Tag Archives: sci-fi

Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans

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(Editor’s note: on this 36th anniversary of the passing of Philip K. Dick, it seems an appropriate time to note the relevance of his work to our current dystopia as Henry Farrell does in the following essay. Unfortunately the author is less astute regarding the ways in which the dystopias of Orwell and Huxley are equally relevant to our current milieu.)

By Henry Farrell

Source: Boston Review

This is not the dystopia we were promised. We are not learning to love Big Brother, who lives, if he lives at all, on a cluster of server farms, cooled by environmentally friendly technologies. Nor have we been lulled by Soma and subliminal brain programming into a hazy acquiescence to pervasive social hierarchies.

Dystopias tend toward fantasies of absolute control, in which the system sees all, knows all, and controls all. And our world is indeed one of ubiquitous surveillance. Phones and household devices produce trails of data, like particles in a cloud chamber, indicating our wants and behaviors to companies such as Facebook, Amazon, and Google. Yet the information thus produced is imperfect and classified by machine-learning algorithms that themselves make mistakes. The efforts of these businesses to manipulate our wants leads to further complexity. It is becoming ever harder for companies to distinguish the behavior which they want to analyze from their own and others’ manipulations.

This does not look like totalitarianism unless you squint very hard indeed. As the sociologist Kieran Healy has suggested, sweeping political critiques of new technology often bear a strong family resemblance to the arguments of Silicon Valley boosters. Both assume that the technology works as advertised, which is not necessarily true at all.

Standard utopias and standard dystopias are each perfect after their own particular fashion. We live somewhere queasier—a world in which technology is developing in ways that make it increasingly hard to distinguish human beings from artificial things. The world that the Internet and social media have created is less a system than an ecology, a proliferation of unexpected niches, and entities created and adapted to exploit them in deceptive ways. Vast commercial architectures are being colonized by quasi-autonomous parasites. Scammers have built algorithms to write fake books from scratch to sell on Amazon, compiling and modifying text from other books and online sources such as Wikipedia, to fool buyers or to take advantage of loopholes in Amazon’s compensation structure. Much of the world’s financial system is made out of bots—automated systems designed to continually probe markets for fleeting arbitrage opportunities. Less sophisticated programs plague online commerce systems such as eBay and Amazon, occasionally with extraordinary consequences, as when two warring bots bid the price of a biology book up to $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping).

In other words, we live in Philip K. Dick’s future, not George Orwell’s or Aldous Huxley’s. Dick was no better a prophet of technology than any science fiction writer, and was arguably worse than most. His imagined worlds jam together odd bits of fifties’ and sixties’ California with rocket ships, drugs, and social speculation. Dick usually wrote in a hurry and for money, and sometimes under the influence of drugs or a recent and urgent personal religious revelation.

Still, what he captured with genius was the ontological unease of a world in which the human and the abhuman, the real and the fake, blur together. As Dick described his work (in the opening essay to his 1985 collection, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon):

The two basic topics which fascinate me are “What is reality?” and “What constitutes the authentic human being?” Over the twenty-seven years in which I have published novels and stories I have investigated these two interrelated topics over and over again.

These obsessions had some of their roots in Dick’s complex and ever-evolving personal mythology (in which it was perfectly plausible that the “real” world was a fake, and that we were all living in Palestine sometime in the first century AD). Yet they were also based on a keen interest in the processes through which reality is socially constructed. Dick believed that we all live in a world where “spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into heads of the reader.” He argued:

the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans—as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides. My two topics are really one topic; they unite at this point. Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans.

In Dick’s books, the real and the unreal infect each other, so that it becomes increasingly impossible to tell the difference between them. The worlds of the dead and the living merge in Ubik (1969), the experiences of a disturbed child infect the world around him in Martian Time-Slip (1964), and consensual drug-based hallucinations become the vector for an invasive alien intelligence in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965). Humans are impersonated by malign androids in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and “Second Variety” (1953); by aliens in “The Hanging Stranger” (1953) and “The Father-Thing” (1954); and by mutants in “The Golden Man” (1954).

This concern with unreal worlds and unreal people led to a consequent worry about an increasing difficulty of distinguishing between them. Factories pump out fake Americana in The Man in the High Castle (1962), mirroring the problem of living in a world that is not, in fact, the real one. Entrepreneurs build increasingly human-like androids in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, reasoning that if they do not, then their competitors will. Figuring out what is real and what is not is not easy. Scientific tools such as the famous Voight-Kampff test in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (and Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie based loosely on it) do not work very well, leaving us with little more than hope in some mystical force—the I Ching, God in a spray can, a Martian water-witch—to guide us back toward the real.

We live in Dick’s world—but with little hope of divine intervention or invasion. The world where we communicate and interact at a distance is increasingly filled with algorithms that appear human, but are not—fake people generated by fake realities. When Ashley Madison, a dating site for people who want to cheat on their spouses, was hacked, it turned out that tens of thousands of the women on the site were fake “fembots” programmed to send millions of chatty messages to male customers, so as to delude them into thinking that they were surrounded by vast numbers of potential sexual partners.

These problems are only likely to get worse as the physical world and the world of information become increasingly interpenetrated in an Internet of (badly functioning) Things. Many of the aspects of Joe Chip’s future world in Ubik look horrendously dated to modern eyes: the archaic role of women, the assumption that nearly everyone smokes. Yet the door to Joe’s apartment—which argues with him and refuses to open because he has not paid it the obligatory tip—sounds ominously plausible. Someone, somewhere, is pitching this as a viable business plan to Y Combinator or the venture capitalists in Menlo Park.

This invasion of the real by the unreal has had consequences for politics. The hallucinatory realities in Dick’s worlds—the empathetic religion of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the drug-produced worlds of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, the quasi–Tibetan Buddhist death realm of Ubik—are usually experienced by many people, like the television shows of Dick’s America. But as network television has given way to the Internet, it has become easy for people to create their own idiosyncratic mix of sources. The imposed media consensus that Dick detested has shattered into a myriad of different realities, each with its own partially shared assumptions and facts. Sometimes this creates tragedy or near-tragedy. The deluded gunman who stormed into Washington, D.C.’s Comet Ping Pong pizzeria had been convinced by online conspiracy sites that it was the coordinating center for Hillary Clinton’s child–sex trafficking ring [likewise, the masses may have been convinced by mainstream media that a real child-sex trafficking ring never existed].

Such fractured worlds are more vulnerable to invasion by the non-human. Many Twitter accounts are bots, often with the names and stolen photographs of implausibly beautiful young women, looking to pitch this or that product (one recent academic study found that between 9 and 15 percent of all Twitter accounts are likely fake). Twitterbots vary in sophistication from automated accounts that do no more than retweet what other bots have said, to sophisticated algorithms deploying so-called “Sybil attacks,” creating fake identities in peer-to-peer networks to invade specific organizations or degrade particular kinds of conversation.

Twitter has failed to become a true mass medium, but remains extraordinarily important to politics, since it is where many politicians, journalists, and other elites turn to get their news. One research project suggests that around 20 percent of the measurable political discussion around the last presidential election came from bots. Humans appear to be no better at detecting bots than we are, in Dick’s novel, at detecting replicant androids: people are about as likely to retweet a bot’s message as the message of another human being. Most notoriously, the current U.S. president recently retweeted a flattering message that appears to have come from a bot densely connected to a network of other bots, which some believe to be controlled by the Russian government and used for propaganda purposes.

In his novels Dick was interested in seeing how people react when their reality starts to break down. A world in which the real commingles with the fake, so that no one can tell where the one ends and the other begins, is ripe for paranoia. The most toxic consequence of social media manipulation, whether by the Russian government or others, may have nothing to do with its success as propaganda. Instead, it is that it sows an existential distrust. People simply do not know what or who to believe anymore. Rumors that are spread by Twitterbots merge into other rumors about the ubiquity of Twitterbots, and whether this or that trend is being driven by malign algorithms rather than real human beings.

Such widespread falsehood is especially explosive when combined with our fragmented politics. Liberals’ favorite term for the right-wing propaganda machine, “fake news,” has been turned back on them by conservatives, who treat conventional news as propaganda, and hence ignore it. On the obverse, it may be easier for many people on the liberal left to blame Russian propaganda for the last presidential election than to accept that many voters had a very different understanding of America than they do.

Dick had other obsessions—most notably the politics of Richard Nixon and the Cold War. It is not hard to imagine him writing a novel combining an immature and predatory tycoon (half Arnie Kott, half Jory Miller) who becomes the president of the United States, secret Russian political manipulation, an invasion of empathy-free robotic intelligences masquerading as human beings, and a breakdown in our shared understanding of what is real and what is fake.

These different elements probably would not cohere particularly well, but as in Dick’s best novels, the whole might still work, somehow. Indeed, it is in the incongruities of Dick’s novels that salvation is to be found (even at his battiest, he retains a sense of humor). Obviously, it is less easy to see the joke when one is living through it. Dystopias may sometimes be grimly funny—but rarely from the inside.

Initial Thoughts on Blade Runner 2049

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Upon hearing early reports of a planned Blade Runner sequel a couple years ago, I felt both anticipation and dread. I considered it a singular vision which didn’t necessarily need a sequel, yet could understand the desire to re-immerse oneself in the compelling world it introduced. Re-experiencing the film through its Director’s Cut and Final Cut versions in subsequent years seemed to me as satisfying as watching sequels since even the relatively minor changes had a significant impact on its meaning and the richness of the sound and production design allows for the discovery of new details with every viewing. Also, one’s subjective experience watching even the same movie can be vastly different depending on one’s age and other circumstances.

One of my earliest cinematic memories was seeing the first Star Wars film as a toddler. At around the same time I remember staying up late with my parents to watch the network television premiere of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Though I was too young to fully comprehend those films’ narratives, the spectacle and sounds definitely left an impression and established a lifelong appreciation for the sci-fi genre and it’s mind-expanding possibilities.

Flash forward to an evening sometime in early 1982. After viewing a commercial for Blade Runner I instantly knew it was a movie I had to see. In the short trailer there were glimpses of flying cars over vast cityscapes, the guy that played Han Solo in a trench coat, bizarre humanoid robots within settings as strange yet detailed as 2001: a Space Odyssey. My parents, responsible as they were, refused to give in to incessant demands to see Blade Runner and that Summer I must have been the only kid who reluctantly agreed to see “E.T.” as a compromise. I probably did enjoy it more than I expected to, but might have enjoyed it more had I not viewed it as a weak Blade Runner substitute and if I actually paid attention to the entire film.

Back then our family usually saw films at drive-in theaters and the one we went to that night had two screens, one showing E.T. and the other, to my delight and frustration, happened to be Blade Runner. Even without sound and at a distorted angle I was awestruck by the establishing shots of LA in 2019 (which I glanced over to witness just as E.T.’s ship was landing on the screen in front of us, and for the entire duration of the films my eyes would switch back and forth between screens. Even without understanding anything about the plot of Blade Runner it made the most fantastical elements of E.T. pale in comparison. Judging from the box-office receipts of its theatrical run, the majority must have thought otherwise since Blade Runner earned a relatively meager $28 million while E.T. was the breakout hit of the year with nearly $360 million.

Within a few years I’d see portions of Blade Runner on cable TV at a friend’s house and finally saw the complete film after my family got a VCR and it was one of the first videos I rented. The film served as a gateway to many other interests such as cyberpunk, film noir, electronic music, but most importantly, an appreciation of the novels of Philip K. Dick. Like a psychedelic drug, they inspired philosophical questioning regarding the nature of reality, consciousness, society and what it means to be human.

This background, which is probably not too dissimilar to other stories of obsessive fandom, outlines how one’s immersion in media is rooted not just in the work itself but how it resonates with and shapes aspects of one’s identity and personal narrative as much as other memories. There’s also a nostalgia factor involved because, similar to a souvenir or any object with sentimental value, revisiting such media can recapture a sense of the feelings and sensations associated with the initial experience and sometimes the milieu of the content as well. Nostalgia is a longing for the past, even a past one has never directly experienced, never was and/or never will be, often prompted by loneliness and disconnectedness. Because it can sometimes provide comfort and hope it’s a feeling too often exploited by the marketing industry as well as media producers such as those behind reboots and sequels. Though Blade Runner 2049 may not have been solely created to cash in on nostalgia for the original, as with most big studio sequels it’s still a factor.

The type of nostalgia evoked by Blade Runner is singular, for it envisions a (near and soon to be past) future through the lens of the early eighties combining a pastiche of styles of previous eras. The film also serves as a meditation on the importance of memory and its relation to identity and the human experience. In a sense, being a longtime fan of the film is like having nostalgia for distilled nostalgia. Also unique is the fact that it took 35 years for the sequel to get made, just a couple years shy of the year in which the original takes place. The long delay is largely due to Blade Runner being so far ahead of its time it took over a decade for it to be widely regarded as a science fiction masterwork. Also, it took an additional decade and a half to develop plans for a sequel. But perhaps now is the ideal time for a follow-up as aspects of our world become more dystopian and there’s a greater need for nostalgic escape, even through narratives predicting dystopia.

While the future world of the original Blade Runner was definitely grim, it was also oddly alluring due to it’s depiction of a chaotic globalized culture, exotic yet functional-looking technology and hybrid retro/futuristic aesthetic shaped by sources as diverse as punk rock fashion, Heavy Metal magazine, film noir and Futurism among many others. The imagery of Blade Runner 2049 expands on the original by visualizing how the future (or alternate reality) LA has evolved over the course of 30 years as well as the environmentally and socially devastating impact of trying to sustain a technocratic corporate global system for so long.

Blade Runner opens with shots of oil refineries in the city intercut with close-ups of a replicant’s eye. 2049 opens with a close-up of an eye and transitions to an overhead shot of an endless array of solar panels, indicating a post peak-oil world. Despite the use of cleaner energy, the world of 2049 is far from clean with the entirety of San Diego depicted as a massive dumping ground for Los Angeles. Scavengers survive off the scraps which are recycled into products assembled by masses of orphaned child laborers in dilapidated sweatshop factories.

The Los Angeles of Blade Runner 2049 looks (and is) even colder and more foreboding than before. Gone are the Art Deco-inspired architecture and furnishings, replaced by Brutalist architecture and fluorescent-lit utilitarian interiors (with a few exceptions such as Deckard’s residence, Stelline Corporation headquarters and the Wallace Corporation building). Aerial shots reveal a vast elevated sprawl of uniform city blocks largely consisting of dark flat rooftops with glimmers of light emanating from below, visible only in the deep but narrow chasms between.

One of the more prominant structures is the LAPD headquarters which looks like an armored watchtower, signalling its role as a hub of the future surveillance state panopticon. Though an imposing feature of the city’s skyline, it’s dwarfed by larger structures housing even more powerful institutions. Just as a massive ziggurat owned by the Tyrell Corporation dominated the cityscape of the first film, by 2049 the Wallace Corporation has bought out the Tyrell Corporation and not only claims the ziggurat but has constructed an absurdly large pyramid behind it. Protecting the entire coastline of the city is a giant sea wall, presumably to prevent mass flooding from rising sea levels.

In a referential nod to the original film, city scenes of 2049 display some of the same ads such as Atari, Coca-Cola and Pan Am, but even more distracting are product placements for Sony, one of the companies which produced the new film. Such details might work as “Easter eggs” for fans (and shareholders), but takes away from the verisimilitude of the world depicted in the film where the Wallace Corporation has such seeming dominance over the economy and society in general, it probably wouldn’t leave much room for competition large enough to afford mass advertising.

While the background characters in the city of the first film seemed rude or largely indifferent to one another, 30 years later citizens are more outwardly hostile. This could reflect increasing social tensions from economic stratification as well as hostility towards replicants because the protagonist of this film is openly identified as one. Speaking of which, Ryan Gosling turns in an excellent performance as the new Blade Runner, Officer K (aka Joe, an obvious reference to Joseph K from Kafka’s “The Trial”).

Ironically, the replicants and other forms of AI in 2049 seem a little more self-aware and human-like while the humans and social institutions have become correspondingly android-like. From the perspective of the future CEOs (and some today), both replicants and non-wealthy humans (known as “little people” in cityspeak) exist to be exploited for labor and money and then “retired” when no longer needed. Reflecting this brutal reality are the largely grey and drab color scheme of the landscapes, interiors, and fashions. Adding to the mood is the soundtrack which, while at times evoking the calmer and more subtle Vangelis music of the original, is more often louder and harsher, sometimes blending with the noisy diegetic (background) soundscape.

2049‘s screenplay is almost a meta-sequel, introducing plot elements seemingly designed to address problems and inconsistencies in the original which have been pointed out by fans and critics through the years. Numerous references to Blade Runner, while nostalgic and crowd-pleasing, are almost distracting enough to break the spell of the film (at least for those who’ve re-watched the original enough times to memorize every detail). Fortunately, just as frequently new revelations, concepts and hints at potential new directions pulls one back in. I especially appreciated the further exploration of the origins and impact of false memories and its parallels to the creation and consumption of media and the way the film expanded the scope of the story beyond the city. Also surprising were references to films partly inspired by the works of Philip K. Dick such as Ghost in the Shell, The Matrix, and Her as well as stylistic influences from more contemporary aesthetic subcultures such as glitch and vaporwave.

Like with most sequels, the main draw for fans is the chance to see familiar faces from the original and 2049 doesn’t disappoint too much. Judging from the posters, trailers, interviews, etc. it was clear Harrison Ford would make a return, but unfortunately it wasn’t until after the majority of the duration of the film had passed. Nevertheless, the reappearance of Ford’s character Deckard was memorable, found by Agent K as a disheveled hermit in an abandoned casino surrounded by copious amounts of alcohol and ancient pop culture detritus. Deckard is apparently as much of a drinker as in the first film, but now not just to block out the pain of the past and present but to escape to an idealized past. Though his involvement in the plot seemed too brief it nevertheless plays a pivotal role in resolving the central mystery of the film and providing additional metacommentary.

Ford’s performance is arguably more compelling than his work in the original, though his character’s lack of charisma in the first film could be seen as intentional. Deckard’s character arc in the film, as well as that of Ford’s last two iconic roles from the 80s he reprised, cements his status as our culture’s archetype for the deadbeat father. This seems inevitable in hindsight because for a generation of latchkey kids (many with actual deadbeat dads), stars such as Harrison Ford were virtually surrogate father figures. Thus, it makes sense that the beloved characters Ford drifted away from for so long would be written as variations of a long absent deadbeat parent in their last installments.

An interesting detail about the way Deckard was characterized in the film was how he seemed more in line with a typical baby-boomer today than the gen x-er one would be at that age 32 years from now.  For example, people in their seventies today are probably more likely to be nostalgic for Elvis and Sinatra than a seventy-something person in 2049 who in our actual timeline would have more likely spent formative years listening to grunge or hiphop. A possible subtextual meaning might be that like false memories, nostalgia for media of enduring cultural value transcends lived experience. The referencing of “real” pop-culture figures within the world of the film seemed anachronistic at first, but the way it was done was interesting and worked with the themes and aesthetic (I suppose it’s preferable to having something like Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” shoe-horned into the film like in the Star Trek reboots). Getting back to the point, in the original Blade Runner, nostalgia permeated the film through its themes, production design, costumes and soundtrack. In Blade Runner 2049, nostalgia is a subtext of repeated callbacks to the original film, Agent K’s idealized retro relationship with his AI girlfriend Joi and Deckard’s hideout within the ruins of a city once associated with fun and glamour. The simulacrum of iconic figures from the past like Elvis and Marilyn Monroe (and Ford) haunting the deserted casino like ghosts reinforces the idea of media and culture’s ability to “implant” memories and resultant nostalgia.

As for the finale, I was disappointed that it was so far from the unconventional conclusion of the showdown between Roy Batty and Deckard. One could argue it’s a reflection of the state of the world (in and of film and reality), but it’d be nice to have a little more creativity and risk-taking. Though viscerally exciting and suspenseful, it wasn’t distinguishable enough from countless modern action films to be truly memorable. More satisfying was the epilogue which paralleled the contemplative nature of the original while reconnecting to the film’s recurring themes.

In a sense, the writers and director of Blade Runner 2049 were in a catch-22 situation. Creating a film too unlike or similar to the original Blade Runner would provoke criticism from fans. What director Denis Villeneuve and co-writers Hampton Fancher and Michael Green have managed to pull off is a balancing act of a film that’s unique in many ways yet interwoven with the original; nostalgic, but not in an obvious or overly sentimental way. Both have their flaws, but while I admire the thought and craft put into the sequel, I prefer the originality, tone, texture and atmosphere of Blade Runner. Blade Runner 2049 will likely satisfy most sci-fi fans, but I’m not sure it proves a sequel was necessary or that it stands alone as a classic.

Though not given the recognition it deserved in its time, Blade Runner was a groundbreaking and visionary film upping the bar for intellectual depth, moral complexity, production design and special effects to a degree not seen since 2001: a Space Odyssey. Its influence can be spotted in countless dystopian science fiction films made since. Though it’s too early to tell how influential Blade Runner 2049 will be, it doesn’t seem to have pushed the genre forward to a similar extent (of course contemporaneous opinions can seem wildly off the mark in hindsight). Regardless, it’s an above-average science fiction film by any reasonable standard so it’s unfortunate that judging from disappointing initial box-office reports, it seems to be following in the footsteps of the first Blade Runner pretty closely in that regard. Time will tell whether it achieves a similar cult status in years to come. Perhaps in 35 years?

 

Saturday Matinee: Le Orme (aka Footprints on the Moon)

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From Archive.org:

“Le Orme” (a/k/a “Footprints on the Moon” and “Primal
Impulse”) has been described variously as an Italian giallo, a sci-fi film, a
mystery, or a psychological thriller. Ultimately, it defies pigeonholing.

It stars Florinda Bolkan as Alice Cespi, a professional
translator, who is tormented by a recurring nightmare; in it, a lunar-landing
team deliberately abandons a colleague on the moon’s surface as part of a scientific
experiment.

Alice arrives for work one day and is summarily canned. The
reason? She’d walked out of an international astronomy conference and disappeared
for three days, incommunicado.

Those three days are a complete blank for her. Alice finds a
few vague clues — a torn postcard from Garma, a resort she’s never visited; an
earring, a unfamiliar bloody yellow dress that fits her perfectly — and sets out
to learn what has happened.

When she arrives in Garma, all of the strangers are
delighted to see her “again” — but claim that she’s another person entirely. And that’s
just the beginning…

Although the storytelling in “Le Orme” is fairly linear, it’s also disorienting — so you’ll
have to pay attention to it. There are blind alleys, red herrings and
(possibly) misleading implications throughout.

Cast includes Bolkan, Peter McEnery, Nicoletta Elmi, and a cameo by Klaus Kinski.

Titles and credits are in Italian, but all dialogue is in English.

Saturday Matinee: Britannia Hospital

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“Britannia Hospital” (1982) is the third installment of director Lindsay Anderson’s “Mick Travis Trilogy”. Like the other films in the series, it’s a dark comedy following a particularly eventful chapter in the life of Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) as he confronts various disturbing and absurd aspects of Britain and western society in general. In Britannia Hospital, Travis is a muckraking investigative journalist covertly filming a documentary on the prestigious Britannia Hospital as it faces a variety of challenges including the opening of a new wing, the arrival of the Queen Mother and other dignitaries, and protesters opposing an African dictator’s stay at the hospital as well as extravagant meals for VIP guests. As he gets further into his investigation Travis becomes embroiled in a secret transhumanist project directed by the head of the new wing. The Film’s central thesis is summed up by the following statement from Lindsay Anderson:

“The absurdities of human behaviour as we move into the Twenty-first Century are too extreme — and too dangerous — to permit us the luxury of sentimentalism or tears. But by looking at humanity objectively and without indulgence, we may hope to save it. Laughter can help.”

Watch the full film here.

Saturday Matinee: Helio

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helio

Helio is a short, visceral film centered on a post apocalyptic underground society where miners work for light to survive. But when a dying rebel thrusts the unexpected onto an unassuming worker’s lap, all hell breaks loose. What begins as one man’s race to escape the hostile government quickly escalates into a city-wide uprising of the people.

Saturday Matinee: Attack the Block

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Attack_The_Block_2

“Attack the Block” (2011) is a British  sci-fi/horror/comedy written and directed by Joe Cornish. The plot takes place in London on Guy Fawkes night following a teenage street gang who, with the help of neighbors, drug dealers, a nurse and college student, hatch a scheme to save their city from an alien invasion. The film was produced from the creators of Shaun of the Dead and features a cameo by Nick Frost as well as a stand-out lead performance (and film debut) by John Boyega who later played Finn in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Watch the full movie here.

The Role of Dystopian Fiction in a Dystopian World

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By Luther Blissett and J. F. Sebastian of Arkesoul

A few years ago, Neal Stephenson wrote a widely-shared article called Innovation Starvation for the World Policy Institute. He began the piece lamenting our inability to fulfill the hopes and dreams of mid-20th century mainstream American society. Looking back at the majority of sci-fi visions of the era, it’s clear many thought we’d be living in a utopian golden age and exploring other planets by now. In reality, the speed of technological innovation has seemingly declined compared to the first half of the 20th century which saw the creation of cars, airplanes, electronic computers, etc. Stephenson also mentions the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and Fukushima disasters as examples of how we’ve collectively lost our ability to “execute on the big stuff”.

Stephenson’s explanation for this predicament is two-fold; outdated bureaucratic structures which discourage risk-taking and innovation, and the failure of cultural creatives to provide “big visions” which dispute the notion that we have all the technology we’ll ever need. While there’s much to be said about archaic, inefficient (and corrupt) bureaucracies, there’s also a compelling argument invoked over the cultural importance of storytelling and art and how best to utilize it. One of the solutions offered by Stephenson, in this regard, is Project Hieroglyph which he describes as “an effort to produce an anthology of new SF that will be in some ways a conscious throwback to the practical techno-optimism of the Golden Age.”

While Project Hieroglyph may be a noble endeavor, one could argue that it’s based on a flawed premise. The role of science fiction has never been just about supplying grand visions for a better future, but to make sense of the present. There seems to be an assumption that the optimistic Golden Age had a causal relationship with a perceived technological golden age when it may have simply been a reflection of it— just as dystopian sci-fi reflects and strongly resonates with the world today. Stephenson may be correct in his view that much SF today is written in a “generally darker, more skeptical and ambiguous tone”, but this more nuanced perspective does not necessarily signify the belief that “we have all the technology we’ll ever need”. Rather, it reflects decades of collective experience and knowledge of unforeseen and cumulative effects of technologies. Nor does such fiction focus only on destructive effects of technology, as large a component of the narrative it may be simply because it makes for better drama and the subtext is often intended as a critique rather than celebration. For example, the archetypal hacker protagonists of technocratic cyberpunk dystopias employ technology for more positive ends (though some question whether good SF, as in speculative fiction, needs to involve new technology at all).

A particularly positive function for dystopian sci-fi is its use as rhetorical shorthand. It’s increasingly common in public discourse on major issues of the day to invoke dystopian references. Disastrous social effects of peak oil or post-collapse are often characterized as Mad Max scenarios. Various negative aspects of genetic modification and pharmaceutical development conjure Brave New World. Anxiety over out-of-control AI and resultant devaluing of human life brings to mind films as varied as Blade Runner, The Matrix and Terminator films. The expanding police/surveillance state is reminiscent of 1984 and numerous classics which have followed in its footsteps including V for Vendetta and Brazil. General fears of duplicitous, psychopathic power elites and social manipulation have elevated They Live from relatively obscure b-movie to cult classic. The entry of the term “zombie apocalypse” into the popular lexicon may in part stem from fear (and uncomfortable recognition) of images of viral social disintegration and martial law-enforced containment efforts depicted throughout various media. The burgeoning omnipotence of multinational corporations and hackers in Mr. Robot may have been the stuff of cyberpunk dystopias such as Neuromancer and Max Headroom 30 years ago, yet, it still has much to contribute to the public discourse as contemporary drama. Such visions may not prevent (or have not prevented) the scenarios they warn us of but have provided a vocabulary and framework for understanding such problems, and who’s to say how much worse it could be had such cautionary memes never existed?

The prophetic nature of storytelling, inasmuch as it derives from the minds of authors, artists and commentators that coexist with tensions and contexts particular to their epochs, resonate with the oughts, ifs, and whats inherent to our daily lives. As it were, the cautionary element of narrative is a natural product of the human mind, and the premium of what involves sharing our mental reserves to the world. To creatively dwelve and concoct problems and solutions from experience, is an axiom analogous to that of the categorical imperative—purely, and in abstract terms of what rationality involves. Yet, often times, we find material that is in favor of cultural malaise; of all things pathological in our society, such as censorship, conformity, bureaucracy, authoritarianism, militarism, and capital marketing; things which underpin issues that, if left untouched, can engulf the real brilliance of our spirit.

Stephenson fails to see this point. SF, as any form of intelligent culture, denounces and opposes systems of oppression, and even shows us the how, when, and why—the frameworks, the makings of apparent utopias into dystopias. Dystopian storytelling can serve the efforts of downtrodden creators with utopian ideals as effectively as utopian stories can reframe a societal trajectory led by beneficiaries of real world dystopia (though it may be experienced as utopia for a privileged few). SF does not only conjure visions of better futures. They lend us vocabularies and syntaxes to understand, and impede the fallenness of a confused, and ever increasingly isolated humanity. They are languages that pervade our interiorities, and that allow the exterior to change.

At the core, SF is prophecy through reasoned extrapolation and artistic intuition. This is what SF stands for when properly aligned with the subjectivities of the oppressed, and not with the voices of oppression: true testaments of a space and a time; visions of the future that carefully partake in not committing the mistakes of the past; and tools for our personal and collective flourishing.

Ex Machina, et al, and the Metaphysics of Computer Consciousness

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By Steven Harp

Source: Reality Sandwich

( ex machina from the phrase “deus ex machina” meaning “god from the machine”)

It seems unquestioned in the world today that science is on the verge of creating consciousness with computers. In a Promethean rapture inspired by its enormous technological success, science aspires now to seize control of fundamental powers at the very heart of the universe.

With the advent of modern science the reality of human consciousness has come to be regarded as physical alone.  A caricature of consciousness has been compounded from such disparate elements as digital code, speculative evolutionary psychology, and a “neuro-phrenology” derived from colorized brain imaging. This caricature from scientists and engineers has gone into public circulation with the help of the media and it has become an acceptable counterfeit currency. And with cinematic virtuosity it has been made plausible by representations in the movies.

In the movie, Ex Machina we see another recycling of the classic Frankenstein story: Life is created from nonliving materials. A lone genius in an isolated laboratory, using the mysterious powers of science, creates new life. In the original Frankenstein story we have a dead body made alive by electricity. In Ex Machina we have a non-living “wetware” circuit given a mechanical body and made conscious by electricity.

This takes the story to a whole new level. Here the scientist is creating the very roots of being. To create consciousness-itself is equivalent to creating de novo cosmic absolutes such as space, matter, or light. It would be equivalent to creating a spectrum of color, a scale of tones, entire ranges of emotion, thought, pain, pleasure, and the entire dictionary of the contents of consciousness, all from the dark and silent abyss of nothingness.

How can something with neither mass nor dimension arise from that which has mass and dimension? How can that which has subjectivity and intentionality arise from that which has objectivity and has no intentionality?  This is the magisterial conundrum and is recognized as the greatest mystery in science.  No one, neither philosopher nor scientist, has a clue to the answer. It has famously been labeled the “hard problem of consciousness” by David Chalmers.

In both cases we see technology extrapolated to the creation our most fundamental being in which man becomes the maker of his most central essence, of what he is himself. The creation becomes the creator, the hand that draws itself.

This year alone has seen 8 major movies featuring synthetic or digital consciousness: Transcendence, Her, Chappie, Ex Machina, Lucy, Extant, Tomorrowland, and Terminator again.  One has to ask, is there something more than a good story line here?

The claim that technology will give birth to consciousness itself within a computer is entirely based on implicit assumptions about the nature of consciousness and reality. The often made assumption that the brain is like a computer and that nerve impulses are like digital code has no direct experimental foundation and is based on superficial resemblances only. There is no real scientific basis for the claim that the digital processing of symbols should somehow be accompanied by inner experience, that is, by consciousness, awareness, qualia, feeling, sentience, etc. 

A computer simulation of brain function is not going to produce consciousness any more than a computer simulation of kidney function is going to produce urine. There is no magic in computation. No amount of digital processing alone is ever going to produce a color. Without consciousness a computer program is a flow of electrons as meaningless and non-referential as those flowing in a wall.

Despite the flagrant and unbridgeable abyss between mind and matter it is the modern claim that if one can set up the right connections and run some electricity through it, a` la Frankenstein, consciousness will arrive on schedule from nonexistence. When undressed from the bewitching technical language this seems to be an equivalent in science of the Immaculate Conception. Or, in the current philosophical language we would call it the Immaculate Emergence. But perhaps Particle Parthenogenesis would be more accurate.

“We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on earth.” -Vernon Vinge

For materialists the arrival of artificial intelligence and machine consciousness is inevitable and only a matter of time. We have two main schools of thought developing on how to meet the coming technological tsunami – those who fear it and those who embrace it. We have on the fear side the notion that we are headed toward a near future where artificial intelligence or machine consciousness presents a danger to mankind (à la Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Nick Bostrom, etc.)

How this danger will manifest is the great unknown. There are countless possibilities. An embryonic AI lurking in the internet could suddenly cross the threshold into self-awareness and seize control of the world’s nuclear arsenals and missiles and demand surrender.  Or, a self-aware internet could lay low and send out brain wave controlling vibrations through WIFI and the background hum of our electrical circuitry to enslave humankind in order to advance technology sufficiently to develop the body or bodies necessary for a now paralyzed internet consciousness. This may have already happened.

And for those who embrace the change we have the Kurzwellians’ vision of the very technological replacement of humanity. This scenario will begin when computers begin to learn and thus redesign themselves. At this point the computer, or computer network, or robot would be capable of designing computers or robots better than itself. Repetitions of this cycle would result in an intelligence explosion resulting in a superintelligence which may be beyond human comprehension. This has been called the technological singularity and could begin as early as 2040, although the date keeps getting pushed further into the future.

In this process consciousness will transcend the hazards and horrors of warm-blooded protoplasmic existence. The machine descendants of man will transcend our obsolete and obscene modules of flesh. They shall put away the sweaty, smelly, hairy, warty, fatty, itchy, scarred, flawed, urinating, shitting, hurting, needy, conflicted, misshapen sac of meat and gristle and the gravity-enslaved earthly existence to become ascended silicon masters and rule like gods in a heavenly cyberspace and perhaps even reconfigure the universe itself. “We shall be as gods!” is a not so hidden background thought.

Consciousness will emerge like a butterfly from its earthbound caterpillar stage and fly freely in the new digital noosphere of a virtual reality (à la Kurzweil, Moravec, Fredkin).  The mortal human self will be subsumed like mitochondria in a giant computational eukaryote.  Our evolutionary period will expire like the dinosaurs’ and we will become a symbiont in the superior host technology. We have been upgraded by Google! All hail Google! Superintelligence is all! Praise Intelligence!

For artificial intelligence enthusiasts this will be good news for mankind. Maintaining mortal human flesh is a logistical nightmare. It requires very specific atmospheric conditions, it requires a very limited temperature range, it requires a vast range of chemical and energy inputs, it requires specific social and sexual connections, it even requires entertainment. Not meeting even one of these requirements could result in the entire operating system crashing and all the data lost (you).  Our wetware obviously makes for an inferior product when compared to a silicon based circuitry which could just as well exist in the vacuum of space with just a single source of electricity.

We shall put aside our earthly raiment of mortal skin and bone and be arrayed in the finest of indestructible metals, plastics, and silicons. We shall be free at last of nature and its’ inconveniences.  All the wealth and riches of the imagination will be at the tip of our cursor.  A million movie channels will be available and we will have an unbreakable silicon heart. We can even have our heart amputated like an infected appendix.  After all it is only pixels!  It is the next stage of evolution! Rejoice in the in the wonderful future of technology! Praise Evolution!

The notion that mind can be uploaded into a computer (Transcendence, Her, Chappie), if not completely loco, is radical in the extreme. But given the hubris of technological success and the realism of movie depictions, it has been made believable and in mainstream scientific circles it is near heresy to doubt the materialist premise of consciousness synthesis from raw physical materials. 

However there is a curiosity in the movie, Ex Machina, that perhaps reveals a crack in the technological juggernaut.  In the movie, Nathan, the techno-wizard internet mogul, has just created the most extraordinary technology in the history of science, a technology that would revolutionize the world and beyond. With Promethean daring he has just robbed the very cradle of consciousness and created Ava, a conscious robot that passes every Turing test.  It would seem that he would be in a state of elation and brimming with fulfillment.  Instead he is getting drunk at every opportunity. Alcohol is featured in almost every scene in which he appears.  One must ask the question, what has gone wrong with Nathan?    

Is this just an iniquitous twist of character?  Or could he be plain old lonely? Or is it a metaphysical crisis?  He lives like a hermit in a remote and isolated Northern region, but he has a retinue of very lovely synthetic ladies waiting for him in closets. And he has a beautiful and near mindless female companion and assistant that likes to dance. And then, he has the mysterious and unknown otherness of Ava. That should be adequate companionship.

But he has just synthesized consciousness. He has dramatically and inescapably demonstrated that life and consciousness are a merely physical phenomena that have no more meaning than electricity passing through a copper wire. He has shown that he himself is not much more than the ionic exchanges occurring through a polarized lipid membrane in a cranial bone flask.  And when the switch is turned off he dissolves into nothingness.

Our lone genius clearly has grounds for a metaphysical crisis.  He has experimentally proven a deeper isolation:  That is the isolation that the vision of materialism prescribes for man – as a spark of consciousness in a meaningless void. There is no wider mystery in being alive… he is all there is… a pathetic lonely little god… isolated in time as well as space with a separation that he cannot mitigate, even with the agreeable companionship of his ersatz bitches.

It is more than ironic that our synthesizer of new consciousness is intent on anaesthetizing his own.  But is this not also modern man? Alcohol is the universal drug of the world today. Nathan here is materialist everyman rather than the oversensitive genius. Modern man closes the door on his personal consciousness while aspiring to extend consciousness through external technological means. It seems modern man shares the same metaphysical disturbance as our techno-wizard, Nathan.

The materialist everyman has fixated on a physical literalism that excludes the meaningfulness inherent within every conscious experience. He has radically reduced the ontological range of life. Life has been stripped of inner meaning. He is abandoned to a complete separation and isolation in both time and space.

He has embraced the lawful Stalinesque reality of materialism as a total explanation for consciousness. He has embraced the scientific fundamentalism of consilience. And total explanations produce repressive states, both political and personal. However, modern man, like an eviscerated organism continues to live… even though partially.

The Frankenstein of today is more than an out-of-control technology. Our Frankenstein monster is the story that science has authority over all other interpretations of life and has replaced them with a grim and desolate paradigm about the nature of the universe and our place in it. Technology has come to shape the imagery by which the world is depicted and to affirm the underlying metaphysics of materialism. We have shaped our reality and now it shapes us. It is only natural then that Ava, the beautiful and sexy creature in Ex Machina kills her creator, Nathan. But modern man cannot kill his own soul so he must anaesthesize it.

But, exercising our imagination, let us suppose that consciousness, rather than being proven physically dependent is proven physically independent. Materialism, irrespective of technological successes, would be shown wrong and suggest that we have been living in the dark ages of a materialist ideology. And it would reveal the present day metaphysics of consciousness at the heart of a dysfunctional civilization.