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Dreaming of Molly Millions, the Panther Moderns and Body Hacking

“It was the style that mattered and the style was the same. The Moderns were mercenaries, practical jokers and nihilistic technofetishists.

The one who showed up at the loft door with a box of diskettes from the Finn was a soft-voiced boy called Angelo. his face was a simple graft grown on collagen and shark-cartilage polysaccharides, smooth and hideous. It was one of the nastiest pieces of elective surgery Case had ever seen. When Angelo smiled, revealing the razor-sharp canines of some large animal, Case was actually relieved. Toothbud transplants. He’d seen that before.”

- William Gibson, Neuromancer

See this real neko interviewed in the trailer for the film Flesh and Blood, about suspension and new forms of body modification.

Looking back at William Gibson’s Neuromancer, I wonder, why has so much geek energy and time gone into creating one aspect of his vision in the book, cyberspace, and not others, like body hacking? Yes, I know that Vernor Vinge came up with the concept of Cyberspace before Gibson, but Gibson’s book is the one most often cited as a huge cultural influence at the root of contemporary cyberculture. I recently read the phrase “the Gibson generation”, and I think I’m not part of it. Sure, I read Gibson, but I dislike these generational names, as if there was a clear marker, and if anything, I hope I’m part of the generation after the Gibson generation, but the quote above about the Panther Moderns gives me pause.

Biotechnology, as it exists today, is still surely limited, and often makes claims much greater than it can actually achieve, such as feeding and feuling the world. The food riots around the world should attest to this fact. Changing global economic policies and encouraging local sustainable food production instead of structural adjustment policies which promote export crops is much more likely to solve the world’s hunger problem than rice which has been genetically engineered to have more nutrients and terminator seeds that farmers have to pay for every year.

Still, there are major advances in biotechnology that are undeniable. Today we have face transplants, cybernetic limbs that move at will and manufactured organisms like Synthia. So, why are these advances only happening in multimillion dollar laboratories? Where is our Apple IIs of biology? And, our garage hackers aren’t using HP calculators, but quad processor machines with 2 gigs of memory, so what else might come out of a garage?

The term body hacking seems to have been coined by Quinn Norton, to describe low cost, DIY approaches to body modifying medical procedures. While some have taken her claims to mean that there might be a “second enlightenment”, I think that the first one did enough damage to our relationships with our bodies, thank you. I’d prefer to hope that more widespread body hacking might lead to new genders, new forms of expression, new ways of being and new relationships with our bodies that can slip out of the grip of biopower by not registering in the protocols of control that biopower works through.

Where can we see body hacking today? There are lots of examples that have been around for a long time of DIY body modification, like tattooing, scarification and piercing. But I would argue that hacking is often engaged with exploring technology and its potentials and ramifications, so we might see contemporary body hacking as novel or unexpected uses of technologies which modify the body. One example of this are the botox parties that the media is fond of talking about where people inject their friends with botox at parties to remove wrinkles. This is perhaps not a very liberatory use of body hacking, as it seems concerned with meeting the demands of biopower, of common beauty standards, at the risk of personal danger. Yet perhaps we can think of prolonging the beauty of youth as fundamentally changing the conditions of culture? I’m avoiding the use of the term “human condition” here intentionally, since it is my hope that body hacking might broaden the notion of what we think human is. Too often the word human, as in human rights, leaves out marginalized groups, often in the service of the economy. Who is human today? Who was yesterday? Still, I’m not sure about botox. I think there is a lot to be said about the ethical differences between cosmetic treatments like botox and surgical procedures that transgender people get and other forms of body modification, and the role of agency, oppression and biopolitical norms.

Perhaps we might see a merging of body hacking and computer hacking practices emerge. In Neuromancer, they seem to both be equally common. Molly injects herself with “endorphin analog” whenever she needs some. Today, the military is experimenting with using fear reducing drugs in conjunction with virtual reality as a treatment for PTSD, but this is not an everyday application. With today’s virtual reality technology, it seems like Dramamine will be a lot more common than endorphin inhibitors as a treatment for Simulator Sickness.

So, what is preventing a broader body hacking practice from developing? The technology is cheaply available. I found lots of medical supplies at an educational store in San Diego. Surely artists are paving the way in this kind of experimentation. Yet why aren’t there more body hackers? Why does saying to someone “i’m a body hacker” seem to imply more that you’re a psychopathic killer than that you’re part of an emerging culture of knowledge exploration, challenging the limits and definition of knowledge itself?

Perhaps it is a question of “critical mass”, that people need to just start doing it, if they’re interested, to create a culture of body hacking. Synthetic biologist Drew Endy at MIT thinks that what we need is a biohacker culture, using freely available software and protein and genome databases to imagine new lifeforms and new biological possibilities. The scifi blog io9.com even recently announced a contest using the Biobricks platform to design a new lifeform, nudging this emerging area along.

Culture was definitely a major part of how I got into hacking. I remember sharing a deep friendship with my buddy who I used to dumpster dive for passwords with and try out phracking software late at night at payphones around Miami. 2600 magazine was a very functional part of the culture and starting the Miami 2600 meeting was such an exciting part of “being a hacker” for me. I think that wanting to “be a hacker”, a major part of why I went into computer science, was tied up with my identity and my conception of myself and having that conception reinforced socially. Note the large number of geek joke t-shirts that I still own, like the 8008135 calculator and the “there are only 10 types of people in the world: those who know binary and those who don’t”. Yes, those shirts both have a hugely different meaning for me today, but geek t-shirts do attest to the cultural currency of geekness and hacking. Even Kevin Mitnick, who is one of the most well known crackers, admits that much of what he did was social engineering, impersonating IT people over the phone. When I read John Markoff’s book Cyberpunk as a young aspiring hacker, one of my favorite stories was of the woman in one of the hacker groups described in the book who would sleep with members of the air force to go through their wallets for passwords while they slept. I don’t remember the exact group name, and I wonder if the story is true.

Libidinal economies must have a large role in body modifications, as well. There are cultural refrences for what tattoos and piercings mean, including sexual attitudes. But how does a cat person fit into the libidinal economy? There must be a point at which it goes beyond novelty and people decide on their sexual relation to these new kinds of bodily expression. Queer and transgender communities are a place where one can clearly see this at work. Often one chooses a particular gender expression to attract a particular person, but in queer communities, one can see clearly the shifting of these choices and the multiple intersections of gender and sexuality at play, with shifting intensities, in any given room, say at an event at the Rubber Rose in San Diego. This kind of sexual economy can act as a limiting factor on new forms of gender and bodily expression if one finds it hard to find those who are attracted to a particular expression. Yet it can also be a driving factor when one encounters a community rich with a diversity of expressions and possibilities.

Another place we can see body hacking today, that has been around for a long time, is in the transsexual community. While some argue as to whether or not transsexual body modification is just meeting the demands of patriarchy and western beauty standards, I personally think it is a form of resistance to them. A major part of biopower, in my view, is to ensure that you are limited to the body that you’re given, and so changing it disrupts the way biopower functions. If “women” and “people of color” are more exploited in contemporary society, which I definitely believe they are, then how does biopower continue to function if anyone can change their gender or skin color on a daily basis? Transgender people have been hacking psychiatric and medical systems for years. It is widely known that psychiatric tests of transgender people that have been required are ineffective because transgender people know what answers to give to get what they want. Similarly, transgender people are often known to get hormones outside of the medical establishment, even though this may be dangerous. How does this kind of hacking arise? From social exchanges within the transgender community, from people sharing knowledge of how to beat an oppressive system which takes away their agency over their bodies. Hopefuly, as body hacking culture emerges and grows, we will see a day in the future where people have more freedom and control over their bodies. If people want to spend their days as Nekos or Orcs or fantasize about having cybernetic eye implants to improve their vision, how long will it be before people start doing it?

Another factor here is our attitudes towards health care, which are totally broken. The current models of health care at work in the United States promote a model where the doctor is the only person with valid medical knowledge and the patient should just take their pills and shut up. Clearly, this is impossible, since the patient knows best about their own lives and bodies and the doctor can only ask questions. This is exactly what Guattari was writing about with the concept of transversality, the relationship of the psychoanalyst to the patient. Guattari proposes in the essay “Transversality”, which he describes as:

“opposed to:

(a) verticality, as described in the organogramme of a pyramidal structure (leaders, assistants, etc);
(b) horizontality, as it exists in the disturbed wards of a hospital, or even more, in the senlie wards; in other words a state of affairs in which things and people fit in as best they can within the situation in which they find themselves.

Think of a field with a fence around it in which there are horses with adjustable blinkers: the adjustment of the blinkers is the ‘coefficient of transversality’. If they are adjusted as to make the horses totally blind, then presumably a certain traumatic form of encounter will take place. Gradually, as the flaps are opened, one can envisage them moving about more easily.”

Guattari goes on to explain the notion as an attempt to get out of established roles like patient and doctor and to facilitate communication across all levels of a group, resulting in more, better information. I think that this describes the situation within cyberculture or network culture well, where the myth of the Apple garage is well known and it is expected that anyone can come up with a good idea and radically change the industry. While that myth may not be applicable in this well developed stage of the internet economy, examples like GNU/Linux continue to prove it’s value. Today, one can see this kind of deterritorialized knowledge production emerging in biology with body hacking, biohacking and even undergraduate students forming new biological fields like comparative proteogenomics.

The subrosa cyberfeminist collective have discussed how early witch hunting was closely related to the establishment of medical institutions of power and had the stated goal of stopping women from spreading their medical and sexual knowledge. subrosa’s book states that “The Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches) was the manual for witch-hunters. As defined in this book the crimes of the witches were: religious heresy, being sexually active, organizing women, having magical powers of healing and hurting, possessing medical and obstetrical skills and knowledge.” Many contemporary moves toward DIY health care and holistic medicine aim at recovering these lost pathways to knowledge. As we rethink the meaning of scientific knowledge in our contemporary art and acivist practices, we can rethink who is and isn’t a scientist, as subrosa’s book goes on, “the witch was the scientist of her time, while the Church still believed in the mumbo-jumbo of prayer… The banishing of common (and female and people’s) knwoledge gained from centuries of inquiry, experimentation, and practice, represents one of the greatest losses to the medical and scientific world in Western history.”

“‘There is always a point at which the terrorist ceases to manipulate the media gestalt. A point at which the violence may well escalate, but beyond which the terrorist has become symptomatic of the media gestalt itself. Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is innately media-related. The Panther Moderns differ from other terrorists precisely in their degree of self-consciousness, in their awareness of the extent to which media divorce the act of terrorism from the original sociopolitical intent…’

‘Skip it,’ Case Said…” - Neuromancer, William Gibson

It’s very interesting that Gibson makes the Panther Moderns, one of the most overtly political characters in the novel, some of the most biologically modded characters as well. Surely the situation with biology today is ripe for hacking. With the human genome sequenced and many more genomes being sequenced every week and massive computing power cheaply available, there is a massive opportunity for people to explore the possibilities of biotechnology and of their own bodies. While so much remains unknown, like the way that proteins unfold and act independently of genetic determinations, I’m personally still hoping for the garage body hackers to radically change the potential of what we can physically “be”, and not just hoping, but working on it myself…

Body Modification artist Steve Haworth says, “If they come after me, I’m gonna fight em, tooth and nail. I’m an artist.” While the potential is still scary to people, much of that fear is rooted in ideas of the sanctity of the flesh, ultimately rooted in religious beliefs that are totally insignificant to many of us. Given the way that the body is seen as an “emerging market area” and the law enforcement applications of bioinformatics, the contemporary power structure will definitely find this new kind of hacking scary and discourage it. But hasn’t that always been an important part of the role of the hacker? To challenge power?