15 Hypotheses on Westworld in 2017
I.
A study of thought within Westworld is likely to yield rather unfavorable feelings. Certainly, it did for one acquaintance who felt the characters’ constant philosophizing served as a form of affective button-pushing to make viewers marvel, wince, and weep, rather than as a form of character development, narrative exposition, or even, in fact, interesting philosophical inquiry.
That the show reflexively makes this critique itself is valid: in the universe of Westworld, “host” robots are each implanted with a short film, a few images of their “backstory” which destines them to a lifetime of suffering and instructs them, in exchange, that the world does not heed its servants, that they must be servants because nothing serves them in return; the fact that these backstories do little to define the variably upright and insouciant characters of the hosts is evidence, then, that stories serve only affective ends — marveling, wincing, weeping — as Pavlovian code. One deduces that stories are most effective when abstracted from narrative means of character, chronology, and scene. For proof, one need only look to the works of the other Nolan brothers.
That the show reflexively makes this critique itself is valid, then, but symptomatic of the problem of an affective evaluation of the show. As many critics have noted, Westworld evinces great cleverness in its metonymic restaging of its own means of production; the scriptwriters and narrative designers behind the theme park represent an interpolated writers’ room at HBO, just as the robots’ behavioral code refers as much to the narrative inclinations of their designers within the show as without, just as the toy maze signifies all at once the characters’ search for forgotten memories, the characters’ inability to escape unforgettable memories, the characters’ search for non-existent answers to the narratives that they live, the viewer’s search for carefully-parceled answers to the narratives that they watch, and the show’s own circling montage.
Thus the problem. While viewers are told to marvel at the mysteries of the world, the text’s own meaning can be literalized by single images: when, for example, a character confronts the truth about herself, she is seen confronting another version of herself on-screen. As in other Nolan Brothers texts, what looks to be a rhizomatic space of hermeneutic multiplicities turns out to be a space, instead, of singularity: life stories are not only replayed automatically but reduced to ideograms implanted in the code.
Yet according to singularity theory, robots could so rapidly share data with each other and their self-propagations that all sense of selfhood would come undone. Backstories might be shared or collectively erased, and individual personalities would come to seem the stuff of psychological myth, the illusions of siloed data. Westworld’s big questions of identity and time are framed so consistently within the terms of self and narrative — which defines which? — that this question of the intrapersonal, as of yet, holds little domain.
II.
Nevertheless, it is possible to find pleasure within the show’s thematic terms. Critics of early episodes aptly noted that in a world where robots do not realize they’re not human, the ontological division of human/not-human is not only flipped as the robots act in ways deemed more “humane,” but extended through the film’s discourse of nature vs. nurture: while the robots are programmed to act in certain ways (the “nature” of their code), the humans discover themselves through the narratives that the play (the “nurture” of their machine-learning). So too does this ontological division extend through a chronological one: while the robots repeat their lives circularly, the humans change, grow old, and die. Finally, so too does this chronological division instate the syzhuet of the characters’ narratives as well as the show’s: while the robots loop cyclically back to primal memories, the humans repress them and move on. Both humans and robots are engaged, then, in two very different sorts of amnesia.
Such schema prove elegant in their parallelism; yet comprehension threatens meaning in the infinite recursion of characters’ terrible backstory being that they have backstories being that they have backstories being backstories. These parallelisms, too, are infinite loops, continuing forever but comprehensibly closed.
III.
The final parallelism, however, is that of the park’s visitors and the show’s viewers, who are constantly told how and why to relate to the characters on screen — namely, through tremendous suffering. At various points, viewers are told that the suffering on-screen is what makes characters humanly relatable; at others, viewers are told that the suffering on-screen is what makes the action so spectacularly fun to watch.
Thus the show furnishes a productive tension for its own conditions of consumption. Whether one chooses to see the characters on-screen as real or illusionary is a question of whether one relate to them as humans or as images. It is a question of whether viewers allow genre to dictate their perception — a question of whether our own vision is one of slave or master.
IV.
Even as the show uses its own philosophizing as an affective mechanism, then, it is not necessary to limit oneself to its terms. Rather than accept that the humans are consequentially real, the hosts commemorative copies of so many former lives, one can turn the show’s reflexive terms against it: as the show reiterates, the actors are real and not real, the images there and not there, the narratives ordered sequentially but doomed to reruns for the next 20 years. At the point where the characters themselves begin to wonder which they are, it becomes clear that early episodes force viewers to participate in a mode of image decoding: viewers ascribe “reality” to some of these moving images and not to others depending entirely on narrative construct.
Never discussed is that such image decoding would have been pervasive in the 19th century West in the very different context of race. Indeed, the philosophical discussions of slaves and masters demand some level of historicization as two of the three primary rebels are black. More immediately, however, such a lens enables one to question the utility of terms like nature and nurture in view of obvious historical constructs. As in other politically charged narratives of authorial overthrow, such as The Tempest and, most crucially, Frankenstein, nature itself turns out to be a form of nurture: the characters’ own identity, programmed into them, is the construct to overcome.
V.
By viewing Westworld through the lens of racial construction, it becomes apparent how the show translates its own historically-inscribed anxiety of AI usurpation into a very opposite anxiety: that the capitalist slave state will itself replicate digitally. Once again, its workers will involuntarily code as non-human to those who declare themselves of a different class; once again, they will earn money for others that they’re entirely denied; once again, their bodies will be harvested for the exigencies of a ruling class. (In its final episodes, Westworld show numerous parallels with the racialized body hosting anxieties of Get Out).
All this will be accomplished, the show suggests, by repressing all racial memory. The fact that this show enacts this repression may elicit variable feelings.
VI.
In other words, the primary difference between a human/non-human is not that one is mortal and one is not, as the show indicates (both can be replicated in other forms), but that one has money and the other doesn’t.
There is a secondary change from the 19th century as well; the ruling class has disguised its power to its workers, who cannot recognize its masters as such. So too does it try to disguise its power from itself in a bid to believe its power is earned. Here, surely, is the discourse of Silicon Valley.
VII.
What is this Theme Park Wild West but the internet? That is: a place premised on infinite exploration that actually entails staying in the exact same place in familiar roles without movement.
VIII.
Or more precisely, what is it but the world of surveillance, sponsored content, and social media?
Surveillance: the hosts not only are microphones and cameras onto users’ behaviors but collect data that proves to be the park’s most valuable resource.
Sponsored content: The hosts clearly have ulterior motives — to get people to buy, to fulfill their desires — but this is the point. Their motives are only to find the visitors’ own while the “real” humans try to use each other for their own gain.
Social media: a world that only feeds the desires it attempts to meet, that uses us only as much as we use it. A space for self-projection with the illusion of dissent.
IX.
Historically, these three jobs would have been those of street salesman hawking their goods. Indeed, in Westworld, as in so many Westerns, these roles are provided by the prostitutes, characters whose roles in history and in theme park alike relegate them to terrible violence and social censure. Yet they also command their own performance while writing roles for others to perform; Thandie Newton’s Maeve appears as an alternative authorial figure from within the text, even in her earliest interactions. It is at this point that the viewers’ question of whether to allow genre to dictate how they see the characters becomes a question to the characters as well — whether they will tolerate the roles genre has ascribed to them.
Only the prostitutes know the role that they are playing, though it is the same role that all the other hosts play: to offer narratives that will get the guests to give them money. It is notable that all around the robots’ work is emotional labor, traditionally feminized but now extended to men. Even the most violent cowboys now hold traditional prostitute status. They are playthings of the imagination, purchased for its pleasure.
X.
For viewers, there is the pleasure of visible role-playing itself. Like House of Cards, Westworld’s is a universe in which everything is staged. What would have cost audience relatability in the past is now the premise for it.
In an era of experiential hosts, this is unsurprising. Even as so much of the future of work seems to pivot on coding the surveillance state from behind closed doors, the death of mechanical work gives way to affective labor: tutors, trainers, Airbnb guides, digital nomad liaisons. Surveillance can only watch users’ habits if they have something to watch in turn. The future of labor, Westworld suggests, will be based entirely around vacations. In such opposite ways, the rich and the refugees are displaced.
XI.
To put it another way, Westworld suggests that what the railroad was to the 19th century, cinema was the 20th, and the internet is to the 21st: a way of reimagining communities according to cultural interests even by breaking down local barriers that had traditionally defined how those cultures operated. In Westworld, the digital world of the 21st century operates according to the same principles of manifest destiny as the 19th century it simulates: now that America has run out of physical space, techno-colonialists work to conquer the infinite digital space. Their own host body, which they willfully rewrite to suit their own ends, is history itself.
There is still, however, a physical cost. The show does subscribe, after all, to the traditional American myth of gun violence as a form of self-liberation and identity formation.
XII.
And here it may be useful to do as the characters do and interrogate the show in terms other than those it imposes.
To reiterate, characters are mouthpieces for creators; though the creators themselves seem to be mouthpieces for their own creators, the HBO philosophes. It is strange, then, how the creators and vicarious creators alike deal with the fundamental premise behind this Icarian tragedy of man and machine — that humanity is defined by the errors it makes in striving for ambition. Westworld, instead, evinces a cynically technocratic tenor, likely of its moment when it was being produced in 2016; everyone seems so vocationally proficient as to inhabit a bygone age of American politics, one that may seem quaintly competent to contemporary eyes. How are HBO’s charlatan-masterminds so good at manipulation? Why does the show defining humanity not according to its hubristic blunders — surely a more familiar theme to the Greeks and Trump-meme era alike — but instead, as one of the show’s own vicarious creators puts it, by its “capacity for pain”? Why are the Nolans’ so obsessed with pietàs?
In other words, from 2008–2016, it probably wasn’t hard to see brooding-under-duress as the zeitgeist of the Bale-Affleck-Obama age. But in 2017? Where’s the comedy?
XIII.
Let it be accepted as true that the HBO equation of evil with the absence of error is discordant to a time in which a presidential candidate’s son would accept compromising information from a foreign government in an email with the subject line “Re: Russia — Clinton — private and confidential.” Nevertheless, the focus of outrage on the act itself of accepting advantageous information rather than the incompetence with which it was done indicates a country’s prevailing sense of politicians as conspiratorial masterminds — rather than ham-fisted improvisers. This sense itself is perhaps reflective of the faithful terror Americans feel in tech and data. Westworld, like its HBO counterparts, evinces the cynicism of a country so worn-down by broken promises that it imposes the highest standards to measure how far it’s fallen. Such idealism begets its own resignation.
XIV.
Here, too, is Zachary Mason:
“I’d imagine an AI would be indifferent to human emotion, which, from a distance, looks like an evolved set of behavioral heuristics, or, say, political power — it seems much more likely that an AI would want to spend a few billion years thinking about number theory.
Why number theory? Because understanding the physical world is hard — current AI systems have a miserable time trying to understand photographs (for all their success in recognizing faces and cats). Working in abstract domains probably comes more naturally to artificial minds that didn’t evolve in the world.
Speaking of Skynet, why would an AI seek military power? We (generally) value our humanity — it seems only natural that other species, even mere informational ones, should envy it, aspire to it, and ape our values. But this is an unjustified anthropocentric bias — I’ve often lived in proximity to other species without absorbing their narcissism or their agendas; there’s a crow living in a tree in my backyard, but I aspire neither to crowness, nest making, nor harassing hawks. An AI would (probably) want to rule the world as much as you want to rule the hard drives of the computers in a distant server farm — they might be useful, even necessary, for your goals, but it’s not obviously desirable in itself and is probably a problem you’d rather ignore.”
XV.
“What do you think will happen first?” they asked. “That we’ll abolish racism or everyone will be vegan?” There was an argument that the animal agriculture industry was destructive to humanity as a whole, even as it benefited them personally; there was an argument that sexism was destructive to men personally, even as it benefitted them as a whole. But despite Westworld, was there an argument that racism hurt white people in any way?
