Becoming Human

Iron Man 2 (John Favreau, 2010) focuses on a man isolated from his environment by a protective suit, and from his friends, family, and romantic interest by the conviction that he is dying as a result of the suit itself. While Tony Stark performs the role of billionaire playboy, Iron Man perceives the world in a doubled form, as perspectival image and as data diagrams in his heads-up display. The chapter gives a brief history of data visualisation, the most important visual language since perspective and now more dominant, to seek out the difficulty of being human in isolation, and at a moment when regimes for understanding the world are in flux. The chapter includes a discussion of the fictional inventor as a paragon of a mythical form of labour, and traces his construction to a new version of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, engaging Stark in competition with his AI.