Human Programming: Brainwashing, Automatons, and American Unfreedom

266 Pages·2016·13.05 MB·English

by  Scott Selisker

Human Programming

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Human Programming
Brainwashing, Automatons, and
American Unfreedom
Scott Selisker

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS
MINNEAPOlIS • lONdON

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Chapter 2 was previously published as “Simply by Reacting? The Sociology
of Race and Invisible Man’s Automata,” American Literature 83, no. 3 (2011):
571– 96. Reprinted by permission of Duke University Press.
Typescript selections from Ralph Ellison’s unpublished “Invisible Man” are
reproduced in chapter 2. Copyright 1951, 2015 by Ralph Ellison. Courtesy of the
Ralph Ellison Papers at the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress;
reprinted by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.
Copyright 2016 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Selisker, Scott, author.
Title: Human programming : brainwashing, automatons, and American unfreedom / Scott
Selisker.
Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015036887 | ISBN 978-0-8166-9987-2 (hc) | ISBN 978-0-8166-9988-9 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: Brainwashing—United States. | Psychological warfare—United States. |
Robots—United States.
Classification: LCC BF633 .S45 2016 | DDC 153.8/530973—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015036887

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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction Enemies of Freedom 1
1 Uniquely American Symptoms: Cold War
Brainwashing and American Exceptionalism 37
2 Anti- institutional Automatons: New Left
Reappropriations of Automatism 69
3 Human Programming: Computation, Emotion,
and the Posthuman Other 99
4 Cult Programming: Extremism, Narrative,
and the Social Science of Cults 125
5 Fundamentalist Automatons: Representing Terrorist
Consciousness in the War on Terror 151
Conclusion Automatism and Agency 179
Notes 189
Index 237

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Acknowledgments
For guidance and rich conversations in the earlier phases of the project,
I thank Jennifer Wicke, Eric Lott, David Golumbia, David Sigler, Erich
Nunn, Walt Hunter, Chris Forster, Wes King, Nathan Ragain, Shaun
Cullen, Gabriel Hankins, and Greg Colomb. For generous pointers, ref-
erences, or questions that had a significant impact on the final text, I
thank Priscilla Wald, Swati Rana, Enda Du¤y, Vaughn Rasberry, Deak
Nabers, Jed Esty, Jennifer S. Rhee, Karim Mattar, and Doug Armato.
And most especially, for their incisive responses to earlier drafts of the
present manuscript, I express my gratitude to Faith Harden, Nathan K.
Hensley, Tim Wientzen, Natalia Cecire, Andrew Griªn, Josh Epstein,
Katie Fitzpatrick, Anne Garland Mahler, Paul Hurh, and Laura Gold-
blatt. For their generous engagements with the manuscript as a whole,
I thank Mark Goble and an anonymous reader for the University of Min-
nesota Press.
On an institutional level, this work was supported by a New Faculty
Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in 2012– 13 and 2013– 14, and I’m grate-
ful to Alan Liu, Rita Raley, and the English department at the Univer-
sity of California, Santa Barbara for hosting me in that fellowship. I’m
also grateful to Larry Evers, Lee Medovoi, and my other colleagues in the

Department of English at the University of Arizona for their generous
support during my transition to that institution. I’m also indebted to the
vii

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viii Acknowledgments
University of Virginia for fellowship support from 2004 to 2010, and
I’m thankful for suggestions from conference audiences at the Modern
Language Association, the American Studies Association, the Society for
Novel Studies, and the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts and
from workshop coparticipants at the Dartmouth Futures of American
Studies Institute and the New England Americanist Collective. Under-
graduate students in my I/Robot course at UCSB and in my Automaton
course at the University of Arizona also helped me to hone the ideas
herein.
My deepest debt of gratitude, in writing this book as in so many other
things, is to Faith Harden.

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introduction
Enemies of Freedom
In November 2001, an American citizen named John Walker Lindh
was taken prisoner by the United States during combat with the Tali-
ban. This “American Taliban” was featured on magazine covers, in
headlines, and in ongoing news coverage across the country well into
2002. The coverage revolved around versions of a single question: how
could a well- o¤ young American become an enemy combatant, fighting
for a group allied with the terrorists behind 9/11? Just over a month
before Lindh’s capture, George W. Bush described the 9/11 hijackers as
“enemies of freedom,” and he issued the well-k nown ulti matum “either
you are with us, or you are with the terrorists” as a strategy for consoli-
dating national sentiment in the face of the 2001 terrorist attacks.1 In the
year of the American flag bumper sticker, Lindh had made a seemingly
impossible choice: he was with the terrorists. In news stories that pur-
ported to help readers understand that decision, shocked friends and
family members frequently wondered aloud how the Taliban “brain-
washed” him.2 The major U.S. newspapers ran series of articles and
commentaries whose coverage of Lindh reached out in several direc-
tions for historical precedents. Interviewees in the Los Angeles Times
included experts such as Philip Zimbardo (then head of the American
Psychological Association and best known for the 1971 Stanford Prison

Experiment) and the families of some of the first Americans to be called
“brainwashed,” the twenty- one POWs who refused to repatriate at the
1

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