Filthy Cleaners: Building Nature after Humans

There is nothing malodorous about Gas Works Park. If you take a deep breath in front of the two giant red cylinders that you see as you enter the park, the only smell is that of the fresh water coming from the lake. More than that, the sight of two giant red cylinders in the middle of a green field left behind by the coal and oil processing plant is visually striking and quite beautiful. But this was not always the case. In its heyday, before the 1960s, the Seattle Gas and Light Company used these structures to convert coal and oil into power for the city. The smell was horrible for the residents. But with the introduction of natural gas and other forms of cleaner energy, there was no more use for the smelly structures. The plant was soon abandoned. If past was prologue and the desire to cover this ugly landscape of waste had prevailed, this beautiful park that sits at the edge of Union Lake today would not have been rescued. But fortunately for us, this didn’t happen.*

Close up view of the abandoned plant at Gas Works Park. "Nature" is taking over. Photo by Author.

The filthy grounds were put through a process of regeneration and re-organization to create a new type of landscape that was somewhat revolutionary at the time. Today, the landscape serves as a place of contemplation that inspires its visitors to ask questions such as: Can we actually say that nature and man-made technology are two separate things? That is, What is nature? This is the power of Gas Works Park that was preserved through much effort in the 1960s, especially landscape architect Richard Haag.

Haag was able to sell his vision of restoring and preserving the industrial history of Seattle by convincing the public of the historical and aesthetic value of the industrial scenery. He enrolled them as allies of his vision and together were able to convince the Seattle City Council to approve his restoration plan of the site unanimously. Urban landscape historian Thaisa Way argues that Haag's restored landscape into Gas Works Park that told a story of Seattle: the city's industrial past, its hilly character, and its historical relationship to nature. For instance, a visitor standing on one of the mounds of the Park can see Downtown Seattle and experience how the hilly landscape of the area was leveled and reconfigured to be built into a new city. Moreover, the neighborhood of Ballard is also visible from Park where once the fishing industry thrived by harvesting nature.**

View of Downtown Seattle from Gas Works Park. Photo by Author

But what is far more interesting is how the restoration was done. Haag used the process of bioremediation, which was cutting edge in the 1960s. This process involved not removing the polluted soil that had made the land barren. Instead, Haag used sludge, oxygen, and bacteria to use up the toxic hydrocarbons from the soil. This way, tiny bacterial life forms (we could call it “nature”) were being used to clean up the mess made by human greed and industrial excess. After Haag put these elements into the landscape, the inhospitable land soon became livable again. However, the worst of the polluted soil was gathered into a mound (called the Great Mound or Kite Hill) under a thick layer of hard clay that allowed rainwater to seep through, and enable the bioremediation process to continue. (It should be noted that years later, this process of regenerating the land was brought under scrutiny as it became evident that bioremediation was not as effective as Haag once believed it to be).

Great Mound in Gas Works Park. Photo by Author

Bacteria as cleaners of the world. Filth cleaning Filth. On the one hand, this is against the basic tenets of germ theory that has driven modern medicine since the late 19th and early 20th century. One legacy of the 20th-century germ theory is the white porcelain toilets in American houses (it made spotting filth easier, they said at the turn of the 20th century)..*** 

But using life to enable more life isn't so strange if you look at it from the perspective of the history of science, more specifically, the history of biotechnology. The modern uses of life can be traced all the way back to fermentation for products like beer. The 19th-century practice of using these microscopic lives, or zymotechnology, shows that putting life to work is not entirely new. Another example of such uses of life is cells. Historian of science Hannah Landecker, for example, shows how the practice of culturing cells rendered what we consider a body part (that is, "cells") into discrete entities living outside of ourselves and made into tools (she calls them infrastructures to describe how foundational these cells are for the fields of biotechnology, biology, and biomedicine) for biomedical and biological science. The use of life forms like cells and bacteria as resource and technology has expanded so much that it underpins early 21st-century economic practices (what one can call a "bioeconomy").****

The use of microbial life as technology to restore the barren land into a livable and green space has an additional effect on the visitor to the Park, what Elizabeth Meyer describes as "sublime." Meyer doesn't mean sublime in the sense of the "feeling of awe" a viewer feels when looking at the Park. Instead, her use of the concept of "sublime" is linked to a philosopher named Lyotard: it is that which makes you feel as if you’re on the edge - a form of pleasurable thrill you feel when doing something you know can be dangerous. In short, it is a “pleasure in fear.” For instance, nature is sublime for viewers because it signifies a time before humans and thus we are in awe of ancient history when we see the landscape. But this awe is not just about amazement of its beauty. It is about being struck by its majesty because of its god-like quality. The nature one is viewing seems immortal compared to the mortal and short history of humans. It is about trembling before a powerful deity, or pleasure and thrill in fear.*****

Inside one of the preserved spaces in the park. Photo by Author

What Haag did in Gas Works Parks preserve the industrial structures of the processing plant - the polluting elements such as the metal structures - rather than bulldozing and covering things up. He made the disturbances or "scars" of the past to be a prominent feature of the landscape. Contemplating these, Meyer writes, makes us think about where we were, what we did, what consequences those actions had, and what future lays ahead. That is, we are in awe of technology that produced Seattle – its industrial prowess symbolized by the metal structures - but also hate and fear those signs of the industrial activities because of the dangers they pose to us. Life here depends on bacteria regenerating the soil - and we must keep our fingers crossed that the bacteria will save life destroyed by human actions.

But both of the stories that have been told here - the use of life as technology and nature as being destroyed by humans - reveal an assumption many people hold: the separation of nature and human technology. cNature, in this sense, is made as something static that is ready to be harnessed for humans or protected by humans. In both of these extremes, nature is seen as something to be static. The underlying logic is about human exceptionalism: that humans can harness the world, and thus, should use it as it pleases; or that humans are outside nature and are enemies to it. While it is true that Gas Works Park makes one wary of where reckless consumption can take us, nature and human technology (or "society) seem to go hand in hand, where one cannot exist without the other. Nature, however, is neither out there nor innocent - but that will be the topic of another post.

The two giant cylindrical structures that greet viewers as they enter the park. Photo by Author

*David Barnes in his book The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle Against Filth and Germs writes a great story about how the smell of Paris at a time when such "bad air" was linked to disease cause a mini, city-wide upheaval. The book helps understand how the concept of the source of illness changed in the Western world.

**Thaisa Way writes a great and complex landscape history of Gas Works Park. She argues that a reading of the landscape - and not just the architectural pieces - of the park tells of the complex history that usually gets left out in the telling of the construction of this site. Her article is titled, "Landscapes of industrial excess: A thick sections approach to Gas Works Park."

***Nancy Tomes writes about how the entire sanitary practices of the American public changed with the introduction and acceptance of the germ theory, which the Americans took on zealously. See her book The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in the American Life for more thorough history of germ theory in the US

****See Robert Bud's Uses of Life: A History of Biotechnology for a full account of this history of using life, especially for industrial purposes. For a more thorough account of the history of putting cells outside the body and why this is important, please see Hannah Landeckers' book Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies. For issues on bioeconomy, see for instance, Melissa Cooper Life as Surplus.

***** An excellent interpretation of Gas Works Park landscape is provided by landscape architect Elizabeth Meyer in her chapter titled, "Seized by Sublime Sentiments" in the edited volume Richard Haag: Bloedel Reserve and Gas Works Park by William S. Saunders

Excremental Identity and Retinal Securities : Turning Your Poop and Eyes into Data

Contrary to belief, your fecal matter is not waste. It is actually quite valuable. This is the insight of an article titled, "Viruses in the faecal microbiota of monozygotic twins and their mothers" published in the scientific journal Nature, one of two of the most prestigious journals in the sciences - the other being Science. While understanding the details of their work require some fluidity in scientific language, their conclusions can be translated in easier terms: the virus-like particles, or VLPs, found in your excrement within a period of time is unique to you. In other words, I can probe your fecal matter and identify you (if I have a database that I can use as a reference table). This terribly exhilarating insight was not lost to the popular media that reported on this as well.*

At first, this is just fascinating and nothing more. But we ought to be more cautious about what the results mean. In my previous post, I wrote about how strategies and technologies that sought to think of life in terms of information were adopted through time. But what this article from Nature points to is something that goes beyond that: it transforms your body into information. Of course, when I say that it transforms you into information, I do not mean that your bodies are suddenly turned into bits like in Star Trek's de-molecularization of your body or Matrix's Neo showing your body as just lines of computer codes - at least, not yet. What I mean is that your body can be tabulated as information in databases for curious people to look you up and that that information can stand in for your actual body. Therefore, I don't need you and your body to be here to say that I know you. In a few clicks on a computer screen, I can read some information and claim that I know you - your physical body is a bit obsolete.**

The need to probe your feces has its own history. 19th century westerners, mainly Europeans and North Americans, were worried about fecal matter as a source of bad odor that was thought to be the source of disease. But around the 20th century, with the rise of germ theory, the fears of the bad smell turned into fears of germs that could inhabit fecal matter and pass the disease. Carrying a blend of both explanations of disease causation, American administrators occupying Philippines in the first half of the 1900s wanted to teach the locals the "correct" way to dispose of their excrements, use "proper" toilets, and celebrate "Fiestas" that aimed to convert the work of cleaning up their streets into a familiar and fun activity.***

While the American forces in the Philippines were more interested in getting rid of excrement during their occupation until about World War II, the Korean government after the Korean War in the 1950s and during the Vietnam war in the 1960s, used methods inspired by something called tropical medicine to look at feces under a microscope. This form of medical understanding was developed by Japan during their imperialist expansion into Asia that aimed to study diseases they thought were unique to tropical countries. That's why they called it tropical medicine. Using the traces of that medical theory, Koreans looked at poop under a microscope as part of the larger anti-parasite campaigns instituted by its military-authoritarian government as a way to clean up the country. Laboratory scientists would smear the excrement and provide a meticulous observation of the fecal matter that had been collected from school teachers to whom children submitted their brown bags with their poop. The same methods from the anti-parasite campaigns was deployed to collect excrement from soldiers fighting in Vietnam as a way to measure how much their country had developed. In short, good poop was a measure of modernity.****

This history of the authorities' desire to collect excrement may be retold as ultimately a beneficial and distant activity happening in the laboratories. But the logic of collecting excrements has been deployed in everyday life and closer to you - your iPhones and Android phones. While you may think it is quite convenient to unlock your phones using your thumbprints or retinal scans - Samsung's Galaxy Note S7 now offers retinal scans - they are part of the historical effort to collect biological data, or biodata for short. The devices are collecting the biological features of your body which are more or less permanent and irreplaceable and transform them into information to be stored in a machine. Indeed, it is very convenient, but it is certainly fraught with risks and, certainly, not benign. Looking more closely into the movie Minority Report shows what this collection of biodata may mean.

                   Minority Report (2002) poster from IMBD

Minority Report takes place in some distant future where a particular city has been able to reduce crime dramatically using a technology that predicts them. The police use that information to arrest what you could call pre-criminals before any crime actually happens. The technology is based on the prediction of 3 very strange beings who will "see" the future and pass the information to the police. However, every now and then, one of beings predicting the future - the most gifted one - sees an alternate future and therefore, contests the actual prediction. This dissenting vision is called the minority report and it presents a threat to the legitimacy and reliability of the entire system of policing that the city has used thus far. The movie's plot follows Tom Cruise and his need to make a minority report public and save himself from ending up in prison after a prediction shows him committing a murder. However, what is quite remarkable (and also not so remarkable today) is that in the movie, Cruise walks into buildings where ocular devices automatically detect and scan a subject's eyes to provide tailored advertisements. This means that some institution holds an entire database of his personal information that can be accessed with a single scan. This is why later in the movie, Cruise finds a new set of eyeballs to avoid being tracked by the police.

While the movie appears to depict a futuristic society that is tightly monitored by biodata (retinal scans), this is not in the future. Every time that you walk through the airport security line as you come in to New York City or Seattle, they scan your fingerprints that connects you to a database that will let the authorities decide whether or not to let you in to the country. And as I mentioned above, when your phone asks for your thumbprints, it is collecting biodata as well. While deployment of such biometric technologies on the general public in Europe and in the United States has been limited - but more invasive for those who have been through the criminal justice system - the use of biodata for state security is not new nor in the future.

The beginnings of usage of biodata today began with the British scientist Francis Galton and the development of a field called Biometry along with his peer Karl Pearson (a mathematician) between the late 19th century and early 20th century. Galton, is of course, famous (or infamous) for being the father of the disgraced field of eugenics that would be further developed in the United States and taken up by Nazi Germany during their genocides in World War II. At a time when statistics was becoming popular due to its ability to make tracking the growing population easier, Galton developed the mathematical and statistical concept of biometry, mainly motivated by eugenic concerns. But in principle, it was a mathematical formula to talk about relationships of one body part to another. Some of the tools used today in statistics, such as correlation and regression, can be traced back to Galton's formulation of biometry.

The concept of biometry was applied, or rather developed, through Galton's fingerprinting system that came out as an alternative to the French system of identifying criminals. He proposed fingerprinting to be used instead of Alphonse Bertillon's method of taking and classifying photographs. While the development of the fingerprinting method preceded the official establishment of biometry and was spurred in part by his competition with Bertillon's system of classification, the adoption, expansion, and utility of the fingerprinting system had more to do with British imperialism than technological competition with his French counterpart. His interest in using fingerprinting for practical purposes of policing linked up with his views about the importance of protecting the British empire. And with the aid of many personalities and interests, fingerprinting based on the concept of biometry would become a critical institution for the British empire.^ 

More specifically, the biometric and fingerprinting system was developed in South Africa (and India first) and has now been introduced in previously colonized countries like Argentina, Brazil, and India. Their welfare system for the poor, for instance, allows those who cannot read or write to go to the ATM and use their fingerprints to have their allowance delivered to them. But most importantly, I should briefly note that the biometric system was not historically so beneficial for South Africa - it was actually quite detrimental in their progress toward a modern state and the treatment of its people. Under the various governments in South Africa, it was used to segregate, mistreat and keep black populations under white control. It was a violent tool, stretching all the way into the Apartheid government; at times, it was used as a way to keep the black people from running away from the horrible mines run by white capitalist interests. In short, it was brutal and repressive.

The next time you flush your poop or give your thumbprint to your phone, it would be good to pause for a second. For now, you cannot exchange the viral population of your intestines or get a new set of fingerprints if something happens to you - although, it is true that fecal transplants have been done. But if a hacker gets your fingerprints, then you will have no alternative and your body - you - will have been stolen. While it is at the moment not common, giving away your excrements to create a database might happen in the future. After all, the Human Microbiome Project that is going on works on the similar idea of the Human Genome Project - and the risks are also similar. The turning of your biological parts into biodata is a double-edged sword and in the hands of the state can even result in an intrusive surveillance of your lives. This is not to create panic or propose we all become Luddites. On a more practical level, it should lead us to discuss about the availability and the unavailability of protective mechanisms that will shield us against the violence that the creation of biodata can unleash - this is what historian Breckenridge proposes. Of course, this issue of body and biodata gives rise to other questions like, Can the state own my body part? Can anybody claim ownership of my poop? An interesting case of a spleen operation in Seattle points us toward an answer to this complex question. But that would perhaps be best told in another post. Until then, flush away, but with a bit of caution.

Notes:

* Alejandro Reyes et al. Viruses in the faecal microbiota of monozygotic twins and their mothers. Nature. 334-340. July 15, 2010. A more exact interpretation is that interpersonal VLPs are highly variable but that interpersonal VLPs are more or less homogeneous, and that they study's conclusion involves about the type of viruses that are that stable, mainly temperate phages. This type of study is not unique or the first. They have been conducted for bacterial communities and a Human Microbiome Project (like the Human Genome Project) has been going on. For more details, refer to the article; An example of the reporting in popular media is by LiveScience. "Your Poop is Unique: Gut Viruses Different in Every Person." http://www.livescience.com/10724-poop-unique-gut-viruses-person.html. 

** For more about the conversion into databases and what this means, The Global Genome by Eugene Thacker provides a great analysis. Similar insights have been shown by sociologist Rene Almeling in her book about reproductive technologies (IVF), Sex Cells

*** See Colonial Pathologies by Warwick Anderson. Such activities were meant in part to inculcate a form of a modern subjectivity by the American forces. By performing such cleaning rituals, the administrators hoped to produce modern subjects - or at least get as close to modernity as possible. 

**** See Reconstructing Bodies by John DiMoia

^ The word "regression" in statistics shows its racists and colonial origins: Galton came up with the concept as a way to describe the idea that the organisms in higher ladders of evolution would "regress" back to its more "savage types" based on his observation about the "savage" South African tribes. For more on the history of the biometric state, see The Biometric State by Keith Breckenridge 

Gaze Inside Me: Ex-Machina and Life Itself as Information

The near obsession to peer into the depths of the human body as a way to understand the complexities of life is a familiar one if we pause to think about it. Almost every day, molecular biologists tear into the walls of human and animal cells to investigate the genes in our DNA in hopes that it will help us better understand how our body works to keep us alive. This obsession to look into ourselves, however, is not completely new. The early 20th century saw the growth of techniques of looking at and into cells in order to make the inside of the body visible. In doing so, looking at cells became the same as looking into "life itself." It was through the socio-political and scientific changes such as the one brought about by Ross Harrison, who isolated living cells outside the body, as well as Alexis Carrel and Burrows who made the technique of "culturing life" outside possible and helped establish "tissue culture" around 1910, which is still a core technique of much biological research today.* 

And this obsession to look inside in search of answers about ourselves is not limited to a small group of elite scientists. Through the porous boundary that separates the world of science and society - or "our real world" - the work of probing the inner depths is a familiar practice for most all of us. It is, then, not a great surprise that the movie Ex-Machina also attempts to open up the bodies to the viewers' eyes to answer a philosophical question : "What makes us human?" which is intimately related to the question, "What is life?" or "What constitutes human life?" Any attempt to answer these questions will inevitably be quite reductive and so I cannot claim to know the answer to the questions.** To say that one can answer such a question would be ahistorical as well as dogmatic and dangerous. Ex-Machina's own vision about "life itself" gives us an entry point into a historical wisdom that will help us be on guard against any claims of transcendental knowledge about what constitutes life. And this is what I hope to discuss here: What kind of vision about life is Ex-Machina proposing? Where does such a view come from? When can we say that such a view arose? In short, the antidote to self-assured answers about the notions of life is a historical inquiry into how discussions and concepts about life come about.

Ex-Machina directed by Alex Garland tells a story about a mega-rich IT company owner, Nathan Bateman, who brings in one of his company's employees, Caleb Smith, to administer the Turing test on his latest iteration of his female artificial intelligence (AI) product that he named Ava. The test, Caleb and Nathan tells us, is to determine whether or not this creation is really an AI. In Caleb's words, "When a human interacts with a computer and if the human doesn't know he is interacting with a computer, the test is passed." That is, a human should be "fooled" into thinking that the robot or computer is actually a human. The significance of such a feat - of having replicated humanity or having created life itself - is not lost to Caleb who claims that Nathan would have attained a near-god status and thus, be written into the book of "the history of gods." With the story now set, the entire movie revolves around Caleb administering the Turing test. There is, of course, a twist to the plot. The viewers find out that in reality, Caleb was not administering the test - he was the test. Nathan wanted to see how Ava would try to use Caleb (and not the other way around) in order to escape the narrow underground laboratory "she" was created in and into the real world of humans. According to him, the creativity involved in solving the problem of how to escape would be the real measure of a machine being an AI. 

The most interesting moment of the movie for our discussion is the first time Caleb meets Ava. As she walks out of her isolated room into the hallway towards Caleb, who is separated from "her" by a translucent but a near indestructible wall, the viewer sees what looks like a hybrid of computer, robot and human.  Ava's chest is metallic, but it was structured to resemble a woman's breast. When we gaze at Ava's face, her eyes, lips, and synthetic skin makes her look so real, so human. In fact, when Ava later covers her body by wearing a dress that nearly covers all of what appears to be her robotic components, it is hard to tell that she is in fact not human. However, our eyes are immediately drawn to her abdomen: it is translucent and displays what looks like metal cables that regularly flashes lights and colors as electric impulses travels through her "veins." Immediately, Ava, I conclude, is not a human. She is the result of cables and computer codes that mimics humans, but can never be human. She is just an aggregation of information placed inside her brain that makes her act and think like a human.***

But, then again, isn't this what humans are after all? Aren't we just a bunch of information?

The movie certainly thinks so. The Turing test that is central to the plot is about measuring information processing and flexible adaptation by re-interpreting a set of information Ava has "learned." Although Nathan has gone to the real trouble of creating a body that resembles the physical attributes of a human, the core - or the "soul" -  is the mind. You can mimic the skin perfectly, but for Nathan, what really matters is if his creations can think and act, through the information she has, like a human. This emphasis on information as the core of life is thus really unmistakable. His first gesture to the question from Caleb about Ava's creation is to show him her "mind": a blue spherical object harboring the information downloaded to it from the queries that humans have posed in the search engine his company owns. Ava is defined by the information her brain. Ava is information. As such, Ex-Machina argues to us that the soul of life - life itself - is information. It is an informatics paradigm of life: life is defined in terms of information content.

That life is an agglomeration and series of information is a historical product. The notion that life is information arose around the 1960s as a result of World War II (WWII) and the 1950s shift toward new information technologies and communication science that accelerated through the Cold War. Government investment in research dramatically increased in the 1940s. Pushed by Vannevar Bush, the head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development and a scientists himself, money poured into research to create a post-war society based on science and technology - a practice that by then had become familiar as large research projects had been funded for war efforts. The crucial need for communication during WWII, and the ensuing Cold War, stimulated the production of new knowledge about coding and decoding messages. This gave us the famous works on information theory by Norbert Weiner and Shannon that now is the foundation of common gadgets and public infrastructure today that we take for granted, including the internet and mobile phones. With history encouraging an information based science and technology research and society, it is not strange that such a way of thinking would also inform investigations about life and biology and bringing in concepts like "feedback loops" that were characteristic to information theory to explanations about life processes.****

The application of an informatics theory and language to describe biological functions and life itself was a substantial shift from previous theories and practices. In the decade that preceded the explosion of information theory in biology, explanations about body functions were described in terms of biological specificity. The most easily grasped concept about biological specificity is the lock-and-key model of enzyme and substrate: each enzyme has a specific 3D structure that specifically corresponds to one specific substance (that is, its substrate). Briefly, it means that there were specific and unique correspondence between structure and function, differences between species, etc. which was attributed to specificity of proteins. The concept of specificity was both a result of ongoing discussions about how the body's different parts worked together as a whole (for example, the arm, legs and torso working together in harmony) as well as the 20th century changes that was pushing toward industrial modernity. The latter had brought about an emphasis on specialization of labor (for example, I paint the car while another person puts the car together) and also worries about social order. This is partly why Rockefeller Foundation was so interested in investing money into research of heredity - they wanted to relieve the social chaos by scientific research of heredity that would help them control the type of people that would populate society. If, as Thomas Huxley believed, everything in life was determined by the biological substance (at the time, proteins; see next paragraph), knowledge and control of heredity would mean control of life in the broadest sense - both heredity and society. In short, the discussions about part-to-whole relationship and the ushering of industrial modernity influenced how our bodies and its life functions were imagined before the beginnings of the information paradigm by using the the language of specialization, specificities and order.

We should also note that at the time, protein was still considered as the center of life (not genes or DNA). To understand this notion, we have to briefly forget about what we know about current theories of genes and DNA. The research they had done until then pointed to proteins as being the master substances that allowed life to happen: evidence said they were key components of bodily structures and acted as enzymes as well. In this way of thinking, protein was life. Nudged by such insights, the proliferation of protein studies brought about biological specificity into a brighter spotlight and because of its supposed importance as master molecules of life, it influenced talks about the genes. I have to caution here that what they called the gene is not what we now think of as the gene. At that time, what "genes" were was still being debated - some thought that genes were also just proteins. Specificity of species and biological function still resided in the most important molecules of life at the time - the protein. But the still debated identity, structure, and function of this thing called "gene" didn't mean they didn't talk about what the gene was or its importance in life. And thus, gene talk was also part of scientific discussion - science requires you to ask different questions, after all, even about things you don't know yet.

For instance, scientists George Beadle, before adopting information theory, introduced what we now know as the one-gene-one-enzyme theory. In this formulation, one gene controlled one specific reaction, which in turn was controlled by one specific enzyme. If you take a close look at this sentence, there is no talk about genes "holding information" or "directing" things to happen. They described the genes as providing some form of physical attribute (the exact word would be "complementarity") that imposed a specific character on the resulting folded proteins. In a sense, the gene was a director that "stamped" - as Joshua Lederberg described it - the physical characteristics on proteins. Still, specificity of the species and biology - that is, what made a species different, for instance - was still found in the proteins. It wasn't until later, most notably by the work of French scientist Monod, that specificity of life would shift to DNA. It might be hard for us today, and rightfully so, to understand how this is different from the gene being reservoirs of information. A crude comparison might be that the genes were like physical molds that you could shape things on. They were not, for instance, a sentence that you could read that contained directions - which is the way we conceptualize DNA today. But the specific identities of the proteins is what made life unique.

With this historical knowledge in mind, one can now see that Ex-Machina's formulation of life as information is also shaped by this information paradigm of life. Talking and imagining about life as information proliferated with works on information theory and technology in both military and civilian research. As such, this information framework became a popular, convincing, and seductive framework for a new generation of scientists and public to actively adopt against other competing concepts of life. And it must be noted that this shift toward and information paradigm was never smooth nor linear: other theories competed with it, sometimes overlapped, sometimes ably criticized the new view. Even different forms of thinking about the information paradigm of life existed. What is important for us to know here, however, is that the incorporation of the information paradigm into biology shifted scientific works and the resulting discussions and thoughts about our bodies and life in the language of information. This is very evident in the way we take as given descriptions about biological parts of our lives: the DNA is conceptualized as hereditary information; the brain and the nerves are thought to transfer information; hormones are messengers. And thus, the core of what makes us human in this sense is the storing, processing, passing on, and adapting various information. Ex-Machina shows us how pervasive and seductive this framework is as it assumes that life as information for its audience is a given starting point. But we know now that it was a more historical work filled with contentious competition to get here, balancing theories of what elemental life is composed of (e.g. proteins or genes) and figuring out how to imagine and talk about it (i.e. biological specificity or information theory). 

The conversation here is not to definitively determine whether being human is about the information we contain. What I can say is that the attempts to define life itself and the core of what makes us human in terms of information is a historical product, as shown by our inquiry into the movie Ex-Machina. There are other questions that the movie raises, like is the "soul" of the human to be found in the "mind?" Is is then fair to say that the "mind" is what makes us human? Those questions are incredibly fascinating, but perhaps, deserve to be answered in another post. 

Notes:

*For a more in-depth understanding about the debates concerning the notion of life in the biological sciences, Culturing Life by Hannah Landecker and Beyond the Gene by Jan Sapp provides excellent accounts about the discussion about the separation of life from the body and the reproduction of life

**Even a short discussion problematizes any single answer: for instance, when you look after the mid-20th century, life was firmly thought to reside in the gene or DNA. But as scientists entered the 21st century, the cell arose again as being the smallest foundational unit of life

***You could say that this is an alternative formulation of Lacan's mirror in which you get to know who you are when you look into the mirror. In short, Lacan's work shows that the idea of who you are comes from the external world and its myriad of discourses, problems, ideas and ideologies that are reflected onto you. As such, the way you get to know yourself is not independent from the socio-political and historical circumstance in which you are born. But now, instead of a mirror, we are making our bodies transparent to gaze into ourselves to get to know who we are.

****A more thorough discussion about the turn toward an informatics paradigm of life is found in Who Wrote the Book of Life? by Lily E. Kay