Penny Arcade: Automata

One of the concerns about technology is its tendency to substitute rather than supplement human experience. For example, my mobile phone allows me to project my voice across vast distances, to write short notes and send them with unerring accuracy and haste to their intended recipient. But what's the cost for such ease? Obviously, if we're calling someone we're not talking to them face-to-face, and if we're texting someone we're again restricted and conforming to a technological medium to express ourselves. These are what philosophers call 'phenomenological' concerns: they worry us at the level of our sensuous experience of meaningful reality.

But there are concerns quite apart from these phenomenological ones. These concerns are about the nature of technology itself and, therein, humanity also. Suppose we consider 'technology' any development that a society (not necessarily a human one) has developed to shape or alter its engagement with the environment it inhabits. This type of strong definition charges that even our clothes and our sunglasses are forms of 'technology'. Effectively, the strong definition of technology makes us all 'cyborgs'. To be a cyborg means that you live and simple 'exist' in a distinct manner to the things around you. Many contemporary writers call this the 'post-human condition'.

But what of that other great example from twentieth and twenty-first century pop-culture: the android. One of my regular touchstones for gaming and webcomic culture is Penny Arcade. The two fellows that operate PA, 'Gabe' and 'Tycho', have been in the business of critiquing gaming culture both graphically through their webcomic and through commentary for over a decade now. Recently, they produced a series of strips entitled Automata. A reader of the strip, Christoph, reworked the six pages of the Automata comic into a YouTube video with music.

This video explores the ontological concerns of technology. Instead of saturating the human body with amplifications, extensions, and layers, Gabe and Tycho have imagined an android, Carl, whose 'interiority' is independent of its detective partner/handler. The very anthropomorphic form of Carl, his exaggerated and stylised figure, suggests that Carl is not so much a mimic of humanity as an objectification of it. Whereas the detective accompanying Carl is clearly a 'human object', Carl retains a far more stylised form.

I doubt many people worry about the difference between phenomenology and ontology, meaning and existence, but technology is one of those sites that endlessly refers us back to our own 'difference'. And so it's more that everyone is forced, in some way, to be a philosopher today.