Dark City

In the neo-noir film 'Dark City' we find our protagonist arising to awareness in what could be described as an episode of interoperative recall. Unlike every other member of his city, the protagonist, John Murdoch, begins to realize that he has lost memories just as he has lost places. Throughout the film, we see through his eyes as he discovers that the very people and places are changed daily, around midnight, and that the city itself is simply the face of a large spaceship piloted by alien controllers who derive some manner of occupational sustenance from maintaining this elaborate rat maze.

I am reminded of this film for one very simple reason. We spend time occupying pre-fabricated spaces whose architecture is a purely symbolic expression of underlying code. In fact, small and sometimes substantive changes occur behind the scenes, in the code, almost daily. When I return to a site and see the widgets changed or functionalities that were once separated now integrated I recall this film. While big unveilings of new sites can and do happen the little changes that accrue over time, as was recalled by the popular vlogger Pewdiepie, demonstrate that we are setting foot upon a fast-changing landscape. While functional buttons get moved and reskinned, and while some of these people are conscious of them is but a tip of a larger iceberg in a data-based landscape that is 'occupied' albeit as a type of fantasy chained narrative of 'online surfing.' And that fantasy, that modicum of normalcy, that foundation of certainty, is an expression of so many interests: the interests of coders, the interests of standards bodies, the interests of lawyers and of marketers, the interests of business, the interests of commodification and monetization, the interests of click, the interests of interface designers, and the interests of the vast majority of users and the kinds of ways that they interact with the data being displayed in the way that is being displayed. All this adds up to a world that, if it were real, would be an ominous sign, but since it is not, remains, at times, just below consciousness and gets registered as a few hiccups in the normal swipe and click routine of a barely conscious, strictly haptic aspect of the ritualized activity of 'online behavior.'

I go back to an early VR pioneer's work and his very iconographic dreadlocked appearance for inspiration and wisdom. Jaron Lanier's recommendation is to monetize data sharing in a way that makes ownership a baked-in feature of a web search and retrieval experience based in microtransactions that go from content creator to content consumer. He says that this will both motivate the creation of new culture and not simply incentivize the process of 'stealing' and remediating others' content.

That interlude is now over. Let us remind ourselves that the world we occupy is protean and surreal. The longer we tread down this path the more we could, and perhaps should, become preoccupied with counterfeit realities as Philip K. Dick described them. In his view, the Roman Empire had never ceased operating. And perhaps he has some truck with this notion of power and organization's historical continuity. This is our world. The glitzy, billion dollar ideas created, bought, and sold in the former orchard acreage that is now Silicon Valley should remind us that while we spend a lot of time meeting the hallucination of 'being online' halfway that there are very real and substantive effects of this whole operation. Money is funneled to the few. The fulcrums are increasingly consolidated into a few levers by which we gain access to a reality that is, by and large, digitally substantiated through so many different and routine mock fictions held together by perfectly separating friend from function in a way that incentivizes return activity.

In other words, to put this into Skinnerian language, our food lever substantiates more than simply organic sustenance but also neuronal sustenance. When we can swipe to order food, swipe to find our way somewhere, swipe to recall a family member or a loved one's number, swipe to 'be' with others, or simply swipe to pass the time we're already begun to flatten the world around us into that universal food lever. And as goes our environment, so goes our persistent behaviors, and then goes our identities, and finally our existence melds into some kind of interaction loop that is self-sustaining. In the end we becomes polyps upon the functional underside of a megatechnology.

This leads me to the trite and worn conclusion that we need to struggle more with a recalcitrant reality that requires us to cultivate, practice, and engage with our great mental inheritance. That we've been able to leave this earthly plain is a small leap from reflex to meta-reflex, time fixing, and cultural mediation in the future perfect mode. That is our great asset and our Achille's heel, imagination and sensation coalesce, which expose us to influence in the very process of creating models of reality. Why else do we worship purely fictional zeniths of social organization? Why else did we look to the stars to chart our paths, plan our crops, and honor the narrative deities that placed them there? Creatures of time we are. And at the very margins of that sensation of something not really present we mine time for significance, and pre-plan a social world by using revelations in time to manipulate a great mass of others through a narrative overlay of significance making upon time itself to furnish an attitude toward a fast-becoming reality.