Jessica Lappin

Project Description:

Our project explores how lie detection technologies gain rhetorical credibility despite lacking scientific validity. I began with an environmental scan of various models of polygraph machines and their histories before focusing on a uniquely Canadian case: the Fruit Machine. Developed between 1960 and 1964 by Dr. Frank Robert Wake from Carleton University, the Fruit Machine was a “gaydar” designed to detect homosexuality among Canadian public servants and support their dismissal. Survivors of these acts, that became known as the LGBT Purge, launched a class action lawsuit against the Canadian government, reaching a historic settlement in 2017. My research asks: How did such a speculative, unproven technology come to be seen as credible? I hypothesized that the Fruit Machine’s mystifying hardware, from its chrome casing to rows of switches resembling an alien spacecraft control panel, reinforces its trustworthiness. To answer this question, I examined declassified government records, conducted a literature review on rhetorical scholarship, and traced representations of the polygraph in science fiction media. Two frameworks emerged as key: visual rhetoric and design fiction. Though visual rhetoric has long developed ways of understanding real, tangible objects, design fiction speculates about objects that do not function in a present-day context, but serve as narrative prototypes for thinking through the social consequences of possible technologies and their futures. I apply these two frames to argue that the Fruit Machine’s failure may reveal its deeper function as a historical example of design fiction. It envisioned, and for several years performed, a long-Cold War dystopia where identities could be made legible, operating much like the Voight-Kampff device from "Blade Runner." Through this analysis, I show how visual design, both imagined and actual, matters for technological claims to truth.

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