From Frontier to Borderland
Like many emerging technologies, virtual reality calls for metaphor.1 The “frontier” and “colonization” have proven to be some of the most durable. The frontier metaphor appeared early in cyberpunk fiction with William Gibson’s novel, Neuromancer (1984), in which the protagonist Case is identified as a “console cowboy” (28). The frontier metaphor also found its way into the writings of virtual reality developers such as Thomas A. Furness III, who stated, “As pioneers, we are obligated to pursue the development of virtual interface technologies in a systematic way and leave a technology base and tools as a legacy for others to build upon” (qtd. in Chesher).2 A founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, John Perry Barlow, turned to an earlier iconic figure: “Columbus was probably the last person to behold so much usable and unclaimed real estate (or unreal estate) as these cybernauts have discovered.” The metaphors of the frontier and colonization are attempts to evoke the ingenuity, individualism, and freedom needed for the long project of virtual reality development. They do so by ignoring the destruction and conquest of European and American colonialism.
As a corrective to this techno-utopianism, a variety of writers in the mid-1990s expanded the metaphors beyond the celebration of computer colonialism. For example, Ziauddin Sardar describes how the military was central to the development of both virtual reality technology and the frontier (737).3 In fact, the military remains one of the most significant users of virtual reality technology in such things as multiuser combat training programs (Beardsley). Sardar also notes that “colonization would not be complete without the projection of Western man’s repressed sexuality and spiritual yearning on to the ’new continent’” (747). This aspect of the metaphor is borne out by the popularity of topics such as virtual sex in films about virtual reality and in cyberculture magazines such as Mondo 2000 (Rucker, Sirius, and Mu). These expanded metaphors of the frontier and colonization gain a new purpose—they show that virtual reality technology is itself a medium used in the exploitation of labor and racial subjugation of people—in Anibal Quijanjo’s terms, the coloniality of virtual reality. The three works discussed in this essay—Guillermo Lavin’s short story, “Reaching the Shore” (1994); Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s live TV broadcast, “Naftaztec: Pirate Cyber-TV for A.D. 2000” (1994); and Alex Rivera’s film, Sleep Dealer (2008)—are critical of the coloniality of virtual reality and move toward updating the metaphors. Rather than looking back to a past built on the destruction of other cultures, they turn to the present and show what became of the American frontier once it was settled—the Mexican-U.S. border, the borderlands that developed there, and the migration systems that emerged. They show that virtual reality is a rich palette that can be used to depict migration, race, and labor. They turn to the borderland instead of the frontier as the new geographic center of virtual reality. While the frontier and the borderland are similar terms, both indicating a boundary, the key difference for this essay is that the frontier is expansionist oriented, while the borderland is hybridizing.
The Illusions of Virtual Reality
In his short story “Reaching the Shore,” Mexican science fiction writer Guillermo Lavin depicts the production side of virtual reality technology. This quotidian story is set in the border town of Reynosa, where eight-year-old José Paul lives with his family. José Paul’s father, Fragoso, works at Simpson Brothers Inc., the Leisure Time Company, a maquiladora (manufacturing operation on the Mexican-U.S. border) that produces virtual reality biochips. When inserted into the head, these chips make one’s dreams a reality. Believing in the promise that technology offers for economic development, Fragoso volunteered to be a tester at the factory. Fragoso becomes addicted, however, and instead of buying José Paul the bike he wants for Christmas buys a cheap imported black market biochip. José Paul decides to steal a biochip, enabling him to get his bike, if only in virtual reality. The story ends with José Paul pondering whether he should give the biochip away or continue to use it, like his father.
This story creatively correlates the experience of virtual reality technology with a variety of phenomena that resemble virtual reality. The common logic of these phenomena is that they are colorful and pleasurable, promising something great, yet are fleeting and over time destructive. Virtual reality technology is simply the newest form of this type of experience. The male gaze, for example, is one prominent virtual reality phenomenon. José Paul is accompanying the men leaving work at the end of the day when a woman passes by: “He followed the men’s gaze and his eyes glided along the undulating curve of her smooth hips and the dark reflection of legs encased in pants that seemed fused to them. The color of the clothes changed constantly, like a kaleidoscope, and he liked that. A gust of cold wind raised a dust cloud; it crystallized in the men’s eyes and compelled them to move on” (226). The reality behind the colorful illusion is signaled by the obscuring of vision by the noncolorful dust: this woman is more than a colorful spectacle; she is someone’s family member. This connection becomes clear when the visual description of this woman parallels the description of José Paul’s sister, Clementina, arriving home with a young man and wearing “pants tight, cheeks aflame” (230). The commonality of these two descriptions is that color is brought so close to the body that the illusion of the person is total. Illusions can just as easily be attached to nonhuman objects of desire, as when José Paul takes his bike ride: “Thousands of summer butterflies molded their colors onto the bike and the boy’s clothes, he felt them like rain, like a new gift from heaven” (234).
That José Paul mimics the male gaze points to the legacy of these virtual reality phenomena. Clearly inspired by his father’s decision to volunteer for the company, José Paul volunteered to be the first student in his class to receive a bioport, which he uses for schoolwork. But even though these illusory experiences are learned, they are solitary experiences. The scene in which José Paul watches fireworks gives a lyrical description of the arc of the experience: “It was time for the fireworks. The time when people came out of their houses and hugged each other and contemplated the gift that the municipal government gave the city in the form of fleeting, dazzling signs, simulated stars, ringlets of burning colors.… Alone, with his arms open wide, he bathed in the halos of illusory fire, until reality reimposed itself with a shout and the hiss of steam that escaped from the pot of tamales someone had uncovered” (230). The community holds the belief that these fireworks are a positive contribution, whereas the city is in fact using its limited resources on brief spectacles, not long-term improvements. These illusions isolate those who have them, and they are dangerous. Since the virtual reality biochips transform one’s imagination into reality, the experience can be of a wonderful dream come true—or a nightmare come true. The reality of virtual reality is found in the eyes: for example, one evening, after Fragoso uses the biochip, José Paul observes that “tiny red veins had been installed in his father’s eyes and that his eyelids formed little dark bags” (230). Later, Fragoso runs “from the bedroom with his eyes popping out of their sockets, bawling like a steer in the slaughterhouse” (232).
This cluster of virtual reality phenomena coalesces at the Mexican-U.S. border, the dangerous point of contact where, as Gloria Anzaldua writes, “the Third World grates against the first and bleeds” (25). In the story’s final scene, after stealing the biochip, José Paul goes on his virtual bike ride: “He could journey far beyond the Rio Bravo, he could leave Reynosa and travel along the riverbanks, along the toll road and the forgotten paths and across bridges. And no sooner had he so decided than he was on his way, racing along a footpath, traveling faster than the greenish current flowing at his side” (234). Virtual reality enables him finally to cross the border, headed for the great spectacle of the United States. Like the dust that crystallizes in the men’s eyes as they gaze at the woman, José Paul had earlier seen the reality of the border in the once lively river that separates Mexico and the United States: “The Rio Bravo: a thin thread the color of dirt, as if coffee grounds ran in its great bed” (228). This dystopian detail of the river drying up allegorically points to a deterioration in the relationship between Mexico and the United States. The reality is that these border factories provide little lasting benefit to the community. Instead, they direct the gaze across the border, creating desires for products that the residents of the town cannot afford while providing for the leisure of those living in the United States.
Ethical responsibility for these effects of virtual reality technology is spread evenly in the story. By correlating virtual reality technology with a variety of other virtual reality phenomena, Lavin seems to be pointing to our deeply ingrained desire for dangerous illusions—a universal human problem. But the very specific economic disparity between the United States and Mexico brings the maquiladoras to town. As a microcosm of this problem, Fragoso freely chooses to volunteer for the job of testing chips, but the company does not help him once he is addicted. The title of the story indicates that the responsibility to fix this situation ultimately falls on the individual. “Reaching the Shore” refers to a line in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) that appears as an epigraph to Lavin’s story: “Don’t ask for guarantees. And don’t look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were heading for shore” (224). The self-reliance recommended in the quote gains some strength since the institutions (factory, school, government) depicted in the story do not in fact give much help to José Paul and his family. But as the quote makes clear, reaching the shore is not guaranteed. When José Paul’s mother calls him out of his bike-riding dream, he repeats, “I really have to think it over.… I’ll have to think it over” (234). The statement indicates some level of awareness of the problem but remains ambiguous.
The Chicano Virtual Reality Machine
Like José Paul, performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena has what he calls a “paradoxical, contradictory relationship with digital technology,” attracted to it yet aware of its dangers (“Chicano”). Virtual reality technology in particular becomes his medium for expressing this contradictory relationship. On 22 November 1994 (Thanksgiving Day), Gomez-Pena and Roberto Sifuentes appeared in a live TV broadcast in which they acted as if they had taken over a television station. This performance, “Naftaztec: Pirate Cyber-TV for A.D. 2000,” was available to 3.5 million cable viewers, since the two men had convinced more than four hundred program directors to air the show under another listing. Gomez-Pena took on the character of El Naftazteca, while Sifuentes was Cyber-Vato. The performance was a collage of monologues by Naftazteca, video clips from past performances by Gomez-Pena, and live interactions with callers. A centerpiece of the show was a fictional technology, Technopal 2000 (combining the words technology and nopal, a Mexican cactus), also known as the Chicano virtual reality machine.4
Naftazteca lays out the problem: “The U.S. suffers from a severe case of amnesia. In its obsessive quest to construct the future, it tends to forget or erase the past. Fortunately, the so-called disenfranchised groups who don’t feel part of this national project have been meticulously documenting their histories.” The Technopal 2000 enables such documentation: “With this new system, called Technopal 2000, I can turn my memories into video images, ipso facto, meaning that I can retrieve any episode of my life, any performance I was ever involved in, any persona or hidden self that exists within me, or any historical event involving my family and my raza—the Chicano/ Mexicano communities in the U.S…. I can edit these memories on the spot and turn them into video footage, like so.” The Technopal 2000 enables video documents to be inserted into the mainstream media system, constructing a different future: “Our video memories will soon also be yours,” declares Naftazteca. The functioning of the Technopal 2000 is also a metaphor for the process of the performance, since it describes the show itself—that is, the selection, editing, and presentation of video clips from previous performances and family events. The Technopal 2000 is a tool for the creation of political art. The artistic-political vision is expressed by the design of the virtual reality equipment used in the show. Naftazteca does not use actual virtual reality equipment but takes traditional virtual reality equipment and modifies it using a mixture of Mexican and Chicano icons, including ethnic stereotypes and low technology.
There are two principal scenes in which the performers use the Chicano virtual reality machine. The first scene involves the use of the beta version, a virtual reality sombrero that references the type of virtual reality equipment tested by Ivan Sutherland in 1966 that included an enormous head-mounted display (Rheingold 105). Prefacing his use of the sombrero, Naftazteca says, “Immigrants are faced with a hairy predicament. Either we immerse ourselves in a nostalgia for a homeland that no longer exists, or we embrace our present condition as public enemies, as unwanted minorities, as painful as it may be, and become politicized. To choose the road of nostalgia is of course more romantic. But it can also be very, very, very dangerous.” As the scene progresses, Naftazteca puts on the virtual reality sombrero, while Cyber-Vato acts as his virtual reality guide. Cyber-Vato performs as a member of the dominant group with control of the media. He numerates various political and cultural problems that worry Naftazteca and then reminds him that he is “not responsible” for these problems. He invites Naftazteca to go back to his first memories in Mexico. As Cyber-Vato begins to count down from ten, Naftazteca reflects, “La nostalgia, le nostalgie. It protects me against the gringos, la migra, the art world.” He begins to remember aspects of his home in Mexico City and increasingly uses Spanish. Cyber-Vato admonishes, “Please, can you remember in English, in English,” indicating precisely who this technology is meant to serve.
Cyber-Vato uses a New Age-type voice in his performance, referencing the early proponents of virtual reality, who were more concerned about the mind-altering experiences possible in virtual reality than the political possibilities. This New Age mentality expresses the danger of that arises if immigrant nostalgia ignores the political. Naftazteca affirms that nostalgia is attractive and that it gives a sense of comfort to migrants in a strange world. He engages in some nostalgia after using the virtual reality machine by showing a video clip from his family, praising their influence on his performance art. He does not reject nostalgia but rather moves on from it to more contemporary political issues such as the passage California’s Proposition 187, which barred state agencies from assisting undocumented immigrants.
In the second scene involving virtual reality equipment, Naftazteca and Cyber-Vato switch roles, with Naftazteca directing the virtual reality experience. Cyber-Vato puts on the alpha version of the Chicano virtual reality machine, a virtual reality bandana that includes a rope tied in a noose around his neck and a glove, referencing the virtual reality glove created by Thomas Zimmerman in 1982 (Rheingold 159). Naftazteca guides Cyber-Vato through three programs. In the first two programs, Cyber-Vato initially has a positive impression of the scenario, but it then turns nightmarish. First, Cyber-Vato is sitting in a car with a guy who seems cool; however, it turns out that Cyber-Vato is wearing handcuffs, and the other man is a cop who beats him. When Cyber-Vato wants out, Naftazteca ironically replies, “Man, don’t worry. It’s just virtual reality.” In the second program, “Borderscape 2000,” Cyber-Vato is in the Southwest desert, where the beautiful scene causes him to exclaim, “It’s gorgeous, man! And I feel happy too, real happy.” He sees what appears to be an eagle in the sky but then realizes that it is a border patrol helicopter and that it is chasing his uncle. Naftazteca repeats, “Tranquilo, Carnal, it’s just virtual reality.” Of course, for a vato (guy or dude), these experiences are not just virtual reality.
These programs exhibit the false promise of the utopian vision of virtual reality—that virtual reality and the Internet were utopian spaces, unblemished by race. Virtual reality proponent Jaron Lanier writes, “Virtual Reality is the ultimate lack of class or race distinctions or any other form of pretense since all form is variable” (Heilbrun 117). Gomez-Pena reports that this idea filtered down into the art world: “The utopian rhetoric surrounding digital technologies, especially the rhetoric coming out of California, reminded Roberto and me of a sanitized version of the pioneer and frontier mentality of the Old West. When we began to dialogue with U.S. artists working with new technologies, we were perplexed by the fact that these artists, when referring to ‘cyberspace’ or ’the Net,’ meant a politically neutral/raceless/genderless and classless territory that gave us all ‘equal access’ and unlimited possibilities for participation, interaction, and belonging” (“Chicano”). Not only is racism intertwined with who has access to advanced technology, but as Thomas Foster describes, “racialized modes of perception are inevitably imported to cyberspace, and racial fantasies are restaged there” (62). Proponents of virtual reality went further in their estimation of virtual reality, claiming that it had the potential to reduce racism by putting a user in the shoes of someone from another race, thereby causing the user to become more empathetic and compassionate. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, for example, imagine that virtual reality technology might allow someone to experience what it is like to be an immigrant chased by border patrol or a civil rights demonstrator beaten by police (166). Gomez-Pena satirizes this kind of ethnic training, describing the Chicano virtual reality bandana as allowing Anglo “users to vicariously experience racism” (“Chicano”). For Cyber-Vato, these experiences are too close to home and traumatic, so empathy is not what Cyber-Vato needs to learn. Virtual reality for ethnic training is constructed by multicultural society, not the immigrant or civil rights protester. These two virtual reality programs enabled Anglo viewers to experience the image of what happens when Latinos do not choose the program and have little control over the media that represents them.
In the third program, Naftazteca takes a step in the direction of showing what happens when Latinos control the media that represents them. Naftazteca narrates a scene in which Cyber-Vato is to take on the role of gardener for former California Republican governor Pete Wilson (1991–99), a supporter of Proposition 187 who was later revealed to have hired an undocumented worker as a housekeeper. Cyber-Vato confronts Wilson about murdering the gardener, who was an undocumented immigrant. Instead of seeing how Cyber-Vato reacts, as in the other two programs, the viewers see a clip from the Mexican film El Hijo de la Calavera in which El Hijo confronts the man who killed his father and stole the family hacienda. Like the man who stole the hacienda, Wilson is engaged in an unjust act. Unlike the first two programs, Cyber-Vato is not just the victim of an injustice; instead, he can fight back. This moment of empowerment is correlated with the use of a Mexican film, an instance in which Mexicans take control of the media. This scene signals that control of television has shifted. This scene also shows something of Gomez-Pena’s perspective on what to do about the unjust use of virtual reality technology. While “Reaching the Shore” indicates that only the individual can improve his or her situation better, Gomez-Pena argues that the individual can change society by working through the Mexican and Chicano communities.
Migration through Virtual Reality
Like “Naftaztec: Pirate Cyber-TV for A.D. 2000,” Rivera’s Sleep Dealer correlates virtual reality with migration, but it does so more directly and in depth. The film’s premise is that in the near future, the border has been sealed but the U.S. desire for cheap labor has not vanished. Cybraceros Inc. meets this desire by constructing maquiladoras at the border in which workers in Mexico control robots in the United States via cyberspace. They connect to cyberspace through nodes in their bodies. Contact lenses in their eyes function as screens on which they see whatever their robot counterparts in the United States see. With this technology, they can work in a variety of jobs, among them construction, child care, and agriculture. The plot revolves around Memo, who leaves his home in Oaxaca after his father is killed by the corporate entity controlling the world’s water and travels to the border where he works at Cybraceros Inc. Along the way, Memo meets Luz, a writer who tells his story on the Internet, where it is read by Rudy, the U.S. military pilot who killed Memo’s father. Eventually, all of the characters collaborate to find a way out of the system that imprisons them.
Virtual reality complicates the experience of migration and raises the question of whether Memo is a migrant or a nonmigrant. In regard to the common conception of migration as human mobility through geographic space, Memo is an internal migrant, traveling from the country to the city within Mexico, from agricultural labor to factory labor. Once at the border, though, Memo is a nonmigrant laborer. The film correlates Memo with various forms of nonmigratory labor, directly referring to the maquiladoras and to outsourcing in general. For example, when Rudy is traveling into Mexico, the border patrol guard is depicted as a worker in India who interacts with Rudy by camera and phone. Both Memo and the guard are working through cyberspace while remaining in their homelands. Memo’s situation as a nonmigrant laborer is elaborated through the correlation between the cybraceros and prisoners. In the film, the closing of the border effectively stops migration from Mexico. This lockdown creates a kind of national prison (the wall is depicted as reminiscent of a prison wall). U.S. citizens can travel south, but Mexican citizens cannot travel north. The film evokes the idea of imprisonment with virtual reality technology. As Lev Manovitch observes, with its goggles and wires, virtual reality technology “imprisons the body to an unprecedented extent” (109). This imprisonment is shared on some level with most technologies, but virtual reality technology raises the paradox to a peak. Virtual reality, which entails visual, auditory, and haptic perception, offers the potential for much greater immersion than does the telephone, for example. The film’s virtual reality systems tie the user physically to the machines and are invasive, with nodes in the arms connected to wires and contact lenses in the eyes. The cybraceros are depicted as marionettes and seem to be wearing prison-like uniforms. The technology also enables invasive body surveillance, so that if a worker falls asleep for an instant, the computer wakes her up, registers the lapse, and docks her pay. For Memo, cyberspace is not Gibson’s bright geometric electronic “consensual-hallucination” (5) but a construction site.5
In addition, the virtual reality equipment gives the workers the appearance of blindness, illustrating the restriction of visual perception to the virtual reality environment and the exclusion of the surrounding world. As in “Reaching the Shore,” for those who labor with virtual reality technology, what the eyes see may be virtual, but what the eyes experience is deadly real. In the virtual reality labor depicted in the film, the eyes are the point on the body of intensive usage, and while powerful organs, they are fragile. Cybraceros suffer injuries both progressive and traumatic. Memo reveals to Luz, “The more time I spend connected, the harder it is to see.” The potential for progressive eye injury is high, much like the carpal tunnel syndrome suffered by present-day workers in chicken processing plants. And Memo describes one kind of traumatic injury—“You might get hit by a surge, end up blind”—that later affects a worker in the film. Memo meets a group of factory workers who have lost the use of their eyes, been deemed useless by the factory, and thrown out to live in the shadow of the border.
Under the traditional conception of migration, Memo is a nonmigrant. There are important reasons, however, to think of Memo as a migrant. His experience can be read as an allegory of migration. The film contains many references to past and present Mexican migration that support such a reading. The name of the company, for example, is a reference to the Bracero program, during which the United States recruited millions of Mexican agricultural workers from the 1940s through the 1960s. The film also depicts many of the most common migrant experiences. Memo travels from southern Mexico to the border, often the step before migration into the United States. He works hard to help his family, has intense periods of nostalgia, and places value on sending money home. Many of the sociological aspects of migration are present as well. For example, coyotes, the nickname for the guides who help migrants cross the border without documents, are in the film called coyoteks, and they put nodes in the arms of would-be cybraceros, allowing them to enter cyberspace.
The film is not only an allegory of migration but an extrapolation of migration into the future. The idea is that virtual reality technology has created a new form of migration—a migration into cyberspace. This correlation is possible because migration and virtual reality experiences share a common phenomenology an understanding of migration expressed by Vilém Flusser: “Custom and habit are a blanket that covers over reality as it exists” (81). The blanket of habit prevents us from sensing the world and from seeing new things. Both the migrant and the user of virtual reality experience life with the blanket torn away and so enter a new world structure. Though equivalent in this regard, migration into cyberspace is not traditional migration: whereas previously months or weeks would be spent crossing an ocean or desert, migration into cyberspace occurs instantaneously. But even though the travel time has vanished, the experience of an arrival and interaction with a new environment has not. One can travel to and within cyberspace. This connection between virtual reality and migration, like the frontier metaphor, appears in Gibson’s Neuromancer, where cyberspace is described as the protagonist’s “distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity” (52).
Because of this ability to move within cyberspace, Memo is a migrant not only into cyberspace but also into the United States. He sees the United States, he uses tools in the United States, affects the United States, and at times interacts with people in the United States. He experiences the geography, even if it is a vague notion of exactly where: at one point, he tells his brother that he thinks his job is in California. Memo’s experience of migration into the United States is enhanced by the use of telepresent technology, including live video streamed in from the robot, enabling him to have a real presence in the United States. This combination of perceptions, along with the real-time telepresence, gives a sense of reality to the new environment, thus creating an experience of migration. In addition, Memo has the use of an avatar that allows him the ability to manipulate tools and the world connected to those tools. The avatar allows Memo to identify with an abstractly humanoid robot that does in fact take up space in the United States, an important element of migration that would otherwise be missing. While the avatar is not personalized, identification is functionally formed—that is, Memo’s movements happen in tandem with the robot, and the robot’s gestures mirror Memo’s gestures (turning his hand turns the robot’s hand). Over time, the identification would deepen.
How, in the end, are we to understand Memo’s experience? One possibility is to use the model of the “virtual migrant” as coined by A. Aneesh in a recent study of computer analysts working from India for corporations in the United States. Aneesh describes virtual migrants as workers who “cross national boundaries and directly occupy some employment space in sectors of the American economy” (2). Like these workers, Memo’s experience is restricted to the workplace, and he cannot interact with the larger culture (for example, by moving to another state). Only energy and data are traveling through geographic space into the United States. Memo confesses that he feels that his energy or labor power is flowing north, reducing migration to labor. The concept is stated by the manager of the factory: “This is the American dream. We give the United States what they’ve always wanted. All the work without the workers.”6 Both Cybraceros Inc. and present-day outsourcing keep the physical distance of the worker; however, Cybraceros enables manual labor on U.S. soil. Virtual reality technology, however, makes Memo’s experience different from that of a computer analyst. It is stronger and more like an actual migration. The adjective virtual should be dropped altogether. To do so may seem at first not to do justice to the idea that Memo is paradoxically both a migrant and a nonmigrant; however, there is a precedent for this idea at the border. We would not call Memo an immigrant, since his experience of migration is not that of immigration, in which a person takes up long-term residence somewhere else. Instead, he is more like a “frontier migrant worker,” or someone who has a border crossing card, crosses the border to work in the United States, and then returns to Mexico at night. Memo experiences the dislocation of migration not continuously but daily.
Because of their unique situation, collaborative politics is difficult for these frontier migrant workers. Memo does not connect to other workers in his factory, presumably because the opaque contact lenses prevent him from seeing his coworkers. He cannot communicate easily with the other workers at his job site, since they are present as robots. Instead, he makes a new kind of interclass connection with Rudy and Luz as “node workers” (in Rudy’s words). Because of Luz’s Internet stories, Rudy travels into Mexico to try to make amends for killing Memo’s father. They concoct a plan to have Rudy fly his fighter drone using the virtual reality equipment at Cybraceros Inc. Rudy flies the drone into the dam, freeing the water that was being held back from the people living in Memo’s hometown. Their collaboration succeeds; however, it seems to be a one-shot deal. Might there be a way for the factory workers to collaborate? One possibility is that because what appears of the workers in the United States are simulations of their language and gestures, they could at some point find a way to demonstrate their presence through performance-based protest—perhaps a robot march like the 2006 immigration marches across the United States.7
New Dystopias in Virtual Reality
On the one hand, the rhetoric surrounding virtual reality and the use of the frontier and colonization metaphors have generally had a strongly utopian element. Cyberpunk fiction, on the other hand, is most often dystopian, depicting a world in which the virtual has overtaken the real. The works discussed in this essay have followed in this tradition of correlating virtual reality with dystopian fiction. These dystopias differ, however, from much of science fiction. In traditional dystopian fiction, such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) or Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the protagonist commonly begins in a privileged position and then falls from that position. The insider citizen becomes an outsider in exile. In mainstream films about virtual reality such as The Matrix (1999) or Avatar (2009), this same dynamic continues. In the dystopian narratives discussed here, the protagonists do not begin with privilege but are already in the position of maquiladora workers, minorities, and migrant laborers. The dystopian problems depicted in these narratives are not future fantasies but present-day realities, not how things will be but how they are. The beauty of these artworks is that they imagine highly creative protagonists who use virtual reality for their own purposes and find some way to change reality.
Notes
1. Virtual reality technology can be understood on a scale from 3D films to the fictional computer-generated world of Star Trek s holodeck (that is, from very little immersion to full immersion).
2. Chesher was most likely the first to comprehensively draw out the genealogy of these metaphors.
3. Sardar’s analysis uses “cyberspace” to refer to both virtual reality and the Internet and shows how they are the newest colonial projects.
4. An edited version of the broadcast is available on DVD through the Video Data Bank. Excerpts from the broadcast are included in Gomez-Pena’s New World Border (1996).
5. Much of the technology depicted in the film exists in prototype: the contact lens screens are currently being developed and may very well replace the goggles that have been a mainstay of virtual reality according (Choi).
6. Contemporary U.S. immigration policy follows this same logic—periodic mass deportations beginning with the Bracero program and continuing through the Obama presidency. Under Barack Obama, approximately 1.1 million people have been deported. This policy functions as a de facto attempt to give the United States all the work without the workers. The deportation rate will presumably fall in the wake of Obama’s 2012 executive order preventing the deportation of young migrants (Preston and Cushman).
7. Rivera mentioned to me at the 2012 Visions of the Future conference at the University of Iowa that he had considered including a scene in the film in which the workers learned to communicate via some kind of robot graffiti.
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