Mondo Nano: Fun and Games in the World of Digital Matter 9780822376330

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Mondo Nano

E X P E R I M E N TA L F U T U R E S: T E C H N O L O G I C A L L I V E S , SC IEN T IF IC A RT S, A N T HROP OLO GIC A L VOIC ES

A series edited by Michael M. J. Fischer and Joseph Dumit

MONDO NANO Fun and Games in the World of Digital Matter

COL IN MILBURN

D U K E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S // D U R H A M A N D L O N D O N // 2 0 1 5

© 2015 Duke University Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-​­in-​­Publication

All rights reserved

Data

Printed in the United States of

Milburn, Colin, 1975–

America on acid-​­free paper ∞ Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Chaparral and Verdana by BW&A Books, Inc.

Mondo nano : fun and games in the world of digital matter / Colin Milburn. pages cm — (Experimental futures) Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn 978-0-8223-5729-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-8223-5743-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Cover art: (top) Two avatars explore a cell on Genome Island in Second Life, developed by Mary Anne Clark. Image © Colin Milburn.

isbn 978-0-8223-7633-0 (e-book) 1. Games and technology. 2. Nanotechnology—Social aspects. 3. Games—Social aspects. I. Title.  II. Series: Experimental futures.

(bottom) Assembling a nanocar in

GV1201.34.M55 2015  794.8—dc23

NanoQuest, developed by Discover

2014031332

Science & Engineering/crann. Image courtesy of crann.

Contents

0000_Press Start//0001_Just for Fun//0010_Digital Matters/ /0011_Tempest in a Teapot//0100_Massively Multi­p layer Laboratories//0101_Weapons- ​­ G rade Car toons//0110_ Have

Nano­s uit—​­ W ill

Travel//0111_ Nano­p olitanism//

1000_My Little Avatar//1001_Game Over—​­ Play Again?// Acknowledgments//Notes//Bibliography//Index//

0000 Press Start

It’s fun to play with atoms. At least, this is the message of a short film called A Boy and His Atom, created in 2013 by a team of scientists at the ibm Almaden Research Center in California. Working together with professional animators and designers, the scientists used the tools and techniques of nano­­­tech­nol­ogy to produce a motion picture at the atomic scale. Lauded by Guinness World Records as “The World’s Smallest Stop-​­Motion Film,” A Boy and His Atom represents the frame-​­by-​­frame animation of individual carbon monoxide molecules. With the help of their scanning tunneling microscopes, the scientists maneuvered these molecules into discrete, pointillistic images on a copper surface. The images were then assembled in sequence to tell a story—​­a little bit of fiction made from little bits of matter. It is a simple tale, minimalist and monochromatic, about an atom that breaks away from a larger stripe of material. The atom sets off on a journey. Bounding along, it encounters a young boy. The boy and the atom share an instant bond and become fast friends. They dance together, mimicking each other’s movements (fig. 0.1). The boy tosses the atom in the air and bounces it against a wall. The atom suddenly flattens on the ground, becoming a trampoline. The boy, surprised, gingerly probes the trampoline with his heel. Discovering its resilience, he begins to bounce on the flattened atom with glee. The atom then reverts to its original form, resting in the boy’s hand for a moment before shooting into the sky, soaring beyond the clouds. It bursts apart, an explosion of particles that briefly coalesce into the word “Think” (the ibm corporate motto) before morphing into the ibm logo itself.

0.1. A Boy and His Atom. ibm Corporation, 2013. The film features microscopic images created by Andreas Heinrich, Christopher Lutz, Ileana Rau, and Susanne Baumann at the ibm Almaden Research Center. It was directed by Nico Casa­ vecchia of 1stAveMachine, developed in collaboration with the Ogilvy and Mather advertising agency and the Punga.tv animation studio.

While the narrative is quite spare, it burgeons with meaning. For the film presents an allegory of technoscientific innovation, depicting the manipulation of atoms as a childlike process of speculation and play, fun and games. The boy, testing the capacities of the atom, discovers its malleability and its potential to take on new forms. The tiny mote is remade into a variety of toys: a ball, a trampoline, even something like a model rocket. Playing with the atom affords inspiration, an uplifting surge of wonder and delight; as the atom flies into the heavens, it is as if the boy’s imagination itself were floating toward new realms of possibility. The sky’s the limit, it seems—​­or just the beginning. According to Christopher Lutz, one of the researchers who worked on the film, galvanizing the imagination in this manner is crucial for the development of new technologies: “We can’t know in detail what those future technologies will be. But we can lay the scientific groundwork for them. And we can spur our own imaginations, and get a head start in exploring these new worlds.”1 If we detect a note of science fiction here, it is no mistake. At the same time as they were making A Boy and His Atom, the ibm scientists also made another short movie out of atoms: a fleeting animation of the Star Trek logo. They also made a set of atomic images 2  0000

inspired by other Star Trek icons, namely, the starship Enterprise and the Vulcan “live long and prosper” salute. These images were designed to tie in with the release of the film Star Trek: Into Darkness, and they featured in the official smartphone app for the movie. Andreas Heinrich, the principal investigator for these creative exercises in scanning probe microscopy, among other experimental programs at ibm Almaden, has suggested some parallels between the crew of the Enterprise and his own research team: “Their claim to fame is that they’re dealing with the final frontier, with space. What we’re doing is dealing with the final frontier of engineering. The finest thing you’ll ever deal with in engineering is atoms. There’s nothing beyond that point. . . . So, we’re dealing with the final frontier of small, and they’re dealing with the final frontier of large.”2 A sense of scientific adventure and enjoyment certainly comes to light in the images and animations, which the ibm research division calls “science fiction at the atomic level.”3 Nico Casavecchia, the director of A Boy and His Atom, has likewise described the atmosphere of playful speculation that surrounded the film’s production: “It was hardcore, the nerdiest project I’ve ever participated in.”4 To be sure, a nerdy and playful attitude materializes even in the aesthetic dimensions of the film, its visual design and soundtrack, which rehearse the storytelling traditions of early video games. As Casavecchia explains, “We had to create a film using no more than 5,000 movements of single atoms, which was a huge limitation for the character design. . . . Once we knew the rules of the game we started thinking about stories that could be told within those boundaries. . . . Our objective was to tell something using such small amount of pixels and a single color. This led us to research 8bits video games from the 80s, that told amazing stories with such limited resources, like a space battle with only a small amount of pixels.”5 Making the film was itself something of a game, it seems, turning material constraints into features and improvising within the established rules, the parameters of the scientific instruments, and the available time frame. The scientists and the artists had to learn these “rules of the game” together, guided by the representational conventions of computer games. The pixelated narrative of the film actually makes a couple of references to such conventions. For example, the sound effects that accentuate the bouncing of the atom, as well as the image of the boy lobbing the atom against the edge of the video frame, charmingly recall the arcade game Pong and its brethren. P R E S S S T A R T 3

The film is an invitation, an alluring spectacle aimed at recruiting young people into the exciting fields of molecular science and innovation. As Heinrich has said, “If I can do this by making a movie and I can get a thousand kids to join science rather than go into law school, I’d be super happy.”6 ibm also promoted the film in conjunction with a series of public outreach events and educational workshops: a coordinated effort to inspire children all over the world to see themselves, their future selves, in this adorable fable of pleasure, friendship, and hope at the bottom of materiality. It is an advertisement for the advancement of nano­­tech­nol­ogy that also highlights specific feats of ibm research. The climactic, atomistic image of the ibm logo, for instance, recollects the significant role that ibm has played in the history of nano­­tech­nol­ogy, and probe microscopy in particular. The scanning tunneling microscope, or stm , was actually invented by Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer in 1981 at the ibm Zurich Research Laboratory—​­an achievement for which they received the Nobel Prize. But this particulate logo more specifically alludes to the experiment that Don Eigler and Erhard Schweizer performed in 1989 at ibm Almaden, using an stm to write the letters “ibm” with xenon atoms—​­demonstrating a new technical ability to control the positions of individual atoms. Even the fun-​ l­ oving boy evokes the legacy of such experiments at ibm , for he looks to be a descendant of the “molecular man” created by Peter Zeppenfeld and Don Eigler in 1991, using the same techniques (fig. 0.2). Symbolically incorporating this longer history of nano­­tech­nol­ogy, the stop-​­motion movie implies that it has all been heading toward a future of extreme computation and digital technologies refined to infinitesimal proportions. At the beginning of the story, the wayward atom separates from a stripe of material, which represents the twelve-​­atom magnetic memory bit created by Heinrich and his colleagues in 2011—​­the smallest magnetic storage device ever made. The filmic narrative begins, then, by rendering visible the experimental limits of digital media—​­or what would appear to be the limits right now, anyway.7 As the prefatory sequence of the film explains, “At ibm Research, we move atoms to explore the limits of data storage. To explore the limits of filmmaking, we created the world’s smallest movie. It was made by moving actual atoms, frame by frame.” The film indexes a scientific drive toward the final frontier of computation and data storage, information technologies reduced to the atomic scale. Heinrich has also emphasized this theme: 4  0000

0.2. Carbon Monoxide Man (a.k.a. “Molecular Man”). Peter Zeppenfeld and Don Eigler, 1991. Zeppenfeld used an stm to arrange carbon monoxide molecules on a platinum surface—​­apparently just for fun: “[Zeppenfeld] was known to go through playful moods, leaving behind a series of images in the lab notebooks, none of which were serious in nature” (Eigler, “Atomilism”). Nevertheless, this experiment was published in a peer-​­reviewed technical journal as serious science: “The results presented above [e.g. ‘molecular man’ and others] demonstrate that molecules and even metal atoms can be positioned and arranged into rudimentary structures of our own design” (Zeppenfeld, Lutz, and Eigler, “Manipulating Atoms and Molecules with a Scanning Tunneling Microscope,” 133). Image originally created by ibm Corporation.

“As data creation and consumption continue to get bigger, data storage needs to get smaller, all the way down to the atomic level. We’re applying the same techniques used to come up with new computing architectures and alternative ways to store data to making this movie.”8 Bodying forth these techniques, the film turns out to address the society of ubiquitous computing, the desire for more and more information—in other words, the digitization of everything. As the adventurous atom dislocates itself from the magnetic memory bit, eventually springing into the boy’s hand, it signals the potential of nano­­tech­nol­ogy to put all data and all knowledge right at our fingertips. Or as Heinrich puts it, “You could carry around not P R E S S S T A R T 5

just, you know, two movies on your iPhone or something, you could carry around any movie that was ever produced, basically.”9 A Boy and His Atom depicts the convergence of the molecular sciences with information technologies, staged as high-​­tech entertainment. It figures technical research at the nano­­scale—​­the domain of individual atoms and molecules—​­as a form of play. It suggests that having a good time with the fundamental building blocks of matter opens up strange and wonderful new vistas of technoscientific possibility. And yet it is not merely propaganda, for it more or less captures the extent to which the research methods of nano­­tech­nol­ogy and related fields are actually blending with the practices and dispositions of gaming, the fictions and fantasies of digital culture. Indeed, that’s what this book is all about. I would like to take you on a fantastic voyage: an exploration of the border zone between laboratory experiments and electronic narratives, cutting-​­edge innovations and recreational pleasures. Together we will discover a new world emerging at the intersection of the molecular sciences and popular media, a wild and wacky world shaped by the playful speculations of scientists, geeks, and gamers. Welcome to mondo nano. Tracing the metaphor of “digital matter” that characterizes the most radical promises of nano­­tech­nol­ogy, we will venture into a number of places where the dream of a completely programmable world is already being made into a lived experience, an everyday reality. Our journey will take us all over the planet, hopping between university labs, startup companies, military institutions, and massively multiplayer online games. This book is about the research agendas, experimental systems, and laboratory instruments of the molecular sciences that are changing in relation to games and other forms of imaginative play. It is also about the ways in which games and cultural fictions of all kinds have taken on new representational concerns in response to high-​­tech research at the nano­­scale. Altogether, it offers a seriocomical account of the deep entanglements of science and innovation in the media ecologies of globalization. It’s science studies meets media studies—​­all in good fun. So let’s have some fun. Whenever you are ready, just press the start button.

6  0000

0001 Just for Fun

Strange as it may seem, the basic idea of nano­­tech­nol­ogy—​­precision control of the structure of matter—​­was not always considered such a serious proposition. From our current vantage, in the midst of a worldwide explosion of scientific, economic, and political investments in the molecular sciences, surrounded by a ponderous discourse of technological convergence at the atomic scale, we are apt to forget that nano­­tech­nol­ogy was borne forth in laughter. It is often said that the Nobel Prize–​­winning physicist Richard Feynman conceived the entire field of nano­­tech­nol­ogy in 1959, in a lecture called “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” Feynman’s role in kick-​ ­starting nano­­tech­nol­ogy is more mythical than actual, more an issue of retrospective attribution and homage to his genius than an authentic genealogical origin. In some ways, his talk simply extrapolated a set of ideas that had already been circulating in the field of materials science—​ t­ o say nothing of science fiction.1 But the vision Feynman presented in this lecture, delivered as an after-​­dinner entertainment for the American Physical Society at Caltech, sounded quite unprecedented to many of his colleagues. A number of them thought that Feynman’s scheme to manipulate matter at the scale of individual atoms and molecules, building tiny machines from the bottom up, was quite weird. Some considered it downright silly. Of course, Feynman was known to be a practical joker. He was prone to saying inappropriate things at inopportune moments. He emphasized this notorious habit in the title of his memoir, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman”: Adventures of a Curious Character. So his provocative suggestion in 1959 that, at some point in the future, we

might casually fiddle around with molecules and build infinitesimal devices seemed yet one more instance of his offbeat sense of humor. One physicist who attended Feynman’s talk that night said, “There was lots of laughter, as there would have to be. . . . The audience wasn’t taking this seriously. They thought it was a big put-​­on joke.”2 Feynman did not, after all, present the concept of molecular manufacturing with much gravitas. He did say that the ability to “arrange the atoms one by one the way we want them” could have significant scientific and economic implications. But he conceded that, even were it to prove technically feasible, the whole thing would likely turn out to be really useless. So the best reason to pursue it might simply be for the fun of it all: “Now, you might say, ‘Who should do this and why should they do it?’ Well, I pointed out a few of the economic applications, but I know that the reason that you would do it might be just for fun. But have some fun!”3 What practical use could there be for infinitesimal machines, anyway? Feynman raised the possibility of building a molecular car: Consider any machine—​­for example, an automobile—​­and ask about the problems of making an infinitesimal machine like it. Suppose, in the particular design of the automobile, we need a certain precision of the parts; we need an accuracy, let’s suppose, of 4/10,000 of an inch. If things are more inaccurate than that in the shape of the cylinder and so on, it isn’t going to work very well. If I make the thing too small, I have to worry about the size of the atoms. . . . Obviously, if you redesign the car so that it would work with a much larger tolerance, which is not at all impossible, then you could make a much smaller device. . . . What would be the utility of such machines? Who knows? Of course, a small automobile would only be useful for the mites to drive around in, and I suppose our Christian interests don’t go that far.4 Feynman’s vision for the future dissolves into irony, foreseeing whimsy as a core motivation for any further research on molecular machines. As late as 1983, when he returned to these ideas in another lecture called “Infinitesimal Machinery,” he still maintained that nano­­scale engineering would never be more than a recreational diversion, a scientific game: “Any attempt to make out that this is anything but a game—​­well, let’s leave it the way it is. . . . I told you there’s going to be lots of laughter, but just for fun, I’ll suggest how to do it—​­it’s very easy.”5 In the decades that followed, as other scientists began to champion 8  0001

the idea of molecular machines and related topics, the intense hype characteristic of nano­­tech­nol­ogy as we know it began to take off. During the 1980s and 1990s, Feynman’s sense that nano­­scale technologies would exist simply for pleasure, entertainment, or “just for fun” faded into the background. Nano­­tech­nol­ogy took on an aura of destiny, solemnity, and cataclysmic potential. Summing up the conventional wisdom that had practically become dogma by 2005, one technology analyst gravely asserted, “Nano­­tech­nol­ogy will change everything.”6 The promissory rhetoric and the rise of “nano” as a signifier of radical futurity resulted from a peculiar mixture of science, politics, and speculative fiction in the history of the molecular sciences.7 In particular, much of the prevailing attitude that nano­­tech­nol­ogy will “change everything” can be traced to the early efforts of Eric Drexler and the Foresight Institute to promote research in molecular engineering and to build a multidisciplinary community invested in a common sense of things to come. Launched in 1986 by Drexler and Christine Peterson—​­then husband and wife—​­the Foresight Institute was a premier space in the 1980s and 1990s for speculating on the future of nano­­tech­nol­ogy and debating foreseeable consequences of the ability to manipulate and control matter at the atomic scale. Even at that time, many scientists and policy makers were hotly divided over Drexler’s agenda to apply mechanical engineering principles to the project of redesigning matter from the bottom up. Nevertheless, there quickly emerged a consensus that the evolution of nano­­tech­nol­ogy was inevitable, and that it would trigger a technocultural revolution of tremendous scope—​­that it would change the world as we know it. In 1999, the U.S. National Science and Technology Council captured the anticipated impact of nano­­tech­nol­ogy with the famous slogan “Shaping the World Atom by Atom.”8 Yet along with all the assurances that nano­­tech­nol­ogy would transform the world, shift the paradigms, and ignite the economy, was there not still something a little silly going on? Something, shall we say, a little ludicrous? If the meanings of the Latin word ludus include play and sport, as well as training and elementary school, surely there is some ludic impulse in the tendency to make the most elementary acts of atomic manipulation into signs of revolution. I mean . . . right? For example, the information-​­processing abilities of the nano-​­abacus created by James Gimzewski and his colleagues at ibm ’s Zurich Research Laboratory in 1996 were quite limited (fig.  1.1). But this limitation did J U S T F O R F U N  9

1.1. Nano-​­abacus. James Gimzewski, Teresa Cuberes, and Reto Schlittler, 1996. Image originally created by ibm Corporation.

not prevent exuberant extrapolations on the fallout of the nano-​­abacus.9 Some alleged that molecular computing would become commonplace, material reality would become programmable, matter would become digital. Gimzewski said, “There is no reason why technologies which work with picometre precision couldn’t be produced. . . . This would enable us to do data processing with molecules.” We could program them, assemble them: “The long-​­term objective is to manipulate molecules on an individual basis, to learn about fabricating devices and machines where every atom is in the right place. . . . The debate is not on feasibility, but how and when we can engineer and mass-​­produce on this scale.”10 Gimzewski suggested that the nano-​­abacus and related experiments were simply forerunners, the vanguard, of more awesome things to come: But if you made a trillion [programmable nano­­scale engines], you could do all kinds of things: Drop them on a field and they could plow it or aerate the soil. . . . Then strange ideas like miniature medical submarines going through the human body and fixing problems are maybe not so ridiculous after all. You could use chemicals in the body to operate the motor and control which way the sub turns. . . . I dream of the day when technology is invisible and people can communicate with each other over distances without mobile phones and so on. I think that would change our society very much.11 Not so ridiculous after all—​­not so funny, it seems, these dreams. So please, stop smiling. Just look here: the tech analysts Alicia Neumann and Kristina Blachere, considering the nano-​­abacus alongside several other 10  0001

iconic nano­­scale experiments from the 1990s, reported that such feats of technical virtuosity already reveal how nano will change the world: By the next turn of the century, we may have submicroscopic, self-​ r­ eplicating robots; machine people; the end of disease; even immortality. . . . In fact, scientists claim that even within the next 50 years, this new technology will change the world in ways we can barely begin to imagine today. Just as computers break down data into its most basic form—​­1s and 0s—​­nano­­tech­nol­ogy deals with matter in its most elemental form: atoms and molecules. With a computer, once data is broken down and organized into combinations of 1s and 0s, it can be easily reproduced and distributed. With matter, the basic building blocks are atoms and the combinations of atoms that make up molecules. Nano­­tech­nol­ogy lets you manipulate those atoms and molecules, making it possible to manufacture, replicate, and distribute any substance known to humans as easily and cheaply as you can replicate data on a computer.12 Jump-​­cutting from the primitive nano-​­abacus to “a future we can barely begin to imagine today,” a fictive world where atoms are indistinguishable from bits, computational 1s and 0s, the discourse of the new molecular sciences plays the old game of speculation. It is a serious game, for sure: we now live in a world of speculation, caught up in the risks and gambits of the pervasive futures market. But as the science fiction writer Hal Clement famously noted, even the most rigorous extrapolation of scientific futurity means “treating the whole thing as a game.”13 The computer scientist Marc Pesce, perhaps best known for his invention of the Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML), went further in descrying a futuristic world of digital matter in the rudimentary activities of today’s nano­science: For some years, researchers have been designing their own arrangements for atoms, drafts of simple mechanical structures. . . . From these basic mechanics, an immense array of machines can be built, including entire computers smaller than the smallest cell within a human body, computers that run a million times faster than those of the year 2000, communicate with the outside world, and can be programmed to build absolutely anything. Including other tiny computers. J U S T F O R F U N  11

Just as the creative world of children has become manipulable, programmable, and mutable, the entire fabric of the material world seems poised on the edge of a similar transformation. . . . Our relationship to the world of information is changing, because the hard-​­and-​­fast definitions of world and information have begun to collide, and the boundaries between them—​­which separate reality from imagination and idea from realization—​­have become ever more tenuous. In the era our children will inhabit, the world is information, and like information it can be stored, retrieved, processed, and portrayed in an endless abundance.14 Pesce employs a vocabulary of fun to describe the coming future, what he calls the “playful world,” where tinkering with computational processes at the scale of atoms and molecules will lead to a new programmable reality. Childlike creativity will resolve what we might do with everything around us, for good or ill. Soon, according to Pesce, we will all toy with the “basic building blocks of matter.” Ludicrous, indeed. Like other scientific fields in the era of postmodernity, shaped by the cultural logic of late capitalism, nano­­tech­nol­ogy has been driven by hype and promise, by speculative finance as much as speculative fiction.15 But isn’t the whole business of seeing the future in the nano­­scale—​­a way of seeing that I have called nano­vision—​­literally preposterous? Several levelheaded critics have certainly thought so. When Steve Forbes launched the Nano­tech Report with Josh Wolfe in 2003, asserting that “I know with absolute certainty that nano­­tech­nol­ogy will change the world in ways it is still difficult to imagine,” a top financial media company proclaimed the whole thing a “cockamamie idea”: “These claims [about nano­­tech­nol­ogy] raise a number of questions—​­chief among them, how long have people at Forbes been dropping acid? . . . We may not have learned much from the dot-​­com bubble, but we have learned that if someone promises that a new technology will cure cancer, improve homeland security, shrink a library to the size of a sugar cube and clean your toilet, the whole thing is probably a scam.”16 So isn’t all the speculation we see today about the colossal impacts of nano­­tech­nol­ogy—​­apparently taken with deadly seriousness—​­just a kind of confidence game, a willful suspension of disbelief, a wager on the utopian dreams of a few oddballs? Well . . . let’s play along for the moment. Because sometimes the most serious work can be done only by goofing around. And sometimes the most hilarious jokes provide the only way of intuiting certain potentialities 12  0001

already at work in the world. Sometimes being silly—​­taking the risk of being a laughingstock—​­is the only way to glean the dimensions of material and historical change that would otherwise remain unknowable and unspeakable. Sometimes letting our guard down and loosening up a bit is the only way to discern the dimensions of the virtual—​­that is to say, the virtual as such, the generative zone of potential realities, not yet actual but absolutely real.17 Just for the moment, then, let’s play along and take the chance of being dupes. Indeed, as the psychoanalytic philosopher Jacques Lacan famously quipped, “Les non-​­dupes errent.”18 Since we wouldn’t want to go astray, accidentally misled into missing or misrecognizing the world taking shape right before our very eyes, we must risk fooling ourselves if we hope to catch a glimpse of whatever futures might yet emerge from the small scales of matter—​­that is, if we are to see how the virtual comes to matter. So then, smarty-​­pants, can you take a joke?

In November 1997, at the Fifth Foresight Institute Conference on Molecular Nano­­tech­nol­ogy, the physicist and computer scientist Marek T. Michalewicz presented a paper entitled “Nano-​­cars: Feynman’s Dream Fulfilled or the Ultimate Challenge to Automotive Industry?” In this paper, Michalewicz proposed building itsy-​­bitsy model cars, using what he described as “molecular component tinkertoys.” Evidently, he aimed to expand on Feynman’s brief sketch of this idea in “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” It was an idea that had been around the block, for sure. The magazine Popular Science had even published a digest of Feynman’s original talk in 1960 as “How to Build an Automobile Smaller than this Dot ➤•.” But where Feynman had been unwilling to speculate on the use-​ ­value of microscopic automobiles, Michalewicz had no such inhibitions. Instead, he pulled out all the stops. Michalewicz intended the paper as a “not-​­so-​­serious contribution to a fundamental debate on the limits of bottom-​­up Drexlerian nano­­tech­ nol­ogy and conceptual limits of how far mechanistic analogies advanced by Eric Drexler could be carried out.”19 In the end, Michalewicz suggested that we could certainly build nano­cars using known chemical components, such as ferric wheels, staffenes, graphite sheets, and carbon nano­ tubes. But to what purpose? Publishing an expanded version of his paper in the Journal for Improbable Research in 1998 under the title “Nano-​­Cars J U S T F O R F U N  13

and Buckyball Pyramids,” Michalewicz lampooned the revolutionary and utopian rhetoric surrounding nano­­tech­nol­ogy by postulating the world-​ ­shaking potential of nano­cars. Michalewicz argued that, first of all, we would need nano­cars to “efficiently cart around these tiny, tiny Buckyballs.” And the most pressing reason to transport buckyballs from place to place would be, quite obviously, to create Buckyball pyramids: “Buckyball pyramids will find wide use in a range of areas—​­as Christmas season novelties, as collectors’ items (collect them all?), and in the seti effort to find and communicate with alien civilizations (we will offer Buckyball pyramids as proof of our civilisation’s superior intelligence and ability to control matter). Buckyball pyramids will also be useful in precision investigations of claims of paranormal pyramid ‘energy.’ ”20 Michalewicz’s thought experiment becomes a montage of strange attractions from the nano­­tech­nol­ogy future—​­a veritable mondo movie of wild and weird images, shock cuts between high-​­tech artifacts (buckyball pyramids) and countercultural motifs (aliens and paranormal energy). This mondo-​­style montage, innovated by films such as Mondo Cane (1962) and Mondo Bizarro (1966), recalls a few high-​­tech magazines as well, such as Whole Earth Review, bOING bOING, Wired, High Frontiers, and Mondo 2000. These U.S. magazines mashed countercultural attitudes together with the emerging worlds of advanced computing and nano­­tech­nol­ogy.21 To be sure, early concepts of nano­­tech­nol­ogy were circulated in these magazines long before gaining credibility in the mainstream scientific community. As early as 1987, Whole Earth Review published a lengthy essay by Eric Drexler on the global implications of nano­­tech­nol­ogy. With a sly wink to Lewis Mumford, Drexler titled this essay “A Technology of Tiny Things: Nano­technics and Civilization.” Drexler distilled several arguments from his 1986 book Engines of Creation, writing that “molecular engineering will become easy, almost like building with Tinkertoys.” He explained that we might build any physical object “from the bottom up” by programming molecular machines to assemble it atom by atom. In the same manner, we might build cheap spaceships and supercomputers. We might develop true artificial intelligence and synthetic organisms. We might abolish disease and live as immortals. We might leap into a post-​­scarcity economy. We might also develop horrendous weapons, exacerbate global inequalities, and wreck the environment.22 But if the future of nano­­tech­nol­ogy might portend anything from molecular Tinkertoys to galactic civilizations, 14  0001

anything from self-​­assembling machines to biological immortality, how could anyone truly know which speculations would prove most serious and which instead would prove mere nonsense? With tongue firmly in cheek, Drexler suggested that the speculative drift of nano­­tech­nol­ogy makes it inherently difficult to answer such questions: “We need better understanding [of nano­­tech­nol­ogy] as individuals and as a society. Our survival may depend on our ability to tell sense from nonsense regarding a complex technology that doesn’t exist yet [ca. 1987]. The nonsense will be abundant, no matter what we do: any field on the borders of science fiction, quantum mechanics, and biology is well positioned to import a lot of prefabricated crap; any field where experiments and experience aren’t yet possible is going to have great trouble getting rid of that crap. When someone says ‘nano­­tech­nol­ogy’ and begins to expound, beware!”23 Like the entire genre of mondo cinema, which infamously mixes real footage with faked footage and proclaims all of it real—​­w ink wink, nudge nudge—​­the discourse of nano­­tech­nol­ogy has long inhabited the blurry border zone between science fact and science fiction, seriousness and slapstick. Mondo 2000 euphonically labeled this border zone the “New Edge”: the fringe domain of cyberpunk fiction, virtual reality (vr), wetware, artificial life, smart drugs, ubiquitous computing, techno-​­paganism, and nano­­tech­nol­ogy—​­a new age of radical technoscience. But such outlandish stuff often invites ridicule. In 1989, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on the launch of Mondo 2000 and the many “strange ideas” it promoted: [Mondo 2000] comes across like a Whole Earth Catalog of new technologies, offbeat interviews and strange ideas for the 1990s. For instance, consider: Nano­­tech­nol­ogy—​­using a combination of biology and computers to create microscopic “assembler robots” that could build a new car or maybe a new being. . . . In essence, [the people involved with Mondo 2000] are 1960s-​­generation radicals trying to reach a much younger audience of computer freaks, many of them inspired by the so-​­called cyberpunk novels like John Brunner’s Shockwave Rider (1975) and William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984). . . . The 160-​­page first edition of Mondo 2000 also seems to side with anarchy, drugs and reckless computing.24 For some, the idea that “[n]anotechnology  .  .  . could build a new car” sounded like something only freaks, cyberpunks, hackers, anarchists, and other jokesters would take seriously—​­or even halfway seriously. So being quite the jokester himself, but certainly no dupe, Michalewicz J U S T F O R F U N  15

proposed an experiment with nano­cars precisely to cut through all the “prefabricated crap”—​­that is, by driving right into it. Satirizing the degree to which nano­­tech­nol­ogy in the 1980s and 1990s was associated with transhumanism, cryonics, New Age philosophy, mondo hacker culture, and science fiction, Michalewicz concludes, Building a nano-​­car will make it possible to build Buckyball Pyramids, but it is also an enterprise worth pursuing for its own right. Perhaps most important, it constitutes the next big challenge for the automotive industry. The philosophical and social implications of this invention are hard to predict. We can be sure only that its size and the requisite mass scale of manufacture will make global civilisation more egalitarian and just. Perhaps we will see a day when there is one Buckyball Pyramid and one nano-​­car for each and every person on earth. Humankind constantly desires to “outdo” both earlier generations and contemporaries. The race among nations to dominate the world, which has been so beneficial in bringing about space exploration, the landing of humans on the moon, the collapse of communism, and the end of the Cold War, is still being run. The first nation to win in the nano­scopic world will, on a more prosaic level, achieve the domination of all nations and macroscopic objects.25 Boldly juxtaposing the microscopic with the global—​­a shock cut from “nano-​­cars” to “the world,” conjoining technical virtuosity at the scale of atoms to political and economic power at the scale of the planet—​ ­Michalewicz mimics one of the most prevalent tropes of nano­­tech­nol­ogy: mondo nano. This trope appears in the alluring motto of “shaping the world atom by atom”—​­the vertiginous seduction of total engineering, complete terraformation.26 It appears in the nano­­scale image of the Western Hemisphere that loomed over President Clinton on January 21, 2000, when he announced the U.S. National Nano­­tech­nol­ogy Initiative to an audience at Caltech (fig. 1.2)—​­standing, as it were, in the place where Feynman dreamt up the whole thing.27 It appears in the field of dna nano­­tech­nol­ogy, where nucleic acids fold into continental shapes and other figures of continence and control (fig. 1.3). It appears in critical media collaborations between artists and scientists (fig. 1.4). It appears in the promotional materials of nano­tech companies (fig. 1.5). And it appears ever more frequently as the dream of an entire high-​­tech culture (fig. 1.6). 16  0001

1.2. President Clinton, speaking on science and technology at the Beckman Auditorium of the California Institute of Technology, January 21, 2000. Also on stage are David Baltimore, president of Caltech at the time (right), and Gordon Moore, chairman emeritus and cofounder of Intel Corporation (left). The nano­­scale image in back was created by John Mamin and colleagues at the ibm Almaden Research Center in 1990. Courtesy of the William J. Clinton Presidential Library.

1.3. Map of the Western Hemisphere. Paul Rothemund, 2006. At Caltech, Rothemund developed the groundbreaking technique of “scaffolded dna origami.” The atomic force microscope (afm) image shows M13 bacteriophage dna folded into a geographic complex; see Rothemund, “Folding dna to Create Nano­­scale Shapes and Patterns.” Reproduced with permission.

1.4. Actual Size. Alessandro Scali and Robin Goode, 2007. The artists collaborated with the physicist Fabrizio Pirri and PhD students at the Polytechnic of Turin, using an afm to fashion the African continent from oxidized silicon atoms. The top image represents a nano­metric Africa, rendered as an afm micrograph. The bottom image represents a micrometric Africa, visible through an optical microscope. Inhabiting the space of nano­science to address the marginalization, exploitation, and “invisibility” of Africa in global technoculture, Actual Size reflects on the geopolitics of “shaping the world atom by atom.” Reproduced with permission.

1.5. “Welcome to Raith Nano­ World.” Sven Bauerdick and Lars Bruchhaus, Raith GmbH, Germany, 2011. This nano­­scale image demonstrates the technical capacities of Raith’s ionLiNE focused ion beam (fib) lithography, nano­fabrication, and engineering workstation. There is a tradition of creating mondo nano imagery with Raith instruments, going back at least to 1995; see “Raith ‘Nano World Picture.’ ” Reproduced with permission.

1.6. Dreams of Buckminster Fuller. Chris Ewels, 2003. Buckminster Fuller may have hoped to put geodesic domes over whole cities, but this image of a buckminsterfullerene molecule (a.k.a. buckyball or C60) encasing our whole planet incisively represents the yet bolder vision of today’s nano­­tech­nol­ogy industry. Chris Ewels is a computational physicist and nano­materials researcher at the Institute of Materials in Nantes, France. Reproduced with permission.

The figure of the whole Earth reshaped in the image of technology is a commonplace feature of modernity, yet its specific manifestation in the discourse of nano­­tech­nol­ogy emphasizes the role of the molecular sciences in the era of neoliberal politics. As Michalewicz’s parody reminds us, the rhetoric of mondo nano relentlessly links the molecular sciences with globalization, the spread of capitalism, industrial prosperity, and worldwide democracy. There is a lot at stake, it seems. Yet in the end, Michalewicz asks us to remember that we are talking about very tiny cars—​­and imaginary ones, at that. The best prospect for these wee vehicles, as far as anyone can see (since “philosophical and social implications . . . are hard to predict”—​­and even harder to swallow), is to help us build other miniscule structures in a dollhouse world below the threshold of visibility. We are talking about “the land of make-​­believe,” a metastasis of childhood, of model cars and the imaginative desire to project oneself into an idyllic fantasy world. We are talking about playing with toys. But seriously, now . . .

Only a short while later, in 2005, the chemist James Tour and his colleagues at Rice University synthesized a real nano­car (fig. 1.7). With its chassis and axles made from alkenes and its wheels made from buckyballs, the nano­car at first seemed simply one more of those many novelty molecules or acts of atomic graffiti through which nano­­tech­nol­ogy has frequently promoted itself. Such technical stunts often appeal to analogies with macroscale objects, yet the vast majority are not comparatively functional.28 But the nano­car was different. Publishing their achievement in the journal Nano Letters—​­one of the many journals of the American Chemical Society—​­the researchers claimed that this tiny molecule was actually a vehicle: it could roll on top of a metallic plate when the temperature was heated enough to overcome the adhesion forces between the wheels and the surface. Moreover, it could potentially operate as a “nano­meter-​­sized transporter.”29 Anticipating skepticism, the researchers needed to show that their molecule was mechanically functional—​­in other words, that its wheels actually rolled, just like a real car. Otherwise, it would simply be a molecule that happened to have some resemblance to a car but without the physical capacities, a solid molecule that was simply sliding along the surface rather than rolling. So the Tour lab created a 20  0001

1.7. Nano­car. Yasuhiro Shirai / Rice University, 2005. Courtesy of Rice University Office of Media Relations and Information. 1.8. stm image of nano­cars on gold surface. Kevin Kelly and Andrew Osgood / Rice University, 2005. Courtesy of Rice University Office of Media Relations and Information.

series of images with an stm that showed the movement of the nano­cars over time (fig. 1.8). These stm images displayed the cars moving in directions perpendicular to their axles, or slightly pivoting due to the ability of the fullerenes to rotate independently, which proved that the molecules were truly rolling along, that the little cars actually worked. No kidding! The original nano­car paper would go on to become the most frequently accessed article published by the American Chemical Society in 2005. LiveScience proclaimed it to be the second most influential scientific paper of 2005 from any discipline. Tour himself was showered with awards and honors, including the nasa Space Act Award, the Honda Innovation Award, and the Foresight Institute’s Feynman Prize for achievement in experimental nano­­tech­nol­ogy. The lab group has since gone on to produce more complex versions of the nano­car, even equipping some models with onboard molecular motors. The researchers have also been experimenting with “nano­trucks” that can carry other molecules from place to place. Each new experimental success receives an extraordinary amount of media attention. So what’s all the commotion about? According to Tour, the nano­cars and nano­trucks represent movement toward molecular manufacturing: “We want to construct things from the bottom up, one molecule at a time, in much the same way that biological cells use enzymes to assemble proteins and other supermolecules.”30 The nano­cars speed down a highway to the future, the promise of atomically precise engineering: “The synthesis and testing of nano­cars and other molecular machines is providing critical insight in our investigations of bottom-​­up molecular manufacturing.” But the nano­car experiments also function as a form of basic research: “We’d eventually like to move objects and do work in a controlled fashion on the molecular scale, and these vehicles are great test beds for that. They’re helping us learn the ground rules.”31 The nano­cars and nano­trucks enable these scientists to imagine their work as a form of gaming or play. Manipulating the toy vehicles in the nano­­scale environment affirms that environment as a rule-​­bound space, a pitch or a sandbox where certain “ground rules” must be followed. (Let us recall that the concept of ground rules comes from baseball.) These ground rules are the so-​­called laws of nature that operate at the nano­­scale—​­which are so different from those at the macroscale that scientists often feel like children learning all over again how to orient themselves, how the rules work.32 In discovering the ground rules, the limits and the resistances of 22  0001

matter, the trick then becomes to renovate the playing field and turn limitations into features—​­in other words, to game the game. Experimenting with nano­cars, the scientists step out into a different world, a space apart. They recreate the nano­world as a playground. Here, they are free to dream, to speculate on a future in which molecular machines and atomically precise manufacturing have become everyday realities. They aim to discover the rules by which science might bring this fantastical future into our present. Andrew Osgood, one of the nano­car researchers, puts it this way: “Molecular machines, typically thought to be only the fanciful imaginings of speculative fiction, have taken great strides in recent years towards real-​­world viability and usefulness. . . . In all, many [nano­car] molecules have been characterized and explored via stm with an eye towards their dynamic capabilities and surface behaviors, in the hopes that future, more complex versions can build on the nascent knowledge base beginning to be established here.”33 Once upon a time, the world of molecular machines—​­long associated with the domain of science fiction—​­might have appeared distinct from the “real world.” Now “taking strides” and stepping out from that other space, molecular machines approach “real-​­world viability and usefulness.” Yet by continuing to interact with nano­cars in that other space that lies somewhere between fancy and real-​­world utility, according to Osgood, the scientists hope to learn something quite significant: namely, how to make even better toys! This situation seems to exemplify the social and imaginative operations of play that the historian Johan Huizinga theorized as the basis of many cultural forms. According to Huizinga, play is “a stepping out of ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own.” Play creates or discovers other spaces “within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart.”34 In the laboratories of Rice University, the nano­world appears as a space apart in which fictions of the future are mobilized—​­or rather, automobilized—​­and enacted, made real. Rendered a playground or a toy box, the nano­world and its ground rules (for example, quantum mechanics) are then subjected to algorithmic encoding and computational protocols. Stephan Link, a chemistry professor at Rice who has continued to experiment with new directions in nano­car research, including a method for tracking the wee automobiles using single-​­molecule florescence imaging, has said, “In terms of J U S T F O R F U N  23

1.9. Nano­Quest: Exploring the molecular surface. Discover Science & Engineering / crann, 2006. 1.10. Nano­Quest: Assembling the nano­car with an afm . Discover Science & Engineering / crann, 2006.

computing, having these single molecules be addressable is a goal everybody wants to reach. . . . And to understand and emulate biophysics and biomechanics, to build a device based on what nature gives us, is of course one of the dreams of nano­­tech­nol­ogy.”35 The goal is to turn the tiny world of nano­cars into an interactive computational space where objects are addressable (for example, through object-​­oriented programming), and where learning the ground rules affords a dreamscape of innovative “emulation” and ersatz devices: a computational space divided between materiality and virtuality, between real rules and reveries. 24  0001

1.11. Nano­cars in motion, with stm tip in background. Takashi Sasaki, 2005. Courtesy of Rice University Office of Media Relations and Information.

This, of course, also describes the hybrid computational space of a video game. As the video game scholar Jesper Juul has written, “To play a video game is therefore to interact with real rules while imagining a fictional world, and a video game is a set of rules as well as a fictional world.”36 So it’s no surprise: the nano­car has now become a video game celebrity. In 2006, the Irish government’s Discover Science & Engineering program, in collaboration with the Centre for Research on Adaptive Nano­ structures and Nano­devices at Trinity College Dublin, published the video game Nano­Quest (fig. 1.9). Nano­Quest concerns the misadventures of a science student accidentally shrunk to the scale of nano­meters. Exploring the nano­world becomes the purpose of the game, precisely to discover the rules of the game—​­to “learn the ground rules,” as it were.37 To accomplish this goal, the shrunken student requires a nano­car to drive around on the molecular surface. The player must temporarily shift perspectives and take the role of one of the student’s colleagues, who helps to construct the nano­car using an atomic force microscope (fig.  1.10). This section of the game aesthetically mimics the graphical simulations that accompanied the original Rice nano­car experiments (fig. 1.11). Situating our gaze at the level of the microscope’s tip, Nano­Quest makes J U S T F O R F U N  25

1.12. Nano­Quest: Cruising in the nano­car. Discover Science & Engineering / crann, 2006.

assembling the nano­car into a puzzle, emphasizing the degree to which nano-​­chemistry is like playing with Tinkertoys. Once the car has been properly constructed, the shrunken student can then fulfill the desire animated by the vehicular form of the molecule, that is, to physically get inside that car and drive it around (fig. 1.12). Nano­Quest vivifies what was already latent in the material-​­semiotic network of the laboratory. For the nano­car serves as a focalizer or proxy for imaginatively projecting oneself into the phenomenal space that seems to unfold from the car itself. In the same way that imaginary or virtual worlds unfold from the beloved toys of childhood play, the Rice nano­cars unfold a virtual world in which human agency might operate at the level of atoms and molecules—​­a world that, although beyond the limits of visibility, we can nonetheless now imagine living in, playing in. So Nano­Quest, for all of its educational and entertaining virtues, simply makes good on the ludic impulse that already informed the original set of nano­car experiments. Let us not, then, put childish things aside. For the nano­car has driven on to other scientific adventures. In 2006, the startup company Nano­rex, Inc.—​­a developer of software tools for the design of atomically precise nano­systems—​­premiered its Nano­­engineer-​­1 platform. Touted as the first computer-​­aided design (cad) program for the nano­tech age, Nano­engineer-​­1 made its public debut in the California State Summer School for Mathematics and Science (cosmos) at UC Santa Cruz on July 9, 2006. Students in the cosmos program were trained on 26  0001

1.13. Nano­engineer-​­1: nano­car simulation. Nano­rex, 2006.

Nano­engineer-​­1 by modeling the original nano­car from the Tour lab, assembling it from its component molecules, and animating it on a simulated metallic surface (fig. 1.13). Mark Sims, the founder of Nano­rex, said that letting students play with simulated nano­cars would not only teach them key principles of nano­­tech­nol­ogy but also pave the road to a new future—​­a future that we can’t even yet imagine: This [nano­car simulation project at cosmos] is Nano­Engineer-​­1’s first job in the “real world,” and I am very pleased it will introduce students to the fundamentals of molecular modeling and molecular dynamics simulations.  .  .  . Nano­rex was founded on the idea that in addition to teaching young people the fundamentals of chemical, biological and mechanical engineering at the nano­­scale, this next generation of nano­­tech innovators will also need to be able to “see” how nature’s fundamental building blocks can come together in new ways.  .  .  . It is our hope that Nano­rex, through educational partnerships like this one with cosmos, will help change the way we all think about nano­­ tech­nol­ogy by no longer defining it within the framework of existing applications and products. I’m eager to see what these bright, creative kids come up with.38 In the “real world” represented here by the “first job” of a piece of software—​­the nonhuman labor of software itself, the transformative and affective work it does to produce subjects of the nano­­tech­nol­ogy age—​ ­the nano­car inspires children with the possibilities of treating matter as software and software as matter. Evidently, the Nano­engineer-​­1 platform J U S T F O R F U N  27

opens up the limits of imagination. By releasing children to think and tinker beyond “the framework of existing applications and products,” the software unfastens the future, helping the nano­technicians of tomorrow to think matter in “new ways.” Miguel F. Aznar, director of education for the Foresight Institute and one of the cosmos instructors, put it this way: “Students have never before been this close to actually building things atom by atom. . . . Using Nano­Engineer-​­1, this will be the first time we’ve been able to give high school students hands-​­on practice with nano­­tech­nol­ogy structures. It makes nano­­tech­nol­ogy tangible, connecting it to the science they’ve studied.”39 The futuristic vision of “actually building things atom by atom,” as nothing otherwise than virtual, now becomes “tangible” and weirdly “hands-​­on.” (Yet what exactly is one touching?) The computer program connects this immanent future to the established science of textbooks (“the science they’ve studied”) by rendering molecules as Tinkertoys. It literalizes the rhetoric that has shaped the nano­car throughout its strange itinerary. From Feynman’s tongue-​­in-​­cheek vision of a vehicle for the “mites to drive around in” to its physical incarnation at Rice University that parked it squarely in the present, the nano­car now races through video games and cad software packages—​­making the potentials of radical nano­­tech­nol­ogy tangible to young users, inspiring them to innovate and remake reality in the image of digital matter. There was a time when speculating on the global effects of toy nano­ cars seemed self-​­evidently absurd. Today, it seems more like precognition. What began as a joke turns out to be something other than a joke. But isn’t that always the way with jokes?

We might consider another example. In 2004, the lab group of Wolfgang Heckl in Munich used an stm to flick buckyballs on a surface of trimesic acid (tma ). Publishing their results in the Journal of Physical Chemistry, the researchers described the experiment as “playing nano­soccer.”40 The buckminsterfullerene molecule has long been thought to resemble a soccer ball. The original 1985 buckminsterfullerene paper by Harold Kroto, Richard Smalley, Robert Curl, and their colleagues had featured a photograph of a “football (in the United States, a soccerball) on the Texas grass” to represent the structure of C60. It also suggested a series of informal names for the molecule, such as “ballene, spherene, soccerene, [and] 28  0001

1.14. “Playing nano­soccer.” In these stm topographs, a buckyball is transferred to different cavities of the trimesic acid network (a, b, and c); a cartoon illustrates the manipulation process (d). Originally published in Journal of Physical Chemistry B: Griessl et al., “Room-​­Temperature Scanning Tunneling Microscopy Manipulation of Single C60 Molecules at the Liquid-​­Solid Interface: Playing Nano­soccer.” The lab group used the same figure in Hietschold et al., “Molecular Structures on Crystalline Metallic Surfaces.” ©2004 American Chemical Society. Reproduced with permission.

carbosoccer,” to supplement the principal (and equally playful) homage to Buckminster Fuller.41 So we might say that fullerene researchers have entertained the idea of “playing nano­soccer” from the outset—​­from the first kickoff, as it were. But now, stepping onto a field of tma and literalizing the latent promise of those itty-​­bitty footballs, the players of nano­soccer discover new rules, invent new rules (fig. 1.14). They recreate the chemical surface as a recreational space: “The ‘nano­soccer’ presented here is not just an academic game. It demonstrates important elements necessary for a single-​ ­molecular data storage: single C60 molecules arranged at well-​­defined positions within tma [in] a regular net-​­pattern can be understood as single bits of information. Their position can be imaged (‘read’) without changing it or changed (‘write’) by making a cavity which has been occupied empty—​­and vice versa.”42 J U S T F O R F U N  29

1.15. Nano­soccer at the 2007 RoboCup competition, hosted by the Georgia Institute of Technology, July 7–​­8, 2007. This robot, dribbling a disk of SiO2, represented the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems (iris) of eth Zürich. A full video showing the Swiss robot in action was published on the nist website in July 2007.

Enrolling the buckyballs as game objects, pushing them around or “writing” them with the stm and then “reading” them in their precise positions, is a form of computational inscription. The nano­­scale sports field becomes a data field, where the bouncing molecular balls perform as “single bits of information.” It is a recreational space—​­a hybrid space between quantum rules and the semiotic regime of football—​­that renders ordinary molecules into digital bits. And insofar as the “writing” of this nano­soccer game also entails a prospective diagram for an imaginary data storage device, the sporting event is also an act of speculation: a future-​­in-​­the-​­making, or rather, a future-​­in-​­the-​­playing. In 2007, “nano­soccer” became an international scientific competition. Sponsored for several years by the U.S. National Institute for Standards and Technology (nist), the annual event happened at a much larger scale than the Munich game. The “ball” was a silicon dioxide disk approximately 100 microns in diameter (fig. 1.15). For the sake of accuracy, the nist website pointed out that the “nano” here describes mass, not size: “Nano­soccer is a Lilliputian event where computer-​­driven ‘nano­bots’ the 30  0001

size of dust mites challenge one another on fields no bigger than a grain of rice. Viewed under a microscope, the nano­bots are operated by remote control and move in response to changing magnetic fields or electrical signals transmitted across the microsized arena. ‘Nano­­scale’ refers to their mass. The bots are a few tens of micrometers to a few hundred micrometers long, but their masses can be just a few nano­g rams. They are manufactured from materials such as aluminum, nickel, gold, silicon and chromium.”43 This waffling over the precise scale of the event seems to confront, in advance, a possible objection that this isn’t really nano­­tech­nol­ogy or even nano­soccer, but rather microtechnology and microsoccer. That nist insists on the nano-​­ness of the event indicates the gravitational pull of the nano­­scale for all the sciences today. It also shows how the imagination of nano­­tech­nol­ogy is shaped through rhetorical play, sleight of hand: a so-​­called nano­­scale game produced through the semantic flexibility of “nano” itself.44 This semantic flexibility, at the same time, bends the present toward a future that has now—​­always already—​­changed the whole world. For the anamorphic rhetoric of “playing nano­soccer” projects ever smaller degrees of control, looking ahead to nano­­scale industries, nano­ technological worlds: Imagine a robotic David Beckham, six times smaller than an amoeba, playing with a soccer ball no wider than a human hair—​­with all of the action happening on a field the size of a single grain of rice. It may sound like the stuff of science fiction. But at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or nist, nano­soccer is serious business. nist, the federal agency that advances U.S. innovation and industrial competiveness, is partnering with industry, universities, and other organizations to move us toward a future where robots smaller than the eye can see are put to work in a variety of ways. [Craig McGray, nist Research Associate]: “Soccer provides a fun way to road test the basic abilities that future nano­bots will need to perform useful work. . . . The microrobotic soccer program is working really well. In the two years since the competition began [i.e., since 2007], we have seen a remarkable improvement in the development of microrobotic systems and their abilities.” The payoff may one day be tiny microchip factories where nano­ bots build products using molecules or even individual atoms, or J U S T F O R F U N  31

microscopic surgeons traveling through our arteries to remove fats and clots. With the lessons learned from the world’s smallest soccer players, nist and its partners are quickly moving microrobotics from science fiction to reality.45 The “serious business” of these invisible sporting events serves as a “road test” for the future abilities of nano­robotic systems. The games are conceptual vehicles—​­just like nano­cars—​­for road-​­testing new ways to drive across the new edge, the fuzzy border zone cutting “from science fiction to reality.”

All of these little toys suggest the degree to which the molecular sciences, operating under the rubric of nano­­tech­nol­ogy and with an eye to the future of digital matter, increasingly stage experiments in the mode of play, as fun and games. Everywhere we look, boosters for the field of nano­­tech­nol­ogy remind us of its playful nature. Mihail Roco, a key architect of the U.S. National Nano­­tech­nol­ogy Initiative, has written that “nano­­scale is a complex inter­disciplinary playground.”46 The Nobel Prize–​­winning physicist 1.16. Nano-​­Tac-​­Toe. Aaron Skelhorne, 2004. Each line is approximately 40 nm wide, scratched into the polycarbonate surface of a standard compact disc with a Veeco Dimension 3100 Nano­man afm. At the time, Skelhorne was in the lab group of Mark McDermott at the University of Alberta. He created the image while practicing with the nano­lithography software of the Nano­man, located in the lab of John-​­ Bruce Green. According to Skelhorne, “Truth be told, the image isn’t even a very good representation of the type of nano-​­scale manipulation I was trying to achieve. If you look closely at the image you’ll notice lines were scratched into the surface between features, the Xs, Os and the grid. When I was moving the tip from one feature to the next it was supposed to be fully retracted. Despite this, I thought it was kind of neat” (email to author, September 19, 2013). Reproduced with permission. 32  0001

Horst Stormer has said, “Nano­­tech­nol­ogy has given us the tools . . . to play with the ultimate toy box of nature—​­atoms and molecules. Everything is made from it. . . . The possibilities to create new things appear limitless.”47 The late Richard Smalley, who received the Nobel Prize in 1987 for his co-​­discovery of fullerenes, has likewise said, “My definition of nano­­tech­nol­ogy is that you do things with perfection at the atomic scale and you build things with a tinker toy set. . . . the tinker toys are atoms.”48 These descriptions, as we now see, are no idle metaphors. Rather, they are figurative language games that script out certain technical, epistemic, and social dimensions of laboratory research. These are metaphors that help constitute the material dimensions of scientific inquiry and technological production; they are metaphors that quite literally matter. Which is to say, the play’s the thing. Some nano­scientists play tiny games of tic-​­tac-​­toe to test out their probe microscopes (fig. 1.16). Others design biomolecular automata to play tic-​­tac-​­toe against human opponents.49 Some use solid-​­state nano­pores to measure dna by bouncing it back and forth between electrical fields—​­a technique described as “playing molecular ping pong.”50 Others use off-​­the-​­shelf toys such as Shrinky Dinks to launch new nano­­tech­nol­ogy companies.51 Some stage miniature chess matches (fig.  1.17). Others see such gambits of nano­­scale control as pointing, inexorably, to the “endgame” of Western material science

1.17. Nano­Chess. Sven Bauerdick and Andre Linden, Raith GmbH, Germany, 2005. Fabricated with a Raith e_LiNE electron beam lithography system, the game seems headed for a stalemate: “Our nano manipulators Kasparov and Karpov are desperately waiting for the kings . . . ” (Bauerdick and Linden quoted in Randall, “eipbn 2005 Micrograph Winners”). Reproduced by permission. J U S T F O R F U N  33

1.18. Chisai Benjo. Takahashi Kaito, 2005. The nano-​­commode was created at sii Nano­Technology Inc. in Japan with an fib instrument. “Chisai Benjo” means “small toilet” in Japanese. “Benjo” also refers to the place in certain Japanese children’s games where those who are tagged “out” must go. According to Takahashi Kaito, “An effective method of dealing with defects is to find a collection site” (quoted in Randall, “eipbn 2005 Micrograph Winners”). Reproduced from Fujii and Kaito, “Nano Factory Achieved by Focused Ion Beam,” with permission of Cambridge University Press. ©2005 Microscopy Society of America.

1.19. Playnano. John Hart, 2007. Grown from carbon nano­tubes, these sexy bunnies are ready to party. Playboy magazine published a mini-​­spread of the multiplying bunnies in the February 2007 “Letters” column (Hart, “Spot the Bunny”). Hart is a professor of mechanical engineering at mit, where he leads the Mechanosynthesis Group and hosts the nano­bliss gallery. Hart’s lab is known for developing research projects at the intersection of nano­science and art, such as the 2008 Nano­bama project. Reproduced with permission.

1.20. Two Smileys. Paul Rothemund, 2006. Each smiley face in this afm micrograph is approximately 100 nm wide, folded from whole M13 bacteriophage genomes. Reproduced with permission.

itself.52 Yes, a few researchers have been known to giggle at mere toilet humor (fig. 1.18). But others prefer more adult jokes (fig. 1.19). There are many ways to play with nano­­tech­nol­ogy. So go ahead and smile (fig. 1.20). Don’t worry, be happy: this is important research. As Paul Rothemund, who engineered the smiley face and other whimsical images to demonstrate the potential of dna nano­­tech­ nol­ogy, writes, “While the smiley face shape is somewhat silly dna artwork, it is a high technology artifact and there is serious science behind it. We hope to use the technique of dna origami (as well as many other techniques of dna nano­­tech­nol­ogy) to build smaller, faster computers and many other devices.”53 Such experiments are not simply things that scientists do in their spare time, as diversions from more serious work: the play is the work, the game is the experiment, the silly image is the technical feat. These miscellaneous molecular toys, infinitesimal parodies, and chemical sporting events index the global transformation of play culture now afoot, the elevation of play from the domain of childhood to the domain of adult productivity. As several high-​­tech business guides have recently attested, the “gamer generation” is reshaping industry through practices of “serious play.”54 Marc Pesce writes, “All around us, the world is coming alive, infused with information and capability; this is the only reality for our children. It is what they learn every time they touch a Furby or build J U S T F O R F U N  35

a Lego robot or play a video game, and it speaks louder than any lesson taught in any school, because the lesson is repeated—​­reinforced—​­with every button’s touch.”55 Children coming of age in this responsive toy culture, according to Pesce, will be predisposed to seeing the world in terms of nano­­tech­nol­ogy, already enframed in its playful image: In fewer than three generations, the Lego has gone from a children’s building block to an archetype that has come to define the way we will soon manipulate the essential elements of the physical world. Yesterday’s child slapped bricks together to create a miniature-​­scale model of a house or a boat: tomorrow’s child will place atom against atom. . . . This grants atoms a material reality that allows us to think of them in the same concrete terms as we might think of a stack of Legos. . . . [Tomorrow’s child] will accept that physical objects, as solid as they might appear, are just a momentary configuration, a fleeting thought that can be made and unmade according to the heart’s desire.56 Imagining atom-​­by-​­atom assembly becomes easy as child’s play, precisely because this vision is produced by our culture of child’s play. It is a dream informed by the society of the game—​­the ludicrous society—​ ­wherein what used to be seen as the basis of industrial labor, namely, the construction of physical objects, now appears a task more suitable for toddlers, toying with atoms as they follow their bliss. In the speculations of nano­­tech­nol­ogy and other emerging sciences, material labor effectively becomes immaterial or virtual labor: scientific research, industrial engineering, and gambols in the sandbox become indistinguishable. As many theorists of the labor practices of globalization have suggested, we are entering a new age of playbor, a widespread transvaluation of fun and games in the world today.57 The molecular sciences are clearly not immune to the appeal of the ludic and the ludicrous. Increasingly, it seems that laboratory objects, modes of experimentation, and forms of technical knowledge are fashioned more through participatory play than the idealized distance of objectivity—​­more through the creative performances of gaming than the venerable, stepwise protocols of the “scientific method.”58 Of course, there have always been undercurrents of playfulness and experimental whimsy in the proper history of science. As Paul Feyerabend famously argued, science is most successful when it abandons method, cuts loose, and opens to play.59 Scientific toys, for instance, have 36  0001

often served to provoke spectacular insights, especially in chemistry and molecular biology, where researchers routinely proceed by tinkering with molecular models.60 At the same time, amateurs and professionals alike have frequently approached science as a recreational activity, for the sake of spectacle, entertainment, or sheer amusement.61 And popular notions of science as a puzzle, a game motivated by innocent or childish curiosity, have long informed cultural narratives about science and its practitioners.62 Yet these undercurrents are surfacing, upheaving, and intensifying rapidly. Not only has scientific play become newly prominent even in proper laboratory settings and publishable in proper technical journals, but it has become a defining feature of the so-​­called speculative sciences—​­those sciences, including genomics, synthetic biology, and nano­­tech­nol­ogy, that now depend as much on the flows of finance capital and the mobilization

1.21. Dirty Dice. Timothy Leong, 2007. This sem micrograph represents six self-​ ­assembled nano­liter containers made from nickel and gold. Leong, who created the “dirty dice” while a doctoral student in David Gracias’s lab at Johns Hopkins University, confirms that the game is rigged: “The nano­liter containers can be manipulated externally. . . . What is special is that now we have a platform that gives us wireless spatial and time control over microchemistry.” But it’s also about having a good time, trying “to have a little fun in the lab” (Leong quoted in Spiro, “Leong Lauded for Science and Art at Materials Meeting”). What would Mallarmé say? Reproduced with permission of the Materials Research Society. J U S T F O R F U N  37

of promissory futures as on any technical research. If the classical game of science has always been to learn the rules of nature, today’s game of speculative technoscience involves a different ethos: hack, cheat, modify, and hedge. Playing against the rules, loading the dice (fig. 1.21). Gaming the game. We see then why nano­­tech­nol­ogy, for all its seriousness, at the same time promotes the image of play, ludicrously opening up to the uncertain future. For it represents a gamble, a wager on the future. It is a risk, to be sure—​­un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard—​­but certainly not without some fun along the way. So come on, let’s join the party (fig. 1.22). Really, who could resist? Why not just play along . . . and laugh . . .

1.22. Field of Smileys. Paul Rothemund, 2006. This afm micrograph captures a riot of dna smiley faces: the laughter of mondo nano. Reproduced with permission.

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0010 Digital Matters

$ open /“Please tell me the truth—​­are we still in the game?”/eXistenZ/1999/David_Cronenberg/level.sav/

The era of advanced nano­­tech­nol­ogy is nearly upon us, it seems. And every­where, visionary scientists and technological forecasters rehearse the claim that material reality—​­that is, matter as such—​­will soon be rendered digital. As the futurist John Robert Marlow writes, “The coming Age of Nano­­tech­nol­ogy might best be described as the Age of Digital Matter, for it will be a time in which it becomes possible to manipulate the physical world in much the same way that a computer now manipulates the digital ones and zeroes on its hard drive.”1 Masami Hagiya, a professor of molecular programming at the University of Tokyo, suggests that recent technical innovations are guiding us to a world where “designing molecules and molecular systems is like programming electronic computers.”2 Similarly, K. Eric Drexler posits that nano­­tech­nol­ogy ultimately “is about bringing digital control to the atomic level and doing so on a large scale at low cost. . . . This methodology, led by molecular simulation, will be at the heart of the engineering process that will lead us forward into this new world of technology.”3 J. Storrs Hall, a fellow of the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing and the founding chief scientist of the Nano­rex startup, has put it even more succinctly: “One way to sum up nano­­tech­ nol­ogy is that it will make matter into software.”4 Despite the figurative qualities of such claims, researchers involved in

this forward-​­looking science often take them quite literally. For example, in 2008 a team of scientists led by Philip Moriarty at the University of Nottingham launched the project “Digital Matter? Towards Mechanised Mechanosynthesis.” The project poses the concept of digital matter as an open question, suspended between virtuality and actuality. But this discrete question mark, this point of interrogation, veers intrepidly toward the future: “Computer-​­controlled chemistry at the single molecule level, a field very much in its infancy, represents arguably the most exciting and, to many, definitive example of the power and potential of nano­­tech­nol­ ogy. . . . Our goal is to programme the assembly of matter from its constituent atoms. This exceptionally challenging objective has the potential to revolutionise key areas of 21st century science.”5 The trope of digital matter, even as an open question, turns around to potentialize a scientific revolution: the present fiction of computer-​ ­controlled precision chemistry opens onto a completely digital world, where matter can be broken down into component parts and recoded differently. The Center for Bits and Atoms at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads a similar research initiative, which “promises to create a ‘digital’ technology for molecular manufacturing, with implications for atoms as profound as they have been for bits.”6 Likewise, the Molecular Programming Project at Caltech and the University of Washington invites the virtual, the yet-​­to-​­be imagined: “Through the creation of molecular programming languages . . . our long-​­term vision is to establish ‘molecular programming’ as a subdiscipline of computer science—​­one that will enable a yet-​­to-​­be imagined array of applications from chemical circuitry for interacting with biological molecules to molecular robotics and nano­­scale computing.”7 The various scare quotes and question marks in these project descriptions may typographically emphasize that “digital matter” and “molecular programming” are tropes, prevarications, as if hedging on the promises otherwise at stake. But the constant slippage between simile and metonymy reveals the extent to which such concepts orient scientific discourse toward particular visions of the future—​­a future of molecular fun and games, a veritable circus. In the words of the nano­scientist Ralph Merkle, “What the computer revolution did for manipulating data, the nano­­tech­nol­ogy revolution will do for manipulating matter, juggling atoms like bits.”8 Such performative accounts of digital matter exemplify what N. Kath40  0010

erine Hayles has called the “Regime of Computation”: the technoscientific worldview in which “code is understood as the discourse system that mirrors what happens in nature and that generates nature itself.”9 Under the Regime of Computation, the computer serves as a privileged metaphor and a conceptual tool, the rules of nature start to resemble informatic code scripts, and matter becomes everywhere subject to the interventions of programming languages. As Hayles writes, “For scientists making the strong claim for computation as ontology, computation is the means by which reality is continually produced and reproduced on atomic, molecular, and macro levels.”10 Symptomatic of the Regime of Computation, visions of the coming Age of Digital Matter suggest that, at a certain level—​­the level of nano­­ scale phenomena—​­there is no absolute difference between materiality and digitality. Enframed by technoscientific operations, matter at the nano­­scale would become discontinuous, modular, and combinatorial, governed by quantum source codes that can now be hacked.11 Nano­­tech­ nol­ogy envisions, or rather discovers, that the world has always been digital, and therefore endlessly reprogrammable. As technicians of digital matter, we would then be able to modify our environments, our societies, and our bodies in the manner of modding an app, or overclocking a cpu. Charles Lieber, a nano­scientist at Harvard University, puts it this way: “When scaled down [to the molecular level], the difference between digital and living systems blurs, so that you have an opportunity to do things that sound like science fiction—​­things that people have only dreamed about.”12 More and more, the fantasy of digital matter lures researchers into the speculative future. In the case of Jim Von Ehr, the founder of the nano­tech company Zyvex, his “background as a software entrepreneur led him to the realization that Atomically Precise Manufacturing—​­creating ‘digital matter’—​­could become a huge new opportunity to manufacture products better, faster, and cheaper than any previous technology.”13 Von Ehr has said, “It intrigues me to do for the world of atoms what software has done to the world of pixels and bits. The attraction of molecular nano­­ tech­nol­ogy to a lot of software people is that we’re used to creating virtual worlds starting with an idea and instantiating that in pixels and bits. It’s fascinating to think that we might have the tools that help us instantiate that in the world of atoms. Because we’re made of atoms.”14 According to the discourse of digital matter, then, there is no longer much of a meaningful distinction between an atom and a bit, a chemical D I G I T A L M A T T E R S  41

reaction and an algorithm, an organism and a program—​­or indeed, real life and a video game. With the coming Age of Digital Matter as a background assumption, it is no wonder then that some nano­scientists already interact with the nano­­scale world as if playing in a video game world. In 1991, the computer scientist Warren Robinett, then at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, together with the chemist R. Stanley Williams, then at ucla , conceived the Nano­Manipulator. The Nano­Manipulator joins a scanning probe microscope to a vr environment, decked out with a stereoscopic head-​­mounted display, a joystick controller, and a force-​­feedback arm.15 This technology for exploring atomic surfaces and manipulating molecular objects was designed as a “real-​­time immersive virtual-​­world interface to [nano­tech] instruments,” transforming measured scientific data into graphical space.16 The project evolved over several years under direction of the computer scientist Russell M. Taylor (who initially implemented the system as his PhD dissertation project), with early contributions from the computer scientist Frederick P. Brooks, the physicists Richard Superfine and Sean Washburn, and several other colleagues at unc–​­Chapel Hill.17 Today, the Nano­Manipulator system and its commercial descendents (such as those manufactured by 3rd Tech and Zyvex) enable scientists everywhere to plunge into a simulacrum of the nano­­scale world, maneuvering atoms by maneuvering pixels. Experimenting with the Nano­Manipulator often seems like adventuring in a computer-​­generated playground; as Washburn has said, “It has a lot of the same things you see in fancy arcade games.”18 Certainly, the similarities have been noted: “The nano­Manipulator multiplies the visualization and control [of molecular systems] nearly one million fold, so that researchers can interact with a system as if they were playing a video game.”19 Or likewise: “The nano­Manipulator works much like a virtual-​ ­reality game.”20 Or yet again: “Say you’ve got a nifty nano­­scale object that you want to look at, test, or just play with. . . . You need a special tool called a nano­manipulator.  .  .  . Movements can be controlled  .  .  . using joysticks, just like a videogame.”21 Moreover, several former members of the unc Nano­Manipulator research team, including Jason Clark, Mark Finch, and Tom Lassanske, have moved on to prominent careers in the commercial video game industry. The Nano­Manipulator, even as a scientific tool, looks quite wrapped up in the culture of gaming. And no wonder: Robinett’s conception of the Nano­Manipulator as a 42  0010

“virtual-​­world interface” was indebted to his own association with the video game industry and its overlap with vr research.22 Between 1977 and 1979, Robinett worked for Atari, where he created the game Slot Racers in 1978, as well as the blockbuster Adventure in 1979. In 1980, Robinett left Atari to cofound The Learning Company, a venture into educational software, where he designed an adventure game about logic circuits, Rocky’s Boots, in 1982. He shortly thereafter joined fellow ex-​­Atari programmer Scott Fisher on the Virtual Environment Workstation Project at nasa Ames Research Center. Moving to Chapel Hill in 1989, Robinett translated elements of those virtual worlds he developed at Atari, The Learning Company, and nasa for the collaborative nano­science projects ongoing at unc, which eventually evolved into the Nano­Manipulator design. As Robinett explained in 1991, around the time he and Williams first considered linking vr games with nano­tech instruments, “It has only been recently, after video games and educational software were established industries, that the scientific world has accepted the idea that computer graphics can help them understand their piles of numbers. This is now called ‘scientific visualization.’ It took scientists over a decade to see what was obvious to every kid the first time he touched a video game—​­the power of interactive computer graphics.”23 The power of scientific visualization to make sense of data and turn “piles of numbers” into sensory experience becomes equivalent to the haptic quality of video games, which Robinett describes as touch. While in 1994 the controls for the Nano­Manipulator involved a QuickShot Python joystick (created for the Nintendo Entertainment System), its lack of native force feedback required supplementation with a customized force-​ f­ eedback arm in order to “feel the surface” of the sample.24 Yet by 2003, researchers from Ludwig-​­Maximilians-​­Universität Munich were able to simply purchase a “commercial force-​­feedback joystick (ffj), originally designed for computer games,” and refit the device directly to an afm.25 They built their own nano­manipulator to interact with real molecules—​ ­in this case, human chromosomes—​­w ith off-​­the-​­shelf video game equipment. The joystick was a Logitech Wingman Force, which features motors that transmit forces to the hand. Working with Microsoft DirectX (a suite of application programming interfaces for developing computer games), the nano­scientists created a software system for producing a scalable force along the joystick whenever the scanning tip of the microscope would run into dna . They could then use the joystick to navigate the D I G I T A L M A T T E R S  43

digitized microscopic terrain and play with any chromosomes encountered during the journey. Although a nano­manipulator generates its images by physical interaction with the real molecules of the sample, many users have discovered that the nano­manipulator experience remains the same even when the probe microscope is disconnected and the system runs from data stored on a disk.26 In fact, training with a nano­manipulator in this “off-​­line user interaction mode” teaches the user how to work with molecular material in the form of an endlessly rebootable “realistic nano­world”: “The use of physically based simulation techniques of 3d multi-​­body nano-​­systems would enhance the operator’s skills by learning and feeling a realistic nano­world in an off-​­line user interaction mode. Then, by practicing the adequate gesture through trial-​­and-​­error schemes, the operator would be able to reproduce the nano­manipulation tasks in a real environment.”27 Repetitive play (trial and error) inside the “realistic nano­world”—​­that is, inside the simulation—​­shapes the operator’s encounter with the belated “real environment” of the molecular sample. Actual nano­manipulation reproduces a set of gestural tasks already mastered in offline mode. The analog movements and sensations of the body are thus entrained by digital processors, coordinated with the software code that produces the graphical atomic landscape, in other words, the “realistic nano­world.” Which is now more real than the real. For the “real environment” appears as a reproduction, a mimetic recollection. The body responds, making sense of the real environment as repetition and rehearsal of the familiar computational playspace. The real environment becomes a simulacrum of the virtual: the nano­world reloaded. This is why the computer scientist Marc Pesce has written, “The virtual world is the most useful when it represents reality, and the nano-​­scale world makes most sense when it is represented virtually.”28 The virtual-​­world interface as the site of nano­ technological investigation is a space apart, a recreational space where matter finally makes sense—​­as nothing otherwise than digital.

$ open /“If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.”/The_ Matrix/1999/The_Wachowskis/level.sav/

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Already, then, video games are deeply entangled with the ongoing evolution of nano­­scale sciences and technologies. Many of the software functions used for molecular visualization are the same as those originally invented for robust video game graphics. For instance, the Nano­Rule+ imaging program for scanning probe microscopes, developed by Pacific Nano­­tech­nol­ogy, “incorporates a versatile set of visualization functions such as rendering, texture mapping, and special effects, which have been used to great effect in video games.”29 The developers have emphasized that such features are not ornamental but crucial for scientific discovery: “We have taken advantage of some of the latest software and video graphics capabilities developed for video games to make Nano­­Rule+ fast, intuitive, and easy to use. It gives the afm user the ability to rapidly visualize data in new ways and gain new insights via controlled 3-​­dimensional imagery.”30 Molecular samples enter the representational space of the laboratory enframed by the aesthetic conventions of gaming (“controlled 3-​­dimensional imagery”) that are baked into the software. Likewise, when modeling nano­­scale objects and processes, a number of researchers now tweak standard game-​­development tools such as the Nucleus physics engine, the Blender game engine, and the Unity game engine.31 The computer scientists Rohit Pathek and Satyadhar Joshi have similarly employed the Microsoft xna game-​­development suite “to simulate many areas of [the] Nano domain, including nano-​­agent based systems, nano manipulations, and other phenomena. . . . The idea is borrowed from the development of modern games where the need for high computation power is required.”32 The methodology of game development, with all its graphical intensities and algorithmic demands, becomes an increasingly prominent model for forward-​­looking research in nano­tech. Virtualization opens the future, composes the future. According to the physicist David Tománek, the most powerful nano simulations often outperform physical experiments in many respects. More importantly, they function as prophetic media: “Even advanced experimental techniques . . . provide only limited information about the atomic and electronic properties of nano­structures, since they either significantly perturb the individual systems, or average over large ensembles. . . . No surprise that nano­­tech­nol­ogy designers are increasingly turning to large-​­scale computations to guide product development. To some degree, unexpected results of computer simulations in the nano­­tech­nol­ogy domain fulfill the D I G I T A L M A T T E R S  45

same mission as prophecies of old, namely guiding the evolution towards a brighter future.”33 These complex nano simulations (or nano prophesies, if you prefer) typically require processing capabilities available only with massive supercomputers or Beowulf clusters—​­or more conveniently, it turns out, video game consoles. Consider the gamess (General Atomic and Molecular Electronic Structure System) application, a powerful code package for ab initio simulation of quantum chemistry and intermolecular dynamics.34 The chemist Todd Martínez and his colleagues have been known to play gamess on hacked Sony PlayStation units, a research procedure they describe as “hijacking game consoles for molecular modeling.”35 Martínez has often emphasized the value of commodity-​­off-​­the-​­toy-​­shelf (cotts) strategies for computational chemistry. He had seen the advantages as early as 2003: “The fact [is] that gaming and computational chemistry applications have significant overlap. This last point means that one can conceive of obtaining higher performance from a cotts strategy than would be possible using clusters of x86 processors. Indeed, this is already the case today [in 2003], with the Sony PlayStation 2 outperforming some of the fastest Pentium-​­III processors, at least for computational linear algebra.”36 Since then, his lab group has continued to test the affordances of new game consoles and high-​­performance graphics cards for research in quantum chemistry. Many other researchers are now taking a similar approach. Moreover, the actual practices of gaming—​­the modes of media interactivity, competition, and recreation associated with video games—​­have begun to inform and refigure the methods of molecular research. A case in point is the Folding@home project, which launched in 2000 at Stanford University. Folding@home is an experiment in distributed computing that aims to unlock the secrets of protein folding, the riddles of biomolecular self-​­assembly. As the project website explains, “Proteins are biology’s workhorses—​­its ‘nano­machines.’ Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or ‘fold.’ The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery.”37 To solve this mystery, Folding@ home encourages computer users to download and run its software, linking their pc s to a network of thousands of others around the world. By assembling all this computing power, Folding@home can run bewilderingly

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complex chemical simulations and graphically depict how proteins fold or misfold. In so doing, Folding@home looks ahead to the future of radical nano­­tech­nol­ogy. As the project leader, Vijay Pande, explains, [Proteins] are nature’s nano­machines. Proteins are the molecules in the body that it uses to get everything done. They act as catalysts to speed up chemical bonds that might take a billion years through other types of biological machinery. So whenever something needs to get done in biology, odds are, proteins are at work. They all have different functions, some are like scissors, some bring bonds together. If you think about the use of building nano­machines today, biology solved this millions of years ago. It amazes how well this works in the body. . . . The connection between biology and nano­­tech­nol­ogy is very exciting and for decades it has been a dream to be able to rationally design drugs. . . . The dream is to design molecules the way we design macroscopic objects. Sounds easy, but being so small you must be really, really accurate and it is very computationally demanding.38 The computational demands of some simulations proved so great that running them on the initial Folding@home pc network still required eighteen months or more. But with the launch of Sony’s PlayStation 3 in 2006, the situation changed abruptly. Pande’s lab teamed up with Sony to make Folding@home available on every ps3 in the world. Accessed through a ps3 menu item originally called “Folding@home” and later redubbed “Life with PlayStation,” the ps3 Folding@home network expanded the computing power of the project into the range of petaflops. By taking advantage of the ps3’s unique hardware and the global reach of the Sony Play­Station Network, Folding@home became, by some measures, one of the most powerful computing systems ever developed.39 As Pande suggested, the ps3 was the key: There are several aspects which makes the ps3 well suited for this task [of Folding@home]. First, it is powerful: its main processor—​­the Cell Processor—​­is very powerful. In fact, we get a 20x speed increase over pc’s. That’s not 20%, but 20x, i.e. a 2,000% increase over a typical pc. . . . Second, a console environment is very uniform, which makes it easier for us to support and easier for people to run Folding@home. Indeed, the ps3 version requires just 1 click to run. . . . Finally, the ­graphics/​ ­v isualization of the ps3 isn’t something we could easily do on a pc. D I G I T A L M A T T E R S  47

Game consoles push the envelope of visualization for games, and it’s great to take advantage of this for [email protected] Sony supported Folding@home on the ps3 for a period of five years. During this time, Folding@home reinvented itself as a kind of video game, sporting new graphics and visualization features (“We worked with Sony to make the simulations visually appealing and more in line with what a gamer might see to make them interested in the program”), as well as team-​­based competitions and leaderboards.41 As the gaming website ign reported, “Of course, it [Folding@home] wouldn’t be a video game without competition.”42 The system was designed to monitor the number of computations performed by all PlayStations and pcs on a team, keeping a running score on the leaderboards. While such competitions are common for distributed computing projects (seti@home and Stardust@home, for example, have employed similar motivational strategies), Folding@home soon made the game aspect into a core dimension of its social narrative, resonating with the playful image of nano­­tech­nol­ogy and the trope of mondo nano. All of this was explicitly promoted through the “Life with Play­ Station” function of the ps3 console, and recent versions of the Folding@​ home client for Windows, Mac, and Linux have retained the same features. For example, users can switch back and forth between the real-​­time image of nano­­scale biology and the real-​­time image of the Folding@home network mapped across the entire planet. Switching between mondo and nano is part of the game, part of the pleasure afforded by Folding@home (figs. 2.1 and 2.2). It encourages users to keep the software running, to devote more and more processor cycles to the critical mission of molecular science. Most of the highest-​­ranked Folding@home teams are driven by hardcore gamers, modders, and overclockers who share techniques for maximizing folding time on their home systems and increasing work-​­unit contributions. Many of these players also distribute volumes of information about biochemistry and nano­­tech­nol­ogy on the team message boards—​­all part of the effort to outcompete other teams. As one player on the Eurogamer team has written, “Just a bit of competition to save the world!”43 The rallying cry of “save the world!” echoes through the ranks, reinforcing group solidarity, urging teammates to own—​­or pwn—​­the future of mondo nano. As one member of the console-​­hacking Acidmods team said, “So lets get going and save the world one molecule at a time and see who wins and is top of the leader board.”44 48  0010

2.1. Folding@home on the PlayStation 3: Mondo view. October 31, 2012. Glowing yellow dots on the planetary map represent sites of folding activity in the PlayStation Network.

2.2. Folding@home on the PlayStation 3: Nano view. October 31, 2012. The work unit (p3460_Fs_peptide) represents Folding@home project #3460, managed by Vincent Voelz (formerly a postdoctoral researcher in the Pande Lab at Stanford, now a professor of chemistry at Temple University). Involving 264 atoms, this particular simulation was part of a series for the PlayStation 3 client (projects #3459–​­3464) that used the gromacs core software to test the solvation model and the application of Markov State Models for protein folding.

Teams focused on particular video game franchises often channel rhetoric from the games when rousing their comrades to fold. For example, the Duke Nukem folding team “Save the World . . . Duke Nukem!” launched its efforts with this provocation: “This team is 100% Duke fans bent on saving the world . . . the way Duke would . . . without a sweat. . . . Hail to the king baby.”45 Similarly, teams committed to games with nano­­tech­nol­ ogy story lines, such as Crysis or Metal Gear Solid, frequently discuss the potentials of Folding@home to make science fiction into reality—​­whether for good or evil. One Metal Gear Solid player, noting the cartoonish names of certain proteins in the Folding@home pipeline, queried his teammates, “Is anyone else working on [Folding@home] files with the words ‘Villain’ or ‘SuperVillain’ in it? I can’t help but wonder if I’m helping make bomb or Metal Gear or something.”46 Nevertheless, most of the gamers who imagine their folding contributions in terms of speculative fiction are enthusiastic and upbeat, genuinely hoping to save the world: “Folding@home is based on the science of Molecular Dynamics where molecular chemistry and mathematics are combined . . . when I first heard about this, I recalled Isaac Asimov’s sci-​­fi masterpiece colloquially known as The Foundation Trilogy which is based on the fictional branch of science called psychohistory . . . [using] computers to predict humanity’s future. . . . Years ago I became infected with an Isaac Asimov inspired optimism about humanity’s future. . . . Dr. Asimov, I’m computing these protein folding sequences in memory of you and your work.”47 To be sure, the discourse of Folding@home resonates with Asimovian optimism and the imagery of science fiction’s golden age. For instance, Pande and his colleagues foresee synthetic technologies modeled after biological systems: “self-​­assembling nano­machines may be designed using synthetic polymers with protein-​­like folding properties.” Medical interventions are right around the corner: “[Folding@home] has been able to make significant advances in our understanding of how [molecular] chaperones may work to speed folding, and we’re looking forward to the future where we apply these ideas to specific biomedical applications,” including therapeutic “protein folding nano­machines.”48 And so forth. Of course, Asimov was speculating about such technologies already in the 1960s: “Let us look forward to the possible consequences that will follow when mankind is able to form synthetic nucleic acids, synthetic viruses, synthetic chromosomes, synthetic life.” He imagined a world transformed by biomolecular machines: “Can we see a future in which 50  0010

2.3. Fantastic Voyage: The miniature submarine Proteus travels into the lymphatic system. Twentieth Century Fox, 1966.

factories are built where the working machinery consists of submicroscopic nucleic acids? Might not mankind gather a repertoire of hundreds or even thousands of complex enzymes and other proteins? Some of the enzymes could be used to bring about chemical reactions more conveniently than any methods now used. Others might be used in medicines or in helping to construct life.”49 These ideas have since become part of the common lore of nano. And at least one nano­­tech­nol­ogy corporation has credited Asimov’s fiction as an inspiration: Seldon Technologies, founded in 2003, is named after the famous prognosticator Hari Seldon from Asimov’s Foundation novels. Let us also recall that Asimov wrote the best-​­selling novelization of the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage—​­an iconic prefiguration of tiny medical machines inside the human body (fig.  2.3)—​­as well as the 1987 sequel novel, Fantastic Voyage II: Destination Brain. Many Folding@home players contextualize their efforts in precisely these terms: “I do folding too to help. . . . [It might lead to a] tech possibility to cure cancer [using] nano­ robots who travel into organisms to deliver the medicine.”50 Such visions have a long history, going back to Feynman’s 1959 talk where he imagined “swallowing the surgeon”—​­though even prior to Feynman, similar ideas had already featured prominently in science fiction literature. Recent decades have been awash in images of medical nano­bots traveling through the bloodstream, reshaping the body from the inside out.51 Rehearsed and disseminated by popular novels, films, and games—​­as well as scientific blogs and technical journals—​­these images evidently precondition D I G I T A L M A T T E R S  51

the experience of folding at home for some players, providing manifold incentives to participate, to save the world, to join the fold. This massively distributed experiment in computational biochemistry, promising a future of programmable matter and medical nano­machines, has enrolled hundreds of thousands of video game enthusiasts into the dedicated work of science, consuming their time, their material resources, their imaginations, and their playbor power—​­in effect, turning them into virtual laboratory technicians. It’s the way of the future. Consider Foldit, an experimental video game that hones the puzzle-​­solving skills of its players for purposes of biochemical discovery and nano­tech innovation (fig. 2.4). In 1998, the biochemist David Baker and his lab group at the University of Washington developed Rosetta, a simulation platform for predicting protein structure from initial peptide sequences. Rosetta has evolved increasingly in the direction of nano­tech research, especially with the addition of the RosettaDesign platform for engineering new proteins with structures unknown in nature. The success of RosettaDesign was proclaimed “a milestone on a path to molecular machine systems,” and David Baker and his colleague Brian Kuhlman (now at unc–​­Chapel Hill) received the 2004 Feynman Prize in

2.4. Foldit: Gene regulation protein puzzle. Puzzle 785: Revisiting Puzzle 77: “This protein is an example of a chaperone protein, one which assists in the folding of other proteins. This puzzle has 68 side chains” (Foldit “Science Puzzles” menu, October 2013).

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Nano­­tech­nol­ogy from the Foresight Institute.52 In 2005, the Rosetta platform migrated to the world of distributed computing as Rosetta@home, following the model of Folding@home. While communicating with Rosetta@home users, Baker and his collaborators realized that some people were treating it as a game, trying to predict the molecular structures developing on their screens—​­and remarkably, they were often arriving at correct results faster than the networked computers.53 To focus the chemical intuitions and analytic capacities of such gamers, the Baker lab, together with colleagues in computer science, developed Foldit as an interactive interface to Rosetta. Released in 2008, Foldit involves a series of “protein puzzles” to train gamers about protein stereochemistry, starting with well-​­studied proteins but progressing to peptide sequences whose 3d structures remain unknown. Players score points for manipulating the proteins into energetically optimal conformations. They can work alone (“soloists”) or collaborate in teams (“evolvers”). High-​ ­scoring players turn out to be as good—​­and in some cases better—​­than Rosetta itself in predicting protein structure. The Baker lab has been synthesizing and testing some of the novel proteins designed by Foldit players, anticipating that important pharmaceutical and biotechnological breakthroughs will eventually emerge. The initial results of this experiment in crowdsourcing, published in Nature in 2010, suggested that gameplay can function effectively as exploratory research: We show that top-​­ranked Foldit players excel at solving challenging structure refinement problems in which substantial [protein] backbone rearrangements are necessary to achieve the burial of hydrophobic residues. Players working collaboratively develop a rich assortment of new strategies and algorithms; unlike computational approaches, they explore not only the conformational space but also the space of possible search strategies.  .  .  . The solution of challenging structure prediction problems by Foldit players demonstrates the considerable potential of a hybrid human–​­computer optimization framework in the form of a massively multiplayer game. The approach should be readily extendable to related problems, such as protein design and other scientific domains where human three-​­dimensional structural problem solving can be used. Our results indicate that scientific advancement is possible if even a small fraction of the energy that goes into playing computer games can be channelled into scientific discovery.54 D I G I T A L M A T T E R S  53

2.5. EteRNA: “Played by Humans. Scored by Nature.” This figure represents the easiest Y rna puzzle: “ Y rna s are small non-​­coding rna components of the Ro ribonucleoprotein particle (Ro rnp). The Ro rnp was first identified by Lerner et al. as a target of autoimmune antibodies in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus. . . . Y rna s are over expressed in human tumours and required for cell proliferation. . . . You have to design the Y rna with following specifications: Minimum 4 GU [Guanine–​­Uracil] Pairs” (EteRNA “Challenges” menu, September 12, 2010).

Gamers become scientists. Moreover, the list of authors for the Nature paper included the entire group of “Foldit players” at that time: “All named authors contributed extensively to development and analysis for the work presented in this paper. Foldit players (more than 57,000) contributed extensively through their feedback and gameplay, which generated the data for this paper.”55 The research team has continued to innovate in this way, not only naming successful Foldit groups as coauthors of journal articles, but also upholding open-​­source approaches to intellectual property, even while recognizing the contributions of individual gamers to potentially patentable inventions.56 So this experiment in gaming for science is also a gaming of science, tweaking the protocols of scientific authorship and valuing the playbor of nonscientists in the production of technical knowledge. The computer scientist Zoran Popović, a principle investigator on the Foldit project, has said, “We’re hopefully going to change the way science is done, and who it’s done by. . . . Our ultimate goal is to have ordinary people play the game and eventually be candidates for winning the Nobel Prize.”57 54  0010

Breaking all the rules, Foldit becomes a joyous instance of citizen science—​­a massively multiplayer laboratory. Hot on the heels of Foldit, researchers at Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University developed EteRNA, another crowdsourcing molecular video game that aims to make gamers into skilled nano­technicians. Players fiddle with nucleo­ tides of rna , engineering complex structures and functions by folding and twisting, snapping and recombining (fig.  2.5). The game features a competition for the most successful designs, which are then synthesized at Stanford and tested for viability. The simulations of the game lead directly to the lab bench, and the experimental results then feed back into the game. According to the biophysicist Rhiju Das, one of the principal investigators on the project, “The dream is that within a year or so we will be able to create rna that is functional and that we can transcribe into cells to do things such as sense light or even deactivate a virus.”58 The online portal for EteRNA hails gamers to participate in the experiment, to play in the name of scientific adventure—​­pioneering a new way of doing science, and helping to design future molecular devices and nano­machines: “By playing EteRNA, you will participate in creating the first large-​­scale library of synthetic rna designs. Your efforts will help reveal new principles for designing rna-​­based switches and nano­machines—​­new systems for seeking and eventually controlling living cells and disease-​­causing viruses. By interacting with thousands of players and learning from real experimental feedback, you will be pioneering a completely new way to do science. Join the global laboratory!”59 Vive la révolution! Enlist! Today, a new way to do science; tomorrow, mondo nano. The revolution will not be televised, of course . . . it will be played.

$ open /“Then you go, but first you have to devirtualize yourself. The question is how?”/Code_Lyoko/“Image Problem”/2003/Jérôme_ Mouscadet/level.sav/

All of this cross traffic between nano­science and video game culture—​ e­ xchanges of specific technologies, narratives, images, and patterns of interactivity—​­informs the way that both scientific and popular audiences D I G I T A L M A T T E R S  55

understand and deliberate nano­­tech­nol­ogy. This is why a team of researchers in Grenoble has written that “if the nano­world is our chosen playground” for scientific development into the foreseeable future, then the task of training citizens to have an intuitive, everyday understanding of nano might best be accomplished through technologies of edutainment: “One way to develop this . . . can be based on real nano­sensors and nano­actuators. Another approach is to use virtual environments which can offer the nano­world to us through real time multisensorial interfaces. This can dramatically enhance possibilities for easy exploration of remote realities foreign to our senses and can trigger a spontaneous motivation of the user similar to the one observed in video game players.”60 In other words, virtual worlds and video games that expose users to sensational encounters with nano­technologies can both train and motivate, providing a feel and a taste for nano, an awareness of nano and its manifestations . . . even in advance of its manifestations. Commercial gaming platforms, including personal computers as well as consoles such as the Sony PlayStation, the Nintendo Wii, and the Micro­ soft Xbox, lend themselves to the research agendas of laboratories seeking to develop instrumental controls in a digitized plane of materiality, transcoding molecular space as computational space. At the same time, these systems provide audiences with innumerable opportunities for interacting with programmable matter through fictional, recreational games that reinforce the epistemic features of nano­science—​­conditioning in advance the social reception of our molecular future. For all the while that the molecular sciences have been absorbing and remodeling instruments and practices from gaming culture, popular video games such as Obsidian (1996), Nano­tek Warrior (1997), Total Annihilation (1997), Xenogears (1998), the Metal Gear Solid series (1998–​­), System Shock 2 (1999), the Deus Ex games (2000–​­), the Red Faction games (2001–​­), Hostile Waters (2001), the Ratchet & Clank series (2002–​­), the X-​­Men Legends games (2004–​­2005), James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing (2004), Nano Breaker (2005), Project: Snowblind (2005), the Nano­stray and Nano Assault sequence (2005–​­2012), the Alien Syndrome reboot (2007), the Dead Space series (2008–​­2013), the Crysis saga (2007–​­), the Mass Effect trilogy (2007–​­2012), Binary Domain (2012), Warframe (2013), and many others have been proliferating plotlines and concepts inspired by the field of nano­­tech­nol­ogy.

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Certainly, these video games are fiction. But they enable consumers to play with advanced nano­technologies and consider their cultural impacts in ways that go far beyond mere representation. For gamers experience these fictive nano-​­things through an immersive interface that turns digital matter into sensory experience. Here, data is made flesh—​­quite literally. At the intersection of user and digital media we find the body-​­in-​­code, as Mark Hansen has argued: the “body whose (still primary) constructive or creative power is expanded through new interactional possibilities offered by the programs of ‘artificial reality.’ ”61 Through interacting with the video game world, the user’s body scheme expands to both enter and enfold the artificial environment, generating its lived dimensions through motor action and tactile manipulation, giving it form through embodied engagement. Video games are not representations, or images, or narratives, or codes, or sets of rules, per se; rather, as Alexander Galloway puts it, “video games are actions. . . . Video games come into being when the machine is powered up and the software is executed; they exist when enacted.”62 The video game is an enactive event that takes place across the biomechanical assemblage formed by the user’s body, the hardware system, and the software program. The embodied event of gameplay confers a phenomenal worldness onto the codes and computations that underwrite the virtual interface. Hence, those objects encountered in video games, as with objects encountered in the explorations of a nano­manipulator or the simulations of computational chemistry—​­as nothing otherwise than digital—​­are given form by the body, focalizing an entire worlding experience, a physical materialization of the as-​­yet-​­virtual, an enfleshment of vaporware. The Age of Digital Matter means that, even as matter is rendered digital, so is the digital rendered matter in the space now shared by the molecular sciences and video games: the space of worlding between the enactive body and the computational system.

D I G I T A L M A T T E R S  57

$ open /“Games? You want games? I’ll give you games.”/Tron/1982/ Steven_Lisberger/level.sav/

There are dozens of consumer games produced in North America, Asia, Europe—​­all over the world now—​­that showcase ostensibly fictitious nano­technologies, while also addressing the real-​­life discourse of nano­ science and its visions of the future. Let’s take a look, shall we? Nano Breaker, for example, was developed by the Japanese company Konami in 2005 for the PlayStation 2. This game projects a bleak virtual world that, albeit fantastic and wildly metaphorical, conjures connections to actual developments in nano­science funding and government policy—​­specifically, the formation of the U.S. National Nano­­tech­nol­ogy Initiative in 2001. Blending its fictional conceits with nonfictional topical references, Nano Breaker anchors its narrative to the technopolitics of the present moment: In the year 2001 ad, the United States Government constructed an experimental island in response to the National Nano­­tech­nol­ogy Initiative (nni). They named it “Nano­­tech­nol­ogy Island” and it was there they assembled the finest American analytic minds from every field—​ ­Business, Government, and Education—​­to form a united research project committed to unlocking the untapped potential of nano­­tech­ nol­ogy. With unlimited access to the world’s most advanced scientific technology and a massive amount of government funds, advances in nano­­tech­nol­ogy occurred at a startling rate over a short span of time. Twenty years passed. Concepts and machines that were considered fantasy in the 20th century were, one by one, becoming a reality. These new technologies were made available to the general public, causing drastic improvements in lifestyle on a global scale. Then, one day, the main computer regulating all the island’s nano­ machines suddenly went out of control. Every nano­machine on the island malfunctioned, from those in the research labs to the “id Nano­s” embedded in the bodies of the island’s residents for identification purposes. Thus occurred the tragic birth of the “Orgamechs,” living mechanical organisms whose bodies are comprised entirely of microscopic machines, from the molecular level on up.63 58  0010

2.6. Nano Breaker: Wielding the Plasma Blade, Jake carves his way through legions of Orgamechs. Grisly torrents of nano­machines spew into the air. A counter at the bottom of the screen meticulously measures the quantity of disintegrated molecules. Konami, 2005.

In this game, the player faces nano­­tech­nol­ogy as an out-​­of-​­control threat, but at the same time, the hero-​­avatar of the game—​­the “cyborg militant” Jake—​­relies on nano­science for his adaptive weaponry. Progressing through Nano Breaker means discovering that nano­­tech­nol­ogy might have devastating global consequences, but also that it is the most powerful and versatile tool for dealing with its own catastrophes. To combat the Nano­s taking over Nano­­tech­nol­ogy Island and producing the hideous Orgamechs, the player must learn (via intricate button combos) the programmed applications of a “Plasma Blade,” which affords direct, violent access to molecular structures: “It’s a new type of weapon we call a ‘Plasma Blade.’ Using this, you’ll be able to destroy anything, down to the molecular level.”64 Whenever Jake’s Plasma Blade destroys molecular components of the Orgamechs, the player sees nano “oil” splatter copiously across the screen (fig. 2.6). Distinctive auditory cues erupting from the speakers signal successfully executed strikes; moreover, during close combat with the Orgamechs, the vibration function of the PlayStation 2’s DualShock controller whirs to life in the player’s grasp, haptically transducing Jake’s brutal contact with programmable matter.65 D I G I T A L M A T T E R S  59

Digital molecules disintegrate under the edge of our nano­tech instrument, and we see their dissection, we hear them, and we feel them in our own flesh. The tangible splatter and spray of nano­machines in this game might therefore be seen as a wicked new twist to Ian Hacking’s famous condition for scientific realism about theoretical entities: “If you can spray them, then they are real.”66 After all, through such acts of nano breaking we attain a recreational familiarity with the sensory dimensions of advanced nano­­tech­nol­ogy—​­a nano­­tech­nol­ogy that is entirely speculative, as-​­yet-​­virtual, completely fictional, but nevertheless played as real, with tangible consequences in the game and physical impacts on our bodies. At the level of the biomechanical assemblage of the video game system, within the transcodings of hardware–​­software–​­wetware, the digital comes to matter, in every sense. In science, as in fiction. The researchers at lmu Munich, when dissecting human dna with their ersatz nano­manipulator, reported that the modified gaming interface enabled them to observe and feel the cuts made by the instrument, down to the molecular level: “The user obtained an interactive feedback of the applied force through the ffj. . . . The chromosome was totally microdissected and a chromosomal fragment was extracted.”67 Totally microdissected, completely gibbed—​­ftw! So here, it would seem, we find another kind of nano breaker (fig. 2.7). As the researchers explain, “Nano­­tech­nol­ogy offers the prospect of analyzing, handling and manipulating biological objects on the nano­meter scale. . . . Controlled nano­dissection of dna by an afm is possible with high spatial resolution.”68 Whether in the form of a Plasma Blade or nano­ manipulator, the virtual instrument sensationalizes the nano­dissection of matter—​­analyzing (literally, breaking up) or fragging molecules into virtual sensations: “Different elements of virtual reality can assist the human user to explore and manipulate [these] nano­­scale objects. Haptic interfaces that generate a feedback of the tip-​­sample forces provide the user with a ‘feeling’ for surface structure and forces during the manipulation process. Entire synthetic worlds facilitate the orientation within the nano­world.”69 Through mediated prehension, as if reaching “down to the molecular level” and stressing chemical bonds past their limits—​ ­participating in a cultural logic of experimentation where to dissect is to know and to break is to see—​­we encounter the nano­world through virtual performances of nano­dissection. We come to understand the properties of nano­­scale matter, its responsiveness, its structure, its resilience, 60  0010

2.7. Nano­d issection of human chromosomes. This topographic afm data shows the slicing of metaphase chromosomes using mechanical afm dissection (left chromosome) and uv-​­laser photo ablation (right chromosome). Reproduced with permission from Advanced Engineering Materials: Rubio-​­Sierra, Heckl, and Stark, “Nano­manipulation by Atomic Force Microscopy.” ©2005 wiley-​­vch Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.

ultimately through its breakage—​­or rather, its digitization. We get a “feeling” for it even as it crumbles between our fingers. In Nano Breaker, then, hack-​­and-​­slash game violence (Rated “M” for Mature) functions as an allegory for digitization as such: the chopping of the analog into measurable units, the slicing of continuous differentials into manipulable parts. After all, the dream of digital matter is about the transformation of analog matter into bits: bits as binary digits, and bits as matter broken apart. Through the nano breaking of matter, we enact our prehension of the molecular world, reaching down to feel its vibrations and tensions, biting into it and getting a taste for it. The violence of Nano Breaker’s gameplay, its repetitive pattern of total nano­dissection, thus serves to allegorize the processes—​­both technical and social—​­whereby matter is made data and data is made flesh.70 Indeed, as a splatter-​­horror allegory, Nano Breaker also confronts the social forces shaping mondo nano. In a twist ending, it turns out that the Nano­s did not go out of control of their own accord, but were caused to do so by a power-​­hungry American general. The general monologues only D I G I T A L M A T T E R S  61

moments before the climactic final boss battle: “Orgamechs are the next generation. . . . And now I control them! And with this power, I will force all those before me to bend to my will! The whole planet, at my finger tips! . . . Do you really think a mere computer malfunction could lead to such perfect results? . . . It was within my authority to intentionally corrupt the main computer. . . . Everything has gone according to my plan.”71 The governmental funding initiative driving Nano­­tech­nol­ogy Island in this game—​­namely, the nni—​­here seems guided entirely by military investments and monomaniacal military officials. As one scientist in the game says, “With the help of a huge government subsidy, [the nano­ scientist who invented self-​­replicating nano­machines] was able to turn his dream into a reality on this island. I should have known the military was behind it.”72 While the motive ascribed to military investment in nano­science—​ g­ lobal domination, or rather, global digitization (“The whole planet, at my finger tips”)—​­resembles the hyperbolic plots of superhero comics more than nuanced social critique, Nano Breaker nonetheless renders certain political conditions surrounding nano­­tech­nol­ogy into playable format. After all, the U.S. Department of Defense currently controls nearly a third of the entire budget of the nni , and military subsidies are indeed propelling advances in basic nano­science around the world.73 So although this game features nano­tech as an agent of apocalyptic horror, such (im)possible dangers are construed—​­or played—​­as symptoms of ideology, situating the technology itself within a broader geopolitical context that must be understood and, in this case, withstood, for the sake of a peaceful future (that is, successful completion of the game). Nano Breaker’s shocking irrealism turns out to transcode an incisive social realism. It suggests that science fiction is actually the realism of our time. The game foregrounds and critiques the social ideology structuring its fictive world, while implying metaphorical or affective congruence with the “exterior” social context, that is, our own real-​­world techno­ politics.74 So what is actually “broken” when playing Nano Breaker—​­what is broken down, gibbed, fragged, dissected, or analyzed—​­is perhaps less nano­­tech­nol­ogy itself than the cultural conditions that even now make certain futures available while foreclosing others.

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$ open /“Then you could throw yourself into a highspeed drift and skid, totally engaged but set apart from it all, and all around you the dance of biz, information interacting, data made flesh in the mazes of the black market.”/Neuromancer/1984/William_Gibson/ level.sav/

The broader socioeconomic context of nano also informs Ratchet & Clank, developed by the American company Insomniac Games for the PlayStation 2 in 2002 and remastered for the PlayStation 3 in 2012. In this game and its several sequels, “Nano­tech” serves as a generic health-​­recovery object, functionally analogous to the “Power-​­Up,” “Med-​­Kit,” “Food,” “Bandage,” or “+Life” found in other games. When the player-​­character Ratchet first encounters a glowing blue sphere of Nano­tech, the on-​­screen heads-​ ­up display (an automated HelpDesk maintained by the fictive corporation Gadgetron) informs us, “That’s Nano­tech! Whenever you sustain injury, let Gadgetron’s patented Nano­tech system rebuild your body from the inside out” (fig. 2.8). Much of the game involves searching for Nano­tech to prevent Ratchet’s

2.8. Ratchet & Clank: Ratchet discovers Nano­tech. The original 2002 version of the game was designed for standard-​­definition televisions; this 1080p widescreen image is from the hd remastered Ratchet & Clank Collection for the PlayStation 3. Insomniac Games, 2012. D I G I T A L M A T T E R S  63

death. Although this virtual object works generically in terms of gameplay, the narrative endows Nano­tech with specific semiotic characteristics affecting our relationship with it—​­all the more so because its role in the game is unavoidable (unless a player happens to be so skilled as to never sustain damage). Nano­tech is advertised to “rebuild your body from the inside out,” restoring Ratchet to good health. The emplotment of this particular object connects its function in the game world to the wider discourse of nano­medicine and aspirations for molecular surgery. Ratchet & Clank thus adapts its conventional ludic elements to the prevailing nano imaginary, transforming scientific speculation into playable simulation. Moreover, it highlights this medical technology as a commodity: “Gadge­ tron’s patented Nano­tech system.” As we progress through the game, we learn more about the economic structure of the galactic civilization and the operations of the nano-​­pharmaceutical industry. Gadgetron turns out to hold a monopoly over almost every form of technology—​­from superfast hoverboards to domestic appliances—​­and above all, Gadgetron is the central munitions manufacturer in the galaxy. Therefore, every time we guide Ratchet to ingest Nano­tech, we participate in the military-​­industrial-​ ­pharmaceutical complex of the game world, and we have no other choice but to do so. We discover our digital body already plugged in to what Gilles Deleuze called the “societies of control,” where the instruments of speculative markets and information networks render individuals as “dividuals” and populations as “data,” operating through multidimensional feedback loops, modulating and regulating the circulation of goods and services, bodies and body parts: societies whose most superficial manifestations would be “the extraordinary pharmaceutical productions, the molecular engineering, the genetic manipulations,” and so on.75 In playing out the game’s demands (using Gadgetron’s Nano­tech while saving money to purchase Gadgetron’s insane weapons) and navigating its plotline about the hazards of global or transplanetary capitalism (the villain of the game, Ultimate Supreme Executive Chairman Drek, is an industrial tycoon bent on hostile development of other planets because he has already catastrophically polluted his own), we comprehend the potential of Nano­tech as either therapy or salvation to be inseparable from the logics of speculative capital and techno-​­militarism. The enfleshment of nano, rebuilding the avatar body from the inside out, is an enfleshment of the diagram or circuit of socioeconomic forces that make Nano­tech possible in the first place: the algorithm of the new flesh. 64  0010

$ open /“You know what they say—​­you play the game too long, you start seeing shit and having seizures.”/Stay_Alive/2006/William_ Brent_Bell/level.sav/

A significant number of video games depict cutting-​­edge nano­­tech­nol­ogy as fundamentally embedded in social and political plots—​­but it always takes some time to get to the bottom of things. These narratives are ergodic in the sense that “nontrivial effort” is required to traverse their story lines and to comprehend their simulated technocultural systems.76 They require work, physical coordination, time, and intellectual engagement (as well as indefatigable finger muscles!) to finish. As an effect of all this toil and bodily fatigue, we become, for a while, inhabitants of the game world. We learn its rules, navigate its terrains, acclimate to its politics, and adapt to its mythologies. In that space, we already live the Age of Digital Matter, and we come to intuit its possibilities—​­its promises and its threats—​­through action and experiment. Deus Ex, developed for Windows and Macintosh by the Texas-​­based Ion Storm in 2000 and later ported over to PlayStation 2 as Deus Ex: The Conspiracy in 2002, requires more than eighty hours of playtime to thoroughly explore and complete. It also expects a high degree of literacy and a willingness to digest large quantities of information about various speculative sciences—​­especially molecular nano­­tech­nol­ogy—​­in the process. In this game, corrupt governments create devastating nano-​­plagues for warfare, while their own citizens must combat these forces by using protective nano. The player’s avatar, J. C. Denton—​­a former security agent turned against his conspiratorial government—​­is augmented with high-​ ­tech microscopic implants. These “nano-​­augs” provide J. C. with super­ human powers that enable him to unravel the conspiracy and deliver the future from corruption (hence, his resonant initials). Although this game is a first-​­person shooter, Deus Ex encourages stealth and technical exploits over raw firepower. The game offers players a huge arsenal of assault weapons, but we are more frequently asked to interact on an intellectual level with the game world to successfully restore order to global society. Throughout the game, we gather clues from scientific textbooks and databases to learn the rudiments of molecular nano­­tech­nol­ogy and the mechanisms of the nano-​­plague. We also gain D I G I T A L M A T T E R S  65

2.9. Deus Ex: The Conspiracy: J. C. Denton uses his SpyDrone to observe the villainous Bob Page before the final showdown. Eidos Interactive, 2002.

recreational experience with virtual nano­systems. We learn to use the different nano­systems embedded in J. C.’s body or discovered in the game world strategically and sensibly—​­the game does not reward hack-​­and-​ s­ lash tactics but privileges the use of nano-​­tools to observe, escape, heal, communicate, or interface. For example, a player might choose to learn how to build a nano­machinic “SpyDrone,” which can scout ahead for dangers or electronically disable other systems: “Advanced nano­factories can assemble a spy drone upon demand which can then be remotely controlled by the agent until released or destroyed, at which point a new drone will be assembled. Further upgrades equip the spy drones with better armor and one-​­shot emp [electromagnetic pulse] attack.”77 This drone becomes a prosthetic extension of the player’s eyes, ears, and hands, a nano­tech probe into the world of Deus Ex. Or rather, it is a prosthetic of a prosthetic, an avatar of an avatar, for it emerges physically out of J. C.’s head (assembled by his cranial nano-​­augs) and feeds data directly into J. C.’s heads-​­up display. It is a second-​­order extension of the virtual-​­world interface, which seems to put the nano­system directly into our hands. We maneuver the nano­tech drone with our console, and we see through its visualization system (fig. 2.9). But the actual functionality of 66  0010

the drone is limited by our own skills as players, as well as the software parameters available to J. C. at this point in the game (the achieved “tech level” for the drone). In other words, our encounter with this nano­system draws attention to the interface itself. The second-​­order avatar makes visible the limit or threshold of the worlding event between the console and our sensorium. We experience nano­­tech­nol­ogy precisely in the computational interface: the screen, in all its senses. In Deus Ex, nano materializes or presences only at the level of the medial display—​­a display whose transparency is the condition for teleoperation, but whose intercession means that we encounter nano as nothing otherwise than digital, mediated or screened by the technological instruments and representational systems that bring it forth and make it accessible to our eyes, our hands, and our imaginations. $ open /“I am the video word made flesh.”/Videodrome/1983/David_ Cronenberg/level.sav/

By virtue of games that turn speculative nano­technologies into meaningful sensations, the Age of Digital Matter is already upon us, inside us. This is the theory behind Re-​­Mission, developed for Windows in 2006 by HopeLab. HopeLab is a nonprofit foundation based in Palo Alto, California, whose mission is to improve the lives of young people suffering from chronic illness. Re-​­Mission was designed for children fighting cancer, though it also appeals to other gamers and has been rated by the Entertainment Software Association (“T” for Teen). In Re-​­Mission, the avatar is a nano­bot named rx5-​­E, or “Roxxi,” who travels inside the human body (fig. 2.10). Like Ratchet & Clank, Re-​­Mission mobilizes the figure of nano rebuilding the body from the inside out. Roxxi is equipped with a chemotherapy weapon (“Chemo Blaster”) and antibiotic ammunition to battle various lymphoma and leukemia cells, carcinomas, osteosarcomas, and other maladies. Players steer Roxxi through the bloodstream of the afflicted patient, delivering chemotherapy directly to cancerous tissues and stimulating the immune system, while communicating via remote link to a nano­scientist who orchestrates the mission from another hospital. The game projects the simulated game world and the exterior context of nano­medicine simultaneously, positing D I G I T A L M A T T E R S  67

them in direct communication with each other (represented as the player’s ability to remotely control Roxxi’s movements). Combining gameplay with science education, the adventure of Re-​ ­Mission teaches players about oncology, immunology, and various medical procedures for fighting cancer. The game asks players with cancer to see Roxxi as a proxy for their own treatment regime, including basic self-​­help strategies (for example, Roxxi is also equipped with a “Stoolsoft Gun” that fires doses of prescription laxative at colonic “stool jags,” a common side effect of chemotherapy). Already regarded as “a promising addition to the psychoeducation resources available to [cancer] treatment teams,” Re-​­Mission exemplifies the power of interactive media to turn concepts into praxis.78 HopeLab ran a study of 375 cancer patients between the ages of 13 and 29 across the United States, Canada, and Australia, all of whom were randomly given either a pc loaded only with an undisclosed commercial video game or a pc loaded with that same control video game plus Re-​­Mission. HopeLab found that “playing Re-​­Mission significantly improved key behavioral and psychological factors associated

2.10. Re-​­Mission: Roxxi the nano­bot patrols the circulatory system and prepares to battle lymphoma cells. HopeLab, 2006. 68  0010

with successful cancer treatment. In the study, participants given Re-​ ­ ission maintained higher levels of chemotherapy in their blood and M took their antibiotics more consistently than those in the control group, demonstrating the game’s impact at a biological level. Participants given Re-​­Mission also showed faster acquisition of cancer-​­related knowledge and faster increase in self-​­efficacy. These results indicate that a carefully designed video game can have a positive impact on health behavior in young people with chronic illness.”79 By projecting an imaginary future in which “nano­­tech­nol­ogy had evolved as a practical means for gene therapy and drug induction,” this game exploits the ability of the gaming assemblage to generate flesh from fantasy, to transcode the digital into the behavioral, to entrain real life as a replication or reloading of the virtual playspace.80 Re-​­Mission does not expect players to think of nano­bots as already “real” in order to be effective; rather, the game affords players an opportunity to consider their own bodies in relation to the future and its traces in the present. Battling virtual cancer with digital nano­bots reinterprets the limits of contemporary medicine in light of desired outcomes, recasting chronic illness as ultimately beatable, offering a vision of hope that involves nano­scientists and patients working together toward a post-​­oncology tomorrow. The game therefore invests patient-​­players with a sense of personal agency in turning the speculations of nano­science into lived experience.

$ open /“I am the future! And you . . . you’re losing your sense of humor.”/Virtuosity/1995/Brett_Leonard/level.sav/

The capacity of video games to program the future, to shape political and social reality, now becomes a tool of technological governance—​­science policy by other means. And everyone is beginning to catch on. In 2007, for example, the London-​­based software developer PlayGen teamed up with the nano­tech consultancy company Cientifica, the Wellcome Trust, and the scientific instruments company fei to release the game Nano­Mission, designed as an educational and recruitment tool for nano­­tech­nol­ogy. While in development, the game even sported a scientific advisory board, composed of Mark Welland (professor of nano­­tech­nol­ogy and director of D I G I T A L M A T T E R S  69

the Nano­science Centre at the University of Cambridge), Richard Jones (professor of physics and pro-​­vice chancellor for research and innovation at the University of Sheffield), Kostas Kostarelos (professor and chair of nano­medicine at the University of Manchester), and Wolfgang Luther (senior technology consultant at the vdi Technologiezentrum in Düsseldorf). Backed by such illustrious scientific authorities, Nano­Mission set out to engineer the public understanding of science: Our aim is to inspire youngsters about the world of nano­­tech­nol­ogy, potentially opening their eyes to choosing it as a career. Aimed at the gaming generations, Nano­Mission™ is an engaging learning experience which educates players about basic concepts in nano­science through real world practical applications from microelectronics to drug delivery. . . . The key factor in the project is a firm grounding in real scientific facts and knowledge played out in an imaginative and exciting game world. As a result of close interactions with the scientific community, the game provides the most accurate three dimensional view of the nano­world ever produced, which will help shift public opinion away from nano submarines and robots to a more realistic view of nano­technologies.81 Nano­Mission was designed to enroll young people in the profession of nano­­tech­nol­ogy by separating “real scientific facts” and “real world practical applications” from fanciful notions of nano­subs and nano­bots. As Kam Memarzia, PlayGen’s managing director, put it, “Working with the scientific community has enabled us to develop Nano­Mission based on real science rather than science fiction. . . . We firmly believe computer games have a far greater role to play in today’s society, especially in promoting learning and understanding the real world around us.”82 The simulated game world of Nano­Mission and its fictive plotline—​­fighting the nefarious Dr. Nevil and his wicked nano­machines—​­would apparently make “the real world” newly comprehensible. In this game, players learn real science by passing through various adventure modules that educate about nano­­scale imaging, nano­materials, and nano­electronics. In the first module released in January 2007, the player uses nano­medicine to battle cancer (caused by Dr. Nevil). The prefatory text describes one of the learning objectives as “dispelling the myth of small mechanical robots inside the body”:

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Many of the early ideas about nano­­tech­nol­ogy were based on the idea that simple mechanical structures could be built at the nano­­scale using atoms as building blocks. These structures would, in theory, be able to operate very quickly and with high precision. However, many of the proposed devices would not actually work on this scale as chemical forces, viscosity and Brownian motion are the dominant forces in the nano­world, rather than friction and gravity which we all are more accustomed to in our daily lives. As a result, designing any machine to operate in the body requires a rather different approach from simply shrinking a submarine to the size of a pinhead as happened in the film “Fantastic Voyage.”83 In the game, the heroic Professor Goodlove discusses the dream of a tiny submarine in the veins, snidely declaring it impossible: “This isn’t a science fiction film, you know!” Ironically, though, the central conceit of the game—​­the very conceit that makes this game playable—​­is itself a science fiction. For Nano­­Mission gives the player a nano­­scale avatar to guide through the human body toward the site of the cancer (fig. 2.11). It is similar in this regard to other games that align themselves with speculative visions of medical nano­ bots, including Re-​­Mission, as well as Nano Legends (2007), Nano­Quest: Virus Attack (2007), Immune Attack (2008), Dr. Nano (2011), and Nano Assault (2011). But Nano­Mission rejects such speculations in favor of more “realistic” nano­medicine. The Professor tells us, We must attack the cancer cells inside [the] body at the molecular level, by delivering cancer-​­killing molecules at the site of the cancer.  .  .  . These molecules are highly toxic, they will do terrible damage to his healthy cells. Therefore we must deliver the molecules to the site of the cancer using nano­scopic carrier structures, called vesicles. These spherical structures possess compartments in which other molecules can be safely wrapped up and transported, and can even have tails attached to them, to propel them through the bloodstream.  .  .  . We’ll need you [the player] to select a vesicle and guide it through the bloodstream, using our simulation terminal.84 To be sure, this avatar is figured as a bioengineered device instead of a “small mechanical robot inside the body,” but in terms of gameplay, there is no functional difference: we teleoperate this vesicle exactly as if we D I G I T A L M A T T E R S  71

2.11. Nano­Mission: Nano­medicine module. The stalwart vesicle travels through the bloodstream, transporting a payload of toxic molecules to the cancer zone. PlayGen, 2007.

were teleoperating a nano­robotic sub, piloting it with our “simulation terminal” (the pc) and monitoring its movements through our viewscreen. Nano­Mission promotes a fantasy of direct-​­access, remote-​­controlled vesicles, endowed with endovascular visualization and illumination capabilities, and insists that all this is “real science” while nano­subs are fake and fictitious. The game even cheekily offers players the option to attempt the mission using a nano­sub instead of a vesicle, but this is designed to be a devastating experience if the player is so naive as to imagine that such a machine might be a good idea (fig. 2.12). While the vesicle is excellently mobile thanks to its adaptive flagellum and its “hairy coat of polyethylene glycol molecules  .  .  . [that] help to shield it from absorbing antibody proteins,” the nano­sub on the other hand cannot move in the blood fluid because it has a propeller rather than a flagellum, and it is always quickly destroyed by the body’s immune system. In asking players to select between the futile nano­sub and the successful vesicle—​­“The choice

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2.12. Nano­Mission: “The choice is yours.” The game offers players the option to select a nano­sub in place of a vesicle—​­but who would be so foolhardy? PlayGen, 2007.

is yours. Select one, and we’ll see how it fares”—​­the game begs the question as to why we could not also give the nano­sub an antibody-​­resistant coat of polyethylene glycol and equip it with a flagellum rather than a propeller. But that would spoil the political agenda of the game, which aims to discredit certain other forms of nano­­tech­nol­ogy research, especially those invested in molecular assemblers, mechanosynthesis tools, or nano­bots—​­in other words, the radical fringe. Nano­Mission thus launches another volley in the ongoing boundary disputes between various competing research programs seeking to shape the identity of nano­science.85 Authorized as a representation of real science (the game has been endorsed by the nni coordination office, the Institute of Physics, the U.K. National Physical Laboratory, the vdi , and the Royal Society of Chemistry), Nano­Mission typifies certain aspects of nano­­tech­nol­ogy discourse at large, which has throughout its history relied on the speculations of science fiction even while denouncing them. Indeed, nano­­tech­nol­ogy’s development in both science and culture has depended on tensions between

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novelty and banality, futuristic visions and technical immediacy, the hyped and the humdrum. The effect has been to continuously recreate the science as science fiction, and the science fiction as science: a process of “code switching” or transcoding. Richard Jones, an accomplished nano­ scientist who also served as one of the technical advisors for Nano­Mission, offers a provocative example: If you were able to make a nano­­scale submarine to fulfill the classic “Fantastic Voyage” scenario of swimming through the bloodstream, how would you power and steer it? . . . [O]ur intuitions are very unreliable guides to the environment in the wet nano­­scale world, and the design principles that would be appropriate on the human scale simply won’t work on the nano­­scale. . . . In my group [at the University of Sheffield] we’ve been doing some experiments to demonstrate the realization of one scheme to make a nano­­scale object swim . . . [and] suggest a strategy for steering our nano­­scale submarines, as well as propelling them.86 In the adventure of nano, cinematic vehicles and scientific vesicles reverse-​­engineer each other. For while the design principles appropriate for a submarine at the human scale clearly will not work at the nano­­scale, the steerable swimming particle that Jones wryly describes here strives to fulfill the Fantastic Voyage scenario, as a compensatory or supplementary modification of the basic conceit. In this way, it becomes what it was not supposed to be, namely, a “submarine.” Even before such devices swim inside our bodies, we can imagine being virtually inside them, remotely “steering our nano­­scale submarines, as well as propelling them.” Or, as Nano­Mission would have it, we can already practice steering our “nano­scopic carrier structures, called vesicles,” by using our “simulation terminal”—​­piloting these imaginary sanguinary vehicles, indulging in science fiction as an affordance, or rather, a condition of real science. This is why, when playing the game of nano­­tech­nol­ogy, it’s important to keep a sense of humor. These things are supposed to be fun, after all! So quibbles about scientific realism miss the whole point. As Homer Simpson says, it’s really all about having a good time (fig. 2.13): “Because that’s what turns a mediocre voyage into a fantastic voyage!”

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2.13. “In the Belly of the Boss”: The Simpsons discover that the pleasures of nano are more than purely scientific. The Simpsons, season 16, episode 1: “Treehouse of Horror XV.” Fox Broadcasting Company, 2004.

$ open /“This technology has peeled back a layer to reveal another universe. Virtual reality will grow . . . It will be everywhere.”/The_ Lawnmower_Man/1992/Brett_Leonard/level.sav/

And so it goes, from games to science and back again. By interacting with simulated molecular technologies in the present, gamers and scientists alike are learning how to play with real nano­­tech­nol­ogy, now and in the future. Playing nano­­tech­nol­ogy involves not only a manipulation of molecules but also an engagement with the ethical and societal implications of programmable matter. Even as nothing otherwise than virtual, the most radical and futuristic nano-​­things already begin to acquire physical and political dimensionality in the multiverse of games and interactive media. So today, technological governance as much as scientific experimentation means learning the rules of these games, enjoying them, tuning them, rebooting them. And of course, practice makes perfect.

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The nano­scientist James Heath has suggested that, to address the scientific complexities of the nano­­scale world, to understand its physics and ultimately reprogram it—​­in other words, to really get a feel for mondo nano—​­we must completely rethink our usual experimental methods, our usual way of doing things. Instead, he says, we must all become gamers. Grab the controller, press the start button: “We can’t approach this by reading the instruction manual starting at page one. . . . We need to jump in and play the game.”87 So fire it up. For the win!

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0011 Tempest in a Teapot

It would seem, after all, that nano­­tech­nol­ogy takes place on an island. The cultural imagination of nano­­tech­nol­ogy—​­to say nothing yet of the scientific imagination—​­is awash with insular narratives. The literature of science fiction in particular has long considered the island as the proper domain of radical molecular science, the proper ecosystem for the evolution of nano­­tech­nol­ogy. In science fiction, mysterious islands often appear as privileged sites for rapid innovation of microscopic technologies, ultrasmall engineering projects, and infinitesimal machines.1 Let us recall some of the earliest stories to speculate about the manipulation of chromosomes and the implications of genetic engineering, alongside other molecular interventions, such as Stanley G. Weinbaum’s “Proteus Island” from 1936, Jack Williamson’s Dragon’s Island from 1951, and so forth. Informed by the model of H. G. Wells’s Island of Dr. Moreau, as well as the history of literary utopias going back to Thomas More and Francis Bacon, these fictions represent the experimental island as a discrete space for prototyping the world of tomorrow: a crucible for futurity. In Theodore Sturgeon’s 1941 short story “Microcosmic God,” the laboratory of the reclusive genius James Kidder is located on a private island. Here, Kidder creates itty-​­bitty life-​­forms called Neoterics, virtuosos of miniature manufacturing. Kidder’s laboratory is on the island, but the island as such becomes the laboratory. By the end of the story, the island is walled off from the rest of the world by an impermeable dome, and inside, the scientist’s tiny creations continue to evolve: “Some day the Neoterics, after innumerable generations of inconceivable advancement, will take down their shield and come forth.”2 The island laboratory is an incubator

for the future as such, the promise of inconceivable molecular technologies to come. Likewise, Hal Clement’s 1950 novel Needle takes place on an industrialized island in the western Pacific. In Needle, two alien creatures composed entirely of viral particles arrive on the island and use human bodies as hosts, hiding inside like proverbial needles in a haystack. The plot revolves around the good alien (the Hunter) and his human host Bob trying to prevent the bad alien (the Killer) from escaping the island. It is a narrative of quarantine and containment. The alien outlaw, capable of refined cellular and biomolecular control, cannot be allowed to stray from the space of first contact—​­it must stay put on the island. The risk of its escape, the possibility that it might hop from host to host (“remember, there is no part of the island that he could not reach given time enough”), metaphorizes the threat of viral innovation: a disruptive technology unleashed upon the world.3 Clement presents the scenario as a theatrical predicament. The island is repeatedly figured as a stage, a performance space, where the hero, the villain, and the supporting characters all have roles to fulfill: “There was excitement and anticipation written large on [Bob’s] face . . . because an exciting play was, from his point of view, about to start. He was ready. He knew the stage—​­the island on which he had been born, and whose every square yard he was sure he knew. The Hunter knew the setting—​­the habits and capabilities of the murderous being they sought, and only the characters were left.” As part of this play, Bob must engage with an otherworldly thing inside his tissues while pretending to his friends and family that nothing has changed, lest the secret get out. The playacting is a practice of managing the present, rehearsing the familiar even while looking forward to exciting drama. Clement’s novel extensively thematizes the force of dramatic and literary conventions in shaping the encounter with weird technologies, the unfamiliar and alienating made comfortable through commonplace scripts (“[Bob] had read his share of the more melodramatic literature”) and hackneyed tropes (“They were looking for a needle in a haystack”).4 The island, a place for melodrama as much as alien experimentation, sets the stage for whatever might yet arrive on scene. Again and again. Consider Robert A. Heinlein’s 1942 novella Waldo—​ ­an occulted literary source behind Richard Feynman’s “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.”5 In Heinlein’s text, the scientist Waldo lives in a self-​ ­contained satellite laboratory, floating just outside Earth’s atmosphere, 78  0011

where he devises a method for manipulating infinitesimal materials: a pantographic “waldo” technology for trans-​­scalar engineering and microscopic surgery. In the process, he comes to discover the scientific basis of what might otherwise be known as magic. Waldo owns a canary named Ariel who has adapted to living in low Earth orbit: “Ariel is a genius among birds. He came here [to the satellite laboratory] as an egg; he invented, unassisted, a whole new school of flying [in zero gravity].”6 If we note that this slyly named canary alludes to the spirit Ariel in William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, we see not only the figural association between Waldo and the philosopher-​­magician Prospero but also the degree to which Waldo’s satellite laboratory is likened to a tropical island of fantasy and experiment. Ariel the canary as “a genius” is the proxy of Waldo’s own genius, just as Ariel in The Tempest is the proxy of Prospero’s genius—​­and we might recall that the magician endearingly refers to his captive spirit as “my bird” and a “chick.”7 Likewise, Waldo’s floating laboratory presents “a madly fantastic air,” for it is a place where dreams become reality—​­just as Prospero indicates for his island: Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-​­capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.8 Prospero’s island is a rounded place where, for a time, vision transmutes into substance, where, for the duration of the play, particles of thin air are made to perform as the world, manifesting even as the “great globe itself”—​­which is both the theatrical space (Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre) and our planet in microcosm, a satellite world on stage. Waldo’s orbital laboratory presents a similar insubstantiality: “Waldo F. Jones seemed to be floating in thin air at the centre of a spherical room”—​­a small globe closed in on itself, free of gravity and other earthly considerations, where the stuff of dreams can be shaped into actual experience. Here, the T E M P E S T I N A T E A P O T  79

scientist becomes a theatrical performer: Waldo’s newfound control of magical radiation, discovered thanks to his waldo devices, empowers him to star in a dancing revue (“I only perform before audiences”). Incidentally, magic proves to be as real as physics: “Magic is loose in the world!”9 Heinlein’s text participates in a tradition of imaging the experimental space station as an isolated utopia, a romantic space set apart from the larger cosmic ocean.10 This tradition includes Arthur C. Clarke’s 1952 novel Islands in the Sky, as well as the exploratory space colonies designed by the physicist Gerard O’Neill in the 1970s, dubbed “Island One,” “Island Two,” and “Island Three.”11 Of course, the literary conventions of space opera have typically presented all celestial bodies as nautical ports of call, as in John W. Campbell’s 1956 novel Islands of Space (originally serialized in 1931), or Raymond F. Jones’s 1952 novel This Island Earth. Nano-​ ­v isionaries such as Eric Drexler and Tom McKendree, among others, have participated in this discourse, devoting considerable effort to theorizing how nano­­tech­nol­ogy might one day support such islands in the sky.12 Shakespearean references abound in this tradition, curiously enough. In Clarke’s Islands in the Sky, for example, one of the favorite pastimes of space cadets manning the orbital stations is to perform Shakespeare’s plays (well, why not?). More famously, the 1956 film Forbidden Planet rewrites The Tempest for the Space Age, recasting Prospero as Dr. Morbius, Ariel as Robbie the Robot . . . and the island, lost in space (fig. 3.1). A few scientists have actually suggested that the Krell machine of Forbidden Planet, capable of controlling the structure of matter, directly anticipates the field of nano­­tech­nol­ogy at large.13 J. Storrs Hall, for instance, explaining his concept of utility fog—​­a swarm of molecular robots (or foglets) able to assemble into any configuration and create objects out of thin air—​ ­describes this prospective technology as “the stuff that dreams are made of.” Elaborating on his appropriation of The Tempest, Hall writes, In 1611 William Shakespeare wrote his final play, The Tempest. Three hundred forty-​­five years later a pair of obscure writers, Irving Block and Allen Adler, updated The Tempest’s plot into a story called “Forbidden Planet” and created a modern myth. “Forbidden Planet,” more precisely the movie version developed by Cyril Hume, has become a classic cautionary tale for any scenario in which people become too powerful and control their environment too easily. In the story, the Krell are an ancient, wise, and highly advanced 80  0011

3.1. Forbidden Planet: Robbie the Robot carries lead plates made from “isotope 217.” Not only can Robbie manufacture new chemical variants, but he can also analyze the composition of any substance and resynthesize it: “Quiet please. I am analyzing. Yes, relatively simple alcohol molecules with traces of fusel oil. Would sixty gallons be sufficient?” He is a cyclotron and a nano­factory all in one—​­and he even makes coffee. Morbius calls him “a useful enough toy.” mgm , 1956.

civilization. They perfect an enormous and powerful machine, capable of projecting objects and forces anywhere in any form, following the mental commands of any Krell. The machine works “not wisely but too well,” manifesting all the deeply buried subconscious desires of the Krells to destroy each other. Utility fog will provide humans with powers that approximate those of the fictional Krell machine. Fortunately, we have several centuries of literary tradition to guide us around the pitfalls of hubris made reality. We must study this tradition, or we may be doomed to repeat it—​­a truth that is by no means limited to utility fog, or indeed to nano­­tech­nol­ogy in general.14 Literary history presents a guide for the future, according to Hall. It helps us apprehend the stuff of dreams, the brave new world on the horizon. If it offers strategies for dodging the pitfalls of hubris, it also provides conceptual and aesthetic resources for technical innovation, as well as rhetorical tricks and diversions. This was already suggested in Forbidden Planet itself; let us not forget, Dr. Morbius was a philologist—​­though it did not save him, in the end.15 Regardless, the discourse of nano­­tech­ nol­ogy already plunders the reserves of literature, modifying fiction for the purposes of science. T E M P E S T I N A T E A P O T  81

3.2. “Outside the Gallery.” ibm Almaden Visualization Lab, 1996. In this image, Don Eigler and his colleagues at the ibm Almaden Visualization Lab represent ibm ’s online stm Image Gallery, containing their most famous experiments in nano-​­imaging, as an orbital space station. In 2013, shortly after Eigler’s retirement, the stm Image Gallery migrated to the main ibm research site—​­minus the outer space view. Image originally created by ibm Corporation.

Some nano­scientists represent their research institutions in ways that charmingly recall Waldo’s orbital laboratory, Prospero’s island, and other techno-​­magical dreamscapes (fig. 3.2). For instance, according to researchers from the Center for Polymeric and Inorganic Nano­materials at the University of Toronto, forward-​­looking experiments in the nano laboratory will “enable ‘nano­machine dreams’ to become ‘dream nano­machines’!”16 One of these researchers, Geoffrey Ozin, nicknames himself “The Wizard of Oz,” and he describes his work in materials chemistry as “nano­w izardry.” (The website for his laboratory even sports the url http://nano­w izardry​ .info). Ozin further elaborates on his “Nano­machine Dream”: My dream of building useful nano­machines might sound futuristic, maybe even far-​­fetched. But Nature has created and relied on nano­ machines for millions of years. Take a bacterium like E. coli, for example, which moves around through a whip-​­like motion of its flagella—​­its nano­biological motor. There’s also the ribosome—​­a nano-​­sized machine that all cells depend on.  .  .  . Inspired by Nature, I am making 82  0011

a Nano­machine Dream come to life in the lab. Using synthetic building blocks, I am creating a whole new class of nano-​­sized motors that might someday transport medicine in the human body, move cargo around computer chips, and search and destroy toxins in polluted water streams.17 Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue, and the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true. So don’t dream it—​­be it. In the nano laboratory, the world and life itself become performable, scriptable, endlessly reprogrammable. Here, the stuff of comic books and sci-​­fi television turns out to be already happening: Talk of an entirely synthetic nano­machine with an on-​­board chemical power source, designed to perform a specific task, seems as fanciful as the intergalactic adventures of Nano (Christopher Pike’s communications officer of the Marvel Comics’ “Early Voyages” of the Starship Enterprise fame). Nano­­scale polymer scaffolds that enable nerve cells to regenerate and partially restore leg motion of a rat with a spinal cord injury, offering hope that paraplegics will walk again someday, sound as improbable as the nano­probes the cybernetic life form known as the Borg inject into the bodies of species they are preparing to assimilate.  .  .  . Nano­­scale cleansing agents made of titania, the pervasive brightener in the whitest of paint, that seek and destroy toxic organic pollutants in waste water streams with a little help from sunlight, might make environmentalists think differently about what chemists do for a living. Add a few gold atoms to the titania and suddenly shower tiles clean themselves and odours in toilets disappear—​­all possible thanks to Nano. . . . All this and more is happening at U of T’s Centre for Polymeric and Inorganic Nano­materials.18 The nano laboratory is the site where “fanciful” adventures come to life—​­all this and more is happening! And evidently, the romance of the laboratory, as much as it might recall the astronautical exploits of the starship Enterprise, also follows the conventions of Shakespearean play. (To be sure, Ozin and his colleagues seem fond of quoting Shakespeare in their publications.)19 In any event, we note that titania—​­as the common name for titanium dioxide, TiO2, the metal of the Titans crossed with the rarer stuff of thin air—​­pays homage to Titania, the queen of fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It is a familiar allusion; even chemical T E M P E S T I N A T E A P O T  83

3.3. Titania spd sunblock, named “after a magical queen,” features titanium dioxide nanoparticles (“magic for your skin”). The ad mixes Shakespeare and science fiction—punning on Back to the Future (1985)—to represent Titania as a rejuvenating time machine: “The future is here.” Aubrey Organics, 1993.

corporations using particles of TiO2 in their products often exploit the Shakespearean cachet—​­along with the glamour of other speculative fictions (fig. 3.3). According to Ozin, Nano magically transforms titania from a mere destroyer of toxic pollutants into something more alluring—​­simply sprinkle the magic Nano stuff, add “a few gold atoms to the titania,” and hocus pocus, toilet odors disappear! Ozin’s puckish narration of Nano rehearses, 84  0011

eerily, the particulate drama that unfolds in Shakespeare’s fairy forest. For in the topsy-​­turvy sylvan seclusion of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, isolated from the rational civilization of Athens, Puck sprinkles drops of potion on Titania and causes the queen of fairies to fall in love with the translated “rude mechanical,” Nick Bottom. But though Bottom may be an ass, the enchanted Titania cleans him right up: “And I will purge thy mortal grossness so / That thou shalt like an airy spirit go.”20 As the literary theorist Henry Turner has argued, the fact that Titania at this precise moment calls upon her smallest fairies—​­Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Mote, and Mustardseed—​­to purge Bottom’s grossness suggests a tantalizing analogy between the magic of Shakespearean theater and the programmable matters of nano­­tech­nol­ogy. As Turner writes, “Ontological heterogeneity and distance is accentuated in A Midsummer Night’s Dream through Shakespeare’s fascination with smallness, one of the play’s most delightful and memorable effects: ‘Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Mote, and Mustardseed’ [3.1.154] are emblematic of the insubstantial, the minute, the atomic, and even the nano­technological (which we could describe as the goal-​­directed modification of natural objects at a small scale).”21 Like Prospero, Titania commands or enjoins the unruly particles of thin air, the tidbits of gossamer, and the motes of the earth to join and rejoin, turning foul matters into airy spirits. Titania’s power in A Midsummer Night’s Dream signifies the capacity of language itself to reorder the world by disordering it, recombining its elements in new ways. Operating in a space apart—​­what the literary theorist Patricia Parker has called the Shakespearean “margins”—​­the ludicrous nature of a dream reigns supreme: words literally matter, preposterous puns have material effects, rude mechanical joinings create novelties and metamorphoses, and all the rules are up for grabs.22 The margins—​­which is to say, the space of play itself. Or, as Shakespeare, who can now be seen as a philosopher of the molecular sciences, famously put it, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”23 Play! The figure of the nano­scientist appears now as a player rehearsing, goofing, and improvising with other players, human and nonhuman alike. This is the so-​­called actor network of experimental life, the theater of nature.24 So we see why certain ludic personae return, over and again, in the insular imagination of nano­­tech­nol­ogy: the sorcerer Prospero, with his scripts and books, lording over the native inhabitants of the island T E M P E S T I N A T E A P O T  85

3.4. Nano Clown. Can Peng, 2007. This tiny jester was a by-​­product of the duplication of nano-​­rings by nano­imprint lithography. Courtesy of the Nano­Structure Laboratory, Princeton University.

even while toying with the shipwrecked visitors; the queen Titania, commanding the wee fairy-​­motes even while lost in enchantment; the philologist Morbius, constructing materials from the particles of thin air even while summoning ludicrous monsters from the Id. And let us not forget the microcosmic god of Sturgeon’s story: a playful, upstart deity whose island experiments take the form of jokes as much as serious science. Yes, it is true, Sturgeon’s scientist is actually named Kidder: “He was always called Mr. Kidder. Not ‘Dr.’ Not ‘Professor.’ Just Mr. Kidder.”25 Nano­scientists have often appeared as kidders, players, even off the island. Always ready to clown around, these scientists (fig. 3.4). Waldo, for one, loves to perform his dancing revue dressed “as Harlequin, poised high in the air.”26 And that famous jokester Feynman! Remember, many of his colleagues thought he was pulling their legs with that whole “Plenty of Room at the Bottom” gag. When Feynman first performed this act at Caltech, it was said that the idea of molecular engineering got lost “in a sea of laughter.”27 Discovered, lost at sea, and then found again . . . it always comes back to the island. The insular image of nano­­tech­nol­ogy is everywhere reinforced. Nano Breaker, of course, takes place on an “experimental island” known as 86  0011

“Nano­­tech­nol­ogy Island.” It is a familiar story by now: “Concepts and machines that were considered fantasy in the 20th century were, one by one, becoming a reality.” On Nano­­tech­nol­ogy Island, dreams become hardware and reshape the globe: “These new technologies were made available to the general public, causing drastic improvements in lifestyle on a global scale.” And so on, and so forth. Similarly, we could point to the nano-engineered floating islands in the game Xenogears, or the islands in Crysis, Hostile Waters, and the Metal Gear Solid series that serve as testing grounds for military nanotechnology. Or we could remember Nanotechnology Island in Second Life, which was hosted for many years by the U.K. National Physical Laboratory. Or we could read further literary accounts of nano­­tech­nol­ogy islands—​­and there are several. Neal Stephenson’s 1995 novel The Diamond Age, for instance, describes a future rife with nano­­tech­nol­ogy, where corporations and entire microcultures (phyles) often take residence on private, nano-​ e­ ngineered islands. The opening scenes of the novel focus on the social dynamics surrounding a particular nano-​­engineered island grown for Princess Charlotte’s birthday party—​­a bespoke “enchanted isle,” a fantasy playground replete with real centaurs, baby dinosaurs, and ruined castles.28 This enchanted isle serves as a metonym for the distinctively insular imagination that emerges with the technology to reprogram matter according to any desire, any whim, any dream. Not to be outdone by mere fiction, in 2003 the Nobel Prize–​­winning chemist Alan MacDiarmid predicted that, on the basis of its booming research industry, Taiwan would soon become the world’s first real-​­life “nano­­tech­nol­ogy island.”29 The Taiwanese nano­tech industry promptly embraced this bold idea of Taiwan as “The Island of Nano­­tech­nol­ogy.”30 Vying for similar renown, the “presqu’île scientifique” of Grenoble followed suit in 2007, announcing a massive new innovation campus focused on nano­­tech­nol­ogy called giant (Grenoble Isère Alpes Nano­Technologies, later renamed Grenoble Innovation for Advanced New Technologies) and thereby claiming the title of “la presqu’île de l’avenir”—​­the “peninsula of the future.”31 Apparently even peninsulas, “almost islands,” dream of mondo nano. There are numerous other examples—​­we have seen just the tip of the iceberg. The natural history of nano is a story of islands. And on the islands, it’s playtime. T E M P E S T I N A T E A P O T  87

3.5. Cesium chloride islands on an oxidized silicon wafer, coated in aluminum. Reproduced with permission from Electrochemical and Solid-​­State Letters: Tsuchiya, Green, and Syms, “Structural Fabrication Using Cesium Chloride Island Arrays.” ©2000 The Electrochemical Society. A Mote It Is . . .

It would seem, after all, that nano­­tech­nol­ogy takes place on an island. For even as the cultural imaginary reproduces the nano laboratory as an insular utopia, inside real-​­life research labs we discover a profusion of islands . . . a veritable archipelago. From relatively early in the history of nano­science, the so-​­called nano-​ ­island became a technical object as well as a fabrication tool. For example, in the 1990s, Mino Green and his colleagues at Imperial College pioneered nano-​­island lithography as a bottom-​­up method for synthesizing useful nano­structures.32 It works like this: under rigorous ambient control, a thin film of thermally deposited cesium chloride is exposed to water vapor, and, as some of this CsCl land mass dissolves into the adsorbed water, crumbling into the sea, the remaining material self-​­assembles into an array of hemispheric blobs, or islands (fig. 3.5). The islands then serve as the basis for making nano­structures such as pillars, cones, and wells through top-​­down fabrication methods. Through lift-​­off techniques, uv lithography, film evaporation, and other microfabrication processes, the nano-​­islands can be used to create quantum dots or silicon structures with unique electronic properties for computational purposes. Nano-​­islands have attained special prominence in the industrial aspirations of nano­science because they represent “technologies combining 88  0011

and bridging the gap between bottom-​­up synthesis and top-​­down miniaturized processing approaches to nano­fabrication.”33 In other words, our world meets the nano­world on the nano-​­island. It is a trading zone, a port of call in the tropics of technoscience. And no doubt, it is a place where magic and romance still reign: indeed, nano-​­islands of exceptional chemical stability are officially known as “magic islands.”34 The enchanted isles of nano­­tech­nol­ogy evolve, unfold, through literary practices and technologies of writing. Lithography, certainly. (Is it worth recalling that lithography was invented in the 1790s by the German playwright Alois Senefelder for the purpose of printing plays?) But other tools of inscription are often involved. In 2005, for example, the materials scientists Shang-​­En Wu and Chuan-​­Pu Liu at the National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan (the “Island of Nano­­tech­nol­ogy”) reported a remarkable innovation: Thus, to produce nano­island arrays directly without any lithography or etching process would be a significant contribution to the advancement of pattern transfer technology. In this study, we report on a new direct writing method for fabricating regular arrays of Si islands with hexagonal symmetry after milling a Si(100) substrate with a defocused and stigmated fib [focused ion beam]. The mechanism and detailed evolution of the Si island arrays from a Si honeycomb structure are illustrated and discussed with scanning electron microscopy (sem).35 The nano-​­island is an object of writing, an artifact of writing. Under the fib, the islands are written directly (a “new direct writing method”). They are literary productions. And if we consider that the island-​­writing technique has some semiotic connection to fiction (the “fib” is, of course, a close associate of both the “lie” and the “fable”), we also see that it takes the form of a script, even in the theatrical sense. For these nano-​­islands are produced, inscribed, on a stage: “Phosphorus-​­doped single-​­crystal Si(100) wafers were used for patterning in a dual-​­beam fib system (fei xl 835 dual-​­beam workstation). The gallium ion beam was operated at 30 keV with the total beam current reaching up to 20 nA. With the specific optics lens design, the beam currents of 1 pA and 300 pA correspond to spot sizes of 6 and 25 nm, respectively. The electron gun was equipped at an angle of 52° with respect to the ion gun. The stage can be tilted to allow the sample surface to become perpendicular to either beam.”36 T E M P E S T I N A T E A P O T  89

Nano-​­islands appear on the experimental stage through the literary technology of the focused ion beam, the fib. And the fib follows a prescribed program: “The patterning of the regular arrays of the nano­islands started with a hexagonal honeycomb structure as an example. Thus, arrays of hexagonal patterns were first defined in the fei software before fib milling.”37 Written forth, the nano-​­islands evolve on stage, reenacting the hexagonal choreography, rehearsing the script. This “direct writing method” indexes the degree to which virtuality conditions the real in the experimental systems of technoscience—​­and especially when it comes to the islands of nano­­tech­nol­ogy.38 It also exposes the theatricality of the experimental stage of the technical apparatus (the fib/sem), a platform for orchestrating what the philosopher of science Robert Crease calls “the play of nature.” Played out on a little stage, the fib script “structures the performance process (it ‘programs’ the performance) and it structures the product of the performance.”39 It decrees a command performance of nano-​­islands. These islands, we are told, appear without “masks”: “The development of the direct writing technology for quantum dot arrays [from nano-​­islands] using stigmated fib is a maskless method, exhibiting precise and efficient patterning.”40 This show requires no (chemical) masking techniques—​­it is performed raw, a “direct writing,” directed without mask or costume. Dramatic minimalism. And yet, even without masks, the islands play roles beyond themselves (fig.  3.6): “Intermediate defocusing of the poorly stigmated ion beam yields the structure in figure 2(a). The height of the shark-​­fin-​­like islands with round bases (figure 2(d)) is much greater than that seen . . . for a larger defocus.”41 The scientific script casts the malformed nano-​ i­slands—​­floating in an ocean of semiconductor, supported on a moveable stage—​­as shark fins, vestiges of swimming predators lurking in the trenches around the proper islands. Ready to bite. Like Prospero’s island, or Titania’s forest, or Morbius’s forbidden planet—​­the margins as such—​­the nano-​­island would be located somewhere between experiment and fancy, science and reverie. For even out of costume, maskless, the nano-​­island opens to strange metamorphoses and magical transformations—​­already taking on a new role as a life-​ f­orm, a monster of the deep. Yet at the same time, it is only a fleeting figment of the imagination. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on.” 90  0011

3.6. Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water. . . . This image series shows the protean inscription of silicon islands under different settings of the fib: “Secondary electron images of the structures made by milling out of the hexagonal areas on Si(100) with a poorly stigmated and (a) intermediately defocused, (b) highly defocused and (c) severely defocused ion beam, where (d)–​­(f) are the corresponding top view images” (2509). Reproduced by permission from Nano­­tech­nol­ogy: Wu and Liu, “Direct Writing of Si Island Arrays by Focused Ion Beam Milling.” ©2005 iop Publishing. All rights reserved.

Swerve Not from the Smallest Article . . .

It would seem, after all, that nano­­tech­nol­ogy takes place on an island. Under certain experimental conditions, clusters of chemical islands form channels, fjords, inlets, bays, and winding rivers—​­coming to resemble a maze of islands, or a tiny labyrinth (fig. 3.7). The study of such labyrinths goes hand in hand with the study of nano-​­islands, the one frequently mutating into the other (fig. 3.8). For example, a team of scientists in Australia, studying thin films at the University of Technology, Sydney, has written, “At shorter deposition times these films consist of islands of metal, and at longer times connected labyrinths of metal envelop remaining voids, which gradually close up with further deposition.”42 It is a commonly observed phenomenon of the nano­world, one of the patterns that the nano­scientist Elena Vedmedenko describes as “puzzles posed to us by Nature.”43 Islands, becoming-​­labyrinths . . . The connection of islands and labyrinths might lure us to mythological associations—​­recalling, perhaps, the great labyrinth of Knossos, on the T E M P E S T I N A T E A P O T  91

3.7. World’s Smallest Maze. Shawn Fostner and Sarah Burke, 2005. Produced with a jeol 4500 afm , the image represents first and second layer growth of buckyball islands at the edge of atomic terraces on potassium bromide. Fostner and Burke’s image won the prize for “Best Scanning Probe Micrograph” at the 49th International Conference on Electron, Ion and Photon Beam Technology in 2005. Reproduced with permission.

isle of Crete. Certainly, researchers who produce molecular mazes have been tempted by such legends. For instance, in 2005, an international team of colloid chemists reported some amazing experiments: Solving complex mazes is not a simple problem and has been attempted in different ways. The first, and perhaps most famous, attempt is known from Greek mythology, where the labyrinth was an elaborate maze constructed by Daedalus for King Minos of Crete to hold the Minotaur, a monster that was half human and half bull. Theseus of 92  0011

3.8. Nano-​­islands becoming labyrinths becoming holes. This image sequence represents the self-​­assembly of Pb on Cu(111): “The most striking feature of this sequence is the evolution of a pattern from circular islands (average diameter, 67 nm) to stripes and then to circular holes within the lead-​­overlayer matrix.” Reproduced with permission from Nature: Plass et al., “Nano­structures.” ©2001 Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

Athens volunteered to kill the Minotaur, and King Minos’ daughter Ariadne gave him a spool of thread so that he could keep track of his own path. This is the first reported example of guided motion in a complex system. . . . However, to the best of our knowledge mazes have so far not been studied in the context of colloidal systems, and we propose here that they can have interesting applications in the transport and crystallization of such systems. In particular, we investigate the behavior of colloidal structures on top of magnetic films with domain patterns of tunable complexity.44 T E M P E S T I N A T E A P O T  93

Such citation of classical mythology in the technical publications of contemporary chemistry seems to confirm the claim made by the philosopher Michel Serres that “literature is the reserve of the sciences,” and that poetry, drama, novels, myths, and other cultural “reserves of language are not humanity’s past, but rather, quite often, the future of the sciences, the unexplored region of future inventions.”45 More specifically, it recalls the enduring figuration of Daedalus as the first modern scientist, the master engineer whose ingenuity in designing the labyrinth is often said to represent the scientific zeal for solving puzzles and controlling the forces of nature. Invoking Daedalus, this study of colloid mazes shares in the technoscientific aspiration for absolute control, the dream of programmable matter. Tunable matter. Indeed, the researchers write that such labyrinths of “tunable complexity” can be adjusted at will “as templates for self-​­assembled structures, where magnetic colloids are guided by the local fields.” The resulting structures can be directly “tuned by using an external magnetic field,” reshaping the confining geometries of the maze (fig. 3.9). Tuning the substrate—​­the platform or stage of magnetic film—​­is now a way to program the organization of matter, for “the underlying substrate controls the dynamic and static structural arrangements of the colloidal particles.”46 The scientists thus discover themselves in the position of Daedalus: puzzle solver, maze builder, tuner of matter. The figure of Daedalus as prototypical natural philosopher or archetypal mechanist has often been invoked over the centuries. Francis Bacon and Galileo Galilei, for example, famously depicted the “book of nature” as a literary riddle or a maze. For them, the natural philosopher embodied the spirit of Daedalus (and Theseus, as well), decoding the language of mathematics to escape the obscuring geometries of nature’s labyrinth—​ t­ o solve the puzzle, to win the game.47 But the prominence of Daedalus in the discourse of contemporary science owes significantly to the 1923 publication of Daedalus, or Science and the Future by the British population geneticist J. B. S. Haldane. Haldane’s work of scientific forecasting is perhaps best remembered in popular culture for its influence on science fiction, especially its futurological concepts such as the “ectogenic fetus” that so heavily informed Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World—​­which itself, of course, brilliantly rewrites Shakespeare’s Tempest as a fable of modern technoscience, a premonition of the societies of control. But Haldane’s text is also remembered 94  0011

3.9. Colloids moving through tiny labyrinths. The images represent polystyrene spheres on top of a magnetic film, as seen through a Leica dmpl polarization microscope: “In the absence of external magnetic fields, the magnetic colloids attach to the boundary between two antiparallel magnetization vectors (a). By gradually increasing the magnetic field from Hex = 0 to 10 000 A/m (a–​­d), we observed that the domain structure and colloidal arrangement changed drastically. The white scale bar is 75 µm” (7519). Reproduced with permission from Langmuir: Helseth et al., “Colloidal Crystallization and Transport in Stripes and Mazes.” ©2005 American Chemical Society.

for the heroic image of Daedalus as the forebear of the modern scientific attitude, and in particular, of the molecular sciences—​­Daedalus as the ancestral geneticist: I fancy that the sentimental interest attaching to Prometheus has unduly distracted our attention from the far more interesting figure of Daedalus. It is with infinite relief that amidst a welter of heroes armed with gorgon’s heads or protected by Stygian baptisms the student of Greek mythology comes across the first modern man. Beginning as a realistic sculptor (he was the first to produce statues whose feet were separated) it was natural that he should proceed to the construction of an image of Aphrodite whose limbs were activated by quicksilver. After this his interest inevitably turned to biological problems, and it is safe to say that posterity has never equaled his only recorded success in experimental genetics. Had the housing and feeding of the Minotaur T E M P E S T I N A T E A P O T  95

been less expensive it is probable that Daedalus would have anticipated Mendel. But Minos held that a labyrinth and an annual provision of 50 youths and 50 virgins were excessive as an endowment for research, and in order to escape from his ruthless economies Daedalus was forced to invent the art of flying. Minos pursued him to Sicily and was slain there. Save for his valuable invention of glue, little else is known of Daedalus. But it is most significant that, although he was responsible for the death of Zeus’ son Minos he was neither smitten by a thunderbolt, chained to a rock, nor pursued by furies. Still less did any of the rather numerous visitors to Hades discover him either in Elysium or Tartarus. We can hardly imagine him as a member of the throng of shades who besieged Charon’s ferry like sheep at a gap. He was the first to demonstrate that the scientific worker is not concerned with gods.48 The image of Daedalus as valiant scientist, defying both government and religion in the pursuit of knowledge and control over nature, has become iconic. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences even adopted Daedalus as its figurehead, christening its flagship journal Daedalus in 1955. The journal sports a labyrinth on the title page of each issue: “The journal’s namesake was renowned in ancient Greece as an inventor, scientist, and unriddler of riddles. Its emblem, a maze seen from above, symbolizes the aspiration of its founders to ‘lift each of us above his cell in the labyrinth of learning in order that he may see the entire structure as if from above, where each separate part loses its comfortable separateness.’ ”49 Daedalus is revered as a player of games—​­he is an “unriddler of riddles.” And according to Haldane, although he obscures the fact that another kind of playfulness in the Daedalus saga was punished by the gods (Icarus, of course, plummeted to the sea for soaring too high, too close to the sun), it is Daedalus’s willingness to play with established laws, to break the rules, that marks him as the prototypical scientist. For Daedalus thwarts the rule of the king (he escapes Crete on engineered wings and later succeeds in having Minos killed). Moreover, he willfully violates the normal order of nature in his experimental research program. Daedalus designs a fake cow for Minos’s queen Pasiphae to crawl into, so that she can mate with the Cretan bull that Poseidon had gifted to Minos. The result of this mating, of course, is the Minotaur—​­which 96  0011

Haldane sees as an unequalled “success in experimental genetics.” Playing with the laws of man and the laws of nature on the island of Crete, now reconfigured as an experimental laboratory—​­a space of “big science” requiring a hefty economic infrastructure fed annually by fifty youths and fifty virgins—​­Daedalus appears in Haldane’s account as the first geneticist, avant la lettre, recombining genes to produce monsters or sports of nature. Daedalus would also appear to be the first researcher to use an island labyrinth as a way of testing and tuning his innovative creations. So it is no wonder that nano­scientists today reproduce the nano-​­island labyrinth in the image of Daedalus’s labyrinth. And it also seems quite appropriate that, in 2001, researchers at Osaka University in Japan used nano­fabrication techniques to sculpt a microscopic bull, smaller than a red blood cell. This tiny taurus is one of the “smallest model animals ever made artificially.”50 It would surely be quite at home, dwelling in an infinitesimal maze (fig. 3.10). Might we call it the Nano­taur? Such whimsical experiments instantiate the serious play we see everywhere today—​­the same kind of play epitomized, mythologized, in Haldane’s figure of Daedalus. Daedalus was a gamer. And that’s no bull.

3.10. The Nano­taur. According to the researchers, it is a hybrid of real matter and dream stuff: “We dream that this bull pulls a drug cart through the blood vessels” (Hong-​­Bo Sun quoted in Whitfield, “Bull Wins Size Prize”). As if prefiguring medical nano­bots, the Nano­taur would travel the maze of the circulatory system. But as yet, the Nano­taur is only a toy. Reproduced with permission from Nature: Kawata et al., “Finer Features for Functional Microdevices.” ©2001 Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

T E M P E S T I N A T E A P O T  97

Much Ado about Nothing

It would seem, after all, that nano­­tech­nol­ogy takes place on an island. As we follow Ariadne’s thread, at every turn we see that research on nano-​­islands resonates with notions of tunable matter, where tuning signifies a precise manipulation, as well as a precondition for play or recreation (as in tuning a musical instrument). In 2007, a team of scientists from Singa­pore and France maneuvered an array of gold nano-​­islands on an MoS2 surface with an stm (fig. 3.11). The experiment involved an unprecedented fine-​­tuning of the interactions between the stm and the nano-​­islands; previously, “this fine-​­tuning ha[d] not been explored for nano-​­clusters on semi-​­conductor surfaces with the prospect to manipulate only one cluster at a time with a positioning precision better than 0.1 nm.”51 After some sifting and sorting, selecting certain islands and clearing away other undesired ones, the scientists made “a fully planar metallic 4 nano-​­pads structure.” From a practical angle, the experiment points to

3.11. Gold nano-​­islands, assembled into a four-​­pad structure. Reproduced under terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license from Journal of Physics: Conference Series: Yang et al., “uhv-​­s tm Manipulation of Single Flat Gold Nano-​ I­ slands for Constructing Interconnection Nano­pads on MoS2.” 98  0011

3.12. Kurikin: Nano Island Story. Mixing Japanese and English puns, the game re­ fashions the dual-​­screen “nds ” (Nintendo DS) as a “Nano Data Sampler.” The nds is now a scientific instrument, giving profile information while magnifying each kin sample (left). Players match kin against others in petri dish brawls (right). Nintendo, 2007.

new electronic links between the nano­­scale world and our world: “We foresee that the precise manipulation of single ultra-​­flat metallic nano-​ i­slands on a semi-​­conductor surface will open a new way of fabricating planar metallic contact pads to interconnect an atomic wire or a molecular to macroscopic probes [sic].”52 But the process of tinker-​­toying and tuning a vast trove of nano-​­islands also affords its own recreational pleasures. At least, in the same year, a similar setup for mobilizing and positioning nano­­scale entities appeared as a video game. Kurikin: Nano Island Story (くりきん ナノアイランドストーリー) is a Nintendo ds game, developed by Media Kite and published in Japan in 2007. In this game, the player is a student at the Nano Academy on Nano Island, a scientific institute that is home to over one hundred different species of microscopic creatures called kin. Similar to Pokémon, this game requires players to collect and train the various strains of kin and put them into battle with one another (fig. 3.12). The kin are controlled via the ds stylus: like maneuvering gold nano-​­islands with the tip of the stm , the kin T E M P E S T I N A T E A P O T  99

in Kurikin: Nano Island Story are maneuvered by fine-​­tuned instrumental gestures. With a twist of the stylus, the kin are marshaled into battle, reorganized into new formations and structures, or brushed away beyond the viewscreen. Moreover, players can blow into the ds microphone to scatter the kin to the four winds. Such catastrophic scattering of nano-​ i­ sland entities is not uncommon, even in real-​­life labs. As the gold nano-​ i­sland researchers report, “Increasing I [the stm tunneling current] by 2 orders of magnitude caused brushing and subsequent removal of the Au nano-​­islands from the MoS2 surface in the area scanned by stm. This phenomenon has been reported by several groups for different cluster and surface materials.”53 Nano-​­island entities require a gentle touch. Having traveled this far, we are now in a position to understand the appeal of the nano-​­island itself as a privileged site of nano­­scale experimentation, the place where nano­­tech­nol­ogy takes place. For the nano-​­island, as we see, is a surface on which to reconstruct and reprogram natural matter—​­to render it digital—​­and even to rewrite, or restage, life itself. This is precisely why tissue engineers have recently been taking trips to the nano-​­islands. As researchers reported in the journal Nano­biotechnology in 2004, “Tissue engineering . . . will need to control precisely cell functions in order to allow the growth of the engineered tissue. . . . One area of materials research currently under investigation is that of eliciting control over cells using topography. . . . Thus, it is thought that having the ability to design complex [topographic] patterns will enable the production of ‘intelligent’ materials for tissue engineering scaffolds. Now, however, microtechnology is evolving into nano­­tech­nol­ogy, and with this the emphasis of cell research is shifting to gaining insight to the breadth of cellular response to synthetic nano­environments.”54 The researchers fabricated various nano-​­island environments, atolls and archipelagos, on which to experiment with engineered tissues. Like the Nano Academy of Kurikin: Nano Island Story, the island environments played host to various strains of microscopic entities: “A number of endothelial cell types have been cultured on the islands,” or, “Fibroblasts are the cell type that have been best characterised on the islands,” and so forth.55 “Gotta catch ’em all!” as Pokémon insists. (ポケモンゲットだぜ!) The nano-​­islands become sites of new life, new filopodial architectures, new cellular cultures (fig. 3.13). For instance: “It has been seen that cell spreading, proliferation and differentiation profiles can be changed in response to the islands, all key parameters for tissue engineering.” On 100  0011

3.13. Fibroblasts at play on the nano-​­islands. These scanning electron micrographs represent Infinity™ telomerase immortalized human fibroblasts (hTERT-​­BJ1 from Clonetech Laboratories) cultured on poly(styrene)-​­poly(p-​­bromostyrene) nano-​­islands: “islands of the brominated polymer protrude from a sea of poly-​ (styrene)” (54). Images (a)–​­(b) show fibroblast filopods interacting with 10 nm high islands; images (c)–​­(d) show filopodial interactions of the unusually stellate and ameboid fibroblasts cultured on 95 nm high islands. Reproduced from iee Proceedings–​­Nano­biotechnology: Dalby, Pasqui, and Affrossman, “Cell Response to Nano-​­Islands Produced by Polymer Demixing.”

the islands, the scientists produce novel modes of biotic existence: “sem observation of filopodia revealed that filopodial/island interaction increased with island size. In fact, fibroblasts on the 95 nm islands took on highly stellate, almost amoeboid morphologies with highly rounded cell bodies and thick filopodia appearing to use the tops of the islands as ‘stepping stones.’ ”56 Experimental forms of life crawl up from the depths, clinging to the islands, boosting over the islands . . . Compare these experiments to a study conducted in 2000 at the Sandia National Laboratories, examining the activities of tin nano-​­islands on a copper surface. The researchers discovered that trails of bronze began to form along the copper surface following the self-​­assembly of the tin islands: “Low-​­energy electron microscopy and atomic-​­resolution scanning tunneling microscopy reveal that bronze forms on the surface by a complicated, unanticipated cooperative mechanism: Ordered two-​­dimensional tin islands containing several hundred thousand atoms spontaneously sweep across the surface, leaving bronze alloys in their tracks.”57 In playing with the islands, the scientists learned how to control them to a certain extent: “We can experimentally adjust the speed of the islands over several orders of magnitude.” They came to imagine the track-​­laying function of the islands as a new technique for nano­fabrication: “Control of the island motion presents the possibility of manipulation of surface alloy formation to create useful and novel nano­­scale structures.” At the same time, the movements of the islands, avoiding each other’s tracks unless gobbling each other up, suggested a degree of agency: “the Sn islands often appear to react to their surroundings in a complex way (pausing when their best path is not obvious, for example) and are efficient in finding new unalloyed regions. It is interesting that such complexity can arise from such a seemingly simple situation as surface alloying.”58 Commenting on this research, the Danish physicists Flemming Besenbacher and Jens K. Nørskov ventured that the marvelous behavior of the tin islands could be considered a kind of motor, and they proposed utilizing such islands as the basis for future generations of nano­machines.59 Norman Bartelt, one of the researchers from Sandia National Laboratories, responded that his team was not interested in nano­machines and thought that the idea that these migratory islands might be futuristic motors was quite “far-​­fetched.”60 At the same time, Bartelt offered his own, even more daring interpretation of the phenomenon: “The tin island looks like it’s alive as it’s grazing along the copper surface. . . . It moves 102  0011

to clean regions of the surface, eating the substrate and spitting out the copper atoms it eats in the form of bronze. It’s amazing that an inanimate system on such a small scale emulates something that’s living.”61 Possessed with an uncanny vitality, the tin nano-​­islands look to the scientists who play with them nearly like a new form of life. An ersatz form of life, a mere “emulation,” perhaps. But in their metabolic activities, these synthetic entities behave “amazingly” like the real thing. Like those malformed nano-​­islands that resembled the dorsal fins of sharks swarming around the silicon reefs, or even the Nano­taur as a tiny recollection of Daedalus’s genetic tinkering, these nano-​­islands are not traces of new future technologies—​­immediately dismissed as “far-​­fetched.” Instead, they appear as fleeting characters in a new staging of life, an artificial animism, a reconfiguration of living at the intersection of digital matter and the insular imagination. On the island, science plays with life itself. Just Sit Right Back and You’ll Hear a Tale . . .

It would seem, after all, that nano­­tech­nol­ogy takes place on an island. This is nothing new. As early as Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, itself borrowing from Thomas More’s Utopia, the island becomes the natural home of experimental science and the scientific society. Bacon’s imaginary island of Bensalem is organized around the research institution of Salomon’s House, where natural philosophers toy with the ordinary course of nature, producing prodigies, wonders, bizarre weather, and other sports of nature (“strange and monstrous objects, in which nature deviates from her ordinary course”), following the Baconian program to discover the order of things: “he who has learnt [nature’s] deviations, will be able more accurately to describe her paths.”62 The European travelers of the New Atlantis, shortly after they arrive in Bensalem, meet with one of the Fathers of the House of Salomon. They learn that the Fathers have mastered the normal works of nature by experimenting with the abnormal, the preternatural, the unnatural. In Salomon’s house, the difference between natural and artificial is rather indistinct, and strange creatures abound. For example, the Fathers have learned to reanimate dead beasts and rearrange their organs: “We have also parks and inclosures of all sorts of beasts and birds. . . . Wherein we find many strange effects; as continuing life in them, though divers parts, T E M P E S T I N A T E A P O T  103

which you account vital, be perished and taken forth; resuscitating of some that seem dead in appearance; and the like.” The Fathers also create giants and dwarves: “By art likewise, we make them [beasts and birds] greater or taller than their kind is; and contrariwise dwarf them, and stay their growth.” The Fathers create chimeras, new species: “We find means to make commixtures and copulations of different kinds; which have produced many new kinds, and them not barren.” The Fathers transform rotting materials into living organisms: “We make a number of kinds of serpents, worms, flies, fishes, of putrefaction. . . . Neither do we this by chance, but we know beforehand of what matter and commixture what kind of those creatures will arise.”63 All this and more is happening at the House of Salomon! The inhabitants of Bacon’s scientific island focus on gaming the laws of nature, stacking the deck, loading the dice (“neither do we this by chance”). Or rather, they learn to play nature’s own game, better appreciating its jokes and whims, its freaks and gambits (lusus naturae)—​­but ultimately to make new rules, to test out other ways of being. The utopian island, in other words, is the magic circle: the space of ludic experimentation described by Johan Huizinga, the enchanted space outside the normal and the everyday, “dedicated to the performance of an act apart.”64 It is a familiar story, after all: Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park. And let us not forget Tycho Brahe’s island, Charles Darwin’s evolutionary insights in the Galápagos, the nuclear tests on Bikini Atoll . . . and so forth. On the islands, science ventures beyond the known and the normative, and nature transforms beyond itself to become otherwise. Let us conclude our tropical cruise with a final stop in the land of the Nano­putians. Created by James Tour and his colleagues at Rice University, the Nano­putians are anthropomorphic organic molecules. They are real molecules, produced through complex synthetic operations; but they are also texts, awash in meaning. Whatever sense of humanness attends them is an effect of standard techniques of chemical representation, picturing them as stick figures or electron cloud cartoons, in addition to a rhetorical frame that draws explicitly on literary history: “the anthropomorphic molecules here are dubbed, as a class, Nano­putians, following the lead of the Lilliputians in Jonathan Swift’s classic, Gulliver’s Travels.”65 104  0011

3.14. The Nanoputians James Tour, George M. Bodner, Eugene Zubarev, Suzanne Lamminen, and colleagues, 2003. Courtesy of Rice University Office of Media Relations.

There are different kinds of Nano­putians: the Nano­Monarch, the Nano­­ Scholar, the Nano­Athlete, and the Nano­Jester, among others (fig. 3.14). And they all live happily in Nano­put, described as the place where “arts and sciences unite.” Nano­put, it seems, is another name for the “size domain” of the nano­­scale as such: “the truly nano­scopic regime in which each 2-​­nm tall figure, termed here a Nano­putian, is a single molecule.”66 Thus reclaiming the image of Swift’s Lilliput—​­if not even Swift’s satirical representation of modern science (for example, the absurd experiments of Laputa)—​­Tour and his colleagues figure the space of nano, the proper place of nano, as a small island where all things are small. T E M P E S T I N A T E A P O T  105

In publishing their efforts to synthesize the Nano­putians and explore Nano­put, the scientists adopt an ironic language of biology (recollecting the artificial vitalism we have seen on other nano-​­islands): a vocabulary of progeny, birth, population, and diversity (“recognizable diversity among the diminutive Nano­putian populace”), along with anatomical descriptions (“We talk about arms and legs, rather than alkyne and acetyl groups”). It is as if a diminutive epic or soap opera were taking place inside the chemical glassware (“We have whole communities of them living in glass jars in the lab”).67 All this is very tongue-​­in-​­cheek, of course. For the Nano­putians are molecular toys, the products of scientific whimsy. At the same time, they signify some very serious things: “the ultimate in designed miniaturization is reached; beyond this size domain there is no conceivable entity upon which to tailor architectures that could have programmed cohesive interactions between the individual building blocks.” The Nano­putians thus embody the convergence of art and science, matter and metaphor at the limits of fabrication (the “ultimate in designed miniaturization”).68 And Nano­put is the name given to this space at the bottom. In Nano­put, the imagination of digital matter (“programmed cohesive interactions” of reactive components) and childhood play (chemical “building blocks” for assembling little dolls) are one and the same. And insofar as the scientists claim a use value for the otherwise useless Nano­putians, it is precisely to educate laypeople about chemistry, to reshape nonscientific or prescientific minds (“The masses view chemical structures as difficult-​­to-​­grasp abstractions formulated by complex algorithms, except when molecules resemble macroscopic objects”), and, above all, to orient the children of the world toward Nano­put . . . toward mondo nano. Tour and his colleagues have also developed an educational program involving the Nano­putians: a 2003 computer-​­animated video series and interactive learning platform called Nano­Kids. The program features a small group of Nano­putians (redubbed “Nano­K ids”) living on the surface of a computer transistor. They communicate with Dr. James Tour (their creator or microcosmic god) through the medium of the computer itself. The introductory episode opens with a shot of planet Earth and then scales down to the level of individual molecules (the familiar visual from Powers of Ten). The video series eventually situates the child viewer in the first-​ ­person perspective of one of the Nano­K ids (a “Nano­Scholar” type), presenting the domain of nano­­scale science as a land of fun and games. Here, 106  0011

Nano­K ids toss around xenon beach balls and play with Nano­Dogs. Atoms turn into clones of Pac-​­Man, dance in a conga line, and sing “Bond with Me.” It all seems like a pretty good time down there! Tour himself appears in the opening episode—​­first in 3d animation, and later in camcorder footage—​­and hails the child viewer: “I invite you to come and discover with us the way you can participate in this new technology, and make a difference.”69 Nano­Kids draws its audience into the land of Nano­put—​­but it ultimately shows that Nano­put is nothing other than our own world. This message is at the heart of the Nano­Kids theme song: I fall from the sky shrink to your size and see a new world through your eyes. Now I return only to learn it was the real world all the time.70 The isle of Nano­put, then, is not so much isolated from everyday life as inscribed within the textures of culture, an imaginary world that is also the real world, brimming with stories old and new. So far away, and yet so close at hand.

So nano­­tech­nol­ogy does not, after all, take place on an island. Rather, the fictions of insularity that circumscribe nano­­tech­nol­ogy depend on the deep channels and trade routes that connect scientific laboratories with the liquid forces of history, mythology, games, literature, and the arts. The island is not an island; it is a nexus, a chiasmus. It is a fundamentally open site where strange futures gestate, waiting to be born, and promising—​­like Caliban—​­to spread and multiply: “Oh ho! Oh ho! Would’t had been done. / Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else / This isle with Calibans.”71 Populating the whole island with sports of nature. Filling the whole world with hopeful monsters, Neoterics, Nano­taurs, kin, Nano­putians . . . the hybrid offspring of science and culture. Here, the only rules are dreams. And our little lives are rounded with a sleep.

T E M P E S T I N A T E A P O T  107

0100 Massively Multiplayer Laboratories

January 11, 2006. A gamer logs onto the Nano­tech forum at Yahoo! Groups. Identifying himself as “new here, but an old fan of nano­­tech­nol­ ogy,” he posts the following message: Ever since I was a kid, I was interested in Nano­­tech­nol­ogy. Now I come to find out that this place exists on Yahoo​.com, and I am overjoyed to no end. My first contact with nano­­tech­nol­ogy was a video game called “Total Annihilation,” a strategy game set 6000 years into the future where nano­­tech­nol­ogy runs the advanced war machine between two sides. Its a rough game on a galatic scale, but it was a lot of fun for strategy game buffs like myself. Ever since I took my first few rocks in that game, broke it down into its component parts with the main “commander” unit, and I built a ship, I fell in love with nano­­tech­nol­ogy. Not because of the horrible war machine it created in that game, (god forbid that should ever have to happen), but for the applications it could have for every human being and every problem on the planet solving problems big and small. Hopefully, through this site, ill gain a larger understanding of my favorite subject, and meet some cool people along the way. Hope to hear from you all soon.1 For this gamer, a childhood experience with the 1997 game Total Annihilation serves as an origin story, accounting for his enduring attraction to nano­­tech­nol­ogy (fig. 4.1). He is not the only one.2 For all its fictive

4.1. Total Annihilation: While arm forces attack from above, the core commander unit (magnified inset) uses a nano-​­lathe to construct a vehicle plant. gt Interactive, 1997.

ele­ments, the game seems to conjure a sense of the real—​­not as if it were, but as if it might be. It is a threshold, opening onto a future where common materials (“rocks”) turn into digital matter with the click of a button (“broke it down into its component parts . . . and I built a ship”). Despite the devastating applications of nano­science featured in Total Annihilation, this gamer perceives other possibilities, utopian scenarios—​­indeed, he falls in love. Taking the game seriously and yet ironically, he comes to imagine ways in which science fiction might be made into something more. Lured by an apperception of potential futures, he inserts himself into an online community of scientists and other enthusiasts, experts and nonexperts—​­a ll the cool people who have come to love nano­­tech­nol­ogy—​ ­in order to learn, join in technical discussions, and participate in the social project of solving “every problem on the planet.”3 It is an enticing vision of mondo nano, to be sure—​­transcoded through a game that is no more than a game, and no less.

M A S S I V E L Y M U L T I P L A Y E R L A B O R A T O R I E S  109

[Gobble, Gobble, Gobble]

Elisabetta Comini, a professor of the physics of matter at the University of Brescia, watches an image from her scanning electron microscope slowly appear on the computer monitor. Looking into the nano­­scale world, she sees something looking back at her. It’s Pac-​­Man. Quite a surprise, for sure: “I can assure that it was really amazing to see it at the microscope.”4 Just a small cluster of copper dioxide, spontaneously formed into an icon of video game history (fig. 4.2). Pac-​­Man seems right at home in the nano­­tech­nol­ogy laboratory. After all, the Pac-​­Man games have always involved a certain particulate drama: maneuvering through small labyrinths, constantly devouring tiny pellets, electronic bits (fig. 4.3). In any event, many scientists have now discovered Pac-​­Man chomping his way through the real world of atoms and molecules, enticing us to play along.

4.2. Nano PacMan Made of Copper Oxide. Elisabetta Comini, 2010. “Scanning electron microscope image of a copper oxide cluster, 3.5 microns in diameter, prepared by evaporation and condensation over an alumina substrate. The smiley nose and eye are present in the original sem image, which has only been color-​­enhanced” (Elisabetta Comini). This image won a first-​­place prize in the “Science as Art” competition at the Spring 2010 meeting of the Materials Research Society. Reprinted by permission.

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4.3. Pac-​­Man: The little yellow guy chows down. PlayStation 3 port of the 1980 arcade game, included in the Namco Museum Essentials collection. Namco Bandai, 2009.

4.4. Pac-Man particles eating pellets. David Pine, 2010. The Pac-Man particles, 2 µm in diameter, were synthesized through a two-stage polymerization of a monodisperse silicon oil emulsion of 3-methacryloxypropyl trimethoxysilane. A microscopic movie hosted on the Pine Research Group website demonstrates the depletion interaction of the lock-and-key binding process (left). A companion movie shows two Pac-Man particles locking onto a single key, while another PacMan watches (right). The file name of this second film sports the wicked title of Two Pacmen One Key.

In 2009, the physicist Pablo Jarillo-​­Herrero and his colleagues learned how to create single-​­layer graphene structures with well-​­defined crystallographic edges using nickel nano­particles.5 Chewing the graphene sheets, etching precise lines, trenches, channels, and mazes, the nano­ particles behaved in a familiar way: “At high temperatures under H2 flow, these Ni nano­particles begin to eat the graphene (like pacman), moving across the graphene surface as it removes carbon.”6 Several research teams have noted the Pac-​­Man behavior of these and other metallic nano­ particles. In 2011, Peter Bøggild, Tim Booth, and their colleagues at the Technical University of Denmark used an environmental transmission electron microscope to observe silver nano­particles eating graphene in situ, recording the velocities of “nano­­scale Pac-​­Man” in real time.7 They posted a video on YouTube, depicting the experiment as “nano Pacman with silver particles.” The video poses the inevitable question of programmability (“can they be programmed to cut the patterns we need?”), and it concludes by crediting all the researchers involved—​­not as scientists, but as “Pacman controllers.”8 Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Similarly, in 2010, the physicist David Pine and his colleagues made dimpled colloid particles—​­promptly called “Pac-​­Man particles” (fig. 4.4). The particles can bind specifically to smaller colloid spheres, like Pac-​­Man M A S S I V E L Y M U L T I P L A Y E R L A B O R A T O R I E S  111

swallowing a pellet. This Pac-​­Man “lock-​­and-​­key recognition mechanism” points the way to new programmable materials: “a means of programming and directing colloidal self-​­assembly.”9 According to Pine, the Pac-​ ­Man particles also represent progress toward a synthetic biology, a form of colloidal life: “We are developing colloids with a variety of specific programmable interactions with the intent of making colloidal motifs that self replicate, much like a biological organism. The idea is to encode within particles themselves the information required for them to replicate themselves.”10 The enduring dream of nano­­tech­nol­ogy to create artificial, self-​ ­replicating systems now materializes in the endlessly respawning figure of Pac-​­Man himself—​­blooming exponentially, becoming a swarm of “self-​­replicating pacmen.”11 He’s everywhere now. “We have designed a ‘Pac-​­man’-​­like (pl) nano­ magnet.”12 “One cerium oxide nano­particle acts almost like a microscopic ‘Pac Man’ gobbling up the destructive free radicals.”13 “In extreme cases, radial cracks in the as-​­spun [carbon] fibre develop into PacMan™-​­like shapes.”14 And so on, and so forth. Gobble, gobble, gobble . . . Although these researchers have pursued different scientific projects, in different parts of the globe, they inhabit a common symbolic space: the cultural mythology of Pac-​­Man. The various arcade games, cartoons, toys, breakfast cereals, and other consumable oddities from the heyday of Pac-​­Man fever—​­a ll the texts and paratexts of the Pac-​­Man universe—​ a­ re now superimposed on the nano­­tech­nol­ogy laboratory.15 It is done for laughs, for the lulz. But it also provides a shared vocabulary, an instantly legible terminology for describing a peculiar molecular shape or a mode of chemical action to other scientists, as well as broader audiences. The fictive world of Pac-​­Man games and the real world of Pac-​­Man molecules are now richly interdigitated, the one chewing into the other. Scientists and gamers can imagine playing in the same sandbox, a programmable gamespace at the limits of matter. The iconography of Pac-​­Man hails us, draws us into that zone: for in discovering that Pac-​­Man and his kin seem to thrive in the realm of nano­­tech­nol­ogy, we can hallucinate the possibility of toying with them, manipulating them with a joystick, surrounded by the haunting electronic sound of waka waka waka waka. Since the debut of the original Pac-​­Man game in 1980, millions of people around the world have learned to maneuver the little yellow guy through the mazes of computational space, fleeing ghosts, obsessively consuming

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particles. Motor reflexes, muscle memory, hand-​­eye coordination—​­all honed to perfection by incalculable hours spent at the arcade. Wasted youth, perhaps—​­or instead, a high-​­tech training regime, preadapted to the nano­­tech­nol­ogy future. [Laboratory: Reloaded]

Today, legions of gamers immigrate to virtual worlds. Many of these massively multiplayer online games (mmo s) feature nano­technologies as core aspects of their ersatz realities. In recent years, mmo s such as Anarchy Online, PlanetSide, Earthrise, eve Online, GhostX, Nano­vor, and Neocron have offered strange attractions from the frontiers of molecular science, mixing current research with fantastical, outlandish projections. Old fans and new fans of nano­­tech­nol­ogy can get a fix in these worlds—​­over and over again—​­as a distributed social experience, shared with thousands upon thousands of their very best friends. Across these worlds, there is endless experimentation. Artistic, technical, and political innovations of all kinds take place in these online spaces, spontaneously and exuberantly. For this reason, the economist Edward Castronova—​­who famously calculated in 2001 that the value of digital goods made in EverQuest meant a gnp per capita exceeding that of India and China—​­has said that “virtual worlds are policy laboratories.”16 The ways in which gamers interact with simulated nano and related innovations, their impacts on the gamescapes or political economies of these mmo s, provide some insight into the social and ethical implications of emerging technologies more broadly. Castronova has even suggested that mmo s present a viable solution to the risks of genetic engineering, advanced robotics, and molecular manufacturing by letting us try out everything in advance: “In sum, synthetic worlds will save the human race by allowing us to protect our bodies against genetic and nano­technological threats without losing our minds, while also giving us the right environment in which to gradually teach robots to live together with us under a common moral code.”17 If nothing else, then, virtual worlds can be seen as petri dishes to test regulatory frameworks and to prepare for a whole range of possible impact scenarios, some more plausible than others. Such work already proceeds apace. However, the function of nano in these online worlds goes beyond

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simulating social or ethical implications, beyond modeling impact scenarios. For these mmo s mobilize radical visions of molecular science as everyday social practices, turning imaginary technologies into lived realities—​­right now. Enabling users to interact and experiment with futurity-​­laden artifacts already in the present, virtual worlds transform simulations into events, pixels into things that literally matter. Of course, this is the case with many virtual things. As Castronova indicates, inside virtual worlds the “processes of value creation have advanced so far, even at this early date, that almost everything known as a ‘virtual’ commodity—​­the gold piece, the magic helmet, the deadly spaceship, and so on—​­is now certifiably real. . . . In the arena of synthetic worlds, the allegedly ‘virtual’ is blending so smoothly into the allegedly ‘real’ as to make the distinction increasingly difficult to see.”18 Yet among all these virtual goodies, nano­­tech­nol­ogy often appears as a privileged topos in online gamescapes. Key concepts and tropes of nano­science fundamentally inform many of these worlds, even at the level of their cultural and industrial infrastructures. For instance, the entire technological ecology in PlanetSide is founded on systems of molecular “nanites”: vehicles, weapons, buildings, and the lives of all combatants in the game are completely dependent on these tiny machines. In Anarchy Online, likewise, player-​­characters gain skills and abilities by uploading “Nano­s” into their bodies, and the major conflicts of the game (namely, the ongoing “notum wars”) revolve around crucial molecular sciences that drive the galactic civilization. Nano appears in these worlds less as one type of virtual object among others than as a primary dimension of political economy and social being: not so much a thing as a deep process at the heart of the world. The playability of these worlds therefore requires a degree of recreational engagement with nano, despite the fact that it is sometimes less than visible, subliminal, under the surface. [Atoms and Avatars]

Consider the world of Second Life. Operated by the San Francisco–​­based company Linden Lab, Second Life launched on June 23, 2003, with great expectations. Unlike most mmo s, which take the form of dedicated gaming environments, structured according to fixed narratives or missions, Second Life is entirely open and relies on its residents to make of it whatever 114  0100

they like. Through their avatars, residents can modify the world, create objects, morph existing geographies into new formations, and develop clubs, townships, or fetish communities.19 Second Life began as an empty wasteland; today, it is filled with cities and cultural attractions engineered by its residents. Basic access to Second Life is free of charge. Shopping, entrepreneurial ventures, and other financial transactions happen all the time—​­the exchange rate between the Linden dollar (the currency of Second Life) and the U.S. dollar hovers fairly consistently around 260 to 1—​­and owning a parcel of land or a designer island does entail regular expenses. But most activities in Second Life can be enjoyed gratis, including the creation of new materials and objects in designated sandbox regions. To encourage residents to build in the world, Second Life’s Terms of Service agreement provides intellectual property rights to content creators, while also granting Linden Lab certain licenses. These features have proved attractive to users worldwide, and Second Life currently boasts over 36 million registered accounts, with more than a million active users (around forty thousand avatars are in-​ w ­ orld at any given moment). While the intense media hype of its early years has calmed down tremendously, Second Life continues to expand and evolve. In 2014, for example, it added support for the Oculus Rift, renovating its graphics and social networking features in anticipation of a vr renaissance. At the same time, its pioneering experiments with customizable avatar technologies and content-​­generation tools have set the standards for other scriptable worlds to come.20 Since the beginning, a significant number of residents in real life have been scientists, science writers, techno-​­geeks, hackers, and other representatives of the technorati. They quickly recognized Second Life as a promising venue for scientific activity. Several research labs, universities, and professional organizations set up in-​­world venues. In 2006, a region dedicated to scientific pursuits emerged: an archipelago of islands called the SciLands. Nano­­tech­nol­ogy has been well represented in all this activity. Numerous regions or “sims” have supported nano enterprises over the years, including the Textiles Nano­­tech­nol­ogy Laboratory of the Hinestroza Research Group at Cornell University, which once floated high above the American Chemical Society Island; the island of the Taresem Movement, which hosts the annual Geoethical Nano­­tech­nol­ogy Workshop; and various SciLands facilities where scientists can release their experiments directly to peers and the public, as a form of open-​­source M A S S I V E L Y M U L T I P L A Y E R L A B O R A T O R I E S  115

science (fig. 4.5). In these sims and others, gigantic interactive molecules and prototype nano­systems abound.21 In 2007, the U.K. National Physical Laboratory founded Nano­­tech­nol­ ogy Island (fig. 4.6). Nano­­tech­nol­ogy Island was fashioned to be a central hub of nano­science in Second Life. On the island, avatars could interact with educational displays about carbon nano­tubes or explore the “Tower of 10” museum. They could tinker with faux nano-​­instruments that closely mimicked real ones (figs. 4.7 and 4.8). There was also a public sandbox where visitors could experiment with chemical models, using handy “molecule rezzers” to translate information from ChemSpider or other databases into 3d structures (fig. 4.9). University students occasionally came here to experiment with the molecule rezzers, whose atom-​­by-​­atom methods would recall the assemblers and desktop nano­factories imagined by Eric Drexler—​­those dream machines that have inspired so much science fiction in recent decades.22 One of the rezzers called “Orac”—​­created by Andrew Lang (Hiro Sheridan in Second Life) in 2007—​­even spoke in the manner of the Orac supercomputer from the tv space opera Blake’s 7 as it synthesized each molecule, one pixelated atom at a time. But the consignment of molecular science to a handful of islands has distracted attention from the fact that the entire world of Second Life resounds with the discourse of mondo nano. From the fundamental act of creating new objects to commonplace encounters with self-​­replicating bots, the rhetoric of Second Life configures the digital world as a nano world. This affords affective experiences with as-​­yet-​­inexistent (even impossible) nano­technologies, producing the irreal as real sensations, emotions, cognitive processes, and physical responses. In living their second lives, residents inhabit the virtual dimensions of nano­­tech­nol­ogy, playing out its core concepts and conforming to its dreams. They bring it forth into real life as a durable habitus, contained inside themselves—​­whether they know it or not.23 That Second Life is rife with speculative nano­­tech­nol­ogy is perhaps no shock, considering the extent to which cyberpunk fiction and its litany of posthuman technologies constitute the vernacular discourse of this world.24 The notion of “rezzing” to describe the materialization of objects in Second Life derives from Tron (1982) and its proto-​­cyberpunk conceit of digitizing molecular matter. Likewise, the designation of Second Life as a “Metaverse” and its cartoon inhabitants as “avatars” owes largely to

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4.5. Colin Dayafter, the author’s avatar, climbs a molecule at the Sky Lab facility of acs Island in Second Life. August 20, 2008. The molecule had been synthesized in late 2007 and tested for anti-​­malarial activity in early 2008 as part of the ­UsefulChem project, led by the Bradley Laboratory at Drexel University. The UsefulChem project was present in Second Life from 2007 through 2011.

4.6. Nanotechnology Island in Second Life. October 1, 2013.

4.7. Colin Dayafter uses an atomic force microscope to examine polymer nanoislands. The experiment took place in the main laboratory building on Nanotechnology Island in Second Life. Photograph by the author. February 3, 2009.

4.8. Colin Milburn uses an atomic force microscope to examine cyanobacteria. The experiment took place in the Scanning Probe Microscopy Facility of the Nanochemistry Research Institute at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. The facility is managed by Dr. Thomas Becker. Photograph by Vyonne Walker. February 3, 2009.

4.9. Colin Dayafter rezzing a lactose molecule on Nanotechnology Island. The molecule was assembled with Hiro’s Molecule Rezzer. August 20, 2009.

Neal Stephenson’s 1992 late-​­cyberpunk novel, Snow Crash. Stephenson famously upgraded William Gibson’s cyberspace into the Metaverse—​ ­a 3d computational world, the principle communications system of the future: As Hiro approaches the Street [the central pipeline of the Metaverse], he sees two young couples, probably using their parents’ computers for a double date in the Metaverse, climbing down out of Port Zero, which is the local port of entry and monorail stop. He is not seeing real people, of course. This is all part of the moving illustration drawn by his computer according to specifications coming down the fiber-​­optic cable. The people are pieces of software called avatars. They are the audiovisual bodies that people use to communicate with each other in the Metaverse. Hiro’s avatar is now on the Street, too, and if the couples coming off the monorail look over in his direction, they can see him, just as he’s seeing them. . . . Your avatar can look any way you want it to, up to the limitations of your equipment. If you’re ugly, you can make your avatar beautiful. If you’ve just gotten out of bed, your avatar can still be wearing beautiful clothes and

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professionally applied makeup. You can look like a gorilla or a dragon or a giant talking penis in the Metaverse. Spend five minutes walking down the Street and you will see all of these.25 Spend five minutes in Second Life and you will see all these things, too. Philip Rosedale, the creator of Second Life, has said, “Snow Crash has the closest practical resemblance to Second Life as it exists now: a parallel, immersive world which simulates an alternative universe, which thousands of people inhabit simultaneously for communication, play, and work, at various levels and variations of role-​­playing with their avatars.”26 Snow Crash played an inspirational role during the making of Second Life, and it remains a touchstone for the culture of this and other online worlds.27 Beyond its isomorphism with Stephenson’s Metaverse, however, Second Life has even greater parallels with Stephenson’s subsequent novel, The Diamond Age. The future imagined in The Diamond Age, where radical nano­­tech­nol­ogy has created a post-​­scarcity global village fragmented into distinct cultural phyles, anticipates the user-​­generated world of discrete sims, FurNations, cyborg tribes, and designer islands in Second Life. Both The Diamond Age and Second Life stem from the same premise: digital control of matter will empower human beings to remake reality, shaping the world atom by atom. Certainly, the discourse of Second Life comprehends the massively multiplayer work of building the world as a form of molecular manufacturing. The graphics of Second Life are made from indivisible units called “prims”—​­primitive graphical objects. Prims can be assembled into larger structures, from a molecular model to the great globe itself. As Second Life: The Official Guide tells us, “The term ‘prim’ refers to a single unit of the ‘matter’ that makes up all Second Life objects. Prims are the irreducible building blocks of Second Life—​­the unsplittable atoms that make up the things of the world.”28 Cory Ondrejka, the former chief technical officer of Linden Lab, points to an implicit analogy between nano­­tech­nol­ogy and the “atomistic construction” principles of Second Life: While everything in the real world is built of atoms, they are generally not convenient tools for human construction. Nano­­tech­nol­ogy, where products are built at the atomic scale, is expensive, difficult, and potentially risky. . . . Unlike the real world, Second Life uses building blocks specifically designed for human-​­scale creation. This is the principle the designers of Second Life call atomistic con120  0100

struction. Primitives are the atoms of Second Life. Simple primitives are combined to build interesting structures and behaviours, and are designed to support maximum creativity while still being simple enough for everyone to play with and use. . . . Instead of the real world’s hundred different atoms with complex interaction rules, Second Life is made up of several simple primitive types with the flexibility to generate a nearly limitless set of combinatorial possibilities.29 Residents are encouraged to understand their creative work as simplified, avatar-​­scale molecular engineering. The construction tools at their disposal (accessible through the “Build” menu) become practical instruments for manipulating the structure of matter down to the individual “building blocks,” the indivisible atoms. Whether assembling chemical compounds in the SciLands or synthesizing whole cities dedicated to ­Gorean slave play, the routine industry of Second Life, the constant labor of creation that constitutes the liveliness of the world and its economy, is enacted as a kind of radical nano­­tech­nol­ogy. Philip Rosedale has repeatedly described the work of Second Life residents in terms that evoke the visions of bottom-​­up assembly from Drexler’s Engines of Creation. Rosedale has openly commended “the first hundreds and now millions of people who had the courage and passion to bring the virtual world to life by creating it and then believing that is was real. As I’ve said before, you are the engines of creation.”30 He imagines top-​­down engineering coupled with bottom-​­up, self-​­organizing vitality: “I believe that the collective challenge of building a viable digital world outstrips in importance the success or failure of any one development team or product. We, as developers, are doing the easy part: building the scaffolding for a new world. You, as the engines of creation, must breathe life into it.”31 The resident avatars themselves are fashioned as nano­­tech­nol­ogy instruments, molecular assemblers or engines of creation toiling away at the bottom of things, shaping the world and life itself prim by prim. Undoubtedly, many Second Life residents will not be fully aware of their conscription into the tropology of nano­­tech­nol­ogy. Yet to the extent that the infrastructure of Second Life is framed in the language of molecular engineering, to the extent that in-​­world creation is performed through atomistic construction, residents participate in the work of molecular science simply by living their second lives. This is not an imitation of real science but rather a mode of becoming, entering into composition M A S S I V E L Y M U L T I P L A Y E R L A B O R A T O R I E S  121

with the image of nano­­tech­nol­ogy, establishing particulate relations with its zone of affect—​­a becoming-​­molecular in the sense of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.32 Playing by the rules of the game, the residents are becoming-​­nano­technicians. Even when they break the rules. [Googols of Goo]

To a greater or lesser degree, Second Life residents become habituated to the images and values of nano­­tech­nol­ogy, experimenting with its possibilities and functionalities, simply by spending a good deal of time—​­and having a good time—​­in the world. We could point to the nano-​­fashion industries (fig. 4.10), the nano-​­armored avatars (fig. 4.11), or even the notorious CopyBot controversy of 2006, which many saw as a rehearsal for the socioeconomic consequences of mature molecular manufacturing.33 But

4.10. Colin Dayafter shows off a new outfit from the Nano­Gunk store in Second Life. May 30, 2013. Founded by Robin Lobo, Nano­Gunk specializes in sexy avatar clothing. It also promotes radical nano­­tech­nol­ogy and other speculative visions, according to its group charter: “Virtual world training for up-​­coming nano neural interfaces and wetware, sweet! . . . A neural interface allows a human brain to communicate directly with a computer, without any other equipment. That kind of interface allows any illusions to be inputted to human nervous system. Read any of William Gibson’s books (coined the term Cyberspace, 1982 -​­Burning Chrome) for fiction, or for scientific analysis: ‘The Singularity Is Near’ by Ray Kurzweil” (Nano­Gunk group charter, Second Life, 2007). 122  0100

I would like to focus on an example that, while it represents resistance to the laws of the world, nevertheless reinforces a nano­tech ethos and a nano­tech way of seeing. It transforms the virtual dimension of radical (if not even impossible) nano­­tech­nol­ogy into enfleshed experience, with tangible consequences in the online world and the offline world. I am referring to the phenomenon of grid-​­crashing griefer attacks. Second Life has periodically suffered from viral infections of self-​ ­replicating digital objects, often scripted by malicious users to overwhelm the Linden servers and produce denial-​­of-​­service shutdowns. Early on, Linden Lab dubbed the self-​­replicating objects “grey goo,” in reference to the doomsday scenario of nano­tech spreading out of control.34 According to Douglas Soo, the former studio director for Linden Lab, “In the same way that it is theorized that out-​­of-​­control nano­tech could consume all of the physical resources of the world and turn it into grey nano­tech goo, Second Life grey goo can theoretically consume all of the available server resources of the Second Life world and fill it with grey goo objects.”35 Linden Lab subsequently introduced a “grey goo fence,” programming the grid platform to arrest self-​­replicating objects that exceed certain parameters. But griefers nevertheless continue to invent workarounds, and

4.11. Exploring the space colony Necronom VI in Second Life, Colin Dayafter models a pair of Nano­tech Pants from the Xeno Cyber Wear store. October 12, 2013. Xeno Cyber Wear specializes in cyberpunk and technogoth armor and apparel: “Evolve Yourself.” The Nano­tech Pants were designed by Xenomorph Wonder [Gianni Pacella]. M A S S I V E L Y M U L T I P L A Y E R L A B O R A T O R I E S  123

grey goo remains a risk. Today, Second Life and the blogosphere at large routinely adopt the vocabulary of grey goo to describe chaotically self-​ r­ eplicating code, turning an analogy into something more like a logical copula, as if the difference between matter and software had already become too small to see, and too small to matter. Some of the grey goo attacks in Second Life have even played into this equation, drawing attention to epistemic bleeds between the molecular sciences and video game culture. One of the largest goo attacks hit Second Life on November 19, 2006, infecting all of Linden Lab’s 2,700+ servers and immediately generating a flurry of online twitter, news reportage, and bloggage of all kinds. At 2:44 pm pst, the Linden Lab staff announced on the official Second Life blog, “An attack of self-​­replicators is causing heavy load on the database, which is in turn slowing down in-​­world activity. We have isolated the grey goo and are currently cleaning up the grid. We’ll keep you updated as status changes.” Twenty-​­three minutes later: “Log-​­ins will be closed to all except Linden staff while we finish cleaning up the aftermath of the grey goo attack.”36 Moments before the world shut off, a resident named Amulius Lion­court shot footage of the massive goo attack and uploaded it to YouTube (fig. 4.12). The goo took the form of gold rings from the 1991 Sega video game Sonic the Hedgehog (fig. 4.13). Whenever residents touched them, the rings released a musical ping from the Sonic games and started multiplying. Soon the ring goo spread across the entire world, infecting the ground, buildings, and even the night sky, zipping overhead like shooting stars. During the attack, agitated residents barraged the official Second Life blogspace, and discussions continued long after the grid was officially reopened at 3:18 pm, less than one hour from the moment the attack started. Some residents confessed confusion: “what’s ‘grey goo’?”37 Others were relieved that their own avatars had escaped disaster: “Man! I thought I was glitched and implanted with some stupid sonic ring replicator or something! Thank god that isnt the case! lol.”38 One or two seemed to applaud the event: “Go Sonic the Hedgehog rings.”39 A few even experienced pure delight: “Wow! Attack of the Self Replicators. I saw a movie once about space aliens attacking with some sort of goo: I think it was called The Blob. Or maybe the Tingler? Anyway, can this game get any more unpredictable and exciting? Lag -​­Panic Land Grabs -​­Griefers -​­Vanishing

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4.12. “Ring Attack 11-​­19-​­2006.” Amulius Lioncourt [Joshua Stortz], November 19, 2006. YouTube, http://www​.youtube​.com/watch?​v=​ 5H8hNXWgOoE.

4.13. Sonic the Hedgehog: Sonic recovers from a collision with a Chopper robot in the Green Hill Zone, but his gold rings have scattered into thin air. Sega, 1991.

Property -​­Highway Robbers Extorting Money -​­and now the entire sl Planet is threatened by Grey Goo!!!. Can’t wait to see whats next.”40 Laughing out loud was not an uncommon reaction—​­lol, lol. Or joking around with a kind of abjection: “Ewww . . . I just got splattered with gray-​­goo. Someone hand me a towel.”41 But while certain residents saw the attack as yet another instance of play or spectacle, the most prevalent emotion was anger. Some were quite concerned about the financial and political implications of the attack. For example, a number were furious about the costs to their in-​­world businesses having been forced offline. Many were distraught that monetary transactions during and after the attack had failed to register, and real money was lost into the digital ether. Others wondered whether Linden Lab would need to impose fees to improve security and start locking down an otherwise “free” world. Responses were quite heated, with a handful of residents feeling intense displeasure as a result of the virtual world being momentarily destroyed—​­the servers shut down, the residents forcibly ejected back into real life:  

 

 

 

“Aww.. I was just having fun, and now it closed =x ”42 “I say that whatever the greifers are planning its not gonna be good but if the grid is down again and i miss an important group meeting I dont know wat to do!!!!!”43 “Mrfle . . . this is annoying . . . those stupid rings caused the floor and walls of my little shop I am trying to build to auto return. . . . Eh . . . I’m starting to get disillusioned with this game . . . and with Linden Labs in general . . . but I got alot of friends on here so I don’t want to quit . . . mrfle. Mrf mrfle mrfling.”44 “Grey Goo lock outs and slow downs again. . . . hah! . . . I’m no killjoy, but this has reached the stage where the joy of the many is being killed by the acts of the few.”45 “I’ve had enough of this.”46

Several of these postings suggested fatigue and dysphoria (“Frikkin’ hackers bring grief everywhere”), even as others exhibited amusement, elation, and awe (“That looks so cool”): an emulsion of conflicted sentiments common to scenes of trolling, gooning, hacking, or griefing.47 These public emotions coalesced around a set of terms, concepts, and ways 126  0100

of seeing associated with the speculations of nano­­tech­nol­ogy, pure science fiction enacted as a real event, a volatile set of sensations and perceptions. And so, even if some residents didn’t have a clue about grey goo beforehand, they came to know what it feels like. [Always Experiment]

The goo attack prompted a great deal of excitement, outrage, contemplation, and obsessive questioning of its implications: social processes habituating resident avatars to the conceptual terrain of digital matter, channeling raw affects into technocultural meanings. This shows how the virtual world, organizing inchoate feelings around specific high-​ t­ ech symbols, putting many thousands of users simultaneously into new compositions, functions as an epistemic space for producing embodied knowledge—​­a massively multiplayer laboratory. It materializes theory in the flesh and opens up experimental modes of play. One resident, Akela Talamasca, who was not in-​­world at the time (which just proves the ramifying effects of such events), left the following post at the Second Life Insider on November 26, 2006: “I missed out on all the grey goo fun, and by ‘fun,’ I mean ‘angst, bored frustration, edging over into malaise, punctuated by moments of mindless rage.’ [The Amulius Lioncourt] video, however, gave me a tiny taste of what it was like. I still get a visceral shudder of horror when I see things like this happen. It hearkens back to early memories of watching the Donald Sutherland version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”48 Pointing to the emotional turbulence in the wake of a goo attack that cannot simply be comprehended as “fun,” Talamasca notes his own “visceral shudder” at the thought of goo, the body reacting in its deep tissues to a horror of being invaded by alien technology. Even this “tiny taste” of goo—​­processed through childhood memories of cinema, images of body snatchers—​­intercepts the resonant meanings of tiny technologies of duplication. For technocultural lore holds that body snatchers are alien spores that develop into pods for growing human simulacra, using a kind of organic nano­­tech­nol­ogy. Jack Finney’s 1954 novel The Body Snatchers provides the canonical description: “Since every kind of atom in the universe is identical—​­the building blocks of the universe—​­you are precisely duplicated, atom for atom, molecule for molecule, cell for cell, down to the tiniest scar or hair on your wrist. And what happens to the original? The M A S S I V E L Y M U L T I P L A Y E R L A B O R A T O R I E S  127

atoms that formerly composed you are static now, nothing, a pile of gray fluff.”49 Or perhaps grey goo? The “grey goo fun” particularly evokes the 1978 “Donald Sutherland version” of the story, directed by Philip Kaufman. It is a gooey film about remakes that is itself a remake of Don Siegel’s 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in turn an adaptation of the Finney novel, and likewise a predecessor of two later Hollywood adaptations—​­Abel Ferrara’s Body Snatchers from 1993 and Oliver Hirschbiegel’s The Invasion from 2007—​­as well as innumerable fannish tributes, spoofs, and direct-​­to-​­video knockoffs. Like its progeny, the “Donald Sutherland version” telegraphs its status as remake, casting the director of the 1956 film, Don Siegel, as well as its star, Kevin McCarthy, in cameo roles as early victims of the body snatchers. Alluding to this versioning history, Talamasca’s commentary situates the grey goo attack in relation to earlier narratives of viral technologies (which other Second Life residents noted as well with references to alien “blobs” and so forth). It recalls a certain compulsion to repeat: an infectious pattern allegorized by the body snatcher narratives themselves. These familiar stories about normal individuals getting snatched up by mass duplication processes—​­participating in the global rebirth of pod people—​­recur again and again. According to W. D. Richter, the screenwriter for the Donald Sutherland version, “There seems to be always some interest somewhere to remake Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”50 The microscopic body snatchers, as nothing more than fictional entities, achieve their own reproduction—​­yet another renaissance or second life—​­by producing a mimetic urge: a desire not simply to rewatch, but to recreate, to relive in a new way. The “tiny taste” of goo opens onto a recursive pattern of remakings: a mimetic contagion that compels further experiments. Reflecting on his own emotional response to the Sonic replicators, Talamasca considers their form and function. He becomes curious to know more, to test another iteration, to play again: “And my further question is: ‘Why rings?’ Should we be expecting those mushrooms from the Mario franchise? Hey, actually, that’d be kinda neat . . . but only if they do allow you to grow to twice your size. Note to self: Learn to build.”51 Talamasca detects a broader semiotic field that would conjoin the concept of molecular replication with video game iconography at large, ring goo with mushroom goo. Ultimately, he aspires to learn atomistic

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4.14. Gold nano­ rings. These sem micrographs show gold nano­r ings (D = 530 nm) on a soda lime glass substrate. Reprinted from Hao et al., “Shedding Light on Dark Plasmons in Gold Nano­r ings,” with permission from Elsevier.

construction skills to carry out further investigations. He is becoming-​ ­nano­technician from the moment of asking “Why rings?” The rings even seem to solicit this line of thought, advertising themselves as topological twists or folds between science and fiction. Of course, gold rings have long been privileged sites for nano­­scale adventures, from the discovery of worlds inside a wedding ring in Ray Cummings’s 1922 The Girl in the Golden Atom to recent laboratory explorations of “gold nano­r ings” (fig. 4.14)—​­a bonanza of tiny golden donuts, necklaces, and toroids.52 Yet these particular gold rings from Sonic the Hedgehog link to other instances where the viral spread of video game code has intersected with actual molecular technologies.

M A S S I V E L Y M U L T I P L A Y E R L A B O R A T O R I E S  129

[Sandbox Science]

In 1993, geneticists at Harvard Medical School isolated a vertebrate gene responsible for coordinating embryonic patterning and organogenesis, a homologue to the hedgehog gene that controls segmentation patterns in fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster). They named this gene Sonic hedgehog, after the beloved Sega game character.53 The Sonic hedgehog gene (shh) was later found to be a highly conserved dna sequence, spanning diverse strata of the animal kingdom from arthropods through mammals: a primordial self-​­replicator spread throughout the phyla of evolutionary history, the very model of a successful “natural nano­­tech­nol­ogy.”54 Today, Sonic hedgehog regularly scurries around the research fields of nano­­tech­nol­ogy and nano­biology. The shh gene and the shh protein are increasingly mobilized for a wide variety of biomedical diagnostics and molecular therapies. In 2006, biologists at Texas a&m University and Emory University proposed a nano­tech assay for Sonic hedgehog signalling in prostate cancer using “quantum dot nano­particles  .  .  . for the rapid detection of treatment-​­sensitive cancer cells.”55 In 2008, scientists from the Nano­technologies for Neurodegenerative Diseases Study Group of the Basque Country (nanedis) envisaged a nano­tech treatment for Parkinson’s disease, using “gene-​­nano­particle complexes” to deliver Sonic hedgehog (shh) and Nurr1 molecules into the brain to stimulate dopamine neurons.56 Thanks to nano­science, Sonic hedgehog even helps men to get erections: the urologist Carol Podlasek and her colleagues have used nano­fiber gel to deliver shh protein directly to the penis, successfully treating erectile dysfunction caused by cavernous nerve damage.57 Sonic saves the day! Clinical researchers often describe such Sonic hedgehog therapies in heroic terms, for example, suggesting that future advances in genetic medicine might compare to Sonic’s victorious battle over the evil Dr. Eggman in the Sega game: “Sonic The Hedgehog to the rescue?”58 Even technical publications in molecular biology enjoy rhetorical flourishes occasioned by this gene’s namesake, sporting titles such as “The Adventures of Sonic Hedgehog in Development and Repair.”59 Puckishly evoking the Sega games, these research reports on Sonic hedgehog also resonate with other elements of the transmedia Sonic universe. Molecular nanites, for instance, appear frequently in the Sonic the Hedgehog comic books. In one story line, Sonic and his friends must fend 130  0100

off a grey goo attack: an entire city made of silicon nanites, depicted as self-​­replicating “microscopic computers.” The nanite city ravenously consumes the surrounding environment: “From what I can tell, matter is being manufactured literally out of thin air!”60 Transgenic modifications, diy biotechnology, and cyborg experiments are commonplace in these comics. At the same time, online fan discussions and Sonic fanfics imagine diverse molecular technologies on the hedgehog’s planet of Mobius. One enthusiastic fan of the Sonic games offers a nano­tech explanation for the power rings that give the hedgehog a speed boost: The surface [of the ring] will be micro textured with thousands of little nano-​­computers that scan any matter that comes near them. If the genetic pattern resembles that of Sonic they release the energy. Of course Sonic wears gloves all the time but the scanners in the nano-​­computers may be able to scan a few millimeters in any direction. . . . When Sonic touches the ring the sensors open up a channel to allow his body to receive the flow of energy. It enhances his abilities and lets him do many things he could previously not do. . . . The actual composition of the ring is probably a core of antimatter surrounded by an outer layer of matter. The outer layer of matter produces a magnetic field that contains the antimatter. Controlled reacting of the matter and antimatter would produce energy, vast amounts of it.61 This conjectural remix of nano-​­computing, theoretical physics, and Sonic’s “genetic pattern” (the full hedgehog genome!) provides the fan community with a “scientific” justification for the phenomena of the game (what the author calls the “actual science of Sonic’s motion”). It adds a layer of technical vocabulary to the computer graphics, a new molecular dimension to Sonic’s adventures.62 The fan modding of scientific knowledge is a mirror image of the scientific modding of video game lore for genetic research. Such borrowings constitute the technoscapes and dreamscapes of the present, operating through webs of latent meanings, discursive associations, and modifiable vectors. No longer an island, the laboratory bursts open along innumerable lines of flight—​­a massively distributed mode of knowledge production, drawing on vast repositories of media culture and scientific research at the same time. So although a primordial dna sequence became associated with a speeding purple hedgehog due primarily to a moment of scientific whimsy, the nomenclature nevertheless instantiates a type of symbolic transfection M A S S I V E L Y M U L T I P L A Y E R L A B O R A T O R I E S  131

4.15. Grey Goo. Gazira Babeli, October 2006. Mature Sandbox, Second Life.

between molecular scientists and video game players (obviously not mutually exclusive categories). Such transfection is far from neutral or inconsequential, for it becomes an enabling feature of the therapeutic imaginary of nano­biology (“Sonic to the rescue”). At the same time, in online worlds such as PlanetSide and Second Life, the transfection is enacted as lived reality. The collapse of speculative nano­­tech­nol­ogy with video game aesthetics in these worlds ensures that atomistic construction tools and goo attacks are not representations of things that are or would be more real than themselves, but rather phenomena in their own right: tangible processes and events registered as visceral intensities and startling emotions, rendered meaningful through links to the knowledge base of modern science. In this way, a grey goo event like the Sonic ring attack of 2006 would seem less an act of pointless chaos than something approaching the status of experiment. Vivifying the transfections that everywhere take place between molecular science and computational worlds, the goo attack both exposed and reinforced their shared epistemic assumptions. To be sure, several grey goo attacks in Second Life—​­such as those staged by the avatar artist Gazira Babeli—​­have aimed to play around with these assumptions, critically reflecting on the relations of atoms and avatars.63 On October 9, 2006, Gazira Babeli launched a code performance called Grey Goo that temporarily filled one of the sandboxes in Second Life with legions of self-​­replicating Super Marios (fig. 4.15). The art critic and curator Domenico Quaranta later commented, In technical jargon this is called “grey goo,” an expression used in nano­­ tech­nol­ogy and science fiction to describe a hypothetical apocalyptic scenario in which self-​­replicating robots consume all living matter on the earth. 132  0100

Although the cataclysm did generate a certain level of anxiety, Gazira appears to be more interested in setting off a mental short circuit than a genuine system collapse. This was why she populated the three-​ d ­ imensional, baroque world of Second Life with the definitive icon of the 8-​­bit era.64 Babeli’s artistic reinventions of grey goo interrogate the extent to which gamespace and nano­space are converging: “She does not pretend, like everyone else, to be in a world made of objects and atoms, but is aware of inhabiting a world made of code, and being made of code herself.”65 Which is to say, she plays into and plays with the discourse of digital matter as such. Winking at her audience of Second Life residents—​­a ll of whom are routinely conscripted in the project of radical nano­­tech­nol­ogy simply by hanging out in this world—​­Babeli insists on the power of metaphor in shaping technical practices, the troping of science itself. On November 15, 2006, she infiltrated the “13 Most Beautiful Avatars” exhibition at the Ars Virtua gallery in Second Life, launching a performance entitled Banana Goo: a swarm of self-​­replicating bananas lifted from Andy Warhol’s 1967 album cover for The Velvet Underground & Nico. While commenting on the aesthetics of mass media, duplication, and remaking—​­the signifying chains of our networked society—​­Banana Goo also hilariously attends to the semiotics of nano­­tech­nol­ogy, its lexical and figurative components (fig. 4.16). Babeli’s code performance recollects that the nano imaginary has been informed as much by experiments in language and symbolic play as by experiments in real science. After all, Banana Goo bodies forth the same joke that the cartoonist Tony Carrillo made in his F Minus comic strip, also in 2006 (fig. 4.17). A low pun or high insight? Perhaps in getting the joke (fyi: les non-​ d­ upes errent), we intuit the ironic condition of technoscience today, both deadly serious and yet wonderfully frivolous, focused on realities of the here and now and yet wrapped in consensual fictions of the there and then. Yes, we have no banano­­tech­nol­ogy. At least, not yet. So when playing around in the fields of mondo nano—​­whether for the advancement of science or just for fun—​­perhaps the most appropriate response is laughter. Old fans of nano­­tech­nol­ogy, laughing together. The residents of Second Life and other online worlds are already getting a feel for nano, tacitly attuned to the allure of digital matter and its promising applications: atomistic construction, nano­robotic self-​­replication, M A S S I V E L Y M U L T I P L A Y E R L A B O R A T O R I E S  133

4.16. Banana Goo. Gazira Babeli, November 15, 2006. Ars Virtua gallery, Dowden, Second Life. 4.17. F Minus. ©1996 Tony Carrillo. Reprinted by permission of Universal Uclick for United Feature Syndicate. All rights reserved.

programmable chemistry. Despite important differences that might distinguish this type of participatory knowledge from what goes on in orthodox nano­science labs, the mode of citizen science emerging here passes over to the offline world already in dialogue with the broader discourse of nano—​­indicating that today, as Bruno Latour has written, “the distinction between what is internal to scientific disciplines and what is external has to some extent disappeared.”66 In other words, virtual worlds open the sciences to democracy. As ­e xperimental zones for transforming scientific speculations into lived experience, they open portals to fully user-​­generated futures. For better or worse. 134  0100

0101 Weapons-​­Grade Cartoons

In February 2002, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology submitted an innovative proposal to the U.S. Army. It envisioned a new research center, with a molecular twist: a collaborative venture between mit and the Army Research Office to prototype and develop military equipment enhanced with nano­­tech­nol­ogy. The Army Research Office had issued broad agency solicitations for such a center in October 2001, and they enthusiastically selected mit ’s proposal from among several candidates, awarding $50 million to kick-​­start the mit Institute for Soldier Nano­technologies, or isn.1 mit ’s proposal outlined areas of nano­electronics, polymer chemistry, and molecular engineering that could provide fruitful military applications in the near term, as well as more speculative applications in the future. It also featured the striking image of a mechanically armored woman warrior, standing amid the monuments of some futuristic cityscape, packing two enormous guns and other assault devices (fig. 5.1). This image proved appealing even beyond the proposal, and it accompanied several publicity announcements for the institute’s inauguration. As this image disseminated, it wasn’t long before several comic book fans recognized similarities to the comic book Radix, created by the fraternal team of Ray and Ben Lai (fig. 5.2). The isn illustration appeared to be a composite of Radix’s fictional heroine, Valerie Fiores, striking her cover pose from Radix #1, wearing a helmet featured in several issues of this series, and superimposed on an urban terrain translated from elsewhere in the same comic.2 The isn illustration had reassembled these fragments from Radix while adding novel flourishes of coloration, background detail, and overlay material. News of the isn illustration reached

5.1. isn Soldier of the Future. 2002. Reproduced with permission. 5.2. Radix #1. Ray Lai and Ben Lai, 2001. Reproduced with permission.

Ray and Ben Lai, who threatened lawsuits, stating that mit had dislocated the futuristic soldier from its real origin in a comic book to the market of nano­­tech­nol­ogy research and military investors: “They’re selling this as science fact while we’re trying to sell it as science fiction. . . . And people don’t even know that we created it in the first place. People might even think we’re copying them.”3 The altered image itself seems to imply that soldier nano­technologies are stepping between fictional and real worlds. Turning off her active camouflage, the warrior emerges from the blurry, almost translucent space in the background into a space of more opaque robustness. She appears to lunge out of the frame, off the page—​­as if materializing from an ephemeral comic book directly into the battlefields of real science. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. Frankly, the direction of travel between fiction and reality is not at all clearly indicated by the drawing. But this is no fault of representation, for such ambiguity is inherent to the image’s social context. As we have seen, the molecular sciences often play fast and loose with the lines between novelty and banality, visionary expectation and 136  0101

technical immediacy. Retracing these same wobbly lines, the isn drawing effectively allegorizes the dynamic oscillation of science and science fiction in the global adventure of nano. Lawyers for mit responded that the isn ’s sampling from the Lais’ image fell under legal standards of “fair use” for academic and educational purposes. Moreover, the misappropriation had not hurt sales of Radix; if anything, the resulting scandal only brought new attention to the comic book. The Lais might claim that mit ’s representation of their fantasy world as reality would malign their status as creators of fictions—​­a grievance noted by the Lais’ lawyers in a cease-​­and-​­desist letter sent to mit. But according to mit ’s legal team, recontextualizing science fiction as science fact is fully permitted by the fair use protections granted to scientific research under U.S. copyright law.4 Nevertheless, the isn illustration was quickly removed from all mit websites. On August 30, 2002, Edwin Thomas—​­the founding director of the isn —​­issued a public apology to the Lais through the mit News Office: I am writing to apologize publicly to you both [Ray and Ben Lai]. . . . [I]f I had known it was your work, I would not have used it. mit strongly supports the rights of creators and greatly regrets using the image without permission or credit. I am very sorry that this occurred; it won’t happen again. Here is what happened. As my team and I were putting the finishing touches on the proposal, we decided to include a drawing of what the soldier of the future might look like. It was a last minute decision, and I asked my daughter, a graphic artist, to provide an image. We put the image into our proposal to the Army in late February. In March, the Army made its announcement and mit included the image in its news release. I didn’t know until after your attorney contacted mit at the end of April that the image apparently was based on your character. As soon as we heard about that, I had it removed from the isn web pages, notified all of those involved not to use the image for any purpose, and mit also ordered the image removed from all mit web sites.5 The isn used the image without knowledge of its science fiction origin. mit spokesman Ken Campbell said, “It was an innocent use. . . . We didn’t know it was from anyone else’s artwork.”6 Elsewhere, Thomas had asserted that his daughter’s interpretive drawing was simply an effort to W E A P O N S -​­G R A D E C A R T O O N S  137

transform his words into graphics, without any intent to plagiarize: “She did it [the drawing] in a couple of days, and was just trying to illustrate what I had been describing to her.”7 So here the issue has been laid to rest, with the Lais claiming ownership and origin of the image (authorship, that is, of science fiction) and the mit researchers claiming ownership and origin of the technical description (authorship, that is, of science). The picture and the writing are rendered absolutely separate, the one becoming just a convenient illustration of the other. We are reassured that the science stands completely on its own, for the written elements of the proposal constitute its real merits and its real substance. mit attorney Ann Hammersla said, “The proposal was peer-​­reviewed on its technical merits, and the award was not based on that illustration.”8 An Army spokesperson confirmed that the grant was “based on the substance of the proposal, and no illustration was required.”9 That is, the proposal had been evaluated on the meritorious substance of its words, not on the superfluous excess of its images. With both parties now appeased—​­or at least reconciled—​­the creators of science and the creators of science fiction then move along, each continuing with their own business. Comics and nano go their separate ways, as if this encounter had been nothing but a strange twist of fate, a regrettable mistake, an accidental meeting of words and images without deeper significance. And yet, while coming down to a case of “illustrative” pictures versus “substantive” words—​­or even to a case of the profession of science versus the profession of science fiction—​­this event also manifests the nonlocal cultural mythologies that frame both military technoscience and comic books, exposing their interdependence. Now, there seems little reason to doubt that Thomas’s daughter simply landed on the Radix drawing by serendipity, adapting it in all innocence as mere illustration for her father’s description of soldier nano­technologies. In this regard, it would be nothing more than a visual interpretation of the words by whose merits alone the application was supposedly judged—​­an extraneous supplement, that is, to the self-​­contained text. But we must nevertheless ask why this image seemed for the daughter to be such an appropriate illustration of otherwise “external” words. Why did her sampling, or poaching, from preexisting images seem to represent so perfectly the description given to her that the military and the isn would disseminate this image widely as “a drawing of what the soldier of the future might look like”? 138  0101

That the cartoon and the text seem to fit each other—​­as if made for each other—​­might make us suspicious of claims for either scientific or science-​­fictional autonomy. Nano­­tech­nol­ogy does not, after all, take place on an island. And neither does science fiction. Both professions bear traces of larger media ecologies that inform and motivate them. For instance, in 2002, when Thomas publicly described the new program of soldier nano­technologies, he put it in the following words: Our goal is to help greatly enhance the protection and survival of the infantry soldier using nano­science and nano­­tech­nol­ogy. . . . This will be achieved by creating, then scaling up to a commercial level, revolutionary materials and devices composed of particles or components so tiny that hundreds could fit on the period at the end of this sentence. The idea is to incorporate these nano­materials and nano­devices into the future soldier’s uniform, and associated equipage like helmets and gloves. . . . Imagine the psychological impact upon a foe when encountering squads of seemingly invincible warriors protected by armor and endowed with superhuman capabilities, such as the ability to leap over 20-​­foot walls.10 Thomas describes the development of soldier nano­technologies as progression from a present “idea” toward a future “goal.” He locates nano­ tech within the syntactical structure of printed language, imaginarily packing hundreds of nano­­scale “components” and “particles” into “the period at the end of this sentence.” It would be possible then to see the isn as a producer of “substantive” text, engineering its very substance—​ ­nano­­tech­nol­ogy—​­w ithin the materiality of writing, as if grammatical sign and technical object were indexical. “The idea” of the whole project is explained through text alone, as an inventory that contains the present in itself while generating the scientific future and setting it off at a distance. We are asked to imagine soldier nano­technologies as a culmination of linear writing, a giving forth or materialization of the technical substance abiding within. “Imagine the psychological impact”: imagine the invincible powers enabled by the invisible particles at the end of this sentence, particles that are the end goal or the referent of this sentence as much as they might appear at its final destination, its conclusive period, its full stop. We are directed to think textually, to visualize nano­devices through the medium of print and the unreeling of its content toward a deferred future.11 W E A P O N S -​­G R A D E C A R T O O N S  139

But at the same time, certain elements of Thomas’s description seem to leap out from another order of narration entirely, one defined less by analog progression toward an inevitable period than by fragmentation and radical juxtaposition. Even the imaginary abutment of nano­particles with their signifiers, where the future goal and the period of writing overlap in space and time, exceeds the notion of self-​­contained text; it is instead more like the conjunction of text with its own illustration. There is a representational practice involved here for which the idea of a substantive writing—​­a writing with “no need of illustration”—​­appears insufficient. Consider the isn ’s account of its research mission in 2003: “The isn ’s research mission is to use nano­­tech­nol­ogy to dramatically improve the survival of soldiers. The ultimate goal is to create a 21st century battlesuit that combines high-​­tech capabilities with light weight and comfort. Imagine a bullet-​­proof jumpsuit, no thicker than ordinary spandex, that monitors health, eases injuries, communicates automatically, and maybe even lends superhuman abilities. It’s a long-​­range vision for how technology can make soldiers less vulnerable to enemy and environmental threats.”12 Colorful associations spring to action with every insistence that we should imagine, as if we could imagine, as if perhaps we have already imagined something like this “long-​­range vision” many times before. After the public exposure of its cartoon infringement, the isn may have wanted to situate its research practices in the medium of substantive text, dissociating itself from the realm of fantasy images. It may have promised that the illustration was excised from its founding text without any loss for science. But let’s connect the dots. Bulletproof jumpsuits as thin as spandex? Invincible warriors leaping over twenty-​­foot walls, able to clear tall structures in a single bound? Superhuman abilities? Apparently, we are deep in the realm of comic book superheroes. This Looks like a Job For . . .

The American discourse on soldier nano­technologies frequently directs us to think of supermen, their wondrous superpowers, and their stunning costumes. In the 2004 book Nano­­tech­nol­ogy and Homeland Security: New Weapons for New Wars, the chemist Mark Ratner and the entrepreneur Daniel Ratner tell us, “The tasks of modern soldiers might well be called superhuman and thus require superhuman characteristics to accomplish them.” So just in the nick of time to save the day: “Nano­­tech­nol­ogy 140  0101

provides the only likely solutions to these problems.” The Ratners envisage soldiers who will wear uniforms made from flexible nano­fibers that “instantaneously can become stronger than steel,” protecting against bullets, explosive blasts, toxins, electromagnetic pulses, and other threats of postmodern battlespace. These nano­warriors will have supervision, superhearing, and superstrength; they will access environmental information down to the molecular level; they will heal from injuries even in the heat of battle. These soldiers of the future would evidently mimic Superman, the Man of Steel, thanks to a nano­tech uniform that affords a “direct interface between the human nervous system and electronics.” And yes, the uniform will be colorful: a “coat of many colors.”13 Extraordinary powers always require extraordinary sartorial innovations. As the cultural theorist Scott Bukatman has suggested, “Superheroes don’t wear costumes in order to fight crime, they fight crime in order to wear costumes,” precisely because the “costume is the sign and the source of power, the mark of grace.”14 Power must display itself on the surface of the body, and it moves in from the outside. The isn cartoon, to be sure, reinscribes a vast history of cyborgs and bionic bodies—​­and likewise recalls how feminized cyborg imagery often fortifies normative military values and masculine power fantasies, conflating desire and threat, technological authority and sexual allure, even while provoking traditional gender distinctions.15 But it is the sleek, fetishistic jumpsuit retraced from the world of comic books that configures this soldier of the future as a crime-​­fighting do-​­gooder, a high-​­tech champion of freedom. (And let us not overlook the mark of geopolitical power flamboyantly inscribed on her massive assault rifle: us army). Visibly, then, what the U.S. Army Research Office has described as the “Army’s overall technology strategy for applying nano­­tech­nol­ogy to the soldiers’ ensemble” reboots an enduring military dream of cyborg soldiers, outwardly graced with all the qualities of superheroes: dangerous, overwhelming powerful, rippling with libidinal energies, but also tightly controlled, bound by a moral code to use force in the name of justice.16 The superhero context of military nano­tech irrupts quite frequently in dispatches from the battlefields of science. In 2001, the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Department of Commerce funded a workshop on enhancing human performance through the convergence of nano, bio, info, and cognitive science, or “nbic convergence.” In the proceedings, Michael Goldblatt, the former chair of the Defense Sciences Office W E A P O N S -​­G R A D E C A R T O O N S  141

at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (darpa ), announced, “darpa has recently begun to explore augmenting human performance to increase the lethality and effectiveness of the warfighter by providing for super physiological and cognitive capabilities.”17 These super capabilities would stem from biomechanical exoskeletons and musculature actuators, as well as metabolic redesign of the soldier’s body against shock, trauma, and sleep deprivation. The enhancements could include psionic powers, such as telekinesis: by virtue of a nano­w ired “brain-​­machine interface,” a soldier might command peripheral computers, vehicles, and weapons with thoughts alone. Likewise, telepathy could be achieved by nano­w iring soldiers’ brains; according to Robert Asher, an electrical engineer then at the Sandia National Laboratories, “Not only intellectual data might be passed from one person to another without speaking, but also emotional and volitional information.”18 With molecular devices and pathogen sensors embedded in tissues of the body, the supersoldier would gain the stamina and strength of Spider-​­Man, as well as his tingling, extrasensory spider-​­sense. This new soldier would be an ultimate weapon, according to James Murday, the former chief scientist of the Office of Naval Research: “The confluence of the nbic technologies will provide the future U.S. warfighter with the capability to dramatically out-​­fight any adversary, thereby imposing inhibitions to using warfare with the United States as a means to exert power and reducing the risk of U.S. casualties if war does occur.”19 If deterrence fails, send in the superheroes—​­a method of conflict resolution often relied on by cartoon representations of war.20 As Ben Grimm (the Thing) of The Fantastic Four always says, “It’s clobberin’ time!” In Brightest Day, in Blackest Night . . .

These textual communiqués of military nano­science already recollect the common lore of comic-​­book culture. So their long-​­range vision is illustrated in advance, intersected by cartoon figures: a graphic narrative that crosses word and image. Some comic book creators use the term co-​­mix to emphasize the blending of media. Art Spiegelman, creator of Maus (1980–​­1991), has said, “I think of comics as co-​­mix, to mix together words and pictures.”21 The co-​ ­mixing and drawing-​­together of images, texts, and other graphical elements presents a unified field of action on the page. It produces meanings 142  0101

unavailable to any one element in itself by inviting the reader to apprehend multiple aspects altogether, or in various combinations.22 But even as the co-​­mix joins its sundry components into a semblance of formal unity, the challenge of reading words while focusing on pictures at the same time ensures a constant, irresolvable tension between them and a continual disintegration of the signifying field.23 Yet it is precisely the play of continuity and discontinuity that affords a sense of narrative. For the sequence of disconnected elements appears as motion in space and passage through time. As comics creator and theorist Scott McCloud writes, “Comics panels fracture both time and space, offering a jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments. But closure allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous, unified reality.”24 The comics medium compels us to suture internal gaps with assumptions of spatial and temporal movement. It is a type of game: a riddle, a puzzle. To play along, we must fill in the blanks with imaginary moving parts, connecting and reconnecting, animating stories on the fly. The isn ’s 2002 research proposal would then also be a kind of comic book, drawing together text and image into an implicit narrative about the rise of military superheroes. The document produces a motion-​­effect, a moving-​­between that cannot be localized to either the words or the picture in isolation. Rather, the conjuring of superhero narrative as the connective tissue between words and picture is a function of their co-​ m ­ ixture. By juxtaposing a written account of scientific research yet to occur with a drawing of “what the soldier of the future might look like,” the isn proposal creates a real gap between text and image, present tense and future tense. But this gap separates only to connect. It performs identically to the “gutter” in comics—​­the blank space between panels. For it is a gap that exists only to be filled in, triggering the imaginary response of suture or closure. It generates a sense of narrative cohesion that spans the distance between here and there to become the measure and the machination of long-​­range vision. What occurs in this internal fissure between the writing of the research proposal and the graphic of the future soldier is the science itself. Benchtop research on fullerene composites, nano­electronics, and quantum computing might seem quite distant from superhero fantasies. But these tangible activities of the laboratory emerge laden with semiotic residue from the proposal’s juxtaposition of words with cartoon. For the isn constructs itself and its research as linking present and future; according W E A P O N S -​­G R A D E C A R T O O N S  143

to its own co-​­mix practices, it occupies that gap between substantive text and fantasy image. The isn draws itself from the gutter. And so even from the moment of its inception, the isn takes its place inside, not outside, the ecology of comic books. Cowabunga!

It is not only that the isn and related endeavors in the field of soldier nano­technologies rely on comic-​­book mythologies—​­Superman’s ability to “leap tall buildings in a single bound,” for example, or Captain America’s supersoldier serum and patriotic spandex—​­to suggest that science can create real superheroes. More specifically, nano travels to the very center of the discourse on superpowers crossing both science and science fiction, to the extent that it is no longer easy to think superpowers without nano, and vice versa. In comics, a new generation of heroes has risen without the improbable radiation accidents or genetic mutations that characterized an older generation of superfolk.25 These new heroes are powered by molecular technologies, and they have deep connections to systems of military-​­industrial production. In the Bloodshot series (1992–​­), Angelo Mortalli is abducted by a corporate military developer and injected with experimental nanites (fig. 5.3). The nanites travel through his blood, constantly repairing damage, augmenting muscles, providing telepathic access to computers, and “teaching him to kill . . . increasing his senses . . . turning him into the most a human being could be.”26 This echo of the U.S. Army motto “Be All You Can Be” underscores the supersoldier context. Yet Mortalli—​­now called Bloodshot—​­escapes the laboratory and takes up his own method of peacekeeping: “Angelo Mortalli died in that California laboratory. . . . But something good came out of it. . . . A better man took his place—​­one with a strong sense of justice—​­of right and wrong. Long live Bloodshot.”27 In the Xombi series (1994–​­2011), David Kim is a nano­medicine researcher until demonic thugs break into his laboratory and murder him. Luckily, medical nano­bots are injected into his blood before he dies: “Inside his body, the nano­machines were moving fast and furious, busy, ever busy. Replicating themselves by countless generations every minute. Pulling raw matter from outside of his body, molecule by molecule and transforming it, building cells, tendons, bones, organs and blood vessels.”28 The nano­bots revive him and make him indestructible, immortal. 144  0101

Now called Xombi, Kim joins other heroes to protect our world against supernatural legions of evil (fig. 5.4). In the Hardware series (1993–​­1997), the scientific genius Curtis Metcalf is a disgruntled employee of the munitions manufacturer Alva Industries. Metcalf uses his employer’s resources to construct a cybernetic battlesuit and renames himself Hardware (fig. 5.5). A proletarian champion, Hardware decides to dismantle Alva’s paramilitary operations from inside: “A cog in the corporate machine is about to strip some gears.”29 While his original armor in 1993 was respectably awesome, by 1994 his arsenal was upgraded to “true . . . superhuman levels” thanks to innovations in digital matter: “The new armor also incorporates advances in technology from the past year, including a new programmable polymer technology that allows for true strength enhancement and superhuman levels for

5.3. Bloodshot: Angelo Mortalli is pumped full of nanites. Kevin Vanhook, “Family Blood,” in Bloodshot #0. Valiant, 1994. W E A P O N S -​­G R A D E C A R T O O N S  145

5.4. Xombi: David Kim is rebuilt by nano­bots. Like miniature copies of the Michelin Man (a.k.a. Bibendum), the bots instantiate an aesthetic of industrial production, reassembling the materials around them with factory-​­line efficiency. They take apart Kim’s lab assistant, using her body as a source of raw matter to patch up their creator’s damaged tissues. Similarly, the comic book itself takes other materials (including corporate trademarks) and remixes them. John Rozum and J. J. Birch, “Silent Cathedrals, Part I: The Rabbit Hole,” in Xombi #1. dc Comics / Milestone Comics, 1994.

the first time.”30 Hardware’s belated induction to the ranks of true superheroes owes to this new exoskeleton, a shell of nano-​­robotic liquid metal and programmable polymers: “The nano-​­robots are microscopic machines whose single purpose is to replicate themselves into pre-​­programmed forms that create the external units of the armor.” This programmable molecular armor makes Hardware “a truly devastating weapon.”31 In the Tom Strong series (1999–​­2006), astounding techno-​­enhancements empower the crime-​­fighting Strong family (fig. 5.6). For instance, Tesla Strong uses nano devices—​­including a utility fog inspired by the work of J. Storrs Hall—​­to confront neo-​­Nazi villains.32 That the Strongs’ peacekeeping methods frequently verge with reactionary politics, even as they stomp out fascism, indicates the ideological baggage of superhero fictions; 146  0101

5.5. Hardware: Sporting a new nano­tech exo­ skeleton, Hardware is online and ready to kick ass. Dwayne ­McDuffie and Denys Cowan, “Version 2.0,” in Hardware #16. dc Comics / Milestone Comics, 1994. 5.6. Tom Strong: Tesla Strong rides the nano-​ f­ og. Alan Moore and Chris Sprouse, “Sons and Heirs,” in Tom Strong #7. America’s Best Comics, 2000.

like other series created by Alan Moore, Tom Strong self-​­reflexively foregrounds the political history of superhero propaganda.33 The New-​­Gen series (2008–​­) likewise addresses the cultural significations of high-​­tech heroes. In this series, the extra-​­dimensional scientists Daedalus and Gabriel develop a form of radical nano­­tech­nol­ogy that could make their world into a programmable utopia. The megalomaniac Daedalus, however, uses the nano­­tech­nol­ogy to create posthuman creatures: hybrids of human and nonhuman animals, enhanced with fabulous “nano­powers.” Banished to another dimension for his actions, Daedalus becomes an insane monster. Tunneling through spacetime into ancient Crete, Daedalus leads an army of self-​­replicating metal mites in an assault against Minos and his people—​­so we discover that this Daedalus, extra-​ ­dimensional nano­scientist, is the same Daedalus from classical mythology. Meanwhile, Daedalus’s posthuman children have turned into a righteous team of superheroes. For his first mission, the young hero Mini Taurus travels to Crete to confront his own creator. The episode attends to the role of fables and fabrications in the creation of nano­warriors. For Daedalus’s tunnel between worlds proves to be the origin of the Cretan

5.7. New- ​­Gen: Mini T ­ aurus has an unexpected nano­power spike. J. D. Matonti, Shaun McLaughlin, Andrew McDonald, and Abdul H. Rashid, New-​­Gen #2. A.P.N.G. Enterprises, 2008. 148  0101

labyrinth, symbolizing the hidden pathways that link science fiction to the real world. When Mini fights Daedalus and the metal mites in Crete, his nano­powers prove to be stronger than he knew: “Of course . . . Mini’s nano­powers would spike during his first mission.”34 Although the New-​ ­Gen team saves the Cretans, the destruction caused by the battle is tremendous (fig. 5.7). The writer Aeschylus (yes, that Aeschylus), in recomposing the events of the battle, casts the futuristic Mini as an ancient evil and forges his own son Perseus into a legendary defender of homeland security. Aeschylus skulks around the battlefield and the transdimensional labyrinth, scribbling on a stone tablet: an embedded poet co-​­mixing history even as it takes place. In New-​­Gen, the posthuman hero emerges as a volatile assemblage of past and future, science and fiction, security and threat, transposed back and forth across the gap between worlds—​­which is to say, the comic book gutter. Avengers Assemble!

We could continue to rehearse the histories of nano-​­enhanced heroes in North American and European comic books, including Nightwatch (a.k.a. Kevin Trench), the Engineer (a.k.a. Angelica Spica), Mr. Terrific (a.k.a. Michael Holt), and so forth. Various Japanese manga have also featured nano­tech avengers, such as the polymorphing Eve in Kentaro Yabuki’s Black Cat series (2000–​­2004). The nano­warrior has even been made an object of satire in the Israeli comic strip The Golem: Adventures of an Israeli Superhero (2005): “A product of Israeli nano technology, strong and invulnerable, this paragon of truth and justice will use his enormous powers for the benefit of all humanity! The Golem—​­carrying the tradition of protecting the Jewish people from its enemies. (This public service announcement was brought to you by the Ministry of Defense.)”35 Bodying forth the grim seriousness of even the most absurd military fantasies, the nano­warrior is now a stock figure of comics the world over: a champion born from cutting-​­edge science, inseparable from the politics and logistics of global securitization. At the same time, other media forms that remediate the characteristics of comics similarly premediate the cultural discourse of nano—​­which is to say, script it in advance—​­by channeling scientific speculation through the familiar image of the superhero . . . again and again and again.36 In the Singaporean animated cartoon The New Adventures of Nano­boy (2008), W E A P O N S -​­G R A D E C A R T O O N S  149

the diminutive Nano­boy battles evil viruses and criminal proteins at the lowest depths of matter: another episode, another conflict between heroic nano­science and the microscopic entities that threaten our own human world. In Dean Koontz’s novel By the Light of the Moon (2002), three friends are infected by a nano­tech virus, which gives them supernatural talents. They promptly organize themselves as a crime-​­fighting team, akin to the X-​­Men or the Justice League—​­and what else would one do under such circumstances? In video games, GeckoMan (2009) uses the power of van der Waals forces to crawl up walls, teaching players about nano­ science in the process, while X-​­Men Legends (2004) features the uncanny heroes equipping suits of nano­fiber armor that might have sprung directly from an isn drawing board. On and on it goes, the potentials of nano­­scale science recoded and disseminated via the transmedia circulation of tropes, memes, and icons from the history of comic books—​­the future borne on a cascade of repetitions and recombinations. To be sure, classic superheroes and supervillains from comics past regularly upgrade with nano­­tech­nol­ogy for the new millennium. In the animated series Justice League Unlimited (2004–​­2006), the nuclear physicist Ray Palmer—​­a.k.a. the Atom, who can shrink at will thanks to the mysterious properties of white dwarf star matter—​­now appears as the world’s leading expert in nano­­tech­nol­ogy. The Atom helps the Justice League deal with various threats of molecular science, even turning his own body into a nano­­scale weapon when necessary.37 Or consider Iron Man: Extremis, Warren Ellis’s 2005 reboot of the Iron Man saga. Injected with a synthetic nano­tech virus called Extremis, Tony Stark turns into a living computer: “Extremis is a super-​­soldier solution. It’s a bio-​­electronics package, fitted into a few billion graphite nano­tubes and suspended in a carrier fluid. A magic bullet, like the original [Captain America] super-​­soldier serum—​ a­ ll fitted into a single injection.”38 Extremis reprograms Stark’s body, enabling him to store part of the Iron Man armor inside his bones as a self-​­assembling shell. It galvanizes the metallic hero: faster, lighter, and nearly invulnerable, he is now neurologically linked to global data networks, his cognition distributed everywhere—​­from mondo to nano. It is a story endlessly recycled. Sam Raimi’s 2002 Spider-​­Man film, for example, not only replaces the comic book’s radioactive spider with a genetically modified spider but also imagines the Green Goblin—​ o ­ riginally turned supervillain by a secret chemical formula—​­to derive his power from nano. Norman Osborn is a nano­scientist developing 150  0101

5.8. “Shags to Riches”: Digitally reprogrammed by the nano­bots in his Scooby-​ ­Snacks, Scooby-​­Doo gains superpowers. Shaggy and Scooby-​­Doo Get a Clue!, season 1, episode 1. Warner Bros. Animation, 2006.

performance-​­enhancement vapors for the U.S. military. These nano vapors confer an “eight-​­hundred per cent increase in strength,” along with “violence, aggression . . . and insanity.”39 When the military threatens to pull funding, Osborn inhales the vapors, slaps on an armed exoskelton, and turns into the Green Goblin. Likewise in Spider-​­Man 2, Doctor Octopus is reconceived as a nuclear physicist and nano­scientist. The Doc’s machinic tentacles now plug directly into his nervous system via nano­ wires: “These smart arms are controlled by my brain through a neural link. Nano­w ires feed directly into my cerebellum, allowing me to use these arms . . . in an environment no human hand could enter.” Nano­ wiring fuses machine intelligence with the body to overcome limitations of the human form, producing a supercreature capable of surviving, and fighting, in the most extreme conditions. Not to be left out, Spidey himself gets a makeover in the animated series Spider-​­Man Unlimited (1999–​ ­2001): his new costume is made entirely of molecular nano­machines, with special tricks beyond his own spider-​­powers. In the 2003 Hulk film directed by Ang Lee, Bruce Banner’s transformation into the Hulk—​­triggered in the original 1962 comic book by a gamma bomb—​­is now an effect of nano­­tech­nol­ogy. Banner is a scientist exposed to “nano­meds” by malfunctioning lab equipment. Stimulated by his anger and a uniquely modified immune system, the nano­meds turn him into a hulking monstrosity that the U.S. military hopes to exploit as a W E A P O N S -​­G R A D E C A R T O O N S  151

weapon. The military goal for nano­science in the film is an army of Hulks and squadrons of “G.I.’s embedded with technology that makes them instantly repairable on the battlefield. In our sole possession.”40 Increasingly, superpowers are thinkable only along with nano­­tech­ nol­ogy, and Cold War heroes of the bomb can come out of retirement to fight again in our molecular future. Even the humblest of cartoon do-​ g­ ooders get enrolled in the program: in the 2006–​­2008 animated series Shaggy & Scooby-​­Doo Get a Clue!, the cowardly canine sleuth becomes a cyborg dyno­mutt after eating Scooby Snacks laced with nano­bots (fig. 5.8). Everywhere we look, nano­­tech­nol­ogy becomes an excuse for new adventures, routinely disclosed as the secret origin of superbeings. With Great Power . . .

It happens even in so-​­called real life. In 2003, researchers at the University of Manchester Centre for Mesoscience and Nano­­tech­nol­ogy invented re-​ ­attachable dry adhesives that might someday enable wall-​­crawling abilities; in fact, “the research team believes it won’t be long before ‘Spider­man’ gloves become a reality—​­particularly useful for rock climbers and window cleaners.”41 Publishing their research in the journal Nature Materials, the scientists embedded a photograph of a toy Spider-​­Man clinging to a glass ceiling (fig. 5.9). The technical report demonstrates the promise of microfabricated “gecko tape.”42 It also remediates the form of a comic book. In the gutter between scientific text and playful image, an implicit narrative of the superhero future springs to life. Anybody can be Spider-​­Man in the nano­­tech­nol­ogy era! In 2007, the physicist Nicola Pugno published his own design for a Spider-​­Man suit in the Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter.43 The gloves and boots would feature a “sticky” surface of microscopic hooks made from carbon nano­tubes, while invisible cables of bundled nano­tubes would replicate Spider-​­Man’s web-​­slingers. The key graphic in this scientific publication juxtaposed images from an assortment of nano­science experiments alongside a cartoon Spider-​­Man, linking the various components with vectors and text captions: a comics diagram joining contemporary research to the promise of everyday spider-​­people (fig. 5.10). Professional scientific discourse is now rife with mock-​­serious accounts of superheroes forged in laboratories around the world—​­the feats of intrepid researchers on the frontlines of nano­­tech­nol­ogy. For instance, 152  0101

5.9. Spider-​­Man meets the University of Manchester Centre for Meso­science and Nano­­tech­nol­ogy. Reprinted by permission from Nature Materials: Geim et  al., “Micro­fabricated Adhesive Mimicking Gecko Foot-​­Hair.” ©2003 Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

scientific journals have reported the amazing capacities of “X-​­Ray Nano­ vision,” that is, the atomic resolution of new X-​­ray microscopes, troping on Superman’s renowned powers of visual penetration.44 Such instruments would seem to address a widespread aspiration for superhuman enhancement among practitioners in the molecular sciences; as the nano­ scientist James Gimzewski has said, “I’d like to have X-​­ray vision eyes to see through walls.”45 Similarly, the Thermo Scientific instruments company advertises that its Nano­Drop 2000c spectrophotometer, which can swiftly analyze tiny samples of protein or nucleic acid, turns the labor of W E A P O N S -​­G R A D E C A R T O O N S  153

5.10. Long-​­range vision for a Spider-​­Man suit. The original figure caption reads, “Spiderman (tm & © 2007 marvel .) must have large cobwebs and self-​­cleaning, superadhesive and releasable gloves and boots. Invisible large cables (Pugno 2006b) could be realized with nano­tube bundles (related inset from (Zhang et al 2005)), whereas gloves and boots, mimicking spider (related inset from (Kesel et al 2004)) or gecko (related inset from (Gao et al 2005)) materials, with hierarchically branched nano­tubes (related inset from (Meng et al 2005)) as suggested by our analysis. Note that the nano­tube forest is superhydrophobic (water repellent) and thus self-​­cleaning (related inset from (Lau et al 2003)).” Reproduced from Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter: Pugno, “Towards a Spiderman Suit.”

5.11. Nano­Drop Superhero. A scientist becomes a superman, according to the tongue-​­in-​ ­cheek advertisement: “It’s easier than you think to be a superhero with the Nano­Drop spectrophotometer. . . . Get easy and accurate results faster than a speeding bullet.” Thermo Scientific, 2009.

science into an epic adventure: “Laboratory researchers can become superheroes with the help of the Nano­Drop 2000c.”46 Armed with the right tool, any geek can be a nano­warrior (fig. 5.11). As ironic and humorous as such appeals to scientific heroism may be, they also index a growing sense that cartoons and comics, games and toys, action movies and pulp fictions—​­the common materials of our ludic society—​­offer important resources for thinking about the shape of things to come. Indeed, they become user guides for the onrushing future. For instance, in 2002, the notion that nano­­tech­nol­ogy could actually create superpowers like those of Spider-​­Man—​­as well as lethal weapons like those of the Green Goblin—​­inspired the Boston University physicist Raj Mohanty to advocate a principle of ethical innovation drawn from Spidey’s famous motto. “With great power,” Mohanty said, “there must come great responsibility.”47 For military science, this is nothing new: military r&d has often been guided by the imagination of science fiction and its tropes of technological futurity. The influence is often visible even when it is denied (fig. 5.12). So the newfound intimacy between soldier nano­technologies and comic books, in some respects, is just another permutation in the history of the military-​­entertainment complex.48

5.12. Ceci n’est pas une pipe. In this 2011 television advertisement from the U.S. Air Force, a General Atomics mq -​­9 Reaper unmanned aircraft—​­originally called the Predator B—​­surveys a hypermediated Middle Eastern landscape. The hunter-​ ­k iller drone transmits data through orbiting satellites to officers back in the United States, who communicate directly to ground troops about enemy snipers in their area. The digitized environment vividly recalls the aesthetics of video games. The ad then wipes to a shot of the drone flying in a more naturalistic landscape: “This is not science fiction. It’s what we do every day.” W E A P O N S -​­G R A D E C A R T O O N S  155

Certainly, the long-​­range vision of soldier nano­technologies resonates with concepts and figures from the deep history of comic books, which have actively explored the exploits, dilemmas, and social consequences of high-​­tech soldiers since the debut of Captain America in 1941, including such iconic characters as Iron Man, Deathlok, War Machine, and Wolverine.49 It also recalls Robert Heinlein’s 1959 novel Starship Troopers, with its vivid depictions of powered armor and its heroic (if quasi-​­fascistic) mobile infantry; significantly, the intense opening scene of this novel features the mobile infantry using the jump gear of their exoskeletons to “leapfrog” over walls on an alien planet, clearing entire buildings with ease. Other associations would include the RoboCop, Terminator, and Universal Soldier films, along with their narrative expansions in television se​­ ooster Armor ries, comics, and games. Manga such as Yoshiki Takaya’s Bio-B Guyver (1985–​­) and anime series such as Mobile Suit Gundam (1979–), Super Dimension Fortress Macross (1982–​­1983), and Bubblegum Crisis (1987–​­1991) also contribute. In these series, even battles of the planets can be waged on a personal level thanks to transforming mecha and bio-​­mechanical armor that traverse interspatial zones with impunity. Such media narratives strongly inform military research on next-​ ­generation soldier systems. Consider the alien technologies depicted in the Predator films, games, and comic books. Predators wear machinic exoskeletons that make them lethal hunter-​­warriors. These exoskeletons also have an active camouflage function, rendering the Predators virtually invisible. Transplanted to the U.S. Army Soldier Systems Center in Natick, Massachusetts, images of this alien costume have served as models for supersoldier design. As the systems engineer Jean-​­Louis “Dutch” De Gay explains, “With a uniform like Predator’s, our soldiers would really have a lopsided advantage.” Thanks to advances in nano and electrochromic camouflage technology, this image from “science fiction is rapidly becoming reality—​­and that could change forever the way wars are fought.”50 To help guide the army’s efforts to develop nano-​­enabled soldier systems in the early 2000s, the Natick Soldier Center created a costume prototype of the Future Warrior (fig. 5.13). According to A. Michael Andrews, the former chief scientist and deputy assistant secretary for research and technology at the U.S. Army, the anticipated capacities of the Future Warrior could be reverse-​­engineered from extraterrestrial innovations: “If you want to visualize the impact of nano­­tech­nol­ogy, think about

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5.13. Future Combat Systems. U.S. Army Natick Soldier Center, 2003. These two Future Warriors (both, in reality, Sergeant Raul Lopez of Natick Soldier Center’s Operational Forces Interface Group, posing in a mock-​­up costume) are superimposed on a computer-​­generated battlefield, replete with cgi cartoons of autonomous mobile weapons systems, an armed drone in the sky (looking much like the Hunter-​­Killers from the Terminator films), and three flying microrobots (perhaps controlled telepathically by the nano­w ired supersoldiers). Courtesy of Natick Soldier Center.

[the movie Predator]. It’s about the ability to have a uniform that protects you totally against your environment.  .  .  . This Predator, until he took his uniform off, he was the meanest sob in the world. Nobody could kill him. That suit is science fiction, but it portrays what might be possible.”51 Drawing the Predator franchise into the discourse of future combat systems makes various symbolic elements available for closing gutters and finding narratological unity. Even the nickname of the project engineer “Dutch” De Gay is the same as that of the Arnold Schwarzenegger character in the first Predator film (1987): the nearly superhuman Major “Dutch” Schaeffer, who trounces the Predator in primal combat. From DeGay’s perspective, “It’s really become one of those things where life is starting to imitate art. . . . Predator is a great example. . . . The military continues

W E A P O N S -​­G R A D E C A R T O O N S  157

5.14. isn emblem coin: “Enhancing Soldier Survivability.” mit, 2002. The sequential curve links nano­scale object to supersoldier, the present to the future (left). The isn crosses the gutter between points on this curve, suturing them together with a cross-​­stitch “x” (right). Designed by Eve Downing. Courtesy of the mit Institute for Soldier Nano­technologies.

to look toward science fiction, video game[s], and the movie industry to say . . . how can that impact how we start to design and move forward.”52 The juxtaposition of alien image with high-​­tech research summons forth a militaristic desire for a superhuman or posthuman future, a “lopsided” distribution of power. In response, engineering designs, exploratory sketches, illustrations, digital images, and other diagrammatic productions of the laboratory emerge to connect the dots.53 Such materials concretize the vector of long-​­range vision. This abstract line appears in the collision of different media and different fields of knowledge to sew up sequential gaps, for example, between Predator and polymer science, between Radix and molecular electronics, co-​­mixing them into the same imaginary space. Although typically invisible, the vector strikingly comes to light in the emblem coin of the isn, where the sketch of a Future Warrior adjacent to a carbon nano­tube (turned so that we might look down its barrel) directs us to read the narrative between them as both a scaling-​ u ­ p and a scaling-​­forward, a fictive closure of the gutter by the sweeping curve of technoscientific progress (fig. 5.14).

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Wonder Twin Powers—​­Activate!

The field of soldier nano­technologies draws a line through the present, co-​ ­mixing an inchoate scatter of laboratory experiments, military-​­industrial innovations, and popular fictions into a cohesive plot of future warfare and posthuman warriors. A panel from Hardware exemplifies this process (fig. 5.15). Bearing the supertitle “On the Drawing Board,” this panel records the media ecology of the nano­warrior: engineering designs for armor, weapons, and vehicles are situated at the diagrammatic intersection of a tv screen projecting a cyborg image on the right, scientific textbooks on the left, a computer graphics workstation in the foreground, scrawled notes and typed letters pasted in random places, and all drawn together within the comics frame. A narrator explains the vector that

5.15. “On the Drawing Board.” Clifford E. Van Meter and Denys Cowan, “Hardware’s Arsenal,” in Hardware #16. dc ­Comics / Milestone Comics, 1994. W E A P O N S -​­G R A D E C A R T O O N S  159

crosses through this multimedia mélange: “Curt [a.k.a. Hardware] maintains a completely equipped design center . . . [where] he developed the original concepts for much of [his] equipment. . . . Curt translates his preliminary designs from his original sketches and drawings to a high speed Silicon Graphics workstation.  .  .  . Those images can be transferred via dedicated data line from his home-​­office to any one of the Alva Industries supercomputers for final output to one of Alva’s robot-​­controlled milling and manufacturing units. These . . . take the electronic data and turn it into a fully functional prototype.”54 The “data line” passing through the plane of the superhero drawing board and terminating in the nano laboratory bodies forth the vector of long-​­range vision, the link between the media ecology of the present and the future technology. It is analogous to the graphical curve featured in the isn emblem coin that joins the nano­­scale object together with the costumed crusader. This panel is therefore an allegory of its own reading. For the data line, collapsing the multimedia design space (the drawing board) into an information stream that fabricates the nano­warrior at the other end, symbolizes the narrative arc that we must decipher from the co-​­mixed media inside this panel: the story line of Hardware’s production process. It is also an allegory of the media practices of soldier nano­ technologies at large. For the long-​­range vision of soldier nano­technologies requires a certain level of comics literacy, that is, co-​­mix literacy: an intuitive capacity to perform transmedia linkages and suture the sci-​­fi image with current scientific research. Such literacy involves interpretive practices, ways of reading, and familiarity with plots, genres, and frames of reference born from comics.55 Marshall McLuhan has argued that the cognitive disposition to draw narrative connections across a sequence of medial units is conditioned historically by the syntactical structure of comics, which shapes the way that we read all manner of media mosaics—​­including television, the medium that turns other media “into a comic-​­strip world by simply featuring them as overheated packages,” strung discontinuously along the televisual signal.56 But where television works on the dimension of linear broadcast, requiring the viewer to fill breaks in sequence and resolution—​­gaps in the strip of medial packages—​­the comic book expands outward from the strip and the broadcast to involve multidimensional reading. As Scott McCloud has shown, “in the temporal map of comics, every element of the work has a spatial relationship to every other 160  0101

element at all times.”57 Narrative coordination of the elements concerns not only the planar page layout but also the depth dimension of the book across its pages—​­or even beyond the book itself. Superhero comics, in particular, often bring titans from different comics series, different media franchises, onto the same four-​­color battle­field. The ubiquitous “versus” in comics discourse signifies the co-​­mix as such, the “crossover” of media domains in conflict that produces narrative synthesis. It structures texts such as Superman versus the Amazing Spider-​ ­Man (1976), Batman versus Predator (1991), and the Aliens versus Predator saga (1989–​­2005). These and other seriated narratives such as Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999–​­2013), where characters from Victorian print fictions assemble in comics space, or Anthony Del Col and Conor McCreery’s Kill Shakespeare (2010–​­2013), where characters from Shakespeare’s plays fight to save or destroy the wizard-​ g­ od known as Will Shakespeare, assume a readerly depth involvement with the intertextual materials. They also assume an understanding of comics’ disposition to draw in other media domains and reconfigure them. The versus, the crossover in all its senses, informs fanboy debates about possible matchups between favorite costumed heroes. It also characterizes texts from the field of soldier nano­technologies that co-​­mix technical innovations and media objects into a vector of long-​­range vision. The Ratners’ Nano­­tech­nol­ogy and Homeland Security, for instance, frequently relies on these crossover operations. Following an account of superhuman soldiers and mind-​­ blowing cyborg interfaces, the book showcases a picture of the first unmanned drone developed by General Atomics: the Predator.58 The Predator aircraft has virtually nothing to do with nano­­tech­nol­ogy, and the Ratners admit as much. But they link this image of aeronautical prowess with speculations on military nano­science to suggest an “interesting trend” toward autonomous technologies and artificial intelligences. More than a non sequitur, the juxtaposition of Predator image with descriptions of a nano­­tech­nol­ogy “man-​­machine interface” implies that “it may be possible to use more and more mechanization to fight future wars.”59 We are asked to imagine a plotline of future warfare in which cyborg nano­warriors, Predators, and ai s all clash together. Our ability to close the narrative gaps in this media montage is likewise facilitated by the overdetermination of the aircraft’s name, which points to other realms where the signifier “Predator” already suggests this kind of futuristic battle royal. W E A P O N S -​­G R A D E C A R T O O N S  161

5.16. Mark Schultz and Mel Rubi, Aliens versus Predator versus the Terminator. “Part 4: Future Hell.” Dark Horse Comics, 2000.

Take, for example, the serialized graphic novel Aliens versus Predator versus the Terminator (2000). Here, three different media franchises blend in a cartoon montage of automated technologies, ai s, cybernetic organisms, Predator heroes, and supersoldiers (fig.  5.16). These figures come together in the same diegetic space under the signifier of comics linkage: the versus that transmediates and synthesizes different fictive domains. Consonant with the real-​­life discourse of soldier nano­technologies, this story depicts human soldiers allied with Predators, using their superior technologies to win the day against an army of creatures engineered from scraps of aliens and cyborgs. The functions of co-​­mix, crossover, and versus assemble miscellaneous discourses, iconographies, technosciences, and values. Correlating them in graphical space, comic books experiment with possible futures. By virtue of their ability to perform exploratory linkups across the ambiguous space of the gutter, cartoons and comics are particularly suited to the task of addressing and reshaping the cultural meanings of science and technology.60 Perhaps this is why Patrick Salsbury, a senior associate of the Foresight Institute, suggested after reading an issue of Tom Strong that comics might be the best medium for presenting nano­tech concepts to the public: “I think comics are an excellent way of reaching youth and presenting ‘far out and fantastic’ notions to an audience that is already clearly receptive to such ideas as living in space, genetic engineering, futuristic materials science and technology, life extension, etc. Might be worth exploring how we could utilize this vector to reach more young people.”61 Transform and Roll Out!

The superhero future is drawn to order, inventoried as standing reserve. Texts and technologies are cobbled together on the drawing board, collected into new plots and associations. The co-​­mix conscripts them into cohesive assemblages, closing up gaps in the ranks: Valerie Fiores is drawn into service of the isn, the Predator is drawn into service of the Natick Soldier Center, Scooby-​­Doo is drawn into service of nano propaganda, and so forth. Which is to say, the drawing board is also a draft board. Let us consider the logic of the draft: it entails both the diagramming of future exercises and the drawing of elements of one text, system, or population into the compulsory service of another, pressing them into

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heroic movements, superscripts. It describes the media operations of soldier nano­technologies, to be sure. But it also appears at the level of representation, as a self-​­reflexive element of many nano­warrior narratives. In comic books, nano­warriors are frequently forced into their cyborg condition by corporations, governments, or other organizations that aim to secure power, if not world domination. The protagonists in Radix, Bloodshot, and Xombi, as well as those in Aaron Thomas Nelson’s Marlow (2008–​­2011) and Ben Templesmith’s Singularity 7 (2005), are all abducted or compelled into combative service as human-​­machine hybrids, cast suddenly into enigmatic wars without possibility of protest. Even a character such as Hardware, who seems to originate as vigilante resistance to corporate militarism, later proves to be the collaborationist product of the very systems he thought to oppose, always already a “cog in the machine.” The technological capture of unwilling soldiers or civilians that transforms them into killing machines could be called machinic draft. In films such as RoboCop (1987) and Universal Soldier (1992), or novels such as Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game (1985) and Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War (1974), protagonists are restructured as high-​­tech warriors without consent or awareness of the cause for which they are fighting. Looking back to Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate (1959) and redeploying its story of military brainwashing in the context of advanced cyborg programs, such narratives allegorize the role of machinic draft in the history of modern militarism. Universal Soldier, for example, depicts the fate of a reluctant American soldier who nearly completes his tour of duty in the Vietnam War, only to be killed by his own superior officer and brought back to life as a piece of remote-​­controlled hardware. In many ways, the operations of the Vietnam War can be seen to epitomize machinic draft, not only setting in motion the computerized algorithms of the Selective Service System, but also establishing key aspects of postmodern warfare, such as the conceptual substitution of humans with machines at the center of warfare and, simultaneously, the transformation of soldiers’ bodies by technological means: bionic implants, performance-​­enhancing drugs, prosthetic replacements of body parts during live combat, and the integration of real soldiers and machines into simulated electronic battlefields.62 Such elements of postmodern war have only been intensified by new technologies. According to Jonathan Demme’s 2004 film adaptation of The Manchurian Candidate, for example, the molecular sciences, genetic therapies, and microelectronics of today’s military r&d are merely the 164  0101

latest ways to rehash the same old vision of programmable soldiers and programmable war.63 Such narratives record persistent social anxieties about the machinic draft, compulsory service under the political regimes of technoculture, and the systemic forces beyond the self that make resistance impossible, even in death. In this regard, military nano­technologies might seem even more irresistible because invisible nano­machines could infiltrate and cyborganize the soldier’s body from the inside out. Certainly, in many nano­tech comics, the incorporation of human beings into the war machine occurs via particulate devices that spread into bloodstreams and cells, not only through prosthesis or injection, but also through inhalation and osmosis. In Singularity 7, the entire human population is either destroyed or biomechanically restructured by nanites flowing in the atmosphere: “Some that were left . . . they tried to fight back. But it was useless. How do you fight something that is in the very air?”64 In these comics, war seeps into your bones via the technologically saturated air. There is no escape from the chill currents of the draft. The transformation of an unwilling civilian into a nano­warrior, as depicted in Bloodshot, Xombi, Singularity 7, Marlow, and other comics—​ ­where death is the mere prelude to a posthuman immortality in which wars are both unending and unavoidable—​­thematizes the expansion of biopolitical control in the age of nano­­tech­nol­ogy. In a 1993 issue of Bloodshot, for instance, the cia sends our hero to present-​­day Vietnam to assassinate a “terrorist” drug dealer who is murdering people all over the country with poisoned dope. Traveling under the pseudonym “Michael Lazarus,” Bloodshot tracks the drug dealer to abandoned Vietcong underground tunnels and kills him. The dealer turns out to be an American soldier, “only eighteen when he was drafted in ’69,” who has been murdering civilians in Vietnam for the past three decades as part of the cia-​­sponsored “Operation Phoenix.”65 Postmodern war here appears as the automated reproduction of an operation that always comes back from the dead, resurrected like the Phoenix (a forever war, in the vocabulary of Haldeman’s novel). After Bloodshot learns the truth of his mission, he turns from the cia in disgust: “You didn’t care that he was a pusher. You were more concerned that the truth might come out. The evidence is down in that little hole. All about the people he killed in the name of Operation: Phoenix. . . . People that weren’t soldiers.”66 The undying war and its underground drafting of noncombatants explicitly parallel the figure W E A P O N S -​­G R A D E C A R T O O N S  165

of Bloodshot himself, the undying nano­warrior, the self-​­styled Lazarus, who finds himself unable to escape revivifications of machinic draft. These cartoon narratives suggest that the indestructible nano­warrior, deployed and recycled in an endless series of battles, repeatedly resurrected and called back to duty, is merely the symptom of a much deeper logic of the postmodern war machine where everyone is already drafted—​ ­where everyone is a soldier, at all times, even in the afterimage of war, even in the postmortem. In these graphic fictions, war is no longer anywhere, because it is everywhere, dispersed across virtual terrains of terror. For example, in J. Michael Straczynski’s 2009 reboot of The Shield series, U.S. Army lieutenant Joseph Higgins is fatally wounded by Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan and then recalled from the brink of death thanks to the nano experiments of U.S. Project Shield. Whereas the original 1940s Shield was a patriotic fbi agent who developed his own chemical formula for superpowers and an impenetrable star-​­spangled uniform, the new Shield has no choice in the matter. According to the director of Project Shield, “Using the technology we have developed, we were able to take a soldier [Higgins] who was mortally wounded in the field of combat, heal him completely, and outfit him with stand-​­alone warfighter capabilities beyond anything we’ve seen before. We were able to literally merge the epidermal layer of the subject’s skin with a new form of nano­­tech­nol­ ogy that in its relaxed state is virtually invisible, but upon reflex action or mental command, it encases his body in a hardened warsuit that is nearly indestructible.”67 Higgins’s life now depends on serving the U.S. Army forever: “The subject was wounded so severely that if the warsuit is ever removed, he will die within a matter of minutes.” One of his first missions as the Shield requires him to return to the Middle East to locate some missing American special ops units. He discovers that the missing units, as well as a small army of local insurgents, are all being mind-​­controlled by a powerful telepathic creature named Malik al Thaka—​­the Brain Emperor—​­who himself is being mind-​­controlled by Gorilla Grodd, one of the stock villains of the dc Comics universe. The hostilities in this region are therefore attributed to a series of psychic conscriptions, with Grodd’s influence at the bottom of everything. The story is about the nano­technics of military globalization, the neurotechnics of empire, and their internal resistances. The Brain Emperor, turning soldiers against their own nations and drawing even children 166  0101

into insurgency, is also a figure for the cognitive force of mass-​­mediated terror: he is, after all, represented as a living broadcast system “for controlling large groups of people.” And if the disclosure of a charismatic supervillain—​­Gorilla Grodd—​­as the ultimate source of the terror seems something of a cliché, this is precisely the point. Upon discovering that Grodd is sock-​­puppeting Malik al Thaka and boosting his signal, the Shield’s fellow superhero Magog says, “Wait a second. I’ve seen this before. Big Ape. Screaming. Empire State Building. Spoiler warning: it ends bad for you, monkey.”68 Yes, we’ve all seen it before—​­and the sense of repetition is as significant as the allusion to King Kong (1933). For once again, it is a story about the autoimmune disorders of empire, and the extent to which superpowers tend to produce and reproduce their own worst enemies.69 When the Shield first arrives in the Middle East, he visits a war-​­torn village to learn more about the insurgents and the missing U.S. operatives. He tries to win over the hearts and minds of the local people: “as much as the insurgents and drug runners and bad guys hated Americans, they sure love American culture. . . . I make a point of packing out some special gear. Just in case. Something to show that we’re not just men with guns and bombs and tanks. Something to show we love children too. Something to dull the misdirected hate.” This special gear is a package of super­hero comics: Superman, Tiny Titans, Shazam!, and others. The mullah of the village scoffs, “Our culture is in ruins . . . but at least the Americans have brought us comic books.” The Shield hopes to socially engineer the locals, but he does not fully appreciate the extent to which the figure of the superhero—​ ­symbol of truth, justice, and the American way—​­triggers its own resistances: “I’m supposed to be a symbol, but to these people, all I’ll represent is death.” The youth Shuja angrily reminds the Shield that, although superheroes might be invulnerable, the rest of the world suffers collateral damage: “When you and your kind fight, my people are the ones who die.”70 Aspiring to bring peace through violence, and even in defeating the mastermind behind the brainwashing plot, the superhero only perpetuates terror. (It was already clear in the original Shield series: “There never has been a more potent force for justice in the history of the world. . . . The Shield becomes a byword for Americanism and a constant source of terror for those gangster forces ever conspiring against society.”)71 This latest revival of The Shield series thus presents not only the experimental operations of soldier nano­technologies as consonant with the media operations W E A P O N S -​­G R A D E C A R T O O N S  167

of comics—​­continually resurrecting symbols of patriotic heroism, even long after their expiration dates—​­but also how superhero fictions have often reinforced the practices of military globalization, drawing soldiers and civilians alike into lethal fantasies of worldwide security. Meanwhile at the Hall of Justice . . .

If comic books often express anxieties about machinic draft, so too does the scientific field of soldier nano­technologies. While the real possibility of nano­war makes ethical discussions necessary and perhaps calls for active nano­tech arms control, it is relatively rare in the public discourse of military nano­­tech­nol­ogy to find plans for offensive weapons.72 The potential violence of nano­tech more often channels through the pumped-​­up body of the supersoldier (as violence usually does in superhero comics). Many of the scientists involved prefer to focus on this extraordinary body and emphasize the protective goal, which the Army Research Office has defined as “enhancing the individual dismounted soldier’s survivability in the battlespace.”73 Defense of the individual’s body and will—​­the individual’s survival as such—​­would seem paramount. The isn ’s motto, after all, is “Enhancing Soldier Survivability.” Edwin Thomas has said, “This is about the survivability of soldiers. It’s all defensive, and can be applied to police forces and the general public. . . . I don’t imagine a university would ever want to work on offensive technologies.” Moreover, while integrated nano­systems might seem invasive of the soldier’s body, Thomas has said that even for special-​­operations soldiers, “these things are going to be on a voluntary basis. . . . Is this ever going to reach an Orwellian level? No, the United States would never go there.”74 Such affirmations of personal agency and subjectivity, seeking to protect what remains of the human in the high-​­tech battlespace—​­or protecting human remains from total exploitation by machinic draft—​­would appear to deflect the risk that nano­tech enhancements might transform or take over the soldier’s body. Of course, representations of cyborg systems in military rhetoric and speculative fictions often insist on the freedom of the body and the freedom of choice, the persistence of the humanist subject, even when agency and subjectivity are evacuated by the usages of such technologies.75 Certainly, enlisted soldiers might participate in military experiments on a voluntary basis. Such ambiguous freedom, however, would merely 168  0101

provide an alibi for more insidious forms of biopolitical control, the ways in which instruments of molecular warfare—​­even before their actual invention—​­trigger new cultural securitizations and immunizations. The anticipation of nano­war and nano­warriors already produces intensified ambient fear, atmospheric currents of “nano­terror.” As the critical theorists Luciana Parisi and Steve Goodman have argued, nano­terror exhausts resistance in advance, for it transforms a politics of deterrence into a politics of preemptive engineering that penetrates human and biotic systems at all levels—​­an expansion of the security state even into the molecular structures of our bodies. Policy makers, defense experts, medical workers, and police forces around the world are now clamoring for nano­tech countermeasures to protect against chemical and biological threats, any number of molecular risks to social stability and personal health.76 Locked and loaded, the future takes over: preemptively engineering our cities and ourselves to defend against molecular invasion, we begin to link militarized visions of nano­­tech­nol­ogy to our currently lived realities, closing the gutter between them. The Ratners have written that, for the sake of homeland security, our urban infrastructures will be protected by the same nano defenses as our soldiers: “It is important to protect a soldier in his uniform, but better defenses are also required for buildings, vehicles, and other installations.” Like the adaptive bulletproofing of the Future Warrior’s exoskeleton, the “same kinds of hardening processes could also be implemented for key infrastructure like water, electricity, subways, mail centers, and communications. In these cases, the upgrades are not really optional.” The Ratners remind us that we can already buy stain-​­resistant Nano-​­Tex pants at many clothing stores. These nano­fiber trousers represent “an evolution” toward the “smart material” fabrics our soldiers will be using: “only nano­­ tech­nol­ogy can combine the properties of comfortable cotton fibers with the desirable properties of . . . smart material in soldiers’ uniforms.”77 Today, you can walk into any Gap, Eddie Bauer, or Target and purchase Nano-​­Tex pants—​­I am wearing my own pair of nano­pants even now—​ w ­ hich use “nano­­tech­nol­ogy to repel spills and stains, so you can always look and feel your best.”78 These khakis link the civilian and the soldier, the present and future, as yet another coordinate in the vector of long-​ r­ ange vision. Renee Hultin, the former president of Nano-​­Tex, put it this way: “The science of tomorrow is being delivered today with proven benefits that the consumer understands and wants.”79 Which is to say, these W E A P O N S -​­G R A D E C A R T O O N S  169

pants stretch across the gap between an immediate, tangible consumerism and the speculative, superhuman horizon. We now find ourselves in the gutter, a temporary space between our wardrobes of nano­fabrics and the future of digital matter. According to Mitchell R. Zakin, program manager for darpa’s Programmable Matter division, military research is guiding the way to a better world: “Imagine the possibilities: an entire toolbox originating from a single material form, or flexible clothing or equipment that can adapt to the immediate and changing needs of the warfighter. . . . The possibilities are endless.” Civilian products, he says, will also derive from the military applications of programmable matter, everything from transformable vehicles to clothes that automatically adapt to the latest styles. He notes that these real military research programs have been modified from science fiction: “Most of my programs come out of the movies or comic books. It’s what I do for a living.”80 Soon, perhaps, it’s what we will all do for a living. Our cinema technologies, video games, and consumer electronics have long been complicit in the expansion of everyday militarism, to be sure. But what happens now that, in the interests of homeland security and survivability in the nano­tech era, our private lives as consumers co-​­mix with the fantasy productions of military technoscience, drawing everything together into a whiz-​­bang cartoon future? . . . Have we already been drafted?

Ha ha—​­that was a joke. But seriously, consider the computer-​­animated cartoon The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius. In the 2002 episode “When Pants Attack,” Jimmy becomes frustrated with having to fold and put away his pants. He decides to invent nano­chips: “Nano­chips are microscopic supercomputers capable of artificial intelligence.” The nano­chips transform Jimmy’s ordinary trousers into self-​­folding and self-​­hanging “smart pants.” When he wears them, however, the pants begin to control his actions. At school, the pants force Jimmy to dance wildly on the ceiling and perform other escapades against his will: “I sense a disturbance in my pants . . . the nano­chips in my pants are making me do this!” He becomes a puppet of his own high-​­tech clothing. The nano­chips spread to his friends’ pants, as well. Soon, the pants begin to walk on their own, disseminating nano­ chips everywhere to control other pants. Jimmy and his friends follow in hot pursuit: “I’ve got to stop my pants before they recruit more pants and 170  0101

5.17. “When Pants Attack”: With his friends at his side, Jimmy Neutron battles the nano­pants. The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, season 1, episode 1. Nickelodeon, 2002.

take over the world!” The martial implications of this recruitment process are made clear when Jimmy’s pants invade a clothing store (“House of Blue Pants—​­Home of a Million Pants”). An army of infected jeans bursts from the store, marching in formation toward their goal of world domination: “They’re planning a full-​­scale pants invasion!” To resist the takeover, Jimmy and his friends must become sartorial warriors. Jimmy invents new weapons, including clothespin guns and starch bombs: “I’ve gotta take out some pants who want to take over the world.” When he at last faces off against his own dastardly trousers—​­the leader of the pants army—​­he pilots a homemade mecha that shoots fabric softener and discharges static electricity (fig.  5.17). This final showdown tropes on Spaghetti Westerns and Japanese anime as much as the confrontation between Ellen Ripley and the alien queen in Aliens (1986). The entire cartoon relentlessly reproduces elements from other popular fictions—​­Star Wars (1977), The Birds (1963), Gone with the Wind (1939)—​ ­animating the logic of the draft in its narrative of nano-​­takeover, as well as its semiotic conscriptions. W E A P O N S -​­G R A D E C A R T O O N S  171

While Jimmy successfully thwarts the pants invasion by developing bigger and better weapons, a more subtle form of militarization has been unfolding back home. Jimmy’s father, concerned that his own pants may have already become nano­pants, straps them into a chair and begins an intense interrogation (fashion police?). He accuses them of terrorist ambitions: “So, you and your little pantsy-​­wantsy friends thought you could take over the world, huh? Well, you didn’t know you’d have to deal with Hugh Neutron, did ya? So talk. Ha ha—​­you can’t talk, can you? You know why? Because you’re pants! So zip it!” The pants are innocent—​­they are normal, civilian pants. But they are nevertheless detained, indicted, and abused in anticipation: preemptive strike, speculative security. Faced with the risk that even pants might be more than meets the eye, Jimmy’s father takes the apparatus of securitization into himself. This is how the prospect of nano­warfare turns everyone into soldiers—​­at least, in the world of cartoons. Which is just silly. Right?

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0110 Have Nano­suit—​­Will Travel

The digital battlefield: an immense network of computers, sensors, and communications systems linking soldiers and machines into common channels of data, where every vehicle, weapon, and combat trooper is rendered a component in the integrated circuits of command and control. It is a hypermedia environment generated by the flows of information streaming from various mobile units, intelligence sources, and global positioning satellites. The zone of armed conflict becomes a virtual reality, navigated on a computer monitor or a heads-​­up display (hud). Coming soon, to a theater near you! The completely digital theater of war appears just off screen but closer than ever, an emergent development of the military-​­entertainment complex. The promise of programmable war—​­synchronizing everything from the operations of unmanned ground and aerial vehicles to the biomonitoring of soldiers—​­configures material bodies as discretely atomized nodes in computational phase space. For instance, Dutch DeGay describes the digital battlefield as depending on two specific engineering objectives: “One is a new suite of vehicles and the network that those vehicles will operate in, and the other is the next-​­generation soldier who will be a node, if you will, to plug into that network and interact with those vehicles. . . . We look at the soldier as the next-​­generation platform. The Star Trek analogy is the Borg, a group of people who are plugged into a supercomputer and part of the collective, so they can share information and push data back and forth; what one person knows, everybody knows.”1 This modular soldier, plugged into combat zones born from science fiction, has been evolving in military programs all over the world, including

Germany’s IdZ (Infanterist der Zukunft), India’s F-​­insas (Futuristic Infantry Soldier as a System), the United Kingdom’s fist (Future Integrated Soldier Technology), France’s felin (Fantassin à Equipement et Liaisons Integrées), Singapore’s acms (Advanced Combat Man System), Norway’s normans (Norwegian Modular Network Soldier), Australia’s Land 125, the United States’ Future Warrior, and many others. These programs—​ ­some in active development, others recently scrapped or revamped—​ f­ ocus on decentralized control networks where, as the critical theorists Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker have written, “the scale is fractal in nature, meaning that it is locally similar at all resolutions, both macroscopic and microscopic.” Such “networks are elemental, in the sense that their dynamics operate at levels ‘above’ and ‘below’ that of the human subject.” They operate, in other words, as interactions of bits and atoms.2 According to the U.S. Army Research Office, the final realization of this vision will depend on innovative military science that looks into “creation and utilization of materials, devices, and systems through the control of matter on the nano­meter-​­length scale and into the ability to engineer matter at the level of atoms, molecules, and supramolecular structures.” This research will contribute to “increasing command and control, lethality, mobility, survivability, and sustainability of systems in the field. . . . [It will enable] a strategically mobile force capable of handling the full spectrum of future operations from stability and support operations through major theater war.”3 Enter nano­­tech­nol­ogy—​­stage right. Indeed, nano would provide revolutionary solutions for integrating soldiers and information systems in the battlespaces of the future. As U.S. Navy officer Shannon L. Callahan explains, if this projected revolution in military affairs depends on “integrating the infantryman’s capabilities into the digitized battlefield without adversely affecting his performance, thereby multiplying his lethality through an ability to communicate what he sees and knows up to higher headquarters,” then nano­­tech­nol­ogy and its “tiny devices could be the revolution’s enabling technology.”4 Certainly, the sense of revolutionary potential informed the U.S. Army’s decision to create the Institute for Soldier Nano­technologies: The individual soldier [of the future]  .  .  . will require systems revolutionary in their capabilities. Recent advances in the field of nano­ science suggest that [it] may be possible to provide the soldier with 174  0110

6.1. The digital battlefield. U.S. Army Research Office, 2001. “Institute for Solder Nano­technologies” proposal solicitation website. http:// www​.aro.army.mil/ soldiernano/.

radically new capabilities in full-​­spectrum threat protection without incurring significant weight or volume penalties. Such soldier systems will only be realized by directing additional resources to the Army’s Science and Technology Program in the emerging field of nano­science. For that reason, the Army’s Science and Technology Program in the emerging and assigns arena is being extended . . . to create a University Affiliated Research Center (uarc) entitled the “Institute for Soldier Nano­technologies.”5 When the Army Research Office solicited proposals for the institute in 2001, the Broad Agency Announcement appeared on the Army Research Office website beside a cartoon of the digital battlefield (fig. 6.1). In this image, futuristic soldiers charge across a computational grid. As in the Matrix films, the environment materializes from a background of green binary code. The 1s and 0s from the antique past of monochrome monitors morph into a scene of high-​­tech warfare. This cartoon makes one thing perfectly clear: the digital battlefield of the future will be forged from the collision of cyberspace with nano­space. Shortly after establishing its operations at mit, the isn produced a couple of publicity videos to reinforce this notion. Soldier of the Future, developed in 2004 by North Bridge Productions (a division of DigiNovations) H A V E N A N O­S U I T—​­W I L L T R A V E L  175

in collaboration with the game company Boston Animation, splices interviews of real mit scientists together with fictive animations of military nano­­tech­nol­ogy in action (fig. 6.2). The animated vignettes reiterate the vision of a skintight exoskeleton that will harden to stop sniper bullets, synthesize antitoxins in response to chemical weapon explosions, and administer first aid to wounded soldiers by “applying little electric currents to systems [of exomuscle] that are unimaginably small and light.” Rendering biometric data visible on the battlefield network, the suit will enable soldiers and commanders alike to observe its molecular operations.

6.2. Soldier of the Future: Wearing their nano­tech armor, two soldiers are surprised by the detonation of a chemical weapon. Institute for Soldier Nano­technologies, 2004. 6.3. Soldier of the Future: “The drama unfolding in my viewscreen was riveting.” Institute for Soldier Nano­technologies, 2004. 176  0110

In one vignette, a chemical weapon injures a soldier named Benson. His suit injects nano­particles into his bloodstream to combat the toxins. Another soldier, watching this microscopic process through the visualization system in his own suit, says, “I switched to monitor Benson over the battlefield network. The drama unfolding in my viewscreen was riveting” (fig. 6.3). The drama of military nano­­tech­nol­ogy, turning the chemical interior of the soldier body into yet another setting for the theater of war, is no insubstantial pageant. According to the Soldier of the Future video, it is almost here: “Nano­­tech­nol­ogy research is taking this out of the realm of dreams and, within a couple of decades, into the field.” A later isn video opens with a first-​­person action sequence (fig. 6.4). The green-​­tinted visual field of this sequence recalls the hud s featured in some first-​­person shooter games, for example, Rainbow Six: Lockdown (fig. 6.5). In this 2005 game, the Rainbow Six team must stop terrorists from releasing a nano-​­v irus: “Unidentified terrorists attacked lnr Anderson— a South African nano­tech research company. They were illegally developing a bioweapon called Legion. It’s an artificial virus, created with nano­­ tech­nol­ogy, engineered to wipe out civilian populations, then burn itself out.”6 Similarly, the isn video concerns a small squad of nano­suited soldiers infiltrating an enemy bioweapons bunker. During this search-​­and-​ d ­ estroy mission, an airborne bioagent (dubbed “bad stuff” by the squad leader) infects Jones, one of the soldiers. But before Jones is aware of it, the nano­tech systems that monitor his blood chemistry go into action to contain the contamination.

6.4. mit Institute for Soldier Nano­technologies—​­Microfluidics Research. Institute for Soldier Nano­technologies, 2005. H A V E N A N O­S U I T—​­W I L L T R A V E L  177

6.5. Rainbow Six: Lockdown (PlayStation 2 version). Red Storm Entertainment, 2005.

In this video, the digital battlefield—​­networking information from various recording devices and nano­sensors in the soldiers’ uniforms—​­is available not only to the troops but to the officers and scientists coordinating the operation through their command terminals: the first-​­person shooter perspective is identical for the soldiers and the officers. When Jones’s bio-​­contamination occurs, the distributed hud indicates that a man has been exposed and therefore must be “sent out,” dropped from the mission—​­like the convention in video games where the hud inventories remaining lives or extra men. Subsequently, the video offers us a molecular view of what happens inside the suit, showing the subdermal functions of the onboard “med-​­surveillance systems.” Nano-​­syringes rapidly puncture the soldier’s skin, sucking samples of his blood through “micro-​­blenders.” His puréed rna molecules filter through lab-​­on-​­a-​­chip devices, which beam diagnostic data back through the digital network. Thanks to the suit, Jones survives to fight another day. Wars are made rebootable. Soldiers’ lives are made replayable. As the first Soldier of the Future video says, isn scientists are “mounting an assault on that challenge [of soldier survivability] with tools that were unimaginable just a few years ago.” Affording command and control even at the atomic scale, nano­technologies of the most radical and far-​­out varieties (“unimaginable just a few years ago”) now appear clear and present. 178  0110

Yet even as scientific institutions and “soldier of the future” programs embrace the technocratic promises of programmable warfare, popular engagements with military nano­­tech­nol­ogy frequently open onto futures of an altogether different order. Crysis Mode

A huge number of video games today animate the technical concepts and political dimensions of military nano­­tech­nol­ogy, making the digital battle­field less a dreamscape of future wars than an everyday playspace, easily accessible and endlessly reloadable. Games such as Deus Ex (2000) and Deus Ex: Invisible War (2003), PlanetSide (2003) and PlanetSide 2 (2012), the Red Faction series (2001–​­2011), Dark Sector (2008), Project: Snowblind (2005), the Metal Gear Solid saga (1998–​­), Heroes of War: Nano­warrior (2009), and several dozen others turn speculative nano­science and military engineering diagrams into recreational experiences. These games contribute to the irruption of futuristic technologies into everyday life by simulating the conditions for advanced nano­warfare as both imminent and playable. In doing so, they participate in the militarization of popular culture, making the state of perpetual armed conflict into a form of consumable pleasure—​­and often naturalizing militaristic values of imperialism, xeno­ phobia, misogyny, and aggressive masculinity in the process.7 But this is only part of the story. For some gamers, quotidian explorations of the digital battlefield afford perceptions and sensations of nano­warfare that diverge significantly from official military visions. After all, media consumers often appropriate, reinterpret, and remake cultural materials in ways that unpredictably subvert their “proper” meanings. As Michel de Certeau famously argued, “Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others.”8 So even as nano­war games normalize the digital battlefield, they also enable its recreational potential. Consider the blockbuster pc game Crysis. Developed by the German game company Crytek, it came out in 2007 as the first entry in a larger saga.9 In Crysis, the player takes the role of James Dunn, an elite U.S. Special Forces soldier, identified by the code name “Nomad.” Nomad is equipped with a nano­suit, which mimics prototypes from the Institute for Soldier Nano­technologies and the U.S. Future Warrior program. According to Bernd Diemer, the senior designer on the Crysis project, the game H A V E N A N O­S U I T—​­W I L L T R A V E L  179

6.6. Crysis: Nomad surveys the island. The data system of the suit constantly maps the geography of the island, the mission objectives, and the hostility levels of other people in the area—​­unless the signals are jammed! Crytek, 2007.

strives for fidelity: “Taking inspiration from the Future Warrior 2020 program, we developed the Nano Fibre Suit that can enhance strength, speed and armour levels. The player can max the speed to dash across an open field, change to the strength setting and silently punch out a sentry.”10 In many ways, Crysis presents itself as a playable version of the scenarios depicted in the isn videos. The game takes place on a tropical island in the South China Sea, where the North Korean military has commandeered an alien artifact discovered by U.S. archeologists. The island becomes a stage for globalization as militarization. The plot unfolds through open-​­ended sandbox gameplay. The player can proceed through various military objectives with a large degree of freedom, selecting missions according to preference rather than a prescribed order, thanks to the logistics of net-​­centric warfare that render the island as a digital battlefield (fig. 6.6). Yet between skirmishes with North Korean soldiers and the onslaught of alien creatures, the narrative elements take a backseat to the real focus of the game, namely, the playability of the nano­suit itself, and its relation to the figure of the male soldier inside. The nano­suit has several functions that the player can activate at will. Noting that Nomad’s supple exoskeleton recalls the iconography of comic books, one player writes, “At its heart this is a superhero game, 180  0110

6.7. Crysis: With his nano­suit set to “maximum armor,” Nomad follows Psycho and Prophet deeper into the island, pursuing an alien creature. Psycho: “I feel like I jumped into a bloody comic book here!” Crytek, 2007.

where the main character is armed with the latest in high-​­tech equipment. Your nano­suit—​­the star of the show—​­allows you to be invisible, to be super-​­fast, to be super-​­strong, or to be virtually bulletproof. Here’s the catch: you can only use one power at a time, and they all have limited energy. Choosing which powers to use in every situation is the heart of the gameplay.”11 Whenever we initiate these nano-​­functions, an ominous male voice mechanically announces the outcome of our selection: “maximum armor ,” “maximum strength ,” “maximum speed,” and so forth. This voice would seem to be the programmed rhetoric of military science as such, built into the operating system of the suit that we inhabit in first-​ p ­ erson perspective (fig. 6.7). The voice, along with the text messages that pop onto our hud, reminds us, comforts us, about our invulnerability—​ ­our virtual impenetrability—​­in the embrace of the nano­suit. We are encouraged to think of our avatar pumped up to the max, boasting maximum power, maximum hardness. While emphasizing toughness and rigidity, Crysis also presents some fleeting views of the interior operations of the nano­suit. Brief shots in the intro video provide an intimate, almost illicit perspective on the high-​ ­tech war machine that Nomad has become. These third-​­person images show the extent to which nano enhancement, in rendering the soldier H A V E N A N O­S U I T—​­W I L L T R A V E L  181

6.8. Inside the nano­suit. Dropping from holes in the exoskeleton, nano­spheres infiltrate the pores of Nomad’s skin. Crysis launch video. Crytek, 2007. 6.9. Wet nano­­tech­nol­ogy. Power-​­boosting nano­spheres flow through Nomad’s bloodstream. Crysis launch video. Crytek, 2007.

maximally powerful, simultaneously renders him maximally fluidic: a ­porous membrane where materials pass back and forth with abandon (figs. 6.8 and 6.9). The graphic exposure of nano devices dropping into the bloodstream, embedding themselves in muscle fibers, and infiltrating the epidermis (similar to the isn images of nano-​­needles puncturing the skin) discloses a conundrum in the imagination of military nano­tech. The soldier is made technologically hard only by virtue of being technologically soft. The soldier is penetrated at all times: not a closed off, armored body, but an open, wet, and humble body unfastened by tiny probing technologies. The mediated views offered by Crysis and the isn videos situate us initially in the first-​­person perspective and then, ecstatically, in the third-​ ­person perspective directly at the nano­­scale. We see the body’s molecular opening, its biomechanical fluidity, even while bombarded with the rhetoric of hardness. We are suspended between these two perspectives, unable to resolve them because they are both insisted on, graphically and semiotically. This is what I will call the crysis mode of the nano­warrior, smeared between the poles of maximally hard and maximally soft—​­armored and fluidic, meaty and mechanical, self and other at the same time. It represents a condition of rupture and disarray internal to the symbolic order of militarization, enframed by the speculative horizon of programmable warfare and the operations of machinic draft. The “crysis” of the crysis mode draws attention to its typographical substitution, of course: a Y in place of an I. This Y would seem nearly identical to an I, yet it signals a difference that makes a difference. Consider that Crytek (which, like many transnational game developers, produces its properties in English before localizing for specific territories) built a reputation on the success of its first game, the 2004 bestseller Far Cry. The sign of the “cry” has become the company’s hallmark, inscribed in its game titles and its game engines: CryEngine 1, CryEngine 2, and CryEngine 3. (And let’s not overlook the evocative initials of Crytek’s cofounder and ceo, Cevat Yerli). Clearly, the “cry” of Crytek invites word play. It also performs the ambiguity of the crysis mode. For the connotations of the word “cry” span from hardened battle cries on one end of the spectrum to the wailing of infants on the other, from the armored body to the leaking body: aggression or weeping, firmness or wetness.

H A V E N A N O­S U I T—​­W I L L T R A V E L  183

In the case of Crysis, the typographic substitution in the center of the word “crisis” likewise makes this trademarked title into a figure, a signifier of the fraught subject position of this first-​­person shooter. The Y, standing for the “I” in crisis: an avatar-​­I caught in the crisis of nano­war, behind enemy lines. Indeed, when the game software launches, immediately after the intro video, a single capital “I” appears in the middle of the screen before fading into the Crysis title. An avatar-​­I in crisis, represented as a Y in crisis. A genetic crisis, perhaps: the threatened Y chromosome, the male body in biochemical peril.12 After all, the discourse of military nano­­tech­nol­ogy often dramatizes such genetic hazards. In the second isn video, for example, toxic bioagents threaten the integrity of Jones’s nucleic acids, and his genetic material must be blended into diagnostic nano-​­bits in order to save him. Yet this is precisely the point: the typographic symbolism of “crysis” suggests that, if the Y is at risk, it is nevertheless fully cushioned and sequestered, shielded inside an exoskeleton of other letters, secure in the middle of crisis—​­just as Nomad, the avatar-​­I, is concealed and protected by the nano­suit. Or so it would seem. Concerns about such issues circulate both overtly and covertly among the self-​­professed hardcore gamers who contribute to discussions of Crysis in online forums, blogs, video-​­posting websites, and gaming magazines.13 From 2006 (when prerelease materials for the title first appeared) through 2012, I monitored more than ten thousand of these public discussions about Crysis. The vast majority of players seemed to support the notion that Crysis appeals to aggressive masculinity, mythically encoded by the Y chromosome itself. One player explains, “The whole basis of . . . Crysis, is besting an adversary and that is something that we with the Y-​­Chromosome have excelled at, for better or worse, since the dawn of time.”14 As a prerequisite for playing the game, in addition to owning high-​­end computer equipment, some other players would “even add a new requirement: a penis. Crysis is the manliest game on any system.”15 Industry stereotypes often assume that military first-​­person shooters like Crysis sell predominantly to male consumers, thus discounting female gamers, as well as transgender and intersex gamers, from consideration in future game design and marketing strategy (a situation that has only recently started to change).16 Certainly, there are many female gamers who play Crysis. But in public discussions of the game, hardcore male gamers frequently assume that all other discussants are also 184  0110

male. In the conversations I observed, players generally agreed that Crysis and its sequels are aimed at men: as one player suggested, rated “M for Manly.”17 This is so much the case that, in one conversation where a Crysis player called “--Anna--” announced her female identity (“I’m a girl gamer, would like to chat, but I’m busy playing Crysis”), the immediate response was incredulity, with several respondents insisting that this “girl gamer” must really be a “boy gamer” in disguise.18 A majority of players involved in Crysis discussions online make a point of their maleness, either in specific postings or in their author profiles. Whether or not they are actually as male as they profess to be (and it is quite conceivable that some female gamers might seek to covertly pass as male in these public forums), the intensely gendered discourse surrounding Crysis nevertheless plays out the stakes and the standards of militarized masculinity in contemporary technoculture. In any event, to whatever degree there might be slippage between the offline gender identity and the online persona of a Crysis player—​­that is, to whatever extent female gamers might be performing as male or vice versa when discussing Crysis—​­this kind of transgender recreation would already enact the problematics of the crysis mode. For the relationship between the hypermasculine image of military nano­­tech­nol­ogy (the nano­ suit’s baritone assurance of maximum power enveloping the tumescent bodies of Nomad and his fellow soldiers, Psycho, Prophet, Aztec, and Jester) and the body of the soldier-​­player who inhabits this image is precisely what is rendered precarious by the Crysis experience.19 For many players of Crysis, military nano­­tech­nol­ogy means empowerment without imperilment. The game cultivates an affirmative response to the nano­suit and its capabilities, generating fantasies of individual superiority and invulnerability under the regime of nano­­tech­nol­ogy. The narrative of the game disappears in relation to the affective force of the playable nano­suit, the imaginary transformation of the player into an indomitable nano­warrior, backed up by the insistence that all of this is scientifically plausible. As one player writes, the game “manages to make you feel like a badass thanks to the high-​­tech nano-​­suit, which has four settings to help with combat situations. . . . By the end of single player it’ll be second nature. . . . The nano-​­suit really helps you feel superior for a plausible reason [i.e., nano­­tech­nol­ogy].”20 Another player attests that “Crysis was a blast when . . . it allowed players to creatively abuse their nano­suit-​­granted super powers to dominate anything in their path.”21 H A V E N A N O­S U I T—​­W I L L T R A V E L  185

The pleasure of the game relates to creative abuse of military power, total domination of the digital battlefield. As one reviewer writes, “Few experiences were better this year [2007] than assuming the role of a Predator-​ ­like Special Forces soldier with a nano-​­suit stalking helpless foot patrols in the deep jungle with the aid of a cloaking device, super strength, and super speed.”22 Yet the fantasy of impenetrable vigor often clashes with the recognition that such powers depend on the molecular opening and invasion of the soldier body. Even as some players identify the nano­suit as protecting subjective and biological integrity (in accord with the rhetoric of maximum armor), others are discomfited by the fact that the nano­suit “allows you to use enhanced abilities to supplement your battle prowess . . . by releasing nano­bots into your bloodstream.”23 A few, puzzled by the disconnect between hard rhetoric and wet imagery, interpret the playable nano­systems as operating at different levels, dividing the armoring functions from the penetrating functions: “in fact, i believe in the game the ‘nano suit’ is two part, the part that covers the users body and provides armour / cloaking, and the free flowing ‘capsules’ within the bloodstream that boost strength and speed upon command.”24 Others express preference for the exomuscle functions, distinct from the intravenous nano­ spheres: “I suppose the balls [passing from the suit into the bloodstream] are things using nano technology to speed up the body. I like the idea of carbon nano­tubes conforming to the muscles to make them stronger better myself.”25 Yet many perceive the nano­suit as actually transforming the biomolecules of the body—​­getting into the dna : “The coolest thing about this game, the Nano Suit. The Nano Suit is a very high tech piece of military property. It has the power to alter your genetic code and will give you 4 different powers, Defense which will make you invulnerable to bullets and more for short time, Speed which will make you ten times faster for short time, Cloak which makes you invisible for short time, and my favorite Strength which give you super strength to pick enemys up and throw them and such.”26 Among those players who detect the perplexities of a technology that promotes maximum hardness while making the soldier into a weeping membrane or molecular sponge, the condition of crysis quite often appears as a failure of normative gender: “little nano guys go into your bloodstream to make you faster!!  .  .  . I’m not even kidding man, these little thingies like balls or something went inside the guys bloodstream 186  0110

and he dyked out. Like, ran fast.”27 The penetrability of the male soldier (“the guy”), his opening to these “little nano guys” or “these little thingies like balls” that get inside him, provokes a player response in which the enhancement of maximum speed is understood as a queering. The soldier’s ability to run fast when injected with nano­spheres is interpreted as sexual chaos, gender slippage: the guy “dyked out,” bewilderingly ambiguated. Normative distinctions—​­the firm and the fluid, the closed and the open, the masculine and the feminine—​­seem to dissolve in the image of military nano­systems. The code name of Nomad even suggests such instability and fluidity: the transgression of borders, a subject in process, becoming otherwise.28 The code name of Psycho—​­Nomad’s brother in arms—​­likewise recalls other cultural narratives of mutable gender identity.29 In any case, a number of players have commented on a sense of gender trouble among the nano­suited soldiers: “jake dunn (aka Nomad) is a raving lesbian trapped in a mans body . . . and Psycho had a fetish for guys in nano suits.”30 Crysis players often discuss the ambivalent condition of these soldiers, spread between maximum hardness and maximum fluidity, precisely because the game presents it as going both ways. Working through the ambiguities of military nano­­tech­nol­ogy in the game, some players arrive at a rather queer perspective on the future. Hardware Fetish

The power fantasies animated by Crysis might seem localized to the irreal spaces of science fiction. Yet adaptation to the digital battlefield, inhabitation of the soldier avatar in the grip of the nano­suit, quickly translates into a tacit sense of personal investment in the future, an embodied response to what one player aptly calls the game’s “unsatiable hardware fetish.”31 The Crysis program demands so much computational muscle to run that only heavy-​­duty pc s equipped with high-​­octane processors and graphics cards are capable of serving the game at its optimum settings. With its resource-​­intensive game engine (CryEngine 2), which provides vivid 3d graphics, sophisticated ai behaviors, and a responsive open-​­world environment, Crysis requires advanced computer hardware with maximized tech specs just to play it: maximum hardware. It has become infamous: “Crysis demanded so much graphical horsepower it crippled most pc s.”32 Everyone agrees: “Crysis has the most highest hardware requirements H A V E N A N O­S U I T—​­W I L L T R A V E L  187

ever.”33 These outrageous requirements make the game itself seem like an artifact transported backward in time from a science fiction universe: “It’s too demanding today, that’s just the simple truth. Nothing runs it.”34 Another gamer concurs: “It may be cheaper to travel forward in time to play Crysis than it is to build a machine capable of bending the game to its will.”35 The idea of future-​­ladenness echoes throughout the gaming community: “Crysis is the future. The present isn’t ready for it.”36 A few reviewers have resorted to parody to capture the widespread concern that running Crysis at maximum settings is beyond the reach of most players, more like a scientific arms race than armchair recreation: Scientists at nasa’s John F. Kennedy Space Center have revealed that they are extremely close to accomplishing what experts once thought impossible: running ea’s pc shooter Crysis at maximum settings. Using a custom built Cray xt 3 Opteron supercomputer, nasa engineers, in partnership with a team of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, claim to have actually run the game at full capacity for more than 10 minutes before a fatal system crash. “It’s been hard,” comments nasa project lead James Ferguson, “but challenges like this are why we do what we do. Hearing everyone applaud in the control room when we got the first level up and running was a feeling I’ll never forget. . . .” Although progress has been good, time is of the essence, as recent rumors have speculated that a rival team in China will be attempting a full run-​­through of the game within the next month. Still, Ferguson remains confident. “I believe in America’s know-​­how, and I guarantee we’ll be the first country on Earth to run Crysis.”37 This parody draws out the Cold War logic that has mobilized such research endeavors in U.S. history, imagining nasa’s quest to complete Crysis as a race for supremacy over China.38 In this way, it echoes the game’s own narrative: a conflict between American nano­warriors and North Korean soldiers to secure an alien technology (which turns out to be a spaceship). The parody forges links between the game’s militaristic content, its futuristic hardware, and the task of actually playing it—​­including the economic resources needed to compete for high-​­tech mastery. As another reviewer puts it, “[The] nano-​­suit super powers  .  .  . can let you pull off some truly bombastic stunts. . . . This is an adventure worth upgrading your machine for.”39 188  0110

Invoking the same militarized rhetoric and science fiction idioms that characterize the story of Crysis itself—​­the “crippling” of lesser pcs, the race for technoscientific power, and the notion that you might need a time machine to operate the game—​­players of Crysis express a mixture of frustration and swagger in describing their gaming experiences. The frustration appears when they are unable to make the game work: “bLAH, This game is my Moby Dick. Crysis had mocked my 8800ultra [video card] for over a year . . . a few months ago I chose to go sli [Nvidia’s “Scalable Link Interface” multi-​­gpu system]. . . . You would think that this would be awesome right? Wrong, I get annoying screen tearing constantly . . . that gives me a headache . . . this bastaaard of a game. I hate it I want Crysis dead.”40 But many players start to swagger as soon as they are able to make the game run, even imperfectly: “I did play crysis on its on very high settings and i did lag a bit at times and i couldent put the anti aliasing up all the way but no computer can run crysis on very high . . . but all in all my computer is awesome and is the envy of everyone i know.”41 Of course, a few play Crysis only to demonstrate the supremacy of their rigs. As one player reports, “High end system builders just sunk a lot of cash into their hardware, and want to show it off. . . . They do necessarily believe they have to show Crysis on it to impress people with its power. Heck, I’ve known people who bought Crysis to convince themselves that their new computer was ‘cool,’ and then go to the office and brag to everyone about how realistic it was.”42 Although the game “cripples most pc s,” those players equipped with superior hardware have comparatively little trouble. These well-​­equipped players often describe their computers in terms that evoke Nomad’s awesome nano­suit—​­while warning other players that, without such a computer, the full awesomeness of the nano­suit will remain elusive. For example: “Crysis is straightforward: You take the role of a soldier of the future who dons a high-​­tech nano­suit that augments natural human qualities like speed, strength, and fortitude. . . . But all of this comes at a price: the cost of a state-​­of-​­the-​­art gaming machine. Play without a technologically advanced rig and you’ll have no choice but to run the game at the lowest visual settings.”43 Or likewise: “Great Game, great graphics and really cool gameplay. If u need to get away from enemies use super speed on your nano­suit and you run really fast! But be warned you have to have a really high tech computer to play this game!”44 The rhetoric of maximum power extends beyond the game, mapping onto players’ relations with their own gaming systems. H A V E N A N O­S U I T—​­W I L L T R A V E L  189

The story of Nomad, a soldier engaged in international (and interplanetary) warfare, pumped up to the max by virtue of his nano­tech exoskeleton, provides an analogy for the technical achievement of running the game itself. Superior computer hardware becomes the player’s own high-​ ­tech exoskeleton. Like the nano­suit, a “state-​­of-​­the-​­art gaming machine” is a hardware prosthesis: a “technologically advanced rig” practically imported from the future, grafted to the player’s body at the moment of picking up the controls. To own such a computer is to be directly in touch with the future depicted in the game. Which is to say, the computer now appears as a fetish. It is the source of high-​­tech power, maximum hardness, maximum strength. Some computer manufacturers have capitalized on the fetishistic equation between the military nano­­tech­nol­ogy represented in Crysis and advanced computational hardware, the object of gamer desire. In 2008, the Taiwan-​­based via Technologies announced its new family of energy-​ ­efficient Nano processors, proclaiming computational superiority by virtue of “advanced 65 nano­meter process technology” (fig. 6.10). via’s initial press release for the Nano processors measured their technical power by referencing their capacity to run Crysis: The first 64-​­bit, superscalar, speculative out-​­of-​­order processors in via’s x86 platform portfolio, via Nano processors have been specifically designed to revitalize traditional desktop and notebook pc markets, delivering truly optimized performance for the most demanding computing, entertainment and connectivity applications, including . . . the latest pc games, such as Crysis™. The via Nano processor family leverages Fujitsu’s advanced 65 nano­meter process technology for enhanced power efficiency, and augments that with aggressive power and thermal management features within the compact 21mm x 21mm nano­BGA2 package for an idle power as low as 100mW (0.1W), extending the reach of power efficient green and silent pc s, thin and light notebooks and mini-​­notes around the world.45 This via press release is laden with fantasies of the digital battlefield. With its language of technological augmentation and enhancement, its boastful display of “aggressive power,” and its vision of global domination by a Nano-​­optimized army of swift and stealthy pc s (“extending the reach of power efficient green and silent pc s . . . around the world”), this 190  0110

6.10. via Nano processor. 2008 publicity image from via Technologies, Inc.

advertisement replicates the narrative logic of the video game it presents as the arbiter of hardware performance: that “most demanding” of all applications, Crysis. This marketing effort relies on the hardware fetish performed and produced by Crysis itself. Everyone gets the point: in order to play as a nano­warrior, you need to have the proper nano equipment. It is a common ploy. For instance, the gaming company Novint has modded Crysis to work with its Novint Falcon force-​­feedback device. This enables the player to “feel the nano­suit”: “Besides feeling weapon recoils and explosions, the gamer can feel acceleration and centrifugal forces when driving vehicles, making the game come to life in a radically new and more exciting way. The HaptX Team has also focused on making the game environment in Crysis become more alive through resistance when swimming in water or feeling the impact when hitting the ground after a high jump.” The nano­suit is no longer just Nomad’s exoskeleton inside the game. Instead, it becomes the player’s very own nano­tech shell: “The gamer’s best friend in Crysis is the Nano Suit which protects the gamer. When playing the HaptX Mod, the different Nano Suit modes will affect the strength and intensity of the forces generated by the Falcon. When in Maximum Strength mode, the Falcon will adjust the strength of the forces accordingly, making you feel stronger when lifting objects, less recoils from your weapons and even less impact from enemy fire.”46 Thanks to the accessory, the gamer now feels secure in the nano­suit: “the Nano H A V E N A N O­S U I T—​­W I L L T R A V E L  191

Suit protects the gamer.” The gamer now feels like a nano­warrior: “making you feel stronger.” For some, this hardware fetishism has strong sexual implications, reflecting the phallocentrism of the game narrative. Many players have noted that the game’s incessant incantation of maximum strength and maximum armor seems really to mean, as one puts it, “maximum penis length.”47 Players of Crysis therefore often measure and compare their relative computing powers in phallic terms: “Those are some pretty heavy processor requirements [to run the game], glad i have a larger e-​­penis than the rest of you.”48 These gamers regularly post photos of their computers and lists of their tech specs to online message boards, sometimes even distributing close-​­up shots of their cpus or graphics cards in ways that self-​­consciously mimic pornographic imagery. Occasionally, fellow players of Crysis appear quite impressed with such displays of hardware prowess: “I was checking it out [a friend’s computer]. Looks totally sweet. Gives big e-​­penis for sure.”49 Or: “That rig will give you a huge e-​­penis. Congrats on that. . . . Your cpu looks amazing with the 4g of ram.”50 Or: “Damn. That rig is sweet dude. You easily have the best rig here. That pic of your rig you emailed me was sweet. I love your rig.”51 Yet just as frequently, other players respond with distain or hostility toward those players who advertise pornographic details about their Crysis-​­mastering hardware: “Congratulations, you can show off your computer on the internet. Your penis probably got larger because of what a good computer you have.”52 Similarly: “I guess your e-​­penis makes up for your real one.”53 Sarcastic allusions to Oedipal complexes and castration anxieties are bandied about to deflate the pretensions of hardware show-​ o ­ ffs: “I told my mom that I had a small penis, so she said to buy a new 500 dollar video card. Now my penis is huge!”54 But whether admiring or ridiculing such displays of e-​­penis power, the communal discourse of Crysis players routinely affirms a linkage between the futuristic nano­suit in the game, the technical capacities required to play the game at maximum settings, and the psychotopography of the male body. We see here an instance of what Sherry Turkle has described as the tendency to identify the computer as a prosthesis or a mirror, a second self: “This kind of identification is a powerful source of computer holding power. People are able to identify physically with what is happening inside the machine. It makes the machine feel like a part of oneself.”55 The sensation of bodily extension or identification with the computer by no 192  0110

means requires physical connection with the hardware; as Turkle writes, “The sense of physical relationship depends on symbolic contact.”56 In the case of Crysis, symbolic contact with the digital battlefield produces a feeling of inhabitation, a merger with the hardware as the site of everyday nano­wars. Many players see the predicament of Nomad in the game as equivalent to the predicament of the computer as it struggles with the Crysis software: “Crysis: Not just a game, but also the state your pc is in trying to run this game!”57 Frequently, this translates as a corporeal predicament, a symbolic crysis of the player’s own body. Indeed, to the extent that it anthropomorphizes the gaming system as an extension or reflection of the player’s body, the discursive field of Crysis effectively e-​­masculates the player. Echoing the gamer vocabulary of e-​­penis, the concept of e-​ m ­ asculation would signify the electronic performance of masculinity, the inflation of soldier-​­male superiority through the virtuosity of gaming hardware—​­and, at exactly the same time, the emasculation or castration of the player-​­soldier through the very same gaming hardware. For example, when considering the hardware expectations for running Crysis, one player said, “I was pretty fucking gay for my Core 2 Duo with the Geforce 8800 gts. Now, I just feel small, limp and ashamed.”58 Or as another player puts it, “Crysis may very well kick your computer in the balls.”59 We see the multiple and irresolvable tensions inherent to the crysis mode of the nano­warrior, where the ability to swagger about e-​­penis power simultaneously involves a risk of e-​­penis wounding, a deflation caused by the very measure of electronic masculinity: the software of Crysis itself. Here, the power enhancement associated with those little thingies like balls that drop into your bloodstream is nearly identical to the experience of getting kicked in the balls: nano-​­empowerment only through nano-​­imperilment. In other words, full-​­on crysis mode. Gay for Play

Players experience the crysis mode in identifying their own gaming systems as the enabling condition to enter the digital battlefield of Crysis and, simultaneously, as the site of limitation or insufficiency relative to the demands of that battlefield. Some players, desperately wanting to join in the fun and live the dream, nevertheless fear for the safety of their computers, and likewise, their own security: “if i put that [Crysis] in my computer H A V E N A N O­S U I T—​­W I L L T R A V E L  193

it would explode.”60 One gamer writes that if he dared to install Crysis, the game would “rape my computer in its ass aaaaall night long man. And then the next morning my computor would wake up in a street without it’s shell on and be complety and utterly violated. raped.”61 For yet another wannabe Crysis player, the game’s thuggish hardware demands appear as an alluring danger, a fantasy of rough trade: “Just thinking about it makes my anus bleed.”62 The power kicks of Crysis expose the technical limits of average graphics processors to handle the game, ubiquitously expressed as bodily—​­or more specifically, anal—​­v ulnerability: “GPUwise it [Crysis] is tearing us a new one.”63 Such transference of anxiety between hardware integrity and personal security, of course, is at odds with the game’s own rhetoric of maximum armor and the discourse that insists that the nano­suit “protects the gamer.” But as we see, this is the nature of the crysis mode: protection enabled only by total exposure to the risks of technology, hardness enabled only by total molecular penetration. In crysis mode, pleasure in extreme militarism comes simultaneously with being forced to one’s knees and made to service the fetish object: “Crysis can bring even the manliest of rigs to their knees.”64 No doubt about it: “even top end systems were brought to their knees by this game.”65 Playing within the crysis mode—​­a volatile condition where even the manliest tops might be made into bottoms—​­appears for some gamers as a queering of heterosexual imperatives, or more specifically, a failure of normative masculinity in their own relations to the game. Homophobic and misogynistic responses are unfortunately frequent within the community of Crysis players. A few identify their computational shortcomings as sexual debasement, an involuntary servitude to the phallic demands of the game: “i wish my pc didnt suck total penis filth.”66 Others try to reject the near-​­universal fetishism of Crysis as the benchmark for hardware power and “maximum penis length,” because everyone comes up short in comparison; they no longer want to view themselves as effeminate recipients of its awesome technology: “Come on guys, lets all take our lips off Crysis’s dick.”67 These sarcastic analogies to fellatio comprehend Crysis-​­fetishism in terms of non-​­procreative sexuality, an erasure of whatever sense of potency or futurity might attach to the human bearer of the Y chromosome, the phallic signifier of genetic sexual difference and the heterosexual generation of the future. As Lee Edelman has argued, the logic of reproductive futurism—​­the heteronormative political regime “programmed to reify 194  0110

difference and thus to secure, in the form of the future, the order of the same”—​­always appears threatened from inside by the possibility of a future of an altogether different order.68 A future devoted not to the future, but instead to its disruption, its obliteration, its molecular reordering. Instead of a reproductive futurism that endlessly defers or prohibits any real difference from the present, Crysis offers something quite different: a twisted temporality that does not cease coming into the present from the moment of loading the game, assaulting normal hardware and average players (recall that many players for this reason accuse the Crysis software of violating linear time, attesting that “the present isn’t ready for it”). Crysis unexpectedly becomes one of those sites of resistance to reproductive futurism that José Esteban Muñoz describes as “outposts of an actually existing queer future existing in the present.”69 Bending the arrow of time, the game performs the nano­tech future as an everyday playspace and animates its queerness—​­identified by several players as the “fetish for guys in nano suits” that seems to exist at the core of today’s speculative militarism, both in video games and in real life (figs. 6.11 and 6.12). For example, one gamer describes Nomad’s exoskeleton in Crysis as “some gay nano­suit. . . . Note of the use of the word gay, not as an insult but as a descriptive word for the sexual status of the nano­suit, which resembles a dudes ballet costume.”70 Yet another gamer, referring to the “Soldier of the Future” suit designed by the U.S. Army’s Natick Soldier Center and featured in the isn publicity videos, writes, “Looks like its for the homosexual type.”71 High-​­tech combat gear and eroticized images of guys in nano­suits body forth a future-​­in-​­the-​­present that intersects both military utopias and gay fantasias. Crysis exposes the extent to which the fetishistic projection of futurity through the playable form of the Soldier of the Future—​­whether a costume mock-​­up or a video game avatar—​­is a fundamentally queer practice. It is a form of what Elizabeth Freeman, in describing queer s/m role-​­playing, has called the “erotic time machine” of performed sexual deviance, which deviates from the temporal rhythms of reproductive futurism: “a deployment of bodily sensations through which the individual subject’s normative timing is disaggregated and denaturalized.”72 To be sure, on the digital battlefield, there is no natural or normative future—​­only that future in crisis. Crysis vivifies a future in the present that is entirely, and in every sense, queer. Some players simply cannot handle it: “Yea im done with Crysis, too many gay things happened to me in the game. . . . nano suit my ass.”73 The H A V E N A N O­S U I T—​­W I L L T R A V E L  195

6.11. Cruising in his nano­suit, Nomad throws us a smoldering, over-​­the-​shoulder glance. Crysis launch video. Crytek, 2007.

6.12. Future Warrior. U.S. Army Natick Soldier Center. 2003. A member of Natick’s Operational Forces Interface Group models a prototype nano­suit ensemble.

failure of the nano­suit to guarantee hetero-​­male identity is charged with gayness, both sexual and nonsexual. Trying it out, putting it on, seems like risky business. It might even lead to flamboyant performances of gender: “I’m not qualified to review this game. I couldn’t play through this whole mess. But I’m an arrogant bitch who has to give his two cents to everything, so here they are. . . . The whole beginning looks like a gay latex fetish porn.”74 Turning away in frustration from a future redolent of gay latex fetish porn (“I couldn’t play through”), this gamer nevertheless perceives himself as becoming-​­queen, an arrogant bitch.75 Others instead find nothing but pleasure in inhabiting a hardcore future where gender becomes fluid and sexuality opens to play. As one reviewer advises, to get maximum enjoyment from the game, best to just play along with the fetishwear fun and get on with saving the world: “be sure to slap on your gimp suit (errrrrr . . . nano­suit) and let it echo ‘maximum crysis ’ while you’re on the biggest mission for mankind’s ultimate survival.”76 Wearing the nano­suit might facilitate a kind of sexual awakening: “In Crysis you have the luxury of wearing the most sophisticated, and sexy, combat suit known to man kind. This sexiness is called the Nano­suit.”77 Inhabiting the nano­suit not only seems to make players aware of its potential queering effects but likewise solicits their comfort with its ambivalences—​­an enjoyment of the destabilized relations between soldier and hardware, player and avatar, penetrator and penetrated. As one player attests, “I’ve take a huge slap . . . Crysis killed me once again. He even rape me so hard, I want a 9800 gtx [Nvidia GeForce graphics card] now ! I wasn’t expect the game to be so good. I really had some much fun, some much gorgeous moments.”78 The imagined phallic demands of the Crysis software would seem similar—​­yet all in good fun?—​­to slapping, wrecking, and raping the player himself. But such violation is surprisingly expressed as affirmative pleasure (“so good”). Rather than protection against further penetration, purchasing a more powerful Nvidia 9800 gtx graphics card would instead mean more thoroughly opening oneself to repeat performances, to meet the game’s own appetites and ferocious desires on more equal terms, and to get further satisfaction from the intensity of the experience (albeit, perhaps, without suffering so much screen tearing). Several male players have described their pleasure in the game with similar masochistic joy, similar fluidity of gender categories, and similar desire

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to repeat again and again: “im the biggest Crysis whore in the world.”79 With little discomfort or anxiety, these players find the sexual ambiguities animated by Crysis to be part of what makes the game so much fun in the first place. One player (self-​­identified as a straight married man and a military engineer in the U.S. Air Force), confessing his fanboy desire to “get on this game’s dick now,” imagines an alternative sexual response, a male femininity: “And the Nano-​­suit makes me wet . . . sooo much fun.”80 Whether trying to distance themselves from the queer future of everyday nano­wars through a vocabulary of homophobic panic or instead blissfully enjoying the ride and looking forward to further adventures, players of Crysis adapt to the game, inhabiting the nano­suit as a symbol of their own computational condition, and navigating the crysis mode without ultimate resolution. If there is resistance to the future of nano­war, it is a resistance produced from within, an internal tension between the force objectives of soldier-​­male militarism and the molecular queering that destabilizes those force objectives from the inside. For recognition that the dominant rhetoric of the game is actually at odds with its own technical representations of nano­war—​­that is, recognition of the crysis mode—​ o ­ pens players’ eyes to the other self-​­critical and self-​­queering dimensions of the game. In discussing the internal resistances or tensions experienced in playing with Nomad, a number of players become ever more attentive to the failures of the in-​­game military rhetoric to live up to its own hype, affording a space for critical analysis and a subversive perspective on the politics at stake. For example, one player writes, I also liked that the game tried to be topical. You played as a technically superior enemy to the Koreans, hunting them, which obviously had a relation to ideas about the major Western powers and their foreign policies in mind. This was a battle to win a major resource, possibly a power source. (Much like oil or nuclear power). The arrival of the aliens can be read in several ways too. The destructive power unleashed by war and violence perhaps? Or more likely given the nature of the aliens, it was representative of the earth rebelling against mankind’s destruction, or even more simply, destruction from ecological change. The earth essentially erupts like a volcano of ice, smothering the tropical jungles. (Referring to current fears about global warming and the melting of the ice-​­caps.) So it was nice to see some thought went into it.81 198  0110

So amid all the enthusiastic chatter about maximum power and e-​ ­penises, some Crysis players take the game as an opportunity to question, to evaluate, and to self-​­reflect on their own participation in everyday nano­wars. Game On

The video games of military nano­­tech­nol­ogy make the digital battlefield described by Dutch DeGay into a commonplace reality: “We look at the soldier as the next-​­generation platform. The Star Trek analogy is the Borg, a group of people who are plugged into a supercomputer and part of the collective.” Channeling the Borg’s notorious motto—​­Resistance is futile—​ ­DeGay’s vision reveals the conscriptive logic of the digital battlefield, the machinic draft. Soldiers would be totally plugged into the data network of c4isr (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance), merging with nano and other technologies that promise to turn war into a video game. Indeed, games such as Crysis that make the digital battlefield into a playable experience become part of the apparatus of training and induction. As DeGay has said, “It’s no shock to see that technology being used for training [soldiers]. . . . It has always been a challenge to get the time, space and resources to train soldiers, so video games give leaders and commanders an easier portable training option.” And likewise, a recruitment option: “It’s not a stretch of the imagination that people who have the chance to see the capabilities of the next generation of soldier [in a video game] . . . might find the idea of being a soldier more appealing. Or at the very least give them a better idea of what it might be like to be a soldier.” DeGay has served as technical advisor for several recent games, including Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter (2006), Ghost Recon: Future Soldier (2013), EndWar (2008), and others. Authenticity is key, according to DeGay, in order to give players “as real a military experience possible in a video game.”82 Certainly, the video games that stage everyday nano­wars in our own living rooms attend directly to military research programs that industriously transform science fiction into reality, making the future as immediate and immersive as possible, something we can all enjoy. Perhaps resistance is futile. As one player has said of Crysis, “Now that i’ve tried it i can’t resist it.”83

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And yet, in making nano­wars playable, these games stage a condition of interminable crysis, where resistance and accommodation to the digital battlefield are experienced simultaneously: an effect of the dynamic tension between the molar and the molecular, the command and the network, the e-​­penis function and the e-​­masculation function. By performing the play of sexual difference, morphing sexualities, and molecular fluidity all at the site of the warrior body, mapping directly onto a player’s own wet relationship with high-​­tech hardware, games such as Crysis spectacularly deconstruct themselves. They render the serious notion of everyday nano­wars laughable, something of a pleasurable joke. They open up a queer form of resistance from the inside against the otherwise overwhelming futility of resistance. Upon inserting Crysis into any computer, the pre-​­credits launch sequence to the game—​­featuring the resonant male voice of the nano­suit—​ ­announces that players of this game will experience the ultimate in high-​­tech digital warfare: “maximum game.” But as many players have noted, what the voice actually says is entirely ambiguous. As one player put it, summing up the indistinction, the irresolvable double-​­speak and double-​­think of the crysis mode in action, “i swear to god that i thought he said ‘maximum gay.’ ”84 Let’s all play.

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0111 Nano­politanism

In 2006, Sabeer Bhatia, the cofounder of the Hotmail corporation, announced his ambition to build a futuristic city on eleven thousand acres of farmland in northern India. Dubbed “Nano­City,” the metropolis was to be rationally designed for the support and cultivation of cutting-​­edge technosciences: a massive, self-​­contained engine of high-​­tech productivity. “The idea of building Nano­City,” Bhatia stated, “is to develop a sustainable city with world-​­class infrastructure and to create an ecosystem for innovation leading to economy, ecology and social cohesion.”1 As a calculated improvement on Silicon Valley, which accelerated the age of computation, Nano­City would accelerate the age of nano. While silicon was the “substrate of the ’60s,” according to Bhatia, nano­­tech­nol­ogy will be the enabling platform for scientific and social progress in the years to come: “Nano­­tech­nol­ogy sits at the confluence of a number of areas of research, not just computing. It’s material science, biotechnology, pharmaceutical research and nano­­tech­nol­ogy itself.”2 In Bhatia’s view, Nano­City would therefore be a privileged hub of the new knowledge economy, the world of tomorrow. Nano­City is a fiction, a dream—​­at least for the moment. The city was to be constructed in the Panchkula district of Haryana, and considerable planning went into the multibillion-​­dollar project for several years (fig. 7.1). But as far as the Haryana government is concerned, Nano­City is dead. It was already on life support by the time the Haryana State Industrial and Infrastructure Development Corporation formally recommended scrapping the project in 2011, after years of extended deadlines: “The government cannot keep on waiting forever for a project.”3 Yet it

7.1. Proposed Nano­City location. Panchkula district, Haryana. Geographic coordinates: 30°36’10.78”N, 76°59’2.28”E. Google Maps satellite image, data courtesy of DigitalGlobe and GeoEye, January 2013.

7.2. Invitation card to the Nano­City showcase event at the University of California, Berkeley. September 5, 2007. The back of the card reads, “You are cordially invited to BgAP’s presentation of: Nano­City—​­Principles, prototypes, proposals for the 21st Century Indian Metropolis.”

persists in spectral form, reappearing in the language of promissory marketing and forward-​­looking statements well after its demise. Rumors that the city might be transplanted to another part of India or another country circulate to this day. Exact details, of course, remain up in the air.4 Always yet to come, there and not there, Nano­City lingers as a vision, a high-​­tech utopia built on nothing other than speculation. While Bhatia and his colleagues might still hope that it will land on the ground eventually—​­somewhere, somewhen—​­the drive to speculate relentlessly projects Nano­City in the dimension of the virtual and invites the rest of the world to live there too (fig. 7.2). As Bhatia has said, “My goal is to build a model city of the future for the whole world.”5 The illusory Nano­City and its extravagant claims on the future index the condition of technoscience today, the extent to which the production of scientific facts and technical innovations is overdetermined by speculation, as both financial calculus and conceptual adventure. For nothing more than a model or prototype, a simulation of itself, Nano­City attracts prospective investments and generates values, economic as well as social. There are many, after all, who want to buy into the dream of Nano­ City. As one U.S. blogger has enthused, “[It] will create a place that will begin to change the world. I truly believe this could happen, if the Dream is Shared. So far investors, corporations and the government have gotten their hands on the project. . . . I hope the people will also!! Share the Dream Sabeer Bhatia, so far it’s great!”6 Here, I want to examine Nano­City as a speculative media object and an object of desire—​­an alluring bundle of design diagrams, digital images, publicity statements, financial plans, and scientific promises. By and by, I will propose a theoretical account of citizenship and everyday life at a moment when urban planning, multinational capitalism, and speculative science converge and become indistinguishable—​­a mode of being in the world that I will call nano­politanism. http://it-​­was-​­the-​­best-​­of-​­times-​­it-​­was-​­the-​­worst-​­of-​­times​.com

Bhatia was born in Chandigarh—​­one of the world’s most famous planned cities. He grew up in Bangalore—​­which has, since the late 1980s, often been called the “Silicon Valley of India” for its high concentration of information technology companies, especially in the Electronic City (ECity) industrial park on the outskirts of the metropolis. From his youth in India N A N O­P O L I T A N I S M  203

through his adult life in the United States, Bhatia became a keen observer of the relations between urban infrastructure and high-​­tech economy, and in particular the function of global cities in the expansion of science and innovation.7 Let us retrace the itinerary. His international career began in 1988, when he transferred from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science in Pilani to the California Institute of Technology. His entrepreneurial aspirations started to crystallize a couple years later when he moved to Stanford University, where he eventually earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering. While at Stanford, Bhatia took a class called “Business for Electrical Engineers” that featured lectures from local entrepreneurs, including Scott McNealy, Steve Jobs, and Vinod Khosla. His imagination took flight with the possibility of becoming a serious player in the high-​­stakes game of technoscience.8 Instead of returning to India after graduating from Stanford in 1993, Bhatia remained in California. What happened then has become the stuff of legend. He took a job at Apple and soon after joined the start​­up Firepower Systems, together with a colleague from Apple, Jack Smith. When Bhatia and Smith began exploring business potentials for a web-​­based database (JavaSoft), they were struck with the notion for a web-​­based e-​­mail system. And so, Hotmail was born. Supported by $300,000 in venture capital from the Draper Fisher Juvertson firm, the free-​­to-​­use Hotmail service went live in 1996. Microsoft negotiated to buy Hotmail in 1997—​­the service was boasting millions of subscribers by then—​­and in the end, Bhatia and Smith sold their fledgling corporation for $400 million. Bhatia was only twenty-​­nine years old. After selling Hotmail, Bhatia worked at Microsoft for another year, at which time he decided to pursue other dot-​­com ventures in Northern California. He is now recognized as one of Silicon Valley’s most influential immigrant entrepreneurs—​­those cosmopolitan visionaries that economic geographer AnnaLee Saxenian has named the “New Argonauts.”9 High-​­tech voyagers of the islands of globalization . . . Bhatia’s plans for Nano­City must be seen in the context of his years living and working in the atmosphere of Silicon Valley’s start​­up culture, and especially his perception of the circuits linking academia and industry in Northern California. To be sure, Stanford University and the University of California campuses have long been identified as key elements of the so-​­called “regional advantage” of Silicon Valley, alongside the legal regimes, diaspora networks, and commercial resources that have 204  0111

enabled its growth.10 Bhatia has repeatedly emphasized that Nano­City would replicate—​­or “clone,” in the idiom preferred by a few Indian newspapers—​­this vibrant intellectual culture: “Silicon Valley has been the economic engine of the United States in intellectual property. . . . So we will have to re-​­create the educational basis of Silicon Valley with universities like Stanford and Berkeley in the Nano­City.”11 By duplicating the successful formulas of Silicon Valley, according to Bhatia, Nano­City would play host for the nano­­tech­nol­ogy era: “Nano­­tech­nol­ogy is the future, and this city will host dozens of high-​­tech research-​­oriented projects on the Silicon Valley model.” It would be a cloned vector of California culture and California ideology, incubated at the foot of the Himalayas.12 The image of this would-​­be city, a global city way ahead of itself, draws extensively on the mediascapes of mondo nano, co-​­mixing familiar narratives of nano­­tech­nol­ogy with corporate aesthetics and an exuberant rhetoric of play. To design and implement Nano­City, Bhatia’s Nano­Works Developers joined forces with the Berkeley Group for Architecture and Planning (BgAP), a team of faculty, students, and design professionals affiliated with the University of California at Berkeley. The BgAP crew considered not only how the innovation circuits of California might be transplanted to India but also how the playbor and weisure practices of the new knowledge economy might be built into the urban plan.13 Certainly, Nano­City will be a place of laboratories, businesses, and schools. These institutions will be distributed among thematic districts to secure “administrative control” and to promote technoscientific creativity (“The districts will unite people with shared interests and give them a singular purpose: innovation”).14 But the city will also feature plenty of parks and recreation areas, including India’s largest golf course. The recreation areas will merge seamlessly with the work zones and domestic environments, collapsing any strict distinctions: “Most of these amenities will be conveniently integrated into the fabric of office and residential space, so that one can work and play, all in a day’s time.” One could even live on the golf course, for example: “The golf course will dually serve as housing for those who opt to live in the high-​­end villas and residential towers lining the western perimeter of the course. . . . Housing doesn’t get any more luxurious than this.” Nano­City has the issue of work-​­life balance all figured out, it seems. As Bhatia has said, “This would be a city where you could live, work, shop and play”—​­all in one convenient location.15 Nano­City translates the grammar of innovation into a simulated N A N O­P O L I T A N I S M  205

urban space, a virtual reality available for occupation. In other words, it manifests speculative futurity in the form of virtual real estate. The empty city—​­an open settlement on the frontier of innovation—​­explicitly hails high-​­tech corporations (“Venture capitalists and it companies are called to stake a claim and have a presence in the up and coming Indian metropolis”) in addition to universities (“We will invite the world’s best educational institutes to the Nano­City to have Ph.D.-​­level courses”).16 But it also hails anyone who might want a piece of the fantasy, anyone who might be looking for “a worthwhile place to call home.” You, me, all of us! And there’s no time like the present: “The new age of urban living is upon us. It is as bustling and fast-​­paced as ever, but this time, it is more connected. It is connected to people and prosperity. It is connected to the environment. It is connected to knowledge and the greater global village. It is connected to our future. It is, in one word, Nano­City.”17 Preemptively, then, as nothing otherwise than virtual, Nano­City opens itself for business, for fun and games—​­as well as the unanticipated consequences. http://dont-​­you-​­remember-​­we-​­built-​­this-​­city​.org

The invitation to live, work, shop, and play amid the wonders of nano­­ tech­nol­ogy (see yourself here!) is vividly rendered in a publicity video that the uc Berkeley design team released in 2007. The video appeared prominently on the main Nano­City website, and it has widely circulated on YouTube and various tech ​­blogs.18 It opens with a white screen. Sitar music begins to play softly. Lines of black text leisurely come into view and then dissolve away: Welcome to the northern niche of Haryana Amidst the foothills of the Himalayas A new hub of education, business, technology and culture has arrived Welcome to the 21st century Indian metropolis Welcome to Nano­city A computer-​­generated 3D image of the city appears. From a high aerial perspective, the virtual camera circles the city, zooming in and out. From this mobile view, the city appears comfortably situated in its local environment, surrounded by nothing other than farmlands. The 2d surface image of the landscape is reproduced from satellite data but sufficiently altered to smooth over the existing villages in the area. In the 206  0111

distant background, the Himalayan foothills come into sight as the camera rotates. Like the city, the foothills are presented as 3d topographic features, rising above the flat plane of the 2d farmlands. Onscreen slogans (“greencity,” “flexcity,” “complexcity ”) characterize the city, which stands out not only as vertically heterogeneous in comparison to the horizontal landscape—​­each skyscraper and warehouse is identifiable by visible differences in height—​­but also as the largest and darkest swath of green in the region, lush with vegetation. It becomes clear that the city is encircled by two rivers. Nano­City turns out, in fact, to be a peninsula—​ ­more or less an island. (As the Nano­City website reports, “Two seasonal rivers form the eastern and western borders of the city.”19) The twenty-​ ­first-​­century metropolis is aesthetically integrated with the surrounding flatlands and yet separated, a space apart. (As the design team puts it, “Nano­City will foster an urban atmosphere on an eco-​­island of living landscape.”20) The sitar music becomes more intense as the virtual camera dips into various nodes of the city (“A city of high density nodes. A city of mixed use districts. . . . A city of parks”). Now accompanied by cymbal crescendos and handclaps, the sitar speeds up as the 3d image twists and turns to highlight the Airport District, the it District, the University District, and the BioTech District. The camera zips down the boulevards, between skyscrapers, rocketing toward the street level. It glides along tree-​­lined sidewalks and arcades. Now we see that Nano­City is filled with people—​ ­people of all races and nationalities—​­but they are also ghostly, transparent. Indeed, they are avatars: computer-​­generated people inhabiting a computer-​­generated city. Their translucent condition signifies that they are open and available for occupation, another form of speculative real estate. The virtual people entice us to enter them as proxies for our own potential life in the Nano­City. Literally, we see through them to observe the more opaque features of the city. Like the avatars of Second Life, Planet­ Side, Anarchy Online, and other mmo s where the molecular future is an everyday playspace, the see-​­through avatars of this promotional video afford the fantasy of living there and then, already in the here and now. Temporality seems all mixed up here. The city of the future is said to have arrived—​­welcome! Yet amid the heightened rhetoric of futurity, the flythrough navigation of the city reveals a strangely antiquated aesthetic, architectural designs that echo high modernism more than cutting-​­edge science: the grid plan, the segregated districts, the corporate warehouses, N A N O­P O L I T A N I S M  207

7.3. “Nano­city Promo” video: The city lies in the gap between rivers. The logo foregrounds the point of confluence (it literally dots the “i” in Nano­City). BgAP, 2007.

the wide boulevards, the arcades of the flâneur. It is more Le Corbusier or Walter Gropius than Peter Yeadon or John M. Johansen. The past visibly persists in this not-​­yet city, anchoring it down even as the hype bubble tries to carry it away. Nano­City has been designed to appear well grounded in space and place. BgAP built deep history and local “character” into the layout: “Geographically, the city is located on a semi-​­arable, greenfield site. Two seasonal rivers frame the eastern and western borders of the city and two streams trickle within its boundaries. These natural water sources and other local reservoirs feed a rich landscape spotted with plots of agricultural vegetation. Thick canopy trees line existing paths, canals and roadways. These trees have been many centuries in the making and will be preserved in Nano­City, so they can maintain the roots they have today into the future.”21 These ancient trees play a symbolic role in showing that Nano­City is rooted in cultural heritage: its speculative ventures will remain grounded in reality; transnational interests will remain committed to local traditions. The water features, too, are made to symbolize the indigenous and mythic past carried forward into the future. The city’s location at the confluence of rivers evokes the significance of converging rivers in Hindu thought, the sacred associations of the point of confluence. As the promotional video emphasizes, the volumetric 3d object of Nano­City sits precisely at the site of confluence, where the two rivers flow together at the foot of the Himalayas. The video concludes by dissolving this image into the official Nano­City logo (fig. 7.3). The speculative design laminates the semiology of Hinduism with the vocabulary of nano­­tech­nol­ogy—​­hybridizing the deep roots of culture with speculative science.22 It channels the symbolic currency of knowledge traditions, even the image of Vedic science as 208  0111

a confluence of modern thought and ancient wisdom, while foregrounding the secular and fiscal dimensions of molecular innovation. For Nano­City bodies forth one of the dominant tropes of high-​­tech discourse today, namely, technological convergence. Among the technorati, the idea that all sciences and technologies are rapidly converging at a common level—​­whether digital convergence or nano­­scale convergence—​ ­has become conventional wisdom.23 The desire for programmable matter epitomizes this discourse, as we have seen. Theorists of convergence habitually draw upon fluidic metaphors: oceans, streams, torrents, and so forth. After all, another term for technological convergence is “confluence.” Recall that Bhatia has said, “Nano­­tech­nol­ogy sits at the confluence of numerous areas of research, not just computing. . . . It’s material science, biotechnology, pharmaceutical research and nano­­tech­nol­ogy itself.” Nano­City, with its rivers, its discrete industrial, academic, and conference districts, its interlinked paths and parks and recreational areas, likewise sits at the confluence of these flows of knowledge and invention. In this way, the urban space would physically incarnate the long-​­range visions of the global nano­­tech­nol­ogy industry. Its organization—​­segregating research disciplines and urban functions only to reconvene them for the sake of innovation—​­reproduces a standard image of convergence discourse. According to the design team, “Innovation is the motivation for Nano­city’s four districts. . . . The districts will house a number of unique neighbourhoods and will be connected through a comprehensive system of roads and public transit options.”24 The plan uncannily echoes a key figure from the influential U.S. nsf-​­d oe report on Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance, which maps the confluence of knowledge streams onto an urban street diagram (fig. 7.4). The caption explains: “The integration and synergy of the four technologies (nano-​­bio-​­info-​­cogno) originate from the nano­­scale, where the building blocks of matter are established. This picture symbolizes the confluence of technologies that now offers the promise of improving human lives in many ways, and the realignment of traditional disciplinary boundaries that will be needed to realize this potential. New and more direct pathways towards human goals are envisioned in working habits, in economic activity, and in the humanities.”25 The confluence of these technologies then feeds into a larger ocean—​ ­the future—​­which presents bold promises as well as risks. It is represented, for example, in an iconic image from the Rathenau Institute in the N A N O­P O L I T A N I S M  209

7.4. A map of convergence. Robert E. Horn, 2003. Originally from Roco and Bainbridge, eds., Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance. Reproduced with permission. 7.5. “The New Technology Wave: Are We Ready for It?” On the beach, a young couple waves to the molecular technology wave. Reproduced from Flux Magazine. Rathenau Institute, September 2009.

Netherlands (fig. 7.5). Or similarly, in the words of the Canadian bioethicist Pat Mooney, “More than a new wave of technology, nano­­tech­nol­ogy is a technological tsunami, unseen until it is upon us.”26 The rhetoric of Nano­City overflows with such metaphors. For instance, BgAP has written, “If the rise of silicon technology marked the 20th century, then nano­­tech­nol­ogy will be the wave we ride into the future. As its name suggests, Nano­City will be the place where learning (Nano) and lifestyle (City) become one and the same.”27 The wave of nano washes over everything, blending the practices of urban living with the practices of the molecular sciences, now inseparable. It will be deliriously exciting, but also profitable. Again, the famous golf course works as a suggestive symbol: “The course is also designed to accommodate and capitalize on the elevated flood levels that arrive with the annual monsoon season. These waters will serve to intensify the difficulty of the course and heighten the game playing experience.”28 This city of playbor is designed in every detail to “capitalize” on the surging waters that propel it into the future. As the flood intensifies, the game only promises to get more and more fun. Amid this torrent of novelty and hype, then, the signs of cultural history, ethnicity, and geography gathered in the image of Nano­City serve to limit wild or unprofitable speculation and, for all intents and purposes, orient the future. They provide recognizable points of stability against the otherwise disorienting effects of the onrushing tsunami, the vast uncertainty that emerges from the promise, the risk that nano will change everything. The media apparatus of Nano­City reassures its target audience of international investors, techno-​­enthusiasts, industrial developers, research universities, and government agencies that, while technological confluence will undoubtedly produce a remarkably different world, some things will always stay the same (“This city of future will bring back lifestyle of the past juxtaposed with the avant-​­garde”).29 The promotional video couples computational imagery and marketing slogans with a rousing sitar soundtrack as yet another way to suggest innovation married to tradition. It performs the Indian-​­ness of Nano­City at the same time as its worldliness, announcing a certain kind of exotic difference within the media ecologies of globalization. But this mediation of Indian culture likewise reproduces the sexual politics of exoticism, despite or even because of the city’s similarity to any number of other

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techno-​­cities and designer research parks. To be sure, Nano­City opens itself up to the rest of the world, tempting foreign investors (“Nano City would attract the best entrepreneurs across the world”) and dominant corporations (“Top institutions of the world will be invited”) to come inside and have their way (“a breeding ground for would-​­be billionaires”).30 In the video, the virtual camera plunges vertiginously into the city and then races down the central throughway in sync with the rhythms of the sitar, surging to a climax. Finally reaching the banks of the river, the camera slows and withdraws. It pulls away from the city, returning to its aerial perspective  .  .  . and the sitar fades to silence. Nestled demurely in its fertile delta, Nano­City awaits further exploration, even as the screen turns white and the production credits roll. But we are to understand that it swells with potential, soon to galvanize the world from the bottom up (Bhatia again: “I want this to be a city that fuels the economic growth not just of India, but of the world”).31 In the media apparatus of Nano­City, then, we see an instance of what the media theorist Wendy Chun has described as high-​­tech Orientalism: the discursive mechanisms by which familiar if not even stereotypical signs of race, ethnicity, and nationality afford an orienting function, helping make sense of the destabilizing effects of world-​­changing technologies. High-​­tech Orientalism manages the disruptive threats of emerging technologies and rising economic powers by presenting them through figures of the exotic, even recollecting historical fantasies of colonization and penetration—​­while at the same time fetishizing the technological prowess of particular Asian countries in the new world order. As Chun explains, “high-​­tech Orientalism seeks to orient the reader to a technology-​ o ­ verloaded present/future . . . through the promise of readable difference, and through a conflation of information networks with an exotic urban landscape. . . . High-​­tech Orientalism offers the pleasure of exploring, the pleasure of ‘learning,’ and the pleasure of being somewhat overwhelmed, but ultimately jacked in.”32 Consider again the trope of the nano tsunami, a Japanese term now made to signify global upheaval (“nano­­tech­ nol­ogy is a technological tsunami, unseen until it is upon us”). It is a trope sometimes embraced by Japanese scientists—​­for example, physicists and chemists who experiment with tiny “nano tsunamis” in their labs.33 But it is also used by European and North American tech bloggers ​­ to represent the threat of nano as a disruptive technology as much as the threat

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7.6. Nano Tsunami. Edited by David Voyle, the Nano Tsunami website was a major European source of nano­tech news and information from 2003 to 2009. Voyle started the site after reading Michael Crichton’s nano-​­thriller Prey: “I wanted the site to offer no fixed point of view about nano­­tech­nol­ogy, I simply worked with the idea that if someone, or a company, government etc. said anything (good or bad) about nano­­tech­nol­ogy I would publish it and my readers would make up their minds if it was ‘fact or fiction’ ” (email to author, November 3, 2013).

of pan-​­Asian dominance in the global market, collating news headlines such as “India the Next Nano­tech Superpower?” under the icon of the unstoppable wave (fig. 7.6). It is a way of coming to terms with the changing conditions of science and innovation today—​­overwhelmed but plugged into the hot spots, ready to plunge into those zones of technopolitical power that are now poised to take over—​­irresistibly, from anywhere in the world. Playing along, Nano­City as the “21st century Indian metropolis” stimulates a desire for India as the next nano­tech superpower, a dominant force of innovation, but it also remains submissive to foreign investors and top companies. The city appears globally progressive but rooted in heritage. It is symbolically insulated from its local environment—​­an island rising above the flatlands of India, an island rising above the tsunami of nano­­tech­nol­ogy—​­but still reassuringly Indian, grounded in the geopolitics of the present and the traditions of the past. Down to earth, secure, realistic—​­nothing too risky, mind you!—​­Nano­City would materialize the principles of convergence, from the bottom up and by design. It would be a place for living the nano­­tech­nol­ogy future, surfing the tsunami every day—​­but never too far from shore.

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http://a-​­metropolis-​­of-​­many-​­narrativ.es/that-​­converged-briefly/ and-​­then-​­separated-​­for-​­ever​.html

Nano­City has been designed, in its architectural layout and its discursive apparatus, to produce citizens of the nano­­tech­nol­ogy future. Its basic principle might be described, somewhat facetiously, as nano­politanism. For the city would inculcate residents with the hopes and visions of technological confluence, drafting them as participants in the gathering of all sciences under the sign of nano, all nations under the sign of nano. Extending a global invitation for knowledge workers to migrate and take up residency in the new home of the future—​­at least, in anticipation—​ N ­ ano­City conjures forth an urban imaginary that operates across multiple scales of identification, from the atomic to the planetary.34 It positions itself as a utopian place for accessing and inhabiting the infinitesimal dimensions of matter as much as the international dimensions of markets. But in many ways, Nano­City’s desire to shape the future by creating the lived conditions of convergence arrives too late. As we have seen, something like nano­politanism has been emerging in many cities and nations all around the world, in universities and corporate laboratories, in online games and social-​­media networks. It is the particular form of cosmopolitan imaginary that characterizes the era of mondo nano. Like other modes of cosmopolitanism, the nano version has both affirmative and firmative aspects: world opening and world enclosing, politically hospitable and economically invested, embracing difference and uniformity at once.35 Yet above all, it sees a changed planet already at home in the present, longing and belonging inseparable. It is a cognitive engagement with globality in the mode of scientific speculation—​­a speculative globality, animated by the promises of high-​­tech futurism. In any event, popular and political discussions of nano had been expanding in India for many years by the time Bhatia and his colleagues announced the plans for Nano­City. As early as 2004, President A. P. J. ­Abdul Kalam—​­himself a rocket scientist, the “missile man of India”—​­was extolling the political opportunities of nano-​­convergence: “We are today at the convergence of nano, bio and information technologies. This age, I feel will create a historic revolution and we must be in the driver’s seat to contribute towards this societal change.”36 Shortly thereafter, as if taking the suggestion to hop in the driver’s seat quite literally, Tata Motors of India released the Nano car (fig. 7.7). The Tata Nano, advertised as the 214  0111

7.7. Tata Nano. Tata Motors, 2009.

world’s cheapest car, suddenly became an iconic figure of innovation. Tata presented it as a small revolution: “Nano­lution. Are you with it? Get up to date with the car that is already changing the history of automobiles.”37 Some used the term “nano­vation” to describe what its compact design would mean for the global automotive industry.38 Despite a few controversies over its safety and production, as well as a disappointing performance on the market, this tiny vehicle has contributed to the sense that India is accelerating into a future marked by nano. It is a notion that Kalam and other Indian political figures have stressed over the past decade: “We believe that nano­­tech­nol­ogy would give us an opportunity, if we take appropriate and timely action, to become one of the important technological nations in the world.”39 Toward the end of his presidency, Kalam recommended a “nano mission for India”: “In areas like nano­­tech­nol­ogy and convergence of nano­­tech­nol­ogy with ict and bt . . . even while we are concentrating on basic research with eminent scientists working in it, simultaneously Indian industrial groups small, big and medium should concurrently work on commercialization of nano­ technologies. . . . The main focus should be speedy commercialization to fit into the global market. The time is now ripe since our economy is in the ascent phase. . . . We should mount a mission mode operation to deliver tangible products to meet our national demand as well as to be beneficial to the other countries.”40 To support the vision of India’s ascending eminence in nano­tech, the union government funded a variety of research and capacity-​­building efforts, in particular through the Nano Science and Technology Initiative of the Department of Science and Technology, which officially launched the “Nano Mission” program in 2007. There have also been focused educational N A N O­P O L I T A N I S M  215

initiatives, programs on “Nano for the Young,” attempts to advertise nano in rural areas, and so forth. C. N. R. Rao, the head of the Scientific Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India and the chairman of the Nano Mission program, has often spoken on the need to inspire Indian youth: “In the area of nano­­tech­nol­ogy, India is in tune with the world. We would be the leader provided we tap the best young talent, particularly from rural India.”41 At the same time, as part of a long-​­standing governmental agenda to promote the values of science for the good of the country, some efforts have been made to popularize nano­­tech­nol­ogy and enhance the public appreciation of its implications.42 As Kalam emphasized in 2011, “The role of science communication is no longer limited by communication bandwidth but the imagination bandwidth of scientists. . . . [It is important] to make all citizens, particularly those in remote and rural areas (e.g. India has 700 million rural population) to feel excitement about science.”43 As one such effort in popularization, the National Council for Science and Technology Communication (ncstc) has been helping to expand the Scientoon project—​­created by Pradeep Srivastava from the Central Drug Research Institute—​­into the area of “Nano­scientoons.” The idea of scientoons is “cartoons which are based on science, they not only make you smile and laugh but also provide information about new researches, subjects, data and concepts in a simple, understandable and interesting way.”44 The slogan of the scientoons project is “Communicating Science with the Planet,” and it is now being taken up in many different countries. Starting in 2008, the ncstc, collaborating with Srivastava and other Indian scientoonists, produced an entire curriculum of scientoons focused on various aspects of nano­­tech­nol­ogy (fig. 7.8). The nano­scientoons have been translated into a range of different media: “radio scientoons,” “puppet scientoons,” and “online scientoons.”45 The nano­scientoons serve up core technical concepts together with a joke about the incredible smallness of nano, the future innovations of nano, or the financial stakes of nano (fig. 7.9). Indeed, most top-​­down efforts to popularize nano in India—​­both as a technical concept and as a compact signifier of futurity—​­have primarily emphasized its economic promises, aside from whatever scientific novelties it might entail. Speculation, above all—​­but all in good fun! And no doubt, many parts of the country want in on the action. In 2008, during the second annual Bangalore Nano convention, the Karnataka state government promised to vigorously cultivate nano in Bangalore 216  0111

7.8. Nano­scientoons: The tsunami is coming, and it is small. Pradeep K. Srivastava, 2009. Reproduced with permission. 7.9. Nano­scientoons: The speculative economy of nano­­tech­nol­ogy. Pradeep K. Sri­ vastava, 2009. Reproduced with permission.

and throughout the region, including development of a giant “Nano Park and Incubation Center.” On the occasion, Vice-​­President Mohammad Hamid Ansari said, “It is now globally accepted that nano­­tech­nol­ogy is dramatically changing the face of industry and economy and will be a transformative force in the future of India and the world.” He then preemptively declared Bangalore to be “the Nano­city of India.”46 So nano­politanism has been spreading. It is in this cultural climate that Bhatia’s own Nano­City project tried to take root, alongside other aspiring techno-​­cities and research parks in India—​­not to mention memories of failure (a number of knowledge cities proposed in recent years have never materialized) and even catastrophe (Bhopal and the Union Carbide disaster ever recalling what a city of molecular industry might actually mean beyond the mode of speculation).47 By 2007, in any case, Bhatia and his colleagues were making real progress to put Nano­City on the map. But then, Nano­City ran into some troubles. http://someone-​­always-​­playing-​­corporation-​­games.info

Shortly after the project was announced in 2006, land prices in villages on the development site skyrocketed. The villagers and local real estate agents had acquired a sense of future value based on the exuberant claims surrounding the fictive city. Plots that had been valued at Rs 10–​­15 lakh per acre only a few months prior were now commanding Rs 35–​­50 lakh per acre. As a representative of Dandhardu village said, “We will sell our land to the company only at the market price. Since our land is at a prime location we expect a compensation of not less than Rs 40 lakh an acre.”48 These prices were far beyond what the Nano­City budget had anticipated. Bhatia’s team was opposed to forcible land acquisition, and by the end of 2007 they had succeeded in purchasing only fifty acres. Bhatia lamented that things were not going well: “Every subsequent acre of land we were buying was more expensive than the previous one.”49 Then came 2008. When the global economic crisis hit, the assets of the public-​­private company that Bhatia had established with the Haryana government, Nano­City Haryana Limited, also plummeted. The grand vision for Nano­City was floundering. At this point, the Parsvnath Development Company came in and bought a 38 percent stake in the project. The Haryana government maintained 10 percent, and the Bhatia group held

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52 percent. Nano­City was suddenly renamed “Parsvnath Nano City.”50 The change of fortune made the fundamental indebtedness of techno-​ ­f uturity to finance capital even more visible: now, if there were to be a nano­­tech­nol­ogy utopia, it would be marketed by Parsvnath. But despite the forward-​­looking rhetoric on stage here, the corporations, governments, and individuals investing in Nano­City were not really thinking about the future as such, and certainly not about the potential for the future to be much different from the present. The risk aversion, that is, the limited imagination of financial speculators became increasingly evident as the time frame for Nano­City began to stretch further and further into uncertainty. While some were comfortable with the idea that building Nano­City could take ten years, as Bhatia had initially promised, few were prepared to imagine a venture worth waiting for much longer than that. The bold dreams proved incommensurable with the myopia of a speculative capitalism more interested in overextending the present, controlling uncertainty to turn a profit in the here and now. Which is to say, the nano tsunami was never really given a chance. Not even a year after buying into Nano­City, Parsvnath realized that the project was more future oriented than bargained for. According to Pradeep Jain, the chairman of Parsvnath, “Everyone is sceptical about long-​­term investment returns now and no one wants to block cash flow. Even though the project is fully sanctioned, you need money to acquire the land from farmers. And even if we acquire the land, there is no guarantee of its offtake.”51 Long-​ ­range visions and insecure futures were not part of the plan, it seems. Parsvnath wanted out. By the end of 2010, the developer was arranging to sell back its equity, abandoning Sabeer Bhatia and his fantasy city to their fates (fig. 7.10). The Bhatia group struggled to find a “foreign investor” to rescue the project, making vague assurances of a new partner waiting in the wings.52 But the problem of land acquisition remained intractable, for every advertisement that Nano­City was still happening provoked real estate speculation to respond in kind. The neoliberal utopia of Nano­City would remain out of reach—​­no place at all. No one fully anticipated the villagers, it seemed. At least, not the real villagers. Although the discourse of convergence has some progressive political aspects, envisioning that the engines of innovation will change the world—​­mondo nano and all that—​­it also evinces a familiar kind of paternalism toward those deemed exterior to the streams of science, the

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7.10. Sabeer Bhatia appears rather glum in a 2010 ndtv exclusive report, “Parsvnath Looking to Sell 38% Stake in Nano­City Project.” This footage was actually repurposed from an earlier 2008 press conference reported in ndtv, “Sabeer Bhatia Logs on to Realty.”

straits of capital. It often imagines that the wave of nano­­tech­nol­ogy will carry everyone in its wake without protest, resistance, or irritation. According to BgAP, Nano­City will be built around and within the naturally existing villages, hydrology and agricultural patterns of the land. In this way, it will use context as opportunity. . . . Nano­City will use the same approach with the existing villages on the site. There are 11 small villages with a cumulative population of approximately 8,000 inhabitants on the land. These villagers reside on 220 acres, or roughly 2%, of the property. Much like the land itself, these people have a future in Nano­City. The initial pay-​­off for the land will be profitable and the appreciation of the property over time will prove even more lucrative for those who become shareholders in the real estate development. Also, Nano­City is planned to develop gradually and local villagers will have the opportunity to farm on the property until its development begins. Even after completion, development restrictions will reserve a periphery belt of land around the city for agricultural farming. Local farmers will be encouraged to produce a diverse variety of crops on this land to sell in the city at higher profit rates. While the city is under construction, 220  0111

villagers will also have the opportunity to live and work in the builder’s towns, where low-​­cost housing, employment and education will be provided. Overall, the financial incentives and educational opportunities available to local villagers and their families will have the potential to provide them with an advantageous new lease on life.53 The project team imagined villagers eager to join the adventure of Nano­City, lending a hand even while relegated to the “periphery”: “Much like the land itself, these people have a future in Nano­City.” There was a plan for integration, folding the periphery into the whole: “It takes a village to build a city. Local villagers will be encouraged to gain employment through local construction projects and live in the builder’s towns. . . . As the city grows outward and the need for construction diminishes, the builder’s towns will be integrated into the greater urban fabric of Nano­ city.”54 However, drafting the villagers into the top-​­down vision proved difficult, especially because they had come to their own surprising conclusions about what a future in Nano­City could mean. They were already speculating on their own, from the bottom up. They had already become nano­politans. Naval Bhatia, director of Nano­City.in Developers and cousin to Sabeer Bhatia, became exasperated by the ongoing inflated real estate prices in the villages even after the global financial crisis: “We offered them medical insurance, education for kids and accommodation, but they seem to prefer farming.” This assessment from above seems quite detached from the situation on the ground, however. It presumes an absolutely rural and georgic imaginary to dominate village life (“naturally existing villages” and so forth). Instead, many of the villagers had already accommodated themselves to the logic of mondo nano, accepting its promises of financial abundance as well as its uncertainties. Of course, there were some who held strongly to their heritage and opposed development on principle (Karam Singh: “Even my great grandfather was born here. How can I sell this land? They have plans to build an airport on our lush green agricultural fields”). But others were trying to maximize gains, realizing that the economic value of the region would grow tremendously once Nano­ City had come into being—​­yet intuiting that, until it came into being, the potential payoff would be much lower. As Karnail Singh of Parwala village said, “Everybody is waiting for the company to start work. Till then confusion will prevail. Only those in dire need are selling their land.” At N A N O­P O L I T A N I S M  221

the same time, a number of those who had agreed to sell saw it as an opportunity to invest in a region that would soon be saturated in global capital—​­the new Silicon Valley of India. According to Harjinder Singh of village Batwal, “Instead of opting for employment in the Nano­City, we’d rather buy more land.”55 The villagers were participating tit for tat in the game of speculation that had shaped the Nano­City project from its very beginning. Nano­ City had presented itself as a venturesome object of desire, and the villagers were playing according to the same rules as the corporate investors: the rules of finance capital, futures markets, and even the corresponding hedging practices and insurance fantasies.56 Les non-​­dupes errent—​­perhaps, or perhaps not. Unwilling to make concessions until the Nano­City project had actually begun groundwork, the villagers were anticipating that the virtual flow of capital could take a drastic turn in any direction, for better or worse. In holding out for a possible future where their land might be even more valuable, they were simultaneously insuring themselves against a possible future where Nano­City never came into being, and all promises for regional advantage would go up in smoke. In other words, they were protecting their best assets, which were also the same assets that allowed them to play the game at all. The game ends in stalemate, an internal seizure. It is not uncommon for financial capitalism, insofar as hedging against long-​­term uncertainty often risks damming up potential fluidities, precluding whatever future might have been. As Bhura Khan of village Shyampur suggested, the more liquid capital was promised for the vicinity around Nano­City, the more it dried up: “Neither can we invest in our land nor are we getting money easily from lenders, who fear that we may sell our land tomorrow and their money will be doomed.”57 Today, speculative technoscience has become so successful at its own shell game, its own pawning of vaporware, that its ability to actually deliver on promises gets caught in the very practices of speculation that were driving the system in the first place. This is not an innovation model where investment leads to implementation and payoff. Instead, the model itself has been forestalled by an overpresencing of the future, turning speculation into an autonomous condition. An end in itself, in other words. Terminal speculation. Nano­City is just one of a growing number of nano­politan visions that hypervalue the near-​­term returns of technological convergence at the 222  0111

7.11. Paris au XXIe siècle. Reproduced from Siemens’ Pictures of the Future magazine: Aschenbrenner, “Scenario 2015: Hidden Wonders.” Siemens ag, 2003.

expense of the long-​­term future, overselling the transformative potentials of molecular science while actively underwhelming whatever capacity might exist for real change (and certainly never conceiving anything like an actual techno-​­revolution or nano-​­tsunami). The promise becomes more valuable than the future as such, and the speculative drive has nowhere left to turn but back, which typically manifests as a radical foreshortening of vision. For example, in 2003 the Siemens ag corporation presented a cartoonish scene of Paris in the near future (fig. 7.11). Nearly everything in this future Paris, we are told, has “got plenty of nano­­tech­ nol­ogy in it”—​­the future will hold many “hidden wonders”—​­but it all looks the same as ever: “The cafes and boulevards haven’t changed much. However, new invisible materials are now integrated in many everyday objects. . . . This nano­structuring concept really did catch on amazingly quickly.”58 So quickly, in fact, that the present is already the future—​ c­ ollapsed upon itself. In fiction as in real life. Nano­polis Suzhou, for example, located in the N A N O­P O L I T A N I S M  223

Sangtian Island zone of the Suzhou Industrial Park in China, began construction in 2011. Operated by the state-​­owned Suzhou Nano­tech Corporation, Nano­polis Suzhou plans to bring in dozens of nano­­tech­nol­ogy companies and research groups from around the world. These innovators are to be “incubated” by the principles of convergence that inform the city plan, the architectural patterns that accentuate a confluence of scales: “The creative leitmotif of the design is the relationship of scale between the molecular world, man and urban space.”59 It also involves a merger of futurity and historicity: “The overall design of Nano­polis Suzhou contains ancient Chinese city-​­making philosophy and realize[s] the perfect combination of Suzhou classical architectural culture and the emerging high-​­tech industry.  .  .  . In the future, the Nano­polis will focus on new fields, explore new resources and create new patterns.” The new, always newer than ever before, yet cloned in the incubator of the past—​­a form of speculation that never gets too far ahead of itself. Indeed, the up-​­and-​ c­ oming Nano­polis Suzhou wants nothing more than to embody “a sense of stableness and generosity.”60Attending the future, yes, but in the phantasmatic form of an eternal now. These nano­politan projects plainly anticipate the whole planet converging, connected by networks of information and molecular innovation (emphasized in the Siemens image by Parisians uplinking through laptops of nano­tubes and phones powered by nano fuel). Yet they depict high-​­tech convergence in the comfort of the familiar and the quotidian, only more so: a speculative vision that might as well have already happened. In other words, these techno-​­cities (no less imaginary than real) already disclose the condition of terminal speculation, banking on the future by overdrawing the present, with all its lock-​­ins and path dependencies. The tsunami is both invited and held back by the breakwaters of these cities. And this is what nano­politanism is all about: a way of imaging the currencies of everyday life in relation to an always deferred future, a state of endless anticipation . . . waiting for nano . . . http://somewhere-​­beyond-​­the-​­sea.net

It is nothing new. The nano­city—​­the city of the future, promoting nano­ technical ways of living—​­has been depicted in science fiction for the past twenty years or more. It is another standard figure in the cultural discourse of mondo nano, along with the nano­car, the nano-​­island, the 224  0111

nano­warrior, and so forth. A variety of novels, comic books, and video games from around the world have made the condition of nano­politanism a central theme, as well as an object of critique. These fictions not only represent the transformative effects of digital matter on urban space, but more importantly, they provide critical vocabularies and conceptual resources for addressing the relations among speculative science and the speculative economy, the configurations of a speculative globality. That is to say, science fiction teaches us to play nano­poly—​­and to see how the game is rigged. Consider Rimi Chatterjee’s 2005 novel Signal Red. It takes place in an Indian research park called the Center for Advanced Research and Development. Scientists and their families live full-​­time here; it is a city unto itself, with all the amenities. But it is isolated from the rest of the country: “This complex in the middle of nowhere was the child and citadel of science, clean and limpid in its stark organization, its grid layout, its lit streets and planned bungalows. . . . [It was] a valued and valuable asset to the nation.” At one point it is likened to “an uninhabited island”; at another, it seems more like “a self-​­contained space station.”61 The Center focuses on defense applications, including nano­tech optical systems, weaponized nano-​­powders, and microwave laser guns. It is run by a nationalistic administration enamored of the discourse of Vedic science, convinced of the Hindu roots of all modern scientific discoveries and the necessity of employing scientific innovations in support of hindutva. The families who live at the Center are effectively brain-​­slaves of the security state. Not only compelled by patriotic and economic incentives, they are also closely monitored to ensure an appropriate degree of commitment to their research projects. This involves micro-​­robots implanted in their bodies, as well as mind-​­altering pharmaceuticals to keep them in line. The inhabitants of the Center are thus turned into nano­politans through a form of machinic draft. Moreover, the influence of the Center spreads beyond its gates. A village situated on lands owned by the Center has been used as a testing site for the weaponized nano-​­powders, and the villagers have been suffering the horrific effects. Unwittingly, these villagers have been incorporated as nano­politans, just like the scientists who live in the citadel itself, and just as disposable. Chatterjee’s novel offers a critique of Hindu nationalist and fundamentalist influences on the institutions of Indian science in the 1990s, while also addressing the history of internal division and trauma in the N A N O­P O L I T A N I S M  225

self-​­image of the postcolonial Indian nation.62 In doing so, it exposes the modes of terminal speculation that have often mobilized technical institutions, the science cities and research parks now of such intense fiscal and national interest (“a valued and valuable asset to the nation”). The protagonist Gopal, a nano­scientist who lives at the Center with his wife Vidura, believes that weaponized nano-​­powder is being developed only to prevent one possible future, as a deterrence: “no one will ever use it in an actual war.” It is purely for speculative purposes: “Insurance. As a weapon of last resort, if we are destroyed by non-​­conventional weapons, if all else fails.”63 But this weapon never to be used, a token in a virtual game, is bundled in forces that overpresence the future, foreclosing the desired outcome. Instead of ensuring that such weapons will never be used, the logic of preemption takes over: “Those who believe differently will sooner or later act against us. We have to pre-​­empt them with overwhelming force.” The advocates of this idea go so far as to fabricate a missile attack from an unnamed “neighboring country” to secure additional provisions for defense research, creating a “playground for the best minds in Indian science” and escalating the development of nightmarish weapons that would otherwise have never been conceived.64 When Gopal objects to the policies of the Center, he is corralled by the administration and his mind is altered. He and his family are destined to live out their lives in the boundaries of the science city, waiting for things to change, waiting forever. This is the way of terminal speculation: preemptively creating a future that is no future. Similarly, in Kathleen Ann Goonan’s 1994 novel Queen City Jazz, Cincinnati has been utterly transformed by advanced molecular technologies. The city now autonomously regenerates itself—​­its infrastructures as well as its inhabitants—​­according to recycled programs, rebooting figures and scenes from American cultural history, literature, and the arts in an endless loop: a closed circuit that relaunches the past each time it moves forward. The city is trapped in a holding pattern. The past and the present, the living and the dead are all commingled in the nano­politan system, which can never get beyond its cycles of terminal speculation: “And each time the whole sad mess began again.”65 As it turns out, there are two different programs, two different speculative drives embedded in the city: one that speculates backward, feeding on itself, and another that speculates forward, opening to uncertainty. These two programs are caught in a stalemate; as Rose, one of the original 226  0111

nano-​­programmers of the city, says to the core architect Abe, “Just think of it as a game.  .  .  . When your city plays one card, mine will play another.”66 The only way out of the deadlock, the sequence of stratagems and trumps that inevitably triggers the game to start over again, comes when the protagonist Verity discovers how to make the city let go the past and “plunge toward the fearful and beckoning unknown.”67 This climactic release turns out to have been available to the city all along in Rose’s forward-​­looking code—​­a figure for the utopian as such. But it needed Verity’s capacity to produce difference from within. This capacity is symbolized throughout the novel by jazz and artistic improvisation—​­playing without rules or securities, innovating beyond the cycles of the familiar and profitable—​­even as the narrative shows how such aesthetic practices are themselves quickly commoditized and neutralized, folded into the enduring present of the modern, the machine, the city. We might also point to Nancy Kress’s 2006 short story “Nano Comes to Clifford Falls.” The arrival of advanced nano­­tech­nol­ogy in the rural American town of Clifford Falls turns the villagers into inhabitants of the high-​ ­tech future, with all the luxuries and premiums. But in anticipating how much nano will change everything, the majority of people fail to change anything—​­about themselves, or the way they wish to live: “I think nano is a sorter. The old sorting used to put the people with money and education and nice things in one pile and the rest of us in another. But nano sorts out two different piles: the ones who like to work because work is what you do, and the ones who don’t.”68 So the new post-​­scarcity economy causes the town—​­indeed, all the cities in the world—​­to break apart, decaying into indolence and violence. The more savvy inhabitants of Clifford Falls regroup as a handcraft commune, restricting their reliance on nano while the rest of the world flounders. Instead of global prosperity, the promise of nano triggers decline and fall. As suggested by the name of “Clifford Falls,” the story recollects key themes of Clifford Simak’s 1952 novel City, inasmuch as technological change leads to affluence but also disintegrates the city as a social unit: “The city is an anachronism,” writes Simak.69 Taking up the thematics of anachronism directly, Kress’s story narrates the speculative drive routed backward through earlier fictive narratives and cultural norms, approaching nano as a signifier of radical futurity as well as its internal limit. This is perhaps best captured by the moment when a child’s experiment breaks the main nano­factory in Clifford Falls: “now all it’ll produce N A N O­P O L I T A N I S M  227

is garbage cans, no matter what you tell it!”70 A heap of broken images, available for recycling—​­but not the future, not now. Over and over. In Warren Ellis’s Transmetropolitan series, technological confluence has changed many things in the city known only as The City, except for greed and corruption; the ubiquitous nano­tech Maker appliances, for instance, are controlled by the Mob—​­and everyone is in debt. Ian McDonald’s 1994 novel Necroville, re-​­titled Terminal Café in North America, focuses on nano­tech ghettos whose inhabitants are resurrected zombies, a permanent underclass of exploitable labor. William Gibson’s novels Virtual Light (1993), Idoru (1996), and All Tomorrow’s Parties (1999) consider the possibility of gentrifying and securitizing entire cities with nano­­tech­nol­ogy—​­in this case, Tokyo and San Francisco—​­unbeknownst to those who live there. A powerful entrepreneur behind this effort concedes that the point is to hold back the future, the transformative promise of the nano tsunami, even while profiting from it: “I want the advent of a degree of functional nano­­tech­nol­ogy in a world that will remain recognizably descended from the one I woke in this morning. I want my world transfigured, yet I want my place in that world to be equivalent to the one I now occupy. I want to have my cake and eat it too.”71 In these texts, nano­politanism proves to be a form of capture and coercion in advance, a mode of techno-​­finance aligned with the machinic draft. Yet even so, it affords awareness and perspicacity. For living in the nano­city means coming face-​­to-​­face with the promises and perils of molecular science, day in and day out, which can also galvanize change from below. For example, as we saw earlier, the 2005 “Nanite City” story line of the Sonic the Hedgehog comic book concerns a city of self-​­replicating nano-​ c­ omputers. It begins colonizing the planet Mobius: “The natural environment is terraformed into a sprawling artificial development! . . . And at its present rate of speed, the entire surface of Mobius will be covered in under a week!”72 The Nanite City gobbles up everything and everyone in its path, turning them into nano­robots. But the process of absorbing organic and bionic beings causes an inner crisis for the city’s central programming. Sonic and friends gain the upper hand, subduing the Nanite City and reconstituting it as New Mobotropolis, a home for all freedom fighters (though it would remain a site of political strife for years to come). And then there are video games that offer estranging urban spaces for players to navigate, build, or destroy: the “Nano­tech Age” arcologies of SimEarth (1990), the nano­tech shopping terminals of Tokyo in Binary 228  0111

Domain (2012), the nano-​­transformed urban jungle of Manhattan in Crysis 3 (2013), and so forth. These virtual cityscapes provide hands-​­on access to the systems of terminal speculation. At the same time, they promote other possibilities of resistance and intervention by teaching us to play even better than before. Consider BioShock, developed by 2K Boston and released in 2007. BioShock takes place in an underwater city built by the charismatic entrepreneur Andrew Ryan, whose political views echo those of the philosopher-​­novelist Ayn Rand, author of The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). The city of Rapture was to be a space for pure individualism and free-​­market innovation. But then a powerful molecular technology appears: synthetic bio-​­machines called plasmids (inspired by bacterial plasmids), which provide amazing performance enhancements when injected. The plasmids operate together with a stem-​­cell derivative called adam and a biochemical solution called eve to make the flesh malleable, instantaneously restructuring human genetics and morphology. These technologies turn out to be highly lucrative—​­and addictive. With no regulation in the free market of Rapture, the mass addiction to adam and plasmids profoundly transforms the city. Ryan realizes that he is losing control, but it is too late. His effort to crack down on the plasmid trade and stifle Fontaine Futuristics, the corporation developing these technologies, only intensifies social tension. The volatile situation turns into armed conflict and a weaponized plasmid race, leading to the complete collapse of Rapture. The game focuses on Jack, the player-​­avatar. Jack arrives in Rapture apparently by accident, having survived a plane crash into the ocean. He explores the ruined metropolis, experiencing its strange suspension of past and future—​­the aesthetics and music of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s together with the futuristic imagery of science fiction (fig. 7.12). The architecture is art deco and modernist; the ambient soundtrack is Bing Crosby (“Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams”) and Bobby Darin (“Beyond the Sea”).73 Tattered posters announce “Happy New Year 1959,” revealing the moment when the utopian vision folded back on itself, consumed in financial panic and civil war. Rapture is frozen in time, at the bottom of the sea—​­and lost in its own addiction to molecular technologies, which were the product of the high-​­tech economy and the trigger of its crisis. As Jack navigates the city, battling fatally addicted plasmid users called “splicers,” it gradually becomes clear that he is not quite in control of his own actions. N A N O­P O L I T A N I S M  229

7.12. BioShock: Welcome to Rapture. 2K Games, 2007.

There is a plot twist [spoiler alert!]: every significant decision that Jack has made in the game—​­piloted by the player—​­was involuntary, the result of molecular and behavioral engineering. Jack is Andrew Ryan’s illegitimate son, purchased as an embryo by Ryan’s business rival Fontaine. Biologically programmed as a sleeper cell, Jack becomes an avatar of political forces beyond himself (much like The Manchurian Candidate). He is a toy, an instrument: “a jukebox, ready to play whatever tune Fontaine wants to hear.”74 Fontaine, posing as a revolutionary figure named Atlas, uses Jack to bypass Ryan’s security systems and assassinate the founder of Rapture. But this is not an attack against neoliberal capitalism; rather, it is committed in the service of business advantage—​­a decisive maneuver in the economic war between Ryan Industries and Fontaine Futuristics. As Fontaine tells Jack, “adam ’s the ultimate score, kid. . . . A monopoly on adam makes Standard Oil look like the Piggly Wiggly. All that’s left is burying the bodies, and when they’re already six miles under the Atlantic, you got one hell of a head start!”75 It is an act of corporate violence—​ l­ ike the vending machines scattered around the city that sell weapons and ammunition, or the combat plasmids marketed through images of casual domestic abuse—​­hyperbolizing the violence of capitalism as such. BioShock lures us into assuming that Jack is immune to the rapture of the high-​­tech city, despite how much we may be uploading plasmids and injecting eve into Jack’s body, only to reveal that he has always been a product of that city and its economic competitions: a citizen born from 230  0111

the internal crisis of venture science. Indeed, it was speculation that drove Ryan to suspend his own libertarian policies, enforcing martial law to squash Fontaine Futuristics and take over the plasmid business: “Something must be done about Fontaine. While I was buying buildings and fish futures, he was cornering the market on genotypes and nucleotide sequences. Rapture is transforming before my eyes. The Great Chain is pulling away from me. Perhaps it’s time to give it a tug.”76 And it was speculation that compelled Fontaine to create Jack, sending him to the surface with a set of false memories (“Even that life you thought you had, that was something I dreamed up and had tattooed inside your head”) in case he might need to recall him later. “You were my ace in the hole,” Fontaine says to him—​­a security, a sure bet in the risky game of speculation.77 And Jack plays like an ace because, in Fontaine’s rules, jacks are wild. The vocabulary of games and play draws attention to BioShock’s allegory of its own gaming apparatus, the media platform that makes Jack a puppet of the player and the player a puppet of the algorithm. When Jack learns that Fontaine has been controlling him, he recalls a series of flashbacks from earlier in the game. Each of these key moments of the story line was triggered by the command “Would you kindly”—​­standing for the algorithm of the game itself, the software that allows a degree of playable freedom but ultimately requires the player to complete specific tasks to progress through the narrative. This command functions because Jack’s biology and psychology—​­hence the player’s apperception of the game world, mediated through Jack’s eyes, manipulated through Jack’s hands—​­have been programmed in advance. Fontaine says to Jack, “You’ve been a sport. . . . I got to say, I had a lot of business partners in my life, but you—​­course, the fact that you were genetically conditioned to bark like a cocker spaniel when I said, ‘Would you kindly,’ might have had something to do with it.”78 Unwittingly, Jack has been a pawn of Fontaine’s business plan, conditioned to follow the rules. He has “been a sport”—​­a good gamer, a good ludic subject—​­carrying out the role given to him and having no other choice but to do so. At least, if to play the game at all. BioShock recursively represents its own gaming apparatus as an instrument of political and technical control, instantiating the convergence of digital culture and molecular culture.79 At the same time, it enables a tactical exploration of Rapture, loading up the architectural designs of the city while facilitating any number of shortcuts, backtracks, and replays, not to mention a relentless hacking of vending machines, locked rooms, N A N O­P O L I T A N I S M  231

7.13. BioShock: Jack must choose whether to “Harvest” or “Rescue” the Little Sisters, the main sources of adam in Rapture. 2K Games, 2007.

and genetic sequences. Exploring the licit and illicit spaces of Rapture discloses its history and its self-​­destructive politics, its ideological formations as well as its resistances. (Fontaine jokes that resistance was almost guaranteed: “These sad saps. They come to Rapture thinking they’re going to be captains of industry, but they all forget that somebody’s got to scrub the toilets.”80) That is to say, the gaming apparatus also affords a fantasy of resisting from the bottom up—​­owning or pwning a state of technological servitude so as to subvert it. Once reprogrammed and released from Fontaine’s total authority, spliced up on plasmids and pumped full of eve, Jack eventually kills Fontaine. Of course, the end of Ryan’s political dominance and Fontaine’s business empire does not mean liberation for Jack or for the city, in any absolute sense. As depicted in the 2010 sequel, BioShock 2, the power vacuum left in the wake of the Ryan–​ ­Fontaine conflict opens the failed state of Rapture to a new authoritarian regime—​­from the left instead of the right, but otherwise identical. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Even BioShock’s gameplay conceit of giving players a choice to “Rescue” or “Harvest” the adam -​­bearing Little Sisters, leading to one of three different game endings, merely highlights the lack of freedom, the extent to which there is no escape from the computational algorithm and its conditional branching structure. “A man chooses, a slave obeys,” says Andrew Ryan. But in obeying the algorithmic mandate to choose—​­having no 232  0111

option but to choose (fig. 7.13)—​­Jack remains a slave to the end.81 There is no outside the systems of control. And that is the point of the game: to play according to its own rules is already to lose, to accept the conditions of terminal speculation that, in capitalizing the future, foreclose the future. The only way out is to play otherwise—​­to game the game. Many players of BioShock actively respond to its narrative of conscription and resistance. It is particularly visible in the body modifications of some BioShock fans—​­those who hack their own flesh in alliance with Jack. For example, Jack’s tattoos—​­the chains that mark him as an engineered organism, Fontaine’s marionette—​­also symbolize his prescribed place in Andrew Ryan’s “great chain” where the powerful stay at the top and the disenfranchised stay at the bottom (fig. 7.14). These tattoos have become popular among BioShock players all over the world (fig. 7.15). Such body mods signal group solidarity—​­gamers united by the narrative of struggle against neoliberal dystopia, always already drafted but hacking it from the inside. The tattoos also point to the game as a work of political activism in its own right, measuring the extent to which video games might foster the potential for technopolitical change. Or not. Whatever. For these gamers have already become nano­ politans—​­ ironically. They mark themselves as citizens of Rapture and all it represents, subjects of high-​­tech capitalism and its internal contradictions. Some tattooed gamers even stage photographic tableaux, meticulously recreating

7.14. BioShock: Jack injects eve outside the Kashmir Restaurant. The banner reads, “The great chain is guided by our hand.” 2K Games, 2007. N A N O­P O L I T A N I S M  233

7.15. “Check out my new Tattoo—​­Would you Kindly?” Dr. Maalac (a.k.a. Kata­ phroneo the Despiser), May 12, 2013. Courtesy of Raptr​.com.

7.16. “BioShock Injecting eve 5.” James Webster, October 5, 2010. This photograph is part of a series: Sir Dragon King’s photostream, Flickr, http://www​ .flickr​.com/photos/38026100@N05/. Reproduced with permission.

images of Jack injecting himself with eve and so forth (fig. 7.16). They rehearse the themes of the game—​­economic enslavement, technological addiction, political collapse—​­in the joyous form of fan art. It is all in good fun, of course: playing with the fiction as if it were only fiction, enjoying the game, laughing because it really is already like that and there is nothing else to do. Rofl. These gamers, performing as nano­politans, claim a right to the city—​ R ­ apture—​­that is now literally and metaphorically inscribed upon them.82 (Certainly, they claim “fair use” of the copyrighted imagery in the game.) Yes, Rapture is fiction. But for those gamers who have spent untold hours exploring its highways and byways, battling Big Daddies, shooting up eve, and frolicking with Little Sisters, they have already lived there. Their bodies have been trained, their reflexes adapted to the patterns of the software, the behaviors of the ai s, the functionalities of the controller. They know what it means to surf the nano-​­tsunami. And so they advertise their stakes in the game. Their tattoos body forth a notion that alternative futures are locked down by the technopolitics of the present—​­but their performative irony also announces a wish to have it otherwise, even while playing along. Needless to say, this is a fantasy promoted by BioShock itself: resistance to neoliberal capitalism in the mode of entertainment, an explosive revolution everyday in the living room. Everyone sees the irony, of course. That’s what makes it so cool. Again and again. And so these gamers wait . . . for something new . . . for another sequel, if nothing else . . . for a time when they might rip off the shackles and try a different game. Ad infinitum.

N A N O­P O L I T A N I S M  235

1000 My Little Avatar

To the best of my recollection, this is how it all went down. I saved most of the chat logs, emails, and snapshots—​­they’re safe on my hard drive—​ s­ o it is not too difficult to reconstruct the story. It started on January 17, 2009. I was in Second Life with a few friends: Katy Park, a historian of science at Harvard University; Joe Dumit, an anthropologist of science at uc Davis; and Tanner Jupin, a literary scholar and a PhD student of mine at the time. We were heading to Extropia Core for Sophrosyne’s Saturday Salon, where our pal Kim Stanley Robinson would be speaking about his latest science fiction novel, Galileo’s Dream. When we arrived, the auditorium was already filling up with a delightful circus of avatars. The text-​­chat window at the bottom of my screen was blazing with excited babble. Stan showed up as a majestic coyote avatar. He spent nearly two hours talking with the assembled audience; around sixty people were there, I would say (fig. 8.1). The rapid-​­fire conversation (all through text chat—​ e­ veryone had been advised to deactivate voice, to prevent bogging down the servers) ranged across a number of hot topics, from climate change and technology governance to the role of science fiction in shaping the future. At one point, Extropia DaSilva asked Stan, “What do you think of the phrase ‘this all sounds like science fiction,’ levelled at any technological proposal that is deemed to be preposterous? Surely, the basis of science fiction is plausible yet not currently feasible technologies?”1 Stan replied, “Funny, Extropia. They don’t know  .  .  . Colin should tell them how often science is also and at the same time science fiction by even their own

8.1. Kim Stanley Robinson at Sophrosyne’s Saturday Salon. Extropia Core, Second Life. January 17, 2009. Robinson’s avatar (Stan Shackleton) is the coyote on stage, being interviewed by Sophrosyne Stenvaag. Joe Dumit’s avatar is the Pac-​­Man (Xanax Ogre) in the middle. Katy Park (Aster Brun) is two avatars to the right of Xanax, and Tanner Jupin (Tanner Minotaur) is directly behind him. My little avatar, Colin Dayafter, is in the lower left, next to a Predator.

definitions.” I was pleased to be called out, even from the middle of the audience. So I stood up, ready to do my usual song and dance about the relations of science and science fiction. But before I could type even a short reply, the conversation had already turned to other topics. Everyone was dashing out opinions, a cacophony of ideas: the otherness of aliens, the feasibility of nano­­tech­nol­ogy for geoengineering, and the value of pursuing utopian visions in the middle of tremendous planetary changes. The discussion was moving so quickly that I could barely keep up; the chat log was a blur of transient characters. Amid all the chatter, a private message popped up on my browser: “PerkyPat Sorciere has sent you a note.” I did not know any PerkyPat, but the message indicated that she or he wanted to talk privately after the event: “Colin Dayafter—​­are you the Colin that KSR is talking about? Can we chat later? I want to know more about science as science fiction.” I responded affirmatively: “OK, great—​­let’s meet after the show!” M Y L I T T L E A V A T A R  237

8.2. Colin Dayafter meets PerkyPat Sorciere. Extropia Core, Second Life. January 17, 2009.

After a while, the salon organizers wrapped things up: applause and cheers for Stan, announcements for the next salon event (it was going to feature R. U. Sirius of Mondo 2000 fame). The organizers also offered a few thoughts on the importance of virtual worlds like Second Life for bringing people together to debate matters of concern, especially problems such as global warming and the speed of technological convergence. A parting insight from Extropia DaSilva: “The draw of online worlds like sl lies more in what they can be, rather than what they currently offer. And, considering the r&d going on in nbic, the future of online worlds looks very exciting.” I said good-​­bye to Katy, Joe, Tanner, and Stan, and then went off to find PerkyPat. She was waiting outside the auditorium. (I was already thinking of PerkyPat as she—​­I’m still not sure why.) “Nice wings,” she typed. I was glad for the compliment about my expansive, feathery wings (fig.  8.2). Though to be frank, they are no credit to my own design abilities; I had picked them up for free on Help Island ages ago, when I first came to Second Life. “Thanks,” I said. “Did you enjoy the event?” “Fabulous,” she typed. “I’m a huge KSR fan.” I nodded in agreement. “It’s great Stan could be here—​­I don’t think he’d ever been in sl before. He must be exhausted from having to type so fast, keeping up with all the questions.” 238  1000

Her avatar laughed. “lol ,” she typed. “It was a wild conversation! I especially liked his point that imagination is important for good science. That’s why I wanted to talk with you. I Googled and saw your books about nano. I’m focusing on nano right now, too.” “You’re a scientist?” I asked. “Well, yes. Amateur—​­diy. We have a fancy hacklab here in Boston—​­a nice community for homebrew nano­­tech­nol­ogy, biohacking, floss. Lots of cool things happening here. I work on protein engineering, dna origami . . . But it looks like you’re an English professor?” “Yes, I’m at uc Davis. I study connections between science, literature, and media technologies. I’m interested in concepts of ‘digital matter’ right now.” Her avatar jumped up and down. “Me too!” she typed. “Actually most of my protein work is computational. This is another reason why I like Second Life. It’s an amazing visualization lab. Using prims for atoms isn’t perfect, but it has some advantages.” She asked if I might like to see a few of her molecules, which sounded like an excellent proposal. So we teleported to the Nano­­tech­nol­ogy Island sandbox, where PerkyPat imported some of the artificial proteins she’d been designing. “What’s great about using the avatar to work with these models,” she said, “is that you can see things from all angles. You can hold them—​­it feels more tangible than just looking at diagrams or microscopic samples. It makes a difference, I think, to be the same scale as the protein. It’s also super easy to use the scripts that people in the sl Molecular Structures Group have developed to accurately rez chemical models. Andrew Lang (his avatar is called Hiro Sheridan) and Troy McConaghy (a.k.a. Troy McLuhan) created these fabulous molecule rezzers that grab data from ChemSpider and the rcsb Protein Data Bank. For getting a hands-​­on look, this is really helpful. You can explore the structure in a really intimate way. One minute you’re big, the next you’re inside the molecule.” I knew what she meant. Walking in the SciLands is often a disorienting experience for this same reason, because the frames of reference constantly shift. Forests of nano­tubes, dna scaffolds you can fly through, gigantic viruses crawling up the sides of buildings, behemoth silicon crystals resting on the grass: all sorts of nano-​­things juxtaposed with macro-​ ­things. I’m always confronted with the fact that scale here is malleable. She and I were currently standing nearby a giant buckyball, so it seemed M Y L I T T L E A V A T A R  239

appropriate to say, “You know, Harold Kroto and Richard Smalley became convinced of the correct structure of C60 by playing with soccer balls, and reflecting on the experience of walking through Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes . . . a game of imagining themselves both inside and outside the molecule.” By this time, I was becoming curious about PerkyPat’s identity in real life—​­clearly, an accomplished diy scientist. As she guided me through the architecture of a protein, pointing out that the difficulties of calculating bond angles could be overcome by seeing oneself at the level of the ion groups, I smiled to myself. She was describing a technical experience that I’d been studying recently, in terms of its cultural history. “I’ve got a theory about this,” I said. I’m usually more cautious when explaining my research to colleagues in the sciences—​­there are often misunderstandings, disciplinary incommensurabilities—​­but it seemed that PerkyPat and I shared enough common background that we could, I hoped, puzzle some things out together. So hazardously, I typed in the chat window, “Avatar has always been the medium of nano­morphosis . . .” In response to her quizzical silence, I hastened to elaborate: “I’ve been thinking about the traditional understanding of avatar as vehiculation, an extension of being or logos into another world. Specifically, a lower realm of existence. In Hindu thought, the avatar is divine incarnation, the enfleshment or materialization of a god. It’s ultimately about inhabiting or controlling the substance of matter as such. In Sanskrit, ‘avatara’ means literally ‘a descent’—​­‘ava’ signifies ‘down’ and ‘tar’ means ‘to cross’ or ‘to pass over.’ Crossing from one bigger world into another much smaller world, moving downwards into the place at the bottom: which of course is how Richard Feynman notoriously opened up our own technological adventures in the nano­world, with his invitation in 1959 to descend into the ‘very, very small world’ of atoms and molecules. ‘There’s plenty of room at the bottom,’ he said. It seems to me that, as a metaphysical concept, as much as a technological concept, avatar presupposes something like ‘becoming-​­molecular’: a rendering or incarnation of personal agency at the limits of materiality, at the nano­­scale level of matter. I’ve been calling it ‘nano­morphosis.’ ” She processed this for a moment, “OK . . . I’m intrigued. But I don’t entirely follow.” For a change of scenery, we agreed to teleport to the faraway Hindu temple of Sri Ganesha (fig. 8.3). After paying our respects, we

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8.3. Colin Dayafter and PerkyPat Sorciere visit the Sri Ganesha Hindu Temple. WORLDland 1, Second Life. January 17, 2009.

walked about the gardens, perching ourselves on a decorative bench and listening to the delicate sound of chimes in the air. “Consider this,” I said. “In the Hindu Vedic narratives as well as the Puranas, Vishnu usually has ten avatars (the ‘Desavatara’). Vishnu’s fifth incarnation is the first fully human avatar: Vamana, or the ‘dwarf.’ So here’s a mythical, etymological link between the idea of a human avatar and nano­morphosis, because the prefix nano-​­ comes from the Greek nano­s, or dwarf. To become a human avatar is to become dwarfed—​­in other words, nano­morphic. The first Western translation of the Rigveda—​­Friedrich August Rosen’s 1830 Latin edition—​­makes reference to the ‘fabulam de Vishnu nano (Vamana-​­avatara . . . )’ in a footnote, although this ‘story of Vishnu the dwarf’ does not actually appear in that text. Even so, already in this early translation of Hindu mythology into Western languages and Western culture, the worldly appearance of nano, or the smallest of human forms, is given as a pivotal moment in a story of avatars. In other words, a story of translations.”2 PerkyPat repositioned herself on the bench. “OK, that makes sense to me. You’re saying that translations and adaptations are avatars of other stories.” “Absolutely,” I said. “And our cultural rendering of nano is determined

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by such translational processes. For example, the Sanskrit scholar Paolo Magnone, in his study of the Vamana avatar of Vishnu, translates the proper name of the avatar into Italian as ‘Nano’ (Dwarf). Hence, a line from the Vāyu Purāna describing the significance of Vishnu’s proper name (‘Vishnu’ literally means ‘All Penetrating One,’ he who is everywhere, according to the Rigveda): ‘Viṣnu ̣ è il suo nome, secondo la tradizione, poiché nascendo quaggiú come Nano ha penetrato (vista) tutto questo universo.’ Which is to say, ‘Vishnu is his name, according to tradition, because having been born down here as Dwarf [Nano], he has penetrated (seen) all this universe.’ So we might say that avatar, as a translational process—​­the god becomes dwarfed and then translates himself everywhere—​­mirrors the translational process that now associates the name nano with a particular technical function: downsizing in order to penetrate and see into the depths of the world ‘down here.’ In other words, nano­­tech­nol­ogy.”3 PerkyPat tilted her head incredulously. “Hmmm, that is a funny coincidence. But are you serious? I really do not think that these literary translations and old myths have anything to do with nano­­tech­nol­ogy. Stories about Vishnu’s avatar ‘penetrating the universe as nano’ are not at all connected to real lab work. Probe microscopes, molecular motors. These things are totally different.” “Well,” I responded, “at least one nano­scientist has suggested something more than coincidence. Srinivasa Ranganathan at the Indian Institute of Science, under the codename ‘Nomad Metallurgist,’ has been blogging about the way in which nano­tech seems to embody a ‘god-​­like’ power, taking over all other sciences in its aspiration to occupy the world of the very small. Check this out.” I then pasted one of Ranganathan’s blog posts into my chat box: What is Nano? Nano means “dwarf” in Greek. It is one billionth of any unit. While this word itself was not used in 1959, Richard Feynman immortalized this tantalizing concept that we can see the very small and move atoms and assemble them by stating that there is plenty of room at the bottom. . . . Where does Vamana come into this? He is the fifth avatar of Vishnu in the Hindu Mythology and is the first human form in the incarnations. Vamana means “dwarf.” As has been narrated many times, Vamana requests King Bali for as much space as could be covered by three of his footsteps. On being granted his wish he takes the Viswaroopa and occupies all space and earth and 242  1000

the head of the king. It may be fanciful but it appears that nano­science and nano­technolgy are following a similar path of taking all space in science. . . . My own affair with Nano began with my doctoral studies at the University of Cambridge in 1962. It was an awesome experience to look at atoms with the field-​­ion microscope and feel God-​­like in evaporating tungsten atoms at liquid nitrogen temperature. . . . It is bliss to be alive at the dawn of this New Age. It can be called as the Diamond Age in pursuit of the convention of naming ages of civilization after materials such as Stone, Bronze and Iron. Diamond stands for carbon which in its new nano-​­avatars as buckyball, nano­tubes and graphene dazzles us more than diamond. Though somewhat farfetched the nano­tube hopes to grow like Vamana and reach the heavens as a Space elevator. The young scientists of today have the most extraordinary challenges and opportunities in this New Age.4 “So even as a scientist,” I said, “Ranganathan playfully puts forward a typological parallel between nano­tech and the mythic ‘human avatar,’ a shared narrative of ‘dwarfing’ that leads to omnipresence and awesome power over matter. But we can make this fabular connection even more concrete, because if we look at the modern history of avatar as a media technology, it turns out that time and again, avatar is foundationally linked to notions of molecular manipulation, the control of the structure of matter, telepresence in nano­­scale worlds, assembling objects with atoms from the bottom up, and so forth: all the familiar tropes that we’ve come to know collectively as nano­­tech­nol­ogy. I’d argue that avatar has served as the imaginary vehicle not only for transmitting the logic of nano­­tech­nol­ogy, but also for conditioning the history of molecular sciences and the ‘molecular imaginary’ of our culture.” PerkyPat suggested that we might fly around a bit, so we did, eventually finding a numinous buckyball to rest on. Watching the animated clouds in the sky drift by, I said, “Today we live in an age of atoms and avatars. It is nothing new—​­not at all. But as the ancient concept of avatar has morphed in relation to modern media technologies, it has helped to make molecular research thinkable as a dwarfing, a descent of human agency. It’s not primarily a technical issue but a way of seeing—​­a way of apprehending the human in relation to the infinitesimal.” PerkyPat leaned toward me. “I think I must already be doing that,” she said. “Honestly, I often imagine myself inside the cell with my proteins, M Y L I T T L E A V A T A R  243

figuring out what they look like. Sometimes when I’m concentrating really hard on the data, it seems like I can almost feel what it’s like to be in that place. I’m working with the lab instruments, but all of a sudden, I can see through them—​­like I’m squeezing myself down into the protein world.” She did not elaborate, but I nodded enthusiastically. As far as I could tell, it was a productive way of doing molecular research. “For example,” I said, “Barbara McClintock famously worked on neurospora chromosomes (which previously had gone unobserved due to their particular smallness) by imagining herself at the scale of the molecules. She described it this way: ‘I found that the more I worked with them the bigger and bigger [they] got, and when I was really working with them I wasn’t outside, I was down there. I was part of the system. I was right down there with them, and everything got big. I even was able to see the internal parts of the chromosomes. . . . It surprised me because I actually felt as if I were right down there and these were my friends.’ ”5 I jumped off the buckyball and performed a clumsy pirouette, which made PerkyPat laugh. Wiggling my arms in the air like noodles, I said, “Or we might also think of all those protein crystallographers who use their own bodies—​­twisting, dancing, and playacting—​­to intuit the contortions of their peptides.”6 She slid off the buckyball and joined me in the silly avatar dance. “Of course,” I admitted, “it is also a function of the way we behave generally in our culture, projecting a fictitious or virtual self onto the world as a habitual performance of identity.” I mentioned the performance theorist William Egginton, who argues that modern Western history has been dominated by a theatrical mode of being, a production of the self as “simultaneously virtual and corporeal: virtual in that it exists in a virtual space completely separate from the space occupied by the human body; and corporeal because the images and representations portrayed in this virtual space are so tightly wired to the feelings, desires, and motivations that emanate from and affect the human body.” Egginton describes this everyday performativity of self as the “construction of a human avatar.”7 So I said to PerkyPat that the “human avatar” is perhaps nothing other than a familiar way of being in the world—​­a permeable interface between ourselves and more than ourselves.8 But I went on to explain my intuition that avatar only became available as an operational tool, or rather, an operational logic for researchers

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in the molecular sciences once distilled from a general process of individuation and instead concretized as a local probe or vehicle for projection into another world—​­a world radically discontinuous from the one we perceive as our own. “From the late nineteenth century onward,” I said, “avatar became an instrument, a practical media technology for transporting a dwarfed human agent into worlds beyond and below. Nano­morphosis. When we trace the history of avatar as a medium—​­I probably shouldn’t say history, since the story of avatar is neither quite historical, nor quite genealogical, but perhaps better described as incarnative—​­so when we trace the incarnative saga of the avatar, this phenomenon emerges as a consistent pattern. I’ve been doing some research on this, do you want to hear about it?” But PerkyPat was already late to a hacklab meeting, so she had to log off. “Let’s email,” she said, shooting her address to me. “I’d love to know more about the avatar saga.” Then she vanished.

To: PerkyPat Sorciere From: Colin Milburn Subject: Incarnation I: The Medium Attachment: Blavatsky1887.jpg [fig. 8.4] Date: 20 January 2009 Dear PerkyPat, For your delectation, here are some notes I’ve drawn up about one early instance of avatar as a medium—​­that is to say, a media technology. Near the end of the nineteenth century, the charismatic founder of the Theosophical movement, the Russian expatriate Helena Petronovna Blavatsky—or, as she preferred to call herself, Madame Blavatsky—​ developed a theory of avatar that synthesized mythology and physical ­ science, spiritualism and molecular chemistry. Following many years as a nomad explorer of world cultures, journeying around the globe and accumulating vast stores of knowledge on comparative religion, occultism, philology, philosophy, and the texts of modern science, Blavatsky eventually settled in New York City in 1873, where she linked up with the growing Spiritualist community and promoted herself as an exceptionally skilled psychic. In 1875, she co-​­founded the Theosophical Society, whose tenets

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she first outlined in Isis Unveiled: A Master-​­Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology in 1877: “The object of its [The Theosophical Society] founders was to experiment practically in the occult powers of Nature, and to collect and disseminate among Christians information about the Oriental religious philosophies” (I: xli). Attempting to reconcile all religions as trace remnants of deeper and now lost occult knowledge, and then align them with the discoveries of modern science, Blavatsky’s articulation of Theosophy depended on enumerating and disseminating the “doctrine of Avataras.” Blavatsky portrayed extant religions and modern sciences as conceptual incarnations or avatars of the once-​­and-​­future “true” knowledge: the Secret Doctrine, which was available only to the “occult sciences.” For example, in Isis Unveiled, Blavatsky attends to the “ten mythical avatars of Vishnu,” which she records as progressing from Matsya-​­ Avatar (a fish) through the fifth, Vamuna (a dwarf, “first step toward the human form”), and culminating in the tenth “Saviour” avatar that “has not yet occurred” (II: 274). This mythic procession constitutes an allegorical “diagram of avatars” in which “we see traced the gradual evolution and transformation of all species out of the ante-​­Silurian mud of Darwin and the ilus of Sanchoniathon and Berosus” (275). Or later, in her massive two-​­volume tome, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy (1888)—​­written shortly after relocation of the Theosophical Society headquarters to India—​­Blavatsky recounts the occult atomic theory contained in the mysterious lost treatise, The Book of Dzyan. She argues that all material reality, each and every atom, is itself an avatar of the noumenal—​ ­“It is an atom and an angel” (I: 107)—​­an emanation of fundamental unity, presence or plenum. Modern atomic theory is itself only a “Mask” or manifestation of this esoteric understanding: “Atoms, Ether, evolution itself—​ all comes to modern Science from ancient notions, all is based on the ­ conceptions of the archaic nations” (507). She goes on to deconstruct the texts of leading chemists and physicists of her day, discussing the etheric “vortical atoms” of William Thomson, as well as Faraday’s notion of atoms as “centres of force,” in connection to older models of metaphysical being (Kanâda, Pythogoras, Leucippus, Democritus, Paracelsus, Leibnitz). Her aim is to show that, even in the rhetoric of modern science, the atom is “the most metaphysical object in creation” (485). From Blavatsky’s perspective, experimental work with atoms is not actually within the purview of physics: 246  1000

Before a physicist can argue [about atoms] . . . he must first know what an atom is, in reality, and that he cannot know. He must bring it under the observation of at least one of his physical senses—​­and that he cannot do: for the simple reason that no one has ever seen, smelt, heard, touched or tasted an “atom.” The atom belongs wholly to the domain of metaphysics. It is an entified abstraction—​­at any rate for physical Science—​­and has nought to do with physics, strictly speaking, as it can never be brought to the test of retort or balance. (I: 513) Blavatsky’s hermeneutic operations on the texts of Victorian science try to unearth the metaphysical foundations of modern atomism—​ ­“Science is honeycomed with metaphysical conceptions” (544)—​­in order to “prove that the atomic theory kills Materialism” (518). In other words, according to Blavatsky, the discourse of atomism, instead of buttressing modern materialistic science, confirms Theosophical belief. Here, she draws support from those Victorian scientists, such as William Crookes, Alfred Wallace, and Oliver Lodge, who insisted on a spiritual dimension to the otherwise mechanistic universe (Oppenheim 1985; Walkowitz 1992; Morrisson 2007; Noakes 2008). She therefore claims atoms as the special resources and experimental objects, not of physics or chemistry—​­which can neither directly measure nor sense them—​­but of the occult sciences, which pretend sensory and cognitive access to the “seven planes of atomic being.” Blavatsky’s writings are filled with elaborate speculations about matter and its manifestations, which she puts forward as superior scientific claims by addressing the gaps in the language of science itself. It is a mode of rhetorical performance that Christopher Toumey has called “conjuring science” (Toumey 1996). But this performance style, as Sue-​­Ellen Case argues in Performing Science and the Virtual, even while aping the logic and language of natural science, echoes science’s own hidden relations with the eldritch and mystical traditions of thought (Case 2006). These relations go way back, and on and on.9 If today we know that seeing, touching, and hearing atoms is a commonplace occurrence in the field of nano­­tech­nol­ogy, then following Blavatsky’s logic we might say that nano is a latter-​­day revival of Theosophy’s privileged claim to “experiment practically in the occult powers of Nature”; or instead, perhaps, that the principal Theosophist herself was an icon of nano­­tech­nol­ogy avant la lettre. After all, Madame Blavatsky often

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presented her own body as a scientific instrument: a medium for controlling the structure of matter, a device for manipulating molecules. In 1875, just before she wrote Isis Unveiled, Blavatsky found herself possessed by an alien presence. Although she had often channeled ghostly visitors in her earlier occupation as a spirit medium, this possession seemed to be something quite different: And just about this time I have begun to feel a very strange duality. Several times a day I feel that besides me there is someone else, quite separable from me, present in my body. I never lose the consciousness of my own personality; what I feel is as if I were keeping silent and the other one—​­the lodger who is in me—​­were speaking with my tongue. For instance, I know that I have never been in the places which are described by my ‘other me’, but this other one—​­the second me—​­does not lie when he tells about places and things unknown to me, because he has actually seen them and knows them well. I have given it up: let my fate conduct me at its own sweet will; and besides, what am I to do? It would be perfectly ridiculous if I were to deny the possession of knowledge avowed by my No. 2 . . . In the night, when I am alone in my bed, the whole life of my No. 2 passes before my eyes, and I do not see myself at all, but quite a different person—​­different in race and different in feelings. But what’s the use of talking about it? It’s enough to drive one mad. I try to throw myself into the part and to forget the strangeness of my situation. (Blavatsky [ca. 1876] 1894) This “lodger who is in me,” “No. 2”—​­this virtual “second life”—​­was soon discovered to be a living “Hindu man” projecting himself into her body from somewhere in the cloud-​­ shrouded Himalayas. Eventually known by the name of Koot Hoomi, this Hindu man was apparently incarnating himself, remotely extending himself into the Western world, through the medium of Blavatsky’s flesh. She, in turn, acquired access to his adept mind. He infused her with enough knowledge to compose her Theosophical writings, to extend her esoteric skills and wisdom. Most spectacularly, through his presence, she developed telekinetic powers, able to move things without touching them and even materialize objects right out of thin air. Blavatsky explained these powers to involve discrete manipulations of atoms, taking apart the molecules of her environment and reassembling or “precipitating” them into the configurations of everyday objects: 248  1000

“The profound art is to be able to interrupt at will and again restore the atomic relations in a given substance: to pull the atoms so far apart as to make them invisible, and yet hold them in polaric suspense, or within the attractive radius, so as to make them rush back into their former cohesive affinities, and re-​­compose the substance” (Blavatsky 1883, 22). On numerous occasions, her friend Henry Steel Olcott witnessed such techniques in action. He recounted how Blavatsky, often possessed, would conjure things such as letters, trinkets, money, and pictures into being; at other times, she would precipitate exact duplicates of items around the house. According to Olcott, this talent of precipitation was a psychic form of engineering, based on “knowledge of the ultimate properties of matter, of the cohesive force which agglomerates the atoms” (Olcott 1895, 37). Thus, as the flesh puppet of a distant occult scientist from the Himalayas, Blavatsky became a vehicle of “descent” to the bottom of materiality. With theatrical flair (“I try to throw myself into the part”), she preemptively claimed the power to do what physicists such as Richard Feynman did not even venture upon until a century later: the technical ability to “arrange the atoms the way we want; the very atoms, all the way down!” (Feynman 1960, 34). In channeling presences and messages from faraway lands, Blavatsky participated in a cultural conception of mediums in relation to technological media (Sconce 2000). Interestingly, Olcott described her frequent possessions in precisely such terms: “As I understood it, she herself had loaned her body as one might one’s type-​­writer . . . a certain group of Adepts occupying and manoeuvring the body by turns” (Olcott 1895, 246). And Blavatsky also described the work of material precipitation as “carried on by a sort of psychological telegraphy” (Blavatsky 1883–​­1884). But she clearly distinguished herself from other mediums—​­ most of whom, ironically, she considered “deluded frauds.” For she claimed to be more than a communications device, more than a telegraph to the afterlife or the astral plane. “This is no mediumship,” she wrote of the lodger inside, “and by no means an impure power . . . Ah no, this is altogether of a higher order!” (Blavatsky [ca. 1876] 1894, 270). For not only could she transmit messages, she could also serve as a tool for remote access: an avatar technology. By incarnating “Masters” like Koot Hoomi and others who soon joined the crowd inside her body, she gained purchase on the deep structures of material reality, in touch with “the capabilities and potency of their M Y L I T T L E A V A T A R  249

8.4. Madame Blavatsky. Photo taken at Mabel Collins’s Maycott cottage in Upper Norwood, London, 1887. Courtesy of the Blavatsky Archives. atoms and molecules, before and after their formation into worlds” (Bla­ vatsky 1888, 150). There she found secret islands of knowledge, on whose beaches avatars and adepts alone now stroll, even while “astronomers, geologists, and physicists are drifting with each new hypothesis farther and farther away from the shores of fact into the fathomless depths of speculative ontology” (150). For the rest of her life, she would continue to play with the subtleties of matter, manipulating swirls and vortices in the waters of Maya, sea of illusion. Guiding her followers to the beachheads of wisdom where fact is awash in speculation, Madame Blavatsky declared that all humankind would soon come along, becoming avatar, becoming again the primordial substance of being: “Man tends to become a God and then—​­God, like every other Atom in the Universe” (159).

PerkyPat was waiting for me at the laboratory tower on Genome Island. I waved as I approached and began typing. (We never used voice chat—​­it just gets in the way.) “Hi!” I said. “Shall we explore?” We decided to spend a couple of hours investigating the microbiology displays on the island. As we poked around inside a eukaryotic cell, chasing the circulating organelles, PerkyPat turned toward me (fig. 8.5). 250  1000

8.5. Colin Dayafter and PerkyPat Sorciere explore a cell. Genome Island, Second Life. February 2, 2009. Developed by the biologist Mary Anne Clark, Genome Island is supported by the Biology Department of Texas Wesleyan University.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about the Blavatsky story,” she said. “Especially her idea that grasping individual atoms and molecules was an ancient occult practice. A mystical technology! It made me think about Maxwell’s demon. I’m sure you know Maxwell’s demon? Actually, do you remember a game for the Atari 800 called Maxwell’s Demon? It was created by Mark Riley in 1982. In the game you control a little door in a wall between two containers of gas molecules, move it up and down, open it and close it. The point is to separate the fast hydrogen molecules from the slow helium molecules.” She sent me a screenshot of her Atari 800 emulator running the game (fig. 8.6). “I vaguely remember it,” I said. “You’re right, it’s an occult science game! Control a demon avatar, defy the second law of thermodynamics. I’ll have to look at it again. Actually, I think there are now several Maxwell’s demon games, but they’re variations of the same setup.” We exited the cell membrane and wandered over to a gigantic petri dish filled with writhing chromosomes (fig. 8.7). “I have a copy of the original software box,” she said, “It was published by DataSoft. Maxwell’s Demon came on the same floppy disk with another game called Bishop’s Square. Here’s what the box says: ‘You are maxwell’s demon and it is your job to take the disorganized state of hydrogen and helium (hydrogen moves M Y L I T T L E A V A T A R  251

8.6. Maxwell’s Demon. DataSoft, 1982.

faster than helium) and organize it exactly the way you wish.’ ” PerkyPat abruptly sat down on a nearby strand of coiled dna . “It really fits with what you’ve been talking about. The demon is a game avatar, letting us play with bits of matter.” Something stirred in my memory. “Wait just a second, I’m afk .” I stepped away from my keyboard, quickly searched my bookshelves, and pulled down the volume I was looking for. A few moments later, I returned to Second Life and said to PerkyPat, “Actually, I think Maxwell’s demon was a player of matter from the very beginning. It was William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) who first invoked the word ‘demon’ in regard to Maxwell’s famous thought experiment. At least by the time he wrote ‘The Sorting Demon of Maxwell’ in 1879, Thomson considered the little imp to be a little improviser.” I transcribed the oft-​­quoted words: Clerk Maxwell’s “demon” is a creature of imagination having certain perfectly well defined powers of action, purely mechanical in their character . . . He is a being with no preternatural qualities, and differs from real living animals only in extreme smallness and agility. He can at pleasure stop, or strike, or push, or pull any single atom of matter, and so moderate its natural course of motion. Endowed ideally with arms and hands and fingers—​­two hands and ten fingers suffice—​­he can do as much for atoms as a pianoforte player can do for the keys 252  1000

8.7. PerkyPat Sorciere and Colin Dayafter romp among the replicating chromosomes. Genome Island, Second Life. February 2, 2009.

of the piano—​­just a little more, he can push or pull each atom in any direction.10 PerkyPat chortled. “I love it,” she said. “The demon is like a pianist. A virtuoso player of atoms!” “And he does it with ‘pleasure,’ ” I said. “So this thought experiment for exploring the nature of entropy is about the demon having a good time. He plays atoms, diverting them from their ‘natural course.’ It’s a recreational activity.” “And now,” she responded, “video games let us play the player. A demonic toy!” She reminded me that a number of nano­scientists were now keen to engineer real Maxwell’s demons. I recalled that Feynman had been curious about this possibility, as well, though he didn’t think it could be done. However, PerkyPat seemed confident that breakthroughs would come in time. We chatted a bit longer, but soon I had to take my leave; it was time to teach my American novel class. My students had been reading Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 that week, which now seemed an uncanny coincidence. But before I signed off, I waved goodbye to PerkyPat. “Let’s stay on the chase!” I said. “I’m going to track down some more information on Maxwell’s demon. I think you are absolutely right. The demon is a key figure in the history of avatar technologies. More news soon . . .” M Y L I T T L E A V A T A R  253

To: PerkyPat Sorciere From: Colin Milburn Subject: Incarnation II: The Demon Date: 29 February 2009 Dear PerkyPat, Maxwell first wrote about the demon in 1867, in a letter to the physicist Peter Tait. The letter was a confession of sorts, describing illicit temptations. For Maxwell found himself irresistibly tempted to break the law: “To pick a hole—​­say in the 2nd law of Ωcs, that if two things are in contact the hotter cannot take heat from the colder without external agency.” He wanted to show that the second law of thermodynamics is less a fundamental rule inherent to matter than a statistical tendency, a limitation of human perception. To “pick a hole” in the law, then, Maxwell sketched a fictive scenario involving a different sort of hole—​­a small aperture controlled by a small creature: “Now let A & B be two vessels divided by a diaphragm and let them contain elastic molecules in a state of agitation which strike each other and the sides. . . . Now conceive a finite being who knows the paths and velocities of all the molecules by simple inspection but who can do no work, except to open and close a hole in the diaphragm, by means of a slide without mass.” By opening and closing the hole to sort the fast molecules from the slow molecules, this finite being could overcome the absolute authority of the second law: “the energy in A is increased and that in B diminished that is the hot system has got hotter and the cold colder & yet no work has been done, only the intelligence of a very observant and neat fingered being has been employed.” This tiny being was purely imaginary, of course. But Maxwell also considered the possibility of creating tools to accomplish the same goal: “[If] we can apply tools to such portions of matter so as to deal with them separately then we can take advantage of the different motion of different portions to restore a uniformly hot system to unequal temperatures or to motions of large masses. Only we can’t, not being clever enough” (Maxwell [1867] 1990). Yet this ironic quip also speculates on the future, beyond current limits of cleverness . . . In a later version of the thought experiment, Maxwell depicted the wee creature as an active intelligence, but also an obedient servant. Should a scientist wish to violate the second law—​­a Faustian exercise, to be sure—​­it would suffice to summon up the tiny being and command it to guard the small hole: “Provide a lid or stopper for this hole and appoint a 254  1000

doorkeeper, very intelligent and exceedingly quick, with microscopic eyes but an essentially finite being” (Maxwell [1870] 1990). The being is observant and mindful; it has its own will. It’s a homunculus. But it is also a scientific instrument—​­its eyes are “microscopic”—​­and it carries out the job of doorkeeper as decreed by the scientist in charge, the boss. William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) later dubbed this small creature a demon. And though both Maxwell and Thomson stressed that there was nothing supernatural about the demon—​­it was imagined as a perfectly finite being, existing in the actual world—​­it certainly had metaphysical implications. Above all, it bodied forth a philosophical claim about free will, the capacity of human beings to enact change in the world: an allegory of mind over matter. In other words, the little demon was an avatar technology. It served to represent human agency in the mechanical universe, operating at a scale that our own bodies could not access. It was a proxy for our own fingers and eyes at the level of individual molecules, a way to overcome the dominion of disorder, the insistent force of entropy. For Maxwell, who was an evangelical Presbyterian, the metaphysical implications of the demon—​­a small agent demonstrating the powers of mind over matter, even while beholden to a higher authority—​­were necessarily theological, as well (Smith and Wise 1989; Smith 1998; Stanley 2008). The demon served as an allegory of thermodynamics as much as an allegory of the human will and its capacity to obey freely, within or without material constraints, while also addressing the logic of sovereignty and the regulation of natural order (Schweber 1982; Clarke 2001). Maxwell’s publication of his Theory of Heat in 1871 further intimated the demon to be an incarnation of human will at the fundament of matter: “One of the best established facts . . . is the second law of thermodynamics, and it is undoubtedly true as long as we can deal with bodies only in mass, and have no power of perceiving or handling the separate molecules of which they are made up. But if we conceive a being whose faculties are so sharpened that he can follow every molecule in its course, such a being, whose attributes are still as essentially finite as our own, would be able to do what is at present impossible to us.” The demon is quite like us. Its attributes are “as essentially finite as our own.” Yet for the demon, the second law is no law at all: “He will thus, without expenditure of work, raise the temperature of B and lower that of A, in contradiction to the second law of thermodynamics” (Maxwell 1871, 308–​­9). The demon is outside the law, or beneath it. In this regard, the demon is not M Y L I T T L E A V A T A R  255

like us—​­at least, for the time being. But the demon also represents the future. It bodies forth a capacity to manipulate matter that is “at present impossible to us” yet might become possible one day. That is, Maxwell’s demon is a fictive prototype: a harbinger of technical innovations to come, picking holes in the law and extending human agency beyond all manner of imagined barriers. Maxwell emphasized that such demonic entities should be considered nothing other than instruments and laboratory helpers, programmable servants for carrying out operations at infinitesimal scales (Canales and Krajewski 2012). In a note to Tait, Maxwell writes: Concerning Demons 1° Who gave them this name? Thomson. 2° What were they by nature? Very small but lively beings, (capable of obeying orders, but) incapable of doing work but able to open & shut valves which move without friction or inertia. 3° What was their chief end? To show that the 2nd law of Thermodynamics has only a statistical certainty. 4° Is the production of an inequality of temperature their only occupation? No for less intelligent demons can produce a difference in pressure as well as temperature by merely allowing all particles going in one direction while stopping all those going the other way. This reduces the demon to a valve. As such value him. Call him no more a demon but a valve like that of the hydraulic Ram, suppose. (Maxwell [ca. 1875] 1990) While an intelligent demon might be “capable of obeying orders,” programmed to carry out binary functions (“open & shut valves”) in response to particular conditions, it is simply a mechanical thing. It may determine the fates of individual molecules, but only to the extent that it was designed to do so. In other words, it obeys. Reduced to a tool, no more valuable than a valve (Maxwell makes a graphical pun of “valve” and “value”), the demon is put in its place. A creature of human volition, representing the will in a universe of deterministic forces, the demon is not an enemy of law or authority, as such—​­rather, it helps the law by defining its proper domain. And ultimately, in the end, the demon would be made to affirm the foundations of thermodynamic theory, instead of puncturing them. 256  1000

Later scientists who took up the challenge of Maxwell’s demon—​­Leo Szillard, Leon Brillouin, John von Neumann, and Norbert Wiener among them—​­decided that its ability to sort molecules would depend on acquiring knowledge about the particles in the system, such as their positions and velocities. Insofar as such knowledge-​­gathering activities would dissipate energy and increase the entropy of the system, counterbalancing the demon’s sorting activities, this insight seemed to rescue the second law from whatever threat Maxwell’s creature might have once presented. Moreover, this solution to the demon problem, advancing the notion of information as a measurable quantity akin to the thermodynamic properties of matter and, more specifically, establishing a relationship between information and entropy, also set the stage for the development of informatics, cybernetics, and modern computing (Hayles 1990, 1999; Earman and Norton 1998, 1999; Clarke and Hansen 2009). It is not too difficult to discern the roots of mondo nano here, the dream of programmable matter. Indeed, the various video games that feature Maxwell’s demon as a playable character could be seen as recursive allegories, replicating the avatar technology already figured in Maxwell’s conception of the creature, while also rehearsing the history of a wish—​­the hermetic desire for “action at a distance” and mysterious powers over matter. Anyway, a number of scientists have been working to create real Maxwellian demons of this nature (Ruschhaupt et al. 2006; Thorn et al. 2008). For example, in 2007, the chemist David Leigh and his colleagues created a rotoxane-​­based system that mimics the setup of Maxwell’s original thought experiment. It involves a light-​­activated nano­machine, like a ratchet, in which information about the position of a mobile particle—​­a molecular ring traveling along an axle—​­enables an onboard “gatekeeper” mechanism to drive the system away from its equilibrium state. According to Leigh: “Our machine has a device—​­or ‘demon’ if you like—​­inside it that traps molecule-​­sized particles as they move in a certain direction” (quoted in “Maxwell’s Demon Becomes Reality” 2007). The demon requires light in order to operate, so it does not violate the second law. But it does represent the potential to synthesize molecular motors that do useful work. You probably already know the technical details (Serreli et al. 2007). I mainly wanted to point out that, at least for Leigh, the experiment retains alchemical and mystical associations—​­pointing to a future where science will be indistinguishable from magic: “It is a machine mechanism M Y L I T T L E A V A T A R  257

that is going to take molecular machines a step forward to the realisation of the future world of nano­­tech­nol­ogy. Things that seem like a Harry Potter film now are going to be a reality” (Leigh quoted in Reaney 2007).

As so often happens, the routines and demands of meatspace called us both away from cyberspace for a while. It was the middle of the academic term at uc Davis, and I could find few spare hours to hang out in Second Life or play any games at all. At the same time, PerkyPat told me that she was dealing with a personal crisis, but she declined to offer details. We were becoming friends, I suppose, but we still didn’t really know each other. In any event, it was a couple of months before we both happened to be in-​­world again at the same time. When I logged in on April 1, 2009, I noticed in my “Friends” window that PerkyPat was online. She was visiting the once bustling but now eerily deserted cyberpunk city of Nexus Prime. I teleported to her, and she rushed to give me a hug. After catching up briefly—​­though neither of us said much about our personal lives—​­we flew to the top of a distant skyscraper to get a view of the neglected town. “I’m sorry I never followed up about your email on Maxwell’s demon. I’m still mulling it over. But I thought it was so funny how the demon metaphor and its associations with necromancy, sorcery, and the Faust legend are still being invoked in the nano­­tech­nol­ogy context. I know they’re just jokes, but there is something fascinating about the magical motifs. Harry Potter, lol!” I laughed as well. “You’d be surprised how often Harry Potter is invoked to explain nano­­tech­nol­ogy, and vice versa. Roger Highfield’s book The Science of Harry Potter, for example: ‘Spells that make objects appear out of thin air could, some speculate, be using silicon chip-​­based machines, so tiny they can fit on the head of a pin, to grow an item, atom by atom, from the molecules and air and dust motes.’ It’s Blavatsky—​­but it’s also Shakespeare! Or here’s an article by Andrew Maynard, a physicist and science policy scholar, called ‘Nano­­tech­nol­ogy for Wizards’: ‘Nano­­ tech­nol­ogy is not magic, but it sometimes looks like magic. For instance, we can make stuff change color, just by altering the size of the particles it is made of. We can weave threads that are so strong a single strand could pull the Hogwarts Express. We can even alter the way that light moves through substances—​­and might possibly be able to mimic . . . Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak one day!’ ”11 258  1000

“Hmm,” she said, “That really confirms Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law: ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ It’s so true!”12 “Yes,” I said, “And I think we’ve found another avatar. Let’s call it ‘The Wizard.’ ”

To: PerkyPat Sorciere From: Colin Milburn Subject: Incarnation III: The Wizard Attachment: Edison1901.tif [fig. 8.8] Date: 15 April 2009 Dear PerkyPat, Thomas Edison was quite a wizard. Thanks to his many marvelous inventions—​­ the electric light bulb, the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and so forth—​­he became known as the “Wizard of Electricity” and the “Wizard of Menlo Park.” And though he was both a materialist and a skeptic, he held a lifelong fascination for claims of spiritualist and occult phenomena—​­he even had a passing affiliation with the Theosophical Society (Bazerman 1999; Baldwin 2001). Indeed, though they never met in person, Blavatsky took to calling him “Brother Edison.” In her 1879 essay on “Magic,” Blavatsky wrote, “Had our Brother Theosophist, Thomas Alva Edison . . . lived in the days of Galileo, he would have surely expiated on the rack or at the stake his sin of having found the means to fix on a soft surface of metal, and preserve for long years the sounds of the human voice; for his talent would have been pronounced the gift of Hell” (quoted in Baldwin 2001, 95). Edison enjoyed a playful relationship with the vocabulary of magic and wizardry. At the same time, he was quite serious about the technological potential for achieving material action at a distance, analogous to his work on electronic transmissions, which involved a spiritualizing of matter as such. In 1890, Edison unveiled his monadic theory of matter to Harper’s New Monthly Magazine: “it seems to me that every atom is possessed by a certain amount of primitive intelligence . . . [derived from] some power greater than ourselves.” For Edison, each particle of matter was itself “possessed” by the primordial intelligence of a prime Creator; it was an atom and an angel, a particulate incarnation of divinity. Acting together, M Y L I T T L E A V A T A R  259

8.8. “The most famous inventor of the age.” A stereoscopic slide (clipped) for viewing Edison and his lab in 3d. Underwood & Underwood, 1901. Courtesy of U.S. Library of Congress.

organize into larger aggregates, organisms, and ultiatoms would self-​­ mately human beings: “Finally they combine in man, who represents the total intelligence of all the atoms”—​­and therefore embodying the intelligence of the original Creator (Edison quoted in Lathrop 1890, 435). Edison contemplated the possibility that he, as a rather inventive person, might eventually come to control his own body on an atom-​­by-​­atom basis: What a great thing it would be if a man could have all the component atoms of himself under complete control, detachable and adjustable at will. “For instance . . . then I could say to one particular atom in me—​­call it atom No. 4320—​­‘Go and be part of a rose for a while.’ All the atoms could be sent off to become parts of different minerals, plants, and other substances. Then, if by just pressing a little push button they could be called together again, they would bring back their

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experiences while they were parts of those different substances, and I should have the benefit of the knowledge.” (Edison quoted in Lathrop 1890, 434) Edison here imagines an avatar technology, applied through himself: a means of telegraphing human will, disintegrating the body into its atomic components, sending them out on reconnaissance missions and then, by pushing a button, bringing them back with new knowledge for the hivemind (or the “swarm,” as he elsewhere describes it; see Lescarboura 1920). Inhabited by his intelligence, the atoms of Edison would be sent out to invade and possess a rose: the rose becoming Edison, Edison becoming rose. A rose by any other name . . . a rose is a rose is a rose. Edison’s conceit of the body as a controllable swarm of atomistic avatars haunted his imagination. In the 1920s, it even inspired his notorious proposal for a device to communicate with the dead: a mechanical “valve” that would amplify the motive force of any lingering “life units” that once had constituted a living person. If the deceased could still animate any particles of life, the valve mechanism would detect them. It would, Edison thought, decide scientifically the question of whether personality persisted in the afterlife. Hedging his bets, he also hinted that this experimental apparatus was little more than a joke. But that is another story (Kahn 1999; Sconce 2000; Enns 2006).

To: PerkyPat Sorciere From: Colin Milburn Subject: Incarnation IV: The Destroyer Attachment: trinity.jpg [fig. 8.9] Date: 5 July 2009 Dear PerkyPat, I’m glad that you had a chance to read Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. I adore that book. My students are actually reading it next week. Yes, I agree with you—​­it’s both an allegory for nuclear holocaust and a prefiguration of nano­­tech­nol­ogy “gray goo” scenarios. Among other things. It’s such a smart novel—​­and hilarious, in a very dark way. In describing the military origins of ice-​­nine and how it was invented by the physicist who also developed the atomic bomb—​­in both cases, just

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for fun—​­Cat’s Cradle fabulates the political and technical entanglement of nuclear technologies and molecular technologies. It’s fiction. But it got me thinking about avatars again, as operational logics or procedural tropes (Bogost 2007, Wardrip-​­Fruin 2009). It occurred to me that avatars have informed the imagination of atomic destruction as much as the imagination of atomic construction. It is said that Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, gave the code name of “Trinity” to the first test of an atomic device (Rhodes 1986; Gordin 2007). Inspired by the poetry of John Donne, Oppenheimer’s code name invested the test site—​­located in the Jornada del Muerto desert of New Mexico—​­with theological symbolism: the materialization and mutability of godhood, the incarnation of divinity on earth. Of course, the code name also signified the physically transformative aspects of nuclear science: the translation of matter into energy, the transmutation of one chemical element into another. But thoughts of incarnation and reincarnation were at the forefront of Oppenheimer’s mind, it seems—​­and not only ironically. At the moment of realizing this accomplishment of the Manhattan Project—​­the first detonation of a plutonium implosion device—​­Oppenheimer understood himself and all the scientists at Los Alamos as avatars of forces beyond themselves. He later recalled that, while witnessing this demonstration of the human capacity to intervene in the subatomic structure of matter, he was overwhelmed by memories of the Bhagavad Gita: We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-​­armed form and says, “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that one way or another. (Oppenheimer interviewed in the 1965 nbc television documentary, The Decision to Drop the Bomb; for the history of Oppenheimer’s quotations of the Gita and his relationship with Hindu scripture, see Hijiya 2000) Oppenheimer recollected himself channeling the words of Krishna, the eighth avatar of Vishnu in his multi-​­armed form as death or passage of time, as well as the predicament of the Prince who must do his duty no matter the cost. A student of Sanskrit texts, Oppenheimer also claimed that another line from the Gita occupied his mind in that moment: “If 262  1000

the radiance of a thousand suns / were to burst at once into the sky, / that would be like / the splendor of the Mighty One” (Jungk 1958, 201). In channeling the Gita, then, Oppenheimer was not only performing avatar but also bodying forth the literary tradition as such. As John Canaday has shown in The Nuclear Muse, most of the Los Alamos scientists expressed their ambivalent perspectives on nuclear weapons by adapting preexisting literary structures and scriptural points of reference: “the Los Alamites’ use of religious language translated their somatic experiences into symbolic entities according to literary conventions” (198). It conveyed high moral purpose, the epic qualities of their accomplishments, while shifting focus away from victims of nuclear weapons to the ethical struggles of the scientists themselves. After the war, as the words of Oppenheimer and his colleagues spread throughout the world, endlessly quoted, nuclear technologies came to embody literary meaning for a broader culture; as Canaday puts it, “a conception of nuclear weapons that is deeply, and perhaps alarmingly, literary” (184). The Destroyer: an avatar of the bomb, the physicist, the awesome power of science over matter; but also a sign of inheritance, a figure of resurrected and recontextualized cultural traditions. That is to say, the irresistible influence of the past over the possibilities of the future.

8.9. Trinity nuclear test. 0.016 seconds after the explosion. July 16, 1945. Courtesy of Los Alamos National Laboratory. M Y L I T T L E A V A T A R  263

To: PerkyPat From: Colin Milburn Subject: Incarnation V: The Puppet Master Date: 24 December 2009 Dear PerkyPat, I’m sorry to be away from Second Life for so long! I’ve been traveling all over the country—​­the holiday season is lovely but hectic. Shall we meet up again in the new year? In the meanwhile, here are more tidbits about avatar technologies, for your amusement. Around 1979, the cognitive scientist and roboticist Marvin Minksy coined the term “telepresence” to describe a high-​­ quality sensation of “being there” when not there. It would be an affordance of future “instruments that will feel and work so much like our own hands that we won’t notice any significant difference.” With these telepresence instruments, we will project ourselves into “any environment alien to humans” (Minsky 1980, 47–​­48). We will control scientific tools and robotic systems at a distance, working in places too hazardous or remote for human access. Telepresence instruments will lead to “nuclear safety and security, advances in mining, increases in productivity, economies in transportation, new industries and markets.” These instruments will be “mechanical hands” through which we will “shape a new world of health, energy, and security.” They will be constantly improved “so that they feel and work like our own hands!” (Minsky 1979, 2–​­3). Minsky’s grand vision, based on the technical extension of human agency from one world into another, carries forward the metaphysics of avatar into the high-​­tech future. To be sure, scientists, engineers, and media artists often speak of such telepresence terminals or mechanical hands as “avatars,” whether “robotic avatars” in real space or “virtual avatars” in synthetic environments (Ishiguro and Trivedi 1999; Goldberg 2000; Maeyama et al. 2001; Goldberg and Siegwart 2002; Kac 2005). Minksy gives credit for the term “telepresence” to his futurist friend Pat Gunkel, but he derives the idea from Robert A. Heinlein’s 1942 science fiction novella, Waldo: “My first vision of a teleoperator-​­based economy came from Robert A. Heinlein’s 1940 [sic] novel, Waldo. The first such instruments were built in 1947. Forty years after writing Waldo, Heinlein helped me sharpen up this paper” (Minsky 1979, 18; see also Minsky 1980, 47). In Heinlein’s story, the disabled genius Waldo F. Jones invents 264  1000

teleoperation devices called “waldoes”: mechanical extensions of his hands for all sorts of useful tasks, ranging in size from gigantic monster hands to tiny “fairy digits” for microscopic manipulations. Waldo discovers that an “Other World” exists outside of our own, an extradimensional space of tremendous energy that, once accessed, could enable mental control of the structure of reality—​­mind over matter. He learns of a long occult tradition on the topic: “There were frequent references to another world; sometimes it was called the Other World, sometimes the Little World” (Heinlein [1942] 1986, 107). Waldo too perceives the Other World as rather small: “I think of it as about the size and shape of an ostrich egg, but nevertheless a whole universe, existing side by side with our own, from here to the farthest star” (115). While investigating ways to access this “Little World,” like any good Theosophist, Waldo comes to see contiguity between modern science and occult knowledge: There was the hydraulic engineering of the Egyptian priests. Chemistry itself was derived from alchemy; for that matter, most modern science owed its origins to the magicians. Science had stripped off the surplusage, run it through the wringer of two-​­valued logic, and placed the knowledge in a form in which anyone could use it. . . . Waldo began to think of the arcane arts as aborted sciences, abandoned before they had been clarified. (108–​­9) To pursue the dream of godlike power over matter and energy, Waldo must learn to exteriorize his own agency by merging experimental science with the technics of avatar: “You send your force into the Other World. You must reach into the Other World and claim it” (93). So he resorts to his waldoes. He conducts fine surgical experiments on the mammalian nervous system to understand the precise point at which the mind might physically touch the Other World. Waldo uses his tiniest waldoes to create even tinier ones: an enchained system of teleoperators extending from his own hands down to the cellular level. Each level of smallness is magnified and projected as a “life-​­size” virtual reality: His final team of waldoes used for nerve and brain surgery varied in succeeding stages from mechanical hands nearly life-​­size down to these fairy digits which could manipulate things much too small for the eye to see. They were mounted in bank to work in the same locus. Waldo controlled them all from the same primaries; he could switch from one size

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to another without removing his gauntlets. The same change in circuits which brought another size of waldoes under control automatically accomplished the change in sweep of scanning to increase or decrease the magnification so that Waldo always saw before him in his stereo receiver a “life-​­size” image of his other hands. (133) Waldo discovers the finite point of materiality where each organism intersects the Little World beyond; the passageway turns out to be located inside the neural “synapses between dendrites” (134). Waldo becomes master of matter, boss of his own flesh. The stuff of reality is now controllable through thought alone. Thus, in Heinlein’s inaugural account of telepresence technologies, remote access to the smallest dimensions of matter points the way to a magical dwarf world on the other side: the “nano­world” in every sense. The occult themes of this story, mixing fantasy with science fiction, can be explained to some degree by Heinlein’s biography. The narrative of Waldo’s techno-​­magical discoveries, resonant with Shakespearean allusions and other literary flourishes, echoes some peculiar theories of Heinlein’s friend John Whiteside Parsons. Parsons was a rocket scientist, one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Aerojet Engineering Corporation—​­as well as a dedicated practitioner of ritual magic. He had explored Theosophy and other esoteric practices in the 1930s before linking up with Aleister Crowley and the Ordo Templi Orientis, turning his Pasadena home into a site for mystical ceremonies. Parsons came to see himself as not only the reincarnation of several historical personages, including Gilles de Rais, but also the “material vehicle” of Belarion, Antichrist. Channeling the voice of Belarion, Parsons reflected on his own past: “The awakening interest [for the adolescent Parsons] in chemistry and science prepared the counterbalance for the coming magical awakening, the means of obtaining prestige and livelihood in the formative period, and the scientific method necessary for my manifestation [as Belarion]” (Parsons 1948). Thus the rocket scientist, thinking himself the material vehicle of a disruptive force from beyond, reinterpreted his orthodox scientific work as a prerequisite for letting magic loose in the world—​­quite like Waldo. Several of Heinlein’s stories from this period, including Magic, Inc. [originally published as The Devil Makes the Law], Stranger in a Strange Land, and The Puppet Masters, feature themes of avatar bodies, the remote

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control of thought and matter, and the merger of science and magic. Such topics characterized the conversations he had with Parsons and his crowd of occult scientists during those heady days in Pasadena. Alas, the conversations came to a sudden end in 1952 when Parsons blew himself up in a tragic garage-​­lab accident. Or maybe it was foul play. (See Carter 2004; Pendle 2005.) Regardless, Heinlein would continue to think about the overlap of hard science with occult themes and fantastical elements for years to come. In particular, he would think about the transformation of fantasy into technics as a unique affordance of the speculative imagination, a game of making the impossible possible, figuring out plausible ways to make magic real. By the late 1940s, remote-​­control manipulators had become standard tools for working with “hot” nuclear materials. As Heinlein proudly noted in a 1957 talk on “Science Fiction: Its Nature, Faults and Virtues,” in the atomic laboratories and other research institutions “the word ‘waldo’ has since become engineering slang” (31). He also observed that biologists had started to use similar manipulators to move “down into the very small.” Heinlein ventured that other real-​­life applications of the ideas from Waldo were imminent: “Use micromanipulation to make still smaller instruments which in turn are used to make ones smaller yet. What do you get? A scientist, working safely outside a ‘hot’ laboratory—​­ perhaps with the actual working theater as far away as the Antarctic while the scientist sits in Chicago—​­seeing by stereomicroscopic television, using remote-​­control microscopic manipulation, operating not just on a cell and a nucleus, but sorting the mighty molecules of the genes, to determine the exact genetic effect of mutation caused by radiation. Or a dozen other things” (34–​­35). Nothing magical, according to Heinlein—​­and not even science fiction, not any more. Using waldoes, direct manipulation of genetic materials and other molecular structures would soon be perfectly feasible. Two years later, the fiat lux of nano­­tech­nol­ogy—​­that is, Richard Feynman’s 1959 lecture—​­took place at Caltech . . . not too far away from Parson’s old house of black magic. Feynman’s bold plan for precise control of the structure of matter, it seems, plundered Heinlein’s concept of the waldo as a medium of molecular control (Regis 1995; Milburn 2008). Feynman had heard about the Heinlein story from his friend and former PhD student Albert Hibbs, who had been so taken with Heinlein’s idea that he even wrote up a patent application on the use of a “Waldo-​­like robot” for space exploration. Hibbs imagined a small humanoid machine, a tiny M Y L I T T L E A V A T A R  267

homunculus (“a scale model of all or part of a human being, with the joints activated by servo motors”), which could be sent to other planets, controlled by a puppeteer back on Earth (Hibbs’s patent application, never filed, is quoted in Regis 1995, 153). Hibbs was working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the time, and though Parsons had departed years before (gone but not forgotten—​­the International Astronomical Union even named a crater on the moon after him in 1972), the culture of science fiction and wild speculation remained strong at jpl and the astronautics community at large (McCurdy 1997; Penley 1997; Kilgore 2003; Westwick 2007). In any case, the specter of Waldo F. Jones—​­occult scientist and literary avatar of John Whiteside Parsons—​­wound its way into the Feynman vision of nano­­tech­nol­ogy. In his lecture, Feynman said that he might conceivably manipulate individual molecules with something like a “pantograph which makes a smaller pantograph which then makes a smaller pantograph,” increasing the precision of the apparatus with each step. Eventually, he would have “a hundred tiny hands” at his disposal: “When I make my first set of slave ‘hands’ at one-​­fourth scale, I am going to make ten sets. I make ten sets of ‘hands,’ and I wire them to my original levers so that they each do exactly the same thing at the same time in parallel. Now, when I am making my new devices one-​­quarter again as small, I let each one manufacture ten copies, so that I would have a hundred ‘hands’ at the 1/16 scale” (Feynman 1960, 30, 34). And so on. Feynman’s proposal uncannily resembles the technology featured in Waldo, to say the least. In the novella, Waldo officially patents his invention as “Waldo F. Jones’s Synchronous Reduplicating Pantograph, Pat. #296,001,437, new series, et al” (26). Yet Heinlein’s story itself reduplicated some concepts from other texts. In his youth, Heinlein had read a pop-​­science article about prosthetic muscle enhancement, which he later identified as an inspiration for Waldo (Heinlein [1957] 1959, 33). Moreover, the technical conceits of Waldo recall a number of earlier science fiction stories about ultrasmall small engineering, such as Edmund Hamilton’s “The Cosmic Pantograph” from 1935. Avatars of avatars . . . all the way down. Two decades later, Feynman revisited these ideas in a lecture called “Infinitesimal Machinery,” which he presented at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1983. He once again focused on ways that science might access the small world below, including the mechanical waldo method. One day, 268  1000

he said, we will project ourselves into this other world with ease, using tiny machine-​­proxies to do experiments, to carry out medical operations, and to goof around. He stressed that research on infinitesimal machines would be mostly for laughs, not “anything but a game” (Feynman [1983] 1993, 6). As per usual, Feynman blurred the lines between serious science and frivolous play: “What about the free-​­ swimming [microscopic] machine? The purpose is no doubt for entertainment. It’s entertaining because you have control—​­it’s like a new game. Nobody figured when they first designed computers that there would be video games. So I have the imagination to realize what the game here is: You get this little machine you can control from the outside, and it has a sword. The machine gets in the water with a paramecium, and you try to stab it” (9). Looking to video games, Feynman conjures a water-​­drop world where remote-​­controlled machines turn into toy warriors, engaging real microorganisms in mock battles. The human operator becomes the miniature avatar: “The machine gets in the water with a paramecium, and you try to stab it.” You project into this battle-​­bot. You are the little machine. Feynman relates the dueling game to an earlier idea from “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”: the “swallowable surgeon,” a free-​­swimming device for doing microsurgery inside the body. According to Feynman: “So we have the idea of making small devices that would go into the biological system in order to control what to cut and to get into places that we can’t ordinarily reach. . . . It doesn’t seem impossible to me that you could watch the machine with X-​­rays or nmr and steer it until it gets where you want. Then you send a signal to start cutting. You watch it and control it from the outside” (9–​­10). So whether we wish to fight paramecia or cancer cells, according to Feynman, such tiny instruments will be our puppets and our vehicles, letting us go places where we would otherwise be too big to fit. In 1984, Feynman gave an updated performance of this lecture at Esalen (the counterculture research institute). Once more, he did the “swallow the surgeon” shtick. Several audience members pointed out that it sounded like the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage. Feynman responded: “Yes, Fantastic Voyage . . . Well I’m a little late with my idea! But the problem is to actually manufacture this. [Albert] Hibbs gave me the idea twenty years ago. This is a rather in some respects an old talk” (Feynman [1984] 2004). Ironically, Feynman found himself needing to defend his intellectual priority, even while implying that the goal “to actually manufacture M Y L I T T L E A V A T A R  269

this” is what distinguished his scientific proposal (“my idea”) from any science fiction—​­no matter that it comes a little late. How different, then, from Isaac Asimov’s novelization of the Fantastic Voyage screenplay, which instead took pains to honor the literary ancestry of these ideas. For instance, Asimov wrote about a key instrument for maneuvering the miniaturized ship Proteus in preparation for its injection into the bloodstream: “A handling device (a gigantic ‘waldo’—​­so named by the earlier nuclear technicians from a character in a science fiction story of the 1940s, Carter had once been told) moved in on silent air jets” (Asimov 1966, 79). Technical innovation turns out to be already belated, from the very beginning. In any event, the science fiction aura has remained potent. In 1985, for instance, Robert Freitas—​­ who later became a visionary advocate of nano­ medicine (Freitas 1999)—​­ composed a survey of technical progress towards all varieties of telepresence technologies. Starting with the example of Heinlein’s Waldo, Freitas’s account also attended to recent dreams of “remote-​­controlled ‘medical mites’ made feasible by modern micromachinery. . . . Some medical mites would be like microminiature submarines, released in the human body for internal sensing . . . and perform[ing] on-​­site repairs from within.” Freitas speculated that telepresence devices inside biological tissues could eventually lead to “teleoperating people”: piloting human bodies as zombies or meat puppets (Freitas 1985, 176, 182). (btw, this disturbing idea has reappeared in a couple of recent films—​­both Gamer and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra feature nano­tech mechanisms for controlling human soldiers as avatars. Have you seen these movies yet? They’re worth checking out.) Given this context, it’s no wonder that when actual nano-​­instruments such as scanning tunneling microscopes came along they inherited the tropes of the waldo. For example, the nano­scientists Don Eigler and Joseph Stroscio have written: “In a sense, we may use the stm to extend our touch to a realm where our hands are simply too big” (Stroscio and Eigler 1991, 1319). It is a familiar motif of descent and enfleshment in a small other world. Today, we see all manner of laboratory technologies designed to facilitate this sort of “direct coupling” between “the nano­meter world and the human world”: an embodied engagement that construes our instruments as ourselves (Hatamura and Morishita 1990). Or consider the Nicolet Instruments company, the largest manufacturer of Fourier transform infrared (ftir) spectrometers since the 1970s and now a subsidiary of Thermo Scientific (Smith 1996). Nicolet produces 270  1000

a line of ftir instruments for analyzing the functional structures of chemical samples as small as one hundred picograms. This line of instruments is dubbed the “avatar” series. With a wink to the long tradition of linking molecular chemistry to psychical research, one of the Nicolet models is even called the “avatar E.S.P.”

It seemed fitting to rendezvous at the jpl site in Second Life (fig. 8.10). As we wandered the grounds, looking at the rockets and satellites on display, PerkyPat said, “You know, this story has already jumped the shark. Now you’re telling me that a coven of Thelemites, physicists, and science fiction writers were all hanging out together in Southern California in the 1940s, and that these mysterious connections somehow inform the history of avatar technologies. Rofl!” “I know, it’s weird stuff! But all true. Heinlein met Parsons though the American Rocket Society.13 Parsons also seems to have been an occasional guest of the Mañana Literary Society, where many of the Los Angeles–​ a­ rea writers would convene—​­Heinlein, Williamson, Hamilton, Brackett, Kuttner and Moore, everyone. Anthony Boucher wrote a mystery novel about these folks in 1942 called Rocket to the Morgue. It’s a roman à clef. The main characters are based on the California science fiction community, and Parsons plays a key role as Hugo Chantrelle: ‘Hugo Chantrelle

8.10. PerkyPat Sorciere and Colin Dayafter at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Explorer Island, Second Life. January 10, 2010. Photo by PerkyPat Sorciere. M Y L I T T L E A V A T A R  271

was an eccentric scientist. In working hours at the California Institute of Technology he was an uninspired routine laboratory man; but on his own time he devoted himself to those peripheral aspects of science which the scientific purist damns as mumbo-​­jumbo, those new alchemies and astrologies out of which the race may in time construct unsurmised wonders of chemistry and astronomy.’ The novel even intimates that science fiction might serve as a resource for scientific innovation, if only to highlight the peculiarity of those who take such ideas seriously: ‘Chantrelle was wont to maintain that the company of fantasy writers is invaluable to a scientist; they are the prophets of the future. . . . Only occasionally did he admit to himself that he enjoyed their company because they received his heterodox views on the borderlands of science far more courteously than did his laboratory associates.’ ”14 PerkyPat and I continued to meander around the jpl displays, admiring the technical artifacts that had been lovingly recreated for the virtual world. Nothing uncanny here—​­save for one large asteroid that floated eccentrically around the walking paths, forcing us to duck from time to time. “Heinlein’s dear friend, the physicist Robert Cornog, was also in the loop,” I said, “which helps to explain a few things. They’d known each other for ages. While still a student, Cornog co-​­discovered tritium and helium-​­3 with Luis Alvarez. When the war started, he was recruited into the Manhattan Project. He was soon posted at Princeton to work with Robert R. Wilson and—​­yes—​­the young Richard Feynman on processes of isotope separation. Eventually, they moved their operations to Los Alamos, where Cornog was made chief engineer of the ordnance division. It’s often been wondered about the remarkable timeliness of Heinlein’s stories ‘Blowups Happen’ and ‘Solution Unsatisfactory’ (the latter of which, like Waldo, was first published under Heinlein’s pseudonym of Anson MacDonald). Both stories focused on U-​­235 energy plants and the political fallout of nuclear weapons—​­years before Trinity! ‘Solution Unsatisfactory’ was actually read by some of the scientists working on the Manhattan Project, including Edward Teller. Heinlein’s figuration of state-​­of-​­the-​­art issues pertaining to fission research and its military applications was due not only to his attentiveness to available scientific literature, but also to his relationship with Cornog.15 “Immediately after Hiroshima, Heinlein went to Los Alamos—​­on Cornog’s invitation—​­to meet with a number of the scientists who, having 272  1000

helped create the bomb, were now worried about its long-​­term geopolitical consequences. Heinlein helped them devise strategies for political mobilizing, joining in efforts that led to the formation of the Federation of Atomic Scientists, later renamed the Federation of American Scientists.16 And Heinlein’s ideas keep coming back around, at least in subtle ways. Just a year ago [2008], the Federation of American Scientists released an educational video game called Immune Attack. You play the role of a young woman whose immune system is compromised. She has remote-​ a­ ccess to a ‘nano­bot’ inside her own blood vessels. The nano­bot is loaded with detachable drones, which are a thousand times smaller than itself. The drones can interact with individual molecules, antigens and such. So as players, we connect with molecular objects through a series of smaller and smaller avatars: our human avatar in the game remotely operates a nano­bot-​­avatar, which is an intermediary to the wee drone-​­avatars. Such is the legacy of Waldo F. Jones!” PerkyPat stopped short. She played one of her favorite gesture scripts, a sinuous and ironic head-​­wobble. “Well,” she said, “I guess the Puppet Master is everywhere now! Curioser and curioser . . .” We started to stroll again, and I continued typing out the story. “Anyway,” I said, “as the Manhattan Project was winding down, Cornog began commuting to Southern California to work with the booming aerospace and defense industries there. He needed a place to live, so Heinlein recommended that he move in with Jack Parsons, who had some rooms available in his Pasadena mansion, the so-​­called Parsonage. Cornog lived together with Parsons and his esoteric crew for several years; he was a first-​­hand witness to many of the sex-​­magic rituals and other shenanigans in the house. (Attesting to the impact of techno-​­mysticism on their lives in those days, Heinlein later dedicated Stranger in a Strange Land to Cornog. That novel, of course, came to be seen as a key text in the hippie movement. But instead of embracing flower power, Cornog himself was building missiles.) “Around the same time—​­this is still 1945, I mean—​­Heinlein introduced Parsons to L. Ron Hubbard. Hubbard lived with Heinlein for a short while after the war but eventually moved into the Parsonage, as well. He became an active participant in Parsons’s homebrew experiments in occult science. Just over a year or so later, however, Hubbard eloped with Sara Northrup, sister-​­in-​­law and erstwhile lover of Parsons, an important Thelemite herself, at the same time as financially swindling the credulous M Y L I T T L E A V A T A R  273

Parsons. It put a damper on the friendship between Parsons and Hubbard, to say the least. This all happened right before Dianetics, with Scientology not long to follow. “There’s a lot that could be said about the Hubbard–​­Parsons connection, of course, and the degree of occult influence on Scientology.17 But I simply want to recall that in Scientology the avatar bodies of Operating Thetans—​­those who have gone clear, in touch with the godlike thetans inside them—​­are said to be capable of numerous supernatural feats, controlling matter, energy, space, and time. For instance, according to Hubbard, they can extend prosthetic energy beams like psychic waldoes: ‘The pressor is a beam, which can be put out by a thetan, which acts as a stick and with which one can thrust oneself away or thrust things away. . . . A tractor beam is put out by a thetan in order to pull things toward him.’18 Using such beams, Operating Thetans can even adjust the molecular structure of objects. As one Scientologist reports, ‘Today was fantastic. I walked downstairs to get some coffee and the coffee machine was buzzing. So I put my hands out and moved them around the machine putting out beams to bounce back and thereby I could tell by watching the particle flow exactly where the error in the machine was. I found it and corrected the molecular structure of that area of the machine and the buzzing stopped. Then I heard my air conditioner rattling so I looked at why it was rattling and it stopped. I’m becoming much more at cause, I love it—​­like Superman!’  ”19 PerkyPat didn’t move for a few moments. “My head just exploded,” she said.

To: PerkyPat From: Colin Milburn Subject: Incarnation VI: The Storyteller Date: 20 January 2010 Hi there, PerkyPat—​­ Yes, it is true, the Cameron film remixes a number of well-​­worn themes and concepts. But I thought it was brilliant—​­I’ve seen it three times now and, honestly, I’ve been emotionally overwhelmed each time. Despite all the clichés and the stereotypes, I find something amazing about this film. Of course, I agree with you that the narrative is nothing original: it’s 274  1000

Dances with Wolves, it’s Pocahontas, it’s A Princess of Mars, alongside a hundred other science fiction stories—​­it even makes explicit allusions to Cameron’s own Aliens. But that is the whole point, isn’t it, when it comes to avatars? A series of reincarnations and repetitions . . . revivifying, recollecting, and rebooting earlier forms. And yes, your observation is spot on: the avatar body gives Jake Sully access to the biomolecular systems of the planet, which the Na’vi can access naturally. But even this plot element recalls earlier texts. A number of science fiction and fantasy stories have used the concept of “avatar”—​ ­even with specifically theological or Theosophical associations—​­to represent instrumental technologies for extending agency at different scales of matter, inhabiting other worlds, augmenting the normal capacities of the body. For example, Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light (1967) or Fred Saberhagen’s Empire of the East (1979). I recently finished reading Poul Anderson’s 1978 novel The Avatar. It reminded me of his 1957 short story “Call Me Joe,” which is also about avatar technologies. In that earlier story, human scientists synthesize a centaur-​ like creature named Joe, using him as a meat puppet to explore other ­ planets: “Joe has never been much more than a biological waldo” (15). Similarly, The Avatar depicts a species of superintelligent aliens known as the Others who gather information from various worlds through their “avatars”: specially tailored representatives of each species in the cosmos, whose bodies have been tweaked to “contain certain structures deep inside, incredibly fine, on the border between molecular and atomic. These do not affect its [the avatar’s] functioning and are not heritable. All that they do is make Oneness possible” (Anderson 1978, 376). The Others use their avatars to experience the essence of every species, merging in “Oneness” through these submolecular interfaces. Upon discovering the existence of the Others, human beings develop or, in its more a lesser form of avatar technology known as “linking”—​­ advanced stage, “holothetics.” This technology meshes the biological sensorium directly to scientific devices: “while linkage to macroscopic machinery has not proven cost-​­effective, the case has turned out to be otherwise for monitoring and controlling scientific instruments. . . . Subjectively, it is like sensing the data directly, as if the nervous system had grown complete new input organs of unprecedented power and sensitivity” (193). The holothetic experience is an enfleshment of the digital: “Information flooded her. . . . It came out of instruments, transformed into M Y L I T T L E A V A T A R  275

digital numbers. . . . The data passed from their sources through a unit that translated them, in nano­ seconds, into the proper signals. Thence they went to her brain” (13). The holothete physically incarnates this data, experiencing intimate details of the world now on the nano­­scale, in “nano­seconds.” The holothete feels the instrumental data so completely in his or her body, aware of every precise configuration of matter and energy, that even direct assembly of molecules becomes possible: “we have for example reached the point of manipulating individual amino acids within protein molecules, using ions directed by force-​­fields which are directed by a holothete, in a manner that perhaps only the Others could plan out step by step” (194–​­95). I’m sure Madame Blavatsky would have appreciated this! By accessing any number of scientific instruments at once—​­molecular manipulation systems, particle accelerators, orbiting satellites, chemical Joelle the holothete and Eric the linker can travel through all sensors—​­ known scales, crossing downwards into biological cells, into atoms, and then into the deep structure of the universe itself. Becoming host to the flood of instrumental data, the human body descends into infinitesimal worlds beyond perception: He [Eric the linker] got no presentation of quantities, readings on gauges whose significance became plain after long calculation. That is, the numbers were present, but in the experience he was hardly more conscious of them than he was of his skeleton. He was not looking from outside and making inferences, he was there. . . . The cell lived. Pulsations crossed its membrane, like colors, the cell was a globe of iridescence, throbbing to the intricate fluid flow that cradled it in deliciousness. . . . The cosmos of the cell was a Nirvana that danced. Now inward, through the rainbows, to the interior ocean. . . . Organelles drifted by, seeming to sing while they wove together chemical scraps to make stuff that came alive. . . . Ahead of him, the nucleus waxed from an island of molecular forests to a galaxy of constellated atoms. . . . He entered it, he swept up a double helix, tier after tier of awesome and wholly harmonious labyrinths. . . . He swept out of the cell, through space and through time, at lightspeed across unseen prairies, into the storms that raged down a great particle accelerator. He became one with them, possessed by their own headlong fervor,

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the same speed filled him and he lanced toward the goal as if to meet a lover. This world outranged the material. He transcended the comet which meson he had become, for he was also a wave intermingling with a trillion other waves. . . . The atom awaited him. . . . Electron shells, elfinly asparkle, veiled it from him. He plunged through, the forces gave him uncountable caresses, he pierced its outer barriers and they sent a rapturous shudder across him, he probed in and in. . . . The atom embraced him, yielded to him, his being responded to her every least wild movement, he knew her. Radiance exploded outward. . . . [Joelle] enfolded him and they flew together, up a laser beam, through a satellite relay, to an observatory in orbit around the Moon. . . . At once he leagued with the instrumentality which was seeking the uttermost ends of space-​­time. . . . And in this Brahma-​­play he shared. . . . Thus did Eric learn something of the depths and order in space-​­time. (199–​­201) Anderson’s remarkable account of this scalar experience, where Eric in becoming avatar becomes molecular and then merges in oneness with the quantum mechanical structures of the cosmos, renders transparent the metaphysical presumptions and sexual politics that attend the invention of telepresence tools. His body, extended everywhere through exquisite scientific instruments, experiences the flood of data in reverse: not as if the microscopic details of the world were entering him, but rather as if he were entering the world. “He was there,” present inside the cell, merging into cytological Nirvana, and then joins with the subatomic particles in the linear accelerator. Descending into this other world that “outranged the material”—​­a virtual dimension beyond matter—​­he discovers that materialism is an erotics. Outranging the material as such, he “lances,” he “plunges,” he “probes” into the essence of the atom, whose delicate “veils” part before his headlong charge into “her” depths, submissively “yielding” and “caressing” at the same time. Coming to inhabit the innermost essence of matter, he then spreads into the reaches of space-​­time. And this is “Brahma-​­play”: a reenactment or game of cosmic creation, a penetrative ordering of the universe, a begetting of form out of chaos (i.e. the principle of Vishnu). As avatar of instrumental data, Eric serves as host to Brahma, the force of “information”: he becomes what informs matter itself, and thus “plays god.”

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The Avatar thematizes the scientific access to increasingly remote worlds as a metaphysical epic: becoming molecular, atomic, computational, and informatic—​­ and thus donning the human mask of godhood. Anderson’s novel makes explicit the avatar logic of molecular instrumentalism, the extent to which we can now imagine a prosthetic distribution of ourselves beyond all possible limits of matter (“outranging the material”), emerging as both subject and object of our own onto-​­theology.

When I logged into Second Life on March 5, I saw that an instant message from PerkyPat had been delivered two days prior: “Sorry, no meet Friday. Something up.” I sent a belated im reply before exiting Second Life: “No worries, see u soon. Hope all is well.” I made a mental note to email her later, but I got buried in grading student papers and I forgot to follow through. It was several months before we were able to meet up in Second Life again.

To: PerkyPat From: Colin Milburn Subject: Incarnation VII: The Sprite Attachments:Habitat_Keys.jpg [fig. 8.11] Date: 2 June 2010 Dear PerkyPat, The specific usage of the word “avatar” to refer to the graphical representation of a person in computational space has a known origin: the multiplayer online world of Habitat. Developed in 1985 by Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer at Lucasfilm Games, Habitat was made available in 1986 through QuantumLink, an online service for the Commodore 64 accessed via dialup modem. Habitat closed in 1988, morphing into the short-​­lived Club Caribe; but it would eventually reopen in 1990 in Japan as Fujitsu Habitat. As the first commercial and fully graphical virtual world, Habitat helped shape the discourse of cyberculture (Benedikt 1991; Stone 1995; Turkle 1995; Rheingold 2000). For example, here is the first report on Habitat, published in run magazine in August 1986:

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Habitat: A make-​­believe world inhabited by small, colorful creatures, called Avatars. Human beings may visit Habitat and move freely about its regions, interacting at will with Avatars. Human beings reach Habitat by traveling many miles through tiny telephone lines and entering through a large gateway, called QuantumLink. Once a human being enters Habitat, he or she takes on the visual form of an Avatar, and for all intents and purposes becomes one of these new-​­world beings. In the world of Habitat, people can play games and go on quests, but mainly they meet other people and have fun. (Morabito 1986, 24) It was the first time that most people, aside from Habitat’s developers and beta-​­testers, would have encountered the word “Avatar” in this particular sense, as the inhabitant of a computational world. The geography of Habitat, as the article suggests, exists independently from the human world, but humans can access it by taking the “visual form” of an Avatar. True, the term “avatar” had appeared in gamer culture before. In the late 1970s, for example, the multiplayer game Avatar, modeled on Dungeons & Dragons, was created for the plato mainframe-​­computing system. In the 1985 game Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, originally developed for the Apple II, the protagonist must become the virtuous “Avatar,” a representative of the sacred values of the land of Britannia. And we must not underestimate the significance of Dungeons & Dragons itself, insofar as “avatar” was already a term for the in-​­game materialization of a god from the Indian mythos, at least by the time of the Deities & Demigods supplement in 1980: “Probably the most difficult concept this mythos presents, at least in ad&d [Advanced Dungeons & Dragons] terms, is that of the ‘avatar.’ An avatar is a physical manifestation of a deity upon the Prime Material Plane” (Ward and Kuntz 1980, 75). Avatar later became a standard concept for all materialized divinities encountered in the ad&d game. (On the influence of Dungeons & Dragons on digital culture, see King and Borland 2003). While echoing other usages of “avatar” in the gamer community, Habitat nevertheless established several features of avatar as a computational entity. Morningstar and Farmer crafted the inhabitants of Habitat as electronic paper-​­dolls, inviting users to inhabit them, to give them life. The cartoonish Avatars would enable players to “go native” in the brave new world of the computer. As the promo article from run explains, a player

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“for all intents and purposes becomes one of these new-​­world beings.” The trope of going native has often featured in fictions of avatar technologies, certainly, from Anderson’s Avatar to Cameron’s Avatar: a colonial practice that reverses upon itself. And as more and more people ventured to the world Habitat, adapting to its protocols, rehearsing its tropes, and transporting its concepts elsewhere, some key aspects of the Avatar lifestyle emerged: 1) Avatars are small. To enter Habitat, humans must shrink down, become electronic in scale, and then voyage “through tiny telephone lines” (Morabito 1986, 24). The gateway to Habitat, now “large” by comparison, is the QuantumLink service itself—​­which emphasizes the absolute smallness of the Avatars, as if their mode of existence were quantum in nature, characterized by entanglement, tunneling, and uncertainty. As we know, the smallness of online worlds became common knowledge in the wake of Habitat, especially in the mud s and moo s of the 1980s and 1990s. Beginning with the launch of TinyMUD in 1989, users of these text-​­based worlds habitually added the prefix “tiny” to many aspects of their online lives: tinygovernment, tinycities, tinygames, tinysex. As Julian Dibbell wrote in his book My Tiny Life, the widespread adoption of a “tiny” vocabulary in worlds such as LambdaMOO significantly reflects “the sense of miniaturization endemic to a world that exists ‘inside’ a small computer somewhere” (Dibbell 1998, 59). 2) Avatars are magical. The residents of Habitat are practitioners of the occult sciences: they communicate over distances using bursts of “esp,” and they also commune with the “Oracle,” an otherworldly intelligence who oversees the operations of Habitat. The Avatars have access to “high magic,” according to an early promotional video from Lucasfilm, “here in a land that lies beyond [our] wildest dreams.” It is a “parallel world” to our own, a “universe unlike any other, full of fantasy and the unexpected. . . . It’s a wonderful new place that’s simply out of this world, coming to life only on QuantumLink” (Lucasfilm 1986). These techno-​­ fantastical elements of Habitat can be traced to a number of sources, according to Morningstar and Farmer: “Habitat was inspired by a long tradition of ‘computer hacker science fiction,’ notably Vernor Vinge’s story, ‘True Names’ (1981), as well as many fond childhood memories of games of make-​­ believe, more recent memories of role-​­playing games and the like, and numerous other influences too thoroughly blended to pinpoint. To this we add a

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dash of silliness, a touch of cyberpunk (Gibson 1984; Sterling 1986), and a predilection for object-​­oriented programming” (Morningstar and Farmer 1991, 275). In this swirl of inspirations, Vinge’s True Names stands out as a key to the semiotics of Habitat. For Vinge’s 1981 novella depicts computational space as a mystical “Other Plane” where algorithmic “sprites” take the form of magical creatures and users adopt personae derived from role-​­ playing games and traditions of fantasy literature (Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, for instance, makes much ado about the executable power of “true names”). Occupants of the Other Plane have come to accept that “sprites, reincarnation, spells, and castles were the natural tools here, more natural than the atomistic twentieth-​­century notions of data structures, programs, files, and communications protocols. It was, they argued, just more convenient for the mind to use the global ideas of magic as the tokens to manipulate this new environment” (Vinge [1981] 2001, 271). This mode of “techno-pagan” thinking would go on to inflect the discourses of virtual reality and cyberspace for many years, promoted by cyberpunk novelists as much as vr researchers such as Mark Pesce—​­to say nothing of the playful occultism of many mud s, moo s, and

mmo s (Pesce [1999] 2001; Dery 1996; Cavallaro 2000; Davis 2004; Cowan 2005; Edwards 2005; Bainbridge 2010; Nardi 2010). 3) Avatars are “nanarchists.” Chip Morningstar had known K. Eric Drexler for a while, of course. They had even worked together on the Xanadu Project (Ted Nelson’s long gestating “hypertext” endeavor), along with others who would also become famous in the high-​­tech world—​­including Mark S. Miller, a longtime friend of Drexler’s and fellow space-​­colony enthusiast. “My experience with Xanadu had quite a lot of influence [on Habitat],” Morningstar has said. “Not so much in terms of direct technical or conceptual input, but by steeping me in a culture of extreme technical audacity, where people knew a lot of esoteric stuff and weren’t afraid to use it in the service of very aggressive goals” (quoted in A. Wallis 2006). That he was thinking of Drexler in particular seems likely. After all, in their 1991 account of “The Lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat,” Morningstar and Farmer had cited Engines of Creation as depicting the high-​­bandwidth requirements of the future, which they likewise described as “esoteric” (Morningstar and Farmer 1991, 278). Drexler had been refining his own concepts of molecular manufacturing in the same milieu of technical audacity, the same crucible of esoteric stuff. Engines of Creation was published in 1986,

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around the time that Habitat went live. So we might say that the term “avatar” as a proxy in the virtual world and the term “nano­­tech­nol­ogy” as molecular manufacturing were linked from the moment of inscription: prime coordinates in the field of modern esoterica (Davis 2010). In managing the everyday operations of Habitat, Morningstar and Farmer also came to see the virtues of a bottom-​­ up approach to self-​ o ­ rganizing systems, as opposed to top-​­down control. They were guided by what Drexler and Miller had been theorizing in computational terms as “agoric open systems” (later published, for example, in Miller and Drexler 1988). For Morningstar and Farmer, this was a core lesson of Habitat: “Indeed, the challenges posed by large systems have prompted researchers such as Eric Drexler and Mark Miller to question the centralized, planning-​ d ­ ominated attitude . . . and to propose alternative approaches based on evolutionary and market principles. These principles appear applicable to complex systems of all types, not merely those involving interacting human beings” (Morningstar and Farmer 2001, 192; slightly modified from Morningstar and Farmer 1991, 289). These same concepts of bottom-​ u ­ p, agoric systems were also at the heart of Drexler’s thinking of self-​ r­ eplicating molecular machines and nano-​­computation in those years (e.g., Drexler 1986, 181; see also Drexler 1992, 371). They were also behind the radical system of human-​­technology governance proposed by Mark Miller, notoriously dubbed “nanarchy.” As Miller suggested, “the whole process of thinking about agoric systems made clear that you want to assign rights to lots of little things.” Instead of control from the top-​­down, a bottom-​­up system of technical restraints and autonomously “enforced rules” would allow social freedom but prevent coercion: “a dispersed system of communicating nano-​­Gorts . . . monitoring for certain inter-​­ boundary activities that may be coercive, and stops any that fall within the possibility of coercion” (Miller interviewed in Krieger 1993). Miller, Drexler, and others who debated the concept of nanarchy considered it a mode of autonomous governance, a technological enablement if not guarantee of free markets and anti-​­statism: an algorithmically implemented “libertarian utopia” (Hanson et al. 1994). It was more or less implied in the conclusions that Morningstar and Farmer drew from their work on Habitat. They observed that, when it comes to technical systems, there are “two basic camps: anarchists and statists.” Regardless, they decided it advisable for “future cyberspace architects”

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8.11. Lucasfilm’s Habitat: Strange creatures offer up keys to occult knowledge and power. Reproduced from “Lucasfilm’s Habitat on QuantumLink” promotional video. Lucasfilm, 1986. to program any system involving lots of little things to function as an anarchy—​­in other words, a nanarchy—​­such that even should a form of internal governance prove useful the system “can instead evolve one as needed” (Morningstar and Farmer 1991, 291). From the 1980s onward, science fiction would intensify such analogies and convergences among avatars and nano­­scale systems—​­as early as Tron, for example, with its “digitized matter” conceit and its plotline of cyber-​­libertarian resistance to the “Master Control Program.” Similar ideas would be explored in novels such as William Gibson’s All Tomorrow’s Parties, Rudy Rucker’s Freeware, Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, Jeff Noon’s Vurt, Bart Kosko’s Nano­time, Ian McDonald’s River of Gods, Nalo Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber, and Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. We could also point to films such as Virtuosity and tv shows such as the “Nanarchy” episode of Red Dwarf. The techno-​­political alignments of nano and avatar have likewise informed the design principles of other virtual worlds, including Anarchy Online and our own Second Life. Linden Lab, which sees its player-​­avatars as “engines of creation” in a tiny free-​­market world, learned well the lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat.

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To: PerkyPat Sorciere From: Colin Milburn Subject: Incarnation VIII: The Golem Date: 20 October 2010 It was great to catch up with you yesterday. I hope your experiments are going well! As I mentioned in passing, I think that the history of avatar technologies helps us better appreciate the new field of claytronics. The Dynamic Physical Rendering Project at Carnegie Mellon University and Intel is directed by Todd Mowry, Seth Copen Goldstein, and Jason Campbell. According to the project website, it “combines modular robotics, systems nano­­ tech­ nol­ogy and computer science to create the dynamic, 3-​­Dimensional display of electronic information known as claytronics” (www​ .cs.cmu​ .edu/​ ~claytronics/). The goal is to develop a kind of “programmable matter” or “programmable clay.” This smart material would be made of swarms of claytronic atoms, dubbed “catoms.” The tiny robotic catoms (which will eventually be made from “nano-​­dust” but for now are somewhat larger) could be programmed to take any shape, modeled after the idea of claymation cartoons. As Mowry describes it: “When you watch something created by claymation, it is a real object and it looks like it’s moving itself. That’s something like the idea we’re doing . . . in our case, the idea is that you have computation in the ‘clay,’ as though the clay can move itself” (Mowry quoted in “ ‘Teleporting’ over the Internet” 2005). The animated clay will be a medium of high-​­fidelity emulation, for example, becoming the simulacrum of an already existing object: “The idea behind claytronics is neither to transport an object’s original instance nor to recreate its chemical composition, but rather to create a physical artifact using programmable matter that will eventually be able to mimic the original object’s shape, movement, visual appearance, sound, and tactile qualities” (Goldstein et al. 2005, 99). Writing from the perspective of the future, Goldstein describes other attractive applications beyond teleconferencing and 3d faxing: A new communication medium known as programmable matter or “clay­tronics” is enabling doctors to visit patients without ever having to leave their offices. An assembly of millions of catoms—​­micron-​­size mobile computers—​­form a 3-​­D facsimile of a doctor in a patient’s home

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and a patient in the exam room. As the doctor interacts with the claytronic patient in his office, the claytronic doctor mimics the real doctor’s movements, performing a checkup on the real patient. Each catom is loaded with sensors that relay information on the patient’s pulse, temperature, reflexes and other vital signs. It’s small-​­town medicine with a high-​­tech twist. (Goldstein 2005, 34) This claytronic doc is likewise a new twist on endoscopic devices, virtual surgeons, and other telemedicine tools (Lenoir and Sha 2002). Yet it goes further, for claytronics would enable a synthetic copy to appear elsewhere, potentially indistinguishable from the original—​­at least on the surface. “Someday,” Goldstein says, “although they won’t have intelligence or behavior that is independent of the original, I’m convinced claytronics will reproduce images of individuals that will have the look and feel of a real person—​­with a shirt on a claytronic image that appears to ripple in the wind and a hand that feels like real skin extended in greeting” (Goldstein quoted in Plummer 2007). Or as he has said elsewhere: “I’ll be done when we produce something that can pass a Turing Test for appearance. . . . You won’t know if you’re shaking hands with me or a claytronics copy of me” (Goldstein quoted in Simonite 2008). Such a creature of advanced technology, a veritable doppelganger, would body forth the cultural history of avatar: “your replicated self, called an avatar, would self-​­assemble out of a pile of catoms” (Imerito 2005). At the same time, it would play out a mythological script, a familiar trope of creation narratives from various traditions, including the ancient Greek story of Prometheus, Yahweh’s creation of man in the Hebrew Bible, and other fables of shaping the human form out of clay. It is a primal mytheme that captivated Blavatsky, as well, especially in the “Anthropogenesis” volume of The Secret Doctrine. Let’s call it “The Golem.” The philosopher of science Alexei Grinbaum has written that “the history of mankind rests, not so much on the memory of past events, as on shared, inherited and perpetuated representations of meaning provided by old narratives, myths including” (Grinbaum 2010, 191). In our contemporary mythographic efforts, we rehearse these old narratives again and again. We now aspire to craft new bodies from claytronic atoms, rendering matter programmable and “animated” so as to host our personal agency at a distance. We dream of becoming the information, the

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essence, the “lodger” inside these new bodies with their feet of clay. Our golems, ourselves. And so we once again wear the mask of the modern Prometheus.

Looking backward, I suppose I should have noticed that something had gone wrong. She had not responded to my emails in a number of weeks. She was never in Second Life anymore, as far as I could tell. I worry that maybe I said something to offend her. Or perhaps it had nothing to do with me at all. I only wish I knew.

To: PerkyPat From: Colin Milburn Subject: Incarnation IX: The Nano­morph Attachments: Alien1.tif, Alien2.tif, Xeno1.tif, Xeno2.tif Date: 15 March 2011 Dear PerkyPat, And now we arrive at the ninth incarnation. “K. Eric Drexler, the avatar of nano­­tech­nol­ogy.” Thus was the scientist introduced to readers of Scientific American in a 1996 article called “Trends in Nano­­tech­nol­ogy: Waiting for Breakthroughs” by Gary Stix. The appellation seems to refer to Drexler’s role as figurehead of the emerging field of nano, the extent to which his name had come to metonymize the wild concepts of a forthcoming molecular revolution. At the same time, it uncannily recalls one of Drexler’s signature notions, namely, his own body—​­indeed, all of our bodies—​­as avatar of nano­­tech­nol­ogy. In a 1996 conference address, for instance, Drexler told the audience, “If you want to know what molecular nano­­tech­nol­ogy is, look yourself in the mirror” (Drexler quoted in Galaasen 2003). The idea that our mirrored image, our avatar in the looking glass, represents nano­­ tech­ nol­ ogy stems from Drexler’s argument in Engines of Creation and elsewhere that the existence of biological organisms in itself demonstrates the feasibility of atom-​­ by-​­ atom engineering. Inside every cell, according to Drexler, are legions of “natural nano­machines”—​ ­ribosomes, mitochondria, and so forth—​­that have evolved to do exactly what we now hope to achieve through science. Drexler argues in the 286  1000

early sections of Engines of Creation that life on Earth evolved from self-​ r­eplicating nano­ machines—​­ prebiotic molecular replicators, at first, and then genetic replicators. Ultimately, multicellular organisms emerged from these evolutionary mechanisms. For Drexler, every organism is an incarnation of ancient “engines of creation”: ancestral machines replicated, reduplicated, or mutated inside all living beings. In this way we are all avatars of nano­­tech­nol­ogy—​­in a word, nano­morphs. In 1995, David L. Pulver invented the figure of “nano­morph” for the gurps Robots rulebook supplement to the gurps role-​­playing system. Pulver describes nano­morphs as the culmination of industrial nano­­tech­ nol­ogy; they are “robots composed entirely of advanced molecular machinery” (Pulver 1995, 71). In the gurps game, nano­morphs are artificial entities that generally serve as powerful antagonists to the players, but it is also possible for a player to take a nano­moph as an avatar. This playmorphs could be said to index the avatar logic of nano ability of nano­ more generally. After all, to the extent that nano­morph—​­understood as a robotic swarm of self-​­organizing molecular machines—​­describes exactly what Drexler imagines an organism to be already, the rhetoric of nano­­ tech­nol­ogy compels us to play nano­morph, to assume the guise of nano­ moph, every time we look in the mirror. The Drexlerian idea of an organism as always already nano­morph owes strongly to Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, which describes the body as robotic puppet, a vehicle piloted by the egocentric genes inside: Now they swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots, sealed off from the outside world, communicating with it by tortuous indirect routes, manipulating it by remote control. They are in you and in me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines. (Dawkins 1976, 19–​­20) A creation myth—​­ “they created us body and mind”—​­ lurks inside of this notion of the organism as an avatar of nano­­tech­nol­ogy, a “survival machine” for the molecular pilots who steer us by “remote control,” as if alien lodgers from another world. We note then a “just-​­so” story of origins, whose theological dimensions were already brought to light as early as 1947 in Eric Frank Russell’s science fiction story “Hobbyist.” In this fable, a human space-​­explorer crashes on an alien planet. He discovers an M Y L I T T L E A V A T A R  287

immense workshop where living organisms are assembled mechanically from discrete atoms. It appears that the alien “hobbyist” running the workshop may be the creator-​­god of all life in the cosmos. We learn at the end of the story that this alien hobbyist had long ago seeded the planet Earth with synthetic organisms, humans included: the origin of life proves to be a primordial act of nano-​­engineering. Russell’s story exposes the mythographic force of the notion that “life itself” represents the principles of nano­­tech­nol­ogy, the possibility that we are all nano­morphs. The avatars we use today for play, work, and experimentation reflect our essential nano­morphic status back to us. They facilitate a thinking of ourselves as both outside and inside; for even as they promote an external, godlike perspective, they also afford an inhabitation of ourselves at a material, molecular level. As the media artist Mark Stephen Meadows has written, the avatar is an extraordinarily intimate device: “a machine that is attached to the psychology of its user. From within that machine the driver can peek out, squinting through alien eyes, and find a new world. And, oddly, the driver can also look into himself, as if gazing into his navel, and find a new landscape inside” (Meadows 2008, 8). Consider the 2007 reboot of Alien Syndrome, developed by Totally Games for the Wii. This game focuses on the adventures of Lieutenant Aileen Harding. Earth Command sends Aileen to combat an alien infestation that has taken over the spaceship Kronos. The ship is a hot zone of extraterrestrial nano­machines that infect human dna and convert it into alien dna . For most of the game, we control Aileen from above, in third-​­person perspective [fig. 8.12]. She uses a variety of weapons, including a “nano­bot-​ swarm cannon,” to fight endless waves of grotesque enemies. As she ­ explores the ship, she occasionally stumbles into alien laboratory pods. These biomechanical vessels, quite vaginal in appearance, provide Aileen with access to nano-​­instruments (a small-​­wavelength kinetic beam and a manipulator beam) to operate on her own dna . Each of the laboratory pods is actually a mini-​­game; when we access the pod, the perspective shifts to a first-​­person view. We now play as Aileen as she plays the mini-​­game—​­inside of herself. She uses the manipulator beam to insert desirable nucleotides into her genes while also wielding the kinetic beam to drive off the hordes of alien machines attempting to stick their own nucleotides into her chromosomes [fig. 8.13]. Alien Syndrome is about the struggle to keep humanness intact, at the molecular level: an alien nano­morphosis versus a human nano­morphosis. 288  1000

8.12. Alien Syndrome (Wii version): Lieutenant Aileen Harding blasts mutant alien Splitters with her flamethrower. Sega, 2007. 8.13. Alien Syndrome (Wii version): Lieutenant Aileen Harding uses nano­tech instruments to operate on her own dna while fending off genetic attacks by the alien syndrome nano­machines.

The threat of losing control of one’s own humanity, slowly turning into the avatar of a different biology, is signaled by the anagrammatic quality of Aileen’s own name. For the “alien” reshuffling of “Aileen” at an alphabetic level reflects the in-​­game process of substituting one cell for another, one gene for another, until there is no human left—​­replaced by the outsider. It’s the body snatchers narrative again, certainly. But Alien Syndrome turns this narrative on its head, foregrounding the fact that Aileen is already possessed: she is a playable avatar, inhabited by the player all the way down to her dna , her most intimate pixels. The more we control Aileen from both the outside and the inside, fighting off the incursion of foreign molecules and hideous monsters, the more the game confronts us with the message that the outside is already the inside: the alien is us. Or consider Xenogears, developed in 1998 by Squaresoft for the PlayStation. The game exuberantly mixes themes of faith, reincarnation, and supernatural transcendence with speculative molecular technologies, including remote-​­control dna , nano­tech interfaces for telepathically operating robotic “gears,” and even nano-​­tools for psychoanalytic treatments. (Actually, the game offers a sustained psychoanalytic allegory throughout: Fei Fong Wong, the central character, has an alternate personality called Id; he is also the reincarnation of another character called Lacan; and so forth. In this allegorical aspect of the game—​­one of many intersecting allegories—​­nano­­tech­nol­ogy is a figure of religious dogma as much as scientific knowledge, both repressing and enhancing the human capacity for change.) The main playable character is Fei, but over the course of its long and convoluted narrative, Xenogears lets us play as nine different avatars—​­one of whom is explicitly represented as a colony of nano­machines [fig. 8.14]. This particular nano­ morph avatar, however, proves to be a metonym for the nano­morphic condition of all the characters. Near the end of the game, we discover that the entire human civilization of this world had been created ages ago through the molecular engineering applications of a powerful Artificial Intelligence called Deus. In other words, every life on the planet turns out to be a nano­morphic puppet, pre-​­programmed for the purpose of giving flesh to the resurrected creator [fig. 8.15]. Xenogears represents the techno-​­creation of life as a theological fiction, yet another refiguring of the mythic history of the soul. (On the persistence of such themes, see Shershow 1995, Nelson 2001, Thomas 2008, Geraci 2010.)

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8.14. Xenogears: Emeralda, the nano­machine colony, floats in her growth tube. Fei, her creator (in his earlier incarnation as Kim), and Elly, her genetic blueprint, await the decanting. Squaresoft, 1998. 8.15. Xenogears: Deus awakens. As the heroes look upon the mummified ai , Elly explains the history of civilization on their planet. Engineered by the “–​­Persona” function of Deus, humans were designed as spare parts for reassembling the creator. Squaresoft, 1998.

In requiring us to play as a variety of cartoon avatars, gradually unfolding the layers of symbolism in each intersecting story line and anime-​ ­inspired cutscene, Xenogears foregrounds the nano­morphic qualities of avatar technologies more generally. For it situates the gamer in the role of the puppet master, controlling the nine different player-​­characters. Likewise, the gamer controls the enormous humanoid gears piloted by these characters, as if accessing the machines through the intermediary human avatars. But Xenogears also situates the gamer in the role of the puppet, revealing that Deus has been pulling the molecular strings since time immemorial. The game puts us both outside and inside, god and atom at the same time, even as we come to learn that Deus is also inhabited by an alien force, the Wave Existence, that it keeps locked inside itself . . . Anyway, I’m sure you get the point. lol!

To: Colin Milburn From: PerkyPat Sorciere Subject: Re: Incarnation IX Date: 1 April 2011 Dear Colin, Thanks for the avatar stories. Unfortunately I cannot linger any longer to learn about the next incarnation. My home planet has suffered a catastrophic grey goo attack, and I must redirect my efforts to that end of the galaxy—​­my government is summoning all scientists back to the hive. It has been lovely meeting you. Best wishes for the future—​­and please do take good care of your little avatar. I enjoyed my walks with Colin Dayafter. Yours truly . . .

So that’s how it all happened. When I received that last email, I remember thinking: Is this some kind of joke? But I never saw PerkyPat again.

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1001 Game Over—​­Play Again?

One thing that PerkyPat said keeps coming back to me, almost every day: “My head just exploded.” I’ve felt it too, this sensation of cognitive overload. A sudden apprehension of the complexity of the world, the overwhelming degree of interconnectivity among so many different elements of high-​­tech culture . . . and the inability of our little brains to keep up with the onslaught of information, the relentless pace of change. My head threatened to explode many times while I was writing this book, which came together in fits and starts over a period of nearly ten years. I’ve often recalled the famous scene from David Cronenberg’s Scanners (1981), where the skull of a genetically enhanced psychic blasts apart. It is the result of too much psionic force, too much telepathic data beaming down on one man’s brain. In a later scene, the scanner Cameron Vale uses his psychic abilities to link into a mainframe computer, connecting through telephone lines like a human modem. As he downloads vast amounts of data into his own mind, he discovers the pharmacological truth behind his scanning powers, the entangled networks of corporate technoscience, biomedicine, and securitization at the root of his psychic condition. His own head almost disintegrates as a shock wave of energy rips through the telephone system; but he reverses the flow at the last second, detonating the mainframe with its own electronic output—​­and killing everyone in the vicinity. The whole thing is a lovely metaphor for what so many of us face in any given moment, whether clicking around the blogosphere, flipping through cable channels, ordering novels at Amazon, listening to music

samples on iTunes, popping over for a quick raid in World of Warcraft, reading up on the latest discoveries in Science and Nature, or whatever. Overburdened with so much media, so much science, so much culture, we cannot engage enough. To be a fully informed and responsible citizen of the new world order, to be up to date on global politics, innovation, the arts and popular media in all their forms, whether as connoisseur or amateur, is an impossible fantasy. Even to ponder what it would mean to have complete technocultural fluency risks setting off any number of cranial eruptions. And this is to say nothing of actual expertise. More and more, we see the need to have expertise in far too many different areas, at least if we are to comprehend the byzantine ways that science, technology, and society impact each other, backward and forward, at many different scales—​­from mondo to nano. I have come to think that this is why play has such prominence, such urgency in the high-​­tech world today. Play is an approach if not a reaction to the bewildering complexity of technoculture in a time of rapid globalization. Through play, we navigate the flows of data, the tortuous networks of knowledge and information that confront us every day—​­without blowing our minds. Play is a form of engagement, a manner of learning, experiencing, and experimenting from the bottom up, little by little, bit by bit. In a world of incalculable, inconceivable diversity and complexity, when it is no longer possible to imagine sufficient mastery of anything, having fun becomes a significant alternative to having formal expertise, an alternative to being totally on top of things. Just play along . . . We see how this works, for example, in the video game SpaceChem. Developed by Zachtronics Industries in 2011, SpaceChem is a puzzle game about digital matter. It focuses on chemical engineering and the use of programmable nano-​­tools to manipulate atoms. The game proudly claims that it is concerned only with “fake chemistry.” But it nevertheless tasks players to learn some fundamentals of actual chemistry, such as the number of chemical bonds allowed by different elements in the periodic table, as well as the importance of stepwise protocols for synthesizing molecular compounds. It does not afford chemical expertise, but it lets us playact as chemical engineers for a while. The game is based on using “waldos” to produce specified molecular structures: “These are waldos. They grab, move, rotate, and drop atoms. Waldos run commands. Science!”1 Due to the constraints of the elements and the reactor system in the game—​ ­fictively representing the constraints faced by actual scientists in the 294  1001

lab—​­synthesizing each molecule is a real puzzle. The game scores our success in constructing each molecule and measures the elegance of our solutions. At the end of each level, the software compares our solutions to those of other players, drawing lucid histograms from online statistical data. Essentially, SpaceChem is a series of chemistry puzzles of increasing difficulty. But it also presents a literary narrative to contextualize our puzzle-​­solving efforts. Each completed puzzle unlocks a new chapter to the story: written in the spare style of pulp fiction and accompanied by stark black-​­and-​­white cartoons, the narrative explains that we are playing as a new recruit to the SpaceChem corporation. SpaceChem is a nano­ tech company, the galaxy’s leading chemical supplier. The story begins in domestic drama and then widens its scope to consider a variety of big issues, including the corporate colonization of other planets, the politics of resource extraction, industrial hazards, gender in the workplace, economic competition, and interspecies warfare. Late in the narrative, we learn that a race of sentient aliens has been resisting the human colonial expansion. The aliens begin to communicate by possessing human bodies with their minds, using them as meat puppets. In one chapter called “Exploding Head Syndrome,” the aliens even use their psychic powers to detonate the brain of a SpaceChem manager, gruesomely echoing the scene from Scanners. But because the aliens respond to the corporate colonies with terrorism, SpaceChem and our player-​­character dismiss any possible legitimacy of their concerns. The political and ethical implications are nevertheless evident, especially once xenocide seems to become a dominant business policy. But our player-​­character never seems to really know what is going on. Mysteries and conspiracies abound. This sprawling space opera, which sketches out the political, social, and economic dimensions of the SpaceChem operations without being too explicit, is more or less a supplement to the game as such. To progress in the game, to win, only requires solving the chemistry puzzles. The prose narrative is available to us, but it is not necessary for gameplay. We are rewarded with a new chapter of the story for each puzzle we solve, but we must make a conscious effort to access it and read it carefully; otherwise, we can simply go from puzzle to puzzle without ever understanding the plot or its significance. The game design thus serves as an allegory for the functionalities of play in the age of mondo nano. Taking the role of a SpaceChem engineer, we can enjoy the game by G A M E O V E R —​­P L A Y A G A I N ?  295

9.1. SpaceChem: Programming waldoes to synthesize hydrogen peroxide. ­Zach­tronics Industries, 2011.

focusing our attention exclusively on the nano level. We can use our waldoes to fulfill specific tasks, to carry out routine lab work. Fun goes in, molecules go out. In this regard, SpaceChem configures play as a localized practice of control, a way to compartmentalize and operate in an overdetermined universe: engaging one small system, following one set of rules, honing skills, moving along a discrete and constrained pathway. This pathway is quite literally represented in the chemical reactor system: the waldo-​­protocol that coordinates the molecular manufacturing process, a circuit of discrete functions (fig. 9.1). SpaceChem also visualizes it as a career track, corresponding to our geographical movements from planet to planet as we advance through the ranks of the corporation (fig. 9.2). Play is clearly figured as playbor in this game. But that is exactly the point, for we can have fun without thinking about it, or what other purposes it might serve. Just solve the puzzle, get to the next level, beat the game. SpaceChem invites playing without any obligation to grapple with the fictional plotline, much less its meanings. Yet solving the atom-​­scale puzzles does actually disclose their technopolitical context, whether we want to engage or not. The expanded context comes in small packets: 296  1001

9.2. SpaceChem: The career path of a SpaceChem engineer. Zach­tronics ­Industries, 2011.

discontinuous units of wry prose that require some interpretive effort to bring into narrative cohesion, closing the gutter between them. The narrative, that is, the literary apparatus of SpaceChem, hints at the perplexing entanglements of cultural history, media systems, and political intrigue that shape the molecular sciences today, and vice versa. The story gives clues to these entanglements through metaphors and symbols; they are available for interpretation and critical analysis. So by completing molecular puzzles, we also have the opportunity to avail ourselves of the more daunting puzzles posed by the narrative, its jokes, allusions, and technopolitical allegories. There are various ways to solve the chemistry puzzles; there are even more ways to read the fictive framework—​­if we choose to accept this challenge at all. While SpaceChem explicitly teaches us how to play with atoms, it leaves the riddles of its story entirely to our own interpretive devices . . . and so, what else to do but speculate? SpaceChem solicits two kinds of play, or rather, two modes of play that are always active, in principle, whenever any game is afoot. On the one hand, there is a mode of play that is about learning rules and sticking to them. It projects a “magic circle” that separates the zone of play from the G A M E O V E R —​­P L A Y A G A I N ?  297

rest of the world as if an enchanted island. It manages complexity by isolating certain functions of the everyday world in microcosm. We might call it anatomized play, or instead, an atomized play. On the other hand, there is a mode of play that takes rules and regulations as occasions to press beyond, to explore and experiment, to speculate boldly, to surf the tsunami. It does not manage but instead jumps in without a life preserver and easily gets carried away. It represents the fun of dashing on ahead, creating new and dangerous visions, adventuring recklessly, shaking up the squares, multiplying possible worlds. Play this way and you’ll probably blow your mind anyway—​­but just think about the lulz! The philosopher Jacques Derrida once theorized these different modes of play, exfoliating them in his beautiful, jovial fashion. He saw the two modes as entailing different approaches to knowledge, different ways of thinking and acting in the world, whether locking down the human present with all its limitations or instead opening to an other-​­than-​­human future, rife with uncertainties: Turned towards the lost or impossible presence of the absent origin, th[e] structuralist thematic of broken immediacy is therefore the saddened, negative, nostalgic, guilty, Rousseauistic side of the thinking of play whose other side would be the Nietzschean affirmation, that is the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation. This affirmation then determines the noncenter otherwise than as loss of the center. And it plays without security. For there is a sure play: that which is limited to the substitution of given and existing, present, pieces. In absolute chance, affirmation also surrenders itself to genetic indetermination, to the seminal adventure of the trace. There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of play. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign, and which lives the necessity of interpretation as an exile. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology—​­in other words, throughout his entire history—​­has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play.2 298  1001

Sure play versus free play, following the rules versus bending the rules, polite chuckles versus riotous laughter, owning versus pwning: these distinct modes appear together, inextricable even if incommensurable. They oscillate dynamically, the one potentially blurring into the other at any given moment. It is not simply an issue of bad games versus good games, or dystopia versus utopia—​­quite the contrary! But if we now occupy a high-​­tech planet whose networks and infrastructures are increasingly mobilized around certain instrumentalities of play, certain stratagems of terminal speculation, it becomes ever more vital to question, to challenge the ways in which our recreational pleasures are made into bankable commodities, corporate securities, and militarized appliances. At the same time, we must not relinquish the affirmative capacities of having fun together, learning, innovating, and discovering in common—​­or just goofing around. For the gamers of the future, there are choices, customizations, mods, and options—​­including the option to not play these particular games at all. Or to play otherwise, in ways yet undreamed. If we explore too far into the dark, we might be eaten by a grue. Or we may find that the princess is actually in another castle. You never really know, for sure. But as they say, nothing ventured . . . Shall we play a game?

G A M E O V E R —​­P L A Y A G A I N ?  299

Acknowledgments

Writing this book was often an exhilarating experience—​­like an action-​ ­adventure game, set to co-​­op mode. Joe Dumit rode shotgun for the entire project. Some of the best ideas came from playing around with Aimee Bahng, Cesare Casarino, Bishnu Ghosh, Geeta Patel, Rita Raley, Bhaskar Sarkar, and Sudipta Sen. At uc Davis, my colleagues in the ModLab, the Department of English, the Program in Science and Technology Studies, the Program in Cinema and Technocultural Studies, the Center for Science and Innovation Studies, and the KeckCAVES make it a pleasure to go into work every day. My thinking about the media ecologies of science has been shaped especially by ongoing conversations with Mario Biagioli, Gina Bloom, Larry Bogad, Nathan Brown, Joan Cadden, Patrick Carroll, Seeta Chaganti, ­A nupam Chander, Tim Choy, Joshua Clover, Christina Cogdell, Lucy Corin, Marisol de la Cadena, Carolyn de la Peña, Greg Dobbins, Fran Dolan, Kris Fallon, Margie Ferguson, Kathleen Frederickson, Beth Freeman, Jim Griesemer, Hsuan Hsu, Mark Jerng, Alessa Johns, Caren Kaplan, Louise Kellogg, Oli­ ver Kreylos, Angie Louie, Desirée Martín, John Marx, Liz Miller, Roberta Millstein, Michael Neff, Jessie Ann Owens, Kriss Ravetto-​­Biagioli, Scott Shershow, Scott Simmon, David Simpson, Eric Smoodin, Matthew Stratton, Dawn Sumner, Madhavi Sunder, Tim Valdepena, Claire Waters, and Mike Ziser. I am grateful to all the current and former uc Davis students who have been involved in these conversations, as well. In particular, I would like to thank Sara Anderson, Kristin Aratoli, Russell Backman, Toby Beauchamp,

Treena Balds, Sylvie Bissonnette, Joseph Bustos, Evan Buswell, Jordan Carroll, Juliana Caccavo, Laurel Carney, Aileen Choe, Cynthia Deg­nan, Brian Egan, John Garrison, Jack Gosse-​­Fuchs, Jenni Halpin, Andy Hageman, Tyler Heid, Robbie Hoile, Courtney Hopf, Ben House, Melody Jue, Chris Kortright, Angela Jeffreys, Tanner Jupin, Will Kaufmann, Ben Kossak, Anthony Labella, Ingrid Lagos, Sara Juliet Lauro, Evan Lauteria, Christina Lee, Alec Levine, Eira Long, Rebeca Ibáñez Martín, Jennifer McClelland, Caroline McKusick, Aaron Norton, Josef Nguyen, Carolyn Ownby, Ryan Poll, Julia Prilepina, David Rambo, Mark Ranstrom, ­K atie Rodger, Chris Schaberg, Tyler Sciacqua, Dean Shreve, Lauren Sinton, Greg Siu, Jessica Staheli, Austin Smith, Tony Tang, Cameron Taylor, Kara Thompson, Julie Tran, Victoria Trang, Janet Towle, Chris Tung, Giancarlo Valdes, Mike Vela, Karen Walker, Marty Weis, Melissa Wills, and John Zibell. Thanks also to all the students who participated in my seminars on “Video Games and Literature,” “Cyberpunk and Cyberculture,” and “Video Games and Digital Narratives.” For all they have done to support this project, I am indebted to the staff of Voorhies Hall. Darla Tafoya and Melissa Lovejoy went above and beyond. Aaron Barstow, Jeanene Hayes, and Mary White made everything run smoothly. Kevin Bryant and Ron Ottman provided technical advice and built several awesome gaming machines for my lab group. The uc Davis Humanities Institute has also been very supportive over the years. I am especially obliged to Regina Canegan, Jennifer Langdon, Elliott Pollard, and Molly McCarthy. Friends around the world helped this book come together in ways large and small. My sincere thanks to Nancy Anderson, John Bender, Michael Bennett, Bernadette Bensaude-​­Vincent, Alisa Braithwaite, Bill Bahng Boyer, Luis Campos, Bruno Clarke, Christopher Coenen, Karen Collins, Wendy Chun, Jeanne Cortiel, Tyler Curtain, Peter Galison, Christine Gerhardt, Alexei Grinbaum, Orit Halpern, Kate Hayles, Lucas Hilderbrand, Chris Kelty, Nadine Knight, Susanne Lachenicht, Brooks Landon, Rob Latham, Tim Lenoir, Seth Lerer, Sylvia Mayer, Mara Mills, Jonah Mitropoulos, Rob Mitchell, Dave Munns, Alfred Nordmann, Gillian Paku, Katy Park, Sharrona Pearl, Perdy Phillips, Neil Randall, Arie Rip, Stan Robinson, Cheri Ross, Russell Samolsky, Laura Thiemann Scales, Daniel Schrimshire, Mark Solovey, Rob Svetz, Amanda Teo, Paul Thomas, Irvin Tyan, Adrian Weber, Jerri Weber, Marga Vicedo, Sherryl Vint, Kath Weston, Fern Wickson, and Lisa Yaszek for sharing innumerable 302  A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

insights and inspirations. I profited hugely from discussions with Anjali Arondekar, Tom Augst, Todd Avery, Betty Bayer, Jim Bono, Vincent Bontems, Marianne Boenink, Jillian Burcar, Finn Brunton, Jimena Canales, Michaela Castellanos, Oron Catts, Sarah Davies, Claudia Deetjen, Fran Dyson, Kevin Elliott, Arianna Ferrari, Ed Finn, Jerry Floro, Alex Galloway, Gretchen Gano, Michael Goddard, Tal Golan, Dave Guston, Uli Hahn, Barbara Herr Harthorn, Susan Henking, Zach Horton, Ben Hurlbut, Deborah Johnson, Darren Jorgensen, Richard Jones, Doug Kahn, Mario Kaiser, Eleanor Kaufman, Kamilla Kjølberg, Kornelia Konrad, Cathy Kudlick, Monika Kurath, Bernie Lightman, Sacha Loeve, Andreas Lösch, Sabine Maasen, Patrick McCray, Cyrus Mody, Rahul Mukherjee, Natasha Myers, Brigitte Nerlich, Laura Oehme, Michael Pettit, Eric Picholle, Amanda Phillips, Steve Pokornowski, Judith Rauscher, Wallace Ravven, Christoph Rehmann-​­Sutter, Rasmus Slaattelid, Chris Stover, Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Christian Schmidt, Astrid Schwartz, Cynthia Selin, Hannah Shell, Tsjalling Swierstra, Pierre Teissier, Jenny Terry, Eugene Thacker, Lindsay Thomas, Jim Tobias, Chris Toumey, Joachim Schummer, Simone van der Burg, Harro van Lente, Janet Vertesi, Vyonne Walker, Peter Yeadon, Emily York, Gregg Zachary, and Ionat Zurr. Many thanks to Sven Bauerdick, Sarah Burke, Elisabetta Comini, Eve Downing, Chris Ewels, Shawn Fostner, John Hart, Robert Horn, Ray Lai, Pascal Messer, Anita Miller, Paul Rothemund, Mark McDermott, Herbert Ragan, Aaron Skelhorne, Alessandro Scali, Pradeep Srivastava, Ned Thomas, Rinie van Est, David Voyle, and James Webster for graciously providing images and anecdotes. Thomas Becker patiently taught me to use an atomic force microscope. PerkyPat Sorciere continues to inspire my imagination, wherever she may be. This project benefited tremendously from my involvement in the IMMERSe Research Network for Video Game Immersion, supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. An award from the Hellman Fellows Program also provided crucial assistance at an early stage of research. The University of California has nurtured this project in innumerable ways, as well. I am grateful to have received a uc President’s Faculty Research Fellowship in the Humanities, a uc Davis Chancellor’s Fellowship, and a uc Davis Faculty Development Award. The framework for the book came together while I was part of a residential research group on “Speculative Globalities” at the uc Humanities Research Institute; thanks to David Theo Goldberg, Stefka Hristova, A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S  303

Ariel Read, and everyone else at the uchri , then and now, for making this work possible. I have been fortunate to share my research on games and molecular science at numerous universities and conferences over the last decade. I thank the audiences who attended these events for their helpful questions and feedback. Some sections of this book previously appeared in significantly different form in the following publications: “Just for Fun: The Playful Image of Nano­­tech­nol­ogy,” Nano­Ethics 5 (2011): 223–​­32; “Everyday Nano­wars: Video Games and the Crisis of the Digital Battlefield” in Nano Meets Macro: Social Perspectives on Nano­­tech­nol­ogy, edited by Fern Wickson and Kamilla Kjølberg (London: Pan Stanford Publishing, 2010), 113–​­41; “Digital Matters: Video Games and the Cultural Transcoding of Nano­­tech­nol­ogy,” in Governing Future Technologies: Nano­­tech­nol­ogy and the Rise of an Assessment Regime, edited by Mario Kaiser, Monika Kurath, Sabine Maasen, and Christoph Rehmann-​­Sutter (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), 109–​­27; “Atoms and Avatars: Virtual Worlds as Massively Multiplayer Laboratories,” Spontaneous Generations 2 (2008), 63–​­89; and “Nano­ warriors: Military Nano­­tech­nol­ogy and Comic Books,” Intertexts 9 (2005): 77–​­103. It has been great to work with the team at Duke University Press. Courtney Berger has been an outstanding editor. The anonymous reviewers gave generous suggestions on ways to morph the book into cohesion. Thanks also to Willa Armstrong, Amy Ruth Buchanan, Erin Hanas, Jeremy Horsefield, Christine Choi Riggio, Ken Wissoker, and the rest of the crew for their help in developing the book and releasing it into the wild. My family means the world to me. Thanks to Douglas Milburn, Renée Milburn, Dustin Milburn, Angela Holman, Mike Holman, and the whole family for their love and support. I dedicate this book to my partner, Peter Holman: it’s been such a fun ride! I look forward to all the adventures still to come.

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Notes

0000. Press Start

1. Lutz interviewed in the documentary video Moving Atoms: Making the World’s Smallest Movie (ibm Corporation, 2013). 2. Heinrich quoted in Graeme McMillan, “The Star Trek Fan Art That ibm Scientists Created out of Atoms,” Wired, May 7, 2013, http://www​.wired​.com/ underwire/2013/05/star-​­trek-​­art-​­atoms-​­ibm/. 3. ibm Research, “A Boy and His Atom: The World’s Smallest Movie,” ibm Research: Articles, 2013, http://www​.research.ibm​.com/articles/madewithatoms​ .shtml. 4. Casavecchia quoted in Ann-​­Christine Diaz, “How ibm Made a Movie out of 5,000 Atoms,” Advertising Age, May 3, 2013, http://adage​.com/article/ agency-​­news/ibm-​­made-​­a-​­movie-​­5-​­000-​­atoms/241271/. 5. Casavecchia, “A Boy and His Atom—​­The World’s Smallest Movie,” Vimeo, May 1, 2013, http://vimeo​.com/65244953. 6. Heinrich interviewed in Moving Atoms. 7. Made from twelve iron atoms, the memory bit exhibited stable magnetic states only at very low temperatures. See Loth et al., “Bistability in Atomic-​ ­Scale Antiferromagnets.” 8. Heinrich quoted in Ari Entin, “ibm Research Makes World’s Smallest Movie Using Atoms: Future Storage Systems Based on Atomic-​­Scale Memory Would Be Capable of Storing Massive Amounts of Big Data,” ibm News Room, May 1, 2013, http://www- ​­03.ibm​.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/40970.wss. 9. Heinrich interviewed in Moving Atoms. 0001. Just for Fun

1. See Regis, Nano; Milburn, Nanovision; and Toumey, “Reading Feynman into Nano­tech­nol­ogy.” 2. Paul Schlichta quoted in Regis, Nano, 65. At the time, Schlichta was one of Feynman’s graduate students at Caltech.

3. Feynman, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” 34, 36. 4. Feynman, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” 26. 5. Feynman, “Infinitesimal Machinery,” 6. 6. Jeffrey R. Harrow, “Nano­tech­nol­ogy Will Change Everything!,” Harrow Technology Report, March 21, 2005, http://www​.theharrowgroup​.com/­articles/​ 20050321/20050321.htm. 7. See Doyle, Wetwares; Hayles, Nanoculture; Thacker, Biomedia; Milburn, Nanovision; Wickson and Kjølberg, Nano Meets Macro; R. A. L. Jones, “What Has Nano­tech­nol­ogy Taught Us?”; and McCray, Visioneers. 8. National Science and Technology Council, Nano­tech­nol­ogy. 9. Cuberes, Schlittler, and Gimzewski, “Room-​­Temperature Repositioning”; Service, “Tiny Abacus Points to New Devices.” 10. Gimzewski quoted in J. Thomas, “Atomic Abacus.” 11. Gimzewski quoted in Saunders, “Molecule Mover and Shaker,” 14. 12. Alicia Neumann and Kristina Blachere, “How Nano­tech­nol­ogy Will Change the World,” cnet, October 20, 1999, http://home.cnet​.com/special reports/0–​­6014–​­7-​­818759​.html. 13. Clement, “Whirligig World,” 102. See Westfahl, Cosmic Engineers: “Writing hard science fiction can be seen as a game, and the major goal of this game is to avoid making scientific errors in its stories” (41). On games of speculative fiction, see Csicsery-​­Ronay, Seven Beauties of Science Fiction; and Mead and Frelik, Playing the Universe. 14. Pesce, Playful World, 9–​­10. 15. See Thacker, Global Genome; Sunder Rajan, Biocapital; Cooper, Life as Surplus; M. Fortun, Promising Genomics; Waldby and Mitchell, Tissue Economies; S. Franklin, Dolly Mixtures; Hayden, When Nature Goes Public; Helmreich, Alien Ocean; and Dumit, Drugs for Life. On cultures of speculative capitalism, see Jameson, Cultural Turn; Jameson, Postmodernism; LiPuma and Lee, Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Risk; and uncertain commons, Speculate This! 16. George Mannes, “The Five Dumbest Things on Wall Street This Week,” TheStreet, March 28, 2003, http://www​.thestreet​.com/story/10076894/1/the-​ ­five-​­dumbest-​­things-​­on-​­wall-​­street-​­this-​­week​.html. The Steve Forbes quotation appeared on mailing envelopes for early issues of the Forbes/Wolfe Nanotech Report. 17. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze writes, “The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual. Exactly what Proust said of states of resonance must be said of the virtual: ‘Real without being actual, ideal without being abstract’; and symbolic without being fictional. Indeed, the virtual must be defined as strictly a part of the real object—​­as though the object had one part of itself in the virtual into which it plunged as though into an objective dimension” (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 208–​­9). 18. See Lacan, Le séminaire XXI, 6–​­48. Lacan’s famous dictum, les non-​­dupes errent, suggests that those who think themselves undeceived by the symbolic order, those who imagine themselves beyond the fictions of discourse—​­the 306  N O T E S T O 0 0 0 1

“non-​­dupes”—​­are actually the most duped, the most caught up in lies (especially the lie that fiction doesn’t tell truth). Because they strive to see through the jokes, the fibs and obfuscations, they do not see how thoroughly such lies actually structure lived reality. For those who think to escape the structuring fictions of discourse by going straight for the truth . . . well, this attitude precisely misses the point, falls into the trap. It fails to see the extent to which the symbolic order, the very condition of representability, authorizes what we take to be reality and prohibits thinking otherwise. This prohibition is already hidden in the language of les non-​­dupes errent—​­ a pun that is only funny when you allow yourself to be duped by language. If you have to explain the joke, it’s not so funny. . . . But what else can be done? In spoken French, les non-​­dupes errent is effectively homophonic for les noms du père (the “Names of the Father,” which, in Lacanian theory, would represent the structuring principle of the symbolic order and its various substitutions) and les nons du père (the “nos” of the Father, the proscriptions of the symbolic order, whose alternative is psychosis—​­or simply getting locked up in a nuthouse, labeled heretic, kook, visionary, and so forth). For Lacan, the funniest thing is that the pun is only amusing if we allow ourselves to be duped, enjoying the trickery of linguistic play, the errant ways of homophony. But if we get the joke, we have not erred—​­though of course we have—​­because we see that there is no final truth of les non-​­dupes errent, and that’s the point. There is no outside the joke, no other way to go but in error, no other choice but to wander around and laugh, tilting at windmills. In other words, there is no metalanguage . . . Now, how’s that for funny? But speaking of errancy . . . have you heard the one about nano and the Holy Grail? A famous physicist once suggested that nanoscientists are like the Knights of the Round Table—​­the archetypal knights errant—​­embarking on a romantic quest: “Futuristic thinking is crucial to making the big leaps. It gives us some wild and crazy goals—​­a holy grail to chase. . . . While we keep our futuristic dreams alive, we also need to keep our expectations realistic. . . . Once we head out on the quest, nature will frequently hand us what initially seems to be nonsensical, disappointing, random gibberish. But the science in the glitches often turns out to be even more important than the grail motivating the quest. And being proved the fool in this way can truly be the joy of doing science” (Roukes, “Plenty of Room, Indeed,” 57). So you see: les non-​­dupes errent . . . though perhaps the insight owes as much to Monty Python as to Lacan. 19. Marek T. Michalewicz, “Sensors and Metrology Devices from Quantum-π: From NanoTrek® to Tunneling Photo-​­Detector Array,” Quantum-​­π: Sensing the Future©, May 5, 2008, http://www​.quantum-​­pi​.com/PAPERS/Quantum-Pi_ Poznan_08.pdf. 20. Michalewicz, “Nano-​­Cars and Buckyball Pyramids,” 18. 21. F. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture. 22. Drexler, “Technology of Tiny Things,” 8. N O T E S T O 0 0 0 1  307

23. Drexler, “Technology of Tiny Things,” 14. 24. Clark and Schneidawind, “Mondo 2000,” C3. During its heyday, Mondo 2000 featured adventurous reports on nano­tech­nol­ogy; see W. Thomas’s “Nanocyborgs.” For an overview, see Rucker, Sirius, and Mu, Mondo 2000. On Mondo 2000’s techno-​­libertarian rhetoric, see Sobchack, “New Age Mutant Ninja Hackers.” 25. Michalewicz, “Nano-​­Cars and Buckyball Pyramids,” 19. 26. Nordmann, “Nano­tech­nol­ogy’s Worldview”; Bensaude-​­Vincent, Les vertiges de la technoscience. On the long-​­standing predicament of the whole earth rendered in the image of technoscience, see Heidegger, “Age of the World Picture”; Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye; Poole, Earthrise; Parks, Cultures in Orbit; and Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet. 27. Clinton said, “Over 40 years ago, Caltech’s own Richard Feynman asked, what would happen if we could arrange the atoms one by one the way we want them? Well, you can see one example of this in this sign behind me, that [Presidential Science Advisor] Dr. [Neal] Lane furnished for Caltech to hang as the backdrop for this speech. It’s the Western hemisphere in gold atoms. But I think you will find more enduring uses for nano­tech­nol­ogy” (Clinton, “Address to the California Institute of Technology”). On the gold-​­dot map, see Mamin et al., “Gold Deposition from a Scanning Tunneling Microscope Tip.” 28. Schummer, “Gestalt Switch in Molecular Image Perception.” 29. Shirai et al., “Directional Control in Thermally Driven Single-​­Molecule Nanocars.” The Tour group has insisted on the vehicular ontology: “Nanocars are single-​­molecule vehicles composed of two to four spherical fullerene wheels that are chemically coupled to a planar chassis and sometimes bearing a loading bay” (Akimov et al., “Molecular Dynamics of Surface-​­Moving Thermally Driven Nanocars,” 652). 30. Tour quoted in Jade Boyd, “Rice Scientists Attach Motor to Single-​ ­Molecule Car: Light-​­Powered ‘Nanocar’ Helps Researchers Test Bottom-​­Up Construction,” Rice University News & Media, April 12, 2006, http://www​.media​ .rice​.edu/media/NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID=8448. 31. Tour quoted in Jade Boyd, “Rice Scientists Build World’s First Single-​ ­Molecule Car: ‘Nanocar’ with Buckyball Wheels Paves Way for Other Molecular Machines,” Rice University News & Media, October 20, 2005, http://media.rice​ .edu/media/NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID=7850. 32. The nanoscientist Robert W. Stark writes, “Children begin to learn by seeing, hearing, tasting and, above all, by touching. In a very similar approach, we are currently learning to orient ourselves in the nanoworld by ‘feeling’ materials—​­not with our fingers, but with microscopes that allow us to probe these materials with atomic resolution” (Stark, “Atomic Force Microscopy,” 461). The childlike experience of navigating the nanoworld has been analogized with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: “As structures become small enough to reach nanometer scale . . . the rules are completely and disorientingly different . . . [like] Alice in Wonderland”; “Atoms are just at the border between ordinary, 308  N O T E S T O 0 0 0 1

macroscopic matter and matter dominated by the Alice-​­in-​­Wonderland rules of quantum mechanics” (Frankel and Whitesides, No Small Matter, 5–​­6, 37). Yet the nanoscientist Michael Roukes cautions that, though we might want to jump down the rabbit hole and play “Cowboys and Indians” down there, we must abide by the rules: “The nanoworld . . . is not some ultraminiature version of the Wild West. Not everything goes down there; there are laws. . . . Nature has already set the rules for us. We are out to understand and employ her secrets” (Roukes, “Plenty of Room, Indeed,” 54, 57). See Lewak, “What’s the Buzz?” Exploring the nanoworld becomes a proper game, with rules—​­though playing by the rules and playing with the rules are not always such distinct practices. 33. Osgood, “Probing Molecular Adsorption and Mechanics at the Atomic Scale,” ii. 34. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 8, 10. 35. Link quoted in Mike Williams, “Rice Rolls out New Nanocars,” Rice University News & Media, January 28, 2009, http://www​.media.rice​.edu/media/ NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID=12042. 36. Juul, Half-​­Real, 1. 37. The media theorist Steven Johnson writes, “Most video games differ from traditional games like chess or Monopoly in the way they withhold information about the underlying rules of the system. . . . In the video game world, on the other hand, the rules are rarely established in their entirety before you sit down to play. You’re given a few basic instructions about how to manipulate objects or characters on the screen, and a sense of some kind of immediate objective. But many of the rules—​­the identity of your ultimate goal and the techniques available for reaching that goal—​­become apparent only through exploring the world. You literally learn by playing. . . . Put another way: When gamers interact with these environments, they are learning the basic procedure of the scientific method” (S. Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You, 42–​­45). 38. Sims quoted in “Nanorex Releases Powerful New Molecular Modeling Software to California’s Brightest High School Students in cosmos Program,” nsti—​­Nano Science and Technology Institute, June 20, 2006, http://www​.nsti​ .org/press/PRshow​.html?id=1126. Nanorex was actively in business from 2004 to 2010. 39. Aznar quoted in “Nanorex Releases Powerful New Molecular Modeling Software to California’s Brightest High School Students in cosmos Program” (n. 38). 40. Griessl et al., “Room-​­Temperature Scanning Tunneling Microscopy Manipulation of Single C60 Molecules at the Liquid-​­Solid Interface.” 41. Kroto et al., “C60,” 162–​­63. On the role of the soccer ball in conceptualizing the structure of buckminsterfullerene, see Smalley, “Great Balls of Carbon.” For a slightly different perspective, see Kroto, “C60.” Although Kroto primarily credits the geodesic domes of Buckminster Fuller as the source of inspiration, he was happy to play along with the soccer analogy, figuring the research group as a five-​­a-​­side football team: “We immediately purchased a real football and N O T E S T O 0 0 0 1  309

our five-​­a-​­side team posed for a photograph” (118). For a more comprehensive history, see Aldersey-​­Williams, Most Beautiful Molecule. 42. Hietschold et al., “Molecular Structures on Crystalline Metallic Surfaces,” 212. 43. Michael E. Newman, “Nanosoccer Robots Ready to Compete in Upcoming RoboCup Games,” nist Tech Beat, edited by Michael Baum, June 16, 2009, http://www​.nist.gov/public_affairs/techbeat/tb2009_0616.htm#soccer. 44. On the language games of nano, see Schummer, Nanotechnologie; Loeve, “About a Definition of Nano”; and Ferrari, “Developments in the Debate on Nanoethics.” On the lure of nanoconvergence, see Coenen, “Deliberating Visions”; Schummer, “From Nano-​­Convergence to nbic-​­Convergence”; Bainbridge, Nanoconvergence; and Venkatesan, “Nanoselves.” 45. Bend It Like nist. 46. Roco, “From Vision to the Implementation of the U.S. National Nano­ tech­nol­ogy Initiative,” 6. 47. Stormer quoted in National Science and Technology Council, Nano­tech­ nol­ogy, 1. 48. Smalley quoted in Robbie Davis-​­Floyd and Kenneth J. Cox, “Bucky Balls, Fullerenes, and the Future: An Oral History Interview with Professor Richard E. Smalley,” Rice University, Houston, Texas, January 22, 2000; transcript available at Davis-​­Floyd’s website, http://www​.davis-​­floydpresents​.com/​ ­uncategorized/bucky-​­balls-​­f ullerenes-​­and-​­the-​­f uture/. 8. See also Colbert and Smalley, “Fullerene Tinker Toys.” 49. Stojanovic and Stefanovic, “Deoxyribozyme-​­Based Molecular Automaton.” 50. Stein, “Nanopores.” 51. In 2008, the bioengineer Michelle Khine and her colleagues used Shrinky Dinks for creating microfluidics devices and nanotech “lab on a chip” instruments: “To address the need to create deep and rounded microfluidic channels without expensive and dedicated tooling, we introduce a novel method of printing microfluidic channel networks onto commercially available thermoplastic ‘Shrinky-​­Dinks’ in a standard laser-​­jet printer. ‘Shrinky-​­Dinks’ is a children’s toy onto which one can draw a picture and subsequently shrink it to a small fraction of its original size. . . . Unlike the expensive setup and laborious processing required to make the silicon wafers, this approach only requires a laser-​­jet printer and a toaster oven, and can be completed within minutes” (Grimes et al., “Shrinky-​­Dink Microfluidics,” 170). In 2008, Khine, Mark L. Baum, and James B. Panther cofounded the startup company Shrink Nanotechnologies to develop Khine’s methods for commercial purposes; see Mark L. Baum, “What’s Shrink’s Story?,” Shrink Nanotechnologies, 2009, http://www​.shrinknano​.com/about/. 52. Gimzewski, “Nano­tech­nol­ogy.” 53. Rothemund, “Paul W. K. Rothemund—​­Senior Research Associate,” dna and Natural Algorithms Group, Caltech , 2006, http://www​.dna.caltech​.edu​ /~pwkr/. Rothemund’s research on “ dna origami” and molecular programming

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has been hugely influential in nanoscience, and it has also made an impact in the world of fine art. The Museum of Modern Art in New York featured Rothemund’s dna origami work in the 2008 “Design and the Elastic Mind” exhibition; see Cogdell, “Design and the Elastic Mind.” 54. See Schrage, Serious Play; Beck and Wade, Got Game; and Edery and Mollick, Changing the Game. On the social effects of these trends, see McGonigal, Reality Is Broken. 55. Pesce, Playful World, 12. 56. Pesce, Playful World, 269. 57. On practices of free labor, weisure, produsage, and playbor (to use Julian Kücklich’s term) as marking the collapse of distinctions between play and labor in postindustrial digital culture, see Postigo, “From Pong to Planet Quake”; Terranova, Network Culture; Kücklich, “Precarious Playbour”; Castronova, Synthetic Worlds; Dibbell, Play Money; Yee, “Labor of Fun”; Dyer-​­Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire; Goggin, “Playbour, Farming and Labour”; Scholz, Digital Labor; and Jagoda, “Gamification and Other Forms of Play.” On affective and immaterial labor practices as principal features of neoliberal globalization and the high-​­tech knowledge economy, see Hardt and Negri, Empire; and Virno, Grammar of the Multitude. Games play a privileged role in the knowledge economy, according to Dyer-​­Witheford and de Peuter, because “games are increasingly being applied to training myriad other kinds of immaterial labor” (Games of Empire, 6). Likewise, Jagoda has argued that the ubiquity of games and gamification today indexes “a condition of seepage through which game mechanics and objectives come to constitute the work, leisure, thought patterns, affects, and social relations of the overdeveloped world,” that is, the “society of the game” (“Gamification and Other Forms of Play,” 116–​­17). 58. To the extent that it signifies a different mode of performative and tactical engagement with matter, nano­tech­nol­ogy challenges forms of scientific objectivity that fashion knowledge in terms of distance, exteriority, and methodical strategy—​­questioning the status of object and objective as such; see Daston and Galison, Objectivity; Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway; Milburn, “Tactical Atomism”; Loeve, “Sensible Atoms”; and N. Brown, Limits of Fabrication. 59. Feyerabend, Against Method. On historical oscillations of scientific play and scientific seriousness, see Findlen, “Jokes of Nature and Jokes of Knowledge,” and “Between Carnival and Lent.” 60. See Gee, “Amusement Chests and Portable Laboratories”; Francoeur, “Forgotten Tool”; Laszlo, “Playing with Molecular Models”; de Chadarevian and Hopwood, Models; and Al-​­Gailani, “Magic, Science and Masculinity.” 61. See G. Turner, “Presidential Address”; Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature; Hilgartner, Science on Stage; Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science; Bowler, Science for All; and Pearl, About Faces. On scientific humor and jokes, see Gilbert and Mulkay, Opening Pandora’s Box; G. Myers, “ Pragmatics

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of Politeness in Scientific Articles”; Beller, “Jocular Commemorations”; and Rudwick, “Caricature as a Source for the History of Science.” 62. See McCain and Segal, Game of Science; Haynes, From Faust to Strangelove; Keene, “Every Boy & Girl a Scientist”; and Bell, “Childish Nature of Science.” 0010. Digital Matter

1. Marlow, “Digital Matter.” 2. Hagiya, “Towards Molecular Programming,” 126. See also Hagiya, “From Molecular Computing to Molecular Programming.” 3. Drexler quoted in Accelrys, “Nano­tech­nol­ogy—​­The Present and Future—​ ­A n Interview with Dr. K. Eric Drexler,” Accelrys Case Studies, 2004, http:// accelrys​.com/resource-​­center/case-​­studies/pdf/drexler.pdf. See also Drexler, Radical Abundance. 4. Hall, Nanofuture, 271. 5. Philip Moriarty, “Digital Matter? Towards Mechanised Mechanosynthesis,” Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (U.K.), epsrc Grant Reference: ep/G007837/1, 2008, http://gow.epsrc.ac.uk/NGBOViewGrant​.aspx?​ GrantRef=EP/G007837/1. Moriarty has reported progress in this research with similar coyness. The title of his talk at the 2013 Foresight Technical Conference, for example, was “Mechanical Atom Manipulation: Towards a Matter Compiler?” 6. “Executive Summary,” Center for Bits and Atoms, mit, 2002, http://cba​ .mit​.edu/about/index​.html. This vision is elaborated in Gershenfeld, Fab. 7. “Welcome to the mpp!,” Molecular Programming Project, University of Washington and Caltech, 2008, http://www​.molecular-​­programming​.org. The project description was updated in 2013, with slightly different syntax, as “Welcome to the 2nd-​­generation Molecular Programming Project!” 8. Merkle, blurb for Drexler, Nanosystems, i. 9. Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 27. 10. Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer, 3. 11. McCarthy, Hacking Matter. On the discourse of programmability that underwrites such visions of digital matter, see Chun, Programmed Visions; Golumbia, Cultural Logic of Computation; and Manovich, Language of New Media. On the materiality of the digital as such, see Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms. 12. Lieber quoted in Shaw, “Virus-​­Sized Transistors,” 8. On the conditions of contemporary science that promote such blurring of digital and biological systems, see Doyle, Wetwares; Helmreich, Silicon Second Nature; Johnston, Allure of Machinic Life; Parikka, Insect Media; and Thacker, Biomedia. 13. “Background: A Corporate History of Zyvex,” Zyvex Labs, 2007, http:// www​.zyvexlabs​.com/AboutUs/Background​.html; updated as “A Brief Corporate History,” 2013, http://www​.zyvexlabs​.com/AboutUs/History​.html. 14. Von Ehr quoted in Howard Lovy, “Zyvex’s Von Ehr on Pixels, Bits and

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Stitches,” Howard Lovy’s NanoBot, May 9, 2004, http://nanobot.blogspot​.com/​ 2004/05/zyvexs-​­von-​­ehr-​­on-​­pixels-​­bits-​­and​.html. 15. Robinett et al., “nanoManipulator”; and Sincell, “NanoManipulator Lets Chemists Go Mano a Mano with Molecules.” See also Robinett, “Electronic Expansion of Human Perception.” On the history of scanning probe microscopy, see Mody, Instrumental Community. 16. R. Taylor et al., “Nanomanipulator,” 127. 17. R. Taylor et al., “Nanomanipulator.” 18. Washburn quoted in Caudle, “Whole Elephant,” 3. 19. H. Simon, “Manipulating Molecules,” 36. 20. House, “Supertubes,” 1. 21. S. Edwards, Nanotech Pioneers, 60–​­61. 22. See Rheingold, Virtual Reality, 22–​­37; and Lenoir, “All but War Is Simulation,” 298–​­299. Ivan Sutherland coined the term “virtual worlds” in 1965 to describe environments made of computer-​­generated images; see Sutherland, “Ultimate Display.” 23. Robinett quoted in Rheingold, Virtual Reality, 24. On the development of interactive molecular graphics, see Francoeur and Segal, “From Model Kits to Interactive Computer Graphics.” On the history of data visualization and interface design as a “governance of sense” and sensory experience, see Halpern, Beautiful Data. 24. R. Taylor et al., “Nanomanipulator,” ch. 5, 4. 25. Rubio-​­Sierra et al., “Force-​­Feedback Joystick as a Low-​­Cost Haptic Interface for an Atomic-​­Force-​­Microscopy Nanomanipulator,” 903. 26. R. Taylor et al., “Nanomanipulator,” 131. 27. Sharma, Mavroidis, and Ferreira, “Virtual Reality and Haptics in Nano-​­ and Bionano­tech­nol­ogy,” 12. 28. Pesce, Playful World, 263. 29. West and Li, “Imaging,” 24. 30. Paul West, former vice president of products and chief technology officer of Pacific Nano­tech­nol­ogy, quoted in “Pacific Nano­tech­nol­ogy Announces New Image Display and Analysis Software for Atomic Force Microscopy,” PR NewsWire, March 17, 2003, http://www​.prnewswire​.com/news-​­releases/ pacific-​­nano­tech­nol­ogy-​­announces-​­new-​­image-​­d isplay-​­and-​­analysis-​­software-​ ­for-​­atomic-​­force-​­microscopy-​­74694287​.html. 31. For examples, see Olguin and Zhao, “From Games and Films to Molecular Simulation and Design”; Zini et al., “BioBlender”; Andrei et al., “Intuitive Representation of Surface Properties of Biomolecules Using BioBlender”; and Lv et al., “Game On, Science.” On computational simulation in nano­tech­nol­ ogy, see A. Johnson, “Modeling Molecules”; and Winsberg, Science in the Age of Computer Simulation. One of the earliest commercial examples of simulated nano­tech­nol­ogy appeared in 1993, on a 5.25" dos-​­formatted floppy disk bundled with Christopher Lampton’s textbook Nano­tech­nol­ogy Playhouse. It featured a

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nano­machine sticking atoms together like Legos, emphasizing the “playhouse” qualities of digital matter. 32. Pathak and Joshi, “Implementation of Virtual Reality and Agents Model Based Nano Domain Simulation an hpc Setup,” 1. 33. Tománek, “Computer-​­Based Carbon Nano­tech­nol­ogy Prophesy,” 1–​­3. 34. Schmidt et al., “General Atomic and Molecular Electronic Structure System.” 35. Todd J. Martínez and Sanjay Patel, “Hijacking Game Consoles for Molecular Modeling,” Materials Computation Center, University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, 2003, http://mcc.uiuc​.edu/research/nsfnuggets/2004-2005/​ 0325939_05_Martinez_Game.ppt. 36. Todd J. Martínez, “Computational Chemistry on the Sony PlayStation 2,” Martínez Research Group, University of Illinois at Urbana-​­Champaign, 2003, http://mtzweb.scs.uiuc​.edu/research/sonyps2/ps2project.htm. Following Martínez’s move from the University of Illinois at Urbana-​­Champaign to Stanford Univeristy in 2009, the documentation for his group’s projects on hijacking game consoles and GPUs transitioned to the Martínez Research Group@​Stanford University website, http://mtzweb.stanford​.edu. 37. Folding@home website, Stanford University, 2002, http://folding​ .­stanford​.edu. This exact quotation appeared on the home page of the Folding@ home site from May 2002 until March 2012. The current website features a slightly modified version. 38. Pande, “Folding@Home Press faq ,” Folding@home website, Stanford University, 2008, http://folding.stanford​.edu/English/FAQ-​­Press. 39. Guinness World Records 2008: Gamer’s Edition, 38. Guinness World Records officially considers Folding@home to have set the record as the world’s “most powerful distributed computing network” on September 16, 2007, when it achieved a processing speed of 1 petaflops. Supercomputers and computing networks continue to race forward, and older systems rapidly become obsolete. But Folding@home remains a contender. With its current configurations, the network averages 15 petaflops. (By comparison, as of 2014, the world’s fastest supercomputers can achieve more than 33 petaflops.) 40. Pande, “Folding@Home Press faq” (n. 39). 41. Pande, “Folding@Home Press faq” (n. 39). 42. Greg Miller, “Folding@Home Details—​­ps 3 to Diseases: Screw You,” ign, March 15, 2007, http://ps3.ign​.com/articles/772/772947p1​.html. 43. Hunam, reply to Pirotic, “Folding@Home Eurogamer Team,” Euro­gamer, March 24, 2007, http://www​.eurogamer.net/forum_thread_posts​.php?​thread_ id=78293. 44. Mactastic Mendez, “Lets Save the World,” Acidmods, January 1, 2008, http://www​.acidmods​.com/forum/index​.php?topic=13257.0. 45. WhiteKnight89, “Duke Nukem Folding@Home Team: ‘Feel Like Saving the World?,’ ” Duke4.net, July 26, 2010, http://forums.duke4.net/topic/2496​­duke-​­nukem-​­foldinghome-​­team/. 314  N O T E S T O 0 0 1 0

46. shock terminal, reply to Banjo, “Folding@Home Team 56895 and Life with Playstation,” response #56, Blu-​­ray, 2007, http://forum.blu-​­ray​.com/­blu-​ ­ray-​­games-​­playstation-​­3 /6975-​­folding-​­home-​­team-​­56895-​­life-​­playstation​.html. Both “villin” and “supervillin” are actin-​­binding proteins—​­but their scientific nomenclature has clearly been infected by the culture of comic books and video games. 47. Neil Rieck, “Folding@Home and boinc—​­Tips and Advocacy,” Neil S. Rieck’s website, March 2011, http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/docs/folding_ at_home​.html. 48. Pande et al., “Atomistic Protein Folding Simulations on the Submillisecond Time Scale Using Worldwide Distributed Computing,” 92; Vijay Pande, “Nanomedicine Center,” Folding@home: A Blog All about Folding@home, from Its Director, Prof. Vijay Pande, September 28, 2007, http://folding.typepad​.com/ news/2007/09/nanomedicine-​­ce​.html. 49. Asimov, Is Anyone There?, 94–​­95. On the fictional roots of nanomedicine, see Freitas, Nanomedicine. On scientific visions of “synthetic biology,” see Campos, “That Was the Synthetic Biology That Was.” 50. marcthpro, reply to Lehman, “Sorry, but What Is Folding@Home??? Thanks,” GameSpot, August 6, 2008, http://www​.gamespot​.com/forums/ topic/26527463. 51. See Feynman, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” 30; Lösch, “Anticipating the Futures of Nano­tech­nol­ogy”; Nerlich, “Powered by Imagination”; de Ridder-​­Vignone and Lynch, “Images and Imaginations”; and Horton, “Collapsing Scale.” 52. “2004 Foresight Institute Feynman Prize,” Foresight Institute, 2005, http://www​.foresight​.org/about/2004Feynman​.html. 53. Hand, “People Power.” 54. Cooper et al., “Predicting Protein Structures with a Multiplayer Online Game,” 756, 760. 55. Cooper et al., “Predicting Protein Structures with a Multiplayer Online Game,” 760. 56. See Khatib et al., “Crystal Structure of a Monomeric Retroviral Protease Solved by Protein Folding Game Players”; and Eiben et al., “Increased Diels-​ A ­ lderase Activity through Backbone Remodeling Guided by Foldit Players.” 57. Popović quoted in Hannah Hickey, “Game’s High Score Could Earn the Nobel,” University of Washington News, May 8, 2008, http://www​.washington​ .edu/news/archive/41609. On protocols and practices of scientific credit, see Biagioli and Galison, Scientific Authorship. 58. Das quoted in John Markoff, “rna Game Lets Players Help Find a Biological Prize,” New York Times, January 11, 2011, D4. 59. “About EteRNA,” EteRNA website, 2010, http://eterna.cmu​.edu/htmls/ abouteterna​.html. This exhortation was later relocated to “The Basics,” http:// eterna.cmu​.edu/web/about/. 60. Marlière et al., “Implementation of Perception and Action at Nanoscale,” N O T E S T O 0 0 1 0  315

181. They later developed an edutainment platform called NanoLearner; see Marchi et al., “Augmented Reality Nanomanipulator for Learning Nanophysics.” 61. Hansen, Bodies in Code, 38. On bodies and the materializing of digital media, see Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media; Hillis, Digital Sensations; Munster, Materializing New Media; and Wegenstein, Getting under the Skin. On the body as transducer of the virtual, see Massumi, Parables for the Virtual. On virtual embodiments afforded by game technologies, see B. Coleman, Hello Avatar; Calleja, In-​­Game; and Graffam, “Avatar.” 62. Galloway, Gaming, 2. 63. Nano Breaker, 01.Prologue. 64. Nano Breaker, 04.Jake. 65. On the functions of auditory cues and multisensory empathies in games, see Collins, Playing with Sound. 66. Hacking, Representing and Intervening, 22. 67. Rubio-​­Sierra et al., “Force-​­Feedback Joystick as a Low-​­Cost Haptic Interface for an Atomic-​­Force-​­Microscopy Nanomanipulator,” 905–​­6. 68. Stark et al., “Combined Nanomanipulation by Atomic Force Microscopy and uv-​­Laser Ablation for Chromosomal Dissection,” 33. 69. Rubio-​­Sierra, Heckl, and Stark, “Nanomanipulation by Atomic Force Microscopy,” 194. 70. Video games often present critical allegories or allegorithms of digitization, recursively figuring the algorithmic codes of culture; see Wark, Gamer Theory. 71. Nano Breaker, 19.Boundless Ambition. 72. Nano Breaker, 14.Human Quality. 73. Altmann, Military Nano­tech­nol­ogy. 74. See Galloway, Gaming, 70–​­84. On science fiction and realism, see Chu, Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep?; Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future; and Canavan, Klarr, and Vu, “Science, Justice, Science Fiction.” 75. Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 4. 76. Aarseth, Cybertext, 1. 77. Deus Ex, “Augs: Spy Drone [Cranial].” 78. Beale et al., “Young Cancer Patients’ Perceptions of a Video Game Used to Promote Self Care,” 211. 79. HopeLab Foundation, “Re-​­Mission™ Outcomes Study.” The technical findings are reported in Beale et al., “Improvement in Cancer-​­Related Knowledge Following Use of a Psychoeducational Video Game for Adolescents and Young Adults with Cancer”; and Kato et al., “Video Game Improves Behavioral Outcomes in Adolescents and Young Adults with Cancer.” 80. Re-​­Mission instruction booklet, p. 8. 81. PlayGen, “About NanoMission,” NanoMission website, 2008, http:// nanomission​.org/category/about/. On video games as rhetorical media, see Bogost, Persuasive Games; and Losh, Virtualpolitik. 82. Memarzia quoted in PlayGen, “NanoMission—​­Cutting Edge Science 316  N O T E S T O 0 0 1 0

Education Using Games,” NanoMission website, January 10, 2007, http://www​ .nanomission​.org/content/blogcategory/14/42/. 83. NanoMission, “NanoMedicine V1 Module.” 84. NanoMission, “NanoMedicine V1 Module.” 85. See Bensaude-​­Vincent, “Two Cultures of Nano­tech­nol­ogy?”; Glimell, “Grand Visions and Lilliput Politics”; Kurath and Maasen, “Toxicology as a Nanoscience?”; M. Kaiser, “Drawing the Boundaries of Nanoscience”; and Kaplan and Radin, “Bounding an Emerging Technology.” 86. R. A. L. Jones, “Nanoscale Swimmers.” The experiments are reported in Howse et al., “Self-​­Motile Colloidal Particles.” Jones’s book Soft Machines, which projects the development of nano­tech­nol­ogy based on biological principles, features a recurring “fantastic voyage” motif. 87. Heath quoted in Zandonella, “Tiny Toolkit,” 10. 0011. Tempest in a Teapot

1. On the literary prehistory of nano­tech­nol­ogy, see Landon, “Less Is More”; and Milburn, “Nano­tech­nol­ogy.” A number of tales about human voyages into the depths of matters adopt nautical motifs and plots. Harl Vincent’s 1929 story “The Microcosmic Buccaneers,” for example, explores the significant problem of piracy inside the atom. Mark Twain’s 1898 fragment “The Great Dark” is about microscopic human castaways desperately searching for land, their tiny ship lost on the open ocean—​­which is actually a tiny drop of water under a microscope. On the nautical features and narrative modes of modernity, including science fiction, see Casarino, Modernity at Sea. In this chapter, I primarily focus on the insular tropes of such narratives, rather than their general nautical dimensions. On the function of insulation for the utopian imaginary of science fiction, see Jameson, “Of Islands and Trenches,” and Archaeologies of the Future. 2. Sturgeon, “Microcosmic God,” 112. 3. Clement, Needle, 84. 4. Clement, Needle, 89–​­90, 65, 71. 5. See Milburn, Nanovision, 47–​­49; and Regis, Nano, 152–​­5 4. 6. Heinlein, Waldo, 45. 7. Shakespeare, Tempest, in Complete Works, 4.1.184, 5.1.320. 8. Heinlein, Waldo, 39; Shakespeare, Tempest, 4.1.148–​­58. It is perhaps worth noting that the hero of Heinlein’s 1958 novel Have Space Suit—​­Will Travel, when called upon to defend the virtues of the human race before an intergalactic court, spontaneously quotes this particular passage from The Tempest to indicate the heights of human cultural achievement. 9. Heinlein, Waldo, 153, 101. 10. Westfahl, Islands in the Sky. 11. See Clarke, Islands in the Sky; and O’Neill, High Frontier. 12. See Drexler, Engines of Creation, “Molecular Manufacturing as a Path to Space,” and Radical Abundance; and McKendree, “Balancing Molecular N O T E S T O 0 0 1 1  317

Nano­tech­nol­ogy-​­Based Space Transportation and Space Manufacturing Using Location Theory.” On the historical connections between space colony research and nano­tech­nol­ogy, especially Drexler’s involvement with O’Neill and the L5 Society, see McCray, Visioneers. 13. For example, see Harris, “A.I. and the Return of the Krell Machine.” 14. Hall, “Utility Fog,” 166. 15. See Lerer, Error and the Academic Self, 261–​­75. 16. Ozin et al., “Dream Nanomachines,” 3017. 17. Geoffrey Ozin, “Nanomachine Dream,” Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (cifar ), January 19, 2010, http://frontiersofhumanknowledge​.com/ nanomachine-​­dream/; also reposted at the gao Materials Chemistry Research Group website, January 19, 2010, http://nanowizardry.info/?p=623. 18. Ozin, “Knocking on the Frontier of Nano.” 19. For example, Ozin, Arsenault, and Cademartiri, Nanochemistry, 781 (referencing Henry IV, Part 1: “Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety”). 20. Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream, in Complete Works, 3.1.152–​­53. 21. H. Turner, Shakespeare’s Double Helix, 90. 22. See Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins. On the metamorphic power of Shakespearean dreaming, see Garber, Dream in Shakespeare. 23. Shakespeare, As You Like It, in Complete Works, 2.7.139–​­40. On relations of playing and gaming in early modern culture, see Bloom, “Games.” 24. On actor networks, see Latour, Reassembling the Social. On theatrical aspects of science, see Crease, Play of Nature; Blair, Theater of Nature; Case, Performing Science and the Virtual; Goodall, Performance and Evolution in the Age of Darwin; Hilgartner, Science on Stage; Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science; N. Myers, Rendering Life Molecular; Pearl, About Faces; Sawday, Body Emblazoned; Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-​­Pump; Shepherd-​­Barr, Science on Stage; and Van Dijck, Imagenation. 25. Sturgeon, “Microcosmic God,” 88. 26. Heinlein, Waldo, 154. 27. Paul Schlichta quoted in Regis, Nano, 70. 28. Stephenson, Diamond Age, 16. On the post-​­utopian or mutopian politics instantiated in Stephenson’s enchanted nano-​­island, see Hayles, “Is Utopia Obsolete?” 29. MacDiarmid quoted in Flor Wang, “Taiwan Can Become a Nano­tech­nol­ ogy Island: Nobel Laureate,” Central News Agency [Taiwan], November 7, 2003. 30. See “Taiwan Nano Tech 2004—​­Preamble,” Taiwan Nano Tech, 2004, http://nano.tca​.org.tw/2004/english/img_nano/01intro​.html. 31. “giant, la ‘presqu’île de l’avenir,’ ” Minatec: pole d’innovation en micro et nanotechnologies, December 2007, http://www2.minatec​.com/actualite/articles/ giant-​­g renoble_12- ​­07.htm. 32. See Green et al., “Quantum Pillar Structures on n+ Gallium Arsenide Fabricated Using ‘Natural’ Lithography”; Green and Tsuchiya, “Mesoscopic 318  N O T E S T O 0 0 1 1

Hemisphere Arrays for Use as Resist in Solid State Structure Fabrication”; Green and Yi, “Light Transmission through Perforated Metal Thin Films Made by Island Lithography”; and Green, “Process for Making Island Arrays.” 33. Yi, Zhang, and Luo, “Fabrication of Nano Structures on Wafer Surface by Using Nano Island Lithography,” 882. 34. See Schroeder and Wolf, “Magic Islands and Submonolayer Scaling in Molecular Beam Epitaxy”; and Suzuki and Shigeta, “Growth of Nanoscale Ge Magic Islands on Si(111)-​­7x7 Substrate.” Compare the “alchemical” language that appears in research on island-​­like clusters: Kumar, “Alchemy at the Nanoscale”; and Pyykkö, “Magic Nanoclusters of Gold.” 35. Wu and Liu, “Direct Writing of Si Island Arrays by Focused Ion Beam Milling,” 2507. 36. Wu and Liu, “Direct Writing of Si Island Arrays by Focused Ion Beam Milling,” 2507. fei is a scientific instruments company that manufactures “Tools for Nanotech”; it is also a corporate sponsor of the NanoMission game. 37. Wu and Liu, “Direct Writing of Si Island Arrays by Focused Ion Beam Milling,” 2507. 38. Nano-​­island experimentation often relies on feedback between computational simulation and instrumental measurements; see Reizvikh et al., “Simulation of Initial Stages of Ge Nano-​­Island Nucleation on Si (111) Surface”; and Voigtländer, Kästner, and Šmilauer, “Magic Islands in Si/Si(111) Homo­ epitaxy.” On the function of simulation in producing the scientific real, see Galison, Image and Logic; Helmreich, Silicon Second Nature; Lenhard, Küppers, and Shinn, Simulation; and Winsberg, Science in the Age of Computer Simulation. 39. Crease, Play of Nature, 123. 40. Wu and Liu, “Direct Writing of Si Island Arrays by Focused Ion Beam Milling,” 2509. 41. Wu and Liu, “Direct Writing of Si Island Arrays by Focused Ion Beam Milling,” 2508. 42. Smith, Maaroof, and Cortie, “Percolation in Nanoporous Gold and the Principle of Universality for Two-​­Dimensional to Hyperdimensional Networks,” 165418-​­1. 43. Vedmedenko, Competing Interactions and Pattern Formation in Nanoworld, ix. Vedmedenko’s textbook addresses all “the patterns arising in nanosystems caused by competing interactions,” in this way helping “to decrypt the puzzles posed to us by Nature” (x, ix); see especially pp. 97–​­98. 44. Helseth et al., “Colloidal Crystallization and Transport in Stripes and Mazes,” 7518. 45. Serres, “Literature and the Exact Sciences,” 14, 16. 46. Helseth et al., “Colloidal Crystallization and Transport in Stripes and Mazes,” 7518, 7523, 7523. 47. Galileo refers to the “book of nature” as a labyrinth in his 1623 treatise, The Assayer: “Philosophy is written in this all-​­encompassing book that is constantly open before our eyes, that is the universe; but it cannot be understood N O T E S T O 0 0 1 1  319

unless one first learns to understand the language and knows the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures; without these it is humanly impossible to understand a word of it, and one wanders around pointlessly in a dark labyrinth” (183). Bacon likewise discussed the book of nature as a labyrinth, invoking the figures of Daedalus and Theseus as prototypes of the mechanical inventor and the new natural philosopher (see “Daedalus, the Mechanic” in De sapientia veterum; see also Filum labyrinthi). On the historical significance of these representations of the “book of nature,” see Pesic, Labyrinth, and “The Clue to the Labyrinth.” On Galileo’s metaphor of the “book of nature” as a literary gambit, risking the relation of natural philosophy to sacred scripture, see Biagioli, Galileo’s Instruments of Credit. 48. Haldane, Daedalus, 46–​­48. 49. This caption has often appeared on the journal’s title page. It draws in part from McCord, “Daedalus”; and from Holton, “Perspectives on the Issue ‘Science and the Modern World View.’” 50. Kawata et al., “Finer Features for Functional Microdevices.” Described by its creators as a “microbull,” the scientific and popular press commonly called it a “nano-​­bull” because of the nanophotonic techniques used to sculpt it, which were refined to a fabrication accuracy of better than 150 nm. On the force of imagination in the case of the “nano-​­bull” and other nanotech objects, see Ruivenkamp and Rip, “Entanglement of Imaging and Imagining of Nano­tech­nol­ogy.” 51. Yang et al., “uhv-​­s tm Manipulation of Single Flat Gold Nano-​­Islands for Constructing Interconnection Nanopads on MoS2,” 1290. 52. Yang et al., “uhv-​­s tm Manipulation of Single Flat Gold Nano-​­Islands for Constructing Interconnection Nanopads on MoS2,” 1290. 53. Yang et al., “uhv-​­s tm Manipulation of Single Flat Gold Nano-​­Islands for Constructing Interconnection Nanopads on MoS2,” 1290. 54. Dalby, Pasqui, and Affrossman, “Cell Response to Nano-​­Islands Pro­ duced by Polymer Demixing,” 53. On the history of cell culture and tissue engineering, see Landecker, Culturing Life. 55. Dalby, Pasqui, and Affrossman, “Cell Response to Nano-​­Islands Produced by Polymer Demixing,” 54, 55. On the proliferation of novel creature types (“pocket monsters” and so forth) and the logic of collectibility characteristic of games like Kurikin, Pokémon, and their ilk, see Allison, Millennial Monsters; and Tobin, Pikachu’s Global Adventure. 56. Dalby, Pasqui, and Affrossman, “Cell Response to Nano-​­Islands Produced by Polymer Demixing, 60, 55–​­56. 57. Schmid, Bartelt, and Hwang, “Alloying at Surfaces by the Migration of Reactive Two-​­Dimensional Islands,” 1561. 58. Schmid, Bartelt, and Hwang, “Alloying at Surfaces by the Migration of Reactive Two-​­Dimensional Islands,” 1564. 59. Besenbacher and Nørskov, “How to Power a Nanomotor.” 320  N O T E S T O 0 0 1 1

60. Bartelt quoted in Chang, “Scientists Make a Bacteria-​­Size Machine Work.” 61. Bartelt quoted in Chang, “Scientists Make a Bacteria-​­Size Machine Work.” 62. Bacon, Novum organum, 392 (II.29). On relations of Bacon’s natural philosophy to the preternatural and the monstrous, see Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature. For the role of utopian islands in the history of science, see Albanese, New Science, New World; and Campbell, Wonder and Science. The Baconian dimensions of nano­tech­nol­ogy are addressed in Kastenhofer and Schmidt, “On Intervention, Construction and Creation.” 63. Bacon, New Atlantis, 74–​­75. 64. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 10. On the ludic dimensions of utopian thought, see Marin, Utopics; and Suits, Grasshopper. On Bacon’s scientific island as a theatrical playspace, see Coffey, “As in a Theatre.” 65. Chanteau and Tour, “Synthesis of Anthropomorphic Molecules,” 8750. 66. Chanteau, Ruths, and Tour, “Arts and Sciences Unite in Nanoput,” 395. 67. First quotation is from Chanteau, Ruths, and Tour, “Arts and Sciences Unite in Nanoput,” 395; second and third quotations are from Tour as quoted in Helen R. Pilcher, “NanoKids Made in Lab,” Nature, October 14, 2003, http:// www​.nature​.com/news/2003/031013/full/news031013-​­3​.html. 68. Chanteau, Ruths, and Tour, “Arts and Sciences Unite in Nanoput,” 395. On the discourse of the “limits of fabrication” in science and literature, see N. Brown, Limits of Fabrication. On the convergence of matter and metaphor in quantum physics and nanoscience, see Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway. 69. “Introduction to NanoKids Series,” NanoKids, Episode 1 (2003). 70. NanoKids opening theme song (2003), music by Bram Barker. 71. Shakespeare, Tempest, 1.2.352–54. On the aspirations of monsters, see Haraway, “Promises of Monsters”; and Milburn, “Monsters in Eden.” On the domain of technoculture as nexus and chiasmus, see M. Fortun, Promising Genomics; Bardini, Junkware; and Shaviro, Connected. 0100. Massively Multiplayer Laboratories

1. Geoffrey Joyner, “New Here, but an Old Fan of Nano­tech­nol­ogy,” Yahoo! Groups: Nanotech, January 11, 2006, http://tech.groups.yahoo​.com/group/ nanotech/message/5626. 2. Total Annihilation has spawned many conversations about the plausibility of its nano­tech­nol­ogy and the implications of programmable matter, both serious and playful. The game often provokes debate about possible futures, inspiring gamers who may have known little about nano­tech­nol­ogy beforehand to investigate further. For example, a 2005 thread on the StarDestroyer forum tried to suss out whether Total Annihilation’s nanoscience was “totally wank or reasonable.” Some gamers argued that the science was wank but nevertheless “cool”; others provided reasons why it should be considered “medium to high N O T E S T O 0 1 0 0  321

grade wank” but not a complete fraud; and still others found some of it quite plausible. See Shinova, “Total Annihilation Nanotech,” StarDestoyer, September 3, 2005, http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic​.php?style=3&f=4&t=76485. On the construction of plausibility in debates about future technologies, see Selin, “Negotiating Plausibility.” 3. It is a common practice of modern fandom. As Michael Saler has shown, from the nineteenth century onward, cultural consumers increasingly “turned to realistic yet fantastic imaginary worlds to secure enchantments compatible with the rational and secular tenets of modernity. They employed the ironic imagination to do so, and fashioned new public spheres of the imagination to help them occupy these worlds communally and persistently. As a result, many of these imaginary worlds became virtual worlds. By living simultaneously in the imagination and in reality, and being self-​­aware about this process, individuals became more adept at perceiving the world in ‘as if’ rather than in ‘just so’ terms” (Saler, As If, 198). Fans often engage with fiction ironically, behaving “as if” duped yet also quite aware of the power of fiction in shaping reality (les non-​­dupes errent). On ways in which fans commonly appropriate media narratives and imagine them differently, see Radway, Reading the Romance; Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers; Bacon-​­Smith, Science-​­Fiction Culture; and Hills, Fan Cultures. 4. Elisabetta Comini, email to the author, March 29, 2011. 5. Campos et al., “Anisotropic Etching and Nanoribbon Formation in Single-​ ­L ayer Graphene.” 6. Javier Sanchez-​­Yamagishi, Ken Van Tilburg, and Danny Bulmash, “Crystal­ lo­g raphic Graphene Nanoribbons,” Jarillo-​­Herrero Group: Quantum Nano­elec­ tronics, mit, 2009, http://jarilloherrero.mit​.edu/research/­crystallographic-​­ graphene-​­nanoribbons/. See also Michael Berger, “Nano­tech­nol­ogy PacMan Cuts Straight Graphene Edges,” Nanowerk, June 30, 2009, http://www​.nanowerk​ .com/spotlight/spotid=11429​.php. 7. Booth et al., “Discrete Dynamics of Nanoparticle Channelling in Suspended Graphene.” See also T. J. Booth, F. Pizzocchero, H. Andersen, T. W. Hansen, J. B. Wagner, J. R. Jinschek, R. E. Dunin-​­Borkowski, O. Hansen, and P. Bøggild, “Cutting of Suspended Graphene by Nanoparticles: Nanoscale Pac-​­Man Live in tem ,” paper presented at GraphITA, Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso, May 15–​­18, 2011, http://graphita.bo.imm.cnr.it/Invited_Keynote/ Boggild.pdf. 8. Tim Booth, Filippo Pizzocchero, and Peter Bøggild, “Nano Pacman on Graphene (live),” YouTube, May 26, 2011, http://www​.youtube​.com/watch?​ v=yLohgsU4RA0. 9. Sacanna et al., “Lock and Key Colloids,” 575. See also A. Taylor et al., “Pac-​ M ­ an”; and Glotzer, “Shape Matters,” 451. 10. David Pine, “Pacman Particles and Colloidal Life,” Symposium on Soft Matters in Materials Science, Penn-​­uprh-​­prem , May 7, 2010, http://prem​ .uprh​.edu/symposium/symposium2010/abstracts​.html#pine, quotation from abstract. 322  N O T E S T O 0 1 0 0

11. David Pine, “Colloidal Self-​­Assembly II: Pacmen and Multivalent Colloids,” Boulder School for Condensed Matter and Materials Physics 2012: Polymers in Soft and Biological Matter, Yale University, https://boulder​.research​.yale​.edu/ Boulder-​­2012/Lectures/Pine/2012-​­07-​­25-​­Boulder-​­PacmenValence.pdf, slide 27. 12. Cambel and Karapetrov, “Control of Vortex Chirality and Polarity in Magnetic Nanodots with Broken Rotational Symmetry,” 014424-​­1. 13. University of Oklahoma Office of Technology Development, “Pac-​­Man Approach: New Nanoparticle Treatment Keeps Some Types of Vision Loss at Bay,” ou Bio News, Office of Technology Development, University of Oklahoma, April 4, 2011, http://www​.otd.ou​.edu/bio/news/nanoparticle_eye_treatment​ .html. Jim McGinnis and his colleagues have extensively researched nanoceria (cerium oxide nanoparticles) as free-​­radical “scavengers”; see Chen et al., “Rare Earth Nanoparticles Prevent Retinal Degeneration Induced by Intra­cellular Peroxides.” McGinnis insists on the Pac-​­Man analogy: “The Nanoceria are not just the delivery agents; they are the therapy themselves. They are like a little Pac-​­Man. And they keep working. Once we inject them into the eye, they are there for at least four months”; McGinnis quoted in Brian Brus, “Innovators: Dr. James F. McGinnis, Dean McGee Eye Institute,” Journal Record, March 26, 2012, http://journalrecord​.com/2012/03/26/innovators-​­dr-​­james-​­f-​­mcginnis-​­ dean-​­mcgee-​­eye-​­institute-​­health-​­care/. 14. Fitz Gerald, Pennock, and Taylor, “Domain Structure in mp (Mesophase Pitch)-​­Based Fibres,” 139. 15. On interactions of texts and paratexts, see Genette, Paratexts. On paratextual materials—​­including instruction manuals, walkthroughs, discussion boards, and advertisements—​­as shaping the meanings of games, see Consalvo, Cheating; and S. Jones, Meaning of Video Games. 16. Castronova, Exodus to the Virtual World, 138. On the gnp of EverQuest in 2001, see Castronova, “Virtual Worlds.” On mmo s as social science laboratories, see Castronova, “Test of the Law of Demand in a Virtual World”; and Bainbridge, “Scientific Research Potential of Virtual Worlds.” Some mmo s simulate quantitative experimentation; see Jorgensen, “Numerical Verisimilitude of Science Fiction and eve-​­Online.” 17. Castronova, Synthetic Worlds, 281. 18. Castronova, Synthetic Worlds, 148. For more on the reality of game objects, see Dibbell, Play Money. 19. On Linden Lab and the history of Second Life, see Au, Making of Second Life; and Malaby, Making Virtual Worlds. On the culture of Second Life, see Boellstorff, Coming of Age in Second Life; Ludlow and Wallace, Second Life Herald; Meadows, I, Avatar; and Graffam, “Avatar.” On cultural practices of other mmos, see T. Taylor, Play between Worlds; Pearce, Communities of Play; Bainbridge, Warcraft Civilization; Nardi, My Life as a Night Elf Priest; Hjorth and Chan, Gaming Cultures and Place in Asia-​­Pacific; and Nakamura, “Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game.” 20. B. Coleman, Hello Avatar. 21. Lang and Bradley, “Chemistry in Second Life.” N O T E S T O 0 1 0 0  323

22. See Drexler, Engines of Creation, and Nanosystems. On nanotech fiction, see Miksanek, “Microscopic Doctors and Molecular Black Bags”; Hayles, Nano­culture; López, “Nano­tech­nol­ogy”; Avery, “Nanoscience and Literature”; Erickson, “Small Stories and Tall Tales”; McKinney, “Nano­tech­nol­ogy Tomorrows”; Suvilay, “Quelques représentations de la nanotechnologie dans le manga”; Taillandier, “Nano­tech­nol­ogy through the Lenses of Science Fiction”; and Youngman and Fruk, “Save the Hype.” 23. On habitus, see Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice. Some residents are acutely aware of Second Life’s connections to nano­tech­nol­ogy discourse; see DaSilva, “Snowcrashing into the Diamond Age.” 24. On cyberpunk as vernacular theory, see Foster, Souls of Cyberfolk. On the cultural impacts of cyberpunk, see Bukatman, Terminal Identity; Dery, Escape Velocity; S. Brown, Tokyo Cyberpunk; Cavallaro, Cyberpunk and Cyberculture; Tatsumi, Full Metal Apache; Latham, Consuming Youth; Vint, Bodies of Tomorrow; Yaszek, Self Wired; and Raulerson, Singularities. On the cyberpunk disposition of video games, see Geraci, “Video Games and the Transhuman Inclination.” 25. Stephenson, Snow Crash, 33–​­34. Stephenson was not the first to call graphical online personas “avatars”—​­Lucasfilm’s Habitat beat him to it in 1986—​­though he has claimed an independent invention of the term; see Stephenson’s “Acknowledgments” section in Snow Crash, particularly the updated 1993 paperback edition. Nonetheless, Stephenson’s novel popularized the concept and made it ubiquitous in today’s digital culture. 26. Rosedale quoted in Carr and Pond, Unofficial Tourists’ Guide to Second Life, 20. 27. Au, Making of Second Life, 1–​­37; Malaby, Making Virtual Worlds, 51, 147n141. Rosedale has contended that the novel more crystallized his thinking rather than directly inspiring his invention; see Stephen J. Dubner, “Philip Rosedale Answers Your Second Life Questions,” Freakonomics, December 13, 2007, http://www​.freakonomics​.com/2007/12/13/philip-​­rosedale-​­answers-​­your-​ ­second-​­life-​­questions. Regardless, the discourse of Second Life is significantly indebted to Stephenson. Several landmarks from the novel, such as the Black Sun, have been recreated in-​­world, and innumerable Hiro avatars have wandered the streets of self-​­described cyberpunk cities, such as Nexus Prime, InSilico, and Pteron. 28. Rymaszewski et al., Second Life, 146. 29. Ondrejka, “Education Unleashed,” 236. 30. Philip Rosedale, “Year-​­End Updates, and Thanks for the Emmy!” Second Life Blog (Official Linden Blog), January 9, 2008, http://blog.secondlife​.com/​ 2008/01/09/year-​­end-​­updates-​­and-​­thanks-​­for-​­t he-​­emmy/. 31. Philip Rosedale, “Digital Worlds, Digital Lives, Digital Futures: An Open Letter to Thereians and the Metaverse Community,” Second Life Herald, June 2, 2004, http://foo.secondlifeherald​.com/slh/2004/06/open_letter_fro​.html. On tensions between the top-​­down and bottom-​­up governance philosophies of Linden Lab, see Malaby, Making Virtual Worlds. 324  N O T E S T O 0 1 0 0

32. For example: “You become animal only molecularly. You do not become a barking molar dog, but by barking, if it is done with enough feeling, with enough necessity and composition, you emit a molecular dog. . . . Yes, all becomings are molecular”; Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 275. Likewise, if you experiment like a nanotechnician with enough affectivity, playing into composition with the image of nano­tech­nol­ogy, you emit a molecular nanotechnician . . . 33. See Al’Afghani, “Second Life’s Copybot, Nanofactory and the Future Model of Constitution”; and DaSilva, “Snowcrashing into the Diamond Age.” CopyBot is an application for cloning any object in Second Life, even those marked as “no copy.” In this way, CopyBot severely threatens the intellectual property regime of the world. In 2006, residents organized protests against CopyBot, threatening Linden Lab with lawsuits for failing to protect against this threat. Linden Lab established that use of CopyBot to infringe on intellectual property would violate Second Life’s Terms of Service. On the controversy, see Au, Making of Second Life, 130–​­39. 34. Drexler introduced the concept of “gray goo” (or “grey goo,” in the international spelling adopted by Second Life) in Engines of Creation. Following public controversy in the wake of Bill Joy’s article “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” and the rise of nano to the top of international funding priorities around 2000, many scientists openly denounced the plausibility of grey goo, including Drexler himself; see Drexler, “Nano­tech­nol­ogy”; Phoenix and Drexler, “Safe Exponential Manufacturing”; and Rincon, “Nanotech Guru Turns Back on ‘Goo.’ ” Even so, a healthy parascientific discourse of grey goo continues to spread. On the cultural politics of goo, see Milburn, Nanovision, 11–​­160; and Rip and Van Amerom, “Emerging De Facto Agendas Surrounding Nano­tech­nol­ogy.” 35. Soo quoted in Robert Lemos, “Viruses Go Virtual,” SecurityFocus, November 22, 2006, http://www​.securityfocus​.com/news/11425/. 36. Robin Linden, “Grey Goo on Grid,” Second Life Blog (Official Linden Blog), November 19, 2006, http://blog.secondlife​.com/2006/11/19/grey-​­goo-​­on-​­g rid/. Relabeled “update: Grid Reopened (Grey Goo on Grid)” at 3:18 pm, November 19, 2006. 37. james, response to Robin Linden, “Grey Goo on Grid,” November 19, 2006, 3:15 pm. 38. Corey Braendle, response to Robin Linden, “Grey Goo on Grid,” November 19, 2006, 3:00 pm. 39. Feynt Mistral, response to Robin Linden, “Grey Goo on Grid,” November 19, 2006, 2:53 pm. 40. Loretta Lura, response to Robin Linden, “Grey Goo on Grid,” November 19, 2006, 3:13 pm. 41. Livinda Goodlife, response to Robin Linden, “update: Grid Reopened,” November 19, 2006, 4:19 pm. 42. Sparkey, response to Robin Linden, “Grey Goo on Grid,” November 19, 2006, 3:14 pm. N O T E S T O 0 1 0 0  325

43. Robin Coalcliff, response to Robin Linden, “Grey Goo on Grid,” November 19, 2006, 3:17 pm. 44. Karsha Yutani, response to Robin Linden, “update: Grid Reopened,” November 19, 2006, 3:44 pm. 45. kuffher hauptmann, response to Robin Linden, “update: Grid Re­ opened,” November 19, 2006, 3:52 pm. 46. Jewel Laurasia, response to Robin Linden, “update: Grid Reopened,” November 19, 2006, 6:18 pm. 47. CidSilverWing and rocksx, responses to Lioncourt, “ring attack 11-​­19-​ ­2006,” 2007, YouTube, http://www​.youtube​.com/watch?v=5H8hNXWgOoE.2007. On griefing and trolling, see Dibbell, My Tiny Life, and “Mutilated Furries, Flying Phalluses”; Bakioğlu, “Spectacular Interventions in Second Life”; Foo, Grief Play Management; Gregson, “Bad Avatar!”; Anable, “Bad Techno-​­Subjects”; Chesney et al., “Griefing in Virtual Worlds”; and E. Coleman, “Freaks, Hackers, and Trolls.” 48. Akela Talamasca, “Video: The Recent Grey Goo / Sonic Rings Attack,” Second Life Insider, 2:58 am, November 25, 2006, http://www​.secondlifeinsider​ .com/2006/11/25/video-​­t he-​­recent-​­g rey-​­goo-​­sonic-​­r ings-​­attack/. 49. Finney, Body Snatchers, 156. Finney’s novel was originally serialized in Collier’s in 1954. 50. Richter interviewed in Re-​­Visitors from Outer Space, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Pod, 2007 dvd featurette, Invasion of the Body Statchers [1978] 2-​­dvd Collector’s Edition, Disk 2 (mgm Home Entertainment, 2007). 51. Talamasca, “Video: The Recent Grey Goo / Sonic Rings Attack.” 52. For example, see Aizpurua et al., “Optical Properties of Gold Nanorings”; and Banaee and Crozier, “Gold Nanorings as Substrates for Surface-​­Enhanced Raman Scattering.” 53. Riddle et al., “Sonic hedgehog Mediates the Polarizing Activity of the zpa .” 54. On genes as self-​­replicators, see Dawkins, Selfish Gene. On genetic self-​­replicators as models for advanced nanotechnologies, see Drexler, Engines of Creation. On self-​­replicating dna as a tool for nanotech, see Seeman, “Nano­ tech­nol­ogy and the Double Helix.” On “natural nanotechnologies” and the path to artificial nanotechnologies, see R. A. L. Jones, Soft Machines, “Future of Nano­tech­nol­ogy,” and “Biology, Drexler, and Nano­tech­nol­ogy.” 55. Datta and Datta, “Sonic Hedgehog Signaling in Advanced Prostate Cancer,” 444. 56. Linazasoro et al., “Potential Applications of Nanotechnologies to Parkinson’s Disease Therapy.” 57. See Podlasek, “Sonic Hedgehog, Apoptosis, and the Penis”; and Bond et al., “Peptide Amphiphile Nanofiber Delivery of Sonic Hedgehog Protein to Reduce Smooth Muscle Apoptosis in the Penis after Cavernous Nerve Resection.” 58. Donahue, “Gene Therapy, Angiogenesis, Sonic Hedgehog,” 998. 59. Parkin and Ingham, “Adventures of Sonic Hedgehog in Development and Repair.” 326  N O T E S T O 0 1 0 0

60. Penders et al., “Sonic’s Angels,” 40, 13. Later episodes of the story line include Flynn, Yardley, and Amash, “Order from Chaos,” and “Cracking the Empire.” 61. R, “Sonic’s Speed and the Power Ring: How the Hedgehog Breaks the Sound Barrier,” Sonic Whammy’s Sonic Universe, 2004, http://sonicwhammy.20fr​ .com/sonic/fanfics/speed.htm. 62. Rationalizing fictive texts with scientific concepts is a widespread practice in fan communities. It has also opened a cottage industry for PhD-​­wielding scientists to go out on a limb and impute the scientific principles behind popular media franchises, filling in gaps often strategically left open in the texts themselves. See Krauss, Physics of Star Trek; Highfield, Science of Harry Potter; and A. Simon, Real Science behind the X-​­Files. 63. On Gazira Babeli’s grey goo performances, see Quaranta, Gazira Babeli. The performances are documented at Babeli’s website, http://gazirababeli​.com/​ greygoo​.php. On the work of Babeli and her Second Front colleagues in the context of Situationist traditions and cyber-​­performance art, see Elias, “Psychogeography, Détournement, Cyberspace”; Schleiner, “Dissolving the Magic Circle of Play”; de Vries, “Avatars out of Control”; and Goriunova, Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet. On such modes of artistic experimentation as technoscientific acts, see Galloway, Protocol; Thacker, Global Genome; Critical Art Ensemble, Molecular Invasion; Da Costa and Philip, Tactical Biopolitics; R. Mitchell, Bioart and the Vitality of Media; and Raley, Tactical Media. 64. Quaranta, In Your Computer, 49. 65. Quaranta, In Your Computer, 48. 66. Latour, Politics of Nature, 63. On efforts to bring nano­tech­nol­ogy to democracy, see Toumey, “Science and Democracy”; Delgado, Kjølberg, and Wickson, “Public Engagement Coming of Age”; Wickson and Kjølberg, Nano Meets Macro; Barben et al., “Anticipatory Governance of Nano­tech­nol­ogy”; Cozzens and Wetmore, Yearbook of Nano­tech­nol­ogy in Society, Volume 2; Murphy, “Dialogic Science and Democracy”; and Bensaude-​­Vincent, “Nano­tech­nol­ogy.” On citizen science and experience-​­based expertise, see Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe, Acting in an Uncertain World; Collins and Evans, Rethinking Expertise; Corburn, Street Science; Eglash, Appropriating Technology; Epstein, Impure Science; Gieryn, Cultural Boundaries of Science; Nowotny, Scott, and Gibbons, Re-​­Thinking Science; and Rip, “Constructing Expertise.” 0101. Weapons-​­Grade Cartoons

1. U.S. Army Research Office, “Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies.” 2. Lai and Lai, Radix #1. 3. Ray Lai quoted in Shachtman, “America’s Might.” 4. Holden, “Comic Infringement”; Shachtman, “America’s Might.” 5. “Professor Writes Artists to Apologize for Inadvertent Use of Comic Book Image,” mit News, August 30, 2002, http://web.mit​.edu/newsoffice/2002/ thomas​.html. N O T E S T O 0 1 0 1  327

6. Campbell quoted in Greg Frost, “Soldier of the Future Plagiarised,” ­ ribune, September 9, 2002, http://www​.tribuneindia​.com/2002/20020909/ T login/main5.htm. 7. Thomas quoted in Tiffany Kary, “Nanotech’s Call to Arms,” cnet, March 27, 2002, http://news.cnet​.com/2008-​­1082-​­869330​.html. 8. Hammersla quoted in J. Russell, “mit ’s Soldier Draws Book Artists’ Ire.” 9. Quoted in J. Russell, “mit ’s Soldier Draws Book Artists’ Ire”; and in Shachtman, “America’s Might.” 10. Thomas quoted in mit News Office, “Army Selects mit for $50 Million Institute to Use Nanomaterials to Clothe, Equip Soldiers,” mit News, March 14, 2002, http://web.mit​.edu/newsoffice/2002/isn​.html. On media ecologies, see Fuller, Media Ecologies; and Shaviro, Connected. 11. For context, see Derrida, Of Grammatology, and The Post Card. The trope of packing future nanodevices into a typographic period or dot goes back to Feynman, as we saw earlier. 12. “About isn,” Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, mit, June 1, 2003, http://web.mit​.edu/isn/aboutisn/index​.html. 13. Ratner and Ratner, Nano­tech­nol­ogy and Homeland Security, 55, 55, 51, 55, 49. 14. Bukatman, Matters of Gravity, 216–​­17. 15. See Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women; Chun, Control and Freedom; Balsamo, Technologies of the Gendered Body; Kakoudaki, “Pinup and Cyborg”; Springer, Electronic Eros; Bukatman, Terminal Identity; Halberstam and Living­ ston, Posthuman Bodies; Hayles, How We Became Posthuman; Foster, Souls of Cyberfolk; Yaszek, Self Wired; Vint, Bodies of Tomorrow; Milburn, Nanovision; Napier, Anime from Akira to Howl’s Moving Castle; LaMarre, Anime Machine; Saitō, Beautiful Fighting Girl; and Azuma, Otaku. 16. U.S. Army Research Office, “Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies.” On the dream of supersoldiers, see Gray, “Cyborg Soldier,” and Peace, War, and Computers; Garreau, Radical Evolution; Blackmore, War X; Masters, “Cyborg Soldiers and Militarised Masculinities”; and Wolf-​­Meyer, Slumbering Masses. On ways in which costumes signify ideological dimensions of heroic action, see Wolf-​ ­Meyer, “Batman and Robin in the Nude”; Bongco, Reading Comics; Reynolds, Super Heroes; B. Wright, Comic Book Nation; Toh, “Tools and Toys of (the) War (on Terror)”; and Dittmer, Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero. 17. Goldblatt, “darpa’s Programs in Enhancing Human Performance,” 337. 18. Asher, “Brain-​­Machine Interface,” 357. 19. Murday, “High-​­Performance Warfighter,” 352. See also Murday, “Science and Technology of Nanostructures in the Department of Defense.” 20. See B. Wright, Comic Book Nation; Matton, “From Realism to Superheroes in Marvel’s The ’Nam”; Scott, “Written in Red, White, and Blue”; Costello, Secret Identity Crisis; Kodosky, “Holy Tet Westy!”; and Di Paolo, War, Politics and Superheroes. On animated cartoons and American military propaganda, see Smoodin, Animating Culture.

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21. Spiegelman quoted in Fein, “Holocaust as a Cartoonist’s Way of Getting to Know His Father,” C1. See also Spiegelman, Co-​­Mix. 22. Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art; Bongco, Reading Comics; Varnum and Gibbons, Language of Comics. 23. Schmitt, “Deconstructive Comics.” 24. McCloud, Understanding Comics, 67, emphasis in original. On the discontinuities of comics in relation to the history of serial media, see Gardner, Projections. 25. See Gresh and Weinberg, Science of Superheroes. 26. Vanhook, “Family Blood,” 24, ellipses and emphasis in original. 27. Vanhook, “Family Blood,” 29. In subsequent reboots of the series, the facts of this origin story are rendered uncertain, insofar as Bloodshot’s memories are also reprogrammed by the nanites inside him. 28. Rozum and Birch, “Silent Cathedrals,” in Xombi #1, 30. After its initial run ended in 1996, Xombi was rebooted in 2011 (“Reanimated!”) with a story line involving magical flying islands; see Rozum and Irving, Xombi. 29. McDuffie and Cowan, “Man in the Machine,” quotation from cover of Hardware #1. On the politics of resistance in Hardware, see J. Brown, Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans. 30. Van Meter and Cowan, “Hardware’s Arsenal,” 34. 31. Van Meter and Cowan, “Hardware’s Arsenal,” 35, 34. 32. Moore and Sprouse, “Sons and Heirs,” 10–​­11. Hall’s designs for utility fog were actually inspired by superhero fantasies—​­in particular, Batman’s utility belt; see Hall, Nanofuture, 195. 33. Klock, How to Read Superhero Comics and Why, 103–​­11; Paik, From Utopia to Apocalypse; Wolf-​­Meyer, “World Ozymandias Made.” 34. Matonti et al., New- ​­Gen, 35, ellipses in original. New- ​­Gen thematizes the mythological structures of superhero stories; see Reynolds, Super Heroes. 35. Fink and Eshed, “Origin of the Golem.” 36. See Bolter and Grusin, Remediation; and Grusin, Premediation. As Grusin suggests, the function of premediation is to “make sure that the future has already been pre-​­mediated before it turns into the present (or the past). . . . Premediation is not about getting the future right, but about proliferating multiple remediations of the future both to maintain a low level of fear in the present and to prevent a recurrence of the kind of tremendous media shock that the United States and much of the networked world experienced on 9/11” (4). 37. For instance, in Episode 8 (“The Return”), the Atom helps to devise a nano­tech­nol­ogy weapon to combat the nano-​­android Amazo. In Episode 10 (“Dark Heart”), the Atom shrinks himself to combat an invasion of self-​ ­replicating, nano-​­powered alien robots. 38. Ellis and Granov, Iron Man, 60. The story line audaciously imagines the human body to operate like a computer, storing a complete blueprint of itself in the brain; the Extremis package then reprograms this blueprint. Such

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representations influence cultural expectations of human enhancement; see Pedersen and Simcoe, “Iron Man Phenomenon, Participatory Culture, and Future Augmented Reality Technologies.” On the posthumanizing discourse of wearable technologies and augmented reality, see Pedersen, Ready to Wear. 39. Spider-​­Man (2002). For the chemical origin story of the Green Goblin, see Lee and Ditko, “Grotesque Adventure of the Green Goblin.” 40. Hulk (2003). For the gamma bomb origin story of the Hulk, see Lee and Kirby, Incredible Hulk #1. 41. “Spiderman Becomes a Reality at the University of Manchester,” University of Manchester News Centre, May 30, 2003, http://news.man.ac.uk/​1054290245/​ index_html. 42. Geim et al., “Microfabricated Adhesive Mimicking Gecko Foot-​­Hair,” 463. 43. Pugno, “Towards a Spiderman Suit.” See also Pugno, “Nanotribology of Spiderman.” 44. Isaacs, “X-​­Ray Nanovision”; Pappas, “Better than Superman?” 45. Gimzewski quoted in Saunders, “Molecule Mover and Shaker,” 14. 46. Thermo Scientific, “Become a Superhero with the NanoDrop 2000c Spectro­photometer,” AZoNano, 2009, http://www​.azonano​.com/nano­tech­nol­ogy-​­ video-​­details.aspx?VidID=680. 47. Mohanty quoted in Christine Walsh, “Panel: Nanotech Revolution Coming in Next 10 Years,” India New England Online, December 15, 2002, http:// www​.indianewengland​.com. Spidey’s motto (“With great power there must also come—​­great responsibility!”) first appeared in Lee and Ditko, “Spider-​­Man!,” in Amazing Fantasy #15, 11. 48. On intersections of military science with science fiction, see P. Edwards, Closed World; H. Franklin, War Stars; Gray, “There Will Be War!”; Gannon, Rumors of War and Infernal Machines; Echevarria, Imagining Future War; and Seed, Future Wars. On the military-​­entertainment complex, militainment, and everyday militarism, see Lenoir, “All but War Is Simulation,” and “Programming Theaters of War”; Raley, Tactical Media; Der Derian, Virtuous War; Stockwell and Muir, “Military-​­Entertainment Complex”; Penny, “Representation, Enaction, and the Ethics of Simulation”; Power, “Digitized Virtuosity”; Terry and Kelly, “Killer Entertainments”; Kaplan, “Precision Targets”; Toh, “Tools and Toys of (the) War (on Terror)”; Stahl, Militainment, Inc.; Huntemann and Payne, Joystick Soldiers; Werning, Real Wars on Virtual Battlefields; Halter, From Sun Tzu to Xbox; Crogan, Gameplay Mode; Mead, War Play; and Virilio, War and Cinema. 49. Oehlert, “From Captain America to Wolverine.” 50. DeGay quoted in Otis Port, “Super Soldiers,” Businessweek, July 27, 2003, http://www​.businessweek​.com/stories/2003-​­07-​­27/super-​­soldiers. 51. Andrews quoted in “Army, mit Unveil Futuristic Soldier Center,” Reuters, May 22, 2003, http://www​.reuters.co.uk/newsArticle.jhtml?type=technology News&storyID=2798848. As early as 2001, Andrews was emphasizing that Predator had helped to “spark our imagination” about soldier nanotechnologies and Future Warrior designs; see Andrews, “Smaller, Smarter & Lighter Systems,” 8. 330  N O T E S T O 0 1 0 1

While the Future Combat Systems project has since been folded into other Army r&d programs, the science-​­fictional vision of the Future Warrior continues to inform the discourse of soldier nanotechnologies. 52. DeGay quoted in John Gaudiosi, “Exclusive Interview Dutch DeGay, Part 2 of 2: Military Veteran Dutch DeGay Discusses Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Future Soldier,” GamerLive, April 13, 2012, http://www​.gamerlive.tv/article/ military-​­veteran-​­dutch-​­degay-​­d iscusses-​­tom-​­c lancy’s-​­ghost-​­recon-​­f uture-​ s­ oldier; also available on YouTube, http://www​.youtube​.com/watch?v= S7zMIVBPn8E. DeGay identifies Predator as one of his favorite films, along with Apocalypse Now, Blade Runner, and The Fifth Element; see “Blogger User Profile: Dutch DeGay,” Blogger​.com, 2005, http://www​.blogger​.com/profile/ 09975388189206847642; and “Dutch DeGay’s Page on 1UP.Com,” 1UP, 2006, http://www​.1up​.com/do/my1Up?publicUserId=5491868. 53. On the diagrammatic and inscriptional tools of science that coordinate images, equations, and data in the same representational zone, see Latour, “Drawing Things Together”; Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life; Griesemer, “Must Scientific Diagrams Be Eliminable?”; Lynch, “Science in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”; Rheinberger, Epistemology of the Concrete; Lenoir, Inscribing Science; D. Kaiser, Drawing Theories Apart; Daston and Galison, Objectivity; Merz, “L’imagerie composite dans la communication scientifique”; Anderson and Dietrich, Educated Eye; Gross and Harmon, Science from Sight to Insight; and Bender and Marrinan, Culture of Diagram. As Bender and Marrinan have written, diagrammatic objects are tools to think with: “Their disunified field of presentation—​­ruptured by shifts in scale, focus, or resolution—​­provokes seriated cognitive processes demanding an active correlation of information” (8). Rather than depicting an already cohesive world, their heterogeneous elements and internal gaps instead mobilize thought experiments—​­just like comic books. 54. Van Meter and Cowan, “Hardware’s Arsenal,” 47. 55. Pustz, Comic Book Culture. 56. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 167. 57. McCloud, Reinventing Comics, 215. 58. Ratner and Ratner, Nano­tech­nol­ogy and Homeland Security, 55, 58. 59. Ratner and Ratner, Nano­tech­nol­ogy and Homeland Security, 58, 59, 58. 60. Locke, “Fantastically Reasonable”; Thurtle and Mitchell, “Acme Novelty Library”; Tatalovic, “Science Comics as Tools for Science Education and Communication.” 61. Patrick Salsbury, “Nanotech Education via Comic Book,” NanoDot: News and Discussion of Coming Technologies (A Foresight Institute Website), August 19, 2000, http://nanodot​.org/article.pl?sid=00/08/20/004223; also available at the Foresight Institute’s blog archive, http://www​.foresight​.org/nanodot/?p=170. 62. Gray, Postmodern War, 46, 150–​­167; P. Edwards, Closed World; H. Franklin, Vietnam and Other American Fantasies; De Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines; Blackmore, War X; Singer, Wired for War. 63. Seed, Brainwashing; Moreno, Mind Wars. N O T E S T O 0 1 0 1  331

64. Templesmith, Singularity 7, 12, ellipses in original. Fictions of nano-​ c­ ontagion reboot some of the standard political metaphors of the outbreak narrative; see Wald, Contagious. 65. Vanhook and Perlin, “Rat,” 11, 22. 66. Vanhook and Perlin, “Rat,” 28, ellipses in original. 67. Straczynski et al., Shield, 14. For the origin of the 1940s Shield, see Castiglia, Shield. 68. Straczynski et al., Shield, 78, 73. 69. On terror as an autoimmunity crisis of globalization, see Derrida, “Autoimmunity,” and Rogues; and W. Mitchell, Cloning Terror. Gorilla Grodd’s history is important to know in this context. In his standard origin story, he orchestrates the killing of his own benefactor and sovereign—​­the alien who gave him superpowers in the first place. 70. Straczynski et al., Shield, 40, 34, 60, emphases in original. 71. Castiglia, Shield, 78. 72. On nanotech arms control, see Altmann, Military Nano­tech­nol­ogy. 73. U.S. Army Research Office, “Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies.” 74. Thomas quoted in Kary, “Nanotech’s Call to Arms” (n. 7). 75. Hantke, “Surgical Strikes and Prosthetic Warriors”; Blackmore, War X; Chun, Control and Freedom. 76. Parisi and Goodman, “Affect of Nanoterror”; Kosal, Nano­tech­nol­ogy for Chemical and Biological Defense. 77. Ratner and Ratner, Nano­tech­nol­ogy and Homeland Security, 44, 72, 44. 78. Nano-​­Tex® Fabric label, 2012 (on file with the author). 79. Hultin quoted in Nano-​­Tex, llc , “nano-​­c are ® Fabric Protection Named as One of time Magazine’s Coolest Inventions of the Year,” press release, Greensboro, NC, November 18, 2002, available at the Federal Bureau of Prisons Uniform Program website, 2002, http://www​.bopuniforms​.com/ images/NanoCare.pdf. 80. Zakin quoted in Donna Miles, “darpa Program Brings Sci-​­Fi Capability to Warfighters,” U.S. Department of Defense, October 16, 2009, http://www​ .defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=56269. 0110. Have Nanosuit—​­Will Travel

1. DeGay quoted in Howard, “Fueling the Future,” 26. 2. Galloway and Thacker, Exploit, 155–​­57. 3. U.S. Army Research Office, “Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies.” 4. Callahan, “Nano­tech­nol­ogy in a New Era of Strategic Competition,” 25, 20, referencing Gourley, “Lethal Combination.” 5. U.S. Army Research Office, “Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies.” 6. Rainbow Six: Lockdown, Mission 2—​­Operation: Backlash, Briefing 1/5. 7. See Power, “Digitized Virtuosity”; Nieborg, “Mods, Nay! Tournaments, Yay!”; Ottosen, “Military-​­Industrial Complex Revisited”; Kline, Dyer-​­ 332  N O T E S T O 0 1 0 1

Witheford, and de Peuter, Digital Play; and Dyer-​­Witheford and de Peuter, Games of Empire. 8. de Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, xii. For examples, see Jenkins, Textual Poachers, and Convergence Culture; Hills, Fan Cultures; and Penley, nasa/Trek. 9. The saga now spans several core games: Crysis (2007), Crysis Warhead (2008), Crysis Wars (2008), Crysis 2 (2011), and Crysis 3 (2013). It also crosses into other media: a 2012 Crysis graphic novel by Richard Morgan and Peter Bergting, linking the events between Crysis and Crysis 2; a novelization by Peter Watts, Crysis: Legion (2011); and a collection of short stories by Gavin Smith, Crysis: Escalation (2013). A vast number of paratexts surround these main narrative texts—​­including trailers, concept art, and websites produced by Crytek, as well as discussion boards, gameplay videos, walkthroughs, mods, and parodies produced by fans. As we will see, the meanings of the core games evolve in relation to the paratextual network. 10. Diemer quoted in Logan Booker, “Inside Crysis,” Atomic: Maximum Power Computing, September 21, 2006, http://www​.atomicmpc​.com.au/Feature/​60160,​ inside-​­crysis.aspx. 11. Dave “Fargo” Kosak, “Crysis (pc),” GameSpy, December 5, 2007, http:// pc.gamespy​.com/pc/ea-​­crytek-​­title-​­untitled-​­project/839785p1​.html. 12. On ways in which the Y chromosome is made to stand for the male ego or body image, see Badinter, XY; and Richardson, Sex Itself. 13. On styles of gameplay and the construction of hardcore gamers versus casual gamers, see Juul, Casual Revolution; and Crawford, Video Gamers. 14. AkumaX, “Why Do We Play Videogames?,” Giant Bomb, September 17, 2008, http://www​.giantbomb​.com/profile/AkumaX/blog/why- ​­do-​­we-​­play-​ ­v ideogames/​11549/. 15. Jordan Roher, “Fantesticle Penisula Adventure,” Not Clickable, October 28, 2007, http://www​.notclickable​.com/blog/fantesticle-​­penisula-​­adventure/. 16. See Cassell and Jenkins, From Barbie to Mortal Kombat; Kafai et al., Beyond Barbie and Mortal Kombat; Deuber-​­Mankowsky, Lara Croft; and Consalvo, “Confronting Toxic Gamer Culture.” 17. danni Marchant, “M for Manly,” response to Benji, “—​­>What Would You Guys Rate Crysis 2? (Sticky Please)