All posts by Matt Spitzer

The Camera & Wild Power

In class today, beginning with the two videos of the Mission Playground/District ‘clash’, my group focused on a discussion of an “invasive” technology and its powers. For example, the ‘intruding’ population was a force of tech workers, who butted heads with the pre-existing, long-term residents of the community. Likewise, the growing Patternfolk numbers have a new technology (i.e., telepathy/mind control).

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Hyper-Humanness & Existential Consent

As “I awoke to darkness,” we– meaning, the unnamed character narrator and us, the readers, are both put in an identical situation (1). Custom and social tradition forgotten, Butler lays us in a destroyed world where “I was hungry– starving!– and I was in pain. There was nothing in my world but hunger and pain, no other people, no other time, no other feelings,” (1). Though Shori is not human, her hungers and abilities seem to exaggerate human qualities and needs– Butler “reduces to the absurd” human hungers in order to draw attention to details too small or unremembered that do, in fact, have enormous consequences.

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