This text was composed as a companion piece to supplement to the film screening of Synthetic Pleasures on September 25, 2014 at Studio XX in Montreal. The author wishes to apologize for any flagrant grammatical / factual errors and insufficient quotation of sources. This short essay was read aloud by myself before the screening to give a bit of context and to flesh out some of the key content and conflicts that we, living in the second decade of the 21st century are currently dealing with. It is also anecdotal to mention that there was a bit of “performance art” involved that evening. We screened Synthetic Pleasures on VHS, the copy of the tape we received was defective in so much that it has some sound quality issues, like large “frappy” static bursts every once in a while. I took some time before the event to attempt a solution on this. By a stroke of good fortune, somewhere in removing the top of the VCR, finding a specific “spool” where the tape threads around, I managed to place my finger upon it and thus eliminated the horrible sound. SO, I had to hold my finger in one certain position on the VCR the ENTIRE film. Absurdity reigns supreme, but the implications of man and machine interacting at such intimate levels only goes to reinforce the entire substructure found throughout the film and this text…
Thank you all for coming. I just want to give a brief presentation on some of the issues that you will be seeing tonight in the film. You will notice that on the image there is a quote taken from the film by a well known physicist and co-founder of super string theory Michio Kaku and who squarely belongs in this movie as an advocate for technology and its application for the human species. It has been almost 20 years since Synthetic Pleasures was made, so you will need to put on your time traveling filters and visit the world of internet foundations. This is 95, so we are visiting computer technology before the .com bubble of the late 90s (i’ll explain a bit about that later) but also post U.S. Military Defence Net and the post cyberpunk cyberspace movement. It’s the beginning growth of broad popular internet use, with more and more stratagems of society participating and contributing in online interactions. I’ll also talk about Transhumanism a great deal and on the topic of High Technology Development, Virtual Reality and The Net.
So the beginnings of the internet lie in two origins, U.S. Military Defence during the Cold War, and the initial reappropriation of it by early online communities. The internet was developed to maintain communications between various parts of the Pentagon, the missile defence system, and the white house in the event of a nuclear war where all other means of communication might be severed and also in large part to relay messages that could not be intercepted. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 a phenomenal thing occurred, the individuals responsible for the creation of the the Net gave it away freely to the public trust to be developed by private individuals and corporations. We see a transformation of usage here from a completely closed and private tool of the military into something quite unintended, namely the expansion of a social network with rise in human expression and emotion and creativity. The origins of a social network precede the net in the counter culture hippie freak movement of the 60s and 70s. The free spirit, DIY fuck the man attitude informed early cyberdelics and cyberpunks as to how to orient the social structure of online interaction. And the effects of experimentation with drugs on the mind precedes the advent of Virtual Reality and looms large in the cultural zeitgeist.
The cultural aesthetic of the cyberpunk movement and subsequent fictional writing style draws heavily from experimentation and alteration of the mind. Yet, not so much with the use of drugs but using technology’s imagined ability to transport entire the world of consciousness into cyberspace, the world of the virtual, where the mind directly connects and interfaces with a computer constructed dimension. The internet is indebted to the visionary works of the cyberpunk movement which in some instances also predates the internet and contributed to the free form approach of internet use… that is up to the present, at least (Ill get into the constriction of internet freedom and net neutrality later). Cyberpunk and the addition of mass culture involvement in the net and emerging technologies also created a crucial turning point (right around the same time as this film was made in fact) in Virtual Reality awareness and investment.
Let’s turn to the Virtual Reality boom and bust. Much like the .com bubble of the late 90s the VR bubble was surfeited on the promises of a grossly overvalued market. The public was encouraged to make high risk investments. VR hype was commercially infectious and impaired society’s ability to make informed and sober decisions. Im telling you about this so you can get a sense of the sort of choices society makes at times (again the Kaku quote) in the pursuit of technology. The failure of the VR PR (public relations) to deliver lies squarely in its marketing tactics, appealing to our immediate sensory desires. The decline in VR development and investment came at the realization that Virtual Reality
Headsets were not much more than wearable TV sets with even less resolution than actual Televisions. It was abandoned for lack of real application. Furthermore i’ll illustrate this point by sharing my experience in attempting to invite someone from the Montreal tech community with early 90s VR equipment to come and demonstrate it for you tonight, I got exactly Zero response. Utter failure compounded by utter bankrupt investments. But VR was successful in yet one clearly identified application. The Gulf War, using flight simulators and eventually ship, tank, and infantry simulators, the U.S. SimNet (as it was called) allowed nearly every flight and battle to be conducted in virtual reality before the real war began. Then the records of the Gulf War events themselves were turned into large scale simulations to test military skills in the future. it has been said that “simulations will become so real it will be impossible to distinguish the real from the simulated”. Virtual reality experienced a lag in application until very recently under the Drone Program. The current U.S. Drone program is an example of modern Virtual Reality (more clearly defined now as Augmented Reality) Augmented Reality includes Google Glass, Computer Implants that allow control over movement soley by reading brainwaves, Remote Surgical operations, and remote drone operation, among many other things. So let’s summarize this using Jean Baudrillard as an anchor, in this quote he is talking about the early iconoclasts who deeply opposed the icon imagery of Christian divinity: “One can live with the idea of a distorted truth. But (the iconoclasts) metaphysical despair came from the idea that the images concealed nothing at all, and that in fact they were not images, such as the original model would have made them, but actually perfect simulacra forever radiant with their own fascination.” So think about this idea when thinking about the sort of world Virtual reality implies, a world of remote controlled manipulations and special sensory devices that augment our perception of the physical world, even in a way replacing the physical world perhaps. Think about the implications for human consciousness placed into these reality compromising positions. The use of AR/VR technologies is in fact a part of a much larger and total philosophical debate that I’ve been alluding to called Transhumanism.
Transhumanism is featured heavily throughout Synthetic Pleasures and in a nutshell proposes to guide us towards a post-human condition. Many fields in life extension, genetic engineering, and nano technology owe a great deal to the Transhumanist approach to overcome human limitations and yet also many utopian goals have been set by Transhumanists that generate a cautionary backlash. There is a concept called More’s Law, which calculates the exponential growth of complex technology, we can start to take some of the Transhumanist goals for the future more seriously by looking at More’s law. An example of it can be found in for instance those singing birthday cards you open up and then music starts to play. The chip in that card has more technological complexity than all the Allied and Axis powers combined during WWII. There is more technological complexity in a cell phone today than NASA had when launching the mission to the moon. Transhumanism anticipates that we will be able to accelerate technological growth at an exponential rate, to improve and modify our bodies, enhance the human nervous system, create the cyberpunk dream of an integrated computer and human organism. The initiative to map the human brain neuron by neuron currently underway in research labs today will put us that much closer to understanding how our brains work, perhaps eventually being able to model, simulate, and even upload it from its “wet-ware” into hardware. Much of the extreme opposition to meddling with the human form comes from the religious right, But also comes under great criticism from those who argue that the Transhumanist directive could potentially drive a “genetic divide” across classes and borders restricting equal access to enhancement and thus a biological ubermench could be formed. Or on the other extreme, tampering with human genetics could cause serious debilitations and weaknesses, an especially troubling prospect for prenatal infants. It would be for better or worse a fundamental and permanent alteration of Human Nature. We must also remember the violent push-back of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber who stated in his manifesto that human beings would likely guarantee their own extinction in developing technologies favored by the Transhumanists. Technologies that promise to provide solutions to our energy crisis, climate change, and environmental degradation using counter-measures, technological fixes. This techno-utopianism is unpopular with many environmentalists and anti –corporate movements who state that the risk of abuse is far too great for high-technology development, since it serves only corporate interests and is likely to remain that way , regardless And as a consequence of the rapid advances in High-tech development. High Tech Development often runs counter to the pursuits of Transhumanist Utopianism, thus enforcing the reality of the present situation as opposed to the dream.
I want to conclude with a mention about the new and dangerous closing up of the internet as we know it, which is occurring as we speak. This film shows us the opening up of the net, potentialities and possibilities. This was made possible by something called Net Neutrality, “the principle that an internet service provider should enable access to all content equally without favoring or blocking particular services or websites”. Net Neutrality is not set in stone, even this year we see the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) of the US proposing the change of rules to Net Neutrality. Much of the world’s internet access flows through American telecommunications, thus jeopardizing equal access worldwide. In effect, a change in the FCC rules would allow service providers like Verizon and Comcast to create fast lanes for content providers who will pay for faster access and condemn those who cannot to the slow lanes, stifling competition and innovation and consequentially controlling to a more heightened degree what you choose to do on the internet based on connectivity. Compounding this with a lack of user privacy under the unbridled and far reaching internet surveillance by the NSA has us looking at a total societal collapse, a dangerous precedence as Big Brother and Orwellian as it could possibly be. The “wild west “of synthetic pleasures reminds us to recall the origins of our current predicament, to recall both parents of the internet, both sides of the coin, the Kaku quote again provides sufficient closure to this presentation.
Thank You.
