Joseph Campbell: “[The modern myth] has to do with machines …” (Interview with Publishers Weekly excerpted in Facebook post from the Joseph Campbell Foundation)

Anything having to do with Star Wars is kind of timely with news of George Lucas preparing to step down at LucasFilm still fresh in our minds. As I read Campbell’s words I had to wonder what he would have made of the Borg from the Star Trek universe, which were more contemporary for people of my generation. With Darth Vader the threat of being made to join “the machine” and all it represents wasn’t quite so overt, compared to how the Borg assimilated both individuals (most memorably Captain Picard/Locutus) and whole worlds. From a writer’s perspective it’s intriguing to think about which got the machine metaphor over more effectively, and whether the comparative subtlety of Darth Vader had more artistic merit, but there’s no doubt that both Darth Vader and the Borg had a huge influence on people my age and older.

Turning to “the real world,” I think one of the reasons people of my generation were so receptive to the notion of being taken over by machines was because it was one of the tangible threats of our childhood. Maybe I was surrounded by it more since I live in the birthplace of Jeep and the nearest big city to me is “the Motor City,” but as the first assembly-line “robots” began to appear in auto manufacturing plants, there was a lot of talk about how people were afraid that “the robots are taking over.” Not surprisingly, since it was the eighties and robots can’t unionize, auto company executives did a lot of investing in assembly-line robots. Even the wave of American companies being bought by larger Japanese companies in the eighties played into this with how we stereotyped the Japanese back then (before the anime/manga boom created a whole new set of stereotypes).

Thinking about this over the weekend, I’m starting to wonder if maybe my generation was the last generation that thought of “the machine” as an external force we were resisting. Looking at more recent generations, I’m not sure if there is even widespread consciousness of the idea that machines (literal and figurative) are taking over our lives and identities, and it seems like a large portion of people who are aware of the encroachment of the machines believe — probably thanks to the media they watch and schools that aren’t allowed to teach them to think critically about these things — that there is simply nothing  they can do to stop this process, and that the best thing they can do is to live as comfortably as they can within the machines.

I’m hardly a Luddite, and yes, I am typing this on a computer connected to the Internet. The thing is, I’ve always viewed computers, the Internet, and what have you, as tools. I certainly won’t argue that technology hasn’t made our lives better in a lot of ways, but there’s a difference between using a machine as a tool to help others (or yourself) and becoming so swallowed up in the machine that you can’t imagine yourself without it. If the Internet were to just plain disappear tomorrow I’d be devastated, as most of us would, but I know that I would find ways to do the things I need to do without using the Internet. The way smartphones are advertised these days you have to wonder if in ten years people will even be able to use the restroom without asking the “virtual assistant” on their phones how to operate the zippers on their pants.

It’s gotten to the point now where even erotica is becoming inundated with machines. It’s been about a hundred years since hand-held electric vibrators were designed to help doctors induce “hysterical paroxysm” in their female patients, but over the past decade there’s been a huge upsurge in the use of piston-driven devices used for penetration, more commonly known as “fucking machines,” in erotica. The technology behind these devices is hardly older than those used in “handheld massagers,” so why are they becoming so prevalent now? Some have speculated that making “the machine/s” more incarnate in erotica is a reflection of how our society has been taken over by machines, and that people are sexualizing the process of being screwed over by “the machine” as a way to deal with the anguish that “the machines” cause in our lives. Hey, if “the machine” is going to screw you over, you might as well get an orgasm out of it, right?

(A couple of years ago there was a small national controversy when a professor brought a couple of sex workers to talk to a class about issues of sexuality and the workers, er, demonstrated one of these machines to the class. There was certainly a lot there to write a blog about, but at the time I couldn’t write about it. If something like that happens again, I’ll probably have a lot to say now.)

Even when you look at music, the use of machines there is reaching near-epidemic proportions. My generation was the one that heard all the synthesizers of the eighties and said, “No, we’re going back to guitars, and we don’t care if we have to record in our parents’ basements and sell tapes out of the trunks of our cars, we’re going to get this music out.” The end result was easily the best period of popular music in my lifetime. Even when electronic dance music took off in the second half of the nineties, we used the synthesizers and computers appropriately, in forms of music where they made sense and sounded good. After things went south near the dawn of the millennium with the return of big-budget pre-processed acts (Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, the Spice Girls, the Backstreet Boys, N’Sync, etc.), it seemed like “technopop” became the big craze, the mechanical twinge of autotuned voices rose in popularity, and once again “the machine” was too involved in our music.

Now we’re going through the age of dubstep, quite possibly the most overtly machine-sounding form of music ever created. I try to be as accepting of other people’s tastes as I can, and I had to hear “that isn’t real music, that’s just noise” so often as I was growing up that I promised myself that I would never say that about any form of music. Dubstep is really, really pushing me, though. Having been to clubs where it was being played, I get that dubstep is good for doing the “drunk shuffle” to (even if you’ve never been to a club, if you’ve been to a wedding where alcohol was served then you know exactly what I’m talking about), and its use of three-against-two rhythms has made it popular in the dance game community, but I find my ability to tolerate dubstep is weakening the more I have to listen to it. I can only hope that the next evolutions of music are more pleasing to my ears.

I could write a whole second blog entry on the connections between “the machines taking over” and the binary choices that modern American conservatism are trying to force on anyone. For now, let me just reject the likely criticism that I’m going to get from some of these right-wingers, that if I don’t like the machine then why don’t I get a cabin in the woods and a manual typewriter and all of that. That’s a false binary. “The machine” is not wholly evil, and I will most certainly continue to use those aspects of machines that are advantageous to me. However, I will not let any machine, or any other external force, take control of my life. I was given a brain for a reason, and I will keep using it for its intended purposes for as long as I live.