To Be a Machine

by Mark O'Connell

  The conversation turned to a guy called Ben Engel, a young grinder from Utah whom some of the Grindhouse people had met recently at a grinder festival in Bakersfield, California. He had built a Bluetooth-enabled gadget that would conduct soundwaves to his inner ear through the bones of his skull. The device would be switched on using a magnet implanted in his finger, and it would, in theory, translate data downloaded from the Internet into compressed audio waves, which he would train himself to interpret using a technique called sensory substitution. He’d been in touch with Grindhouse about his plan, and they had been trying to dissuade him from going through with it, because of the likelihood that it would kill him.

  “He just basically Frankensteined this thing together using a bunch of shit,” said Justin Worst, a Grindhouse engineer to whom he’d shown the device. “An electric toothbrush charger, a couple cell phone parts. The thing is fucking huge.”

  Right now, they were trying to convince him to abandon his skull-conduction device and use Grindhouse’s technology instead.

  “We’re just really nervous that the implant would leak through to the brain. It would not be good for the movement to have this dude kill himself,” said Tim, who then wandered back into the kitchen and descended into the gloom of the basement. One of his dogs, a terrier named Johnny, trotted out onto the porch and began to take a polite interest in my lower legs. I noted that the dog was himself missing a leg.

  “What happened to Johnny’s leg?” I asked.

  “He got hit by a car,” said Olivia Webb, head of safety testing. It was Olivia’s last night with the company; after several years in Pittsburgh, she was about to leave for a new job in Seattle.

  “And then he ate his leg,” said Justin. “Tim and Danielle woke up one morning, and he’d been gnawing on it all night, and they had to go get it amputated.”

  Working his way thoughtfully through a bag of potato chips, Ryan asked whether, once humans began to successfully merge themselves with machines, we might also extend the courtesy to our pets.

  “Would that be ethical?” he said. “Or should we just let them live out their miserable biological lives and then die?”

  “We already do things without their consent anyway,” said Olivia. “No dog is ever going to be like ‘Please take my balls off,’ but we do it anyways, for the betterment of them. I mean, Johnny’s doing okay with his three legs, but what if he had like a bionic fourth leg?”

  Johnny efficiently consumed the few remaining shards of potato chips that had fallen from Ryan’s bag, then removed himself to the kitchen at an arrhythmical gallop, as though in passive-aggressive reproach of any such suggestion.

  —

  The more time I spent with Grindhouse, the more it became apparent that their ultimate interest was not the augmentation of the human body per se. Which is to say that they were not especially interested in the marginal—and, I would say, highly debatable—degree to which your human life might be made more convenient if you had, say, a subdermal implant that lit up or vibrated when you were facing toward magnetic north. Certainly, they were frustrated by the limitations of the body, and wanted to ameliorate those limitations through technology. Tim, for instance, said that when he first got electromagnets implanted in his fingertips allowing him to sense magnetic fields, he did not suddenly feel exhilarated by his newly expanded sensory capabilities, as most people had assumed he would.

  “What I felt,” he said, “was terrified. I was like, these things are fucking everywhere, and we can’t see shit. We are totally fucking blind.”

  “Exactly,” said Marlo. “We can’t even see X-rays. I mean, how lame is that?”

  But what they were interested in, fundamentally, was something far stranger, far less identifiable, in every sense of the term, than any mere augmentation of our human capabilities. What they were interested in was a final liberation I found it difficult to see as anything other than annihilation.

  I was sitting in the basement with Tim and Marlo and Justin while they worked on the new Northstar implant. Wu-Tang’s “Protect Ya Neck” was blasting tinnily from a set of desktop speakers, and Tim was nodding emphatically along to the beat while bashing out some code on a laptop. I was perched uncomfortably on the saddle-shaped seat of a workout bench. To no one in particular, to the room in general, I said: “So what’s the endgame here? What are you guys looking to achieve, long-term?”

  Marlo rotated toward me, a soldering iron poised delicately in his hand, and said that, to speak in a purely personal capacity, he himself wanted to consume the entire universe. Personally, he said, he wanted to become a being of such unimaginably vast power and knowledge that there was literally nothing outside of him, nothing beyond him, that all of existence, all of space and time, was consubstantial with the being formerly known as Marlo Webber.

  I said that he would be well advised not to put this on his application form for a U.S. work visa; he laughed, but in such a way that it did not seem that he had previously been thinking of it as a laughing matter. It is possible that he was joking. He did, as I have said, perpetually bear the expression of someone who was sharing some private joke with himself. And there was an appealing absurdity, I found, in the extent to which this personal ambition to assimilate within himself the entire universe seemed at odds with the leisurely precision of his Australian drawl, his affable if obscurely aloof vibe. But it didn’t seem to me that he was being insincere.

  “I’m not sure whether you’re fucking with me,” I said.

  “I’m not fucking with you in the slightest, mate,” said Marlo.

  “He’s not fucking with you,” Tim assured me.

  “So what’s your endgame,” I asked Tim. “Are you looking to consume the entire universe, too?”

  “For me,” he said, “the endgame is when the entire population of humanity, minus a few douchebags, basically flies into space. My goal, personally, is to peacefully and passionately explore the universe for all eternity. And I’m sure as shit not gonna be doing that in this body.”

  “But what would you be?” I asked. “And would it be you?”

  Tim said that what he imagined himself being was an interconnected system of information-seeking nodes, traveling in ever-widening arcs throughout the universe, sharing intelligence across the vastness, learning, experiencing, collating. And his guess, he said, was that this unimaginably expansive system would be as much him as the six-foot-high assemblage of bone and tissue that happened to be his current form.

  I was going to say that all of this sounded hugely expensive; I was going to ask who was supposed to pay for it all. But I thought better of it, in the way that you might think better of making a joke about the central tenets of a person’s faith after they had taken the trouble to explain them to you.

  And we were, it seemed clear to me, encroaching here on the traditional territory of religious belief—a crossover that I felt characterized many of the conversations I had with Tim, and with other transhumanists.

  On my last afternoon there, Tim and I were lounging on the L-shaped arrangement of couches in his living room, talking about the future, when Johnny hopped up beside me and climbed into my lap and began licking me in a frantic transport of unprovoked affection. I felt the animal’s clammy breath on my face and in my mouth, the slick heat of its tongue on my nose, and I strove to appear more pleased by the attention than I was.

  And we started talking, then, about the question of whether we were our bodies, and whether Johnny therefore somehow existed less, was diminished in some way other than the merely physical, because he had lost part of his body.

  I was not quite sure what I believed, but I said that I felt that embodiment was an irreducible and unquantifiable element of existence, that we were human, and the dog was the dog, only insofar as we were these bodies of ours. I talked about my son, and how my love for him was largely, even fundamentally, a bodily experience, a mammalian phenomenon. When I held him in my arms, I said, I felt his smallness, his compactness,
the slender bones of his little shoulders, and I experienced the softness and delicateness of his neck as a physical sensation, a tender swelling, a quickening in the machinery of the heart. I often found myself marveling at how little space he took up in the world, how his chest was no wider than the span of my hand, how he was literally a small object, an arrangement of fragile bones and soft flesh and warm unknowable life. And it was this that constituted my love, my animal anxiety and affection for him, little beast that he was.

  I asked Tim about his own children, his love for whom he had spoken of to me on a couple of occasions over the last few days, and he said again how he lived for them, how their appearance in his life had saved him from himself. And he agreed that, yes, he had those feelings too, those animal affections and fears.

  “What do your kids think of you wanting to become a machine?” I asked. “What do they think of the implants?”

  Tim’s face was a blank mask of intense focus, as he refilled his vapebox with a homebrew juice given to him the previous evening by a new intern. I wondered whether he had not heard the question, or was perhaps planning to ignore it. I looked at his pale and thin arms, and tried to read the arcane history of his skin: the tattoos, the implant wounds, the coronation of disfigurements.

  “My kids understand what I’m doing,” he finally said, still insistently focused on the vapebox. “They’re totally saturated in it. My daughter, she’s eleven. A little while ago, she said to me, ‘Dad, I don’t care if you become a robot, but you have to keep your face. I don’t want you to replace your face.’ Personally, I don’t have any sentimental attachment to my face, any more than I have a sentimental attachment to any other part of my body. I could look like the Mars Rover for all I give a shit. But she’s pretty attached to my face, I guess.”

  He took a long hit of the juice, and exhaled heavily; a billowing plume of pure whiteness obscured momentarily this face of his to which he had no sentimental attachment, the dark and faintly Asiatic eyes, the fanatically flared nostrils of a proud and strangely driven man.

  He said how great Danielle was with the kids. How she was like a mother to them. He said how she’d wanted children of her own, too, and how hard it had been on her, his refusal to become a father again, his insistence on “not participating in the problem anymore.”

  And then he expressed a sentiment that struck me as essentially religious, in both meaning and expression. “I’m trapped here,” he said, nodding down at his chest, at his legs folded yogically beneath him on the couch. “I’m trapped in this body.”

  I suggested that this made him sound like a Gnostic heresiarch from the second century AD.

  Tim shook his head patiently. “But that’s not just a religious idea, man. Ask anyone who’s transgender. They’ll tell you they’re trapped in the wrong body. But me, I’m trapped in the wrong body because I’m trapped in a body. All bodies are the wrong body.”

  We were, I felt, nearing the central paradox of transhumanism, the event horizon where Enlightenment rationalism, pushed to its most radical extremes, disappeared into the dark matter of faith. As unfair a double bind as it may have been, the more Tim denied any connection between his own thinking and the mysteries of religion, the more religious he sounded.

  But perhaps it wasn’t so much that transhumanism was a quasi-religious movement, as that it addressed itself toward the fundamental human contradictions and frustrations that had traditionally been the preserve of faith. To experience oneself as imprisoned within the body, with its frailties and its inexorable finitude—fastened to a dying animal, as Yeats put it—was a fundamental condition of being human. It was, on some level, in the nature of having a body to want out of it.

  “Today,” wrote D. H. Lawrence, “man gets his sense of the miraculous from science and machinery, radio, airplanes, vast ships, zeppelins, poison gas, artificial silk: these things nourish man’s sense of the miraculous as magic did in the past.”

  And just as the human need for mystery, for cosmic awe, was now increasingly satisfied by science, the longing for some promise of redemption had similarly become the inheritance of technology. Although he would not have put it in these terms, this was ultimately Tim’s message, the message of the cyborg: that we would eventually be redeemed of our human nature, of our animal selves, and that all we had to do to secure this redemption was to let technology into our mortal bodies, thereby achieving a communion with machines, a final absolution from ourselves.

  * * *

  * It turned out to be technically untrue. Although many of our organs regenerate their cells at various rates, there are cells in the body, such as those in the cerebral cortex, that are never replaced. This fact I was both relieved and obscurely disappointed to learn.

  Faith

  THERE WERE MALFUNCTIONS of equipment; things did not proceed frictionlessly. My journey from San Francisco to Piedmont for the conference on transhumanism and religion was beset on all sides by minor difficulties. From the Mission, where I’d rented an Airbnb place for the few days I was in town, I took the BART across the bay. It was eight-thirty or so on a Saturday morning, in the middle of a ruthless May heatwave, and downtown Oakland was deserted by all but a loose cohort of the afflicted and unhoused. This gave the place an air of sorrowful aftermath, as though in some efficient and bloodless apocalypse all souls had been raptured, but for those tainted by poverty.

  I needed to get to Piedmont by 9 a.m., and there was not a cab to be seen. I had maxed out on data roaming within minutes of landing in SFO two days previously, and so had no way of Ubering or Lyfting myself the remaining five miles east to the conference venue. I felt divested, as though bereft of some irreducibly human faculty. After an interlude of vacillation (Should I look around for a café with WiFi? Should I get some quarters and find a pay phone? Were pay phones even a thing anymore?), I eventually flagged down a cab in the manual style, the whole business of which had already begun to feel like some whimsically old-timey affectation. On arrival in Piedmont, there were further complications. My driver, whose English was only barely functional, was relying on a dash-mounted-smartphone-and-Google-Maps system to get us where we needed to go, and Google Maps was doggedly refusing to acknowledge that where we needed to go even existed. By the time the driver eventually pulled up outside the veterans hall, it was a good fifteen minutes past the conference’s start time of nine, and I was aware that I may already have missed out on some high-grade material.

  A group of men were gathered in conversation toward the rear of the hall, one of whom was Hank Pellissier, the conference’s organizer. Hank was in his late forties, with short gray hair, but he had the trim stature, and something of the awkward ebullience, of a teenage boy. This impression was enhanced by his buoyantly youthful attire (rainbow-striped T-shirt, bright green pants, Seinfeldian tennis shoes). I wanted to announce my presence, to thank him for setting me up with a press pass, and for connecting me with various people he thought I might be interested in speaking to. He welcomed me in a manner both warmly enthusiastic and slightly absent, and quickly introduced me to the rest of the clustered miscellany of white American manhood.

  There was a stocky and bearded and affable young dude from Nashville who was somehow both a transhumanist and a born-again Christian. There was a sixtyish professor of Systematic Theology at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in Berkeley; a burly man in an olive drab field jacket with pockets both plentiful and capacious, both zipped and buttoned, a garment such as you’d likely favor if you felt the Rapture might potentially kick off while you were out of the house. There was a somber transhumanist Buddhist from Las Cruces, New Mexico. There were two Mormon transhumanists from Utah. (I knew, from long months of Internet stalking, that the Mormons were a small but vocal contingent within transhumanism, and that this had to do with some unexpected synergies between the movement and the beliefs of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.) And there was a guy called Bryce Lynch, a pale and intense and bespectacled cryptographer
in his late thirties, with hair that was both receding and long, and a manner that was both chipper and aloof. I asked Bryce whether he belonged to any faith, and he equivocated a moment before telling me that he practiced a modern form of Hermeticism, an esoteric pagan religion that had more or less peaked in late antiquity. I pressed him gently on the matter, but he seemed a little reticent, which is maybe what you’d be wise to expect from a cryptologist who was also a practicing hermeticist.

  Bryce wore a black T-shirt emblazoned with a message whose meaning was obscure to me—

  I DON’T ALWAYS TEST MY CODE,

  BUT WHEN I DO,

  I DO IT IN PRODUCTION

  —but which I took, almost certainly wrongly, to be some kind of sexual innuendo rooted in a programming pun. One of the Mormon transhumanists was sufficiently amused by the shirt to ask if he could take a photo of it. Bryce obliged, striking a heroically wide-legged stance, chest pushed forward and arms waggishly akimbo; this posing drew yet more attention to the shirt, whose message was now provoking mild merriment among the group as a whole. That I could not share in this merriment, that I could only chuckle politely and hope that I would not be called upon to make comment on its meaning, made me strangely self-conscious about my difference from these people, a difference that came to seem more profoundly irreconcilable the more I considered it. I was basically illiterate in the language of technology, was the thing. I was a user of technology, a passive beneficiary of its many advances, while knowing next to nothing about it per se; these people, though, these transhumanists, were rooted in the intimate logic of machines, grounded in the source code of our culture.