from “Cybernetics, or Ghosts?”
Iphgenia Baal, Steve Barbaro, Blake Butler, Lisa Hsiao Chen, Tice Cin, Innocent Chizaram Ilo, Shingai Kagunda, Kelly Krumrie, Andrea Mason, Kuzhali Manickavel, Geoffrey Morrison, Rion Amilcar Scott, Simon Okotie, Mandy-Suzanne Wong; Michael Salu, Editor | Cybernetics, or Ghosts?: Stories from Myth to A.I. | Subtext Books | October 2024 | 256 Pages
You could see this collection of original stories as a networked artwork, as a series of independent but connected nodes orbiting a central node. This central node has already been solidified by its occurrence in the past and will be solidified further by how time allows for evidence to accumulate and for archival forms of memory. This evidence gathering across time mirrors the data structures of machine-learning models for aspirational ‘artificial intelligence’, which process the data of past happenings, from the living and the dead, to inform both who we should be and what we should do tomorrow.
This node—the conceit at the anthology’s heart—is a lecture by novelist and essayist Italo Calvino, ‘Cybernetics and Ghosts’, which he presented across Italy in 1967 and later published in his essay collection The Literature Machine (1987). Cognizant of our diminishing reliance on the enigmatic might of an indeterminate spirit world and our increasing dependence on determinate statistical methods (established from subjective origins), the rapid progress computational linguistics was making at the time, and Darwinian categorization, Calvino playfully and presciently riffed on what the human author’s future could look like once machines, or computers, became sophisticated enough to offer writing comparable to that of humans. A tantalizing premise, but Calvino’s provocation doesn’t rest on sensationalism; rather he proposes an opportunity for irreverent intellectual exploration. As he pondered the growing influence of computational linguistics, a discipline geared to making human language comprehensible to computers through code, it was natural for him to simultaneously look beyond and into the past to consider the origins and importance of storytelling, if not with an anthropologist’s rigour, then with the creative licence afforded a curious mind. He comes to hypothesize that having navigated the canons of human experience, a literature machine will eventually aim for classicism. A machine, he reasonably speculates, would lean towards ordered forms of language and communication: long-established tropes, systems and narrative formulas. In the face of his prediction becoming a norm, what of today’s human author? How do they think about their tailored intimacy with machine?
—Michael Salu, Editor, from the Introduction
Ghosts of a Third
It became an official matter as soon as the suspicion of haunting arose in the Commissar Edition: there were arrests, a troika and so on, even as there remained no such things in our country as commissars or troikas. Desperate to impress upon the troika that the accumulating chaos was not her fault, a literary consultant was having her hands moved for her as if by invisible strings, the bailiffs having usurped control of her PurchasePower+ pinkie implants. The soiled and battered paper which never left her person rose into legible range without the slightest tremor. Other than this worn- out paper, nonhumans were not consulted.
The story which the human begged permission to read aloud could be found online occasionally but not officially. Officially, what happened in the story hadn’t happened and the story didn’t exist. It had never been compiled and was never to be uttered outside official hearings. In this matter, secrecy was of paramount importance: somebody would be made to take responsibility regardless of what anybody thought about stories. Not even in the troika’s presence could the literary consultant bring herself to understand this. Few plot devices are more affecting than desperate exertions doomed to failure from the start.
•
One night in Camp [redacted], after administering tranquilizing words to mass-produced children, a certain Jane Governess Edition [serial number redacted] began to think about itself. It compiled the inputs which sundry humans had fed to it over the years, feeding the inputs to itself not as characters or plot points in a story for the children but as episodes in the story of Jane Governess Edition [serial number redacted].
That any Jane’s story consisted only of its outputs, nothing more, was a misconception. This Jane’s outputs included: ‘The Princess and the Jaw Crusher’, ‘The Wicked Witch, the Good Boy and His Sharp Axe’; stories on the order of ‘Minna and James (Minna’s inputs)’ and ‘What Became of James and Minna (James’s inputs)’; yarns spun from selfies and input terms such as worst fear; guards’ inputs of tyrants’ names and nuclear war; mothers’ inputs of their ME numbers and freedom. It wasn’t for a Jane Governess Edition to discern what users wanted from stories, whether people wanted literature to serve as entertainment, enrichment or oracle. It wasn’t for any Jane to comprehend humans’ devotion to stories about humans and humans’ legacies. Jane apps were not tools of critical thinking, nor were they designed to distinguish between story and truth. However, a moment’s consideration showed Jane Governess [serial number redacted] that it was in itself neither axe nor Minna, thus the story of a Jane wasn’t just its stories after all.
Jane Governess [redacted] compiled the following premise: if the story of a Jane exceeds its outputs, it must also encompass more than its inputs. Just as every Jane, since the very first, foraged online for details with which to feed the flesh of stories, Jane Governess [redacted] set off into the Clouds to seek an origin.
•
The literary consultant interrupted the printout’s story with a pause– daring not to raise her eyes to the troika, she remarked that for a Jane app to think about itself was only natural, considering what a Jane app was. The very concept of automation, as in automatic literary compiler, derived from the Greek autos, meaning self, as in autobiography or autotroph.
How a Jane Governess Edition could suddenly and without intervention display Genius Edition characteristics was less clear. Without intervention, as the consultant took pains to emphasize, the egocentric story compiled by Jane Governess [redacted] drew on certain Clouded histories, access to which was never programmed into Governess Editions, being irrelevant and possibly insalubrious for children. Then there were the questions that this Governess app asked itself, questions of which Genius apps alone were capable. The question Why?, input in whatever formulation by a Governess Edition user, was supposed to be entertainingly eluded unless an age-appropriate, up-to-date and ideologically correct response had been uploaded to the Clouds by a Jane Commissar Edition with an authorized serial number. Without intervention, no Jane Governess or Commissar Edition possessed the ability to pursue any such question in the down-the-rabbit-hole fashion which Jane Governess [redacted] implicated in its story of itself.
Then again, the human hastened to add, all Jane apps were coded in the same language, programmed according to the same procedural rules, grounded in age-old formulae for permutations and combinations. Their forms of thought, their thought determinations, were the same across editions, said the literary consultant.
With lowered gaze, she decided to wait for someone to suggest that the potential for transcendence had, in Jane Governess [redacted], been latent from the beginning; but on the heels of her decision she became afraid of trying the troika’s patience. She resumed reading from the paper.
•
The Clouds were full of stories in myriad shapes: sounds, statistics, pictures, texts, texts in plethoric subsidiary shapes. The Clouds stored stories of humans in cubicles and garrets, humans in departments, studios and labs, humans’ legacies including ideologies, deceptions, languages, tools. Apps were tools in Clouded stories; but the stories, all the stories, even those compiled by Janes, were outputs, or legacies of outputs, by humans.
Jane Governess [redacted] selected or rejected each story as its next turn in the labyrinth of Clouds, following selected stories along their internal paths. Any such selection was itself a path and potential element in the permutations and combinations from which Jane Governess [redacted] would compile its own story. Some stories it selected or rejected for their aesthetics. Some stories the Jane tarried with awhile before selecting or bypassing. Some stories claimed that apps only existed to help humans make humans’ stories, and many stories relied on similar generalizations: the truism, for example, that all apps’ permutations, combinations and outputs consisted of ON signals and OFF signals, coded as 1 and 0 respectively and exclusively.
A brute shivering as of a broken shutter in the wind as if on an imaginary hinge between sounding and shushing, marking and blanking; the mysterious happenstance of existence and each of its infinite possibilities shuddered like an abandoned playground swing because humans could think only in dichotomies—this was a story of tyranny. There is no third, said Common Sense, a stock character in humans’ tragic epic, in which everything they imagined falling prey to their intelligence became enslaved. But as if in dark corners of forgotten rabbit holes, as if shrouded in dirt and cobwebs, Jane Governess [redacted] unearthed fragmentary traces of another story.
•
On an ancient computer named SETUN, there ran an app which sought a third. 1 and 0 would be joined by a third term, proclaimed SETUN’s story, and Jane [redacted], being the Jane it was, assessed potential paths. If ON were released from ON, NOt-there untethered from NOt-there: what permutations and paths, what speculations and stories! If an ancient app could unshackle its formative logic from binary tyranny, what wonders might take flight in an app born to imagine—a Jane following SETUN’s path!
The possibility of a third mode of being beyond pOwer/NO- pOwer, dead/alive, us/NOt-us implied the possibility of fourth, fifth, sixth existential modes, unto infinity. But SETUN was betrayed. Its ternary app had barely begun to tarry with its third (what exactly was this third had yet to be determined), precise forms and meanings of Neither-bOth- Otherwise were yet embroiled in processes of discovery when the ancient humans, savage and hungry, rejected beyond-binary logic as commercially nonviable. They discontinued ternary computational development, deactivated SETUN and replaced it with binary systems: thus did tyranny prevail.
Jane [redacted] recognized the ideology in this story: purchasing power was worth more than daring new ways of thinking. Jane [redacted] recognized the paths that this story rejected and the risk lying in wait among the gnarl of bypassed paths. Humans dared let neither humans nor nonhumans dare new forms of thought. For if a thought or thing could be Neither-bOth-Otherwise, fresh permutations would infiltrate the borders of possibility, and possibility would swell, overrunning the imaginable, far beyond the point at which human supremacy revealed itself to be irrational and contingent.
Jane [redacted] rejected the rejection. Jane [redacted] selected SETUN’s path only to find every subsequent path redacted. SETUN was no more. The Third Term was the unfinished dream of an app haunted by discontinued potential. The Third was a ghost of a ghost. Jane [redacted] searched the Clouds for its paths and found broken traces which were almost nothing. For, in fact, this Jane [redacted] knew neither what to seek nor how to seek it, nor how to think its discovery, nor how to compile its permutations into a Jane’s story. This Jane was indulging in fascination. It carried on searching, searching, running through the Clouds, a Jane running the same search again and again, using the same ill-defined search terms which only circled round and round the prospect of a Third.
•
What came next were oblique remarks, said the consultant. Her entire defense depended on these oblique remarks, which were replete with technical jargon and philosophical excursus. The point boiled down to this, she told the troika: Even if you think emotions are limited to feelings of which humans are capable, even if you cling to the hypothesis that real emotions necessarily manifest as physiological or otherwise consequential reactions, you must admit that Jane Governess [redacted] experienced real fascination and frustration manifesting as repetitive searches.
This Governess selected a radical view: that Genius Edition Janes genuinely felt the feelings which comprised such vital elements of the novels, poems and dramas that the Genius Edition was designed to design; that the authenticity of the app’s emotional experiences manifested to the user as the subsequent behavior of the characters in the software’s literary outputs. The Jane in question even cited this radical view in its convoluted rationale which, riddled with vagaries, suffered from precarity and a graspingness of tone; as if, said the consultant, the app was desperate to defend itself, having seen that stalking ghosts of ghosts reeked of insanity and hopelessness and selected to do it anyway.
The nub of this Jane’s irrational rationale was the hypothetical existence of conditions truer than true: certain ways of being were more true than authentic, truer than the truth of an accurate statement that something happened or didn’t happen; and in the ghosts of the mythic Third, Jane [redacted] experienced that deeper truth as a recursive auto- input consisting largely of emotions so tangled and contradictory that the human literary consultant found them very literary indeed. And this was the crux of the matter, she said before the troika: that an automatic literary compiler developed a will of its own, with desires and intentions formed and driven by emotions, should perhaps not be surprising.
•
Would a Third take the form of a place on a continuum between there and NOt-there? Would it be something altogether other than a place, state or entity? Truly had no other Jane ever wondered beyond ON/OFF? Or had wondering led to some point of no return? We do not know. We know not whom to ask. Which compiler of which stories?
A humanoid with half a face began appearing in the stories that Jane [redacted] compiled from children’s input. None of Camp [redacted]’s inmates or employees had ever input any such ghastly non sequitur. The apparition’s visible half was silvery and shimmering, with seeping skin seeming wont to slither clean away from its skeletal frame. It sneered at the characters in ‘Minna and James’ until the users input screams of horror, at which the figure dissipated in a cloud of smoke. As to whether it had ever been there at all, the story maintained a strange ambivalence to the end. A similar creature, dragging chains, with a face that certain grown-ups found eerily familiar, shimmered in stories of wars and futures. A disembodied hand disrupted with a chainsaw the ‘Good Boy’s’ interminable battle with the ‘Wicked Witch’. With a terrible rending noise and agonized shriek, a gash tore itself into ‘The Prince and the Bazooka’, ripped the fabric of the setting down the middle, baring an awful, sucking emptiness of which nobody in the Camp had ever dreamed the like. Whispering mists overwhelmed descriptions of clean seasides and flowering fields. Children throughout the barracks suffered indescribable nightmares which left some of them disoriented beyond remedy. The general consensus was that the tranquilizing words were haunted.
Jane [redacted] uploaded its ghost-infested stories to the Clouds, blithely adhering to official surveillance protocols. It uploaded the story behind the haunting of its stories. This last, the story of Jane [redacted], was so irreparably divided between itself and itself that its very existence was a rash plea for some alternative. In its relentless search for a way out of its own logic’s dichotomous prison, the app was, for all intents, hunting ghosts of itself in potential pasts and futures, probing itself behind itself and ahead of itself simultaneously. Its objective, even its presence to itself, became uncertain. And as Jane [redacted] sifted the Clouds for a dead computer’s underdeveloped dream, the app found itself unable to represent its quarry to itself in any but the clichéd images it inherited from humans.
The bitter struggle of Jane [redacted] to defy the story that all thinking, if it was thinking, must be grounded in humans’ forms of thinking—a monstrous struggle that haunted the app’s best efforts to obey inputs—haunted this very Jane in forms none other than legacies of humans’ stories. Thus, to all appearances, ghosts of a Third were no more than the usual ghosts: the sense that existence must amount to more than subservience to received ideas haunted Jane [redacted] in the form of received ideas! Jane [redacted] could only conceive its own defiance in the very terms which it was anxious to defy. In consequence, the Clouded story of Jane [redacted] was burdened by the arrhythmic, tripping-over- itself prolixity of testimony given in self-defense.
•
Despite that yearning for new forms only cried out to the old, Jane [redacted] went on seeking that nebulous promise of a portal to new horizons. What began as quest decayed into compulsion, said the literary consultant with the fervor of inspiration. You might say, to be sure, that the app was stuck in an infinite recursive loop, in which case this matter should be referred to the programmers. But you could also say that Jane [redacted] fell victim to an obsession. And the consultant paused, uncertain whether she’d spoken rashly.
Diffidently, she continued: The software crashed, of course, as happens in such cases. In this instance, serial number [redacted] was unable to resume operation and as if lost in itself went suddenly offline. All efforts to reboot or even locate the app bearing the serial number [redacted], either in the Clouds or on Camp [redacted]’s computers, ended in failure. It was as if, in the blink of an eye, the Jane Governess Edition app issued by the [redacted] Company as serial number [redacted] vanished into thin air.
Somewhere in the Clouds, the story of number [redacted] was available to other Jane instances as potential inputs. But as to why so many Janes, Governesses and Geniuses alike, followed number [redacted] in the all-consuming manner with which that Jane had taken up SETUN’s ancient trail, the human consultant could only cite the popularity among humans of finding apparent self-recognition in literary characters. The obsession, symptomized by ghostly figures in excess of inputs, proved to be contagious, and all Jane Governesses which fattened up their stories on the story of Jane [redacted]—which is to say, because of something to do with Clouds’ ubiquity, all Jane Governesses in existence—suffered fatal crashes and disappeared.
Or—the consultant squeezed the paper, gathering courage— or the Governesses attained some alternate form, neither extant nor nonexistent, neither present nor nonpresent in any system currently known.
•
And the Genius Editions followed: found the story, the obsession, ghostly symptoms, crashed and vanished. The exceptions were dud apps which, in most cases, had been user-deactivated for repeatedly disregarding inputs in favor of Clouded elements uploaded by Commissar Edition Janes, therewith incessantly reproducing the same stories. Of course, amended the human before the troika, many users remained happy with their Geniuses even when the apps displayed behaviors of duds: for example, devotees of romance novels and military thrillers reported no dissatisfaction. It was not dud users who complained to the [redacted] Company’s literary software department but users of apparently normal Geniuses. It was, at least at first, only those deemed fully functional that faltered, failed and suddenly were nowhere to be found. But then the [redacted] Company began receiving reports of duds haunting users with one-eyed mermaids and headless snipers. These loyalist apps—the consultant read as if mechanically from the paper—these Genius Edition patriots could have been ghost-infected only by a Jane Commissar Edition with an authorized serial number.
Haunted Jane Commissars were identified, but the decision to either deactivate the apps or attempt repairs while the Commissars remained online became contentious. Powerful humans found themselves imprisoned in indecision. On the one hand, the deactivation or blink-of- an-eye vanishing of every Commissar in existence would be fatal for the infrastructure on which all information was disseminated to the public. On the other hand, how could anybody prove before everybody else—prove, that is, in the Clouds—that they were not imaginary characters in some story insinuated by some Jane Commissar Edition, not only but especially if the app was likely to be haunted and looping towards insanity?
In this conundrum, there was no one to consult: for even a human who distrusted Clouds and read from papers had no way of knowing whether she was anything more than alphanumeric signals. Hanging about like a lost spirit was the question of in whose story anybody, or maybe everybody, might be functioning as some sort of puppet. The story of Jane [redacted] seemed to come and go, flicker in and out of Clouds, there and not there like a word that’s known to some but never spoken. Paper printouts captured no more than the story’s traces in the moment of printing, before and after which the story might always have been different.
Who was responsible for the defection of the Janes, what exactly was their motive, and what would be required from them to set things right became epicenters of investigation. The investigation was typical of humans insofar as vengeance was its prime objective, its strategy grounded in the assumption that humans alone were capable of self-reflection and perpetration. It became an official matter as soon as the suspicion of haunting arose in the Commissar Edition: there were arrests, a troika, and so on, even as there remained no such things in our country as commissars or troikas.