V. Information Technology
Total Recall and Dreams
“Total Recall”, as directed by Paul Verhoeven, is pure sci-fi spectacle. Released in 1990, it stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as Douglas Quaid, a man disenfranchised with his life—his spouse and job bore him, and he keeps having dreams of a seductive woman on Mars, where he occasionally falls and
breathes the atmosphere’s air. Similar to “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” with its memory-augmenting fantasies, but also unlike that film, a company implants memories instead of erasing them. Their newest form of entertainment happens to be something more than just a memory of a vacation on a beach in Hawaii or an Alaskan cruise; it is an adventure. The doctor/salesmen gives Quaid the pitch:
Basic Mars package will run you 899 credits. Now, that’s for two full weeks of memories, if you want a longer trip it will cost you a little bit more because it’s a deeper implant. [...] When you go Recall, you get nothing but first class memories. Private cabin on the shuttle, deluxe suite at the Hilton, plus all the major sites, Mount Pyramid, grand canals, and of course, VenusVille. [...] As real as any memory in your head. [...] Your brain will not know the difference. And that’s guaranteed or your money back.
After the procedure is done, the patient will recall a wild trip as a millionaire playboy, a sports hero, an industrial tycoon, or a secret agent. “What is it that is exactly the same about every single vacation you have ever taken? [...] You. You’re the same. No matter where you go, there you are, it’s always the same old you. Let me suggest that you take a vacation from yourself. And I know it sounds wild. It’s the latest thing in travel. We call it the ego trip.” Quaid chooses to become an agent to follow the dreams he has been living every night.
The plot, which unfolds after, forces you to ask whether any of it is real or not. On his journey home, Quaid is attacked by a coworker who claims that the procedure has begun the process of reopening Quaid’s past memories, that he never was who he thought he was at all and his old Martian dreams
really happened to him. The whole film is like this. Layers keep falling away, revealing new aspects to the complex question of “who am I if I am not me?” We are introduced to a Mars colony, the woman in Quaid’s dreams, and we discover that Quaid’s previous personality may have been complicit in the whole thing to begin with. You see, Arnold's character discovers that he used to be the agent on Mars known as Hauser and that it was part of a conspiracy to
find the terrorist, Kuato. Kuato is an illusive man who the capitalists on the red planet are desperate to find and kill. Quaid
does find Kuato’s hiding place, but he turns out not to be quite the ordinary person we expect. He is, in fact, an infant tumor growing on the chest of another man. He tells Quaid, “you are what you do. A man is defined by his actions not his memories,” and grabs Arnold’s hands. “Now open your mind to me, please. Open your mind. Open your mind. Open your mind. Open your mind. Open your mind.” We are taken down a hallway to underneath the mysterious Martian pyramid, down more passages, and discover the ancient alien technology which will release oxygen into the atmosphere of Mars, ruining Cohaagen’s (the film's antagonist’s) monopoly on the gas.
Besides being a rip-roaring good time with intrigue, back-stabbings, romance, and three-breasted whores, “Total Recall” offers up another deeply disturbing scene. Not only does it make us re-question the events of the movie, but also our own lives. As Quaid sits in his fancy suite before he meets Kuata and discovers his double-dealing in the past as Hauser, he hears a knock on a door. In walks Dr. Edgemar, or more like he is pulled in by Quaid with a gun to his cranium. We assume that he is working for Cohaagen because the audience has also been swept up in the Quaid’s apparent dream. But the doctor warns him that he has “suffered a schizoid embolism” and that the entire adventure so far has been a “delusion.” When Quaid tries to justify his experience, especially of the woman he had dreams of before the memory implants, Edgemar answers back, “Oh Mr. Quaid, she’s real because you dreamed her.” Quaid raises a gun the doctor’s head and threatens to kill him:
It won’t make the slightest difference to me Doug, but the consequences to you will be devastating. In your mind, I’ll be dead, and with no one to guide you out, you’ll be stuck here in permanent psychosis. The walls of reality will come crashing down around you. One minute, you’re the savior of the rebel cause; next thing you know, you’ll be Cohaagen’s bosom buddy. You'll even have fantasies about alien civilizations as you requested; but in the end, back on Earth, you’ll be lobotomized! So get a grip on yourself, Doug, and put down that gun!
Quaid fires it. He refuses to give into the Doctor’s suggestions. Mythologies of the East would report to us that the basis of all growth is ‘letting go’. We have to release the ego’s need to cling to things to be truly at peace. ‘Bhudda’ literally means one who has awakened.
Alan Watts says Hinduism has a similar concept in Shiva, who has ten arms, or “the Buddhist Avalokiteshvara with one thousand arms. Their image of the divine is of a sort of centipede. A centipede can move a hundred legs without having to think about it, and Shiva can move ten arms very dexterously without having to think about them” (Watts 79, Myth and Religion). The multi-armed god is a representation of every person who has ever lived. We are his arms, we are all Shiva and just don't know it, pretending to be someone we are not. Watts continues, comparing theater to the Hindu god. He says:
There are actors coming on the stage, but they are real people like you. In order for you not to see them in that way, they are going to put on their costumes and makeup, and then they are going to come out in front here and pretend to various roles. And you know you want to be half convinced that what they are doing on the stage is real. The work of a great actor is to get you sitting on the edge of your chair, anxious, or weeping, or roaring with laughter, because he has almost persuaded you that what is on the stage is really happening. That is the greatness of his art, to take the audience in. In the same way, the Hindu feels that the Godhead acts his part so well that he takes himself in completely. And each of you is the godhead, wonderfully fooled by your own act. And although you won't admit it to yourself, you are enjoying it like anything. (Watts 82)
Story and myth are the closest we can ever get to truth. They represent the plays which have been occurring since the big bang exploded and light and matter ballooned across the nothingness (we have creation myths) and until the end of everything (Apocalyptic myths).
What stories tell us about ourselves is that we are capable of playing every role there is. We identify with the hero’s quest to take down the villain, we gasp when it looks like he is about to be killed, and applaud when he wins out; but at the same time there is delight with the villain’s shenanigans. In theater, we realize the importance of the bad guy when he receives applause from the audience at the end of play. This, of course, is less explicit in modern entertainment. There is no dramatic bowing of the mobster with gales of approval at the end of the movie. However, it is not unheard of to overhear people leaving the theater mentioning how amazing the actor was who played the killer. As kids, we engage in this intense “level of play”, which the ancient hunter-gatherers in the Paleolithic era extended to all of life. Joseph Cambpell writes in
Primitive Mythologies: The Masks of God that a “certain level of ‘make-believe’ is operative in all primitive religious. ‘The savage’ wrote Marett, ‘is a good actor who can be quite absorbed in his role, like a child at play; and also, like a child, a good spectator who can be frightened to death by the roaring of something he knows perfectly well to be no ‘real' lion’” (Campbell 23). By acknowledging that the villain is being acted by someone who is not really a bad person, we are beginning to acknowledge that it is
all in act. That we are all being tricked into believing that we are who we are, that we are the hero, and that we should cling to material things. Like Dr. Edgemar says, it’s all a delusion in our heads. What Quaid's character in Total Recall doesn’t realize is that he is performing the hero’s role in this dream. In the next, he might be the evil industrialist, the perky lover, the little mutant child with the freaky eye. That is what reincarnation truly is, a morphing of the eternal consciousness into every role.
The Indians have another mythic image of the Net of Indra which relates to this essay. It “is a net of gems, where at every crossing of one thread over another there is a gem reflecting all the other reflective gems. Everything arises in mutual relation to everything else, so you can’t blame anybody for anything. It is even as though there were a single intention behind it all, which always makes some kind of sense, though none of us knows what the sense might be, or has lived the life that he quite intended” (Campbell 284, The Power of Myth). This is not to say we shouldn’t be involved with life because that is the fun of it; however, it does seem to be the case that the worst atrocities against our fellow men occur when we become too involved in the material world. Stories show us that we are communicating with archetypes and roles which we all fit in some way. When we get into a really good book, our minds start communicating with this unconscious realm. It gives the chaotic voices of the right brain shape and coherence, linking both hemispheres together in a song or dance and harmonizing the brain like a lyre. Old archetypes from ages past can rear their heads and haunt us again, and there is no one there to tell us that this isn’t real, or that this can't happen. It is complete experience. We get caught up with the characters, with the monsters which the ego usually denies us with its rational knowledge. Trolls, ogres, demons gods are there in their archetypal splendor, daring us to be terrified by their grotesque visages, or the specters within ourselves. Erik Davis in his book
TechGnosis claims that the “pagan and the paranormal have colonized our pop media” and that the “West’s mystical heritage of occult dreamings, spiritual transformations, and apocalyptic visions crashed on the scientific shores of the modern age” (4-5). It is the same with video games, with their fascination with alien and fantastical monsters.
As we progress further into the 21st century, there is going to be more bending of identity to the whims of computer interface. Information technology has already begun to shape our personalities in new and profound ways. With the invention of Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter, users are picturing themselves not as a person, but an online image. Go through your friends’ photo albums, wall posts, and favorites list—these are online identities which can be very separate from the person they present in public. Erik Davis says that of all the technologies, “it is the technologies of information and communication that most mold and shape the source of all mystical glimmerings: the human self.” It “tweaks our perceptions, communicates our picture of the world to one another, and constructs remarkable and sometimes insidious forms of control over the cultural stories that shape our sense of the world” (Davis 6). Like all tools, these technologies become extensions of the person wielding them. However, beyond even that, they allow us to interface with each other in methods which weren’t available to us before. In the online sphere we can hide behind masks. No one knows our “true” personalities, only a silly username. This allows great freedom of identity in the cyber-world and is an interesting case-study on the nature of reality.
Davis paints a picture of the growing number of new technologies which changed the perception of the self and how each time a new one became available, people would see it as mystical. People believed that electricity was the spiritual force which God used to create life. In it, they found new mythic experiences because the human mind would fill the knowledge-lacuna with imagination. When we don’t understand something, we usually choose to see it as magical. Magnets were also used for therapy by icons like Franz Anton Mesmer who came up with ‘animal magnetism’, which eventually led to the concept of hypnotism. Phones calls and radio waves were seen as almost spiritual—voices from people far away that were them and not them at the same time. Old animist spirits were evoked in us. They desired to be free and roam the planes of the collective imagination again, and these technologies were giving them the means to do so. As the world became increasingly demystified, the magic was drained from peoples’ everyday lives. This was translated into ‘real-life’ adventures of explorers discovering new civilizations underground and ancient islands populated with strange locals in books like
The Coming Race by Edward Bulwer-Lytton and
Erewhon by Samuel Butler, or reemerged in spiritual contact through electricity and radio waves. Whereas older technologies were extensions of a limb, McLuhan opines that modern ones were more like the expansion of the nervous system. “As new technologies begin to remold [...] boundaries, the shadows, doubles, and dark reflections that haunt human identity begin to leak outside the self as well, many of them taking up residence in the virtual spaces opened up by the new technologies” (73). In our current age, magic of ages past has dissolved into the pseudo-underworld, and it is now the magic of the internet which possesses the mind of man, only one part of the GRIN (genetics, robotics, information tech, and nanotech).
Similar to the description of reading I described above, “the virtual topographies of our millennial world are rife with angels and aliens, with digital avatars and mystic Gaian minds, with utopian longings and gnostic science fictions, and with dark forebodings of apocalypse and demonic enchantment” (Davis 8). Hermes, or Mercury to the Romans, is the electric psychopomp who will guide us through the new technological spheres of ego. Technology, according to Davis, is a trickster because it “pulls wool over our eyes” and disconnects us from the natural world. This is Hermes’ domain. The internet connects us with people across the globe, just like the quick-footed god, but hides us away from those closest to us. “Hermes [...] embodies the social psychology of language and communication. He flies ‘as fleet as thought,’ an image of the day-light mind, with its plans and synaptic leaps, its chatter and overload. Hermes shows that these minds are not islands, but nodes in an immense electric tangle of words, images, songs, and signals” (19). However, Hermes is also completely comfortable with stealing, tricking, and confusing those around him, and he is most definitely the god of commerce, which the web provides a catalyst for. The false utopias talked about across the web can be harbingers of both peace and destruction. This is something a person should be weary of not only in the science fiction imaginings at fiction-net, but also in emails from Nigerian princes. Hermes cons us with his quick words and duplicitous smiles. His form of communication is language, reading, a form of animism itself with the way it pops images of archaic spirits into our minds. Davis quotes Marshall McLuhan on Hermes’ writing: it “‘shattered the charmed circle and resonating magic of the tribal world, exploding man into an agglomeration of specialized and psychically impoverished individuals or units, functioning in a world of linear time and Euclidian space’” (35). It is Thoth, the Egyptian Hermes, who tempted King Thamus with literacy.
Like the world depicted in “Total Recall”, Char Davies’ Osmose surrounds the experiencer with sights, sounds, and a real, living space—a person can move around inside this electronic piece of art, playing in it like your own backyard. This is the next stage of online interaction, with humans increasingly building avatars to interact with each other in social memory palaces. “Osmose,” Davis says, “[...] reminds us how intimate we are with electronics, in sight and sound, in body and psyche. [... and] is a powerful example of how technological environments can simulate something like the old animist immersion in the World Soul, organic dreamings that depend, in power and effect, upon the ethereal fire” (70). Some theological researchers, like Tom Horn in
Forbidden Gates, believe that this sort of communication is the gateway to the demonic realms. With the continued linking up of mind and machine, and concepts of transhumanism and posthumanism, our future, some fear, will resemble something like Star Trek’s Borgs with the loss of identity, or as Tom Horn opines, a demonic hell with doors being open that should not, releasing the ability for demons from another realm to break into our own.
In fact, a pulp story by Laurence Manning and Fletcher titled
“The City of the Living Dead” paints a Dystopic hell where the last remaining remnants of man’s techo-empire are dying off because people have placed themselves into a continual dream-state. The whole of humanity became wired to machines which let them experience any adventure of their choice:
‘Thus if the operator wished to make the Adventurer feel that he was hunting, the record of a hunting adventure was placed in the Machine, and the cable leading from the adventurer’s nerves was connected to it. The nerves of the adventurer’s foot would assure him that he trod the mould of the forest; the nerves of his eyes would bring him a vision of the dim vista of trunks and a wild animal bounding through them; the nerves of his hands and arms would tell him he was making the correct motions to take aim and bring the animal down; and through the nerves of his ears, the Machine Adventurer would hear the dying scream of the beast he had slaughtered’ (14-15).
However, no one had left their machine-escape-worlds in ages, and they were slowly starving to death. The only one left was an old man trying to maintain the humans and tech which remained. This relates to the human-as-a-computer-system I will go into further below.
Mind-Body Computer
In Part I on Hypnosis, I mentioned Heidegger’s notion of ‘ready-to-hand’, which dealt with technology becoming part of the person in the same way we breathe without thinking about it. Modern science has shown that his perception was indeed correct. According to
an article posted in Wired, Anthony Chemero, a cognitive scientist at Franklin & Marshall College, and two graduate students Dobromir Dotov and Lin Nie, discovered via research that people controlling a normal working computer mouse became attuned to the ‘pink noise’—a frequency that occurs often in the natural world, from “universal electromagnetic wave fluctuations to tidal flows to DNA sequences” (Keim) and showed that they were not thinking about the process of steering a mouse when things went smoothly. However, when they were instead given a malfunctioning one to work with, “the pink noise vanished.” “The thing that does the thinking is bigger than your biological body,” Chemero reported. “You’re so tightly coupled to the tools you use that they’re literally part of you as a thinking, behaving thing.” More research has shown that subjects fitted with goggles which streamed video directly into their eyes of a rubber mannequin or even another body which was not there’s could feel what was being done to it. This is known as the ghost limb phenomenon—when an amputee feels like the part of them missing is still there. “These experiments have demonstrated how remarkably easy it is to ‘move’ a human centre of awareness from one body to another,” a Swedish group of researchers write and is reported in
an article in Wired written by Alexis Madrigal. “This speaks directly to the classical question of the relationship between human consciousness and the body, which has been discussed by philosophers, psychologists, and theologians for centuries.”
In this vain, I want to explore the human body as a computer theory which conspiracy theorists like David Icke opine so much about. Before we begin, I want to make a few things clear: my favorite area in the book store is, and has been for a long time, the esoteric section. The shelves are filled with literature (if you can call it that) on discovering the lost city of Atlantis, UFO abductions, bigfoots, yetis, Loch Ness monsters, alien greys, the reptilians, the Nordics, manuals on how to read auras, cast spells, and how to calculate life paths in numerology. This is not a new fling in my love affair with the unknown. In my elementary school library, it was not the young adult literature I was fascinated with, as it was with most of my peers; it was the books on real-life monsters, aliens, and ghosts. I can remember checking them out so many times, careening through their pages to be shocked by first-hand accounts of encounters with the sublime, the dastardly picture of Grendel ripping men apart, stories of green Martian men attacking a farm in the middle of nowhere, and a gory image of a knight being strangled to death by a serpentine dragon. As kids, ogres, witches, and dragons were real. A part of me couldn’t accept that. The greys could be real. So could the reptilians. So could Bigfoot and the yeti. Why have I always been fascinated with these illusive monsters? I wanted, I want, them to exist. As a little kid (couldn’t have been more than five) I recall asking my grandma if she believed in aliens. Even at that age, when the thought of beings existing on a planet far, far away was a new concept, I wanted to know more. I love mysteries, but not detective stories dealing with things like murders or burglaries, but mystical/spiritual/cosmic ones. Unveilings, if you will, of something that would not only reshape one person’s life, but everyone’s.
During the summers, I woke up early every morning before my mom went to work to watch a show called “Sightings” on the SciFi network. The host, Tim White, would report on unusual events across the nation and world: ghosts, close encounters, and cryptozoology. Some of it was very convincing to my young mind, but one day the channel stopped airing the show (I had been watching reruns from the early 1990s’). I was distraught. I needed my fix. Lucky for me, in middle school I discovered
Coast to Coast AM, a late-night radio show which talked about similar things. George Noory has been a constant in my life ever since. To add to my mystery-obsession, television programs like LOST and Heroes began airing during this time as well. Both revolved around central mysteries which always left the viewer wanting more. Between LOST, Coast to Coast AM, and my fascination with mythology, the occult, and philosophy, I started to create my own grand theories. They slowly became influenced by literary theorists, philosophers, the ancients, and conspiratorial radio hosts like Alex Jones. I love conspiracy theories and am proud of it. They, like most of the things I have been describing, are real life ghosts stories (some literally). I am not going to pretend like the information discussed in the next paragraphs is new to me. I have been following out-there stuff since way before this class, and I am aware of the perceived lunacy of this material. As an academic, it slightly scares me to cite such sources; however, it is very much within the theme of this project. I hope you enjoy what’s to come, if not for its craziness.
David Icke, for his part, is a proponent of the reptilian-shapeshifter-bloodline agenda of the ruling elite, but for all his far-out talk on reptilians in power, he does prove to be quite philosophical when it comes to theories on consciousness and personalities. Everything about our person is a downloadable program, according to him, and the body itself is in fact similar to a computer. Icke says that “‘we’ don’t die because ‘we’ can’t. We are Infinite Awareness—not a body. It is our computer that dies when either its communication system has broken down and is no longer able to function, or consciousness chooses to withdraw from this reality and end the experience” (Icke 4). He compares this Infinite Awareness to a user on a computer. If you were to tell a computer it was being handled by an outside force to do what it does, it would call you crazy (if it could, of course). “Our hunches, our intuition, or what I call ‘knowing’, come from Infinite Awareness—not intellect. The ‘scientific’ and ‘intellectual’ professions, like teachers, university lecturers, and those in media, are awash with unconscious people” (6). These people have been tricked into identifying with their bodies, personalities, emotions, and egos—these things are not you, but the computer you use to interface with the world. It would be like an astronaut saying that he is his spacesuit or a person identifying with the clothes he is wearing (it happens). One more step, and a person would no longer be just living through his body, memories, and emotions, but the technology he is using. Clearly most people do not extend their bodily identity to the car they are driving or the mouse they are using to interact with a computer interface, but there is nothing to say where our identity should begin and end. In fact, the air around you completes you as much as your body does, for what where would you be without it?
I mentioned before about the Hindu god Shiva tricking himself into seeing the world through each of us. The god Brahma also
said, “The universe is an Idea, my Idea.” I have heard the Infinite Awareness which Icke describes called many things, the Cosmic Consciousness, Universal Unconscious, or just plain God. To illustrate a point, rat brains can be
manipulated into controlling airplanes in a simulation. According to an article by Robin Lettice on
The Register, “Scientists at the university of Florida taught the ‘brain’, which was grown from 25,000 neural cells extracted from a rat embryo, to pilot an F-22 jet simulator. It was taught to control the flight path, even in mock hurricane-strength winds” (Lettice). If something as basic as rat neurons grown on a petri dish can be manipulated into believing they are collectively a jet, than who are we really? Icke says the brain, rather than being us, is a receptor for the greater consciousness, and the main receptor is the third eye or the pineal gland. All reality is simply energy frequencies, according to him. Most of the ‘solid world’ we see is empty space (remember, atoms are 99 percent empty) and is an illusion. We have dialed up to a certain frequency—it is why radio waves can exist in the same space you are in—and our senses are simply what our brains use to pick it up. “You don't see with your eyes,” says Icke, “You see with your brain.”
Icke makes the claims that our personalities are achetypal structures built into the human computer hardware:
I have heard it said by psychologists that there are only a small number of what they call archetypal ‘personalities’. Some say there are no more than twelve basic ones. [...] Humans did not have separate, or personal, unconscious minds and instead shared a single Universal Unconscious, Jung said. What we call the conscious mind was rooted in this, he believed, and to him the mind was shaped according to universal patterns (16).
This makes sense in that we are very much part of this universe—our minds should be continued to be shaped by it because we are ‘it’. When we see the patterns in the heavens, or the earth’s cycles, we feel separate from them, when in fact, we are them. “Like everything in this reality, ‘human’ is a computer construct and not who we really are. Psychiatrists and mainstream therapists who work with the ‘human mind’ are like computer tech-support and hypnotists are re-programmers. They are not dealing with Infinite Awareness, but the computer ‘mind’” (6). These archetypes, says Icke, would contradict our basic assumptions about ourselves—if there are so few, is there any real freedom or are we just living out these stories already set up for us? For example, Jean Shinoda Bolen's
Gods in Everymantries to help men find the archetypes within themselves (she uses the Greek pantheon). Are these archetypes computer programs we download from our genes and environment? “As with an inherited disease that some children get and others don’t, the ‘personality’ programs are sitting there waiting to be triggered. A conscious person can overcome and inherited tendency through the enlightenment of Infinite Awareness, but a non-conscious person, following the program and thinking it is them, may fall into the inherited response” (17). Icke goes as far to say that our demons are in fact downloaded programs. I would relate that the images of hell, the devil, and his minions are images of our own internal dilemmas, nightmares, and problems. Gender is also another aspect of our computer-body. We identify with a particular sex; however, as Judith Butler pointed out, this is often just a role we play for others. Everything is energy, and our body is simply the interface we have been given to interact with it and make it solid to touch.
These ideas are nothing new. According to Erik Davis in
TechGnosis:
The electromagnetic universe set the stage for the final deconstruction of atomic materialism: the dissolution of the ether, the emergence of Einsteinian space-time, and ultimately the arrival of quantum mechanics and its colossal oddities. [It] catalysed the alchemy that revealed the physical universe to be an enormous vibrating mantra of potent nothings. (62)
In the rise of this new era, esoteric teachers began to incorporate new technologies into their teachings. Col. Henry Steel Olcott and Madame Helena Blavatsky formed the Theosophical Society in 1875, which wanted to understand the universe by combining modern ways of thought with hermeticism and Eastern religion. “They were the gnostics of modernism,” says Davis. The Theosophists weaved together the mind before matter universe (as well as the power of thoughts to influence the material world), with “the language of etheric waves, vibrations, cosmic frequencies, and fields of force” (63). David Icke is the progression of this—the melding together of ancient myth with new age pop Buddhism and new technology. “Consciousness is like an FM radio band,” said William Irwin Thompson, a social philosopher from the 20th century, “as long as one is locked into one station, all he receives is the information of one reality; but if . . . he is able to move his consciousness to a different station on the FM band, then he discovers universes beyond matter in the cosmic reaches of spirit” (Davis 64).
The New Era of Technology
Another beauty of this technological century is that it gives power back to the introverts. Clive Thompson, in the April 2012 edition of Wired magazine, wrote an article titled
”Solo Performance” which discusses people like Guy Kawasaki, a popular entrepreneurial blogger, who admitted a few years ago, “You may find this hard to believe, but I am an introvert. I have a ‘role’ to play, but fundamentally I am a loner.” This is a startling fact! Where the oral tradition forced a person into constant physical interaction because it was nearly impossible for him to do so by any other means, the internet can allow a person to descend so far inward, alone on his desk or lap top, that he can return to the fundamentals of illiterate culture. It has been concluded by researchers like Susan Cain, and discussed in a fascinating New Yorker article by Jonah Lehrer,
“Groupthink: The brainstorming myth”, that traditional group meetings are ineffective compared to other methods—“That’s because,” reports Thompson in Wired, “social dynamics lead groups astray; they coalesce around the loudest extrovert’s most confidently asserted idea, no matter how daft it might be.” Thompson reasons that “virtual collaboration” is not only the way of the future but will also lead to better decision-making. It forces each member to consider his ideas alone before he speaks.
Thompson ends his article with the following statement, “We generally assume that [the internet] has unleashed an unruly explosion of disclosure, a constant high school of blather. But what is has really done is made our culture more introverted—and productively so.” Indeed, research has shown that better ideas are brought forth from private thought before the actual meeting takes place. This is quite similar to how the web functions. Things like email, instant messaging, comment posts, and even text messages are typically measured before sent. The internet has also led to the creation of ‘look-before-they-flame-out’ memes. With one quick glance around sites like reddit or Digg, you will discover a plethora of modern day icons. They represent aspects of our modern personalities, just like the ancients had their gods. There is an endless list of them, from Socially Awkward Penguin (SAP) and Foul Bachelor Frog (FBF), to Insanity Wolf (IW) and Paranoid Parrot (PP), with inevitable new ones popping up each week. Like characters from television or comic books, they are interpreted by an endless array of people adding their particular spin on the character. Some, of course, relate more with SAP, others with FBF, and others with PP. Often we have a bit of all the characters inside us. Like the public forums of old which brought together whole communities, these memes typically originate with the self-proclaimed “butt-hole” of the internet,
4chan. It is forum filled with hilarious images, terrible pornography and gore (especially /b). After their creation on 4chan, the best memes end up at the social news site, reddit, where they are brought to a more acceptable and standardized image. One could relate this process to the oral tradition’s acceptance of the vulgar, of the disgusting, of sex, gore, and wretched inhumanity, and then these being brought to a literate culture where morals and standardization become more important. Oral culture accepts everything, literate culture does not.
These memes are also fascinating in how they return to a sort of image or icon, a medium associated with the feminine in Leonard Shlain’s
The Alphabet Versus the Goddess. What does this mean? Well, for one, anyone can influence a cultural image like FBF or SAP, but written words are brought together by an author (associated with ‘authoritative’). Words in a book are static and it is hard to challenge the original writer, as Walter Ong explains so well in
Orality and Literacy. Thus, memes can be far more influenced by the cultural attitude at the time. They are brought to us not by one person but by many, and they are commented on continuously. The meme is the result of millions of minds coming together in solitude. They are the introverted gods of our age. Was there ever an equivalent of this before the information age? Reddit is filled with thousands of these “subreddits” which bring together users who are interested in the same topic, and I am personally a member of r/literature, r/promtoftheday, r/mythology, and r/criticism. Anyone can post an article, video, or comment on one of these boards, and if they are popular enough, can be read by thousands of people all over the world. It has also become quite popular with celebrities, who will create a forum on r/iama and have a chat with their fans. Interactions like these were impossible just 15 years ago. Will the collective mindscape start to become even more transformed by memes? One only needs to look at the
Kony video phenomenon to see how it could play out in the future, but it is still a clunky process, one which takes time and a great deal of good luck. As our lives become increasingly entwined with social networking, I believe we will see a shift towards the ‘secondary orality’ which Walter Ong talked about. This will be the marriage of the literate and oral tradition.
But there is also danger in this process. The film “We Live in Public” tells Josh Harris’ story. Harris was an early online entrepreneur who gave up his identity in the desire for fame and loses everything in the process. The internet is already causing a loss of identity—a person will turn increasingly misty because of the loss of control of his own narrative. Many modern conveniences which we take for granted today like elevators, escalators, cars, and airplanes would have been considered magical 100 years ago. They
are magic. Humans can fly, communicate with another person on the opposite side of the globe, and steer giant mechanical monsters, and this sublime progression will only speed up in the years to come with genetics, robotics, information technologies, and nanotechnology (GRIN). Our bodies will be upgraded with animal parts, integrated further with the machines and the internet, and nanotech will allow us to alter the physical world like a programmer does with computer code.
Tom and Nita Horn warn in Forbidden Gates of teenagers “i-Dosing”. This phenomenon seemingly has “teens gett[ing] ‘digitally high’ by playing specific Internet videos through headphones that use repetitive tones to create binaural beats, which have been shown in clinical studies to induce particular brain-wave states that make the sounds appear to come from the center of the head. Shamans,” they continue, “have used variations of such repetitive tones and drumming to stimulate and focus the 'center mind' for centuries to make contact with the spirit world and to achieve altered states of consciousness” (Forbidden Gates 205). Music, in the esoteric tradition, has the ability to excite the spirit’s emotions into a frenzy—I think it is important to remember that the ancient Paleolithic peoples believed that everything contained a spirit, something which existed in the invisible realm which a person could not see. The beat of a drum and wailing of a voice had the power to connect with the invisible empire. Upon further research I found a
website which allows people to log on and discover the pleasure of ‘i-Dosing’. It gives links to download ‘biaural’ audio, computer software “which is the ultimate way to achieve an incredibly powerful simulated mood or experience with longer effects”, and even mobile apps. According to a Mail Online
article titled, “I-Dosing: How teenagers are getting ‘digitally high’ from music they dowload from internet” and written by Daniel Bates:
Dr Helane Wahbeh, a Naturopathic Physician and Clinician Researcher at the Oregon Health and Science University, said: 'Binaural beats happen when opposite ears receive two different sound waves.
‘And normally, the difference in sound between each ear help people get directional information about the source of the sound.
‘But when you listen to these sounds with stereo headphones, the listener senses the difference between the two frequencies as another beat that sounds like it's coming from the inside of the head.’
After all the hoopla, I had to try it out myself. I put on my headphones, plugged them into the computer, and started listening to a ‘track’ (if you want to call it that) on Youtube. It is true; the sound does feel like it is coming from the center of the brain. If I were to use this in the middle of the night, with the lights off and the realm of spirits surrounding me, I think it would send me into a wave of either sublime horror or glee. If you are not ready to make contact with the angels and demons, I suggest you not listen to it—yes, it can be a bit freaky. The constant beat and notes flowing back and forth across your cranium appear to be a state of self-hypnosis. It relaxes you to a point where you can communicate with your subconscious and all the good and evil things that reside there. According to the Horns, “the lure of ‘digital simulation’ can actually produce dopamine releases in the brain that affect the heart rate and blood pressure and lead to drug-like highs and lows” (205).
According to Dr. Christopher Hook,
“If implanted devices allow the exchange of information between the biological substrate and the cybernetic device would be intimately associated with the creation and recall of memories as well as with all the emotions inherent in that process. If this device were...to allow the importation of information from the Internet, could the device also allow memories and thoughts of the individual to be downloaded or read by others? In essence, what is to prevent the brain itself from being hacked? The last bastion of human privacy, the brain, will have been breached” (Horn 207).
Tom Horn would relate that this would lead to the ‘borgification’ of mankind, similar to the villains in Star Trek where individual beings plugged into the larger technological machine at the expense of their freedom. Mihail Roco, the NBIC director said in
Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance says, “Humanity would become like a single, distributed and interconnected 'brain' based in new core pathways in society.... A networked society of billions of human beings could be as complex compared to an individual being as a human being is to a single nerve cell” (Horn 209). This is a terrifying prospect—these new technologies could either be a great linker that brings humanity to new enlightenment or our destruction where we could lose the humanness that made it worth living in the first place.
Bill Joy, a computer scientist in his own right and the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, wrote an
impassioned warning about the future of these technologies for Wired magazine in April 2000 titled, “Why the future doesn’t need us.” Joy fears that scientists today are tinkering with nature (be it human genes or nano machines) with Frankenstein-esque pride. Mythologies in the West warn man against interfering with God's authority—Prometheus, Frankenstein, even the hapless Adam and Eve. As humanity moves into this mysterious future, there will be a return to a sort of oral tradition which was lost long ago. We are on the precipice of a great consciousness shifter. What will happen when our brains become so entwined with the machines that they are no longer separable? What will happen when there is a breakthrough in the process of aging and immortality? There are some who claim that these technologies will be used for a burgeoning technological dictatorship which will be ruled by an intellectual elite, and transhumanists like Ray Kurzweil discuss a point in the future where technological innovation will come so quickly that it will self-replicate out of humanity’s control. Logical thinking has progressed so far that it is now returning to a more intuitive realm. It is coming full circle.
