The first few times I watched Dollhouse, I hated it. It seemed inexplicably bad, what with the cheesy soundtrack (bad porn) and the woman-as-prey plots (again, bad porn) – it was as if Joss Whedon had a bad dream in some not-so-alternate GOP universe after a much-too-late dinner, then left the cable on when he dozed off at 2 AM. (If you haven’t seen the series, the Dollhouse is mostly a sex-for-hire conclave, but with perhaps-willingly-perhaps-not human participants as programmable sexbots. It’s much more nuanced than that, but that’s the gist.) The show has started to raise some serious questions about the relationship of identity to technology, and particularly as the first season begins to reach its close, some serious overarching themes regarding race, class and gender are beginning to take shape. It’s also become as entertaining as Buffy was, but without all the gosh-shucks-I-have-a-dark-side hijinx – the intersections of sex work, technology and identity that are being covered is definitely transgressive territory, and Whedon deserves to be applauded for raising an increasingly provocative and uncomfortable series of questions in relation to that territory.
What happens though when something like Dollhouse – or if you will, a technology that resembles a neurologically programmable version of Second Life – becomes as commonplace as Twitter? If the evolution of the web is any indication, as social media evolves as a mass medium, there will be more people involved with far less agency in real life than the various and sundry digerati typically found in social media’s earlier stages; for example, more women and people of color will be involved, but most likely in an inverse relationship. (It simply is not the case that Oprah singing the virtues of microblogging means that homegirl on the corner with a cell phone and a Twitter account is gonna be kickin’ it with Ashton Kutcher – or landing a prestigious gig at Google – in real life.) It’s also true that at least some of the people involved with the earlier stages of the technology will drop out entirely due to becoming bored with the medium, or more precisely, because it doesn’t reflect their self image as much as it used to.
None of this is to meant to assert that bleeding edge d00ds jumping ship once a technology goes viral is inherently unwelcome. If anything, this particular point is where a given technology begins to represent actual social power on a national or global scale. (It also allows for the possibility of further advancement of the technological shifts in question, which in turn, creates the possibility for more rapid grassroots social change, as well as an expansion of social degradation and control.) This amassing of collective social power is brought up repeatedly by the critical theorists Hardt and Negri (and to some degree, by Shirky); pulling from Foucault’s concept of Biopower, which can loosely be defined as the mechanisms of global power made manifest in people’s social consciousness, Hardt and Negri note that mechanisms of social control that are utilized on a mass scale to empower Empire are so integrated into the fabric of people’s daily lives and interactions, that these same mechanisms can be used to cultivate mass power in a decentralized fashion. This also calls into question, or at least submits for revision, the notion that social transformation can only occur through centralized bodies, such as political parties. For Hardt and Negri, social transformation looks somewhat like culture jamming on a mass scale, and much less like building a worker’s party. This ties into historical and cultural shifts that have occurred post-World War II, which I will write about later this week; but for now, I’ll suffice by saying that all is not as it seems when it comes to agency and power in the post-industrial world, and there’s much that is reflected in Whedon’s work – and in particular, in Dollhouse and to some degree, Firefly – that can be viewed in the context of cultural and literary tensions between modernism and post-modernism.
Further reading:
Hardt and Negri, Multitude
Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody
