Syllabus Builder: Why You Should Teach The Private Eye

I saw a few people looking comic up while in class so I think some other people might write about it to, but screw it this was the first thing I thought of  and it’s by a writer I love, so let’s talk about it. I think for the syllabus you should add The Private Eye. The Private Eye is a comic published online in 2013 and 2014, the premise is that at some point in the not too distant future the “cloud” has burst and released everyone’s data, from personal information, to every text message you’ve ever sent, to your entire internet search history. The internet collapses and technology falls into this weird space between past and future. Everyone hides their identity in public, wearing masks and much more technologically sophisticated disguises, while much of pre digital technology comes back.

The first reason you should use this comic is because it is really good. It is written by Brian K. Vaughn one of the best writers in comics and drawn by Marcos Martin a really great and unique artist. While this isn’t really close to being either’s best work they are the type of talents that warrant at least checking out whatever they have worked on.

The second reason is that it thematically ties into a lot of what we’ve been talking about in class. The cloud bursting for example leads to a world where we know everything about a person, you could talk about the parallels between the cloud bursting and the Circle completing. It would also be interesting to discuss if the future the novel presents could be the future of the world after the Circle completes. Since everyone’s information became available online the place we became anonymous was in public.

There is also an element of nostalgia that can tie the novel to Ready Player One with technology having caused such a disaster people move back to older forms of listening to music, through vinyl and cassettes as streaming services and digital files have imploded, and television becoming the main form of entertainment again.

The best part is the comic is entirely “pay what you want” so it can be purchased for free, making it very convenient for you and your future students. I’ll link to the page below.

http://panelsyndicate.com/comics/tpeye

Scalar Pitch

After a little bit of thought my idea for my Scalar pitch would be something to do with looking at the pop culture of Ready Player One. I’m leaning towards looking at the music that is referenced and seeing how distorted Cline’s view of the 80s music landscape is. I’m also interested in discussing what the canonical 80s music playlist/album/artist list would look like, and if a truely accurate list can exist, and if the biases of Cline’s canon any worse than that of music publications like Pitfork, NME, or Rolling Stone. 

I’m willing to switch this idea and apply it to film if I find there to not be enough music content in the book. 

The Circle (2017) Film Review

 

Lightbeam

After spending the weekend trying to go about my internet habits as normal as possible knowing that I’m going to have to look at the connections of my data, and end up being paranoid about for the rest of my life, I took a look at my lightbeam graph. However, it wasn’t nearly as weird as I was expecting it to be. The graph pretty much came back as a singular massive blob, with a few sites floating off in the distance. 

 A lot about lightbeams presentation disappointed me, as beyond a cool visual I’m not sure how much information can be derived from it. For example I easily expected Amazon to be dead center in the middle reaching out and connecting to every site. However, it ended up off to the side with its logo about medium size compared to the rest of the sites. 

I realized that I missed out on a lot of interesting information doing this experiment by way of simply forgetting to go to some sites. Obviously my biggest mistake was not going on any of my social media platforms. Mostly because I’m not the biggest social media user, and when I do use it I primary access it through mobile apps. I also just didn’t go to some of my favorites sites this weekend, like basketball and baseball reference, two sites I am actually really curious what they do with my data. 

Dyer-Witheford and Transmission

While reading Dyer-Witheford’s essay the first thing that reminded me of Transmission  was the concept of the global worker, which in my mind Arjun embodies perfectly. Dyer-Witheford writes about how capitalism has always taken adavantage of the world-wide labours, that the slave trade and colonial workers are the older siblings of the global worker. The slave trade is an interesting example because of how Arjun’s experience with Databodies could be seen as a parallel to slave trade. He is brought from his home country to America to work, he is placed in communal housing with other Databodies employees where, they are then assigned to a company to work and Databodies collects most of the money. Much like the slave traders cashing in on distributing labor. Even the company name Databodies is completely dehumanizing, as it suggests that it’s workers are nothing more than a series of ones and zeros, that can be easily transferred for use by any employer. While I don’t think Dyer-Witheford’s intention was to say that global workers are today’s slaves precisely, as he only mentions slave trade once, more so that they both are a product of capitalism’s desire to circumvent laws and morality for the benefit of the bottom line. However I do believe that Kunzru was trying to express that Arjun is, along the lines, a modern slave. 

Another interesting thing about Dyer-Witheford’s essay was how it brought up Marx’s idea of capitalism leading to the alienation of people. This again relates to Arjun as he becomes alienated from others when he takes the Databodies job. However it’s interesting to try and look at what drives the alienation in Arjun’s life. Is it the nature of his work, spending all of his time in alone coding, or is it the nature of the Databodies logistics, the work housing isolating him from the rest of society outside of his bubble, or is it due to the nature of capitalism itself, capitalism is about the success of the individual and since we are all competing against each other can we really connect to one another? 

Noiromancer

Up to this point we have looked at Neuromancer as a combination of science fiction and punk, as if those are the only two influences the novel displays. Equally important to the identity of Neuromancer’s subversion of science fiction is Gibson’s usage of noir sensibilities. The 1953 film Pickup on South Street is a excellent example of a classic noir film, to compare Neuromancer to.

The set of similarities between the two begins in the setting. The about the first half of Neuromancer is set in an urban environment much like Pickup on South Street. Both use the urban setting to reinforce the dark, dirty and claustrophobic tone. The two stories spend all their time in slummy locations, from bars, to subways, to police stations. All of the interactions are not formal ones in a clean meeting room, they’re unofficial and rather shady, from Armitage or Molly’s first meetings with case to the detectives working with Moe, nothing is proper.

Another big set of similarities is the characters. The two leads Skip and Case are antiheroes, both are much more interested in themselves and what befits them, rather than the relationships they have with those around them. Another similarity is how the “criminal”characters all seem to have some special skill. Case is hacking, Skip is pick pocketing, Peter is manipulation, Moe is information gathering so on. This is a major aspect of noir is the value given to the lower class, that they’re are things that those that are dirty and crooked have a different but just as valuable set of knowledge.

Neuromancer as a Hack

Hacking, to paraphrase McKenzie Wark’s “Hacker’s Manifesto” is in short to take a preexisting code of some kind and alter it in such a way in which it becomes something new. This definition of a hack could be applied beyond computer programs, all the way to a piece of literature, in this case Gibson’s Neuromancer. 

The novel serves as hack itself due to how it alters the genre of science fiction. Most notably by recontextualizing science fiction’s tropes and characteristics, better technology, dystopia etc, into a world with a new punk aesthetic. In order to make this change of scenery fit, Gibson creates a need for a new set tropes and characteristics of  in his new remix, cyberspace, hacker ninja hybrids etc, creating the framework of what would becomes its own genre.

This leads to the second way that Neuromancer is an example of a hack.  Another characteristic of hacking is that whatever is produced in not owned by the creators and is free to be used by others. This is exatly what happens to Gibson’s novel. Since it served as the blueprint of the cyberpunk genre. It has been taken by and informed many other writers in creating their own cyberpunk novel.

Arguably the most important part of the hack concept is that it can also be hacked. Hacking exists to open up new doorways for other users to travel down and create something of their own. Neuromancer didn’t shut the door on science fiction’s development, it smashed a hole through the wall , spray painted a Dead Kennedy’s logo next to it, and led a crowed of people right on through.

Judy is a Cyberpunk

When comparing “God Save the Queen” to Neuromancer looking for makes the novel cyberpunk instead of plan science fiction we have to look at what makes “God Save the Queen” punk and what from that carries over thematically and aesthetically to Gibson’s novel.

One of the most obvious elements of “God Save the Queen” is the song’s attack on the English monarchy and society’s acceptance of it. The song presents a very negative picture of England’s government, in a way saying that England is using the monarchy to fool its people. This sort of carries over to Neuromancer, in the book there is defiantly a sense that the common people aren’t doing that well, and that there are those that have far more power than them, such as Case’s former employers, and they are hanging over the whole story. However the distrusting those  in power and protest are not exclusive to punk, folk and soul artist such as Bob Dylan and Sam Cooke were making protest music in the 1960s and no one is gonna argue that they are punk. So we must continue.

Another major aspect of punk is it’s attitude and aesthetic. In “God Save the Queen” this is expressed through the instrumentation, loud upfront guitars played straight and to the point, as well as the vocals snide and aggressive delivery, give the song a dirty, abrasive, and arrogant feel. This of course carries over to the novel and we see it all over the place. We see it in our main character, he’s mostly unconcerned with others and he thinks he’s better than everyone else, which he might just be with hacking. We also see this in the books world it dirty, rundown, and filled with society’s cast offs.

Lastly and probably most importantly, punk at its core was a movement against the virtuosity of  blues and prog rock at the time to make music that was less overwrought and more straightforward in sound and more accessible in style, music that sounds like it could be made by people in a garage. Cyberpunk does that with science fiction moving away from fiction about those space captains and genius level scientists, shifting the narrative to characters that could be us or people we know if that was the world we lived in. Punk and cyberpunk are the sum of each of these aspects.