Monstrum

Advances in technology are always met with some degree of technophobia and villainization.

From the very beginning, mechanization has been perceived as a promise and a threat.

Talk of humans being replaced by machines immediately emerged alongside voices praising their life-enhancing benefits.

Cyborgs are a unique amalgamation of both ideas since they directly merge flesh with tech.

Some of pop culture's most iconic villains are cyborgs, but so are some of the heroes.

What is it about the blending of man and machine that scares us but also thrills us?

[exciting orchestral music] I'm Dr. Emily Zarka, and this is Monstrum.

The impact of industrialization and mechanization are crucial to the cyborg's history, but that's not where the idea began.

We have to go way back.

Stories of human automatons date back as far as the fourth or fifth century BCE.

The Chinese philosophical texts "Liezi" includes mention of a play that utilized a mechanical puppet made from wood and leather that could independently move its head, sing, and dance.

Records of steam-powered human-like automatons appear in the text of Alexandrian engineers in Egypt around the Third Century CE.

There are also tales of automated soldiers protecting relics in ancient Indian Buddhist texts.

In both fiction and real life, automatons were intriguing rarities prized for their unusualness and ability to inspire wonder.

And yes, obviously cyborgs are different from automatons, but the two have a blended cultural history.

A cyborg is a living organism machine hybrid while an automaton is a machine made to look and or act human.

Legends of brazen heads, bronze or brass talking fortune telling automations modeled after humans fill the pages and stages of the Renaissance period.

First appearing in the 12th century text "Chronicle of the Kings of England," they were often said to be powered by the devil, sorcery, or necromancy.

So these disembodied heads were viewed as monstrous, defying natural order and challenging the idea of the soul by raising questions about what moved our own bodies, what imbued life in a thing.

In the 17th century, French philosopher and mathematician Rene Descartes introduced the beast-machine hypothesis, theorizing that the human body is composed of mechanical processes or motions.

As medicine emerged as a profession around this time, so did the understanding of the body as an organic machine supporting Descartes' theory.

Of course, this overlaps with the Industrial Revolution and political revolutions across the world.

In science and culture, the concept of the body was becoming destabilized at the same time the manufacturing process shifted from human hands to mechanized devices.

New technologies like the battery, the steam engine, and later, electricity, opened a world of possibilities, including artificial life.

While the emergent technologies became increasingly linked to imagination, magic, and utopia, they were also met with fear and trepidation.

It wasn't until the 19th century that the first human-machine hybrids appear in fiction.

Technically, German Gothic author E.T.A.

Hoffmann's 1814 "Automata" has the first quasi-human automation, but everyone knows it's a machine.

In his 1816 story "The Sandman," two men attempt to pass off a wooden clockwork-driven automaton as a real woman with moderate success.

Jane Loudon's futuristic 1827 novel "The Mummy" includes speculative technologies like a mirror holoscreen, flying robotic horses, and labor androids in the form of prison guards, judges, and lawyers.

In these texts before and after their non-human identities are revealed, these creations are viewed with a mix of revulsion and awe.

Seen as unnatural and frightening, these Romantic era androids reflected the cultural conceptions of the human-machine dynamic.

Edgar Allen Poe famously explored the boundaries of the mechanical body and the human body in his science fiction.

During his writing career, the United States saw over 3,000 miles of train tracks laid across the US, with both the medical doctor and machine doctor or mechanic emerging as professions.

All of this likely inspired his 1839 short story "The Man That Was Used Up," which is widely cited as the first true cyborg narrative.

The tale is a satirical social mystery of sorts.

A narrator tries to determine the story behind General John A.B.C.

Smith's great notoriety as a war hero.

Formidable and handsome, the narrator is horrified to learn that the general he admires so much lost his teeth, arms, legs, scalp, shoulder, chest, and eye, and most of his tongue from torture while a war prisoner, and now uses a false eye, wig, cork legs, and other man-made parts, including a mechanical tongue.

When the narrator sees him without his non-organic additions as a large and exceedingly odd looking bundle of something, he's frightened into shocked silence.

So we've had humans with machine enhancements in fiction for a couple hundred years, but it took until 1960 for someone to define them.

The word cyborg first appears in 1960 in a New York Times article about scientists looking into enhancing astronauts for space travel efficiency.

Coined by researchers Manfred E. Clynes and Dr. Nathan S. Kline, the article proposes development of human-and-then-some bodies that would not need to eat or breathe because of battery powered devices built into the body.

They provide us with the first public definition of cyborg, essentially a man-machine system in which the control mechanisms of the human portion are modified externally by drugs or regulatory devices so that the being can live in an environment different from the normal one.

The late 1970s and '80s were a time of cultural and social technological pandemonium.

The introduction of personal computers, portable phones, fiber optics, and of course, the internet challenged our worldview and created new anxieties.

In a post-industrial world, existing fears of machines taking over humans' jobs and relevance seemed even more possible.

And like always, popular culture exposes that anxiety and imagines the possible effects of digital technology, positive and negative, in dystopian android movies like "The Terminator" and "Blade Runner," but also more optimistic characters like the superhero Cyborg in DC Comic Universe and "Ghost in the Shell's" crime-fighting cyberpunk Major Motoko Kusanagi.

In 1985, Donna Haraway's feminist post-human text, "A Cyborg Manifesto," declared we are all already cyborgs.

She argues that humans are chimeras of organism and machine, a reality we sit with uncomfortably, although she argues we should take pleasure in such instability and transgression.

Haraway uses the cyborg as a metaphor to challenge the definition of human and non-human.

She points out that we are already cyborgs.

Modern medicine has advanced to the point that small machines can reside in the body in what she refers to as couplings.

The anxiety around cyborgs is their perceived threat to humanity in the physical and mental, enhanced humans who challenge the very idea of human.

Post-humanism is a philosophical concept that challenges anthropocentrism, the idea that humans are the central and most significant entities in the world.

It's all about blurring or eliminating the boundaries between humans and other organic and inorganic matter.

Monsters and the post-human are intertwined.

As N. Katherine Hayles argues in "How We Became Post-Human," even the threat of transformation via technology inspires simultaneous terror and pleasure.

But that does not mean that post-human has to be apocalyptic or anti-human, but you can probably see how the cyborg can easily represent both the negative and positive interpretations of post-humanism.

Discoveries in zoology also contribute to our modern conception of cyborgs.

By the end of the 20th century, the distinction between the human animal and the non-human animal is narrowed.

Many non-human animals craft and use tools, problem solve, have complex languages, social behaviors, and grieving practices.

The cyborg then is a man-made distinction between human and non-human animal where artificial devices contribute to making humans less animal.

Although a more radical approach is to see the cyborg as a break in the distinction between human, animal, and machine, in a post-humanist utopian vision of connectivity among all things where boundaries are not only blurred but they also simply don't exist, which is both liberating and terrifying.

This is why the cyborg is always made monstrous.

From the hive-mind driven villainous Borg in Star Trek to Marvel's Dr. Octopus or James Bond's nefarious Dr. No, evil or antagonistic cyborgs are physically threatening with their divergent technologies marking them as the other or the bad guy in the story.

Even when cyborgs are the good guys, this holds true, but they are painted in a different light.

Robocop, Ironman, Major Motoko, the Bionic Woman, and others like them almost always have some traumatic backstory or event that propels them towards mechanical augmentation, justifying their monstrosity.

Star Wars is the perfect example.

Both Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker are cyborgs, at least since the end of Episode Five.

We spend "A New Hope" and "The Empire Strikes Back" following Luke's struggles and triumphs.

His tragic backstory, an orphan relegated to a hard life on an unforgiving planet after his father was murdered, at least that's what Obiwan tells him, creates sympathy even before his hand is cut off.

Luke's artificial hand even looks organic at first.

Essentially, his cyborg nature can be hidden.

Darth Vader's tech, on the other hand, is not only on full display, it visually makes him the villain.

His cyborgness isn't justified.

That is, not until Anakin's own tragic history which helped push him to choose the dark side is revealed.

I must point out that this only happens explicitly in the newer movies released at the turn of the 21st century when arguably, attitudes towards robotics have somewhat shifted.

Nevertheless, all cyborgs still represent the fear inherent in losing ourselves in the technologies we create.

Cyborgs may not inherently be monsters, but we are afraid they will become monsters.

Our response to them is largely driven, I think, by how we want to integrate technology into our life.

Do we live with technology or do we become technology?

"Liezi."

Did I do it right?

Sliezi includes mention-- (crew) Hold on.

Clockwork-driven ato, the automata, automaton.