Human Programming: Brainwashing, Automatons, and American Unfreedom by Scott Selisker (review)

Scott Selisker's Human Programming examines the idea of the human automaton and traces how it has inflected the understanding of freedom and unfreedom in the United States from the 1940s through today. While this book does not purport to be a history of technology, it will interest cultural historians—especially those who study the ethics of technology and rhetoric. Its methodology resembles the scholarship of Leo Marx, Priscilla Wald, and others like myself who blend literary and cultural history. In its exploration of the entangled concepts of humanness and mechanism, it brings to mind Steve Woolgar's "Reconstructing Man and Machine: A Note on Sociological Critiques of Cognitivism" from The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (MIT, 2012). Human Programming also engages more directly with such scholars as Donna Haraway, N. Katherine Hayles, Bruno Latour, Jacques Rancière, and Cary Wolfe. Human Programming ultimately expands discussions about the "humanist-posthumanist divide" (p.9) by demonstrating how the idea of automatism has been used to create a human-subhuman divide—one that distinguishes the presumably free-thinking American from the racial, religious, or political Other.

Selisker analyzes an astounding array of sources in this study, including John B. Watson's work in behavioral psychology, Norbert Wiener's cybernetics, theories of post- and trans-humanism, fiction and nonfiction representations of "brainwashing," and cinematic and televisual representations of figurative and literal robots. He often juxtaposes artifacts and ideas that seem unrelated at first glance, in order to draw out themes that cut across the disciplinary boundaries of literary and intellectual history. For example, his first chapter takes up George Orwell's 1984, The Manchurian Candidate, and Joost Meerloo's concerns about the television as a tool of social control. In this chapter, Selisker discusses how language itself can be (or can be perceived as) a technology of totalitarianism. His second chapter brings together Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Ken Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Betty Friedan's Feminist Mystique to articulate how the idea of the human automaton could be used to anti-institutional purposes. This chapter demonstrates that the construct of the robotic human has implications for the way Americans have understood racism and sexism sociologically and culturally. Specifically, it critiques the midcentury sociological conceit, popularized by Gunnar Myrdal, that some figures are passive or reactive rather than active agents of social change.

Chapter three will be of particular interest to readers of Technology and Culture; this chapter chronicles the coevolution of science fictions and "technologies of computation, genetics, and cybernetics" (p. 34). It asks where emotional labor fits in the discourse of programmable humans, and it poses ethical questions about who is "counted" as a free-thinking human(p. 112). Chapter four looks at the particular case of the "cult," and traces how religious and political cults became an epidemic cultural phenomenon between the 1970s and 1990s. This chapter discusses perplexing historical cases, such as Patty Hearst's relationship with the Symbionese Liberation Army, to draw attention to one of the paradoxes of brainwashing: the process of deprogramming is nearly indistinguishable from the process of human programming. Comparing these techniques, Selisker asks how can we distinguish the free from the unfree mind.

The final full-length chapter of Human Programming focuses on the War on Terror and its representation in literature and culture, from Don DeLillo's Falling Man through the popular television series Battlestar Galactica. This chapter brings the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder into conversation with ideas of the programmable mind to complicate prevailing discourses about brainwashing. Finally, the conclusion to this book uses an interesting literary example, Daniel Suarez's Daemon, to discuss how representations of networked humans and computers could bolster a different kind of discourse about humans, programs, and networking that problematizes the concept of the human automata.

Scott Selisker's clear writing creates a sense of surprise and synthesis as he tracks...