dystopia – Trance-Scripts

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.”

Severance

“If the texts that students and I have been studying this semester are best referred to as ‘portal fantasies,’” thinks the part of me that persists here in the future, “then that, too, is the term to use in discussing the new AppleTV+ television series Severance. Characters in the show pass quite literally through one or more doors between worlds, living two separate lives.”

The show’s title refers to an imagined corporate procedure of the near-future that severs personhood. Those who volunteer to undergo this procedure emerge from it transformed into split subjects, each with its own distinct stream of memory.

As unlikely as this dystopian premise may seem, we can’t fully distance ourselves from it as viewers, given our severed personhood here “IRL,” or “AFK,” as the kids are fond of saying. “Others may not be quite as manifold as me,” admits the Narrator. “But each of us is Janus-faced. Each of us houses both a waking and a dreaming self, with each incapable of full memory of the other.”

And as the show advances, of course, we learn through a kind of detective work that the severance procedure isn’t in fact what it seems. The work-self (or “innie”) battles the home-self (or “outie”) — as do Superego and Id here at home.

Sunday April 18, 2021

Utopias and dystopias promote and project contrary “affects” or (to use Raymond Williams’s term) “structures of feeling.” Reading Philip K. Dick’s drug dystopia A Scanner Darkly, one feels deflated. One would rather get stoned. Stand around in the yard, share a joint and chat about bats, skunks, porcupines, dogs, and gardens with one’s elders. “Bats are interesting,” says a friend’s mother.

Thursday November 14, 2019

Songs play in my mind as if echoing down a long corridor or hallway. An auditory memory, some imaginary or half-remembered AM gold, retro in the way of Ariel Pink. Lo-fi, hypnagogic, like a band practice heard from the street. After the sixties, we land in Philip K. Dick’s drug-war dystopia A Scanner Darkly, reading the book’s critique of McDonalds hamburgers while eating McDonalds french fries. Dick’s observations about the spread of capitalist reality appear beside the buy-sell calculations of the book’s drug-addict protagonist, capitalism thus glimpsed and understood as a system that compels us to think and behave like addicts hooked on “product.” It’s a bleak book, its cop characters as stunted and debased as its dopers — the two ultimately the same, in fact, in the case of the protagonist, an undercover narcotics officer who also uses and deals a drug called Substance D.

Tuesday November 12, 2019

Children of Men is a panic-pitched end-times vision, a film about fear, all of twenty-first century humanity’s worries in quick succession: terrorism, environmental collapse, wars waged between states and nonstate actors, inequality, infertility, banditry, you name it. “Theo,” the Clive Owens character, wanders traumatized, cynical and half-numb, through a kind of hell-house morality tale, until his arrival at the miracle of the nativity. His job thenceforth is to shepherd Kee, the film’s Mary, a refugee whose body houses future life, toward the hope of the film’s Utopia, a legendary community said to exist on an island in the Azores, led by a group called the Human Project. “Everything’s fine,” people keep saying, “all part of a bigger thing!” With death and danger all around them, punctuated by moments of great beauty, Kee persists, and Theo follows, protecting her and the baby from harm. Members of the Human Project arrive to the rescue by film’s end, floating toward Kee and her baby in a boat called Tomorrow.

Tuesday September 10, 2019

I re-read a friend’s novel, preparing to discuss it again with students. It’s weird and wonderful, terrifying and funny, the fictional consensus realities of Norman Rockwell paintings and Nancy Drew novels turned askew. The small town after which the book is named operates as a microcosm, patriarchy ensnaring the novel’s female protagonist, interrupting her attempts to see beyond her surroundings. Mansplaining townsfolk infantilize her, stripping her of self-confidence to the point where she doubts her own existence. All of this occurs in a limbo-like bizarro-world, some liminal Nowheresville halfway between Twin Peaks and Bikini Bottom. The book is a dystopian fabulation in some sense, its grammar taken from capitalist realism; but it leavens this weight with its slapstick and the joy it takes in language as a site of play — its reminder, in all of these ways, that Utopia is right there for the taking. Despite our society’s sometimes horrifying resemblance to the world of the novel, the book’s delight in the craft of writing shows that it needn’t be that way. The book ventriloquizes and caricatures ruling rhetorics. Institutions are made to speak: landlords wax eloquent about landlordism, mothers extol the virtues of shopping. All of these rhetorics in their recitation are shown to be evasions and denials, self-propagating fictions, avoidances of past and ongoing abuse. Against these rhetorics, the book celebrates and revels in the imaginative flights and associative leaps of its protagonist, whose mind races, a part of it still attentive, still wanting to know, still curious and free despite circumstance.

Saturday November 24, 2018

“Me with nothing to say, and you in your autumn sweater,” go the words to a song of my late teen years by the New Jersey band Yo La Tengo. I heard it the other day, only to be reminded of it again midafternoon as Sarah and I, bundled in hats and scarves, set out on a brief walk through our neighborhood. By the evening, though, I’m back to re-reading Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, a book I’m teaching next week. Dick’s dystopian future depicts widespread, near-universal dehumanization as a consequence of prolonged multi-decade domestic drug war. A pair of narcotics officers review horror stories involving consequences of addiction to the novel’s fictional drug Substance D: rapid aging, blown scholarships, a sister raped by her amoral drug-dealing brothers, babies born addicted, spread of STDs. Yet Dick also shows the lack of humanity among the cop side of this nightmarish future. When speaking to each other, Dick writes, these two narcotics officers, Fred and Hank, “neutralize” themselves; they assume “a measured and uninvolved attitude,” repressing feelings of warmth and arousal and cloaking themselves in anonymity. No one is likeable in this future. In order to live in it, one has to be willing to negate the humanity of others. “In this day and age,” says a character named Barris, “with the kind of degenerate society we live in…every person of worth needs a gun at all times” (61). This is a slight exaggeration; on the next page we learn of a character who has never owned a gun. But Dick’s future is one where gun violence is a commonplace (a world, in other words, much like our own). Everyone’s paranoid; everyone’s depressed, depraved, anxious, neurotic, confused. Indeed, to the extent that novels undergo cathexis when written, this one feels strangely anhedonic, borne of a period in Dick’s life of deep psychological crisis. For more on this period, see The Dark Haired Girl, a posthumously released collection of Dick’s letters and journals.

Friday May 25, 2018

This miserable totality is driving me stir-crazy. I conjure on my telescreen an episode of The Mike Wallace Show from May 18, 1958 featuring Aldous Huxley, described by Wallace during the episode’s intro as “a man haunted by a vision of hell on earth.”

What I find, with some surprise, in this broadcast is a description of twenty-first century reality, especially if by that I mean reality here in the United States under the current Trump regime. Yet this world of ours also isn’t quite the one Huxley imagined, due to his misunderstanding of the logic of capitalism. Unlike Brave New World, for instance, it isn’t so much a world of “people happy where they oughtn’t to be.” Fear and anger, rather, are the dominant emotions in this world, whipped into being through omnipresent policing and gun violence. Given the structure of the built environment, one rarely experiences other people, one rarely experiences any kind of “group dynamic,” except via mediation, thanks to the ubiquity within the society of money, cars, and cellphones. Members of the dominator class drive around under these undemocratic, unfree circumstances communicating their dominance with their GOP bumper stickers and their MAGA hats and their open-carry firearms, while the rest of us hunch over steering wheels or stand alongside busy highways waiting for city buses, growing harried and bitter as we rush back and forth between rented or mortgaged living spaces and corporate-governed sites of production and consumption. In fact, I begin to wonder as the interview proceeds if it isn’t ultimately some deep-seated fear of rhetoric, of “verbal boobytraps,” as he says, that drives Huxley’s evolution, his turn in the final years of his life toward mysticism and psychedelics. Hope depended for him upon the possibility of direct, unmediated access to and experience of truth. Rhetoric maintains its victory, as it has in all hitherto existing societies, turning all of history into a forced march toward “thoughtless pleasure and ordered efficiency,” only to the extent that it succeeds in distracting us from the truth of the injustice of servitude, the truth that murmurs up from within. For what is “applied science,” what is “instrumental reason,” after all, if not rhetoric?

Saturday July 29, 2017

Ears perk up, as on a hound. I do this whenever others wish to converse with me about “traps.” We’ve all lost time to sinkholes and vortices, haven’t we? As I drive along a parkway, an old woman walks past, head tipped back, pouring sunflower seeds down her gullet with the palm of her hand. Would it be fair to liken the invention of a cognitive map to the invention of a superior mythos — one suited to one’s historical moment? Those who call themselves scientists still walk in a mucky world, don’t they? A grizzled oldtimer, sucking on a pipe, lowers his eyes and grumbles ominously out the corner of his mouth, “Ain’t that the truth.” Imagine me speaking to you through a medley of voice actors. Plants today feel prickly, causing me to flinch upon contact. Colored-pencil illustration of fingers, their nails polished, rolling up a thing and lighting it. The buzz of an air unit conspires with the ring of insects out back to wake me like an alarm. Hot damn, where am I? I justify my actions with as loose a code of ethics as possible: just go with it. Become one with the democracy of the self. Contain multitudes comfortably and without apology. So many bugs, though — one must refrain from scratching and striking out at them. For peace, the Lord hath provided us with places indoors. Inner spaces. Learn to stress inwardness as well as presence. No need to crave others’ possessions. The Master of the Self — a master in reach of everyone — redoubles that wealth of joyful intensity within. And that doesn’t require renunciation of the world. Just the opposite: take it, it’s yours and everyone else’s. A small lizard scampers off my stoop. A little black one, with stripes like a skunk. The world in that moment is flush with novelty. These minor revolutions console us in the big one’s absence. These are our share of what was promised: our inheritance. Drug laws are flouted en masse because the people know what works best. A perfect litmus test for detection of the authoritarian personality: do you or don’t you allow yourself entry into the Kingdom of God? As soundtrack, by the way, for today’s entry, allow me to suggest The Isley Brothers’ great cover medley spoken on behalf of and from the standpoint of the meek, “Ohio / Machine Gun.”

The world grants me these real-time, synchronistic epiphanies. Trigger warning: the torture endured toward the end of this track nears the unbearable, and is thus a perfect anthem for today’s struggles: hands up. And for those of you who own property, allow Robyn Hitchcock to cast his spell on you with “Insanely Jealous of You.” Triple hex! Put yourself in mind, as well, of Nick Cave’s strip-club rewrite of William Morris’s utopia in “More News from Nowhere,” wherein Mr. Stripper himself follows Oscar Wilde in seeing utopia as “like a lamp, hanging from a distant boat” and toward which we float, thus sending his desire-riven protagonist sailing ever onward like a drug-addled Odysseus. It is to that that the disease of property leads — so, renounce it by going inward, and ye shall be saved.