#cyborgization

The lines that separate online and offline are already blurred. The physical body transports its content to the network, and it coexists in it. This hybrid experience transfigures the way in which we relate, transformation our bodies into devices. Cyborgization has already begun.

I'll get it out of the way: this movie is not particularly good.  It opens strong, but the pacing is all shot to hell and the narrative arcs go all over the place.  The effects are Nice Enough, but they don't sell the bone-crunching impacts involved in these cyborg fights.  Like, there really is still no better depiction of cyborg combat than the various incarnations of Ghost in the Shell, and the fact that they're *animated* is a big part of that.  (I do not count in this generalization the live-action abortion that was Scarlett Johansson's film, which was to Ghost in the Shell what LaCroix is to actual sparkling water).

I've never seen another movie with Rosa Salazar in it, but she does sell Alita.  She really inhabits this person and when she gets pissed, she brings it, even through the somewhat-silly CGI job they did on her face. I also am a big Christoph Waltz fan, and he's terrific as usual.  And Ed Skrein, who was fantastic in Deadpool and who really earned my respect when he walked away from Hellboy so his role could go to an Asian actor, is in his best element as the smug, horrible hunter-warrior (ugh, the dumbest terminology) Zapan.  Mahershala Ali and Jennifer Connelly are great as the main villains, particularly Ali switching seamlessly between the Vector and Nova personalities.  I enjoyed the *performances,* just not the movie they were in.

The biggest problem for me isn’t that the film isn’t as cerebral as GitS.  The thing is the film doesn’t know what it’s about.  You have the obvious class warfare angle represented by the literal floating city where the rich people and Big Bad live, and the Iron City urban sprawl underneath it filled with people trying not to get murdered by one another.  You also have Alita’s quest to regain the truth of her identity.  You have her burgeoning (and somewhat, frankly, rushed and dumb) romance with… Guy.  Vaguely Sexy Guy.  Can’t remember his name.  Hugo, that’s it.  Wow, that did not come off great for him.  You have that burgeoning romance which might have provided a lens to explore how cyborgization and transhumanism interacts with human sexuality and relationships, and it seems like they took a swipe at that when Alita asks Ido, “Can a human love a cyborg?,” but that’s about all the introspection we get before we’re back to CGI people murdering one another.  You have her registering as a hunter-warrior, her feud with Zapan, the whole motor-ball cultural obsession and her quest to become Final Champion… there is just a shit-ton going on in this movie, and there isn’t room for all of it. We don’t even get a proper climax; she kills Mahershala Ali, tries and fails to save her boyfriend’s life, and then we flash forward several months to her about to become Final Champion and go to the floating city to do… something.  Finish her mission from her previous life by killing the Big Bad?

To put it more succinctly, the movie doesn’t have a single question it’s trying to ask us.  Good sci-fi (of which cyberpunk is a sub-genre) asks a question.  Ghost in the Shell’s question is, in most of its stories, “at what point does a human stop being human?” and it answers that in various ways.  Alita doesn’t have a single, driving question.  The first and most obvious one is, “Who was Alita before Ido found her in the scrapyard?”  But that gets answered about halfway through the film, and then we kind of meander to the sequel-bait conclusion.  It isn’t asking us “can a human love a cyborg,” because Alita asks that and it is immediately answered because of course they can, we’re not fucking idiots, cyborgs are by definition human.  If all they wanted to do was make a movie where a cute cyborg girl kills a bunch of less-cute cyborgs with kung fu, and then call the kung fu “Panzer Kunst” for some ridiculous reason, they should have done that and leaned harder into it.  The movie feels like it’s grasping at something Artistic, but it never quite makes it there.

Chris Hables Gray on AI and the Singularity: We Need Strong Citizenship!

Prof. Chris Hables Gray is someone whose work on both war and the cyborg is a must read for anyone interested in those topics. I have followed Gray’s work for over 10 years and have read at least 3 of his books. So when I discovered that Chris will be one of the speakers for the upcoming ISTAS2013 conference in Toronto, that I can’t wait to attend this June 27-29, I decided to use it as an excuse…

Prof. Chris Hables Gray is someone whose work on both war and the cyborg is a must read for anyone interested in those topics. I have followed Gray’s work for over 10 years and have read at least 3 of his books. So when I discovered that Chris will be one of the speakers for the upcoming ISTAS2013 conference in Toronto, that I can’t wait to attend this June 27-29, I decided to use it as an excuse to get him for an interview on Singularity 1 on 1.

During my conversation with Chris Hables Gray we cover a variety of interesting topics such as: how Chris got interested in issues related to war and cyborg; the definition of cyborg and why the term has been actively avoided by both NASA and the US military; the difference between a drone and a robot; cyborg society and the politics thereof; why cyborgization is as overdetermined as it is a political process; human nature, nurture, competition and cooperation; Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto; mind-reading, mind-control and neuro-marketing; philosophy and death; transhumanism and the technological singularity; artificial intelligence and hubris; Gray’s upcoming book on Infoisms…

My favorite quote that I will take away from this conversation with Chris Hables Gray is:

“We need good citizenship, strong citizenship like Socrates had when he went and risked his life to fight for Athens. […] We can’t be just people who vote. […] We must be really engaged citizens like our hero Socrates and risk all, risk our lives to make the world better – for our children and our friends.”

As always you can listen to or download the audio file above or scroll down and watch the video interview in full. To show your support you can write a review on iTunes, make a direct donation or become a patron on Patreon.

  Who is Chris Hables Gray?

Chris Hables Gray, Ph.D., lectures at the University of California at Santa Cruz and California State University at Monterey Bay in the Cultural Studies of Science and Technology. His particular interest is how information technologies shape contemporary war and peace making and the politics of our ongoing cyborgization. He is the editor of The Cyborg Handbook and author of Postmodern War, Cyborg Citizen, and Peace, War and Computers. Currently he is researching social media and social change and finishing a book on information theory entitled Infoisms: Aphorisms About Information.

to listen and check out the rest of the podcast see: https://www.singularityweblog.com/chris-hables-gray-on-cyborg-singularity-citizenship/