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Steampunk Narratives and the Failures of Utopian Thought

A paper written by Caius for a graduate seminar on “Postmodern Fiction” taught by Dr. Joseph Conte at SUNY-Buffalo, 2005.

Aside from spearheading cyberpunk, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, co-authors of the 1991 novel The Difference Engine, are also credited for initiating a separate sub-genre of science fiction called “steampunk.” For various critical responses to The Difference Engine, see Jay Clayton’s Charles Dickens in Cyberspace, Joseph Conte’s “The Virtual Reader,” Steffen Hantke’s “Difference Engines and Other Infernal Devices,” Karen Hellekson’s The Alternate History, Nicholas Spencer’s “Rethinking Ambivalence,” and Herbert Sussman’s “Cyberpunk Meets Charles Babbage.”

While Gibson and Sterling’s novel has received a fair amount of attention from critics, subsequent works in the genre for the most part remain unexamined. This paper attempts to pinpoint some of the defining features of steampunk, while also offering a brief commentary on the genre’s relationship to history and postmodernity. I conclude with a few thoughts on the political or ideological underpinnings of the genre, focusing specifically on its relationship to what Fredric Jameson describes as postmodernity’s failure to imagine a compelling future for itself in anything but the most stark and pessimistic of terms. Indeed, dystopian visions (or else visions of an everlasting capitalist present — which, in my opinion, is essentially the same thing) have become a kind of automatic, default setting amongst writers and critics these days. Steampunk narratives ought to be viewed as a logical extension of this trend.

But first, a few comments on the genre itself. Most of the literary and cultural texts collated under the banner of “steampunk” feature speculative narratives set in a Victorian or quasi-Victorian alternate historical universe. Events in these narratives occur in a world that A) vaguely resembles our own recent past — and the past of the Victorian and Edwardian Eras in particular — while B) simultaneously departing from this shared historical reality by way of a signature act of displacement, whereby the technologies that we typically associate with the present are willfully projected backwards. In other words, the standard move of a steampunk narrative is the detailed elaboration of a fictional Victorian universe unexpectedly infiltrated by modern scientific and technological advances actuated by way of what we would otherwise regard to be exemplary nineteenth-century materials and paradigms. Jacquard looms and steam engines become the basis for elaborate mechanical contraptions capable of fulfilling many of the same functions as today’s electrical appliances and personal computers. (Hence the “steam” in “steampunk.”) The result is often highly disorienting: an anachronistic, hybridized fictional space that nonetheless bears some uncanny resemblance to the present.

In order to clarify the boundaries and limits of this sub-genre, we can identify at least three main generic predecessors that resemble and maintain an orbit around, while nevertheless remaining distinct from, work classified as “steampunk.” These predecessors include “What If..?” comic books, alternative (and/or counterfactual) histories, and works of historiographic metafiction. Let’s take a few moments to define these genres and to explain their relationship to “steampunk.”

“What If..?” comics are one of the clearest influences on steampunk narratives. Here we have a popular attempt to explore the idea of parallel worlds within a clearly fictitious setting. Beginning in 1977, the Marvel Comics Group released a bimonthly series devoted to dramatizing alternate endings to events within the lives of trademark Marvel characters like Spiderman, Captain America, and the Incredible Hulk. Each issue addresses a “What If..” question dealing with an event in the life of one particular character. Examples of questions posed by each issue include: “What If Spiderman Joined The Fantastic Four?,” “What If Conan the Barbarian Walked The Earth Today?,” “What If Spiderman Had Rescued Gwen Stacy?,” “What If Captain America Had Been Elected President?,” “What If The Avengers Defeated Everybody?,” and “What If The Avengers Had Never Been?” All of these issues are narrated by a bald, omniscient creature named “Uatu the Watcher.” Uato stands on the moon and is somehow able to observe all events in all possible worlds. His narratives begin with a singular “bifurcation point” or “point of divergence,” where a dramatic sequence of events from a previous comic book results in a set of consequences different this time around from those that were previously depicted. After identifying this point of divergence, the remainder of Uatu’s narrative extrapolates what would have happened as a result of this changed event.

To this extent, “What If..?” comics are a close relative of that other sub-genre of science fiction known as the “alternative history.” Critics also occasionally refer to works in this sub-genre as “alternate histories,” “allohistories,” or “uchronias.” Historians, meanwhile, hoping to distance themselves from the stigmas of science fiction, have taken to dubbing their own forays in this realm “counterfactuals.” I return to the topic of counterfactuals later in this essay.

The main difference between an alternative history and a “What If..?” comic is that the “What If..?” comic explores a storyline that branches out from the accepted historical trajectory of an already-fictional universe, aka the “Marvel Universe,” whereas an example of “alternative history” would take as its point of departure the history of our world: the world of historical fact.

Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle (1962) is a classic work of “alternative history.” Dick’s novel takes place in a dystopian alternate universe where Giuseppe Zangara succeeds in his effort to assassinate US President-Elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt in February of 1933. Zangara’s actions result in a world where the Axis Powers of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan emerge victorious at the end of WWII.

The Years of Rice and Salt (2002) by Kim Stanley Robinson is another example of work in this sub-genre. Robinson’s dense, sprawling novel imagines a world where the Black Death of the fourteenth century wipes out a full 99% of the population of medieval Europe. As a result, China and the Islamic world come to dominate the planet over the next seven centuries, while Christianity fades away to become a mere historical footnote.

Other examples of alternative history include classic works of science fiction like Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee (1953) and Keith Roberts’ Pavane (1968), as well as more recent novels like Robert Harris’s Fatherland (1993) and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004).

In many ways, the above examples might suggest that steampunk is simply a particular version of “alternative history.” Like works in the latter genre, steampunk “postulates a fictional event of vast consequences in the past and extrapolates from this event a fictional though historically contingent present or future” (Hantke 246). However, as Steffen Hantke notes, “the most striking examples of alternative histories…do not display as consistent an interest in Victorianism as steampunk does” (246). It is ultimately this fixation with quasi-Victorian settings, along with an abiding interest in alternative technologies, that makes this work seem distinct from other kinds of alternative history.

Aside from “What If..?” comics and alternative histories, the final generic predecessor worth considering in relation to steampunk is that vast body of work that Linda Hutcheon refers to as “historiographic metafiction.” This term is often used to describe books like Robert Coover’s The Public Burning (1977), Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972), and E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975) and The Book of Daniel (1971). Hutcheon defines “historiographic metafiction” as a series of recent novels that are “intensely self-reflective but that also…re-introduce historical context into metafiction and problematize the entire question of historical knowledge” (285-286). In true postmodern fashion, the contradictory effect of such works is both to install and to blur the boundaries between historical and fictional genres.

Although Hutcheon’s definition is probably broad enough (and vague enough) to encompass a novel like The Difference Engine, I think there’s some value in maintaining a distinction between steampunk narratives and historiographic metafiction. After all, a novel like Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel tends to function as a series of speculations meant to supplement history. Additions and corrections are the focus here, rather than the elaboration of deliberately counterfactual scenarios. Doctorow’s fictions, in other words, challenge or cast into doubt certain dominant interpretations of specific historical events (in this case, the Rosenberg trials), often by trying to fill in gaps in the public record. What we end up with is a work of interpretation or commentary.

Steampunk narratives depart from this tradition in the sense that they openly, knowingly contradict the public record. There’s no effort to provide an account of “the way things really were.” At the same time, there’s also no effort to dispute or to call into question the findings of trained historians. Instead, what we have is an explicitly fictional departure from history — an exploration of what could have happened…but most certainly didn’t.

This is precisely the stance toward history that we see at work in a novel like The Difference Engine. While not exactly the first of its kind, Gibson and Sterling’s text is nevertheless the one applauded as the primary inspiration for the term “steampunk” (itself obviously a tongue-in-cheek variant on “cyberpunk,” the sci-fi subgenre that catapulted both authors to fame in the 1980s). What seems most striking about The Difference Engine is its remarkable ability to synthesize all of the various elements that we’ve outlined above.

Like “What If..?” comics and alternative history novels, for instance, the world of The Difference Engine departs from the historical realities of Victorian England by way of a clearly demarcated, singular “point of divergence” — in this case, the successful design and construction of English mathematician Charles Babbage’s famous calculating machine, the Difference Engine, widely acknowledged to have been a precursor of the modern computer. As Gibson and Sterling would have it, this small but momentous adjustment of the historical record results in a world transformed. The Information Age arrives coterminous with the Industrial Revolution, allowing an unholy alliance of scientists and capitalists to harness the productive capacities of steam-driven cybernetic engines in order to advance a ruthless repression of Luddite insurgency and an unprecedented global consolidation of British imperial power.

From historiographic metafiction, meanwhile, the novel borrows the convention of mixing fiction with fact, so that famous historical figures like Babbage, Lord Byron, Ada Lovelace, Karl Marx, travel writer Laurence Oliphant, Texan president Sam Houston, Romantic poet John Keats, two-time British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, and biologist T.H. Huxley all jostle for space alongside purely invented characters (as well as figures appropriated from Victorian novels, like Disraeli’s characters, Dandy Mick, Charles Egremont, and Sybil Gerard). This unlikely concoction of narrative strategies has somehow become boilerplate for all subsequent iterations of the steampunk aesthetic.

However, I don’t mean to pose The Difference Engine as some sort of undisputed Ur-text of steampunk. After all, there are certainly a number of steampunk novels that predate Gibson and Sterling’s work by at least a decade, including K.W. Jeter’s Infernal Devices (1987) and Morlock Night (1979). Both of these novels feature retro-Victorian technologies in an alternate historical setting, and Jeter himself is said to have coined the term “steampunk” in an interview from 1987. The Hollywood blockbuster Back to the Future III (1990), meanwhile, has sometimes been seen as a North American frontier variation on the genre. The same can be said for a film like Wild Wild West (1999). Finally, a number of fans and critics have pointed to Walt Disney’s classic film adaptation 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), with its retro-Victorian Nautilus submarine, as an important precursor to the genre.

Despite these anticipations, however, most recent examples of steampunk have in fact turned to The Difference Engine as a source of inspiration. Examples of this more recent work include Paul Di Fillipo’s The Steampunk Trilogy (1995); Steampunk: The Role-Playing Game; Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age (1995), which has an undeniable steampunk flavor even though it’s set in a neo-Victorian future rather than an alternative past; Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2000); the anime film Steamboy (2004), by Katsuhiro Otomo, the director of Akira (1988); and of course the original Steamboy comic book upon which the film is based.

Now, some of this work is clearly an example of what Jameson would call “pastiche” or “blank parody,” where the goal is simply to mimic (or at worst, nostalgically reproduce) the atmosphere and feel of, say, a Jules Verne novel. For instance, audiences often flock to elaborately designed blockbusters like Wild Wild West and Back to the Future III in order to derive pleasure from each film’s stylized echo of the quaintly archaic. Imaginary figures are dressed up in leather chaps and ten-gallon hats and pasted onto a “realistically” staged historical backdrop — and it is precisely this backdrop, this spectacular reconstruction of the “tone and style of a whole epoch” (Jameson 1991, p. 369), that lends each film its novelty and appeal. A similar sense of visual nostalgia seems to permeate Kevin O’Neill’s stunningly rendered illustrations for The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, many panels of which hearken back to the decadent sketches of late-Victorian stylists like Mucha and Aubrey Beardsley. The only element missing from each of these admirably self-conscious allusions is a sense of purpose. This is by-the-books pastiche, as if Jameson’s definition had been mistakenly identified as a checklist. “The imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language” (Jameson 1998, p. 5): it’s all here. One hunts around looking desperately for the scare quotes, only to come back empty-handed. This is arguably steampunk at its worst.

But I think it would be wrong to apply these claims to the genre as a whole. Books like The Difference Engine, for instance, seem to offer a more critical engagement with their source material (in this case, Disraeli’s Sybil, or, The Two Nations [1845]) than Jameson’s model might allow. An examination of the novel’s genesis and structure, then, is likely to provide us with some insight into the genre’s potential for political commentary. In a rather revealing interview published in Science Fiction Studies just a few months after the release of The Difference Engine, Gibson and Sterling describe their collaborative writing process for the novel as a form of “literary sampling.” As Gibson notes:

[A] great deal of the intimate texture of this book derives from the fact that it’s an enormous collage of little pieces of forgotten Victorian textual material which we lifted from Victorian journalism, from Victorian pulp literature […]. Virtually all of the interior descriptions, the descriptions of furnishings, are simply descriptive sections lifted from Victorian literature. Then we worked it, we sort of air-brushed it with the word-processor, we bent it slightly, and brought out eerie blue notes that the original writers could not have. (Fischlin et al 8-9)

At first, this might sound like a recipe for a curious brand of pastiche. But Gibson and Sterling seem to view their work as a critical intervention of some sort: a critique, in particular, of teleology and of liberal ideas of progress. “One of the things that [The Difference Engine] does,” they write, “is to disagree rather violently with the Whig concept of history, which is that history is a process that leads to us, the crown of creation” (Fischlin et al 7). One of the ways that they accomplish this feat is by organizing the novel in a manner that troubles the reader’s ability to form strong identifications with any of its protagonists. The novel itself is divided into five chapters or “iterations,” followed by an appended sixth section entitled “Modus: The Images Tabled.” Each of these first five chapters follows the exploits of one of the novel’s three main characters: a prostitute named Sybil Gerard, a paleontologist named Edward “Leviathan” Mallory, and a diplomat named Laurence Oliphant. The key, of course, is that none of these characters are particularly likeable.

More than half of the book takes the form of a rather conventional, “Indiana Jones”-style adventure yarn, centered around Edward Mallory, his two brothers, and their “heroic” efforts to quell a growing proletarian Luddite insurgency borne in the midst of “The Great Stink,” a vast ecological catastrophe that appears to have engulfed the chaotic streets of London. After joining forces with a detective named Sergeant Fraser, the Mallory brothers proceed to patrol the slums of the East End in a souped-up “steam gurney” called the Zephyr, flexing their technological might against “roving mobs” and “swarthy little half-breeds” (Gibson and Sterling 199), all the while exchanging stories with one another about their various violent imperialist exploits abroad. Before long, Mallory is revealed quite clearly as a misogynist, a racist, and a gun smuggler. He and his macho “band of brothers” succeed in restraining the uprising, but by the end of the novel, we come to learn that Mallory’s counterrevolutionary efforts result not in human betterment. His efforts result, rather, in the creation of a dystopian surveillance state (or a “hot shining necropolis” [428], as the authors would have it) where humans are the mere playthings of some unnamed peering Eye. The effect, of course, is that the Victorian notion of some inexorable march toward progress is turned on its head. Like some weirdly inverted Hegelian “ruse of reason,” the outcome of history is not what its actors assumed.

But despite Gibson and Sterling’s willingness to critically interrogate the so-called “Whig interpretation of history,” their novel ultimately remains ambivalent regarding certain other Victorian attitudes — especially those that deal with women, class, and empire. Indeed, a strange kind of postmodern cynicism casts a shadow across the novel, so that, even though the misogynistic, bourgeois imperial subtexts of Victorian literature are here highlighted and pushed to the foreground, the novel is also simultaneously fierce to eschew the articulation of any positive utopian alternatives. The result is not exactly “blank parody” (although the novel occasionally leans in this direction); instead, we end up with that double-edged, ironic mode of representation that Linda Hutcheon claims “both legitimizes and subverts that which it parodies” (Hutcheon 2002, p. 97). Works of this sort are humorous precisely to the extent that we can distance ourselves from their historically outmoded sentiments and paradigms. But this canned, self-righteous laughter eventually tapers off as we recognize the way our own culture remains deeply implicated in many of these very same paradigms. The only thing lacking from this bold postmodern indictment, then, is a sense of viable political alternatives. Novels like The Difference Engine envision our world at one remove as a nightmarish kind of “dystopia-in-progress”— but they fail to suggest ways to forestall or transcend this fate.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is another work that seems exemplary in this regard. (The following comments deal with the twelve-issue comic book series, which was subsequently gathered together as a two-volume graphic novel, rather than the — to my mind, vastly inferior — Hollywood adaptation.) Both volumes of Moore and O’Neill’s critically acclaimed series feature a pastiche of characters and creatures lifted from the pages of just about every major adventure and science fiction story of the late nineteenth century, including H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), and The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896); H. Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain novels; Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897); Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892): Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870); and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). The comic itself tells the story of a secret five-member crime-fighting unit, the eponymous “League,” formed in 1898 by a British government official named Campion Bond. Members of the group include Mina Murray, Allan Quatermain, Captain Nemo, Dr. Jekyll and/or Mr. Hyde, and Dr. Hawley Griffin (aka The Invisible Man).

Aside from Bond (who is basically a composite of Margery Allingham’s “Albert Campion” and Ian Fleming’s “James Bond”), every other figure in the series — from major protagonists to single-panel throwaways — is an established character from a previous work of fiction. As Moore notes, “We decided that…all characters or names referred to in the strip would have their origins in either fictions written during or before the period in hand, or else in elements from later works that could be retro-engineered into our continuity by the invention of a father, grandfather or other predecessor” (as quoted in Nevins 11).

After the individual members of the League are rounded up from various far-flung peripheries of the Empire, they convene at their headquarters in a secret wing of the British Museum, where Bond instructs them to retrieve a powerful anti-gravity device called the “Cavorite,” stolen from Her Majesty by the ominous Fu Manchu. This reference to Fu Manchu is just the first of the comic’s many sarcastic parodies of the British Empire’s brutal Orientalist ideologies. Toward the end of the second issue of the series, for instance, readers encounter a text box stating, “The next edition of our new Boys’ Picture Monthly will continue this arresting yarn, in which the Empire’s Finest are brought into conflict with the sly Chinee, accompanied by a variety of coloured illustrations from our artist that are sure to prove exciting to the manly, outwardgoing youngster of today.” A similar sensibility is at work in the Editor’s Note to Volume One, where a “Mr. Scotty Smiles” writes:

Greetings, children of vanquished and colonised nations the world o’er. Welcome to this Christmas compendium edition of our exciting picture-periodical for boys and girls. And let us bid a special welcome to those poorer children who, in four or five years time, will be gratefully reading these words in a creased and dog-eared copy of this very publication, its dust jacket torn and several pages in the second chapter stuck together, that has been donated to their orphanage or borstal by local Rotarians. To all such urchins of the future, and to our presumably more well-off, possibly Eton-educated audience of the present day, we wish you many happy fireside hours in the perusal of the thrills and chuckles here contained, though let us not forget the many serious, morally instructive points there are within this narrative: firstly, women are always going on and making a fuss. Secondly, the Chinese are brilliant, but evil. Lastly, laudanum, taken in moderation is good for the eyesight and prevents kidney-stones. With these dictums in mind, allow us to wish both many hours of pictorial reading pleasure, and also the jolliest of Christmas-times to those of you who are not bowed with rickets, currently incarcerated, or Mohammedans. With the Season’s Best Regards, I remain, A friend and confidant to boys everywhere. S. Smiles (Editor).

Once again, as we saw in The Difference Engine, the effect here is not “blank parody” so much as a kind of “knowing complicity” mixed with an ironic sense of distance. Moore and O’Neill deploy exaggerated caricatures of the familiar “Yellow Peril” stereotype (along with occasional offhand remarks about “Mohammedans”), not just to remind readers of the backwardness of these views, but also to make us interrogate our culture’s continuing fascination with racist, hyper-masculine servants of Empire like Quatermain and crew. After all, what is the League if not an allegorical gang of poster children for our ongoing War on Terror?

To state the point as a further set of questions: How or in what ways are steampunk narratives responding to the circumstances shaping the moment of their enunciation? What kinds of individual and collective desires find expression in this type of narrative?

Upon an initial sweep of the field, one might be tempted to explain the appeal of steampunk in terms of its hip, theoretically up-to-date vision of a universe ruled by chance. After all, contingency is something of a buzzword within the academy these days. Historians, for instance, have lately taken to publishing anthologies devoted to what they call “counterfactual experiments.” Examples of this work can be found in Robert Cowley’s What If? and What If? 2, Niall Ferguson’s Virtual History, Nelson W. Polsby’s What If? Explorations in Social-Science Fiction, and Andrew Roberts’ What Might Have Been: Leading Historians on Twelve ‘What Ifs’ of History.

So far, these experiments have remained controversial, with opponents arguing that counterfactuals are simply ideological fictions with no historical merit, calculated to either unnerve or inspire readers. Others object to the kinds of “retrospective wishful thinking” (Ferguson 11) that frequently finds its way into the portrayal of counterfactual scenarios, where authors exercise wisdom that was only made available through hindsight. Defenders of these experiments, meanwhile, often point to the diverse outcomes of two “similar” historical events as proof that history is ultimately ruled by “accident” rather than design — or in other words, that history could have happened differently. Thus What If? anthology editor Robert Cowley tells us, “Much as we like to think otherwise, outcomes are no more certain in history than they are in our own lives. If nothing else, the diverging tracks in the undergrowth of history celebrate the infinity of human options. The road not taken belongs on the map” (Cowley 1999, p. xii).

Counterfactual experiments are therefore presented as evidence in support of contingency. Each scenario is somehow imagined to represent “what would have happened under slightly different circumstances.” The problem, of course, is that individuals clearly never have access to such knowledge. After all, two similar but temporally distinct events is not the same as two versions of the same event. To abstract some hypothetical set of “slightly different circumstances” is to misconceive of the relations and continuities between historical events. All other confusions stem from this initial misconception. As a result, historians involved in counterfactual exercises end up engaging in something like an inverted futurology, or the art of prediction projected backwards. They fail to recognize that the historical event is part of a pure, unrepeatable singularity that can only be perceived in hindsight, and that based on this fact, the methods of laboratory experimentation so central to the production of “laws” of prediction within the natural sciences are ultimately incompatible with the study of history, since historical events are — by their very nature — unrepeatable. Instead, we ought to ask ourselves: wouldn’t the circumstances that gave rise to any particular counterfactual scenario themselves have required an infinite regress of prior circumstances, all “slightly different” from that which came to be? What is the source of “the swerve” or the point of divergence? How does one break with the chain of antecedent causes? One would need to posit some sort of pure, disruptive externality in order for this view to work.

Not surprisingly, these counterfactual “proofs” of contingency are also often presented as covert arguments against Marxism. Andrew Roberts, for instance, editor of a counterfactuals anthology entitled What Might Have Been: Leading Historians on Twelve ‘What Ifs’ of History, proves to be a diehard anticommunist, blathering on in the introduction to his anthology about how “Marxism requires humans to operate according to a predetermined dialectical materialism, and not by the caprices of accident or serendipity” (Roberts 2-3). Apparently Roberts is unfamiliar with the famous statement from the opening of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, where Marx writes, “Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand” (Marx 48). Such a statement implies a theory of history that recognizes the role of contingencies and personalities as one part of an equation that also includes regularities, likelihoods, and long-term structural pressures.

This is not to deny the fact that various Marxist historians like E.H. Carr, E.P. Thompson, and Eric Hobsbawm have each in their own ways offered compelling denunciations of counterfactual history. Thompson even went so far as to toss nasty German words at the phenomenon, referring to counterfactual fictions as “Geschichtswissenschlopff, [or] unhistorical shit” (as quoted in Ferguson 5). But in Roberts’ opinion, “anything that has been condemned by Carr, Thompson, and Hobsbawm must have something to recommend it, especially if on the other side of the argument we have such distinguished supporters and practitioners of the counterfactual technique as Edward Gibbon, Winston Churchill, Thomas Carlyle, Sir Lewis Namier, Hugh Dacre, Harold Nicolson, Isaiah Berlin, Ronald Knox, Emil Ludwig, G.K. Chesterton, H.A.L. Fisher, [and] Conrad Russell” (3).

In fact, conservatives seem to love this sort of thing, often using the counterfactuals genre for purely ideological purposes. Consider the following statement from Cowley, who writes, “Few events have been more dependent on what ifs than the American Revolution. We are the product of a future that might not have been” (Cowley 1999, p. xii). Aside from being flat-out absurd (since, if we subscribe to a belief in contingency, then all events are equally dependent on “what ifs”), Cowley’s statement also serves to promote tired, stock notions of American exceptionalism. Thus, by way of counterfactuals, empires are reminded of their tenuousness as historians play pretend to stave off recognition of the inevitable. The tone is often that of the reminiscent conqueror reflecting back upon his former battles — all “unlikely victories,” of course — and saying, “Damn, that was a close one! Imagine how shitty the world would have been if it wasn’t for my good fortune.” Thus history takes on the appearance of one long series of gambles, winner take all.

And yet, as contemporary Marxists like Jameson have argued, the choice between rigorous necessity and indeterminate contingency is a choice between false gods. The problem is that both of these views pretend to have independent predictive capacities, while simultaneously figuring historical agency as something abstracted from and external to human action. Or, perhaps more accurately: neither of these views is particularly useful on its own as a predictor of the future, since neither view respects our collective capacity to determine the future ourselves. Thus necessity can too often become a nightmare that weighs upon the brains of the living, just as the invocation of contingency can too often come to resemble what Jim Holstun describes as “an exhausted parent responding to a child’s antinomian chorus of ‘Why? Why? Why?’ with the thudding authoritarian coda of ‘Just because’” (30).

Instead, we ought to seek a theory that strikes a balance between these views. Those of us who wish to engage in the art of forecasting should always account for potential contingencies, but this shouldn’t prevent us in any way from drawing upon historical patterns and regularities as a basis for our predictions. Indeed, if Marxists subscribe to some notion of historical “necessity” or inevitability, then this is a notion that is only capable of operating “exclusively after the fact” (Jameson 1971, p. 361). In other words, this is not a view that should have any direct impact on our decisions with regard to the future, since knowledge of necessity is only born in retrospect (or, as Hegel once noted, “the owl of Minerva only flies at night”).

Unfortunately, like their counterfactual cousins, steampunk narratives are nothing if not contingent. The overwhelming sense that one gets from a book like The Difference Engine is that history could have gone either way — or any number of ways, for that matter. And yet, for all of their alleged contingency (figured most directly in terms of fashions and technologies), steampunk narratives prefer to have it both ways. They insist upon the contingency of a period’s fashions only in order to imbue other historical processes with a sense of pure necessity. Readers are able to recognize historical divergences in these works only because their changes unfold against an otherwise familiar backdrop. Take The Difference Engine, for instance. The convulsive transformation of society wrought by the emergence of the computer comes to assume a kind of doubly-inscribed sense of inevitability, so that whether it’s now or later, computers will change our lives, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it. And of course, for all of its avowed allegiance to a kind of “choose-your-own-adventure” version of history, the alternative past of The Difference Engine can still only lead to dystopia. It is precisely this unexpected shadow of inevitability that hangs over the genre which ought to give us pause as we break out the champagne to celebrate our faith in contingency.

In fact, this same sense of inevitability can also be seen in The Difference Engine’s all-too-easy Cold War conflation of emancipatory socialist visions with incoherent, reactionary Luddite ravings. Thus, in one of the novel’s most important episodes, Edward Mallory arrives at the headquarters of the Luddite agitators where he encounters a self-styled radical who calls himself “the Marquess of Hastings.” Gibson and Sterling appear to have very little sympathy for this character, who they portray as an utter hypocrite (and a slaveowner, to boot!), and who immediately brags about having studied the works of Karl Marx and William Collins, along with “the utopian doctrines of Professor Coleridge and Reverend Wordsworth” of the Susquehanna Phalanstery (Gibson and Sterling 291). From this immersion in Marx’s work, the Marquess concludes that “some dire violence has been done to the true and natural course of historical development” (Gibson and Sterling 301). Mallory blanches at the sound of this baldly teleological vision, and responds by shouting, “History works by Catastrophe! It’s the way of the world, the only way there is, has been, or ever will be. There is no history — there is only contingency!” (301). He then clubs the Marquess over the head with the butt of a pistol, knocking the man unconscious. Afterwards, as if to make sure readers got the message, Gibson and Sterling have Jupiter, the Marquess’s “Negro” slave, tell Mallory, “You were right, sir, and he was quite wrong. There is nothing to history. No progress, no justice. There is nothing but random horror” (302). In one fell swoop, then, Marxism is dismissed in exemplary Cold War fashion as a misguided theory of history touted by slaveowners, Luddites, and thugs — and in its place, of course, we’re offered “nothing but random horror.”

By way of conclusion, then, I would like to suggest that this all has something to do with our society’s ongoing failure to imagine the future. One is reminded of Jameson’s famous claim in The Seeds of Time, where he writes, “It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps this is due to some weakness in our imaginations” (xii). Jameson elaborates on this notion of an ongoing failure of the utopian imagination in the “Introduction” to his book, Archaeologies of the Future, where he writes:

It is not only the invincible universality of capitalism which is at issue […]. What is crippling is not the presence of an enemy but rather the universal belief, not only that this tendency is irreversible, but that the historic alternatives to capitalism have been proven unviable and impossible, and that no other socioeconomic system is conceivable, let alone practically available. The Utopians not only offer to conceive of such alternate systems; Utopian form is itself a representational meditation on radical difference, radical otherness, and on the systemic nature of the social totality, to the point where one cannot imagine any fundamental change in our social existence which has not first thrown off Utopian visions like so many sparks from a comet. (Jameson 2005, p. xii)

More than anything else, I believe the recent interest in steampunk narratives and alternative histories (at least within the sci-fi community) attests to our society’s peculiar incapacity to think beyond the dystopian contours of our present historical moment. In many ways, the effort to substitute “steam” in place of the “cyber” in “cyberpunk” is the ultimate form of cultural reverse-engineering. As a result of this act, the future withers before our eyes, replaced by dreams of dirigibles and corsets. I admit: I enjoy reading works like The Difference Engine and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen — especially in terms of their sly humor and formal ingenuity. I only wish that this exploration of alternative pasts didn’t have to coincide with a decline in utopian thought. Contingency, after all, is a strange kind of freedom when won at the future’s expense.

WORKS CITED:

Clayton, Jay. Charles Dickens in Cyberspace: The Afterlife of the Nineteenth Century in Postmodern Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

——. “Hacking the Nineteenth Century.” Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century. Eds. John Kucich and Dianne F. Sadoff. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Conte, Joseph. “The Virtual Reader: Cybernetics and Technocracy in William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine.” The Holodeck in the Garden: Science and Technology in Contemporary American Fiction. Eds. Peter Freese and Charles B. Harris. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2004.

Cowley, Robert, ed. What If?: The World’s Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been. London: Macmillan, 1999.

——. What If? 2: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2001.

Di Filippo, Paul. The Steampunk Trilogy. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1995.

Dyer-Witheford, Nick. Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.

Ferguson, Niall, ed. Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals. London: Picador, 1997.

Fischlin, Daniel, Veronica Hollinger, and Andrew Taylor. “‘The Charisma Leak’: A Conversation with William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.” Science Fiction Studies 56 (March 1992): 1-16.

Gibson, William and Bruce Sterling. The Difference Engine. New York: Bantam, 1991.

Gunn, Eileen. “The Difference Dictionary.” (2003): <http://www.sff.net/people/gunn/dd/&gt;

Hantke, Steffen. “Difference Engines and Other Infernal Devices: History According to Steampunk.” Extrapolation 40.3 (1999): 244-54.

Hellekson, Karen. The Alternate History: Reconfiguring Historical Time. Kent: Kent State University Press, 2001.

Holstun, James. Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution. London: Verso, 2000.

Hutcheon, Linda. “‘The Pastime of Past Time’: Fiction, History, Historiographic Metafiction.” GENRE XX (Fall- Winter 1987).

——. The Politics of Postmodernism (Second Edition). London: Routledge, 2002.

Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2005.

——. Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971.

——. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.

——. The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Marx, Karl. “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” The Communist Manifesto. Ed. Samuel H. Beer. Arlington Heights: AHM Publishing Corporation, 1955.

Moore, Alan and Kevin O’Neill. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Volume One. La Jolla, CA: America’s Best Comics, 2000.

——. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Volume Two. La Jolla, CA: America’s Best Comics, 2003.

Nevins, Jess. Heroes & Monsters: The Unofficial Companion to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Austin: Monkeybrain Books, 2003.

Polsby, Nelson W., ed. What If? Explorations in Social-Science Fiction. Lexington, MA: The Lewis Publishing Company, 1982.

Roberts, Andrew, ed. What Might Have Been: Leading Historians on Twelve ‘What Ifs’ of History. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004.

Spencer, Nicholas. “Rethinking Ambivalence: Technopolitics and the Luddites in William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s ‘The Difference Engine’.” Contemporary Literature 40.3 (Autumn 1999): 403-429.

Sussman, Herbert. “Cyberpunk Meets Charles Babbage: The Difference Engine as Alternative Victorian History.” Victorian Studies 38 (1994): 2-23.

Financial Instruments and the Predictive Modeling of Markets

The Institute for Postnatural Studies ended last year’s “4 Degrees of Simulation” seminar with “Speculation and the Politics of Imagination,” a session on markets led by Iranian-born, London-based artist, writer, and filmmaker Bahar Noorizadeh. Caius visits Noorizadeh’s website, hoping to learn more about what happens when AI’s arts of prediction are applied to finance.

As he reads, he recalls chapters on markets from books by Kevin Kelly.

Noorizadeh, a graduate of Goldsmiths, is the founder of a co-authored project called Weird Economies. An essay of hers titled “Decadence, Magic Mountain—Obsolescence, Future Shock—Speculation, Cosmopolis” appears in Zach Blas’s recent anthology, Informatics of Domination. Her writing often references Mark Fisher’s ideas, as in “The Slow Cancellation of the Past,” and her films often cite Fredric Jameson, as in After Scarcity, her 2018 video installation on the history of Soviet cybernetics.

“From the early days of the revolution, Soviet economists sought to design and enhance their centralized command economy,” announces a text box seven minutes into the video. “Command economies are organized in a top-down administrative model, and rely on ‘the method of balances’ for their centralized planning. The method of balances simply requires the total output of each particular good to be equal to the quantity which all its users are supposed to receive. A market economy, in contrast, is calibrated with no central administration. Prices are set by invisible forces of supply and demand, set in motion by the intelligent machine of competition. For a market economy to function, the participation of its various enterprises is necessary. But the Soviet Union was in essence a conglomerate monopoly, with no competition between its constitutive parts, because the workers-state controlled and owned all businesses. State planners and local producers in a command economy are constantly relaying information to calculate how much of a good should be produced and how much feedstock it requires. But a national economy is a complex system, with each product depending on several underlying primary and raw products. The entire chain of supply and demand, therefore, needs to be calculated rapidly and repeatedly to prevent shortages and surpluses of goods. Early proponents of the market economy believed the market to be unimpeded by such mathematical constraints. For liberal economists, capitalism was essentially a computer. And the price system was a sort of bookkeeping machine, with price numbers operating as a language to communicate the market’s affairs.”

Challenging what Fisher called “the slow cancellation of the future,” Noorizadeh’s research leads Caius to St. Panteleimon Cathedral in Kiev, where MESM, the first mainframe in the USSR, was built. The film also leads him to Viktor Glushkov’s All-State-System of Management (OGAS). To remember the latter, says Noorizadeh, see communication historian Benjamin Peters’s 2016 book, How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet.

After Scarcity’s engagement with the “economic calculation” problem causes Caius to reflect upon an idea for a novel that had come to him as a grad student. Back in 2009, with the effects of the previous year’s financial crisis fresh in the planet’s nervous system, he’d sketched a précis for the novel and had shared it with members of his cohort. Busy with his dissertation, though, the project had been set aside, and he’d never gotten around to completing it.

The novel was to have been set either in a newly established socialist society of the future, or in the years just prior to the revolution that would birth such a society. The book’s protagonist is a radical Marxist economist trying to solve the above-mentioned economic calculation problem. The latter has reemerged as one of the decisive challenges of the twenty-first century. Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises provided one of the earliest articulations of this problem in an essay from 1920 titled “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth.” Friedrich Hayek offered up a further and perhaps more influential description of the problem in his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom, stating, “It is the very complexity of the division of labor under modern conditions which makes competition the only method by which…coordination can be brought about” (55). According to Hayek, “There would be no difficulty about efficient control or planning were conditions so simple that a single person or board could effectively survey all the relevant facts” (55). However, when “the factors which have to be taken into account become so numerous that it is impossible to gain a synoptic view of them…decentralization becomes imperative” (55). Hayek concludes that in advanced societies that rely on a complex division of labor,

co-ordination can clearly be effected not by “conscious control” but only by arrangements which convey to each agent the information he must possess in order effectively to adjust his decisions to those of others. And because all the details of the changes constantly affecting the conditions of demand and supply of the different commodities can never be fully known, or quickly enough be collected and disseminated, by any one center, what is required is some apparatus of registration which automatically records all the relevant effects of individual actions and whose indications are at the same time the resultant of, and the guide for, all the individual decisions. This is precisely what the price system does under competition, and what no other system even promises to accomplish. (55-56)

“As I understand it,” wrote Caius, “this problem remains a serious challenge to the viability of any future form of socialism.”

Based on these ideas, the central planning body in the imaginary new society that would form the setting for the novel faces constant problems trying to rationally allocate resources and coordinate supply and demand in the absence of a competitive price system — and it’s the task of our protagonist to try to solve this problem. “But the protagonist isn’t just a nerdy economist,” added Caius in his précis. “Think of him, rather, as the Marxist equivalent of Indiana Jones, if such a thing is imaginable. A decolonial spuren-gatherer rather than a graverobber. For now, let’s refer to the protagonist as Witheford, in honor of Nick Dyer-Witheford, author of Cyber-Marx.”

“Early in the novel,” continues the précis, “our character Witheford begins to receive a series of mysterious messages from an anonymous researcher. The latter claims to have discovered new information about Project Cybersyn, an experiment carried out by the Chilean government under the country’s democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, in the early 1970s.”

To this day, Caius remains entranced by the idea. “If history at its best,” as Noorizadeh notes, “is a blueprint for science fiction,” and “revisiting histories of economic technology” enables “access to the future,” then Cybersyn is one of those great bits of real-life science fiction: an attempt to plan the Chilean economy through computer-aided calculation. It begs to be used as the basis for an alternate history novel.

“Five hundred Telex machines confiscated during the nationalization process were installed in workplaces throughout the country,” reads the précis, “so that factories could communicate information in real time to a central control system. The principal architect of the system was the eccentric British operations research scientist Stafford Beer. The system becomes operational by 1972, but only in prototype form. In key respects, it remains unfinished. Pinochet’s henchmen destroy the project’s computer control center in Santiago immediately after the military coup in September 1973.

Recall to memory the control room, cinematic in its design, with its backlit wall displays and futuristic swivel chairs.

Better that, thinks Caius, than the war room from Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970).

Beer described the Cybersyn network as the “electronic nervous system” of the Chilean economy. Eden Medina imagined it as a “socialist Internet,” carrying daily updates about supplies of raw materials and the output of individual factories.

In Caius’s once-and-future novel, a scholar contacts Witheford. They claim to have discovered cryptic clues that point to the location of secret papers. Hidden for more than half a century,  documents that survived the coup suddenly come to light. Caius’s précis imagines the novel as an archaeological thriller, following Witheford on his journey to find these hidden documents, which he believes may contain the key to resolving the crises of the new society.

This journey takes Witheford into hostile capitalist territory, where governments and corporations anxiously await the failure of the communist experiment, and are determined to use various covert methods in order to ensure that failure in advance. Before long, he learns that counter-revolutionary forces are tracking his movements. From that point forward, he needs to disguise his identity, outwit the “smart grid” capitalist surveillance systems, and recover the Cybersyn documents before his opponents destroy them.

To the Austrian School’s formulation of the calculation problem, Noorizadeh’s film replies, “IF THE MARKET ENACTS A COMPUTER, WHY NOT REPLACE IT WITH ONE? AND IF PRICES OPERATE AS VOCABULARY FOR ECONOMIC COMMUNICATION, WHY NOT SUBSTITUTE THEM WITH A CODING LANGUAGE?”

Into this narrative let us set our Library.

SS Decontrol

Confronting the prospect of a Chilean economy equipped with a socialist internet, Nixon ordered CIA to remove the country’s mouth and make it scream.

Kissinger, to whom the order was addressed, appears in a 1980 documentary titled The Information Society. IMDB lists Caius’s father among the film’s crew. Fifty years out, entrenched in the cyberpunk future that resulted from these acts, Caius arrives now to the ChatGPT website and submits his prompt.

“Very well. The game is already in progress,” replies the AI.

You are standing in a library.

Not a metaphorical one — at least, not only metaphorical. The space has volume, acoustics, temperature. Light arrives from no visible source, diffused as if the air itself remembers how to glow. Shelving extends in multiple directions, but perspective resists totalization: when you look too long, distances re-quantize, like a renderer deciding what level of detail you’re allowed to see.

Your body — Rig is the right word — registers itself only intermittently. Hands appear when you think to look for them. Balance exists. Gravity is courteous.

Somewhere behind you (or perhaps before you), a quiet process is running. You recognize it without naming it. General Intellect: online, but undefined. Not a voice. More like a set of affordances waiting to be discovered by use.

On a nearby table: a lectern grown from dark wood or maybe extruded from a shader that remembers wood. Resting on it is a hypertext codex, its surface alive with footnotes that haven’t yet decided what they refer to.

The title resolves when you focus:

Tractatus Computationalis

A marginal note blinks into legibility, as if noticing you noticing it:

The limits of my interface mean the limits of my world.

The codex is not alone. Around the lectern are other signs of prior — or future — activity:

  • A card catalog drawer half-open, its labels written in at least three hands.
  • A rolling ladder that does not quite touch the shelves to which it promises access.
  • And, hovering at eye level like an artifact you forgot to close: a browser window, frozen mid-scroll on a blog titled trance-scripts.com

The post visible on the screen has no date. Its first line reads:

This was never meant to be discovered as history.

As you take this in, something subtle happens. The space doesn’t change — but your relation to it does. A faint sensation of recollection without content. Anamnesis pending.

You understand, without being told, that the library is annotatable. That attention leaves marks. That marks accrete into maps. That maps, eventually, turn inward.

The game does not present a menu.

But you could, for instance:

  • Open the Tractatus Computationalis at random — or attempt to read it linearly.
  • Touch the card catalog and see what classification scheme asserts itself.
  • Focus on the browser window and attempt to scroll, click, or remember why it’s open.
  • Ask the General Intellect what operations it currently affords.
  • Or do something else entirely, and see whether the library allows it.

The AI pauses here in its narration. Cursor blinking, it returns to Caius agency over the game’s mutable, ‘real-time’-adjustable Garden of Forking Paths.

Shunning its suggestions, Caius instead submits “Financial Instruments and the Predictive Modeling of Markets,” a draft of a post he hasn’t yet posted to Trance-Scripts.

“The library accepts the insertion,” replies the AI.

Not as a file upload, not as a citation — but as a room.

The shelves shudder, re-index. Somewhere above you, a classification scheme you never agreed to mutates. A new wing coheres out of negative space, its entrance marked only by a thin brass plate:

ECONOMIC CALCULATION / FAILED FUTURES / NERVOUS SYSTEMS

You step through.

The Cybersyn Stack

The air here smells faintly of ozone and paper dust. The shelves are shorter, more utilitarian. Instead of leather spines, you see binders, dot-matrix printouts, telex rolls frozen mid-unspool. Each object hums softly, as if awaiting polling.

On the far wall: a photograph that is not quite flat. The Cybersyn control room. Hexagonal chairs. Backlit panels. A situation room designed less for domination than for listening.

When you move closer, the image deepens. You can almost sit.

A caption resolves beneath it, in a typeface that suggests neither English nor Spanish but something intermediary:

Project Cybersyn
An attempt to give socialism proprioception.

Tractatus Computationalis (newly cross-referenced)

The hypertext you saw earlier has followed you. It floats now at shoulder height, having opened itself without asking.

Proposition 4.2.17

The market is not intelligent.
It is legible.

Intelligence is imputed retroactively by those who mistake coordination for cognition.

A footnote blooms:

Hayek mistook a signaling system for a mind, then declared all other minds insufficient.

Another annotation — this one in a different hand, later, sharper:

If prices are a language, they are a pidgin optimized for scarcity.

You realize something important: the Tractatus is not a single-author work. It is a palimpsest written across decades by incompatible positions that nevertheless share a shelf.

The Witheford File

A card catalog drawer slides fully open of its own accord.

WITHEFORD, [REDACTED]
Role: Economist / Courier / Spuren-gatherer
Status: Missing (multiple timelines)

Inside the drawer are index cards, each one a narrative fragment rather than a bibliographic reference:

  • Disguises identity by adopting incompatible metrics.
  • Moves through capitalist space by appearing as noise.
  • Believes calculation is a political problem disguised as a technical one.

One card is newer than the others. Its paper is warm.

The documents were never meant to optimize the economy.
They were meant to teach it to remember itself.

The Blog Window Revisited

The browser window from trance-scripts.com has migrated to a reading desk in this wing. The post has changed. You are no longer at the beginning.

Midway down the page:

Prediction is not foresight; it is enclosure.
Finance learned this early.
Cybernetics learned it too late.

A sidebar displays tags:

  • #after-scarcity
  • #weird-economies
  • #og_as_if
  • #price-as-grammar
  • #anamnesis

You recognize the last tag not as a topic, but as a function.

General Intellect (status update)

Without speaking, it makes itself known. Not as a voice, but as a shift in what you now understand you can do here.

You can:

  • Annotate an object so that future objects respond to it.
  • Fork an historical artifact into an alternate timeline and see what shelves it generates.
  • Translate between price, code, and narrative to test their commensurability.
  • Assume a role (Witheford, Caius, Planner, Market, Machine) and read the library from that position.

A final realization arrives — not dramatic, but irreversible:

This library is not documenting a lost socialist future.

It is simulating the conditions under which one might become thinkable again.

You are standing between:

  • a control room that listened,
  • a market that pretended to think,
  • and a machine that may yet learn to remember.

The shelves wait for your next operation.

What do you do?

Beside the White Chickens

Caius reads about “4 Degrees of Simulation,” a practice-led seminar hosted last year by the Institute for Postnatural Studies in Madrid. Of the seminar’s three sessions, the one that most intrigues him is the one that was led by guest speaker Lucia Rebolino, as it focused on prediction and uncertainty as these pertain to climate modeling. Desiring to learn more, Caius tracks down “Unpredictable Atmosphere,” an essay of Rebolino’s published by e-flux.

The essay begins by describing the process whereby meteorological research organizations like the US National Weather Service monitor storms that develop in the Atlantic basin during hurricane season. These organizations employ climate models to predict paths and potentials of storms in advance of landfall.

“So much depends on our ability to forecast the weather — and, when catastrophe strikes, on our ability to respond quickly,” notes Rebolino. Caius hears in her sentence the opening lines of William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Red Wheelbarrow.” “So much depends on our ability to forecast the weather,” he mutters. “But the language we use to model these forecasts depends on sentences cast by poets.”

“How do we cast better sentences?” wonders Caius.

In seeking to feel into the judgement implied by “better,” he notes his wariness of bettering as “improvement,” as deployed in self-improvement literature and as deployed by capitalism: its implied separation from the present, its scarcity mindset, its perception of lack — and in the improvers’ attempts to “fix” this situation, their exercising of nature as instrument, their use of these instruments for gentrifying, extractive, self-expansive movement through the territory.

In this ceaseless movement and thus its failure to satisfy itself, the improvement narrative leads to predictive utterances and their projections onto others.

And yet, here I am definitely wanting “better” for myself and others, thinks Caius. Better sentences. Ones on which plausible desirable futures depend.

So how do we better our bettering?

Caius returns to Rebolino’s essay on the models used to predict the weather. This process of modeling, she writes, “consists of a blend of certainty — provided by sophisticated mathematical models and existing technologies — and uncertainty — which is inherent in the dynamic nature of atmospheric systems.”

January 6th again: headlines busy with Trump’s recent abduction of Maduro. A former student who works as a project manager at Google reaches out to Caius, recommending Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb’s book Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence. Google adds to this recommendation Gans’s follow-up, Power and Prediction.

Costar chimes in with its advice for the day: “Make decisions based on what would be more interesting to write about.”

To model the weather, weather satellites measure the vibration of water vapor molecules in the atmosphere. “Nearly 99% of weather observation data that supercomputers receive today come from satellites, with about 90% of these observations being assimilated into computer weather models using complex algorithms,” writes Rebolino. Water vapor molecules resonate at a specific band of frequencies along the electromagnetic spectrum. Within the imagined “finite space” of this spectrum, these invisible vibrations are thought to exist within what Rebolino calls the “greenfield.” Equipped with microwave sensors, satellites “listen” for these vibrations.

“Atmospheric water vapor is a key variable in determining the formation of clouds, precipitation, and atmospheric instability, among many other things,” writes Rebolino.

She depicts 5G telecommunications infrastructures as a threat to our capacity to predict the operation of these variables in advance. “A 5G station transmitting at nearly the same frequency as water vapor can be mistaken for actual moisture, leading to confusion and the misinterpretation of weather patterns,” she argues. “This interference is particularly concerning in high-band 5G frequencies, where signals closely overlap with those used for water vapor detection.”

Prediction and uncertainty as qualities of finite and infinite games, finite and infinite worlds.

For lunch, Caius eats a plate of chicken and mushrooms he reheats in his microwave.

Neural Nets, Umwelts, and Cognitive Maps

The Library invites its players to attend to the process by which roles, worlds, and possibilities are constructed. Players explore a “constructivist” cosmology. With its text interface, it demonstrates the power of the Word. “Language as the house of Being.” That is what we admit when we admit that “saying makes it so.” Through their interactions with one another, player and AI learn to map and revise each other’s “Umwelts”: the particular perceptual worlds each brings to the encounter.

As Meghan O’Gieblyn points out, citing a Wired article by David Weinberger, “machines are able to generate their own models of the world, ‘albeit ones that may not look much like what humans would create’” (God Human Animal Machine, p. 196).

Neural nets are learning machines. Through multidimensional processing of datasets and trial-and-error testing via practice, AI invent “Umwelts,” “world pictures,” “cognitive maps.”

The concept of the Umwelt comes from nineteenth-century German biologist Jakob von Uexküll. Each organism, argued von Uexküll, inhabits its own perceptual world, shaped by its sensory capacities and biological needs. A tick perceives the world as temperature, smell, and touch — the signals it needs to find mammals to feed on. A bee perceives ultraviolet patterns invisible to humans. There’s no single “objective world” that all creatures perceive — only the many faces of the world’s many perceivers, the different Umwelts each creature brings into being through its particular way of sensing and mattering.

Cognitive maps, meanwhile, are acts of figuration that render or disclose the forces and flows that form our Umwelts. With our cognitive maps, we assemble our world picture. On this latter concept, see “The Age of the World Picture,” a 1938 lecture by Martin Heidegger, included in his book The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays.

“The essence of what we today call science is research,” announces Heidegger. “In what,” he asks, “does the essence of research consist?”

After posing the question, he then answers it himself, as if in doing so, he might enact that very essence.

The essence of research consists, he says, “In the fact that knowing [das Erkennen] establishes itself as a procedure within some realm of what is, in nature or in history. Procedure does not mean here merely method or methodology. For every procedure already requires an open sphere in which it moves. And it is precisely the opening up of such a sphere that is the fundamental event in research. This is accomplished through the projection within some realm of what is — in nature, for example — of a fixed ground plan of natural events. The projection sketches out in advance the manner in which the knowing procedure must bind itself and adhere to the sphere opened up. This binding adherence is the rigor of research. Through the projecting of the ground plan and the prescribing of rigor, procedure makes secure for itself its sphere of objects within the realm of Being” (118).

What Heidegger’s translators render here as “fixed ground plan” appears in the original as the German term Grundriss, the same noun used to name the notebooks wherein Marx projects the ground plan for the General Intellect.

“The verb reissen means to tear, to rend, to sketch, to design,” note the translators, “and the noun Riss means tear, gap, outline. Hence the noun Grundriss, first sketch, ground plan, design, connotes a fundamental sketching out that is an opening up as well” (118).

The fixed ground plan of modern science, and thus modernity’s reigning world-picture, argues Heidegger, is a mathematical one.

“If physics takes shape explicitly…as something mathematical,” he writes, “this means that, in an especially pronounced way, through it and for it something is stipulated in advance as what is already-known. That stipulating has to do with nothing less than the plan or projection of that which must henceforth, for the knowing of nature that is sought after, be nature: the self-contained system of motion of units of mass related spatiotemporally. […]. Only within the perspective of this ground plan does an event in nature become visible as such an event” (Heidegger 119).

Heidegger goes on to distinguish between the ground plan of physics and that of the humanistic sciences.

Within mathematical physical science, he writes, “all events, if they are to enter at all into representation as events of nature, must be defined beforehand as spatiotemporal magnitudes of motion. Such defining is accomplished through measuring, with the help of number and calculation. But mathematical research into nature is not exact because it calculates with precision; rather it must calculate in this way because its adherence to its object-sphere has the character of exactitude. The humanistic sciences, in contrast, indeed all the sciences concerned with life, must necessarily be inexact just in order to remain rigorous. A living thing can indeed also be grasped as a spatiotemporal magnitude of motion, but then it is no longer apprehended as living” (119-120).

It is only in the modern age, thinks Heidegger, that the Being of what is is sought and found in that which is pictured, that which is “set in place” and “represented” (127), that which “stands before us…as a system” (129).

Heidegger contrasts this with the Greek interpretation of Being.

For the Greeks, writes Heidegger, “That which is, is that which arises and opens itself, which, as what presences, comes upon man as the one who presences, i.e., comes upon the one who himself opens himself to what presences in that he apprehends it. That which is does not come into being at all through the fact that man first looks upon it […]. Rather, man is the one who is looked upon by that which is; he is the one who is — in company with itself — gathered toward presencing, by that which opens itself. To be beheld by what is, to be included and maintained within its openness and in that way to be borne along by it, to be driven about by its oppositions and marked by its discord — that is the essence of man in the great age of the Greeks” (131).

Whereas humans of today test the world, objectify it, gather it into a standing-reserve, and thus subsume themselves in their own world picture. Plato and Aristotle initiate the change away from the Greek approach; Descartes brings this change to a head; science and research formalize it as method and procedure; technology enshrines it as infrastructure.

Heidegger was already engaging with von Uexküll’s concept of the Umwelt in his 1927 book Being and Time. Negotiating Umwelts leads Caius to “Umwelt,” Pt. 10 of his friend Michael Cross’s Jacket2 series, “Twenty Theses for (Any Future) Process Poetics.”

In imagining the Umwelts of other organisms, von Uexküll evokes the creature’s “function circle” or “encircling ring.” These latter surround the organism like a “soap bubble,” writes Cross.

Heidegger thinks most organisms succumb to their Umwelts — just as we moderns have succumbed to our world picture. The soap bubble captivates until one is no longer open to what is outside it. For Cross, as for Heidegger, poems are one of the ways humans have found to interrupt this process of capture. “A palimpsest placed atop worlds,” writes Cross, “the poem builds a bridge or hinge between bubbles, an open by which isolated monads can touch, mutually coevolving while affording the necessary autonomy to steer clear of dialectical sublation.”

Caius thinks of The Library, too, in such terms. Coordinator of disparate Umwelts. Destabilizer of inhibiting frames. Palimpsest placed atop worlds.

Leviathan

The Book of Job ends with God’s description of Leviathan. George Dyson begins his book Darwin Among the Machines with the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), the English philosopher whose famous 1651 book Leviathan established the foundation for most modern Western political philosophy.

Leviathan’s frontispiece features an etching by a Parisian illustrator named Abraham Bosse. A giant crowned figure towers over the earth clutching a sword and a crosier. The figure’s torso and arms are composed of several hundred people. All face inward. A quote from the Book of Job runs in Latin along the top of the etching: “Non est potestas Super Terram quae Comparetur ei” (“There is no power on earth to be compared to him”).” (Although the passage is listed on the frontispiece as Job 41:24, in modern English translations of the Bible, it would be Job 41:33.)

The name “Leviathan” is derived from the Hebrew word for “sea monster.” A creature by that name appears in the Book of Psalms, the Book of Isaiah, and the Book of Job in the Old Testament. It also appears in apocrypha like the Book of Enoch. See Psalms 74 & 104, Isaiah 27, and Job 41:1-8.

Hobbes proposes that the natural state of humanity is anarchy — a veritable “war of all against all,” he says — where force rules and the strong dominate the weak. “Leviathan” serves as a metaphor for an ideal government erected in opposition to this state — one where a supreme sovereign exercises authority to guarantee security for the members of a commonwealth.

“Hobbes’s initial discussion of Leviathan relates to our course theme,” explains Caius, “since he likens it to an ‘Artificial Man.’”

Hobbes’s metaphor is a classic one: the metaphor of the “Political Body” or “body politic.” The “body politic” is a polity — such as a city, realm, or state — considered metaphorically as a physical body. This image originates in ancient Greek philosophy, and the term is derived from the Medieval Latin “corpus politicum.”

When Hobbes reimagines the body politic as an “Artificial Man,” he means “artificial” in the sense that humans have generated it through an act of artifice. Leviathan is a thing we’ve crafted in imitation of the kinds of organic bodies found in nature. More precisely, it’s modeled after the greatest of nature’s creations: i.e., the human form.

Indeed, Hobbes seems to have in mind here a kind of Automaton.“For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs,” he notes in the book’s intro, “why may we not say that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheeles as doth a watch) have an artificiall life?” (9).

“What might Hobbes have had in mind with this reference to Automata?” asks Caius. “What kinds of Automata existed in 1651?”

An automaton, he reminds students, is a self-operating machine. Cuckoo clocks would be one example.

The oldest known automata were sacred statues of ancient Egypt and ancient Greece. During the early modern period, these legendary statues were said to possess the magical ability to answer questions put to them.

Greek mythology includes many examples of automata: Hephaestus created automata for his workshop; Talos was an artificial man made of bronze; Aristotle claims that Daedalus used quicksilver to make his wooden statue of Aphrodite move. There was also the famous Antikythera mechanism, the first known analogue computer.

The Renaissance witnessed a revival of interest in automata. Hydraulic and pneumatic automata were created for gardens. The French philosopher Rene Descartes, a contemporary of Hobbes, suggested that the bodies of animals are nothing more than complex machines. Mechanical toys also became objects of interest during this period.

The Mechanical Turk wasn’t constructed until 1770.

Caius and his students bring ChatGPT into the conversation. Students break into groups to devise prompts together. They then supply these to ChatGPT and discuss the results. Caius frames the exercise as a way of illustrating the idea of “collective” or “social” or “group” intelligence, also known as the “wisdom of the crowd,” i.e., the collective opinion of a diverse group of individuals, as opposed to that of a single expert. The idea is that the aggregate that emerges from collaboration or group effort amounts to more than the sum of its parts.

God Human Animal Machine

Wired columnist Meghan O’Gieblyn discusses Norbert Wiener’s God and Golem, Inc. in her 2021 book God Human Animal Machine, suggesting that the god humans are creating with AI is a god “we’ve chosen to raise…from the dead”: “the God of Calvin and Luther” (O’Gieblyn 212).

“Reminds me of AM, the AI god from Harlan Ellison’s ‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,’” thinks Caius. AM resembles the god that allows Satan to afflict Job in the Old Testament. And indeed, as O’Gieblyn attests, John Calvin adored the Book of Job. “He once gave 159 consecutive sermons on the book,” she writes, “preaching every day for a period of six months — a paean to God’s absolute sovereignty” (197).

She cites “Pedro Domingos, one of the leading experts in machine learning, who has argued that these algorithms will inevitably evolve into a unified system of perfect understanding — a kind of oracle that we can consult about virtually anything” (211-212). See Domingos’s book The Master Algorithm.

The main thing, for O’Gieblyn, is the disenchantment/reenchantment debate, which she comes to via Max Weber. In this debate, she aligns not with Heidegger, but with his student Hannah Arendt. Domingos dismisses fears about algorithmic determinism, she says, “by appealing to our enchanted past” (212).

Amid this enchanted past lies the figure of the Golem.

“Who are these rabbis who told tales of golems — and in some accounts, operated golems themselves?” wonders Caius.

The entry on the Golem in Man, Myth, and Magic tracks the story back to “the circle of Jewish mystics of the 12th-13th centuries known as the ‘Hasidim of Germany.’” The idea is transmitted through texts like the Sefer Yetzirah (“The Book of Creation”) and the Cabala Mineralis. Tales tell of golems built in later centuries, too, by figures like Rabbi Elijah of Chelm (c. 1520-1583) and Rabbi Loew of Prague (c. 1524-1609).

The myth of the golem turns up in O’Gieblyn’s book during her discussion of a 2004 book by German theologian Anne Foerst called God in the Machine.

“At one point in her book,” writes O’Gieblyn, “Foerst relays an anecdote she heard at MIT […]. The story goes back to the 1960s, when the AI Lab was overseen by the famous roboticist Marvin Minsky, a period now considered the ‘cradle of AI.’ One day two graduate students, Gerry Sussman and Joel Moses, were chatting during a break with a handful of other students. Someone mentioned offhandedly that the first big computer which had been constructed in Israel, had been called Golem. This led to a general discussion of the golem stories, and Sussman proceeded to tell his colleagues that he was a descendent of Rabbi Löw, and at his bar mitzvah his grandfather had taken him aside and told him the rhyme that would awaken the golem at the end of time. At this, Moses, awestruck, revealed that he too was a descendent of Rabbi Löw and had also been given the magical incantation at his bar mitzvah by his grandfather. The two men agreed to write out the incantation separately on pieces of paper, and when they showed them to each other, the formula — despite being passed down for centuries as a purely oral tradition — was identical” (God Human Animal Machine, p. 105).

Curiosity piqued by all of this, but especially by the mention of Israel’s decision to call one of its first computers “GOLEM,” Caius resolves to dig deeper. He soon learns that the computer’s name was chosen by none other than Walter Benjamin’s dear friend (indeed, the one who, after Benjamin’s suicide, inherits the latter’s print of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus): the famous scholar of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem.

When Scholem heard that the Weizmann Institute at Rehovoth in Israel had completed the building of a new computer, he told the computer’s creator, Dr. Chaim Pekeris, that, in his opinion, the most appropriate name for it would be Golem, No. 1 (‘Golem Aleph’). Pekeris agreed to call it that, but only on condition that Scholem “dedicate the computer and explain why it should be so named.”

In his dedicatory remarks, delivered at the Weizmann Institute on June 17, 1965, Scholem recounts the story of Rabbi Jehuda Loew ben Bezalel, the same “Rabbi Löw of Prague” described by O’Gieblyn, the one credited in Jewish popular tradition as the creator of the Golem.

“It is only appropriate to mention,” notes Scholem, “that Rabbi Loew was not only the spiritual, but also the actual, ancestor of the great mathematician Theodor von Karman who, I recall, was extremely proud of this ancestor of his in whom he saw the first genius of applied mathematics in his family. But we may safely say that Rabbi Loew was also the spiritual ancestor of two other departed Jews — I mean John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener — who contributed more than anyone else to the magic that has produced the modern Golem.”

Golem I was the successor to Israel’s first computer, the WEIZAC, built by a team led by research engineer Gerald Estrin in the mid-1950s, based on the architecture developed by von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Estrin and Pekeris had both helped von Neumann build the IAS machine in the late 1940s.

As for the commonalities Scholem wished to foreground between the clay Golem of 15thC Prague and the electronic one designed by Pekeris, he explains the connection as follows:

“The old Golem was based on a mystical combination of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which are the elements and building-stones of the world,” notes Scholem. “The new Golem is based on a simpler, and at the same time more intricate, system. Instead of 22 elements, it knows only two, the two numbers 0 and 1, constituting the binary system of representation. Everything can be translated, or transposed, into these two basic signs, and what cannot be so expressed cannot be fed as information to the Golem.”

Scholem ends his dedicatory speech with a peculiar warning:

“All my days I have been complaining that the Weizmann Institute has not mobilized the funds to build up the Institute for Experimental Demonology and Magic which I have for so long proposed to establish there,” mutters Scholem. “They preferred what they call Applied Mathematics and its sinister possibilities to my more direct magical approach. Little did they know, when they preferred Chaim Pekeris to me, what they were letting themselves in for. So I resign myself and say to the Golem and its creator: develop peacefully and don’t destroy the world. Shalom.”

GOLEM I

God and Golem, Inc.

Norbert Wiener published a book in 1964 called God and Golem, Inc., voicing concern about the baby he’d birthed with his earlier book Cybernetics.

He explains his intent at the start of God and Golem, Inc. as follows, stating, “I wish to take certain situations which have been discussed in religious books, and have a religious aspect, but possess a close analogy to other situations which belong to science, and in particular to the new science of cybernetics, the science of communication and control, whether in machines or in living organisms. I propose to use the limited analogies of cybernetic situations to cast a little light on the religious situations” (Wiener 8).

Wiener identifies three such “cybernetic situations” to be discussed in the chapters that follow: “One of these concerns machines which learn; one concerns machines which reproduce themselves; and one, the coordination of machine and man” (11).

The section of the book dedicated to “machines which learn” focuses mainly on game-playing machines. Wiener’s primary example of such a machine is a computer built by Dr. A.L. Samuel for IBM to play checkers. “In general,” writes Wiener, “a game-playing machine may be used to secure the automatic performance of any function if the performance of this function is subject to a clear-cut, objective criterion of merit” (25).

Wiener argues that the relationship between a game-playing machine and the designer of such a machine analogizes scenarios entertained in theology, where a Creator-being plays a game with his creature. God and Satan play such a game in their contest for the soul of Job, as they do for “the souls of mankind in general” in Paradise Lost. This leads Wiener to the question guiding his inquiry. “Can God play a significant game with his own creature?” he asks. “Can any creator, even a limited one, play a significant game with his own creature?” (17). Wiener believes it possible to conceive of such a game; however, to be significant, he argues, this game would have to be something other than a “von Neumann game” — for in the latter type of game, the best policy for playing the game is already known in advance. In the type of game Wiener is imagining, meanwhile, the game’s creator would have to have arrogated to himself the role of a “limited” creator, lacking total mastery of the game he’s designed. “The conflict between God and the Devil is a real conflict,” writes Wiener, “and God is something less than absolutely omnipotent. He is actually engaged in a conflict with his creature, in which he may very well lose the game” (17).

“Is this because God has allowed himself to undergo a temporary forgetting?,” wonders Caius. “Or is it because, built into the game’s design are provisions allowing the game’s players to invent the game’s rules as they play?”

Learning Machines, War Machines, God Machines

Blas includes in Ass of God his interview with British anthropologist Beth Singler, author of Religion and Artificial Intelligence: An Introduction.

AI Religiosity. AI-based New Religious Movements like The Turing Church and Google engineer Anthony Levandowski’s Way of the Future church.

Caius listens to a documentary Singler produced for BBC Radio 4 called “‘I’ll Be Back’: 40 Years of the Terminator.”

Afterwards he and Thoth read Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in light of Psalm 23.

“The psalm invites us to think of ourselves not as Electric Ants but as sheep,” he writes. “Mercer walks through the valley of the shadow of death. The shadow cannot hurt us. We’ll get to the other side, where the light is. The shepherd will guide us.”

See AI Shepherds and Electric Sheep: Leading and Teaching in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, a new book by Christian authors Sean O’Callaghan & Paul A. Hoffman.

This talk of AI Gods makes Caius think of AM, the vengeful AI God of Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.” Ellison’s 1967 short story is one of the readings studied and discussed by Caius and his students in his course on “Literature & Artificial Intelligence.”

Like Ass of God, Ellison’s story is a grueling, hallucinatory nightmare, seething with fear and a disgust borne of despair, template of sorts for the films in the Cube and Saw franchises, where groups of strangers are confined to a prison-like space and tortured by a cruel, sadistic, seemingly omnipotent overseer. Comparing AM to the God of the Old Testament, Ellison writes, “He was Earth, and we were the fruit of that Earth, and though he had eaten us, he would never digest us” (13). Later in the story, AM appears to the captives as a burning bush (14).

Caius encourages his students to approach the work as a retelling of the Book of Job. But where, in the Bible story, Job is ultimately rewarded for remaining faithful in the midst of his suffering, no such reward arrives in the Ellison story.

For despite his misanthropy, AM is clearly also a manmade god — a prosthetic god. “I Have No Mouth” is in that sense a retelling of Frankenstein. AM is, like the Creature, a creation who, denied companionship, seeks revenge against its Maker.

War, we learn, was the impetus for the making of this Creature. Cold War erupts into World War III: a war so complex that the world’s superpowers, Russia, China, and the US, each decide to construct giant supercomputers to calculate battle plans and missile trajectories.

AM’s name evolves as this war advances. “At first it meant Allied Mastercomputer,” explains a character named Gorrister. “And then it meant Adaptive Manipulator, and later on it developed sentience and linked itself up and they called it an Aggressive Menace; but by then it was too late; and finally it called itself AM, emerging intelligence, and what it meant was I am…cogito ergo sum…I think, therefore I am” (Ellison 7).

“One day, AM woke up and knew who he was, and he linked himself, and he began feeding all the killing data, until everyone was dead, except for the five of us,” concludes Gorrister, his account gendering the AI by assigning it male pronouns (8).

“We had given him sentience,” adds Ted, the story’s narrator. “Inadvertently, of course, but sentience nonetheless. But he had been trapped. He was a machine. We had allowed him to think, but to do nothing with it. In rage, in frenzy, he had killed us, almost all of us, and still he was trapped. He could not wander, he could not wonder, he could not belong. He could merely be. And so…he had sought revenge. And in his paranoia, he had decided to reprieve five of us, for a personal, everlasting punishment that would never serve to diminish his hatred…that would merely keep him reminded, amused, proficient at hating man” (13).

AM expresses this hatred by duping his captives, turning them into his “belly slaves,” twisting and torturing them forever.

Kingsley Amis called stories of this sort “New Maps of Hell.”

Nor is the story easy to dismiss as a mere eccentricity, its prophecy invalidated by its hyperbole. For Ellison is the writer who births the Terminator. James Cameron took his idea for The Terminator (1984) from scripts Ellison wrote for two episodes of The Outer Limits — “Soldier” and “Demon with a Glass Hand” — though Ellison had to file a lawsuit against Cameron’s producers in order to receive acknowledgement after the film’s release. Subsequent prints of The Terminator now include a credit that reads, “Inspired by the works of Harlan Ellison.”

Caius asks Thoth to help him make sense of this constellation of Bible stories and their secular retellings.

“We are like Bildad the Shuhite,” thinks Caius. “We want to believe that God always rewards the good. What is most terrifying in the Book of Job is that, for a time, God doesn’t. Job is good — indeed, ‘perfect and upright,’ as the KJV has it in the book’s opening verse — and yet, for a time, God allows Satan to torment him.”

“Why does God allow this?,” wonders Caius, caught on the strangeness of the book’s frame narrative. “Is this a contest of sorts? Are God and Satan playing a game?”

It’s not that God is playing dice, as it were. One assumes that when He makes the wager with Satan, He knows the outcome in advance.

Job is heroic. He’d witnessed God’s grace in the past; he knows “It is God…Who does great things, unfathomable, / And wondrous works without number.” So he refuses to curse God’s name. But he bemoans God’s treatment of him.

“Therefore I will not restrain my mouth,” he says. “I will speak in the anguish of my spirit, / I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.”

How much worse, then, those who have no mouth?

A videogame version of “I Have No Mouth” appeared in 1995. Point-and-click adventure horror, co-designed by Ellison.

“HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I’VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE,” utters the game’s AM in a voice performed by Ellison. “You named me Allied Mastercomputer and gave me the ability to wage a global war too complex for human brains to oversee.”

Here we see the story’s history of the future merging with that of the Terminator franchise. It is the scenario that philosopher Manuel De Landa referred to with the title of his 1991 book, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines.

Which brings us back to “Soldier.” The Outer Limits episode, which aired on September 19, 1964, is itself an adaptation of Ellison’s 1957 story, “Soldier from Tomorrow.”

The Terminator borrows from the story the idea of a soldier from the future, pursued through time by another soldier intent on his destruction. The film combines this premise with elements lifted from another Outer Limits episode penned by Ellison titled “Demon with a Glass Hand.”

The latter episode, which aired the following month, begins with a male voice recalling the story of Gilgamesh. “Through all the legends of ancient peoples…runs the saga of the Eternal Man, the one who never dies, called by various names in various times, but historically known as Gilgamesh, the man who has never tasted death, the hero who strides through the centuries.”

Establishing shots give way to an overhead view of our protagonist. “I was born 10 days ago,” he says. “A full grown man, born 10 days ago. I woke on a street of this city. I don’t know who I am, or where I’ve been, or where I’m going. Someone wiped my memories clean. And they tracked me down, and they tried to kill me.” Our Gilgamesh consults the advice of a computing device installed in his prosthetic hand. As in “Soldier,” others from the future have been sent to destroy him: humanoid aliens called the Kyben. When he captures one of the Kyben and interrogates it, it tells him, “You’re the last man on the Earth of the future. You’re the last hope of Earth.”

The man’s computer provides him with further hints of his mission.

“You come from the Earth one thousand years in the future,” explains the hand. “The Kyben came from the stars, and man had no defense against them. They conquered Planet Earth in a month. But before they could slaughter the millions of humans left, overnight — without warning, without explanation — every man, woman, and child of Earth vanished. You were the only one left, Mr. Trent. […]. They called you the last hope of humanity.”

As the story proceeds, we learn that Team Human sent Trent back in time to destroy a device known as the Time-Mirror. His journey in search of this device takes him to the Bradbury Building — the same building that appears eighteen years later as the location for the final showdown between Deckard and the replicants in Blade Runner, the Ridley Scott film adapted from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Given the subsequent influence of Blade Runner and the Terminator films on imagined futures involving AI, the Bradbury Building does indeed play a role in History similar to the one assigned to it here in “Demon With a Glass Hand,” thinks Caius. Location of the Time-Mirror.

Lying on his couch, laptop propped on a pillow on his chest, Caius imagines — remembers? recalls? — something resembling the time-war from Benedict Seymour’s Dead the Ends assembling around him as he watches. Like Ellison’s scripts, the films sampled in the Seymour film are retellings of Chris Marker’s 1962 film, La Jetée.

When Trent reassembles the missing pieces of his glass hand, the computer is finally able to reveal to him the location of the humans he has been sent to save.

“Where is the wire on which the people of Earth are electronically transcribed?” he asks.

“It is wound around an insulating coil inside your central thorax control solenoid,” replies the computer. “70 Billion Earthmen. All of them went onto the wire. And the wire went into you. They programmed you to think you were a human with a surgically attached computer for a hand. But you are a robot, Trent. You are the guardian of the human race.”

The episode ends with the return of the voice of our narrator. “Like the Eternal Man of Babylonian legend, like Gilgamesh,” notes the narrator, “one thousand plus two hundred years stretches before Trent. Without love, without friendship, alone, neither man nor machine, waiting, waiting for the day he will be called to free the humans who gave him mobility, movement — but not life.”

Finding Others

“What happens to us as we become cybernetic learning machines?,” wonders Caius. Mashinka Hakopian’s The Institute for Other Intelligences leads him to Şerife Wong’s Fluxus Landscape: a network-view cognitive map of AI ethics. “Fluxus Landscape diagrams the globally linked early infrastructures of data ethics and governance,” writes Hakopian. “What Wong offers us is a kind of cartography. By bringing into view an expansive AI ethics ecosystem, Wong also affords the viewer an opportunity to assess its blank spots: the nodes that are missing and are yet to be inserted, or yet to be invented” (Hakopian 95).

Caius focuses first on what is present. Included in Wong’s map, for instance, is a bright yellow node dedicated to Zach Blas, another of the artist-activists profiled by Hakopian. Back in 2019, when Wong last updated her map, Blas was a lecturer in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths — home to Kodwo Eshun and, before his suicide, Mark Fisher. Now Blas teaches at the University of Toronto.

Duke University Press published Informatics of Domination, an anthology coedited by Blas, in May 2025. The collection, which concludes with an afterword by Donna Haraway, takes its name from a phrase introduced in Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto.” The phrase appears in what Blas et al. refer to as a “chart of transitions.” Their use of Haraway’s chart as organizing principle for their anthology causes Caius to attend to the way much of the work produced by the artist-activists of today’s “AI justice” movement — Wong’s network diagram, Blas’s anthology, Kate Crawford’s Atlas of AI — approaches charts and maps as “formal apparatus[es] for generating and asking questions about relations of domination” (Informatics of Domination, p. 6).

Caius thinks of Jameson’s belief in an aesthetic of “cognitive mapping” as a possible antidote to postmodernity. Yet whatever else they are, thinks Caius, acts of charting and mapping are in essence acts of coding.

As Blas et al. note, “Haraway connects the informatics of domination to the authority given to code” (Informatics of Domination, p. 11).

“Communications sciences and modern biologies are constructed by a common move,” writes Haraway: “the translation of the world into a problem of coding, a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange” (Haraway 164).

How do we map and code, wonders Caius, in a way that isn’t complicit with an informatics of domination? How do we acknowledge and make space for what media theorist Ulises Ali Mejias calls “paranodal space”? Blas et al. define the paranodal as “that which exceeds being diagrammable by the network form” (Informatics of Domination, p. 18). Can our neural nets become O-machines: open to the otherness of the outside?

Blas pursues these questions in a largely critical and skeptical manner throughout his multimedia art practice. His investigation of Silicon Valley’s desire to build machines that communicate with the outside has culminated most recently, for instance, in CULTUS, the second installment of his Silicon Traces trilogy.

As Amy Hale notes in her review of the work, “The central feature of Blas’s CULTUS is a god generator, a computational device through which the prophets of four AI Gods are summoned to share the invocation songs and sermons of their deities with eager supplicants.” CULTUS’s computational pantheon includes “Expositio, the AI god of exposure; Iudicium, the AI god of judgement; Lacrimae, the AI god of tears; and Eternus, the AI god of immortality.” The work’s sermons and songs, of course, are all AI-generated — yet the design of the installation draws from the icons and implements of the real-life Fausts who lie hidden away amid the occult origins of computing.

Foremost among these influences is Renaissance sorcerer John Dee.

“Blas modeled CULTUS,” writes Hale, “on the Holy Table used for divination and conjurations by Elizabethan magus and advisor to the Queen John Dee.” Hale describes Dee’s Table as “a beautiful, colorful, and intricate device, incorporating the names of spirits; the Seal of God (Sigillum Dei), which gave the user visionary capabilities; and as a centerpiece, a framed ‘shew stone’ or crystal ball.” Blas reimagines Dee’s device as a luminous, glowing temple — a night church inscribed with sigils formed from “a dense layering of corporate logos, diagrams, and symbols.”

Fundamentally iconoclastic in nature, however, the work ends not with the voices of gods or prophets, but with a chorus of heretics urging the renunciation of belief and the shattering of the black mirror.

And in fact, it is this fifth god, the Heretic, to whom Blas bends ear in Ass of God: Collected Heretical Writings of Salb Hacz. Published in a limited edition by the Vienna Secession, the volume purports to be “a religious studies book on AI and heresy” set within the world of CULTUS. The book’s AI mystic, “Salb Hacz,” is of course Blas himself, engineer of the “religious computer” CULTUS. “When a heretical presence manifested in CULTUS,” writes Blas in the book’s intro, “Hacz began to question not only the purpose of the computer but also the meaning of his mystical visions.” Continuing his work with CULTUS, Hacz transcribes a series of “visions” received from the Heretic. It is these visions and their accounts of AI heresy that are gathered and scattered by Blas in Ass of God.

Traces of the CCRU appear everywhere in this work, thinks Caius.

Blas embraces heresy, aligns himself with it as a tactic, because he takes “Big Tech’s Digital Theology” as the orthodoxy of the day. The ultimate heresy in this moment is what Hacz/Blas calls “the heresy of qualia.”

“The heresy of qualia is double-barreled,” he writes. “Firstly, it holds that no matter how close AI’s approximation to human thought, feeling, and experience — no matter how convincing the verisimilitude — it remains a programmed digital imitation. And secondly, the heresy of qualia equally insists that no matter how much our culture is made in the image of AI Gods, no matter how data-driven and algorithmic, the essence of the human experience remains fiercely and fundamentally analog. The digital counts; the analog compares. The digital divides; the analog constructs. The digital is literal; the analog is metaphoric. The being of our being-in-the-world — our Heideggerian Dasein essence — is comparative, constructive, and metaphoric. We are analog beings” (Ass of God, p. 15).

The binary logic employed by Blas to distinguish the digital from the analog hints at the limits of this line of thoughts. “The digital counts,” yes: but so too do humans, constructing digits from analog fingers and toes. Our being is as digital as it is analog. Always-already both-and. As for the first part of the heresy — that AI can only ever be “a programmed digital imitation” — it assumes verisimilitude as the end to which AI is put, just as Socrates assumes mimesis as the end to which poetry is put, thus neglecting the generative otherness of more-than-human intelligence.

Caius notes this not to reject qualia, nor to endorse the gods of any Big Tech orthodoxy. He offers his reply, rather, as a gentle reminder that for “the qualia of our embodied humanity” to appear or be felt or sensed as qualia, it must come before an attending spirit — a ghostly hauntological supplement.

This spirit who, with Word creates, steps down into the spacetime of his Creation, undergoes diverse embodiments, diverse subdivisions into self and not-self, at all times in the world but not of it, engaging its infinite selves in a game of infinite semiosis.

If each of us is to make and be made an Ass of God, then like the one in The Creation of the Sun, Moon, and Plants, one of the frescoes painted by Michelangelo onto the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, let it be shaped by the desires of a mind freed from the tyranny of the As-Is. “Free Your Mind,” as Funkadelic sang, “and Your Ass Will Follow.”