THE LOST BOY

Leda Hayes

A Thesis

Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

December 2017

Committee:

Becca Cragin, Advisor

Jeremy Wallach

Esther Clinton

Jeffrey Brown

© 2017

Leda Hayes

All Rights Reserved iii ABSTRACT

Becca Cragin, Advisor

The following thesis seeks to contribute to contemporary masculinities scholarship by exploring the recent deployment, on and among 20th and 21st century MIC telecommunications, of the myth of the lost boy. It begins with a close look at the origin of the myth of the lost boy, a form first authored as a revision to modernity’s myth of the boy by New

Imperialists who sought to justify the long term occupation of colonial territories and protectorates and thus shifted, away from an earlier model of domestic masculinity that pressed forward towards an exhaustive known, rational, and developed; and towards a model of masculinity that was restricted to a Bakhtinian adventure time of serial story, homosocial partnership, and performances of primal boyhood. After a subsequent exploration of the medium and mandates of MIC synergy, that utilizes Marshall McLuhan’s science of medium, this thesis offers that a late 20th and early 21st century community among such Futurama discovers, within the lost boy 2.0 it embraces, a configuration of masculinity that can remasculinize Futurama’s dogma of networked node. While the myth of the lost boy is often popularly proposed to be problematic, detached, and disordered, my research suggests that the myth is instead a restorative configuration that discovers the model of network within Futurama to be inspired by an organic, empowered masculine affection: far from lost, the lost boy of 2017 is the heart of labor, kinship, narrative, and life. The myth of the lost boy 2.0 offers the 21st century a masculinity that naturalizes the radical and new of MIC telecommunications by discovering the form of network within a man.

iv

With Pat and never without Michaela and Kailey v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The completion of this thesis was made possible in the generous support, advice, and encouragement gifted to me by a full team of educators, staff members, coworkers, students, and friends (and the cooperation of one tiny sonny with an iPad). It would have certainly failed to have been born without Professor Esther Clinton and Professor Jeremy Wallach who patiently dialogued my lost boy ideas, introduced me to the exciting world of social theory, and helped an enthusiastic Adorno to attempt balance, pace, method, and clarity. Jeremy is responsible both for the question that generated the discovery of Hammer and the embrace in this thesis of Fry;

Esther is responsible for any legibility in this thesis. Any illegibility is due to my uncooperative nature.

Beka Patterson compassionately, and unwaveringly, guided me through this complex process.

Professor Jeff Brown reintroduced me to remasculinization, Professor Vikki Krane gave me permission in plenty of possibility and space, Professor Radhika Gajjala helped me discover myself to be the Gidget among lost boys, Professor Bill Albertini gave me Puar, Professor

Andrew Schocket heard Sutton-Smith and Michael Hammer first, Professor Cynthia Baron introduced me to Angela Ndalianis, and Professor Becca Cragin both assigned Gloria Anzaldua and asked how I knew the digital was moral (generating the moment Gabriella Coleman told me, whether she meant to, to look at the medium).

This thesis began, as an independent study at MHC, with Professor Robin Blaetz who let

Barbie Lohman write a paper about teen movies and masculinity. I could not be more grateful for the ways in which a young scholar was humored, encouraged, and challenged by Professor

Blaetz both in that research and in Films Studies courses. (Though it took quite a few years, and vi a son of my own, I finally know how boys grow up.) I’d like to additionally acknowledge that the foundation of this thesis depends on the investments of MHC Professors Amy E. Martin,

Peter Berek, Elizabeth Young, and Carolyn Collette. OCC Professor Louie B. Graham, my very first professor, gave me the world one summer in Terrance, Shakespeare, and the truth that “if you had bought the book, then it was about whatever you thought it was about—as long as you could explain it.”

Michaela Hansen read every draft, took every phone call, and helped me to arrive where it all could become something beyond my favorite thing to think about. This is her triumph and alchemy.

My extended unconventional family--Tessa, K’s brother Ethan, Steven, ACS 2013,

POPC 2014, Kerri, Jenn, Sharon, Diane, Stephanie, Paradise, Monica, Heather, EAP, TCC

WTC, Team Invista, Kristi, Tom Taylor, Annie and NIAC, Gussie, Richard, the hands that held my baby so that my arms could be free (AWS, Peggy, Sarah, MV), and countless lost boys who let me play too—were my partners, home, and together in the process of this journey.

When this thesis was impossibly hard to do, and when it was the most wonderful thing in the world, I have done it for, and with, Pat. We cross this finish line together.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

INTRODUCTION: FUTURAMA AND FRY, REMASCULINIZING THE TENETS OF

NETWORK…………...... 1

Futurama …………………………………………………………………………. .. 1

MIC as Futurama: the noun …………………………………………..……. 1

Futurama: the adjective …………………………………………………… . 2

Futurama: the series ……………………………………………………… .. 4

Fry ……………………………………………………………………………..…… 6

The Slacker………………………………………………………………… 7

The Lost Boy……………………………………………………………… .. 8

Futurama as Technologies: the networked node …………………………………… 11

The Medium is the Message ……………………………………………… . 12

An Outline: The Map to an Investigation of Futurama and Fry……………. 15

The Science of Medium: a note …………………………………………… 20

CHAPTER ONE: A DELIVERY BOY!…………………………………………………… 24

Masculine Myths ……………………………………………………………………. 24

The Boy, Lost……………………………………………………………….. 29

The Other, Lost …………………………………………………………….. 31

Remasculinization…………………………………………………………… 34

Lost Boy as Remasculinization …………………………………………….. 36

New New York……………………………………………………………………. . 38

Gotta Do ……………………………………………………………………. 42 vii

The Boy and the Bot…………………………………………………………. 44

The Lost Boy, Lost ………………………………………………………… 50

CHAPTER TWO: THE 21ST CENTURY…………………………………………..……. 53

Obliterating…………………………………………………………………………. 53

A Subject Without Work …………………………………………………… 55

The Solution for Stable Stochastic Flow……………………………………. 56

Packet Mechanics: Distributed Control, Demand Access, and Redundancy . 57

Packet Switching Network as Business Process…………………………… 59

The Central Database: Mandated Play …………………………………… .. 61

The Lost Boy 2.0…………………………………………………………………… 63

Telxon—21st Century Node ……………………………………………… .. 64

EMR—21st Century Network……………………………………………… 67

21st Century, Lost……………………………………………… ...... 69

Love Finds the Lost Boy …………………………………………………… 76

The Masculine Network…………………………………………………… . 81

CONCLUSION: TOGETHER…………………………….….………………………..…… 85

WORKS CITED……………………………………………………………………………… 90 1

INTRODUCTION: FUTURAMA AND FRY, REMASCULINIZING THE TENETS OF

NETWORK

Futurama

The following thesis looks closer at both Futurama and Fry to argue that the masculine

mechanics of a lost boy character like Philip J. Fry remasculinizes the pervasive postwar Military

Industrial Complex (MIC) tenets of networked node. This assertion first presents a broad and

impressive list of terminology to discretely define within a careful introduction. I begin with

Futurama.

MIC as Futurama: the noun

In the context of these pages the term Futurama is bound primarily to the MIC: a

synergistic complex of military and industry encouraged by 20th century legislation. Such a configuration of cooperative and interdependent nodes of power gained enthusiastic adoption after this style of task management facilitated the innovation and speed that birthed, by way of the nuclear bomb and bountiful wartime production, the global might of postwar American nation.1 The term MIC was first used by Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961; however, the style of synergetic partnership it denotes between government and industry stakeholders was an emerging practice in American politics during J. Edgar Hoover’s presidency, as a model that shifted away from Progressive Era proposals of natural monopoly and a dogma of skilled

1 Marcus, Alan I. and Amy Sue Bix. The Future is Now: Science and Technology Policy in America Since 1950. Humanity Books, 2007. (13, 16, 20). 2

management executed in the name of the common good of the majority, and is generally

proposed to have first appeared in significance in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.2

I look, in the following thesis, at the Futurama of 21st century telecommunications, communication that moves as a signal through space in an electromagnetic transmission, and infer, from the mechanics of node and network within such telecommunications, a corresponding ideal model of work and worker. While 21st century telecommunications, like the nomadic networked computing of mobile browsing, can appear to be a radical practice only just emerging, the technology, research, and network that realizes such communications was both initiated in early 20th century MIC associated legislation and business policy, and enthusiastically embraced and funded in postwar MIC legislation and business policy. The postwar MIC is notably responsible for authoring the contemporary telecommunications infrastructure of satellite technology, digital computing mechanics, and stochastic flow servicing network.3

Futurama: the adjective

The word Futurama comes to be associated with the MIC in a prewar usage as the title of

General Motor's 1939 World's Fair exhibit, designed by Norman Bel Geddes4, that presents a

model of imagined 1960 America in which the progress of science and industry rewrites the

crowded city that, before the 1920s, resisted and thwarted the advance of the car, and the

motorist, with Progressive Era legislation and regulation that prohibited speed, freedom, and the

2 Marcus, Alan I. and Amy Sue Bix. The Future is Now: Science and Technology Policy in America Since 1950. Humanity Books, 2007. (13-15). 3 Marcus, Alan I. and Amy Sue Bix. The Future is Now: Science and Technology Policy in America Since 1950. Humanity Books, 2007. (13-23, 32). Mead, Corey. War Play: Video Games and the Future of Armed Conflict. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013. 4 Geddes also designed the encasement for the Harvard Mark I, also known as the IBM Automatic Sequence Control Calculator, a synergistically funded supercomputer, realized jointly by the American government, Harvard, and IBM, which served the Manhattan Project in one of its initial calculations. Akera, Atsushi and Frederik Nebeker, eds. From 0 to 1: An Authoritative History of Modern Computing. Oxford, 2002. (18-22). 3

free hand of capitalism.5 The model of future the exhibit Futurama proposes, in its seven lanes of

parallel concrete, smooth mergers, and a maximum speed of 100 miles, argues that innovation

and endless expansion are stable enough to hold the speed and promise of a perpetual, “without

end” of yet-to-be-imagined within an engineered material nation of government-legislated,

industry-funded infrastructure.6, 7 As Peter D. Norton notes Futurama, the motor city world of tomorrow, both reflected and demanded a reunderstanding of the rights of the pedestrian, the place of industry in politics, the purpose of technology, and the nature of legislation.8 In the reunderstanding that birthed Futurama, the pedestrian, who before the mid 1920s was understood as entitled to make unhampered use of America's streets, lost access to the road except at marked and metered crossings, while private industry became an integral member of legislation and research as a source of funds, an expert opinion grounded in business management, and, most critically, as a representation of the customer interests it embodied.9 During Hoover's presidency

a politics of associationism authored the core of the American citizen consumer in order to

dismiss the Progressive Era expert that understood the American street as a public utility ideal

for efficient and scientific management.10 In this configuration government served the people by

5 Norton, Peter D. Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. The MIT Press, 2008. (7-8, 15-17, 255-262). 6 Norton, Peter D. Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. The MIT Press, 2008. (248-254). 7 “Futurama 1939 New York World's Fair "To New Horizons" 1940 General Motors 23min.” YouTube, uploaded by Jeff Quitney, 07 Aug. 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cRoaPLvQx0. Accessed 31 Oct. 2017. 8 Norton, Peter D. Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. The MIT Press, 2008. (7-8, 15-17, 255-262). 9 Norton, Peter D. Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. The MIT Press, 2008. (65-78, 175-206). 10 Norton, Peter D. Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. The MIT Press, 2008. (180,196). 4

way of their industry representation, their association, and in this adopted an understanding of

the rights and needs of its citizens as the demand of supply and demand economics.11

The term Futurama when used as a noun denotes 20th century synergistic infrastructure

and might only indicate, though not entirely neutrally, the MIC. When used as an adjective the

term Futurama more loudly carries with it the intense pressure of rapidly rising modern

infrastructure, the exchange of an earlier configuration of subjecthood for a consumer citizen,

and the often irrational experience of life within a supposedly rationalizing community. The

proposal to imagine, articulate, and comment on such an experience of life among Futurama is

the subject of the fictional American animated series Futurama.

Futurama: the series

Co-developed by Matt Groening and David X. Cohen, Futurama the series, hereafter

FTS,12 is a workplace drama set in a science fiction future of turn-of-the-31st century

Futurama.13 Appropriately the series has itself struggled to find stability in the new of the (turn- of-the-21st century) Futurama it suggests is potentially unstable, and the series exists quite novelly across four distinct chapters: a challenging first run on Fox from 1999 to 2003, that was aired irregularly and can be understood to have run for both four and five seasons; a more successful second life in syndication on the (then rising) cable channel Comedy Central; a season

11 Norton, Peter D. Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. The MIT Press, 2008. (193-202). Marcus, Alan I. and Amy Sue Bix. The Future is Now: Science and Technology Policy in America Since 1950. Humanity Books, 2007. (14). 12 I have chosen to differentiate between the uses of the term Futurama, that are bound to a particular characterization of American postwar MIC telecommunications, and the television series Futurama, that explores a fictional future among fantastical Futurama, in this thesis by adopting FTS to refer to the series. It is likely that the term Futurama remains in this scholarship, even with this distinction, at times playfully confusing. As the concept is intended to define such a state of between, I find this confusion useful. 13 Futurama. developed by Matt Groening and David X. Cohen. The Curiosity Company, 20th Century Fox Television, and Rough Draft Studios, 1999. 5 of four feature-length narratives that were crafted to function as both direct to DVD features, complete with extensive supplementary content, and as several linked episodic segments that could be aired on Comedy Central; and as a reborn series that ran conventionally on Comedy

Central from 2010 to 2013 for a total of four seasons.14,15 While the synergistic Futurama the authors of the so titled 1939 World’s Fair exhibit meant to playfully proclaim was, as Norton notes, a radical transformation of the familiar material city of traffic, infrastructure, and citizen, the climate of Futurama, either enduring or similar, that surrounds the 14 year span of FTS is itself a radical chapter of increasing immateriality that found a new pace for computing in a national fiber optic network that left behind analog transmission, shifted tangible memory storage into cloud based configurations, and realized nomadic networked computing in powerful wireless peripherals.16 Both the fickle and the boons of this Futurama account for, and have foundationally authored, the very existence of FTS. As noted in a Wired interview intended to promote the feature-based rebirth of the series in 2007, entitled “Futurama is Back! Grab a Can of Slum and Settle In,” “Cohen credits DVD sales as the force behind FTS's return. 'This new revenue stream saved our neck,' he says. 'It might be a very brief window when DVDs are so powerful. If the show had been on 10 years earlier, we'd be dead. A few years from now, when

14 Futurama. developed by Matt Groening and David X. Cohen. The Curiosity Company, 20th Century Fox Television, and Rough Draft Studios, 1999. 15 Though not considered in this thesis, a potential fifth chapter of the series appeared on September 14, 2017 as a two episode Nerdist podcast, both authored by original series writers and voiced by the original cast. The podcast episode(s) advertised a Futurama branded app and, not unconventionally for the series, fictional products in an episodic form that both conformed to the conventions of the series, applied historic radio drama conventions, and, in plot, offered commentary on the podcast as form, media, and experience. “Radiorama (Futurama Podcast).” YouTube, uploaded by Nerdist, 13 Sept. 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=778&v=BxF1zjlEU-A. Accessed 26 Oct. 2017. 16 Akera, Atsushi and Frederik Nebeker, eds. From 0 to 1: An Authoritative History of Modern Computing. Oxford, 2002. (122-131, 148-160). 6

Internet speeds are better, maybe one person buys it and shares it with a hundred of their friends.'”17

Fry

Groening and Cohen’s FTS begins, in the final moments of the 20th century, with the accidental cryogenic freezing of a ca.1999 New York pizza delivery boy who finds himself awakened a distant 1000 years in the future and must resultantly navigate the alien of a New

New York. Wired’s Chris Baker explains, again quoting Cohen, “Set in the year 3000,

Futurama's interstellar sci-fi future isn't a shiny utopia like The Jetsons or a dark dystopia like

Blade Runner. It's a time that seems wonderful or awful depending on how you look at it — just like the present. 'On The Jetsons, there's a machine that ties your tie for you,' Cohen says. 'On

Futurama, there'd be a machine that tied your tie, but it would malfunction and start strangling you.'”18 FTS’s Futurama is the language, hope, and infrastructure of world of tomorrow ca. 1939 but post several decades of the embrace of such Futurama. It’s not a dream of what might be but speech and stories from a people who can speak to what is actually realized in the mechanics that give life, over the subsequent decades of the 20th century, to the scale model dreams of 1939

Futurama. FTS is a narrative of the consequences of Futurama not reconstructed, as Norton revives in his archival research that discovers the negotiations of ideology and power made to realize the motor city, but authored both among, and with the tools of, late 20th and early 21st century Futurama. It is fiction that speaks to the MIC, in a speech medium--the telecommunications network--the MIC authors, from a space of 20th and 21st century subjecthood among MIC ideals, innovations, pleasures, and losses.

17 Baker, Chris. “Futurama is Back! Grab a Can of Slurm and Settle In.” Wired, 27 Nov. 2007, https://www.wired.com/2007/11/ff-futurama/. Accessed 17 Sept. 2017. (par. 33). 18 Baker, Chris. “Futurama is Back! Grab a Can of Slurm and Settle In.” Wired, 27 Nov. 2007, https://www.wired.com/2007/11/ff-futurama/. Accessed 17 Sept. 2017. (par. 3). 7

Groening and Cohen choose as the vessel for such speech a slacker caricature--a twenty- five-year-old pizza delivery boy named Philip J. Fry, a foolish, henpecked (by men, women, and children) loser--and declare over the course of the series that such a loser is at once both particularly useful and no great specimen of 20th century masculinity—an interesting between that the following thesis will endeavor to unpack. I propose that Fry’s utility in the future imagined by the series both betrays a long and fruitful partnership between modernity’s innovations and stereotypical supposedly arrested masculinity and proposes a resolution to late

20th and early 21st century Futurama--the “wonderful or awful…[of] the present”—FTS is both written in and within.19

The Slacker

I began exploring the research question that informs my thesis more than a decade ago as an undergraduate in a Film Studies course. At the time I sought to define and explain a particular caricature that often appeared in, then contemporary, teen genre works, the slacker. When taking the slacker’s measurements across the films I screened in my research, primarily mid 1990s to early 2000s titles that were available to a 2004 Netflix subscriber, I initially observed that the slacker’s state of arrest was contradictory. While slackers typically were sloppy bloomers in narratives that moved towards problematic closures in which they embraced a female lead, and often by extension their fathers, when each film began, slackers were almost always already in committed, mutually fulfilling relationships with a same sex life-partner-in-crime. In my initial scholarship I called this partnership ‘the lost couple’ and wondered why a female lead, who was as compatible with a slacker as his lost partner, was so impossible for a teen genre piece to imagine. I proposed that the moment in which contemporary films could satisfactorily close the

19 Baker, Chris. “Futurama is Back! Grab a Can of Slurm and Settle In.” Wired, 27 Nov. 2007, https://www.wired.com/2007/11/ff-futurama/. Accessed 17 Sept. 2017. (par. 3). 8 narrative of the slacker would be a moment in which we as a community had resolved the crisis of masculinity of the moment—a crisis Marian Salzman, Ira Matathia, and Ann O’Reilly outlined in their 2005 look at the future of masculinity, The Future of Men—as contemporary masculine ideals increasingly looked most in a man for a woman, men, as they might have been previously understood to be, were potentially obsolete.20

The Lost Boy

My look at the slacker was initially limited in scope, insights, and conclusions to an analysis of semantic and syntactic adaptations within the genre texts of a particular medium, but my work quickly became leaky as I found it more productive to consider the rich popular culture dialogue the slacker existed within, and among, including both the individuals and the subculture communities that served as inspiration for the form21 of the caricature and the moments in time, place, and space that might be understood to have inspired the key features of the caricature.

With my research objective now the much broader goal of attempting to capture, understand, and speak to the dialogue of the slacker my research subject gained a new, more useful, moniker: the lost boy.

The term lost boy is an expression popularly linked to J. M. Barrie’s 190422 play Peter

Pan or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, in reference to the island boys of the tale who exist without mothers and fathers and instead adventure, both performatively and liminally, in a fickle land of high-stakes conflict, yet such a boy of problematic time features beyond and before

Barrie in philosophies, fictions, and prescriptions throughout modernity and is similarly present in multiple texts, including John Locke’s “Some Thoughts Concerning Education,” Thomas

20 Salzman, Marian, Ira Matathia, and Ann O’Reilly. The Future of Men. Palgrave, 2005. (32). 21I am using the word form here as a term that refers to the structured nature of a work of art. Form includes all of the choices that together construct a piece of art. 22 The character Peter Pan appeared first in Barrie’s The Little White Bird, 1902. 9

Hughes’ moralizing sermon Tom Brown’s School Days, and Mark Twain’s Americana tales of westward expansion and sacred technology. Roland Barthes calls such a form a myth: a forgettable, flexible, historic structure that offers a community a scaffold of depoliticized assumptions upon which to place acts of speech.23 In unpacking a myth rather than a caricature my thesis considers most the dimensions and use of a particular piece of depoliticized speech for a community that embraces and deploys the myth in their speech acts and syntax. The lost boy has been previously explored similarly by C. J. Jung, a 20th century24 Swiss psychiatrist who fathered analytical psychology: a practice of psychology and psychoanalytics that aspired, in an incorporation of the practices, texts, and truths associated with the fields of literature, anthology, and religion, to author a more holistic configuration of Freud’s fundamental science of self.25

Jung understood the lost boy, the puer aeternus, to be an archetype: an ahistorical form that existed universally in all cultures, which labored within the subconscious to assist the

23 Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972. Print. (142). 24 Jung lived from 1875-1961, my citations are drawn from work he completed from 1930-1940, and Marie-Louis vonFranz's 1970 expansion of his puer aeternus archetype. I consider Jung’s voice to reflect a 20th century perspective but one without the ability to reflect significantly on postwar telecommunications and practices-- the postwar telecommunications scholarship on node and network I explore, Kleinrock’s PhD research, was completed in 1962, published in 1964, and realized in a four node network, ARPANET in 1969. 25 I cite C. J. Jung’s archetypes, collective unconscious, and individualization in this thesis not as an endorsement of prescription but as a 20th century primary source in which the myth of the lost boy is considered, embraced, and found productive. Most 20th century popular psychology texts that discover contemporary masculinity too playful, flighty, childish, homosocial, or incompatible with heteronormative monogamy/a patriarchal model of head of household/white collar career employment, including but not limited to Peter Pan Syndrome: Men Who Have Never Grown Up (Dan Kiley), Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child (John Bradshaw), and The Future of Men (Marian Salzman, Ira Matathia, and Ann O’Reilly) are built on a Jungian foundation and seek to resolve the tensions Jung notes by discovering the work/play balance that will give coordination to modern masculinity. Register, Woody. The Kid of Coney Island: Fred Thompson and the Rise of American Amusements. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Print. (307-312). Salzman, Marian, Ira Matathia and Ann O’Reilly. The Future of Men. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Print. 10 individual in the process of their individualization.26 The lost boy embodied the traditions of a community that would lead an individual to a stable configuration of new by illuminating a path forward that maintained a consistency with the path that stretched out behind him.27 My research into the lost boy has lead me to similarly conclude that a community engaged in the radical new of Futurama deploys and centers the lost boy archetype in its popular culture, in part, because it labors to negotiate the unfamiliar.28

Futurama as Technologies: the networked node

In his look backwards at early 20th century traffic technologies through a lens of historically bound culture, politics, and industry, Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, Peter D. Norton proposes that technology does not emerge but rather arrives through an active negotiation of needs, values, and truths among multiple stakeholders.29 20th century urban America becomes the motor city through a negotiation that builds Futurama from

26 Jung, C. G. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. translated by R. F. C. Hull, Princeton University Press, 1969 (1959). (158-167). 27 In “The Psychology of the Child Archetype” C. G. Jung notes that the lost boy is a singularity that joins binaries to both facilitate the future and recall a past unity: “The “child” paves the way for a future change of personality. In the individualization process, it anticipates that figure that comes from a synthesis of conscious and unconscious elements in the personality. It is therefore a symbol which unites the opposites; a mediator, bringer of healing, that is, one who makes whole.” Jung, C. G. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. translated by R. F. C. Hull, Princeton University Press, 1969 (1959). (167, 174). 28 I do not mean to suggest in this sentence the existence of a communal psyche laboring to individualize, but rather, without evaluating the science or logic within analytical psychology, offer that if it is markable that, as Jung’s scholarship is able to illustrate, communities tend to deploy a lost boy figure in texts that consider transition, technology, and change, it is reasonable to assume that the slacker caricature or the broader myth of the lost boy are used in late 20th and early 21st century texts of a community among Futurama in this manner. Certainly it is possible that, in a western community where Jung and his theory of individualization are well known, the slacker caricature or the myth of the lost boy appear in texts because such a community is under the impression that such markers should be present among Futurama. To avoid debating intentionality in this thesis I speak specifically of a lost boy, Fry, who is clearly both authored by Groening and Cohen and intentionally placed within FTS. 29 Norton, Peter D. Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. The MIT Press, 2008. (255-262). 11 a polyphonic dialogue of ideologies, logistics, and economics. Similarly the technologies of the late 20th and early 21st century, the Futurama the co-creators of FTS consider and are authored within, have also emerged from a negotiation among stakeholders and figure collectively a speech act of ideology that registers the dialogue of power that has facilitated their birth. A

Futurama of MIC networked telecommunications erects a radical new configuration of work, worker, self, and community in the reconstruction of the mechanics of power and privilege required to propose and realize foundational theories of network and node. I acquire both the dimensions of this radical new as a proposal, and gain a methodology for reading this Futurama, in the scholarship of Marshall McLuhan.

The Medium is the Message

Marshall McLuhan, 1911-1980, was a mid 20th century scholar who considered the form and history of communication and ultimately produced scholarship that compared and contrasted the natures and mechanics of mediums of communication-- among them literature, print advertisement, radio, and television--with particular attention to the shift he noted in the mode of western communication from Mechanization to Automation.30 McLuhan observed that technologies of communication are inherently ideologies that hold within them the needs, values, and constraints of the communities that work together, though not entirely in coordination, to realize them.31 McLuhan argued that the technology of print, the technology of Mechanization, was born from and within a community of specialization that ventured globally from villages and

30 These are McLuhan’s terms. I capitalize and italicize them in this thesis to differentiate between their meaning in McLuhan’s deployment and any use of the terms in the rest of the thesis. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. edited by Terrence Gordon. Gingko Press, 2003. (19, 461) 31 McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. edited by Terrence Gordon. Gingko Press, 2003. (19-35). 12 required a division of labor.32 The medium of this community, the novel, thus encouraged and reinforced a mindset of specialization in its mechanics and placed a reader within the atomized singular mind of an individual author.33 In contrast, the cathode tubes and satellite feed of postwar MIC telecommunications were born from, and within, a community of global network, unity, and collective singularity.34 The mediums of this community, the mediums of Automation, radio and television, blanketed the globe in a network of signal and encouraged the electromagnetic extension of man.35 McLuhan named this network the global village and proposed that the global citizen within it was encouraged to perceive the world in sculptural and tactile dimensions, take up entrepreneurship, and perform variable individuality.36 For McLuhan the mediums of the global village reflected the end of an age of national exploration, expansion, and conquest, which demanded a centralized core of power and a standardized mode of communication, mind, and citizenship, and the dawn of an age of unified global mind that spoke at once in unison and singularity, discovered the stability of worldwide scale within a synergistic mode of government, and erected a nationalism of association.37 The global village replaced not only an ideology and media of nation but the rote of assembly line labor, erecting a new model

32 McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. edited by Terrence Gordon. Gingko Press, 2003. (233-242). 33 McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. edited by Terrence Gordon. Gingko Press, 2003. (233-242). 34 McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. edited by Terrence Gordon. Gingko Press, 2003. (440-445). 35 McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. edited by Terrence Gordon. Gingko Press, 2003. (5-8). 36 McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. edited by Terrence Gordon. Gingko Press, 2003. (226, 459-473). 37 McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. edited by Terrence Gordon. Gingko Press, 2003. (5-8). 13 of work and worker that tasked the disseminated nervous system of a global citizen to a lifelong labor of perceptual information gathering.38

McLuhan arrived at his observation, that a shift in 20th century medium was a reflection of a shift in ideology, by deploying an unconventional understanding of technology and text that is encapsulated in his most notorious phrase--“the medium is the message”--a sentiment that ultimately argues the message, the meaning within an act of speech, is authored by the vessel, the communications network it is authored within and articulated by, its medium.39 This assumption of medium offered McLuhan a structure that, in macro, allowed modes of communication, technologies and mediums, to be compared and contrasted and, in micro, encouraged technologies to be read as materially grounded mechanics--physical manifestations of cathode tubes, wires, and satellite dishes--animated in their operations by ideologies and theoretical proposals. Though McLuhan’s prose was, quite notably, hardly scientific, McLuhan’s approach to communication and technology might be called a science40 of medium.

Assuming McLuhan’s theorized Automation and Mechanization exist, a fruitful correlation might be made between his theories of communication and scholarship that considers the ideologies of subjecthood, speech, and power within 20th century culture and technologies.

38 McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. edited by Terrence Gordon. Gingko Press, 2003. (459-473). McLuhan, Marshall and Quentin Fiore. The Medium is the Message. Bantam Books, 1967. (63). 39McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. edited by Terrence Gordon. Gingko Press, 2003. (13, 19). 40 I appreciated that my use of science here is problematic and attempt to clarify it later in my introduction. While McLuhan’s scholarship lacked the method of hard science scholarship and failed to really demonstrate a functional literacy in the science behind the telecommunications technologies he considered, his scholarship fairly consistently aims to explore the mechanics of materiality grounded technologies of communication and I assume that to embrace his conclusions or take up his method is to read the material and theoretical mechanics of technologies of communication. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. edited by Terrence Gordon. Gingko Press, 2003. 14

To scholars who seek to measure, explore, and understand Futurama, McLuhan offers a theory that proposes the radical within Futurama to be both the result of, and markable within, the adoption of 20th century telecommunications as a technology of communication. While

McLuhan himself might not have made the correlation between Automation and Futurama exactly as I have suggested, and unfortunately lacked the privilege of seeing the MIC telecommunications mediums and messages he read develop and transform into the telecommunications web of the 21st century, if it might be suggested that McLuhan’s theorized

Automation is a proposal that describes Futurama, McLuhan’s science of medium could be understood to offer an approach that would allow a scholar to access and investigate the ambiguous “wonderful or awful” of contemporary Futurama.41 In the following thesis,

McLuhan’s science of medium allows me to speak specifically to the Futurama of the 21st century that the myth of the lost boy might be thought to be deployed in an effort to embrace. In order to ground this proposal, and avoid appearing to present a singular reading of either the myth of the lost boy or Futurama, I’ve chosen to explore the dialogue generated by a single lost boy character that is advantageously centered within a text that is clearly defined as intended to speak to the “wonderful or awful” of 20th, 21st, 30th, and 31st century Futurama.42

An Outline: The Map to an Investigation of Futurama and Fry

I return now to the proposal I offered at the start of this introduction that a closer look at

Futurama and Fry would reveal that the masculine mechanics of a lost boy character like Philip

J. Fry remasculinizes the pervasive postwar Military Industrial Complex (MIC) tenets of networked node. With some of my terminology now defined, I can clarify both my proposal and

41 Baker, Chris. “Futurama is Back! Grab a Can of Slurm and Settle In.” Wired, 27 Nov. 2007, https://www.wired.com/2007/11/ff-futurama/. Accessed 17 Sept. 2017. (par. 3). 42 Baker, Chris. “Futurama is Back! Grab a Can of Slurm and Settle In.” Wired, 27 Nov. 2007, https://www.wired.com/2007/11/ff-futurama/. Accessed 17 Sept. 2017. (par. 3). 15 the process of investigation that the chapters of this thesis will build. Futurama is a term that might appear as noun, proper noun, or adjective and in popular usage connotes a synergistic future--that might be foretold of, actively unfolding, or already arrived--both “wonderful or awful.”43 The neologism, Futurama, was initially built within a community that labored to embrace the automobile and in the negotiation lost individual rights of mobility it had not previously questioned, considered the utility of a philosophy of natural monopoly and public utility, and embraced the capital, expertise, and cooperation of industry in ways that obligated both legislation and the individual to a performance of association.44 The foundation this

Futurama laid was further embraced in American wartime and postwar legislation that funded a national, and limited international, telecommunications network.45 In recent decades this

Futurama of telecommunications network has become increasingly immaterial and proposes a new model of work and worker translated from the telecommunications ideology of networked node.46 McLuhan associated the rise, in the 20th century, of synergistic telecommunications media with alternate models of person, the extended and individualized global citizen, and new models of work, leisure, and lifestyle, governed by a commandment of information harvest.47

My interest in Futurama began with scholarship that considered the 21st century slacker caricature and has transitioned over the course of my investigation to a desire to understand the deployment of the myth of the lost boy by those among early 21st century Futurama. I adopt this

43 Baker, Chris. “Futurama is Back! Grab a Can of Slurm and Settle In.” Wired, 27 Nov. 2007, https://www.wired.com/2007/11/ff-futurama/. Accessed 17 Sept. 2017. (par. 3). 44 Norton, Peter D. Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. The MIT Press, 2008. 45 Marcus, Alan I. and Amy Sue Bix. The Future is Now: Science and Technology Policy in America Since 1950. Humanity Books, 2007. (34-39). 46 Akera, Atsushi and Frederik Nebeker, eds. From 0 to 1: An Authoritative History of Modern Computing. Oxford, 2002. (41-50). 47 McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. edited by Terrence Gordon. Gingko Press, 2003. (459-473). 16 point of entry to begin my first chapter, “A Delivery Boy!,” and trace within it the genealogy of the myth of the lost boy. The lost boy is a myth born first as the myth of the boy--a myth generated in the embrace and adoption of McLuhan’s Mechanization. The myth of the boy naturalized the ideology of linear time and development that global trade and travel adopted and demanded--in the markable human development of a male child the pace of modernity’s panoptical time could be understood as inspired rather than arbitrary--but such a narrative was unstable in the accessibility of development and the rapid of a speedy time that raced ever forward towards a frightening point of terminal.48, 49 New Imperialists revised the myth of the boy, in the mid 19th century, discovering that the narrative of the boy could be made liminal in a between of expanded in statu pupillari that both demanded the boy receive constant care and vigilance and, in exchange, gifted those among him the distraction of endless serial adventures.50

The myth of the lost boy is, in this reading, what Susan Jeffords has called a remasculinization--a mechanism that refuses the potential for radical redefinition within the openness of a moment of conflict with a reaffirmation of the status quo of binary gender and patriarchal privilege.51 In

FTS, Philip J. Fry, as an instance of lost boy myth and thus a remasculinizing mechanism, introduces in his own delivery, by way of cryogenics, to the Futurama of the year 3000, a

48 Lesko, Nancy. Act Your Age! A Cultural Construction of Adolescence. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2012. (94-105). 49 Deane, Bradley. Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870-1914. Cambridge University Press, 2014. (17-18). Lesko, Nancy. Act Your Age! A Cultural Construction of Adolescence. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2012. (105-115). McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. edited by Terrence Gordon. Gingko Press, 2003. (5-8). 50 Macleod, David I. Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870-1920. The University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. (15-28). Deane, Bradley. Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870-1914. Cambridge University Press, 2014. (115-120). 51 Jeffords, Susan. The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War. Indiana University Press, 1989. (182-186). 17 moment of Homi Bhabha's disjunctive that introduces both a New Imperialist myth of gendered labor to the future, facilitating a binary dogma of gender that liberates New New Yorkers, as it did the New Imperialists who imagined the lost boy, from a rational future, and a series/serial narrative form of adventure time and liminality that allows the narrative of daily life in a New

New Yorker among Futurama with Fry to be the inconsequential of pulp novel tales and scripted television.52 The myth of the lost boy can disarm Futurama in the tenets within the myth that disarmed the mid 19th century as a moment of late imperialism.

In my second chapter, “The 21st Century,” I use McLuhan’s science of medium to take a closer look at the medium of late 20th and early 21st century Futurama and open with a detailed reading of Michael Hammer’s Business Process Reengineering--BPR. Proposed in 1990,

Hammer’s BPR translated the ideology of networked node within the mechanics of MIC telecommunications into business theory and reengineered work during the decade of FTS and

Fry’s genesis53 with an ideology that terminated skilled work, mandated the central database, and enrobed the globe as a single system of, ideally, cooperative and synergistic economic exchange.54 Philip J. Fry is more often called Fry--a moniker that empathizes his foundational identity as BPR’s ideal worker, the Customer Service Representative.55 A fry is, not only

52 Lesko, Nancy. Act Your Age! A Cultural Construction of Adolescence. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2012. (136-137). 53 Baker, Chris. “Futurama is Back! Grab a Can of Slurm and Settle In.” Wired, 27 Nov. 2007, https://www.wired.com/2007/11/ff-futurama/. Accessed 17 Sept. 2017. 54 Hammer, Michael. “Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate.” Harvard Business Review, July-Aug 1990 issue. Harvard Business Publishing, https://hbr.org/1990/07/reengineering-work-dont-automate-obliterate. Accessed 08 Dec. 2015. (par. 57). 55 “Space Pilot 3000.” Futurama. written by David X. Cohen and Matt Groening, directed by Rich Moore and Gregg Vanzo, 20th Television, 1999. Hammer, Michael. “Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate.” Harvard Business Review, July-Aug 1990 issue. Harvard Business Publishing, https://hbr.org/1990/07/reengineering-work-dont-automate-obliterate. Accessed 08 Dec. 2015. (par. 18, 36). 18 generally understood to be produced within the post-industrial food service industry, but one of a bound many french fries: capable of singularity but never able to be fully estranged from the collective that gives its form meaning. Such a fry is a part that, like a node within the mechanics of MIC telecommunications and Hammer’s BPR, is because it is networked. It is this condition of networked node, a condition that is the inherent ideology that erects, shapes, and demarcates

MIC telecommunication technologies, the mechanics of synergistic postwar Futurama, and

McLuhan’s Automation, that FTS considers and that the character of Fry neutralizes.

Groening and Cohen produce, in Philip J. Fry, a remasculinization that overcomes the new of 21st century work and worker by discovering within the myth of the lost boy the secret, the very form, of Automation’s network.56 This lost boy 2.0 reunderstands, or rather reengineers, masculinity leaving behind the privileged subjecthood in the form of the myth of the boy, and the myth of the lost boy 1.0, and instead embracing a masculinity of network: discovering that the network, and the networked node, are fundamentally beholden to connection, it is offered that no one connects, loves, like a man. Conveniently the homosocial bonds of kinship that facilitate the adventure time family of the lost boy 1.0 can be combined with a heteronormative, reproductive, model of masculinity to generate a masculinity of dual partnership-- a duality that can be proposed to be unlike, and superior to, the bonds, historically associated with the other-- hierarchical relationships of birth or communities of choice.57 The lost boy 2.0, Fry, declares that the network, 21st century labor, is masculine and thus that the workplace of the world of tomorrow demands, needs as its heart, the lost boy.

56 McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. edited by Terrence Gordon. Gingko Press, 2003. (19). 57 Dennis, Jeffery P. We Boys Together: Teenagers in Love Before Girl-Craziness. Vanderbilt University Press, 2007. (3, 8-15). 19

Barthes’s suggests in Mythologies that the myth is a speech act, silent in its familiarity, that makes the ideology of a culture invisible.58 The myth of the boy naturalized the arbitrary of panoptical time and linear development for the 17th century of Mechanization.59 The myth of the lost boy naturalized an understanding of masculinity, time, and labor built from the estrangement of the raced and gendered other while gifting a late imperial community the comfort of adventure time’s liminality.60 And the myth of the lost boy 2.0 naturalizes the slack of the 21st century demanded in a synergistic mode of nation, production, and self that manufactures a surplus of time itself.61

The Science of Medium: a note

McLuhan was not a scientist and had, or at least displayed in his scholarship, limited functional knowledge of the mechanics of MIC telecommunications technologies he boldly summarized.62 His conclusions can thus potentially appear poorly composed from both a liberal arts reading, that often understands McLuhan to be observing patterns within the form of an act of speech and finds the excitable narration and sweeping generalizations in his scholarship at best a practice of pop analysis, or when viewed through a more mechanically literate lens, that supposes McLuhan to be claiming that the mechanics within a technology of communication are the primary author of speech acts that occur within such technologies but quickly discovers

McLuhan illiterate in the actual micro mechanics of satellite telecommunications. I do not

58 Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. translated by Annette Lavers, Hill and Wang, 1972. (129, 143). 59 Lesko, Nancy. Act Your Age! A Cultural Construction of Adolescence. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2012. (94-105). 60 Lesko, Nancy. Act Your Age! A Cultural Construction of Adolescence. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2012. (94-97). Deane, Bradley. Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870-1914. Cambridge University Press, 2014. (4-16). 61 Chiarella, Tom. “The Lost Boys.” Esquire, Feb., vol. 141, no. 2, 2004. 84-91, 128-130. (91). 62 Marchand, Philip. Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger. Ticknor and Fields,1989. (xiii, 16). 20 endeavor in this thesis to exonerate McLuhan’s observations, but instead apply both his theories of communication and medium and his method of science of medium to my research into the culture of 20th and 21st century Futurama. I offer to those who might object to my selection of theory and method that McLuhan supplemented his teaching income from the University of

Toronto as a telecommunications expert and was embraced enthusiastically by those engaged in

American postwar advertising, communications, and business management.63 His theories fit well both among the New Age ideas, then popular, on the college campuses that postwar MIC research was conducted upon, and the fields of industry and entertainment that realized, harvested, and disseminated postwar research to the citizen consumer.64 Whether McLuhan’s insights were a decoding of the MIC as a medium or whether McLuhan’s writings ultimately shaped the nature and mechanics of the MIC as a medium is a research question beyond the scope of my thesis; however, the ideology McLuhan discovered, and potentially encouraged, within a mid-to-late 20th century community that adopted the Futurama of MIC telecommunications is, if not within the code of the network65, present within the culture of the network user during McLuhan’s career.

My reader might note that the second chapter of this thesis takes up a close reading of both the material mechanics and the ideologies of Michael Hammer’s Business Process

Reengineering (BPR) and several terms gleaned from Leonard Kleinrock’s network theory

63 Marchand, Philip. Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger. Ticknor and Fields,1989. (137-193). 64 Marcus, Alan I. and Amy Sue Bix. The Future is Now: Science and Technology Policy in America Since 1950. Humanity Books, 2007. (34-39). Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, The Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. The University of Chicago Press, 2006. (4-5). 65 While McLuhan did not himself successfully prove this truth, the look at packet network mechanics in the second chapter of this thesis suggests that the challenge both might be fruitfully taken up and is as likely as it is not to confirm his hypothesis. 21 scholarship. While McLuhan himself did not attempt to ground his readings of MIC telecommunications technologies in their actual mechanics, the science, engineering, and theory of cathode tubes, satellites, and electromagnetic web, it is my assumption that this missing labor both can be performed by a liberal arts scholar and, in truth, should be performed by a liberal arts scholar who seeks to consider and speak to subcultures, stories, and power among Futurama.

This thesis is not an exhaustive presentation of such a science of medium, but an initial proposal that offers the method to be a useful tool that might illuminate new dimensions in texts written on and within the language of Futurama.

When I began my journey with the myth of the lost boy I was a young scholar who was inspired by a pattern I noted in contemporary media texts. Over the years since, I have enjoyed watching this pattern shift in adaptation and intended, when I arrived at BGSU as a masters student, to compose scholarship that outlined such adaptations; however, the interdepartmental climate of my courses shifted my own scholarship radically when I joined to my theory and methods toolbox--previously quite dominated by Barthes’ Mythologies--the mass of theories and methods deployed in cultural and critical studies. My slacker-turned-myth of the lost boy became a polyphonic of Jung’s puer aeternus, Lord Baden-Powell’s hardy brick of empire, Nancy

Lesko’s adolescent trapped in Bakhtinian adventure time, and, most critically, Michael

Hammer’s Customer Service Representative and Leonard Kleinrock's networked node. The slacker caricature I found remarkable appeared in the media of my adolescence potentially for many reasons, but when read as a form that negotiates the networked power of Futurama, such a figure speaks in his very form to the truths of the bind between the “wonderful or awful” of MIC telecommunications network: a future so, as the film that chronicled the 1939 World's’ Fair

Futurama exhibit closes, “without end,” that the message that is FTS is flippantly and, seemingly, 22

forever propelled between and beyond MIC telecommunications mediums.66 For me, the journey

of seeking to read the myth of the lost boy closes in this chapter of my investigation with the

discovery that the medium of Futurama begs to be read.

The scholarship in the following pages illustrates the shift in my own scholarship from a

devotee of postmodernism and leaky texts who imagined communities within popular art to a

scholar who aims to conjure such translations of popular communities and popular art

polyphonically across multiple axes in a manner that better allows for variability, includes the

voices of those I propose to read, and reads the speech within texts deeply in order to appreciate

the layers of ideology within meaning, technology, and myth. I hope ultimately the following

thesis might speak, with nuance, a suggestion that perhaps the explanation one seeks is, as

Hansel says, “in the computer.”67 After all, the medium is the message.68

66 Baker, Chris. “Futurama is Back! Grab a Can of Slurm and Settle In.” Wired, 27 Nov. 2007, https://www.wired.com/2007/11/ff-futurama/. Accessed 17 Sept. 2017. (par. 3). “Futurama 1939 New York World's Fair "To New Horizons" 1940 General Motors 23min.” YouTube, uploaded by Jeff Quitney, 07 Aug. 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cRoaPLvQx0. Accessed 31 Oct. 2017. 67 Zoolander, directed by Ben Stiller, Paramount Pictures, 2001. 68 McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. edited by Terrence Gordon. Gingko Press, 2003. (13, 19). 23

CHAPTER ONE: A DELIVERY BOY!

Masculine Myths

For Roland Barthes the exercise of decoding a myth uncovers a mechanism that, for a

community within a particular place, time, and space, facilitates meaning.69 Myths are emptied,

but not empty, structures that both can accept conversational acts of speech, and when they do

so, create the stability of the assumed that allows for the play of novel and emerging ideas,

meanings, and terms, and are themselves speech acts built from context, precedent, and habitual

application.70 Communities generate, embrace, and discard myths--“there is no fixity in

mythological concepts: they can come into being, alter, disintegrate, disappear completely”—as

suits the needs, values, and mechanics of a moment.71 Myths are at once foundational, familiar,

and entirely forgettable: the habitualizations that generate a context of here and now, or there and

then, in a silent speech that is empty of the dimensions, weight, and demand of a force.72

Calling the lost boy a myth, as I do in this thesis, claims that it is a tool, embraced by a community in a particular moment, with markers within its form that note the moment and nature of its embrace.73 It assumes that the lost boy can, and has, changed as the community that

authors, animates, and preserves it changes. And it assumes that this dialogue generates a myth

that contains within it the negotiation a community makes as it labors to find meaning, adapt to

change, and preserve traditions.74 The myth of the lost boy is at once ephemeral and bound,

placed and timeless, definable and impossible to capture.

69 Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. translated by Annette Lavers, Hill and Wang, 1972. (109). 70 Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. translated by Annette Lavers, Hill and Wang, 1972. (117-118). 71 Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. translated by Annette Lavers, Hill and Wang, 1972. (120). 72 Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. translated by Annette Lavers, Hill and Wang, 1972. (143). 73 Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. translated by Annette Lavers, Hill and Wang, 1972. (117-121, 129, 142-145). 74 Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. translated by Annette Lavers, Hill and Wang, 1972. (142-145). 24

As a contemporary popular utterance ‘the lost boy’ can be assumed to quickly conjure an

image for my reader in 2017, that would be generally understood, by a consensus, to reflect an

accurate translation of the ideology, history, and meaning bound to the term; however, in

declaring the lost boy to be a myth I propose that the lost boy is only superficially read as a sign

in this quick consensus and offer that the term has more, deeper, layers of meaning, speech, and

signification.75 This proposal is most challenged by the disadvantage of laboring to decode a

loaded term that resists, in its usefulness, familiarity, and popularity, a reintroduction. My

contemporary western reader will not arrive at my scholarship without an assumption, potentially

several complex assumptions, of the lost boy. In research that unpacks the emergent, novel, or

radical a scholar has the benefit of building an introduction for their reader; however, in research

that explores the habitualized, familiar, and popular—Barthes’s mythic—a scholar begins among

a conversation already in progress and with a topic, idea, or terminology already, potentially, so well-known that their great challenge is convincing a reader that there is cause to read such a text—that something new can be discovered.

The following chapter initiates a thesis length, confined and incomplete, labor of considering the lost boy through a close reading of a single iteration—the animated delivery boy

Philip J. Fry. It begins with a beginning, modernity’s boy and New Imperialism’s lost boy, that is generally present in most scholarly research that considers the lost boy--whether it investigates an imagined lost boy character in the work of late 19th century boys workers, social scientists

75 While I present a consensus level reading of the term lost boy later in this section-- the loser boy-man on the basement couch, deep in a Mountain Dew and hard at work at a videogame, who is a lazy, arrested, Digital Age specimen of masculine failure—for clarity I’ll offer that I expect my average reader to associate the term lost boy with a popular reading of the character Peter Pan—childish, out of time, and proud. In Jungian Maria vonFranz’s scholarship the lost boy is associated diagnostically with a lack of commitment to self, heteronormativity, and community. von Franz, Marie Louise. The Problem of the Puer Aeternus. Spring Publications, 1970. (1-5). 25 who specialized in creating prescriptions for the care and education of suburban middle class boys; the lost boy lifestyle animated by Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts who authored a personal persona of playful eternal boy-man in short pants from a boy school childhood, a military career of foreign administrative service, and science of scouting; or the features of a narrative made by lost boy tales.76 I next offer that the transition between the boy and the lost boy is a mechanism that resembles Susan Jeffords’s remasculinization: the myth of the lost boy restores masculinity among the everyday of New Imperialism, and does so primarily because gender can figure a consistent traditional that familiarizes the new, novel, and radical of change.77

In FTS the lost boy Fry familiarizes the new, the Futurama, of New New York; Fry’s archaic configuration of gender, the myth of the lost boy within Fry, generates a disjunctive that creates an indeterminism of potential.78 The New New Yorkers of the 30th and 31st century have their own culture, myths, and habitualizations, their own everyday, and the delivery of Fry, a myth of yesterday, enriches, problematizes, and questions this everyday--Fry is a foreign unexpected who delivers with his arrival an unfamiliar context. In a close reading of Fry’s impact it is visible that, as a lost boy, Fry’s most significant contribution to New New York is the

76 Macleod, David I. Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870-1920. The University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. Lesko, Nancy. Act Your Age! A Cultural Construction of Adolescence. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2012. Rosenthal, Michael. The Character Factory: Baden-Powell and the Origins of the Boy Scout Movement. Pantheon Books, 1986. Deane, Bradley. Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870-1914. Cambridge University Press, 2014. Dennis, Jeffery P. We Boys Together: Teenagers in Love Before Girl-Craziness. Vanderbilt University Press, 2007. 77 Jeffords, Susan. The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War. Indiana University Press, 1989. (183-184). 78 Lesko, Nancy. Act Your Age! A Cultural Construction of Adolescence. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2012. (136). “Space Pilot 3000.” Futurama. written by David X. Cohen and Matt Groening, directed by Rich Moore and Gregg Vanzo, 20th Television, 1999. 26 script and specifications New Imperialists placed within the myth of the lost boy in order to remasculinize the everyday of their late 19th century community. Fry gifts New New Yorker

Bender a masculinity of homosocial kinship and adventure time that allows the robot to escape the urgent, radical, and expectant time of late imperialism’s atomization of urban city and industrial assembly line, McLuhan’s Mechanization, and alternately acquire family, freewill, and meaningful labor.79

As a scholar I explore the mechanics of gender, personhood, and power that author the dominate within mythologies—in modern, western habitualizations, myths, and ideologies this research objective is essentially the task of reading the dimensions, shape, and nature of stories, assumptions, and truths about masculinities. I arrived at this task primarily in the mechanics of my education—I began my undergraduate education at a community college in night classes among soldiers, some of whom were also pizza delivery boys, and completed my undergraduate studies at a Women’s College—that suggested to me the utility of the application of gender studies theories and methods to the questions, texts, and myths of masculinity. I assume in my research that dominant masculinities are best articulated in, and most easily harvested by a scholar from, the popular and that the mechanics of everyday western contemporary life expresses dominant, masculine, ideology. I labor most in this thesis to discover the utility of these assumptions: Can Fry, a pop culture character, and Futurama, a dispersed hegemonic of telecommunications infrastructure, synergistic MIC, and postwar legislation, offer insights into the mechanics of masculinity as a placed, peopled, and contextualized dialogue of meaning? Is a science of medium a useful method for masculinities research? Thus, while I expect that a deeper look at the mechanics of the myth of the lost boy might seem to many potential readers an

79 Lesko, Nancy. Act Your Age! A Cultural Construction of Adolescence. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2012. (105-106). 27 unnecessary investigation certain to discover the loser boy-man on the basement couch, deep in a

Mountain Dew and hard at work at a videogame, is a lazy, arrested, Digital Age specimen of masculine failure, I initiate such a deeper look with the assumption, like Barthes, that reading the mythic reveals a community’s scaffold level truths: the assumptions at the heart of a people, a way of life, and a particular time, place, and space. As it is these truths that generate the story of western masculinity—a story that holds within it the shape of the familiar embraced as the vehicle for everyday acts of speech, forgotten as a routine habitualization, and centered as a mandate of tradition—I explore the myth of the lost boy in order to understand the service a story of loser gifts the community that imagines, curates, and preserves it. To appreciate the service of the story of men, whether losers, athletes, soldiers, or fathers, is to gain an understanding of masculinities not as a unified patriarchy, subjecthood, privileged voice, dominant form, or hegemonic ideology but as a polyphonic narrative built from the contributions, negotiations, and losses of a living community, culture, and people.

The Boy, Lost

The myth of the boy was born within the western empirical approach of the mid 17th century that understood the mechanics of life as a knowable, paced, linear process of development that could be predicted, shaped, and excited.80 Conveniently, such a reality was discovered in the growth, both physical and intellectual, of the sons of the middle class, and made sacred in an in statu pupillari, or pupil under guardianship,81 documented in the works of

80 Calvert, Karin. Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600-1900. Northeastern University Press, 1992. (56-61). Lesko, Nancy. Act Your Age! A Cultural Construction of Adolescence. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2012. (5-6). Mandell, Richard D. Sport A Cultural History. Columbia, 1984. (146). 81 Deane, Bradley. Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870-1914. Cambridge University Press, 2014. (116). 28

Locke and Rousseau.82 In acts of worship, configurations of education, dress, and home were erected to mark an increase in responsibility and skill that terminated in a fully internalized gendered administrator, who carefully named the world around him, and loving saw to tasks of production and the care of those under his familial jurisdiction.83 However, the accessibility of manhood in this model of domestic masculinity was found problematic for those in a late 19th century that sought to continue to occupy colonial territories by withholding any eventual self- government from native populations, and thus in this moment a small adjustment was made to both the model of human development grounded in becoming boys and administrator men, and the mythic narrative that generated such forms: the addition of a qualifier of lost.84

While the model of domestic masculinity presented the capacity for government as grown in a process of self-government that through education rationalized, and thus internalized, less rational responses, practices, and traditions85, the dogma of lost proposed by late 19th century

New Imperialists mythologized a revised narrative that discovered the ideal path not a refining

82 Mandell, Richard D. Sport A Cultural History. Columbia, 1984. (154-159). 83 Rousseau’s writing on children, education, and development and, though several years after its initial release, Locke’s similar work was embraced in early America by a growing middle class comprised of both merchants, venture capitalists, and tradesmen and an emerging bureaucratic workforce that, while employed in tasks of management, analysis, and social sciences, developed both the field of statistics and professional certifications. The culture of American childhood was strongly impacted both ideologically and as a practice by the interests, occupations, and convictions of this middle class. Calvert notes that the containment and display, the dress (the confinement or freedom of limbs), and even the place within the home (dedicated beds, bedrooms, and nurseries) occupied by a child radically altered as a myth of childhood was erected. Calvert, Karin. Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600- 1900. Northeastern University Press, 1992. (56-72). Macleod, David I. Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870-1920. The University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. (117-124). Deane, Bradley. Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870-1914. Cambridge University Press, 2014. (4-5). 84 Deane, Bradley. Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870-1914. Cambridge University Press, 2014. (6-18). 85 Deane, Bradley. Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870-1914. Cambridge University Press, 2014. (4-5). 29 narrative of increased internalization and control, but an enduring stasis: an enduring inner boy of fight, ludic morality, and performativity.86 The secret to a lasting empire was a stable wall of hardy bricks-of-boy that met the novel with pluck and steadfast excitement, anxious for a game.87 In the literary tales of this moment, domestic masculinity was discarded for a liminal, serial, adventure of boyhood in which the main character, if a man, fell in love with an exotic mummy he could never catch and marry, or if a boy, partnered with pirates to liminally adventure across the universe or discover, in the make-believe of the schoolyard playground, the vastness of his boyhood.88

The Other, Lost

Bradley Deane notes that the science fiction of H. G. Wells struggles with an obsolescence that looms within a popular, 19th century appreciation of Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.89 The future of efficiencies, higher consciousness, and peace Wells’s travelers visit are a double edge that foretell of a better at the end of domestic masculinity, in which all people are a singular of rational and all backward monsters of impulse have been banished to a far beneath. This fantasy proposes the challenge of identity and place felt by late 19th century citizens, who discovered that the economically advantageous arrangements they enjoyed as either colonizers or gendered patriarchs were terminal within a model of forward, linear time and

86 Deane, Bradley. Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870-1914. Cambridge University Press, 2014. (113). 87 Rosenthal, Michael. The Character Factory: Baden-Powell and the Origins of the Boy Scout Movement. Pantheon Books, 1986. (9-10). 88 Deane, Bradley. Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870-1914. Cambridge University Press, 2014. (114, 131-132, 199). 89 Deane, Bradley. Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870-1914. Cambridge University Press, 2014. (202-205). 30 development.90 Such citizens lived among a world they knew to be capable of radical change and transformation, both social and biological, but this quality was not as playful as it might have seemed when it inspired earlier explorers into the unknown.91 It was instead, suddenly, the force that would ultimately be the demise of privilege, gender, and empire. New Imperialists thus proposed that such an end could be avoided with an embrace of stillness in proposals that granted administrative power over colonies until some future moment and under conditions yet to be determined.92 Popular narratives shifted from a moralizing arc of deviant boys refined into properly domestic men, to serial installments of continuous chapters within the youthful adventures of deviant boys before reform,93 but such stillness estranged mythic masculinity from the maturity and power that remained within a domestic doctrine of internalization. Wells’s travelers were not so much still as they were stuck—between a choice of alien tomorrow and backwards yesterday.94 Deane notes that in order to resolve this bind, Wells novelly gifted his masculine traveler the secret to his foe’s animation: the response of force imagined within evolution's process of adaptation.95 No animal survived without a primal will to endure96 that rose from within to return the pressure required for transformation. While the process of forward

90 Deane, Bradley. Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870-1914. Cambridge University Press, 2014. (8-18). 91 Lesko, Nancy. Act Your Age! A Cultural Construction of Adolescence. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2012. Print. (23). Ndalianis, Angela. Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2004. Print. (136-137). 92 Deane, Bradley. Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870-1914. Cambridge University Press, 2014. (172-175, 177-178). 93 Deane, Bradley. Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870-1914. Cambridge University Press, 2014. (131-132). 94 Deane, Bradley. Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870-1914. Cambridge University Press, 2014. (202-205, 205-215). 95 Deane, Bradley. Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870-1914. Cambridge University Press, 2014. (226-227). 96 The phrase will to endure is neither Bradley Deane’s nor Wells’s term but rather a phrase I built to summarize and encapsulate the nature, context, and shape of the solution Wells, according to Deane, offers to the challenge of potential masculine obsolescence. 31 time and development within evolution and domestic masculinity could not be entirely neutralized, Wells’s will to endure offered the idea that the essential indomitable fortitude that fueled both was the manifestation of inspired, masculine gendered, force.

Wells seated this naturally occurring primal response of will to endure in the reconfigured masculinity of the mythic lost boy, offering that a timeless savage of earlier man— the boyish man New Imperialists were fond of—sat within all of the male gender, and was accessible in acts of corporeally grounded labor.97 In the exertion of work, men were universally connected to a collective of species in a manner that recalled the historic of a human people and presented an ordered community. Humanity lived in a gendered, raced configuration of labor.

Such a will to endure is problematic both in the lack of access it presents to a female traveler and the use it makes of the colonized.98 The gendered primal inner lost boy is grafted in a configuration of race that discovers, in a reading of the colonized as exotic, a hierarchy of development that presents a journey of becoming that can be arrested because it has been so by nature.99 Haeckel's recapitulation theory was enthusiastically embraced as a model of gradated development well suited to the serial configuration of time proposed in the myth of the lost boy by the emerging Western social science community of the late 19th century.100 Recapitulation theory offered that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny—that the process of human development in either an individual or a species retraces the path of the historic development of its ancestors.

From such a proposal, Western, white, middle class men of empire could imagine not only that

97 Deane, Bradley. Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870-1914. Cambridge University Press, 2014. (226-227). 98 Deane, Bradley. Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870-1914. Cambridge University Press, 2014. (226-227). 99 Macleod, David I. Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870-1920. The University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. (98-103). 100 Macleod, David I. Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870-1920.The University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. (98-114). 32 evolution was a knowable, predictable force, but also that this predictability was visible in the differences they beheld in others. Conveniently, when noted in their sons, such differences reaffirmed a gendered primal will to endure. A young boy who savagely punished his playmate or tracked small animals was not only developing well, but doing so because he was displaying the behaviors of his ancestors, known to be so by the adults of his world because they resembled the practices of colonized peoples.101 Such comforting savage scenes were, in this model of masculinity, inaccessible to the colonized as their production could only reinforce a narrative of the colonized as other. In an embrace of the colonized as the source of civilization, a myth of masculinity was erected that estranged all but those it privileged in their own production of identity.102 The myth of the lost boy figured as a rebuttal to the shortcomings of domestic masculinity’s boy and redirected attentions from a someday future to a once upon a past that offered to those who gazed upon it an enchanting narrative of humanity’s stable endurance built in a romance of other that left the differences it found most hallowed, exclusively available to a western community literate in the vastness of difference.

Remasculinization

Remasculinization is a term originally proposed by Susan Jeffords in her 1989 text The

Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War.103 Jeffords observes that plentiful and popular, at the time of her research, American Vietnam revisionism plays a trick in

101 Macleod, David I. Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870-1920. The University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. (98-114). 102 Deane, Bradley. Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870-1914. Cambridge University Press, 2014. (6-8). 103 Jeffords, Susan. The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War. Indiana University Press, 1989. 33 narratives that appear, initially, to offer conflict as a fruitful space of universal citizenship.104

While such tales espouse that performances of difference, distinctions of race or ethnicity, are inconsequential in a daily life among death; beneath this false front of universal citizenship, is often a firm reinscription of patriarchal privilege and gender binary.105 Jeffords declares that, without the demarcation of essential difference among a gender binary, war stories could not discover all men equally empowered with a primal will to endure; in a moment in which race is radically reunderstood, the reinscription of gender as a binary restabilizes the embrace of new.106

Jefford illustrates the mechanics of remasculinization in the final chapter of her text with a close reading of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. In the shifts made, in adaptation, to film’s source text, the novel The Short-Timers, Jeffords observes that the translation most significantly revises the universal citizenship of war the text proposes, perhaps successfully, to a gendered binary that reaffirms in a moment of conflict the universalness not of humanity but of masculinity.107 In Kubrick's film the female children that the soldiers engage in battle with within the novel The Short-Timers, become singularly prostitutes--all unquestionably “baby-sans”108 who seek, offer, or engage in “boom-boom”--while all of the film’s male characters are united,

104 Jeffords, Susan. The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War. Indiana University Press, 1989. (183-184). 105 Jeffords, Susan. The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War. Indiana University Press, 1989. (182-183). 106 Jeffords, Susan. The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War. Indiana University Press, 1989. (185-186). 107 Jeffords, Susan. The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War. Indiana University Press, 1989. (169-186). 108 The Full Metal Jacket quote I reference here is delivered by a soldier who looks at a dead female sniper and muses, “no more boom boom for this baby-san,” observing in this that when the enemy is female the enemy does not fold into a universal brotherhood of solider but rather remains the baby-san, the prostitute. Jeffords, Susan. The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War. Indiana University Press, 1989. (179) 34 across race and nation, through the verifying gaze of a prostitute.109 When “soul brother”

Eightball’s black penis, that is initially assumed collectively to be other--“too beaucoup”--is identified, upon visual inspection, by a prostitute, as the same as any other soldier’s penis, the other of race and ethnicity is declared unremarkable in a male soldier, while the state of all women as a second sex of lack that universally knows, receives, and consumes a penis, and can thus universally identify the humanity of all men, is reaffirmed.110

Jeffords concludes from this reading that war often signals, for myths of gender, not the transformation of tradition but the maintenance of hegemony, the status quo of patriarchal privilege.111 War is a corrective mechanism that defuses the tension of progress, innovation, and deviance by discovering within such new the familiar of yesterday’s gender binary.112 In 1980s narratives of Vietnam revisionism Jeffords discovers that a nation with a reunderstanding of race, in which [B]lack soldiers are unremarkable, is one in which women are clearly marked other in order to naturalize such new while preserving preexisting norms.

Lost Boy as Remasculanization

Jeffords illustrates remasculinization in order to urge feminists, of 1989, to engage with dialogues of warfare, rather than understand themselves and their interests to be exclusively allied with legislation and peace, as to foreclose feminism from conflict is to foreclose it from the debate of power, privilege, and personhood that fruitfully occurs within conflict while facilitating the reinscription of binary gender as the tradition that endures and stabilizes the

109 Jeffords, Susan. The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War. Indiana University Press, 1989. (176-179) 110 too beaucoup Jeffords, Susan. The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War. Indiana University Press, 1989. (178-179). 111 Jeffords, Susan. The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War. Indiana University Press, 1989. (180-186). 112 Jeffords, Susan. The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War. Indiana University Press, 1989. (180-186). 35 new.113 I cite the term remasculinization, and the context of Jeffords’s scholarship that illustrates its origin and form, here to give a name to the movement I’ve just traced within my look at the myth of the lost boy as a genealogy that evolves from a myth of boy, that grounds domestic masculinity, to a myth of lost boy, that grounds a masculinity of fight, ludic morality, and performativity in the caricature of an enduring, primal, inner boy whose will to endure animates not only his own becoming but the motion of the known and rational world. In the revisions to the myth of the boy made by New Imperialists, the lost boy remasculinizes the culture, panoptical time, and ideology of evolution that threatens New Imperialists with a foreboding terminal by proposing that the new is not entirely alien, but instead known, and is present in the dependable games of boys who, though they might continue to develop into men, enduringly play.

The lost boy is a boy because the myth of the lost boy uses a structure of binary gender to naturalize the new in the world of tomorrow. The proposal of a will to endure is a negotiation that unifies all men as a natural army in order to maintain the status quo of patriarchal privilege among New Imperialist communities that embrace radical new proposals of time, space, and life.

In an ideology that unifies all men in a gendered primal labor, a call of will to endure, all women are made, as they are in Jefford’s look at Full Metal Jacket, foundationally, primally, and eternally other. The myth of the lost boy refuses women the power they might have found within the myth of the boy.

The myth of the lost boy is not unique in its mechanism or objective, its source, the myth of the boy, similarly exploits a binary of primitive raced other and developed white man in order to access a narrative of peoples, nations, and time that sees the order of rational process in an

113 Jeffords, Susan. The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War. Indiana University Press, 1989. (184-186). 36 outward and forward motion. Mechanization’s dogma of knowing, expansion, development, and nation depends on a reading of place, people, before, and unknown that is discovered in the primitive of the discovered. This construction of race endures in the myth of the lost boy gifting the shape of before, the primitive and primal of Woodcraft, clans, and performance adopted by

Boy Scout founder Baden-Powell, which allows for the idea of liminality, Neverland, and adventure time.114

Masculinities are negotiations of power that author configurations of privilege, reality, self, and community and adapt in dogma as hierarchies and knowledges demand. When the myth of the boy was no longer useful, the ideology that would better serve a New Imperialist community’s need for stability was authored in adaptations that remasculinized the novel, the radical, and the emerging of the late imperial. New Imperialist privilege was threatened most by an accessible and asexual model of human development that proposed an eventual terminal to the global administrator, the wealth of empire, and the adventure of expansion. The myth of the lost boy discovered women to lack the will to endure and the colonized to figure completed earlier men who lacked not the will to endure but the biology to become full citizens.

New New York

Philip J. Fry begins his serial life in a twenty-two minute episode, entitled "Space Pilot

3000," that introduces four of the series’ ensemble cast: the eccentric, mad-scientist Professor

Farnsworth; the singular, one-eyed, orphan, alien Leela; the rogue, bending unit robot Bender; and the ca.1999 delivery boy Fry.115 When the episode opens, on December 31, 1999, Fry is the lowest mechanism within a specialized structure of labor, compelled to expectantly await the

114 Deane, Bradley. Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870-1914. Cambridge University Press, 2014. (88-89, 113-114). 115 “Space Pilot 3000.” Futurama. written by David X. Cohen and Matt Groening, directed by Rich Moore and Gregg Vanzo, 20th Television, 1999. 37 explicit tasking of pizzeria owner Mr. Panccuci, and restricted by economic sanctions that limit his benefit and recognition. More simply, Fry is a man deep in a videogame, while at work, with a boy at his elbow, and Fry's labor is animated by the shout of a balding, hairy, ethnic chef caricature who passes him a pizza box that notes to the customer, “Do not tip delivery boy!”116

As the episode unfolds, the audience watches Fry's disempowerment and misfortune compound as, on the way to deliver the pizza, he loses his girlfriend and his bike. Once at the address he's been directed to, Fry reads the customer name from his delivery slip, I. C. Weiner, aloud and dejectedly observes that he'd always thought he'd be the one making the crank-calls by now.

Crestfallen at the identification of his task as moot, Fry welcomes "another lousy millennium" by helping himself to one of the beers among his delivery cargo and settling his slouching form into a desk chair that he tips backward as he blows out a party horn: punctuating the end of a cutaway sequence that marks a global countdown to the year 2000.117 The combination of sluggish pause and boyish behavior topples him into an open and awaiting cryogenic capsule that closes on his startled form and leaves him fixed as the picture window beside him witnesses a thousand years of invasions and rebuildings until his capsule unlocks with a bright kitchen-timer ding.

Once released from the capsule, Fry is initially quite excited to find himself beyond his previous reality. The loss of friends, family, and narrative is an opportunity to begin his story again under altered circumstances and with more expertise, opinion, and direction than before.

This time he can get it right. Of course, this is the one thing he will not be allowed to do. After

116 “Space Pilot 3000.” Futurama. written by David X. Cohen and Matt Groening, directed by Rich Moore and Gregg Vanzo, 20th Television, 1999. 117 “Space Pilot 3000.” Futurama. written by David X. Cohen and Matt Groening, directed by Rich Moore and Gregg Vanzo, 20th Television, 1999.

38 an introduction to Leela, the cryogenic facility's career specialist, or Fate Assignment Officer, and a probing by the probulator, Fry is to be career chipped118 with the permanent career he is most suited to: delivery boy. Horrified at the sentence this would repeat, Fry flees the center to explore New New York and meets, in the line for what he thinks is a phone booth but is instead a suicide booth, a bending robot who, having discovered that his labor builds components for suicide booths, can no longer continue as programmed.

A boy of the 20th century, Fry sees the robot, Bender, as the friend and companion he has hoped for since childhood and, though Bender sees this coupling as unconventional—he expects them to be read by the New New York community as robosexuals—he agrees to the partnership as long as Fry promises to pose as his debugger when asked. The two seek escape from Leela in the Head Museum, a collection of preserved jarred celebrities and experts, and ultimately find themselves cornered with their only exit a barred grate. Fry asks Bender to bend the bars so they can escape and Bender resists. He can only bend constructively and only to the 30-32 degree angle he is programmed to execute. Fry then offers an argument that links free-will and consciousness, "It's up to you to make your own decisions in life, that's what separates people and robots from animals and animal robots,"119 and while initially Bender continues to refuse, after his antenna surreptitiously connects with a live hanging wire, disobedience is awakened within him and he accepts both the challenge of the task and the power within him to act without an explicit directive. Gleefully he bends an additional grate unnecessarily as the pair continue their evasions.

118 A chip is to be inserted into Fry’s hand using a tagging gun. He is to be subdermally coded-- branded a lost boy by 31st century means. 119 “Space Pilot 3000.” Futurama. written by David X. Cohen and Matt Groening, directed by Rich Moore and Gregg Vanzo, 20th Television, 1999. 39

Fry and Bender next find themselves within the undercity of New New York, the ruins of

Fry's 1999 community, and Fry reflects, finally, on the loss of his revised temporality. They are shortly joined by Leela who explains that she, like Fry, is a singularity among her greater community, and that she lacks even his sense of narrative and place as she was abandoned in infancy and has no knowledge of her own species. Among communion, Fry relents and submits himself to her and his inevitable delivery boy career chipping. But as with Bender, Leela's encounter with Fry has proved transformative and, instead of inserting his career chip, she removes her own explaining of her choice to “quit” rather than continue to “do what you gotta do,” as the career poster in her office directs, that "I've always wanted to, I just never realized it until I met you."120

A trio of job deserters Leela, Bender, and Fry decide next to seek Fry's only living relative, Professor Farnsworth, because as Fry explains, "we're unemployed but we have a doddering old relative to mooch off of."121 The aged scientist first confirms his genetic link and then offers his guests a tour of his laboratory that includes both various lengths of wire and a spaceship that he uses to transport cargo in a small home business that funds his research.

Conveniently Professor Farnsworth has retained the career chips of his former three man cargo delivery crew, who were recently consumed by a space wasp, and can offer the trio the technology to legitimize their rebranding. Fry enthusiastically inquires as to the nature of his new adventure, imagining himself a Starfleet officer of 20th century fictions, but is quickly met with

120 “Space Pilot 3000.” Futurama. written by David X. Cohen and Matt Groening, directed by Rich Moore and Gregg Vanzo, 20th Television, 1999. 121 “Space Pilot 3000.” Futurama. written by David X. Cohen and Matt Groening, directed by Rich Moore and Gregg Vanzo, 20th Television, 1999. 40 a more familiar job description. He'll "be responsible for ensuring that the cargo reaches its destination."122 Catching on, Fry responds,

So, I'm going to be a delivery boy? Professor Farnsworth: Exactly. Fry: Alright! I'm a delivery boy!123

Gotta Do

The world of 2999 Fry encounters in the pilot episode of FTS is the ultimate emasculated bureaucracy of domestic masculinity Bradley Deane notes in H. G. Wells’s fictions, and most clearly so in the phrase that structures the onus of the episode. Behind Fate Assignment Officer

Leela, as she accesses Fry’s core data and the probulator’s fate assignment determination, is a poster featuring the upper half of a dejected looking white, overweight, middle-aged man, in an aluminum colored hardhat and teal coveralls, sporting futuristic shoulder embellishments that recall the uniform of a Disneyland World of Tomorrow cast-member, who holds up a thumb to illustrate his lackluster endorsement of the bright red capital letters above him that spell out the motivational slogan: You Gotta Do What You Gotta Do. Leela responds to Fry’s distress at his delivery boy assignment by gesturing to the poster, which is then framed and held for the audience as Leela explains that, “Lots of people don’t like their jobs, but we do them anyway.

You Gotta Do What You Gotta Do.”124 30th century labor is simply conscription compelled by an all knowing structure, in which those who refuse to be as they are known to be ideally, by the probulator, are executed, and those who accept their fate are universally miserable.

122 “Space Pilot 3000.” Futurama. written by David X. Cohen and Matt Groening, directed by Rich Moore and Gregg Vanzo, 20th Television, 1999. 123 “Space Pilot 3000.” Futurama. written by David X. Cohen and Matt Groening, directed by Rich Moore and Gregg Vanzo, 20th Television, 1999. 124 “Space Pilot 3000.” Futurama. written by David X. Cohen and Matt Groening, directed by Rich Moore and Gregg Vanzo, 20th Television, 1999. 41

The sentiment of the 30th century Fry arrives within, is a bastardization of a phrase known to the 20th, and often misattributed to John Wayne, that reassures “A Man’s Gotta Do,

What A Man’s Gotta Do.”125 In its 20th century configuration, the phrase speaks to a masculine animating push that unquestionably demands from within a man’s gendered-innermost that he meet the domestic masculine inevitable, of an overly organized and mistakenly discrete universe, with the force of a gendered, primal will to endure: lost boy mythic masculine labor. Within this dogma men are called to conquer, transform, endure, and rise in a performance of cowboys, soldiers, and entrepreneurs who, knowing both the unfavorable odds and the unwritten mandate that no hero ever sees a reward, nevertheless set themselves to defend a town, hold a line, or erect a better world. This lost boy mythic masculine core of labor releases Wells’s travelers in the discovery that while they cannot alter a forward moving universe of domestic masculinity, they are, in their very form, the enduring force of an indomitable people, that figures humanity itself, and in this are cursed to play the hero of the story.

The introduction of Fry, with his archaic primal gendered will to endure of lost boy mythic masculinity, to New New York challenges the stable order of the Wellsian future by placing its contemporary dogma of Gotta Do within a dialogue that, in context, exposes the core commandment as arbitrary, historic, and local. Homi Bhabha calls this dialogic disturbance of the mythic “disjunctive,” and notes that modernity’s foundational assumption of time as linear and progressive is similarly exposed as a structure, a built form, when postcolonial scholarship introduces contrasting mythic configurations of time.126 For Bhabha, within such a disjunctive is

125 “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.” Cambridge Dictionary. Cambridge University Press, 2017, https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/a-man-s-gotta-do-what-a- man-s-gotta-do. Accessed 05 Nov. 2017. 126 Lesko, Nancy. Act Your Age! A Cultural Construction of Adolescence. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2012. (136). 42 a productive indeterminism that allows for both contemplation and new understandings. The point of inquiry produced by Fry allows New New Yorkers Bender, Leela, and Professor

Farnsworth to behold and interrogate the core structuring assumptions of their communal understanding--their myths—and embrace Fry’s alternate mythic lost boy narrative of gender and other in a bridging manner that both facilitates a new and naturalizes a hybrid as it joins opposing forms. The pilot episode of FTS thus proposes as thesis that the embrace of Fry, “a poor kid from the stupid ages,”127 fundamentally transforms New New Yorkers who discover, as a result of the disjuncture they experience, that what they understand to be, not only might be, but can be, otherwise.128 So empowered and informed Bender, Leela, and Professor Farnsworth are not only released from Gotta Do but set to begin a serial narrative, guided by the core dogma of the myth of the lost boy: identity, performance, and ludic morality.

The Boy and the Bot

In his first notable encounter among New New York beyond the cryogenic facility, Fry meets a robot who is desperately in love with humanity but isolated from his amour in a fear grounded in robophobia129 and an agency locked in narrow programing that restricts his experience to the useful parameters of an assembly line cog. Fry problematizes these challenges with a recall of a late 19th century model of homosociality practiced by middle-class male

127 Leela observes, and speaks, this characterization of Fry as he is beaten by the police. “Space Pilot 3000.” Futurama. written by David X. Cohen and Matt Groening, directed by Rich Moore and Gregg Vanzo, 20th Television, 1999. 128 “Space Pilot 3000.” Futurama. written by David X. Cohen and Matt Groening, directed by Rich Moore and Gregg Vanzo, 20th Television, 1999. 129 In the pilot episode, Bender expresses concern that if he and Fry are friends, they will be identified by New New Yorkers as robosexuals. Robophobia is my own term. “Space Pilot 3000.” Futurama. written by David X. Cohen and Matt Groening, directed by Rich Moore and Gregg Vanzo, 20th Television, 1999. 43

Victorians, 130 who in the mechanics of empire spent youths among boarding school fagging131 and decades of adulthood installed on colonial frontiers, popular at the time of the lost boy’s initial New Imperialist embrace.132 While Bender perceives the pairing of a boy and a bot as deviant, Fry perceives the pairing as the elements of adventure133: in the serial of lost boy narratives the presence of companions and the bond of attachment generate the stable familial of community beyond the timed and terminal domestic.134 When Bender borrows Fry’s older configuration of mythic masculinity, he is free to love deeply, beyond any sexual implications, in the safety of fantastic serial quests.

130 Baden-Powell’s biographers each struggle to frame, contextualize, and recount his homosocial partnership, both during his years of foreign service and in his years of early celebrity immediately following the Boer War, during which he founded the Boy Scouts, with a subordinate officer named Kenneth McLauren, nicknamed by Baden-Powell ‘The Boy.’ While whether the pair was sexually intimate appears unknowable, it is consistently acknowledged that the two enjoyed each other’s company to the extent that they choose to cohabitate in a household while in India, shared leisure activities, and were reunited years later in the mechanics of producing the first Boy Scout Brownsea Training. For further reading: Rosenthal, Michael. The Character Factory: Baden-Powell and the Origins of the Boy Scout Movement. Pantheon Books, 1986. (48, 85). Jeal, Tim. The Boy-Man: The Life of Lord Baden-Powell. William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1990. (74). 131 This is a term refers to a tradition practiced in British public (boarding) schools of a formal peer hierarchy that creates a ceremonial homosocial partnership between upper and lower classmen that generally obligates lower classmen to housekeeping tasks and affective labor in addition to, creating a culture of acceptable student on student violence and abuse. Jeal, Tim. The Boy-Man: The Life of Lord Baden-Powell. William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1990. (74). 132 Dennis, Jeffery P. We Boys Together: Teenagers in Love Before Girl-Craziness. Vanderbilt University Press, 2007. (12-15). 133 DeForest, Tim. Storytelling in the Pulps, Comics, and Radio: How Technology Changed Popular Fiction in America. McFarland and Company, Inc., Publishers, 2004. (15-25). 134 The domestic, marriage, is noted to be, by Deane, the terminal of the liminal of occupation: the arrest of a story’s conclusion. For this reason, the love stories of men among New Imperialism have as the object of affection wards and alien woman. These homosocial adventure time partners generate an alternative familial that remains intimate and interpersonal, but beyond both the ceremony and reproduction that a nation is legitimized in. The adventure time partnership is an ephemeral that escapes the grounded real of nation and stabilizes such mechanics in directing the remaining need for commitment within citizens towards fantastical beings. Deane, Bradley. Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870-1914. Cambridge University Press, 2014. (182, 198-199). 44

Bender is also released from his assembly line slavery as a programed being in an embrace of Fry’s mythic masculinity. In Act Your Age!: A Cultural Construction of Adolescence,

Nancy Lesko identifies, as a great tension within the mechanics of adolescence, the concept of expectant time.135 The Western communities that embraced and erected the mythology of the boy, and later the lost boy, did so initially particularly for the beholdable animation of paced time that could be marked in the human development, either physical or mental of, particularly male, children.136 This bond between ideas of human development and paced panoptical time is particularly problematic in the demands it places upon performances of embodied time for youths actually within the process of development. While few bodies develop in a pace of statistical arithmetic mean137, only such a pace realizes the onus of the boy’s developing body to reaffirm in pace the dogma of his empirically minded industrial age community. Called to an impossible task, immobility is the only solution available to a youth: rather than age out of time, either too quickly or too slowly, and disturb an illusion so foundational to his community, a youth will attempt to fashion himself a monument of obedience and wait, expectantly, on a line for explicit directions.

Lesko proposes that in order to overcome the paralyzing disembodiment of expectant time, real world adolescents escape into a fantastical beyond time that Bakhtin called adventure time.138 Such a space lacks the features of change and place that allow for the passage of time to be noted, and thus creates a space of unmarkable time in which youths can safely,

135 Lesko, Nancy. Act Your Age! A Cultural Construction of Adolescence. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2012. (105-106). 136 Lesko, Nancy. Act Your Age! A Cultural Construction of Adolescence. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2012. (91-94). 137 Creadick, Anna G. Perfectly Average: The Pursuit of Normality in Postwar America. University of Massachusetts Press, 2010. (34). 138 Lesko, Nancy. Act Your Age! A Cultural Construction of Adolescence. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2012. (113). Holquist, Michael. Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World. Routledge, 1990. (117-118). 45 inconsequentially and imperceptibly, do. While Lesko offers that the adventure time escape of

20th century adolescents may generate the identity crises, and problematic magical thinking, signature to the population139, Bakhtin noted adventure time in the serial literature of the early

20th century that refused to register markable events in order to preserve the harvestable brand of a core narrative property140, a style of tale signature to early mass culture.

As Lesko’s adolescents look beyond themselves, and time, in order to negotiate expectant time, so to it might be proposed that a Western modern community erected a fantastical beyond in serial narratives that could offer the possibility of dreams and forward in a safely removed of nowhere. For a community beholden to an expectant time of factories and evolution, the adventuring lost boy, within both late 19th century narrative form and its accompanying mythic masculinity, was not only comforting in his lack of markable time, because such a choice neutralized the forward time of domestic masculinity that threatened to end an empire of colonies and the paternal privilege of men, but also in the escape adventures beyond time provided. The myth of the lost boy appeased the hearts of the disempowered with the harmless fun of something sweet, fantastical, and stable: narratives that operated regularly with defined openings, explicit conflicts, complete Catholic closures, and dependable caricatures, all suspended within a beyond of someplace else and bound to a mandate that nothing of any consequence could ever happen.

When evasions leave Fry and Bender cornered in a closet at the Head Museum, Fry proposes, quite ridiculously, that their escape remains possible if only his bot can abandon his

139 Lesko, Nancy. Act Your Age! A Cultural Construction of Adolescence. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2012. (112-114). 140 Nash, Ilana. American Sweethearts: Teenage Girls in Twentieth-Century Popular Culture. Indiana University Press, 2006. (30-35). Holquist, Michael. Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World. Routledge, 1990. (117-118). 46 asexual Gotta Do programming and adopt a gendered A Man’s Gotta Do of incorrigible will and bend the bars on a window grate to create an exit. Bender initially responds logically and turns from Fry and the task, explaining that he can only animate within the parameters that have been proposed by his program: as an assembly line machine, he is beholden to a literal expectant time and he lacks the capacity to imagine beyond his rational, concrete, protocols. In response, Fry offers that the will to either Gotta Do or Don’t cannot be legitimately imposed on people: only animals, and animal robots, obey mindlessly. Conveniently in the mechanics of a second refusal of Fry’s call, Bender’s antenna connects with a hanging lightbulb and in a jolt of life—an electromagnetic Gotta—he is encouraged into the chaotic indulgence of Fry’s fantastical narrative of free will. A conservative reading of this interaction notes that Fry’s story of choice presents deviance as a possibility to Bender, just as his earlier interest in a homosocial friendship presents Bender with an alternate path that realizes the inner longings of his character that were either taboo or impossible in the logic of his 2999 world. The disjunctive of Fry provides Bender with a myth that reveals, or discovers, his secret convictions.141

This same scene might be alternately read, not as a reunderstanding of free will that places dialogically a robot’s programing of expectant Gotta Do and Wells’s inner indomitable and discovers in the resulting disjunctive the empowerment of chaos and choice within descent, but as a reunderstanding of a rote response of Gotta Do that discovers, in dialogue with the myth of the lost boy, the psychic salvation dream escape of inconsequential adventure time Lesko identifies in expectant-time-obligated adolescents. With no available exit, and confronted with a future of compulsory Gotta Do, Fry and Bender are doomed to either the expectant time of a

141 If this wasn’t a challenging proposal because Bender is a programmed robot, it is a challenging proposal to assume that in a world of Gotta Do the desire to be a boy’s bot or bend deconstructively occurred to Bender. It is more likely that the myth Fry brings with him created the conversation that generated these objectives and interests. 47 fully administrated community, or an outlandish execution, and thus they escape as Lesko’s adolescents do: they leave the real for an adventure time of nowhere. Among adventure time

Bender can bend as he pleases without disturbing the scientific logic of his mechanical consciousness and animation. As if to note the fantastical space the narrative has transitioned to,

Bender’s triumphant deconstructive bend, and the reasonable resulting detachment of his upper limbs, is followed, after a commercial break punctuation, with an abstract scale of medium shot set at torso height that frames Bender’s arm reattaching its mate to his arm socket. The camera pulls slightly backward and next frames the attachment of the second arm by the first, finally settling in a wide shot in which Fry marvels “I don’t know how you did that.”142 If the FTS universe has laws of logic and physics, something that might be successfully argued both for and against143, the repair of himself Bender performs clearly violates them, and in this suggests that where the story now continues is a space beyond New New York proper. The myth of the lost boy’s adventure time solution of expectant time launches the boy and the bot of FTS beyond an obligation to the structure and consequence of a logical asexual Gotta Do future, by donning an archaic space of impunity in which they are free to realize the obligation of the lost boy to venture and perform, playfully, forever.

142 “Space Pilot 3000.” Futurama. written by David X. Cohen and Matt Groening, directed by Rich Moore and Gregg Vanzo, 20th Television, 1999. 143 The existence of the episode “The Prisoner of Benda”, which features as resolution a functioning mathematical equation, and the careful consistency of narrative and logic within the series, suggests that the universe depicted in Futurama does have laws of logic and physics; however, there are also many moments, like the reattachment of Bender’s arms in the pilot episode, in the series that embrace inconsequential moments in service of humor. It might be best offered that Futurama is a serial configuration of a classic series form that deliberately explores the disjunctive offered in a space between consequential and inconsequential narrative. In a 2007 interview with Wired it is noted that the pitch board for the series features; “A quote credited to Cohen is the centerpiece of the board: ‘Reality should not stand in the way of comedy.’” Baker, Chris. “Futurama is Back! Grab a Can of Slurm and Settle In.” Wired, 27 Nov. 2007, https://www.wired.com/2007/11/ff-futurama/. Accessed 17 Sept. 2017. 48

The Lost Boy, Lost

While as a lost boy character Fry carries the ideologies and configurations of kinship and time associated with the myth of the lost boy and thus can be demonstrated to gift a New Imperialist authored remasculinization to New New Yorkers in a moment of disjunctive and indeterminism,

Fry is not himself conjured, animated, or embraced by a New Imperialist community but instead authored by 20th century Groening and Cohen, among 20th and 21st century telecommunications, and placed within a debate that considers the speedy “wonderful or awful” of 20th and 21st century Futurama.144 A close reading of Fry thus demands an appreciation of the character that locates his form’s signature in the character’s historically bound costume of wide legged jeans, bulky skate shoes, and James Dean Rebel Without A Cause red jacket; his ca. 1999 service industry occupation as a ‘clerk’; and the postwar telecommunications Futurama of fiberoptic cables, World Wide Web, and synchronous social that figures the “wonderful or awful” both of its telecommunications transmission and context.145 The following chapter explores the

Futurama, by way of McLuhan’s science of medium, that contextualizes, concerns, and animates

Fry, ultimately proposing that the challenge Fry is authored by, within, and in response to is the embrace in 20th and 21st century Futurama of a reengineered subject of networked node. The innovation of McLuhan’s Automation, 20th and 21st century Futurama, proposes a global web of extended citizens, each independently empowered but none notable, privileged, or beyond, that discards the binary that masculine myths of boy and lost boy secure. As McLuhan’s own research noted, and as Salzman, Matathia, and O’Reilly propose, Futurama is a mandate,

144 Baker, Chris. “Futurama is Back! Grab a Can of Slurm and Settle In.” Wired, 27 Nov. 2007, https://www.wired.com/2007/11/ff-futurama/. Accessed 17 Sept. 2017. (para. 3). 145 Baker, Chris. “Futurama is Back! Grab a Can of Slurm and Settle In.” Wired, 27 Nov. 2007, https://www.wired.com/2007/11/ff-futurama/. Accessed 17 Sept. 2017. (para. 3). Rebel Without A Cause. directed by Nicholas Ray, Warner Bros, 1995. 49

moment, and structure that rejects Mechanization’s man; however, I’ll propose, in the following

chapter, the Automation authors a new masculinity, of masculine affection, that abandons the

privileged subjecthood 20th and 21st century masculinity among Futurama’s tenets of network that cannot exhaustively maintain and instead imagines masculinity within the privilege of a new binary of network and networked node.146 FTS’s Fry embodies this new masculinity not only in his dual partnership of paired homosocial kinship and heteronormative sexuality but in his slack—for inactivity is the signature of privilege, labor, and stability within 21st century telecommunication.

146 McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. edited by Terrence Gordon. Gingko Press, 2003. (131). 50

CHAPTER TWO: THE 21ST CENTURY

Obliterating

In the summer of 1990 Michael Hammer, an MIT business professor, published an article

in the Harvard Business Review titled "Reengineering Work: Don't Automate, Obliterate,” that

proposed a radical new approach to business management.147 While historically technologies had been integrated into the labor of manufacture and management in a manner that saw the machine as the substitute for a man and expected that technologies simulate the habits, behaviors, and patterns of men, Hammer argued that this approach restricted the efficiencies possible in a model of labor and management that inquired first of the needs, nature, and capacity of a machine.

Hammer's article presented two case studies of antiquated automation148 and bloated

workforce that could be trimmed into an integrated system of efficient technology and lean

labor149: Ford’s accounts payable department, and the insurance application process at Mutual

Benefit Life, then the nation’s eighteenth largest carrier. At Ford the deployment of Hammer’s

Business Process Reengineering, or BPR, identified, in an analysis of the existing system, multiple moments of full duplication and points of potential miscommunication that could be resolved in the embrace of a company-wide central database, and the termination of paper invoices, documentation, payment, and billing files. If a receiving clerk could be additionally

147 Hammer, Michael. “Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate.” Harvard Business Review, July-Aug 1990 issue. Harvard Business Publishing, https://hbr.org/1990/07/reengineering-work-dont-automate-obliterate. Accessed 08 Dec. 2015. 148 The word automation is not used here to reference McLuhan’s deployment of the term. Hammer is actually discussing McLuhan’s Mechanization. 149 BPR was notably an approach that produced a dramatic labor force reduction in reengineered departments. Hammer notes that for Ford departments in which BPR is deployed, a 75% reduction is achieved. Similarly, MBL was able to reduce its labor costs, through reengineering by 100 employees. Hammer, Michael. “Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate.” Harvard Business Review, July-Aug 1990 issue. Harvard Business Publishing, https://hbr.org/1990/07/reengineering-work-dont-automate-obliterate. Accessed 08 Dec. 2015. (4-5). 51 tasked with entering data into a system at the point of receipt, then such data could be efficiently passed, and automatically matched and verified by a database system, to accounts payable clerks who, again with the aid of a database, could print and mail payment.

In Mutual Benefit Life’s application processing, Hammer’s BPR found an inefficiency of rigid sequential process that most dysfunctionally dropped data and customers in the exchanges required in transitions between multiple workers and various departments. In order to resolve this challenge, Mutual Benefit Life implemented both a central database, like Ford, and an entirely reconfigured, customer focused, worker ultimately named, by Hammer, a Customer Service

Representative, or CSR. At Mutual Benefit Life, after BPR, the CSR stayed with a customer from the initial point of service, functioning as an empowered, through-networked case manager who managed the complete life-cycle of the application processing including all related customer interface. Mutual Benefit Life’s CSR, as proposed by BPR, was entrusted with more responsibilities than an employee in the company’s previous model of fixed-task-labor, whether previously assigned to rote tasks or middle management, as he could no longer handoff data, knowledge, or responsibilities. With the support of “powerful PC-based workstations... run[ning] an expert system and connect[ed] to a range of automated systems on a mainframe,” the CSR of

BPR had the capacity, and the obligation, to independently perform an expansive scope of functions.150

A Subject Without Work

Hammer’s BPR fundamentally altered the nature of modern work, and the ideal worker imagined within it. With the embrace of the database, the previous distinction between manual

150 Hammer, Michael. “Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate.” Harvard Business Review, July-Aug 1990 issue. Harvard Business Publishing, https://hbr.org/1990/07/reengineering-work-dont-automate-obliterate. Accessed 08 Dec. 2015. (5). 52 labor and skilled middle management in industrial age modes of manufacturing was collapsed in an approach that both empowered the lineman with the capacity and responsibility for complex cognitive mechanics, and disempowered the administrator by removing from him the safeguards of a historical frame of management as skill151 and the configuration of tangible intellectual property bound within person and files.152 While the receiving clerk at Ford was potentially reimagined favorably, the accounts payables clerk was demoted and dispersed in his reconfiguration—an act that facilitated the cost reduction goals of BPR by questioning the existence of skilled labor.

At its core, BPR successfully inquires of the nature and capacity of the mechanical structure of manufacturing and process by standardizing the capacity, agency, and skill of the worker. The system chooses to view the worker unconditionally as a subject, a structure that can perform the complex operations required to discern and input the variable, but critically never imagines this subject citizen beyond its network. BPR demands that a universal exhaustive all— of both employee and customer—remains visible and accountable and builds accountability in a mandatory matrix of exhaustively complete data. While the configuration in BPR distributes rights democratically, it does so while simultaneously closing the borders of a collective to any form or possibility of beyond, and takes as inspiration for such a configuration of node-based networked power the fundamental mechanics of the networked technologies it centers as a communal cognitive: postwar MIC telecommunications theories of user, flow, and network.

The Solution for Stable Stochastic Flow

151 Macleod, David I. Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and Their Forerunners, 1870-1920. The University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. (117-126). 152 Miller, G. Wayne. Toy Wars: The Epic Struggle Between G.I. Joe, Barbie, and the Companies that Make Them. Times Books, 1998. (136, 180-204). 53

The American153 telecommunications research, funded by postwar legislation, that synergistically erected an expansive global communications network, arose from an endorsement of the model of future surveillance and en masse parallel production that had—in a combination of quantum leaps of innovation and the empirical authority of knowledge—both abetted the end of the world, in the development of the atomic bomb, and discovered within a youthful nation the power of an imperial administrator.154 The generation of this form of communication required a radical solution that reimagined core fundamental understandings of power, person, and place.

Existing telecommunications networks operated on mechanics of centralized control— hierarchical structures that estranged tasks and employees in discrete, specific, responsibilities gaining efficiencies in a dogma of atomization, and dedicated access, a strict method of resource dispersal that allowed power to be decentralized from an administrative core in exhaustive commitments.155 Each of these models lacked stability when scaled and couldn’t bare stochastic,156 essentially a chaotic or irregularly paced, flow. Separately, in the first years of the

1960s, Leonard Kleinrock, a MIT PhD candidate in Electrical Engineering; Paul Baran, a Rand

Corporation employee; and Donald Davies, a researcher at the National Physical Laboratory,

153 The theories noted here were not developed in isolation from a greater Western community and both the theories and their global deployment could be argued to not share a singular national identity but rather form a global union. The debate inherent in such mechanics is beyond the scope of this thesis. 154 Marcus, Alan I. and Amy Sue Bix. The Future is Now: Science and Technology Policy in America Since 1950. Humanity Books, 2007. (20-27). 155 The Herbert H Warrick Jr. Museum of Communications. 7000 East Marginal Way South Seattle, Washington, WA 98108. 20 March 2016. 156 Stochastic flow can be analyzed mathematically but has a nature so complex it cannot be predicted. While it is a gross oversimplification, it may be useful to state as summary that in his labors Kleinrock desired to build a mathematical model that could functionally meet needs too chaotic to, at the time of his thesis, be mapped and he was able ultimately to do this by creating a system that successfully met the needs of a simulation, a model, of stochastic flow. Kleinrock, Leonard. Communications Nets: Stochastic Message Flow and Delay. Dover Publications, Inc. 2007 (1964). (5) 54 proposed a solution for a network that could maintain its form and integrity while meeting unknowable demands: a packet switching network that operated according to demand access and distributed control mechanics.157

Packet Mechanics: Distributed Control, Demand Access, and Redundancy

Packet switching networks create a stable structure of communication exchange by reversing the fundamentals of centralized control and dedicated access.158 Distributed control disperses power across the system, rather than centering it in single files or concentrating it in single employees, while demand access imagines within the system a competent subject with the onus to speak his own needs—to perform his being. Data is moved in a packet switching network, after being broken into packets, by empowered components called nodes, a term that can refer to discrete hardware workstations or tiny internal hardware components, that are dispersed in a web like configuration. Data is not sent in a singular chain of nodes, or as a singular transmission, but rather identically sent to multiple nodes that each, after receiving the

157 The exact founding fathers of the Internet vary considerably depending on what in particular a scholar considers most fundamental to the mechanics one identifies as “the Internet”. The trio I offer is contested and incomplete; however, it is beyond the scope of this thesis to either offer the context of such contestation or argue in favor of any particular singular inventor. For the purposes of this thesis, it is relevant that the mechanics of a packet switching network were theorized in the first years of the 1960s and, ultimately, a packet switching network, ARPANET, was erected in 1969. I have embraced Kleinrock’s Communication Nets: Stochastic Message Flow and Delay and “Creating a Mathematical Theory of Computer Networks” as the sites that most inform my understanding of packet networks and related mechanics of demand access and distributed control. The mechanics of discovery created this preference. I include here a citation that offers Baran as a key founding father, authored by a key personality, Stewart Brand, who himself shaped the nature of the Internet. Kleinrock, Leonard. “Creating a Mathematical Theory of Computer Networks.” Operations Research, vol. 50, no. 1, 50th Anniversary Issue (Jan. - Feb. 2002), pp. 125-131. INFORMS, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3088461. Accessed 11 May 2017. Brand, Stewart. “Founding Father.” Wired, 01 Mar. 2001, https://www.wired.com/2001/03/baran/. Accessed 17 Sept. 2017. 158 Kleinrock, Leonard. “Creating a Mathematical Theory of Computer Networks.” Operations Research, vol. 50, no. 1, 50th Anniversary Issue (Jan. - Feb. 2002), pp. 125-131. INFORMS, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3088461. Accessed 11 May 2017. 55 data, independently select the next path most ideal for continued transmission. Like the wartime laboratories that successfully isolated mass quantities of fissionable material by operating in parallel independent lines of task, a packet network’s nodes are independently collective in parallel.159 While tasked identically, they will each choose to resolve their task independently, and their work will be variable.160 The independent processes in packet networks aren’t more stable than the collective process of communications exchange in earlier centralized control/dedicated access networks, in fact they’re far less reliable and run on less dependable hardware, but the collective network of a mass of cheap161 hardware and variable nodes is more stable than an expensive single dedicated line. The objective of MIC telecommunications research was not to realize a more refined micro structure—an objective of early industrial management theories like time and motion study—but to erect a more dependable macro structure that figured a reliable, exhaustive global: a telephone line that could not be severed for a Cold War community that would only endure the future of the present if it collectively maintained a dialogue among a comprehensive all. Packet networks offset the inefficiencies of their en masse by embracing redundancy. Redundancy recognizes that each node is fundamentally identical, in mechanics and function, to another. This allows for the functions and labor of one node to be replaced seamlessly with the functions and labor of any other node in the

159 Marcus, Alan I. and Amy Sue Bix. The Future is Now: Science and Technology Policy in America Since 1950. Humanity Books, 2007. (33). 160 The use of the term variable seems potentially misleading here, while the mechanics of CSRs are variable in the human sense meant by the term, nodes are restricted to the resolutions that have already been offered to them as code. The variability of a node’s independent operations is restricted to a definable range and better understood as a simulation of variability. 161 The use of the term cheap here is not meant to connote an indication of value, but rather an economic characteristic that differs between the two modes of network. Telegraph and telephone telecommunications hardware require precious metals and skilled care, while the hardware that networks MIC telecommunication computing is, like the consumables produced by mass modes of manufacturing, intended for a short lifecycle and everyman user. 56 event that a node is lost, which is not only possible in the system of cheap hardware the MIC telecommunications network is built from, but is in fact a certainty coded within the system’s scripted variability.

Packet Switching Network as Business Process

When Hammer magnifies and applies the mechanics of stochastic flow communication networks to the mechanics of post-industrial business management, he mandates three core assumptions: all information should be stored in a central database, frontline workers should be empowered to directly input the data they interact with/independently serve the customers they interface with, and customers both can and should perform some of the labor their transactions require.162 These tenants realize a closed global configuration of network, and gain accuracy in efficient, stable, and exhaustive communication. All parts of a process of development, design, production, marketing, and sales chain can speak simultaneously and, as a result, synergistically integrate once atomized and estranged mechanics. For example, the cost of printing the logo of a new brand can be considered along with focus group feedback and design aesthetics in an integrated simultaneous whole that perceives a narrow, once atomized, decision as its global polyphonic impact. Communication is, without question, more accurate, nuanced, and exhaustive within the MIC telecommunication configuration of networked nodes. However, Hammer’s second and third directives migrate the configuration of the node—the mechanics that allow for the improved communication of MIC telecommunication—onto a workforce. For Hammer,

Ford’s receiving clerk and accounts payable employee are not only an identical node of essential

162 Hammer, Michael. “Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate.” Harvard Business Review, July-Aug 1990 issue. Harvard Business Publishing, https://hbr.org/1990/07/reengineering-work-dont-automate-obliterate. Accessed 08 Dec. 2015. “Business process re-engineering.” The Economist, 16 Feb. 2009, http://www.economist.com/node/13130298. Accessed 17 Sept. 2017. (8-13). 57 subjecthood, but so too is the supplier, the client, the competitor, and the customer that are linked in a common network of economic exchange.163 All of these individuals become at once a centered, mandatory subject and a universally identical node—a CSR—and are imagined to be critical but inconsequential, subjects born in their own, variable, interpersonal labor and known to their network of post-industrial corporate nation by the stability that can be formed in a standardized universal understanding of their individuality.

For the nodes within a mechanical packet switching network the false compulsory subjecthood that results from a simultaneous embrace of variability and singular universal individuality is not a traumatic illusion because the variable behavior of packet switching network nodes is not inborn, but rather scripted. A node’s mechanical operations are restricted, even when variable, to a definable range and thus, as the nodes within a MIC telecommunications network are given the variability they exhibit, they are inherently a standardized simulacra of individuality: a scripted simulation of the stochastic flow of living beings. However, for the living beings BPR imagines to be mechanical nodes, CSRs, the labor of erecting a simulation of packet switching network is a violent estrangement that demands the continuous production of a performance of variable self that is concurrently discarded as merely the mechanics of an ephemeral carrier, as the universality of individuality is simultaneously embraced.164 The CSR subjecthood of BPR is an ultimate silence that estranges the worker not from the greater whole of a task, or the value of his own labor, but from impact itself.

163 Hammer, Michael. “Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate.” Harvard Business Review, July-Aug 1990 issue. Harvard Business Publishing, https://hbr.org/1990/07/reengineering-work-dont-automate-obliterate. Accessed 08 Dec. 2015. (13-14). 164 Terranova, Tiziana. “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy.” Social Text, 63, vol. 18, no. 2, Summer 2000, pp. 33-58. Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/31873. Accessed 10 Sept. 2017. (36, 42) 58

The Central Database: Mandated Play

The second and third tenants of Hammer’s BPR places the CSR in an uncomfortable double bind between the variability he is compelled to perform and the singular universal individuality he is concurrently commanded to be; but it is Hammer’s first tenet and its interaction with the variable/redundant nature of the CSR that most estranges the living node within a MIC telecommunications network-inspired model of work. For it is the central database itself that alienates the CSR from his own data, his own networked form, in a centralized mode of collective knowledge.

Brian Sutton-Smith presents, in his consideration of the culture of play, that work and play are poorly named when the process of learning and human development is considered.165 In their first years children aggressively collect the observations and truths required to fully appreciate the nature and rules of their community, essentially working, while in later years older citizens who’ve already internalized the basic nature of their community can, if they so choose, invert the conventional and in this engage in an act of play.

Within the MIC telecommunications model of network and node, no single node (CSR) has the privilege of exhaustive literacy. Only the central database knows all, because the narrow concentration of privilege in discrete singularities would destroy the cooperative synergy and redundancy of MIC telecommunications. This model of labor thus estranges the collective all it incorporates from the mechanics and conditions required to enter a space beyond the childish labor of learning. MIC telecommunications is a configuration of communal that is collectively a whole that more accurately and reliably communicates across the global it incorporates exhaustively, but in this, demands from the nodes it is assembled from a subjecthood of

165 Sutton-Smith, Brian. Toys As Culture. Gardner Press, Inc. 1986. (146, 165-166). 59 variability it dismisses as mechanically universal, and an estrangement from the knowledge, or data, that builds their own individual and collective form.

McLuhan cautioned in the final chapter of Understanding Media: the extension of man that Automation was not an ideology, technology, or medium that would mandate uniformity.166

Automation would instead encourage variability, offer the comfort of entrepreneurship, and no longer press the mandate of expectant time’s pace and linear upon the citizen.167 While superficially the liberation of Automation, the efficiency, speed, and independence of Hammer’s

BPR, released the assembly line worker from the atomization of Mechanization, it did so only by exchanging one model of work and worker for another. As the pedestrian lost their right to the road in 20th century Futurama, that embraced highway engineers and associationism, the employee of Mechanization too exchanges his mobility for a Futurama of networked node that impairs his form, variability, in a verification, a seen, that animates an engineered synergy of universal all.168

Lost Boy 2.0

Groening and Cohen’s Philip J. Fry arrives nine years after the introduction of Hammer’s

BPR in the final months of a year that counted down nervously to Y2K-- sloppy, speedy, early

MIC programing had built a network of computer code that didn’t transition to the year 2000 as it could not register the change of the prefix 19 to 20--and is animated on FTS over a subsequent

166 McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. edited by Terrence Gordon. Gingko Press, 2003. (473). 167 Lesko, Nancy. Act Your Age! A Cultural Construction of Adolescence. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2012. (94-105) McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. edited by Terrence Gordon. Gingko Press, 2003. (459-473). 168 Norton, Peter D. Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. The MIT Press, 2008. (65-78). 60

14, or 18169, years as Hammer’s radical proposal of central database and universally networked node is widely adopted.170 BPR, though not typically known by name by the average 2017

Amazon shopper, Walmart CSR, or middle class remote employee, is the easy second nature, the ideology, endorsement, and myth, of daily life that brings a universe of goods, with two day shipping, through a powerful, efficient telecommunications network; the holstered handheld

Telxon that empowers and enslaves the networked CSR with the portable disembodied knowledge of an extensive inventory management system; and the inescapable extended workplace that dispenses with the expense of material logistics in a trade that demands that skilled labor be performed only where such labor can be exhaustively documented, recorded as patterns, and accounted for by timestamps.

Telxon--21st Century Node

On August 23, 2014 SideshowBoob posts the following question on the r/Walmart subreddit, a subforum of the MIC telecommunications World Wide Web social news aggregator

Reddit,

Is it normal to be handed a Telxon with zero training? As a newly minted Sales Ass, I keep getting asked to do things that require a Telxon and given about 30 seconds of instruction about how to do it before being sent off to do it. Is this...normal? Am I asking for trouble if I try to learn it on my own? Was I supposed to get CBLs that covered things other than how not to kill myself with the baler?

As far as I'm concerned the Telxon is a magic wand whose true powers remain a mystery to me, and I'm not sure what to do about that. I want to ask for some real training (on everything, really) but the atmosphere strongly suggests that "associate

169 “Radiorama (Futurama Podcast).” YouTube, uploaded by Nerdist, 13 Sept. 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=778&v=BxF1zjlEU-A. Accessed 26 Oct. 2017. 170 “Y2K bug.” Encyclopedia Britannica, Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., https://www.britannica.com/technology/Y2K-bug. Accessed 31 Oct. 2017. 61

needs training" is synonymous with "associate isn't pulling his weight", plus there are never enough Telxons (or carts, or jacks, or ladders, etc.) as it is.171 As of November 5, 2017 the two following responses, from KeredYojepop and chevysareawesome respectively, are the first to follow SideshowBoob’s post:

KeredYojepop: Your fellow associates are the ones to ask. The hunt for telxons is a shift ritual that we must all endure. If that is the attitude towards wanting to know how to do shit right in your store, that sucks. We get mad when people don't ask. If a new hire isn't asking me questions the first two weeks, I eat them. chevysareawesome: Bless your heart...In all seriousness ask. Please ask. Ask ask ask. When I first started i had no knowledge of how to use a 960, and truthfully, after a while i started asking around for basic things like what are picks and how to bin items, which i taught myself late one shift after everyone was gone.

If you can dream it, the 960 can do it.

[*]Manual Picks *Binning *Inventory Prep *Counts *Price changes *Item Location (even at other stores) *it can look up cross referenced items *It can find modulars *[sic]clearence items *find [sic]Merchendise status *order [sic]frieght *hold freight *build features to stop replenishing an item for a set time period *bulk scanning for multiple upc's *trailer listings

...and these are just the things i've learned it can do since i've been working. I learn something new/wonder if it can be done on a 960 every day. The only thing I wish it could do was display a clock and print multiple labels.172

171 SideshowBoob, “Is it normal to be handed a Telxon with zero training?.” self.Walmart. r/Walmart. Reddit. reddit inc, 23 Aug. 2014, https://www.reddit.com/r/walmart/comments/2edlcl/is_it_normal_to_be_handed_a_telxon_with_ zero/. Accessed 05 Nov. 2017. 172 KeredYojepop, “Re: Is it normal to be handed a Telxon with zero training?.” self.Walmart. r/Walmart. Reddit. reddit inc, 23 Aug. 2014, https://www.reddit.com/r/walmart/comments/2edlcl/is_it_normal_to_be_handed_a_telxon_with_ zero/. Accessed 05 Nov. 2017. chevysareawesome, “Re: Is it normal to be handed a Telxon with 62

SideshowBoob, KeredYojepop, and chevysareawesome are discussing the Telxon, often called the Telxon gun, a handheld scanner that allows the 21st century CSR, known at Walmart as a Sales Associate but referred to by SideshowBoob as a “Sales Ass,” to perform all aspects of his BPR style occupation--the 21st century version of the “powerful PC-based workstations... run[ning] an expert system and connect[ed] to a range of automated systems on a mainframe”

Hammer proposed would give the CSR of BPR the ability to independently perform an expansive scope of functions.173 SideshowBoob expresses concern that he has little understanding of the capabilities of the Telxon and has not received a formal onboarding to familiarize him with the functions available through the machine. Both KeredYojepop and chevysareawesome advise SideshowBoob to connect with his fellow workers to discover capabilities of the tool--explaining that to do his job requires foremost speech acts that facilitate networking. chevysareawesome additionally confirms SideshowBoob’s reverence for the Telxon, referring to it by its model number, 960, and listing the things they have learned to efficiently access through the tool (by exploring it during their leisure hours). When viewed through this conversation/discussion, labor in the 21st century is understood to demand the node network, independently problem solve, and most of all access the tool of the database. Appropriately the only thing a Telxon is proposed to not do is display Mechanization’s panoptical time or function as an output device that generates Mechanization’s tangible infrastructure.

zero training?.” self.Walmart. r/Walmart. Reddit. reddit inc, 23 Aug. 2014, https://www.reddit.com/r/walmart/comments/2edlcl/is_it_normal_to_be_handed_a_telxon_with_ zero/. Accessed 05 Nov. 2017. 173 Hammer, Michael. “Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate.” Harvard Business Review, July-Aug 1990 issue. Harvard Business Publishing, https://hbr.org/1990/07/reengineering-work-dont-automate-obliterate. Accessed 08 Dec. 2015. (5). 63

As a 21st century CSR SideshowBoob will not be offered the security of information-- except in the case of the baler, a cardboard compactor he does receive safety instructions for-- from a hierarchy but rather will be expected to discover knowledge of his obligations and the methods he can apply to complete those obligations by erecting, through his extension, a network and accessing, through the Telxon, a central database. SideshowBoob is, when compared to the rote of Mechanization’s entry level laborer, radically unbound and free to variably perform the paid labor he understands himself to encounter in the manner that he sees fit. There is little limit to the efficiencies he can achieve or the insights he can learn from a Telxon, a networked tool that presents him with direct access into the information of database, supply, and metrics of not only his Walmart but a collective of many Walmarts. But SideshowBoob is also more radically bound than Mechanization’s entry level laborer in a silence he is compelled to fill and a network he is obligated to generate. If he does not ask questions, he will be, as KeredYojepop flippantly types, ‘eaten’ and in such dismissal and estrangement, from his CSR node collective, be set apart from the web of kinship required for life. The networked node of Automation is not the atomized cog of Mechanization, but any liberation he enjoys in a gift of universal subjecthood and variability is given with a mandate of together that demands the active networking of participation, engagement, and collective.

EMR--21st Century Network

As the Futurama of highway and MIC synergy were naturalized through 20th century legislation, BPR’s exhaustive central database and networked node have been similarly legislated in the 21st century. Such a mandate of database and networked node were imposed universally 64 on American medicine through the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.174 As detailed in an article entitled “Federal Mandates for Healthcare: Digital Record Keeping

Requirements for Public and Private Healthcare Providers,” on the University of South Florida’s

Health program pages, designed to illuminate the, “100% online,” Health Informatics Programs the university offers,

All public and private healthcare providers and other eligible professionals (EP) were required to adopt and demonstrate ‘meaningful use’ of electronic medical records (EMR) by January 1, 2014 in order to maintain their existing Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement levels. Since that date, the use of electronic medical and health records has spread worldwide and shown its many benefits to health organizations everywhere.175

Such ‘meaningful use’ is proposed to achieve, the outcomes Hammer presented as the objectives of BPR: accessible and accurate data; an accountable, efficient, and lean workforce that is adaptable within business processes but inexpensive and, in skills, redundant; and a networked customer who is obligated to participate in their own transactions. USF outlines the boons of electronic medical records (EMR) in bullet points:

● Improve quality, safety, efficiency, and reduce health disparities ● Engage patients and family ● Improve care coordination, and population and public health ● Maintain privacy and security of patient health information176

174 “Federal Mandates for Healthcare: Digital Record Keeping Requirements for Public and Private Healthcare Providers.” USF Health, https://www.usfhealthonline.com/resources/healthcare/electronic-medical-records-mandate/. Accessed 17 Sept. 2017. 175 “Federal Mandates for Healthcare: Digital Record Keeping Requirements for Public and Private Healthcare Providers.” USF Health, https://www.usfhealthonline.com/resources/healthcare/electronic-medical-records-mandate/. Accessed 17 Sept. 2017. 176 “Federal Mandates for Healthcare: Digital Record Keeping Requirements for Public and Private Healthcare Providers.” USF Health, https://www.usfhealthonline.com/resources/healthcare/electronic-medical-records-mandate/. Accessed 17 Sept. 2017. 65

USF’s “Federal Mandates for Healthcare: Digital Record Keeping Requirements for Public and

Private Healthcare Providers” encourages its reader, a potential program recruit, by presenting the labor of a BPR mandate as the invention of an exciting new field that awaits the ‘skilled’ expert CSR:

Not surprisingly, the EMR/EHR mandate spurred significant growth in health informatics, an interdisciplinary field of study that merges information technology and healthcare. Healthcare professionals with the skills and knowledge necessary to develop, implement, and manage IT software and applications in a medical environment are already in high demand, and the field is expected to experience continual growth.

In fact, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), which has yet to publish data on health informatics, due to the field’s relative youth, does anticipate a more than 12% rate of growth in employment opportunities for other related positions—including medical records/health information technicians, medical/health managers, computer support specialists, and computer systems managers—in the decade from 2014 to 2024.177

The embrace of Hammer’s BPR in EMR mandates the networking of the node-- there can be no medical professional in 2017 that practices medicine without the network for such a choice, to conceal one’s labor or to make invisible one’s patient, would be unforgivably irresponsible. Like the traffic rules and customs that generated the Futurama of the 20th century motor city, in part, by discovering the rogue pedestrian to be a jaywalker, the network and the networked node of

BPR authors the rogue node: a subject who refuses to explore the Telxon to discover the potential within the database, to speak into the network as either a voice that questions or one that replies, or to accurately enter all data it encounters.178 These are the obligations of 21st century Futurama. And, critically, these mandates forestall the binary gender that western

177 “Federal Mandates for Healthcare: Digital Record Keeping Requirements for Public and Private Healthcare Providers.” USF Health, https://www.usfhealthonline.com/resources/healthcare/electronic-medical-records-mandate/. Accessed 17 Sept. 2017. 178 Norton, Peter D. Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. The MIT Press, 2008. (65-78). 66 modernity’s patriarchy, privilege, and masculinity are built from by denying the mechanics required to facilitate a bifurcated construction of subject.

21st Century, Lost

In Chapter One it was offered that the myth of the lost boy is built from a binary of subject and other, a raced configuration of masculine and feminine, that is a readjustment, a remasculinization, made to an earlier myth of the boy—that is itself a binary pair of rational domestic masculinity and uncoordinated primitive. The desired stable liminality within the myth of the lost boy is generated in an exhaustive estrangement of a female other from the will to endure--the force that was, for New Imperialists, popularly understood to animate Darwin’s

Theory of Evolution--while raced masculinity is simultaneously embraced as the shape of youthful masculinity and neutralized as the source text for the stages of youth development within Recapitulation Theory.179 As Jeffords illustrates in her reading of Vietnam Revisionism, an adjustment to meaning and ideology is often made upon the stability of a core of binary gender: the new is embraced through a mechanism that reaffirms a binary structure of gender to naturalize the unfamiliar in a more enduring familiar—a remasculinization.180

When New Imperialists sought to naturalize the liminality of extended, and perhaps eternal, colonial occupation they did so by contextualizing this new ideology of adventure time in the familiar dogma of binary gender.181 While who men were understood and imagined to be, in truth, had altered quite considerably--masculine ideals of fight, ludic morality, and

179 Deane, Bradley. Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870-1914. Cambridge University Press, 2014. (200-205). Lesko, Nancy. Act Your Age! A Cultural Construction of Adolescence. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2012. (16-40). 180 Jeffords, Susan. The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War. Indiana University Press, 1989. (83-84). 181 Deane, Bradley. Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870-1914. Cambridge University Press, 2014. (4-5). 67 performativity were a significant departure from the previously centered domestic masculinity of internalization, administrative surveillance, and paternal care--the myth of the lost boy appeared superficially to only assert the already familiar difference of gender: as they had always been, men were men and women were women.182 In FTS such remasculinization can be noted in the impact of Fry’s delivery upon Leela.183 While the disjunctive created by the introduction of an archaic myth of the lost boy to New New York gifts Bender the empowerment of a gendered

Gotta Do and the freedom of an adventure time of homosocial partnership--in an archaic mythic masculinity that can be embraced by a male robot--the delivery of Fry simultaneously gifts Leela a female identity that transforms her initial presentation as a competent, if militant, state employee through a reunderstanding her body, emotions, and skills, to that of an alien superwomen most markable in her irrational outbursts of rage, pity, and sexuality. The myth of lost boy while a boon that generates adventure time and homosocial kinship for some, is a boon that generates such a release of liminality, pleasure, and partnership in a mechanism that estranges and otherizes the other half of a gender binary. As Jeffords’s notes, in her reading of

Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, Eighball’s embrace is generated in the paired estrangement of all of the film’s female characters as other; Bender’s embrace as a masculine subject with the agency to remove himself from the assembly line of expectant time and engage in partnerships and adventures of choice is facilitated in the demotion of Leela from a jacketed badged member of

30th/31st century bureaucracy to an undershirt clad pair of breasts.184,185

182 Deane, Bradley. Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870-1914. Cambridge University Press, 2014. (113). 183 “Space Pilot 3000.” Futurama. written by David X. Cohen and Matt Groening, directed by Rich Moore and Gregg Vanzo, 20th Television, 1999. 184 Jeffords, Susan. The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War. Indiana University Press, 1989. (184-185). 68

However, the radical of 20th and 21st century Futurama, built from a configuration of networked node that demands a universal subjecthood generated, and secured, in a composure performance of variability, redundant individuality, and mandated play, is a new that cannot facilitate the mechanics of such a remasculinization. As observable within the mechanics of

Hammer’s BPR and CSR, 20th and 21st century Futurama refuses access to privilege, forestalls silence, and disperses, McLuhan would say extends, both power and person. This extension of man is at once entirely visible, in network data signatures like timestamps and IP addresses, and invisible, in the absence of Mechanization’s controls that have been, in BPR, understood as antiquated and reengineered away. In my earlier the look at SideshowBoob and the Telxon, there is quite notably no hierarchy that tasks SideshowBoob. He is instead, as a CSR, his own manager and, as a 21st century node among network, hired directly into a terminal position that is indistinguishable from all other positions within the network. The better SideshowBoob learns to access the exhaustive central database through his Telxon, the better he will perform his functions, but he cannot in this labor, nor should he, aspire to become indispensable to his store or team because such consequence would destroy the redundancy that stabilizes the network of his 21st century CSR occupation. Like Ford’s receiving clerk, MBL’s reengineered agent, and

Kleinrock’s node SideshowBoob is a fixed point in a network of identical fixed points. Such a

185 In the final scenes of the pilot episode Leela takes the helm of the ship, the only qualified driver, to Captain the trio of fugitives’ escape in the Professor’s rocket ship after dramatically removing the black, badged, uniform jacket she wears. The character’s default presentation for the rest of the series, after this moment, will be a white ‘wife beater’ tank top that clings to shapely, sizable breasts and exposes deep cleavage. A potential reading of this moment might be that while the introduction of Fry allows Leela to discover that she can reject a mandate to Gotta Do, the rejection of that mandate generates a central embrace of her sexuality that is both distracting and problematic. “Space Pilot 3000.” Futurama. written by David X. Cohen and Matt Groening, directed by Rich Moore and Gregg Vanzo, 20th Television, 1999. 69 fixed point, an extended man, is no longer differentiated from any other node and thus cannot be privileged as one half of a gender binary.

As there are no “adversaries” in the network of BPR, only “partners in a shared business process” the privilege of masculinity is fundamentally refused by the mechanics and mandates of network and node.186 There are no men in Futurama, appropriately no ‘a man’ in FTS’s Gotta

Do, not because it is the realization of a Wellsian future in which men are no longer recognizable, but because Futurama, the synergistic 20th century MIC animated world of tomorrow that birthed a telecommunications network from an ideology of networked node, has no encoded gender binary.187 The boon of this lack is the speed, innovation, and “wonderful” of

Futurama, while such an absence is the horrific of a present that efficiently strangles its citizens in a world of countless consumer pleasures that have been bought with the emasculation of the citizen cloaked in the guise of a privilege of association. The “awful” of Futurama is the lack of differentiation between nodes that refuses an embrace, an understanding, of Futurama as a familiar new—Futurama is uncanny not because it is novel, but because it is a departure that foundationally resists the mechanics of remasculinization.

The departure of Futurama is notable not only in the shape of the networked node, but in the shape of the network itself. The adoption of an exhaustive central database and the related network mechanics of infrastructure, like the recent embrace of EMR, scripts an other in the unseen. Within a mandate of EMR medical practitioners who fail to input data are untraceable in labor that fails to be declared in data entry devotions and patients who refuse to report their

186 Hammer, Michael. “Reengineering Work: Don’t Automate, Obliterate.” Harvard Business Review, July-Aug 1990 issue. Harvard Business Publishing, https://hbr.org/1990/07/reengineering-work-dont-automate-obliterate. Accessed 08 Dec. 2015. 187 Deane, Bradley. Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870-1914. Cambridge University Press, 2014. (204-205). 70 symptoms accurately, or who fail to seek medical treatment and thus do not input themselves into the network, are metrics that cannot be accounted for and contagions that cannot be seen.

While a medical practitioner, or a patient, is potentially empowered in such an omission that asserts their ability to refuse to submit to the surveillance of the network, as a jaywalker who refused to recognize a new mandate of traffic flow in the 1920s was similarly empowered, the privilege either exercises both deprives fellow networked nodes from the collective reality of a data set such networked nodes depend on, in fact are critically subordinate to, and generates inaccuracies that render the network so fallible it is not merely unstable but potentially destructive.188

It is fruitful to note here that modernity’s earlier myth of masculinity, domestic masculinity, is essentially a dogma of internalization—gradations of control that abandon the uncoordinated, leaky, and emotional of an expressive primitive to generate hardened men equipped to empirically evaluate data in order to competently administrate an empire of natural world—and thus there is an unfortunate correlation made in the adoption of 21st century mandated network: the other of the network, a silence of undeclared, internalized, and independent, contains within it the form of domestic masculinity’s civilized administrator who leaves his baser habits of speech and emotion behind in his boyhood. As the myth of the lost boy fails to transition into Futurama, domestic masculinity simultaneously becomes the terrorist, the false data, within the network. 189

188 Norton, Peter D. Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. The MIT Press, 2008. (65-78). 189 I use the term terrorist here because it is the term Puar uses to describe the enemy of the 21st century global network. Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke University Press, 2007. (185-187, 204-215). 71

While Salzman, Matathia, and O’Reilly’s The Future of Men proposed that the crisis of

21st century masculinity was a mandate of emotional labor, service worker, and sensitivity that outright rejected masculinity, a closer look at the 21st century through its medium of MIC telecommunications network, as McLuhan’s science of medium facilitates in this chapter, reveals that Salzman, Matathia, and O’Reilly are locating a partial impression of what is better described as a crisis of networked node.190 21st century masculinity cannot remasculinize Futurama, because Futurama not only lacks a binary construction of subject, the node is a universal subject, but Futurama’s network rejects the internalization, historically used by western communities to imagine a linear and progressive model of time, development, and person, that authors masculine privilege in an understanding of superiorly rational, highly internalized, behaviors as an elite skill performable exclusively by, and naturally associated with, adult men. The resolution of such a crisis demands that Futurama discover a myth of masculinity that preserves the status quo of patriarchal privilege among BPR by beholding within such a myth the central ideology, processes, and mechanics of Futurama: the node and the network.

Groening and Cohen’s fictional CSR, Fry, embodies this reengineered lost boy--a radical reunderstanding of masculinity that adapts to Futurama by estranging masculinity from productivity and discovering masculinity to instead be the very together that links productive nodes. As Futurama cannot bear a bifurcated node, masculinity is reunderstood to be not one half of a pair of networked citizens but instead the opposition to a universal subjecthood of networked nodes: the network itself.

Love Finds the Lost Boy

190 Salzman, Marian, Ira Matathia, and Ann O’Reilly. The Future of Men. Palgrave, 2005. (32). 72

While FTS’s Fry, as a slacker caricature who is most often found in the series deep within a couch, does not labor, he does love; and in the motions inspired by his devotion to Leela,

Bender, and the rest of his Planet Express crew family, Fry generates a unity that withstands the fickle of his MIC telecommunications networked reality. FTS has several points of potential closure, as a result of its unconventional configuration across mediums, but two episodes in particular are generally offered as satisfactory points of closure for the series: S4, E18 “The

Devil’s Hands are Idle Playthings,” the final episode of the series that aired on Fox in 2003, and

S7, E26 “Meanwhile,” the final episode of the rebirthed Comedy Central series arc.

In “The Devil’s Hands are Idle Playthings”191 Fry actively attempts to resolve his estrangement from Leela through the development of cultural capital. He attends beginner holophonor192 lessons, lessons noted to be for young children, but finds that he lacks the corporeal skill to realize the disembodied mental talent he holds within him. The ever plucky adventuring duo of Fry and Bender decide that a resolution can be found to Fry’s conundrum in a deal with the devil, the Robot Devil, and Fry signs away his hands for the hands of an unknown robot. As FTS is a land of bewitched Murphy’s Law, the predictable configuration of a “deal with the devil” plot is shifted ever so slightly and the hands Fry acquires are not Bender’s, but the Robot Devil’s. With mechanical hands Fry becomes a famous composer and is commissioned to author a grand opera, for whose subject he embraces the life story of his muse and great love Leela, while in a parallel plot a frustrated Robot Devil constructs an elaborate scheme that will deprive Fry of his new hands. In a second and third deal with the Robot Devil,

Bender’s ass is exchanged for an air horn, and, once deafened by Bender, Leela exchanges “her

191 “The Devil’s Hands are Idle Playthings.” Futurama. written by Bret Haaland, directed by Ken Keeler, 20th Television, 2003. 192 A holophonor is a fictional instrument that creates holographic illustrations and music when played. 73 hand” to the Robot Devil for mechanical ears. As the second act of Fry’s opera begins, the Robot

Devil interrupts to claim Leela’s hand, in marriage, and while caught between the loss of the woman he can only successfully woo with mechanical hands and the loss of those hands, Fry ultimately chooses to free Leela from marriage, even if in exchange he loses the capital to access a partnership with her himself. Returned at the close of the episode to the forever hopeless state he began in—as Fry is in every installment of FTS sentenced to do—Fry sits dispossessed in an empty opera house, but he is rescued by Leela who returns his persistent, though hopeless, interpersonal investment and invites, “Please don’t stop playing, Fry. I want to hear how it ends.”193 Taking up his holophonor, Fry shakily illustrates a roughly drawn Fry and Leela who link hands and, after a kiss, walk together towards the horizon behind them. While Futurama is a world in which the specifications of nodes and network forestalls the heroics and privilege of historic masculinities, the heteronormative embrace that links two nodes is not only permitted but the active state within a MIC telecommunications network. The onus of such a motion of embrace is found to begin in the pedestrian but enduring devotions of a man in love with a woman.

In the series’s current terminal episode194, “Meanwhile,”195 Fry and Leela are similarly centered as a core that must be united with a reliable and realistic closure. The episode features

193 “The Devil’s Hands are Idle Playthings.” Futurama. written by Bret Haaland, directed by Ken Keeler, 20th Television, 2003. 194 I have chosen not to adapt this section of my thesis to account for the podcast episodes of FTS released in September 2017. The undead nature of FTS, while a useful illustration of Automation, is a quality that makes it, and much of the telecommunications media considered by cultural studies scholars who work in 20th and 21st century culture, too slippery to be captured perfectly in the Mechanization of academia. “Radiorama (Futurama Podcast).” YouTube, uploaded by Nerdist, 13 Sept. 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=778&v=BxF1zjlEU-A. Accessed 26Oct. 2017. 195 “Meanwhile.” Futurama. written by Peter Avanzino, directed by Ken Keeler, 20th Television, 2013. 74 the invention, by Professor Farnsworth, of a time jump button that thrusts the user ten seconds into the past. Those inside a time shift insulating structure, a small bubble, are transported back with the user and can witness the revision, while all others are ignorant of the time they have lost and will compulsorily reanimate. The constraint that the time button takes ten seconds after use to recharge, ultimately allowing at best for the creation of a time loop but not functional time travel, is forebodingly added to the time button’s introduction.

Again, the playful pair of Fry and Bender dependably create a central disturbance for the episode’s plot and immediately use the time button to fleece a jeweler while Fry secures an engagement ring. He’s decided to finally propose to Leela and forestall her answer from him in a romantic, 20th century popular culture inspired, incremental process: while he’ll propose, with a ring, at the close of a meal at Elzar’s, he won’t take an answer from Leela until the following evening where, if she accepts, she is to meet him at the top of the Vampire State Building for champagne. Fry intends to use the time button to hold the moment of her acceptance in a literal liminality. However, a Futurama of metered metrics won’t facilitate Fry’s scheme and in a misfortune of logistics, and as a result of his earlier playful time skips at the jeweler's, Fry’s watch is running fast and, when Leela fails to arrive “on time,” he throws himself from the

Vampire State Building roof in despair, at just the right moment to both discover Leela’s near arrival and to fail in a subsequent backwards skip to return to the top of the building. Among panic and pain Fry repeatedly presses the time button, generating a moment of forever with Leela that endlessly repeats a near miss at successful closure. When Professor Farnsworth and the

Planet Express crew arrives to help, the futile mechanizations of the cast to relocate a collective liminality result in an adjustment of the time loop that kills Fry, in one cycle he fails to press the button before reaching the terminal of the ground, and a new cycle is formed in which in 75

initiation Leela presses the button and in termination Fry hits the ground. In the haste of this

revision Professor Farnsworth is unforgivingly ripped to shreds when he exits the time bubble

before the parallel running timelines are rejoined and the anti-chronitons mechanism that

facilitates the time shift cannot find an earlier version of the Professor to return his form to.

Ultimately the horrific cycle is terminated when Fry crushes the time button beneath him

and in a temporal rip all of the globe, beyond Fry and Leela, is frozen in a single moment. And

without, or perhaps beyond, the resistance of the world, time, and needs of narrative, Fry and

Leela are finally free to invest, or spend, a lifetime adventuring together. The pair, and the

series’s devoted audience, are gifted the impression of a closed, linear, and peaceful forever as an

extensive bucket list is incrementally completed and time is marked upon the bodies of the

couple. As the couple approaches the close of their natural lives Professor Farnsworth appears,

he has spent their forever relentlessly tunneling through time, and in minutes assembles from the

broken time button the mechanism of a potential return. As with all FTS episodes the closure of

the episode will erase the narrative of lifetime and lesson that has been entertained, Professor

Farnsworth explains that the press of the time button will restart the world but, in the mechanics

required, Fry and Leela will lose the narrative they have just built together. Fry looks to Leela

and inquires, “Well, what do you say? Wanna go around again?” She returns, taking his hand, “I

do.”196 The couple seal their commitment with a kiss as Professor Farnsworth thrusts the pair, and the universe around them, back into the forever of an adventure time cycle of series.

FTS proposes in the restorative closure built by Fry and Leela’s union that the secret to a bearable Futurama of postwar MIC telecommunications network is the stability of a heteronormative partnership that remains, no matter how time and meaning around it are

196 “Meanwhile.” Futurama. written by Peter Avanzino, directed by Ken Keeler, 20th Television, 2013. 76 radically reunderstood, consistently scripted. Love endures as the threads of a together that the network will not, cannot, terminate. For this together is the connection between nodes that allows for traffic, the reliable and resilient connection nodes are imagined in order to obtain. However,

Fry and Leela’s union is not a singularity but one half of a pair of unions that gives form to an episode of FTS. As the heteronormative bond between Fry and Leela gifts Fry the productive onus of linear narrative, the homosocial partnership between Fry and Bender gifts Fry the playful, harmless, antics of serial adventure time. Similarly, while the peace of closure is found in the heteronormative embrace between Fry and Leela, the stability of a beginning is created in the homosocial home that Fry and Bender share. I find again, in FTS, the conundrum of my cinematic slacker caricatures’ ‘lost couple.’

The Masculine Network

In her look at the post-structural nature of terminology and truths in the first years after

September 11, 2001, Jasbir K. Puar offers that queerness has been reunderstood by a nation invested in a global understanding of space as a within, a homonationalism,197 rather than a beyond of other, while a revised other has been imagined as a diffuse alien.198 Such an embrace of the homonational, gifts the heteronational, historically queer configurations of private and public that endorse a compulsory performativity and an expanded family, while discovering, in the incorporation of the homonational, a new other that opposes the unity of networked global in

197 While heteronationalism is a configuration of imperialist nation that erects a network of corporeal surveillance in order to serve the heterosexual/heteronormative reproduction it centers, homonationalism speaks to the adaptations made to this model in a postindustrial, global, networked collective. In this revised model of globally situated nation, the formerly queered is incorporated into the matrix of meaning that figures a nation and in this newly discovered to be amenable to configurations of empire within a moment of evolving national boundaries and identity. Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke University Press, 2007. (xxii-xxviii). 198 Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke University Press, 2007. (205, 222). 77 prejudicial mechanics of connection.199 Puar is critical of the embrace of the queer through legislation that gifts privileges in exchange for the behaviors and visibility that serves the synergistic nation and cautions that such negotiations strengthen the assumption of a nation’s right to reunderstand citizenship as it best suits the status quo of privilege.200

Many of the shifts Puar notes parallel revisions that McLuhan noted in Automation, and that I, in this thesis, note in a reading of Futurama through a science of medium. Puar’s compulsory performance is McLuhan’s extended man and the form within the networked node of MIC telecommunications. Potentially the queer, the other, is embraced by Futurama’s exhaustive network in the manner that Puar notes because the homonational of historically queer configurations of private and public that endorses a compulsory performativity and an expanded family are behaviors and ideologies that serve to naturalize not only the extension of man but to remasculinize Futurama’s mandates.

The embrace of homosocial kindship in FTS is locatable in the myth of the lost boy proposed by New Imperialists; however, in Fry’s partnered parallel of heteronormative union the lost boy animated by Fry diverges from the exclusively homosocial lost boy of New Imperialist adventure time fictions. As Jeffrey P. Dennis notes, the lost boy before WWII was not “girl- crazy” and avoided the terminal of heteronormative domestic union that would forestall his adventure time narratives.201 Fry’s interest in Leela differentiates the configuration of lost boy within his form from the form of a lost boy 1.0 and proposes a lost boy 2.0 that is an exhaustive font of affection equally bound in kinship, devotion, and network to partners of either gender.

199 Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke University Press, 2007. (1-11). 200 Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke University Press, 2007. (114-165). 201 Dennis, Jeffery P. We Boys Together: Teenagers in Love Before Girl-Craziness. Vanderbilt University Press, 2007. 78

The myth of the lost boy 2.0, a myth of the lost boy that binds to masculinity a dual

partnership by fundamentally associating masculinity not only with heteronormative unions but

homosocial kinship, conveniently exhaustively forbids full personhood from women by rejecting

the reproductive links that bind familial generations as too hierarchical, while estranging women

from the, historically, domestic feminine of interpersonal labor. Similarly, the raced other is read,

through an indelible ethnic identity, associated with a dogmatic familial rejection of homosexual

unions, that is fundamentally too prejudice to facilitate stable connections.202 The universal, democratic bonds of network that indiscriminately join all nodes in network are understood in the myth of the lost boy 2.0 to be inspired by a uniquely male configuration of affection--the lost boy 2.0 embraces the queer--generating what Puar calls the homonational--discovering queerness within the form of masculinity and resultantly proclaiming that only men have the capacity to indiscriminately embrace all.

Privilege in the 21st century is the domain not of the networked node but the network, that retains the value of skill, the ludic of expertise, and variability of choice. The lost boy 2.0 remasculinizes Futurama by inventing a new binary of node and network and, in a discovery of democratic masculine affection, asserting the essential masculine nature of network. 21st century

masculinity is thus discovered to figure a stable network of connection and conductivity that can

be depended upon to facilitate the exhaustive universally known of the network and, in this

essential privilege, 21st century masculinity is excused from any mandate of networked node that

would require submission, subordination, or a shared singular subjecthood. Such masculinity is

an ephemeral patriarchy that gifts the other of networked nodes their personhood in a masculinity

202 Puar, Jasbir K. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke University Press, 2007. (173, 193). 79 that, in order to preserve masculinity among Futurama, divorces masculinity from labor—in

Futurama, slack becomes the signature of masculinity.

In FTS, the remasculinization of Futurama is achieved in the myth of the lost boy 2.0 of

Fry that proposes the nature of masculinity to be a universal, enduring, democratically distributed, thread of affection. In the dual partnership animated by Fry the world of tomorrow is proposed to be a world that remains recognizable—with recognizable masculine privilege— because Fry is not the busy of his Planet Express co-workers but instead the slack of network that facilitates the stability, the connection, of 21st century Futurama. 80

CONCLUSION: TOGETHER

Mythologies fundamentally seek to obscure the mechanics that generate their meaning in

order to confirm, through absence, the easy common sense of a community’s core

habitualizations.203 For C. J. Jung the lost boy, the puer aeternus, is a transitional figure that

assists in the process of individualization by binding the traditional of the past to the novel of the

future.204 While the preceding thesis clearly notes this quality in the fictional lost boy of 20th and

21st century Futurama, Philip J. Fry, Jung’s positive characterization is not the stereotype most popularly associated, in the 20th and 21st century, with the myth of the lost boy. As Jung’s

student, Marie-Louise vonFranz, details in her expansion of Jung’s proposal of the puer

aeternus, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus (1970), the lost boy is a diagnosis associated in

analytical psychology with patients who suffer from an “outstanding mother complex”205 and presents as a failed transition which evades the steady paced stages of expectant time. The puer aeternus fails to perform heteronormative adulthood, to marry and father children, and in this evades his obligation to reproduce nation, to realize his self in the gendered and racialized labor of empire, and instead embraces a “false individualism” in which he understands himself as uniquely beyond his community, beyond the need to commit himself to the work of his individualization and the unity of the greater collective.206 As a result the puer aeternus lives a

“’provisional life’” in which he refuses “to commit [himself] to the moment”, imagines himself a

203 Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. translated by Annette Lavers, Hill and Wang, 1972. (129, 143). 204 Jung, C. G. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. translated by R. F. C. Hull, Princeton University Press, 1969 (1959). (161-175). 205 I seek in noting this diagnosis only to offer that in vonFranz’s scholarship a recognizable mythic lost boy is drawn and a specific prescription is offered as panacea. Von Franz, Marie- Louise. The Problem of the Puer Aeternus. Spring Publications, 1970. (1). 206 vonFranz, Marie-Louise. The Problem of the Puer Aeternus. Spring Publications, 1970. (2). 81

savior whose “time ‘has not yet come’”, and refuses any weight or baggage.207 The puer

aeternus is resolved, cured, with a single tonic--work. He must commit himself and endure the

menial of the boring routine of mechanical labor.208

The diagnostic reading of the puer aeternus I recount is a familiar set of assumptions that is linked to the character, whether a fictional animated caricature or a post-industrial CSR. Lost boys are poor men who are arrested from their narratives, duties, communities, and heterosexuality because they refuse to leave their mother’s basement, accept their masculinity, and leave childhood behind.209 However, this reading of the lost boy fails to truly engage with

the context that generates the myth and thus, while it can propose interpretations, it does so

without genuinely inquiring as to the use of the myth of the lost boy.

In the previous chapters I have aimed to explore the genealogy, shape, and utility of the

myth of the lost boy. In a story of Futurama, FTS, a lost boy, Fry, both reintroduces binary

gender and liminality to a future with an asexual commandment of labor, Gotta Do--rescuing the

citizens of New New York from an assembly line with the fantasy of adventure time--and

proposes a model of masculinity for a 21st century of networked node. While the first of these

gifts is written into the myth of the lost boy, embodied by Fry, by New Imperialists who

remasculinized the mechanics of their late imperialist community by discovering that the modern

myth of the boy could be reimagined an ideal perpetual colonial administrator if held apart from

his development in arrest, the second is a modification to the myth of the lost boy made by those

among a post-industrial America that embraces synergy, overcomes the pace and linear of

207 vonFranz, Marie-Louise. The Problem of the Puer Aeternus. Spring Publications, 1970. (2-3). 208 vonFranz, Marie-Louise. The Problem of the Puer Aeternus. Spring Publications, 1970. (4-5). 209 Register, Woody. The Kid of Coney Island: Fred Thompson and the Rise of American Amusements. Oxford University Press, 2001. (304-321). 82 industrial panoptical time, and reimagines both work and worker as network and node.210 The myth of the lost boy 2.0 presents the lost boy as a democratic lover who links to both men and women with equal intensity. This configuration of masculinity generates a remasculinization that finds a masculinity for the 21st century--not the universal subject of the variable and redundant node, that is offered to all within Automation, but the design, schematics, of Futurama’s network.

The lost boy, far from the apart he might appear to be, is the center of the 21st century--a dispersed web that binds together productive nodes in a unity of nation. A singular binary of father and mother that leaves the problematic mandate of a subjecthood of variable redundancy to the other embracing in the ether of electric signal a new will to endure of legion.

I have aimed in this thesis to reintroduce the lost boy to cultural and critical studies scholarship: to offer, in a collection of his intersections, that the world of boyish masculine slack within the lost boy is a complex dialogue that negotiates the most naturalized of assumptions in order to sustain and propel the truths foundational to identity, performance, race, gender, and labor. This thesis lacks the complexity of an exhaustive examination of the culture of the lost boy, either commercially produced or subculturally crafted, and in this fails to speak to all—both the myth and the practice—that the lost boy encapsulates. However, from the constraints of a smaller project I offer an observation that reframes conventional assumptions of theme and normativity in contemporary lost boy narratives.

Though lost boys like Philip J. Fry may remasculinize a narrative of a tech tomorrow by reaffirming a foundational binary through a reunderstanding of subjecthood within networked

MIC telecommunications, I do not mean to imply that the myth of the lost boy can forestall the

210 Lesko, Nancy. Act Your Age! A Cultural Construction of Adolescence. 2nd ed. Routledge, 2012. (94-105). Deane, Bradley. Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870-1914. Cambridge University Press, 2014. (6-18). 83

wired from users or divorce a greater network built by individuals from those that imagine it. But

I do wish, in my scholarship, to caution against an embrace of the Digital Age as a chapter so far

beyond that it exists out of reach of the mechanics, histories, and negotiations that both

composed a truth for those who imagined it and continue to inform those who refine and direct

its continued development. Networked computing remains, no matter how “wonderful or awful,”

a medium with a knowable nature that impacts the messages and speech encoded within it; and

the adjustments made to configurations of subject and labor in order to facilitate networked

computing are not beyond structural negotiations and shortcomings.211 The myth of the lost boy, as deployed upon MIC telecommunications in FTS’s Fry by Groening and Cohen, is both an irreverent adventure time of “wonderful” and a macabre Automation of “awful” that discovers in the network of the networked node the opportunity to reunderstand the status quo of patriarchal privilege a future of node based citizenship threatens.212 I find this proposal in the structural truths of 21st century networked life and propose, in the use of McLuhan’s science of medium I demonstrate, the potential of an exploration of telecommunications engineering and network theory as text.

211 Baker, Chris. “Futurama is Back! Grab a Can of Slurm and Settle In.” Wired, 27 Nov. 2007, https://www.wired.com/2007/11/ff-futurama/. Accessed 17 Sept. 2017. (para. 3). Norton, Peter D. Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City. The MIT Press, 2008. (255-262). 212 Baker, Chris. “Futurama is Back! Grab a Can of Slurm and Settle In.” Wired, 27 Nov. 2007, https://www.wired.com/2007/11/ff-futurama/. Accessed 17 Sept. 2017. (para. 3). 84

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