Here's an essay that I submitted to the SmartPop Dollhouse Essay contest. Unfortunately, it didn't make the cut, but here it is anyway:

TECHNOLOGY AND HUMANITY IN DOLLHOUSE
By William A. Welton

All Joss Whedon’s shows are character-driven; we fall in love with the people, and the plots are devices through which our shared humanity is explored. We identify with and befriend the characters, care about them, and see our own lives mirrored in theirs. But Dollhouse shows us world without clear heroes or villains, at least to the extent that every major player on the show will at some time do something heroic and at some time do something villainous. Characters are weak enough at certain moments to violate their own ideals, and yet strong enough at certain moments, to redeem themselves, to risk all for the sake of a larger good. The combination of weakness and strength in the characters is very human. The strange technology that makes the dollhouse possible—the power to manipulate human personalities and transmit their traits from one human body to another—becomes the perfect device for exploring this duality of human nature, and demonstrating the ease and speed with which one side of it transforms into the other.

It is well-known that on Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel the weekly demons or magical circumstances were metaphors for real-life problems. By means of such devices the writers on those shows were able to give a surprising feeling of reality to the most surreal circumstances in the characters’ lives. In Whedon’s science fiction shows, Firefly and Dollhouse, the futuristic or technological aspects function in much the same way; as tools that help the writers get to home truths about the human heart. But in the case of Dollhouse especially, the imaginary technology that forms the premise of the show has a special significance. It is both metaphor and something more. While the writers are able to use it as a lens through which to explore the human heart, they are also more literally raising serious ethical questions begged by the future of possible scientific interventions in the brain.

One of the cleverest aspects of Dollhouse is way the technological premise gets employed in so many ways owing to the various permutations of the tech and the various applications envisioned for it. Indeed, a theme of the show is the way that technology, once created, can morph and branch out into countless unforeseen directions. The show also confronts us with the seeming inevitability of such changes, the seeming inevitability of that the use of the tech will be driven by our worst impulses.

The uses of the tech that initially confront one include: 1) controlling others, 2) living out one’s fantasies, and 3) the acquisition of enhanced skills. But from this beginning, the applications head in some surprising directions. The ability to provide enhancements turns out to include even 4) “enhanced empathy”—when Topher, in “Briar Rose”, alters an abused child’s brain data to create an imprint that is a version of the same child after therapy. He thereby synthesizes a therapist who has gone through and handled exactly the trauma with which her patient needs to come to terms. But as the show progresses, even more unusual and imaginative uses of the tech are envisioned—for instance, 5) the possibility of limitless revenge, when (in “Omega”) Alpha plans to imprint countless girls with Caroline’s personality so that he can kill her again and again, or 6) stealing the personality traits of others (when Alpha steals Paul Ballard’s consciousness in an attempt to possess whatever it is about him that makes Echo love him); or 9) coming back from the dead, 8) possessing ever-lasting life, and even 10) spying on others to learn what they really think about you (as in the episode “Haunted “ in which Adelle’s recently deceased friend is downloaded into Echo’s body so that she can attend her own funeral and solve her own murder, and through talking to her family members at her own funeral, finally gains insight into what others really think of her). As another variation on the possibilities transplanting one’s own personality into new bodies comes the possibility of 11) inhabiting multiple bodies, effectively splitting oneself into multiple distinct selves ( “Epitaph One, and “The Attic”). The possibility of using remote imprinting over robo-calls to 12) create instant obedient armies provides a vision of the end times (“Epitaph One), while the maniacal Alpha, a composite of over 40 distinct and complete personalities, raises the possibility of using the tech to 12) create a kind of 'ubermensch', taking the enhancement of abilities to its limit by means of adding entire personalities together to form god-like super-personalities (“Omega”). More subtly but no less scarily are those interventions to which we imperfectly approximate even today by means of drugs, such as using the technology to escape one’s own memories or one’s conscience; a clear and chilling of example of this is when Priya asks Topher to make her forget her killing of Nolan.
Some of these uses of the Dollhouse tech parallel the various uses of other kinds of information made possible by computers and the internet. The show in effect asks: What becomes of our ‘humanity’ if we begin to see and to treat ourselves as mere ‘information’ in the brain? The human issues most prominently explored in Dollhouse are power, exploitation, identity and our relation to technology, and one of the fascinations of the show is the way these issues are inextricably interrelated. Connected with the issues of power and identity are other themes that take us deep inside the characters: deception, self-deception, the search for and loss of authenticity, the search for and fear of connection, vulnerability and fear of vulnerability, autonomy, responsibility, etc. Dollhouse points to the deeply intimate relation between our technology and our very humanity. Any show that could so brilliantly raise the question of our relation to technology would be bound to raise deep questions about human identity, perhaps, but in no case is this more obviously true than when the technology in question is precisely a manipulation of identity, one that forces us to probe our most fundamental ideas about who we are. For the Dollhouse tech raises the question of ‘what is a human being?’

Consider the question: who are the victims in the dollhouse? The dolls, most obviously. Kant’s imperative—never to treat others as mere means to an end-- is violated in relation to the dolls all the time. They are human beings used as mere tools for others’ ends. The Kantian imperative includes not treating oneself as a mere means as well; thus, this moral principle is violated even by the dolls, if indeed they volunteered for service, to the extent that they are thereby treating themselves as mere means.

But who is the victim? Is it the body into which new personalities are uploaded? Or is it the original personality sitting in a wedge somewhere on a shelf? Is the victim somehow both at once? Is the person really both body and personality at once, or once these have been separated, are each of these elements separate beings with moral worth? Once one does make that separation--a personality from a body-- it raises the question of ethical obligations with respect to both body and personality. Dollhouse has dealt with both these obligations, and shown how at times, once the separation has been made, either the body or the mind gets treated as a mere tool. The body becomes a mere ‘doll’ to be manipulated at will, effectively nothing until a new personality has been loaded into it; and then, since these personalities are made to order by the dollhouse, even when it is integrated with a persona the doll remains a mere puppet. But the personality in a wedge has also lost its humanity, insofar as it has become mere data to be manipulated and used at will. The question of who is the real person, to whom do we have ethical obligations in such a situation, is raised for the viewer fairly explicitly in the episode “Omega”, for instance, when Alpha confronts the transplanted Caroline personality with her own body and accuses her of abdication of responsibility to it; and then the issue is pressed from the other side when Alpha holds Echo at bay by threatening to destroy the Caroline wedge. Now Echo, a person occupying Caroline’s body, is meant to feel an obligation to her absent personality. It is as though Echo senses that the mind in the wedge is somehow still the rightful ‘owner’ of the body she now inhabits. Oddly, the materialism that makes no separation between minds and the functioning of brains seems to lead, through the Dollhouse technology, to a new kind of Cartesian split between mind and the brain; for the mind is no longer soul, but has become a kind of software –the program called an ‘imprint’—and the brain plays the role of hardware. (Granted, the idea that the neural connections of a lifetime could be altered in a moment, or that remaining the same, they could somehow play host to a new personality, seems far-fetched, but who is to say what similar alterations of our being the advocates of ‘transhumanism’ will pursue in the not-too-distant future?)

What of the synthesized personalities created by Topher? Are they not victims as well? Surely the Kantian imperative is also violated in the case of the imprints as well. Can it be a world that encourages one to ‘do unto others as you would have do unto you’ when you can create those others in advance in accordance with your own whims? The dollhouse programmers can create the doll-imprints so that the dolls want what the client wants; thus, the client can, in a sense, do to them what anyone would want done for themselves, namely ‘satisfy their desires’; and yet the dollhouses have constructed the doll’s desires to meet their clients needs, and most people would not consciously choose to be nothing more than the helpless playthings of other human beings—at least, not without a ‘safeword’. Dolls may be programmed to enjoy what they are doing and what is happening to them; but the beings thus gratified had no choice but to be beings who would be so gratified. How can they have human autonomy then? The fear that technology would transform our very humanity into mere material to be manipulated, a mere ‘human resource’ to be exploited rather than a human being, has never been more vividly portrayed.

Take a personality like that of Mellie; or consider her November-persona in her doll-state; these personae are also real people, as much as the original owner of the doll's body, it would seem. Even if there were the whole time some 'original' for Mellie (the imprinted personae, not the doll) who is living somewhere free, the imprinted persona who's been living with Ballard is now a different person, a unique person. When November’s doll-body is returned to its original personality, Madeline (or vice versa, when Madeline is returned to her body), the Mellie persona is left without a body, trapped in the wedge on the self. Is not Mellie herself a person, consigned to the limbo of her disembodied state? When Mellie is returned to that body, Madeline is evicted; when Mellie kills herself, Madeline is still back on a shelf, perhaps someday to be reincarnated in another doll, perhaps nevermore to exist in any form; but in any case, her body is no more. Likewise, when Topher uploads his persona into Victor/Anthony, Topher 2.0 immediately begins seeing the world literally through different eyes, literally from a different perspective, having different memories, different experiences; and thus, in some sense is a different being. Is it not then murder to wipe the doll again? In “Omega” Boyd Langton says about the process of imprinting dolls, “Topher says it’s like child birth…I think it’s more like watching someone die.”

The Dollhouse technology seems to get even more insidious if one takes away some of the obviously immoral aspects of its use on the show. A less problematic, truly consensual use might be imagined, for instance, if one imagined doll's signing up on a case by case basis only after being fully informed about just what their assignments would be. Then one truly could imagine it as a legal business regulated by contracts (as opposed to the thin pretence of contractual obligation oddly maintained by the thoroughly extra-legal dollhouses on the show). Also, since Topher has shown some ability to very selectively artificially alter personalities, and implant traits, one could imagine signing up to have particular sorts of ‘work done’, and paying for that—like cosmetic surgery for the mind. There are a couple of the uses of the tech portrayed on the show that verged on such seemingly less oppressive uses of the tech: For instance when Adelle’s friend wanted to be brought back after her death (in “Haunted”), or perhaps even when Echo asked to be given the traits to find the spy (in “Spy in the House of Love”); for in this case, she volunteered, and it seems that during that time she knew that she was a doll.

But although one could argue that autonomy is preserved in these cases, such usage of the tech is in a way even more insidious. Once the obvious immorality of violating autonomy is factored out then the more confusing, interesting, and subtly dangerous side of the tech reveals itself. For just how far can one go in treating oneself like a product, in manipulating oneself, in altering humanity, or to put it another way, in enhancing one's powers, or in altering one's identity, before something irrevocably scary has been done?. One could argue that this aspect of the technology just gives us new ways to do what we always do (with any technology and even without technology), namely "enhance our powers, expand our possibilities, and thereby alter our identities." But that these dangers reside not in any particular technology but in ourselves is perhaps the scariest statement of all. For Dollhouse also deals with the seduction of power; it forces us to consider how hard it would be to resist the possibilities that the technology creates. And in this sense, technology is capable of transforming even its wielders into victims, perhaps almost as helpless as those they are using the technology on. The seduction lies both in the temptation to use the tech on others, to finally recreate them as one see fit to be able to get what one needs, and also in temptation to use the tech on oneself, to enhance one’s skills, the temptation to grow our powers and possibilities with the risk of destroying or altering our identities. Both the technology and the knowledge and genius behind it, are seductive forms of power; in this sense, even the knowledge and genius that creates the technology, and the desire the drives the creation, are powers capable of transforming the very people who have this knowledge, this genius, or these desires, into victims, even if they are in some sense victims of themselves.

It is appropriate that the villain (Boyd Langton) is a character who thinks that both the technology and its misuse are inevitable. He thinks this no doubt precisely because he recognizes that the seductions of knowledge, genius and power are rooted in human nature. He draws an extremely fear-based, Machiavellian conclusion not much different really, from the kind of logic that motivated the ideology of the nuclear arms race. One should imagine the loneliness of a character who had concluded the only way to escape humanity’s self-destruction through technology was to bring it on so as to be the one in control of—and safe from –the technology question. It is perhaps not surprising that out of that loneliness he would attach to one group of people and hope they would come to accept his decision. And yet all the while he knows that, if they did not, he could use the tech on them to see to it that they did. For him, the mere existence of the technology changes everything; the significance of very human life, the nature of human relations, the meaning and even the value of the individual –are all inevitably altered in the new context, and this has all transpired in a way that no human choice, no decision, attitude, stance, or philosophy, could do a thing to prevent.

Consider Echo at the end of Season One. She wants to go on being a doll as a way of undermining the dollhouse from within; but also surely because she is attracted by the prospect of integrating more and more personalities. But in order to do so, she has to pretend to be fully wiped each time (even though she really is not). Balanced between wanting to grow her own powers(that is, to acquire more selves, more possibilities ) and having to sell her soul or at least to continually compromise her identity to do so, in this state, she now perfectly represents, as a microcosm, what the show is showing us about the entire human race through this fictional technology—namely that we want to keep growing our powers, our possibilities, but in doing so we change who we are irrevocably and perhaps threaten our ultimate destruction and/or very meaning.

In the season one finale, “Omega” we were presented with the contrast between Echo and Alpha as two distinct visions of the potential for human transformation through the technology. Alpha wanted to make himself into a more and more powerful super-self, a Nietzschean ubermensch, an “ascended being”. In attempting to do so, he is clinging to this fusion of a multitude of personae, identifying with it even as he measures it against others. But Echo, by contrast, identified with none of her myriad personalities completely; she was the emptiness behind all these selves, an emptiness that could allow one or the other self to ‘slip into her’ and come to the fore. She realized that she was no one, at the same time as she was everyone inside her. Whereas Alpha’s composite ego aims to transcend human frailties, Echo’s more Buddhist sensibility represents a humble self-abnegation and compassion. In a way, all humans really are multiple; Echo is merely an exaggeration of the multifaceted nature of the human self, which plays many roles, has many voices, wears many masks. We all have to ask ourselves whether we will act like Alpha and try to set ourselves up as special, superior beings, entitled to more than those around us and demanding to bend them to our will, or whether instead we will follow Echo’s path. To follow her path is to recognize the fragmented and changing character of the self in virtue of its many aspects and roles, and to avoid identifying ourselves exclusively with any one of them. Perhaps only such calm fluidity and detachment makes possible the ability to achieve full harmony and self-integration. Perhaps Echo’s character suggests the search for the quiet emptiness behind the self, behind the many selves that make up each individual human being. Perhaps only the discovery of this quiet inner void behind the ego makes possible the detachment needed to avoid being caught up in the chaos of technological will to power.