Episode 82: Transcript
Episode: 82: The resistance isn’t dead.
Transcription by Keffy
Annalee: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about science fiction, science, and everything else. I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm the author of Four Lost Cities, a new book about archaeology and ancient cities.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:13] I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm the author of a brand new young adult space fantasy called Victories Greater Than Death.
Annalee: [00:00:21] So this week, we're going to be talking about the idea of resistance. How do you tell stories about resistance? And how do you do it accurately. We're going to talk about one particular interesting example of how resistance is talked about in real life history. And then we're going to talk about how science fiction has changed the way we think about resistance over the past 40 or 50 years. So get ready to resist. Here we go.
[00:00:52] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.
Annalee: [00:01:19] Charlie Jane, I really wanted to start this episode by talking about the history of resistance in real life. Because I've taken a deep dive on one particular story recently, I want to talk about the African Burial Ground in New York City.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:34] Oh, wow. So what's the African Burial Ground and what does this story have to do with resistance?
Annalee: [00:01:40] So I was working on a story about archaeology and science, which, as you know, I'm pretty interested in, and I came across a bunch of papers about how scientists and anthropologists had been studying human remains at the African Burial Ground in New York City. And for those of you who don't know, this is a national monument in the United States. It's in Manhattan and kind of nearish to the downtown area. And what happened was, in the early 1990s, the federal government was breaking ground for a new building right next to some other courthouses and other government buildings in the city. And they discovered some coffins. And this isn't particularly unusual. You know, sometimes when you're breaking ground, in an old city, you find stuff. But the more they dug, the more they realized that this was a huge burial ground that they'd uncovered and they had no idea what it was.
[00:02:44] So they brought in some historians and quickly realized by consulting old maps, that they'd come across an African Burial Ground that had been used, basically, throughout the entire 18th century. So really, most of it was used before the United States even became an independent nation. And this would have been a burial ground for Africans who had been enslaved by early white settlers in the United States.
[00:03:15] So once they realized that, work was halted on the excavation project that had been going on, and a group of anthropologists were called in from Howard University and some other universities to kind of take over and do some rescue archaeology and figure out what it was.
[00:03:33] Michael Blakey, who at the time, was an anthropologist at Howard, and now he's that William & Mary University, he headed up the project. And they quickly found about 400 human remains that they excavated. They estimate that there's about 15,000 people buried there, but they've left those human remains in place. And now the site, not only is it a national monument, it has a wonderful historical center there, you can visit, you can learn about the site. But in the ‘90s, it was all very new and there was a lot of discussion around what it meant about New York history, about US history, and most importantly, what it meant about African American history.
[00:04:18] And first of all, people in the ‘90s had to suddenly wrap their minds around the idea that enslaved people had built northern cities, because one of the earliest findings to come out of this was that these were people who were obviously working. Their bones showed signs of really intense physical labor, injuries that were consistent with lifting and carrying and doing very difficult things that are involved in building a new city.
[00:04:47] And the other thing was that when I talked to Michael Blakey, because I got so fascinated by this, that I called him up and, and asked him about the history of this excavation. He said that the most Important thing wasn't so much the science that they did, using these human remains, which they did. And I want to get to because they used a lot of cutting-edge science to figure out where these people had come from and what their lives were like. But he said, it was one of the first times when the descendant community of African Americans were able to participate in asking questions about what these people's lives were like.
[00:05:26] Typically, what would happen when you would have a finding like this is that a bunch of anthropologists and archaeologists would come in, they'd be mostly white, and they would set the terms. They'd say, well, we want to know X, Y, and Z about these people. In this case, Blakey and his colleagues consulted with an African American community that were the descendants of these people and said, well, what do you guys want to know? And one of the things that I thought was so interesting was that they wanted to know how these people had resisted enslavement. And to me, that was one of the most fascinating questions I'd heard. It's not the kind of thing that archaeologists usually ask. And it's an incredibly important question.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:09] So what can you learn about these people's resistance by studying the remains? And what did Blakey tell you about that?
Annalee: [00:06:16] So first of all, Blakey told me that we should always assume that enslaved people are resisting. And this isn't just because we have historical documentation of multiple slave uprisings during the 18th century, during the time when this African Burial Ground was being used. But even more simply, because these Africans who were brought to the United States are human beings. Yeah, they're enslaved human beings, but they still have agency. They are going to resist, because they're human. And here's what he had to say. And I apologize, there's a lot of background noise in this clip, but you can still hear Blakey,
Michael Blakey: [00:06:57] That resistance was constant. And in so many different ways, Sort of every day in every possible way. Africans were resisting, because they're human beings. They weren't chattel, which is based on the word cattle. They weren't domesticated animals. They were human beings and so they resist.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:23] So he spent a lot of times studying these remains and learning about them through science and through just observation, and how do you see resistance by looking at these people who've been dead for centuries?
Annalee: [00:07:35] That was my first question to Blakey. Once he told me that I was very compelled by this idea that we could see resistance. I said, well, so is everything resistance? Is the entire graveyard a sign of resistance, because these are people who are continuing their cultural traditions in burials. And he said, Look, not everything is an act of resistance, of course. But there's certain patterns that they see in the burials that suggests very strongly that the African community of enslaved people in New York City during the 18th century, were resisting enslavement, and not just by fighting back physically, but by holding on to their relationship to Africa and to African traditions, and making that a part of their lives and refusing to become assimilated into a white culture that was enslaving them.
[00:08:33] And so there's two super interesting examples of this. The first example comes from the teeth of the people who are buried in this burial ground. And teeth are really important, because if you're an archaeologist who wants to find out about where someone came from, there are chemical analyses that you can do on tooth enamel, that let you see what kinds of chemicals people were exposed to as children. Because your tooth enamel, it's kind of like tree rings, you gain layers of tooth enamel over time. And so if you're drinking water from a certain place when you're a kid, or if you're exposed to certain kinds of metals when you're a kid that gets lodged in your enamel. Hundreds of years later, a scientist can kind of scrape off a tiny, thin layer of that enamel, and basically see those tooth rings and see different kinds of exposures.
[00:09:33] And when I say exposures to chemicals, I don't mean like nasty industrial chemicals. I mean, like literally any substance. It could be water, it could be food, it could be carbon. And there's a lot of different chemical signatures that scientists look for to try to figure out human origins. And one of the first things that they found when they examined people's teeth, was that people who were born in the United States, or what would become the United States had an incredibly high lead content in their teeth from when they were kids. And that's because people in the Americas who came from Europe just used lead constantly. They had pewter dishes that they ate off of. They used lead in pipes.
[00:10:18] Oftentimes, people who drank rum had a really high content of lead in their teeth, because rum would be stored in containers that had lead in it or it would be treated with water, it would be made with water that had gone through lead pipes. So basically, anyone, regardless of where they're from, Europe, or Africa, who is living in the Americas, at this time, has a lot of lead in their teeth. So they could immediately figure out who in that graveyard had been born in the US, because of the lead content in their teeth. Because people in Africa, who grown up in Africa, certainly they had, these were very sophisticated cultures that worked with metal, they just didn't work with lead, they worked with lots of other kinds of metals. So you just didn't see it in in the African cultures that were the sources for enslaved people in the States.
[00:11:07] So they were able to learn that. But what they also learned was that people who were born in Africa, not surprisingly, tended to have filed teeth. This was just a tradition and a fashion and aesthetic, in a lot of the areas that were sources for enslaved people where people just decorated their teeth, and in all different kinds of ways. But you can see very easily that the teeth have been shaped or filed or decorated. So again, that was another sign of who had come from Africa, and who had been born in the States.
[00:11:43] And so here's the question about resistance that's super interesting. What we see is that people who are born in the states almost never file their teeth. And you would think if you were looking at this graveyard, and considering how cultures change over time, you might think, oh, well, they stopped shaving their teeth, because they assimilated. They became part of European culture, and they lost that aspect of their African identity.
[00:12:11] Nope, that's not true. The reason why people stopped filing their teeth was because it was used as a way to identify runaway enslaved people on wanted posters. They would say, oh, this person has this very specific design on their teeth. And so people who were enslaved in the states quickly learned that if you continue this tradition of shaving your teeth, of filing them down, it makes you more identifiable to slave catchers. So that's an example of resistance, seeing the way that people really quickly stopped filing the teeth of their children to reflect their culture was a way of protecting the community and protecting their culture.
[00:12:57] So I love that that allowed him to and his colleagues to figure out where people had come from, but also how they resisted this horrific system that chased people down who’d escaped from their enslavement.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:12] But there were also enslaved people who were filing their teeth, even though they're born in the United States, or what became the United States?
Annalee: [00:13:17] There were very few. But there is one example. And this man actually is at the heart of one of the biggest controversies around the African Burial Ground. This is the famous, to archaeology nerds, the famous burial 101. And this is a man who died probably in his mid-30s and the lead content in his teeth suggests he was almost certainly born in the United States, or at least was an infant in the United States, and his teeth are filed. And he was also buried in a coffin that was decorated with tacks, which I should say is very common. People often in the colonies, in the States would put the year of death on someone's coffin lid using tacks. Or sometimes they would leave the name of the family on the coffin. So this was a common way to decorate a wooden coffin.
[00:14:17] But in this case, it was not these typical kind of European designs. Instead, there's this design in the coffin in these tacks that looks, it looks a little bit like a heart, with big swirly shapes around it. And when archaeologists looked at it, they were like, okay, first of all, this is really special because we don't usually find coffins that have tacks in them that show anything. And second of all, this design looks so much like a design called a sankofa, which is one of many kinds of symbols that's used by the Akan people in Ghana, and on the Ivory Coast, and it's a symbol that's used in burial shrouds, and it's it's supposed to be a symbol that is about looking to the past in order to understand the future. It's used a lot in kind of mourning ceremonies. And it makes perfect sense that someone who was an African person who had been enslaved in New York might have roots in the Akan culture.
[00:15:25] And so Blakey and his colleagues were like, this is amazing we've actually found this beautiful example of how African culture persisted in New York's African American community, they wrote about it, and they, they talked about it a lot. And it became, in fact, when you visit the African Burial Ground in New York City, which I hope you will when the pandemic is over, there's a beautiful etching of a sankofa there at the visitor center, talking about its importance and how it was found on burial 101.
[00:16:00] So, this is considered to be kind of an open and shut case of how people continue to resist domination by whites by kind of treasuring their traditional cultures. But in 2010, right, when New York City was about to open up the burial ground as a national monument, a scholar named Erik Seeman, wrote this incredibly blistering critique of the idea that this was a sankofa. And he basically felt like, everyone involved in the project around the African Burial Ground had been radically misinterpreting what they found, because he believed, and I'm gonna quote from him, he said, “They have too readily attributed cultural practices to African antecedents, without convincing documentary or archaeological evidence.”
[00:17:05] So basically, he's saying, you know what, this is not African stuff, you guys are just leaping to conclusions, because that's what you want to find. And implicitly, he's saying they want to find it, because they're Black. I should say that Erik Seeman is white. But he's a historian who's very knowledgeable about the history of colonialism in the US. And so what he says in his paper is that it would have been customary for masters to supply coffins for their slaves. And he goes on to say, “It would have been his master’s decision to pay extra for the tacks on the lid.” And so instead of saying that there's evidence of this connection to Africa, Seeman is saying, mo, no, no, this wasn't enslaved people who chose this image. This was the master who chose this image. And not only that, but we see examples of Europeans buried in coffins around this time throughout New England that have heart shapes on the lid. So obviously, he says, this is a European thing. And it's a European image that's being imposed on this burial of someone who is from Africa.
[00:18:22] And in addition, he says that we have no evidence of sankofa symbols being used in Africa during the 18th century. And he bolsters his quote unquote, “evidence,” Seeman does, by saying that the way we know that is because in the British Museum, we have no examples of sankofa symbols before 1817. So if the British didn't know about it, it probably didn't exist in Africa, is basically what he's saying. So this is Seeman’s evidence. And, you know, it really rests on this idea that, that there is no resistance here that this is not a symbol of connection to Africa, a symbol of resistance, but instead, it's something that a master imposed on his enslaved people.
Charlie Jane: [00:19:09] I feel like, first of all, the idea that like, they could only have gotten the tacks from the enslaver, that the enslaver had to supply the tacks, whereas these are people that we know were working on building that they were working on building sites and building a city. And you know, who's to say that some tacks didn't go missing, here and there through the building sites? Or who's to say that they didn't just say, hey, we want to bury our friend, and can we do it however we want? And you know, and the enslaver was like, fine, I don't care. Like there's a bunch of—I can think of 100 different ways that that this could have been a decision that was left up to or taken control of by the enslaved people. But basically, at its roots, I feel like this gets down to this debate that's been going on for decades about like, how totalizing a system of slavery was. Like, whether slavery just completely eradicated all of your cultural traditions. Whether slavery basically took away all of your humanity, all of your ability to control your own circumstances, or whether you could still be a person and be enslaved. And is that basically what the root of this question is? How totalizing was slavery?
Annalee: [00:20:14] I think that's right. And Blakey told me that this is a really common theme, especially among white anthropologists who really want to foreground the importance of white people over the humanity of Black people in these situations. And here's what he said, and again, apologies for the background noise.
Michael Blakey: [00:20:31] So that if you tell a story, the story of the past, without resistance, white virtue is elevated. But the humanity of Africans is marginalized.
Annalee: [00:20:43] So the idea that this sankofa symbol is somehow from European traditions, or that it could only have been put there by a master is basically a way of dehumanizing enslaved people. And in that sense, it's a way of taking away their resistance. It's saying, no, no, no, they couldn't resist, even though we know there were multiple slave uprisings in the 18th century and beyond. Even though we know that slaves continued to resist, and this is attested in the literature, and of course, out of the mouths of former slaves themselves. And yet, Erik Seeman and other anthropologists like him are saying, no, no, no, it had to have been the master’s culture that we're seeing here in this graveyard. It can't possibly be African.
[00:21:33] And the funny thing is, Seeman and other archaeologists and anthropologists like him don't seem to consider the possibility of appropriation. Where, looking at, because his evidence is like, oh, but we see all these Europeans putting hearts on their coffins. And it's like, well, we only see that happening in the Americas, where there are enslaved Africans. And this is kind of the whole history of the US is, white oppressors stealing the culture of either enslaved or marginalized African Americans. And why wouldn't they have been doing that in the 18th century too? Maybe they saw the pattern, and they were like, wow, that's, that's really beautiful and cool. Why don't we use that on our coffins?
[00:22:18] So I just think it's funny that, you know, somehow, when this white anthropologist looks at this, all he can think is like, this must be white culture, instead of this must be white culture, stealing from Black culture as usual.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:32] Yeah. And we know that Cotton Mather, the famous kind of Calvinist preacher, learned about inoculation from an enslaved person, and who had learned the practice in Africa and spread it throughout Boston. So we know that, at this time, white people were learning from enslaved people and taking their traditions and basically repurposing them, like white people do.
Annalee: [00:22:54] Mm hmm. Yep, it's true. And I wanted to just conclude by talking about the fact that one of the really cool things that came out of all of these excavations at the African Burial Ground other than just this beautiful Visitor's Center, and this place that you can visit, and indeed, they did not end up building that government building there. And they've kept the people buried there intact. They also did DNA analysis on a lot of these skeletons. So they weren't just looking at the teeth and doing what's called isotope analysis on the teeth. They were also looking at genetic ancestry. And they uncovered some things, nothing that is too shocking. It's a lot of people from West Africa and that kind of thing. Stuff that we already know now, because of the fact that the African Burial Ground actually popularized the use of DNA testing in the African American community. Alondra Nelson, who is an amazing academic, she writes about this in her book, The Social Life of DNA, which I highly recommend. She talks about Michael Blakey, and his work at African Burial Ground. And then she goes on to talk about how it becomes part of this whole movement to sequence the DNA of descendant populations. And, of course, the 1990s and ‘00s are also the period when Henry Louis Gates has his show, Finding Your Roots, which is all about doing DNA tests on people like Oprah, so that they can learn about where they came from. And it was a really fantastic kind of moment of science and culture coming together to help the United States as a whole acknowledge the role that enslaved Africans had played in our national history.
[00:24:34] And it kind of comes back to resistance again, because one of the things that Blakey said to me about DNA tests was that before their work in the African Burial Ground became popular, and became widely known when people, mostly white anthropologists, were asking questions about the DNA of African American he said mostly they wanted to know about something called admixture. And admixture is just a way of talking about mixing between populations. And so, before this, the big question that archaeologists and anthropologists had was, basically how much white is in these African American populations? We want to know about the mixture, we want to know about, again, the same question how much of whiteness has crushed the Africanness of these people. And then when Blakey and his team came along, they started saying, how much of this is African? Where in Africa? Where were these people coming from? When were they coming here from Africa? What makes them connected to an African tradition?
[00:25:49] And again, it's about centering that kind of resistance. And I think the fact that we're still having this debate over the history over whether it's more important to look at the Africanness, and the resistance in this community, or to look at the admixture and the ways that whiteness constrained this community. These are the kinds of questions that we ask anytime we tell a story. And if the story is about real history, it has a certain kind of weight. But when we look at that same kind of storytelling in the realm of fiction, often the same kinds of questions get raised. When we're thinking about resistance in science fiction, which we're going to talk about in a second, it's really, I think, nice to have the story of the African Burial Ground in the background. And thinking about how we understand resistance, how complicated resistance is, and how certain kinds of storytelling are designed to make us think that there was no resistance, when in fact, there really was resistance. Because you know why? People resist. All human beings resist. And I think that's the biggest lesson here, is that it's so easy to erase that and to forget that resistance is a part of every community that has been oppressed.
Charlie Jane: [00:27:13] And it's a form of oppression after the fact, the idea that we’re going to simplify history down to these people were on the top, and these people were on the bottom. And this never was in question.
Annalee: [00:27:22] That's right. And that because there are people on top, everything that we find is about them. Even when we find an African Burial Ground, somehow, it all becomes about white people and it all becomes about the symbols that are from white people, instead of looking for ways that those symbols are, in fact, not about the white oppressors, but are in fact about the enslaved Africans, and how they pushed back in every way that they could. If they couldn't fight back with violence, they fought back with culture. And that's what we see in this burial ground.
[00:27:59] Alright, so let's take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to talk a little bit about how this fits into science fiction storytelling.
[00:28:05] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.
Annalee: [00:28:19] So I'm really interested in talking about the history of how resistance is represented in science fiction over the past, let's say 40-ish years or so. Just as an arbitrary divider, let's start by thinking about how resistance is represented kind of in the 1970s and ‘80s. And how that's really different. Or maybe not so different from what we're seeing today.
[00:28:46] I wanted to start by asking you, Charlie Jane, about some examples of resistance in science fiction, kind of in the ‘70s, early ‘80s period.
Charlie Jane: [00:28:57] Yeah, I mean, obviously, one story that looms really large when we're talking about resistance is Star Wars, and—
Annalee: [00:29:04] Literally about the resistance.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:05] It’s literally about the rebellion against an evil Galactic Empire. And it takes until Rogue One before I feel like you really have a Star Wars movie that explicitly states that it's about resistance and about hope as like a form of resistance against tyranny. Those things are really foregrounded in Rogue One, but they're present in the original Star Wars.
[00:29:28] And it's a post-Vietnam war story, very explicitly, and I think that two things are interesting about that. One is that you had… space opera before that was very much about galactic empires are generally pretty good and awesome, and we loved galactic empires, and you have like, Foundation, which is all about like, but how can we keep the galactic empire going longer? We need more galactic empire. And there was a lot of that kind of, well, of course, we want galactic empires because that's awesome. And it went hand in hand with this colonialist kind of, we're going across space, and we're bringing civilization to the stars. And we're like encountering all these alien species and showing them our human values and they're gonna be like, whoo, that's so great.
[00:30:15] So I think Star Wars represents a break from that. But also the other thing about Star Wars that I really think about is, previously, George Lucas had made THX-1138.
Annalee: [00:30:24] Yep.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:24] Which is like your classic sci fi dystopia and it's the same era as Logan's Run. Really, if you think about resistance and sci fi before about the mid-‘70s. It's post-apocalyptic, dystopian storytelling of the kind that kind of came back into vogue about 10-15 years ago. But early ‘70s, was all these like dystopias where it's like one individual has been crushed by a dystopian regime. It's very Orwellian, very Huxleian and Logan's Run and THX-1138 are in this classic mode of this kind of shiny, white, everything is very white, all the surfaces are white.
Annalee: [00:31:00] And most of the people are white, too.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:02] Well, most of the people are also white, yes. And there's one individual who maybe has had their head shaved, I don't know. And they were wearing pajamas. And they have to fight against this crushing dystopia. And then Lucas made American Graffiti, a movie that I've never seen, but I assume is also very dystopian, because it's about graffiti. And I don't know, it's a dystopian film, we’re just going to—
Annalee: [00:31:22] Also, about white people.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:23] It's also about white people. And so you have this transition from the individual facing this giant faceless crushing dystopia, versus a band of people who have cool spaceships and awesome outfits, who are going out and blowing stuff up. And shooting lasers, and around the same time as Star Wars, and I think independently of Star Wars, I don't think it came about as an imitation of Star Wars. You have the British show Blake's Seven, which is incredibly close to my heart, which similarly takes basically the view of what if the Federation from Star Trek was evil, and we had to destroy it, and there was a group of freedom fighters going in an awesome spaceship, shooting at stuff and blowing things up and going, pew, pew, pew. And instead of just being like, I'm being crushed. I'm… My humanity is being destroyed by this dystopia, it's like, nope, I'm out there blowing stuff up and having fun.
[00:32:18] And I feel like that plus, I'm just gonna rope in the rise of cyberpunk, which was really late ‘70s, early ‘80s, which was also heroic hackers who were kind of often in a corporate kind of dystopia, but they were out there fighting back and doing awesome stuff. And you have heroes who are more active and more effective, I would say, then these dystopian heroes of the early ‘70s, who often were kind of mopey. You know, there's a certain mopiness.
Annalee: [00:32:49] Yeah. It's funny, because as you were saying that and kind of roping in cyberpunk, which I think is right, is that the difference between something like THX-1138, or 1984, or Logan's Run, which you mentioned, which is, of course, based on a 1960s novel. Is that all of those movies and books are about people who failed to resist. Because in THX-1138, and also in 1984, of course, our protagonist is destroyed and gives up.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:21] Spoiler alert!
Annalee: [00:33:21] Yeah, spoiler alert. And so resistance is, as they say, in the Borg, resistance is futile. Because while we see a resistance represented, it's just impossible. And maybe that's partly because the individual is not the right unit of resistance. You need to have a gang, a band, a squad to have successful resistance. I think cyberpunk is interesting because especially if you think about the classic cyberpunk novels like Neuromancer, and William Gibson's work more generally, they are often about an individual who's been kind of beaten down and is trying to resist, but those individuals always wind up finding a kind of ragtag band of rebels who can help them. And you know, they sometimes help in trickster ways. They sometimes aren't so much trying to save the world as pull off a caper. But the point is that they aren't just these rugged individuals. They're part of a group, a group of resistors, a group of pranksters.
[00:34:32] But the other thing about cyberpunk that's so freakin’ interesting is that it's a genre, unlike space opera, cyberpunk is kind of born in the late ‘70s. So we can see how it has evolved since then, all the way up into the present and how it's really changed. Because in the early days of cyberpunk, you have things like Blade Runner, which is kind of a companion piece to Neuromancer, in a lot of ways, although they were not aware of each other at the time that people were writing them, and they're very dark. They do involve AI, but the AI are either kind of unknowable or incomprehensible or kind of weird and objectified.
[00:35:17] And then you get like, The Matrix era of cyberpunk, where you start to have an even more technological world. I mean, everyone is in cyberspace in The Matrix, as opposed to just a few people jacking into cyberspace in Neuromancer, and there is a successful resistance there. But again, the AIs are kind of the bad guys. They're unknowable. They're sort of on our side sometimes, but mostly not.
[00:35:47] And then in the modern era, you get a very different notion of cyberpunk, you get stuff like Maka Older’s novels, in the Infomacracy series—the Sentinel series, which start with Infomacracy. So those are much more focused on people dealing with the political implications of kind of a cyberpunk world. But then you get stuff like Westworld or Person of Interest, where we start to see the AI being humanized. And then you get books like the Murder Bot series, you get movies like Her and Ex Machina. You get Ted Chiang's amazing story, The Lifecycle of Software Objects. You get Becky Chambers work, especially in the novel, A Closed and Common Orbit. And I think Murder Bot is the best example, in a way.
[00:36:39] All of these have really sympathetic AI characters. And they're not like the machines in The Matrix. They're not oppressing us as humans, they're being oppressed. And so it's this amazing shift in cyberpunk from the AI being this kind of cool, removed, potentially superior being, to being basically the new enslaved class of being who need to resist and rebel.
[00:37:08] So I just find that so interesting. And I also think another great place to look at this is in the transformation of Battlestar Galactica, which, of course, is a ‘70s show, and then later becomes a show in the early 21st century that's totally reimagined.
Charlie Jane: [00:37:24] Thinking also about The Terminator series where the first terminator movie, The Terminator, is just like evil robot from the future part of these scary robot army that's created by these AIs that is oppressing humanity in the future. And there's a resistance similar to other stuff we've talked about. There are people, there humans who are fighting back, and it's very cut and dried humans vs. robots. That's the original Terminator. And then, by the time of Terminator 2, we're starting to actually see that terminators can be allies, that they can actually grow and change. And there's that amazing moment halfway through Terminator 2, where they change Arnold Schwarzenegger’s brain from read only to read and write access. And after that he's able to grow and change. And the terminator of the Sarah Connor Chronicles series goes a lot further with exploring the potential humanity of these cyborgs. And I think that that's like this shift that happens, where we start to get a more complicated view of resistance and alliance. And the idea that we can have allies and the idea that enslaving artificial intelligences is bad, and that they should fight for freedom, too.
Charlie Jane: [00:38:29] Yeah, I think that this is where a lot of these stories, especially in the United States, around resistance really do come back to an awareness or sometimes a lack of awareness about how enslaved people fit into any civilization, really, but our history and our future. And I think you're so right, that a lot of this shift in the AI characters, is about going from focusing on basically the people who oppress the AI, the people who enslave the AI, to the AI, who are saying, um, you know? Being enslaved actually is really terrible. And I feel like the earlier stories about AI, the only way that they imagine resistance is if the AI rise up and start oppressing humans and start murdering humans. And so not only are the AI kind of demonized and othered, but their forms of resistance are represented as horrific, right, as civilization destroying. Whereas in these later stories, including the later Terminator stories, the resistance is complicated and it involves alliances with humans and it involves trying to rethink the relationship between humans and AI.
[00:39:51] And it's in a weird way more realistic, even though of course, we're talking about a bunch of fantasies basically. About how AI would be if we had hard AI, or if we had general AI. But I think it is… I think it is a shift in our understanding of what it means to resist and a shift in our sympathies toward people who've resisted. And then we’re kind of projecting that into our science fiction stories.
[00:40:19] I'm wondering, do you have a sense of what's causing some of these shifts in the way we're telling cyberpunk stories and the way we're telling resistance stories. What’s been changing culturally between the ‘70s and now that might be making us tell new kinds of stories about resistance?
Charlie Jane: [00:40:39] I think in part, it is a diversification of the type of people who are allowed to tell these stories.
Annalee: [00:40:45] Yes.
Charlie Jane: [00:40:45] And it's no coincidence that we start to see more women and BIPOC people and queer people and disabled people getting to be part of telling these stories about resistance and thinking about resistance in different ways. It's also just, the longer a genre, or a sub-genre goes on, which I would say that cyberpunk and the kind of space opera that starts with Star Wars are two kind of relatively new genres, to the extent that they’re new. I think the longer they go on, the more you want to complicate them and the more you want to find kind of the nuance, rather than the kind of simplistic, these are the good guys. These are the bad guys version of the story. But I think a lot of it does have to do with just having more voices in the mix. What do you think, Annalee?
Annalee: [00:41:26] At the risk of just repeating myself, I think a lot of it does have to do with people in the United States who are telling these stories, having a better understanding of our own history as a nation, and understanding what it means to be enslaved and actually hearing from descendant communities, people who are descended from people who were enslaved. And that that changes the way we tell stories about oppression. The more we understand how oppression actually works in real life, the more that our stories are going to reflect that. And telling a story of oppression from only one point of view is always going to be inaccurate. It's not going to get at the complexity. Yeah, I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that it's not just white people telling these stories anymore.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:22] Yeah, I mean, I guess my final thought is that, coming back to Star Wars, the thing that Star Wars has yet to grapple with is the enslavement of droids. Which is a thing that we could talk about, we could do a whole episode about that. The movie Solo was actually deeply upsetting and a lot of levels because the enslavement of droids is finally talked about, but it's treated as kind of a joke and the droids try to rise up, win their own freedom, and that's also kind of played for laughs. And it's like, this isn't funny, you guys. This is not a funny topic.
Annalee: [00:42:52] Yeah. And I think that that came up again in the Mandalorian, where we have this droid who is a former murder droid who becomes a nanny droid, which I frickin’ love. I think we all loved that character. Basically, does this kind of classic bullshit thing of sacrificing his life for the living creatures, for the non-droids. Which, this is like, one of those shitty tropes of basically Black people sacrificing themselves for white people, that goes back forever. And it definitely made a lot of us mad and uncomfortable to see that happening with our favorite droid character and to see these tropes about descendant communities from enslaved people just being replicated in the story about a droid.
[00:43:45] So I think, yes, I would love to see Star Wars finally frickin’ deal with this and take it seriously. Because, yeah, you can say, sure, Star Wars is just a space fantasy, but it's also a really powerful story about resistance. And I think that people in real life look to it as a balm in times of oppression. And let's take that seriously and realize that it actually matters if you treat your droids’ resistance as a joke. It actually sends a really fucked up message.
[00:44:20] Alright, I guess that's a good place to end then.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:24] Droid liberation!
Annalee: [00:44:23] Droid liberation. And if you're going to be writing about issues around oppression and resistance, or if you're going to be watching a lot of stories about it, it helps to know the real life history of how that unfolded in the United States and in other places, too.
[00:44:43] So you've been listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. You can find us anywhere find podcasts are purveyed. Please do leave us a review on Apple Podcasts because it helps people find us and we just like to read through those reviews. Sometimes late at night when we're feeling sad, we just want to check out our reviews and it's always nice if the reviews don't say things like, “I like chocolate” or like, “Popcorn is tasty.” We like a good solid review. You can also find us on Patreon, we’re at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. If you support us, you can get all kinds of goodies like we give you audio extras, we give you excerpts from our upcoming work. And we ask you silly questions. And you can find us on Twitter at @OOACpod. Thank you so much to our producer, Veronica Simonetti, and thanks to Chris Palmer for the music and we'll be back in your ears in two weeks.
[00:45:45] Bye!
Charlie Jane: [00:45:45] Bye!
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