Human Programming: Brainwashing, Automatons, and American Unfreedom

(Paperback)

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Do our ways of talking about contemporary terrorism have a history in the science, technology, and culture of the Cold War "Human Programming" explores this history in a groundbreaking work that draws connections across decades and throughout American culture, high and low. Scott Selisker argues that literary, cinematic, and scientific representat

Reviews

"Human Programming is an imaginative and incisive account of how US cultureacross decades, mediums, and institutionshas given form to dystopian fears of mind control as a way of buttressing a sense of the American self that is even more outlandish in its pretenses to autonomy. From Cold War politics to posthuman technologies, Selisker reconsiders who we think we are by looking closely at the forces that have told us what to do."Mark Goble, University of California, Berkeley

"Lucid and compellingly conceived, Human Programming contributes much to the growing body of scholarship on postwar American anxieties about human agency and social influence."Timothy Melley, Miami University

"The American rhetoric around brainwashing, Selisker shows, is inconsistent at the most basic level: it takes for granted that the programmed self is inauthentic, and that the real self is spontaneous and unlearned."Los Angeles Review of Books

"Scott Selisker offers readers a fascinating new history of American anxieties along the borderland between the machine and the human mind."New Books Network

"The scope of the book is impressive, and the authors fusion of media forms and disciplinary approaches is creative and adept."CHOICE

"Seliskers history of the human automaton is far reaching and firmly grounded in evidence. His work provides a meaningful contribution to the interactions between culture and political thought, and his research will be of interest to academics with a variety of different research interests. This book has expertly answered the what; how; when and where of human automaton, and has made strong inroads into the why."British Society for Literature and Science

Author Bio

Scott Selisker is assistant professor of English at the University of Arizona.