Fictional technotragedies precede, parallel, and expose the archetypal pull of the real ones.
Perhaps our richest contemporary example, The X-Files, fuses tragedy with technology. Its heroes act out age-old technology debates in a formula worthy of Greek drama: Mulder the mystic, Scully the scientist, one always turning to the supernatural for explanations, the other countering with logic and research.
The series is riddled with angst, dread, and sadness. Mulder's father was murdered, his sister kidnapped, his mother felled by a stroke. He sleeps on a sofa and his love life consists of phone sex. Scully, whose sister was murdered, is apparently dying of cancer. Her most intense sexual experience was with a vampire.
As much as they differ in their approaches to the strange occurrences they investigate, they both turn to technology for research, and as an integral part of their work and personal lives. Cell phones connect them intimately to one another. Mulder goes online for answers to his thorniest problems, and has an advisory board of ingenuous conspiratorial hackers. Scully lives in the lab and the examining room, quotes scientific theory, and journals nightly on her computer.
In the background, eternal debates about technology and morality rage. Did alien visitors come to America? Were they murdered, their technology stolen? Is technology monopolized and lied about by powerful political elites?
Batman, one of America's most persistent popular modern myths, constantly places technology in the crossfire between good and evil. Batman himself is half man, half geek. Like The X-Files, Batman reeks of paranoia; vast conspiracies occur in smoke-filled rooms at the hands of middle-aged white men, out of sight and beyond the control of a powerless, vulnerable public.
But it's that reigning fictional technotragedy, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which stands out as a loud and enduring voice raising the moral conundrums and deflating the inherent arrogance of technology's unthinking advocates.
In Mary Shelley's saga - which bears little resemblance to the movie versions - Victor Frankenstein embodies the blind adherence to technological progress for its own sake. He creates life because he can, never stopping to consider the implications.
Political scientist Langdon Winner, in "Frankenstein's Problem," an essay in his book Autonomous Technology, points out that Frankenstein's invention "is incredibly powerful and represents a quantum jump in the performance capability of a certain kind of technology. Yet he sends it out into the world with no real concern for how best to include it in the human community."
In fact, in Shelley's book, it's the monster who grasps the moral implications of the technology that gave him life, dogging his creator ruthlessly to demand that he take responsibility for what he's done.
When the creature meets Victor on an icy slope in the Alps, he eloquently warns him about the perils of technology without responsibility, of imperfect creation and insensitivity. He asks Frankenstein to recognize that the invention of something powerful isn't an end in itself.
But Frankenstein, the proto-nerd, remains self-absorbed, arrogant, and oblivious. "Abhorred monster!" he replies. "Fiend that thou art! Begone! I will not hear you. There can be no community between you and me; we are enemies." Frankenstein's dilemma points to the deep vein of anxiety technotragedies tap into when they flood our media's vision and captivate us for a time. Victor's problem, writes Winner, has become a metaphor for a whole culture.
"At the outset," says Winner, "the development of all technologies reflects the highest attributes of human intelligence, inventiveness, and concern. But beyond a certain point, the point at which the efficacy of the technology becomes evident, these qualities begin to have less and less influence upon the final outcome; intelligence, inventiveness, and concern effectively cease to have any real impact on the ways in which technology shapes the world."
It is at this sad point, says Winner, that ignorance, irresponsibility, and blind faith characterize society's orientation toward the technical; this point at which the Victor Frankensteins of the world release powerful changes for their own sake, with little regard for their consequences.
It is this drama - the heart of the technotragedy - we hypnotically watch played out in endless repetition, powerless to turn away and powerless to respond.
