Science fiction stories often portray the future as a dark, desolate place corrupted by technology, greed, or a lack of natural resources, among other things. Paolo Bacigalupi’s story “The Calorie Man,” fits the bill of a “dark” science fiction story perfectly, as it centers around all three of the aforementioned issues for the future. The story’s main character, Lalji, finds himself living in New Orleans in the not-so-distant future as a lower class antique salesman. In this world, energy in the form of calories are the most important currency. Giant companies that grow genetically engineered plants control most of the nation’s economy, since their crops not only provide food for Americans, but also for the genetically engineered animals that are used to store kinetic energy.

“Calorie Man” focuses on Lalji, the protagonist, and his trip north on the Mississippi River from New Orleans to smuggle a brilliant geneticist back to New Orleans so he can destroy the status quo of the economy. While the crops created by the large companies (SoyPRO, U-Tex, etc.) have incredibly high caloric value and resistance to outside forces, they are not fertile. Whether this is a good thing or not depends on one’s point of view, but in the eyes of the crop companies, keeping them from spreading outside of their fields keeps all profit in their hands. Charles Bowman, the geneticist, plans to distribute a crop that will spread just like plants do naturally in today’s society. This will create too many crops for the Intellectual Property (IP) Police to stop, thus creating chaos for the large monopolistic companies that control the United States. Unfortunately, Bowman is killed by the aforementioned IP Police, but his seeds are given to Lalji in hopes that he will spread the seed himself.

Bacigalupi’s story is one that warns of the grave dangers of genetic engineering, natural resource depletion and the problems with protecting intellectual property.  The latter, in fact, is a driving force in the story. Baciagalupi harbors negative feelings toward the intellectual property movement, which is a very important component of a strong capitalist economy. The characters all fear the IP Police, as if they are (to a much lesser extent) Big Brother and the Thought Police from 1984. One of the most prominent examples of this comes when Lalji scowls his help-boy, Creo, for undermining his planning for the trip.

“And then what would the MidWest Authority be saying as we are going upriver? All their IP men all over our boat, wondering where we are going so far? Boarding us then wondering what we are doing with such big springs. Where have we gotten so many Joules? Wondering what business we have so far upriver.” – Lalji

It is clear that Bacigalupi wants to create a sense of fear for all of the characters towards the IP Police, as it appears to permeate their every thought in regards to the trip. While this can be interpreted as an attempt to add suspense to the story in the broad sense, the story implies (in a very realistic way) that intellectual property laws will be incredibly restrictive on the innovative few who seek to improve society.

Perhaps the mega corporations in “The Calorie Man” are Bacigalupi’s comparison to the seed monopoly controlling American farmers in today’s society. Enhancements in biotechnology have brought innovations which are necessary to today’s farmers; and the seeds these innovations are producing are being monopolized by one company, Monsanto. “Monsanto is the Microsoft of agriculture — the dominant company that controls the key biotechnology that all farmers need.[1]” The mega corps in “The Calorie Man” hold on to the power and money just as Monsanto does in today’s society.

“When one gigantic corporate entity is allowed to block farmers from planting a seed without compensating that monopoly, the farmers are held in bondage to uncontrolled price increases. A decade ago I could purchase a 50-pound bag of soybean seeds for $11.00. That same fifty pounds of seed has risen to $56.00 dollars because there is no choice or competition in the market. ”[1]

Pictured above left: The Company Monsanto, located in Illinois, is the best example of a company similar to mega-corporations in “The Calorie Man” In that both specialize in genetically engineered crops. This photo shows genetic engineering in a negative light.

Pictured above right: On a positive note, however, genetic engineering can greatly improve society. This picture shows a piece of corn that has medicinal properties. The positives of genetic engineering can be incredible beneficial.

Genetically modified crops in “The Calorie Man” such as TotalNutrient Wheat and PestResis Sunflower seeds are Bacigalupi’s comparison to today’s genetically modified crops that are able to resist certain pests, allow for easier maintenance as well as a more standardized harvest. Both monocultures in “The Calorie Man”, such as SoyPro and PurCal, and those in the United States today are vulnerable to diseases which they aren’t genetically modified to protect against. This can cause drastic consequences, including the destruction of entire populations of crops. In “The Calorie Man” we see this same idea through Bowman’s seeds which when planted will destroy the Mega Corps genetically engineered crops.

Hyperlink sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_energy

http://www.monsanto.com/Pages/default.aspx

References:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-boyd-jr/high-price-of-monopoly-wh_b_1291603.html

Photo Sources:

http://torresbioclan.pbworks.com/f/pharmcorn1.jpg

http://axisoflogic.com/artman/uploads/1/monsanto1.jpg

(By: Dan Hoelting and John Goldrick)

 Mystery of Capital:

“Mystery of Capital among the Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon” (28 minutes)

Direct Links and More info:

• http://www.ild.org.pe/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=124&Itemid=295&lang=en
• http://www.ild.org.pe/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=62&Itemid=264&lang=en)

Commanding Heights Interview:

Commanding Heights Interview with Hernando de Soto

Direct links and more info:

• http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/int_hernandodesoto.html
• http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/vid_hernandodesoto.html

Picture below left: San Francisco Bay Bridge as it stands today. It connects San Francisco and the Oakland area, carrying approximately 270,000 cars per day.

Picture below right: San Francisco BART Transbay Tube. It connects San Francisco and Oakland and runs right underneath the San Francisco Bay Bridge. About 12,000 people per day take the BART to cross the bay. [1]

Marcus Yallow was just one rebellious kid who loved to play alternate reality games (ARG) and evade the surveillance of school authorities. Marcus was ditching school to follow the clues in his favorite ARG when terrorists bombed the Bay Bridge and subway underneath it, killing four thousand plus people. San Francisco came to a halt and in the chaos Marcus and his friends were all taken into custody and falsely identified as terrorists. They were tortured, humiliated, and forced to sign an agreement stating that they would not talk or report about what had happened before they would be secretly released. With his friend still held by the DHS and his rebellious soul taking over, Marcus decided to fight against the DHS. The campaign against the DHS became complicated as the DHS increased surveillance over the whole San Francisco Bay Area: DHS operatives broke into Marcus’s home and installed a bug in his own home-assembled laptop and, the DHS started to track peoples’ travel patterns by recording their public transportation records. Yet, all DHS’ efforts did not intimidate Marcus. Under the name M1k3y he started Xnet that united the rebelling teenagers, allowing them to organize anonymously. They started jamming DHS’s tracking system by switching peoples’ identity on transportation passes. M1k3y soon became so famous, and his Xnet so influential, that the DHS started hunting Xnet members down. With the horror of imprisonment still lingering in his head and worried about leaving the Xnet members under the brutality of DHS, M1k3y eventually broke down and told his parents of the story. Even though they had initially supported the DHS, upon hearing his story, however, they decided to support M1k3y and make the news go public. They turned the story to a journalist. Meanwhile, Marcus and his girlfriend decided to start a big flash mob event, which would enable them to cover themselves and flee the city. M1k3y lost his girlfriend Angie in the chaos and did not leave the city, but ended up with evidence that his friend Darryl was still alive. Following the flash mob, M1k3y went back to the city and was captured by the DHS and was tortured again, only to be saved in the middle of a water-boarding session by state troopers. At the end of the book, Marcus’ story eventually made it to the public and the abusers of power within the DHS were punished.

Although recognizing people from the way they walk is still in development, face recognition systems are already in use and it is predicted that soon such a system will be capable of sorting and analyzing faces in public places where the population is dense. [2] This system is widely spreading in public areas needing extra safety. Any person who has experienced air travel or has been in high security areas has gone through multiple screenings including facial recognition systems. [3]

DHS’ use of transportation passes to track citizens already exists. People who travel leave a record of places they have been and where they are going (for example, the simple check-in procedures at the airport, the automatic toll systems on the highways, credit card records, or the new American passports containing RFID chips). What’s more, the popularization of smart phones, for example Facebook mobile, gives users the option of “checking in”. Social media users can tag a photo and tell others where it was taken. What most don’t know is that people may not be able to easily turn off such tracking systems. Cell networks, wireless internet, even the cell’s own signal can be used to track down a phone. We all have most likely already been tracked in some way — although usually tracking of ordinary citizens in the USA has been done for commercial purposes rather than for political control.

Doctorow’s Little Brother also illustrates how terrorism can turn simple fear into a kind of institutionalized paranoia. Doctorow uses the Department of Homeland Security, in reality and in Little Brother, to criticize America’s difficulty in handling unseen enemies. Marcus’ father mentions a few times during his argument with Marcus that because citizens are helping in the capture of those they deem to be crushing their natural rights (to safety), that they should be ready to (paradoxically) give up some rights (to privacy) because there is nothing to hide. This leads to an endless cycle of allowing trading rights to act for safety from (possibly hypothetical) attacks. Is this worth a blanket feeling of security? That’s the question we must all ask ourselves. Doctorow illustrates how the overstressing security system can get out of control. This is evident in Marcus’ struggle against the abuses of the DHS, and in later overcoming the oppressive federal government by the state. It is human nature to want to feel secure; however, when security becomes oppressive citizens should keep government in check.

How Marcus and his group of friends deal with the aftermath of being held and tortured by their very government is the real part of the story, and technology plays a major role. Even before the attacks the school system already implemented things like “gait-recognition cameras” and keyboard logging on school issued laptop computers. However, after the attacks, surveillance increased even more so in intensity. Doctorow seems to suggest that technology is a means to enable activism and may even be necessary for activism in the face of a surveillance state. In fact the title of the book, “Little Brother”, refers to the idea of Sousveillance. This idea mirrors surveillance in that it is a watching, or monitoring, of others but Sousveillance is a way to keep authorities in check as well. Cameras are becoming smaller, making recording easier for citizens. Wireless and cellular internet access is becoming faster. Websites like Twitter innovate the way information spreads: a single message can be shared a million times within seconds, making it is very difficult for governments to contain and control the news. All these technological improvements have made it possible for the citizens to watch government much more closely. With recent threats to online freedoms, the American people have begun to protest limitations of online privacy; seemingly, these fights were made successful through social media like Facebook and Twitter that allowed citizens to make the evils of SOPA and PIPA well known. Marcus uses this type of Sousveillance to ultimately win the fight against the DHS. His parents convince him to talk to a journalist and get his story told. When he agrees his story wins retribution against the DHS by bringing the events to light. After all it’s technologies like Xnet, serving as a counterforce against government that help Marcus go underground and win the campaign.

Hyperlink Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/magazine/10section3b.t-3.html

References:

[1] http://dot.ca.gov/hq/esc/tollbridge/SFOBB/Sfobbfacts.html

[2] http://www.tech-faq.com/facial-recognition-system.html

[3] http://articles.cnn.com/2001-09-28/us/rec.airport.facial.screening_1_biometric-technology-face-recognition-visionics?_s=PM:US

Photo Sources:

http://media.web.britannica.com/eb-media/14/66214-004-73E9EA0C.jpg

http://www.google.com/imgres?hl=zh-CN&client=firefox-a&hs=OH0&rls=org.mozilla:zh-CN:official&tbm=isch&tbnid=BNKn2iSSVIXSHM:&imgrefurl=http://wilshirevermont.com/category/bart/&docid=h4rnXH2b7CbwaM&imgurl=http://wilshirevermont.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/5

(By Justin and Natalie)

Holy Fire takes place in the year 2095 and chronicles the life of the 94-year old Mia Ziemann during a time where health care and treatments provide the potential for people who are extremely careful about their health to live nearly indefinitely. The death of Mia’s former lover from 74 years prior, Martin Warshaw, causes Mia to reflect on her past. After an encounter with a much younger woman named Brett, who lives outside the medical system, is homeless, and is frustrated in her pursuit of a career in fashion, Mia suffers a kind of identity crisis which leads to her pursuit of a new medical treatment which provides the possibility of renewed youth. The treatment, known as Neo-Telomeric Dissipative Cellular Detoxification (NTDCD), gives Mia the physique equivalent to that of a 20-year-old, in part, because the procedure involves regrowth of brain tissue,  a new hormonal system, and also induces identity-crises (or at least, produces the conditions for new identity formation). Now “post-human”, the new and developing persona, now calling herself Maya flees post-treatment medical observation in San Francisco and arrives somewhat accidentally in Europe, beginning in Munich (Munchen). As she moves from one European city to another, living an outlaw existence, Maya encounters many different young companions from various walks of life. These young people are involved in risky activities (such as drug usage or theft), and each person is critical of the established social structures of the world. After instances of  network abuse, medical fraud, complicity in illegal discharge into an urban sewer system, abetting the posthumous escape of an organized criminal, number of episodes of transportation toll fraud, reencountering Brett (now being called Natalie) in Rome, and becoming the pupil of a famous photographer, Maya is finally discovered and arrested in Prague (Praha). Brett, under the influence of a drug meant to bring the user great sadness and also conceptual clarity (a lacrimogen), breaks into a meeting between the chief of police (Helene) and Maya. Natalie explains that she has realized that the lives and actions of the young carry no weight in the considerations of the old and decides that she would rather die than live as a young person in the gerontocracy. She then jumps from the window of the building and dies on the pavement below. In the denouement, Maya wanders the rural back-roads of the United States, trying to make art as a photographer. Maya succeeds in the last pages of her book when she takes a picture of her ex-husband, also a post-human.

Building on trends in increased life-span and medical technology that he observed in the late 1990s, Sterling paints a vision of the future in which the potential of each generation edging closer to an indefinite lifespan creates a society in which the thoughts, desires, and drives of the young (also referred to as their “Holy Fire”) are completely discredited due to the fact the old people in power will inevitably live forever. The economy is run by an elite governing collective of older people known as the gerontocracy. Holy Fire depicts a society in which the young will never see the wealth and status that the gerontocrats have had the ability to accumulate over time and will subsequently never relinquish thanks to the prospect of living forever.

“But I’ll never make it. I’ll never be as good as Giancarlo Vietti. He’s a hundred and twelve years old. He has every file ever posted on couture, every book ever written. He’s had his own couture house for seventy-five years. He’s a multimillionaire with an enormous staff of people. He has everything, and he’s going to keep it forever. There’s just no way to challenge him… Vietti got to start young, he got to have experience, he got to be king of the world through this whole century. I’ll never have that experience. By the time I’m ninety, I’ll be turned to a stone.”  –Brett

Sterling envisions a future where medical authorities and citizens have the power to almost instantly gain access to anyone’s medical and health history with a simple DNA test. In certain cases, this is used against a person, as was the case of Martin Warshaw, whom the doctors allowed to die due to his choice to abuse alcohol earlier in life. This relates to Foucault’s theory of a disciplinary society in the sense that it allows people (both the observers rationing health care and the observed striving to show that they are worthy of life-extension) to have a permanent record of their past decisions both biologically and electronically. Therefore, people must behave bearing in mind that such record could be accessed at any time by anyone (the medical records are public).

“They won’t outlaw alcohol, they won’t even outlaw narcotics, but when you go in for a checkup they take your blood and hair and DNA, and they map every trace of every little thing you’ve done to yourself It all goes right on your medical records and gets splashed all over the net.” –Martin Warshaw

Sterling’s emphasis on the consequences of the medically advanced society in Holy Fire encourages us to consider our own future in light of advances in medical technology.  First, and most obviously, if we avoid the plagues which depopulated Sterling’s world, we imagine that world population will rise from seven billion people to over ten billion over the next seventy years.  We thus imagine severe resource scarcity resulting from medical technology in the absence of some drastic depopulation or surprising technological solution to the problems of scarce nutrition and energy.

The increasing age of the population in a society like Sterling’s could also affect the political environment.  As we write, the majority of habitual voters in the United States are over forty.  As that proportion rises, the older people represent a larger portion of the population and thus the preferences of the older populations in democracies will carry even more weight than they already do.  In Sterling’s world the old are so powerful that the young feel they have no say at all in government.  With no voice, the young resort to radical activities, such as crime, drug use and promiscuity, to bide their time before they have the opportunity to take over. The young people in this generation already have this feeling that their voice does not carry much weight in society. Sterling’s society shows young people with merely more strongly felt versions of the feelings that are already common among young people in the United States today.

“You don’t want to talk to me.  I can’t say anything that matters to you.  You just don’t want to be embarrassed, that’s all.”-Brett

Sterling imagines that the possibility of significant life-extension and advanced medical technology would lead to a surveillance state. After the plagues in Sterling’s world tradeoffs were made by the citizens, exchanging their privacy for increased life spans and health care.  With the Bill of Rights for the United States and the assumed right to privacy, the tradeoff would not be easy.  Initially people might lash out against such injustice and invasions of their privacy, but with the death tolls of the plagues Sterling’s society chooses life over privacy.  The attacks of September 11^th provide a parallel to this tradeoff in the real world.  After September 11^th the fear of terrorism was rampant, and as a result the United States government was able to pass the Patriot Act.  The Patriot Act allowed law enforcement easier access into the public’s phone, medical, and financial records in order to prevent future attacks.  In times of desperation, people are willing to give up their rights to protect their own lives.  Without the feeling of losing their life or their privacy however, the people would demand that governmental institutions bar such surveillance.  Without a big event that threatens the lives of the public and increased technology that can prevent it, a government run surveillance state just isn’t likely.

Pictured Above Left: Joan Rivers (age: 78) is just one example of someone using modern medicine (in the form of cosmetic surgery) to maintain a youthful appearance.

Picture Above Right: Queen Elizabeth II, the current Queen of England, (age: 85) serves not only as a contrast to Joan Rivers’ age representation, but also serves as an excellent example of someone who acquired power early in life (at age 26) and has held onto to it for 59 years, thus becoming the second longest reigning British Monarch: a perfect parallel to the gerontocrats.

by Grant Dailey and Allison Kennedy

Hyperlink Sources:

http://www.biotechnologyonline.gov.au/human/dnaprofile.html

http://geography.about.com/od/obtainpopulationdata/a/worldpopulation.htm

http://www.google.com/imgres?um=1&hl=en&sa=N&rlz=1C1CHKW_enUS459US460&biw=1639&bih=812&tbm=isch&tbnid=74w9Zsq3Be8csM:&imgrefurl=http://www.civicyouth.org/quick-facts/&docid=WcCIaydcRN-zKM&imgurl=http://www.civicyouth.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/Voter-Tu

http://www.theticker.org/2.10633/why-young-people-don-t-vote-1.1417519#.Ty70TuQ_cuN

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longest-reigning_British_monarchs#Overall

Photo Sources:

http://media.ticketmaster.com/tm/en-us/dbimages/55657a.jpg

http://passivevoices.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/queenelizabethii.jpg?w=530

You can see the syllabus here.