by Mark Dery
Rosen notes that a winged human wouldn’t actually be able to fly “because he wouldn’t match the rules in terms of the amount of weight compared to the amount of wing surface, although if you brought in hybrid materials, you could potentially build wings that would allow [a patient] to glide, like a flying squirrel.”178
But it is the Gibsonian implications of Rosen’s theoretical musings on implantable computer chips that have earned the surgeon an unlikely following among would-be cyborgs, or “wireheads.”179 His technical speculations about interfacing peripheral nerve axons and integrated circuits hold forth the possibility of linking individual nervous systems to “mankind’s extended electric nervous system”—a dream that is alive and well in the elusive subculture of “neurohackers,” or “do-it-yourself brain tinkerers,” uncovered by Branwyn.180 In his Wired feature, “The Desire to Be Wired,” Branwyn quotes a correspondent on a BBS:
I am interested in becoming a guinea pig, if you will, for any cyberpunkish experiment from a true medicine/military/ cyber/neuro place. New limbs, sight/hearing improvements, bio-monitors, etc. Or even things as simple as under-the-skin timepieces.181
Cyberpunk fantasies such as these were catalyzed by Gibson’s tantalizingly vague references to the “dermatrodes,” or “‘trodes,” with which Case jacks into cyberspace; evocations of simstim, a one-way brain link to another, wired body that enables a passive “rider” to share another human’s sensorium as a “passenger behind [the] eyes”; and mentions of carbon sockets nestled behind ears, receptacles for silicon shards called “microsofts” that enable the user to instantly boot up any information stored on a chip.182
So ubiquitous is the cranial jack in cyberpunk fiction that it has become semiotic shorthand for the genre in the same way that Frankenstein’s neck bolts came to symbolize gothic SF. “Boreholes to the limbic system! Manipulation of the parietal lobes! Taproots to the visual and auditory cortices! Coming soon to a brain near you” gibes the Nation’s John Leonard, in his auto-da-fé of cyberpunk novels and cybercul-tural criticism.183
But bionic dreams die hard. Cyberpunk enthusiasm for the ultimate interface between mind and machine-the brain socket-remains undiminished, sustained by pop science articles on neural prosthetics such as the Omni story that describes an experimental visual implant in which tiny electrodes were inserted into the visual cortex in a volunteer’s brain; wires ran from the electrodes, through the patient’s scalp, and into a computer. Signals sent from the computer stimulated the visual cortex, enabling the totally blind volunteer to perceive patterns of light made up of phosphenes, the “stars” produced by a blow to the head or by rubbing the eyes. “By the end of the decade,” writes David P. Snyder in Omni, “the research team hopes to have constructed a device utilizing a [miniature] television camera that would interface with 250 or more implanted electrodes and a signal-processing computer to stimulate the occipital lobe.”184 The world of a blind person equipped with such a device would be rendered in pointillistic pinpricks of light, “something like a stadium scoreboard.”185 William H. Dobelle, a researcher whose pioneering experiments in this area were conducted at the University of Utah, envisions a miniature television camera housed in an artificial eye fitted into the user’s eye socket and attached to his or her eye muscles; a pair of glasses concealing a battery-powered microprocessor would translate the televisual images into phosphenes and transmit them to the electrodes implanted in the visual cortex.
A 1975 prototype of such a system actually incorporated the fabled cranial jack. The connecting wires of a subject’s electrode array
ran out of a hole at his skull base, then under his scalp to a round, dime-sized graphite socket above his right ear. A computer wired to a television camera was plugged into the socket. When the camera was aimed at a pattern, [the subject] saw phosphenes that reproduced that pattern: a white line on a dark background, geometric figures, even individual letters and simple sentences written in a special visual Braille alphabet.186
Looking beyond the disabled, F. Terry Hambrecht, the head of the Neural Prosthesis Program at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, speculates that prosthetics may one day be used to “make normal people supernormal: the true bionic man or woman.”187 In the future, says Hambrecht,
we might be able to detect signals from the motor area of the cerebral cortex, then bypass muscles and communicate directly with machines. We might be able to use the output from the motor area to control machines without having to wait for the slow muscles of the body to respond.188
Snyder spins out an SF scenario in which “supernormals” enhanced with neural prosthetics “operate computers, typewriters, or turn on a television set just by using their brains-through recording electrodes and telemetry, a special radio transmitter that sends signals picked up from the motor cortex to the machine.”189
Meanwhile, in science fact, Eric Sutter has produced a working prototype of just such a device, controlled not by motor signals but by brain waves generated in the visual cortex. Sutter, a senior scientist at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco, is the inventor of the Brain Response Interface (BRI), a system used, until his death, by Dr. Lance Meagher, an Oregon physician who suffered from near-total paralysis caused by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease).
Electrodes implanted under Meagher’s skull, near his visual cortex, picked up the neural activity generated when Meagher gazed at a flickering object-in this case, one of the sixty-four squares on a gridded computer screen, each of which contained a letter, word, number, or command. Each square flashed with its own characteristic signature, and when Meagher focused on a specific square, his brain translated its pulses into faint electrical signals. Relayed to the computer by a tiny, short-range transmitter taped to Meagher’s neck, the signals were compared to a library of earlier readings for that screen. When a match between the distinctive flicker of the square Meagher was looking at and one of the sixty-four recorded rhythms was found, the operation indicated by that square was executed. The system has multiple grids, yielding up to 2,048 user-programmable commands-“enough for activating a speech synthesizer, or for operating ‘environmental controls,’ such as the TV, stereo, or motors that open and close windows,” according to the Omni writer Darrell E. Ward.190
Sutter has staked his claim to scientific innovation in crowded territory. Monitoring brain waves with pattern-matching neural networks, Akira Hiraiwa and his fellow researchers at the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation have been able to determine, with a fair rate of success, which way a person intends to move a joystick. Dr. Jonathan R. Wolpaw and his associates at the New York State Department of Health’s Wadsworth Center in Albany have designed a system that uses mu waves-rhythmic signals emitted by the brain’s sensorimotor center when it is inactive-to permit trained users to move a cursor around a computer screen with their minds. And Emanuel Donchin, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, has developed a brain-controlled typewriter that enables users to type, at the less than breathtaking speed of 2.3 characters per minute, by spelling out words in their minds. “Such knowledge could help develop the thought-driven machines of the future,” concludes the New York Times writer Andrew Pollack.191
Branwyn’s neurohackers can’t wait. Impatient with the measured tread of technological progress, they are attempting to transfer EEG patterns from one brain to another; zapping the pleasure centers of their brains with electrodes; and, according to disturbing rumors, “actually poking holes in their heads and directly stimulating their brains.”192
Meanwhile, science advances more prudently. Citing an article in IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, Branwyn reports a Stanford University experiment in which “microelectrode array[s] capable of recording from and stimulating peripheral nerves” remained functional in laboratory rats up to a year after implantation.193 Notes Branwyn,
Although this research is very preliminary and there are stil
l many intimidating technical and biological hurdles (on-board signal processing, radio transmittability, learning how to translate neuronal communications), the long-term future of this technology is exciting. Within several decades, “active” versions of these chips could provide a direct neural interface with prosthetic limbs, and by extension, a direct human-computer interface.194
Rosen and his collaborators have investigated the use of computer chips in neuromuscular interfaces. In “Microsurgery: The Future,” he and coauthor R. A. Chase claim that
[t]he possibility of interfacing elements of the peripheral nervous system with a silicon chip has become a reality. Rosen and Grosser (1987) have shown that a properly designed and fabricated implantable microchip can both record and stimulate elements within a peripheral nerve. . . . The prospect of using implantable electronic devices, such as intraneuronal silicon chips, sets the stage for direct nerve to prosthesis linkages. Such linkages may be bidirectional, sending signals peripherally to generate electronically controlled motion, or receiving signals from electronic sensors imbedded in the prosthesis.195
Like most researchers, Rosen is wary of the media, which raise false hopes even as they arouse interest in his work—interest that, when it reaches critical mass, can garner all-important funding. “Intraneuronal chips are futuristic and fun to write about and very important as the ultimate interface between man and machine,” he says, “but as a clinician with federal grants the media gets me in trouble with patients who don’t really understand what we’re doing. I get letters from people wanting to know if I can make their grandfathers walk, that type of thing. In our lab, we’re working on silicon chips that could be implanted in the peripheral nerves and allow us to make a communication channel between your nerve and . . . a robotic arm, but even those devices are ten or twenty years in the future.”
In the final analysis, however, Rosen agrees that “the big applications” for devices such as nerve chips lie not in bionic medicine but in communications technologies. “The concept of putting devices in people so that they can communicate with the entire network is what cyberculture is all about,” Rosen maintains. “The nerve chip is the ultimate virtual reality interface; rather than putting on a helmet, as in the systems that Scott Fisher or Jaron Lanier have been involved with, what you’re basically doing is splicing into the nervous system directly.
“Is society ready for these kinds of things? I don’t know. I’m doing the technology; I’m not trained in making moral judgments. Building hybrid people who are part human, part machine is more an ethical dilemma than a technical problem. The issue is: Do we go beyond the human? We’re confronted with the fact that humans have already been designed. So the issue becomes: Do we redesign ourselves? We’re in a transition phase where it’s hard to know the answer.”
The Perils of Posthumanism
In another thousand years we’ll be machines, or Gods.
—Bruce Sterling196
Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times.
—Sigmund Freud197
I don’t see much point in . . . transcending the body. . . . That brings its own level of debilitating trouble. I think that if you could become a cyborg for reasons of intellectual ecstasy, one day you’d discover that [you had] passed out in the street and there [were] roaches living in your artificial arm.
—Bruce Sterling198
Thomas Hine is not alone in his conviction that the “further evolution of humanity is one of the most profound issues of the future”; speculations about the fate of the body and debates over the promises and threats of posthumanism resound throughout cyberculture.199
The art critic Jeffrey Deitch has suggested that human evolution “may be entering a new phase that Charles Darwin never would have envisioned.”200 In Post Human, the catalogue to an exhibition of works by artists whose subject is the self and the body, he writes,
Social and scientific trends are converging to shape a new conception of the self, a new construction of what it means to be a human being. The matter-of-fact acceptance of one’s “natural” looks and one’s “natural” personality is being replaced by a growing sense that it is normal to reinvent oneself.201
As I argued at length in chapter 1, New Age and cyberdelic subcultures have also taken up the posthuman theme. In The Future of the Body: Explorations into the Further Evolution of Human Nature, Michael Murphy argues that “metanormal abilities” can be cultivated through a host of “transformative practices”—yogic, shamanic, athletic, somatic, therapeutic, and so forth. Murphy, the cofounder of the Esalen Institute, a human potential ashram in Big Sur, California, maintains that these disciplines, if widely practiced, could provide a springboard for a quantum leap in human evolution characterized by telepathy, telekinesis, clairvoyance, and “alterations in bodily structures, states, and processes.”202 Likewise, in Mega Brain Power: Transform Your Life with Mind Machines and Brain Nutrients, Michael Hutchison notes that “evolution may involve developing new mental powers” through mind machines, smart drugs, and other “mind technologies.”203
Scientists engage in their own, no less poetic speculations about posthuman possibilities. The computer scientist Daniel Hillis imagines that “the process of machine evolution will lead to things we can’t imagine right now. I think I’m not going to get to be immortal, but maybe my children will. They may be made out of different stuff than I am.”204 The nanotech-nologist K. Eric Drexler theorizes that the same microscopic machines he believes will make cell repair (and hence, near immortality) possible “will allow people to change their bodies in ways that range from the trivial to the amazing to the bizarre. . . . Some people may shed human form as a caterpillar transforms itself to take to the air; others may bring plain humanity to a new perfection.”205 And the computer scientist Gerald Jay Sussman believes that the day will soon come when human consciousness can be digitized and saved to disk. “It isn’t very long from now,” he told the science writer Grant Fjermedal in The Tomorrow Makers: A Brave New World of Living-Brain Machines. “I’m afraid, unfortunately, that I’m [part of] the last generation to die.”206
What is now scientific conjecture was once science fiction. The perversely brilliant sci-fi body horror of David Cronenberg constitutes an extended meditation on the mind/body split in the information age, where, as Scott Bukatman points out, “the apparent mind/body dichotomy is superseded by the trichotomy of mind/body/machine.”207 The filmmaker, who has wondered if “we are just beginning a very important phase of our evolution,” a sort of unnatural selection catalyzed by technology, is “always talking about McLuhan,” according to Martin Scorsese.208 In a sense, Cronenberg is McLuhan’s dark twin, theorizing electronic media and mechanical devices less as “extensions of man” than as agents of a morphogenesis that is not always pretty to look at.
Videodrome (1982), the filmmaker’s masterpiece, enacts Visual Mark’s dictum, “FIRST YOU SEE VIDEO. THEN YOU WEAR VIDEO. THEN YOU EAT VIDEO. THEN YOU BE VIDEO.”209 Or, as the “media prophet” Professor Brian O’Blivion tells the movie’s protagonist, Max Renn, “Your reality is already half video hallucination; if you’re not careful, it will become total hallucination. You’ll have to learn to live in a very strange new world.”
Convinced that “public life on television was more real than private life in the flesh,” O’Blivion designed a mutagenic TV signal. Covertly transmitted in a sadomasochistic snuff program called Videodrome, the signal stimulates the production of a TV tumor in the viewer, “a new outgrowth of the human brain which will produce and control hallucination to the point that it will change human reality” (O’Blivion). As O’Blivion observes, “After all, there is nothing real outside our perception of reality, is there?” In the electronically mediated world of Videodrome, thoughts are omnipotent; the conviction of Freud’s primitives-that they could “alter t
he external world by mere thinking”—is unexpectedly borne out in a cybernetic culture where kinetic, tactile experience has been superseded, for the most part, by the sedentary consumption of images on screens. “The television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye,” declares O’Blivion. “Therefore, the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, television is reality and reality is less than television.”
The professor believes that the brain tumors induced by the Video-drome signal will trigger the next stage in the coevolution of humanity and technology (coevolution being an interactive process of evolutionary change in which changes in species A initiate changes in species B, which in turn create the necessary conditions for the natural selection of changes in species A, and so on). But O’Blivion has been murdered by the shadowy defense contractor Spectacular Optical, which plans to use Videodrome to control the minds of the shock-proof, sensation-hungry masses.
Meanwhile, Renn-the jaded owner of a porn channel who is attempting to track down the source of the mysterious signal-has been mutated by Videodrome and is suffering from bizarre, mechano-erotic hallucinations: A vaginal slit gapes in his belly, moistly awaiting the insertion of a videocassette; his hand morphs into a gun made of molten, marbled flesh; his TV heaves and moans in concupiscent ecstasy, its screen bulging toward his waiting lips. Surrendering to the postmodern madness of a world in which distinctions between this and that side of the TV screen-between the real and the hyperreal-are no longer meaningful, Renn kills the conspirators and holes up in a deserted barge.
