Real Virtual Human

Tom Maddox
Aug 22, 2017 · 15 min read

The disclosures of the impermanence of the past suggested, and suggest, an impermanence of the future. Little of what we have believed has been true …
Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel

Old people have always noticed how much has disappeared. For most of human history, this has meant family, lovers, friends, neighbors, all vanished along with many of the artifacts they’d grown up with — the human-built places of their youth, the house that burned down years ago or the abandoned farm, the cities ravaged by fire and plague and war. While tragic (sickness, death, destruction, material decay), these things are in a weird way, manageable. If there’s no solution for something dreadful, there’s no problem — it’s a condition of existence, and we cope as best we can.

In the early 20th century, Rilke sensed something different was on the way:

Now, from America, empty indifferent things are pouring across, sham things, dummy life…. A house, in the American sense, an American apple or a grapevine over there, has nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which went the hopes and reflections of our forefathers … Live things, things that are alive — that are conscious of us — are running out and can no longer be replaced. We are perhaps the last to have known such things.

Now, however, in the early years of the 21st century, what Rilke feared has expanded beyond anything he could have foreseen. Not just things but the fabric of everyone’s lives around the globe is disintegrating, because of war and disease, certainly, but also because of a continual rewrite of the human world, materially, intellectually, morally.

Now the old are not witnesses to what has disappeared but survivors mumbling about all that has been lost, all that has disappeared over an event horizon and thus has gone from our universe. They are fearful and uncomprehending — it’s as if aliens had visited our planet and destroyed the things we knew, then gone away, leaving behind their trash, their rootless and incomprehensible ways, their incessantly changing, polymorphic artifacts.

For both young and old, the rate of change has accelerated to a nauseating pace, as if we have been sentenced to live on a chaotic and terrifying carnival ride. Beliefs, from world religions to tribal animism, and ways of life (courtship, marriage, family, for instance) are warped, challenged, destroyed. They become contested domains or new ones. What people thought were self-evident truths about fundamental human practices can become battlegrounds. Whatever you cherish in your heart, it may be gone by the time you read this.

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People have not worn these changes well.

The dispossessed — their traditional ways of life now ill-recalled memories, their current lives subject to war, ethnic conflict, disease, poverty — move on as best they can, trying to create new ways of life. Megacities pop up like metastasized hobo jungles, with ten million and more inhabitants. They are places of uncertain refuge for people whose way of life has become unsustainable on farms and in villages. So they flee to Mumbai, Mexico City, Delhi, Jakarta, Karachi, Lagos, Kinshasa, Abidjan, Cape Town. Most live in shantytowns or favelas — such as the Red Zone in Mexico City, Dharavi in Mumbai: by whatever name, these improvised communities are mutant slums, semi-civilized, semi-permanent. The migrants try to survive in these fearful places; often they live without water or sewage or most formal civic structures. Yet even in the midst of privation, danger, and damaged human dignity, these places become defenses against the chaos, loci of community and self-rule.

Dislocated from their onetime physical homes and landscapes, their local customs and rituals, the millions also go to the cities for work, in the terrifying euphemism. They seek to be paid, but really they will be devoured. They occupy vast dormitories and work as long and hard as told for very little. If they despair and leap out of dormitory windows, thousands line up to replace them.

And there are others still more desperate: they simply flee from the apparently endless wars of the contemporary world — from Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Iraq — country after country where violence and chaos and privation drive out the inhabitants. They carry their children in their arms, whatever goods have not been destroyed in carts or on their backs. Their emblem is a drowned child washed up on the Mediterranean shore.

Behind them they leave their dead and what were their homes, which are now mostly piles of rubble, along with the ever present threats of air strikes and mechanized armies that kill them without much thought and with less remorse. They beg wealthier and more peaceful countries to take them, to provide them refuge.

In terms of continents, Asia hosts 3,5 million refugees on its soil, more than the Middle East (2,6 million), Europe (1,8 million) and America (800.000). 86% of all refugees have fled to so-called developing countries, the highest percentage in 22 years.
Arte, September 5, 2014

We, the comfortable, with the richest material lives, are the least hospitable. No surprise there.

The refugees’ suffering turns in the hands of bureaucracy into abstract, bloodless categories — immigrants, displaced persons, aliens, illegal aliens. Nation-states and the professionals who administer them know how to deal with categories, if not the people. Consider as a searing example the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has made virtue out of cruelty and indifference to others.

They are only one among the many organizations who pour salt on the wounds of the suffering. These institutions exist to sort the deserving from the unworthy — without empathy, even common kindness — and they condemn those who suffer to absurd, sometimes terrible fates at apparent whim. On Manus and Nauru, two Pacific islands, Australia holds more than 2000 refugees and asylum seekers:

Australia has reduced the men, women and children on the islands to namelessness, referring to them by registration numbers. Asked their names, kids often give a number. It’s all they know. At least the digits are not tattooed.
(New York Times, August 8, 2017, Roger Cohen, “Australia’s Desperate Refugee Obstinacy”)

Meanwhile the carnival ride continues, hatred of the other has become a resurgent fact of our globalism, and the gap between mortal poverty and obscene wealth (the billionaire lifestyle, if you will) in which the world is for sale and all its people for hire creates bitterness, despair, overwhelming resentment, self-loathing, envy. In our anger, we, whoever we might be, spit venom at those different from us, and this has become one normal way of finding an object for loathing of our ways of life, of ourselves, of the dilemmas we find ourselves in. It also expresses our rage at what has been lost, orders of understanding and practice that may have been racist, misogynistic, that may have expressed the orders given by power, but were nonetheless ours — our beliefs, our rituals.

So billions of us try to cope with the constant churn of geography and politics.

Climate change, meanwhile, threatens to rewrite the globe and certainly not to our advantage, perhaps to our extinction. Processes that have taken years to do their work quickly raise the oceans, heat the atmosphere, and rewrite the ecosystems that sustain life on the earth, and we let the chances we had to halt or slow these changes pass without doing much at all.

Small groups of the rich continue to collect the money made by destroying the world while assuring us the world is not being destroyed. We are paralyzed at the enormity of the challenge and sit like scared children peering out our cellar door at approaching funnel clouds as big as the sky.

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The destruction and disintegration I’ve been describing is hardly the whole of the story, indeed it’s just a partial sketch of our grief and despair and loss sketched with the broadest of brushes.

That’s one side of our recent history, but there are others: the virtual worlds that have come into existence and are now rewriting our lives; they have their own logic and power, their own narratives, their own effects, unknowable before and now woven into our lives, transforming and dislocating, promising more surprises to come. The rides at the carnival constantly become faster, higher, more and more disorienting and nauseating.

Many of us accept that we cannot make sense of our world in any comprehensive manner. There is no grand narrative.

From the Oxford Reference article on grands récits ‘big stories’:

Lyotard’s term for the totalizing narratives or metadiscourses of modernity which have provided ideologies with a legitimating philosophy of history. For example, the grand narratives of the Enlightenment, democracy, and Marxism.…Lyotard argues that such authoritarian universalizing narratives are no longer viable in postmodernity, which heralds the emergence of ‘little narratives’ (or micronarratives, petits récits): localized representations of restricted domains, none of which has a claim to universal truth status.

There are only more or less illuminating and relevant micronarratives. So far we have been looking at the brute material of the world in its transmutations and the human suffering that accompanies it.I’ll offer a few of the micronarratives that I’ve found useful over the years. Each is written by someone with a consuming, unifying idea, not a grand narrative but an obsessive way of looking at our world:

· Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 1967

· George W. S. Trow, Within the Context of No Context, 1980

· Neal Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 1985

So if we want to understand the evolution of smartphones, streamed videos and music, all that, we need to learn from television, particularly what it offers in terms of desire and projection. (At this point in our cultural transformations, there’s really little point in trying to explain the Web. We are soaked in it. We don’t need to have the Web’s complexities explained to us anymore than we do the layout of our living rooms.)

Debord’s central idea is the spectacle:

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.

And the vehicle of the spectacle is commodity fetishism: a notion that was first presented in Karl Marx’s Capital, it has remained one of most persuasive Marxist ideas.

It is nothing but the definite social relation between men themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race.
(Karl Marx, Capital)

Setting aside the economic mechanisms that drive these relationships, the phenomenon described here is “the fantastic form of a relation between things.” From this grows our involvement with things as objects of desire, and from that grows the spectacle:

The fetishism of the commodity — the domination of society by “intangible as well as tangible things” — attains its ultimate fulfillment in the spectacle, where the real world is replaced by a selection of images which are projected above it, yet which at the same time succeed in making themselves regarded as the epitome of reality.
(Debord, Society of the Spectacle)

Material things may or may not be involved in any scene of the Spectacle, but they need not be. We may be dealing with pure manifestations of the imaginary.

To understand this relationship, let’s examine a pervasive and successful feature of the Spectacle. Consider an automobile commercial done in video: its colors are super-saturated, with intensities seldom if ever seen in real life; the motions of the vehicles in it flow along diagonals, the most exciting of vectors — upward and downward at a slant because normal horizontals are boring (and verticals are science fiction). In the ads, the shoppers browse showrooms that are little capsules of the consumer universe. The showrooms gleam as the vehicles do, and car sellers stand ready to inform the shoppers — who may be canny or dopey, clued in or clueless , about whom the relevant fact is that they want to buy a new vehicle. The stakes for a salesperson are high, as he is really present in order to usher the shoppers into the beautiful fictions.

The buyers are in a state of arousal, consumer desire at a high level, with deep feeling. As the video ads show us, they are possessed by joy once at the wheel of a vehicle, as they steer along the strangely diagonal highways, through cities of romance, where buildings shine in the night and beautiful strangers watch their passing with interest and commendation, across expanses of desert where sand boils around them, or among cliff side vistas where they can drive without hindrance above beautiful blue ocean. The consumers are aroused and tumescent: how could they not be? (Perhaps they have orgasms, perhaps not. The ads are a bit coy in this regard.) Mostly, they are in love with the experience of being consumers in love — with vehicles, vistas, seeming cascades of possibility and joy beyond end. Not with the brute facts of car purchase and ownership and the real-world experiences of driving, but with enchantments focused on these things.

Again, note that our relationship to these dense moments of the Spectacle is driven by commodity fetishism: our desire invested in the network of images and sounds that bind us to our goods, to what we acquire or want to acquire. This relationship holds together the consumer economy, which supports and is supported by the Spectacle.

Absent the Spectacle, Apple would have no factories in Asia, no Apple stores in the U.S., no “Geniuses.” There might be machines with all the capabilities of any Apple but without the special combinations of marketing design and advertising that gave birth to the iPod and all Apple has shoved in front of us as supremely desirable consumer products. They could not engage our desires without stages on which to show them.

Here in the First World, where affluence is common, ambition has scope, and consumers have the illusion of infinite choice, what we see in the ads, whatever they try to sell us, is the face of the Spectacle: Guy Debord says,

When we look at its face, we do not see the Spectacle’s essential nature, its structures, its goals, its cultural totality: these are for the most part unseen, as they would interfere with the Spectacle’s presentation of itself. They would break the spell, and in the Spectacle, the spell is prized above all.

Marketing and advertising have become mechanisms of sensory-rich abduction that never speaks its true aims.

Simply, the relationship between commodity fetishism and the Spectacle holds together the consumer economy.

We — by which I mean the privileged — arrived here by years of technological development, economic and political struggle, of ever more fragmentation of groups and selves until the primary fact of our daily lives is the ongoing show across every possible medium of bright, shiny things to hold our attention — and yes, as we watch the play of light and form, the presenters of the shows pick our pockets, rifle through our private belongings, discover our secrets or mere privacies, search our homes, and do their very best to ensnare us in networks whose ostensible purposes can be anything from “friendship” to dating to ill-defined “sharing” but whose real purpose is to create false communities of desire which we can “share” in only through selling our selves. Literally: as many have pointed out, we are the payment for the pleasures we are offered.

How did all this come about? The story is now mythic and well-worn: of the technological advances that made all our virtualities possible; of the scientists, mathematicians, and technical geniuses who created the technologies, and of the heroic struggles of the visionaries and entrepreneurs who oversaw the creation of whole new enterprises (search, social networking, the iEverything), as though Ayn Rand’s wettest dreams of being dominated by heroic entrepreneurs all came true, almost instantly.

Trow and Postman focus on the media that dominated the spectacle when they wrote: in a simpler time, television and its endless strategies for entertaining us, to our detriment.Note that these are pre-Web books, and that their shared focus is how our attention is grabbed by television. Given that the Web (or, more generally, the Internet) is an extension of television by other means, everything that television offered and inflicted has become totalizing. TV evolved like a radioactive mutant in a comic book into computer networks, and its children fill the web, makes available print, audio, video, files of every conceivable type presented in their native format. And, of course, it allows us the illusion of playing along. We could only watch TV passively while pretending to share in the intimacy of the millions.

Postman starts off from Aldous Huxley, from Brave New World.

[I]n Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

And in a speech given the year before he died, Huxley said:

In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies — the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.
“Man’s Almost Infinite Appetite For Distractions”

The notions of distraction and amusement seem harmless enough, but when inflated to their current dimensions, media of distraction and amusement interfere with how we think, as Huxley says. Our experience of the world is skewed by viewing it as a series of amusements.

Trow’s evocation of television strikes more mysterious chords: “Television does not vary. The trivial is raised up to power. The powerful is lowered toward the trivial.”

Worse yet, television works a peculiar magic:

It is bewitching.
It interferes with growth, conflict, and destruction, and these forces are different in its presence.
’Entertainment’ is an unsatisfactory word for what it encloses or projects or makes possible.
No good has come of it.

He concludes, “Television is a mystery.”

Television was what we might call the needed ground for the global flowering of the Spectacle, because it was the first ubiquitous communicator of sound and images — which bewitched and manipulated, and largely immobilized us, which is the state in which the purveyors of the Spectacle want us. Watching TV, we careen from image to image, pulled along all the paths of desire.

As Postman repeats in various ways, when the news must be entertaining, it changes into entertainment, whose practices, virtues, and defects are very different from the news as we once knew and experienced it. How this series of infinite distractions penetrates into how we read, think, and criticize — perhaps rendering them strangely different — is a deeper, more mysterious question, one whose answers are emerging as the years of distraction move along, though most ultimate outcomes remain in doubt.

However, as is clear at this point, things are much worse than the mere metamorphosis of news into entertainment. Television represented an enormous leap beyond print and audio cultures and, of course, prepared us for the deluge, for the Internet and the Web and all that has come with it — including smart phones, a nausea inducing phrase, certainly, but a descriptive one. And the phones represent the ultimate development of the Spectacle … for the moment. If the purveyors of the Spectacle have their way, implants and enhanced realities are on the way, promising an infinite capacity for amusement and farther distance away from the real, from reason, evidence, critical questioning and analysis, even simple understanding.

At this point we have two domains for us to consider: the material and the virtual. The material: the domain of war, famine, plague, the world of new things — alien artifacts, notionally or metaphorically — of nomadism and hyper-urbanism; also the domain threatened by climate change, which can turn the screws on our species in horrible ways, at present only dimly seen because unexpected consequences will become the norm when we live and die in hot, wet, shifting environments, terrible places for our and other species. And the virtual domain: where reality can be superseded, perhaps banished, and where we seek endless amusement and more, deep gratification.

Can there be any doubt which domain will rule our fates? Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, the great and spectacular structures of the virtual, can disintegrate and collapse if the Internet connections fall into disrepair, the fragile networks that blanket us no longer function, the satellite networks disintegrate, and the hyperkinetic carnival rides of our world will lie in smoking ruins. There are hundreds, maybe more scenarios portraying just such events in more or less convincing ways. Collectively, these dramas say essentially one thing: the world as we know it can disappear almost overnight.

Imagine that the billions will no longer be able to afford the luxuries of social networks with their billionfold chatter, of shiny videogames and things for sale. People will instead be searching for protection from misery and destruction, for shelter, clothing, and food, for medical care and medicines in scarce supply in a chaotic world and its disintegrated civilizations.

Will we despair? Will we, like Chauncey Gardner in Being There, point our TV remotes at reality and click click click, attempting to change the channel because the one we are watching is threatening, terrifying? Will we live among the ruins and do the best we can to survive as global civilizations disintegrate around us?

As of the moment, world population numbers around 7.5 billion human beings: how many will survive the destruction of their habitats and the affordances of their technologies and current ways of life? Perhaps human resiliency and the whims of fate will allow us to escape the worst consequences of our global, drunken, destructive sprees, perhaps not. If we cannot escape our darkest, most violent and greediest impulses — and we here are not the privileged but all of us on this world — and if we cannot master Huxley’s “infinite appetite for distraction,” then we likely cannot escape the worst. Our hatreds and greed and addiction to amusement will consume us.

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Tom Maddox
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