Defining Androgynous Characters

(I misread the syllabus and accidentally posted about "A Rape in Cyberspace" last week, so I'm just going to repost it again here, hopefully this time it will be relevant)

The strangest aspect of the story to me, from a perspective gender, is contained in this excerpt: “And thus the woman in Seattle who had written herself the character called legba, with a view perhaps to tasting in imagination a deity's freedom from the burdens of the gendered flesh, got to read similarly constructed sentences in which legba, messenger of the gods, lord of crossroads and communications, suffered a brand of degradation all-too- customarily reserved for the embodied female” Somehow the lamdaMoo became a place (for characters such as Legba and other androgynes, at least) where gender is only defined by its violation. Legba defined herself as androgynous, a god who had no need for a sex in order to exist, and yet was raped as a woman. While this presents a unique and strange situation for gender to exist, it does not occur without some theoretical hiccoups, mostly relating to its inescapable relationship with the physical world.

Even if the internet society of MOO asks us to “behold the new bodies awaiting us in virtual space undazzled by their phantom powers, and to get to the crucial work of sorting out the socially meaningful differences between those bodies and our physical ones,” it is . The case of Mr. Bungle is continually considered in the sense of how its analogues would be found in the physical world (“consider how that wisdom would sound to a woman who'd been, say, fondled by strangers while passed out drunk,” for example). By doing this, the denizens of Lambda require some sort of consistency between the two worlds, and firmly ground their imaginary plane with the rules of the physical world.

Thus, when Mr. Bungle decided to violate androgynous characters such as Legba,
his inaccurate descriptions of their selves would remove the literality of his control over them. If Legba is truly androgynous, and why not, it is a god after all, the nature of Legba implies a physicality that would make the physical descriptions of his “rape” inaccurate, as they assume Legba is a woman (at least I think, I might be mistaken). Thus, the rape becomes a description of rape, rather than the literal act itself.

To be honest, I am not sure where this takes the story. It makes Bungle’s acts no less malicious or violative on a personal level for each of the victims, only making the crime less harsh technically. Perhaps viewing the situation like this confers some sort of “power” on the digital androgyne (which could also just be taken as any digital persona that has decided not to identify a gender, rather than specifically state they have ambiguous gender), in that their indefinability makes them more elusive in a world that relies on the accurate descriptions of each of its aspects to exist. Also, I don’t really know enough about gender theory to make any of these statements about androgyny with certainty or authority, this is just an argument I’ve made off of assumption, so correct me if im wrong.

Snow Crash: Action Thriller/Social Commentary

Snow Crash depicts a society in which the government no longer plays an active role in the provision of public services such as highway maintenance and law enforcement, those roles having been taken over by corporations such as Fairlane, Inc, WorldBeat Security and MetaCops Unlimited. While traditional economic theory suggests that government intervention is necessary to ensure sufficient provision of these public goods, as private producers would not find it profitable to supply such services, corporations are shown to have successfully taken over production of these services in Los Angeles and elsewhere, and no decrease in standards of living which might be caused by private underproduction is apparent. Stephenson’s depiction of this entirely laissez-faire economy thus appears to be denouncing the need for government intervention in markets, which we might have expected given how counter-culture themes are often present in works of cyberpunk (or post-cyberpunk, as the case may be).

Of course, this abolishment of “big government” does not come without its costs, for the corporatization of America’s public space has caused both social and cultural fragmentation. Los Angeles has been divided into residential districts affiliated with different “franchise nations”, each with their own culture: the “technomedia priesthood” that is Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong is always welcoming to immigrants, while America’s middle class has retreated to “identical, computer-designed” Burbclaves, which only serve as a “culture medium for a medium culture”. This fragmentation is also present on the Raft, where people of different ethnicities occupy different ships, but whereas the franchise nations exist in an uneasy peace at worst, resorting only to stickers, guard robots and law enforcement officers to keep non-residents out, neighborhoods on the Raft are openly afraid that neighboring ships will “gang up on them and cut them loose”, showing how social tensions might arise from fragmented cultures being in close proximity with one another. Snow Crash thus suggests that while doing away with government intervention may be beneficial (or at least not detrimental) on the economic front, the resulting cultural fragmentation and loss of centralized law enforcement can cause social problems in their own way.

Another interesting point to consider is how Snow Crash and Neuromancer imagine cyberspace differently. In Neuromancer, only corporations and “console cowboys” can maintain presences in and manipulate cyberspace, implying that cyberspace belongs only to the economic and intellectual elite. While this same problem is also present to some extent in Snow Crash’s Metaverse, as only around 1% of the planet’s population has access to it, it is also much more inclusive than Neuromancer’s cyberspace, as untrained programmers such as businessmen, ordinary citizens and Kouriers can access the Metaverse just as easily as hackers can. Thus where Neuromancer imagines a future in which unrestrained capitalism and the rise of global megacorporations can exacerbate existing social inequalities by creating technological ones alongside them, Snow Crash suggests how free markets and technology can do the opposite, and insofar as the accessibility of our own Internet appears to more closely resemble Snow Crash’s Metaverse than Neuromancer’s cyberspace, I’d like to think that technological advancements can indeed be a force for social equality.

Defining Androgynous Characters

The strangest aspect of the story to me, from a perspective gender, is contained in this excerpt: “And thus the woman in Seattle who had written herself the character called legba, with a view perhaps to tasting in imagination a deity's freedom from the burdens of the gendered flesh, got to read similarly constructed sentences in which legba, messenger of the gods, lord of crossroads and communications, suffered a brand of degradation all-too- customarily reserved for the embodied female” Somehow the lamdaMoo became a place (for characters such as Legba and other androgynes, at least) where gender is only defined by its violation. Legba defined herself as androgynous, a god who had no need for a sex in order to exist, and yet was raped as a woman. While this presents a unique and strange situation for gender to exist, it does not occur without some theoretical hiccoups, mostly relating to its inescapable relationship with the physical world.

Even if the internet society of MOO asks us to “behold the new bodies awaiting us in virtual space undazzled by their phantom powers, and to get to the crucial work of sorting out the socially meaningful differences between those bodies and our physical ones,” it is . The case of Mr. Bungle is continually considered in the sense of how its analogues would be found in the physical world (“consider how that wisdom would sound to a woman who'd been, say, fondled by strangers while passed out drunk,” for example). By doing this, the denizens of Lambda require some sort of consistency between the two worlds, and firmly ground their imaginary plane with the rules of the physical world.

Thus, when Mr. Bungle decided to violate androgynous characters such as Legba,
his inaccurate descriptions of their selves would remove the literality of his control over them. If Legba is truly androgynous, and why not, it is a god after all, the nature of Legba implies a physicality that would make the physical descriptions of his “rape” inaccurate, as they assume Legba is a woman (at least I think, I might be mistaken). Thus, the rape becomes a description of rape, rather than the literal act itself.

To be honest, I am not sure where this takes the story. It makes Bungle’s acts no less malicious or violative on a personal level for each of the victims, only making the crime less harsh technically. Perhaps viewing the situation like this confers some sort of “power” on the digital androgyne (which could also just be taken as any digital persona that has decided not to identify a gender, rather than specifically state they have ambiguous gender), in that their indefinability makes them more elusive in a world that relies on the accurate descriptions of each of its aspects to exist. Also, I don’t really know enough about gender theory to make any of these statements about androgyny with certainty or authority, this is just an argument I’ve made off of assumption, so correct me if im wrong.

Addicted to Cyberspace

I want to build upon Shelina's post, in which she compares the cyberspace in Neuromancer to our current experiences with the internet, arguing that "we seem to be capable of entering a type of virtual reality without the physical melding of human and machine."

My initial reaction to Gibson's cyberspace was extreme discomfort. To Case, at least, cyberspace seems a way of escaping reality. Without the ability to access it, Case becomes a suicidal drug addict, desperate for a way to escape the bleakness of reality. Once he reconnects, he cries "tears of release" (70), and quickly allows cyberspace to take over his entire existance: "This was it. This was what he was, who he was, his being" (79). As we saw in Tiptree's story The Girl Who Was Plugged In, virtual reality completely replaces Case's actual reality, with his virtual self become more real that the person he is without the assistance of the matrix. "He forgot to eat" (79), because real life no longer matters. And this addiction appears to be because real life is too boring, too painful, too unbearable. When he remembers Linda Lee, and her death, for example, "he jacks in and works for nine straight hours" (79), hiding from his own thoughts, his own reality, by immersing himself in a vibrant world where he gets to rule.

This resonates with our own current relationship with the internet, and with computers in general. Many people have become addicted to gaming, whether World of Warcraft or Farmville, with some individuals even literally playing themselves to death through extended gaming marathons. Even casual users can find hours of their day disappearing to constant refreshing of Facebook and PrincetonFML, clicking links of Wikipedia, or watching cats playing the piano on Youtube. Neuromancer seems to have predicted not only the existance of this network, but also its ability to help us to escape from the stresses and worries of our everyday lives, and the addictive nature of this possibility.

However, the more of Neuromancer I read, the more troubled I became by my initial definitions of "real" and "imaginary," and my condemnation of Case for prefering to abandon "reality" in favor of comforting cyberspace. Shelina's discussion of how novels produce a similar experience particularly made me rethink this dismissal, as I can neither deny that my novel addiction involves escaping into a fictional world for a while nor claim that there is something "weak" or "delusional" about engaging in such activities, I think I must reevaluate my original black and white definition. Poe asked, "Is every thing we see or seem but a dream within a dream?", and if the answer is "yes," and life is just an illusion in our consciousness, does it matter whether that life takes place in the "real world," or in a consuming virtual reality?

To add to this debate, I found an article on BBC news that claims that a connection has been found between excessive internet use and depression. However, the researchers were unable to determine whether excessive internet use causes depression, or whether people use the internet more before they're depressed. In the first instance, "escaping" from reality through cyberspace is mentally harmful. In the other, it provides a welcome and useful form of escape when the "real world" becomes overwhelming. The problem, I guess, is discovering which is the truth.

Virtual Enough

 tags: cyberspace, virtual/virtual reality, cyborg, plugged in, the Internet

“A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly” (Gibson 4)

As the seminal work of cyberpunk fiction, Neuromancer is famous for a number of things, including its influence on the technical terminology of today. One of its greatest impacts can be seen through the word “cyberspace”, coined by Gibson in an earlier novelette and popularized through his use of it in Neuromancer. Today, cyberspace has become synonymous with the world of the Internet –  so much so that in the afterword of the 2000 reprint of Neuromancer, Jack Womack suggests that Gibson’s famous line, “Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation” (Gibson 51) may have itself encouraged people to turn the then-fledgling Internet into what it had become by the turn of the millennium.

It has been eleven years since Womack asked the question, “What if the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about?” (Womack 269, original emphasis). And in the space of just over a decade, the world of cyberspace, the world of the World Wide Web, has transformed. In the year 2000 (a year after the release of The Matrix), the internet had only been made available to the general public for six years (Abell), the dot-com bubble had just burst, and the Web was definitely still 1.0.  Writing this post on Blogger, I hardly need to describe the transformation that’s taken place on the web since then. But one transformation seems to be glaringly absent. I’m not jacked in.