Abstract

The werewolf: a howl under the full moon, teeth, claws, and fur. A secret uncontrollable rage, a wolf among sheep, a danger to the community. The transformation between a wild animal and its civilized form, dividing human nature into what’s acceptable and what’s not. How do you tame the big bad wolf?

The machine: an object. Easy, quick, effective, a perfect result every time. The mark of an advanced civilization, to free mankind of labor. Powerful servants of the masses, controlled by an elite few. Who do these machines actually serve?

The mythology of the werewolf and the ideological development of automatization technologies: by analyzing these two starting points as manifestations of the desire to tame human nature, this text will frame machines as anti-animalizing tools. It will investigate the overpowering machinic qualities of civilization, and how they result in societal development being aimed at fellow machines rather than real people. Finally, it will reflect on the inevitability of the animal qualities of human nature, and their ability to adapt to the imposing smoothness of digital technologies. This research will be conducted by analyzing historical documentation and case studies relating to either topic and analyzing the intersections of their respective discourses.

Introduction

I often refer to my laptop as “she”. Not only because I think it adds a touch of wit and whimsy to any sentence, but also because it somehow makes sense: she’s a girl, just like me. ✷ She helps me in my work and shows me cool movies, and is by my side when I need her with (almost) no complaints. She has enough data on me to make somewhat accurate predictions on which album I might want to play next, or which website I’ll visit, or even which of my contacts I’ll call at the end of the day. But I know her pretty well too. I can recognize how her movements change when she’s getting tired, I know how to adapt my language when she gives me more advertisements than actual information, and I don’t actually need a website to be well-constructed to find what I’m looking for. I recognize that this fluency goes beyond my own personal device, and that it’s a level of digital literacy I’ve gained from years of experience. Comparing this relationship with the way some members of my family treat and speak about their devices, they seem to experience much more frustration and confusion, and I see they haven’t developed as much sensitivity for understanding their device. But if machines are made to be used by us, if they’re so intelligent and intuitive and practical, why are they indecipherable for some? How has this dynamic of two-way communication become such an important part of working with machines?

These questions lead me into investigating the human-machine relationship, the duality between people and their faster and more efficient counterparts. In the context of work and production, machines seem to be an embodiment of the better parts of human nature: a stoic entity that tirelessly does whatever it’s told, instead of a needy and less engineerable employee. In a culture that deems production as a necessity to participate in society, the machine has a more secure place within our civilization than the human. But how civilized can a system be when it serves primarily machines rather than people?

At the same time I started thinking about a lecture I attended about werewolves, by designer and theorist Lluís Sallés. ✷ In it, he outlined the development of the werewolf myth and how it represents how we might deal with “otherness”. For not fitting the pattern of what we consider civilized, we might conceptualize the other as a monster. As people, we might even conceptualize our own “unproductive” characteristics as monstrous. Drawing parallels between the dualities of man-wolf and man-machine, where an unpredictable side seems to “drag down” a comparatively more functional side, I started wondering how researching the myth of the werewolf might answer my questions about machines.

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When I mention werewolves, you probably imagine a scene very similar to this description. Although it was written two thousand and seventeen years ago, ✷ In Metamorphoses, Ovid’s epic on classic Greco-Roman mythology, there is one of the first mentions of a man-wolf shapeshifter in human history: the myth of Lykaon. The story goes that Lykaon, the tyrant ruler of the land of Arcadia, decided to test the Olympian gods by trying to feed Zeus human meat. ✷ He killed his own son and cooked him, but Zeus caught on to the trick. Furious, he cursed Lykaon by turning him into a wolf with an insatiable thirst for human blood.

Cleric / Occult researcher ✷ Montague Summers defines a werewolf as “a human being, man, woman or child (more often the first), who either voluntarily or involuntarily changes or is metamorphosed into the apparent shape of a wolf, and who is then possessed of all the characteristics, the foul appetites, ferocity, cunning, the brute strength, and swiftness of that animal.” ✷ Nowadays we might see the werewolf as a made-up creature from blurry-rooted tales that has since found a home in Hollywood and fantasy. However, throughout centuries there have been documented real-life werewolves, also known as lycanthropes.

The term lycanthropy (as you might’ve guessed, originating from Lykaon) refers to the psychological and/or supernatural condition of being able to transform into a wolf. ✷ Cases of lycanthropy span over centuries but peaked at the same time as witch-hunting in Europe. We now treat it as a psychological disorder, where the afflicted person genuinely believes they possess the physical capabilities of or can transform into a wolf. Cases of lycanthropy usually include serial murder and cannibalism; the most recent instance was reported in 2019. ✷

One of the most famous and horrifying trials of a lycanthrope was of Peter Stubbe/Stumpp, ✷ also known as the werewolf of Bedburg. ✷ He was a wealthy farmer and father of two from a rural community in sixteenth century Germany, who confessed to having made a deal with the devil for a belt which granted him the power to transform into “a greedy, devouring wolf, strong and mighty, with eyes great and large… a mouth great and wide, with most sharp and cruel teeth, a huge body and mighty paws.” ✷ Allegedly, Stubbe killed and ate two pregnant women and fourteen children, one of which his own son. He was also accused of rape and incest of multiple people including his daughter, as well as bestiality and devouring many animals. Once caught in 1589, he was punished by being horrendously tortured, beheaded, and burned at the stake along with his mistress and his daughter. Warding off similar behaviour, local authorities erected a pole with the torture wheel used in the trial, topped with a figure of a wolf and Stubbe’s head. The following image documents his trial procedure.
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Before the development of psychiatry and a somewhat general disbelief in the supernatural, communities in Western Europe tended to look to religion and spirituality to explain what might bring someone to such gruesome actions. To give some context on the religious ideology at the time, in order to absolve someone of their sins, a priest had to decide if the sinful action meant that the offender had placed any other powers at the same height (or above) the powers of God. ✷ This divisive and combative duality between an absolute good and an absolute evil is known as Manichaeism. Through this ideology, a culture of “you’re either with me or against me” emerged, by which violence against any otherness was justified. This dynamic only strengthened as different sects of Christianity spread among populations of Western Europe. This “threatened” the Catholic Church and lead it to deem these sects as Satanic, accusing them of spreading false and dangerous morals.

At the same time, it’s important to understand that in Western Europe the animal that posed the greatest threat to mankind was the wolf. ✷ Nowadays, after centuries of developing urban landscapes which attempt to keep wilderness at bay, we cannot comprehend the fear that the wolf instilled in communities at the time. Inhabiting the remote and untamed depths of the dark forests surrounding human settlements, regardless of the continuous human efforts to hunt and kill it, the wolf persisted for centuries, making it the perfect form for Western European fears to shapeshift into.

Soon enough, the story of the werewolf wasn’t necessarily about serial murders anymore. By the 16th century, following Catholic values at a time of religious turmoil in Europe, the werewolf became more of a cautionary tale about the dangers of not repressing the “wild”, separating human nature into two sides: civilized versus uncivilized. ✷ The morale of this story was that it’s dangerous not to repress our supposedly untame characteristics, demonizing those who fail to do so.

As weary as I am of quoting Freud, he wrote about this same dynamic from a sociologist perspective in arguing that to be civilized means to repress yourself to some extent: “Communal life becomes possible only when a majority comes together that is stronger than any individual and presents a united front against every individual. The power of the community then pits itself, in the name of ‘right’, against the power of the individual, which is condemned as ‘brute force’.” ✷ In a utilitarian and egalitarian society, where all individuals are equal and strive for the good of the group, the will of the majority wins over the will of a few. Here, the idea of Manichaeism returns, where there is one motion that represents a net positive for the community and another which represents a net negative.

In Spirit and Teeth, by another author I’m weary of quoting, Nick Land explains this concept by pointing out how in the right hands, fire is “the hearth, the protective and nutrifying glow,” an analogy for ingenuity and progress, but when handled by the other side, it is a “dissolvant blaze which spreads uncontrollably, (…) the fire of waste, dissipation, dehumanization.” ✷ We don’t want to entrust agency to the members of civilization we deem as uncivilized, because their very nature suggests this would destroy the structures we call progress. Therefore, it’s safer to outcast these outsiders, excluding them from the past, future, and present of the societies they inhabit.

“To be a werewolf is to be inferior by the most basic criteria of civilization. Not only is the discipline of political responsibility alien to them, so is the entire history of work in which such discipline is embedded. (…) The accursed race, living like beasts, whose veins are inflamed by a cosmic menstruation, have never entered into the great project of civilization, which begins with the use of fire to keep the wild animals at bay.” ✷

This interpretation of the werewolf creates a cycle, generating a self-sustaining system of separation between the werewolf and civilization:

Inability to repress wilderness is demonized.
Repression is a characteristic of civilization.
Wilderness is seen as destructive.
Wilderness is excluded from society.

The Machine as a Tool for De-Animalized Smoothness

Are you still thinking about Peter Stubbe from the last chapter? Part of me wants to defend the wilderness of the werewolf for being an outcast of society, but this feeling starts to shrivels up when I think of him. Even understanding that it’s a true story, I tend to read it as fiction for how it reminds me of the killer psychopath trope from the horror genre: the unpredictable violent criminal possessed by a demon or a horrible condition, imprisoned to solitary confinement inside a straightjacket. Of course we want to keep this dangerous type of otherness away. It’s like finding some really old yoghurt in the back of your fridge: an instinctive feeling of disgust and abject takes over, making you forget about recycling the packaging as you deal with it under five layers of gloves. You can’t even stand to look at it.

How is it possible that the human species, who evolved into developing altruism, empathy, and compassion, who repeatedly demonstrates a calling to create art and science and philosophy, is also capable of murder, of genocide? This text will not attempt to answer this age-old question. It will, however, point out that as people we’ve always struggled to cope with our own duality.

When we’re confronted with hideousness within ourselves, with something we’re not quite able to accept, a similar feeling to that of the old yoghurt takes over. In order to keep the safety of our societies, we feel that we must throw out the disgusting animal. The concept of civilization itself suggests leaving behind animal wilderness and advancing into a more developed and cultured way of living, by building technologies such as tools, walls, laws, etc. By progressively making our existence easier and more comfortable, we’ve continued to create distance between our human experiences and nature in its wild, untouched state.

In The Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Harraway defines a cyborg as a hybrid of imagination and material reality”, created “where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed.” ✷ Here, she points to technology as the outcome of the human imagination when posed with a lived reality which it sees as improvable: engineerable, de-animalizable, un-wildened. Harraway carries on to explain how this mechanism has made us reconstruct our world as “a problem of coding, a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange.” ✷ In other words, we melt a rough wild world and pour it into molds we construct; we attempt to build perfectly smooth construction blocks that fit better together according to our convenience.

Through this understanding of ourselves and of the world as optimizable, we engineer ways of calculating each individual, process, and resource. Having this data lets us create control strategies which (theoretically) remove the dangers of unpredictability and animalism. For example, we’ve invented ophthalmology to fix eyesight to a standard, we’ve invented a pill that helps control the frequency of pregnancies, and we’re cloning meat in labs to create alternative food sources. By translating the world into numbers we’re able to track, we invent systems to figure out how to organize ourselves and make machines that maximize productivity. And in theory this is great because again, by removing wilderness from our societies and allowing us to plan for how to get the most out of our resources, we promote our own survival, comfort, and prosperity.

Through these logics that equate systems with righteousness, we create power dynamics that favour productivity and the machinic spirit that supports it. We create the idea that our civilization should function like a well-oiled machine, a complicated mechanism made up of very specific parts, and that would come to a halt if some of these parts were “misshapen”. This dynamic echoes the rhetoric of the werewolf. By requiring smoothness of its participants, the system punishes any roughness in individuals that challenge machinic functioning: unpredictability, wilderness, the wolf.

The Machine as the Intended User

Heyyyy, so, we’re 2531 words in and I’m about to tell you about some weird AI stuff I’ve seen, but first let me actually introduce myself. My name is Joana, and with this text I’m hoping to finish my degree in Graphic Design. As a young woman planning on making a living as a creative/developer during a global recession, I can’t say I’m not afraid of the future of AI, and recognize my bias against it. But I want to clarify that by discussing this technology in relation to the werewolf, my aim is not to demonize it. I don’t blame anyone who (responsibly) uses this technology to save time, money, or energy, and appreciate the innovation it has brought to several fields, including the creative one. Although I avoid using it for personal creative and environmental reasons, I also try to keep an open mind to how it can continue to make itself part of the world in helpful ways.

Now that we’re a little more cozy, let’s move on. In late November 2024, Telephone Communication Limited (TCL, the largest television manufacturer worldwide) held a panel talk and screening of the first AI-generated films at the Chinese Theater in Hollywood. ✷ These short films are available online, watch at your own risk. The images below are stills from (in my opinion) the most disturbing-looking one out of the total five released. It’s a body-horror short film about a woman who due to an unexplained illness turns into a giant slug:
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As explained at the event by the general manager of TCL Research America, Haohong Wang, the aim of the project is to “create a flywheel effect funded by two forces, advertising and AI,” creating a content-producing strategy that is both funded and informed by targeted advertising. ✷ As was later explained by TCL’s vice president of content service and partnerships, Catherine Zhang: “data told us that our users don’t want to work that hard, half of them don’t even change the channel.”

In his article on the event, Jason Koebler from 404 Media goes on to discuss the implications of AI on the creative and economical lives of creators: “I can’t say for sure why any of the directors or individual people working on these films decided to work on AI movies, whether they are actually excited by the prospects here or whether they simply needed work in an industry and town that is currently struggling following a writers strike that was partially about having AI foisted upon them.” ✷

However, I want to zoom into the utility of these short films. Regardless of any potential artistic intention of the few humans involved in their making, as Wang explained, more than anything they were created to generate profit as quickly and effortlessly as possible. Therefore, they are marketable digital content before they are art.

In the last couple years there has been a very tangible shift of the internet as a place for personal interconnectedness to a place for generating profit, accelerated by the spreading accessibility of AI tools. Another example is the shifting purpose of YouTube, a digital platform started in 2005 for anyone to share personal videos, encouraging many to experiment with the medium as a form of personal expression. ✷ Later came the implementation of advertisements, leading to the “YouTuber” and influencer profession as a potential way for anyone to earn from the platform, possibly even to make a living. Now, in the last couple years, a new side-hustle trend has been saturating the platform with automated channels, run by using AI tools to script, write, voice, and edit videos. ✷ As opposed to a “regular” side-job, this option offers the opportunity to earn an extra income without spending as much time and energy.

But hey, what else are we supposed to do during a global recession, when so many people aren’t able to make a livable wage? These two examples are of course very different scenarios: one is a company that made 24.3B$ in revenue in 2024 that’s trying to make even more money, ✷ the other is a mass of anonymous individuals trying to make more out of what they have. Regardless, both are products and upholders of the societal and economical dynamics we’ve created. Again, as explained in the previous chapter, we idealize optimization and production to the point that as individuals, in order to ensure our own survival, we're pushed to melt and pour ourselves into molds that fit into these machinic dynamics. Through this process, wild and animalistic human processes like self-expressive creativity are sacrificed, in order to make profitable products instead.

Enter cybernetics, a field of mathematics and science pioneered by Norbert Wiener around the 1950’s, who defined it as “the science of control and communications in the animal and machine.” ✷ In essence, it studies how a total of interconnected pieces function together to maintain the whole and create progress, equating the functioning of an animal to that of a machine. Living beings are made up of cells and tissues and organs that work together to keep them alive. Machines are made up of sensors and decision-making mechanisms and executers that work together to keep them functioning. ✷

Extending this logic further, cybernetics allows us to once again arrive at the point that our societies function as large machines made up of interconnected individuals, working together to maintain themselves and create progress. Wiener argued that as members of society, we are virtually equivalent to machines: “What is used as an element in a machine, is in fact an element in the machine. Whether we entrust our decisions to machines of metal, or to those machines of flesh and blood which are bureaus and vast laboratories and armies and corporations, we shall never receive the right answers to our questions unless we ask the right questions.” ✷ In other words, since mechanical functioning requires its parts to work smoothly and predictably, being participants of a machinic society means that we as people become machines to an extent. Therefore, it doesn’t matter much anymore whether a decision is made by an actual human participant or a mechanical component of this machine. From this, Wiener argues that it’s much more relevant to question the whole system under which such decisions are made.

Through this cybernetic envisioning of our societies, we see that in reality we’ve shaped them to accommodate machines rather than actual people. By scaring away the animal to protect the productivity of smoothness, we’ve created systems that reward machinic behaviour. We’ve come to value the characteristics of human nature which align better with the functioning of machines, while suppressing those that are more animalistic. As in the examples from this chapter, human creativity is better rewarded when used to make something profitable and productive, feeding the machine, than when it is used for self-expression. Those that are able to adapt and evolve into functioning more mechanically are able to survive, maintaining and developing the machine further.

Machinic functioning is an extension of human nature, of our desire for prosperity and inclination to building systems in the name of survival. However, we will never be as productive and smooth as our architectures ask of us. Because at the end of the day, we are just living, breathing, flowing, evolving, unique, wild animals.

The Machine Under the Full Moon

The original story of the werewolf, the myth of Lykaon’s curse, doesn’t mention the moon as an ingredient of the werewolf’s transformation. The connection between the werewolf and the moon actually comes from medieval France. ✷ In populations near the dark forests of the Burgundy region, people believed they could be cursed to become loup-garous: ordinary people that transform into blood-thirsty wolves under the light of the full moon. Sharing the same narrative as the other branches of the tale, the belief was that this curse was a punishment for not following the teachings of the church.

The moon: a symbol of change, of cyclical transformation. In his article into the interpretation of the myth of the werewolf, Eddie Ejjbair points out how “the historical attribution of lycanthropy to man is interesting considering the well-established link between femininity and the lunar cycle.” ✷ There’s the obvious connection between menstruation and the werewolf, of experiencing a monthly bloody outburst of rage and wilderness. An experience that seems destructive against the more predictable (and machinic) daily energetic rhythm of the male hormonal cycle.

Beyond this connection, in her meta-analysis of werewolf tropes in horror media, Gwen C Katz discusses how through the genre, several artists have explored the conceptual connection between the werewolf and other “violent” natural physical experiences, namely feminine ones. ✷ For example, how Catherine Lundoff’s Silver Moon explores the werewolf as a metaphor for menopause, or how werewolf-hood in John Fawcett’s Ginger Snaps represents feminine puberty. In both stories the wolf is an analogy for an abrupt change to the body, challenging because of how the character must “act normal” in a new condition which doesn’t fit with societal expectations. However, these transformations also present the characters with a new sense of freedom and power. In Silver Moon, Becca’s transformation grants her the possibility of creating a new path after divorcing her ex-husband, as well as exploring her same-sex attraction. In Ginger Snaps, Ginger’s transformation represents her growing into an adolescent, adapting to a more powerful body and experiencing sexual desire.

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Katz uses the term hopeful monster to describe this duality of monstrousness and freedom in the werewolf trope. She argues that this duality gives the myth the ability to explore the abhorrent with a certain open-mindedness, making the viewer question their fear of animalistic instincts in the first place. However, the same term is used in the field of evolutionary biology to refer to “organisms with a profound mutant phenotype that have the potential to establish a new evolutionary lineage.” ✷ ✷

Regardless of how they exist in very different contexts, both definitions speak to the creative spirit of the werewolf, describing its outcastedness as its strength, much like the terrifying unkillable wolf of the Middle Ages. As explained in the first chapter, excluding wilderness from society means the werewolf doesn’t have the safety of being rooted in an ideology or history that represents them, like their civilized counterparts. Removed from a cybernetic society built of coding languages, excused of the cyborg vision of optimizing material reality, this is all the werewolf has left: raw reality. By representing our tie to nature, the only human characteristic we simply can't melt down (as long as we’re still biologically living beings), the wolf gains its immortality. Although unable to enjoy the successes and disasters of a machine society, the spirit of the werewolf prevails.

Despite of how sophisticated a machine might be, the full moon always returns to disrupt its supposed smoothness. Regardless of the pressure exerted by the machinic patterns we’ve created, the urge to shapeshift will always be louder, as exemplified by the phenomenon of folk programming. Spencer Chang defines it as “the kind of (re)programming we learn through our active use of the Internet and software. As we use the Internet and learn how it works, we’re constantly changing software to work for us (and in doing so, make it feel more like us, too). If you’ve ever used an app outside of its intended purpose, you are a folk programmer.” ✷

I’ll leave you with one of my favourite examples of this concept. On May 2nd in 2020, Marie Foulston organized a party on a Google Sheets document. ✷ In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, she missed certain unspoken rituals of social interaction, the subtle elements that go beyond the exhaustingly literal translation of a conversation through video call. In the format of Google Sheets, someone’s presence is only known through their clicking on a cell, adding text or images or color. Conversations flow beyond time, as it’d been impossible to tell if the text written on any particular cell had been written 10 seconds or 10 minutes ago, by a close friend or someone you’d never met. Nevertheless, guests would hang out in the Kitchen sheet, dance and take mysterious gummies on the dance-floor, quietly sit together and chat while enjoying a virtual sunrise.

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Our creativity in problem solving allows us to find countless alternative ways to interact with any object or tool. Just as we might think to use a chair to reach a high shelf, we might think of using an online data processing program to host a virtual house party. Similarly, regardless of the rigidness of the systems we might put in place and adapt ourselves to, our werewolf nature dictates that shapeshifting is inevitable, as we’ll always find room to transform. The concept of folk programming re-centers the real human in digital technologies, subverting the societal power of the machine.

Conclusion

Hi again, this is it, we did it, we’ve made it to the end. Together, we’ve travelled a long and winding path through the entangled forest that this text inhabits. So use this conclusion to rest and recollect the main ideas we’ve covered.

I want one of your main takeaways to be that you are a very smart animal. Our intelligence and desire to survive and prosper have driven us to organize ourselves according to systems that prioritize safety and productivity, requiring us to distance ourselves from the unpredictability of animal nature. In other words, we’ve built societies that encourage the machinic qualities of human nature, while suppressing the animalistic ones. This is the ideology behind the werewolf: a tale that’s supposed to teach us that it’s dangerous not to suppress our wilderness.

In this process of de-animalizing ourselves, we’ve developed civilizations that run on and maintain this expectation of tameness and smoothness. Therefore, these machinic societies end up accommodating other machines better than actual people. As digital technologies develop in what seems like a never-ending race, their use is no longer necessarily to add to human experiences, but to produce more with less, to contribute further to the societal machine. The intended user is no longer an actual person, but a fellow machine.

However, just as the werewolf transforms with the loyal and eternal lunar cycle, our human nature always finds the space to shapeshift. The myth of the werewolf teaches us that our animalness–our rebelliousness, creativity, non-conformity–threatens the systems we’ve built, but it also shows that this wilderness is inevitable, regardless of any technological pressure to domesticate it.

Bibliography

Cited Sources:

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Influenced by:

“BBC. All. Watched. over.by. Machines.of. Loving. Grace. 3OF 3. Monkey.in.the. Machine. Pdtv.x 264. AAC. Mvgroup.Org : Adam Curtis : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming.” Internet Archive, BBC, 1 Jan. 1970. ⤷

Estés, Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. New York. Ballantine Books, 1992.

Konior, Bogna. “The Dark Forest Theory of Intelligence.” Machine Decision is Not Final. Urbanomic, 2023.

Preciado, Paul B. “Baroque Technopatriarchy: Reproduction.” Artforum, Artforum. 1 Jan. 2018. ⤷

Quicho, Alex. “Everyone is a Girl Online”. Science and Technology Essays & Ideas, WIRED. 11 Sept. 2023. ⤷

Image Sources:

Foulston, Marie. “Kitchen and sunrise. Party in a Shared Google Doc.” Google Sheets, 1 May 2020. ⤷

Ginger Snaps. Directed by John Fawcett, performances by Emily Perkins and Katharine Isabelle, Oddbod Productions, 2000.

Mayer, Lukas. Execution of Peter Stubbe in 1589. Wikipedia. ⤷

“Shakira - Loba (Official HD Video)” YouTube, uploaded by Shakira, 14 Nov. 2009. ⤷

“THE SLUG | SHORT FILM | TCL STUDIOS” YouTube, uploaded by TCLtvplus, 22 Nov. 2024. ⤷

Werewolf of London. Directed by Stuart Walker, performance by Henry Hull, Universal Pictures, 1935.