Grindhouse Wetware is, as the company’s website explains, a team of people working toward the goal of “augmenting humanity using safe, affordable, open source technology.” Their devices are designed for subdermal implantation, and intended to enhance the sensory and informational capacities of the human body. Grindhouse is the most prominent group within what is known as the grinder scene, a mostly online community of biohackers, or “practical transhumanists.” These are people who don’t want to wait around for the Singularity to happen, or for artificial superintelligence to finally materialize and subsume the informational content of their human minds, their wetware. With the means currently at hand, they are doing what they can to merge with technology right now.
The company, as it happened, had just had a nontrivial infusion of cash, and there was a palpable sense of relief, of accomplishment, in the air. As of this evening, the cyborg future was ten grand closer. A check had just hit the company’s bank account, payment for a recent speaking engagement in Berlin by one Tim Cannon, Grindhouse’s chief information officer and de facto leader, out of whose basement the whole operation was run.
Earlier that evening, I had met up with Tim and a couple of his Grindhouse colleagues at a place called TechShop, a maker space in Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood, where he was taking part in a panel discussion that was being recorded for an NPR show. It was our first encounter in the flesh, after almost a year of emails and Skype chats, most of which had been mediated by Grindhouse’s publicity director, Ryan O’Shea. Ryan had come along for the talk, as had their young colleague Marlo Webber, a gifted self-taught electrical engineer who had recently moved from northeastern Australia in order to work with him. He’d been crashing at Tim’s place since he got to Pittsburgh; the plan was that the company would eventually be in a position to pay him a wage sufficient to make him eligible for a work visa.
These gentlemen didn’t look like cyborgs, although I suppose that raises the question of what you’d expect a cyborg to look like. They didn’t especially look like geeks, is maybe what I’m saying. Ryan looked more or less how you’d expect a guy to look who had a day job in independent film production, and who’d previously worked as a congressman’s aide on Capitol Hill: neat blond hair, black-framed Ray-Ban prescription glasses, beige slacks, checked shirt—his style was situated somewhere in the disputed middle ground between hipster and preppy. Marlo was small, slight, in jeans and a black denim shirt; he had the face of a wayward teen, a permanent half smile, like he was relishing some private absurdity, weighing up whether to disburden himself of a smart-ass remark that had just occurred to him.
And Tim: given that his whole deal was radical self-transformation, Tim looked very much like a guy who’d worked out an aesthetic for himself at sixteen and basically butched it out since the late 1990s. He wore a black flat cap, a Grindhouse T-shirt, chunky skater shoes, and green cargo shorts that exposed a tattoo on his right calf depicting a cartoon punk (Mohawk, Dead Kennedys shirt) holding a gun to his own head. Another large tattoo, on the pale underside of his left arm, depicted a DNA double helix surrounded by a circular cog. This pictorial representation of Tim’s mechanistic view of Homo sapiens—a grinding of the human code—was, literally, underscored by an impressively lurid scar, gnarled and thick-grained as bark. This was the result of a device called Circadia he’d had implanted for three months of last year; it took various biometric measurements from his body and uploaded them via Bluetooth to his phone, and thereby to the Internet, at five-second intervals—adjusting for good measure the thermostat of his house’s central heating in accordance with his body temperature.
If you’d met Tim back then, you’d have found it difficult to ignore the protrusion about the size of a pack of playing cards bulging beneath the ventral surface of his forearm. You might have felt faint or nauseated even looking at it, this spectacle of techno-penetration, this violent machining of the flesh. The device’s insertion required a long incision, then a lifting away of the upper layer of skin from the fatty tissues beneath to create a yawning orifice, then a penetration of the body with the device, before a final suturing of the wound, a stretching and closure of the meat over the machine. Because no medical professional could perform the procedure without losing their license, the whole thing was done in Berlin by a body-modification “flesh engineer,” and it was performed in a manner Tim referred to as “raw dog,” meaning without the benefit of anesthesia.
“That was a rough ninety days,” he said, “I’ll tell you that much.”
We were lounging around in armchairs outside the room where the NPR people were setting up for the panel discussion, putting out popcorn and spring water and craft beer.
“In the first couple of weeks, there was a lot of fluid buildup, and that had to be drained regularly. I also had to take medication to stop my body from rejecting the implant. I was in a state of constant paranoia. I’d feel a tingling in my head, and I’d think it was my brain being poisoned by the battery leaking into my bloodstream or some shit. Then I’d sneeze, and I’d be like, oh, okay, I just needed to sneeze.”
People would ask him why Circadia was so large, and he would tell them this was because they weren’t trying to make it small. It was a proof of concept, an experiment to ascertain whether the technology functioned as required inside the body. And it did: Tim’s mortal terror aside, it functioned just fine. Now they were working on a newer and more compact version, requiring a less grotesque and gratuitous transgression of the membrane between human and machine.
Tim told me about his grueling-sounding daily routine, which involved a day job as a programmer with a software contracting agency, and nights working on Grindhouse stuff down in the basement. He also had a son and daughter, aged nine and eleven respectively, over whose custody he was involved in an intense and protracted legal struggle with his estranged ex. None of this left a lot of time for sleep, and so he’d implemented a system of polyphasic sleeping, whereby he took two twenty-minute naps during the day, and then went into shutdown mode for a total of three hours every night, generally between 1 and 4 a.m.
It was all about systems, he said, about understanding and manipulating them: the system of the day, the system of the body, the system of a life.
A middle-aged woman in high-waisted trousers and sandals wandered over to where we were sitting. She had a scrubbed and oddly blank appearance, and her hair was pulled back austerely from her face. She introduced herself as one of Tim’s two fellow interlocutors on the panel. Her name was Anne Wright; she was a professor at Carnegie Mellon, and she was heavily involved in the Quantified Self movement, whose adherents used technology to track and analyze data about their everyday lives. Tim told her he’d dabbled in QS himself, that he’d recently bought a wearable gadget that tracked his every movement and uploaded the data to the cloud for later analysis. He was interested in the whole Quantified Self thing, he said, but had his reservations.
“It’s really a matter of gathering as much data as possible about your life,” she told him, “and figuring out how you can use that data to optimize yourself as a person.”
“Right,” said Tim. “Although I’d like to take the ‘person’ term completely out of the equation. People really suck at decisions. It’s like the whole self-driving car thing. People are like, ‘Oh, you can’t take humans out of the loop, I’m a human and I’m an awesome driver.’ And I’m like, no, man, you’re not an awesome driver. You’re a monkey, and monkeys suck at making decisions.”
Anne emitted a perfunctory laugh. She seemed uncomfortable, and I wondered whether this discomfort was a reaction to the way in which Tim’s language seemed to lay bare the mechanistic principles of the QS movement, its view of the self as reducible to a set of facts and statistics that could be interpreted, and whose interpretation thereby informed the activity of the self, and thereby the generation of further data—the human being as a feedback loop of input and output.
“Far as I’m concerned,” Tim went on
, “there is no amount of optimization of this barely evolved chimp that is worthwhile. We just don’t have the hardware to be ethical, to be the things we say we want to be. The hardware we do have is really great for, you know, cracking open skulls on the African savanna, but not much use for the world we live in now. We need to change the hardware.”
It was Tim’s rhetorical custom, in common with many transhumanists, to make frequent allusions to the African savanna. We were a long way from the world for which we evolved, was the general point.
“This guy’s like some kind of quote-generating machine,” I said to Marlo, as we waited for the panel to start. I was kneading my wrist, massaging its crude technology of ligament and cartilage, the seized carpal machinery beneath its casing of skin.
“My writing hand’s fucked already,” I said. “Maybe you guys could fix me up with some kind of transcription upgrade.”
Marlo chuckled, and showed me an RFID chip he’d implanted in the back of his own hand, probing it back and forth through the thin layer of flesh with an index finger. It was roughly the size and shape of a paracetamol capsule. In theory, it enabled him to wave his hand and unlock the front door of HackPittsburgh, the laboratory space downtown where they sometimes worked when they needed more high-grade equipment, but as a new employee he didn’t have clearance, so it basically just sat there, a dormant cell of technology awaiting its commands.
The panel discussion was entitled “Borg in the USA: Cyborgs and Public Policy in the Digital Age,” and, with Anne Wright, the other speaker was an elegantly dressed man named Witold “Vic” Walczak, legal director of the ACLU for the state of Pennsylvania. The moderator, an NPR presenter called Josh Raulerson, introduced Tim by announcing to the room that “there are, it’s safe to say, literal cyborgs among us,” and then looked at Tim and asked whether this was in fact safe to say, or whether he’d perhaps used an inappropriate term.
“It’s as good a label as anything else,” said Tim, and shrugged.
There was some back-and-forth on the topic of Big Data, and of contemporary humanity as a collection of nodes through which information is channeled. Anne talked at length about her discomfort with corporations using this collected information about her to predict what she might want to purchase, or where she might want to travel to. Tim, for his part, said that there was a difference between using people and utilizing them. He didn’t understand why everyone was so precious about being predicted.
“I think it offends people’s belief that they’re these unique little flowers. But we’re animals, and animals have patterns of behavior. We’re offended by any suggestion that we’re predictable.”
“I’m not predictable,” said Anne, who had, predictably, taken offense.
“Everyone is predictable,” said Tim, “given a high-enough degree of information, and powerful-enough processing.”
Here, Anne invoked the academic-sounding concept of “emplotment,” whereby a person became “emplotted” in some external design, used in a narrative other than their own. “There’s something wrong with this putting together of a person’s pattern,” she said. “It makes us into a character in someone else’s plot.”
I noted here that Marlo, who had been availing himself remorselessly of the complimentary pale ales, was shaking his head in weary disputation.
“If a computer’s able to predict to ninety-nine-point-nine-nine-nine percent accuracy from your purchases or your search engine activity that you’re pregnant,” said Tim, “that’s not ‘emplotment,’ that’s just a fact. We are deterministic mechanisms. The problem is, most people make the mistake of anthropomorphizing themselves.”
This latter aphorism landed slow and unsteady, drawing laughter from perhaps only half of the fifty or so people in the room—a strangled laughter, an uneasy laughter, a laughter of uncertain subjects.
Our need for privacy, said Tim, arises out of our primitive animal nature. If we had more advanced brains, we wouldn’t do things that required the screen of privacy. The solution, he said, was to go inside the brain and destroy vestigial behaviors that are no longer useful, because evolution was just not happening fast enough.
“I mean, we are breeding at an unsustainable rate here, devouring all our resources. Our libido is calibrated for the Ice Age, where one in four of us died in birth and took the mother with us. That’s no longer the case. And yet every one of us in this room is very interested in fucking. Right?”
There was another ripple of nervous laughter. Josh Raulerson smiled queasily at the audience, and Ryan shifted in his seat.
“Man, I hope this isn’t live,” said Tim. “Is it live? Because I’ve just been saying whatever I feel like saying.”
—
The thing about listening to Tim and his fellow grinders, the activity in which I was largely occupied while I was in Pittsburgh, is that their rhetoric is so forceful that it pushes you to adopt defenses of positions you’re not sure you hold. Their whole ethos, in one sense, is such a radical extrapolation of the classically American belief in self-betterment that it obliterates the idea of the self entirely. It’s liberal humanism forced to the coldest outer limits of its own paradoxical implications: If we truly want to be better than we are—more moral, more in control of ourselves and our destinies—we need to drop the pretense that we are anything more than biological machines, driven by evolutionary imperatives that have no place in the overall picture of the kind of world we say we want to create. If we want to be more than mere animals, we need to embrace technology’s potential to make us machines.
The idea of the cyborg is mostly associated with science fiction—with Philip K. Dick and William Gibson, with RoboCop and The Six Million Dollar Man—but its origins are in the postwar field of cybernetics, which its founder, Norbert Wiener, defined as “the entire field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal.” In the posthumanist vision of cybernetics, human beings were not individuals acting autonomously toward their own ends, free agents in pursuit of their destinies, but machines acting within the deterministic logic of larger machines, biological components of vast and complex systems. And what linked the elements in these systems was information. The key idea of cybernetics was the notion of the “feedback loop,” whereby a component in a system—for instance, a human—receives information about its environment, and reacts to that information, changing the environment and thereby the subsequent information it receives. (The Quantified Self movement is, in this sense, deeply embedded in the cybernetic worldview.) Where energy, its transformations and transfers, had previously been seen as the fundamental building block of the universe, information was now the unit of universal exchange. In cybernetics, everything is a technology: animals and plants and computers were all essentially the same type of thing, carrying out the same type of process.
The term cyborg, which means “cybernetic organism,” was first used in a 1960 scientific paper called “Cyborgs in Space,” published in the journal Astronautics by the neurophysiologist Manfred Clynes and the physician Nathan Kline. The article begins with the fairly uncontroversial assertion that the human body is constitutionally unsuited to space exploration, and goes on to suggest that it would therefore be beneficial to integrate into the bodies of astronauts such technologies as would allow them to function as self-sustaining systems in hostile extraterrestrial environments. “For the exogenously extended organization complex functioning as an integrated homeostatic system unconsciously,” they write, “we propose the term ‘Cyborg.’ The Cyborg deliberately incorporates exogenous components extending the self-regulatory control function of the organism in order to adapt it to new environments.”
And so the cyborg arose as a Cold War phantasm, a dreamlike intensification of American capitalism’s ideals of efficiency and self-reliance and technological mastery. One of the variously conflicting and interlocking definitions of the cyborg Donna Haraway offers in her essay “The Cyborg Manifesto” was as “the awful apocalyptic tel
os of the ‘West’s’ escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space.” It was also a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the mechanistic and militaristic vision of the human body and brain: the cyborg was the human not simply as machine, but specifically as war machine—a human body and mind in a symbiotic feedback loop with the information systems of modern warfare.
The American government has, unsurprisingly, shown a long-standing interest in the idea of merging humans with machinery for military purposes. In 1999, DARPA began awarding grants for “biohybrid” research programs, the objective of which was to create creature-machine crossbreeds. That was the year the agency created its Defense Sciences Office, and hired a former McDonald’s executive and venture capitalist named Michael Goldblatt as director. Goldblatt was convinced, as he put it in an interview, that the “next frontier was inside of our own selves,” and that human beings could be “the first species to control evolution.” As Annie Jacobsen puts it in The Pentagon’s Brain, her relentlessly approving book about DARPA, Goldblatt was “a pioneer in military-based transhumanism—the notion that man can and will alter the human condition fundamentally by augmenting humans with machines and other means.”
To Be a Machine Page 15