via:

Things Fall Apart

When Nike Honcho Phil Knight commissions his swoosh-stripe Mount Rushmore somewhere in the wilds of the Pacific Northwest, the Air Max 95 will be one of the shoes that will be carved into the Precambrian granite outcropping. The Air Max 95 isn’t the best Nike runner ever made, it’s arguably (sorry Air Jordan junkies) the best Nike shoe ever made, an object burrowed deeply into the popular culture. Collectors flocked to it, kickstarting what would become a $75 billion global industry fueled by hype beasts, sneakerheads, and enough aspirational consumers to fill the Mariana Trench several times over. Since it’s 1995 debut, the Air Max 95 has remained a perennial bestseller. Nike churns out several new versions every year. The number of colorways is staggering: over 150 and counting. Such ubiquity has done nothing to diminish the shoe’s cachet. It continues to be been worn by artists, actors, pop stars, criminals and, yes, even actual athletes.

Nagomo Oji knew he was stepping into history when he laced up a pair of Air Max 95s last month in Saitama City, Japan, a commuter sprawl 10 miles north of central Tokyo. What made Oji’s shoes so special was their pedigree. Anybody can walk into Foot Locker and buy a pair of Air Maxes for 160 bucks. Oji’s shoes were something quite different. To use the sneakerhead vernacular, they were “DS” (dead stock), a discontinued model that’s new, unworn, and unboxed. Even better, they were “OG. Not “original gangster,” just “original.” In other words, these vintage kicks were highly collectable, a pristine example of the very first Air Maxes that dropped two decades ago.

But something insidious has been happening to those shoes, and every other pair like them, over the years. They’ve been crumbling away to nothing as they sit tucked in boxes or hidden in closets. The materials used to make them degrade over time, causing the shoes to fall apart, rendering them worthless.

Untouched specimens like Oji’s are as rare as Siamese hermaphrodites and can fetch over $2,000. But Oji had no interest in selling his Air Max 95s. For him, the shoebox was a time capsule that conjured fleeting images of lost youth and harkened to a forgotten period when collecting kicks was a hobby, not an investment. Besides, how could you put a price on old-school details like midsole “BWs” (big windows) that contained the encapsulated nitrogen bubbles, or the PSI specs stamped on the sole from toe to heel (“20, 25, 5,”), like an Enigma code?

Much had happened since Oji purchased these Nike runners. He no longer defined himself by the shoes he wore. Vanity had been undermined by adulthood and responsibilities. He was a grown man now, a father of 2-year-old twins. As he appraised his newly shod feet, a smile creased his lips. It might not be possible to relive the past, he thought. But this was the closest thing to it.

As soon as he planted his feet, Oji sensed something was terribly wrong. The midsoles flattened, and his footing became strangely unstable. He didn’t realize it at the time, but the polyurethane (PU), that squishy, shock-absorbing material sandwiched between the upper and the outer sole, was more than ten years past its projected lifespan.

After just one step, the hardened PU foam fractured and collapsed, like arid soil crumbling beneath the boots of a Dust Bowl Okie. Oji looked down in disbelief. With the inner soles completely detached from the uppers, his feet were actually touching the ground. His beloved Air Maxes had just morphed into Fred Flintstone shoes.

by Rene Chun, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Nagomo Oji

Family Raised $187M For Cancer, Spent It On Themselves

[ed. And they got away with it. So how is this a deterrent to anyone, exactly?]

A Tennessee man and his family used much of the $187 million it collected for cancer patients to buy themselves cars, gym memberships and take luxury cruise vacations, pay for college tuition and employ family members with six-figure salaries, federal officials alleged Tuesday in one of the largest charity fraud cases ever, involving all 50 states.

The joint action by the Federal Trade Commission and the states says James T. Reynolds Sr., his ex-wife and son raised the money through their various charities: The Cancer Fund of America in Knoxville, Tennessee, and its affiliated Cancer Support Services; The Breast Cancer Society in Mesa, Arizona; and the Children's Cancer Fund of America in Powell, Tennessee. (...)

Anyone who donated money to these groups shouldn't expect a refund anytime soon. While litigation against Reynolds Sr. and the Cancer Fund of America is ongoing, the settlement agreements with Reynolds' son, ex-wife and a long-time associate of the family - Kyle Effler - notes that much of the money has already been spent. The agreement bans the three from fundraising and shuttered their organizations.

"The money is mostly gone," said Jessica Rich, director of the FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection. Rich declined to say whether a separate criminal investigation might be underway, noting only that the regulatory agency doesn't have that authority. (...)

The settlement agreement imposed hefty judgments based on the amount of money donated to the charities between 2008 and 2012. But because of Perkins' "inability to pay," her $30 million judgment would be suspended entirely. The $65.5 million judgment against Reynolds II would be suspended after he pays $75,000.

Effler, former president of Cancer Support Services, faced a $41 million judgment that would be forgiven after paying $60,000.

Officials on Tuesday said that any money recouped under the settlements would go to state authorities, which will have the ability to distribute the money to legitimate charities. Officials cited complexities of the case to explain why the charities were allowed to continue operating even after media outlets flagged them as potentially fraudulent.

"I hope it serves as a strong warning for anyone trying to exploit the kindness and generosity of others," Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring said of the investigation.

by Anne Flaherty, AP | Read more:
Image: via:

$400 Yoga Pants Are Just the Beginning

[ed. Why, indeed.]

Feeding off the rise of workout gear that can be worn in or out of the gym, activewear labels have become status symbols, much like any other pricey designer clothes. Premium yoga pants, made popular amongst the masses by Lululemon, can run anywhere from $80 to $200. A horde of brands battle each other in this segment as upstarts such as Outdoor Voices, Michi, and Vie Active jostle with superpowers Nike, Under Armour, and Adidas.

Yet there's little available for women searching the racks for even more expensive, higher-end performance wear. Fear not, luxury shoppers. It won't remain like this for long.

Quietly, a smattering of new true luxury activewear labels have appeared, each with the hope that affluent shoppers are willing to shell out $300, $400, or more on a pair of pliable pants. Think about it this way: If you're a luxury shopper who buys $1,500 designer dresses, pays $250 a month for an Equinox gym membership, and totes around a $4,000 Chanel bag, why would you spend a mere $100 on the leggings that you wear to the gym, on errands, and on the weekend?

by Kim Bhasin, Bloomberg |  Read more:

Image: Claire Pepper via Charli Cohen

via:

via:

The Tao of Poo: We're Doing It All Wrong

In my large Italian family, I grew up with the subject of poo, bottoms and constipation readily – and far too frequently – discussed at the dinner table. I’d be about to raise a raviolo to my mouth, only to hear how someone’s piles had popped, just that morning.

This doesn’t mean I’m anal (sorry) about the subject. It’s fascinating away from the lunch table. Late last year, I read that we are pooing all wrong: we should be squatting, not sitting, on a toilet bowl. Then a book called Charming Bowels by Giulia Enders caused something of a storm in its native Germany and I got fully immersed in the subject.

Enders is studying in Frankfurt for her medical doctorate in microbiology. She is utterly, charmingly obsessed with the gut, gut bacteria and poo. She writes and talks about her subject matter with such child-like enthusiasm, it’s infectious. And, yes, we have been pooing all wrong. Enders tells me about various studies that show that we do it more efficiently if we squat. This is because the closure mechanism of the gut is not designed to “open the hatch completely” when we’re sitting down or standing up: it’s like a kinked hose. Squatting is far more natural and puts less pressure on our bottoms. She says: “1.2 billion people around the world who squat have almost no incidence of diverticulosis and fewer problems with piles. We in the west, on the other hand, squeeze our gut tissue until it comes out of our bottoms.” Lovely.

But not to worry. Although you can climb on your toilet seat and squat (“It might be fun!”), we can iron out the kink by sitting with our feet on a little stool and leaning forward. The book even has a helpful drawing by Enders’ sister.

Then there are the sphincters. One of them we probably all know about – the one we open consciously – but there is also another, inner one, which is operated unconsciously. This ani internus sends a sample into the chamber between the inner and outer sphincter for the sensor cells to analyse and decide if it’s “safe” to fart or poo: “Yes, you’re at home. No, you’re in the office.” If it’s not safe, the sensors send it back in. But, if the inner sphincter is ignored enough times – say, because we are too shy to go to the loo for fear of being overheard – it sulks and can switch off. That’s one of the reasons constipation can occur.

Enders loves her inner sphincter. “Learning about those two sphincters really changed my perspective on life,” she says. “Those inner nerves don’t care for other people; they have no eyes or ears. Finally, something that only thinks of me! So, now I can go to the toilet anywhere. I worship that muscle!”

But the gut – and Enders’ book – is about far more than poo (although there is plenty there, about consistency, frequency, buoyancy, colour and laxatives, to keep the most forensic of scatologists happy). Enders’ big thing is bacteria.

by Annalisa Barbieri, The Guardian |  Read more:
Image: Sciepro/Science Photo Library/Corbis

Dr. Eelgood

Personally, I can’t think of a sea creature more horrific than the eel. It has all the negative qualities of a fish (might touch you while swimming, incapable of feeling love), plus all the negative qualities of a snake (has no limbs at all yet somehow manages to move around)—plus, in some cases, all the negative qualities of a poorly-grounded home appliance. In fact, if I were choosing something to encounter in open water, I’d rank only one fish lower than an eel: an eel that’s been marinating in cocaine. Unfortunately for me, a team of Italian scientists has been exposing European eels to low doses of cocaine to monitor the effect of the drug.

by Jess Zimmerman, Hakai Magazine | Read more:
Image: Jelger Herder/Buiten-beeld/Minden Pictures/Corbis

Octopus Chandelier by Daniel Hopper
via:

via:

The Hole in the Rooftop Solar-Panel Craze

Most people buy rooftop solar panels because they think it will save them money or make them green, or both. But the truth is that rooftop solar shouldn’t be saving them money (though it often does), and it almost certainly isn’t green. In fact, the rooftop-solar craze is wasting billions of dollars a year that could be spent on greener initiatives. It also is hindering the growth of much more cost-effective renewable sources of power.

According to a recent Energy Department-backed study at North Carolina State University, installing a fully financed, average-size rooftop solar system will reduce energy costs for 93% of the single-family households in the 50 largest American cities today. That’s why people have been rushing out to buy rooftop solar panels, particularly in sunny states like Arizona, California and New Mexico.

The primary reason these small solar systems are cost-effective, however, is that they’re heavily subsidized. Utilities are forced by law to purchase solar power generated from the rooftops of homeowners and businesses at two to three times more than it would cost to buy solar power from large, independently run solar plants. Without subsidies, rooftop solar isn’t close to cost-effective.

Recent studies by Lazard and others, however, have found that large, utility-scale solar power plants can cost as little as five cents (or six cents without a subsidy) per kilowatt-hour to build and operate in the sunny Southwest. These plants are competitive with similarly sized fossil-fueled power plants. But this efficiency is possible only if solar plants are large and located in sunny parts of the country. On average, utility-scale solar plants nationwide still cost about 13 cents per kilowatt-hour, versus around six cents per kilowatt-hour for coal and natural gas, according to the Lazard study.

Large-scale solar-power prices are falling because the cost to manufacture solar panels has been decreasing and because large solar installations permit economies of scale. Rooftop solar, on the other hand, often involves microinstallations in inefficient places, which makes the overall cost as much as 3½ times higher.

So why are we paying more for the same sun?

There are lots of reasons. Well-meaning—but ill-conceived—federal, state and local tax incentives for rooftop solar give back between 30% and 40% of the installation costs to the owner as a tax credit. But more problematic are hidden rate subsidies, the most significant of which is called net metering, which is available in 44 states. Net metering allows solar-system owners to offset on a one-for-one basis the energy they receive from the electric grid with the solar power they generate on their roof.

While this might sound logical, it isn’t. An average California resident with solar, for example, generally pays about 17 cents per kilowatt-hour for electric service when the home’s solar panels aren’t operating. When they are operating, however, net metering requires the utility to pay that solar customer the same 17 cents per kilowatt-hour. But the solar customer still needs the grid to back up his intermittent solar panels, and the utility could have purchased that same solar power from a utility-scale solar power plant for about five cents per kilowatt-hour.

This 12-cents-per-kwh cost difference amounts to a wealth transfer from average electric customers to customers with rooftop solar systems (who also often have higher incomes). This is because utilities collect much of their fixed costs—the unavoidable costs of power plants, transmission lines, etc.—from residential customers through variable-use charges, in other words, charges based on how much energy they use. When a customer with rooftop solar purchases less electricity from the utility, he pays fewer variable-use charges and avoids contributing revenue to cover the utility’s fixed costs. The result is that all of the other customers have to pick up the difference.

by Brian H. Potts, Wall Street Journal |  Read more:

Image: Getty

Roger Guetta
via:

Swearing Off the Modern Man

The Modern Man has an iPhone 6 Plus and goes to Coachella every year. He’s thinking about starting a blog and has been “like really into standup lately.” He has a favorite microbrewery because he likes his beer really hoppy, whatever that means. He has a fun Twitter feed and interesting theories about what could happen on “House of Cards.”

Peter had all the makings of a Modern Man. His Twitter feed was super-witty. He drank only local beer. He owned one of those weed pen vapor things. He wore cardigans and insisted on managing the music at every party, saying, “Trust me, you’ll see this artist on the Coachella lineup in two years.”

Peter was funny, cultured, well dressed and well read, and I took pride in dating a guy who was so keenly cool. But like most modern men, when confronted after weeks of sleeping together with mild inquiries regarding commitment, he crumbled. The Modern Man is “just not into labels” and is “only trying to have some fun.”

When I asked Peter what that was supposed to mean, he said, “Chill.”

Yet “chill” I did not.

Later, I met a friend for lunch. “Peter and I broke up,” I announced.

“Were you guys together?” she asked.

“Well, we’d been seeing each other for a few weeks.”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t on Facebook,” she said. “It’s only real if it’s on Facebook.”

I was devastated when Peter and I stopped seeing each other, except for the fact that when we stopped seeing each other, we couldn’t stop seeing each other, because we followed each other on Twitter and Instagram and were friends on Facebook. So I saw him all the time, his grinning profile picture shadowing my feed.

“Unfollow him!” my friends would roar. “You’re never going to get over him unless you unfollow him on all that stuff.”

But I couldn’t. There was something so enthralling about being able to track his social life. Was he seeing someone else? I had to know. Besides, unfollowing him was too dramatic, as if I were proclaiming, “I can’t handle this!” Remaining friends on social media, however, showed I was unfazed, cool, “chill” and whatever.

But I wasn’t any of those things. I’d find myself scrolling through his tweets and Instagram posts, which included photos of other women. I’d shove my phone into my friends’ faces, their noses practically fogging the screen, and ask, “Is she prettier than me?”

One night, drunk at 2 a.m., I was trying to decipher if an innocuous Drake lyric he tweeted could somehow be directed at me as a possible admission of affection. Sensing the craziness of that, I clicked “unfollow” and then “unfriend.” With this tiny act of defiance, I was finally free. “This is closure,” I told myself. “This is moving on.”

After that splash of romantic failure, I remembered the wisdom of George Costanza. In a classic episode of “Seinfeld” (are there any nonclassic episodes?), George, in realizing that his life is a failure, decides he should do the opposite of what he normally does, reasoning that if every instinct he has is wrong, the opposite must be right.

With this in mind, I decided to swear off modern men. No more Twitter games. No more Instagram dissections. No more Facebook predation. I wanted someone mature.

by Jochebed Smith, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Brian Rea

The Science of Craving

[ed. See also: The Neurological Pleasures of Fast Fashion]

The reward system exists to ensure we seek out what we need. If having sex, eating nutritious food or being smiled at brings us pleasure, we will strive to obtain more of these stimuli and go on to procreate, grow bigger and find strength in numbers. Only it’s not as simple in the modern world, where people can also watch porn, camp out in the street for the latest iPhone or binge on KitKats, and become addicted, indebted or overweight. As Aristotle once wrote: “It is of the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it.” Buddhists, meanwhile, have endeavoured for 2,500 years to overcome the suffering caused by our propensity for longing. Now, it seems, Berridge has found the neuro-anatomical basis for this facet of the human condition—that we are hardwired to be insatiable wanting machines.

If you had opened a textbook on brain rewards in the late 1980s, it would have told you that the dopamine and opioids that swished and flickered around the reward pathway were the blissful brain chemicals responsible for pleasure. The reward system was about pleasure and somehow learning what yields it, and little more. So when Berridge, a dedicated young scientist who was more David than Goliath, stumbled upon evidence in 1986 that dopamine did not produce pleasure, but in fact desire, he kept quiet. It wasn’t until the early 1990s, after rigorous research, that he felt bold enough to go public with his new thesis. The reward system, he then asserted, has two distinct elements: wanting and liking (or desire and pleasure). While dopamine makes us want, the liking part comes from opioids and also endocannabinoids (a version of marijuana produced in the brain), which paint a “gloss of pleasure”, as Berridge puts it, on good experiences. For years, his thesis was contested, and only now is it gaining mainstream acceptance. Meanwhile, Berridge has marched on, unearthing more and more detail about what makes us tick. His most telling discovery was that, whereas the dopamine/wanting system is vast and powerful, the pleasure circuit is anatomically tiny, has a far more fragile structure and is harder to trigger.

Before his lecture, we meet for coffee; there’s another Starbucks in the convention centre. I’m surprised to find that someone so practised at public speaking has pre-performance jitters. Shortly after arriving, Berridge turns white and bolts from the queue to retrieve the laptop with his presentation on, which he has accidentally left in his hotel lobby. Nor is he immune to the desires and pleasures he studies. Without hesitating, he orders a “grande” chestnut praline latte and slice of coffee cake. “It’s easy to turn on intense wanting,” he says, when we eventually sit down. “Massive, robust systems do it. They can come on with the pleasure, they can come on without the pleasure, they don’t care. It’s tricky to turn on the pleasure.” He hadn’t expected his findings to turn out this way, but it made sense. “This may explain”, he later tells his audience, “why life’s intense pleasures are less frequent and less sustained than intense desires.”

In recent years, Berridge’s doubters have steadily dispersed, and reams of research have been applying the disparity between liking and wanting (or pleasure and desire, enjoyment and motivation) to the clinical study of conditions such as depression, addiction, binge eating, obsessive-compulsive disorder and Parkinson’s disease. It is also increasingly present in psychological and philosophical discussions about free will, relationships and consumerism. (...)

Although desire and pleasure often go hand in hand, it is perfectly possible to want something without liking it. Think of the crazy impulse purchases that are more about the frisson of shopping than the product itself. The cake that disgusts you, but you eat it anyway. The drugs you crave, even though they’re no fun any more. And as for that ex-lover...

by Amy Fleming, More Intelligent Life |  Read more:

Image: Brett Ryder

The Mystery of $2 Bills

Heather McCabe's wallet is as full as George Costanza's. But rather than being stuffed with hard candy and ads for free guitar lessons, McCabe's is full of an exotic material of another sort: $2 bills.

Over the past few years, McCabe has been going to the bank, withdrawing her money in stacks of $2 bills, and using them in a social experiment of sorts. Every time she pays with them, McCabe snaps a photo of the recipient and posts a dispatch at her website TwoBuckaroo.com. “Usually there's a moment of surprise, a pause when someone sees it, an exclamation,” McCabe says. “Sometimes eyes light up, sometimes the person gasps, and then usually says something like, 'Oh lucky two-dollar bill!'”

It's not always positive though. While the now-famous Snopes story about a Taco Bell employee who refused to accept a $2 bill is probably not true, McCabe has been on the receiving end of vendors refusing to accept it as currency. “That's against the law,” McCabe says. “The bill is legal tender.” Among storeowners, the worry is that the $2 bills are counterfeit, a notion that comes from simply not seeing the bills in action all that much. “They don't necessarily trust themselves to know whether or not it's the real thing,” McCabe says. “But even so, who cares? If it's counterfeit, you're only losing two bucks.”

To McCabe, though, it's all good. Even negative reactions are indicative of this strange mid-point between currency and novelty that the $2 bill somehow inhabits. “There is always a reaction,” she says.

McCabe started her obsession after finding a bill in her jewelry box. “I have no memory of saving it,” McCabe says. “I thought it was special, I don't know why.” Personally, I had the same strange experience after returning to my parents' home and being greeted with a metal cup of $2 bills that I'd apparently held onto. John Bennardo, the producer and director of a soon-to-be-released documentary about the bill, found himself in the $2 crew by finding a bunch of them in the bottom of his drawer, saved for no good reason.

“I'd pull them out and admire them,” Bennardo says. “I didn't want to spend them.”

But why? Are they rare, therefore making them somehow more valuable than their $2 label? Nope. According to United States Federal Reserve statistics, there are currently 1.1 billion of the $2 bills in circulation. While that may be comparatively fewer than other bills—there are 11 billion $1 bills, 1.9 billion $10 bills, 8.1 billion $20s, and 10.1 billion $100s roaming the world right now—anything that numbers over one billion should not be considered “rare.”

How about the claim that they're not printed anymore? “The majority of people I've met, regardless of their education level or background, seem to believe the two-dollar bill is not made anymore,” McCabe says. They're printed less regularly than other bills—normal bills get a yearly printing, while $2 bills have only been printed three times over the past decade—but the most recent printing occurred in 2014. It's not as if the $2 bills being handled are classic tender from yesteryear.

What, then, makes them seem somehow more valuable than $2?

by Rick Paulas, Pacific Standard | Read more:
Image: armydre2008/Flickr

[ed. Oh my. Miss America, Kira Kazantzev, plays golf. No wonder she won!]
via:

David Shterenberg (1881-1948)
via:

Lernert and Sander, Food Cubes
via:

The Robots Are Winning!

Just as the Industrial Revolution inspired Frankenstein and its epigones, so has the computer age given rise to a rich new genre of science fiction. The machines that are inspiring this latest wave of science-fiction narratives are much more like Hephaestus’s golden maidens than were the machines that Mary Shelley was familiar with. Computers, after all, are capable of simulating mental as well as physical activities. (Not least, as anyone with an iPhone knows, speech.) It is for this reason that the anxiety about the boundaries between people and machines has taken on new urgency today, when we constantly rely on and interact with machines—indeed, interact with each other by means of machines and their programs: computers, smartphones, social media platforms, social and dating apps.

This urgency has been reflected in a number of recent films about troubled relationships between people and their human-seeming devices. The most provocative of these is Her, Spike Jonze’s gentle 2013 comedy about a man who falls in love with the seductive voice of an operating system, and, more recently, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, about a young man who is seduced by a devious, soft-spoken female robot called Ava whom he has been invited to interview as part of the “Turing Test”: a protocol designed to determine the extent to which a robot is capable of simulating a human. Although the robot in Garland’s sleek and subtle film is a direct descendant of Hesiod’s Pandora—beautiful, intelligent, wily, ultimately dangerous—the movie, as the Eve-like name Ava suggests, shares with its distinguished literary predecessors some serious biblical concerns.

Both of the new films about humans betrayed by computers owe much to a number of earlier movies. The most authoritative of these remains Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which came out in 1968 and established many of the main themes and narratives of the genre. Most notable of these is the betrayal by a smooth-talking machine of its human masters. The mild-mannered computer HAL—not a robot, but a room-sized computer that spies on the humans with an electronic eye—takes control of a manned mission to Jupiter, killing off the astronauts one by one until the sole survivor finally succeeds in disconnecting him. It’s a strangely touching scene, suggesting the degree to which computers could already engage our sympathies at the beginning of the computer age. As his connections are severed, HAL first begs for its life and then suffers from a kind of dementia, finally regressing to its “childhood,” singing a song it was taught by its creator. It was the first of many scenes in which these thinking machines express anxiety about their own demises—surely a sign of “consciousness.”

But the more direct antecedents of Her and Ex Machina are a number of successful popular entertainments whose story lines revolved around the creation of robots that are, to all intents and purposes, indistinguishable from humans. In Ridley Scott’s stylishly noir 1982 Blade Runner (based on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), a “blade runner”—a cop whose job it is to hunt down and kill renegade androids called “replicants”—falls in love with one of the machines, a beautiful female called Rachael who is so fully endowed with what Homer called “mind” that she has only just begun to suspect that she’s not human herself.

This story is, in its way, an heir to Frankenstein and its literary forerunners. For we learn that the angry replicants have returned to Earth from the off-planet colonies where they work as slave laborers because they realize they’ve been programmed to die after four years, and they want to live—just as badly as humans do. But their maker, when at last they track him down and meet with him, is unable to alter their programming. “What seems to be the problem?” he calmly asks when one of the replicants confronts him. “Death,” the replicant sardonically retorts. “We made you as well as we could make you,” the inventor wearily replies, sounding rather like Victor Frankenstein talking to his monster—or, for that matter, like God speaking to Adam and Eve. At the end of the film, after the inventor and his rebellious creature both die, the blade runner and his alluring mechanical girlfriend declare their love for each other and run off, never quite knowing when she will stop functioning. As, indeed, none of us does.

The stimulating existential confusion that animates Blade Runner—the fact that the robots are so lifelike that some of them don’t know that they’re robots—has given strong interest to other recent science-fiction narratives. It was a central premise of the brilliant Sci-Fi Channel series Battlestar Galactica (2004–2009), which gave an Aeneid-like narrative philosophical complexity. In it, a small band of humans who survive a catastrophic attack by a robot race called Cylons (who have evolved from clanking metal prototypes—hostile humans like to refer to them as “toasters”—into perfect replicas of actual Homo sapiens) seek a new planet to settle. The narrative about the conflict between the humans and the machines is deliciously complicated by the fact that many of the Cylons, some of whom have been secretly embedded among the humans as saboteurs, programmed to “wake up” at a certain signal, aren’t aware that they’re not actually human; some of them, when they wake up and realize that they’re Cylons, stick to the human side anyway. After all, when you look like a human, think like a human, and make love like a human (as we repeatedly see them do), why, precisely, aren’t you human?

Indeed, the focus of many of these movies is a sentimental one: whatever their showy interest in the mysteries of “consciousness,” the real test of human identity turns out, as it so often does in popular entertainment, to be love. In Steven Spielberg’s A.I. (2001; the initials stand for “artificial intelligence”), a messy fairy tale that weds a Pinocchio narrative to the Prometheus story, a genius robotics inventor wants to create a robot that can love, and decides that the best vehicle for this project would be a child-robot: a “perfect child…always loving, never ill, never changing.” This narrative is, as we know, shadowed by Frankenstein—and, beyond that, by Genesis, too. Why does the creator create? To be loved, it turns out. When the inventor announces to his staff his plan to build a loving child-robot, a woman asks whether “the conundrum isn’t to get a human to love them back.” To this the inventor, as narcissistic and hubristic as Victor Frankenstein, retorts, “But in the beginning, didn’t God create Adam to love him?”

The problem is that the creator does his job too well. For the mechanical boy he creates is so human that he loves the adoptive human parents to whom he’s given much more than they love him, with wrenching consequences. The robot-boy, David, wants to be “unique”—the word recurs in the film as a marker of genuine humanity—but for his adoptive family he is, in the end, just a machine, an appliance to be abandoned at the edge of the road—which is what his “mother” ends up doing, in a scene of great poignancy. Although it’s too much of a mess to be able to answer the questions it raises about what “love” is and who deserves it, A.I. did much to sentimentalize the genre, with its hint that the capacity to love, even more than the ability to think, is the hallmark of “human” identity.

by Daniel Mendelsohn, NY Review of Books |  Read more:

Image: A24 Films

via: