User:Francg/expub/media-writing/essay-15march

What are we turning into?

Franc González

Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy

Master Media Design: Experimental Publishing

Reading, Writing & Research Methodologies, Steve Rushton

15-03-2017

Our demand to better understand nature and ourselves as individual beings, widespread over as pragmatic case studies began to claim foundations in rationality and the scientific understanding of the world. Ethics evolved along with technological advances, allowing individuals to freely reconfigure their conception of nature by strengthening individual thinking. The Internet provided us of new ways for shaping rationality and simultaneously distributed a manmade illusion/perception of spatial freedom. This abstract and utopian concept has been transforming our physical awareness into an immaterial phenomenon that has extended our senses beyond given nature. The digital era is unceasingly stretching out our preconceptions and moral limits, while rising up both speculative views of dehumanised and/or intellectually self-sufficient societies.

The question that seems to be rising up significantly is: "What are we turning into?" Technology is becoming a fundamental part of our daily routines. We live in a state of uncertainty, anxiety and paranoia expecting to be rewarded by stimulating encrypted data. Our sense for being our real selves becomes an extension of these practices. It is possible that our reality testing and the sense of personal identity might mediate a centralised online mashup (a subculture based on diminishing posts where personality is defined by software) and the illusion that it creates. Additionally, we increase our social network by widespreading our identity, also causing vulnerabilities in our privacy (Lanier 2010).

On one hand, a crucial necessity and an essential hope in the early digital revolution/open culture was that a connected world would create more opportunities for personal advancement for everyone. However, since crowds (or social networks) were more emphasized and manifesting themselves speaking lauder, the masses have been then heightening importance. Contrarily there has been a lot of attention, importance and value taken away from individual humans in the design of society, which has induced to technophilia side-effects (Lanier 2010). On the other hand though, there is a strong belief in a better future where technology will not be feared. In any case, we’ve just shortly began to speed up and to improve manufacturing in order to stock up on an increasing dependancy for having smarter devices around us. Technology can be highly accurate processing and controlling data for us, but they can also be the threshold of contradictions, confusions and specific unwanted reactions. For instance, virtual reality can simulate three dimensional environments that can interact in a seemingly real way with human senses. If reality isn’t going as you might have expected, the chance you can jump into an utopic harmless space where you are in total control of the given scenario, makes it look more like a powerful drug for entertainment than a healthy alternative (Lanier 2010). Interestingly, the film industry seems to also theorize with fascinating or apocalyptic futures without strong evidences. Films like “Transcendence” where nanotechnology synthesize with living organisms, it brakes open both human skepticism (or fear at intellectually superior, self-sufficient entities) and the optimism to believe in such a potential future. If a computer software that could simulate a network of neurons, sending signals from one another, would consciousness now exist in the computer? (Lanier 2010). Most recently “Westworld” series argues whether manmade sophisticated “machines” that look and behave like real humans, should be treated as aimless artificial scrap and therefore kept imprisoned for attending human needs, instead of acknowledging their intellectual self-developing awareness to take freely conscious choices. In such case, are these machines persons? Should an artificially enhanced biological being, sufficiently powerful to become fully conscious and rational, be allowed to own itself? (Hayles 2008). Hans Moravec’s predictions on artificial intelligence and transhumanism, envisioned that humans may enter into symbiotic relationships with intelligent machines (Hayles 2008). Furthermore, “Mr Robot” series suggests a near future society in which any capitalistic, oppressive and discriminative form of power is removed from the system by hacking the entire World’s economy. In any of the above mentioned fictional cases, both the dangerous and pragmatic points of view of technology are presented and equally considered for discussion. A real contemporary case of human/program misinterpretation would be the command line interface from our computers: in this system, when you type instructions and press “return”, Unix, Linux or Windows can’t tell if a person or a program hit return (Lanier 2010).

Humanity will probably be able to efficiently create technology to replace or improve human physical qualities and extend its senses. Being a cyborg will not be seen as an abstract idea, but as the ultimate, most suitable and normalised state of an upgraded human, living according to the present socio-technological time. Although individual’s choice on what to do with their bodies might initially prevail overall, the more outdated one turns to be, the less socially integrated will probably become. Exactly the same as with nowadays smartphone’s dependancy to fulfil our personal needs for communication. Besides, communication without context can be harmful and certainly misleading to wrong nonexistent paths. We are living in a world of representations rather than realities, of seeing and hearing rather than touching (Paul 2016).

A significant and quite predominant example of what’s happening to people’s everyday reliance on technology, is the fact they have to manage their online reputation across different social medias or idealised online platforms, in which this irrational gadget devotion can be excessive in some cases. It is a sort of entertaining open culture anarchism against authority driven more by self-esteem than by truly affective or constructive facts (Lanier 2010). Such “uncontrolled” technology is seductive and liberating, but playing around with information can become a destructive weapon of oppression, altering our ethics and cultural habits (Siva 2005). However, when information is controlled, power is acquired. Are we then (as the 1986 commercials from “Nintendo” entertainment systems suggested) playing with power? In that sense, could people be considered as just one form of information? If so, can information have profound effects on real / living things? Furthermore, Shannon’s theory defines information as a probability function with no dimensions, no materiality, and no necessary with meaning. It’s a pattern, not a presence (Hayles 2008). Reality of information is however very different from the reality of what it describes, it is a representation of something else that is real (Paul 2016).

Like Shannon, Wiener thought of information as representing a choice (Hayles 2008). Moreover, Wager said that by existing in a state of uncertainty (as humans trapped in an incomprehensible infinity with no explanation of what is man in nature), constraining our ability to reliably achieve truth, we are forced to choose between different actions for practical purposes (Wager 2017): In the late 1980’s, “Hypertext fiction” or “cybertext” was an interactive narrative / fiction that began to circulate through a small subculture of writers and technologists. It was a genre of electronic literature (e-lit) with works provided by networked computers, in which the reader assumes the role of creating its own narrative by choosing links to move from one node of text to the next (Hypertext fiction 2017). Similarly, in children gamebook series “Choose your own Adventure” by Edward Packard, the reader also makes choices that affects how the story unfolds.

“Patchwork Girl” was a work of electronic literature by Shelley Jackson which was written in “Storyspace” software in 1995. It metaphorically symbolizes the connections between monstrosity, subjectivity and new reproductive technologies. The picture of a scared and naked female body sewn together with a single dotted line is shown as the central narrative figure. Her body limbs (or hypertext links) give access to the reader into different sections of the text. Women social mistreatment and the objectification of the female body are stated clearly together with the passage “I belong nowhere” along the text (Patchwork Girl 2017). She is also the aborted female monster created by Victor Frankenstein in Shelley's 1818 novel “Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus” (Haraway 2017).

Nevertheless, this idea of extending human limitations by using mechanical elements is applied by Donna Haraway, with the perspective of the “no-gender” to strongly suggest feminists to move beyond the limitations of traditional gender, feminism, and politics. The utopian view of an obscure world without gender is expressed in Haraway’s work “A manifesto for Cyborgs”, rejecting any separation between human from animal or machine (Hayles 2008). It is no wonder that with so many concerns on the development and functioning of the human society, our identity has been shifting from “representation” to “simulation” and from “reproduction” to “replication” (Haraway 2017). For instance, “MCI”’s 1997’s commercial manifests that the Internet is a utopian public space where inequalities disappears, and no race, age, gender or disabilities exists, just minds (Wendy 2008). More recently, Jordan Wolfson's “Female Figure” in 2014 (currently exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum in Rotterdam), is an animatronic no-gender robot/cyborg that dances in front of a large mirror while exploring its relationship with space, materiality and the human being (Wolfston 2014).

In a comparable way, non-artistic real experiments have also been achieved in order to measure, control and predict specific data; for instance, on how we living beings learn and behave. Technological theorists such as Martin Heidegger, Jacques Ellul, Marshall McLuhan or Albert Borgmann manifest that technologies are a “cultural software” with ideologies, that tend to generate or fix values by altering our environment (Siva 2005). What are then the cultural habits and assumptions of such interaction? In David Rosenhan’s famous experiment aimed to determine the validity of psychiatric diagnoses, he concluded that the world is always covered by our own subjective perception, influenced by our personal feelings or thoughts that happen in the mind rather than in the real world (Lauren 2005).

Such experimentation has helped to better comprehend some existential questions more associated with philosophy, but as time goes on new areas of study of the mind will progress and therefore new questions will emerge. We can’t escape to our own mystery loop as we keep on seeking out answers, and maybe that explains why some feel the necessity to even experiment with themselves.

In 2009, scientist and cybernetics researcher Dr Mark Gasson got implanted a sophisticated version of ID chips (used to tag pets) on his hand, that enabled him to pass through security doors and activate his mobile phone. Surprisingly, the chip got infected with a computer virus, becoming a threat to external control systems (Cellar-Jones 2010). Neil Harbisson (first human recognized by a government as a cyborg) expresses fascination by the idea of having a future with applications designed for our bodies, rather than for our mobile phones. He can detect the light frequency of colors by using an antenna implanted on his skull, which sends a different audio signal for each tone. Artist and cyborg activist Moon Ribas develop an online seismic sensor and implanted it on her arm, allowing her to detect different earthquake magnitudes through a vibration system, or Scott Cohen, who has a titanium device anchored on his chest that boozes everytime he faces north (Swain 2017).

In conclusion, there will be a future where natural and artificial, human and machine, will be difficult or impossible to distinguish. On one hand, the potential for predicting data, or control our bodies through electronic devices opens up new pragmatic alternatives for solving problems. On the other hand, it unfolds new existential questions on whether there is a real necessity for transforming the natural qualities of our self-hood. However, our identity seems to be continuously morphing along with technology at the same time that our dependancy seems to unceasingly grow. This makes any possible technological phobia to become ambivalent and inconclusive somehow. In that sense, there is an emerging concern to understand technology at an individual level that hadn’t happened before, which makes me consider whether or not this instinctive stimuli or fix pattern is part of nature itself.

Bibliography:

Cellan-Jones, R. (2010) First human ‘infected with computer virus’. [blog] BBC News, Technology. Available at: http://www.bbc.com/news/10158517 [Accessed 25 Feb. 2017]

Swain, F. (2017) Meet the Cyborgs. [blog] BBC Radio 4. Available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08bzl96 [Accessed 25 Feb. 2017]

Grigar, D. (2017). What is E-lit? [online] Electronic Literature Organization. Available at: http://eliterature.org/what-is-e-lit/ [Accessed 2 March 2017]

Haraway, D. (2017) A Cyborg Manifesto [online] Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Cyborg_Manifesto [Accessed 5 March 2017]

Hayles, K (2008) How We Became Posthuman. Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, University of Chicago Press

Hypertext Fiction (2017) Hypertext Fiction. [online] Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext_fiction [Accessed 10 March 2017]

Lanier, J. (2010) You Are Not a Gadget, Penguin Adult

Lauren, S. (2005) Opening Skinner’s Box. Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century, Bloomsbury Paperbacks

Paul, L. (2016) Real Space. The Fate of Physical Presence in the Digital Age, On and Off Planet, Routledge

Siva, V. (2005) The Anarchist in the Library. How the clash between Freedom and Control is hacking the Real World and Crashing the System, Basic Books

Wager, P. (2017) Pascal’s Wager. [online] Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal's_Wager [Accessed 12 March 2017]

Wendy, C. (2008) Control and Freedom. Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics, the MIT Press

Wolfson, J. (2014) Jordan Johnston (Female Figure) 2014. [online] Youtube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVTDypgmFCM [Accessed 25 Feb. 2017]

Jones, S. (2010) MCI TV Ad 1997. [online] Youtube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioVMoeCbrig [Accessed 11 March 2016]

Universe, R. (2009) Nintendo NES "Now You're Playing With Power" - 1986 Commercial. [online] Youtube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v02WFh_Kdl0 [Accessed 11 March 2017]

The Patchwork Girl (2016) The Patchwork Girl (hypertext). [online] Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patchwork_Girl_(hypertext) [Accessed 5 March 2017]