{"id":3093,"date":"2021-09-20T18:28:18","date_gmt":"2021-09-20T18:28:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/itp.nyu.edu\/adjacent\/issue-8\/?p=117"},"modified":"2024-10-08T22:04:34","modified_gmt":"2024-10-08T22:04:34","slug":"be-there-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/itp.nyu.edu\/adjacent\/issue-8\/be-there-now\/","title":{"rendered":"Be THERE Now"},"content":{"rendered":"

Telepresence\u2014the promise of a technology that will let us \u201cbe THERE now\u201d\u2014is an old dream with a new urgency. But when it feels like we\u2019re <\/span>really there<\/span>, it\u2019s easy to ignore the connections facilitating our \u201cnatural\u201d experience: the systems that mediate our communication, the workers who build and maintain them, the ecosystems and laborers who supply the raw materials.\u00a0<\/span><\/em>
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\"ScreenshotScreenshot of TelepresenceRobots.com\u2019s homepage.<\/h6>\n

The homepage of TelepresenceRobots.com has big plans for my remote presence, now that COVID-19\u00a0 has forced me home. One bullet point at a time, it describes the time and money I’ll save, the agency and access I\u2019ll regain when I invest in a remote-controlled home for my consciousness. It will feel natural, too: I can \u201cBe THERE now!\u201d This promise is accompanied by a photograph of a comfortable living room where a wheeled platform sits in this scene of familial bliss. A warm glow radiates from the underside of the platform\u2019s wood-toned base, and a millennial pink pole telescopes upward. A circular unit attached to the pole sits at eye level with the mother; I assume it\u2019s some kind of camera and speaker, but its smooth surface lacks any indication of its function. This plastic-and-metal machine is surrounded by softness: plump upholstery, throw pillows, plush carpeting, a sheep, a balloon; all in shades of sanitary white and domestic pale pink. A toddler grasps the pole with both hands, mouth open and tongue protruding with joy. I can almost see the plume of germ particles leaving the toddler\u2019s mouth. Just above their adorable butt is a friendly, rounded button with the words \u201cVIEW ROBOTS.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never seen a telepresence robot IRL, let alone in my living room. But the surreal scene is also familiar: it perfectly captures what it feels like to conduct large portions of my life over Zoom. Sometimes I feel like the toddler, gleefully gripping the cold metal as I talk to my loved ones; sometimes I\u2019m more like the mother, mouth frozen in a stiff smile, eyes unfocused, unable to look past the poorly domesticated military-industrial-corporate technology standing in for the person on the other end. On bad days, I worry I might be most like the robot, struggling to arrange the unresponsive parts of myself into legible emotions, wedged awkwardly against the couch.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\u201cHolographical
\n\u201cHolographical Reality\u2122 provides the ultimate communications experience by generating the three dimensional embodiment of the transmitted person to appear in the room for natural human communication.\u201d<\/p>\n

Credit: TelepresenceTech<\/h6>\n

Telepresence\u2014the promise of a technology that will let us \u201cbe THERE now\u201d\u2014is an old dream with a new urgency. Telepresence isn\u2019t a specific technology; it\u2019s a narrative device, a sales pitch, an ideology, a myth. It promises an image so crisp, a connection so fast, a screen so diaphanous, that the whole assemblage melts away, leaving only, in the words accompanying this image from telepresencetech.com, \u201cnatural human communication.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The last year of maintaining my close relationships through the bland, glitchy interfaces of business software has made me acutely aware of how far our current technologies are from fulfilling the promise of <\/span>being there<\/span><\/i>. At the same time, I\u2019m all the more aware of the thoroughly embodied networks of resources, infrastructure, and labor\u2014groceries, postal deliveries, power, trash collection\u2014that sustain me. Someone has to <\/span>be there<\/span><\/i> by <\/span>actually<\/span><\/i> being there, and suffer the consequences of a now-risky physical proximity. That risk, of course, is not evenly distributed; it falls <\/span>disproportionately<\/span><\/a> on the Black and brown people whose labor has cared for the country, even as the country\u2019s political and economic systems have <\/span>utterly failed<\/span><\/a> to care for them.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Mark

Mark Zuckerberg “visits” Puerto Rico in the aftermath of 2017\u2019s devastating Hurricane Maria.<\/p><\/div>\n

Credit: Screenshot of Facebook Live video, via The Verge<\/h6>\n

And yet, the myth of risk-free telepresence persists. \u201cIt feels like we\u2019re really here in Puerto Rico,\u201d says Mark Zuckerberg in a <\/span>widely<\/span><\/a> criticized<\/span><\/a> 2017 promotional video for Facebook\u2019s virtual reality platform. As his cartoon torso floats above homes flooded by Hurricane Maria, Zuckerberg helpfully makes subtext text: the dream of telepresence is to <\/span>be there<\/span><\/i> without taking on the risk that <\/span>being there<\/span><\/i> entails. This dream insists that technology will let (some of) us have it both ways: embodiment without proximity, knowledge without danger, pleasure without risk, and power without exposure. And it has been remarkably resilient, used to redefine everything from the nature of work, to the boundaries of warfare, to the contours of intimacy during a plague.<\/span><\/p>\n

At its core, telepresence extends the reach of our bodies. The term itself is loosely defined, and can encompass a wide range of technologies with varying degrees of immersion. Used broadly, telepresence could describe something as familiar as a video call: a system for real-time communication that engages and expands the reach of our senses (in this case, seeing and hearing). In more precise application, it might refer to more-or-less sophisticated robots, like TelepresenceRobot.com\u2019s speaker\/camera unit on wheels, that allows users to move around and interact from a distant location. At its most robust, telepresence invokes complex systems for remotely manipulating and controlling environments, from the minute (surgical robots) to the far-reaching (military drones). For all their variation though, one constant remains: there is always, somewhere, a person in control.1<\/a><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

The paradox of remote presence at once constructs and blurs boundaries: between near and far, us and them, valued and expendable, human body and machine. Every promise of telepresence is a narrative of rupture and suture, a simultaneous making-more-than and less-than human. These technologies strike a bargain, imperfectly extending some of our senses while flattening the rest, connecting us to distant places and people while fracturing our bodies from their sensations, their labor, and the situated networks that physically sustain them. They ask, “what is the bare minimum we need to feel human?” And generally answer with, “<\/span>whatever you need to do your job<\/span><\/i>.”\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And as they move ever closer to seamless embodiment (\u201cIt feels like we\u2019re really here\u201d), they promise, finally, to obscure their own presence. \u201cDo you want to teleport somewhere else?\u201d asks Zuckerberg, and then, in an instant, he leaves the devastated streets of Puerto Rico. When it feels like we\u2019re <\/span>really there<\/span><\/i>, it\u2019s easy to ignore the connections facilitating our \u201cnatural\u201d experience: the systems that mediate our communication, the workers who build and maintain them, the ecosystems and laborers who supply the raw materials. We simply teleport away, as easily as we dropped in.<\/span><\/p>\n

But whose interests and ideologies are concealed, and whose risk and labor is swept from view? Can a century of shifting dreams of telepresence tell us why this myth so stubbornly persists? Can they help us understand power, responsibility, and the ways that race and gender intersect with labor and technology? And can we learn from the dreams of the past and begin to imagine richer and more equitable forms of connection and care?<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Animated

Videophone in Metropolis (1927).<\/p><\/div>\n

Credit: klausnominomi<\/h6>\n

Almost a century ago, Fritz Lang\u2019s 1927 landmark sci-fi film <\/span>Metropolis<\/span><\/i> vividly illustrated the conflicts and paradoxes, the ruptures and sutures, the simultaneous construction and blurring of boundaries that telepresence technologies would usher in.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the first filmed portrayal of a videophone, the at-the-time fictional technology serves as connective tissue for the embodied, all-powerful computer system controlling a hyper-stratified dystopian city. From the comfort of his office on the 1000th floor, the city\u2019s \u201cmaster planner\u201d consults statistics spewing from his \u201cbrain machine.\u201d Concerned with the figures on the ticker tape that warn of an impending labor riot, he places a call to the foreman of the dirty, dangerous \u201chand machine\u201d miles below. In the rigidly hierarchical world of Metropolis, the videophone terminals themselves manifest rank: above, there is a video display and no camera; below, a camera and no display. Through this asymmetrical technology, the city\u2019s technocratic ruler physically extends both his senses and his will, surveilling and controlling the workers, while his body remains unseen and safely cocooned from the dangers below.<\/span><\/p>\n

When Lang made <\/span>Metropolis<\/span><\/i> in Weimar-era Germany, the country was still reeling from the devastation of World War I. He and his audiences would have been acutely attuned to the body\u2019s fragility in proximity to industrialized machinery. Against this backdrop, the videophone collapses and reinforces the vast distance between the city\u2019s master and its vulnerable workers. Lang highlights their vulnerability in an indelible dream sequence that brings the trenches of war to the factory floor, where workers\u2019 bodies fuel the ravenous, demon-faced machine powering the orderly city above.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"A

Marvin Minsky in Omni, in a portrait accompanying his 1980 article on telepresence.<\/p><\/div>\n

Credit: Dan McCoy<\/h6>\n

Less than a decade later, the videophone would make its nonfictional debut in the post offices of Nazi Germany2<\/a><\/sup>,<\/span> just in time for the propaganda-laden 1936 Berlin Olympic Games.3<\/a><\/sup><\/span> But the term \u2018telepresence\u2019 itself wasn\u2019t coined until 1980, when computer scientist and AI pioneer Marvin Minsky published an article by that name.4<\/a><\/sup><\/span> Minsky describes \u201cnew kinds of versatile, remote\u2011controlled mechanical hands\u201d\u2014a literal implementation of <\/span>Metropolis<\/span><\/i>\u2019s \u201chand machine.\u201d But his vision for telepresence quickly moves beyond specific technologies to encompass a total restructuring of labor and space:<\/span>
\nYou don a comfortable jacket lined with sensors and muscle-like motors. Each motion of your arm, hand, and fingers is reproduced at another place by mobile, mechanical hands. Light, dexterous, and strong, these hands have their own sensors through which you see and feel what is happening. Using this instrument, you can “work” in another room, in another city, in another country, or on another planet\u2026 Your dangerous job becomes safe and pleasant.<\/span><\/p>\n

Minsky concludes that \u201cmany young people today consider it demeaning to be bound to any single employer, occupation, or even culture.\u201d In his quintessentially neoliberal vision, <\/span>\u201ctelepresence offers a freer market for human skills, rendering each worker less vulnerable to the moods and fortunes of one employer\u201d\u2014a view <\/span>still promoted<\/span><\/a> by gig economy employers like Uber, who frame their workers\u2019 \u201cindependence\u201d as a feature, not a bug. As in <\/span>Metropolis<\/span><\/i>, telepresence technologies entangle worker with machine, labor with capital. But where <\/span>Metropolis<\/span><\/i> depicts stark differences between proletariat and capitalist, Minsky articulates the\u00a0 myth of a classless \u201cdigital utopia\u201d where, in media theorists Richard Barbrook and An dy Cameron\u2019s words, \u201ceverybody will be both hip and rich.\u201d5<\/a><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

Barbrook and Cameron\u2019s unfortunately still timely 1995 essay locates the deep inequities that the Silicon Valley investor and C-suite class ignore: \u201cTheir utopian vision of California depends on a willful blindness toward the other, much less positive features of life on the West Coast\u2014racism, poverty, and environmental degradation,\u201d even as their technologies are \u201creproducing some of the most atavistic features of American society, especially those derived from the bitter legacy of slavery.\u201d And in the present day, \u201cthis utopian fantasy of the West Coast depends on its blindness toward\u2014and dependence on\u2014the social and racial polarization of the society from which it was born.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\"An

An operator using the GE Master-Slave Manipulator in Popular Science, June 1948.<\/p><\/div>\n

Credit: Hobert Lushest, via Cybernetic Zoo<\/h6>\n

Minsky envisions a world where creatively fulfilled workers are free agents selling their professional services to the highest bidder. But this blinkered view fails to account for the \u201cunfree and invisible labor\u2026 including indentured and enslaved labor as well as gendered domestic and service labor” that Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora assert has always been \u201cthe hidden source of support propping up\u201d Minsky\u2019s empowered contractors. In their book, <\/span>Surrogate Humanity<\/span><\/i>, Atanasoski and Vora argue that racial capitalism\u2019s 6<\/a><\/sup><\/span> desire and need for a \u201csurrogate human\u201d fuels a history extending from \u201cthe disappearance of native bodies necessary for the production of the fully human\u201d to \u201cthe slave\u2019s body as standing in for the master,\u201d and into the current \u201cdisavowal of gendered and racialized labor supporting outsourcing, crowdsourcing, and sharing economy platforms.\u201d7<\/a><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

This desire for surrogacy rests on the belief that anybody\u2019s body can be easily separated from their home, their labor, and even their humanity. Simone Browne sees this belief enacted on an intimate scale, writing that the moment when a person is marked as black is \u201cthe moment of fracture of the body from its humanness.\u201d8<\/a><\/sup><\/span> Kathryn Yusoff sees a similar violent logic at work on a global and environmental scale, describing the European invasion of the Americas as a \u201crupture of bodies, flesh, and worlds\u201d that marked the beginning of the Anthropocene: \u201can epochal redescription of geography as Global-World-Space.\u201d For the native inhabitants of this redescribed world, colonization is \u201ca process of alienation from geography, self, and the possibility of relation.\u201d9<\/a><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

The ruptures of colonialism and enslavement lie just below Minksy\u2019s bland assurance that \u201cteleoperation will do away with hazardous and unpleasant tasks…In a remote\u2011controlled mining operation, there are no people to be hurt.\u201d And the inequities of postcolonial globalization cast a shadow over his rosy promise that \u201ca laborer in Botswana or India could market his or her abilities in Japan or Antarctica.\u201d Minsky proposes a new, technologically-mediated form of rupture as a way to heal the sins of the past, but his aggressively ahistorical view neglects critical questions: Who currently does those hazardous and unpleasant tasks? Will Botswanan diamond miners enter a global labor market with the same bargaining power as a technology consultant in San Jose? For people whose skin color meant they were only recently deemed human, is the promise that \u201cno people\u201d will be hurt, in fact, reassuring?<\/span><\/p>\n

From Minsky to Zuckerberg, telepresence is a dream of fracture without alienation, extraction without entanglement, and colonization without the colonized. Subtext is, once again, made text: mechanical arms built for handling radioactive materials (\u201cYour dangerous job becomes safe and pleasant\u201d) were named the Master-Slave Manipulator, a name that became\u2014and, appallingly, <\/span>remains<\/span><\/a>\u2014a generic term for mechanical arms like the one Minsky poses with.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"CoverCover illustration details from different editions of Robert Heinlein\u2019s 1942 short story Waldo.<\/h6>\n

Early iterations of these \u201cMaster-Slave Manipulators\u201d were nicknamed \u201cwaldoes,\u201d 10<\/a><\/sup><\/span> in homage to sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein\u2019s 1942 short story <\/span>Waldo<\/span><\/i>, which was incredibly influential; in Minsky\u2019s 1980 article, \u201cTelepresence\u201d, he explicitly credits Heinlein\u2019s decades-old story as the inspiration for his vision of a technology-enabled \u201cremote\u2011controlled economy.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Heinlein and Minsky each describe their speculative technologies in imaginative detail. But where Minsky focuses on potential economic benefits and personal freedoms, Heinlein envisions the intimate power dynamics of such a system. Readers are introduced to the titular \u201cwaldoes\u201d\u2014a linked series of remote controlled robotic hands\u2014in an overtly sexualized scene of dominance and submission. In this passage, the system\u2019s space-dwelling inventor takes control of mechanical gloves worn by an earth-bound machine operator millions of miles away:<\/span><\/p>\n

[Alec] Jenkins [the machine operator] thrust his arms into the Waldoes [the mechanical gloves] and waited. Waldo [the inventor] put his arms into the primary pair before him; all three pairs, including the secondary pair mounted before the machine, came to life. Jenkins bit his lip, as if he found unpleasant the sensation of having his fingers manipulated by the gauntlets he wore…<\/span>
\n“Feel it, my dear Alec,” Waldo advised. “Gently, gently\u2014the sensitive touch\u201d\u2026<\/span>
\n\u201cRhythm, Alec, rhythm. No jerkiness, no unnecessary movement. Try to get in time with me.\u201d11<\/a><\/sup><\/span><\/p>\n

Heinlein describes in detail the sweat dripping from the machine operator\u2019s forehead as his hands are forcibly manipulated from afar. Exhausted, finally, Alec removes his hands from the metal gloves. Waldo is furious: still in control of the gloves, he uses one of them to violently grasp the other man\u2019s wrist, threatens him with termination, and concludes to Alec\u2019s supervisor, \u201cSame time tomorrow, McNye. Progress is satisfactory. In time we\u2019ll turn this madhouse of yours into a modern plant.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In this extraordinary scene, coercion and desire intertwine with technology, power, and progress. Again, boundaries are at once reinforced and blurred: two men, separated by vast distances in space and socioeconomic status merge into a single flesh-and-metal assemblage to share a brief, fraught, and just-barely consensual \u201csensitive touch\u201d in the name of industrial efficiency. In Heinlein\u2019s depiction, even when the tech is flawless, the embodiment is anything but seamless. Despite the relentlessly optimistic terms that Minsky and his intellectual offspring use to describe telepresence, its original portrayal is deeply ambivalent.<\/span><\/p>\n

This ambivalence is highlighted through several decades worth of spectacular cover illustrations; with echoes of <\/span>Metropolis<\/span><\/i>\u2019 omniscient city planner, artists portray an ominous, all-seeing figure floating high above the earth, cybernetically linked with grasping, mechanical hands. As viewers, are we meant to imagine ourselves as the powerful, misanthropic Waldo? Or are we looking up at him from Alec\u2019s point of view, waiting for his robotic hands to grasp ours?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"StillStill from Videodrome (1983) of a fleshy, pleasure-giving and -receiving television.<\/h6>\n

\u201cCan telepresence be a true substitute for the real thing?\u201d Minsky wonders. \u201cWill we be able to couple our artificial devices <\/span>naturally and comfortably<\/span><\/i> to work together with the sensory mechanisms of human organisms?\u201d (emphasis is mine). In his 1983 film, <\/span>Videodrome<\/span><\/i>, David Cronenberg answers this question with an <\/span>un<\/span><\/i>comfortable vision of <\/span>un<\/span><\/i>naturally fleshy machines that desire us, control us, and irreversibly transform us into something neither wholly human nor machine\u2014in the film\u2019s parlance, \u201cthe new flesh.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A kind of treatise on the pleasures and perils of Heinlein\u2019s mechanically mediated \u201csensitive touch,\u201d <\/span>Videodrome<\/span><\/i> delves deep into the power dynamics and potential consequences of a world where the boundaries between ourselves and our machines\u2014and the opaque corporate powers controlling them\u2014have completely dissolved. Half a century after <\/span>Metropolis<\/span><\/i>, Lang\u2019s room-size computers and cavernous factory floors have been replaced by small, personal devices inside our homes; protagonist Max\u2019s adult cable station bills itself as \u201cthe one you take to bed with you.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But over the course of the film, we\u2019re introduced to a fictional technology even more intimate than VHS porn. In the world of <\/span>Videodrome<\/span><\/i>, telepresence manifests as a tumor or a virus, living and replicating itself within our bodies at the cellular level.<\/span> The effects of this literally embodied technology are drastic and uncertain. In the film, Kelly Pendergrast notes, \u201cbodily integrity is constantly being violated\u2026 with results as exhilarating as they are scary.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

With echoes of Heinlein\u2019s robotic hands, Cronenberg\u2019s haptically sensitive television sets extend their users\u2019 sense of touch. Pendergrast points out that in this AIDS-era film, \u201cbodies are foregrounded as sites of pleasure and vulnerability (and pleasurable vulnerability).\u201d12<\/a><\/sup><\/span> In Cronenberg\u2019s telling, opening oneself to intimacy and repressed desires renders us susceptible to manipulation and physical danger. Videodrome<\/i>\u2019s protagonist ultimately loses his grip on reality, his sense of self, and control over his actions. Cable executive Max begins the film in control of television programming, and ends it as a human VCR, manipulated by shadowy figures with obscure motivations.<\/span>\u00a0As one antagonist says, \u201cOpen up for me, Max. I’ve got something I want to play for you.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In this telling, the machine-mediated ruptures of <\/span>being there<\/span><\/i> without <\/span>being there<\/span><\/i> have serious consequences: both the terrifying fracture of objective reality and the sensuous potential of cybernetic transcendence. In the words of the film\u2019s media prophet, a Marshall McLuhan stand-in, \u201cyou’ll have to learn to live in a very strange new world.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\n\t\t