In Defense of Synthesis: A Glimpse into the Mass Effect Trilogy and the Bias of Technologies - Taylanumut Doğan

Prescript: I would like to thank my dear friend Claire Kim for her brilliant feedback on this article.

Concept art for a mass relay (BioWare, 2012b)

Revisiting the Mass Effect trilogy (BioWare, 2007-2012) provides a glimpse into the starry-eyed cultural liberalism of the early 2010s. It is a space opera molded into the shape of an action-RPG, depicting a multicultural galaxy resisting against annihilation by making peace across species and cultures. Since its release, a lot of scholarly attention has been paid to the worldbuilding of the trilogy, which is the basis of its representations of multiculturalism. Its combined representations of queerness in the military has been noted to be a source of “homonationalism” (Youngblood, 2018). Patterson (2015) notes that multiculturalism in a militaristic setting reproduces imperialist attitudes. These cultural representations lend themselves to an allegorical reading (Carvalho, 2015), wherein the science-fiction narrative seems to be both influenced by and commenting on the cultural and political context of the late 2000s and early 2010s.

In addition to its temporal-cultural relevance, as explored in the works described above, Mass Effect has also been reflective of a more spatial context, namely, its Canadian connections. Callahan (2019) notes the importance of BioWare being a company out of Edmonton, especially in relation to representing Canadian multiculturalism as a distinct form of cultural politics. Through its sci-fi setting, Mass Effect is able to present a contemporary multiculturalism, “but without facing up to the complex problems surrounding the historical and continuing dispossession of those Canadian cultures which are Indigenous” (Callahan, 2019). The third game heavily leans into this, as after two games set in deep space, the first time the player gets to experience Earth in person happens in Vancouver. According to Derek Watts from BioWare, the reasoning for this was quite straightforward: “We're a Canadian company, so we should make it a Canadian city. Vancouver had just finished the Olympics, so we set it in Vancouver” (Sapieha, 2012). In relation to these Canadian cultural representations, I would like to shift the scope towards how Mass Effect represents transportation infrastructures, namely, the “mass relays” (BioWare, 2007) that propel spaceships across the galaxy. Through this piece of sci-fi infrastructure, I will attempt to provide parallels with the uneven political and economical expansion of Canada, referring to Harold Innis’s (1923; 1950; 1951) ideas on the bias of communication technologies. Finally, I will attempt to emphasize the enduring relevance of the trilogy, possibly bringing a fresh perspective to its infamous endings through this line of interrogation.

Spread Too Thin: The Bias of Space over Time

To begin with, let us consider the basic description of this significant transporation infrastucture in the Milky Way galaxy, which is the basis for the title of the trilogy: the mass effect relays, or mass relays in short. The in-game codex describes them as “enormous structures, scattered throughout the stars, create corridors of virtually mass-free space. This allows instantaneous transit between locations normally separated by years or even centuries using conventional FTL [faster than light] drives” (BioWare, 2007). Crucially, this technology was not created by its contemporary users in the Milky Way; it was salvaged: “Once believed to be of Prothean origin, mass relays were in fact created by the Reapers using technology far beyond that of other living species” (BioWare, 2012a). The mass relays were created as an evolutionary control mechanism by the race of artificial intelligence dubbed “the Reapers”:

SOVEREIGN: “Your civilization is based on the technology of mass relays; our technology. By using it, your society develops along the paths we desire. We impose order on the chaos of organic evolution.” (BioWare, 2007)

The mass relays are indicative of the inherent instability of depending on a single strand of technology for which no substitute exists. This essential piece of infrastructure is what allows various species to become a galaxy-spanning confederation instead of being confined to a miniscule corner of the galaxy, unaware of each other. The Reapers exploit this dependency when the time of harvest comes due for the spacefaring civilizations. Utilizing the mass relays, they quickly lay siege to the homeworlds of every spacefaring species, aiming to harvest them as they did the preceding advanced species 50.000 years ago.

The instability of relying on a single strand of technology is echoed by one of the most prominent figures of the Toronto school of communication theory, Harold Innis. He distinguishes between time-bound (easy to transport, yet perishable) and space-bound (hard to transport, yet durable) communication technologies:

“Concentration on a medium of communication implies a bias in the cultural development of the civilization concerned either towards an emphasis on space and political organization or towards an emphasis on time and religious organization. Introduction of a second medium tends to check the bias of the first and to create conditions suited to the growth of empire.” (Innis, 1950, p. 216)

Referring to the Eastern Roman Empire’s political and religious durability, Innis notes the compromise between the parchment and papyrus technologies. Innis claims that the former influenced the durability of the Eastern Orthodox Church, while the latter informed the bureaucratic expansion of the empire. In essence, Innis (1951) proposes that the “relative emphasis on time or space will imply a bias of significance to the culture in which it is embedded” (p. 33), and overreliance on time or space would bring about a quicker end for a civilization. This is precisely the conundrum presented in the Mass Effect trilogy: by salvaging and using the mass relays, the species of Milky Way exhibit a significant bias towards space over time. The exploitation of this bias is not presented as the reason for its existence in the narrative, but it certainly is an embedded weak point that leads to a strategic disadvantage for organic civilizations in the war depicted in Mass Effect. This is comparable with the suggestion that the easing of transportation of information leads to increased competition and conflict:

“In the fifteenth century the high price of hand-copied manuscripts provided an incentive to experiment with mechanical methods of reproducing information. The resulting fall in transmission costs led to the development of written forms of vernacular languages and intense competition for territory.” (Dudley, 1995, p. 764).

It would be easy to imagine Sovereign, the vanguard of the Reapers, referring to Harold Innis in its tirade about the expansion of organic civilizations, referring to their spread across the galaxy as a weakness to be exploited. The idea of stretching too thin is also something that has roots in Canadian political and economic history, which is especially emblematic in relation to Canada’s settler-colonial history, and the development of Canadian Pacific Railway. Innis (1923) attributes the development of the CPR to the preexisting bias towards the political unity over the economic unity of Canada: “Politically these sections were united but economically the barriers proved to be of a character which tested severely and almost to the breaking-point the union which had been consummated”. Much like the communication technologies, the adoption of different transportation technologies also offset existing biases towards spatial dispersion or concentration.

A Paradigm Shifts and History Marches On: Undoing the Biases

So far, we have compared Innis’s ideas on communication and transportation technologies with Mass Effect’s depiction of dependence on salvaged transportation technologies. There is yet another dimension to this argument, which is related to the conclusion of the trilogy. Here, the duality of political (spatial) and religious (temporal) organization proposed by Innis is replaced with the duality of synthetic and organic life. The collective intelligence of Reapers (“the Catalyst”), reveals this reasoning during the final culmination of the narrative, claiming to provide the solution to the “inevitable” problem of synthetic life rebelling against their flesh-and-blood creators: “We harvest advanced civilizations, leaving the younger ones alone [...] Without us to stop it, synthetics would destroy all organics. We’ve created this cycle so that never happens [...] I was created to bring balance, to be the catalyst for peace between organics and synthetics” (BioWare, 2012a). This is reflected in the game through the conflict between the organic “Quarians” and the synthetic “Geth”. The Quarians had the ability to create synthetic life in the form of the Geth, but not the social conditions to treat them as equal beings, leading to an existentially threatening conflict. The ability to create synthetic life is not matched with the socio-political conditions of giving that life autonomy. The game allows the player to establish a new paradigm, one wherein the organic and synthetic life would be integrated in a “Synthesis” of potential resolutions.

First of all, the Synthesis ending clearly contributes to the themes of multiculturalism that are encountered throughout the trilogy, which is also reflected in how the Catalyst frames it: “Organics seek perfection through technology. Synthetics seek perfection through understanding” (BioWare, 2012a). Although the synthetics were initially framed as being a threat to the existence of the organics, the Synthesis ending is framed as a paradigm-altering change that makes it possible to permanently include synthetic life in the multicultural galaxy we have referred to previously. In any case, the question stands: why could the synthetics not be included in this mosaic of cultures before the Synthesis? What made them intrinsically incompatible with the organics? Callahan (2019) suggests that Canada’s multiculturalism is “assimilation by stealth” (Hansen, 2016), and that Mass Effect, as a Canadian cultural artifact, reflects this attitude. This is a situation wherein the fear of difference leads to conflict, and the assurance of integration is presented as the only way to quell this fear. Yet, the trilogy treats this ending in terms of bringing about understanding through direct experience of others’ experiences rather than erasing differences, which is a form of multiculturalism that can persist.

The Synthesis ending is also intrinsically related to the concept of social evolution (or revolution), as the Catalyst claims that the “organics will be perfected by fully integrating with synthetic technology”. This brings us back to Harold Innis, as Dudley (1995) characterizes Innis’s ideas about the bias of space and time as deeply evolutionary concepts:

“At any moment in a given society, different communications technologies are likely to coexist. Indeed, his ideal is a state of balance in which two or more media of communication are used. Such a state of balance is likely to be temporary, Innis realizes, since one technology will tend eventually to dominate the other. Even then, however, there is no enduring equilibrium [...]” (p. 761).

Yet, the search for equilibrium is intrinsic to both the Synthesis ending, and to the work of Harold Innis: “Innis, like Darwin and Marx, was proposing a historical, path-dependent theory of change. In this sense he was very much a follower of the German idealist philosopher G.W.F. Hegel, for whom history was a dialectic process by which conflict between opposing forces is resolved” (Dudley, 1995, p. 767). Innis’s theories relating to the biases of technologies are relevant for both Canadian social history, as well as its cultural artifacts such as the Mass Effect trilogy.

The final choice of the trilogy has the options of taking control of the Reapers or destroying them alongside all synthetic life. The Catalyst claims that neither choice will bring a resolution to the conflict of organics and the synthetics; they are characterized as solutions that does not advance history, but simply bring about a delay to an inevitable conflict. The Synthesis is presented as the only ending that radically alters the paradigm of human existence, as a transhumanist solution to social conflict that gives synthetics and organics the keys to love and reason, respectively. This is the missing third concept Dudley (1995) claims to be missing from Innis’s communication binary of time and space, which is numbers: “when a complex system of communication is replaced by a simpler one, there is deeper penetration into the society. What was formerly reserved for an elite becomes accessible to a much wider segment of the population” (p. 765). Synthesis is this missing link; it evenly distributes the tools of synthetic reasoning and organic emotions across both populations, bringing about an egalitarian paradigm shift.

-Taylanumut Doğan

References

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