The following is an essay I submitted at Purdue University for ENGL 223: Literature and Technology.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a novel that follows Rick Deckard, a bounty hunter who hunts down rogue androids. It has plenty of themes which create a caricature of our modern world in terms of a reliance on religion in the face of uncertainty, consumerism, and capitalism, as well as our disconnect from the natural world; these are the themes I will be discussing and analyzing in this paper.
In the world of this book, there has been a catastrophic war known as World War Terminus which has caused Earth’s atmosphere to become horribly radioactive, urging the United Nations to push for mass emigrations to off-world colonies; to encourage this, they are giving androids to those who leave. Androids are robotic servants that are near indistinguishable from regular humans, they can perform labor tasks, work in dangerous environments, and partake in menial chores that humans would not want to do. A corporation named The Rosen Association manufactures these androids on Mars, however, some of them violently rebel and flee to Earth where they hope to remain undetected. This is where our main character, Rick Deckard, comes into play. He is tasked to hunt down 6 of these androids.
On his mission to kill the six rogue androids, Deckard meets another android, Rachel, she believes she’s human due to the artificial memories implanted in her. She fails the Voight-Kampff test, which is meant to find if someone is human or android through various tests regarding empathy in relation to animal cruelty. Eventually, we see more and more of these androids who believe themselves to be “human”, causing Rick to question his own humanity and that of those around him.
Rick kills three of the six androids, earning him 3,000 dollars which he spends on a real, biological goat without a second thought. He then gets a call from Rachel who invites him over and sleeps with him, trying to convince him not to kill the remaining three androids and says she’s slept with many bounty hunters so dissuade them from killing androids. He ignores this request and eventually ends up tracking them down to an abandoned apartment where he kills all three of them. Having set a record of killing 6 androids in under 24 hours, he becomes very rich and can buy whatever he wants; instead of immediately buying more pets, he flies to the Oregon desert which was once a lush forest, takes drugs, and has a vision before finding a toad, an exotic animal in the wild, he takes that back to Iran, his wife, but it’s revealed to be a fake. Iran orders electric feed for the electric toad.
In our Earth, status symbols involve big houses, luxurious cars, branded clothing, and technology such as smartphones, flat screen TVs, computers, and such. It is a quintessential consumerist ideal to outshine one’s neighbors, to buy the newest and greatest to make sure everyone around you knows that you are of a “higher class” or superior to them in some way. This is encouraged by the marketing culture of our modern economy, which keeps telling us that these (luxury items) are “needs” rather than “wants”. Mass media encourages people to want for the same things, making it easier to cater to a given audience and control a population if they all believe in similar things, breaking them into factions and possibly pitting them against each other.
In the world of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? this phenomenon is existing in the form of a demand for animals. Following mass extinction of animals and a societal push for “empathy” in its widely adopted religion of Mercerism, they become a precious, exceedingly valuable commodity and thus, extremely expensive. Societal pressures force people into thinking that having these real animals is something they should all strive for, given their high demand and incredibly low supply, most people must settle for electric replicas of the animals’ biological counterparts due to outrageous prices. Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep? presents a very interesting satirical look into the future of humanity, juxtaposing our wants right now, i.e., technological advancements to push us even further beyond, against our wants in the future, i.e., a connection to our natural world; embodying the adage: “you never know what you have until its gone”.
Current society is looking ahead, evolving technologically, and getting closer and closer to the science fiction ideas present in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? such as off-world colonization, humanoid assistants and more being in discussions and actual development; this coupled with the industrial disregard on the effects of the environment is portrayed in the text following World War Terminus which turns the world into a nuclear wasteland. No matter how many whistleblowers we have warning us about our current “innovation precedes environment” route and what it might lead to in the future, the demand for that which pushes us further along this path never ceases.
This constant push to innovation, the commodification and consumerist ideals of the modern world is expertly caricatured within the novel. From the first page, we get to see the regulation of emotions themselves through the “mood organ”, which allows a shadowy government to control the masses extremely easily, not only through societal pressures and expectations created to control what the people think but also directly through the chemicals in our brain i.e., directly impacting how people think.
Conformity of thought is deified in this world. The ability to feel the exact same thing as others is even made possible through an “empathy box” leaving no room for interpretation, this allows industries to produce products that cater to that feeling of “need” that conformity sows inside us because if we all think the same, we can all be dealt with the same way. The novel paints a vivid hyperbolic picture of how people are manipulated day-in-and-day-out to think in a certain way and follow the media agenda to a T. We see that Deckard, manipulated by the forces around him, has made him believe he absolutely “needs” to have a real pet to be happy, linked to society expectations of wealth and stability, which in our modern world can be having a car or a bleeding-edge smartphone. Furthermore, this desire for a pet is part of yet another theme in the story, a yearning for a connection to the natural world.
In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, people are looking for any roots back to the natural world, this route just so happens to be real pets. The relationship between humans, animals and the natural world is an important theme in this book, a relationship that was weakening at the time of writing this book, and tragically still is. One important exchange to note is when Deckard and his neighbor discuss the real animals that Deckard’s rich neighbor owns; Deckard feels an undeniable sense of envy when he looks upon the animals and is ashamed of his own electric replica, and his neighbor taunts him by saying he should purchase something cheaper like a mouse. This is not too far detached from modern examples of shame experienced when someone has a better phone than you, nicer clothes than you, or other material possessions that are “superior” to yours. Furthermore, this idea of “owning” an animal to show off status drives home the point that humans seek to dominate the natural world as a means of garnering power or influence in some way, shape or form. We see this further exemplified in the colonization of other planets; humans, having ravaged their own planet have ventured beyond the stars to claim other parts of the natural world as their own till, that too, is decimated, proving that humans have never learned from their mistakes and still push to expand technology despite the entire society on Earth revolving around wanting these pets, wanting this connection to the natural world; a very plausible desire that is distorted by the lens of consumerism.
This desperation to latch onto the remaining slivers of the natural world even though what is deemed “natural” is incredibly difficult to pin down in the text The constant debate about whether androids would be “human” or not, as well as the existence of the “mood organ” which completely change the idea of natural emotion and all but confirm the idea of “physicalism” i.e., there is no “soul” or any immaterial matter that governs humans beyond hormonal secretions that guide emotions therefore making humans essentially the same as androids, and in times of such uncertainty, people turn to the religion, in this case, Mercerism.
Mercerism places an incredible emphasis on empathy making us human, which in turn plays into the “empathy box” and once again, into the conformity of thought. However, in the course of the story, Mercerism is proved to be a hoax but there are still devout followers even after said reveal. Mercerism is essentially an anti-thesis to physicalism and is the school of thought where the Voight-Kampff test stems from.
It is also not a coincidence that the Voight-Kampff test shares such a phonetic similarity to Adolf Hitler’s book Main Kampf, which uses pseudo-science and other stretches of arguments to establish a hierarchy of races, stating one is clearly superior to the other, as well as try to defend Nazi values. Voight-Kampff is designed to parallel the book in that it uses Mercerism, a pseudo-scientific argument that is biased towards humans, as the final deciding factor about humanity to prove that humans are superior to androids which are inferior. The test is alluded to be defective throughout the text as well, not just by relation to Main Kampf but through the demonstrations present in we see that at times it shows that humans have psychopathic tendencies to feel less empathy for the animal iconography used in the test, and it shows the extent to which androids feel a lack of empathy to animals e.g., Rachel killing Deckard’s goat and the rogue androids mutilating a spider, which begs the question if androids are able to feel empathy at all, however, as we know all too well, humans are not beyond cruelty to animals, and Rachel’s cruelty towards the goat can be considered a passionate act of anger, an emotion that is acutely human; not to mention that Rachel’s evident concern over other android’s lives is something a being devoid of empathy should not be able to do. Additionally, one of the androids that Deckard pursues is an Opera singer, it is a very artistic job, and it would require some knowledge and understanding of empathy or similarly vulnerable emotions, this further calls into question that validity of the Voight-Kampff test as well as the constraints by which we define what makes us human.
It is not hard to see the parallels that Philip K. Dick draws to our real world when creating the world that this story is set in. He caricatures many things that are flawed in our world in a tangible manner, framed through the idea of fiction, allowing us to confront these blatant flaws in our humanity. If what makes us human is our empathy, Dick calls us to be more aware of the natural world, and those around us. The author attempts to pull us out of our cocoon of blind conformity to the way the world works, to not follow and exist in the world without questioning it as a sheep follows a herd and is punished by a shepherd and his dog. Too long have we dreamt of the possibilities of the future without protecting what we have in the present, thus I change the question the title poses, Do Sheep Dream of Electric Androids? Yes, yes, they do.
Saye Kamal 