Hybrid Life in the World of Computers

Assaults upon the Gender System

The industrialized western society is constituted under the dictate of a dualistic gender concept. This dualism defines the plans and chances of people’s lives; it is imprinted in our bodies and habits. Dualisms are a systematical part of the domination over those, who are defined as others. Electronical data networks contain the possibility to make experiences, which refer to someting beyond dualistic patterns. The boundaries between ‚man‘ and’woman‘, between humans and machines, humans and animals, here and there, virtual and real become blurred. Cyborgs, who are developed out of machines and organism – are occuring on the net. In the lecture different appearences of hybrid phenomenens will be pointed out. In addition I will discuss the following qustions: How do the users experience the contact with hybrid phenomenens? What is the users‘ motivation to constitute hybrids by themselves? What are the consequences of such experiences for the life offline? And finally: Do the computers show us a world, in which the traditional gender system is meaningless?

Barry adores Julia whom he met in a MUD. MUDs are text-based virtual realities on the internet which were conceived as interactive adventure games. Whoever logs into a MUD creates a fictional character which enters into playful relationships with other MUD visitors. The following dialogue took place on July 21, 1992 between Barry and Julia in a MUD (Hoffman 1998,109):

“Barry says, 'Are you still holding out on me?'

Julia says, 'I mean, have I convinced you I'm a computer yet?'

Barry says, 'I guess you’re real ... But I’d still like to get you to my

DEN to run tests on you.‘

Julia says, 'I live for your approval, Barry.'

Barry says, 'I'm so glad to hear that. Why don't you come over to my home?'

Julia says, 'I want to have a child someday.’

Barry says, 'What a coincidence ... I too wish to make a baby ... someday.’

Julia says, 'The day is Tue Jul 21, 23:57:31, Barry!'”

Julia turned out to be a chatterbot. She isn’t controlled by a human user, rather by a computer program. In cyberspace a multitude of computer programs abound which develop a manner of communication bearing human traits. In the course of the conversation Barry began to have doubts about whether Julia was really a woman of flesh and blood. He began communicating with Julia in a way which hinted at these doubts. Julia went along with this game. She acted autonomously. By doing so doesn’t she grow beyond the dimensions of her machine existence?

When we come into contact with other beings, we assume we know whether our opposite is a human being or a machine. From this certainty we develop our pattern of interaction; our emotional involvement is different with humans than with inanimate objects. A human being can insult us, a machine can’t. The technological development in the area of computer-supported media shakes this certainty. The boundaries between human and machine become fluid (Schachtner 1993). Previously, theoretical interest in the areas of media and technology was concentrated primarily on computer-supported simulations of intellectual processes; less attention was paid to the physical dimension of computer-supported constructions (Baacke 1997, 100).

In the following, I would like to sketch areas in which encounters with hybrid computer-supported constructions can be experienced. My goal is to sensitize for course of technological developmental which are useful in turning basic premises of our existence upside down.

1. Hybrids of Human and Machine

1.1 A part of me

I encountered the phenomena of the melting of human and machine for the first time in my research during interviews with teenage and adult software developers (Schachtner 1993). A 16 year-old explained to me that a computer behaves like a human being, receiving information and giving information back; however, despite this fact, it is still not a human, but it is also not a machine. She described a computer finally as “a little bit of both”, thereby finding a way of expressing the experiences she shared with other software developers.

People who develop computer programs cross their thinking permanently with the materialized thought patterns of the machine. That which was only just inner reality is, in the next moment, brought onto the screen, outer reality. The boundaries between inside and outside, between material and immaterial, between subject and object become fluid. “So what I mean is that in every program my brain structures appear, I imagine, they come back out. That is what I consider to be moving,” explained a 19 year-old developer. An AI (artificial intelligence) researcher gave the medical expert system she developed her own name, thereby transforming herself into the system or into the computer, she didn’t definitely decide. She says, “I pick at (name of the AI researcher) all the time,” and, “I am now it”, meaning the computer. She imagines a human-machine creature into which her mind but also her physically body flows. To the AI researcher the system equipped with her own name appears as an “arm to grasp, hit and catch with which reaches outward and has the ability to store and compute, therefore a part of you” (quoted according to Schachtner 1997). The AI researcher reacts ambivalently to her hybrid creation. She has a funny feeling about it yet at the same time she remarks that “I had the most pleasant feeling as I created it.”

The human-machine creations of the developers belong in the realm of the cyborgs. Science fiction is teeming with cyborgs. Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, full of combinations of organisms and technical apparatus, combinations “as the history of sexuality was not capable of producing” (Haraway 1995, 34). Cyborgs undermine the certainty of the classification of what can be termed natural and artificial, living and dead (Ibid, 38).

1.2 Transformative Toys

In the early 1980s transformative toys had already been introduced into children’s culture in America. Now children are becoming aquatinted with the transformation of the Power Rangers, which can change themselves into hermaphrodites of human/machine/animal. There is a Power Ranger TV series, there are videos, comic strips and action figures (Turkle 1998, 275). A special type of hybrid constructions with which children play, the Power Rangers can take on the form of tanks, robots and humans, but can also be used to create mixed forms, so that a robot arm protrudes from a human body or a human leg projects from a tank. A child took offence, as Sherry Turkle reported, to the unclearness of the cyborgs: “You should either make whole humans or whole machines with it” (Ibid). Another answered: “There’s no harm in playing with it when they are half one, half other” (Ibid). At her request to characterize cyborgs Sherry Turkle got the answer: “The robots control their actions themselves but aren’t alive; they would be alive if they had bodies; they are alive because they have bodies; would be alive if they had feelings; are alive in the same way as insects, but not as people.” (Ibid, 276).

The children’s theories are ambiguous and contradictory. They reflect the experience of a hybrid reality in which, according to Donna Haraway, no one must fear his/her connection to machines and in which no one must recoil from partial and changing identities and from conflicting feelings (Haraway 1995, 39).

1.3 Artificial Life

18 year-old Klaus acquainted me at the end of the eighties with the “Game of Life”, a simulation of life, as he characterized the computer game. With a graphic pipette he put a starter population of bacteria on his computer screen and commented, “I am putting bacteria on my screen culture.” The bacteria continued to develop in dependence on their environment; they multiplied when they had too few neighbors, and died when the number of neighbors exceeded a certain limit. A variation of the game consisted of a chessboard with white and black squares which changed their color depending on the color of the neighboring squares. Complex patterns develop which replicate themselves and die (Turkle 1998, 246). “Game of Life” was developed in the late sixties by the mathematician John Conway. Self-reproducing and evolving forms are generated in an open-end development which is characterized by surprise and order, repetition and identity. The program “Game of Life” is one of the first attempts at artificial life research. A later attempt was the program SimLife which was hailed as a genetic playground; it asks the user to create evolving creatures in a virtual, dynamic ecosystem. Artificial life is the science of the creation of evolving organisms whose development runs emergent, meaning from lower to higher states of being. For Klaus the bacteria cultures he created on the screen were merely simulations of living organisms. Around the same time, the question was discussed among American scholars whether the creations of artificial life research were not, in fact, forms of life. Following the conference at Alamos in 1987, a consensus was developed that artificial organisms must fulfil four criteria in order to be classified as living:

1. They must go through an evolution with natural selection.

2. They must contain a genetic program in which the instructions are contained for their functioning and reproduction.

3. They must show a high level of complexity.

4. They must distinguish themselves by self-organization (Turkle 1998, 243).

Under these terms artificial life creations would be considered living. For 10 year-old Robbie a-life organisms are “a bit alive”, but “you can turn the game off and you can not save it, so all of the creatures that you created disappear” (Turkle 1998, 272), he claims. They stay in there (in the computer), whereas we are outside. Does this distinction secure us a special place in the world, can we trust that a-life creations will limit their existence to the computer screen? Robbie takes into account that the creatures could find out how to get around certain parts of the program, “so that you have to secure the game.....then they could leave the computer when the modem is on and go to America Online“ (Ibid). They have already left the computer screen--in the form of movable three-dimensional cyborgs--because cyborgs are a-life creations in as far as they function of the basis of concepts and techniques of a-life.

Children feel called upon, as Sherry Turkle found out, by the creatures out of the a-life realm to search for new words and for a language which is befitting of these beings (Turkle, 273). Often they conceptualize these in psychological and technical terms at the same time, characterize them simultaneously as living beings and as dead artifacts, which indicates that they combine what we normally view at not compatible in a mixed existence. By doing so children show a way to a theory of multiples.

2. Disturbing Possibilities

The development and utilization of the new machines leads us into a world in which key characteristics are ambiguous and uncertainty. Our concepts of female and male identity, of interpersonal relationships, of morals, of corporeality, of living being and dead artifact are put to the test. How should we classify ourselves in a world if we can no longer be sure what is similar to us and what it different? The basic relationship between a subject and the world stands to debated. The hybrid human-machine creations unsettle and fascinate us at the same time. The software developers I interviewed described the encounter with the ambiguous as funny, fascinating, thrilling, as “that which is truly exciting about the whole thing” (Schachtner 1997, 23).

The uneasiness results from the doubts cast upon the obvious, upon that which builds the unquestioned platform of our daily actions. The fun provided by the encounter with the hybrids is usually combined with a feeling of liberation. In such an encounter the dualisms bestowed upon us by the occidental rationalism are conquered, dualisms which, always binding us to one or the other, proved to be shackles. Problematic dualisms of the western world include male/female, civilized/primitive, mind/body, culture/nature, true/false, truth/illusion, native/foreign. Dualisms are systematic components of domination over all those who are the “Other” and over everything which constitutes “Otherness” (D. Haraway 1995, 67). People are discriminated, excluded and fought against on the basis of dualisms; in the name of dualisms wars are fought. Donna Haraway suggests trying to understand the metaphor of the cyborgs as a way leading us out of the labyrinth of dualisms, which push us to lead a far too disciplined, a much too controlled, an altogether too either/or-bound life (Haraway, 72). Her suggestion places her in the company of other current theorists who, in light of a world of increasing pluralization and intercultural development, demand ideas of subjectivity be developed which are less uniform than in the past (H. Bilden 1997, 1; K. Meyer-Drawe 1990). How are we to succeed in finding common ground connecting us with members of other cultures and enabling intercultural understanding if we strictly separate “own” and “other” and compare them hierarchically? (A. Knapp-Potthoff 1997, 202). Letting go of dualisms is risky business for the subject, and must be learned. Tolerance of ambiguity, the act of making distinctions, and concepts of plurality are strategies for mastering life which cannot be sacrificed in a world of loosened dualisms. Cyberspace offers a good field of practice.

Computer technology was produced by humans as a result of their thought and will, and in the process of using and continuing to develop this technology, the technology begins to, in turn, effect its creators. It assails their certainties, posses uncomfortable questions, entices them to experiment, supports their crossing of boundaries. Perhaps it even has a function such as this Taoistic fable which I found from Elisabeth List. A woman painter receives the assignment “to decorate the entrance hall of a noble house with a painting. She viewed the wall and painted a thick forest of exotic beauty. When the painting was finished guests were invited to view it, and the painter was on hand as well. During the festivities it happened that the artist, with a smile on her face, took her leave of the guests, turned to the wall, walked towards it and disappeared between the trees and bushes--and was never seen again (...)” (quoted according to E. List 1996, 99). The lesson the Taoists draw from the fable is to make stronger use of their fantasy and, in experimenting with thought possibilities, to dissolve themselves from the fixation with their acquired view of life.

The hybrid creations of the computer world tell us the same story. They point beyond the binary figures. They confront us with a post-gender world. In this world the word gender has lost its power as a structuring category of order, which classifies humans into women and men and ensures that the relationship of the sexes remains a relationship of domination. In their ambiguity cyborgs break through the discursive order on which our model of society rests and stand, therefore, for the possibility of changing the world.

Christina Schachtner Marburg 2000

Prof. Dr. Christina Schachtner

Institut für Erziehungswissenschaft der Philipps-Universität Marburg,

Wilhelm-Röpke-Str. 6B, 35032 Marburg

Tel.:06421/28-24775 od. 23590, Fax: 06421/28-28946

E-mail: schachtn@mailer.uni-marburg.de

Homepage: http://staff-www.uni-marburg.de/~schachtn/