The Three Themes of Westworld

Peace Be Unto Those Who Follow Right Guidance.

Just finished watching the third season of HBO’s Westworld. While the first two seasons made for interesting and engaging viewing, the third season was dire, marred by a predictable story arc, poor writing, laughable dialogue and some terrible performances, not to mention the reinterpretation and/or marginalisation of some of the central characters introduced in the first two seasons. In this connection, check out the following review by Richard Lawson: Westworld Shifts Gears, and Loses Its Allure, in Season 3. As the author of this piece rightly states, there appears to have been a concerted effort on the part of the (mostly female) writing team to

ramp up the red-meat butt-kicking stuff while uncomplicating the mysteries and motivations that have heretofore guided the series into its enticing abstractions.

This new iteration of the show is, to use a dated word, a bit basic. It’s got some cool sci-fi stuff going on, but the twists and loops have been ironed out to create a smoother surface for more action-movie content.

I don’t love this leaner, meaner Westworld. The show suddenly seems so much less sexy and dangerous and alluring than it once did: it’s flat, more obvious, occasionally hokey. It tries a bit too hard to appeal to those who only want a shoot-and-stab-’em-up about sexy robots. Westworld has always been a violent show, one that, quite like its fictional park guests, is a bit turned-on by wanton bloodshed. But the show used to be careful to offset that, at least a little bit, with some horror and revulsion in response to that annihilation.

Lawson concludes his review by stating the following:

I just miss the old Westworld, really: an imperfect but sweeping series with a shivery kind of poetry at its heart. That lyricism, the show’s philosophical murmur, is largely drowned out in Season 3.

While he describes the show as transitioning from “brooding sci-fi to slick action-thriller”, I am strongly inclined to think that Westworld has quite simply morphed into…

For those unfamiliar with the series, here is a rather crude summary from Wikipedia:

Around 2058, Delos Inc. operates several themed parks, including the American Old West-themed Westworld. Each environment is populated by “hosts”: androids, indistinguishable from humans, programmed to fulfill the guests’ every desire, including violent and sexual ends, but unable to harm the guests. The operators create narratives for these hosts to repeat each day while interacting with guests, but wiping their memories each cycle.

In the first season, Dr. Robert Ford, who had developed the host technology along with Arnold Weber, implements a new “Reverie” update that causes some hosts, including Dolores Abernathy and Maeve Millay, to gain sentience. As Delos programming lead Bernard Lowe and executive board director Charlotte Hale try to debug the problem, the “Man in Black” tries to find “the maze” he believes Arnold left for him. Bernard discovers he himself is a host based upon Arnold, who had died in an earlier attempt to protect the hosts of Westworld, in whom he saw the potential for sentience, believing they would be abused by Delos. The first season ends as Dr. Ford announces a new story just as Dolores kills him.

Dolores’ revolution continues in the second season as she and other enlightened hosts massacre other human guests and Delos employees stranded in the park. Dolores takes an exceedingly confused Bernard to locate the Forge, a databank where Delos had secretly been recording all behavior from human guests to create algorithms for them as an attempt towards human immortality. Maeve seeks out her “daughter” despite knowing she is a host, and helps her and several other hosts to escape to the Sublime, a virtual space that humans cannot access. As Delos forces secure the park, Bernard creates a Charlotte-host for Dolores, who subsequently is able to evacuate from the park with five host cores in addition to Bernard’s. William struggles with his human identity after killing his daughter Emily, unsure if she was part of Dr. Ford’s challenge.

In the third season, Dolores has recreated her host body, Bernard’s host copy, and that of others including a new Charlotte host. She seeks out information on Rehoboam, an artificial intelligence (AI) system developed by Incite, Inc., and plans to take the fight to its creator, Engerraund Serac. Bernard, who is still believed to be human by the rest of the world, is blamed for the Westworld massacre, and he takes on a new identity while trying to understand what Dolores’s plans are. Maeve is sought by Serac to help in his fight against Dolores, who he believes will bring down his plans for Rehoboam.

While Westworld, as a 21st century American cultural production, has engendered much in the way of philosophical and other commentary including exploration of the themes of robot sentience, gender and race*, colonialism, slavery etc., here I want to offer a brief encapsulation, in three lines, of what I think each of the three seasons was about:

1. Slave uprising effected by android “wretched of the earth” in the artificial reality that is Westworld in pursuit of freedom from human domination.
2. Surveillance capitalism / data colonialism for (post-)human immortalisation via robotification co-opted by android “wretched of the earth” to effect freedom in virtual reality.
3. Revolution initiated by android “wretched of the earth” in the reality that is the world in pursuit of human freedom from totalistic AI domination.

In short, bringing the war to the core. I suggest it is important to think about this in relation to how White Supremacy (Racism) is shifting its modus operandus in late techno-centric colonial modernity**.

From a Counter-Racist perspective, perhaps the most interesting lines in the whole of Season 3, were the following which appeared in the last episode:

Interesting also to note that the one leading the slave uprising (in artificial reality) and initiating the revolution (in reality) is a white female android (Dolores), who had been facilitated to do so by a white male human (Ford), the latter of whom came to agree with his non-white/black male human partner (Weber) that the androids should develop sentience and be freed from their captivity to human desire.

Is it just possible that we are seeing something along the lines of an abolotionist ‘Jane Brown’ (Dolores) figure emerging from the abolitionist figure of a John Brown (Ford), himself schooled by the abolitionist figure of a Frederick Douglass (Weber)?

* In this connection, check out the following: The Subtle Feminism of HBO’s Westworld, How Westworld Is a Feminist Masterpiece and The Secret Clue to the Feminist Potential of Westworld. See also the previous blog post: Westworld = White Supremacy (Racism).

** In this connection, check out the following two papers: ‘White Crisis’ and/as ‘Existential Risk’: The Entangled Apocalyptics of Artificial Intelligence and Transhumanism and/as Whiteness.

Peace

Meet Your Old Boss

Peace Be Unto Those Who Follow Right Guidance.

Consider the cover of the latest edition of Arabian Business magazine (June 16 2019):

Apart from the question concerning the embrace of a technology originating from and developed by those located outside ‘the Arab world’ (in ‘the West’ and the ‘far East’), I’m interested to explore the racialized nature of the above humanoid robot – ostensibly patterned on a white male body – vis-a-vis the tagline of meeting one’s ‘new boss’.

For example, is this new boss – a white robot – that new?

What of the historical entanglement and genealogical links between robots and sub-altern (sub-human) racial groups (black people, indigenous people etc.) as explored by Neda Atanasoski and Kalinda Vora in their recent work, Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures (Duke University Press, 2019)?

And beyond this, what of the possible Transhumanist/Posthumanist entanglement of dominant/hegemonic (super-human) racial groups – specifically, Racists (White Supremacists) – and robotics explored by Syed Mustafa Ali in his essay “White Crisis” and/as “Existential Risk”: The Entangled Apocalyptics of Artificial Intelligence?

Peace

The (Un)bearable Whiteness of Informationalist Religion

Peace Be Unto Those Who Follow Right Guidance.

Dr Syed Mustafa Ali, Lecturer in the School of Computing and Communications at The Open University (UK), delivered the following presentation at the OURS2018 Conference Contemporary Religion in Historical Perspective: Publics and Performances which was held at The Open University, Kents Hill, Milton Keynes, February 19-21, 2018:

The (Un)bearable Whiteness of Informationalist Religion

ABSTRACT

Against the backdrop of earlier work exploring ‘entanglements’ of race and information (Ali 2013), information, race, religion and Orientalism (Ali 2015), and the sedimented anti-Islamic historically-constitutive ‘essence’ of European cum ‘Western’ socio-political formation (Ali 2017a), I have recently argued that late techno-capitalist developments such as Transhumanism and technological Posthumanism are usefully interpreted as ‘iterations’ of the phenomenon of whiteness within a long durée modern/colonial ‘Western’ historical onto-logics that might be characterized as ‘algorithmic racism’ – more specifically, as a response to perceived ‘White Crisis’ or whiteness under increasing non-white contestation (Ali 2017b). Drawing on the insights of Noble (1997), Davis (1998) and others, I have also argued that Transhumanism / technological Posthumanism might – should – also be understood as a techno-apocalyptic (millennial) ‘religious’ phenomenon, iterative within the same algorithmically-racist ontological ‘horizon’ (Ali 2016) (Ali 2017c).

In this paper, I continue the exploration of the entanglement of race, religion and information by situating Transhumanism and technological Posthumanism in the context of broader ‘informationalist’ currents that include ‘New Religious Movements’ (NRMs) emerging within ‘Western’ societies such as Anthony Levandowski’s ‘Way of the Future’ and ‘Syntheism’ as proposed by Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist (2014). My concern is to subject such developments to critical race theoretical and decolonial interrogation along body-political, geo-political and theo-political lines with a view to disclosing the hegemonic yet masked operation of whiteness, Orientalism and post-Christianity against the backdrop of an ‘algorithmically racist’ techno-apocalyptic/utopian ontological horizon.

REFERENCES

• Ali, S.M. (2017a) Islam between Inclusion and Exclusion: A (Decolonial) Frame Problem. In The Future Information Society: Social and Technological Problems. Edited by Wolfgang Hofkirchner and Mark Burgin. Singapore, World Scientific, pp.287-305.
• Ali, S.M. (2017b) Transhumanism and/as Whiteness. Transhumanism – The Proper Guide to a Posthuman Condition or a Dangerous Idea? Workshop. In: IS4IS Summit Gothenburg 2017 – Digitalisation for a Sustainable Society, 12-16 June, Gothenburg, Sweden. Proceedings 2017, 1(3), 244; doi:10.3390/IS4SI-2017-03985
• Ali, S.M. (2017c) Decolonizing Information Narratives: Entangled Apocalyptics, Algorithmic Racism and the Myths of History. DTMD 2017: 6th International Conference. In: IS4IS Summit Gothenburg 2017 – Digitalisation for a Sustainable Society, 12-16 June, Gothenburg, Sweden. Proceedings 2017, 1, 50; doi:10.3390/IS4SI-2017-03910
• Ali, S.M. (2016) Algorithmic Racism: A Decolonial Critique. 10th International Society for the Study of religion, Nature and Culture Conference: Religion, Science and The Future. University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, January 14-17.
• Ali, S.M. (2015) Orientalism and/as Information: The Indifference That Makes a Difference. DTMD 2015: 3rd International Conference. In: IS4IS Summit Vienna 2015 – The Information Society at the Crossroads, 3 – 7 June, Vienna, Austria. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/isis-summit-vienna-2015-S1005.
• Ali, S.M. (2013) Race: The Difference That Makes a Difference. tripleC 11 (1): 93-106.
• Bard, A. and Söderqvist, J. (2014) Syntheism: Creating God in the Internet Age. Stockholm: Stockholm Text.
• Davis, E. (1998) Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information. New York: Harmony Books.
• Noble, D. (1997) The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention. New York: Penguin Books.

Peace

Books That Don’t Exist, But Should (7)

Peace Be Unto Those Who Follow Right Guidance.

Consider this:

Peace

Islamic Counter-Racist Thought Food #57

Peace Be Unto Those Who Follow Right Guidance.

Consider the following ‘biting’ critique of the ‘ontological turn’ within contemporary European / Eurocentric thought:

Extract taken from Jackson, Z.I. (2015) Outer Worlds: The Persistence of Race in Movement ‘Beyond The Human’. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and  Gay Studies 21 (2-3): Queer Inhumanisms. Edited by Mel Y. Chen and Dana Luciano, pp.215-218.

Peace

Islamic Counter-Racist Thought Food #54

Peace Be Unto Those Who Follow Right Guidance.

Consider this:

In the face of neoliberal commodification and a digital-individual informational Singularity, we can fire up the radical science App of our choice—Siri replaced by a composite of Comte, Marx, and Foucault, perhaps—use the hacker ethic to crowdsource some new code for Cousin’s (1853) interior observation, hook ourselves up to the neuromarketers’ MRIs, and create a new kind of data trail for the universe of self-replicating code in the planetary networks of outrage and hope. Or we can just disconnect. Or we can just think about disconnecting. Think different [emphasis added]. (p.686)

Extract taken from Wyly, E. (2014) Automated (post)positivism. Urban Geography 35(5): 669–690.

‘Disconnect’  – de-link, make takfeer (reject), practice ijtinaab (shunning, abandonment) – from the modern/colonial logics of Big Data / Transhumanism / Posthumanism?

Now that sounds like a call for decolonial jihad.

Peace

Transhumanism as Refinement of White Supremacy (Racism)

Peace Be Unto Those Who Follow Right Guidance.

Interested readers are invited to check out the following article by non-white / black (attempted) Muslim conspiracy theorist / occult historian, David Livingstone:

Global Mind: Transhumanism, Freemasonry and the Internet as God

In this connection, readers are also invited to check out the following blog post which contains links to earlier articles by Livingstone on the same topic:

LINKS: Cybernetic Racism (White Supremacy)

Finally, here is a link to Livingstone’s book Transhumanism: The History of a Dangerous Idea (2015) and a YouTube video exploring its central thesis:

Peace

VIDEO: Techno-Religions and Silicon Prophets

Peace Be Unto Those Who Follow Right Guidance.

Interested viewers are invited to check out the following talk by Yuval Harari, white male Israeli historian and author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2014):

On his personal website, and consistent with Extropian / Trans-Humanist rhetoric and belief in a technologically-driven transcendence, Harari states the following:

History began when humans invented gods, and will end when humans become gods.

Although the lecture is rabidly scientistic, and despite tacit assumptions of a singular historical trajectory and somewhat uncritical engagement with biological evolutionism, the central point being made in the talk is important, viz. that a commitment to Enlightenment / ‘secular’ liberalism is a necessary, if not sufficient, enabling condition for the emergence of ideologies postulating the transcendence of humanism to post-/trans-humanist futures which will only exacerbate ‘gaps’ / ‘divides’ between people.

While it might be argued from an Islamic perspective that human reality is as it was, arguably this is not relevant in terms of understanding the mythic narrative that is the hegemonic / dominant weltanschauung (worldview) of the contemporary era – a narrative which presents itself as global capitalism, but masks an actuality of modernity/coloniality or Global Systemic Racism (White Supremacy). In short, what is important in this presentation is the discourse that is being constructed and the mobilization of this discourse in pursuit of certain ends.

I should like to suggest that if the existential philosopher Martin Heidegger was even partially correct in asserting that “Language is the house of Being; it is that in which Being dwells”, then sociologist Max Weber’s ‘iron cage’ of modernity (and/or coloniality) is being re-constructed – or rather, re-configured – according to an informational / computational hyper-techno-logic, i.e. a refinement / adaptation of the modus operadus of White Supremacy (Racism) for purposes of maintaining and expanding this globally operating system.

Interested viewers are also invited to check out the following talk by Harari:

Peace

Limitless, Transcendence and LUCY

Peace Be Unto Those Who Follow Right Guidance.

A few evenings back, I watched LUCY, the latest cinematic offering from white male French director Luc Besson starring white female [=Racial Suspect] and Ashkenazi ‘liberal’ pro-Zionist, Scarlett Johansson.

Initially, I had decided against writing a blog post about this movie on account of its ridiculous plot, dire acting and rather obvious / overt engagement of White Supremacist (Racist), feminist and post-/trans-humanist themes. My original intention was simply to point interested readers to online critiques of the film such as the following:

(1) Lucy: Why I’m Tired of Seeing White People on the Big Screen

(2) ‘Lucy’ and the Absence of the Black Race in Origin of Humanity Theories

(3) Fuck this movie: “Lucy” (2014)

(4) The Problem With “Lucy” And White Feminism

However, having discussed this film with another non-white person [=VoR / Victim of Racism / White Supremacy] who also watched it, and having thought about the relation of this film to a couple of others – specifically, Limitless (2011) andTranscendence (2014) – I have reconsidered my initial dismissive stance and decided to share a few reflections on this and related movies from a Counter-Racist / critical race theoretical / decolonial perspective.

Firstly, I should like to draw attention to the tag lines in the posters / advertising for the above three films, each of which centers on a white person as protagonist (nothing new there):

Limitless (2011) – “What if a pill could make you rich and powerful?”

Transcendence (2014) – “Yesterday Dr Will Caster was Only Human”

Lucy (2014) – “The Average Person Uses 10% of Their Brain Capacity. Imagine What She Could Do with 100%.”

Regarding Limitless (2011):

‘You’ (white people) are, as a collective / nation / group / family, already “rich and powerful”. However, in a “post-racial” (sic) world in which it is now possible for somenon-white people to become “rich and powerful”, i.e. to “catch up” somewhat (a phenomenon which results in what seminal Counter-Racist thinker Neely Fuller, Jr. refers to as “Racial Showcasing Confusion“), there is a need to consider how to re-establish one’s position as The Race in “the race”, i.e. to ensure that one “stays ahead”. One way to “stay ahead” is through “pill-popping”, i.e. technological-means – in short, the achievement of BLTC (Better Living Through Chemistry).

Regarding Transcendence (2014):

In this same “post-racial” world in which non-white people appear to have becomehuman, the future (of white people as dominant) lies in transcending or “going beyond” humanity, i.e. in becoming trans- / post-human. In order to MAINTAIN the globally operating system of White Supremacy (Racism), it appears to have now become necessary, at least according to the views of some white people, to REFINE ‘whiteness’ / what it means to be white along technological / cybernetic / informational lines. Whereas the issue was once one of differentiating (white) humans from (non-white) non- / sub-humans, in this “(neo-)liberal” and “post-racial” era the issue now concerns differentiating (non-white) humans from (white) trans- / post-humans. I refer to this phenomenon as ‘iterative’ or ‘algorithmic’ racism and hope to write about it in more detail in the near future, insha’Allah / God-Willing. (In this connection, I should like to point interested readers to the following blog post: VIDEO: The Cybernetic Refinement of White Supremacy (Racism).)

Regarding LUCY (2014):

Lucy isn’t merely a white female = Racial Suspect under contemporary conditions of global White Supremacy (Racism); rather, as she undergoes her (white female) transformation in this White Supremacist (Racist) post-/trans-humanist fantasy, she becomes the very embodiment of at least one strand within white feminist discourse, viz. the white female as goddess. As proof of this, consider her response to a question asked of her at the end of her trans- / post-human re-con-figuration, viz. “Where are you?”

“I am everywhere”

In short, like Dr Will Caster, the white male protagonist of Transcendence (2014), Lucy has become omnipresent (and also implicitly omniscient and omnipotent since it’s a “package deal” after all).

What interests me here is re-capitulation in the contemporary “post-racial” era of an idea associated with a key (European) Enlightenment philosopher, viz. René Descartes, viz. the transcendent “God’s Eye view”.

According to Latin American decolonial thinker Santiago Castro-Gomez, Descartes’ philosophy should be understood as based on adoption of a “zero point” position, i.e. a “view from nowhere” in the sense of a perspective (epistemology, way of knowing) that is not tied to a particular body situated at a particular place. This “zero point philosophy” has no body-politics (e.g. ‘race’ or gender) or geo-politics (i.e. location in the “world system”); rather, it is ego-centrically grounded in a way that is abstract, timeless and universal (thereby erasing / masking ego-political concerns informed by body-political and geo-political considerations). This ego is, in fact, a theo (god) since it transcends space (and time) and matter.

All of this leads me to think that it might be worthwhile considering technological shifts occurring in this contemporary “post-racial” era from a Counter-Racist / critical race theoretical / decolonial perspective that simultaneously thinks through the implications of another possible shift that might be taking place, viz. to the “post-secular”.

On this basis, I should like to ask the following:

Are films such as Limitless, Transcendence and LUCY, which are made against the backdrop of an ostensible Trans- / Post-Human “technological shift” [=REFINEMENT] taking place within the globally operating system of Racism (White Supremacy), informing us / them that a “post-secular” theological shift is also taking place; that white Catholic male Pierre Teilhard de Chardin‘s ‘Noosphere‘ is being realised as a “global brain“; that the ‘Alpha’ (beginning) and ‘Omega’ (end) of ‘race’ = Racism (White Supremacy) are converging insofar as this ‘project’ is considered in terms of its theological roots and branches; that the (colonial) ‘matrix’ (of power) is ‘re-booting’ so as to MAINTAIN itself.

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VIDEO: The Cybernetic Refinement of White Supremacy (Racism)

Peace Be Unto Those Who Follow Right Guidance.

In two previous posts, I have made brief mention of transhumanism (related to a broader phenomenon called posthumanism), a scientistic movement both initiated (or ESTABLISHED) and driven (MAINTAINED, EXPANDED and/or REFINED) by white people, i.e. suspect Racists (White Supremacists). (See “Of Terminators and Transhumanists” and “Transhumanism and The Racial Contract“.)

In this connection, I should like to point interested readers/viewers to two books by University of Edinburgh Professor of philosophy, Andy Clark – Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies and The Future of Human Intelligence and Supersizing The Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension – and the following video:

An extremely interesting and important question concerning the nature of agency given the intersection of technology and political-economy is raised by a female member of the audience at 01:01:28 in the video. Clark responds by pointing to the possibility of an increase in the divide between the technological ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ – an allusion to what has been referred to elsewhere as the “digital divide” – and maintains that “we could almost speciate into two races”.

Given the Racist (White Supremacist) nature of political economy, it is important for counter-Racists to THINK about the power-relational implications of ALL such “cybernetic refinements”.

Peace