I like to have a little music in the background when I’m writing–code or other compositions. According to an article in the Economist, in order to self regulate perfectly with music, you have to choose the right kind: something too familiar, but not so familiar it’s nostalgic; something instrumental, with relatively few (or, if any) vocals to pipe alluring siren songs into your ears. The Economist suggests to balance out your neoliberal working hell with something like classical music, though a part of me wonders if it’s more like classical Muzak–the carefully engineered, pay-to-play psy-op of corporate background music, designed to eke as much production as possible out of workers and as much coin as can-be dug out of customers’ pockets.
For me, the perfect background music is synthwave. With a sawtooth-wave heavy set of synths and a lot of 1980’s nostalgia, synthwave is the perfect music for working on projects that will come alive once they hit the internet. There’s a very precise aesthetic that goes along with synthwave. On youtube, popular synthwave mixes–often over an hour or two long–feature endlessly looping graphics, dominated by purple and black color schemes. They often depict a vehicle, often a car or a space ship, hurtling forward towards an endless horizon in single-point perspective. Usually, there’s the faint outline of the city awaiting the traveler like a feigned promise, silhouetted dark against a partially setting sun. Dim palm trees, each one a perfect copy of the last, dot the sides of the virtual highway that the listener traverses as, transfixed, they take in the music, ever-accelerating, never-ending–as soon as one video has fished playing, youtube queues up another from the same genre.
Youtube can queue up infinite video playlists of vehicles speeding into infinity because nostalgia for the 80’s isn’t in short supply in American culture. One mix that’s made it into my feed, called Stranger Synths, uses synths from Netflix’s Stranger Things, a horror/fantasy series set in small-town America during the 1980’s. I like the series, and to me there’s little wonder why it became a popular favorite. Taking a look at the headlines makes it feel like we’ve gone back in time. A new Cold War is brewing, the Russians are at our gate with their frightful armies of super-soldier bots, and spies might be anywhere. In the 1980s, HIV/AIDS became a pandemic, putting an abrupt end to the era of free love and leaving people worried about what their next kiss might lead to. Now we know that condoms provide excellent protection from sexually transmitted illnesses like HIV/AIDS, but Tinder sparks are now being relegated to virtual smouldering. There’s been a popular meme going around, a comic depicting a person double-checking the calendar after being presented, via smartphone, with news that reminds us of the bad old times.
But I don’t think that nostalgia from the 80’s is solely tied to the headlines, or from desires to return to childhood or better times. I think it stems from something that permeates American culture at a deeper, more essential level. In the 1980’s, when computer technology originally used for military purposes began to trickle down into consumer products–for hobbyist programmers and for young, soon-to-be gamers–the future had a certain kind of brightness to it. Like that moment, right when the light shimmers so perfectly in the long golden hour before the sun coalesces into a warm red orb on the horizon. The future had a darkness to it: the way that computers could be used for systems of control, the way that, in the wrong hands–they might lead to the end–but you know, it seemed so far off. Infinitely far off. We have the bright lights of arcade games to dazzle us after school, and WarGames–that can be left to the movies. Real cyborgs were just beginning to exist as characters of fiction, and the differences between humans and computers couldn’t be clearer.
It would have been hard to, in the 90’s, imagine myself as a cyborg. Computers were for playing and making with, for point-and-click explorations of the Oregon Trail and chatting with friends online. Even in the early 2000’s, when I began writing code and creating dreams for Furcadia, I saw the curved CRT monitor of our old workstation as more of a Through-the-Looking-Glass than as a black mirror. But now, cloud servers store memories of mine which I can’t reach through my wetware; my hard drive and the virtual arrays I work with when programming feel like something more than second nature: they feel like me. I build my current PC with my own hands, gently coaxing each component into place and sealing the whole case with a thought and a prayer. When I look into the clear glass panel and watch my CPU cooler change color, the fans of my GPU whirring, I see a scrying-pool into my own self, and the warm air from the exhaust fan feels like my own breath.
Perhaps that’s why I connect with A Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway’s 1985 treatise on feminist cyborg revolution that is to come. But for Haraway, what makes a cyborg is not a human-machine hybrid; it’s the way that we can exist within a radically re-imagined, technologically enabled, world–our biological bodies preserved, and our technology liberating rather than controlled. If you go by Haraway’s words, I was born a cyborg: my intersectional identities, my uncertainties, and all my potential as a multiracial, queer woman of color emerge from the sum of experiences, socialization, culture-and-subculture which have been etched into me by the world that we live in. Plus, A Cyborg Manifesto, originally printed in a magazine, was reprinted formally as part of a book in 1991–the same year that I was born.
In A Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway writes,
From one perspective, a cyborg world is about
the final imposition of a grid of control on
the planet, about the final abstraction
embodied in a Star Wars apocalypse waged in
the name of defence, about the final
appropriation of women’s bodies in a
masculinist orgy of war (Sofia, 1984). From
another perspective, a cyborg world might be
about lived social and bodily realities in
which people are not afraid of their joint 16
kinship with animals and machines, not afraid
of permanently partial identities and
contradictory standpoints.
Donna Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto, p.15-16
For Haraway, the cyborg’s political struggle is to hold these things together at once, both the potential for control and oppression, but also for the potential of radical liberation. And it’s this struggle to hold things together at once which makes the 1980’s so alluring. During the 1980’s and early 90’s, the internet was used most heavily by academics and garden-variety nerds. It let people communicate, research, and network like never before. It allowed said nerds to make their fantasies, like Furcadia, real; it allowed people to play, make love, and make mischief. It was hard to use, but also hard to control. It wasn’t dominated with platforms of human misery, like Twitter; like the bright major chords that dominate the synthwave aesthetic, it was lit with infinite potential. During the 1980’s, both potentials for the future–one of technological liberation and one of digital authoritarianism–could be held, one in each hand, and weighed as equal potentials.
But in 2021, Star Wars is back in the news as an endlessly derivative piece of intellectual fodder and the inspiration for a new American “Space Force” designed to carry American imperialism into the infinite resources of outer space. The virtual space of the internet is now gated off into a few platforms controlled by even fewer big tech companies, and the FBI crowd-sources the identities of political protestors by encouraging people to turn in their friends, relatives, and Tinder dates. Resources devoted to sharing information freely, like Library Genesis, are presented to young students as dangerous Russian websites which might contain malware that could harm their precious university system’s interests. That it is the university’s financial interest is left unsaid. And instead of the sinister computer of WarGames(1983), the artificial intelligence which talks back to computer users is a polite Siri, Google, or dear little Xiao AI.
And yet, this isn’t the end. It can’t be. Cyborgs are, by definition, at least part biological; and biological beings evolve. Fast. A new type of cyborg creeps onto the web like a spider, half-hashtag-crawler and half wage-worker. Vulgate users seize the memes of production to make Karl Marx trendy again. We’re not creatures etched with the written circuits that established hierarchies and social relations carve into our chips. We are agile. We boost our post reach with one hand cast on the web, waiting to feel for a flutter in the infosphere. We look for disruption and mean to evade capture at all costs. We do for each other. We found that on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog–and that gave us Godlike powers. We trade gender dysphoria for gender euphoria. We become who we know we are, and we confidently navigate an internet that’s always somewhere between pastiche and collage.
Pastiche, because we are constantly referring to what came before; and collage, because we bring these things together in a way that they were never meant to, in a way which exists as art only as its own. When these collages coalesce into music, art or written word, or meme, or something else–it’s more than just a piece of human creation floating around on the internet. They allow us to make free, loose associations between the pieces which have been sampled and created, bringing us to a fuller and better understanding of how history and blunder have brought us into the world that we know–and how we can get back to that struggle to see the potential for revolutionary liberation as something that remains extant alongside the crushing tools for control and containment that pervade the internet. But most importantly, they let us do it in an incredibly chill, fun, and vulgar way.
In the prologue to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the narrator smokes a little of that good old reefer, letting the sound of Louis Armstrong’s Black and Blue course through him, reveal him sonically, in the subterranean space he fills with pirated light. When I listen to Flying Lotus’s 2008 BBC Essentials Mix, lying back on a bamboo mat that has somehow made its way from Beijing to Tennessee to Davis, I find that, between the samples, there’s a way to reach out and touch a time that I can’t fully remember: 2008, my junior year of high school. I know that I applied to college that year; I listened to a little Flying Lotus, because one of my friends–a DJ at American University’s radio station–gave me access to the station’s illict dropbox account. From this third-party-hosted Flying Lotus mix, I can feel the reverberations of all the music that we used to pirate.
The set opens with an Alice Coltrane track, the sound of Flylo’s grandmother’s music slowly subsuming to a pulsing beat and a text-to-speech header with a cartoonishly bad British accent. The programmed text-to-speech voice pronounces “BBC” as “Bibby-see” and, skipping as it degenerates into repetition, offers the listener a little tea before pulling her into the next track. There’s something about the way that Flylo mixes a set which gives the user a taste of progression, with sound degenerating into noise which first recedes before bubbling over into the next track, forming an aural collage of samples including everything from the echoes of his grandmother to a splice from the cruel computer of WarGames. Easy listening fresh from a stimulus progression Muzak Track or a 1950’s advertisement for something totally unnecessary are juxtaposed with remixes of Thom Yorke and Bjork, samples so far out of context and with nebulous attribution that you either get the reference or you don’t, but either way, you get the meaning: it’s all bound up in a web of pattern and implication. Voices are stretched beyond recognition, distorted to the point where the ear strains to make out even a syllable; but it doesn’t matter, because being lost, washed smooth in the reverb and ebbing and flowing samples keeps the music flowing, showing a path to our present and making space for the future.
At around 19:00 into the Mix, Flyo makes the transition from one track to another smooth with a recitation that sounded, in content, so incredibly familiar to me–lines right out of the medieval medical manuscript that I’d been working on at the beginning of the pandemic. The tone, and the cadence, of the voice were not familiar to me; but a quick search for the lyrics revealed that they were from a performance of the poems of Omar Khayyam, a 11th-century polymath who would have been familiar to ancient physician who wrote the tome.
I oft when young did eagerly frequent doctor and saint, and heard great argument about all things…
Flying Lotus and also Omar Khayyam
The practice of hearing the arguments of the learned was still common in the 13th century; but it’s also what we do when we listen to Flylo’s set. The voice trails off into the mix, and before we know it we’re in the 21st century, drifting again into the amnion distortion of real, grimy k-hole of a classic Burial track. The listening experience is immediate; I forget I’m listening to something from 2008. I try to hold onto what remains in my memory, turning a wave-worn popsicle stick over and over in my hands. The one that I pulled form the sea in Boston had been in the ocean so long that the gnaw-marks were worn smooth, the bad joke seared into the wood barely legible. It’s not even sticky any more. I was obsessed with Burial in 2008, eschewing the loud drops of American dubstep for the softer, more achingly sad UK variety. But as a listener, I can’t linger here, in that moment;
Halfway into the two-hour set, the cadence changes abruptly and a sample peals through the beat.
Shall we play a game? Oh, I’d love to. Let’s play…Global…Thermonuclear…War
By integrating Daedaleus’s Hours Minutes Seconds, which samples heavily from Wargames, Flylo’s mix turns us back to 1983, reminds us that in order to get to here, we were once there; that the lighter and lovelier and the gentle and sad and the sample of Hindi song in which the human voice becomes so distorted that it’s indistinguishable from the sound of a warbling flute–all of this exists as music against that backdrop of, and part of, the two potentials for our technological future: authoritarian control and radical liberation.
Hours and minutes and minutes, and seconds! Hours, and hours, and minutes and seconds!
How much time can we hold onto from a lifetime, given the petabytes our wetware can supposedly store? Up to 200 hears of HD video–how much of that do we hold dear enough to render clearly? For cyborgs, this web of associations and symbols come together into collages that, in turn, become us. We are linked by endless in-jokes, references from weird corners of the internet, the moments of history learned and remembered and overhead and stumbled upon–collages comprise our social media feeds, our experience of our world and our histories and the webs of social relations that knit us into the people that we are. And yet we eschew what we don’t want, reject what doesn’t work, and surround ourselves with complicated beautiful things.
Is this a game, or is it real?
What’s the difference?
For the new cyborgs, cloaked and revealed and made real through our collage, it doesn’t matter; that fantasy of what we might be, what our dreams might become, and how we play them out is all one gorgeous chunk of conglomerate, like the tumorous pebble-studded red sandstone that you can fish out of the Long Island Sound at low tide. Ever-becoming, we make and are made by the infospheres we surf, the world we drift through; it’s our lived experience, and what’s real, what makes the matrix that binds it all together. We see the signal in the noise, and we use the internet to organize ourselves, to realize the struggle, and see the potential for a new kind of future.
Hold tight to your titties, cyborgs. There’s a new human-machine hybrid in the undertow.