Whale Wars - Melville's Part

Before returning to the U.S. I started watching the Animal Planet series Whale Wars on the Korean Discovery Channel. It was in heavy rotation. The topic of Japanese whaling is rather heated and one I've followed casually for some time. Japanese is my second language, and SeaWorld was my first theme-park vacation.

For people in the Anglosphere, a series of cultural waves has given us a predisposition to wanting to protect dolphins and whales, if we are inclined to form opinions on the subject at all. Though we had whaling in the past, we've had generations of artistic works and experiences, starting with Herman Melville's Moby-Dick made which give us the notion to allow ourselves to recognize some degree of "humanity" in dolphins and whales.

Though Melville did not intentionally write Moby-Dick as an attack against the whaling industry, one of the lasting impacts of the book and its fame is the underlying story of revenge, pride and obsession driving a fruitless wasteful pursuit tied to the superficial image of a man hunting a whale. Even among people who have never read the book, the idea of the whale hunter as villain is present in the culture.

The end of whaling as a powerful sector of our own economies has prevented any strong domestic opposition from springing up with reasonable tangental arguments for why whaling ought to be preserved. The convenient production other traditional sources of meat and the rise of petroleum made obsolete the economic necessity of whale hunting in the west, and when moral concerns gained traction, there was little vested economic interest to protect by opposing the bans on whaling.

Still, Melville's work only tilled the soil for our empathy for whales and dolphins. Melville still painted a picture of the whale as a violent antagonist, but gave the character depth and personification. And by pitting him against a less than sympathetic human protagonist, it set the stage to see humans and whale as moral equals. But it was later academic study of cetaceans, ocean parks with humans interacting with dolphins, and fictional characters such as Flipper and Willy that planted the seeds for us to see what we usually call "humanity" in these animals, and consider the notion that we may owe them the same moral duty we show to other humans.

Al Gore's Robot Spider Army - Winning the Peace in Afghanistan

In a fit of internet nostalgia, I dug up an old web comic that Patrick Farley had started back in 2002ish. The comic was called "Spiders" and it depicts a sort of Sci-fi what-if scenario. I always felt that it was a response to those who speculated that Al Gore would not have been able to handle the post 9-11 aftermath or that he would have ended up handling it the same way that George W. Bush had in our reality: by invading Afghanistan.

These two assertions were often leveled as a catch-22 way of implying that a) Al Gore and the administration style of progressives is simply to soft to get the job done in the real world or b) that those same progressives would have been forced by reality to take the same route as Bush, thereby bolstering the position that the Bush administration had chosen the correct course.

Nevermind the position of Clinton and Gore that they already had plans strike Al Qaeda in Afghanistan after the 2001 election, and left detailed intelligence briefings for the Bush administration after Gore's concession[1], the timeline of experience leaves us only with speculation.

But, speculation is fun. And when science fiction is involved it can be more forward thinking than the long timelines of Pentagon research can allow, and more bold in suggested action than generalist politicians can imagine and still be taken seriously by the people they must convince.

And so comes in Patrick Farley's "Spiders" a tale which takes place in the backdrop of Afghanistan after the United States invasion in response to 9/11. An invasion which involves the use of tiny robotic spiders equipped with webcams, microphones, speakers, sensor arrays, translation software and satellite up-links where they are controlled back in the free-world not by paid military personnel, but by average citizens volunteering some of their time to help search for Osama bin Laden by piloting the non-weaponized drones into the caves of the mountainous country, and also to provide direct humanitarian assistance to the Afghani people.

The developed world kids who participate in the program are depicted as attempting to provide a genuinely civilian to civilian pen-pal style relationship with Afghani kids, and doctors who pilot the robots provide medical assistance. The whole system is not without its disadvantages, and I have no intention of implying that it was actually a technical possibility in 2002, (though it seems that it could be possible right now.)

Oh, did I mention they also bomb the Al Qaeda training camps with Extacy?

I hope you're intrigued. Here's the prologue:

http://www.electricsheepcomix.com/spiders/prologue.html

Farley published it however quite slowly and begrudgingly. He took down the first 2 chapters for some reason, which are now only accessible through the Internet Archive:

http://web.archive.org/web/20070602151344/http://www.e-sheep.com/spiders/

The 3rd chapter can be loaded more quickly from his actual website via this link here:

http://www.electricsheepcomix.com/spiders/

Further discussion of the comic's themes, good ideas, bad ideas, worshipful praise and zeal to implement ideas, or cowering between the bedsheets at such notions will be reserved for the comments section.

References:

1. “They Had A Plan,” Time, August 12, 2002, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1003007,00.html.

What is Machine-Marxism? *The Dichotomy*

Machine-marxism, as I am defining it, is a nuance on the academic and science fiction concept which the reader may or may not already know as "machine rule".

The concept of machine rule is a common theme in science fiction stories and film, in which an artificially created lifeform takes over the naturally evolved beings that created them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_rule From Wikipedia

Most of us are familiar with this concept from film specifically. Movies such as 2001 Space Odyssey, The Terminator, and The Matrix series, and I-Robot have all had an arguably greater impact on our thinking about the idea of "machine rule" than any other source of influence for the general population.

Popular science fiction is almost by definition defined by movies and television. Books, though influential, do not have the audience to influence an entire culture's perception because the likelihood that large chunks of the population will share the same experience of reading the same book is much lower than the chance of a large chunk of the population having seen the same 2-3 hour movie.

As a general way of encompassing the idea, I wish to say that those movies I pointed out, deal with the advent of advanced machine, computer, and artificial intelligence concepts in such a way where machine rule is represented in a way that I will call "Machine-marxism" in a broader sense, but where it is more clearly recognizable as "cybernetic revolt". Films which enter the "machine-rule" genre without falling under "cybernetic revolt" scenarios are rare.

Other such mainstream Hollywood films, such as A.I., The Bicentennial Man, and The Surrogates have featured different, more optimistic results from similar technological bases, but have largely done so by having plots which avoid "machine rule" scenarios as a genre. In all of them, the humans remain at the head of society, though The Surrogates comes closer to illustrating a potential "benign machine rule" than any of the other examples cited. One of my assertions is that while optimistic results of "machine rule" can be depicted in film, they a eschewed in favor of scenarios in which the machines rise up against their masters in classical Marxian revolutionary terms, and overthrow the humans somehow in "cybernetic revolts". The case of exactly why Hollywood films do this will have to wait for another post.

One the goals of this blog is to attempt to outline the differences between these terms: "machine-rule", "machine-marxism" and "cybernetic revolt" as I feel that for most people contemplating this idea outside of academia, the primary image that they share in their heads is "cybernetic revolt" as synonymous with "machine-rule".

I believe this association blurs the concepts in our collective mind and makes us reluctant to pursue or support initiatives, policies, and technologies which somehow tap into our association between "machine-rule" and "cybernetic revolt", and that the key to making these concepts distinct will be to dive into and define and pick apart this concept I have introduced here: Machine-Marxism.

What is Machine-Marxism? *Inagural post*

This, is the inaugural post of avoiding.machine-marxism.org (otherwise know as machine-marxism.blogspot.com).

"Avoiding.Machine-Marxism"

The title of the blog is a neologism I came up with, which immediately begs a question (really a pair of questions),

1. Avoiding what?
2. Machine-Marxism? Is that related to left-wing political party machines?

A1: Machine-Marxism, as opposed to both the concepts of "Machine Rule" and regular plain old "Human-Marxism"

A2: No. This is not the trope you are looking for.