Fantasies

One of the more interesting questions raised by EXistenZ is that of free will: to what extent are our actions, thoughts, feelings, and aspirations original to us, and to what extent are they constructed by external forces? In the movie, Pikul poses this same question in so many words while he and Allegra are in the world of the game. Forced to grapple with the uncomfortable feeling that they are being propelled along by an arbitrary external will, unable to choose their own responses to the events unfolding around them, Pikul complains:

Ted: "We're both stumbling around together in this unformed world, whose rules and objectives are largely unknown, seemingly indecipherable or even possibly nonexistant, always on the verge of being killed by forces that we don't understand."

Allegra: "That sounds like my game, alright."

Ted: "That sounds like a game that's not gonna be easy to market."

Allegra: "But it's a game everybody's already playing."

The "unformed world" of the game is, according to the dialogue, not so different from the "unformed world" of existence. Most games are escapes: aesthetically, they simulate worlds, roles, and situations that are obviously imaginary or 'unreal,' and, in terms of their design, contain clear, easy-to-understand rules and objectives that allow the player to feel in control. Free will is very much apparent in single-player adventure games and RPGs -- there are rules and limits, sure, but ultimately, players are allowed to do as they wish, imposing their will on a responsive but passive environment. I remember being blown away by Super Mario 64 (1996), the first fully three-dimensional platformer and one of the first fully three-dimensional games; unlike in two-dimensional platformers, Super Mario players could veer off course and go exploring, spending hours away from the objectives of the game and building objectives of their own. In essence, Super Mario 64 was a groundbreaking fantasy of empowerment, uniquely suited to its time.

What's ironic about EXistenZ is that Allegra Geller has designed a game that is as unnervingly unlike a game as possible. The fantasies of empowerment are swift and fleeting because consequences are always close behind. In Grand Theft Auto, there are no 'real' or significant consequences for killing a cop. Sure, you'll have the entire police force hunting you down, but the worst they can do is kill you and give you a chance to re-spawn and start over. In EXistenZ, Pikul may have enjoyed killing the Chinese waiter, but in so doing he unleashes a chain of events over which he has no control. He cannot see what's coming next, and this causes him some serious existential angst. His complaint, then, is one stemming from feelings of disempowerment -- aren't games, after all, supposed to give us more control and more free will?

The answer is yes, but the funny thing is most of us don't see it that way. We maintain the fantasy that we're pretty much in complete control of our lives -- when we're happy, at least. Questioning this basic tenet of existence leads one down some pretty nasty thought tunnels. So we keep up the fantasy as much as possible. The virtual identities we construct online in digital spaces such as Facebook and World of Warcraft are extensions of this fantasy. They give us the power to conduct 'impression management' and control how the world responds to us as individuals. But ironically, as our technological capabilities catch up with our desire to be whomever we want to be, these identities will inevitably become more fully realized -- more real to us; and perhaps, for that very reason, less satisfying. Our various identities are only becoming more integrated; and the closer our avatars and our SNS profiles get to exposing things about us that we'd rather see left out of the fantasy, the more will we feel disempowered. It will be interesting to watch as these new identities begin to 'bleed through' into the real world, putting us in the uncomfortable position of having to determine our 'real' identities from those that may merely be 'fake' or 'manufactured.'

Ultimately, the lesson here as I see it is that any attempt to fragment existence between 'real' and 'not real' serves the purpose of making us feel better about the fact that there is much in life we can't control. But that's life. There is such a thing as reality -- it simply encompasses all those things we would prefer not to think of as reality, too. And it shouldn't be forgotten that at the end of the day, we do have control over some things. The decision to go online and build an entirely new identity is, after all, a choice -- an imposition of our wills on reality.

S/R 3: EXistenZ

S/R 3: EXistenZ

EXistenZ (1999) is a sci-fi film written and directed by David Cronenberg that explores the limits of how we view reality. Based in a future where ordinary people divide their time between ‘reality’ and astonishingly realistic VR game worlds, it opens with the unveiling of eXistenZ — the latest creation by brilliant game designer Allegra Geller — before a specially selected focus group gathered in a country church. EXistenZ, like other VR games, is accessible via organic “game pods” constructed from bits and pieces of farm-raised amphibious mutants, or “trout.” To experience the game, the gamer must ‘plug’ the pod into his or her “bioport,” a surgical hole at the base of the spinal cord. Once the pod is inserted, the game will begin, constructing a fully immersive virtual world complete with sensations, characters, morals, motives, and choices from the collective thoughts, emotions, fears, and aspirations of the participants. As the group prepares to ‘enter’ eXistenZ, an attempt on Geller’s life by a fanatical assassin acting in the name of “the one true reality” thrusts the designer into the ‘protective’ custody of nervous PR intern Ted Pikul. With Pikul, Geller spends the remainder of the movie on the run, trying to learn the identities of those responsible for the conspiracy against her life. Their search for answers leads them in and out of eXistenZ, where they quickly become embroiled in a ‘virtual’ version of the very conspiracy they have been trying to uncover, eventually losing all sense of where the ‘virtual’ world of eXistenZ ends and the ‘real’ world of existence begins. In the final scene, they appear back at the church, and it is ‘revealed’ that they have been in another game the entire time — this once called tranCendenZ — that neither one of them is actually a famous designer — and finally, that they themselves are the very assassins they’d been trying to catch.

One of the more interesting themes in EXistenZ is that of violence. I never was particularly convinced by arguments suggesting a link between video games and violent behavior; it always seemed to me that the gulf between the world of the game and reality was too great to result in any confusion over the distinction between gunning down cops in Grand Theft Auto and firing an actual weapon at an actual flesh-and-blood person. But Cronenberg’s film presents a very different picture of the distinction — or lack thereof — beween virtual and ‘actual’ violence. Throughout, violent actions are portrayed in an exaggerated, cartoonish fashion, presumably in an attempt to emulate the over-the-top, cartoon violence of video games and low-budget sci-fi movies. While initially comical, these cartoon portrayals become gradually more disturbing as the movie progresses and the characters become increasingly unsure of what’s ‘real’ and what’s not. Pikul makes the first kill, dispatching Gas at the filling station as he is about to kill Geller. We assume, at this point, that he is not in the game — that he is, in fact, in ‘reality’ and that he just did, in fact, kill a ‘real’ person. But ironically, even though Pikul’s next kill — the Chinese waiter — is a character in the game, his death is easily the goriest and most disturbing in the film. We feel more for him than we do for Gas, as his death makes considerably less sense. By leaving us with no perceptible distinction between the ‘virtual’ and the ‘real’ and forcing us to witness acts of violence that could belong to either category, Cronenberg effectively turns our fascination with ‘virtual’ violence around on us with an emphatic twist, reminding us that what’s ‘virtual’ and what’s ‘real’ might not be so different after all.

getting to know the cyberhood

"One thing to keep in mind about social media: the internet mirrors and magnifies pre-existing dynamics. And it makes many different realities much more visible than ever before ... You can see homophily online and you can see the ways in which people who share physical space do not share emotional connections."

Boyd suggests that, by simply going online and having a look around, we can become more aware of how social stratification really works. This is both sad and encouraging. It is sad that more of us aren't using SNSs like facebook to meet new people from different backgrounds. I for one followed the script described by Boyd pretty closely; as a teenager, I defected from myspace because my sister was in college and she and all her friends were on facebook. And since then, I've pretty much exclusively friended people from my offline network. The potential to reach out to a stranger on the basis of a shared interest or to go rub elbows with my old myspace buddies is always there, but the force of habit is strong.

The suggestion that looking online can help us see things we may have formerly missed is encouraging because it might offer a way out of this dilemma. There is apparently a lot going on online that most of us flat out miss. Like bona fide digital stratification. Being a little more aware of where we go and whom we interact with online -- and then making a conscious effort to try new things and seek out new perspectives -- should empower us to at least have a better understanding of our online capabilities.

But my question is: what's the best way to initiate a meaningful dialogue between people of different classes, nationalities, and culturally defined values? It's one thing to go seek people out, but it's quite another to forge that "emotional connection" mentioned in the quotation above. Should there be any rules? Any guidelines?

Dorian Benkoil on Augmented Reality

I like Benkoil's attitude at the end of the article:

"Of course, there is a 'creepiness' factor in some of this, and it can be frightening to think of the possibilities for invasion of privacy. But let’s see how far the technology goes in the coming months and years — a lot of the apps are still glitchy, require downloads and don’t quite work all the time — then see what objections are raised to how the technology is being used."

AR is definitely creepy... and Benkoil's suggestion that the technology might prove a useful tool for journalists wanting to dig up a bunch of extra information on people during interviews is creepy, too. When standing face to face with someone else, having a conversation, most people like to think that all the communication is out there in the open. It's acceptable to 'read' the other person's facial expressions and tone of voice without him/her knowing about it, so long as any additional 'reading' is done on the sly... after all, it's understood that this is something people naturally do, and the information gleaned from 'reading' other people in this way is strictly conjectural anyhow. But facts -- or, at the very least, what the person you're communicating with wants you to believe to be fact -- are generally mediated and exchanged via speech. If a reporter were to use a smart phone equipped with AR technology to gather facts on an interviewee, it would presumably have to be without the interviewee's knowledge and consent. She would literally be on the record before opening her mouth. Now imagine the not-too-distant future of AR technology... if we could somehow get the data routed through camera lenses in our eyes, we'd pretty much be where Molly is in Neuromancer, minus the retractable finger knives. We could access all there is to know about anyone simply by looking at them. According to the standards of today, this would almost certainly constitute a serious violation of privacy rights... but at least it'd let us dispense with the pleasantries.

Getting back to the quotation above, what I like about Benkoil's attitude here is that he seems to understand the futility in trying to project the moral rules of our current technological paradigm onto the paradigm that is currently emerging. Thanks to the proliferation of SNSs, cultural attitudes towards privacy are already starting to shift... is a shift beyond indignation at the scenario described above really that hard to imagine? Ultimately, limiting prohibitions on technology use puts the power of ethical choice in the user's hands. While the potential for wrongdoing is there, we can't really know the 'wrong' of the matter until we've pushed the envelope just a little.

S/R 2

S/R 2: Neuromancer

Henry Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) takes place in a dystopian future where advancements in computer technology have enabled the transcendence of locality and other human limitations, as well as set the conditions for unfettered capitalism and pervasive cybercrime. It follows the story of a washed-up hacker named Case, whose inability to jack into the matrix – “a graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system” and routinely accessed by “legitimate operators” for the purposes of work, play, and interaction – is a result of toxin-induced nerve damage that has reduced him to hustling for drug money in the criminal underbelly of Chiba, a prominent Japanese sea port (56). Case is rescued from this dead end life by Molly, a female samurai under the employ of a mysterious individual named Armitage who offers to repair Case’s nerves as payment for a hack job. As the novel progresses, Case and Molly’s desire to figure out Armitage’s motives leads them into contact with Wintermute, an artificial intelligence (AI) controlled by the highly secretive Tessier-Ashpool (T-A) collective. Through these encounters and his own investigation, Case learns that Wintermute was programmed with a keening desire for purpose and direction that led it to deliberately invade the consciousness of a psychologically damaged U.S. colonel named Willis Corto and ‘repurpose’ him as Armitage, effectively gaining direct entry into the world of human affairs. Having discovered his employer’s will to be essentially that of a powerful AI intent on ditching its ‘natural’ limitations, Case is led involuntarily onto a collision course with the T-A collective, whose various attempts to achieve immortality via cloning, cryogenics, and another AI construct called Neuromancer are gradually revealed over the course of a dangerous mission into the heart of their hive-like, orbital residence to coerce 3Jane, a member of the T-A line, into disclosing the password that will release Wintermute from the collective’s control. Just as an uncalculated betrayal threatens to jeopardize the mission, Neuromancer invades Case’s consciousness and lets him experience fist-hand the futility of an eternal existence devoid of change – a futility he expresses to 3Jane, prompting her to give up the password and release Wintermute and Neuromancer from their technological prisons, to unknown effect.

As this summary suggests, one of the major questions explored in Neuromancer is that of the mind/body divide. Gibson’s analysis of this question is perhaps more pertinent than ever, as it is generally agreed that our routine participation in virtual worlds via the Internet is causing us to become increasingly disengaged from our bodily limitations. Like the masses of “legitimate operators” jacking into the matrix in Gibson’s world, we too have become used to conducting much of our work, play, and social interactions through a variety of digital media that allow us to exchange real, ‘out-there-in-the-world’ experiences for simulated ones. The world of Neuromancer is simply one in which the simulations and their corollary technologies have become sophisticated enough to make total disengagement from biology a viable option. When cowboys like Case refer to the “animal” necessities of “food, warmth, [and] a place to sleep” and emotions like fear and anger as “meat thing[s],” they express a contempt for the body that goes back at least as far to debates in Ancient Athens between Platonists and Hedonists, who took opposite positions on the question of what make us human (‘Is it mind or body?’) (153). Whereas Wintermute, for all its intelligence, will, and careful premeditation, represents the former position, the psychotic, pleasure-crazed Riviera represents the opposite pole of inhumanity in his endless pursuit of sensual gratification. Somewhere between these two extremes lies Case, the utterly normal “statistical animal” whose conscious rejection of a virtual life a la the world of the Neuromancer construct constitutes a profoundly “human” decision to embrace the uncertainties of age, decay, and most importantly, change – in other words, the inseparability of body and mind. What I find to be beautiful about Gibson’s work is that it imagines conditions under which we, like Case, might one day be able to resolve ancient debates over the mind/body split and what it means to be human in our own lives, via our own choices and our own actions. And considering these conditions are already in the making, Neuromancer may in fact be a very instructive fiction.

Neuromancer 3

Marie France’s vision of achievable immortality is fascinating precisely because it couldn’t be more unlike the clone-and-freeze method favored by Ashpool. She conceives of freedom from death as occurring through the medium of personality, testing her theory with the construction of Neuromancer -- an intelligent RAM construct capable of simulations designed to elicit real human emotion. Whereas Ashpool couldn’t bring himself to let go of the ‘meat’ (not until his suicide, that is... his brand of immortality was apparently not much worth living for), M/F recognized that, via AI, she could let her body die without having to let go of the experience of living. Love, hate, fear, piss... it’s all there in the construct... only difference is, it’s forever.

Case, when given the choice to participate in this alternate reality, ultimately chooses the real thing -- even in spite of the fact that remaining in the N/M construct would allow him to spend eternity with the only person he ever really loved. As he explains to 3Jane, “‘I met Neuromancer. He talked about your mother. I think he’s something like a giant ROM construct, for recording personality, only it’s full RAM. The constructs think they’re real, like it’s real, but it just goes on forever.’” According to Case’s logic, nothing that lasts forever can be ‘real’ in any meaningful sense, as a big part of the experience of reality is the experience of change and uncertainty. So the concept of living forever by any method is, in his view, a false concept... at some point, the living ceases to be living in any familiar sense. When people talk about downloading an entire human personality onto a ROM or a RAM or some kind of hardware, they often add that doing so would grant that personality a kind of immortality. We may be getting close to attaining this technological capability... but in the end, would it really be all that desirable, living forever in a hermetically sealed system, impervious to change? It may be true, as many great writers have suggested, that life can only be conceived of in terms of variability and decay. Efforts to freeze reality in place, then, run somewhat counter to the nature of existence... the impulse to freeze is perfectly natural, but still... the efforts themselves never fully satisfy. So is there any real point in pursuing immortality? By way of a lot of money and effort, we’re steadily getting closer... and pursuing longevity is no doubt a good thing for discovering cures to major illnesses... but is the goal of living forever really worth all that much?

Neuromancer 2: Us vs. Them 4eva

After reading Brown, we considered the question of whether the ability to connect to anyone at any time -- made possible by the Internet -- is creating more unity among people with opposing worldviews or less. Brown’s suggestion was that neither conclusion is 100% accurate... while happenings like the Evil Bert Laden incident point us to examples of how massively distributable and reproducible media can cause considerable cross-cultural confusion over the significance of a single text or event, leading (in some cases) to potentially violent tensions, they also point us to the inevitability of ‘contact’ in the Internet age and the near limitless potential for peaceful dialogue inherent in such encounters with ‘the other.’ People can insulate themselves from the other in groups, but nowadays, the barriers that separate one group from another are becoming more and more manifestly fictitious. So what does Neuromancer have to say about all of this? For one, the notion of being able to swap sensoriums entails a total breakdown of the barrier between self and other -- one so complete that, if such a capability were to exist, distinctions between individuals would become pretty much moot, except for the purpose of shopping around to find that perfect set of eyes or hands or legs or whatever. Neuromancer is full of descriptions of people exchanging pieces of themselves -- in many cases, literally -- for pieces of other people. Though the technologies used to effect these exchanges are not all web based, one can see how the Internet is already enabling similar exchanges between disparate people, groups, and cultures. From what I’ve seen of WoW, it seems to be somewhat disproportionately populated by beautiful, thin, scantily clad elf women... a product, no doubt, of American culture’s obsession with certain female body types. And in analyzing these avatars, one can’t neglect the influence of Tolkien and D&D and, depending on how far they want to go, a thousand other cultural imports from many different areas of the world. In playing games like WoW and creating various web profiles and avatars across hundreds of other venues, we’re stitching new experiences from recycled material... just like the folks in Gibson’s book. In our world, it’s all virtual... but still, it’s a testament to the extent of our interconnectedness and to the flimsiness of the ‘barriers’ that keep us separate from one another.

So how long do we go on pretending like certain barriers exist when it’s becoming increasingly apparent they don’t, hiding away in groups that define their shared interests in opposition to everyone else’s? Gibson’s answer to this question would seem to be a long, long time. His descriptions of various religious groups, though rarely essential to the plot, nevertheless pass some interesting commentary on our human tendency to factionalize. Even with the technology to literally swap perspectives and the mind boggling potential for empathy and peace entailed thereby, people in Gibson’s world still turn to Zionism, Christian Fundamentalism, etc. ... systems of thought that preach the sanctity of remaining separate from ‘the other.’ The imputation is that there’s something natural about making enemies, just as there’s something natural about making friends. Gibson’s outlook is a bit discouraging if you’d prefer to think that the Internet is broadening our capacity for empathy rather than contracting it or leaving it unchanged... but at the same time, it’s a reminder that we can’t exactly expect our technologies to fix everything for us without any kind of effort on our parts. (Or can we?)