EXPANDED
MIDDLE
Expanded Middle
Mind Mapping and Structure
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Why do people want another chance at life/to live longer---marginalized people
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San Junipero--queer woman given a chance at young love after a debilitating accident
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We learn that this love -- immortality--euthanized and become a part of a simulated reality forever in this large black, blinking machine
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What makes life life? Is she really living if she is actually just in a simulated reality, separated from her body and true reality
The first time I watched San Junipero I was a young, queer teenager trying to navigate my place in a school where I watched so many of my friends get into relationships, without ever getting remotely close to those feelings. I always had felt that I missed out, to some extent, on the glorified idea of a high school relationship. So when I watched San Junipero, it deeply resonated with me. The episode, which is on the third season of Netflix’s satirical, tech-based drama Black Mirror, is about a young woman who is given a chance at first, young love after a debilitating car accident she gets into when she comes out to her homophobic parents. Later, we learn that the young lovers are actually elderly women living within a simulated reality. The first time I watched San Junipero, I was so enthralled with the queer love story, that I watched the ninety-minute installment two more times shortly afterward. I felt as if I were living vicariously through the characters, Yorkie and Kelly, just as they were living vicariously through their characters in this virtual world. Eventually, Yorkie and Kelly are euthanized and become immortal, living forever in their simulated dream world. As technology advances rapidly, the line between reality and fantasy is blurred. This poses pressing questions about what constitutes life, is virtual reality life? And without death, what can you make of life?
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Scheffler: what composes life
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Human life is intimately structured by fixed time limit
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Going through stages, eventually end in death
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What if you dont get those stages? Being queer and feeling unfulfilled
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Cryonics---end too soon--didn’t get to fully live out life
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Speak Memory-- one last conversation
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Deaths that were shocking/maybe came out of nowhere
According to Samuel Scheffler, a Berkeley philosopher, what distinguishes life is it’s intimately structured by the fact that we all have a time limit--meaning that immortality would completely deconstruct our notions of life. He argues that we go through expected stages organized by this time limit, eventually ending in death. However, for someone like Yorkie, and other queer people, many of these “life stages”--finding love, having a family, etc--might never happen. Of course, these socially constructed “stages” are not necessary to live a fulfilling life, but when lives end unexpectedly early people might turn to AI and technological advancements for answers. Specifically, in The New York Times longform, A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and A Future, Kim, a 23-year-old terminal brain cancer patient dedicates her last years towards preserving her brain in hopes of one day coming back to life. Kim and her boyfriend had planned on settling down and having children together, so when life was stripped from her far before she could live out these time-enforced stages of life, she turned to cryonics.
What if the question is not about immortality, not about being scared of death, but having control over when we die rather than never dying at all. --is that being entitled? Why do we always need to be in control
Perhaps for Yorkie and Kim, their fear of death was based more upon the idea of dying before they could reach all of the life stages they hoped to, and having control over when we finally die rather than never dying at all. In Ever, After, Miles Klee argues that “the notion that it’s our duty to surpass the physical self complements the canards of abundance and exception that plague an (over)ambitious mind”, insinuating that there is a certain amount of privilege and entitlement that comes with wanting control over natural forces that cause us to die. Of course, an aging queer woman who just wants to fall in love for the first time and a young, dying cancer patient who wants to raise a family with her boyfriend, both don’t seem like entitled people.
What type of people want to live forever: billionaires: Robert Bigelow wants to live forever,
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Millions of cancer patients “no reason” one person should live longer over another
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80,000 dollars cost in A Dying Young Woman’s Hope
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Degree of social capital and wealth
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power and entitlement
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How can living longer and immortality exacerbate social inequalities?
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Who already lives longer/shorter and how is this tied with inequality
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Why not just focus on solving inequalities in the real world so that marginalized people and cancer patients don’t have to turn to something else
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Others, like Robert Bigelow, a real estate mogul and billionaire, seem a bit more entitled in wanting to live forever. He is so determined in his quest that he offered a million dollars to researchers who could prove consciousness after bodily death. Although Kim’s attempt at living after death did not require quite as much as a million dollars, she still had to have a relatively large degree of social capital, wealth, and/or privilege to rake up $80,000 for the cryonic process. Kim even confessed to her boyfriend, Josh, that “there’s no compelling reason why [she] deserve[s] another chance at life.” Amongst millions of worldwide cancer deaths a year, it’s impossible to decide which people should have the opportunity to live longer. In From Gene Editing to AI, How will Technology Transform AI?, scientist ____ believes that another path to living longer (“designer babies”), could easily cause a “small number of extremely healthy genetically engineered elites and a large and comparatively ill and genetically challenged underclass”. This same structure of inequity actually already exists to some extent, given that the lowest-income classes in America, on average, live ten to fifteen years less than the wealthiest-income classes (Harvard). This already existing inequity is likely to be exacerbated by rapidly developing technology that makes designer babies and immortality possible. Furthermore, the potentiality for very powerful and privileged people such as Bigelow as well as Larry Page (who is on his own quest for immortality), is extremely dangerous in terms of keeping the same people in power for eternity. Klee, in Ever, After, warns of a book in which an immortal aristocrat uses the mortals as “slaves and cattle”, and deprives them of purpose to extend his reign of terror. Although quite dystopian, immortality would make already powerful people see others as further disposable and usable for mere capitalistic gain.
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The line--how western society is structured in a linear growth manners (Buried Roots and Indestructible Seeds)
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This is why we don’t focus on actual inequalities --ie social progress and maybe medicine to give people fulfilling mortal lives.
Immortality seems to be driven by the biggest leaders of our capitalist society, in hopes for eternal upwards mobility. Western histories of colonialization, pyramid-shaped social structures, and the rise of neoliberal capitalism demonstrate the urgent desire for society to move “forward” without much care for people and the environment that this desire harms. In fact, Buried Roots and Indestructible Seeds, a book about Native American thought, argues that because we constantly think of upward mobility “time becomes of utmost importance”, and “the ticking of the clock is more important than the beat of a human heart”.
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This second chance at life may not even be worth living--be right back
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Be right back Black Mirror quotes
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“You are not enough of him”
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“You are just a few ripples of you. There is no history to you” you’re just a performance of stuff that he performed without thinking and it’s not enough.”
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The robot differs from Ash because:
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Doesn’t close his eyes when he sleeps or breathe
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Doesn’t know how to have sex with her
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Doesn’t know sister
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Awkwardly stands at the door
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Doesn’t react when she tries to argue
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Is doing nothing --the opposite of a world driven by technology--perhaps what gives life shape?
How to do nothing
Multimedia sources
San Junipero
Be Right Back
Quotes:
A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and A Future
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Before Josh and Kim reached their 50s, according to Mr. Kurzweil, microscopic devices known as nanorobots inserted in the bloodstream would be able to scan brains and wirelessly upload their information.
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In the event of a sudden death, you could be rebooted from your last backup. Enhancements for memory, intelligence and empathy would be available, as would the option to merge with other minds, a possibility, the couple recalled, that prompted Josh to imagine plugging into the brain of Kim’s notoriously crotchety cat, Mikey.
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The median survival time for patients like Kim, treated with standard radiation and chemotherapy, was less than two years.
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“Why destroy the wisdom we build up individually and communally every generation if it’s not necessary?” he prodded reporters, fellow scientists and potential donors.
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“Cryonics only seems disturbing because it challenges our complacency about death,”
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But since cryonics can begin only after a formal declaration of death, clots can form and vessels can start to collapse before the process is started.
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“But why would anyone donate?” she demanded of Josh. “There’s no compelling reason why I deserve another chance at life.”
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Ouija:
Known and unknown:
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It was an acceptable, even wholesome activity to contact spirits at séances, through automatic writing, or table turning parties, in which participants would place their hands on a small table and watch it begin shake and rattle, while they all declared that they weren’t moving it. The movement also offered solace in an era when the average lifespan was less than 50: Women died in childbirth; children died of disease; and men died in war.
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“Communicating with the dead was common, it wasn’t seen as bizarre or weird,” explains Murch.
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The first patent offers no explanation as to how the device works, just asserts that it does. That ambiguity and mystery was part of a more or less conscious marketing effort. “These were very shrewd businessmen,” notes Murch; the less the Kennard company said about how the board worked, the more mysterious it seemed—and the more people wanted to buy it. “Ultimately, it was a money-maker. They didn’t care why people thought it worked.”
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It’s quite logical then the board would find its greatest popularity in uncertain times, when people hold fast to belief and look for answers from just about anywhere, especially cheap, DIY oracles. The 1910s and ’20s, with the devastations of World War I and the manic years of the Jazz Age and prohibition, witnessed a surge in Ouija popularity.
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In 1930, newspaper readers thrilled to accounts of two women in Buffalo, New York, who’d murdered another woman, supposedly on the encouragement of Ouija board messages.
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Ever After:
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“Whether it’s a quest for the Holy Grail or dominion over our DNA, capital remains a common ingredient.”
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“Once again, the project of dismantling existential borders emerges from the alignment of technology (however one defines it), dollars, entitlement and irrational optimism—manifest destiny, you might say. The notion that it’s our duty to surpass the physical self complements the canards of abundance and exception that plague an (over)ambitious mind. Who’d be willing to quit consciousness when it offers elite and conspicuous pleasure?”
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“It’s not a religion? These are people who believe the Invisible Hand of the Market runs everything. They fight holy wars against competing religions like Marxism. Against all evidence that the world is finite, this blind faith that resources will never run out, profits will go on increasing forever, just like the world’s population—more cheap labor, more addicted consumers.”