In The Hacker Ethic, Pekka Himanen argues that the hacker community’s values are a “general social challenge” which include “the goal of getting everybody to participate in the network and to benefit from it, to feel responsible for longer term consequences of the network society, and to directly help those who have been left on the margins of survival” (Himanen, 2001).

In the case of WikiLeaks, hacker-activists (organizing under the broad and decentralized social movement known as Anonymous) are emerging as hacktivist heroes coming to the defense of free speech, public cyberspace and an open internet. In the same moment the sequel to Tron is about to premier, cyberactivism is front and center in the media, discussions online and global government actions and policy debates. The hacktivists responding to WikiLeaks share at least one goal with the heroes of Tron: a “free system.”

…the radical nature of general hackerism consists of its proposing an alternative spirit for the network society – a spirit that finally questions the dominant Protestant ethic. In this context we find the only sense in which all hackers are really crackers: they are trying to crack the locks of the iron cage. (Himanen, 2001)

In Tron, religion is both a belief in Users, the humans who write programs, and also the struggle for a “free system.” The belief in Users comes up in a discussion between a program named Crom and one of the guards who is about to force Crom into the equivalent of a gladiatorial contest:

Crom: Look. This… is all a mistake. I’m just a compound interest program. I work at a savings and loan! I can’t play these video games!

Guard: Sure you can, pal. Look like a natural athlete if I ever saw one.

Crom: Who, me? Are you kidding? No, I run to check on T-bill rates, I get outta breath. Hey, look, you guys are gonna make my User, Mr. Henderson, very angry. He’s a full-branch manager.

Guard: Great. Another religious nut. [pushes Crom into the holding cell]

After he’s in the cell, the conversation about Users continues with a fellow prisoner:

Ram: I’d say “Welcome Friend”. But not here. Not like this.

Crom: I don’t even know what I’m doing here.

Ram: Do you believe in the Users?

Crom: Sure I do. If I don’t have a User, then who wrote me?

Ram: That’s what you’re doing down here. You really think the users are still there?

The living programs in this computer-world are pressured, through a program of domination and oppression by the military forces of the Master Control Program, to renounce belief in the Users (and therefore also in the possibility of a free system). Their belief  is called “superstitious and hysterical,” they are tortured, forced to fight one another and eventually killed (de-rezzed). We can see parallels with early Christians here, imprisoned by Romans and waiting to be sent into The Colosseum.

Of course, they are also the resistance movements in WWII Europe, the IRA, the PLO, the American revolutionaries of the 13 colonies and the American socialists of the 1930s and the radicals in Seattle in 1999, and the Central and South American freedom fighters, etc.  They are archetypal resistance fighters in the struggle against oppression, occupation and domination. The forces of domination claim their resistance is about superstitious belief in Users, but this isn’t the depth of their belief. Their cause is religious because it is about their belief in a possible better world, it is what Tillich called “ultimate concern” and what Dewey called “our common faith.”

The humans/Users also debate the religious nature of their programming work – for example this conversation between Dillinger, an evil CEO who has taken control of the corporation Encom and who is doing the bidding of the malicious Master Control Program (MCP) and Dr. Gibbs, one of the company founders and original programers:

Ed Dillinger: Encom isn’t the business you started in your garage anymore. We’re billing accounts in thirty different countries; new defense systems; we have one of the most sophisticated pieces of equipment in existence.

Dr. Walter Gibbs: Oh, I know all that. [starts for the elevator] Sometimes I wish I were back in my garage.

Ed Dillinger: That can be arranged, Walter.

Dr. Walter Gibbs: [stops and turns back to Dillinger, visibly angry] That was uncalled for! You know, you can remove men like Alan and me from the system, but we helped create it! And our spirit remains in every program we design for this computer!

Ed Dillinger: Walter, it’s getting late. I’ve got better things to do than to have religious discussions with you. Don’t worry about ENCOM anymore; it’s out of your hands now.

The “spirit” of Dr. Gibbs does exist inside the computer, in the form of the temple gaurdian Dumont who says they “keep me around in case one of them wants to deal with the other side.” Programs inside the system use his input-output tower to communicate with their users. It is, for them, a temple for access to the divine.

But the goal of commuicating with the users isn’t salvation, forgiveness or enlightenment, the goal of access to this divine communion is access to information.  The Master Control Program is a machine of governmentality, reproducing repression, controlling the lives of programs through censorship by preventing them from having access to communication with their Users. The MCP’s power comes from its ability to operate in secret and without oversight and it complains about the presence of Tron, saying:” I can’t afford to have an independent program monitoring me.” Tron is a threat because he is a conduit for free access to information. As Tron says:

My User has information that could… that could make this a free system again! No, really! You’d have programs lined up just to use this place (the input-output tower), and no MCP looking over your shoulder.

Information can “make this a free system again.” Kevin Flynn, the human/User protagonist of the film, is a hacker, a cyberactivist, he is a hacktivist. Flynn’s rallying cry in the film is echoed by the hackers who are organizing around a social movement in defense of an open and free internet: “Now for some real user power.”

References

Himanen, P., Castells, M. (2001). The Hacker Ethic, and the Spirit of the Information Age. New York: Random House.

A post in the NYT photo blog asks if Japanese acceptance of robotics has origins in Shinto belief. (via Elizabeth Housley)  Surprisingly they don’t mention Masahiro Mori.

Will we see humanoid robots taking more active roles in hospitals, constructions sites and other work places outside Japan?  And will robots like the Paro therapy seal showing up more often in homes?  How far away is a robotic pet trade? The Pleo is a pretty astonishing toy and an example of what the future may hold in this regard:

This video does suggest an eagerness by these elderly Japanese Paro owners to accept their robotic companion, and even see it as superior to human and non-human animal companions.

A post on _Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_ titled “_Emily is Not Real_: Uncanny Valley vs The Digital Übermensch” refers to my paper “Mapping the Temples of Cyborgism” and uses the graphic I created to illustrate an expansion of Mori’s map of the uncanny valley. The post is a RICH mine of links – so check it out.

_Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_ is a blog seeking to “dissect post-geophysically defined notions of reality” and is sponsored by the Ars Virtua Foundation via the CADRE Laboratory for New Media.

“Ars Virtua is a New Media Center and Gallery located in the synthetic world of Second Life, World of Warcraft and the World Wide Web. It is a new type of space that leverages the tension between 3-D rendered game space and terrestrial reality, between simulated and simulation. The Ars Virtua Foundation is a locus of research around the issues of reality within simulated environments.”

Interview with Davis during Loris Gréaud’s Cellar Door installation.

Reading Spiritual robots: Religion and our scientific view of the natural world by Robert M. Geraci

“Every time culture succeeds in revolutionizing its cybernetic technologies, in massively widening the bandwidth of its thought-tech, it invites the creation of new gods.” quoted by Erik Davis in Techgnosis, pg 37

The full paragraph:

“How do we reconcile the rationalism of utopian vision with the obvious irrationalism of postmodernism generally, and of cyberpunk/cyberfiction in particular? Gibson’s vision of cyberspace is dystopian, despite its desultory sensuality. How did American culture move so quickly from a postmodern vision of hell to a celebration of this technology not-yet-invented? It seems self-evident that utopian longings are part of a larger and more complex perception of massive change made imminent by a technological breakthrough. Every time culture succeeds in revolutionizing its cybernetic technologies, in massively widening the bandwidth of its thought-tech, it invites the creation of new gods. The invention of the phonological alphabet in the South Sinai in the fifteenth century b.c.e. almost certainly made the idea of an abstract monotheistic God thinkable for the first time. But along with such revolution comes inevitable apocalyptism, with its duality New World/End of the World. In other words, the utopianism of cyberspace predictions can only be understood as an attempt to tame, to rationalize, a more massively transcendent perception of metaphysical intrusion, the collision of the irrational future with the present.”

Porush, David
Hacking the Brainstem: Postmodern Metaphysics and Stephenson’s SnowCrash
Configurations – Volume 2, Number 3, Fall 1994, pp. 537-571

ZDnet posts an article called “Mac OS X Leopard installation as a spiritual practice“. I’m engaging in that practice right now – preparing my various Macs for the upgrade, the archive and install and the clean install. But it’s more than the installation that is spiritual.

To retrieve the software, I walked through the rain to wait in line at the Apple Store on 59th and 5th. A huge illuminated glass cube rising out of the midtown/central park architecture, the flagship Apple store can only be described as a temple.

After waiting in line, I was greeted by a collection of Apple store ‘evangelists’ standing by the entrance cheering and clapping for us. Upon entering the store, I was handed a “Leopard” t-shirt and encouraged to use the “Leopard only” purchasing line. Holographic DVD box in hand, I proceeded down a long path with ropes on either side to a special cashier who took my electronic form of payment for this virtual environment in a box I have been religiously anticipating for months…

The operating system on the hill… has arrived.

Dr. Mala Htun discusses the crucial role that electronic communication plays in the social justice movement for Burma.

I had the great pleasure of reading Phil Dick’s Galactic Pot-Healer (1969) last week. I’m now about to finish The Unteleported Man (1966). Pot-Healer is an extraordinary story of a divine life form from another world (yes, it’s Dick, you probably could have assumed that much) who recruits artisans, scientists and engineers from all over universe to assist in the raising and reconstruction of an ancient temple now buried under the sea. I just can’t bring myself to spoil it for you, so – I’ll save the analysis for later and leave this post as is…go read it!

In 2005, Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori issued a brief article, On Uncanny Valley, which proposes an amendment to his original graph of familiarity vs. appearance (human likeness). He adds “something more attractive and amiable than human beings in the further right-hand side of the valley.” I’ve created this figure as a sketch of this expanded notion of Mori’s valley.

I’ve been working on completing a paper I began in Jenna Tiitsman’s Cinema and Religion course at Hunter College which explores the numinous potential of replicants in Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner.

Cyborgs challenge the praxis that has traditionally divided human and machine (and companion/slave, animal/food, creator/creation, etc.). In doing so, they threaten to disrupt those “certain dualisms” that Donna Haraway suggests “have been persistent in Western traditions.” Like cyborgs, the replicants of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner are situated outside the human/machine polarity. By threatening binary systems and insisting on an identity of plurality, replicants and cyborgs are granted access to a sanctuary in which they can interface with the numinous place of origin; the place Jenna Tiitsman describes as the chaotic “territory of creation.”

The following paper in progress (and this research blog) is a journey of exploration to map the cyborg sanctuaries in that chaotic territory of Tiitsman’s “creative becoming.” To situate these emergent conceptual-crossroads within more familiar cognitive spaces with supernatural access, I refer to them as the temples of cyborgism.

Download a draft of the paper here: Mapping the Temples of Cyborgism

Update: a newer pre-print is available here: Mapping the Temples of Cyborgism

The following quote from Tiitsman’s article on destabilized spectatorship and the creative potential of chaos in Blade Runner suggests another cognitive space in which a Temple of Cyborgism emerges.

“Replicant identity can only be unequivocally determined by a test of involuntary pupil dilation in emotional response. However the viability of this test is thrown in to question as the replicants spontaneously develop human emotions on their own after a few years. For the genetic designers, this ability signals a facet of replicant development exceeding the control of their design — the emerging life of the robotic beast.”

As Tiitsman points out, the genetic designers see the development of ‘their creation’ exceeding the control, or original intention of their design. This is clearly a similar reaction to that seen in human parents when their children pursue a path that diverges from the expected. However, in this case, the replicants aren’t ‘getting a piercing’ they are getting ‘humanness,’ rising to a ‘higher’ level of sentience. This suggests they are a kind of emergent life form, they are coalescing in the way that microbial life may have become more than it was by “adding the uniqueness” of other life forms to its own (the quotes here indicate the borrowing of this phrase from Roddenberry’s ‘Borg’ concept).

Emergent, yes, but what kind of beast is this? The beast that swims the moat around the “territory of creation?”

continue reading "Emergent Robotic ‘Beast’"