A pinch of salt

Ever since reading an opinion piece in the Guardian about Soylent, I have been intrigued by the possibility of experimenting with meal replacements as I thought the experience would be fascinating to look at from an ecocyborg manifesto perspective. It took several months (and the encouragement of a fellow hacker) to work up the courage to give it a try, though we ended up using Huel rather than Soylent because it’s available in the UK in powdered form. For £45, you got two bags of Huel, a shaker, a T-shirt and an instruction manual.

What is this stuff, and what’s it all about? I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but Huel strikes me as being a contraction of HUman fuEL, and it’s what you end up with when you regard food as something that is solely about nutrition to keep the body and brain functioning and generating value. I was particularly struck by the quotation of Rob Rhinehart’s (Soylent founder) deleted blog post in the Guardian opinion piece: “I think it was a bit presumptuous for the architect to assume I wanted a kitchen with my apartment and make me pay for it.” Quite. If the function of food is simply to keep you going, in much the same way electricity does a computer, or fossil fuels a car, then what the hell are you doing faffing around choosing recipes, chopping vegetables, making sauces, and inviting friends over for a meal? That’s time you could be earning money, spending it, or undertaking ‘lifestyle’ activities like free-sky-board-wave-bike-surfing or whatever it is that means you’ll need a crossover SUV, some form of lycra costume, and about £2,000 of kit.

Ironically, the ecocyborg is already putting pressure on you to drop food preparation; another comment piece in the Guardian suggested houses of the future won’t have kitchens. This is so that more and more of us can be crammed like cattle into compact megacities in the name of efficiency and sustainability. The message will, in time, become clear: eating food, rather than scientifically prepared just-add-water nutrient sachets will be seen as a bourgeois indulgence. How outrageously luxurious to be able to cook when you could be running another delivery or developing the next viral meme!

My main finding from trying Huel was that the only way I could get the stuff down without gagging was if I took it with a pinch of salt.

Airbrushed Landscapes

Airbrushing is a rather controversial practice when applied to human models, in that it erases supposed ‘imperfections’ in appearance — freckles, moles, not quite the right shaped lips, legs, etc. — creating an impossible standard for those wishing to emulate the appearance of whatever we should call the depicted result: A cartoon? A caricature? The results are harmful, being linked in various studies (such as Hawkins et al. 2004, to choose a random result from a Google Scholar search) to serious mental and physical health problems.

The same controversy hardly applies to landscapes, and for decades photographers have used tricks with filters at the time the photo is taken, and later, when developing the film. Postcards are a particular treasure trove of the phenomenon, as shown below. I came across a postcard of the Old Invercauld Bridge in Scotland’s Dee valley, a cutout of which I have pasted in to a photograph I took at the same location (from a slightly different angle) the other day. You will see from the photo I took that the sky is blue in places, and that the blueness is reflected in the water near the bottom on the left hand side, just to the right of the reflection of the trees.

The inset in my photo, from the postcard I scanned, is a particularly vivid example of the kind of thing I’m talking about. The blue with which the water is shown, supposedly reflecting a peerless blue sky, is impossible to match in the real world without the most horrific accident at a chemical factory somewhere upstream. (Probably with copper sulfate.) I think it’s reasonably safe to say (since Braemar has no chemical factory), that the water under the Old Invercauld Bridge has never been the colour shown in the postcard.

A photo of Old Invercauld Bridge,with an inset from an old postcard as contrast.

Thankfully, landscapes don’t suffer from anorexia, so impossible depictions of them can hardly be said to be the direct cause of harm. But why go to all the trouble of editing what I imagine was an excellent photo of the subject? Clearly the water was felt to be insufficiently blue to attract potential buyers of the resulting postcard to choose it, rather than a competitor, as being suitably symbolic of their trip to Scotland when writing to their friends and relatives to tell them about it. This seems strange, as it is hardly as though Scotland is famed for the blueness of either its skies or its waters. Indeed, one only visits Scotland for the weather when utterly fed up with sunny days without a cloud in the sky.

So, at worst, this is just the very thin end of some sort of wedge: a photograph of some scenery perceived as needing to be ‘touched up’ because the actual photons captured by a chemical reaction on the negative at the time the photo was taken somehow fail to reflect an image that lives up to our ideal of what we think the world should be like. And our activities to modify the world (rather than photos of it) to make it so do cause harm. Which leaves the question, “What is the fat end of that wedge?”

Wasp on a train

A while ago, I was riding in a train between Edinburgh and Aberdeen. The interior of the ScotRail class 170 turbostar train is a mass of plastic panelling and nylon seats. There are no windows one can open to let in fresh air, but at one of the stops, while a door was open, a wasp must have been let in. There was nothing inside that could be of interest to the wasp. Sometimes on trains there is the detritus of provisions people have brought with them for the journey and consumed, which might have provided some sustenance, but not, for some reason, in this particular carriage. The wasp buzzed its frustration against the window, doubtless keen to get outside in the countryside that we were speeding through.

Luckily for the wasp, no-one seemed overly perturbed by it. Wasps’ interactions with humans are usually accompanied by a flurry of whirling hands, panicked screaming, and/or a rolled up newspaper. However, either everyone in the carriage was unconcerned by its presence, or they were more afraid of embarrassment than they were of the wasp. The wasp in question was, to be more precise, probably Vespula vulgaris (I am no naturalist, but I imagine this is one of the most common ‘yellowjacket’ (the North American name for this kind of wasp) species in the area). These wasps build intricate paper nests from wood that they gather and chew to make into a pulp. Hearing the quiet “scritch scritch scritch” of a wasp gathering (untreated) wood with its mandibles is, to me, one of the many pleasures of spring and summer.

It is fair, I think, to say that most people regard wasps as pests even in their native habitat in Europe. This, perhaps, is mostly due to their ability to deliver a painful sting when they feel threatened, and their propensity to come into contact with humans because of a shared love of sugar. September in particular, when wasps are a bit groggy from the cold, has always been, to me, a time when wasp stings are more likely. I remember all too clearly trying to avoid them at breaktimes when at school. Picnics were also a time when they made a nuisance of themselves, hovering around the jam sandwiches just as you are about to eat them. Nowadays I mostly meet them at the recycling bins, where they are often to be found around the plastic drinks bottle bin trying to get at the last few drops of drink we leave behind.

However, wasps play a really important role in European ecosystems, and life without them is almost unthinkable. Besides pollinating plants when they visit flowers for nectar, wasps also hunt other insects to feed their young. In turn, wasps themselves are prey to various animals.

Perhaps because everyone on the train ignored the wasp, perhaps because it was so desperate to get out, or perhaps because there was nothing on the train it could use, I was suddenly struck by the fact that it did not belong there. At the same time, all the humans (some of whom were WASPs!), clearly did. If the wasp was incongruous with the train, were the humans in it incongruous with the world outside? Why weren’t we as desperate to get out of this fearful space of blue and white plastic?

A riddle for materialists

Screen shot of the definition of 'machine' from Apple's dictionary app on 9 February 2019. A machine is defined as: 'An apparatus using mechanical power and having several parts, each with a definite function and together performing a particular task.'

As scientists, we often look at humans and nature as though they are ‘systems‘. Our descriptions of what we observe are mechanistic: formal, mathematical and algorithmical. We don’t want to invoke concepts, very familiar in other endeavours, that we cannot observe and do not have evidence for, but I expect many of us are not entirely happy seeing ourselves, our friends and family, and the natural world, in purely mechanistic terms.

So, what is something if it is not a machine?

It is easy to confuse the fact that something can be described in mechanistic terms with the belief that the thing being described is a machine. So, just because my digestion, circulatory system, immune system, lymphatic system, musculoskeletal system, nervous system, etc. etc. can be described in purely mechanistic language as the function of interactions among cells, molecules, organs, bones and skin; and even though some of these things can be replaced by actual human-made machines (e.g. heart, kidney, artificial limbs) — I am not ‘just’ a machine. To describe me, you, anyone, and indeed the rest of nature itself, as a machine is, at an emotional level, not doing any of us justice.

How can I assert that I am not a machine without invoking the supernatural? Well, one way of handling that kind of argument is to muck around with the definition. I don’t think I need to do that too much, however (see the screen grab above), if I say that I think a machine is necessarily something that has been designed to perform a particular function. If that’s a reasonable definition, then, as it implies, all machines must have a designer. This messes with the brain a little: describing things as machines, something scientists do to avoid invoking the supernatural, fails precisely because so doing means there must be an intentional designer of some sort (intelligent or otherwise) who needs that function performed. I think it’s a bit weak to say we’ve been ‘designed’ by nature — then we might ask who (or what) designed nature. Besides, nature doesn’t ‘need’ the functions performed by humans — looking at various environmental disasters humans have caused (more than just recently), I often wonder whether, if Nature did have intentionality, she would consider herself better off without us. Be that as it may, it is funny to watch documentaries about biology and ecology and count the number of times the word ‘design’ is used by the narrator or presenter.

If you think about it, the absence of a designer who has a function or purpose for us that we must fulfil is liberating. When I first thought of this, I was somewhat unnerved. I had a Christian upbringing. The absence of any purpose felt worrisome, perhaps because it left responsibility for what I did, and did not, do squarely on my shoulders; rather than allowing myself to duck the responsibility and claim I am just fulfilling a deity’s plan for me (or following my genetic programming, or some hapless victim of my environment). Of course, it also meant I am insignificant — there isn’t a supreme ultimate being that is deeply interested in what I do. Many schools of thought end up ascribing some sort of purpose to our lives. Besides being ‘saved’ or becoming enlightened, or whatever your religion gives as your purpose, biologists tell you you must reproduce, capitalists that you must accumulate wealth, Marxists that you must be socially ‘active’, academics that you must learn things, … How incredibly freeing it is not to have to do all those things!

There is no function or purpose we are ‘intended’ to fulfil, no plan, no destiny, no fate. This, however, does not mean we are inanimate; it does not mean we do not ‘do’ things. The things we do cause changes in the environments we inhabit. These changes can be exploited by ourselves, and by other organisms (especially if they are repeated regularly or at least partially predictably); indeed, many of the changes we cause arise from actions that themselves exploit actions by other organisms. We are part of a vast nexus of interactions, a network of life itself that is able to perpetuate itself without intention, consciousness, direction or purpose. It happens because it happens. It seems like fate, it seems like order, because we only have cognitive machinery to recognize patterns, and language to articulate that regularity. But this network is never at equilibrium, it is permanently changing, adapting, co-adapting. Niches and species emerge and disappear as life evolves.

But if we are not machines, what are we? To some extent, the very fact that this question needs to be asked is an expression of the degree to which we have lost any sense of what we are. To describe us as machines is to see us only in terms of some Platonic ideal human, and our differences from that ideal as deformity or malfunction. Instead of which, we are all unique – most of us are genetically unique; those who are not have slightly different experiences of the world that can change their body chemistry, and even the genes they pass on to their offspring. Biologically (and perhaps epistemologically depending on what you think is important about your identity), all that matters is that we can limp along for long enough to participate in the creation of the next generation. Evolution is a constant process of deformity – we are all ultimately deformed single cells. If there is no function, how can there be malfunction? This is not to say there is no suffering, no disease – quite clearly there are patterns of existence where individuals suffer. Sometimes there are interventions we can make that stop the suffering, sometimes there aren’t. But these interventions are not necessarily about restoring our bodies to some Platonic ideal – instead they are focused on stopping suffering.  

There is no blueprint for you, or for me. Even your genes (sometimes metaphorically referred to as your blueprint) are not enough information to replicate you — your experiences of life may have made epigenetic switches turn off or on, and have certainly shaped the neurones in your brain. Instead, we are emergent self-organised systems. We are emergent in that we are the products of millions of years of evolution and co-evolution. We are self-organised in that there is no design for the way we work, and each of us works in individual ways (albeit with significant areas of commonality with other humans, and indeed with other species). We are systems in that the way we work can be described mechanistically. But, if even your twin does not do exactly the same thing as you, how can you be replaced by a machine? We’ve all heard that every snowflake is different, and how we are all different, and how that makes us uniquely precious. In a sense that is true, but not in any way that makes any one of us more special or precious than anyone else. The truth of that statement, however, reflects the importance of seeing ourselves, and the life around us, as more than machines.

Space Walk

I think the image of Bruce McCandless II taking an untethered space walk on 7 February 1984 is one of the most astounding photos ever taken. I haven’t included it here for copyright reasons, but, well, here it is in (bad) ASCII art:

Surface           
of Earth           #  <-- Bruce McCandless II
   |                              
   V  
-------------------------------------------

Einstein’s theory of relativity tells us that there is no privileged viewpoint of the universe. The camera, however, because it has a clearly designed top, creates an objectivity to the views of the universe it captures. Each photo has an implicit instruction to it saying, “This way up.” Thus, although this, and other photos on NASA’s website, show the first human to fly in space without an umbilical cord connecting him to his spacecraft, could have been photographed in any juxtaposition with his home planet, the only way to see this photo is with Bruce McCandless II above the planet. Feminists would surely have a field-day, if indeed they haven’t already, in the quarter of a century since the photo was taken. There he sits, godlike in his throne above the clouds, master of all he surveys, watching us poor sinners down below.

The staggering bravery required to venture out into the most inhospitable environment humankind has ever encountered with no physical connection to your only means of transportation back to the environment that sustains you surely borders on insanity. In space there is no friction or air resistance; one slip on a thruster and you could be shot off into space with nothing to slow you down. A human can survive in space without a space suit for perhaps as long as a minute according to the Scientific American. It need hardly be said that space is not an environment that can sustain human life. I wonder how long Bruce McCandless II could have survived in space in his space suit.

The photo captures an instant in time, but its persistence makes that moment timeless. This is one lie the camera tells. This photo helps us believe that humans can survive in space, that they can exist apart from their home planet. They can, sort of. Valeri Polyakov stayed on the Mir space station for over a year. There’s another lie the camera tells, however: it draws a border around the image. Valeri Polyakov survived on the Mir space station because of regular supplies from the ground — he won’t have farmed his own food in the space station! Similarly that picture of Bruce McCandless II doesn’t show the support network that got him there and brought him home: the ground crew, pilots, mission planners, engineers, medics, and so on. For that matter, it doesn’t show the bacteria in his gut, or the viruses that trained his immune system.

Even though the photo shows the space man surrounded by the emptiness of space, it is a kind of levitation illusion. Like the wires holding the assistant in place while the magician performs the trick, the connections between Bruce McCandless II and the world are invisible to the audience, but not non-existent. Without denying the truth of what happened, or detracting from the extraordinariness of the achievement, the photo is a lie insofar as it creates the impression in the viewer that humans are something separated from their home planet. Rather, we are intricately interconnected with it, and unravelling all those links so that we can build a machine that can sustainably replicate what the Earth does for us is a massive, and very expensive, challenge.

What is an ecocyborg?

A quick internet search on the term ecocyborg brings you results pertaining to the EcoCyborg project — some academic research conducted by Lael Parrott under the supervision of Robert Kok. The EcoCyborg project focused on modelling the creation of an artificial ecosystem suitable for sustaining life on a space station. Lael Parrott’s masters thesis opens with the point that although we’ve quite cheerfully destroyed ecosystems over the centuries, creating them still remains something of a taboo. As has been pointed out before, however (many times), our home planet can be thought of as a spaceship; and one that has, seemingly without intention (Gaia and various deities notwithstanding), managed to sustain human life for eons. However, we may now be coming to a time when continuation of that state of affairs will require intention.

I don’t really have a proper, precise definition of an ecocyborg. This is all about giving voice to poorly-articulated feelings. But it’s not too difficult to extend the concept of the cyborg (a human/machine hybrid) to the environment. For now, then, an ecocyborg is the augmentation of the environment with technology to create a designed environmental machine. The ‘useful’ parts of nature are interfaced with machines that overcome the parts that are detrimental (to humans). In such a world, only the irrelevant have the chance of persisting with relatively little interference — provided there is space for them to do so.

Boundaries are going to be difficult to define, much as they are for cyborgs. What ‘counts’? Supposing I have to take medication for the rest of my life, and if the supply of medicine stops for long enough (say a few months), I will die. Am I, in some sense, a cyborg? The pill isn’t quite a microchip, or some titanium implant giving me superpowers. But at the same time, in terms of what sustains me, it would be a mix of both the (supposedly) ‘natural’ ecosystem and the industrial supply chains associated with the manufacture and delivery of my medication.

For ecocyborgs, there are similar questions. Did we already cross the Rubicon when we applied artificial fertilizers to the land? Or created irrigation channels? Or built roads, sewage systems, and communication networks?

The question of what we should and shouldn’t be doing with the environment is highly contested. My impression of reading some of the green literature is the general advocation of things we should stop doing (e.g. driving cars, flying planes, intensifying agriculture). This suggests that we have somehow progressed too far, and so we need to go back, which then makes one wonder how far we should go? When was the ideal time when humans lived in sustainable harmony with nature? The idea that there was some time when humans lived in harmony with nature goes back to the creation stories of many religions. Clearly even thousands of years ago people were aware that there were problems with the relationship between humans and their environment. Are we to go back to being hunter gatherers, then? If we do, what is to stop us rediscovering agriculture?

To live in harmony with our environment, we must first design and build an environment we can live in harmony with. There is an old story about a king who ordered his lands to be covered with leather after treading on a thorn. A fool suggested cutting two small pieces of leather and attaching them to his feet instead. We can argue that it would be better to change ourselves than our environment; what we perhaps don’t appreciate is the extent to which the two are, I think, inseparable. I believe we can no more change ourselves without changing the environment than we can change the environment without changing ourselves: As we become cyborgs we create ecocyborgs to live in; as we create ecocyborgs, we become cyborgs so we can live in them.

 

Three Cyborg Manifestos

A significant step towards articulating the discomfort I referred to in my previous post was a random encounter on the web with a ‘hoax’ perpetrated by Richard DeGrandpre, author and associate editor of Adbusters magazine. The hoax, perpetrated at the time through a Flash app at cyborgmanifesto.org, is old enough that I had to go to web.archive.org to get a link. The app, essentially, just presented some text for you to read, and I’d love to type it all out here to make it more accessible, but that would be an abuse of copyright.

The text opens with an imagined conversation in an internet chat-room, in which the participants discuss the formation of the Cyborg Manifesto, which is built around the seemingly noble goals of advancing and disseminating human knowledge, eliminating human suffering and increasing life expectancy; and the more questionable goals of making human biological systems obsolete and engineering artificial consciousness. The subsequent text is presented as a series of scrollable pages within the app, each accessed by pressing a button at the bottom of the previous page. It covers themes familiar to any sci-fi and cyberpunk fan: what it means to be human in an increasingly artificial reality, and the blurring of the boundaries between human and machine. It was clear that the ultimate destiny the manifesto had in mind was the complete subsumption of human existence in computers.

The app then invited people to submit comments for or against the manifesto. What seems to have shocked Richard DeGrandpre was that — whether comments were in favour or opposed, whether they thought it was really possible to bring about or not — people took the manifesto seriously. Fifteen to twenty years later, there are people working to bring about the kinds of phenomenon discussed in the Cyborg Manifesto: body–hackers, biohackers, and life-extenders — somewhere in the world there’s an underground movement working away right now to make all this happen. Almost incredibly, there’s even the 2045 initiative with its own manifesto (one that is absolutely not satirical) that mirrors, if not word-for-word, then intention-for-intention, the one at cyborgmanifesto.org.

The cyborgmanifesto.org hints at what might have been the inspiration for its content with a rather disturbing reference to Donna Haraway. Her 1991 book Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, contains a chapter more modestly entitled “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” This is a highly-influential piece of work that has been cited thousands of times, but a little bit like the way Richard DeGrandpre embedded his text in Flash, Donna Haraway’s text is couched in the turbid language of critical feminist theory. I have what might be called a mental ‘Foucault-horizon’: a little bit like the boundary of a black hole, any article mentioning Foucault is going to be one I will struggle to comprehend. But in the Cyborg Manifesto chapter, he’s right there at the bottom of the third paragraph: “Foucault’s biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics.”

Whether satire, vision or blasphemy the three manifestos for cyborgs mentioned here focus on the human; as though humans are distinct ‘things’ that can have an independent existence, as opposed to deeply interconnected networks of collaborating cells engaged in a constant exchange of materials and information with an ecosystem in which they are embedded. Cyborgs, if they are to exist, need an ecocyborg to exist in. If we are already engaged in projects to bring about the cyborg manifesto, what is the manifesto that underwrites what we are doing to our environment?

Why

I started this blog with a view to giving expression to a discomfort I feel in the relationship(s) between humans and their environment; perhaps more specifically, the relationship the humans belonging to the culture and society to which I belong have with their environment. I am not sure whether it is possible to be precise about that discomfort, not least because (I have always found) feelings and emotions to be inconsistent, imprecise and transient. Scientists (and I claim to belong to that profession) are not supposed to like such things. It’s not as though they can be usefully applied or relied on. Further, there is a normative imperative to ‘objectivity’, though perhaps a little old-fashioned: a cold statement of facts, evidence and theory that supposedly exist irrespective of who discovers them or communicates them. This leads to over-use of the passive voice. Well, I wanted a space where I could write publicly about the ‘irrational’ reactions I’ve had to the facts, evidence and theory to which I have been exposed. The kind of material you can’t put in a paper to a journal.

The best metaphor for the discomfort I feel is an experience I had many years ago spending 24 hours with a tube running through my nose, down my oesophagus and into my stomach, connected at the other end to a data monitor keeping an eye on the pH of my stomach acid. It was bearable – sometimes you could even forget it was there – but it wasn’t comfortable. It was the intrusion of a machine into my daily routine, an ever-present augmentation of my physicality that was there to watch over me. The discomfort of the ecocyborg manifesto is like that, but without knowing or being able to see that the monitor or tube is there.

Putting emotions to one side, as I reflect on this discomfort, I have also found myself often to be in two minds (sometimes more…): are these really things to feel uncomfortable about? How should things be otherwise such that I might feel better about our relationship with the environment? And would that really be ‘better’? In sharing these thoughts, therefore, I share a conflicting mess, a confused bundle of half-thoughts and distracted imagery, a flickering screen channelling a noise-polluted signal. It is, for others who have read the works of A. A. Milne, the thoughts that occur in the gaps between life’s bumps as I am dragged downstairs, held by one ankle.

A manifesto is usually associated with a series of promises made by a political party, with a view to persuading the electorate that said party should be put in government. Manifestos thus, in some sense, outline the policies of their authors. The ecocyborg manifesto is, however, not mine; it is instead an observation, a manifesto I ascribe to my social, ecological and physical environment. Insofar as this environment is inanimate, such ascription could be open to the same criticisms as are levelled at Dennett’s Intentional Stance, or to non-animal agents in Actor Network Theory, or indeed, to any religion interpreting environmental outcomes in terms of the whims of fickle deities. I don’t particularly care: this is a mirror I hold up to the environment – if it is capable of decision-making, let it react as it sees fit. For now, the mirror is more important to me than the reaction. Sometimes, emotions and feelings beget insight.