In Fellini's telling of the Casanova story, Donald Sutherland's Enlightenment lothario has a little clockwork rooster that he winds up prior to bedding anyone (which he does a lot)...]]>

In Fellini’s telling of the Casanova story, Donald Sutherland’s Enlightenment lothario has a little clockwork rooster that he winds up prior to bedding anyone (which he does a lot). Over the course of the film the rooster pun is hammered home as Casanova starts to realise that for all his other accomplishments – his grasp of cosmology, philosophy and mathematics, his accomplishments as a litterateur and wit – people continue to treat him like a mechanical cock, a literal sex machine. The film ends with the hero dreaming about waltzing across the canals of Venice in the arms of the only partner who ever understood him: a ravishing (albeit facially waxy) automaton. The same idea, the notion that there’s something strangely and shamefully robotic about giving in to your natural drives, is played out (albeit in a less sentimental register) in Paul McCarthy’s The Garden – a tableau of an animatronic businessman coupling with a tree. Likewise, when we say something turns us on we’re gesturing at the idea we’re weirdly machine-like when we’re at our most animal.

This tendency to get the biological and the technological all muddled is hardly new; In her The Monster in the Machine Zakiya Hanafi notes that even as early as the 17th Century commentators were fretting about automata blurring the lines between nature and mechanism, human and machine. So lifelike that they left audiences frozen with wonder, rendering them ‘doubles of the objects they admired’, these Baroque proto-robots looked, to Emanuele Tesauro, to be more ‘alive’ than the entranced spectators for whom they were performing. The idea of mistaking persons for mechanisms isn’t just insulting, it’s also (as Masahiro Mori’s uncanny valley theory suggests) fundamentally upsetting at some level. For slobbery Ljubnajan psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek, even the sorts of facial tics and twitches that bear witness to real live humans’ sub-cutaneous circuitry are distressing, putting us all too intimately in touch with the wires and valves that we don’t like to remember we’re made of. For philosopher Henri Bergson, meanwhile, the entire purpose of comedy was to shore up the distinction between people and machinery, the organic and the inorganic; we laugh at finding ‘a certain mechanical inelasticity, just where one would expect to find the… living pliableness of a human being’. All comedy (including, presumably this classic scene), for Bergson, arose from our anxiety about humans resembling machines. Interestingly, in his account, as in McCarthy’s Garden, nature is itself represented as somehow mechanical – unthinking, relentless, terrifying in its dumb material obstinacy.

To an extent, psychoanalysis – and, to a still greater extent, its quick ‘n’ dirty alternative CBT – invites us to think of humans electronically, in terms of circuits, code, drives and programming. Implicit in this line of thinking is the idea that if we can reprogramme both machines and each other, then machines might be able to reprogramme us. Carried away by enthusiasm for ELIZA, a 1960s computer programme coded cannily enough to fool some users into thinking that it was really listening to and analysing their problems, Carl Sagan prophesied “a network of computer psychotherapeutic terminals” to cater to the depressives of the future.   Of course, technology does shape our habits and actions; Jonathan Crary’s account of how visual technologies inform human behaviours and modes of perception is, for example, nuanced and broadly persuasive. Many of these technologies, after all, resulted from an improved understanding of our own hardware – the speed impulses’ passage through the nervous system, the duration of retinal afterimages etc. Other advocates of the notion that machines are reprogramming us are less convincing, however. Lt. Col. Dave Grossman – who’s coined the catchy term ‘killology’ to describe the way videogames and other violent media are breeding a generation of supersoldiers devoid of qualms and compunction – tends, for example, to prefer bombastic fear-mongering and sweeping generalisations to reasoned debate. Weirdly, arguments like his are as popular with liberals as  conservatives; anti-war protesters have objected to the use of games like America’s Army (developed by, yes, the US army for the joint purpose of training and PR) to ‘attract young potential recruits . . . train them to use weapons, and engage in virtual combat and other military missions’.

Henry Jenkins has pointed out that although these commentators claim to be worried about games’ capacity to make us machine-like, you have to have a conception of your fellow man as already pretty machine-like to believe that binary code can alter people’s personalities. ‘Where is meaning, interpretation, evaluation or expression in Grossman’s model?’ Jenkins asks, pointing out that the behaviourist underpinnings of Grossman’s position have long been ‘discredited among schooling experts’ – after all, rote learning was getting Dickens’ goat way back in 1853. While America’s Army is, in many respects, a disturbing phenomenon, it’s also proven to be a forum for protest, discussion, performance and other non-automatic behaviours. And while games developers might boast of having programmed AI opponents so realistic that you’ll think you’re competing with real humans, their products are still pretty easy to distinguish from reality – not to mention barely any better at teaching you to handle weapons than chess is at inculcating good horsemanship.

Which isn’t to say quasi-behaviourist attempts to cajole and butter up voters, shoppers and ‘users’, to pander to and script their habits, to plot advantageous routes of least resistance for them to follow, aren’t effective or widespread. We make irrational decisions all of the time, especially if they’re easier in the short term, or more exciting, and businesses have become very skilled at exploiting and inflecting our patterns of behaviour – how many companies rely, for example, on the fact that we’re far less likely to opt out of an initiative we’ve been automatically signed up to than we are to sign up for one we actually like the sound of? Here, again, it emerges that we’re most programmable when we’re least machinic, when we’re lazy or lonely or thirsty. Maybe there will come a time when we’ll be able to rewire ourselves out of this irritating paradox. Until then it’s probably best to be wary of people making hay with sloppy hardware/biology conflations – on which note did anyone else think that Avatar was telling them we should save the rainforest because it’s a bit like the internet?