Technology the Mediator and Multistability
Reviewing the Technology of the Graphic Novel Black Star
Note: The above voice over is an experiment to see if there is appetite for voice overs of the things I write. Please let me know what you think!
The graphic novel Black Star isn’t one of my favorite pieces of Sci-fi, and it’s not one of my favorite cat and mouse stories either, but it details a few key aspects of technology that are currently on my mind. This narrative ended up being a good of a chance as any to talk about them.
Black Star, as I’ve mentioned, is a story of two astronauts competing for a return flight home on a ship that only holds one. Eric A. Glover, TV writer on the upcoming Star Trek: Star Fleet Academy and the cancelled Tom Swift, of which I may look at another time, wrote Black Star initially as a screenplay, but decided to develop it into a graphic novel instead. Arielle Jovellanos, who has done issue covers for Marvel and has illustrated a number of graphic novels such as Just a Spell (2023), illustrated the graphic novel.
The lead of this story is Dr. Harper North and she is being pursued by the ship’s wilderness survival expert Samantha Parrish. Originally on a quest to collect a specific flower specimen on alien planet, the voyage turns from scientific endeavor into a fight of life and death between the two characters mentioned.
My goal here is not to judge the artistic merit of this graphic novel, though I do appreciate the art style, and the narrative as a whole is solid. As with my previous essay, my goal instead is to look at the technology. The theme that comes to mind when I read Black Star is mediation. Though Dr. North is a technical expert, in this narrative we don’t see her employ her expertise. Instead, we see her in nearly constant communication with Guardian, an AI interface. We see technology play the role of a mediator of experience, rather than an actor itself, through this dynamic.
You can see on pages 5 and 6 the interface used to interact with guardian:
Dr. North wears some kind of extended reality (XR) visor which then visualizes map data of the planet they crash landed on. While guardian is capable of responding accurately to time and distance calculations, what is interesting here is that in some ways what we’ve seen in ChatGPT today is more robust than what is on display in the narrative. ChatGPT can act in the world, the digital world, but still the world. Through the Zapier plug in, it can streamline just about every activity under the sun. Guardian is purely for question and answer prompts. In a way it feels like what ChatGPT was when it was first released; a chat bot. Of course Guardian is more than that. Dr. North, has no reason to doubt any of the information that the Guardian provides her, it is presumed to be 100% accurate as opposed to the disinformation (that some would like to call hallucinations) that ChatGPT generates. While I’m this topic of comparing Guardian to ChatGPT, I want to highlight two ways in which Guardian takes to heart its role as a mediator of experience. The first is in way finding. We see on the following page, that Guardian can incorporate wayfinding, directly into the XR headset Dr. North is wearing.
Also in that page is the second function that I do think we’ll see in more advanced forms of ChatGPT based on integrations, or at least within the ballpark. Dr. North is wounded and doesn’t realize it yet, likely because of the adrenaline still pumping through her veins, but Guardian informs Dr. North that she is injured and should tend to those wounds before proceeding.
Guardian is also able to respond to highly sophisticated queries such as to follow a specific subject that was recorded from multiple camera angles. The features embedded within Guardian, or at least the one we see on display, take seriously, whether it was Eric Glover’s intent to, the idea that technology, and even AI, can serve as positive mediator of our experiences. It can augment what we do in ways that may even end up saving our life. Though this story is one of survival, where only one can survive, we see something somewhat remarkable in how Dr. North uses technology for positive (for her) outcomes.
This brings me to another theme that I would like to highlight: the idea of multistability. A stability within the context of technology refers to a singular meaning of an artifact. Any specific stability of a technology is something that can only be realized through the interpretation of the user. Multistability is then the concept that there are a plurality of meanings, and therefore uses of a technology. I am directly borrowing this from Don Ihde in the book “Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth” which introduces the topic. Before returning to Black Star, though I want to highlight how Manuel Carabantes in his paper “Towards the End of the Designer Fallacy: How the Internet Empowers Designers over Users” extends this idea. Carabantes makes the claim that technologies such as the internet are resolving to some degree (though it can never be fully resolved) what is called the designer fallacy (also from Ihde’s work): the idea that a technology only is what is inscribed to it by its designers. To Carabantes, the internet makes this possible through patching and other such practices that are enabled through connecting to a device. Carabantes makes a great illustration of this example with the difference between the Nintendo 64 (N64) and the PlayStation 3 (PS3). With the N64, based on technology of the time, Nintendo had minimal power to stop the flow of unlicensed peripherals from going into market, despite legal action taken. Fast forward a few decades with the PS3, and you have an example of Sony patching out a feature that allowed 3rd party operating systems to be installed via internet connection. It later found ways to punish users who “jailbroke” their systems.
What does all this have to do with Black Star? There is a device that’s attached to the suit that both Dr. North and Samantha Parrish wear—the suit itself is a kind of device that can sense the health of the wearer. This device is a small metallic looking ring, and is supposed to help resuscitate the wearer in case of cardiac arrest or other such event via an electric shock. Throughout this story the device is used instead to deliberately harm one another to gain a leg up. In one example depicted in the panel below, Dr. North hacks into Parrish’s device and activates the resuscitation. In another, Dr. North removes the device from her suit and learns to trigger it in the water thus amplifying the shock (and later pays the price for introducing this idea).
What is important to me here is not that they use a technology for an unintended purpose, but rather that the designers of the technology have every means to stop this unintended stability (Carabantes would call this an eccentric stability, one that is outside of the designers intent) but decided for one reason or another not to. They could at a moment’s notice, patch Guardian to not allow overrides on someone’s resuscitation device, they could add in additional fail safes to make sure they were not used in water and et cetera. Rather than think of this as mere plot contrivance, which it may be. I want to treat it instead as a sign of a larger philosophy of technology from those in the story who created these suits.
Carabantes was concerned about how technology can steer behavior through these stabilities, much like those flashing police lights on posted speed limits, to guide behavior toward something morally correct, a nudge. At a large scale, the designers of this technology are making a deliberate choice not to nudge on proper usage of this technology, trusting the human agency to do what is most appropriate for their context. I will not make an argument for or against this point of view here, but this to me seems to be the statement this technology is making.
Technology can and does even in the real life, mediate our experiences. We go to certain food places not because we want to per se, but because reviews on Yelp say it is good. Algorithms on insert social media of choice, or on YouTube, mediate what kinds of things you watch, based on what they think you would want to watch. We are living in the world of technology as the mediator. We are seeing more and more signs of technology the actor, from its early days in industrial robotics to fully automated financial transactions not based on simple rules programmed by humans, but based on rules learned that their creators might not even be aware of in deep learning processes. Yet, how these technologies will end up being used, the multistable quality of these technologies, is something that we need to be conscious of. Black Star shows us a positive (given the circumstances) view of what good AI can do even if it doesn’t act in the world, and in doing so showcases (again for better or worse) the creative ways that human beings can use technology for radically different means that what the designer intended.
And to me, this technological creativity should be celebrated.