From Wired Magazine

Stewart Brand: Save the Slums

By Douglas McGray 09.21.09

Some people see a squatter city in Nigeria or India and the desperation overwhelms them: rickety shelters, little kids working or begging, filthy water and air. Stewart Brand sees the same places and he’s encouraged. The pioneering environmentalist, technology thinker, and founder of the Whole Earth Catalog has written a new manifesto, Whole Earth Discipline, in which he defends genetic engineering, nuclear power, and other longtime nemeses of the green left as good for the planet. Brand also makes a counterintuitive case that the booming slums and squatter cities in and around Mumbai, Nairobi, and Rio de Janeiro are net positives for poor people and the environment. Wired asked him to elaborate.

Nils Christie: Empty the Prisons

Thorkil Sonne: Recruit Autistics

Most occupations require people skills. But for some, a preternatural capacity for concentration and near-total recall matter more. Those jobs, entrepreneur Thorkil Sonne says, could use a little autism.

For the rest of the ideas, which I didn’t like so much, go to Wired Magazine

As founder and publisher of Skeptic Magazine, Michael Shermer has exposed fallacies behind intelligent design, 9/11 conspiracies, the low-carb craze, alien sightings and other popular beliefs and paranoias. But it’s not about debunking for debunking’s sake. Shermer defends the notion that we can understand our world better only by matching good theory with good science. Thus, in order to explore a conspiracy theory that pre-planted explosives caused the World Trade Center towers to fall on 9/11, the magazine called on demolition experts.

Shermer’s work offers cognitive context for our often misguided beliefs: In the absence of sound science, incomplete information can powerfully combine with the power of suggestion (helping us hear Satanic lyrics when “Stairway to Heaven” plays backwards, for example). In fact, a common thread that runs through beliefs of all sorts, he says, is our tendency to convince ourselves: We overvalue the shreds of evidence that support our preferred outcome, and ignore the facts we aren’t looking for.

It seemed inconceivable, above all, that the Sentinelese islanders could have survived, living as they did on a remote island directly in the tsunami’s path.

The photo that told the world the Sentinelese had survived the 2004 tsunami.

Yet when a helicopter flew low over the island, a Sentinelese man rushed out on to the beach, aiming his arrow at the pilot in a gesture that clearly said, ‘We don’t want you here’. Alone of the tens of millions of people affected by the disaster, the Sentinelese needed no help from anyone.

Perhaps no people on Earth remain more genuinely isolated than the Sentinelese. They are thought to be directly descended from the first human populations to emerge from Africa, and have probably lived in the Andaman Islands for up to 60,000 years. The fact that their language is so different even from other Andaman islanders suggests that they have had little contact with other people for thousands of years.

This does not mean, however, that they live just as they did 60,000 years ago. Commonly described, for instance, as belonging to the ‘Stone Age’, they do in fact make tools and weapons from metal, which they recover from ships wrecked on the island’s reefs.

The Sentinelese are believed to have lived on their island home for 60,000 years.

Like so many isolated tribal people with a fearsome reputation, the Sentinelese are often inaccurately described as ‘savage’ or ‘backward’. Their hostility to outsiders, though, is easily understandable, for the outside world has brought them little but violence and contempt.

In 1879, for example, an elderly couple and some children were taken by force and brought to the islands’ main town, Port Blair. The colonial officer in charge of the kidnapping wrote that the entire group, ‘sickened rapidly, and the old man and his wife died, so the four children were sent back to their home with quantities of presents.’ Despite being responsible for the deaths of at least two people, and quite possibly starting an epidemic amongst the islanders, the same officer expressed no remorse, but merely remarked on the Sentinelese’s ‘peculiarly idiotic expression of countenance, and manner of behaving.’

The Sentinelese enjoy excellent health, unlike those Andamans tribes whose lands have been destroyed.

How far this is from the truth can be easily judged from a video of the Sentinelese on the island’s beach taken during an Indian government ‘contact’ expedition in the 1990s.

The islanders are clearly extremely healthy, alert and thriving, in marked contrast to the two Andaman tribes who have ‘benefited’ from Western civilization, the Onge and the Great Andamanese, whose numbers have crashed and who are now largely dependent on state handouts just to survive.

Pressure from Survival and other organisations has led the Indian government to alter its policy towards the Sentinelese, from attempting to make contact, to recognising that similar policies have proved disastrous for other Andaman tribes, and accepting that they have the right to decide for themselves how they wish to live. Underpinning this shift is the simple acknowledgment that the people themselves are best placed to decide what is in their own interests.

Cyber-war – the way of the future?

Governments are increasingly preparing themselves for an internet-based attack on their essential service infrastructure, say security experts

Jonathan Richards from the Times Online

The prospect of inter-governmental cyber-war was something for which countries needed to be increasingly prepared, security experts said today.

An attack launched by an army of zombie computers which could disable a country’s computer systems and cut off its essential services could “definitely” be pulled off by a Government, they said.

The comments come in the wake of allegations by Estonia that Russian authorities were responsible for a wave of attacks on Estonian government websites designed to make the Baltic state’s systems crash and paralyse its infrastructure.

If the attacks, which Estonia claims can be traced to internet protocol (IP) addresses associated with Russian authorities, are found to be linked with the Kremlin, it would be the first known instance of one state ‘declaring cyber-war’ on another.

“The US Department of Defence (DoD) is definitely preparing for something like this,” Ihab Sharaim, chief security officer at Mark Monitor, a computer security firm, said.

“If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be doing their job properly,” Mr Sharaim said, adding that an “increasingly sophisticated” array of technique were at cyber-criminals’ disposal to disguise the origin of so-called ‘distribution denial of service’ (DDOS) attacks.

Many of the successful DDOS attacks were generated from within Baltic States and Russia, Mr Sharaim said, before specifying that none so far were known to have been endorsed by a Government.

In February hackers, possibly based in South Korea, attempted to bring down at least thre of the 13 computers which help manage global internet traffic, including one operated by the DoD.

A Defence Department official was quoted in Network World at the time as saying: “We have to be able to respond. We need to be in a co-ordinated response.”

Peter Wollacott, chief executive of Tier-3, which advises governments on the security of their computer systems, said: “Officials are increasingly concerned about the vulnerability of essential services such as water and gas which are dependent on IT and the ability of terrorists to bring them down.”

“Whether it’s a group of university students setting up a ‘botnet’ or someone more ideologically motivated, all those possibilities are there.”

An attack of the sort suffered by Estonia, where a website or websites crash under a deluge of visits, is known as a ‘distributed denial of service’ (DDOS) attack.

A vast army of ‘zombie’ computers known as a ‘botnet’ comes under the control of a master computer which directs the zombies, or ‘bots’, to visit a chosen website simultaneously, causing it to wilt under the sheer weight of traffic.

In most cases the zombie computers that participate in such attacks do so without their owners’ knowledge, the virus which co-ordinates the attack having arrived in an e-mail attachment or while the owner was visiting a website.

Experts said, however, that it would be easy to confuse the originators of such attacks with the computers who were merely victims of the botnet, and were receiving orders from a master computer elsewhere.

“This traffic may appear to be coming from Russian computers, but the Russians would likely say that their computers – if they are involved – are being directed to visit Estonian sites against their will,” Paul Vlissidis, technical director at the security firm NCC said.

“In any case these days there are mitigating techniques against such attacks,” Mr Vlissidis went on. “What you can get what is essentially a type of router which sits in front of a site and analyses the traffic.”

“If the router senses a pattern in attempted visits – for instance that the volume is unusually large for a certain time, it can direct the requests elsewhere down a ‘cyber black hole’.”

Fourteen years ago, a pasty Irish teenager with a flair for inventions arrived at Edinburgh University to study artificial intelligence and computer science. For his thesis project, Ian Clarke created “a Distributed, Decentralised Information Storage and Retrieval System”, or, as a less precise person might put it, a revolutionary new way for people to use the internet without detection. By downloading Clarke’s software, which he intended to distribute for free, anyone could chat online, or read or set up a website, or share files, with almost complete anonymity.

By Andy Beckett for the Guardian

“It seemed so obvious that that was what the net was supposed to be about – freedom to communicate,” Clarke says now. “But [back then] in the late 90s that simply wasn’t the case. The internet could be monitored more quickly, more comprehensively, more cheaply than more old-fashioned communications systems like the mail.” His pioneering software was intended to change that.

His tutors were not bowled over. “I would say the response was a bit lukewarm. They gave me a B. They thought the project was a bit wacky … they said, ‘You didn’t cite enough prior work.’”

Undaunted, in 2000 Clarke publicly released his software, now more appealingly called Freenet. Nine years on, he has lost count of how many people are using it: “At least 2m copies have been downloaded from the website, primarily in Europe and the US. The website is blocked in [authoritarian] countries like China so there, people tend to get Freenet from friends.” Last year Clarke produced an improved version: it hides not only the identities of Freenet users but also, in any online environment, the fact that someone is using Freenet at all.

Installing the software takes barely a couple of minutes and requires minimal computer skills. You find the Freenet website, read a few terse instructions, and answer a few questions (“How much security do you need?” … “NORMAL: I live in a relatively free country” or “MAXIMUM: I intend to access information that could get me arrested, imprisoned, or worse”). Then you enter a previously hidden online world. In utilitarian type and bald capsule descriptions, an official Freenet index lists the hundreds of “freesites” available: “Iran News”, “Horny Kate”, “The Terrorist’s Handbook: A practical guide to explosives and other things of interests to terrorists”, “How To Spot A Pedophile [sic]“, “Freenet Warez Portal: The source for pirate copies of books, games, movies, music, software, TV series and more”, “Arson Around With Auntie: A how-to guide on arson attacks for animal rights activists”. There is material written in Russian, Spanish, Dutch, Polish and Italian. There is English-language material from America and Thailand, from Argentina and Japan. There are disconcerting blogs (“Welcome to my first Freenet site. I’m not here because of kiddie porn … [but] I might post some images of naked women”) and legally dubious political revelations. There is all the teeming life of the everyday internet, but rendered a little stranger and more intense. One of the Freenet bloggers sums up the difference: “If you’re reading this now, then you’re on the darkweb.”

The modern internet is often thought of as a miracle of openness – its global reach, its outflanking of censors, its seemingly all-seeing search engines. “Many many users think that when they search on Google they’re getting all the web pages,” says Anand Rajaraman, co-founder of Kosmix, one of a new generation of post-Google search engine companies. But Rajaraman knows different. “I think it’s a very small fraction of the deep web which search engines are bringing to the surface. I don’t know, to be honest, what fraction. No one has a really good estimate of how big the deep web is. Five hundred times as big as the surface web is the only estimate I know.”

Unfathomable and mysterious

“The darkweb”; “the deep web”; beneath “the surface web” – the metaphors alone make the internet feel suddenly more unfathomable and mysterious. Other terms circulate among those in the know: “darknet”, “invisible web”, “dark address space”, “murky address space”, “dirty address space”. Not all these phrases mean the same thing. While a “darknet” is an online network such as Freenet that is concealed from non-users, with all the potential for transgressive behaviour that implies, much of “the deep web”, spooky as it sounds, consists of unremarkable consumer and research data that is beyond the reach of search engines. “Dark address space” often refers to internet addresses that, for purely technical reasons, have simply stopped working.

And yet, in a sense, they are all part of the same picture: beyond the confines of most people’s online lives, there is a vast other internet out there, used by millions but largely ignored by the media and properly understood by only a few computer scientists. How was it created? What exactly happens in it? And does it represent the future of life online or the past?

Michael K Bergman, an American academic and entrepreneur, is one of the foremost authorities on this other internet. In the late 90s he undertook research to try to gauge its scale. “I remember saying to my staff, ‘It’s probably two or three times bigger than the regular web,”‘ he remembers. “But the vastness of the deep web . . . completely took my breath away. We kept turning over rocks and discovering things.”

In 2001 he published a paper on the deep web that is still regularly cited today. “The deep web is currently 400 to 550 times larger than the commonly defined world wide web,” he wrote. “The deep web is the fastest growing category of new information on the internet … The value of deep web content is immeasurable … internet searches are searching only 0.03% … of the [total web] pages available.”

In the eight years since, use of the internet has been utterly transformed in many ways, but improvements in search technology by Google, Kosmix and others have only begun to plumb the deep web. “A hidden web [search] engine that’s going to have everything – that’s not quite practical,” says Professor Juliana Freire of the University of Utah, who is leading a deep web search project called Deep Peep. “It’s not actually feasible to index the whole deep web. There’s just too much data.”

But sheer scale is not the only problem. “When we’ve crawled [searched] several sites, we’ve gotten blocked,” says Freire. “You can actually come up with ways that make it impossible for anyone [searching] to grab all your data.” Sometimes the motivation is commercial – “people have spent a lot of time and money building, say, a database of used cars for sale, and don’t want you to be able to copy their site”; and sometimes privacy is sought for other reasons. “There’s a well-known crime syndicate called the Russian Business Network (RBN),” says Craig Labovitz, chief scientist at Arbor Networks, a leading online security firm, “and they’re always jumping around the internet, grabbing bits of [disused] address space, sending out millions of spam emails from there, and then quickly disconnecting.”

The RBN also rents temporary websites to other criminals for online identity theft, child pornography and releasing computer viruses. The internet has been infamous for such activities for decades; what has been less understood until recently was how the increasingly complex geography of the internet has aided them. “In 2000 dark and murky address space was a bit of a novelty,” says Labovitz. “This is now an entrenched part of the daily life of the internet.” Defunct online companies; technical errors and failures; disputes between internet service providers; abandoned addresses once used by the US military in the earliest days of the internet – all these have left the online landscape scattered with derelict or forgotten properties, perfect for illicit exploitation, sometimes for only a few seconds before they are returned to disuse. How easy is it to take over a dark address? “I don’t think my mother could do it,” says Labovitz. “But it just takes a PC and a connection. The internet has been largely built on trust.”

Open or closed?

In fact, the internet has always been driven as much by a desire for secrecy as a desire for transparency. The network was the joint creation of the US defence department and the American counterculture – the WELL, one of the first and most influential online communities, was a spinoff from hippy bible the Whole Earth Catalog – and both groups had reasons to build hidden or semi-hidden online environments as well as open ones. “Strong encryption [code-writing] developed in parallel with the internet," says Danny O'Brien, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a long-established pressure group for online privacy.

There are still secretive parts of the internet where this unlikely alliance between hairy libertarians and the cloak-and-dagger military endures. The Onion Router, or Tor, is an American volunteer-run project that offers free software to those seeking anonymous online communication, like a more respectable version of Freenet. Tor's users, according to its website, include US secret service "field agents" and "law enforcement officers . . . Tor allows officials to surf questionable websites and services without leaving tell-tale tracks," but also "activists and whistleblowers", for example "environmental groups [who] are increasingly falling under surveillance in the US under laws meant to protect against terrorism". Tor, in short, is used both by the American state and by some of its fiercest opponents. On the hidden internet, political life can be as labyrinthine as in a novel by Thomas Pynchon.

The hollow legs of Sealand

The often furtive, anarchic quality of life online struck some observers decades ago. In 1975, only half a dozen years after the internet was created, the science-fiction author John Brunner wrote of "so many worms and counter-worms loose in the data-net" in his influential novel The Shockwave Rider. By the 80s "data havens", at first physical then online locations where sensitive computerised information could be concealed, were established in discreet jurisdictions such as Caribbean tax havens. In 2000 an American internet startup called HavenCo set up a much more provocative data haven, in a former second world war sea fort just outside British territorial waters off the Suffolk coast, which since the 60s had housed an eccentric independent "principality" called Sealand. HavenCo announced that it would store any data unless it concerned terrorism or child pornography, on servers built into the hollow legs of Sealand as they extended beneath the waves. A better metaphor for the hidden depths of the internet was hard to imagine.

In 2007 the highly successful Swedish filesharing website The Pirate Bay – the downloading of music and films for free being another booming darknet enterprise – announced its intention to buy Sealand. The plan has come to nothing so far, and last year it was reported that HavenCo had ceased operation, but in truth the need for physical data havens is probably diminishing. Services such as Tor and Freenet perform the same function electronically; and in a sense, even the "open" internet, as online privacy-seekers sometimes slightly contemptuously refer to it, has increasingly become a place for concealment: people posting and blogging under pseudonyms, people walling off their online lives from prying eyes on social networking websites.

"The more people do everything online, the more there's going to be bits of your life that you don't want to be part of your public online persona," says O'Brien. A spokesman for the Police Central e-crime Unit [PCeU] at the Metropolitan Police points out that many internet secrets hide in plain sight: "A lot of internet criminal activity is on online forums that are not hidden, you just have to know where to find them. Like paedophile websites: people who use them might go to an innocent-looking website with a picture of flowers, click on the 18th flower, arrive on another innocent-looking website, click something there, and so on." The paedophile ring convicted this autumn and currently awaiting sentence for offences involving Little Ted's nursery in Plymouth met on Facebook. Such secret criminal networks are not purely a product of the digital age: codes and slang and pathways known only to initiates were granting access to illicit worlds long before the internet.

To libertarians such as O'Brien and Clarke the hidden internet, however you define it, is constantly under threat from restrictive governments and corporations. Its freedoms, they say, must be defended absolutely. "Child pornography does exist on Freenet," says Clarke. "But it exists all over the web, in the post . . . At Freenet we could establish a virus to destroy any child pornography on Freenet – we could implement that technically. But then whoever has the key [to that filtering software] becomes a target. Suddenly we'd start getting served copyright notices; anything suspect on Freenet, we'd get pressure to shut it down. To modify Freenet would be the end of Freenet."

Always recorded

According to the police, for criminal users of services such as Freenet, the end is coming anyway. The PCeU spokesman says, "The anonymity things, there are ways to get round them, and we do get round them. When you use the internet, something's always recorded somewhere. It's a question of identifying who is holding that information." Don't the police find their investigations obstructed by the libertarian culture of so much life online? "No, people tend to be co-operative."

The internet, for all its anarchy, is becoming steadily more commercialised; as internet service providers, for example, become larger and more profit-driven, the spokesman suggests, it is increasingly in their interests to accept a degree of policing. "There has been an increasing centralisation," Ian Clarke acknowledges regretfully.

Meanwhile the search engine companies are restlessly looking for paths into the deep web and the other sections of the internet currently denied to them. "There's a deep implication for privacy," says Anand Rajaraman of Kosmix. "Tonnes and tonnes of stuff out there on the deep web has what I call security through obscurity. But security through obscurity is actually a false security. You [the average internet user] can't find something, but the bad guys can find it if they try hard enough."

As Kosmix and other search engines improve, he says, they will make the internet truly transparent: "You will be on the same level playing field as the bad guys." The internet as a sort of electronic panopticon, everything on it unforgivingly visible and retrievable – suddenly its current murky depths seem in some ways preferable.

Ten years ago Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist credited with inventing the web, wrote: "I have a dream for the web in which computers become capable of analysing all the data on the web – the content, links, and transactions between people … A 'Semantic Web', which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines." Yet this "semantic web" remains the stuff of knotty computer science papers rather than a reality.

"It's really been the holy grail for 30 years," says Bergman. One obstacle, he continues, is that the internet continues to expand in unpredictable and messy surges. "The boundaries of what the web is have become much more blurred. Is Twitter part of the web or part of something else? Now the web, in a sense, is just everything. In 1998, the NEC laboratory at Princeton published a paper on the size of the internet. Who could get something like that published now? You can't talk about how big the internet is. Because what is the metric?"

Gold Rush

It seems likely that the internet will remain in its Gold Rush phase for some time yet. And in the crevices and corners of its slightly thrown-together structures, darknets and other private online environments will continue to flourish. They can be inspiring places to spend time in, full of dissidents and eccentrics and the internet's original freewheeling spirit. But a darknet is not always somewhere for the squeamish.

On Freenet, there is a currently a "freesite" which makes allegations against supposed paedophiles, complete with names, photographs, extensive details of their lives online, and partial home addresses. In much smaller type underneath runs the disclaimer: "The material contained in this freesite is hearsay . . . It is not admissable in court proceedings and would certainly not reach the burden of proof requirement of a criminal trial." For the time being, when I'm wandering around online, I may stick to Google.

The detonation of the atomic bomb irreversibly altered man’s relationship with the world he inhabited. Absolute finality had been the exclusive preserve of story-tellers, of fictions, of narrative; the bomb now threatened to end to the human narrative itself, to put an end to not only history but the conditions by which history might exist at all

By Adam Gyngell

The detonation of the atomic bomb irreversibly altered man’s relationship with the world he inhabited. Absolute finality had been the exclusive preserve of story-tellers, of fictions, of narrative; the bomb now threatened to end to the human narrative itself, to put an end to not only history but the conditions by which history might exist at all. In 1948, Andre Breton admitted that he had once been seduced by the ‘temptation for the end of the world.’ Apocalypse had represented the thrill of revolution, the absurd carnage of meaningless devastation. Now, having come through another global war and the nuclear obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Breton decided on behalf of his generation that ‘we no longer want the end of the world’ (Conrad 1998, 39). Nuclear apocalypse would represent nothing, nothingness. The end of the world, Breton realized, could happen: but the event would be purely destructive, annihilating. It would not be hermeneutic, it would not be revelatory, it would just happen. Insofar as we represent it at all, we are not representing it. Like Riddley’s paper, nuclear holocaust occupies a blank space. We can write about it only by writing ‘about’ it, by writing around its perimeter, by circumnavigating an empty centre. Nuclear holocaust is intrinsically alien to narrative, aggressively extinguishing the very possibility of narrative itself. Nevertheless, we look to narrative to see what it can ‘tell’ us about nuclear holocaust, to see whether it can tell us about it. Steven Connor astutely notes: ‘apocalypse is as much a challenge to our capacity to conceive, represent and narrate it, as it is to our will to avert it’ (Connor 1996, 201). Indeed, one might say that the atomic bomb and its aftermath have become suitable icons for the post-mortem condition of post-modernism: for the post-modern, as Lyotard notes, is ‘that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself’ (Lyotard 1984, 81).

Nuclear holocaust is framed from the longer perspective of future time: rather than the end, the disaster becomes a distant point of origin, a cataclysmic past that is reconstructed through surviving texts and oral myths. The apocalypses of these post-apocalyptic representations are historical events.

Narrating the annihilation of the world and its inhabitants, the writer occupies a liminal space after the end, becoming a survivor and witness of his own apocalypse. In Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, the need to circumscribe an apocalypse that cannot be circumvented is taken as a matter of national policy. The government authorize a history of the nuclear holocaust to be written on glass bricks, encased in a cement cellar on Australia’s highest peak. Nuclear holocaust is a (non)event that puts an end to history. Yet the decision demonstrates an attempt to historicize an event that will put an end to writing, an event that has not taken place and that, in taking place, will end rather than initiate its historicity. No one will read this history; Dwight’s belief that ‘there should be something written, all the same’ (Shute 2000, 77) is indicative of the impulse towards resisting the absolute finality of nuclear holocaust, towards providing the satisfaction of narrative closure that nuclear ending prohibits. Indeed, the document is characteristic of the way writers find means of framing the apocalypse, of defusing its finality: the idea that it could be the end of the narrative, or the ending of narrative itself, is strenuously resisted. Rarely does the end of the narrative coincide with the end of the world. The existence of the ragged remnants of humanity provides the psychic space needed to contemplate and articulate nuclear annihilation. Faced with the prospect of an end without appendix, with the task of imagining an event that is terminal, authors construct scenarios ‘after the end’. Apocalypse must be displaced chronologically and ontologically. Nuclear holocaust is framed from the longer perspective of future time: rather than the end, the disaster becomes a distant point of origin, a cataclysmic past that is reconstructed through surviving texts and oral myths. The apocalypses of these post-apocalyptic representations are historical events. Remainders and reminders survive: the people who inhabit these post-apocalyptic worlds try to discover, through deciphering its traces, the nature that war, and of our own situation before its outbreak. For Riddley’s community, all quests for forgotten knowledge resemble the excavation of wrecks from the earth. These speculative fictions point back towards an apocalypse that is an erasure, a blank space that characters try to interpret and understand by articulating the fragments that remain. The worlds they portray are characterized by the absence of written texts and literacy. As a result, nuclear holocaust becomes an enigma which survives only outside the order of conventional discourse.

Nuclear holocaust thus exists on the margins of the text: the bomb falls in an unspecified past before the start of the narrative (like the shadow of nuclear destruction in Orwell’s 1984) or beyond the last page of the book (as in Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow). Authors invariably write about nuclear war without confronting it directly. Speculative fictions dodge the realities of human apocalypse by transferring it to other times, other species, other galaxies. Nuclear annihilation itself is seldom portrayed in narrative: peering into the crater, writers nervously edge back to the narrative safety of solid ground. The most challenging narratives are those that attempt to render holocaust in the narrative present, rather than placing it in the assumed narrative past. Yet, in the present, it is an event that annihilates the very possibility of narrative representation. It can only be known in advance, in projections, predictions, and premonitory narratives: it exists in the tense of science-fiction, the future-conditional of what ifs and maybes. The few works that take us through the blank of the atomic blast itself are forced to question their own capacities of representation. Set in the distant past or projected future, apocalypse finds a narrative frame: the end of narrative is signalled by and within narrative itself.

R. J. Lifton has observed that the hypothetical space of nuclear disaster cannot be inhabited by the imagination. Writers find themselves skirting round the perimeter of the gaping chasm of disaster, unable to conceive or represent it except by indirection. Nuclear holocaust offers a test of the limits of the human imagination. The Editorial in August 31^st 1946 New Yorker explained its decision to print Hersey’s Hiroshima in full: ‘in the conviction that few of us have yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive powers of this weapon…’ (Hersey 1981, 15). The bomb and its effects are ‘all but incredible’: the very language used to convey its power is stretched to its elastic limits; one would not believe it were it not for knowledge of its very real existence. Its consequences exert an even greater pressure on the resources of the imagination: confronted with the picture of mass obliteration, radioactive contamination, and even human extinction, the mind recoils. Denied a cosmic perspective, the human imagination, trapped in the confines of the individual consciousness, finds itself engaging with something too big to comprehend, too final to overcome. If nuclear holocaust defies human imagination, then it constitutes an even greater challenge to artistic representation. Devoid of its symbolic or allusive mediations, nuclear holocaust precludes the possibility of a narrative structure: imagining the destruction, one is projected into a dead time that falls outside the human tenses of past, present and future.

Lifton discovered in the hibakusha or ‘psychic numbing’ of Hiroshima survivors a metaphor for what one might feel if one tries to undergo and absorb the experience of nuclear annihilation: ‘the human mind cannot bear very much of this reality’ (Lifton 1967, 33). The memory of the Japanese holocaust acts both as a brake and a stimulus to the apocalyptic imagination, exposing the limits of our language and our imaginations. Nuclear holocaust is ‘unthinkable’: it is not only meaningless, but consumes all potential for meaning, all systems of human thought, in its destructive fire. When we try to articulate the totality of the obliteration, we are left facing a blankness, or emptiness.

When proposals were being made for the Hiroshima Ground Zero Memorial, one survivor suggested a large, empty open space to represent nothingness – because ‘that was what there was’ (Lifton and Falk 1982, 108). Disintegrating people, the blast left white shadows on the walls and pavement: like these spectral outlines, narrative can only register a blank, a mark of absence, when it comes to delineating the bomb and its aftermath. Lifton notes that many Japanese survivors describe their state at that time with the phrase muga-muchu, ‘without self, without center’ (Lifton 1967, 26). The Japanese who lived through the blast are ‘Empty Ones’: the words they grasp to give expression to their experience take the form of negation, of cancellation. In The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot explores the problems of addressing a holocaust in language: ‘it is that which, in thought, cannot make itself present, or enter into presence, and is still less able to be represented or constitute itself as a basis for representation’ (Blanchot 1986, 33). Nuclear holocaust manifests itself as ultimate absence, an annihilation that is purely destructive, a return to the nihil from which the world was made.

The atomic bomb and the prospect of universal annihilation place an interminable stress on the capacity of language to articulate the realities of the nuclear age. Ideas that were formerly unthinkable now required a semantic structure, a new language. In Physics and Philosophy, Heisenberg questions how we might understand nuclear physics when we cannot speak about the atom in ordinary language. Physicists found themselves confronted with a mystery, a power that defied the vocabulary that first tried to encompass it: sub-atomic particles whose behaviour could be explained only in the densest mathematical equations. We see the human world replaced by a statistical one: death and destruction are reduced to a neat collection of fractions and figures. Our vertiginous sense of dislocation, our awareness of the helplessness of words to express such precise annihilation, is one shared by those whose task it is to narrate nuclear holocaust. Derrida observes how, faced by the bleak prospect of nuclear ending, we seek to neutralize its horror, “to translate the unknown into a known, to metaphorize, allegorize, domesticate the terror, to circumvent (with the help of circumlocution…) the inescapable catastrophe’ (Derrida 1984, 201). Unable to comprehend the unprecedented destructive force of nuclear war, we are reduced to rolling out clichés, exchanging dead metaphors.

Nuclear war is ‘unthinkable’: it is a site where language stops, for reasons of both internal logic and social proscription. If the unthinkable cannot be thought, it is both in terms of possibility and prohibition. Striving to reveal the secrets of apocalypse becomes an attempt to uncover forbidden knowledge. The scientists at Los Alamos strove to unlock the secrets of the universe.  In doing so, they discovered the means by which the world might be destroyed. In 1944, while work on Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project proceeded, Niels Bohr arrived in Washington from Europe. He warned that the plan to release nuclear energy through a bomb constituted ‘a far deeper interference with the natural course of events than anything ever before attempted’ (Jungk 1958, 345). Scientists, Bohr reckoned, were dealing with something beyond their control, beyond their comprehension. A decade earlier, Szilard had been quick to realize the potential dangers of nuclear chain reaction, and called on his colleagues to keep the discovery secret from the Germans. Szilard was painfully aware of the need to restrict this knowledge.

Unlike the apocalypses of the Bible, nuclear holocaust precludes the possibility of a ‘secret pointing to salvation’. It offers no revelation, no judgment, no definition. The title of Derrida’s seminal essay, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now’, does not imply that the world cannot be destroyed by nuclear war: rather, it underlines that there will be no revelation, ‘not now’. Nuclear holocaust makes revelation of meaning impossible: it represents ‘the historical and ahistorical horizon of an absolute self-destructibility without apocalypse, without revelation of its own truth, without absolute knowledge’ (Derrida 1984, 27). As in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, the apocalypse that will consume the world is an absurd accident. Death is accidental, random, meaningless. At the point of critical mass, the light does not illuminate, but incinerate.

Derrida famously observed that nuclear apocalypse as a ‘phenomenon is fabulously textual… a nuclear war has not taken place: one can only talk and write about it’ (Derrida 1984, 23). Denied its all-consuming reality, nuclear holocaust can exist for Derrida only within the secure confines of the text. It seems suitable, then, that the history of nuclear war itself seems to be so ‘fabulously textual.’ Over thirty years before the Alamogordo explosion, Wells’ The World Set Free depicted a devastating global war fought with ‘atomic bombs’ – a Wellsian coinage. Dedicated to Soddy and his ‘Interpretation of Radium’, the novel would later influence Szilard in his development of the nuclear chain reaction: a discovery that paved the way for the first atomic bomb. The bomb germinated in the mind of a writer of speculative fiction. By 1980, faced with the nightmarish prospect of human extinction as a result of global nuclear conflict, the American Office of Technological Assessment compiled a mammoth report called The Effects of Nuclear War. The report concludes by abandoning its hypothetical empirical assessments of a surviving society, ending, ironically: ‘In an effort to provide a more concrete understanding of what a world after a nuclear war would be like, OTA commissioned a work of fiction’ (O.T.A 1980, 9). The bomb’s genesis was located in a work of fiction: staring at a future more unbelievable and overwhelming than the most dystopian of novels, it seems appropriate that a work of fiction should be commissioned to find its solution.

Apocalypse is a product of the imagination. The scientific imagination has produced weapons with the destructive capability to end the world, leaving no remainders, no aftermath. Within the artistic imagination, the end becomes a permeable boundary, an event that can be rehearsed, reversed and repeated – like the looped footage of blossoming mushroom clouds, accompanied by Vera Lynn’s ‘We’ll Meet Again’, at the end of Dr Strangelove. In a world where there is no-one left alive to watch his film, Kubrick permits this primal scene, the sight forbidden to humanity on pain of death, to repeat itself indefinitely.

© Adam Gyngell, 2009

F. T. Marinetti hailed the twentieth century as the one in which man would finally consummate the “dreamt-of metallization of the human body”.[1] For Marinetti, modernity carried with it the promise of a new, dynamic synthesis of man and machine – a synthesis that Gerald Heard would, in 1939, term mechanomorphism.[2] The human body had proven itself to be a faulty piece of apparatus. The Futurist dream invested in the promise of new technology, believing that modern man would be redeemed by the machine. Mechanization constituted an advance beyond humanism: man could now evolve, Dziga Vertov announced, “from a bumbling citizen, through the poetry of the machine, to the perfect electric man.”[3]

By Adam Gyngell

The fear of the machine takes two distinct forms – that man, forced to configure to the machine, will extinguish that vital element that makes him human; or worse, that the machines man created will run loose from our control, their automatism transforming into a new and terrifying autonomy

Starting work on his Rock Drill in 1913, the sculptor Jacob Epstein conceived of his machine-human hybrid as the form of the future. By 1915, the year the sculpture was finished, amidst the mechanized horrors of the Great War, Epstein had lost faith in his mechanic creation. “Here is the sinister form of today and tomorrow,” he declared. The work displayed “no humanity”: this, he said, was “the terrible Frankenstein’s monster we have made ourselves into.”[4] The dream of mechanomorphism, of the machine purging man of his weak and fallible flesh, had turned into a nightmare. The Futurist machine-body no longer promised the dawn of ‘new men’, but the ominous elimination of the human.

In the early years of cinema, we see the ways in which modern culture sought to come to terms with man’s relationship with the machine. The fear of the machine takes two distinct forms – that man, forced to configure to the machine, will extinguish that vital element that makes him human; or worse, that the machines man created will run loose from our control, their automatism transforming into a new and terrifying autonomy. Whether machine is elevated to quasi-human status, or man is degraded to the level of automata, both represent the process of dehumanization that was seen to characterize machine-industry. Marx was astute in his dismissal of neo-luddite machine-smashing. He knew that the problems lay with humans not machines: machines have always been a mirror for humans. In his ‘Project for a Glossary of the Twentieth Century’, J. G. Ballard gives his entry for Science Fiction as “the body’s dream of becoming a machine.”[5] How soon that dream was transformed into a nightmare.

Taylorism bases industrial productivity in “the reduction of human beings to a mechanical assemblage of partial functions and parts of organs.”

Analysing the effect that mechanized industrial labour had had on the human body in Capital, Marx states that “To work at a machine, the workman should be taught from childhood, in order that he may learn to adapt his own movements to the uniform and unceasing motion of an automaton.”[6] In order to harness the energies of the working body most efficiently, the nineteenth century science of work strove to harmonize the movements of the body with those of the industrial machine. Marx articulates the common tenet that the body can “adapt” itself to the rhythms of the automaton. Yet if the biological body can place itself in the service of the machine, it is only because the body, as an organism, has long been perceived to function like a machine. Finding its roots in the Cartesian view that man is a mechanical physical form presided over by a soul, the empirical science of the nineteenth century took as its leitmotif the metaphor of the machine for the functions of the animal organism. The body became refigured as a microcosm of the machine: the arms are levers, the lungs are bellows, the eyes are lenses, the heart is a pump, the fist is a hammer, the nerves are a telegraph system connected with a central station.[7] The division of specialized labour that accompanied the technological advances of the nineteenth century performed an analysis of the working process, reducing it to a series of simplified human motions which could then be translated into mechanical operations. The French physiologist and chronophotographic pioneer Etienne-Jules Marey was a leading figure in this mechanization of the human body. Using his innovative photographic time-and-motion studies in the 1870s, Marey conceived of the body as La Machine animale. The functional anatomy of organisms and that of machines, Marey noted, obey the same laws: “The laws of mechanics are as applicable to animated motors as they are to other machines.”[8]

Mechanics is governed by the principle that every movement of a machine is geometric and measurable. Marey’s work proposed that the movements of the human body submit to the same rational measurement and control as the machine. Indeed, it was this research that paved the way for the mobilization of the body-machine as an economic system in Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management (1911). Building upon the foundations laid by Marey’s discoveries, Taylorism bases industrial productivity in “the reduction of human beings to a mechanical assemblage of partial functions and parts of organs.”[9] For Taylor, the human body and the industrial machine could be run by the same principles: both were motors that converted energy into mechanical work. His system views the worker as a machine capable of infinite productivity.

Apart from the advent of machine-driven production, no other development in the history of industrial work had an impact equivalent to Taylor’s ideas of industrial organization. It seems significant that if the first major revolution in industry is considered to be the development of machines, the second is the redevelopment of humans as machines, Taylorism’s mechanization of the human body. Taylor’s system takes as its starting point the decomposition of each task into a series of abstract, mathematically precise, and calculable, relations. Its focus is on economizing motion and achieving greater work performance through adapting the body to technology. Above all, it invests in the utopian hope that the resolution of industrial conflict was possible, by scientific and rational means, in the interests of economic progress.

For Taylor, the rationalization of production was predicated on the rationalization of the body. The chronometrics of Taylorism represented only a part of a system that included the standardization of tools and plant design. The Taylorist factory was designed to produce a standardized object, with standardized machinery and standardized methods. It demands, with exemplary logic, that human labour be similarly calibrated and standardized: the worker is regarded as an extension of a mechanical system.

Commenting on his first stage role as a child actor, Charlie Chaplin revealed that “only mechanics bothered me.”[10] Throughout his career, the mechanistic drill of cause and effect would become a continuous source of frustration and humour. It is in the rationalized deployment of the human body as mechanism that Chaplin finds the essence of his comic art. His 1936 masterpiece Modern Times can be seen as a savage satire of Taylorism. Chaplin appropriates the calculating logic of Taylor’s system – which takes as its base assumption the commensurability of man and machine – and stretches it to its elastic limit. Working on the assembly line, Chaplin continues spasmodically to tighten imaginary bolts after the conveyor belt has stopped. In this famous gag, Chaplin has harmonized his own movements to the machine. For Taylor, the success of the factory system was dependent on the capacity of the worker to acquiesce to the rhythms of the machine. But there was one weak spot in the system: the nature of human beings themselves. The main difficulty, as the great Victorian apologist for industry Andrew Ure pointed out, lay “above all, in training human beings to renounce their desultory habits of work and to identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex automaton.”[11] In this scene, Chaplin has followed Ure’s counsel: losing his human ability for spontaneous adaptability, he has identified himself with the automaton so completely that his walk to the bathroom is punctuated by the “unvarying” convulsive jerks required of his labour. Chaplin applies Ure’s logic with a fidelity that ruthlessly exposes the degrading demands of automatised work.

The underlying assumption of Taylorism is that man must configure himself to the machine in order to gain mastery over it. However, the fear articulated in Modern Times is that, rather than becoming masters of the machine, workers become machine-like. Examining the network of connecting rods, propellers and pistons, Marey had observed that the organs of machines are a perfect expression of physical laws which are imperfectly expressed in the functional anatomy of the human body. “There is,” he pronounced, “therefore a profound difference between the mechanisms employed by nature and those created by man: the former are subject to special demands which do not apply to the latter.”[12] BeneatMarey’s empirical language lies an ominous suggestion: that the machine or automaton is superior to the human. Marey’s evaluation carries with it the dangerous belief that the machine, unconstrained by the organic limitations imposed on man by nature, takes precedence over the human. Mechanized industry, as Marx presciently perceived, demands that the body adapt to the machine. If the body cannot conform itself to the machine, the natural conclusion is to replace the body with a machine – the robot. Reducing ourselves to mechanical processes, we see in the automaton our own image: man as a dehumanized machine.

In The City in History, Lewis Mumford assesses the predictions of sociologists for the metropolis of the future. These speculative visions tend “to arrive at a universal megalopolis, mechanized, standardized, effectively dehumanized, as the final goal of urban evolution. Whether they extrapolate 1960 or anticipate 2060 their goal is actually ‘1984’.”[13] Mumford reveals the fear that beneath mechanization’s superficial regard for improving life lies a deep contempt for organic processes. As he concludes: “the popular technology of our time devotes itself to contriving means to displace autonomous organic forms with ingenious mechanical (controllable! profitable!) substitutes.”[14]

In Karel Capek’s 1921 play R.U.R., the designer at the automaton factory Fabry outlines the inventor Rossum’s motivation for creating his ‘Universal Robots’: “The human body is very imperfect; one day it had to be replaced with a machine that would work better.”[15] Capek’s play coined the term ‘robot’: in its original Czech, robota signifies labour or drudgery; the inventor’s name alludes to the Czech word rozum, meaning ‘reason’ or ‘intellect’. Capek presents the robot as the rational replacement for an unpredictable proletariat. Rossum’s automata are better suited to modern capitalist industry than any human ever could be: for the robot, to live is to work – for what other life do machines know? Machines rather than humans, robots instead of thinking beings – the industrial complex excludes all dimensions of the human personality other than the physiological. Technological progress strives for a rational reconstruction of the body; when the body fails, the robot emerges. As Fabry wryly notes, “nature had no notion of the modern rate of work.”[16]

Marx asserts in Capital that “machinery not only acts as a competitor who gets the better of the workman, and is constantly on the point of making him superfluous. It is also a power inimical to him.”[17] This is the fear of man in the industrial age. Confronted with machines that were more powerful than the men who invented and operated them, man sees them as a hostile force. Out of fear, his primitive, animalistic response, like that of the workers in Ernst Toller’s play The Machine-Wreckers (1922), is to destroy the machine. In the modern era, the automaton, like Epstein’s Rock Drill, becomes a Frankenstein’s monster, an autonomous, inimical power. Man had previously seen himself as the agent for technological change.

Why, Mumford asks, should he now assume a more craven posture in confronting the machine, “whose physical laws he discovered, whose body he created, whose rhythms he anticipated by external feats of regimentation in his own life?”[18] How could the machine take possession of European society until that society had, by an inner accommodation, surrendered to the machine? The prostrate submission of modern man towards the machine signifies an abdication of human agency. The automaton, for Marx, is endowed “with intelligence and will”; it is “animated by the longing to reduce to a minimum the resistance offered by that repellent yet elastic natural barrier, man.”[19] Man is recast as the machine’s enemy.

The processes of mechanization that came to dominate industry were a means of gaining a greater control – of people, of production, of profit. The machine was the counterfeit of nature: nature analysed, regulated, controlled by the mind of men. The robot marks the apex of man’s technological ingenuity, the culmination of these processes. Yet, almost immediately, this achievement comes to embody a mechanization that has gone out of control. It is telling that R.U.R., the play that introduced the robot into modern culture, also is the first to depict the rebellion, and eventual victory, of robots against the men who created them. No sooner have they been given a measure of autonomy than they use it to turn on their human masters.

Gyorgy Lukacs memorably termed technology “second nature”.[20] Alienated and reified, this “second nature” constituted a world created by humans who did not recognise it as their own. This new “nature”, Lukacs points out, was not just industrial technology but the entire world of matter (including humans) as it has been transformed by this technology. The machine embodies that which is made by human hands, but is alien to human nature. It is our instinct to recoil from the robot – for in the robot, we are forced to confront how our conceptions of ourselves have been transformed by technology. We see in the robot a distorted and disturbing image of ourselves.

Chaplin understood what Walter Benjamin would later theorize: that “film is the art form corresponding to the pronounced threat to life in which people live today.”[21] It is fitting that, for Chaplin, cinema is seen as the ideal medium for an exploration of man’s fear of mechanization. Cinema, the exemplary art form of the mechanical age, offers a palliative rehearsal of modern society’s uneasy relationship to the machine. Aldous Huxley saw cinema as product of a modern world ruled by “Taylorized work and mechanized amusement.”[22] Cinema, as Benjamin points out, mirrors the means of production employed in the factory: while factory production is “psychotic” and is experienced at work, film production is curative and is experienced in the cinema, the ‘dream factory’.

[2] Heard 2004: 60

[3] Vertov 1922: 2

[4] Epstein 1955: 56

[5] Crary and Kwinter 1992: 277

[6] Marx 2008: 260

[7] See Appendix 1: Kahn, Der Mensch als Industriepalast

[8] Marey 1874: 62

[9] Doray 1988: 9

[10] Chaplin 1964: 80

[11] Ure 1835: 15

[12] Marey 1874: 70

[13] Mumford 1966: 600

[14] Mumford 1966: 600

[15] Capek 1921: 5

[16] Capek 1921: 7

[17] Marx 2008: 267

[18] Mumford 1934: 318

[19] Marx 2008: 247

[20] Lukacs 1971: 86

[21] Benjamin 2008: 132

[22] Huxley 1929: 61

Ari Folman asks his friend why, twenty years down the line, he is now having this surreal dream from the war in Lebanon. Why can’t he remember the occasion this vision so powerfully depicts? His friend tells him about a famous psychological test, in which people are shown ten photographs from their youth, and asked if they recall the events shown in the photos. Nine of the photographs are genuine; one however, shows the young participant surrounded by the trappings of a fair ground. Eighty per cent of participants, Folman is told, declare that they remember the day vividly: being taken round by their parents, eating candy, going on the rides. Except that they weren’t there: the figure of the child has been superimposed onto a scene they were never present in. The mind, confronted by such seemingly objective ocular proof, revises its own uncertainties: memory displays the versatile and beguiling capacity to rewrite its own contents into conformity with the evidence.

The photographer, thrust into the heart of such carnage, allows his eyes to replicate the hardened, unblinking gaze of the camera, the artificial eye…War, as the Italian futurist Marinetti declared 50 years earlier, has become an aesthetic triumph of technology over man, a proliferation of images – an abdication of human response

The falsified photograph is a controlling image through out the fragmentary and fractured narrative of discovery in Waltz with Bashir. Folman’s film becomes a troubling reflection of the way in which technology has alienated man from his own humanity. A psychiatrist Folman later meets relates to him the story of a young amateur photographer called into action in the Israeli-Lebanese war. Wondering how the man maintained a steady head despite the brutality, he tells her that it was easy – the whole war become one long day trip – the bodies, the bombs, the devastation, all were composed in his mind as striking pictures, vivid snapshots. The photographer, thrust into the heart of such carnage, allows his eyes to replicate the hardened, unblinking gaze of the camera, the artificial eye. He merely sees the horror; he is not there in person, he is detached. War, as the Italian futurist Marinetti declared 50 years earlier, has become an aesthetic triumph of technology over man, a proliferation of images – an abdication of human response.

As we stare into the glazed-over eye of the dead horse, we see that the young soldier no longer sees what is around him, but feels it. Denied the mediation of his psychological ‘camera’ vision, he is sickened by a horror that is all too primal

Folman’s friend Boaz looks through the crosshairs of the sniper rifle at his target as if watching a television screen. Photographically framed, the dogs he aims at cease to be living beings. Pulling the trigger, Boaz shoots the image, not the dog. The sniper’s sight enables him to distance himself from the act of killing; the shooter is able to evacuate his own agency, to transform his own situation into a simulation. This is why the photographer the psychiatrist talks about finds that his defence mechanism – appropriating the cool and unaffected vision of the camera lens – breaks down when faced with the agonizing scene of the maimed horses slowly dying. The horses represent the intrusion of the organic into the sterilized detachment of the mechanical. As we stare into the glazed-over eye of the dead horse, we see that the young soldier no longer sees what is around him, but feels it. Denied the mediation of his psychological ‘camera’ vision, he is sickened by a horror that is all too primal.

The very same technological advancements that provide us with more efficient ways of killing each other have, thoughtfully, given us new means of distancing ourselves from the depersonalized destruction they cause. Armed with machine guns and MAGs that rip the fabric of the air with interminable rounds of bullets, the Israeli recruits can remove themselves from the scene by imagining their trigger fingers are clicking a camera rather than unleashing deadly fire. Technology becomes a medium of disengagement. War demands human sacrifice in more ways than one. The technology of war dehumanizes the battlefield; soldiers, consequently, are compelled, not only to dehumanize their opponent, but to void themselves of their own humanity. Ari and his fellow soldiers ride around firing blindly into the enveloping darkness of night; when he is asked what they are shooting at, he replies, “I don’t know. Anything. Everything.”

The very same technological advancements that provide us with more efficient ways of killing each other have, thoughtfully, given us new means of distancing ourselves from the depersonalized destruction they cause

Waltz with Bashir tracks the director’s efforts to find someone who can bear witness to the massacre. Every individual he talks to has at best a partial recollection of where they were, what they were doing, who they were with. Ari initially thinks of memory as a store-house of extinguished experiences, a lasting record of the lives we have lived. He soon discovers that memory is a survival mechanism, relying on the censorship of self-erasure for efficient operation. Memory, like a digital camera, can delete its files. This is why the choric response of all the veterans he interviews adopts the same computerized jargon for describing their self-enforced amnesia: “it’s not stored in my system.” In a technological age, memory must assimilate itself to the machine to ensure its survival. That technical, mechanized response betrays the inhumanity of their experiences of war. Forced to act like a killing machine, and not a human, the brain responds by refiguring itself as a hard-drive: trauma is translated into data-loss.

The modern era has come to see technology as an objective guarantor of truth. Technology, unlike the inconsistent, emotional, illogical human subject, carries with it the self-assured air of empirical certainty. The tapes we use can remember with fidelity conversations we have long forgot; the films we watch can immortalize scenes that have slipped into oblivion; the cameras we click can capture infinitesimal details the naked eye overlooks. Technology embodies the perfect objectivity that Western science has long aspired towards – the objectivity that our frail, physical limitations have long prevented us from attaining. Yet if technology is objective, it is also an objectifier, turning subjects into objects, people into things. The camera lens treats all things, animate or inanimate, within its range as objects alike. Frozen on film, the camera refuses to distinguish between the smiling baby, the birthday cake and the table it sits on. The camera transforms everything in its scope to petrified stillness – just like the guns that turn humans into corpses, subjects into lifeless lumps of flesh.

Mediated through the cartoon, war becomes just as unreal and unreachable as it does to those young Israeli soldiers called up to fight. Animation exquisitely captures the dissolving images and hallucinations that haunt the minds of those involved, decades later

Folman’s choice of graphic animation is fundamental to the film’s presentation of modern war. Animation enables the audience to experience a corresponding feeling of detachment from the horrors of war so explicitly visualized in the film. Presented with the callous execution of innocent women and children, animation makes the senseless and bloody violence that much easier to stomach. Mediated through the cartoon, war becomes just as unreal and unreachable as it does to those young Israeli soldiers called up to fight. Animation exquisitely captures the dissolving images and hallucinations that haunt the minds of those involved, decades later. Several soldiers attest that they are unsure of whether these phantasmal visions are subconscious, suppressed projections of real events, or whether they are memories simulated by a troubled mind. One solider Folman meets invokes a nightmarish scene of a wasted battlefield. “It was like a trip, like LSD, but it was real”: for the soldier, struggling to articulate in words the image inscribed on his memory, the ‘reality’ he recalls can only be explained as a hallucination, as a chemical imbalance of the brain’s synapses. Perhaps this is why Carmi anaesthetizes himself with steady pulls on endlessly rotating joints. Forced into the unwelcome act of remembrance by Folman, he seeks to dull his senses in the pacifying haze of marijuana smoke, to make things less real by means of chemical assistance.

Andy Warhol declared that “once you see emotions from a certain angle you can never think of them as real again”. Technology supplies that angle, and takes away an inconvenient reality. This is the experience that J.G. Ballard call de-cerebration. Driving cars, watching screens, firing guns – the individual finds himself no longer prompted by personal needs and desires. He feels his brain to be a motor, issuing directions to a body that resembles an apparatus. This is the disconcerting anxiety that the characters in Waltz with Bashir experience, that the psychological test exposes: it is not only our bodies but our sentimental lives that can be mechanically programmed. Warhol stated that he could not imagine being in love – surely it would resemble a made-for-TV movie, with faked rapture and flimsy scenery. The same dissociating numbness affects the Israeli soldiers. They cannot imagine being at war: instead, it resembles a photograph, a film, a cartoon.

Technology equates itself to truth. But it is a truth that has been voided of human significance, a truth that depersonalizes and dehumanizes. In Folman’s film, the sole person who can bear witness to the submerged horrors of the massacre, crucially, is not a soldier but Roni, the war reporter for Israeli television. It seems fitting that is only from behind the artificial eye of the camera, through the mitigating mediation of the television screen, that the full savagery of the atrocity can be felt. It is significant that the end of Folman’s road towards remembrance and revelation comes not in the animation that has provided the medium for the film’s hazy, hallucinatory fragments of memory, but in real, documentary footage. The film’s stark and sickening conclusion – images of piles of dead bodies filling doorways, limbs of suffocated infants poking through the rubble, overlaid with a cacophonous soundtrack of howling widows – has a visceral immediacy that the rest of the film studiously avoids. Confronted with this horrific reality, we are denied the ameliorating strokes of the cartoonist’s pen that have, to that point, provided a surreal glaze to the film’s phantasmagoric recollections. “What if I don’t want to know these things about myself?”, Folman asks a friend. The film’s final scene shows the camera refusing to baulk at sights the human eye instinctively shirks away from. It is a mortifying token of war’s inhuman capacity to disregard human life. It is also a shocking reminder of technology’s inhuman incapacity for emotional response. Faced with this final picture of desolate horror, we are more forgiving of the convenient amnesia of Folman and his comrades.

© Adam Gyngell, 2009