by Mark Dery
Empty and decaying, the rusting hulk is a fitting metaphor for the body in cyberculture, an unworthy vessel abandoned by its owner. The radio personality and S and M freak Nicki Brand, who was Renn’s lover before she disappeared into the parallel dimension of Videodrome, appears on the TV that sits incongruously in the moldering boat. The time for his transmigration has arrived, she tells Renn. “Your body has already done a lot of changing but that’s only the beginning,” she says. “You have to go all the way, now: Total transformation.” Paraphrasing the New Testament (“You must be born again,” John 3:7), she admonishes, “To become the new flesh, you first have to kill the old flesh. Don’t be afraid to let your body die.” As ominous, ascending chords build to a crescendo, Renn lifts his hand-once again metamorphosed into an organic gun-to his head; with the rallying cry, “Long live the new flesh!” he pulls the trigger. In a traumatic, low-tech version of Visual Mark’s assumption into cyberspace, Max Renn will be born again as a pure simulacrum-what O’Blivion’s daughter calls “the video word made flesh.”
In its ontological nausea, Videodrome recalls “The Precession of Simulacra,” the essay in which the philosopher Jean Baudrillard argues that reality has disappeared into a “hyperreality” of mechanical reproductions and digital representations that “bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.”210 We are reminded, too, of Ballard’s pronouncement that “we live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind”—digitally altered photos, surgically reconstructed celebrities, computer simulations, staged photo ops, sampling-and-lip-synching pop stars, synthetic food substitutes-whose surreality makes it seem as if the subconscious has seeped into daylit reality, as if the waking world has been arrogated by the twilight zone.
Simultaneously, we cannot help but think of Ballard’s chilling observation that the “demise of feeling and emotion” in such a world, “has paved the way for all our most real and tender pleasures-in the excitements of pain and mutilation; in sex as the perfect arena . . . for all the veronicas of our own perversions.”211 The deadpan, affectless Nicki Brand, true to her name, derives sadomasochistic pleasure from searing her bare flesh with a cigarette. “We live in overstimulated times,” she asserts; like Crash’s narrator, who confides that his accident was “the only real experience [he] had been through for years” (“For the first time I was in physical confrontation with my own body”), she has been deadened by the nonstop shock treatment of postmodern culture, distanced by the multiplying layers of electronic mediation between herself and embodied experience.212 Only extreme pain can bring her back to her physical body; cell by cell, she is being replaced by the new flesh, the video flesh-as are we all, in cyberculture.
Whereas technology transforms Cronenberg’s characters into dehumanized automata or, worse yet, inhuman mutants, Bruce Sterling’s characters employ it to engineer their own, posthuman evolution. In his short story collection Crystal Express and his novel Schismatrix, Sterling charted a “posthuman solar system” in which Shapers (genetic engineers who have “seized control of their own genetics”) and Mechanists (cyborgers who have “replaced flesh with advanced prosthetics”) struggle over the future of the human form.213 The “sharp perceptions of Shapers, with their arsenals of brain-stretching biochemicals,” are pitted against “the cybernetic advances of the Mechanists and the relentless logic of their artificial intelligences.”214 Assuming Stelarc’s premise that “[o]nce technology provides each person with the potential to progress individually in [his or her] development, the cohesiveness of the species is no longer important,” Sterling imagines the obsolescence of the Mech/Shaper dichotomy:
“The old categories, Mechanist and Shaper-they’re a bit outmoded these days, aren’t they? Life moves in clades.” He smiled. “A clade is a daughter species, a related descendant. It’s happened to other successful animals, and now it’s humanity’s turn. The factions still struggle, but the categories are breaking up. No faction can claim the one true destiny for mankind. Mankind no longer exists.”215
The neat, binary opposition of Mechanist and Shaper gives way to the chaos theory of nonlinear evolution: Among the many variations on the posthuman theme are the borged, black-armored Lobsters mentioned in chapter 4 of this book, as well as a breed of “aquatic posthuman” known as an Angel, its skin
smooth and black and slick. The legs and pelvic girdle were gone; the spine extended to long muscular flukes. Scarlet gills trailed from the neck. The ribcage was black openwork, gushing white, feathery nets packed with symbiotic bacteria. . . . The lidless eyes were huge, and the skull had been rebuilt to accommodate them.216
Schismatrix ends with the clades’ ascent to “the Fifth Prigoginic Level of Complexity”—named for the physicist Ilya Prigogine, who theorizes that order spontaneously emerges when “dynamical systems” move far from equilibrium, giving rise to transition points known as “singularities” (attrac-tors are one of several types of singularities). In Schismatrix, Sterling applies Prigogine’s theories to humanity, considered as a dynamical system; moving “far from equilibrium” (Prigogine) into posthuman clades, the species encounters a mystical singularity-a sketchily rendered “final transcendence” reminiscent of the astronaut’s apotheosis as the “Star-Child” in 2001: A Space Odyssey. This, the Fifth Level, is “as far beyond Life as Life is from inert matter,” explains the numinous Presence at the novel’s end. “It’s the Godhead, or as close as makes no difference to the likes of you and me.”217 Sterling’s posthuman protagonist Abelard Lindsay is gathered up into the ineffable (“a silver wave . . . a melting, a release”), leaving his body behind: “Atop its clean white ladder of vertebrae, his empty skull sank grinning into the collar of his coat.”218
The mathematician and SF author Vernor Vinge is convinced that something resembling Sterling’s “final transcendence” is just around the corner. Vinge, whose 1981 novella True Names portrayed cyberspace in techno-mystical terms, believes that a technological singularity looms in the near future of the human species. It will come about, he asserts, as a result of “the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater-than-human intelligence”: sentient, super-smart computers; genetically engineered superbrains; computer-human interfaces so transparent that their users are virtually indistinguishable from the ultra-intelligent machines to which they are connected; electronic networks that suddenly become self-aware, like SkyNet.219
Guided not by human hands but by Darwinian competition, artificial evolution will give rise to a “greater than human intelligence” between 2005 and 2030, predicts Vinge, at which point technological progress will accelerate by orders of magnitude, with ever smarter machine life designing and fabricating still smarter offspring at an ever increasing pace. Humanity will be swept into a singularity-a “throwing-away of all the human rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye.”220 Vinge’s rendering of superhuman morphology is sketchy at best, but it is certain to involve cyborging and genetic engineering.
Although he is the furthest thing from a scientist, William Burroughs has captivated hackers and SF fans alike with posthumanist musings confected from fringe science, survivalist politics, and science fiction. A longtime advocate of do-it-yourself mutation, he has suggested that “the political and social chaos we are seeing on every side reflects an underlying biological crisis: the end of the human line.”221 If we are to survive, he argues, we must muster the courage to take the evolutionary leap that he, like Stelarc, believes will be precipitated by space migration. “We have the technology to . . . produce improved and variegated models of the body designed for space conditions,” asserts Burroughs, who sees in the bone loss and muscle atrophy experienced by contemporary astronauts a blueprint for engineered evolution.222 “Astronauts stand to lose their bones and teeth,” he notes. “A skeleton has no function in a weightless state.”223 Redesigned for zero gravity, the human form might resemble an octopus, he speculates.
Terence McKenna, who likewise believes that humanity is “on
the brink of another leap in evolution,” favors the octopus paradigm as well, although for him it is metaphoric rather than morphogenetic, enabled by cyberspace rather than necessitated by outer space.224 He speculates that in VR “men and women may shed the monkey body to become virtual octopi swimming in a silicon sea,” by which he means that computer-generated representations of octopus bodies would be ideally suited for the post-Logos paradise McKenna imagines VR could be.225 The octopus, he reasons, “does not transmit its linguistic intent, it becomes its linguistic intent,” communicating with other octopi by means of body language and color changes.226 “Like the octopus, our destiny is to become what we think, to have our thoughts become our bodies and our bodies become our thoughts,” writes McKenna. “VR can help here, for electronics can change vocal utterance into visually beheld colored output in the virtual reality. . . . At last we will truly see what we mean.”227 In McKenna’s fantasy, the dislocation of mind and body, signifier and signified is mended at last.
Of course, there’s a bit of sleight of mind here: The consciousness may frolic in a “silicon sea” as a cartoon octopus, in postlinguistic communion with other simulacra, but the body is left behind, its sensory organs sealed off by the VR paraphernalia through which the system transmits visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, and gustatory input. It may gesture from time to time or jog in place, but safety requires that its movements be restricted; the disjunction between the world around it and the artificial sensory input it is receiving from the virtual reality it “inhabits” is all but complete.
The obvious next step is that of making the rupture total by doing away with the body entirely. For all their cyberpunk trappings, Vinge’s superhumans, Burroughs’s bioengineered octopi, or McKenna’s virtual ones still cling to embodiment; the final solution to the mind-body problem, according to the dominant logic in cyberculture, is the reduction of consciousness to pure quintessence.
Hans Moravec’s notion of “downloading”—mapping the idiosyncratic neural networks of our minds onto computer memory, thereby rendering the body superfluous—offers a highly theoretical but exhaustively worked-out solution to the knotty problem of how mind might be extracted from body.
Moravec, who is the director of the Mobile Robot Laboratory in Carnegie-Mellon’s Field Robotics Center, spends much of his mental life in the distant future. The first chapter of his book Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence begins with a statement calculated to cause apoplectic seizures in humanist quarters: “I believe that robots with human intelligence will be common within fifty years.”228 Moravec, an unreconstructed mechanist, believes as Marvin Minsky does that the mind is simply a meat machine; human-machine equivalence, therefore, is merely a matter of computing speed. Ten teraops should do the trick, by his reckoning. That’s 10 trillion operations per second, light-years beyond a state-of-the-art PC chip like Intel’s Pentium, capable of 112 million instructions per second. Based on his calculation that there has been a trillionfold increase in the amount of computation a dollar will buy since the invention of the punch-card tabulator shortly before the turn of the century, Moravec projects the arrival of a ten-teraops machine by 2010.
At which point, buckle your seat belt, because evolution’s warp drive is going to engage. Astronomically intelligent robots, “looking quite unlike the machines we know,” writes Moravec, “will explode into the universe, leaving us behind in a cloud of dust.”229 Robots capable of engineering their own evolution will quickly surpass human equivalence, he theorizes, leapfrogging up the scale of intelligence to a level that defies human comprehension. Homo sapiens’ superintelligent artificial offspring almost certainly will not inhabit humanoid bodies and may not resemble anything we have ever seen. One possibility among many, suggests Moravec, is trillion-limbed machine flora-robot bushes whose stems branch into ever more delicate, ever more numerous twigs, culminating, finally, in a dizzying array of microscopic cilia. Possessed of “great intelligence, superb coordination, astronomical speed, and enormous sensitivity to its environment,” a robot bush would be able to “watch a movie by walking its fingers along the film as it screamed by at high speed” or reach into complicated machines or even living organisms to manipulate them at the molecular level. “A bush robot would be a marvel of surrealism to behold,” writes Moravec.230
Downloading human consciousness into computers is one of Mor-avec’s strategies for keeping pace with our superevolved creations. With dubious relish, Moravec describes a robot surgeon removing the crown of a person’s skull and using high-resolution magnetic resonance measurements to create a computer simulacrum of the subject’s neural architecture. Layer by layer, the brain is scanned and simulated; in the process, the superfluous tissue is surgically removed and disposed of. At last, the braincase is empty; the robot disconnects all life-support systems, and the body goes into convulsions and expires.
The subject’s consciousness, meanwhile, is curiously unconcerned, wandering wraithlike through cyberspace. “You may choose to move your mind from one computer to another that is more technically advanced or better suited to a new environment,” offers Moravec, helpfully.231 Naturally, a discarnate mind would be immortal, and backup copies could be made as insurance against mechanical breakdowns or software “bugs” (programming errors) or viruses. Moreover, as Moravec points out, a disembodied consciousness need not spend eternity in a stationary computer, inhabiting simulated worlds. “As a computer program, your mind can travel over information channels, for instance encoded as a laser message beamed between planets,” he speculates. “If you found life on a neutron star and wished to make a field trip, you might devise a way to build a robot there of neutron stuff, then transmit your mind to it. . . . You would explore, acquire new experiences and memories, and then beam your mind back home.”232
The concept of “downloading” has proven popular among exponents of postevolution, foremost among them the Los Angeles-based Extro-pians. Writing in the movement’s organ, Extropy (which claims a circulation of thirty-five hundred), the Extropian David Ross speculates that, since “[b]rain structure at every level determines the functioning of the mind,” every neuron and synapse in a given brain must be re-created in a computer program if an individual consciousness is to be transferred from its organic body into digital memory.233 Since in Ross’s bio-cybernetic theory of mind the “wiring is the program,” we need not understand human consciousness to perform such an operation; a comprehensive knowledge of the synaptic connections of the brain would suffice, since individual consciousness is presumed to be one with the unique neural map of each brain.
Ross illustrates his theories with a flight of Moravecian whimsy in which a man discards his body, uploading his mind into “the world-wide Cyberspace Web”; nanomachines perform invasive brain surgery, “systematically replacing each neuron with a functionally equivalent artificial structure” in computer memory:
Gradually, each synapse in his brain is absorbed into the program structure of the emulation program, its functionality retained but its physical structure gone. . . . After a while . . . [t]he doctor hands him a switch which he knows will turn off his old body. . . . All nerve and muscle connections are severed at once and the body dies instantly. He feels less emotion than he thought he would. He knows that if he doesn’t like it here in Cyberspace, he can always have another physical body constructed, grown from his original DNA, if he wishes.234
As cyberculture’s most vocal proponents of consigning the body to the scrap heap of the twentieth century, the Extropians merit close scrutiny. Ross, executive director Max More, and the rest of the movement’s membership rally around the banner of “transhumanism.” Transhumanism is the human potential movement on steroids-an up-with-technology, business-friendly, hell-for-leather humanism bent on self- and species-transformation by any means necessary: downloading (Extropians prefer the more upbeat “uploading” or the even zingier “transbiomorphosis”); “nanomedicine” (“the use of molecular-scale de
vices to repair damage and boost the immune system”); nanocomputer implants (“molecular computer[s] integrated with the brain, providing additional memory, processing power, and running decision-making programs”); genetic engineering; smart drugs; cryonics; and “self-transformative psychology” in the Anthony Robbins mold.235
As theorized in Extropy, Extropian transhumanism is a marriage of Ayn Rand and Friedrich Nietzsche-specifically, Rand’s conviction that statism and collectivism are the roots of all evil and Nietzsche’s complementary concepts of the end of morality, the “will to power,” and the Übermensch, or “overman.” The “optimal” Extropian persona, writes More in issue ten of Extropy “is Nietzsche’s Übermensch, the higher being existing within us as potential waiting to be realized.” Extropian writings champion laissez-faire capitalism (“Are you attracted to innovative, market-oriented solutions to social problems?” reads a flyer) and exude a buoyant technophilia.
Extropian transhumanism speaks to the collective yearnings that took shape in the L-5 Society’s vision of an off-world Utopia. According to Norman Spinrad, the L-5 colony had mythic resonance for “science fiction writers of a laissez-faire libertarian bent,” whose novels transplanted the space station envisioned by the society from Earth orbit to the Asteroid Belt.236 “Out there in the Belt, with its limitless mineral resources, its low gravity, and its wide-open spaces, was the future of the species,” notes Spinrad, “and as for poor old polluted, overpopulated, screwed-up Earth, well, tough shit.”237
