The Moth and the Bat: A Cybernetic Reading of Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects
The Moth and the Bat: A Cybernetic Reading of Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects

Summary/Abstract: This paper analyzes Ted Chiang’s novella The Lifecycle of Software Objects (2010) in light of the resurgent interest in cybernetics and postapocalypse fiction, while paratextually repurposing the Soviet metaphor of ‘the moth and the bat’ to describe our digital capitalist epoch. It uses an associative method to explore how Ana and Derek, the protagonists of the story, craft potential solutions to their ethical quandary, that is, the fact that their digients (digital entities raised as pets) have become obsolete thanks to the predominant logic of digital capitalism. The second half of the paper examines a cybernetic case study (Soviet mathematician Mikhail Tsetlin’s theory of collective games of automata), and the metaphor which late-Soviet scientists used to describe their bureaucratic epoch: a moth being chased by a bat. Comparing the mothand-bat metaphor to zoomorphic metaphors historically used to describe capitalism (the ‘rat race’ and Web Crawler), it argues that the repurposed Soviet metaphor most accurately describes our digital epoch. It appraises the novella’s method for confronting human alienation in the face of anarchic obsolescence a retreat into the heart, which celebrates the anachronistic ethic of motherly devotion. This paper contributes to speculative fiction studies and cybernetics scholarship by rediscovering an accurate metaphor for our fraught relationship with the digital world, and by theorizing an intuitive escape from the grasp of cybernetic thinking.

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