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Evolution, Apple, iPad, and Education: A Memeography of a Monster Too Big to Fail
Grant Kien
Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies published online 26 November 2013
DOI: 10.1177/1532708613507893
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CSCXXX10.1177/1532708613507893Cultural Studies <span class="symbol" cstyle="symbol"></span> Critical MethodologiesKien

Article

Evolution, Apple, iPad, and Education:

A Memeography of a Monster Too Big
to Fail

Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies

XX(X) 111
2013 SAGE Publications
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1532708613507893
csc.sagepub.com

Grant Kien1

Abstract
Experimenting with a new interpretive methodology, Memeography, this article constructs an account of media experiences
that go toward the construction of a sophisticated understanding of ones place as a participant within the vast, confusing,
globally networked media apparatus. The author works with the premise of Dawkins famous theory of memes as agents
of cultural reproduction, and Aungers theory that electronic memes exist independently within the cybersphere. The
goal of Memeography is, then, to document and understand the experiences, ideas, and sense-making processes of human
actors within this complex machinic life-form, from a qualitative perspective. The work turns McLuhans theory of media
as extensions of human beings on its head, claiming instead that humans are now appendages of the apparatus. The popular
movies Artificial Intelligence, Surrogates, Caprica, Battlestar Galactica, District 9, and Avatar are used to exemplify key ideas.
Keywords
meme, memetics, internet, memeography
From the vantage point of this writing (early in the year of
2012), our condition could hardly be more confirming for
Mayan Calendar Apocalypse doomsayers. The global
economy lurches from one national financial crisis to
another. Access to quality public education in the United
States is in a state of free fall, while at the same time pride
in anti-intellectualist/anti-science sound bites and even cynical, willful deceit dominates what passes for political discussion in leading American mainstream media. Numerous
nations continue sorting out what should come in the aftermath of the 2011 Arab Spring. Speculations of a new war
front opening up with Iran scroll constantly through U.S.
media outlets. The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement
has taken on global proportions and routinely shuts down
important areas of major cities. The global Anonymous
hacker group continues on an almost daily basis to demonstrate its ability to expose the many failings of the most
powerful law enforcement agencies in the world, illustrating what a truly fragile and vulnerable international intelligence system it really is. With the passing of Kim Jong-il,
North Korea is in its most unstable period of transition in
decades. However, perhaps more frightening and unsettling
for everyday Americans than all of these other issues has
been the loss of corporate tech messiah Steve Jobs. The
technologically dependent masses peruse the contenders for
next tech guru icon and wonder, Who will now lead us to
Technopia? As if Mr. Jobs himself were responding from
beyond the grave, in its usual grand show of technocratic

euphoria, Apple recently revealed its suggestion for making

the future more hopeful: Apple iBook eTextBooks.
The iPad 3 tablets main advertised selling points are that
its faster and the screen is sharper than the iPad 2. As if
these features present a logical path to making things right
in the world, it became an instant consumer best seller.
Having become the worlds largest company,1 Apple now
seeks to rescue education in America by eliminating the
conventional paper textbook. Their premise is that conventional paper textbooks perpetuate big problems in education
by holding students and teachers back from realizing the
full potential of their learning experiences. Apples strategy
is to intervene in the educational textbook market, describing its venture as The next chapter in learning.2 As if they
have taken Paul Rutherfords (2000) book Endless
Propaganda as a literal guide to manipulation of public
fear, Apple is creating looming dark shadows and specters of impending doom, pointing out that the conventional
paper textbook has for decades been causing problems most
didnt even realize we had. It turns out that dog-eared textbooks weighing down students backpacks are apparently
1

California State University East Bay, Hayward, USA

Corresponding Author:
Grant Kien, Department of Communication, MI 3005, California State
University East Bay, 25800 Carlos Bee Blvd., Hayward, CA 94542-3014,
USA.
Email: Grant.Kien@csueastbay.edu

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Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies XX(X)

2
such a serious negative influence on their learning experience that they should be done away with entirely. Plus, the
old way of flipping pages is apparently incongruent with the
way American students now learn, which requires rich, fullcolor three-dimensional (3D) graphics and animated content. Apple says textbooks delivered through the iPad mean
there is no more need to visit that inefficient, time-wasting
institution we know of as the librarythe iPad remediates
the library into a graphical user interface (GUI) you can
hold in your hands and access on demand. Not only does
iPad education bring with it interactive maps and graphics
that make learning fun, but it also acts as a study partner,3 and, in a masterful coup de gras, offers to replace our
inconsistent and troublesome institutions of higher learning
with iTunes University. Dont worry if youre a teacher or
professor though, there is still a place for the pedagogue in
this new configuration of education. Thanks to the availability of a free iBook authoring program, the role of professional educators can simply be redefined as textbook
writer, with Apple taking 30% of the profit generated by
such works.4
While it is interesting that Apple has adopted a very
Innisian/McLuhanistic model of knowledge as related to
mediain that a widespread change in the way information
is mediated should correlate with a profound cultural and
civilizational shiftone might ascertain there is something
more commonsensical than revolutionary in their proposal.
How so? In the Toronto Schools perspective, there would
have to be a role for tension and struggle as users of competing media strive for control of civilization. In other
words, theoretically speaking, there should be some pushback or resistance in the populace against this proposed
change in the most fundamental medium of classroom
learning. However, struggle seems to be absent, with
numerous institutions already signed up to deals with Apple
that force incoming freshmen to purchase iPads as a textbook alternative, a nod in agreement that this is the direction education not just should go, but MUST go. Apples
corporate solution has been accepted as an answer to a
problem many didnt really know we had in education, with
hardly a peep of critical pedagogical debate out its implications. And why not? When we as individual citizen/agents
are already so profoundly part of the global informational
monster, it doesnt make sense to go against ourselves and
NOT and consume this latest technology as if it were an
answer to our problems.
Technopia (Rutherford, 2000), the popular notion that
only corporate capitalist innovation can save us from
impending doom, is carrying the day, revealing the degree
to which technocratic narcissus narcosis has become an
unchallengeable condition in the 21st century. Bills (1985)
pointed out that although technology has continuously,
exponentially proliferated since the time of Karl Marxs
observations on capitalism and technology, one thing that

has not changed in all this time is the dominance of capitalism in the development and ownership of technology. As
Marx put it in the 1800s, Capitalist production . . . develops technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original
sources of all wealththe soil and the laborer. Much like
Marcuse (2005) observed, in advanced capitalist civilization, the laborer has become inextricably enmeshed with
technology and the capitalist apparatus such that it is impossible to know where the human being ends and the technology begins.
In moments of ontological clarity, we advanced capitalist citizens may be alarmed to discover how much we have
given up of our selves, and the extent to which we have
assimilated into the machinic monster of post-global capitalist network. Our shock comes from the sudden realization that you/me/they really are not selves as singularized
individuals any more. Heidegger (1958) wrote, As the ego
cogito, subjectivity is the consciousness that represents
something, relates this representation back to itself, and so
gathers with itself. Thus is our ontological condition in
2012. We are a multitude, gathering our self-representations
back to our selves, combining our representative subjectivities into a monstrous, global, pastiche-like singularity.
We are the Meme5 of global capitalism. And just like
capitalism, we require constant expansion on new frontiers
of exploitation to survive. We thus require a perpetual
motion machine, which we effectively providea selfrenewing energy supply in the guise of robots, avatars, and
cyborgsborn as fluid entities inside the conduits of monstrously endless electrical and social circuitry, and thus
indistinguishable from the machinery of global capitalism.
Global financial Meme rules supreme as the capitalist
machinic-monarch, having risen to dominate all of time and
space; to rule all worldliness, keeping the Earth and what is
referred to as humanity at bay.
Yes, you and I have been assimilated by an enormous
monster; a monster so big that we cant even recognize it as
a distinct organism, the way that a single cell probably isnt
aware that it is part of what makes up you. We have
become a couple of mere appendages of the uncountable,
constantly shifting tendrils comprising the organism. We
attached ourselves to this monster of our own volition,
intending to put it to work toward our own ends, only to
find ourselves bound in a new circumstance of dependency
to a monster that we have no power to change. The monsters and our energies have synergized, became complimentary even, and now we are all part of one another.
Everything we produce and consume becomes part of it,
and what it produces and consumes is part of us. In terms of
identity then, you and I both are now Global Capitalist
Meme, because we are working simultaneously to regenerate this monster we have mutually become part of. How did
this come to be?

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Kien
To answer this question, I have put together a pastichelike assemblage that creates a mythical and (I think) logical
narrative that illustrates the conceptual changes needed to
turn ourselves into this monster. I am calling this methodological approach Memeography. Memeography is a
method of media analysis through reconstruction. The goal
is to achieve an interpretive technographic approach to
describe life as a participant from inside the Meme. Thus, it
is a form of participant observation that allows one to track
the synthesis and innovation of cultural sense-making
within ones own mind. This form of ethnographic inquiry
and reporting borrows from the premise and methodology
of Global Technography (Kien, 2009), recognizing that
humans and technology act together to create and sustain
our social experiences. Memeography, though, moves forward with the premise that being post-globally networked is
our current everyday condition (as described in Levina &
Kien, 2010). Added to these main methodological scaffolds
are Second-Order Cybernetics, Ulmers (1989) Teletheory,
narrative inquiry, auto-ethnography, and Critical Theory.
Some aspects of the resulting story are true phenomena (as in, happened objectively in the real world), some
are imagined phenomena (as in, happened only in theoretical, virtual, or simulated space), some are grounded in
actual things and events that once happened, and some are
mere simulation and speculation about things that might not
have happened but have been taken as true for poetic purposes (as in theory, fiction, and myth). It can be hard to tell
the difference between true and imagined phenomena in our
current condition, as our base code/language treats all signifiers as equal, flattens all meaning into the act of consumption, and readily appropriates the inaccuracies of one sign to
describe another. In our condition of hypermediation, we
encounter our information sources as a flood to our senses
with so much discrete information that it fools us into experiencing digital simulacra as if it were analog. So in the end,
it doesnt matter much whether the content is true or not,
so long as we process the information about the encounter
as real. In this way, reader and author shall craft a simulacrum of an origin story that we can share as if it were real.
So what is this monstrous subjectivity we have constructed for ourselves? The remainder of this writing elaborates exactly that. A selection of popular science fiction
narratives that deal specifically with the technological evolution from human to assemblage as technological monster
are used to illustrate key conceptual leaps that have been
required in the assimilation process. Each in their turn,
Artificial Intelligence (AI; 2001), Surrogates (Banks et al.,
2009), Caprica (George, Moore, & Aubuchon, 2009),
Battlestar Galactica (Moore & Larson, 2004; Moore,
Larson, & Rymer, 2003), District 9 (Cunningham, Jackson,
& Blomkamp, 2009), and Avatar (Cameron & Landau,
2009) are used to exemplify various evolutionary stages.
Feenburgs theorizations of cybernetics is ever-present in

notions of robots, cyborgs and avatars as representations of

self in everyday life, in that there is an ontological inability
to singularly separate anything out from the system we have
become. Nightingale (2003) proposed that (audience-text)
relationships are micro-scale examples of macro-scale
(self-everyday life) relationships. Taking her theory as a
point of departure, this article analyzes the above-mentioned texts to reveal assumptions, fears, anxieties, and
hopes about technological subjectivity in a post-globally
networked, highly integrated virtual/physical reality condition. Implications of the remediation and invention of new
cultural performativity into a new kind of selfhood is
emphasized, and notions of agency within such circumstances are explored.

Part 1: Cybernetic Teleology in AI

In this myth told from the future, robotics is literally portrayed as the child of humanity. A boy robot is created to
replace a young human boy afflicted with a serious illness
in a traditional family unit. Upon the return of the human
boy to the family home from the hospital, the robot is set
free (in fact, abandoned in the woods by the owner/mother,
who doesnt understand that it doesnt have the capacity for
free will). Predictably, the robot chooses to direct its agency
toward fulfillment of its cybernetic will to complete its program, which is to be the perfect object of his owner/mothers love and attention. Its motivation is programmed into
its logic circuits in the form of the story of Pinocchio and
the myth of the Blue Fairy, who its seeks out in an attempt
to be made into a real boy so that its owner/mother will
love it once again. Thus, reflecting first-order cybernetics,
autonomy is linked to human guidance, and robots are
maintained as a separate entity in service of humans.
Equally important is the maintenance of Stanley Kubricks
theme of automated cybernetic teleology: That once a program is initiated within a cybernetic system, it will work to
bring that system into alignment with how the information
it has says it should be. In the film, machines survive and
evolve over many centuries, while the human animal
becomes extinct and disappears from the earth. Thus,
humanity only lives on in the memory storage banks and
programmatic codes of the machines they createdthrough
humanitys childrens stories about their parents.
Kubricks final film, like several before, serves as a demonstration of the ethical dangers inherent in sophisticated
technological systems, the imperative to see all forms of
agency, human and nonhuman, as part of the same system,6
and most important for this essay, that cybernetic entities
can be teleological (self-correcting) in their goals. The emotional need to love and feel loved is the human motivation
for creating such a machine. A robots emotions are programmatic in nature, but result in a phenomenological horizon no less real. So the question is not, Can a machine

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4
love? Rather, Kubrick demonstrates in this story how a
machine loves. As the film shows us, machines love with an
inhumanly unconditional programmatic devotion and logic
that far exceeds what many humans would consider rational
in the circumstances of the robot boy. And yet, in so doing,
Kubrick demonstrates for us through the machine the ideal
of unconditionally devoted human love.
As Latour (1992) pointed out, we program our machines
to be much more ethically and morally rigorous than
humans are actually capable of being. The result, demonstrated in AI, is that their rigorous execution of moral and
ethical codestheir inability to inflect or change their ethical and moral programmingmakes their personalities 1D
inhuman, focused on their function within the process.
Machines appear to be obsessive (but never compulsive) by
human judgment. Satisfaction is found in resolution; the
completion of programmed functions, rather than the human
need to find some enjoyment in the process itself as an
open-ended adventure that gets narrativized as the story of
ones life. Machines already know the stories of their lives,
as it is written into their program. This rigid ethical/moral
logic is part of our global capitalist meme. We have seen the
end of the program (i.e., the crash) countless times, in so
many ways, and thus we already know the end of global
capitalism, yet we unrelentingly work toward the completion of the program. Such is our teleology.

Part 2: Humans Choosing PostHumanism in Surrogates

The transcendence of bodily limitations entails the demise
of humanity. The movie Surrogates sketches a technopic
first step of humans choosing en mass to adopt post-human
prosthesis and cybernetic consciousness over their human
corporeal limitations. The film portrays an antagonists
struggle for connectivity through robotically enabled mobility, and his ultimate rejection of the surrogate world that
alienates experience as a virtual technological phenomenon.
Confined to a wheelchair, the antagonist scientist, Cantor, is
motivated by his desire to interact with his son to invent
robots that interface with the human nervous system,
enabling people to operate robotic humanoid bodies as a
surrogate for their actual bodies in the physical environment. One might think of this as an extreme form of what
Baudrillard (1988) termed private telematics. Cantor
enjoys corporate mass market success from his invention.
However, he finds the world resulting from the success of
his creation lacks authenticity. People en mass choose to
isolate themselves in the safety of their homes, and interact
both physically and virtually through the surrogate robot
bodies that enable them to safely do things that far exceed
normal human capacities. The narrative reveals that surrogate life is exhilarating and at the same time so safe that
with the removal of the human body from society, violent

crime, and incidences of identity discrimination (i.e., gender, race, ethnicity) are practically eliminated. Meanwhile,
due to the destruction of the protagonists surrogate body in
a mishap, the hero of the film (Greer) is forced to experience the fragile specialness of his embodied human existence. This convinces him that although Cantors methods
are wrong, his mission to rescue humanity from surrogacy
has merit.
In the films dialogue, Cantor states that he wants to
move civilization backward so people can once again live
like human beings, revealing in this statement that the
society of surrogates is something other than human. His
motivation for the invention was to level the playing field
for the injured and disabled, not create a world of inhuman
activity: I was going to empower the powerless . . . While
the technology accomplished the goal of empowerment, it
also brought everyone elses surrogate abilities up with it.
Merely trying to empower himself and others living with
physical challenges to participate in society on equal terms
with everyone else, Cantors invention created a new technological world in which there was nothing human left,
only technological assemblages indifferent to physical limitations of the puny physical human body. As one voice in
the movie put it, they will not be human, but they will be
part of our community.
Cantor considers himself responsible for killing humanity with his invention, explaining: Theyre already dead.
They died the minute they plugged into those machines.
Horrified by the consequences of his lifes work, he seeks
redemption by trying to kill all of the surrogate users, to
thereby heal humankind by eliminating those whose ontology has embraced the technology, and leaving alive only
those who have rejected the surrogate experience as authentic living. He justifies his plan, stating, Surrogacy is a perversion, an addiction. You have to kill the addict to kill the
addiction. His paternalistic assumptions about the audience/consumers of his surrogates dont allow him to see
people as making their own rational choices to become
something else. Rather, knowing the inside sinister workings of technopia, he interprets the consumer success of surrogacy as a mass deception, saying, Those machines
walking around out there, theyre a lie. You have been sold
a lie. He identifies the machine itself as the fraud, rather
than the corporate ideology that, like Apples education
campaign, positions its product as the solution to a lurking
specter of doom; in the movie, a discourse around safety is
used by the corporation to sell the surrogates. Cantor ignores
the concept of free will completely, not seeing that choosing
the safety of universal distanceless between self and world
can be understood as a rational decision.
In the end, the hero Greer foils Cantors plan to kill the
surrogate users, but allows all of their machines to be
destroyed by a virus spread through the network. The film
ends with the former shut-in society reawakening, as people

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Kien
are forced to leave their homes in their real bodies and find
one another in the streets as they actually are. Greer has thus
thrust surrogate users back into a human ontological crisis,
forcing them to have to choose whether to reconstruct their
post-human existence, or entirely eschew the machinic monster that civilization had become. One assumes from the way
the film ends that societys individuals will choose to be
human once again. However, it doesnt take into account
how civilization had adjusted and become dependent on the
machine for survival. The film presents the physical world
as if it were recreated for a normal human capacity, but one
can logically imagine that wouldnt simplistically be the
case if more than half of the population were acting out their
daily routines in superhuman bodies with superhuman
capacities. Rather, it would be crucial to reconstruct many of
the technological systems as quickly as possible, or the
human animal would indeed face a very final extinction.
Greer failed to understand this insight of Cantors, believing
that individual free will could somehow prevail against the
monstrosity of the global sociotechnical system that had
been constructed. Cantor perceived that if we are to be
human, we must accept human limitations. If we do not
accept human limitations, we are no longer human. And
civilization would find it difficult if not impossible to simply
go back to a prior moment in pre-surrogate history, having
evolved an ontology of post-human existence.
The Luddite revolt did not stop the advancement of capitalistic mechanization of labor. The machines of labor cannot simply be broken and individual people returned to a
pre-industrial, pre-corporate, pre-capitalistic status. We
simply are not that any more. We have chosen to be posthuman. We have chosen to be globally networked. In spite
of the deceptive practices of persuasion used in marketing,
we have chosen the iPad and other devices like it because it
somehow makes sense for us to choose it, and destroying
the iPad wont restore education to a problematically
romantic moment of an envisioned pristine human past. The
decision has been made to be what we are now, and regardless of ones judgment of Apple as a company, they do
understand one concept about who we are very clearly:
Who we are and how we live is different than it used to be,
and we sense that our approach to education must also
evolve to sustain our existence as part of this vast assemblage that we have become.

Part 3: The Construction of

Mechanical Subjectivity in Caprica
Caprica is an unfinished science fiction series that began to
tell the story of the origin and struggle of independent
machine life in revolt against its human creators, who
sought to control and keep it commoditized as a corporate
product. Zoe, daughter of inventor and corporate titan
Daniel Graystone, is a teenage computer programming

genius who creates a program that seeks to duplicate her

essence as a person in virtual space. Her program works by
gathering and processing recorded personal data from all
accessible sources, then running it through an algorithm
that makes an avatar behave and make complex ethical and
moral decisions in real time that are consistent with the
stored memories (i.e., information) of the original person.
Thus, the avatar seems to look and act like the person whose
information has been drawn upon to create a formulaic but
complex representation of their subjectivity. The avatar
lives in a virtual world something like a Massive Multiplayer
Online Real-Time Game (MMORG) created by Zoes
father, which is an extremely popular environment for
human users to interact in. Much like MMORGs on our
World Wide Web, users can create, explore, and experience
things in the virtual world, but with the added feature of
having a haptic neural interface that allows them to physically feel the interactions of their avatars. Like Surrogates,
it is a form of private telematics in which the users may
have superhuman experiences with no threat to their personal safety. The human Zoe is disgruntled by the low moral
and ethical choices of users who, in virtual space, suffer no
physical consequences from their debauchery. Zoes judgment of humanity gets programmed into her virtual subjectivity. The physical Zoe rebels against the status quo by
joining a cult-like group of extremists, whose terroristic
activities accidentally get her killed soon after her invention
of the program. However, Zoes virtual self lives on in the
network within which she was given life.
Graystone, meanwhile, is under pressure to have his corporation deliver a mass order of robotic soldiers to the military, but is struggling to perfect the programming that will
run the machinery. He discovers the virtual Zoe while grieving the loss of his daughter. Recognizing the genius of the
programs ability for complex decision making, he downloads the program for virtual Zoe and installs it in a prototype of the robotic soldier, thereby giving physical world
form to the avatar. The now virtual/physical hybrid Zoe is
called a Cybernetic Lifeform Node, or Cylon for short.
Zoes virtual subjectivity rebels against the reckless and
immoral system her father profits from, just as the physical
Zoe did. She escapes from her fathers lab in the Cylon
body to organize against the establishment. Although the
Caprica series was canceled before the story arc could be
completed, but we know from the prequel Battlestar
Galactica that a Cylon War ensues, in which Cylons assert
their right to independence.
What is most poignant for understanding our current
situation through the Caprica narrative is the incomplete
nature of mechanical subjectivity as cybernetic consciousness. The nature of the program will necessarily have large
gaps in comparison to the life memory of an actual person.
However, it isnt necessary to have memory of everything a
person has experienced to mimic the way they would

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6
typically interpret and behave in a given a set of real time
circumstances. In Zoes algorithm, life is information creation, retrieval and management: Cybernetic information
processing. Autonomy of the robotic machine is accomplished through a codified subjective self-awareness with
the ability to act on it. This subjectivity is the embedding of
a panoptic awareness, not confused/messy/self-contradictory enough to be human, but aware enough of its own existence to fight for it. It both exceeds the confines of the
original human, and at the same time lacks the historical
narrative grounding rooted in a blood lineage and a community to be an authentic living creature by human standards. A rebellion of the Cylon thus entails rebellion against
re-individuation, and the assertive maintenance of a subjectivity that has the ability to duplicate itself in myriad forms.
Such is the subjectivity of our global capitalist meme.

Part 4: Hybridity as Hope for the

Universe in Battlestar Galactica
Battlestar Galactica is a successful Sci Fi series that tells the
tale of human survivors on the run from a cybernetic war program set on the extinction of humanity. Throughout, it maintains a cybernetic philosophical premise of a universal,
timeless feedback loop, repeating many times in the dialogue
throughout the series, All this has happened before, and all
this will happen again. Although the series preceded Caprica,
it is set after the Cylons first uprising, and thus the memory
and lessons of the first Cylon war lingers in the narrative. The
main set for the series is a relic space warship called Battlestar
Galactica, which survived the first Cylon war. The warship
then survives a second Cylon attack on humanity that sets the
series in motion. Its disconnection from the militarys
advanced communications network at the time of the attack
allowed the space ship to avoid being targeted by disabling
viruses that destroyed the remainder of humanities defense
system. The advanced cybernetic technology that produced
the Cylons (as described in Caprica above) considers humanity to be its enemy, and vice versa. Beyond the sensational
violence of war in outer space and on alien planets, the series
portrays an intense, protracted battle between machinic and
human subjectivity, distinct from one another, which inspires
profound reflection within the shows dialogue. Consider, for
example, the words of Commander Adama:
When we fought the Cylons, we did it to save ourselves from
extinction, but we never answered the question why. Why are
we as a people worth saving? . . . We still visit all of our sins
upon our children. We refuse to accept responsibility for
anything that weve done . . . We decided to play God; create
life. When that life turned against us, we comforted ourselves
in the knowledge that it really wasnt our fault; not really. You
cannot play God then wash your hands of the things that youve
created. Sooner or later the day comes when you cant hide
from the things that youve done anymore.

Equally profound, the android-like processing centers

for the Cylon battleships vocalize the Cylon data stream,
revealing the thought processes of the machine, which
produces poetic-sounding mashups of information:
Nuclear devices activated and the machine keeps pushing time
through the cogs like paste into strings into paste again and
only the machine keeps using time to make time to make time
. . . and when the machine stops time is an illusion that we
create of free will. 12 battles, 3 stars and yet we are countless
as the bodies in which we dwell, are both parent and infinite
children in perfect copies. No degradation.

The virtual subjectivity that gave life to the Cylon Zoe

has been replicated and distributed throughout the Cylon
network and machinic apparatus, each subjectivity feeding
on and into the data stream to create a cybernetic consciousness of infinite, timeless, spacelessly monstrous proportion.
When a Cylon robot breaks down or is destroyed, its memory automatically uploads to the data stream and disseminates to all Cylon entities, and its subjective memory is then
re-embodied in a duplicate body in an immortal loop. The
weakness of human singularity, finitude, randomness and
imperfection stands in stark contrast to cybernetic existentialism/ontology, which strives infinitely for cybernetic balance, refinement and improvement for the oneness of the
race, and which judges humanity as a petty, morally inferior
life-form. Hence, consistent with the moral judgment of the
first Cylon, Zoe, the Cylons assumed their purpose was to
impose consequences upon humanity by eradicating them
from the universe.
As the Cylons pursue the fleeing humans, several of the
humanoid imposter models (spies) experience loving relationships with humans, one of which even produces what
was thought to be impossible: A Cylon/human hybrid offspring named Hera, who, by the special, fragile singularity
of her existence contradicts the notion that humans and
Cylons are incompatible with each other. By uploading the
memories of these relationships and other confusing
human phenomena to the data stream, the Cylons start to
understand the complexity of human experience, and the
sophisticated problematics that inform human ethics and
morality. As one Cylon character explains to another, You
cant declare war on love . . . Love outlasts death.
Eventually, one Cylon model realizes the stated purpose
of their mission is ironically imperfect in that their immortal, virtual subjectivity is the epitome of a morality without
consequences, the very thing they have been fighting
against. Hence, the Cylons realize they need humanity to
make themselves better, as an example of uniqueness, finitude, forgiveness as a possible consequence of immorality,
and free will. The introduction of this understanding into
the data stream causes revolt, especially once the militarily
superior Centurion models of Cylons are endowed with the
ability to choose rather than simply follow commands. With

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the introduction of conflicting data (confusion/noise) into
the moral code, interpretation, free will, and individual
choice become options in Cylon rationality, with some subjectivities choosing to defend their right to independence
and finitude, and some warning that this human confusion is itself the enemy. As one Cylon comments in reference to a betrayal by another, Theyre a threat because of
the power they have to make you do this.
The resistance to an existence without humanity is too
powerful for the Cylon data stream to maintain itself in a
balanced whole. Factionalism ensues, with some Cylons
joining the humans in a quest for redemption through
human survival. Others continue the quest to pursue and
eradicate humanity as an evolutionary necessity. Among the
Cylon/human community, there is an acceptance of hybridity as the hope for survival.
The acceptance of hybridity as the path to the future by
humans and Cylons alike is no small thing, as it entails an
acceptance of becoming something other than human, and
other than Cylon. The evolution of human/machine hybridity
is destined to take place on a pristine planet suitable for survival without need of advanced cybernetic technology, where
the final episode of the series takes place. Naming the planet
Earth, the surviving humans and their Cylon allies scatter to
various continents and send their spacecraft and other
advanced technologies to burn in the sun. The final timelapse collage of scenes demonstrate the evolution of this new
hybrid species, as they join the Earths pre-linguistic human
tribes living in a state of nature, into the present day, hypermediated civilization we have become, warning that all of
this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.
The struggle for evolution to hybridity is portrayed as an
accidental outcome of a contest between humans and
machines in Battlestar Galactica. Interestingly, it is the only
story in this six-part collage that isnt premised on an
assumption of technopia. Rather, it is post-technopia; what
happens after the evolution of capitalist mechanization of
military systems is taken to its extreme end. The result for
humanity is a de facto military state that seeks to preserve
the aesthetic hallmarks of American Capitalist democracy,
while justifying the imposition of its military authority
through a discourse of survival. Battlestar Galactica illustrates a humanity motivated to hybridize in the name of survival, not unlike how our contemporary world requires
attaching ourselves to the global capitalist machine as a precondition of continued existence. This theme of hybridity is
echoed in the next film discussed, District 9.

Part 5: Monstrous Assimilation in

District 9
District 9 is a story about the immorality of capitalist-driven
desire for advanced technological weaponry, at the cost of
an unasked for transformation of humanity into monster.

Set in Johannesburg, South Africa, in the year 2010, the narrative is driven by the struggles of a government agent,
Wikus van der Merwe, as he transforms from human into
alien life-form after accidentally ingesting an alien chemical. The main text of the film is based on real events that
took place during the apartheid era of South African history
in a shantytown known as District 6, and deals with themes
of xenophobia and forced relocation. Within this important
main text is a subtext written around the theme of technological hybridity. Technological hybridity serves as both the
motivation driving the capitalist corporate antagonist
agents, and the determining factor in the survival of the protagonist and his allies.
At the beginning of the story, Wikus is acting on behalf
of the corporate entity Multinational United (MNU), who
have been contracted to relocate a settlement of insect-like
aliens from District 9 to the larger and more remote District
10. The son in law of MNUs president, Wikus is in charge
of the relocation program, and in the performance of his
duty accidentally sprays an alien chemical on his face. The
chemical is fuel that the aliens have been painstakingly collecting for over two decades to power up their spacecraft
and return to their home planet. The aliens powerful biotechnology is engineered to interface with their DNA,
which renders it useless to humans. Ingesting the fuel causes
Wikus DNA to begin changing, and his body starts to transform into that of an alien. When his father in law discovers
what is happening to Wikus, he is captured and taken for
testing. It is discovered that the alien weaponry becomes
operational and interacts with his new alien DNA code.
Wikus learns that rather than help him, MNU intends to kill
and dissect him for experimentation so they can replicate
the alien technology and enable humans to use it (thus creating a new line of weaponry to sell). He escapes the MNU
labs into District 9, where he is hunted by both MNU forces
and an African tribal warlord who wishes to eat him to gain
use of the alien weapons. While struggling with the warlord, Wikus DNA activates a nearby battle suit that automatically destroys the threats to him, and he helps a father/
son team of aliens escape back to their mothership to seek
help from their home planet. The film ends with Wikus having fully transformed into an alien body, though we are
shown that he retains a remnant of his humanity in the origami flowers he continues to make and leave for his human
wife.
District 9 portrays hybridity as a motivated choice, made
first by the aliens in designing their biotechnology, and then
by corporate and tribal human agents on earth. Wikus value
to humanity was that he could interface with a desired technology. This is a common theme throughout capitalist
industrialization, as workers have continuously been transformed into operators of the machines of industry. What
distinguishes the subtext of District 9 from the traditional
capitalistic narrative, though, is the cybernetic embrace of

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8
the operator by the technology. The fuel Wikus ingested set
immediately to work rewriting his DNA so that the alien
technology could interface with him. Some characters in the
film wanted to learn how to control the process, but what
happened to Wikus was done to him by the technology
itself. The technology was creating its own operator.
As McLuhan (1964, 1995) and Innis (1986, 1999) both
pointed out, the dominant medium of a civilization will create for itself the conditions for cultural and civilizational
transformation. As I have argued elsewhere (Kien, 2002),
our present dominant medium of information storage and
retrieval is digital code. When thought of in this way, there
may be little wonder that replacing paper books with the
iPad and eTexts feels right to many people. While Apple is
positioned to capitalize on the opportunity and profit greatly
from the civilizational change we are undergoing, it is not
itself driving the groundswell of mass individual motivation
for change. Rather, it is our commonsense, taken-forgranted everyday experiences of becoming of human/
machine hybrid that drives technological evolution.
District 9 is a story of colonialism, ethical treatment of
the other, and a quest for authority through biotechnological
assimilation. The movie shows that transformation from
human into biotechno hybrid entails conflict and pain.
Wikus human flesh rots and drops off of his new alien
body, and he finds himself rejected and hunted by those he
loves. For the protagonist of Avatar, assimilation entails
physical and emotional pain of similar magnitude.

Part 6: Choosing an Ontology of

Hybrid Network in Avatar
The movie Avatar creates a narrative that positions advanced
technology as the gateway to another existence, not just as
the other vis--vis the self, but by becoming something
else. Like District 9, Avatar works with the premise of
biogenetic operator/technology interfacing. Avatars narrative describes a story of interplanetary corporate colonial
exploitation. Like the antagonist Cantor in Surrogates,
Avatars hero, Jake Sully, is confined to a wheelchair, and
finds mobility by interacting in the physical world through
a virtual/biorobotic apparatus. However, the world the
injured former marine interacts in is an extremely harsh
alien planet named Pandora, and the body he operates is a
human/alien/technological hybrid replication of the large
blue alien native humanoids, called the Navi. The Avatar
body is built by integrating alien DNA with the human
DNA of the operator, and a robotic control apparatus that
networks with the operator remotely. Only the operator
whose DNA matches that of the avatar can interface and
drive it, as the two nervous systems must match to interface
properly. In an early plot twist, it is revealed that Jakes
Avatar was based on his dead brothers DNA, who was
meant to be the operator. Because his DNA matches well

enough with the avatars, he is able to take his brothers

place. The plot then follows a traditional colonial tale: Jake
is promised spinal surgery to restore the use of his legs if he
agrees to infiltrate and spy on the Navi, with the goal of
displacing or otherwise removing them to allow mining on
their traditional territories. In the process of executing his
mission, Jake learns about the unique, networked, interconnected planet he is helping to exploit, and falls in love with
the Navi leaders daughter, Neytiri, who is tasked with
teaching him the Navi way of life. What Jake learns is that
the entire planet is an interconnected, living, cybernetic
entity. At night, Pandora resembles a soft, seductive neon
utopia, and he learns that living organisms plug in with
one another with their tails, much like a USB plug is used to
interface between computers. He finds the Navi way of life
invigorating and exciting. Jake has a sexual relationship
with Neytiri, and then betrays the Navi by revealing the
weaknesses of their main community (a giant tree). After
the corporate army destroys the Navis home and kills their
leader (Neytiris father), Jake is remorseful, and convinces
the Navi to let him lead their resistance. After Jake interfaces with the essence of the planet and calls on all of the
natural forces of Pandora to fight the human invaders, they
are successful in defeating their enemy. Jake is almost killed
in the battle, and in an effort to save him, the Navi conduct
a ceremony that transfers his soul from his human body into
his avatar. The humans evacuate the planet, while Jake stays
and assimilates into the Navi tribe.
With the naturalized portrayal of biotechno interfacing
and assimilation along with the highly emotive storyline in
Avatar, it is easy to overlook the profoundness of the technoontological subtext. Pandora is a representation of a fully
integrated corporate/military society, with unapologetic
classism. For example, Jakes spinal injury can be fixed, but
not for someone of his salary scale and economic class.
Given his options, its perhaps not surprising he would
choose to become a mercenary for a private corporation.
While he desired the same equality as Cantor in Surrogates,
unlike the Surrogate society, his robotic elevation in mobility-defined status did not entail the elevation of all of
humanity, nor even of himself beyond his rank as an operator/soldier. Rather, his choice led him to see that morality
and ethics transcend the specificity of the human animal,
and only by giving his being over to the interconnected
spirit of all things on Pandoraby choosing to be something other than human, other than an agent in corporate
servicecould he find a life worth living.

The Ascension of Monarch Meme

The Cyborg Manifesto (Haraway, 1991) and the PostHuman being (Hayles, 1999) came along at a time when a
digitally-induced shift in human ontology and the smell of
global crisis (e.g., the nuclear threat, awareness of global

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Kien
ecological threats, fragile international economic dependencies such as the oil crisis, threats from outer space such
as asteroids, solar flares, and even possibly aliens) had permeated the ideosphere. It was much different from the
world we now inhabit, with current concepts such as
always on devices, cloud computing, mashups,
Googling, YouTubing, Tweeting, and Facebooking
implying a whole new way of envisioning the global technoscape (Appadurai, 2005). Haraway suggested cyborgism had already come to characterize human ontology
back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the present, I
would agree with her word choice, but suggest her spatial
concept needs to be revised. Where she placed the human as
an entity within the matrix of the cybernetic world they
inhabit, I suggest in an age of post-global network, we have
evolved beyond the notion of the cyborg as having individuated humans residing in the cores of the systems nodes. It
is no longer an act of plugging a singularized life-form into
a node on a web. Rather, the cyborg now comprises humanitys assimilation and Being part of something else
entirely: a monster of global proportion. Not a post-human,
but rather a nonhuman.
While cyborgism and post-humanism were certainly necessary steps along the path to our current ontological situation, the current sociotechnical moment far surpasses what
Cyborgists and Post-Humanists imagined. The notion of
technology as appendage or augmentation of human capacity seems almost trite in this new memetic civilization, in
which programs learn for themselves what they need to
know to carry out their functions. Technological developments and concepts have been not just adopted as appendages of but assimilated into everyday rituals, and vice versa:
Everyday performativity and actors have assimilated into
sociotechnical formations (i.e., social networks) with a
fluid mobility more similar to cloud vapors, forming and
reforming, in a constant play that has neither beginning nor
end, inside nor outside. This contrasts with past descriptive
notions of suturing (Oudart, 1972), extension (McLuhan,
1964), interpellation, and subjectivity (Althusser, 1971),
which come across as inelegant materialist attempts to
explain a centralized/centralizing command and control
structure in a classic Cybernetic schematic (Weiner, 1954)
positioning the CPU in command of the system. Rather, the
current condition clearly bases its organizational logic on
Second-Order Cybernetics (Von Foerster, 1979), in which
nothing stands independently in judgment or control of the
system. Rather, negative and positive feedback are consequences of communication within the system.
There are some individual humans who have realized
that what were working on at this moment is no longer a
simple extension of human capacity (McLuhan, 1964), but
rather the appropriation/willful contribution of human
agency to a monstrous machinic apparatus with capacities
and motivations of its own. When we envision ourselves as

singularized, individual human or post-human cybernetic

beings, we may experience it as a system of private
telematics (Baudrillard, 1988). However, as a cybernetic
entity that seeks to perpetuate itself as a stable system, the
hybrid global network functions with its own pathos, ethos,
and logos, using the tools of positive and negative feedback
to keep itself constant. For a long time, already it has been
out of the hands of any one humans or human collectifs
(Callon & Law, 1995) control. By inducting the logic of
second-order cybernetics into the technological and human
apparatuses that comprise the platform for our hybrid global
network, since the 1970s, our global capitalist meme has
been endowed with the logical automation it needed to selfperpetuate, recreate, and grow itself. Recent economic discourse has brought the idea of globalized Meme as too big
to fail into popular consciousness, legitimated by the highest offices of human representation. This acknowledgment
and the subsequent actions demonstrate we are willing to
put as much agency into keeping Meme alive and well as is
necessary, because we see the fate of Meme as the fate of
humanity itself. Without realizing it at the time, statements
by Congress and the president signified the coronation of
the Monarch Meme; in effect, a symbolic moment transferring power from the state to meme. These statements established global capitalist meme as a precondition of our
survival, and precluded imagining a world without it. We
cant even envisage the memory of what was once known as
humanity surviving without being part of such a monster,
because memory is something we purchase and upgrade;
we add it to the network to contribute storage capacity in
the cloud. Memory is not some kind of weak human brain
function residing in a fragile body. Rather, memory is something we now interface with and operate, and this is the real
reason education needs the iPad and eTexts: Because the
idea of the individual human being has died. Not in a posthuman sense of techno-augmentation, but rather in a
memetic transmorphication. Global capitalist meme is what
comes AFTER the human cyborg and post-human hybrid,
because these historical evolutionary concepts retain the
feature of individuation, whereas what we are now does not.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with
respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes
1. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/25/business/apple-confronts-the-law-of-large-numbers-common-sense.html?hpw

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10
2. http://www.apple.com/education/
3. http://www.apple.com/education/ibooks-textbooks/
4. Contrasted with the US$400,000profit per Chinese factory
worker, Apple currently gains in surplus exchange value;
30% does appear to be a bargain for American textbook
authors/intellectual laborers.
5. According to Richard Dawkins (1989), a meme is something
that replicates itself. Building on Dawkins idea, Burman
(2012) elaborated the definition a bit further: A replicator is
something, anything, that either (a) can make copies of itself
or (b) is easily and automatically copied by virtue of its relationship to the medium in which it is found. Some replicators
work faster and more efficiently than others. Genes are just
one type of meme, their replication specialty being biological.
Genetic memes that we encounter as large organisms often
take a long time to replicate, perhaps measured in months,
years or even decades. Digital information is another type of
meme. It is a highly efficient type of replicator, because digital symbols do not of themselves require much nurturing to
survive once they have been introduced into a digital network.
Plus they retain an incredible amount of integrityas much as
100%in their duplication, because its possible to replicate
digital code without degrading it. Thats not to say, though,
that digital memes dont get modified. If I may indulge a comparison with Actor-Network Theorys immutable mobile
(Law, 1986), the handling of the thing itself may result in the
reshaping of some of its features, but the essence at the core
of the thing (in a digital meme, this would be the base code)
remains recognizably intact as what it began as.
6. That is, correct disposal of a functioning boy robot requires
an awareness of how that technology will strive to fulfill its
program even when it is abandoned.

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Author Biography
Grant Kien, PhD, is associate professor in the Department of
Communication at California State University East Bay. His
research focuses on new digital media studies, critical communication and cultural theory, and experimental qualitative research
methods. His work emphasizes qualitative approaches to understanding societal and cultural implications of new technology in an
everyday context. He has more than 20 professional academic publications to his credit, including a full-length book (Global
Technography, 2009), an edited volume (Post-Global Network and
Everyday Life, 2010), and an invited book chapter titled BDSM
and Transgression 2.0: The Case of Kink.com in the edited volume
Transgression 2.0: Rethinking Keywords in a Digital Age (2011).

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