothly and without a ripple of (scientific) discontent with what
the theorist Paul Virilio has described as the process of
"endo-colonization," namely strategic interventions by which
governments make war on their own domestic populations. As reported
by John Tucker in _Defense One_ ("The Military is Building Brain
Chips to Treat PTSD"), the research program follows the trajectory of
technologies of "deep brain stimulation":
How well can you predict your next mood swing? How well can
anyone? It's an existential dilemma for many of us but for the
military, the ability to treat anxiety, depression, memory loss
and the symptoms associated with post-traumatic stress disorder
has become one of the most important battles of the post-war
period.
With $12 million (and the potential for $26 million more if
benchmarks are met) the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency, or DARPA wants to reach deep into your brain's soft
tissue to record, predict and possibly treat anxiety, depression
and other maladies of mood and mind. Teams from the University
of California at San Francisco, Lawrence Livermore National Lab
and Medtronic will use the money to create a cybernetic implant
with electrodes extending into the brain. [11]
The research is funded by DARPA through its SUBNET (Systems-Based
Neurotechnology for Emerging Therapies) program. With the overall aim
of "automatically adjusting therapy as the brain itself changes," the
military's interest is said to lie in obtaining high-resolution maps
of the brain's neural circuitry, particularly when surges of
electrical signals moving across its motor cortex express themselves
in symptoms related to anxiety, depression, and memory loss. "Brain
chips," then, for modulating mood swings in subject populations.
Future augmentations of the DIY body with brain chips–"invasive deep
brain implants"–lend themselves most immediately to dystopian
visions of mind control. Here, under the therapeutic cover of
improving individual psychological health by reducing depression,
anxiety, and mood swings, what is really being delivered to the brain
is a fundamental change in the patterns of its neural circuitry. Once
brain implants have been drilled down into the soft matter of the
brain, the expectation is that gushers of neural data will provide
new ways of mapping, then modeling, the brain's electrical networks.
Once installed, brain chips could potentially reverse engineer the
amygdala by changing the patterned behavior of neural circuitry as a
way of circumventing the neurological sources of traumatic injury.
Once the brain has been opened up by cybernetic implants to
mood-altering therapeutics, it creates the possibility of
generalizing this initially purely therapeutic intervention across
entire populations. In other words, "a crude example of what's
possible with future brain-machine and cybernetic implants in the
decades ahead." [12]
Perhaps, though, not "mind control" in the traditional sense of a
political mechanics of domination, but the wiring together of
previously individuated brains into new forms of fused affectivity.
In this case, brain chips are a two-way (neurological) street, both
transmitting data to waiting sensors from deep inside the soft matter
of the brain and also delivering to the amygdala mood-altering
therapeutics. If a future of bodies with brain chips is alarming from
the perspective of received visions of mind control, perhaps that is
because this is already less a futuristic project than a deeply
retrograde one. In a highly mediated culture we have long been
accustomed to what McLuhan once described as "media as
massage"–electronic media that modulate the human nervous system
with psychologically powerful simulacra of images, sounds, and
(virtual) emotions. To some extent, inserting digital devices such as
brain chips only makes obvious what may have already happened to us
in that complex environment of brain/cybernetic interfaces known as
the mass media. But, if that is the case, maybe what is most
disturbing about brain chips for mood alterations are two of its
other constitutive features. First, with this neurological experiment
in "invasive deep brain implants," an ethical boundary is fatally
breached, one in which the human brain is harvested as another
inanimate object of vivisectioning. Implanted with prosthetics,
drilled with chip technology, carefully mapped and modelled, this is,
in essence, an experiment in rendering neural circuitry a fully alien
object of radical experimentation. What is possible, then, with
"future brain-machine and cybernetic implants in the decades ahead"
may be a deeply ominous future in which neurological functioning is
reduced to a servomechanism of more pervasive cybernetic patterns of
behavior. Operant conditioning delivered by a brain chip at the speed
of light optics. Second, not just brain chips as advanced expressions
of wireless operant conditioning, but also the construction of DIY
bodies of the future built upon the triumph of the data-driven brain
and the eclipse of the human mind. Here, hacking the brain by
literally "jump-starting" it with electrical currents would mean that
the struggle to overcome consciousness of trauma and mood swings
associated with anxiety and depression would be reduced to a purely
operational solution with efforts at understanding the social origins
of trauma and existential crises that may have triggered acute
anxiety or severe depression eliminated from the psychic scene.
Jump-starting the data-driven brain also means a big increase in the
cybernetic control of human neurology and an equally big decrease in
the necessarily contingent, contextual, and ineffable nature of human
consciousness.
Of course, for researchers of the data-driven brain, consciousness of
the ultimately consequential results of the project may well lend
added visibility to fundamental ethical doubts concerning the wisdom
of this latest proposal for the technological interpolation of neural
circuitry. For example, if past practices hold true, the first test
subjects for this experiment in brain vivisectioning are likely to be
animals involuntarily sequestered in laboratories, then perhaps even
selected groups of army veterans who may be told that participation
in this experiment aimed at implanting cybernetic sensors into the
brain is a precondition for continued medical treatment. Equally, if
mood swings are to be placed under remote (medical) control, what is
to prevent the dark side of data–viral contagions, aggressive
hackers, stolen or misplaced flash drives, broken codes–from being
introduced quickly and decisively into the deepest recesses of the
soft matter of the brain? Sharper (brain) images, then, but also
blurred ethical vision.
When Synthetic Biology Rides the Wave
————————————-
We are actually transitioning from a ~Homo Sapiens~ into a ~Homo
evolutis~–a creature that begins to directly and deliberately
engineer evolution to its own design. [13]
It's perfect surfing conditions in La Jolla, California–sunny sky,
steady breeze, and gigantic waves finally finding their way to the
Pacific shoreline, swelling up to beautiful crests just before the
whole (wave) scene dissolves again and again into a bone yard of
broken patterns of water ebbing onto the beach. On this particular
morning, there are dozens of surfers riding that magical California
edge of bright sun and killer waves, some just bodysurfing but most
trying to find the sweet spot of those cresting waves, that momentary
physics of the barrel where bodily balance, fast motion and the curve
of the cresting wave exists for the millisecond that is the take-home
measure of the perfect wave. Now all this is pushed to the (pleasant)
background of my attention as my mind is locked in deep, reading Greg
Bears's prophetic book _Blood Music_ in a beachfront cafe located
just steps away from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, with
its fabled marine research of life related to the watery element of
the physical universe. In this whole scene, there's a lot of surfing
going down. Certainly, those incredible surfers of the waves just
offshore, but also those marine biologists engaged in a kind of
intellectual surfing of their own, this time trying to ride the waves
of those sometimes perfect patterns of watery life-forms. There's
also some serious surfing taking place in _Blood Music_, although
this time it's not about human bodies tracking cresting waves or
marine biologists looking to catch and ride the edge of insightful
findings, but a story concerning the future of nanotechnology: a
science-fiction fable of artificial cells that have escaped the lab,
taken possession of the body of a graduate researcher, and then
literally surfed the biological material of that single body until
those artificial cells propagate beyond synthetically infected flesh
to change the physiological structure of the entire environment.
Aesthetically, the image of the future offered by _Blood Music_, with
its story of artificial life and computation come alive, is similar
to those eerie images painted by the surrealist artist Max Ernst,
where human bodies, inanimate objects, vital animals, and
mythological symbols blind together into a common morphology.
Politically, it's anticipatory of Bill Joy's warning that while a
computer crash might mean the inconvenience of some lost data,
crashing the basic codes of life runs the danger of taking down
entire environments, if not suddenly terminating the natural
evolution of the human species.
In the usual way of always incommensurable thought, my mind might
have the apocalyptic futurism of _Blood Music_ in its foreground and
those scenes of rhythmic surfers in its background, but my
situational awareness is short-circuited by a news alert from my
always on mobile that transmits the following headline from, of all
places, the Scripps Institute of Research:
LA JOLLA, CA–Scientists at the Scripps Research Institute
(TSRI) have engineered a bacterium, whose genetic material
includes an added pair of DNA "letters" or bases, not found in
nature. The cells of this unique bacterium can replicate the
unnatural DNA bases more or less normally, for as long as the
molecular building blocks are supplied.
"Life on Earth in all its diversity is encoded by only two pairs
of DNA bases, A-T and C-G, and what we've made is an organism
that stably contains those two plus a third, unnatural pair of
bases," said TSRI Associate Professor Floyd E. Romesberg, who
led the research team. "This shows that other solutions to
storing information are possible and, of course, takes us closer
to an expanded-DNA biology that will have many exciting
applications–from new medicines to new kinds of
nanotechnology." [14]
While the news release was enthusiastic in its account of synthetic
biology delivering on its promise of a new alphabet of life, my own
"exciting application" of the development of artificial DNA was
tempered by the immediate thought that, try as I might, I could not
sequester in the background of my perceptual field–was it really
possible that, only three decades after the dystopian fable traced by
_Blood Music_, events first written as literature have leaped the
divisional boundaries of fact and fiction and become the
modelling-principle for the future of the real. Is _Blood Music_ the
skin of the new real of synthetic biology and artificial DNA?
There can be little equivocation with the claim that synthetic
biology, with its transformative creation of artificial DNA, is the
future of the DIY body first, and perhaps later even, of the DIY
planet. Brushing aside the seemingly feverish efforts by
neuroscientists to stake proprietary claims on rewiring cognitive
networks, whether by drugs, tracking, or implanted cyber-hooks,
synthetic biology has introduced the fundamental game-changer of
artificial life. For example, while contemporary social and political
thought continues to debate the contentious relationship between
power and life–whether, that is, power speaks in the name of
(normative) life or in the more disciplinary name of death–synthetic
biology envisions something entirely different, specifically the
creation of previously unimagined forms of artificial life, from
synthetic cells to the artificially constructed bodies of soldiers,
astronauts and workers, that take full advantage of "an expanded
DNA-biology." More than "life by numbers," the "quantified self," or
"remote mood sensors," and going beyond mechanistic images of the
reengineered brain as a "wireless transmitter" or an "integrated
circuit" with neurons to be lit up and neural pathways to be
"jump-started," synthetic biology provides a dramatically new
creative principle–Artificial DNA. Here, the addition of a "third,
unnatural pair of bases" to genetic history does not simply promise
"solutions to storing information" or expanding DNA-biology, but
introduces a fundamental element of uncertainty into the living
world. While injecting a free-wheeling and essentially designer note
of the recombinant, the unnatural, the artificial to the biological
process of coding "life on earth" will undoubtedly facilitate many
novel and worthwhile applications, it also means taking final
possession of the question of life itself. Consequently, when genomic
scientists envision multidisciplinary approaches linking together
molecular biology, chemistry, computer science, and electrical
engineering, what they are really articulating is the gateway to the
future–a gateway to enhanced possibilities for "assembl(ing)
biological tools to redesign the living world." [15]
At this point, thinking at the intersection of ocean-driven scenes of
California surfers and science-fiction hauntologies of _Blood Music_,
I wondered if the unnatural world to come will also someday
experience for itself those strange and enigmatic fractures of broken
meanings, uncomfortable fits, and clashing cosmologies of the heart
and mind that seems to so unique to the human species about to be
left behind. Measured by the first, truly global burst of excitement
that greeted the Scripps announcement–an excitement less, to be
sure, about the foregrounded text of a novel scientific breakthrough
than what seems be the really existent, animating subtext, namely
that we are speaking openly and positively about redesigning
molecular building blocks for the "living world," well, judging
solely by the positive response to this drop-dead end of evolution,
end of (natural) story press release–there is an unqualified
smoothness to the future of Artificial DNA. While Artificial DNA
might not, as synthetic biologists like to claim, be allowed to
escape the laboratory, that does not preclude active experimentation
with synthetic DNA in the many other laboratories of power and
capital–weaponizing synthetic biology, creating highly specialized
artificial life-forms to maximize capital accumulation as well as
minimize labor unrest, technologically enabled, eugenic dreams of
synthesizing the "perfect child." No longer the "terrorism of the
code" in any particularly negative sense, but a future scripted in
all its smoothness, transparency, and perfectibility by the rising
(genomic) signs of synthetic biology.
Yet, for all that, there is still that lingering sense that in the
future even the most artificial of all the artificial DNA will come
to recognize that the mythic fate of the artificial–the ancient art
of artifice–is always necessarily doubled. Certainly, every artifice
first expresses itself in the language of perfect simulation–a
smooth coding of the living world by biological tools that only work
to enhance "exciting applications." But, of course, the secret of all
the great masters of the art of artifice is the hard-won realization
that what motivates the artificial, what really renders believability
to the theatre of artifice is precisely the intangible elements of
undecidability, imperfection, and, indeed, latent error that is
always carefully masked by the staging of the artifice. In this case,
as in (natural) life, so too in (artificial) life: the fact that
every fully accomplished perfect surf ride ends in the boneyards of
just another wave on the beach might just intimate that the future
logic of synthetic biology already contains its own boneyards, that
what presently remains unsynthesized, unthought, and unconsidered is
the ghost-rider in the shadows of artificial DNA. Could it be that
resuscitating something of the spirit of the human, that which is
presently policed away by the totalizing logic of synthetic biology,
is the once and future destiny of artificial DNA? Or perhaps the
reverse is true. If _Blood Music_ is the skin of synthetic biology,
swarms of mutating cells, like nature before them, will be
indifferent to human fate. That would mean the future of synthetic
biology will likely cast natural indifference against human artifice
as its likely fate. In this case, we are in the presence of new
(molecular) building blocks for a very traditional story.
Remember the unanticipated, premature death of Dolly, the first of
all the android sheep that, for all its artificial resuscitation by
the scientific hubris of genetic engineering, could not escape its
fatal destiny of accelerated, synthetically enabled, aging. Just as
we can acknowledge with some confidence that every massive wave is
doomed to crash and every breakdown can be a potential breakthrough,
so too even the science of artifice can never really escape that
messy tangle of mythic destiny, complex ambitions, complicated dreams
of the sub-real, and utopian dreams of transhumanism that is the
continuing singularity event of the new real. In this case, the
future of synthetic biology, with its creative breakouts of
artificial DNA, nanotechnology, and fabricated xeno-organisms,
remains fully uncertain in advance–fully undecidable, that is, until
that future moment when the synthetic imagination actually begins to
ride the wave of unsynthesized reality onto the beach of life itself.
Notes
—–
[1] Raymond Kurzweil, "Reinventing Humanity: The Future of
Machine-Human Intelligence,"
http://www.singularity.com/KurzweilFuturist.pdf (accessed May 21,
2014).
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Gary Wolf, "The Data-Driven Life," _The New York Times_ (May 2,
2010),
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/magazine/02self-measurement-t.html?
pagewanted=all (accessed May 20, 2014).
[5] Paolo Saraceno and Renato Orfei, "From Molecular Clouds to
Stars," Istituto Di Fiscia Dello Spaizo Interplanaterio, CNR,
http://www.gps.caltech.edu/classes/ge133/reading/starformation.pdf
(accessed July 28, 2014).
[6] James Wolcott, "Wired up! Ready to Go!" _Vanity Fair_ (February
20, 2013),
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2013/02/quantified-self-hive-mind-
weight-watchers (accessed May 20, 2014).
[7] Ibid.
[8] Robert Lee Holtz, "Mysterious Brain Circuitry Becomes Viewable,"
_The Wall Street Journal_,
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/
SB100014241278873242353045784388114892 74812 (accessed June 2, 2014).
[9] Ibid.
[10] Patrick Tucker, "The Military is Building Brain Chips to Treat
PTSD," _Defense One_, http://www.defenseone.
com/technology/2014/05/D1-Tucker-military-building-brain-chips-treat-
ptsd/85360/?oref=d-channelriver (accessed May 29, 2014).
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Juan Enriquez, quoted in Breanna Draxler, "Life as We Grow it:
The Promises and Perils of Synthetic Biology," _Discover Magazine_
(December 11, 2013),
http://discovermagazine.com/2013/oct/14-life-as-we-grow-it (accessed
July 22, 2014).
[14] "Scripps Research Institute Scientists Create First Living
Organism that Transmits Added Letters in DNA 'Alphabet,'" _Scripps_
press release (May 7, 2014),
http://www.scripps.edu/news/press/2014/20140507romesberg.html
(accessed July 23, 2014).
[15] Ibid.
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