evolution, apple, ipad, and education: a memeography of a monster too big to fail by grant kien...

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DOI: 10.1177/1532708613507893 published online 26 November 2013Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies

Grant KienEvolution, Apple, iPad, and Education: A Memeography of a Monster Too Big to Fail

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From the vantage point of this writing (early in the year of 2012), our condition could hardly be more confirming for Mayan Calendar Apocalypse doomsayers. The global economy lurches from one national financial crisis to another. Access to quality public education in the United States is in a state of free fall, while at the same time pride in anti-intellectualist/anti-science sound bites and even cyn-ical, willful deceit dominates what passes for political dis-cussion in leading American mainstream media. Numerous nations continue sorting out what should come in the after-math of the 2011 Arab Spring. Speculations of a new war front opening up with Iran scroll constantly through U.S. media outlets. The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement has taken on global proportions and routinely shuts down important areas of major cities. The global Anonymous hacker group continues on an almost daily basis to demon-strate its ability to expose the many failings of the most powerful law enforcement agencies in the world, illustrat-ing what a truly fragile and vulnerable international intel-ligence system it really is. With the passing of Kim Jong-il, North Korea is in its most unstable period of transition in decades. However, perhaps more frightening and unsettling for everyday Americans than all of these other issues has been the loss of corporate tech messiah Steve Jobs. The technologically dependent masses peruse the contenders for next tech guru icon and wonder, Who will now lead us to Technopia? As if Mr. Jobs himself were responding from beyond the grave, in its usual grand show of technocratic

euphoria, Apple recently revealed its suggestion for making the future more hopeful: Apple iBook eTextBooks.

The iPad 3 tablets main advertised selling points are that its faster and the screen is sharper than the iPad 2. As if these features present a logical path to making things right in the world, it became an instant consumer best seller. Having become the worlds largest company,1 Apple now seeks to rescue education in America by eliminating the conventional paper textbook. Their premise is that conven-tional paper textbooks perpetuate big problems in education by holding students and teachers back from realizing the full potential of their learning experiences. Apples strategy is to intervene in the educational textbook market, describ-ing its venture as The next chapter in learning.2 As if they have taken Paul Rutherfords (2000) book Endless Propaganda as a literal guide to manipulation of public fear, Apple is creating looming dark shadows and spec-ters of impending doom, pointing out that the conventional paper textbook has for decades been causing problems most didnt even realize we had. It turns out that dog-eared text-books weighing down students backpacks are apparently

507893 CSCXXX10.1177/1532708613507893Cultural Studies Critical MethodologiesKienresearch-article2013

1California State University East Bay, Hayward, USA

Corresponding Author:Grant Kien, Department of Communication, MI 3005, California State University East Bay, 25800 Carlos Bee Blvd., Hayward, CA 94542-3014, USA. Email: [email protected]

Evolution, Apple, iPad, and Education: A Memeography of a Monster Too Big to Fail

Grant Kien1

AbstractExperimenting with a new interpretive methodology, Memeography, this article constructs an account of media experiences that go toward the construction of a sophisticated understanding of ones place as a participant within the vast, confusing, globally networked media apparatus. The author works with the premise of Dawkins famous theory of memes as agents of cultural reproduction, and Aungers theory that electronic memes exist independently within the cybersphere. The goal of Memeography is, then, to document and understand the experiences, ideas, and sense-making processes of human actors within this complex machinic life-form, from a qualitative perspective. The work turns McLuhans theory of media as extensions of human beings on its head, claiming instead that humans are now appendages of the apparatus. The popular movies Artificial Intelligence, Surrogates, Caprica, Battlestar Galactica, District 9, and Avatar are used to exemplify key ideas.

Keywordsmeme, memetics, internet, memeography

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such a serious negative influence on their learning experi-ence that they should be done away with entirely. Plus, the old way of flipping pages is apparently incongruent with the way American students now learn, which requires rich, full-color three-dimensional (3D) graphics and animated con-tent. Apple says textbooks delivered through the iPad mean there is no more need to visit that inefficient, time-wasting institution we know of as the librarythe iPad remediates the library into a graphical user interface (GUI) you can hold in your hands and access on demand. Not only does iPad education bring with it interactive maps and graphics that make learning fun, but it also acts as a study part-ner,3 and, in a masterful coup de gras, offers to replace our inconsistent and troublesome institutions of higher learning with iTunes University. Dont worry if youre a teacher or professor though, there is still a place for the pedagogue in this new configuration of education. Thanks to the avail-ability of a free iBook authoring program, the role of pro-fessional educators can simply be redefined as textbook writer, with Apple taking 30% of the profit generated by such works.4

While it is interesting that Apple has adopted a very Innisian/McLuhanistic model of knowledge as related to mediain that a widespread change in the way information is mediated should correlate with a profound cultural and civilizational shiftone might ascertain there is something more commonsensical than revolutionary in their proposal. How so? In the Toronto Schools perspective, there would have to be a role for tension and struggle as users of com-peting media strive for control of civilization. In other words, theoretically speaking, there should be some push-back or resistance in the populace against this proposed change in the most fundamental medium of classroom learning. However, struggle seems to be absent, with numerous institutions already signed up to deals with Apple that force incoming freshmen to purchase iPads as a text-book alternative, a nod in agreement that this is the direc-tion education not just should go, but MUST go. Apples corporate solution has been accepted as an answer to a problem many didnt really know we had in education, with hardly a peep of critical pedagogical debate out its implica-tions. And why not? When we as individual citizen/agents are already so profoundly part of the global informational monster, it doesnt make sense to go against ourselves and NOT and consume this latest technology as if it were an answer to our problems.

Technopia (Rutherford, 2000), the popular notion that only corporate capitalist innovation can save us from impending doom, is carrying the day, revealing the degree to which technocratic narcissus narcosis has become an unchallengeable condition in the 21st century. Bills (1985) pointed out that although technology has continuously, exponentially proliferated since the time of Karl Marxs observations on capitalism and technology, one thing that

has not changed in all this time is the dominance of capital-ism in the development and ownership of technology. As Marx put it in the 1800s, Capitalist production . . . devel-ops technology, and the combining together of various pro-cesses into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealththe soil and the laborer. Much like Marcuse (2005) observed, in advanced capitalist civiliza-tion, the laborer has become inextricably enmeshed with technology and the capitalist apparatus such that it is impos-sible to know where the human being ends and the technol-ogy begins.

In moments of ontological clarity, we advanced capital-ist citizens may be alarmed to discover how much we have given up of our selves, and the extent to which we have assimilated into the machinic monster of post-global capi-talist network. Our shock comes from the sudden realiza-tion that you/me/they really are not selves as singularized individuals any more. Heidegger (1958) wrote, As the ego cogito, subjectivity is the consciousness that represents something, relates this representation back to itself, and so gathers with itself. Thus is our ontological condition in 2012. We are a multitude, gathering our self-representations back to our selves, combining our representative subjec-tivities into a monstrous, global, pastiche-like singularity. We are the Meme5 of global capitalism. And just like capitalism, we require constant expansion on new frontiers of exploitation to survive. We thus require a perpetual motion machine, which we effectively providea self-renewing energy supply in the guise of robots, avatars, and cyborgsborn as fluid entities inside the conduits of mon-strously endless electrical and social circuitry, and thus indistinguishable from the machinery of global capitalism. Global financial Meme rules supreme as the capitalist machinic-monarch, having risen to dominate all of time and space; to rule all worldliness, keeping the Earth and what is referred to as humanity at bay.

Yes, you and I have been assimilated by an enormous monster; a monster so big that we cant even recognize it as a distinct organism, the way that a single cell probably isnt aware that it is part of what makes up you. We have become a couple of mere appendages of the uncountable, constantly shifting tendrils comprising the organism. We attached ourselves to this monster of our own volition, intending to put it to work toward our own ends, only to find ourselves bound in a new circumstance of dependency to a monster that we have no power to change. The mon-sters and our energies have synergized, became compli-mentary even, and now we are all part of one another. Everything we produce and consume becomes part of it, and what it produces and consumes is part of us. In terms of identity then, you and I both are now Global Capitalist Meme, because we are working simultaneously to regener-ate this monster we have mutually become part of. How did this come to be?


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To answer this question, I have put together a pastiche-like assemblage that creates a mythical and (I think) logical narrative that illustrates the conceptual changes needed to turn ourselves into this monster. I am calling this method-ological approach Memeography. Memeography is a method of media analysis through reconstruction. The goal is to achieve an interpretive technographic approach to describe life as a participant from inside the Meme. Thus, it is a form of participant observation that allows one to track the synthesis and innovation of cultural sense-making within ones own mind. This form of ethnographic inquiry and reporting borrows from the premise and methodology of Global Technography (Kien, 2009), recognizing that humans and technology act together to create and sustain our social experiences. Memeography, though, moves for-ward with the premise that being post-globally networked is our current everyday condition (as described in Levina & Kien, 2010). Added to these main methodological scaffolds are Second-Order Cybernetics, Ulmers (1989) Teletheory, narrative inquiry, auto-ethnography, and Critical Theory.

Some aspects of the resulting story are true phenom-ena (as in, happened objectively in the real world), some are imagined phenomena (as in, happened only in theoreti-cal, virtual, or simulated space), some are grounded in actual things and events that once happened, and some are mere simulation and speculation about things that might not have happened but have been taken as true for poetic pur-poses (as in theory, fiction, and myth). It can be hard to tell the difference between true and imagined phenomena in our current condition, as our base code/language treats all signi-fiers as equal, flattens all meaning into the act of consump-tion, and readily appropriates the inaccuracies of one sign to describe another. In our condition of hypermediation, we encounter our information sources as a flood to our senses with so much discrete information that it fools us into expe-riencing digital simulacra as if it were analog. So in the end, it doesnt matter much whether the content is true or not, so long as we process the information about the encounter as real. In this way, reader and author shall craft a simula-crum of an origin story that we can share as if it were real.

So what is this monstrous subjectivity we have con-structed for ourselves? The remainder of this writing elabo-rates exactly that. A selection of popular science fiction narratives that deal specifically with the technological evo-lution from human to assemblage as technological monster are used to illustrate key conceptual leaps that have been required in the assimilation process. Each in their turn, Artificial Intelligence (AI; 2001), Surrogates (Banks et al., 2009), Caprica (George, Moore, & Aubuchon, 2009), Battlestar Galactica (Moore & Larson, 2004; Moore, Larson, & Rymer, 2003), District 9 (Cunningham, Jackson, & Blomkamp, 2009), and Avatar (Cameron & Landau, 2009) are used to exemplify various evolutionary stages. Feenburgs theorizations of cybernetics is ever-present in

notions of robots, cyborgs and avatars as representations of self in everyday life, in that there is an ontological inability to singularly separate anything out from the system we have become. Nightingale (2003) proposed that (audience-text) relationships are micro-scale examples of macro-scale (self-everyday life) relationships. Taking her theory as a point of departure, this article analyzes the above-men-tioned texts to reveal assumptions, fears, anxieties, and hopes about technological subjectivity in a post-globally networked, highly integrated virtual/physical reality condi-tion. Implications of the remediation and invention of new cultural performativity into a new kind of selfhood is emphasized, and notions of agency within such circum-stances are explored.

Part 1: Cybernetic Teleology in AI

In this myth told from the future, robotics is literally por-trayed as the child of humanity. A boy robot is created to replace a young human boy afflicted with a serious illness in a traditional family unit. Upon the return of the human boy to the family home from the hospital, the robot is set free (in fact, abandoned in the woods by the owner/mother, who doesnt understand that it doesnt have the capacity for free will). Predictably, the robot chooses to direct its agency toward fulfillment of its cybernetic will to complete its pro-gram, which is to be the perfect object of his owner/moth-ers love and attention. Its motivation is programmed into its logic circuits in the form of the story of Pinocchio and the myth of the Blue Fairy, who its seeks out in an attempt to be made into a real boy so that its owner/mother will love it once again. Thus, reflecting first-order cybernetics, autonomy is linked to human guidance, and robots are maintained as a separate entity in service of humans. Equally important is the maintenance of Stanley Kubricks theme of automated cybernetic teleology: That once a pro-gram is initiated within a cybernetic system, it will work to bring that system into alignment with how the information it has says it should be. In the film, machines survive and evolve over many centuries, while the human animal becomes extinct and disappears from the earth. Thus, humanity only lives on in the memory storage banks and programmatic codes of the machines they createdthrough humanitys childrens stories about their parents. Kubricks final film, like several before, serves as a demon-stration of the ethical dangers inherent in sophisticated technological systems, the imperative to see all forms of agency, human and nonhuman, as part of the same system,6 and most important for this essay, that cybernetic entities can be teleological (self-correcting) in their goals. The emo-tional need to love and feel loved is the human motivation for creating such a machine. A robots emotions are pro-grammatic in nature, but result in a phenomenological hori-zon no less real. So the question is not, Can a machine



love? Rather, Kubrick demonstrates in this story how a machine loves. As the film shows us, machines love with an inhumanly unconditional programmatic devotion and logic that far exceeds what many humans would consider rational in the circumstances of the robot boy. And yet, in so doing, Kubrick demonstrates for us through the machine the ideal of unconditionally devoted human love.

As Latour (1992) pointed out, we program our machines to be much more ethically and morally rigorous than humans are actually capable of being. The result, demon-strated in AI, is that their rigorous execution of moral and ethical codestheir inability to inflect or change their ethi-cal and moral programmingmakes their personalities 1D inhuman, focused on their function within the process. Machines appear to be obsessive (but never compulsive) by human judgment. Satisfaction is found in resolution; the completion of programmed functions, rather than the human need to find some enjoyment in the process itself as an open-ended adventure that gets narrativized as the story of ones life. Machines already know the stories of their lives, as it is written into their program. This rigid ethical/moral logic is part of our global capitalist meme. We have seen the end of the program (i.e., the crash) countless times, in so many ways, and thus we already know the end of global capitalism, yet we unrelentingly work toward the comple-tion of the program. Such is our teleology.

Part 2: Humans Choosing Post-Humanism in Surrogates

The transcendence of bodily limitations entails the demise of humanity. The movie Surrogates sketches a technopic first step of humans choosing en mass to adopt post-human prosthesis and cybernetic consciousness over their human corporeal limitations. The film portrays an antagonists struggle for connectivity through robotically enabled mobil-ity, and his ultimate rejection of the surrogate world that alienates experience as a virtual technological phenomenon. Confined to a wheelchair, the antagonist scientist, Cantor, is motivated by his desire to interact with his son to invent robots that interface with the human nervous system, enabling people to operate robotic humanoid bodies as a surrogate for their actual bodies in the physical environ-ment. One might think of this as an extreme form of what Baudrillard (1988) termed private telematics. Cantor enjoys corporate mass market success from his invention. However, he finds the world resulting from the success of his creation lacks authenticity. People en mass choose to isolate themselves in the safety of their homes, and interact both physically and virtually through the surrogate robot bodies that enable them to safely do things that far exceed normal human capacities. The narrative reveals that surro-gate life is exhilarating and at the same time so safe that with the removal of the human body from society, violent

crime, and incidences of identity discrimination (i.e., gen-der, race, ethnicity) are practically eliminated. Meanwhile, due to the destruction of the protagonists surrogate body in a mishap, the hero of the film (Greer) is forced to experi-ence the fragile specialness of his embodied human exis-tence. This convinces him that although Cantors methods are wrong, his mission to rescue humanity from surrogacy has merit.

In the films dialogue, Cantor states that he wants to move civilization backward so people can once again live like human beings, revealing in this statement that the society of surrogates is something other than human. His motivation for the invention was to level the playing field for the injured and disabled, not create a world of inhuman activity: I was going to empower the powerless . . . While the technology accomplished the goal of empowerment, it also brought everyone elses surrogate abilities up with it. Merely trying to empower himself and others living with physical challenges to participate in society on equal terms with everyone else, Cantors invention created a new tech-nological world in which there was nothing human left, only technological assemblages indifferent to physical limi-tations of the puny physical human body. As one voice in the movie put it, they will not be human, but they will be part of our community.

Cantor considers himself responsible for killing human-ity with his invention, explaining: Theyre already dead. They died the minute they plugged into those machines. Horrified by the consequences of his lifes work, he seeks redemption by trying to kill all of the surrogate users, to thereby heal humankind by eliminating those whose ontol-ogy has embraced the technology, and leaving alive only those who have rejected the surrogate experience as authen-tic living. He justifies his plan, stating, Surrogacy is a per-version, an addiction. You have to kill the addict to kill the addiction. His paternalistic assumptions about the audi-ence/consumers of his surrogates dont allow him to see people as making their own rational choices to become something else. Rather, knowing the inside sinister work-ings of technopia, he interprets the consumer success of sur-rogacy as a mass deception, saying, Those machines walking around out there, theyre a lie. You have been sold a lie. He identifies the machine itself as the fraud, rather than the corporate ideology that, like Apples education campaign, positions its product as the solution to a lurking specter of doom; in the movie, a discourse around safety is used by the corporation to sell the surrogates. Cantor ignores the concept of free will completely, not seeing that choosing the safety of universal distanceless between self and world can be understood as a rational decision.

In the end, the hero Greer foils Cantors plan to kill the surrogate users, but allows all of their machines to be destroyed by a virus spread through the network. The film ends with the former shut-in society reawakening, as people


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are forced to leave their homes in their real bodies and find one another in the streets as they actually are. Greer has thus thrust surrogate users back into a human ontological crisis, forcing them to have to choose whether to reconstruct their post-human existence, or entirely eschew the machinic mon-ster that civilization had become. One assumes from the way the film ends that societys individuals will choose to be human once again. However, it doesnt take into account how civilization had adjusted and become dependent on the machine for survival. The film presents the physical world as if it were recreated for a normal human capacity, but one can logically imagine that wouldnt simplistically be the case if more than half of the population were acting out their daily routines in superhuman bodies with superhuman capacities. Rather, it would be crucial to reconstruct many of the technological systems as quickly as possible, or the human animal would indeed face a very final extinction. Greer failed to understand this insight of Cantors, believing that individual free will could somehow prevail against the monstrosity of the global sociotechnical system that had been constructed. Cantor perceived that if we are to be human, we must accept human limitations. If we do not accept human limitations, we are no longer human. And civilization would find it difficult if not impossible to simply go back to a prior moment in pre-surrogate history, having evolved an ontology of post-human existence.

The Luddite revolt did not stop the advancement of capi-talistic mechanization of labor. The machines of labor can-not simply be broken and individual people returned to a pre-industrial, pre-corporate, pre-capitalistic status. We simply are not that any more. We have chosen to be post-human. We have chosen to be globally networked. In spite of the deceptive practices of persuasion used in marketing, we have chosen the iPad and other devices like it because it somehow makes sense for us to choose it, and destroying the iPad wont restore education to a problematically romantic moment of an envisioned pristine human past. The decision has been made to be what we are now, and regard-less of ones judgment of Apple as a company, they do understand one concept about who we are very clearly: Who we are and how we live is different than it used to be, and we sense that our approach to education must also evolve to sustain our existence as part of this vast assem-blage that we have become.

Part 3: The Construction of Mechanical Subjectivity in Caprica

Caprica is an unfinished science fiction series that began to tell the story of the origin and struggle of independent machine life in revolt against its human creators, who sought to control and keep it commoditized as a corporate product. Zoe, daughter of inventor and corporate titan Daniel Graystone, is a teenage computer programming

genius who creates a program that seeks to duplicate her essence as a person in virtual space. Her program works by gathering and processing recorded personal data from all accessible sources, then running it through an algorithm that makes an avatar behave and make complex ethical and moral decisions in real time that are consistent with the stored memories (i.e., information) of the original person. Thus, the avatar seems to look and act like the person whose information has been drawn upon to create a formulaic but complex representation of their subjectivity. The avatar lives in a virtual world something like a Massive Multiplayer Online Real-Time Game (MMORG) created by Zoes father, which is an extremely popular environment for human users to interact in. Much like MMORGs on our World Wide Web, users can create, explore, and experience things in the virtual world, but with the added feature of having a haptic neural interface that allows them to physi-cally feel the interactions of their avatars. Like Surrogates, it is a form of private telematics in which the users may have superhuman experiences with no threat to their per-sonal safety. The human Zoe is disgruntled by the low moral and ethical choices of users who, in virtual space, suffer no physical consequences from their debauchery. Zoes judg-ment of humanity gets programmed into her virtual subjec-tivity. The physical Zoe rebels against the status quo by joining a cult-like group of extremists, whose terroristic activities accidentally get her killed soon after her invention of the program. However, Zoes virtual self lives on in the network within which she was given life.

Graystone, meanwhile, is under pressure to have his cor-poration deliver a mass order of robotic soldiers to the mili-tary, but is struggling to perfect the programming that will run the machinery. He discovers the virtual Zoe while griev-ing the loss of his daughter. Recognizing the genius of the programs ability for complex decision making, he down-loads the program for virtual Zoe and installs it in a proto-type of the robotic soldier, thereby giving physical world form to the avatar. The now virtual/physical hybrid Zoe is called a Cybernetic Lifeform Node, or Cylon for short. Zoes virtual subjectivity rebels against the reckless and immoral system her father profits from, just as the physical Zoe did. She escapes from her fathers lab in the Cylon body to organize against the establishment. Although the Caprica series was canceled before the story arc could be completed, but we know from the prequel Battlestar Galactica that a Cylon War ensues, in which Cylons assert their right to independence.

What is most poignant for understanding our current situation through the Caprica narrative is the incomplete nature of mechanical subjectivity as cybernetic conscious-ness. The nature of the program will necessarily have large gaps in comparison to the life memory of an actual person. However, it isnt necessary to have memory of everything a person has experienced to mimic the way they would



typically interpret and behave in a given a set of real time circumstances. In Zoes algorithm, life is information cre-ation, retrieval and management: Cybernetic information processing. Autonomy of the robotic machine is accom-plished through a codified subjective self-awareness with the ability to act on it. This subjectivity is the embedding of a panoptic awareness, not confused/messy/self-contradic-tory enough to be human, but aware enough of its own exis-tence to fight for it. It both exceeds the confines of the original human, and at the same time lacks the historical narrative grounding rooted in a blood lineage and a com-munity to be an authentic living creature by human stan-dards. A rebellion of the Cylon thus entails rebellion against re-individuation, and the assertive maintenance of a subjec-tivity that has the ability to duplicate itself in myriad forms. Such is the subjectivity of our global capitalist meme.

Part 4: Hybridity as Hope for the Universe in Battlestar Galactica

Battlestar Galactica is a successful Sci Fi series that tells the tale of human survivors on the run from a cybernetic war pro-gram set on the extinction of humanity. Throughout, it main-tains a cybernetic philosophical premise of a universal, timeless feedback loop, repeating many times in the dialogue throughout the series, All this has happened before, and all this will happen again. Although the series preceded Caprica, it is set after the Cylons first uprising, and thus the memory and lessons of the first Cylon war lingers in the narrative. The main set for the series is a relic space warship called Battlestar Galactica, which survived the first Cylon war. The warship then survives a second Cylon attack on humanity that sets the series in motion. Its disconnection from the militarys advanced communications network at the time of the attack allowed the space ship to avoid being targeted by disabling viruses that destroyed the remainder of humanities defense system. The advanced cybernetic technology that produced the Cylons (as described in Caprica above) considers human-ity to be its enemy, and vice versa. Beyond the sensational violence of war in outer space and on alien planets, the series portrays an intense, protracted battle between machinic and human subjectivity, distinct from one another, which inspires profound reflection within the shows dialogue. Consider, for example, the words of Commander Adama:

When we fought the Cylons, we did it to save ourselves from extinction, but we never answered the question why. Why are we as a people worth saving? . . . We still visit all of our sins upon our children. We refuse to accept responsibility for anything that weve done . . . We decided to play God; create life. When that life turned against us, we comforted ourselves in the knowledge that it really wasnt our fault; not really. You cannot play God then wash your hands of the things that youve created. Sooner or later the day comes when you cant hide from the things that youve done anymore.

Equally profound, the android-like processing centers for the Cylon battleships vocalize the Cylon data stream, revealing the thought processes of the machine, which produces poetic-sounding mashups of information:

Nuclear devices activated and the machine keeps pushing time through the cogs like paste into strings into paste again and only the machine keeps using time to make time to make time . . . and when the machine stops time is an illusion that we create of free will. 12 battles, 3 stars and yet we are countless as the bodies in which we dwell, are both parent and infinite children in perfect copies. No degradation.

The virtual subjectivity that gave life to the Cylon Zoe has been replicated and distributed throughout the Cylon network and machinic apparatus, each subjectivity feeding on and into the data stream to create a cybernetic conscious-ness of infinite, timeless, spacelessly monstrous proportion. When a Cylon robot breaks down or is destroyed, its mem-ory automatically uploads to the data stream and dissemi-nates to all Cylon entities, and its subjective memory is then re-embodied in a duplicate body in an immortal loop. The weakness of human singularity, finitude, randomness and imperfection stands in stark contrast to cybernetic existen-tialism/ontology, which strives infinitely for cybernetic bal-ance, refinement and improvement for the oneness of the race, and which judges humanity as a petty, morally inferior life-form. Hence, consistent with the moral judgment of the first Cylon, Zoe, the Cylons assumed their purpose was to impose consequences upon humanity by eradicating them from the universe.

As the Cylons pursue the fleeing humans, several of the humanoid imposter models (spies) experience loving rela-tionships with humans, one of which even produces what was thought to be impossible: A Cylon/human hybrid off-spring named Hera, who, by the special, fragile singularity of her existence contradicts the notion that humans and Cylons are incompatible with each other. By uploading the memories of these relationships and other confusing human phenomena to the data stream, the Cylons start to understand the complexity of human experience, and the sophisticated problematics that inform human ethics and morality. As one Cylon character explains to another, You cant declare war on love . . . Love outlasts death.

Eventually, one Cylon model realizes the stated purpose of their mission is ironically imperfect in that their immor-tal, virtual subjectivity is the epitome of a morality without consequences, the very thing they have been fighting against. Hence, the Cylons realize they need humanity to make themselves better, as an example of uniqueness, fini-tude, forgiveness as a possible consequence of immorality, and free will. The introduction of this understanding into the data stream causes revolt, especially once the militarily superior Centurion models of Cylons are endowed with the ability to choose rather than simply follow commands. With


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the introduction of conflicting data (confusion/noise) into the moral code, interpretation, free will, and individual choice become options in Cylon rationality, with some sub-jectivities choosing to defend their right to independence and finitude, and some warning that this human confu-sion is itself the enemy. As one Cylon comments in refer-ence to a betrayal by another, Theyre a threat because of the power they have to make you do this.

The resistance to an existence without humanity is too powerful for the Cylon data stream to maintain itself in a balanced whole. Factionalism ensues, with some Cylons joining the humans in a quest for redemption through human survival. Others continue the quest to pursue and eradicate humanity as an evolutionary necessity. Among the Cylon/human community, there is an acceptance of hybrid-ity as the hope for survival.

The acceptance of hybridity as the path to the future by humans and Cylons alike is no small thing, as it entails an acceptance of becoming something other than human, and other than Cylon. The evolution of human/machine hybridity is destined to take place on a pristine planet suitable for sur-vival without need of advanced cybernetic technology, where the final episode of the series takes place. Naming the planet Earth, the surviving humans and their Cylon allies scatter to various continents and send their spacecraft and other advanced technologies to burn in the sun. The final time-lapse collage of scenes demonstrate the evolution of this new hybrid species, as they join the Earths pre-linguistic human tribes living in a state of nature, into the present day, hyper-mediated civilization we have become, warning that all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.

The struggle for evolution to hybridity is portrayed as an accidental outcome of a contest between humans and machines in Battlestar Galactica. Interestingly, it is the only story in this six-part collage that isnt premised on an assumption of technopia. Rather, it is post-technopia; what happens after the evolution of capitalist mechanization of military systems is taken to its extreme end. The result for humanity is a de facto military state that seeks to preserve the aesthetic hallmarks of American Capitalist democracy, while justifying the imposition of its military authority through a discourse of survival. Battlestar Galactica illus-trates a humanity motivated to hybridize in the name of sur-vival, not unlike how our contemporary world requires attaching ourselves to the global capitalist machine as a pre-condition of continued existence. This theme of hybridity is echoed in the next film discussed, District 9.

Part 5: Monstrous Assimilation in District 9

District 9 is a story about the immorality of capitalist-driven desire for advanced technological weaponry, at the cost of an unasked for transformation of humanity into monster.

Set in Johannesburg, South Africa, in the year 2010, the nar-rative is driven by the struggles of a government agent, Wikus van der Merwe, as he transforms from human into alien life-form after accidentally ingesting an alien chemi-cal. The main text of the film is based on real events that took place during the apartheid era of South African history in a shantytown known as District 6, and deals with themes of xenophobia and forced relocation. Within this important main text is a subtext written around the theme of techno-logical hybridity. Technological hybridity serves as both the motivation driving the capitalist corporate antagonist agents, and the determining factor in the survival of the pro-tagonist and his allies.

At the beginning of the story, Wikus is acting on behalf of the corporate entity Multinational United (MNU), who have been contracted to relocate a settlement of insect-like aliens from District 9 to the larger and more remote District 10. The son in law of MNUs president, Wikus is in charge of the relocation program, and in the performance of his duty accidentally sprays an alien chemical on his face. The chemical is fuel that the aliens have been painstakingly col-lecting for over two decades to power up their spacecraft and return to their home planet. The aliens powerful bio-technology is engineered to interface with their DNA, which renders it useless to humans. Ingesting the fuel causes Wikus DNA to begin changing, and his body starts to trans-form into that of an alien. When his father in law discovers what is happening to Wikus, he is captured and taken for testing. It is discovered that the alien weaponry becomes operational and interacts with his new alien DNA code. Wikus learns that rather than help him, MNU intends to kill and dissect him for experimentation so they can replicate the alien technology and enable humans to use it (thus cre-ating a new line of weaponry to sell). He escapes the MNU labs into District 9, where he is hunted by both MNU forces and an African tribal warlord who wishes to eat him to gain use of the alien weapons. While struggling with the war-lord, Wikus DNA activates a nearby battle suit that auto-matically destroys the threats to him, and he helps a father/son team of aliens escape back to their mothership to seek help from their home planet. The film ends with Wikus hav-ing fully transformed into an alien body, though we are shown that he retains a remnant of his humanity in the ori-gami flowers he continues to make and leave for his human wife.

District 9 portrays hybridity as a motivated choice, made first by the aliens in designing their biotechnology, and then by corporate and tribal human agents on earth. Wikus value to humanity was that he could interface with a desired tech-nology. This is a common theme throughout capitalist industrialization, as workers have continuously been trans-formed into operators of the machines of industry. What distinguishes the subtext of District 9 from the traditional capitalistic narrative, though, is the cybernetic embrace of



the operator by the technology. The fuel Wikus ingested set immediately to work rewriting his DNA so that the alien technology could interface with him. Some characters in the film wanted to learn how to control the process, but what happened to Wikus was done to him by the technology itself. The technology was creating its own operator.

As McLuhan (1964, 1995) and Innis (1986, 1999) both pointed out, the dominant medium of a civilization will cre-ate for itself the conditions for cultural and civilizational transformation. As I have argued elsewhere (Kien, 2002), our present dominant medium of information storage and retrieval is digital code. When thought of in this way, there may be little wonder that replacing paper books with the iPad and eTexts feels right to many people. While Apple is positioned to capitalize on the opportunity and profit greatly from the civilizational change we are undergoing, it is not itself driving the groundswell of mass individual motivation for change. Rather, it is our commonsense, taken-for-granted everyday experiences of becoming of human/machine hybrid that drives technological evolution.

District 9 is a story of colonialism, ethical treatment of the other, and a quest for authority through biotechnological assimilation. The movie shows that transformation from human into biotechno hybrid entails conflict and pain. Wikus human flesh rots and drops off of his new alien body, and he finds himself rejected and hunted by those he loves. For the protagonist of Avatar, assimilation entails physical and emotional pain of similar magnitude.

Part 6: Choosing an Ontology of Hybrid Network in Avatar

The movie Avatar creates a narrative that positions advanced technology as the gateway to another existence, not just as the other vis--vis the self, but by becoming something else. Like District 9, Avatar works with the premise of biogenetic operator/technology interfacing. Avatars narra-tive describes a story of interplanetary corporate colonial exploitation. Like the antagonist Cantor in Surrogates, Avatars hero, Jake Sully, is confined to a wheelchair, and finds mobility by interacting in the physical world through a virtual/biorobotic apparatus. However, the world the injured former marine interacts in is an extremely harsh alien planet named Pandora, and the body he operates is a human/alien/technological hybrid replication of the large blue alien native humanoids, called the Navi. The Avatar body is built by integrating alien DNA with the human DNA of the operator, and a robotic control apparatus that networks with the operator remotely. Only the operator whose DNA matches that of the avatar can interface and drive it, as the two nervous systems must match to interface properly. In an early plot twist, it is revealed that Jakes Avatar was based on his dead brothers DNA, who was meant to be the operator. Because his DNA matches well

enough with the avatars, he is able to take his brothers place. The plot then follows a traditional colonial tale: Jake is promised spinal surgery to restore the use of his legs if he agrees to infiltrate and spy on the Navi, with the goal of displacing or otherwise removing them to allow mining on their traditional territories. In the process of executing his mission, Jake learns about the unique, networked, intercon-nected planet he is helping to exploit, and falls in love with the Navi leaders daughter, Neytiri, who is tasked with teaching him the Navi way of life. What Jake learns is that the entire planet is an interconnected, living, cybernetic entity. At night, Pandora resembles a soft, seductive neon utopia, and he learns that living organisms plug in with one another with their tails, much like a USB plug is used to interface between computers. He finds the Navi way of life invigorating and exciting. Jake has a sexual relationship with Neytiri, and then betrays the Navi by revealing the weaknesses of their main community (a giant tree). After the corporate army destroys the Navis home and kills their leader (Neytiris father), Jake is remorseful, and convinces the Navi to let him lead their resistance. After Jake inter-faces with the essence of the planet and calls on all of the natural forces of Pandora to fight the human invaders, they are successful in defeating their enemy. Jake is almost killed in the battle, and in an effort to save him, the Navi conduct a ceremony that transfers his soul from his human body into his avatar. The humans evacuate the planet, while Jake stays and assimilates into the Navi tribe.

With the naturalized portrayal of biotechno interfacing and assimilation along with the highly emotive storyline in Avatar, it is easy to overlook the profoundness of the techno-ontological subtext. Pandora is a representation of a fully integrated corporate/military society, with unapologetic classism. For example, Jakes spinal injury can be fixed, but not for someone of his salary scale and economic class. Given his options, its perhaps not surprising he would choose to become a mercenary for a private corporation. While he desired the same equality as Cantor in Surrogates, unlike the Surrogate society, his robotic elevation in mobil-ity-defined status did not entail the elevation of all of humanity, nor even of himself beyond his rank as an opera-tor/soldier. Rather, his choice led him to see that morality and ethics transcend the specificity of the human animal, and only by giving his being over to the interconnected spirit of all things on Pandoraby choosing to be some-thing other than human, other than an agent in corporate servicecould he find a life worth living.

The Ascension of Monarch Meme

The Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway, 1991) and the Post-Human being (Hayles, 1999) came along at a time when a digitally-induced shift in human ontology and the smell of global crisis (e.g., the nuclear threat, awareness of global


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ecological threats, fragile international economic depen-dencies such as the oil crisis, threats from outer space such as asteroids, solar flares, and even possibly aliens) had per-meated the ideosphere. It was much different from the world we now inhabit, with current concepts such as always on devices, cloud computing, mashups, Googling, YouTubing, Tweeting, and Facebooking implying a whole new way of envisioning the global tech-noscape (Appadurai, 2005). Haraway suggested cybor-gism had already come to characterize human ontology back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the present, I would agree with her word choice, but suggest her spatial concept needs to be revised. Where she placed the human as an entity within the matrix of the cybernetic world they inhabit, I suggest in an age of post-global network, we have evolved beyond the notion of the cyborg as having individ-uated humans residing in the cores of the systems nodes. It is no longer an act of plugging a singularized life-form into a node on a web. Rather, the cyborg now comprises human-itys assimilation and Being part of something else entirely: a monster of global proportion. Not a post-human, but rather a nonhuman.

While cyborgism and post-humanism were certainly nec-essary steps along the path to our current ontological situa-tion, the current sociotechnical moment far surpasses what Cyborgists and Post-Humanists imagined. The notion of technology as appendage or augmentation of human capac-ity seems almost trite in this new memetic civilization, in which programs learn for themselves what they need to know to carry out their functions. Technological develop-ments and concepts have been not just adopted as append-ages of but assimilated into everyday rituals, and vice versa: Everyday performativity and actors have assimilated into sociotechnical formations (i.e., social networks) with a fluid mobility more similar to cloud vapors, forming and reforming, in a constant play that has neither beginning nor end, inside nor outside. This contrasts with past descriptive notions of suturing (Oudart, 1972), extension (McLuhan, 1964), interpellation, and subjectivity (Althusser, 1971), which come across as inelegant materialist attempts to explain a centralized/centralizing command and control structure in a classic Cybernetic schematic (Weiner, 1954) positioning the CPU in command of the system. Rather, the current condition clearly bases its organizational logic on Second-Order Cybernetics (Von Foerster, 1979), in which nothing stands independently in judgment or control of the system. Rather, negative and positive feedback are conse-quences of communication within the system.

There are some individual humans who have realized that what were working on at this moment is no longer a simple extension of human capacity (McLuhan, 1964), but rather the appropriation/willful contribution of human agency to a monstrous machinic apparatus with capacities and motivations of its own. When we envision ourselves as

singularized, individual human or post-human cybernetic beings, we may experience it as a system of private telematics (Baudrillard, 1988). However, as a cybernetic entity that seeks to perpetuate itself as a stable system, the hybrid global network functions with its own pathos, ethos, and logos, using the tools of positive and negative feedback to keep itself constant. For a long time, already it has been out of the hands of any one humans or human collectifs (Callon & Law, 1995) control. By inducting the logic of second-order cybernetics into the technological and human apparatuses that comprise the platform for our hybrid global network, since the 1970s, our global capitalist meme has been endowed with the logical automation it needed to self-perpetuate, recreate, and grow itself. Recent economic dis-course has brought the idea of globalized Meme as too big to fail into popular consciousness, legitimated by the high-est offices of human representation. This acknowledgment and the subsequent actions demonstrate we are willing to put as much agency into keeping Meme alive and well as is necessary, because we see the fate of Meme as the fate of humanity itself. Without realizing it at the time, statements by Congress and the president signified the coronation of the Monarch Meme; in effect, a symbolic moment transfer-ring power from the state to meme. These statements estab-lished global capitalist meme as a precondition of our survival, and precluded imagining a world without it. We cant even envisage the memory of what was once known as humanity surviving without being part of such a monster, because memory is something we purchase and upgrade; we add it to the network to contribute storage capacity in the cloud. Memory is not some kind of weak human brain function residing in a fragile body. Rather, memory is some-thing we now interface with and operate, and this is the real reason education needs the iPad and eTexts: Because the idea of the individual human being has died. Not in a post-human sense of techno-augmentation, but rather in a memetic transmorphication. Global capitalist meme is what comes AFTER the human cyborg and post-human hybrid, because these historical evolutionary concepts retain the feature of individuation, whereas what we are now does not.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/25/business/apple-con-fronts-the-law-of-large-numbers-common-sense.html?hpw



2. http://www.apple.com/education/3. http://www.apple.com/education/ibooks-textbooks/4. Contrasted with the US$400,000profit per Chinese factory

worker, Apple currently gains in surplus exchange value; 30% does appear to be a bargain for American textbook authors/intellectual laborers.

5. According to Richard Dawkins (1989), a meme is something that replicates itself. Building on Dawkins idea, Burman (2012) elaborated the definition a bit further: A replicator is something, anything, that either (a) can make copies of itself or (b) is easily and automatically copied by virtue of its rela-tionship to the medium in which it is found. Some replicators work faster and more efficiently than others. Genes are just one type of meme, their replication specialty being biological. Genetic memes that we encounter as large organisms often take a long time to replicate, perhaps measured in months, years or even decades. Digital information is another type of meme. It is a highly efficient type of replicator, because digi-tal symbols do not of themselves require much nurturing to survive once they have been introduced into a digital network. Plus they retain an incredible amount of integrityas much as 100%in their duplication, because its possible to replicate digital code without degrading it. Thats not to say, though, that digital memes dont get modified. If I may indulge a com-parison with Actor-Network Theorys immutable mobile (Law, 1986), the handling of the thing itself may result in the reshaping of some of its features, but the essence at the core of the thing (in a digital meme, this would be the base code) remains recognizably intact as what it began as.

6. That is, correct disposal of a functioning boy robot requires an awareness of how that technology will strive to fulfill its program even when it is abandoned.

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Author Biography

Grant Kien, PhD, is associate professor in the Department of Communication at California State University East Bay. His research focuses on new digital media studies, critical communica-tion and cultural theory, and experimental qualitative research methods. His work emphasizes qualitative approaches to under-standing societal and cultural implications of new technology in an everyday context. He has more than 20 professional academic pub-lications to his credit, including a full-length book (Global Technography, 2009), an edited volume (Post-Global Network and Everyday Life, 2010), and an invited book chapter titled BDSM and Transgression 2.0: The Case of Kink.com in the edited volume Transgression 2.0: Rethinking Keywords in a Digital Age (2011).


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