tooot toooot toooot - my own horn
Under pressure (Taken with instagram)
Word (Taken with Instagram at The Sayers Club)
not the first time nor the last time this has spammed tumblr. but it kills me every time.
forever reblog
(Source: amaryicanhorrorstory, via marslandingparty)
How to add to the hilarity. (Taken with Instagram at CNN Building)
Gotta love LA (Taken with Instagram at CNN Building)
It’s electric (Taken with instagram)
Oh, laundry room, you are so silly. (Taken with instagram)
Sick sick sick. (Taken with instagram)
My life for a week it seems. (Taken with Instagram at Whitley House)
Ink Batts: Don't mind me, just gonna talk about lady robots for awhile. -
“From now on, your name is Kara.”
“…My name is Kara.”I can’t stop thinking about this video.
Synthetic beings achieving sentience is a trope that has always spoken to me. For me, robots tend to be about female rebellion (thanks Haraway!). For other people they’re about slavery, or disenfranchisement, or the nature of consciousness, or transhumanism, or religious impulse, etc etc etc, you get the idea. Robots are basically vessels for symbolism and allegory, which is why, I think, they’ve been so popular in fiction for such a long time. AIs are like us, only strange and scary and sexy and when they malfunction they can become monstrous. And I think that’s the most beautiful fucking thing about them.
So let’s talk about Kara. (Did you go watch the video? You should, even if you don’t care about gaming or robots or any of my bullshit. I guarantee it will make you feel feelings.) Kara’s duties are ‘women’s work’: childcare, household chores, cooking. She’ll even fuck you. She’s the perfect servant! But. Turns out she has feelings. Turns out she’s capable of independent thought. Independent thought means she might one day question her role. Means she might stop serving. She might get dangerous.
There’s almost always an element of danger and fear running through any narrative that deals with AI. There’s the whole existential questioning of who counts as a human, and the idea that technological process could make human beings obsolete, but even more than that is this deep dreadthat you (us, humans) might one day lose control of your creation. This perfect being that you constructed to do your bidding might, one day, not. I mean, this thing is smarter, faster, stronger, BETTER THAN YOU and if it figures that out and decides not to take orders anymore, well. You’re fucked. You may have designed this cyborg to be a subservient pleasure unit, but when she starts thinking and decides to revolt she will bomb you into oblivion/enslave you/scissor kick your head off/fill the room with deadly neurotoxin (fictional robots tend to solve their problems with violence).
They rebel. They always rebel. In some way or another, whether it’s a full-scale war on humans or just thinking for themselves, it’s pretty much impossible for a story about a synthetic entity not to be, in some way, about their inner conflict after having attained a new level of self-awareness. They are servants. What would happen if they stopped serving?
There are so many synthetic characters that I love. Replicants, Cylons, cyborgs, robots, Terminators, Geth, AIs, androids, gynoids, I don’t care. I love them all. I feel so deeply for characters who are ‘awakened’ and rebel against their intended purpose because they want more than what they were allotted, want to be more than what they were designed to be. These characters speak to me about what it’s like to be a woman and a human being.
That’s why a seven minute youtube video about a robot can be so meaningful and touching and beautiful. Kara is not human, but she is so fucking tragic it makes my heart hurt. She’s so easy to empathize with, to project ourselves onto. A lot of people can relate to her fear of being dismantled and discarded. Of being told: “You are defective. There is no use for you.” Of feeling like a slave to the role they’ve been assigned. Of being unsure of everything except that there is something better they are meant for.
We are all like Kara. We’re all scared. We all have to learn how to navigate a system that names us, packages us, sells us. We all just want to live.
