Where is Reality?
The Disappearance of Reality Part.I
by Shawn Thompson
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF REALITY became the focal point of French sociologist, photograph and asshole – Jean Baudrillard – in his later life.
I say asshole because he had severe douchebaggytic episodes. Like when he said that contemporary art is rubbish («nul») without further explanations or when he said that AIDS was some kind of Mother’s Earth revenge against homosexuals («autodéfense de l’espèce humaine» ) whereas homosexuality is a sexual death («dilapidation sexuelle») because the ones who live by the same will die by the same («Celui qui vit par le même périra par le même»).
Well, Johnny’s dead now. He died in 2007, at 77, and had most probably stopped understanding the world in around 1970.
But somehow he managed to keep kind of lucid about the increased computation of our lives and the impact of such virtual presence on our evolution. His simulacra and simulation (1981) book is said to have heavily influenced the Wachowski brothers in the making of The Matrix (1999).
So how can the real disappear?
Well first, stemming from semiotics, Baudrillard believes «things live only on the basis of their disappearance» because naming kills in a way. When we delimit and identify, when we frame stuff into concepts; things are conceptualized, it becomes ideology and in the same movement, it ceased to exist because it’s pulled away from its brute reality. It’s like naming an artistic movement. When it’s possible it means it’s disappearing. And this takes place within people too, when we name parts of ourselves, personality traits, something has disappeared, escaped, died, in the very moment we have named it, that we have called it into existence. A vital dimension of life would then be disappearance, a kind of nothingness, just like what’s between neutrons and electrons.
Now, for sure technology and its increasingly mind-blowing sophistication has always triggered humankind’s ancestral fear of extinction, whether by aliens, tsunamis or robots. But there is an added anguish to the Frankenstein myth, to the man-created machine that turn against its master, this idea that humans can create a God-like machine, so perfect that if it would become ‘’evil, ’’ it’d be unstoppable.
Well, there is some of this fear in stuff like:
examples bellow.
(you can click on the links! (titles))
I haven’t seen it myself but apparently Avatar is just too beautiful, so immersive and…real. Real?
And now, fuck HD we’re moving 3D! Like sorry but I don’t especially want to have to wear a pair of polarized goggles while watching TV. Looking stupid has never been for such an unworthy cause. When is the 4D TV set coming? Maybe we’d get to wear a virtual reality space helmet and have sex with ghosts of famous people?
Joysticks are now your own brain. You can command all actions of your character just by thinking about it. The helmet on your head (!) records the electrical pathways you take for each of your action-thoughts. With use, the machine will become better and better at identifying what you are thinking of by converting it into algorithms, you know…these things. Every brain works differently or takes different routes so the ‘’joystick’’ has to be self-programmed. You just think: ‘’Lift the rock’’ and you lift the rock… in virtuality.
ROBOTS-AS-A-SOLUTION-FOR-INSUFFICIENT-BIRTHS
Japan’s population is aging. There’s not enough births. What to do? Let’s make human-like robots with full emotional range (anger too..!)
Will Smith, where are you? Can you save the planet again?
(To be continued…)
