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Human Programming: Brainwashing, Automatons, and American Unfreedom
Do our ways of talking about contemporary terrorism have a history in the science, technology, and culture of the Cold War? Human Programming explores this history in a groundbreaking work that draws connections across decades and throughout American culture, high and low. Scott Selisker argues that literary, cinematic, and scientific representations of the programmed mind have long shaped conversations in U.S. political culture about freedom and unfreedom, and about democracy and its enemies. Selisker demonstrates how American conceptions of freedom and of humanity have changed in tandem with developments in science and technology, including media technology, cybernetics, behaviorist psychology, and sociology. Since World War II, propagandists, scientists, and creative artists have adapted visions of human programmability as they sought to imagine the psychological manipulation and institutional controls that could produce the inscrutable subjects of totalitarian states, cults, and terrorist cells. At the same time, writers across the political spectrum reimagined ideals of American freedom, democracy, and diversity by way of contrast with these posthuman specters of mental unfreedom. Images of such “human automatons” circulated in popular films, trials, travelogues, and the news media, giving form to the nebulous enemies of the postwar and contemporary United totalitarianism, communism, total institutions, cult extremism, and fundamentalist terrorism. Ranging from discussions of The Manchurian Candidate and cyberpunk science fiction to the cases of Patty Hearst and the “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh, Human Programming opens new ways of understanding the intertwined roles of literature, film, science, and technology in American culture.
- GenresPoliticsPsychology
248 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2016
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53 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 9, 2017
An impressive history of the term "brainwashing" and its adaptations from the Korean War through 9/11 terrorist rhetoric. I hope that Selisker considers releasing subsequent volumes on the alt-right and mainstream media conceptions of political indoctrination. The book has great depth and breadth covering film, literature, religious cults, Communism/McCarthyism, cybernetics, feminism, transhumanism/posthumanism, etc. I plan on adopting many of these concepts into my own research in science fiction.
One of my favorite passages:
“The British philosopher Isaiah Berlin considers the problem of the ethics of ‘brain-washing’ in his major 1958 lecture ‘Two Concepts of Liberty.’ As Berlin remarks, any kind of brainwashing scheme would be one of ‘shaping [citizens] against their will to your own pattern [and moreover] all thought-control and conditioning, is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate.’ In this tangent to the lecture’s main concepts of positive and negative liberty, Berlin’s point is that the technocratic management of others violates a principal tenet of Kantian ethics. If one uses one’s subjects ‘as means for my, not their own, independently conceived ends, even if it is for their own benefit,’ it is, ‘in effect, to treat them as subhuman, to behave as if their ends are less ultimate and sacred than my own’” (54).
One of my favorite passages:
“The British philosopher Isaiah Berlin considers the problem of the ethics of ‘brain-washing’ in his major 1958 lecture ‘Two Concepts of Liberty.’ As Berlin remarks, any kind of brainwashing scheme would be one of ‘shaping [citizens] against their will to your own pattern [and moreover] all thought-control and conditioning, is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate.’ In this tangent to the lecture’s main concepts of positive and negative liberty, Berlin’s point is that the technocratic management of others violates a principal tenet of Kantian ethics. If one uses one’s subjects ‘as means for my, not their own, independently conceived ends, even if it is for their own benefit,’ it is, ‘in effect, to treat them as subhuman, to behave as if their ends are less ultimate and sacred than my own’” (54).
September 3, 2018
More of a survey of popular culture tropes than elucidation of psychological and technological methodology or implementations. Stimulating analysis nonetheless.
December 19, 2016
Human Programming is a history of the past eighty years of American anxieties along the borderland between the machine and the human mind. I just finished the first season of Westworld and dang but did I ever need this book in my life.
In Selisker's own words, it “offers a new literary and cultural context for understanding the human automaton figure” as it has appeared and reappeared over the last half century--the "human automaton" being either a human who is acting under some kind of mind control or a humanoid figure with a machine mind that appears to be human but is, in fact, something else. In tangling with a history of these ideas the book explores how the metaphor of the automaton has “shaped American conversations about the self and other, the free and unfree, and democracy and its enemies, since World War II” (7, 8). Beginning with a prehistory in WWII propaganda, the book comes up to the present in which we replace our employees with touchscreens, rely on machine learning to translate our conversations, and use proprietary software to plot our routes, but deny the human freedom of our fellow citizens. I've heard a lot of people dismissed as "brainwashed drones" this year, even as we actually trust drones to do more and more of our work--cultural, artistically, militarily, economically, etc. etc. etc.
This is a book that pulls together so many of the things that have been on my mind over the past couple of years, touching on why we both fear and love AI, and compulsively tell stories about it; what's going on with stories about American military action against totalitarianism; how stories help us to feel connected to a community, or make us feel disconnected from it; ways in which various (opposing) American subcultures have perpetuated reprehensible us-versus-them mentalities; how our narratives about technology iterate on our narratives about race, and what that says about us. Seriously, Human Programming manages to thoughtfully and carefully explore all of these and more. Time after time going through this thing I was stunned by how much this is exactly the book I want right now.
It engages academic work on labor automation, posthumanism, affect and emotion, and techno-Orientalism, which I guess makes it sound pretty theoretical and abstract, but it hits on all of that through careful interpretation of news reports, books, films, etc. etc. that lay it all out in plain language. As a short sampling, the argument includes books on American soldiers returning from the Korean War, the trial of Patty Hearst, the narrative logic of Snow Crash, Blade Runner, Dollhouse, and BSG, the central personalities of Homeland and the Manchurian Candidate, and the baffled news reports on John Walker Lindh at the outset of the War on Terror.
And this isn't some fabricated piece that pulls in these stories as some kind of gloss to show how hip and with it Selisker is (I've read enough of those). This is really an argument from those texts, those stories, those threads of our rhetorical culture in recent decades, demonstrating the way that a variety of fields influence and coproduce one another. It's a book about why we tell those stories in the first place, and what we did with these stories once they were out in our world.
Human Programming follows the metaphor of the automaton through news media, fiction, psychology, cybernetics, film, law and back again, as a literary image that gets developed in a novel, 1984, say, gets picked up and used as a rhetorical weapon in a political campaign a decade later--ever heard a politician accused of "doublespeak"?--or even serving as the central concept in a trial. The "brainwashing" defense is a thing, and this book gives a really powerful historical explanation of why that is.
It's interesting, it's scary, and it's powerful. Definitely one of the best books I've read this year.
In Selisker's own words, it “offers a new literary and cultural context for understanding the human automaton figure” as it has appeared and reappeared over the last half century--the "human automaton" being either a human who is acting under some kind of mind control or a humanoid figure with a machine mind that appears to be human but is, in fact, something else. In tangling with a history of these ideas the book explores how the metaphor of the automaton has “shaped American conversations about the self and other, the free and unfree, and democracy and its enemies, since World War II” (7, 8). Beginning with a prehistory in WWII propaganda, the book comes up to the present in which we replace our employees with touchscreens, rely on machine learning to translate our conversations, and use proprietary software to plot our routes, but deny the human freedom of our fellow citizens. I've heard a lot of people dismissed as "brainwashed drones" this year, even as we actually trust drones to do more and more of our work--cultural, artistically, militarily, economically, etc. etc. etc.
This is a book that pulls together so many of the things that have been on my mind over the past couple of years, touching on why we both fear and love AI, and compulsively tell stories about it; what's going on with stories about American military action against totalitarianism; how stories help us to feel connected to a community, or make us feel disconnected from it; ways in which various (opposing) American subcultures have perpetuated reprehensible us-versus-them mentalities; how our narratives about technology iterate on our narratives about race, and what that says about us. Seriously, Human Programming manages to thoughtfully and carefully explore all of these and more. Time after time going through this thing I was stunned by how much this is exactly the book I want right now.
It engages academic work on labor automation, posthumanism, affect and emotion, and techno-Orientalism, which I guess makes it sound pretty theoretical and abstract, but it hits on all of that through careful interpretation of news reports, books, films, etc. etc. that lay it all out in plain language. As a short sampling, the argument includes books on American soldiers returning from the Korean War, the trial of Patty Hearst, the narrative logic of Snow Crash, Blade Runner, Dollhouse, and BSG, the central personalities of Homeland and the Manchurian Candidate, and the baffled news reports on John Walker Lindh at the outset of the War on Terror.
And this isn't some fabricated piece that pulls in these stories as some kind of gloss to show how hip and with it Selisker is (I've read enough of those). This is really an argument from those texts, those stories, those threads of our rhetorical culture in recent decades, demonstrating the way that a variety of fields influence and coproduce one another. It's a book about why we tell those stories in the first place, and what we did with these stories once they were out in our world.
Human Programming follows the metaphor of the automaton through news media, fiction, psychology, cybernetics, film, law and back again, as a literary image that gets developed in a novel, 1984, say, gets picked up and used as a rhetorical weapon in a political campaign a decade later--ever heard a politician accused of "doublespeak"?--or even serving as the central concept in a trial. The "brainwashing" defense is a thing, and this book gives a really powerful historical explanation of why that is.
It's interesting, it's scary, and it's powerful. Definitely one of the best books I've read this year.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews