It is super weird to write about the apocalypse while there’s a plague going on. Not because there’s some worrying emotional parallels between the subject matter and my real life experience. My time in quarantine has basically been the opposite of Mad Max in every possible way. Rather, it’s difficult because this real life experience is mostly just unfathomably boring, and that’s basically how a real world end of days scenario would play out.

In Noam Chomsky’s interview, he talks about looking at the state of the world from the perspective of aliens, and trying to explain why the world is the way it is to these alien entities. Why is the fact that the earth is dying not a massive concern to everyone all the time? Why is everyone just concerned with twitter, and not this upcoming apocalyptic event?

My simple slug answer a couple of months ago would have just been that it’s difficult to feel a sense of urgency and dread when the impending catastrophe is so slow moving. Not many people feel active terror about something that is gonna happen 20 years from now, especially when it’s not something that most individuals have any way to affect. You can stop using plastic straws if you’d like, but that’s not going to stop the fact that most pollution comes from a handful of major companies.

However, now that there’s a plague going on and everything is happening really really fast all the time, but the reaction of most people I know is basically just boredom and apathy, it’s definitely not a question of urgency. Probably more of empathy. Basically just a perfect encapsulation of Dunbar’s number in practice. The plague isn’t directly happening to me or my friends, so there’s a limit to how freaked out I can feel about it at any given time.

That being said, there was another part of the Chomsky interview that stuck out, and that was when the inevitable downfall of empires was brought up, which led to discussion of how the next large scale war might end civilization as we currently understand it. I’m not discounting the possibility, but I’m willing to bet good money that the post-apocalypse does not resemble Mad Max. It’s not going to be roving bands of marauders, with everyone out for themselves and only localized settlements to serve as civilization. If I may borrow a take form David Wong, the entire history of humanity has been taking apocalyptic conditions in stride and then continuing forward. The black plague killed approximately half of Europe while it was prominent, but uncontrolled descent into lawlessness was not what we saw at the end of it.

I should probably say that when I say Mad Max dystopia, I’m referring to the sequels more than the original movie. The first movie does a pretty good job showing how a bunch of raiders mess stuff up, and if it’s setting were to happen anywhere, Australia is a pretty good candidate.

But still, as the internet likes to say, we live in a society. Humans are social creatures, and the default state of people is not to wander around alone and aimless. Most people aren’t drifters by nature.

The main thing apocalypse will probably do is take all the problems we have now and make them worse. Climate disaster will result in more natural disasters, more refugees, that sort of thing. It’s very un-spectacular, and therefore something it’s difficult to portray in movies. Movies are inherently biased towards drama, and it’s difficult to extract drama from things getting gradually shittier. You could go down the Idiocracy route and jump straight to the end when things have gotten as bad as they probably will, but that kind of defeats the purpose, and also Idiocracy is a dumb and bad movie. That’s not how evolution or genetics work, and it’s weird that the movie basically has a pro-eugenics setting.

I’ve been watching a lot of Youtube lately. Before quarantine, most of the media I consumed was online videos, but that sort of got hyper-charged the last couple of months between the depression and the sitting around inside all day. Occasionally Youtube content creators will talk about the keys to success on the platform, and generally it comes down to the creation of content that forms a parasocial relationship from the audience to the creator. Shannon Strucci made an excellent documentary on this.

You succeed by making the people watching your video think that you are their friend. Not in a specific, personal way, but by cultivating a feeling of intimacy. By sharing your personal feelings, your life story, and acting in a friendly and personable way. It isn’t real of course. Youtubers aren’t your friends, and you don’t actually know someone because you watch their videos. However, it feels real. More than that, it feels more real than real. You get all the intimate details of someone, all their personal feelings and deepest thoughts, without any fluff interactions in between. There isn’t building to this point like in a normal friendship, it’s cutting right to the point.

The reason I bring this up is because it is understandable why someone would want to have a parasocial relationship with a content creator as opposed to actual real life friendships. It’s all the fun parts of a friendship with none of the boring or messy parts in between. It is a simulation of a friendship, if one would want to use the terminology of Baudrillard.

If one so desired, it’s possible to look at all of media through that lens. As just a less complicated and easier to digest version of the real world. However, I find it really interesting that, even with the knowledge that real life content like youtube or reality tv is staged, there is a very precise distinction drawn between the real and the not real. That behind the scenes context that a TV show is real vs off the cuff, it makes a lot of difference. This makes me think of Videodrome.

The scene that sticks out in my mind is when the protagonist Max is talking to Masha, and he learns that the footage is real and not faked. He says that it would have been easier to fake it. That knowledge changes how he thought about videodrome. It’s not about the images themselves, it’s about what they represent. That extra level of emotional investment knowing that it’s real people really being tortured. Nothing has actually changed in the content, it’s all about how Max has been perceiving it.

This is a bit different in video games as opposed to films. The former is consumed actively, the other passively. This often makes people think that because people enjoy killing in games that they enjoy killing in real life. That the game in Avalon trained these people to be murderers. It placed them in a situation where they would kill people-like entities, and then the jump over to actual people is inevitable.

This is complicated by the fact that computer controlled opponents aren’t designed to simulate the behavior of actual people. If they did, they wouldn’t be any fun to fight against. Most combat-centric games are more similar to a pop up shooting gallery, it wouldn’t be any fun if the targets behaved in the random ways people are. It’s better to fake it than to make it real.

I’ve concluded with two contradictory ideas. You want the genuine in one case, and fake in another. Or maybe in the end you know its fake and real at the same time, sort of a doublethink thing going on. I couldn’t say for sure one way or the other.

Not gonna lie, I have spent the last month or two pretty heavily disassociating. I was feeling alright for about the first week of quarantine, and then depression hit like a ton of bricks. That certainly was not helped by me going through my very first breakup a couple of weeks ago, after a relationship that had lasted for three years and one month. It’s just me and my dad in the house, and really only the internet for company. About two weeks ago I just sort of sat in bed all day, thinking about how I wasn’t sure if the outside world was real, if anything outside of my room was real. This probably wasn’t helped by the fact that all the movies and TV shows I’d been watching were about the main character going slowly insane. Not good vibes. But I digress.

One of the more interesting books I read in the last year was “CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret History of the Sixties” by Dan Piepenbring and Tom O’Neill. It starts out as looking into some of the inconsistencies in the police work and prosecution of the Manson family, but then spirals out into a much broader look at domestic intelligence operations. Particularly it focuses on CHAOS and MK ULTRA, the former being an effort by the CIA to discredit and sabotage leftist movements within the United States, and the latter being a series of classified experiments into things like mind control by the CIA.

One of the big takeaways from the book was what the actual findings of MK ULTRA were. Basically, it was that you could basically compel someone to do things that were counter to their ordinary moral code, but you couldn’t really make a Manchurian candidate. The process required you to psychologically break the person, and then reconstruct them in the way you wanted. For MK ULTRA, this entailed quite a lot of LSD. The Scientific American Article “How to Instill False Memories” sort of shows how this would happen in a simplified, less dramatic form.

Considering the MK ULTRA documents hadn’t been leaked at the time, “Total Recall”, or “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” as the original short story was called, was awfully prescient. Both have shadowy organizations implanting memories to try and get someone to work as an assassin.

It probably did influence the writing of “A Scanner Darkly” which was being written at basically the same time as the original MK ULTRA documents were being released. Philip K Dick also did a lot of LSD at the time, so he probably felt some resonance with the news.

I got less introspective on this writing than I thought I’d get. It’s 4:30 in the morning as I write this, and mostly I just wanted to point out how a thing I had read was similar to things I had read and seen for this class. CIA is bad, shadowy fictional organizations are bad, I should probably go to sleep now.

There are two things that I worry about when I write one of these posts. The first is that I repeat myself. When going through the reading for this chapter, my take was basically the same as the post I wrote on fascism in cyberpunk: that the bad thing doesn’t really work because it’s still designed and created by humans. We can build incredibly lethal robots that can annihilate people in a split second, but they’re basically going to have the same level of competency as Siri or something like that. The killbot is going to fuck up and kill the wrong people if it’s left to it’s own devices. Then again, the US military has been known to murder people via drone strike if they’re slightly tall, so it’s probably matching the modus operandi there.

My other main concern is that I’m too cynical. You could probably ascertain that from the last part of the previous paragraph. I like to think of myself as a humanist: someone who believes in the amazing potential of humanity, in the sanctity of all human life, and the people are generally better and smarter and kinder than we often give them credit. I try to square that belief with the takes I have on inept and dangerous leadership by targeting the ideologies present, and the way things tend to work out in the real world.

Looking at Robocop and the ED 209 for example, that’s basically what I was thinking of when I was writing that first paragraph. That, and the fact that my phone keeps on resetting for some reason, and I hate it, but I can’t afford a new one. We will undeniably build a robot that can murder stuff with the best of them, but there’s basically no practical version in the foreseeable future that is better at ascertaining threats than a real life person. And that’s a very low bar, considering how bad humans are at deciding how threatening something is. Mostly that’s informed by real life biases, and machines are only as smart as we can make them. We pick values for the machine to look for, and that’s unavoidably informed by real world bias. Machines can’t fully operate on logic and reason because humans can’t fully operate on logic and reason.

Although, I think that’s a really really good thing. I don’t know why empathy and emotionality is considered such a negative quality. There’s one bit in “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” that sticks out in my mind, and it’s towards the end where a replicant is pulling the legs off a spider. It’s a chapter designed to show how terrifying the idea of an entity without empathy is, someone who looks at suffering and pain with nothing more than curiosity. It makes sense that Dick was inspired to write about this after researching nazis for his other book “The Man in the High Tower.” The movie blade runner has different goals, and I respect that, but I think it would’ve been nifty to include.

In the introduction to “War in the Age of Intelligent Machines” the author talks about how in testing for nuclear scenarios, the humans were always much more cautious about the nuclear option, compared to the computers. I should think that being shy about killing millions if not billions of people in nuclear hellfire would be an admirable trait in a person. But I guess that it’s mostly fear about what the other side will do, that they are monsters who do not share your value for human life, and so you must become a monster in turn.

Not gonna lie, when I first read saw this chapter header, I assumed it was going to be about body horror. Horrifying fusions of man and machine, bio-mechanical monstrosities, that sort of thing. Basically talking about the ending of “Akira” or something. But no, it’s about how human bodies are assimilated used in the machine that is society. This honestly makes more sense if I’m honest (lol).

About a month ago, before we all started living that #quarantine lifestyle, you (Prof. Cooley), recommended I watch “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace”. I watched all three parts, out of order accidentally, as I was doing 3D modeling assignments. Just going over how we like to view society and the world we live in as a series of systems, and how the world doesn’t actually work that way. It provided a contrast with “The Flesh Machine” by Critical Art Ensemble, and how it views the present state of society as manifesting through a series of self-perpetuating systems.

I don’t think the two pieces contradict each other, just that one helped shed light on the other in regards to how society works, and the value of being descriptive rather than prescriptive. Of describing phenomenon as they appear in reality, as opposed to how one would imagine they would work in your head. Of looking at the ways that ethics always takes a backseat to scientific advancement in the real world, particularly when it benefits the interests of those in power, and seeing how there is a system in place that explains why this happens as opposed to just being a random accident. A systemic critique is invaluable, and we have to look at systems as they exist and how they fail, rather than just saying that the system would be working if we did it more. The point of a system is what it actually does, after all.

This is all to say that I saw Gattaca, and I thought it was good. I first saw it in High school, in my weird Catholic bioethics program, where the message was much different that it was watching it for this class. I thought I would have more to say on the connection if I’m honest, one the subtle and not so subtle ways that the society of the movie exerts its values on those within it. How the society is constructed in invisible ways as well as visible ones to enforce the value of genetic engineering by making the lives of those within it harder in obvious and not so obvious ways. I can’t really say that that is how real life works right now though. There’s a plague going on, I am completely burnt out, and many of those at the highest echelons of power are just flatly saying that people need to be sacrificed for the sake of capitalism.

It has been about 2 weeks (or more or less, time is blurring together for me), and over 600 people have died for Corona Virus. The economy tanked after less than a week, and the US government is pumping a trillion dollars into the economy to keep it afloat. Throughout all of this, I have been seeing figures saying that we cannot allow the virus to “hold us hostage”. We have to reopen the economy, they say, to return things back to normal. Maybe people will die, but the older generations will happily bear that sacrifice for the sake of their children. I’d be horrified at this cavalier dismissal of the value of human life if I found it at all surprising. We’re all just saying the quiet parts loud now, saying that this system exists to take human flesh in, grind it up, and turn it into profit. This system is supposed to benefit those at the top, and everyone else is just fuel for it. I have no doubt that the society of Gattaca will come about because those who control the means of production decide that ordinary people are not efficient enough, and only those with superior genetics are good enough to turn the gears. And we will do it.

Sorry if this was a bit of a bummer, I was originally going to talk about how the military structure of Avatar incorporated biology into the machine of war, but I wasn’t sure what I could say outside of that initial sentence. I have spent the last week slowly going insane and listening to clipping. albums. I’ll try and be more cheerful in the next blog post. Have a great day!

At the beginning of 2019, I socially isolated myself for about a month. I was living on the George Mason University Campus, and there was no one living within a two hour drive that I would unambiguously call my friend. I spent all my time in my room, or in class, where the most I ever got in socialization was occasional passing words. I would have isolated myself more if I could. The biggest source of human interaction I had was online, talking to people through Discord. It was an unbelievably lonely time, and all throughout I knew that living my life this way was making me unhappy, yet still I persisted. I feel like the film Pulse (Japanese Kairo), in its attempt to portray through subtext the phenomenon of hikikomori, does not do a very good job with it’s visuals of portraying the type of isolation of those like myself who have withdrawn from society in favor of online interaction.

The way Pulse portrays isolation is with solitary spaces. Abandoned factories, empty train cars, that sort of thing. The characters of the film are in these communal spaces designed for large groups of people, and yet they are alone. There is no one else around the characters, and therefore they are isolated. However, that is not the feeling one gets when becoming isolated from society. It is not that you are the only person in a big empty world, it is more that you live in a world you don’t understand, filled with people you can’t relate to.

There are a number of different pieces of media that do this well. The original Jacob’s Ladder and Madoka Magica: Rebellion both do a remarkable job of this, the former with it’s monsters, and the latter with it’s Clara doll city folk. Song of Saya (Japanese Saya no Uta) is probably the best exemplification of this feeling, coming from the cosmic horror genre. It depicts a protagonist suffering from a condition that causes the entire world to appear like it’s made of blood and flesh, and all the people within it like blobs of eyes and organs. The protagonist is repulsed by these appearances, so even if before he had friends before becoming afflicted, he is no longer able to relate to the place he once called home, and the people he once knew as friends. Most forms of social anxiety are not nearly so dire as what Song of Saya depicts, but the basic feeling of alienation remains the same.

With this alienation from society, there comes an urge to find a simplified form of human interaction. To replace the complexity and ambiguity of talking face-to-face to someone with the clarity of communicating online. Part of what makes it easier is the text-based nature of most interactions, which eliminates the difficulty in trying to parse someone else’s body language or facial features. Another part is the transient nature of contact, where you can drop in and out of conversation as it pleases you, while still watching how it plays out. It frees you from the social obligation to be actively involved. A final part is the commonality of interest, where it is possible for entire communities to be formed around interests that are not shared widely in common society. You may not have anyone in your school or in your town who enjoys talking about anime, but there are a number of people online who enjoy exactly that.

This commonality of interest is a problem as much as it is helpful. It helps provide a means of contact to those who are members of marginalized or minority communities, especially those who cannot express themselves in the physical world without facing real consequences. This is useful to LGBTQ+ who may come from a transphobic or homophobic household, and cannot come out to their families without being kicked out. Unfortunately, it is also useful to far-right groups, Incels, and others who share positions that cause harm to those around them. For an even more extreme example “Social Media and Suicide: A Public Health Perspective” goes into how online communities are used to create suicide pacts. The internet provides a way for people to talk about things that are less frequently talked about in mainstream media and society, and that’s not always a good thing. 

There is one part of Pulse which I feel is quite true to life in regards to social isolation, and that is the lasting damage it does which makes it difficult to reintegrate into mainstream society after going through the isolation itself. After traveling into one of the red tape rooms, the people are changed. They are no longer able to interact with the rest of the world in the same way, even if they are with someone when they come out of it. The red tape room is a horrifying place, but leaving it does not mean that they are free of it. Almost everyone who goes into the rooms ends up returning to them, either through death, or by turning to ash or a shadow on the wall. So it goes with the internet. Isolating yourself to the online world fundamentally changes your kind of interaction, and makes it more difficult to communicate with those who are not incredibly online. Part of this is the alternative lexicon and field or references that are not used by mainstream society, but the other part is the more complex nature of in-person interaction. It’s something you have to constantly work at, or else grow unaccustomed to it. 

“Mussolini made the trains run on time” is a classic saying both in political discussion and common parlance. It’s used as a justification of fascist governments, pointing out that maybe fascists kill a bunch of people, but at least they’re efficient in solving problems in society. It’s exemplified in Science Fiction all the time with films like 1984 or Minority Report. Sure, 1984 presents a world where people live in fear of a totalitarian government, but that government snuffs out any opportunity for dissent before it ever appears, and has created a system of wars designed to perpetuate itself indefinitely. Yes, Minority Report shows a world where people are imprisoned without actually having committed a crime, but it also dropped the murder rate in Washington D.C. down to basically nothing. These systems may not be the best for people, but they’re just so darn efficient. This is an absolute baldfaced lie, and anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you on something. And there is no better demonstration of this in action than the film Brazil.

Brazil is very silly in it’s presentation of an Orwellian dictatorship. It has AC repairmen with 2 foot long visors, torturers who wear baby masks, and plastic surgeons who use Saran Wrap. That in itself is not a critique. It’s unbelievably easy to make fascism look silly, just look at any Mel Brooks movie, or for a recent example, JoJo Rabbit. Where the critique becomes particularly interesting is in how its applied to the security state.

The fundamental satire of Brazil is that a Dystopian security state would be as dysfunctional or more than any currently existing government organization. Full of redundancies, inter-departmental conflict, and people just trying to go through their days without being hassled. If the world of 1984 is a fascist version of “The West Wing”, then Brazil is a fascist version of “The Thick of It.”

But why does this dysfunction exist? The government has complete control over the populace, and can effectively act with impunity. Why is it not competent? The answer is just that the people who run these organizations are basically as competent as those who run the mundane government organizations that exist now. There is an implicit assumption that the people who do fascism are dangerous ubermensch, when in reality it’s all just fail-sons, fake tough guys, and incredulous doofuses.

The same is true of the tools that are being used. The assumption is that once the fascists are in charge, they’ll utilize or manufacture tools that can pinpoint dissidents in this new world, and harvest information that can provide a totalizing portrait of who they are and what they’re like. Meanwhile, in the real world, the tools people are building for this tasks are even worse at guessing who’s likely to be a criminal than humans are. As pointed out in the article “AI is sending people to jail—and getting it wrong” by Karen Hao, facial recognition software often mistook members of congress for criminals, and risk assessment tools are only really useful for identifying which of the defendants are poor or people-of-color. For an even more recent example, the company FAMA does automated background checks through people’s social media history, and flags tweets it sees as “bad” or “good.” The only things it seemed to look at in the posts in question was whether or not they used swear words.

Now, what I’m not saying is that fascist governments aren’t dangerous because they’re incompetent. Rather, that they’re incompetent, and that makes them more dangerous. Fascist governments will end up killing or disenfranchising not just those within it that it sees as dissidents or undesirables, but also totally random people who didn’t violate any of the arbitrary rules the government had. Basically everyone living under a fascist government is marked for death at all times, whether they comply with it or not. If fascist government was an animal, it would be the biggest, dumbest elephant the world had ever seen. But when elephants fight, it’s the ground that suffers.

The politics of the 1927 film “Metropolis” are very weird. Not weird in the same way that a movie like “Inception” is often talked about as weird, where it’s sort of difficult to figure out what is going on and what it all means. “Metropolis” goes to great lengths to ensure that the viewer knows exactly what the meaning of the film is, spelling it out in plain text at the very beginning and the very end of the film. The reason “Metropolis” is weird is because of what it believes the systemic problems in capitalism are, and how to resolve them.

“Metropolis” seems to believe that the main problem with capitalism is miscommunication between the upper and lower classes. That if the factory workers and factory owners were merely able to understand the positions of the other, then the problem would be solved. Indeed, the closest thing to an antagonist is the character of Rotwang, and his robot, whose grand evil plan is to sow the seeds of discontent between the upper and lower classes until all of society comes crashing down.

The weird thing about this all is that Jon Fredersen, the factory owner, is not held in any way culpable for the conditions in his factory. He is on the same moral level as those workers in his factory who eventually decided to riot. Fredersen merely needs to come to an understanding with the workers, as mediated by his son. “Fredersen is not a bad person”, the film seems to say. “He has the best of intentions, and just needs to be shown the right path.”

This is an enforcement of the idea that capitalism works and is good, it’s just a few bad apples who have lost their way that are making everyone’s lives miserable. Those in power should remain in power, they just need to learn to be nice. The workers shouldn’t try to organize and fight for their rights or anything, that’d be the same thing as a mob, and they’d just end up blowing up society and killing their own children.

Karl Marx wrote in “The Labour Process and Alienation in Machinery and Science” about how labor was being redirected away from a human effort using tools to a machine effort aided by humans. That which is being produced is no longer the product of the humans working there, but rather that of the machines. Looking at this in a vacuum, it’s easy to see how machines could be considered the bad guys in “Metropolis.” The factory is represented as the Canaanite god Moloch, to whom human sacrifices are fed. However, this is a very shallow interpretation. The problem is not that machines are used in factories. The problem is with the people who own the factories and machines, and who create the conditions in which the workers are injured or killed.

It is easy to understand why the message of “Metropolis” appealed to so many. It is a view of the world in which everyone’s life gets better, but none of the fundamental power relations change at all. It’s just like how things are right now, but better! Things just need to be tweaked a bit, some new policies and regulations implemented, and then everyone will be happy.

This is a way of looking at the world which fails to address why things are the way they are. The existing power relations are what led to the world in which those in the film and those in real life exist. The world cannot change unless those power relations change. The key to the change depicted in the film is not a 3rd party mediator, but rather redistribution of power such that those in the lower classes can argue for their interests on their own terms.

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

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The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

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You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

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