The Invisible Infrastructure of Cyborgs – Cyborgs & Architects 5

Tuesday July 21, 2009 by Tim Maly

Part of a series: Cyborgs & Architects

In 4 Jonah poked some holes the Architect half of the division I’d set up. I’d like to spend 5 looking at the Cyborg’s story.

In the first two Terminator movies, Arnold is cast as the classic cyborg, a nearly unstoppable man-machine. Incredibly durable and adaptable, he takes freely from his environment, arriving in the present literally naked and acquiring the equipment he needs along the way. He is supremely self-reliant.

Except.

Except that in order to show up in the present, there needed to be a working time machine. In order for him to even exist, there needed to be Skynet and enormous factories full of vats connected to assembly devices.

This is the invisible infrastructure of cyborgs.

Sometime in the 90s until 2006, the U.S. Army replaced “Be All You Can Be” with “Army of One”. Advertising for the campaign featured hardcore-looking soldiers with all sorts of high tech gear. The implication being that to join the Army of the 21st century, was to become a stupendous badass. (Sure there was some noise about the “one” being an acronym for “Officers, NCOs, and Enlisted” but who listens to acronyms?)

They certainly are. Consider the infamous Black Hawk Down incident. 18 U.S. soldiers died. Between 130 and 2,000 (that is not a typo) Somalis died. Brutal.

The U.S. Army is probably the most cybernetic military force, in their tendency to prefer increasingly high tech solutions to combat problems.

But a high tech military is supremely reliant on the support staff and logistics that comes with deploying and maintaining the equipment. The logistical operations of the army are dizzying in their complexity. Just getting all of the gear needed into the field is an overwhelming (and expensive) proposition.

The fact is that cybernetic beings can’t be self-reliant. It takes an enormous amount of institutionalized medicine and technology to make a working cyborg. The moment to moment self-reliance of the cyborg can be seen as a kind of infrastructural debt that must be paid back either at another time or by someone else. That someone else can be a willing participant, as in the crew of technicians building and maintaining Robocop between mission, or a victim, as in the hapless bikers who give Arnold the clothes he needs in Terminator.

In the penultimate issue if Warren Ellis’ run on Iron Man, Tony Stark has just taken the Extremis serum and is discovering his new powers.

“Maya, I can see through satellites now,” he says.

Which is all well and good. So long as there are satellites.

All of: Cyborgs & Architects

Adaptation – Cyborgs & Architects 1
Astronauts and Super Villains – Cyborgs & Architects 2
Nomads and Homesteaders – Cyborgs & Architects 3
Mobile Structures – Cyborgs & Architects 4
The Invisible Infrastructure of Cyborgs – Cyborgs & Architects 5 ((YOU ARE HERE))
6 Points On a Continuum – Cyborgs & Architects 6

jwinzey

This brought to mind issues I've always had with the "hippy" scavenger/squatter mentality. I hear these people talk about the downfalls of modern society, and they berate the "man" for his structure and his rules... and then they subsist off the waste products FROM the society that they so loudly preach against.
You couldn't eat that Big Mac out of the garbage if someone who worked for a living hadn't paid for it in the first place. You couldn't squat in that abandoned building if no one had built then abandoned it.
I guess my biggest issues are-
1. That seems like a crappy way to live.
2. Maybe stop spitting on the people who are feeding and housing you.

EDIT:
Thinking about this a bit more, I realized that boiling the "Cyborg/Architecture" down like this, I really can't think of a way in which the established architecture model relies upon the nomadic cyborg. I think they can work well together, but it seems to me that the cyborg CANNOT exist without the architect. The architect, on the other hand, can live his life just fine without the cyborg. Although to be fair, incorporating cyborg advancements into the architects life does seem to be a very awesome pathway for advancement.
Tim Maly

I've been thinking about this a lot too. I have some rough notes for talking about Bruce Sterling's description of living, what he calls, "glocally". It's a very nomadic lifestyle and he describes with some glee how stressful it is, not on him but on the Westphalian nation-state.

Your EDIT raises a point that I hadn't thought about at all: is there a need by the architect for the cyborg in this division? I don't know, but you can bet that I'm going to spend a bunch of time thinking about it. I feel like there might be a way that it's needed. still not sure how.

I've got this sheet of notes and in big letters in one place it says "Infrastructure is POWER crystallized" and then there's some other stuff about being able to say "we were here" and "we intend to be here for awhile".
gordon

I think you're conflating "cyborg" and "tool user".
Tim Maly

What distinction do you think I'm missing?
gordon

Well it seems like "cyborg" implies that somehow a machine is a part of your body, i.e. that you have the same time of awareness of the machine as you do of your own body.
Tim Maly

I think that it's a family resemblance thing, with degrees of closeness.

Are glasses crude cybernetics? What about contact lenses? What about eye implants? What about eyes rebuilt through laser surgery? What about contact lenses that project a HUD of data to the user? What about night-vision goggles? What about night-vision eyes?

When NASA was looking into their cybernetics programs, a huge amount of the work they were doing we wouldn't recognize as cybernetics in the modern chrome-skeleton sense of the idea. They spent a lot of time looking at pharmaceutical interventions as ways of enhancing the human machine. Performance enhancing drugs.

Does this make women who use the pill cyborgs? What about IUDs? (Actually there's a tonne of crazy writing about cybernetics and reproduction by feminist thinkers, lots of interesting stuff).

I'm definitely pushing the edge of the category when I look at the various U.S. Army tools and tech. But at some point along the line between // Guy with Gun / Body Armour / Powered Exoskeleton / Iron Man circa 1960 / Iron Man Extremis version / The Terminator // people turn into cyborgs. It's not at all clear to me when that happens.
gordon

Pharmaceuticals are sort of a non-starter because they are not importantly different from food. So if you start saying that we're cyborgs because of ritalin you are sort of forced to go back to other advances in cybernetics such as readily available protein. The same thing happens when you argue that a pacemaker or a replacement hip are cybernetic, if a pedical screw, why not a back brace, if that why not a cane.

I think that this is not a case of a fuzzy distinction between cyborg and tool user, but rather that all these cases are just examples of tool using, ditto eye glasses. Ditto Ironman.

There is a really clear division between cyborg and machine user. A cyborg would be someone who had a body type relationship to a synthetic product. I think this would have to include propriocetpion and inclusion of the thingy into the body schema. Whether that has or hasn't happened in a particular case is an empirical question.
Tim Maly

The term cyborg was coined in 1960 in a paper by Kline and Clynes when they were discussing adapting humans for space. You can read the paper Cyborgs and Space on scrbd. (It's really interesting!)

They are very clear in the paper that they are not just talking about implanting things in people.

In the past evolution brought about the altering of bodily functions to suit different environments. Starting as of now, it will be possible to achieve this to some degree
without alteration of heredity by suitable biochemical, physiological, and electronic modifications of man's existing modus vivendi.

Their primary interest was in making self-regulating (i.e. not requiring conscious acts on the part of the cyborg to maintain homestasis) manmachine systems. An exoskeleton that is controlled as naturally as moving but which offers considerable strength is a tool yes, but it's also a cybernetic device. The users wears it and BECOMES stronger, without thinking about it. The body-type relationship that you want is there. Ditto, I think, for glasses. You put them on, they correct your vision and then most of the time you forget about them. (I'm guessing that you disagree with me about the glasses)

In the paper, they actually (and this is sort of awesome) go on to talk about Yoga and Hypnosis as control systems that can impact the functioning of an organism. They discuss using drugs (automatically administered) to keep pilots awake for longer, protect from radiation, and to induce hypothermia and hibernation at appropriate times during a mission.

Indeed, aside from brief references to electrical physiological solutions, it's pretty much 4 pages of "ways we can use pharmacological tech to adapt people to space".

In the 80s the cultural emphasis turned to hardware adaptations - installed artificial limbs and implants and endoskeletons and the like, but the origins of the term are still there and still meaningful.

The cyborgs of the near future will very likely not have mechanical parts at all. It'll be nano and bio.