American Gadgets: Cybernetics, Consumer Electronics, and Twentieth-Century Us Fiction

AMERICAN GADGETS: CYBERNETICS, CONSUMER ELECTRONICS, AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY US FICTION BY MICHAEL SIMEONE DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2011 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Robert Markley, Chair Professor Cary Nelson Associate Professor Spencer Schaffner Assistant Professor Anustup Basu Professor Laura Mandell, Miami University of Ohio ABSTRACT Challenging the argument that liberal humanism faces extinction in the face of ubiquitous digital technologies, my dissertation analyzes the ways in which consumer electronics reinscribe the human subject as a privileged category in the information age. Through spaces like the Matrix, Windows 7, or even the single row of play controls on a cassette deck, gadgets preserve the concept of human autonomy by yoking personal entertainment with technical knowledge, agency, citizenship, and individuality. In American postwar fiction and film, gadgets serve powerful functions that allow authors such as Thomas Pynchon, William S. Burroughs, Neal Stephenson, Pat Cadigan, and Richard Powers to explore the complexities of humankind’s responses to technological and digital innovation. ii For Christopher and Shayna iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This project is indebted to the care and support of my colleagues and family. Many thanks to my adviser, Robert Markley, who helped me translate my grunts and gestures into readable prose and was always at the ready as a collaborator and friend. Also, thanks to Spencer Schaffner for so many conversations laced with wisdom and ease and to Anustup Basu for his generous encouragement. Thanks to Cary Nelson for his invaluable lessons. And thanks most of all to my colleague, friend, and brother Christopher Simeone, without whose inspiration this project would not be possible. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS: Blackberry One: Introducing American Gadgets.........................................................................1 Chapter 1: “Plasticity’s Central Canon:” Gadgets, Science Fiction, and the Wonders of Techno Magic…………………………………………....24 Chapter 2: Recording Literature: Recording, Replication, and the Cybernetic Dialectic………………………………………………………..72 Chapter 3: Cyberpunk Without Cyborgs: Style and Gadgets in the Early Fiction of Gibson and Stephenson………………………………………..109 Chapter 4: Electronics and Cognition: Gadgets as Cinematic Form ……………………………………………………………………………………..153 Conclusion: “I am Iron Man”.……………………………………………………………………..189 Notes…………………………………………………………………………………………………194 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………………205 v BLACKBERRY ONE: INTRODUCING AMERICAN GADGETS In January of 2009, President Barack Obama’s Blackberry addiction went public. Featured in the New York Times, Obama’s Blackberry had been the focus of a heated battle between the President and his advisors. At stake: Obama’s ability to keep a personal Blackberry device for the purposes of contacting senior aides and close friends. The Times revealed that so intimate was Obama’s connection with his mobile device, he worried, “They’re going to pry it out of my hands”(qtd in Times http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/23/us/politics/23berry.html). But what Obama fights for so stubbornly is more than just a piece of hardware, and his bond with the pocket- sized device is not idiosyncratic. His Blackberry extends his personal space into a virtual space demarcated within electronic communication, one that extends beyond his office as President and articulates his sense of self to a social and professional milieu that remains navigable through his handheld device. And truly, this is what broader US popular culture embraces about handheld electronic devices: the ability to reposition the self as the primary mode through which to interact with a complex social, informatic, and media ecology. Obama’s Blackberry is a means through which he can identify as “himself” and not the national office of President of the United States. It parses a subset of personal choices, contacts, and information as privately his. “Blackberry One” is not a just personal collection of phone numbers, emails, and text messages; it’s a private portal that facilitates Obama’s activity as an individuated subject in a digital age. While the rhetoric of the Times article characterized Obama’s relationship with his Blackberry as “obsessive,” Obama’s pronounced sense of ownership is more 1 pervasive in 2009 and at the time of this writing than the language of obsession suggests. What Obama fought to keep is no different than what so many consumers seek out and purchase every day. Despite the recession in the U.S., consumers purchased 172 billion dollars’ worth of consumer electronics in 2008, a five percent increase from 2007.1 Since its 2007 debut, revenue from the iPhone has increased by 3,400 percent,2 and the debut of the iPhone 4 produced a crush at the gates of retailers that resulted in suspended pre- orders and inventories backordered for weeks.3 Of the world population of 6.7 billion, over 4 billion of them are cell phone service subscribers.4 Consumers electronics are everywhere in the United States. And just as in the case of President Obama, these electronics are most certainly personal. Large flat-screen televisions can serve as the centerpiece of a meticulously curated living space, access the Internet, and connect to local digital storage loaded with custom content. Portable music players from the manufacturers such as Samsung, Creative, and Apple make or break morning walks, afternoon workouts, or a commute on the bus or metro. The device on the nightstand that serves as an alarm clock is also a telephone. Telephones are carried in pockets and backpacks, and often share space with personal music players, cameras, and Global Positional Satellite systems (GPS). Sometimes they are all in the same device, packaged within a single portable computer with wireless access to the internet. And sometimes is rapidly changing into all the time. What used to be fixed installations in the home—telephone, radio/stereo, personal computer—now comes in portable, pocket-sized varieties. So attached are users to their personal electronics that legislation is becoming increasingly necessary to regulate talk, texting, and mobile web use for drivers, whose 2 level of distraction while at the wheel surpasses that of drunk drivers.5 In the first 80 days of sales in 2010, the Apple sold over 3,000,000 iPads.6 The present technocultural moment is the culmination of a decades-long consumer love affair with personal electronic technologies. But by what specific mechanisms and to what consequence has this moment arrived? Amidst a boom of personal electronics as well as myriad claims that these technologies are helpful, fun, and even necessary for living in the United States as it undergoes widespread economic decline, this project examines personal electronics as something more than a class of consumer technologies that are the provenance of corporate economics, histories of technology, and communications. More than hardware, personal electronics are a key part of the postwar American imagination of technology, personhood, and prosperity. Electronics delight users even if they have no idea how any given device actually works. Though they rapidly become obsolete, they are exciting in their embodiment of a present future. As individual devices they are impressive, but connected to other devices like them, they comprise entire social worlds. They demand from their users as much imagination and suspension of disbelief as any film, novel, or play. Personal electronics grow from the foundational object of this study: the imaginative trope of “American gadgets.” Not merely material, these gadgets are a cultural configuration of electronic technologies, information, imaginative conventions, and theories of human/technology interaction. They are not mere ideological formations; gadgets are both the logic and artifacts through which much of twentieth-and twenty-first American technoculture has built its consumer citizens. 3 By “American gadget,” I mean to set apart a special term for personal electronic database technologies as objects for literary and cultural analysis in US contexts. Gadgets are an influential human/technology configuration through which so many Americans understand and construct their identity, social space, and personal history. American gadgets empower and individuate, extending traditional American attitudes about the synergy of democracy and technological progress against a backdrop of U.S. economic decline. In contemporary vernacular, gadget is a broad term that could designate anything from a small mechanical or electronic novelty to the small desktop programs that run on the Windows Vista operating system.7 It is not my aim to discuss which electronics or proto-electronic technologies are or are not gadgets, rather, I formulate a principle of inclusion through which we may begin to understand better American gadget technoculture. The designated form of gadget studied by this project possesses qualities that obtain across a wide variety of imagined and physical systems, for my attempts to define American gadgets approach a theory about imagination, technology, and subjectivity than merely a taxonomy of electronic devices. They are an imagined order among subjects and technology, information and networks. First, gadgets receive and play back signals transmitted from a specific network

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