Assimilate or Terminate?
Would you rather be assimilated? Or terminated?
While wondering what to write about in this week’s blog I decide to watch a little TV to see if it would jog my mind. It did just that. I stopped on channel 74, the Sci-Fi network (while now it’s the ‘SyFy’ network which is just absurd) and what did I find, just an episode of Star Trek entitled ‘I, Borg’. Perfect, just when I needed an answer TV gives me one. I’ve never really been attentive or interested in the Star Trek series but this episode, along with the two following episodes, might have altered that perception and perspective. In this episode the crew finds an injured Borg, which is a cybernetic organism that exists as a collective, and they nurse him back to health. The Borg (plural form) apparently operate as a collective with no individual identities, communicate as a networked computer and have no individual decision making process. In this episode the crew isolate the Borg they find from the collective hive mind. Once they do this, they discover that the Borg can create individual identities and give this Borg a name Hugh.Throughout the episode Hugh could only describe himself in the plural ‘we’ but eventually because he has to make individual decisions he identifies himself as ‘I’.
Would you rather be assimilated? Or terminated?
While wondering what to write about in this week’s blog I decide to watch a little TV to see if it would jog my mind. It did just that. I stopped on channel 74, the Sci-Fi network (while now it’s the ‘SyFy’ network which is just absurd) and what did I find, just an episode of Star Trek entitled ‘I, Borg’. Perfect, just when I needed an answer TV gives me one. I’ve never really been attentive or interested in the Star Trek series but this episode, along with the two following episodes, might have altered that perception and perspective. In this episode the crew finds an injured Borg, which is a cybernetic organism that exists as a collective, and they nurse him back to health. The Borg (plural form) apparently operate as a collective with no individual identities, communicate as a networked computer and have no individual decision making process. In this episode the crew isolate the Borg they find from the collective hive mind. Once they do this, they discover that the Borg can create individual identities and give this Borg a name Hugh.Throughout the episode Hugh could only describe himself in the plural ‘we’ but eventually because he has to make individual decisions he identifies himself as ‘I’.
Hugh
This episode was interesting because it shows the cyborg as both something to fear and later have sympathy for. We discussed in class that cyborgs poses a threat to break down the binary boundaries and dualist views that have been created by the narratives and doctrines of the past and that it will create a new perspective that does not have rigid boundaries. I think that this episode depicts that idea of a new perspective without the limitations of subjectivity born from the dualists’ views that Donna Haraway describes. They only issue is that the Borg, as a cybernetic race, and many other cyborg representations in the media are mostly depicted as monstrous beings whose prime directive is either to ‘assimilate us’ or ‘terminate us’. Why do we fear the cyborg? Do we fear that we will lose our individuality and become Borg? Do we fear that our creations will overthrow and mark us for termination? This representation of the cyborg as something to fear is repeated in many forms of media.
The opposite representations are few and far between. David from A.I. can be an outlier to this pattern but is he truly a cyborg or just a synthetic? If we accept him as a cyborg and he becomes the sympathetic cyborg then aren’t we creating a dualist view of the cyborg? It seems that the cyborg perspective without limited or prescribed boundaries and perspectives is one that is hard to believe possible. So I guess we should fear the cyborg, because it sells tickets.
David
