To Be a Machine

by Mark O'Connell

  The agency’s funded programs began producing various nightmarish chimeras: rats whose movements could be controlled from laptops via electrodes implanted in their medial forebrains, hawk moths with semiconductors implanted at pupal stage so that the technology became part of their adult development. By getting in on the ground floor of the insect’s metamorphic tissue development, Jacobsen writes, the scientists “were able to create a steerable cyborg, part insect, part machine.” (Wiener’s coinage “cybernetics” arose initially from the Greek word kubernan, meaning “to steer.”)

  As DSO director, Goldblatt was more or less frank about the aspiration to create human-machine hybrids, super-soldiers who would be built to withstand and thrive in the extreme conditions of combat. In a statement to his program managers not long after DARPA hired him, Goldblatt insisted that “soldiers having no physical, physiological, or cognitive limitation will be key to survival and operational dominance in the future.” Areas of experimentation included pain vaccines, chemical compounds through which injured soldiers could go into a kind of “suspended animation” until medical aid arrived, and a “Continually Assisted Performance” program, which sought to create a “24/7 soldier” who would gain the edge on enemy combatants through never needing to sleep.

  Brain-machine interfaces became a major area of interest for DARPA around the turn of the century, and remain a significant target of funding. The idea is to allow soldiers to communicate and control purely by thought. “Imagine a time,” as the DSO’s Eric Eisenstadt put it, “when the human brain has its own wireless modem so that instead of acting on thoughts, warfighters have thoughts that act.”

  All of this seemed to further pierce the veneer of cheerful humanitarianism that had surrounded the Robotics Challenge in Pomona. DARPA’s interest in technology was, it seemed clear, always an interest in the methodology of efficient violence.

  —

  The grinder movement is characterized by both an internalization and a subversion of this cybernetic ideal. Grinders want the same things as DARPA, but for individualistic reasons; the aim, in this sense, is a kind of personalized military-industrial complex. “The main trouble with cyborgs,” as Haraway puts it, “is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often extremely unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.”

  There is a strong element of performance to the grinder movement; Tim’s implanting of a gigantic biometric measuring device in his arm, to take an unignorably bulging example, is as much a provocative gesture as anything else. In this sense, one obvious forebear of the movement is the Australian performance artist Stelarc, whose work since the 1970s has been increasingly extreme in its obliteration of the boundaries between technology and flesh. For his piece Ping Body, he attached electrodes to his muscles, which allowed his body movements to be controlled by remote users over the Internet. Ear on Arm, a project he began in 2006, involved the use of cell cultivation and surgical construction to create a prosthetic ear on his left forearm, with the intention of connecting it to the Internet so that it could be employed as a “remote listening device” for people in distant locations. Stelarc’s whole artistic project is an explicitly transhumanist one: a series of provocative gestures intended to represent the body as a technology in need of updating for the information age. As he put it in a statement that directly echoed the original invocation of the cyborg by Clynes and Kline: “It is time to question whether a bipedal, breathing body with binocular vision and a 1400cc brain is an adequate biological form. It cannot cope with the quantity, complexity and quality of information it has accumulated; it is intimidated by the precision, speed and power of technology and it is biologically ill-equipped to cope with its new extraterrestrial environment.” The body, for Stelarc—the poor, bare, forked animal that we are—is an obsolete technology. Flesh is a dead format.

  What would it mean to think of yourself—you, personally—as a cyborg? In a certain sense, the idea of the cyborg is no more or less than a particular way of thinking about the human, a peculiarly modern picture of a person as a mechanism for the processing of information. Do you wear glasses? Do you wear orthotics in your shoes? Do you have a pacemaker fitted in your heart? Do you get a strange phantom limb sensation when you are for some reason denied access to your smartphone, when your battery’s dead or your screen is smashed or you left the thing in your other jacket, and so you can’t access some or other piece of crucial information, or you can’t navigate via GPS, can’t triangulate your location using a satellite orbiting the Earth? And are you therefore lost? Does that lostness, that loss, suggest a breakdown in the exogenously extended organization complex of your body and its supplementary technologies, a rupture in the integrated homeostatic system of yourself? If a cyborg is a human body augmented and extended by technology, is this not what we basically are anyway? Are we not, as they say in the philosophy racket, always already cyborgs? These aren’t rhetorical questions. I’m genuinely asking here.

  On my second day in Pittsburgh, I found myself with an afternoon to kill before taking a cab out to Tim’s house to meet the grinders again. So I left my hotel downtown and walked toward the river, following on the screen of my phone the pulsing blue circle representing the location of my body in space as it inched downward through the empty grid of streets. In the basement of a museum dedicated to the work of one of the city’s most famous citizens, Andy Warhol, I saw a poster bearing a monochrome image of the artist crouched over a silkscreen mesh, beneath which was printed a quotation: “The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine.”

  Later, as I lingered in the gift shop—which, more than ordinarily, in this particular museum seemed like the point of the place—I plucked from a shelf a paperback edition of the screenplay for the film I Shot Andy Warhol, in which Lili Taylor plays Valerie Solanas, the writer and former sex worker who attempted to murder Warhol in 1968. In the back of the book, the full text of Solanas’s compellingly insane and disturbingly insightful SCUM Manifesto was reproduced. Flicking through it, I came across the following lines: “To call a man an animal is to flatter him; he’s a machine, a walking dildo.”

  I replaced the book on the shelf and, neither flattered nor wounded, walked out of the museum and back across the river.

  —

  “People just routinely give themselves too much credit,” Tim said.

  The blades of a ceiling fan turned slowly above our heads, and through the screen door in Tim’s kitchen the evening trill of cicadas could be heard, the clicking and whirring of countless machines connecting to the system of the night.

  He said: “If you look at the evolution of the brain, the logic centers, they were growing at the same time as the creative centers were expanding. And that creates this really potent illusion that you’re not just a bag of chemicals reacting to shit. Which is what you are.”

  Tim was leaning with his back to the sink over by the kitchen window, and on the wall behind his head were stenciled, in ornate script, the words “Live well, Love much, Laugh often.” This sentiment sat oddly with its surroundings, and with what was under discussion among the bags of chemicals in the room. This flourish of interior decor, I surmised, was the work of Danielle, Tim’s cheerfully reserved girlfriend, a Web developer who worked for the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust. Danielle did not herself have any special transhuman aspirations, but was open to the idea of maybe getting an implant at some point.

  “Maybe down around here,” she said, indicating her hip, “where it wouldn’t be so visible.”

  Having lived with Tim for eight years now, she’d accommodated herself to the strangeness of his work and his lifestyle, to the extremity of his futurist vision. She’d been with him when he first decided he wanted to be a cyborg, when he announced to her that, as soon as such a procedure became available, he was planning to have his arm amputated and replaced by a technologically
superior prosthesis.

  They were in the car when he came out with it: once they started making prostheses that were superior to his natural limbs, he said, he would have no sentimental aversion to having those limbs removed and replaced with the more advanced technology. She was taken aback, even horrified at first, but she got used to the idea.

  “If it makes him happy, I’m happy,” she said. “It’s whatever.”

  “People have this magic-in-the-meat mentality,” said Tim. “People have this idea that because something is natural to our bodies, it’s therefore somehow more real, more authentic.”

  This attitude, of which Danielle had cured herself over time, was, he insisted, irrational and sentimental. Every seven years, he said, our bodies were entirely replaced; and so he was, at the cellular level, not the person who had met Danielle eight years ago, and in another eight years he would be an entirely different person again: a different body, a different thing. Whether they were replaced by “natural” means, by the death and regeneration of cells, or by bionic prostheses, the arms with which Tim now embraced Danielle would no longer exist eight years from now.

  I thought of Randal Koene, and of the idea that the physical forms we inhabited, the substrates of our existence, were purely contingent. I thought of Nate Soares saying there was “nothing special about carbon.” I had no idea whether it was true or not, this idea that every cell in our bodies was replaced on a seven-year cycle, but if it was true, it seemed like it would be a potential propaganda victory for transhumanism, for substrate independence, for the Ship of Theseus view of whole brain emulation. It was a vertiginous thought: that the person who had first read about transhumanism in Dublin ten years ago had no material connection to the person now sitting in a living room in Pittsburgh talking to a transhumanist about how all the cells of the body were replaced on a seven-year cycle—because if there was no such material connection, how could either of those people be me, my “self”? And what was a “self” anyway? What was a person? Wasn’t a person just a bunch of atoms, and wasn’t an atom mostly emptiness—just a shell, containing a single nucleus floating in nothing? Wasn’t a person therefore more or less a vacancy? I had begun questioning whether I could even be meaningfully said to exist when one of Tim’s dogs wandered in from the back porch and took a frank and almost officious interest in my crotch; this I received as a sign that I did, in fact, exist—or a sign, at least, that I should move on to some other topic.*

  I wanted to see some implants, and so Tim and Marlo took me down to the basement to look at what they were working on. The major project right now was a technology called Northstar, which Marlo described as his “baby.” The current iteration was capable of detecting magnetic north, and lit up in response with red LEDs under the skin. A newer version, which Marlo was in the process of building, would incorporate gesture recognition, so that the implanted customer would be able to open their car door with, say, a circular motion of the palm, or start the engine by making a cruciform blessing in the air.

  Neither Tim nor Marlo disagreed with my suggestion that, as impressively provocative as this kind of thing might be, it didn’t exactly amount to a revolutionary intervention into the human condition. The idea of being able to unlock a car door with a gesture was, in itself, not much more than a gesture—a signaling toward some larger and more profound transformation. (It was also, if anything, less convenient than just using your car keys, given that using your car keys didn’t involve unlicensed surgery.) But this, they insisted, was just the beginning. There was almost no limit to what you could achieve if you approached humanity as an engineering problem. And biology was the fundamental difficulty; the nature of the problem was nature itself.

  “We just shouldn’t be in the biology game anymore,” said Tim. “It’s just not the right game for us, as a species. It requires too much wanton cruelty.”

  He was sitting cross-legged and barefoot on an office chair, taking hits from a modified vapebox, his face now and then obscured by the great mushroom clouds of caramel-scented mist that emanated from his open mouth.

  “People think I’m this guy who really despises nature,” he said, the lenses of his spectacles glinting in the basement’s halogen glow. “But that’s not true.”

  Marlo, who was tinkering with some wired-up circuitry over on the far side of the room, swiveled a quarter turn in his ergonomic chair. “To be fair, mate,” he said, “you do kind of come across as a guy who despises nature.”

  “I don’t despise it,” said Tim, snickering indulgently. “I just point out its limitations. People want to stay being the monkeys they are. They don’t like to acknowledge that their brains aren’t giving them the full picture, aren’t allowing them to make rational choices. They think they’re in control, but they’re not.”

  Tim knew what it meant to not be in control. He knew what it meant to experience himself as a desiring-machine, a conductor in a circuitry of need and satisfaction. When he left high school he joined the army. This was before 9/11, and the great boom in the American war industry that followed, and so he was never deployed overseas. When he left the military, he started drinking heavily, and throughout his twenties he was a mess, he told me, a helpless subject of implacable systems within and without. He would awake in the morning and tell himself he wasn’t going to drink that day—and he would mean it, he said, but the craving would assert itself, the physical spasms of desire, and he would have little choice but to follow the orders of the chemicals in his brain. The act of drinking was never the result so much of a decision as of a yielding to a force much greater than his own resolve, and he would never know what part of the equation was really him: the need or the resistance; the voice in his head insisting that there could be no drinking today, or the convulsions in his body insisting that there must.

  He was a bad drunk: volatile, mean, obliviously driven by rage and self-contempt. His teenage years in the Pittsburgh punk scene, his years as a soldier: all this contributed to what he described as his flair for fistfighting. It was, he acknowledged, a huge character flaw, but it felt glorious to defeat another guy with his bare hands. Even now, he said, every fight he didn’t get into was one he had to remember, another one he had to regret.

  One day, he told me, he woke up in the hospital, and learned that he had tried to kill himself, and he had no recollection of what had happened. He literally did not know what he was doing. Somewhere along the way, he’d become the father of two young kids, and his relationship with their mother had turned sour and cold and venomous. He was not in control of himself.

  After the suicide attempt, after the hospital, he went into AA, and gave up entirely the illusion of free will. He was an atheist, but he relinquished all that he was, as required, to the Higher Power, in which nebulous entity he forced himself to believe, though he never did believe in that belief. And this system worked, this mechanism: he hadn’t had a drink in seven years.

  When Tim talked about the body, when he spoke of humans as monkeys, or as deterministic mechanisms, he spoke in general terms, but it also seemed clear to me that he was speaking specifically about himself, about his addiction and his overcoming of it. Not being an addict anymore was the start of a journey that would end, somewhere down the line, in not being a human anymore, in no longer being subject to those animal urges and frailties.

  In January of 2011, he came across a talk on the Internet by a young Englishwoman who called herself Lepht Anonym. The talk was called “Cybernetics for the Masses,” and she spoke about her DIY experiments in extending her own senses, inserting magnets and other devices beneath her skin. Unable to secure the assistance of an actual medical professional, she’d performed these procedures on herself in her own home, sterilizing her equipment—vegetable peelers, scalpels, needles—with vodka. She’d consulted some introductory anatomy textbooks to make sure she didn’t damage any major nerves or blood vessels, and gone to work on hacking her body, on becoming a machine.

  “Lepht was kind
of crazy,” said Tim, “but she was also fucking badass. I really admired her.”

  “She was a hard-core hacker,” agreed Marlo.

  “To the fucking bone,” said Tim. “So when I saw that shit, it was like, Fuck, man, the revolution’s started without me.”

  On an online forum called biohack.me, Tim got to know a Pittsburgh-based engineer named Shawn Sarver, and together they decided to start designing and building their own cyborg technologies. Shawn was also ex-military; he’d enlisted in the air force after 9/11, and had done three tours of duty in Iraq between 2003 and 2005, specializing, as an avionic technician, in the recovery of materials from shot-down planes. To look at the guy, you wouldn’t necessarily peg him as a former serviceman: the day I met him, in Tim’s basement, he was wearing a tweed sport jacket with velvet elbow patches, his extravagant blond mustache waxed at either end into an opulent coil, and he looked like nothing so much as a villainous dandy from a Victorian children’s book. When he wasn’t working on the cyborg future, Shawn was a barber in Pittsburgh. (For years now, he had been working his way through what he called “an ancient bucket list of occupations,” on which he had so far ticked off such diverse fields as the military, firefighting, electrical engineering, and gentleman’s grooming.)

  Tim and Shawn talked about how basic army training involves a violent obliteration of your idea of yourself as an individual, and of how, in a different way, a breaking down of the personality, a letting go of the self, is required of you in AA. I suggested that all of this seemed to inform Tim’s view of what it meant or did not mean to be a person, his radical and literal remaking of himself. He saw what I meant, but despite his rhetoric about humans as predictable and deterministic mechanisms seemed reluctant to accept such a deterministic interpretation of his own life.

  —

  It was Friday night, and the group had just finished its weekly meeting, where everyone—including team members across the country and one or two living abroad—had sat around in Tim’s living room and talked about what they’d been working on. A few of us were standing out on Tim’s back porch, enjoying the view of the abandoned motel, drinking bottles of some kind of horrible berry-infused beer.