The Unforeseen Consequences of Technology
‘Fighting an alien robot? That was me! And it was amazing!’ boasts Susan Murphy soon after having defeated an alien robot probe in San Francisco with the help of a gelatinous blue blob and a gay fish-ape hybrid. She gleefully proceeds to enumerate all the different ways in which being a monster is an extremely appealing and rewarding status for an American girl of her age. All the while, the group of freaks that surround her—which includes a mad scientist and a perambulating insect chrysalis—marvel at the discovery of their own virtues and talent.
I would like to propose a brief reading of the computer-animated feature film from DreamWorks, Monsters vs. Aliens, as a kind of ‘alternative summary’ of Software Theory here. Monsters vs. Aliens was released in March 2009. In this film, Susan Murphy, a young woman from Modesto, California, is hit by a radioactive meteor on the day of her wedding, thus absorbing a rare substance called quantonium that mutates her into a giantess. Immediately captured by the US military and classified as a ‘monster’, she is imprisoned in a top-secret facility directed by General W. R. Monger where other ‘monsters’ are kept in custody, among whom are B.O.B. (Bicarbonate Ostylezene Benzonate, an indestructible gelatinous blue blob without a brain), Dr. Cockroach, PhD (a mad scientist with a giant cockroach’s head), the Missing Link (a twenty-thousand-year-old amphibious fish-ape hybrid), and Insectosaurus (a 350-foot grub). When an alien named Gallaxhar attacks the Earth with his gigantic robotic probes and an army of clones of himself, General Monger persuades the president of the United States to deploy the monsters as military weapons. Having accepted the mission with the promise of freedom if they succeed, the monsters manage to destroy the alien robotic probe that Gallaxhar has sent to San Francisco. During the fight Susan discovers that she possesses an unexpected strength and that she is also invulnerable to Gallaxhar’s weapons. Having been freed, Susan happily returns to Modesto—only to be rejected by her fiancée (who claims that he cannot be married to a woman who overshadows him) while, unwittingly, her monstrous friends disseminate panic in the neighbourhood. Initially sad and dispirited, Susan suddenly realizes that becoming a monster has actually enriched her life, and she fully embraces her new ‘amazing’ lifestyle and her newly formed bond with the other monsters. After a final epic fight Susan and her gang completely defeat Gallaxhar and his cloned army, and are eventually acclaimed as heroes. In the last scene of the film, they are alerted to the fact that in the surroundings of Paris a snail has fallen into a nuclear power plant and is growing into a giant due to nuclear irradiation. They then fly off on a mission to protect the Earth from the new enemy.
In the context of the overall argument of my book, what is particularly interesting about Monsters vs Aliens is that in the movie the monsters function first and foremost as a figure of the unexpected consequences of technology.[1] In fact, they all come into existence as unforeseen effects of technology: they are the unpredictable outcomes of experiments gone wrong. B.O.B. was mistakenly created by injecting a genetically modified tomato with a chemically altered ranch dressing. Dr. Cockroach ended up with an insect head and the ability to climb walls while subjecting himself to an experiment in order to gain the longevity of a cockroach, and the mad scientist is the figure of the experiment gone wrong par excellence. Insectosaurus, originally a one-inch grub, was transformed into a giant after being accidentally invested by nuclear radiation. Even the Missing Link could not have been found frozen in a lagoon and thawed out by scientists without some help from technology.[2]
However, in Monsters vs Aliens the monsters are also ‘domesticated’—or rather, they are kept under custody by the American government and later on transformed into weapons. In other words, the film seems to imply that technology needs to be controlled in order to be made useful—that is, it has to become a tool. But in order to be successfully deployed as weapons, monsters must be released from custody—that is, in order to be ‘used’, technology must be set free. In turn, once set free, technology escapes instrumentality. In fact, it is by fighting Gallaxhar that Susan discovers her unexpected physical strength. Similarly, during the final battle against the aliens Insectosaurus apparently dies, only to undergo a metamorphosis from a chrysalis into a beautiful butterfly. Ultimately, though, the monsters are still kept under control: they constitute an American military team, albeit a very special one. It is here that aliens find their place in the film narrative: a relationship which would otherwise be quite uncomplicated (humans detain and domesticate dangerous monsters) finds its third term in the aggressive threat from the outside. Aliens provide an enemy and help construct the narrative of the American fight for democracy against (alien) totalitarian regimes. Even though it occasionally makes fun of the American government (General W. R. Monger’s name is a pun on the word ‘warmonger’, while the inept president of the United States is always on the verge of launching a nuclear attack by pressing the wrong button), the film still embraces a narrative that legitimates the Unites States as the world superpower.
The point of opacity of the film is to be found at its end: in the final scene the monsters set off to Paris to fight the gigantic snail which has broken into a nuclear plant—but should the snail be understood as an alien or a monster? Since it is presented as a threat against which the monsters are supposed to fight, it must be an alien. And yet, since clearly it is an unexpected effect of technology (actually, accidental nuclear irradiation is one of the most common origin stories of superheroes and is very similar to Insectosaurus’s story), the snail must be a monster and in principle it should not be fought but rather helped out or maybe even recruited as part of the team. With a revealing lapse, the Wikipedia entry on Monsters vs. Aliens recounts how at the end of the film ‘the monsters are alerted to a monster attack near Paris and fly off to combat the new menace’ (emphasis added).[3] In Derridean terms, it could be said that the snail is the incest taboo of Monsters vs Alien.[4] In other words, the snail is the point where the instrumentality of technology undoes itself, because technology is always both a monster and an alien, an instrument and a threat, a risk and a promise. The unexpected is always implicit in technology, and the potential of technology for generating the unexpected needs to be unleashed in order for technology to function as technology. The attempt to control the unexpected consequences of technology is ultimately destined to fail—and yet it must be pursued for technology to exist. For this reason, every choice we make with regard to technology always implies an assumption of responsibility for the unforeseeable. As a deconstructive approach to software like the one I have offered in Software Theory shows, whenever one makes decisions about technology, one has to remember that technology can always generate consequences that escape predictability. Thus, to think of technology in a political sense we must first and foremost remember that technology cannot be thought from within the conceptual framework of calculability and instrumentality.
In Software Theory, I have proposed a radical rethinking of software as always entangled with the conceptual framework of instrumentality—typical of Western philosophy’s understanding of technology—and thus somewhat complicitous with it, while at the same time capable of escaping it by transgressing all the conceptual boundaries associated with instrumentality (such as hardware/software, source code/machine code, program/process, language/materiality, technology/society). For instance, I have showed how the discipline of software engineering emerged as a strategy for the industrialization of the production of software at the end of the 1960s and how it understood software as a process of material inscription that continuously opened up and reaffirmed the boundaries between ‘software’, ‘writing’, and ‘code’. Software engineering established itself as a discipline precisely through an attempt to control the constitutive fallibility of software-based technology. I have also presented the emergence of the free/open source movement in the 1990s as one of the unforeseen consequences of the software engineering of the 1970s and 1980s. Ultimately, I have argued that software engineering is characterized by the unstable definition of the instrumentality of software. In software engineering, the instrumentality of software is—as Derrida would have it—‘in deconstruction’: it is the unstable result of the process of technological exteriorization. And yet, since the undoing and redoing of instrumentality can go unnoticed, a deconstructive reading—that is, a critical and creative problematization—of software must be actively performed. This active problematization of software ultimately clarifies the significance of software—always to be thought in its singularity—for our understanding of the human and of its constitutive relationship with technology.
In the last section of Software Theory, I have taken a deconstructive approach to the theory of formal languages in order to shed light on what I have proposed to call the ‘aporetic’ nature of software. I have argued that software emerges as a self-differentiating process of material inscription and as a precarious process of linearization which continually transgresses the very conceptual categories through which it comes into existence. Open to iteration, which implies variation through repetition, software always entails unpredictable consequences—that is, unforeseeable aporetic differentiations of what Bernard Stiegler has named the ‘who/what complex’.
Every time software brings about some unexpected consequences, it is fundamental to decide whether this is a malfunction that needs to be fixed or an acceptable variation that can be integrated into the technological system, or even an unforeseen anomaly that will radically change the technological system for ever. This is the fundamental double valence of the unexpected as both failure and hope. Like Derrida’s pharmakon, technology entails poison and remedy, risk and opportunity.[5] Once again, the inseparability of these aspects means that, every time we make decisions about technology, we are taking responsibility for uncalculable risks. The only way to make politically informed decisions about technology is not to obscure such uncalculability.
In the documentary The Net (2003), director Lutz Dammbeck shows how obscuring the incalculability of technology leads to setting up an opposition between risk and control and between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ technology, and ultimately to the authoritarian resolution of every dilemma regarding technology. Questions such as ‘Should technology be ‘democratized’?’, ‘Should it be made available to everyone even when it is “dangerous”?’, ‘Who decides what is dangerous for whom?’ are then addressed by embracing either a policy of control or a deterministic, almost paranoid fear of technology, which is also possibly combined with a Luddite stance. The film explores the complex story of Ted Kaczynski, the infamous Unabomber. A former mathematician at Harvard, Kaczynski retreated to a cabin in the wilderness of Montana in 1971. In 1996, he was arrested by the FBI under the suspicion of being responsible for the attacks carried out between 1978 and 1995 by an unknown individual nicknamed the Unabomber against major airlines executives and scientists at elite universities. The film complicates the narrative regarding the Unabomber (the author of an anti-technology Manifesto, and an ultimate figure of resistance for those who oppose contemporary technology as a form of control) by situating him within the complex and contradictory web of late twentieth-century technology.
Particularly revealing is an interview with John Taylor—an ex-NASA engineer and an admirer of Norbert Wiener, the founding father of cybernetics—which shows how the idea of calculability (and the attempt to expel the unexpected from technology) was crucial for early cybernetics. Taylor recounts how ARPA (the Advanced Research Projects Agency) was set up in 1958 by the American president Eisenhower with the goal of seeking out ‘promising’ research projects—in Taylor’s words, projects that had ‘a longer term expectation associated with them’. ARPA was instituted after the launch of the Russian space probe Sputnik in 1957, which Taylor characterizes as ‘a great surprise’ for the United States. The US Department of Defense set up ARPA ‘in the hope that we would not get surprised again like the Russians surprised us’. The ambivalence of the term ‘surprise’ as both risk and promise is obvious in Taylor’s words: the best research projects are the ones which hold the ‘promise’ of ‘good surprises’, which will in turn prevent the enemy from surprising us in a ‘bad’ way. ARPA was therefore meant to ‘domesticate’ the potential of technology to surprise us, that is its capacity for generating the unexpected, by subjecting ‘promising’ projects to control. Taylor ostensibly embraces such a philosophy of control. When, during the interview, Dammbeck mentions the Unabomber, a horrified look crosses Taylor’s face and, as many of his colleagues interviewed in the film do, he refuses to speak about Kaczynski, dismissing him as a terrorist and even comparing the Unabomber’s Manifesto to Hitler’s Mein Kampf. When Dammbeck suggests that some people such as the Unabomber might be scared by technology and asks Taylor what he is scared of, he answers ‘I am scared of Al-Qaeda . . . I am scared of cancer. But if we could find a cure for cancer, we wouldn’t be afraid.’ According to Taylor, fear is a matter of ignorance, of ‘not knowing’. By possessing more knowledge—he adds with a curious phrasing—we could ‘prohibit cancer’. Taylor’s revealing formulation is the ultimate expression of a desire for the technological control over nature and for the complete calculability of the future.
The idea of cybernetics as the science of control takes up a new meaning here—one related to prediction, calculation, foreseeability—if one considers, as Dammbeck does, that one of the participants in the Macy Conferences (which instituted cybernetics as a discipline between 1946 and 1953), the psychologist Kurt Lewin, conceived a project for programming humans to give them an ‘anti-authoritarian personality’, thus obstructing the possibility of fascism forever. Oblivious to the fact that this would be the ultimate authoritarian gesture, Lewin suggested that cybernetics could control and remap people’s subconscious in order to immunize people against totalitarianism and to make authoritarian systems impossible. For him, anti-authoritarianism was first and foremost a matter of calculation, as the control of the political future of humanity.[6] Ironically, drawing on Lewin’s project, Henry A. Murray, one of the fathers of today’s assessment centres, devised a series of tests which were supposed to highlight concealed psychological tendencies by penetrating consciousness with non-surgical means—basically LSD and other drugs. Such tests were carried out by the CIA in the late 1960s at Harvard on a group of talented young male students, among whom was Ted Kaczynski. Whether those experiments led Kaczynski to the fear of occult forms of mind control, and ultimately resulted in his paranoid terror of technology is a possibility that the film leaves open. Importantly, however, Dammbeck’s film makes a suggestion that control and uncalculability, risk and opportunity, are constitutive of technology. As Dammbeck himself states, the key to Kaczynski’s tragedy is the fact that he is ‘part of a system from which there is no escape’. He does not understand that, even isolated in a forest cabin, one is still part of the technological system (a cabin is a form of technology, after all), and that there is no ‘outside’ of technology.
Once again I want to emphasize here that in order to make responsible decisions about technology, one must be aware that technology (as well as the conceptual system on which it is based) can only be problematized from within.[7] In fact, the problem I started from, or the question that, following Stiegler, I emphasized in the Introduction to Software Theory—namely, that we need to make decisions about a technology which is always somehow opaque—requires precisely such an active problematization of technology. One must acknowledge that software is always both conceptualized according to a metaphysical framework and capable of escaping it, that it is instrumental and generative of unforeseen consequences, that it is both a risk and an opportunity. Such a problematization of technology is a creative, productive, and politically meaningful process. By opening new possibilities and foreclosing others, our decisions about technology also affect our future. Thus, thinking politics with technology becomes part of the process of the reinvention of the political in our technicized and globalized world.
Judith Halberstam has proposed a ‘queer’ archive of animated features where the term ‘queer’ means that such features incorporate a politically subversive narrative cleverly disguised in a popular media form aimed at children (cf. Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure [Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011]). For instance, according to Halberstam, the CGI animated film of 2003, Finding Nemo, depicts the title character—a motherless fish with a disabled fin—as a ‘disabled hero’ and links the struggle of the rejected individual to larger struggles of the dispossessed (Nemo leads a fish rebellion against the fishermen). Halberstam proposes the term ‘Pixarvolt’ to indicate movies depending upon Pixar technologies of animation and foregrounding the themes of revolution and transformation. For Halberstam, the Pixarvolt films use the individual character as a gateway to stories of collective action, anticapitalist critique, and alternative imaginings of community and responsibility. In a sense, it could be said that the monsters in Monsters vs Aliens yield themselves to a queer reading—actually, queer references seem to have become quite commonplace in animated features. For instance, the Missing Link is a parody of excessive masculinity (notwithstanding his machismo and his gung-ho attitude to fight, he is comically out of shape) and has a gay bond with Insectosaurus; the monsters perform part of their first battle against Gallaxhar on a stolen San Francisco bus directed to the Castro; and, even more tellingly, the transformation of Susan into a monster frees her from all heterosexual social expectations and places her in a queer alliance within other social outcasts. Nevertheless, it is debatable whether the narrative of the film can be read as subversive, since the monsters’ community seems not so much to constitute an alternative to the mainstream society as a weapon in the hands of the American government—although one could argue that such subversive narratives are at their most intriguing when they are apparently neutralized. As I will show in a moment, the neutralization of the monsters in Monsters vs. Aliens is in fact apparent, but to understand this point the monsters must be viewed in their relationship with technology.
Ostensibly the film here taps into the popular tradition of superheroes that has dominated American comic books for decades and has subsequently crossed over into other media. The so-called ‘origin stories’ associated with superheroes, which explain the circumstances by which the characters acquired their exceptional abilities, often involve experiments gone wrong. For instance, Spider Man (Peter Parker) got bitten by a radioactive spider during a science demonstration at school when he was a teenager, while the Fantastic Four (Reed Richards, Sue and Johnny Storm, and Ben Grimm) were accidentally exposed to cosmic rays during a space mission (Richard Reynolds, Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology [Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994]). In other words, it can be said that superheroes themselves embody unexpected consequences of technology, which have nevertheless been reframed into a narrative of fight against evil.
“Monsters vs Aliens,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsters_vs_Aliens.
In Of Grammatology, Derrida famously shows how the incest taboo is the unthought of structural anthropology—that is, a concept that cannot be thought within the conceptual system of the discipline because it escapes its basic opposition between nature and culture (cf. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976]).
Jacques Derrida, Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981).
This is just one of the many examples of how the concept of the ‘system’ of cybernetics was transferred to the social and political realm quite uncritically, starting from the 1950s. In the BBC documentary The Trap (2007), director Adam Curtis has shown how the idea of freedom that characterizes today’s neoliberal democracies is a very limited one, mainly founded on the idea of the individual as a free agent always pursuing its own self-interest. This idea is very much based on game theory and other theories developed during the Cold War period, which had a strategic importance in determining the so-called ‘balance of terror’ (in which basically the enemy avoids attacking for fear of being destroyed). Driven by the necessity of anticipating Soviet moves, John F. Nash’s games were based on the belief that, in every society, stability could be created through distrust. Nash’s equations work only if individuals are presumed to be selfish and suspicious of one another. If they start to cooperate, however, then the system becomes unpredictable. In the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma, it is selfishness that leads to safety. This game shows that the rational move is always to betray the other. This was the logic of the Cold War (that is, one cannot trust the other not to cheat)—but Nash turned this assumption into a theory of society. In his paranoid view of the lonely human being in a hostile society, the price of freedom is distrust. Curtis’s fascinating documentary shows how Nash’s ideas spread to fields that had nothing to do with nuclear strategy, from R. D. Laing’s psychiatric thought to George Buchanan’s theories of ‘public choice’ which assisted Margaret Thatcher’s dismantling of the welfare state.
This is precisely what deconstruction allows us to do—stepping out of a conceptual system by continuing to use its concepts while at the same time demonstrating their limitations.