Nano final

3. Blogs: Read all the blog entries for the quarter from one of your peers—hopefully someone you don’t know well. Using the text of your own blog and his/her blog compare and contrast your experiences in the course.

In my experience, the blogs in our Nanotexts class have been almost like the arms of our super organism. Arms in the sense that they have grasping hands, but in their nature they are more like the branches of a tree. The branches that take ideas from the class as nutrients and reach out and grab new ideas and, hopefully, bring them back into the class; with this in mind, I chose the blog of someone I don’t know well, but I made sure that the our two blogs contained a few similar ideas, so I can better show how those ideas are connected to the class.
For this part of my final I chose to read Kathryn Keyser’s blog. The main difference I noticed was that her blogs, it seemed, were more directly based of what had happened in class recently and than from there she juxtaposed her own ideas with what had happened in class; while my posts tended to be more abstract and less directly related to class. Aside from this, another interesting thing I noticed was that both of us spoke about religion early on in our blog posts. For Kc, as she goes by on both plurk and her blog, it was a question of religion’s place in the future, as well as with technology in general. She seems to think of it as a crutch that humanity has used in difficult times in the past. I think she believes that religion could be done away with is some of the modern difficulties of living were removed from the equation. In my blog I was defining my own faith, to a certain extent. It’s not so much our differing views on religion that I find interesting, rather that it came up in both of our blogs at roughly the same time. I do not specifically recall spending a great deal of time in class discussing religion, but according to our blogs, it is something we both found important alongside other topics of class discussion. One section of her post on religion that I find particularly interesting was:
“religion is something that societies have adapted and clung to in times of hardship as far back as science can find. So when there is no longer struggle and thus no longer a need for religion will the world change?”
In a class that constantly asks its students to take an analytical view of their society, as well as the society they want to see in the future; both the present and future pervasiveness of religion seems to be an important question. It is also a difficult one. The idea of their no longer being struggle in the world seems farfetched to me, but perhaps what Kc is envisioning a world that has sufficiently calmed down for people not to need the crutch of religion anymore. Kc also gives another question that was raised thanks to her blog as well as what happened in class:
“And if it does change will it be for the better, or is religion something that all societies need regardless of scientific and logical thought otherwise.”
Here Kc seems to be addressing Humanities need for spirituality. All of the books we read in class that discuss the future have a place for spirituality. Perhaps the bigger problem, the bigger question, is where will humanity turn to for spirituality in a world where religion no longer exists? Will it be difficult for people to find their own forms of spirituality? In one of my posts I feel that I attempted to answer these questions, or at least, predict the way in which solutions will come about
“mainstream religion has quite a few problems, it needs some serious reform, or to be disbanded. Hell, I myself might have some of the answers, but I think that it’s something that people need to figure out for themselves.”
I feel like the class blogs are interconnected, they flow into each other like a lakes connected by one river. With class over maybe the river will start to dry up, maybe it will not be able to make it to some of the lakes, but even if this does occur, we can still visit these lakes and sample their water, and find out that a percentage of this water flowed from a certain river. Our blogs are our others, but in some ways our others are connected. This only makes sense though; shouldn’t the others of a super organism be a super organism themselves?

3. Animals and Machines: our texts have been filled with both of these things. Working with Ribofunk and Ronell & Kac’s text Life Extreme, make a case for the difference between animals and machines. Is there such a difference? And where do humans fit in all of this?

The initial question posed seems quite simple to me. A fundamental difference between animals and machines is that machines are manmade and animals, classically, are not. I feel, however, that neither Ribofunk nor Life Extreme disagree with my statement. I think the question raised in Ribofunk and Life Extreme is: when humans genetically modify animals for specific uses, how are they then different from machines? Life Extreme primes the charge, so to speak, by giving us a picture of a featherless chicken on pages sixteen and seventeen, then compares them to humans interestingly enough. Life Extreme also shows us a mouse on page seventy-nine with a human replacement ear growing on its back. These animals have all been bred with a specific purpose in mind, which is human use, or, perhaps more realistically, human consumption. These animals differ from machines only somewhat. On one hand, these animals have been created, or modified, to meet certain human needs and wants. A machine it created for the same reasons. As for the differences between the two, as of right now these animals aren’t completely made by humans, they are only genetically modified and then sometimes bred to make them more economic to produce, or more desirable to consumers. All that we are able to do as of right now is tweak what evolution has already given us. This line is blurring rapidly however; Iranian scientists have created not one, but an entire flock of sheep that consist of fifteen percent human cells and eighty five percent normal sheep cells. The intension of creating these animals is still like farming them however, as once the sheep have a high enough percentage of human parts, their organs can be harvested for human transplant. This becomes similar to ideas in Ribofunk, where cultivars, or splices, are part human part animal creations that serve specific rolls in society, but are only considered human if their genes are more than fifty percent human.
As of right now, the primary difference in my mind, between genetically modified animals and machines, is that genetically modified animals are still farmed and harvested, whereas machines are basically employed; that is, a machine is designed to perform a specific task from creation to decommission. In Ribofunk we see both genetically modified animals and machine employees at a level where they are in direct competition with each other for work. The only difference between the two being how they are made, and what they are made of; so there are two ways to look at it, if you wish to define something by its function, then ultimately, even today, machines and genetically modified animals are unique, since throughout both the overall goal is to make human life simpler. If you choose to define something by what it is made of, however, then the line between machines and animals will remain distinct; at least until you start to see biomechanics, such as humans using brain implants or other robotic enhancements working alongside traditional biological functions.
If you ask the question: Where do humans fit in to all of this, then I think you also have to consider the question, what is the difference between humans, machines, and genetically enhanced animals? First of all we need to accept that humans are animals. Then if we consider the idea of humans having robotic enhancements within their bodies, and pair that with the popular futuristic idea of humans modifying their own genes we seem to be getting the three quite mixed together. Beyond simple gene modification, it seems likely that humans may want more than modified human genes in the future; I believe it is likely that humans will want to have animal genes mixed into their own genes as well. For example, a pair of antlers like the ones that Jinx gets in “After School Special”. With this in mind it seems that humans, machines and genetically enhanced animals are all moving towards each other in the future; towards a singularity of sorts where humans have all the precise combinations of animal, human and machine that suits them best. I also don’t believe that it is farfetched to believe that if a new human-machine-animal is wanted or needed, he she or it will simply be created. Traditional birth is far too limited, and may frankly become impossible. Although singularity may be the future, I do not think that animals and machines will be done away with. People will still want machines to do the dirty jobs for us, and will still want animals to eat, or at least to keep as pets.

4.Doubles/Doppelgang: Beginning with our first novel, The Invention of Morel, the theme of doubles or copies has been coming up again and again. First, explain how you see the notion of the double in each of the thematic sections of the course:

1. The photographic double: Morel, The Ticket that Exploded, Film in general
2. The biological double: the clone, the splice, the twin
3. The double achieved through other means: brainwashing, time travel, pataphysics

Using these three types as a departure point explore how the concept of the double changes with the technology that produces it. Does the notion of just one double hold in the twenty-first century?

From a chronological point of view, the first double we could look at is perhaps the painting, a precursor to the photograph. If we were to characterize this double, we would say that it is one that does not move though space or time, at least not in the conventional means, the means of the being it was created after. It also only relays the outward characteristics of its original, and these characteristics are subject to the artist’s personal tastes and choices. The next double we see is that which occurs in writing, or what might be called, the biographical double. This double usually attempts to follow the original’s movements through space and time, as well as give accurate, though not ever complete, recount of the original’s characteristics and perspectives, both inward and outward. The next on the list would then be photography, photography is unique from the list in the sense that the original’s features can matched, unaltered, for one specific point in time. Next is film, which is really only a series of, usually, twenty four pictures a second; with sound added in later on. Now an individual’s double can be analyzed throughout a certain time span; a video also allows for a greater amount of data on the original to be analyzed. The Invention of Morel gives us a very advanced idea of what I think of as the recorded double also referred to as the photographic double. Morel’s invention allows every aspect of the originals’ lives over a certain amount of time. Even weather is preserved with his system. Like a video, however, the doubles only move throughout a certain period of time. In some ways Morel’s doubles are not doubles at all, since the machine kills whatever it records. It seems that the doubles become jealous of their original counterparts and have the power to suck the original’s life away; almost like the full realization of the notion that a photograph steals one’s soul.
To say that a twin is one’s double had always seemed odd to me. Twins may, or may not look alike, and may or may not share habits and traits. In all honesty it’s just as likely for your twin to be an exact opposite as it is for them to be just like you. A twin is very unique, however, in the sense that twins do not stem from one individual. I think this idea raises the question that if twins have doubles, aside from the other twin, are those doubles also to be considered twins? The notion of a doppelganger almost certainly stems from feuding twins, and therefore makes the idea of having a double much more sinister and frightening. Moving away from twins, the clone seems to fit the classic scheme of a double much tighter, since it seems likely that many clones will act similarly to the original; that they will almost be programmed like machines. Even if the clones become their own people, they still share identical genetic composure with their original. The idea of a clone-doppelganger has also become pervasive throughout literature and film. The idea of a splice as a double seems very vague to me; it seems more like that a splice is likely to be a result of the combination of two doubles, which would result in something different altogether. An other of sorts, but my guess is that the whole would be greater than the sum of its parts.
The double that comes from brainwashing is very interesting because it involves the takeover of the original’s body. The emergent double will therefore be physically identical to the original, but that is more or less where the similarities stop. This can result from not only brain wash, but also from hypnosis or the re-emergence of repressed psychological traits. Time travel gives us a double that is an exact copy of the original from a different point in time. Finally there is the double that stems from the pataphor, unlike the metaphorical character because in a metaphor the characters, the originals, are changed in the sense that they are symbolically compared to something else. A pataphor is different because it allows characters to remain the same, but instead changes the world in which they exist. The doubles in a pataphors raise the question not how you affect the world around you and cause it to change, but how uncontrollable changes in the world affect you.
For most of history the double’s intention for technology is to create the most perfect copy of the original that is possible, it is only recently that we see any deviation from this, that is, a desire for a double to not be a perfect copy. I believe this is tied in with the concept of multiple doubles in the twenty first century. You can make all the home movies you want, take thousands of pictures that showed just how you looked, just what you said at any given time. Maybe people are getting tired of seeing themselves and want to tweak things to male every double unique in some way. Morpheus called it “residual self image”, and despite what you think of The Matrix, I think this idea exists. People are becoming more interested in what they want to look like instead of simply what they do look like at any given time. In a way, I feel that the change in our doubles is reflective of a movement to make a human into art, just like what was stated in Technocalyps.

A creative endeavor

John rolled his fingers across the table. Each finger following the one before it almost like a stream, pinky to index finger and then back the other way. He had a seductive way of moving his hands; it was just one of the man’s subtly attractive features that lured women to him without them realizing it was happening. The bar he was sitting in right now, Rust, it was called, was even one that he frequented to get in on a bit of deviant behavior, and that thought had occurred to him several times already tonight. Several times he would also wish that he was at this particular bar for the reasons he usually was, but that simply wasn’t the case. The man sitting across from him didn’t give a shit. He didn’t notice how John’s fingers moved. He didn’t know why John normally came to this bar, and he was completely ignorant to the number of semi-inebriated woman John had left with on previous nights. It’s not that they were uncomfortable around each other, but john, for once in his life, was not sure how to act.

Roland was not worried about how to act, or at least, he wasn’t any more worried socially than he was at any given time. He looked nervous, but aside from social situations, not too much bothered him. He had never been to Rust before tonight, he preferred to drink at home, and at six foot three, two hundred and twenty pounds, he saved a lot of money that way. Besides that, he figured it was the best idea, given his present situation. That situation also applied to his views on meeting women, which was not something he was good at anyway. At his size, one would be inclined to think that he would stand out more in a crowd. This is only natural, but not the case. He may have been tall, but when someone pictured him in his or her mind, Roland wasn’t a tall person. He wasn’t muscular or reserved either, nor was he the opposite of these things, he simply was not. Before you knew it you would forget his name altogether and then he disappeared. You might say he was the opposite of John; he had the subtle knack of not being noticed. This could be considered a genuine talent given his current position.

“This guy of ours is… well he’s pretty late I guess…” said John, desperate to break the silence.

“People often are.” Said Roland, calmly.

“ Yea, I mean he must be nervous, this is probably a big deal for people that aren’t old pros like us huh?”

“I’d hardly consider us pros John. This won’t be as easy as it was for us the first times.”
“Well, right, I guess I was trying to make a joke. Oh hey look at that girl at the bar, I think I picked her up once, Christ I hope she doesn’t recognize me…”

“I doubt it, that would have been a long time ago. Before you left Particlecorp. Wait, no, if it had been that long this wouldn’t be an issue, you wouldn’t remember her . John do you mean to tell me that you’ve been prowling this bar since your incident at Particlecorp?”
“You’re a sharp one Roland… I…”

“You asshole. You’ve got to be fucking kidding.”

“Take it easy man, I mean, keep your voice down, I mean, I’ve been using John as my name, and only going to places where there aren’t any temps to check your blood. They aren’t too many places that don’t anymore.”

“Great. You avoid the places where they don’t need to look for us for the places they will be looking for us. Ah Fuck John, what if they figured out we were here, nabbed our guy and now they’re probably strapping him up with a wire. He’ll have to help them out or go to jail. They might be watching us right now, waiting for us to slip up. Then they’ll nab us too. Fuck it, I’m leaving, now.” Roland got up and started walking towards the door, he was moving quickly, but not running.

John, catching up to Roland just as he was walking out the door, “Take it easy Rol, we can’t pass up this chance.”

“The hell we can’t, you drive,” said Roland, moving to the passenger side of the small car that they shared, the door unlocked and opened as soon as it recognized his hand, and started up quietly as soon as John touched the handle on the other side. It ran on a combination of solar power and battery, as cars most did. Cars themselves were a rarity these days, public transit had become efficient and economic before the switch to clean powered cars had been made. Driving had mostly faded out of the fore grounds society, but was making a comeback now that it was clean. The place where they had been, however; was not only off the public transit grid, but was also off the guided road system. You had to drive yourself to this place. Gutsy. John liked the kind of people that frequented it, but that apparently was the cause of their current situation, be it real or imagined.

Just our luck, though John, “you think that car is following us or is it just… on its own?”

Roland had already pulled a large handgun from under the seat, not that he ever really was the think-twice kind of guy. The gun looked like a larger-than-life semi-automatic pistol, but had an elongated barrel that was attached to the rest of the gun by a metal part that was specifically designed to look like a spine with ribs that went around the barrel, but didn’t connect at the bottom. This allowed the barrel to dynamically change size, depending on the ammunition. The barrel also typically expanded after a shot had been fired to better disperse heat. “When I vape this guy you better put the pedal down, ok buddy?”

“Hold on, don’t kill him, we don’t even know if he’s a fed!”

“Fine” Roland tapped a few things into the computer on his wrist, which in turn relayed instructions to his gun. He swiftly twisted in the seat and fired, shooing out the back window and into the engine of the car behind them. At first it looked like the car had hit a nasty pothole, but that was only because Roland’s shot was a little low. A decent sized explosion destroyed the engine, front axle, and probably gave the passengers a few nasty burns to deal with. John pushed the car’s accelerator to the floor his nerves were now visible in his face; Roland on the other hand looked strangely calm, much calmer than he had looked inside Rust. “We need a place to ditch the car, stay off the grid.”
They found a suitable place after driving for about fifteen minutes, an empty field with not too much plant life, low fire risk. Roland gave a few instructions to the spine-gun from his wrist computer and then shot the car towards the back of the engine. At first nothing happened, Roland threw the gun into the driver’s side window, as well as has wrist computer. The car sat quiet for just a few more seconds; John followed Roland’s unspoken advice and moved further away from the thing. They were both still retreating when a large, but perfectly controlled blast destroyed the car from the inside out. A blast of heat caught up to them, as well as a mild sonic shockwave, but that was it. The car, gun and computer were completely gone.

“Bitchin.” Muttered John.

“Efficient, but a shame.” Said Roland.

“Ah forget the car, we can get a new one, but who needs cars anyway?”

“Not the car, the gun. That gun was probably worth fifteen cars.”

“No way, did Aldor give it to you?”

“Well one of his guys did, yea.”
“Shit, well don’t worry about it, Aldor could probably buy a spine-gun for everyone in New Mexico”

“Yep, and we’re working to keep it that way”

“Hey don’t get all economic on me now Rol. We’re above that stuff remember, we have the greater good at heart here. Aldor is just a means to the end, financing.”

“Right, I’ve just been having this feeling lately that even though we’re trying to stop one set of assholes we’re just helping another one.”

“Aldor’s temps aren’t so bad; they’ve only killed a few people. We aim to save the whole damn planet. He is a greedy bastard though.”

“That’s what I was referring to. He’s using us to keep his business alive.”

“Let’s talk about this later. Rifttech is still the biggest problem. Let’s get moving though, we’re still a couple kilometers outside town.”

The walk was uneventful, apparently the police weren’t that hot on their trail, or maybe they had actually blown up a civilian’s car back at Rust. It was also completely possible, Roland realized, that they simply weren’t prepared to deal with a spine gun, and had decided to back off. Roland found comfort in realizing that John was, for the most part, right. All that Aldor Creff wanted was to keep his massive temp empire from slowing down. His company and revolutionized nanotechnology almost twenty years ago with the invention of the first nanobot, now referred to as a “temp” due to their temporary power supplies. The temps were used for a variety of purposes, including medicine and military, but there most widely used for surveillance. Many establishments now had a temp hub, a box about the size of a rubik’s cube, at the entrance. The temps would enter a body entering the building and scan DNA, as well as check for concealed weapons. It was against the law to keep a record of someone’s DNA, the temps could only run it against criminal records, and then it had to be deleted. It was common knowledge, however; that many shady establishments illegally modified temps to raise alarms when people with certain DNA came knocking. The temps were accepted socially because they only had a limited power supply, the best technology available allowed a temp to have about a twenty-four hour power supply, most commercial temps however, only ran for about ten hours at a time, and charged when businesses were closed; when their power supply ran out, the temps had to return to the hub and connect and charge. During this time, an authorized person could change their programming, or even stop the temps from going back out of the hub all together. The system was highly controlled.

What Roland and John were trying to stop was the fast arriving scenario where nanobots constructed other nanobots on their own. This removed a level of control from the system by allowing nanobots to be in charge of programming other nanobots. This sort of technology would have hit global markets about a year ago, but Roland, which is not his real name, had stopped it. He had been working as head of security for a company called “Microsoft”, who were on the verge of creating self-replicating nanobots, when he decided to go rogue and blow up a large section of their Seattle based nanotechnology laboratory with a respectable amount of illegal explosives. The attack had sufficiently crippled Microsoft, and Aldor’s massive company had been able to buy it out a year later.

John had done his part as well when, about eight months ago, he hacked into the mainframe and a company called Int.Tech, Particlecorp being yet another pseudonym. Int.Tech had been getting close to developing self-replicating nanobots as well, and during this time John was working for Int.Tech as a mid level programmer. One night, on his own authority, he hacked into the Int.Tech mainframe and spread a virus throughout their network that effectively deleted most of their data on self-replicating nanobots and even deleted John’s personal records with the company. His attack had been so successful that Int.Tech went completely bankrupt soon afterwards.

John and Roland had only met each other about four months ago, thanks to Aldor Creff who had swept both of the fugitives up and put them in hiding. Now rumor was that a third company, Rifttech, was close to developing self replicating nanobot of their own; it was at this point that Aldor decided it would be good idea to set John and Roland against them, since they had been so successful in the past. John and Roland were too happy to help at first, partly because Aldor was the only person keeping them out of jail, but also because John and Roland both didn’t want self-replicating nanobots to become reality. The man that they were planning to meet at Rust was a Rifttech employee who was supposedly going to help them get inside Riftech and sabotage it.

Both Roland and John readily realized that if they were caught, they were most likely dead. Most civilians had no real use for self-replicating nanobots, it was the government who wanted them created. Uncle Sam was livid, and his war hammer was seeking John and Roland with the ungodly efficiency that only the U.S. government could muster.

In short, John and Roland were currently America’s most wanted. National terrorists who were employed by a fat cat CEO who wanted to keep his massive company bloated with capital for as long as possible. Personally, John and Roland, they were just afraid of a grey goo scenario, and were pretty damn devoted to stopping it from ever having a chance of taking place.

They got back to their apartment at about three in the morning, both of them exhausted. Before he went to sleep, Roland came into Johns room and spoke his mind, “Listen, I’m gonna let you explain this to Aldor tomorrow, ok? You’re better with word than I am anyway. Oh and I understand if you don’t want to tell him about my spine-gun, that’s ok, but I think you should, I think it’s a good idea that we have one”

“Sure, thanks a lot.”

“Yea. Goodnight.”

Roland switched out the lights for John who quickly fell into a not entirely peaceful sleep.