ScratchPad: 2024-05-13 Mo: Bruce Stirling on Frankenstein's Monsters Mopping Up at Fast-Food Restaurants; & Fixing Apple's Very Unfortunate iPad ad...
A scratchpad….
Enlarging the Human Empire: Cosma Shalizi sends me to:
Bruce Sterling (1996): Cyberpunk in the Nineties: ‘FRANKENSTEIN is “Humanist” SF… promotes the romantic dictum that there are Some Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. There are no mere physical mechanisms for this higher moral law—its workings transcend mortal understanding, it is something akin to divine will. Hubris must meet nemesis; this is simply the nature of our universe. Dr. Frankenstein commits a spine-chilling transgression, an affront against the human soul, and with memorable poetic justice, he is direly punished by his own creation, the Monster.
Now imagine a cyberpunk version of FRANKENSTEIN.
In this imaginary work, the Monster would likely be the well- funded R&D team-project of some global corporation. The Monster might well wreak bloody havoc, most likely on random passers-by. But having done so, he would never have been allowed to wander to the North Pole, uttering Byronic profundities. The Monsters of cyberpunk never vanish so conveniently. They are already loose on the streets. They are next to us. Quite likely WE are them.
The Monster would have been copyrighted through the new genetics laws, and manufactured worldwide in many thousands. Soon the Monsters would all have lousy night jobs mopping up at fast-food restaurants.
In the moral universe of cyberpunk, we already know Things We Were Not Meant To Know. Our grandparents knew these things; Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos became the Destroyer of Worlds long before we arrived on the scene.
In cyberpunk, the idea that there are sacred limits to human action is simply a delusion. There are no sacred boundaries to protect us from ourselves. Our place in the universe is basically accidental. We are weak and mortal, but it’s not the holy will of the gods; it’s just the way things happen to be at the moment. And this is radically unsatisfactory; not because we direly miss the shelter of the Deity, but because, looked at objectively, the vale of human suffering is basically a dump. The human condition can be changed, and it will be changed, and is changing; the only real questions are how, and to what end. This “anti-humanist” conviction in cyberpunk is not simply some literary stunt to outrage the bourgeoisie; this is an objective fact about culture in the late twentieth century. Cyberpunk didn’t invent this situation; it just reflects it…. Hubristic mania is loose…. Eeverybody and his sister seems to have a plan to set the cosmos on its ear. Stern moral indignation at the prospect is the weakest of reeds…. We already live, every day, through the means of outrageous actions with unforeseeable consequences to the whole world…. We’re just not much good any more at refusing things because they don’t seem proper. As a society, we can’t even manage to turn our backs on abysmal threats like heroin and the hydrogen bomb. As a culture, we love to play with fire, just for the sake of its allure; and if there happens to be money in it, there are no holds barred. Jumpstarting Mary Shelley’s corpses is the least of our problems….
The idea that… Human Nature is somehow destined to prevail against the Great Machine, is simply silly; it seems weirdly beside the point. It’s as if a rodent philosopher in a lab-cage, about to have his brain bored and wired for the edification of Big Science, were to piously declare that in the end Rodent Nature must triumph… <https://ia801209.us.archive.org/11/items/Interzone_048_1991-06/Interzone_048_1991-06.pdf>
Sterling, Bruce. 1991. “Cyberpunk in the 1990s.” Interzone. 48, June. <https://ia801209.us.archive.org/11/items/Interzone_048_1991-06/Interzone_048_1991-06.pdf>.
Tech: Very clever indeed. The major flaw in the Apple ad is that in trying to appeal to people who like to make and experience art and music on the one hand, people who think it is cool to watch things get crushed by hydraulic presses on the other, and potential iPad buyers on the third, it would up disgusting and repulsing everyone:
Rezo Sixo Safai: I fixed Apple’s Ad: