Resisting Biometrics/Evolving Cyberebonics
In my 2003 project ‘Robot Bodies’, I argue for the existence of a metaphorical paralleling between the perception of the ‘robot’, the machine subject, within science fiction, and ongoing social perceptions around the racial ‘Other’. In the related essay ‘Notes on the Mechanoid’s Bloodline: Looking at Robots, Androids, and Cyborgs’ (6) , I point to the derivation of the term ‘Robot’, with it’s roots in the Czech term for ‘servitude’ a well as the first use of the term within Karel Capek’s 1920 play ‘Rossum’s Universal Robots’. Within this play, the Robots make up a slave class who rise up to overthrow their human overseers. Within this, a literary pattern was established within which the robot becomes invariably either the loyal servant or the marauding monster, but within all cases, it remains incontrovertibly ‘other’.
It could be argued that the computer… as either the ‘brain’ of the robot, or the disembodied robot, shares that same status as ‘other’, alternating between helpful and compliant servant or all pervasive threat, stealing jobs, youth full innocence and control of our environment. Our progressive cycle social panic’s around the corrupting internet, the Y2K bug and the terrifyingly imagined omnipresent computer HAL in the Stanley Kubrick classic film ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (1968) make evident our ambivalent relationship with the computer.
Therefore, if the computer, like the robot can be seen as occupying a metaphorical space as ‘other’, then the inter-language which we develop to speak directly to the computer becomes even more a parallel of ‘patois’ or ‘pidgin’.