Where is Reality Part II
The Disappearance of Reality Part II
By Shawn Thompson
So, What is this fascination/obsession with the REAL?
The real is an integral part of most discourse: what is reality, is this real, it feels real, am I real…
Baudrillard asks: ‘’is it, in fact, the real we worship, or its disappearance?’’
What about all this technology getting more real every time… or is it?
Now, our supreme fantasy can be fulfilled because in virtual reality we ARE like God, we can create anything, become anything, do anything. Everything IS possible. You can kill, you can fly, you can be anyone you like, you can lie, you can live, you can die and live again, you can die…!
The thing is, we are creating a world that no longer needs us nor our representation, as Baudrillard says. A world where no human being is there to see it, a world where we have disappear from it…
In the digital realm, the computerized world, no one is standing IN it, no one can ‘live’ it from the inside, we’re outside of it, in periphery, just watching.
Now that we can digitally construct a universe, the singular presence of objects and ourselves is superfluous, absent, not needed. And if softwares wins over the human eye to capture reality, then where are we?
True. We create those software, we program those whatever devices but they do have a life of their own, they do operate autonomously from within, once it’s ON we don’t intervene much anymore…
Ultimately, the crucial question – or in my view anyway – is How the digitalization will affect the human brain and how it processes reality, How the computerized landscape will shape ourselves, our understanding, our interactions?
If we follow the stream of thought of Communications theorists, well we’re pretty much modeling the human brain on computers. In their view, people are whether receivers or transmitters and brains become a screen for the imagery of the world to be projected on…
I think this depressing/reductive view contributes to create, support and valorize the idea of an objective universe.
If humans disappear, so does subjectivity.
So what does it mean really?
Well the suppression of human beings, of imperfection, of evil, of uncertainty, of duality, of anything that cannot be reduced to the binary 0/1 language of computer programming will affect in turn how our mind processes stuff.
There is no thoughts involved in computers, no words. Baudrillard calls in for the disappearance of thought-sensitive surface of confrontation. The digital world has no morality, no ethics. Computers cannot tell the difference between good or bad or illusion and reality.
And technology is indeed free of morality, there is no good nor bad, just an objective product. Yay! We found our way out of humanity! No more conflicts! No more duality! 0000111 01001001 11010 01001 or should I say in computer-language.
But objectivity or robot-like vision can be fucking creepy. What the fuck is going on with Google Street View!?! Who is there, standing, to see, to feel what it’s like to be on whatever street we’re virtually walking on? Who is seeing? How the fuck they managed to capture everything, from cars to baby cribs, to addresses and people waiting for the bus to come? Who is watching? Who is translating this digitally constructed reality for me to navigate on my computer? It’s no humans. We have disappeared from the very mapping of our world.
Our ‘’unremitting quest for ‘’objective’’ reality that is mirrored by technology’’ would have create this kind of monster. Back to the Frankenstein myth, back to the suppression of human beings INTO the processing of reality, of what’s around us…
Things like Google Street View no longer need a referent, no REAL can take place there. It’s a CGI. A Computer Generated Image. And Baudrillard said what might be the worst thing ever, would be to have a world where it is impossible NOT TO have an image play-back, a world that is constantly captured, caught, filmed and photographed EVEN BEFORE IT IS SEEN.
Google Street View embodies that perfectly. And it’s mortal for reality and also for the image itself because the real and the unreal (CGI) are completely merged together. Hence, the world image, isn’t an image anymore because it isn’t an exception, an illusion, a parallel world. It stands as an “objective” image, something that holds truth because no humans were there to taint it.
Well, HELLO, that IS part of being human. It’s called individuality and bias and subjectivity and interpretation.
Baudrillard said that “if there is one supreme product of the human mind that is: TRUTH and OBJECTIVE REALITY.
How ironic we create the very concepts that robs us of our humanity?
