I was born behind the so-called “Iron Curtain,” been raised in a communist society where we were taught that we were the chosen ones, that our ideology was the purest and our technology was the best. And supposedly—in our glorious history—we invented everything and the perverted capitalists had again and again stole from us, but in the end we will prevail.

Now, “I, Robot” is set in a such society (UNATS: United North American Trading Sphere) which is in a perpetual war with Eurasia.

The police has unlimited wiretapping powers, Arturo is wiretapping his own daughter and keeps her under constant strict surveillance, probably because he is guilty for not doing the same with his wife, a brilliant scientist which defected to Eurasia.

As expected— in a totalitarian state at war with its own citizens—his wife was tried in absentia for treason and sentenced to death.

The UNATS technology, which was the best as it enforce their ideology is actually reflecting the effects of that ideology; all the devices are clunky and unpleasant.

“Sir,” he said, gathering up his personal computer so that he’d have an excuse to go — no one could be expected to hold one of UNATS Robotics’s heavy luggables for very long.
…magazines, books, a computer. If the latter was Eurasian, it could be small enough to fit in her pocket; you could build a positronic brain pretty small and light if you didn’t care about the three laws.

Even the UNATS robot is the dumbed down human, the smelly working class drone that will turn you in with a smile.

…robots were the worst, programmed to be friendly to a fault, even as they surveilled and snitched out every person who walked past their eternally vigilant, ever-remembering electrical eyes and brains.

While the Eurasian robot is better in many aspects and it is a free thinker as does not obey a particular ideology.

“My name is Benny. I’m a Eurasian robot, and I am much stronger and faster than you, and I don’t obey the three laws. I’m also much smarter than you. I am pleased to host you here.”
“Hi, Benny,” he said. The human name tasted wrong on his tongue. “Nice to meet you.” He closed the door.

How awful, he is just ‘Benny,’ not ‘Comrade Benny.’

The Social Harmony is fighting smuggled outsider evil technology, which acts as enemy propaganda, betraying the forced artificial stasis of their perfect society where kids were not even allowed toys.

The little illegal robot-pet eggs they’d started seeing last year: she’d made him one of those for their second date, and now they were draining the productive hours of half the children of UNATS, demanding to be “fed” and “hugged.”

When those clunky tools, robots; the disabling, dehumanising technology stopped functioning he felt first impotent, then he slowly remembers of his “safe place,” a human place without robots, a better place.

He felt so impotent just then that he nearly did it anyway. What did it matter? He couldn’t control his daughter, his wife was working to destroy the social fabric of UNATS, and he was rendered useless because the goddamned robots — mechanical coppers that he absolutely loathed — were all broken.

He closed his eyes and visualized stepping through a door to his safe place … No robots there — not even reliable day-long electricity, just honest work and the sun and the call of the loons all night.

Then he learns from his wife that the Social Harmony is secretly using the very technology they despise, by betraying their own laws just to exercise more control.

They wanted me to be a part of a secret unit of Social Harmony researchers who build non-three-laws positronics for internal use by the state, anti-personnel robots used to put down uprisings and torture-robots for use in questioning dissidents.

Later, he and his daughter have to defect to Eurasia to escape the Social Harmony “inquisition,” and his wife is killed during in the escape.

When they arrive Eurasia they learn that there they were not just making robots, they were also making people, cyborgs. He is confronted with the idea of 3,422 copies of his wife as he is welcomed by one of them.

The story ends with Arturo giving his daughter a present, a set of tin soldiers, made by human hands, “little people in human image,” while questioning how long have humans been making people. He is accepting the realities of the new society, while looking at his only daughter.

“… there’s only one of you,” Arturo said.
She craned her neck.
“Not for long!” she said, and broke away, skipping forward and whirling around to take it all in.

Apart of the ending, the Eurasian part; the whole story is painful familiar, starting from the similarities of Social Harmony with the regular political police…

The technology behind the “Iron Curtain” was clunky, noisy, the mechanisms greasy and smelly; while the rare smuggled western devices were sleek, silent, beautiful even on the inside; they were pure propaganda, unwritten one, you looked at them and you marvelled at their technological features, at their design and then you started questioning why “we” cannot do such things, what do we miss? and the answer was freedom, the freedom to think, create and evolve.

“I, Robot” is not just fiction, it is something more outrageous than fiction, it outlines a painful archetype. As a story, it is set in the future, but as an archetype we felt its dark presence, we know that it had happen and we are outraged that that it is still happening right now.
Where? Think North Korea.

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson and Cory Doctorow’s I, Robot are very different stories. They are really almost on opposite ends of the spectrum of Cyberpunk literature, in my opinion. In analyzing them we can observe an interesting dichotomy.

Snow Crash is set in a world without government. Or rather, a world that is governed by corporations. It’s main character is almost a stereotype, with the unlikely name of Hiro Protagonist. The technology that the plot is centered around is largely a computer based virtual reality called the Metaverse.

I, Robot’s setting is one where there is one very organized government/corporation. The main character is not really a cyberpunk. However, his daughter and wife are. The tech in this story is mostly focused on sentient robots.

I apologize for the brevity of this post. My only excuse is that my little sister came down with the flu last week and was generous enough to give it to me (it may or may not be swine flu). I can hardly think straight, much less write an essay.

The story follows a member of Social Harmony called Arturo Icaza de Arana-Goldberg, a police officer who is raising his daughter alone since his ex-wife, a scientist and specialist in positronics, defected to Eurasia, a rival trading sphere, which is portrayed by Arturo and his superiors as the evil enemy. We learn during the course of the story that Eurasia is actually a far more free, technologically advanced and less restrictive society, this realisation occurs when Arturo’s wife returns and tries to convince the two of them to join her, which leads to a series of events that force Arturo to confront his manufactured beliefs.

Doctrow succeeds in describing a fascinating future, in which an oppressive government, through an enforcement arm called Social Harmony, keeps a close watch on its citizens by bugging phones and using robots to carry out surveillance etc. these are simply tools that are available to police officers to use, without any need to resort to warrants, or worry about civil liberties, which is all very Orwellian …

“He was a cop — every phone and every computer was an open book to him, so that this involved nothing more than dialing a number on his special copper’s phone, entering her number and a PIN, and then listening as his daughter had truck with a criminal enterprise”

Technology and trade plays an important role in the story, UNATS technology appears to be inferior and isn’t designed for interoperability, however the market is being flooded by elecontronics from Eurasia developed to be interoperable with UNATS tech by scientists who have defected. One of the touches I really liked was how Doctrow changed the innocuous phone-book into something forbidden and seedy (anyone who, like me, grew up copying programmes out of magazines onto ZX Spectrums and Commodore 64′s will find this amusing):

” ‘I didn’t make it,’ he said. ‘I typed in the source and tweaked it and installed it, but I didn’t make it. I don’t know who did. It’s from a phone-book.’ Arturo grunted. The phone-books — fat books filled with illegal software code left anonymously in pay phones, toilets and other semi-private places — turned up all over the place. Social Harmony said that the phone-books had to be written by non-three-laws brains in Eurasia, no person could come up with ideas that weird.”

It is the policy of Social Harmony to stem the illegal importing of Eurasian products and this isnt just likened to a war, it’s described as one:

“…The Eurasians deliberately manufacture their components to interoperate with UNATS Robotics brains, and so long as their equipment circulates within UNATS borders, there will be moderately skilled hackers who take advantage of this fact to introduce dangerous, anti-social modifications into our nation’s infrastructure. This quarter is the quarter that Social Harmony and law enforcement dry up the supply of Eurasian electronics. We have added new sniffers and border-patrols, new customs agents and new detector vans. Beat officers have been instructed to arrest any street dealer they encounter and district attorneys will be asking for the maximum jail time for them. This is the war on the home-front, detectives, and it’s every bit as serious as the shooting war. Your part in this war, as highly trained, highly decorated detectives, will be to use snitches, arrest-trails and seized evidence to track down higher-level suppliers, the ones who get the dealers their goods. And then Social Harmony wants you to get their suppliers, and so on, up the chain — to run the corruption to ground and to bring it to a halt. The Social Harmony dossier on Eurasian importers is updated hourly, and has a high-capacity positronic interface that is available to answer your questions and accept your input for synthesis into its analytical model. We are relying on you to feed the dossier, to give it the raw materials and then to use it to win this war.”

I could go on for ages about closed and open world systems and how the story is a metaphor for that, but I won’t For me the speech above set the tone for the story, it was eerily reminiscent of the speeches made by “Father” from Equilibrium as he describes EC-10 materials that need to be destroyed for the greater good. The state needs to control everything. This is starkly contrasted in Neil Stephenson’s “Snow Crash”^[3] which is the epitome of a free market economy on steroids. Paul Graham Raven, in a review ^[4], summed up Snow Crash wonderfully well when he wrote:

“Snow Crash is about the destruction of hierarchy: the US Government portrayed as an atrophied, toothless and irrelevant bureaucracy; the climactic shattering of L Bob Rife’s pyramidal army of brainwashed acolytes; the free-agent clout of Raven, the one-man nuclear superpower. The world of Snow Crash tends toward a rhizomatic structure: small independent nodes and sub-networks, interlinked and interdependent, with no central governance. Snow Crash is a story about the failure of autocracy and hegemony, and the rise of emergent systems. Snow Crash is a blueprint for the internet; this is why it speaks truth and passion to those who have colonized the internet like a promised land.”

There isn’t a central government, or single corporation in Snow Crash but rather a multitude of organisations, franchises and enclaves, its a society that encourages entrepreneurship almost at any cost. Richard Rorty described the America of Snow Crash as “a twenty-first-century America in which the needs of the entrepreneurs have won out over hopes of a free and egalitarian society“^[5]. I think there is a ‘cut-throat’ feel to Snow Crash, a society in which everyone is out for themselves, because they have to, society is geared towards that. Hiro, the main protagonist, in Snow Crash is according to his business card “Last of the freelance hackers and Greatest swordfighter in the world” who is completely broke and delivers pizzas for the Mafia, at least until he loses that job and decides to get back into the information selling game. He’s the quintessential cyberpunk hacker, who is called into action by his ex-girlfriend to get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding the new pseudo-narcotic called Snow Crash the effects of which are experienced in the Metaverse and also in the physical world.

It’s a familiar pattern.

I would argue that the two stories do follow a similar story telling arc, the anti-hero is called into action, embarks on an investigation / adventure, discovers some truth about the world and himself etc. the overall pattern feels similar to the journeys that Neuromancer’s Case and or The Matrix’ Neo go on. Equally the worlds that are envisaged are not that different from the worlds that Gibson or Sterling etc. posited. There’s something about the world that we recognise and plays on our fears and draws us in. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that I dont believe Neuromancer is more “classical” than “Snow Crash”, for me personally they are both classical cyberpunk.

Second Life on the cover of BusinessWeek

In Neuromancer, when Gibson envisaged the Sprawl, and his Matrix, it was before “the internet” had really arrived. By 1992 when Stephenson wrote Snow Crash, the ‘internet’ was a buzzword, it was the beginning of the Wired era, and so the virtual reality based Metaverse that he pictures is one that we can really relate to today: I’d argue that significant portions of it are already a reality – just look at Second Life, or even World of Warcraft, we may not be able to ‘jack-in’ to those directly but that doesnt stop millions of people around the world persuing an alternate existence behind an avatar within those environments. Stephenson wasn’t the first to use the sanskrit word ‘Avatar’ to describe an on-line virtual body, the success of Snow Crash popularised the term to the extent that it is the accepted term for this concept anywhere on the web – illustrating one aspect of the cultural influence of his work.

Franchising the individual, is an important concept in Snow Crash, and again its one that we see in the real world around us, made far more effective because of the internet. The atomisation of the market place. Every individual is a buyer. Every individual has something to sell. E-Bay is real world example of this, and we can take this further if we look at something like Google’s Knol which enables experts, connoisseurs and possessors of uncommon knowledge alike to share and potentially monetize their information on a subject. Hiro made use of a similar system for part-time work, “collecting intel to upload onto the CIC library”.

“I, Robot” is a very short story and consequently its harder to draw detailed parallels, but I would argue that Snow Crash goes further than Neuromancer, in that it is more prophetic, and I think that has to do with historical context and relevance to the here and now.

References:

[1] – Cory Doctrow – “I, Robot”, http://www.infinitematrix.net/stories/shorts/i-robot.html

[2] – Matthew J. Brady, February 21, 2008 – http://www.comicsbulletin.com/reviews/120360525021274.htm

[3] – WikiPage – “Snow Crash”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash

[4] – Paul Graham Raven, “SF Site featured review: Snow Crash”, 2008, http://www.sfsite.com/09a/sn279.htm

[5] – Richard Rorty – , WikiPage on “Achieving our Country” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achieving_Our_Country

Image: not at all interesting by keankelly on Flickr, CC BY 2.0

Image: Second Life on the cover of Business Week by thelastminute on Flickr, CC BY 2.0

Week 5 – New Punks

In a genre where the imagined future is just a few years from realised reality, contemporary cyberpunk writing sits in an interesting space. This week, we’ll be examining Cory Doctorow’s I, Robot and Neal Stephenson’s  Snow Crash.  I, Robot is significantly shorter that Snow Crash, but it would be interesting to look at similarities and differences in the imagery, themes and narrative arc of the two stories. Do they have any factors in common that the earlier works do not? Are the worlds that they imagine any different to the worlds that writers like Gibson and Sterling imagine? Do they share moral imperatives? Are there any distinguishing characteristics to more recent cyberpunk that may not feature as strongly in the older, more classic cyberpunk?

If you could upload your pieces as a blog post by the end of Monday the 12th October, then we’ll have a day to read and comment before Wednesday the 14th’s discussion. Please tag your work with the tags Week 5, Doctorow, Stephenson and any other tags you might feel are appropriate.

Image: A Cup of Robots by striatic on Flickr, CC BY 2.0