"Lord of the Machines: Reading the Human Computer Relationship," Daniel Keller’s audio essay, explores the complex relationship that humans have established with computers through their daily interaction and through media representations. It is worth focusing on a few key elements in the introduction and first five minutes of this eleven-and-a-half minute audio essay—just in case readers are tempted to dismiss this piece as a fun little distraction from the serious rhetorical work of composing.

One of the first things that many readers note is that this aural essay, like many written essays, opens with a hook—an attempt to engage the reader, drawing them into the essay and orienting them to its subject matter. In written essay, the hook makes a reader want to read on; in an audio essay the hook should make a listener want to listen carefully. To compose this hook, Keller selected a series of eight closely related sounds that play for approximately thirteen seconds. We hear the sound of typewriter keys, pages being flipped, a mechanical voice reciting the alphabet, a pen scribbling on paper, a ringing telephone, another computerized voice, this time reading binary code, and a computer modem dialing and successfully connecting to a network. In combination, these small bits of aural information alert us to the technological subject matter of the essay “But many people fear what the wired world is doing to our world.” and provide an acoustic foreshadowing of the issues that it will take up.

As this introductory mosaic of related sounds resolves itself and fades out, Keller introduces an important musical reference. Readers who didn’t grow up in the sixties or seventies, might initially miss Pink Floyd’s “Welcome to the Machine,” that Keller uses at in both the introduction to this essay and, later, in the conclusion as a unifying element. The song, published on their 1975 Wish You Were Here album, is generally interpreted as an anthem of creativity lost, the story of overwhelming systems—social machines like the recording industry—that consume and corrupt human beings, especially rock musicians.

As a cultural reference, this song works on several levels. The first level, as we have said, is the allusion provided by the lyrics to machines in general and their general hunger for human resources, a point that would be appreciated by Martin Heidegger (1977). This dark allusion is picked up by the heavily synthesized minor chords, haunting vocals, and industrial resonance of the music that conveys a second level of meaning in this piece. But an audience of perceptive listeners may also catch the hints of a third more ironic layer of meaning, one suggested by a band that warns listeners about the inexorable power of the machine’s destructive ways, while speaking in hollow tones from within the machine, on an album made by an industry that depends on machines. For Daniel Keller, this disturbing irony also rests at the heart of the human-computer relationship, and in thirty seconds of carefully selected and artfully deployed cultural references, Daniel has prepared us to understanding the complexity of the thesis he is about to articulate.

It is also clear, from this essay, that Daniel Keller understands the canon of delivery not only as an historical artifact, but as an important component of his essay. His use of a robotic voice in this piece is a good case in point. To create this essay, Keller used a synthesizer of the kind employed by individuals with vocal impairments. His altered voice—artificially measured, mechanical in its emphasis, unmarked by pauses or nuance of emphasis—serves as a metonymic reference to the cyborg—the being that is neither man nor machine, but some combination of both. This aural allusion to the complex linkages between humans and machines is a performative enactment of the relationship that rests at the heart of the essay. As Keller (2007) noted about his use of this cyborg voice,

I wanted to unsettle audiences with a computerized voice, make them negotiate the irony of a computer talking about the human-computer relationship, and possibly cause audiences to think about how and why they might have adjusted to the voice after eleven minutes….I aimed for an exploration and an experience of an idea, which is what NPR and music and poetry do so well.

Finally, listeners may want to focus on how Daniel Keller brings his thesis home, adding texture and depth to his essay through the inclusion of popular culture texts that serve as examples, illustrations, quotations, and references, all of which he cited in his bibliography that you see on the screen. As Keller (2007) explains his work:

I had to consider how audio delivers information, which then influenced the content: I researched numerous books and articles on the human-computer relationship, but I couldn’t figure out how to translate that material to audio by using the traditional model of quoting and paraphrasing. Pop culture examples from television, movies, and music expressed many of the same ideas I found in my research, and they offered better use of aural affordances.

With these examples, Keller explores the complexities of the human-computer relationship in different aural registers. In his essay, for example, Keller includes, among other references, the paper jam scene from the 1999 movie Office Space, a clip from The Six-Million Dollar Man (1973), a parody of Darth Vader’s mechanized breath, The voice of Hal the computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a bit of dialogue from the 1991 movie Sneakers, the voice of Robocop (1987), and Elliott Smith’s song “Can’t Make a Sound” (2000).

Each of these examples resonates with the broad cultural concern about humans and computers that Keller refers to in his essay and opens a space for the closer look he takes at particular issues in the rest of this piece: among them, how best to maintain a sense of human agency in an increasingly technological world, what can be done to ensure privacy in digital environments, how closely technology is linked to multinational capitalism, and whether or not we can identify the essential nature of what makes humans truly human.