That Sound Gave Me The Creeps: Virtual Obsession

In 1998, Hallmark Entertainment, purveyors of life-affirming greeting cards and myriad made-for-TV movies about wild hearts, newlyweds and strawberry summers, decided to make a film about a small group of research scientists on the brink of a full-on Ray Kurzweil singularity. Peter Gallagher and Pete Sampras's wife, Brigitte Wilson-Sampras, succeed in uploading the brain of a rat onto a computer with access to all human knowledge and experience. The real rat immediately dies and the digital rat "hides" somewhere in the system… "What if the stripping the consciousness from the body is agony?" asks Gallagher (as Dr. Joe Messenger), speculating that the digital copy of the rat "sensed competition with the living rat" and murdered its own organic original.

Before the rat dies, however, it does one thing: it emits a sound. A strange electronic squeal, like the film-makers had recorded the sound of an actual rat and treated it with digital filters and effects. "The sound first, then the discharge," confirms the computer (‘Alfred’). The sound and the ‘discharge’, we are told, were "contiguous, sequential events." That is, "the end of the sound marked the beginning of the discharge." Where did the sound come from? "Sound came from rat's brain."

"That sound, that sound…"Messenger obsesses over that sound the rat emitted from the computer before it died. The sound gives him "the creeps". The sound was the rat's "response" to its new digital consciousness, he concludes. "It was not the sound of joy. It was pure agony." Albert also starts to feel "ill at ease" with a little bit of rat consciousness running around inside of him muddling up his literary quotations.

Finally, we are afforded a glimpse of the virtual "Eden" of infinite knowledge into which the new post-biological men (and women) are uploaded. According to a venerable sci-fi tradition, everything is white as far as the eye can see. But there is a strange sound and it is not the sound of joy. We hear a deep rumble, like a bass-heavy band pass filter's been applied to one of Ligeti's choirs. At once sound effect, sound design, and music; the sound is distinctly ill at ease.

Cancerous Growths : Technological Darwinisms

For over a century, the question of tomorrow has largely been a question of evolution. Under the influence more, perhaps, of Herbert Spencer than Charles Darwin, the future path of the human race is conceived now as one of a directed evolution through technology, and in this respect the theorems of futurologists have themselves evolved somewhat less over the course of the capitalist period than has the peppered moth.

The term Techno-Darwinism has entered a certain vogue over the past few years thanks to the work of entrepreneur and 'angel' investor, Benjamin Joffe. For Joffe the term refers to what he calls a "survival of the fittest" amongst tech start-ups in the rapidly expanding Chinese market. Nevermind, that the term "survival of the fittest" is Spencer's and not Darwin's, Joffe is hardly the first capitalist to stretch a scientistic metaphor in order to justify and naturalise his own profiteering.

Nor - though he may be credited with the hyphenation - is he the first to import purportedly Darwinist models and notions into the sphere of human technological 'progress' - in order, principally, to legitimise the use of the very word 'progress' and frame it as a kind of naturally occurring and practically inevitable process.

For Ray Kurzweil, evolution through technology represents an exponential growth in human advancement towards what he refers to as the Singularity, a point in the near future (2045) when the combination of advance in genetics, nanotechnology, robotics and artificial intelligence will allow an expansion in machine-human intelligence and technological development beyond our wildest imaginations.

Similarly, as Marina Banjamin has pointed out, the Space Age was full of evolutionary metaphors, with everyone from Werner von Braun to Arthur C. Clarke to Buckminster Fuller referring to Apollo 11 as the natural sequel, equal in importance, to the moment primitive life first left the oceans for the land.

All of which amounts to little more than a stretched metaphor put in the service of valorising some favoured project. Consensus amongst developmental biologists and palaeontologists seems to be that human evolution has remained fairly static for a good hundred thousand years or so. That's not to say that we are not witnessing evolution - and rapid evolution at that- in the present day. Only it's an evolution to which we are but the hosts. To talk of the evolution through natural selection of metastasising cancer cells is not just a metaphor. Puts a somewhat less positive spin on Joffe's notion of capital as techno-Darwinism though....