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.