Our relationship with our technology: An unequal partnership

Philip Dick wrote about it. William Gibson centred much of his fiction on it. What is our relationship with our technology? People like to think they are the Masters or Mistresses and that their machines do their bidding but I think it is the other way round. I perceive this partnership as essentially an unequal one, with the balance of power favouring the technology.

It can be as simple an interaction as an attempt to communicate with a bank or the people who deliver bottled water. 'Voice-recognition' or 'voice-activated' software, often touted as the ultimate advance with respect to communication is a nightmare.

I recently overheard a conversation between a girl and her cellphone. I cannot recall the exchange verbatim but it went something like this:
Cellphone: 'What listing?'
Girl: 'Harriet'.
Cellphone: 'You want to call Home?'
Girl: No. 'Harriet'.
Cellphone: 'You want to call Rick?'
Girl (speaking louder and more distinctly): No, Harriet.

And so on and so forth, the girl becoming rather bitter in her seemingly circular argument with her own servant machine!

I have had the same conversation dozens of times with merchants who have the same sort of software.

They cannot get it right. I eliminate my 'accent', attempt to flatten my delivery and the machine still does not comprehend.

Ultimately, there is only ONE solution in every instance: to simply repeat, again and again, the words, 'Customer Service' until the machine untangles its translation and sends you to a REAL human being.

I cannot imagine what horrors will be in store for users who eliminate their keyboards on their computers in order to use 'voice-activated' software. Give me a keyboard any day, although a keyboard on a computer is subject to the same glitches and quirks as any technological item.

For example, on my laptop, when I am typing, very often the machine inexplicably will jump to a previous paragraph and insert my text there. Worse than that is the programming that causes the machine to highlight a paragraph or portion of a paragraph quite without my permission and then DELETE it! Fortunately, I discovered that 'Undo' SOMETIMES if not always can be applied here to restore the cut text.

When I contacted the makers of the laptop, I was told that this is unavoidable, caused somehow by the close proximity of ALL the keys and the sensitivity of the keyboard. I attempted to change the sensitivity to make the keyboard as insensitive as the worst lout and cad, but in vain... Yes, I type very quickly, but I never had this trouble in pre-computer days.

My laptop turns itself on and off without my permission, installs programmes without my permission, all under the guise of 'protecting' me from harm and danger. I try to limit its autonomy but one reaches points constantly where the machine refuses to act, saying that updates are required...

One of AOL's 'updates' in the past year or so added nasty advertisements to their site AND forced me to include them in my emails. Under the guise of 'improving' performance or 'security', it appears to me that most of these 'updates' and changes are motivated by greed, thinly disguised as a concern for the user's welfare. AOL became a 'free service' after all the advertising was added. I personally would have preferred to pay a minimal fee to keep my life free from these intruders.

There are few programmes that do not require 'updates', sometimes shutting down the computer at an inopportune moment. Yesterday, I was working on a document and had been writing for almost two hours. I had to step away from the laptop for a moment. When I returned, it was 'recovering from an unexpected shutdown'. All my work was LOST.

This caused me to think about the relationship we have with these machines and how much of our time is spent waiting for them to respond or installing 'updates' and 'improvements' that seldom improve anything for the machine's human user. Furthermore, how many of us really know what our machines are DOING???

It is not only hackers who assume control of our computers. There are countless outside influences that dictate the actions of our machines at any given moment. You may be doing NOTHING at all when the machine begins to work furiously at some hidden task... Go into the Task Manager menu and you may or may not understand what application is being used or what programme is involved...

It is not computers alone that bedevil our lives. Telephones are extremely sophisticated, including all sorts of programming that prevent any simple interaction. You have to spend at least half an hour with ANY new machine to programme it or make it ready to function on YOUR behalf.

There is a part of me that loves technology. It is akin to magic, really. On the other hand, any adept in magic knows that allowing the jinn to escape from the bottle, or conjuring a demon or spirit is dangerous... Control and vigilance are required on a constant basis. Otherwise, the power will take matters into its own hands to perform actions that are part of its own hidden agenda... It is no different, I would say, with technological 'powers'.

N.B. Photograph of what may be the most utterly cool cellphone in the world... I don't know, never having seen it 'in the flesh' as it were... By 'servants' like this are we seduced and yet... and yet... For all the little wonders it promises to deliver, how much time would be spent serving IT?

The Futures that never Were

William Gibson has to be one of the most brilliant thinkers and writers of our age. 'Neuromancer' in particular blew me away when I read it. Most novels can be read effortlessly and one never has to ponder a sentence or an image. If one chooses to slow down, to reread or to pause simply to savour a beautifully crafted sentence or an exquisitely framed landscape, it is a matter of choice rather than necessity.

William Gibson is one of the few novelists who write prose that forces me sometimes to stop briefly and reread a sentence, because of the intricacy and depth of some of his concepts and descriptions. That is not to say that he writes deliberately convoluted prose or ostentatiously crafts obscure words and images into a tortured form. There are writers who do and I abhor them. Gibson is a consummate storyteller whose images are crisp and unforgettable and whose concepts always have been on the cutting edge of reality or beyond. Even so, his sheer brilliance can necessitate a pause to think carefully about a sentence he has written once in awhile.

This is above and beyond the ordinary pauses and rereading of a phrase or paragraph from admiration and delight of the skill of a wordsmith. Gibson forces me to use my brain. He challenges me a little, and that always is a thrill. There are thousands of books that challenge me intellectually or academically, but they are non-fiction, technical treatises for the most part in one arcane subject or another. For a novelist to be able to challenge the mind in such a fashion while managing to create a fast-paced exciting tale has to be one of the ultimate literary achievements.

For an individual like myself who tends to try to ignore the writer behind the work for the most part, I have been reading quite a few interviews with favourite writers recently, all quite by accident, I have to admit.

William Gibson, in an interview about his most recent novel declared:

'I'm sure I must have readers from 20 years ago who are just despairing of the absence of cyberstuff, or girls with bionic fingernails. But that just the way it is. All of that stuff reads so differently now. I think nothing dates more quickly than science fiction. Nothing dates more quickly than an imaginary future. It's acquiring a patina of quaintness even before you've got it in the envelope to send to the publisher.'

When asked if his shift in writing were due to less current interest in imagining a future world on his part or the change in the actual world, he responded:

'I think it's actually both. Until fairly recently, I had assumed that it was me, me being drawn to use this toolkit I'd acquired when I was a teenager, and using my old SF toolkit in some kind of attempt at naturalism, 21st-century naturalistic fiction. But over the last five to six years it's started to seem to me that there's something else going on as well, that maybe we're in what the characters in my novel Idoru call a 'nodal point,' or a series of them. We're in a place where things could just go anywhere. A couple of weeks ago I happened to read Charlie Stross's argument as to why he believes that there will never, ever be any manned space travel. It's not going to happen. We're not going to colonise Mars. All of that is just a big fantasy. And it's so convincing. I read that and I'm like, 'My god, there goes so much of the fiction I read as a child.'

I always perceived science fiction as prophecy to some extent and writers like Philip K. Dick and William Gibson have been truly prophetic in describing a series of futures that have merged into our present reality in the early 21st century.

For all the true depictions of the future, there are as many if not more false futures in the realm of science fiction. On the other hand, it is only in one way that they are false. Even if humanity never colonises Mars in reality, the history of Mars' colonisation has been a long one in literature and film and that has become a part of our collective unconscious for better or worse. In the same way that the vampire culture has been founded and built upon generations of literary and cinematic imaginings to coalesce finally into what amounts almost to accepted 'fact' in terms of their history, habitat, food sources and relationship to darkness and light, there is another Mars that exists apart from the planet that rotates in our skies.

Humanity builds as much upon its fantasies as its realities. Science takes as many leaps by way of imagination's stepping stones as any novelist and although it is the job of Science to fill in the gaps ultimately, very often the pioneers who took those initial leaps were writers of fiction.

Yes, there is a 'patina of quaintness' when we read an old science fiction novel that attempted to depict our contemporary culture and we focus on the little discrepancies and absurdities... but how much of what we live and breathe was conceived initially and brought into being by a vision like that?

Tolkien always averred that he simply rediscovered the 'lost' culture of the British Isles, that what he wrote was not fiction as much as a reconstruction of the myths and tales that would have thrived were it not for the influence of foreign invasions.

What is history after all but the remembrances and prejudices of many individuals painted on a fragile skeleton of 'fact'? How many actors and politicians have become an image fleshed out by the media, the realities of their lives compressed and ultimately lost beneath a weight of popular pseudo-facts that are created over the course of time about any public figure?

'We're in a place where things could just go anywhere,' Gibson declared. How much technological advancement can there be before our species or Nature wipes it all out in some cataclysmic event? Is there a point beyond which our collective stability cannot be trusted, a point at which our weapons outrun our defences, whether in the area of 'weapons of mass destruction', 'biological warfare' or some natural or mutated 'Black Death' or 'AIDs' type of plague?

The 'end of the world' always is floating at the edge of human consciousness. The end of our individual world is death but the end of an era is an end of the world in a way to those who knew a certain way of life. Thus, each new technological revolution marks the end of a world. Mechanisation has put an end to many worlds, from horse-drawn transport to handwritten communications. There always have been those who have believed that mechanisation was not a movement forward but backwards in terms of human philosophy, value and ethics.

The phoenix rises from the ashes of its own pyre. Change both is destruction and the agent of creation. It is possible, of course, that we will continue to advance in technological terms, that we will find replacements for our fragile, human cases or 'live' ultimately in worlds like Second Life that have been fashioned by machines and our minds while our bodies rest quiescent in coffin-like beds all over the globe.

And yet... even in this age, the drive within us to return to Nature is strong. 'Organic' fruits and vegetables, meat untainted by hormones, water that has not been processed... it is not simply a whim on the part of the rich for that which is rare. It is something quite fundamental within us that responds to our roots. Those who long have dreamed of a world where Nature no longer figures as a force will find it difficult to erase humanity's need for our ancient Mother even if we somehow overcome our tendencies towards self-destruction.

Incidentally, for those who may be interested in the intersection of worlds, I have posted a brief video of William Gibson's appearance in Second Life as well as his own opinions of the virtual reality in Second Life. You will find it on my Second Life page at:

William Gibson and Second Life

Gazing through 'A Scanner Darkly'

'A Scanner Darkly' commences with a scene from a nightmare. Insects cover a man, crawling all over his body while he frantically attempts to shake them off. Ultimately, he resorts to insect spray, dosing himself with toxic clouds of insecticide. Finding them on his dog as well as himself, he spends long hours in the shower with the animal to no avail.

When a friend asks him what he is doing in the shower with the dog, he confides in his friend and begs him to help catch samples of the insects so he can take them to a laboratory for analysis. His friend brings him an empty mayonnaise jar and they proceed to fill jars with the invading insects.

'Within half an hour, they had three jars full of the bugs. Charles, although new at it, found some of the largest.'

The insects are imaginary and yet they cause unspeakable torment to the victim. In Philip Dick's world, it is not surprising that the friend is able to see the imaginary insects and participate fully in the paranoid delusion, even finding 'some of the largest' of the imaginary insects to take to a scientist for analysis.

Far from my rather low expectations, Richard Linklater's animated interpretation of Philip K. Dick's masterpiece, 'A Scanner Darkly' fully satisfies intellectually and visually. It manages to capture Philip Dick's quarky humour while encapsulating the horrors of paranoia and the corruption of law enforcement and government.

With the enactment of the Patriot Act and Homeland Security Acts in the United States, the old social paranoia of the 1960s and 1970s achieved new relevancy. The 'war against drugs' always has been a morally bankrupt affair but society in general is reluctant to scrutinise the facts, domestically or internationally, whether because of general personal indifference or a fundamental prejudice against drug users.

Nonetheless, despite the important political issues raised in 'A Scanner Darkly' and its stark depiction of a world where 'plastic' identity creates a new definition of 'haves and have nots', it is Philip Dick's preoccupation with the nature of reality that transcends plot and creates a work of philosophical genius.

In 'Burnt Norton', T.S. Eliot declared that 'human kind cannot bear very much reality.' Maupassant wrote: 'how childish it is, anyway, to rely on reality when each of us carries his own in his mind and body.'

For Philip Dick, twin preoccupations of personal paranoia and an almost desperate spiritual quest for the Divine suffused all his work. Although 'A Scanner Darkly'
is more of a dark comedy than a rambling spiritual dissertation like 'Valis', the book nonetheless poses all of the same questions that reverberate through Dick's writing.

Dick once commented: 'If I knew what a hallucination was I would know what reality was' and gave his definition of reality as a shared vision when he said: 'If two people dream the same dream it ceases to be an illusion; the basic test that distinguishes reality from hallucination is the consensus gentium, that one other or several others see it too.'

The hallucinations and delusions of the characters in 'A Scanner Darkly' are interwoven through shared experience and their common addiction to 'Substance D'. Although ostensibly containing an anti-drug message, the true villains in the book are not the drugs but the government and corporate greed. Bob Arctor and S.A. Fred both may be living a lie to some extent but ultimately, both are shown to be innocent pawns in a ruthless government operation.

When a friend enters into the paranoid delusion of Jerry's 'aphid invasion', reality itself shifts. The aphids are invested with a temporary reality when the hallucination is shared. The friend later recounts: 'I was up two nights and two days counting bugs. Counting them and putting them in bottles. And finally when we crashed and got up and got ready the next morning to put the bottles in the car to take to the doctor to show him, there was nothing in the bottles. Empty.'

This is the epiphany that drives the original victim of the 'aphids' to seek 'rehabilitation' in a clinic that ultimately is unmasqued as the true villain in the book.

Paranoia and its effects on the nature of reality and questions of identity is a constant theme in Philip K. Dick's novels.

Most of the best scenes in the book are depicted faithfully in the film. Charles Freck, the friend who helped Jerry collect the illusory insects, drives in a drug-fueled state of paranoia while 'fantasy numbers' unroll in his head.

'A black-and-white evidently had noticed something in Charles Freck's driving he hadn't noticed; it had taken off from its parking spot and was moving along behind him in traffic, so far without lights or siren, but...

'Maybe I'm weaving or something, he thought...

'COP: 'All right, what's your name?'
'My name?' (CAN'T THINK OF NAME.)
'You don't know your own name?' Cop signals to other cop in prowl car. 'This guy is really spaced.'
'Don't shoot me here.' Charles Freck in his horror-fantasy number induced by the sight of the black-and-white pacing him. 'At least take me to the station house and shoot me there, out of sight.'

'To survive in this fascist police state, he thought, you gotta always be able to come up with a name, your name. At all times. That's the first sign they look for that you're wired, not being able to figure out who the hell you are...'

Identity is a fundamental issue in 'A Scanner Darkly' where an undercover agent in his law enforcement capacity is assigned the task of mounting surveillance on himself in his 'doper' persona.

In an ever-fluctuating state of perception, the writer, if not the characters themselves struggle to find some underlying spiritual touchstone.

Philip Dick himself attempted to believe in an ultimate spiritual truth that transcended ordinary realities. His spiritual quest surfaces somehow in each and every one of his stories and novels.

Luckman in 'A Scanner Darkly' poses the philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin:

'He to whom it is given to see Christ more real than any other reality in the World, Christ everywhere present and everywhere growing more great, Christ the final determination and plasmatic Principle of the Universe, that man indeed lives in a zone where no multiplicity can distress him and which is nevertheless the most active workshop of universal fulfilment.'

For de Chardin, reality was defined by the intersection between two different systems. The first was an organic system of classification of ideas and forms, embracing both scientific thought and religious philosophy. The second considered reality in terms of its appearance in history, its position in time and space. The manifestation in the second system is given its reason and definition by the first.
Beyond this, however, de Chardin's philosophy dealt with the interconnection of form and energy. Absolute reality or Being emerges as truth in the discovery of the movement of the phenomena towards a maximum of unity or order. The multiple phenomena in time and space is held together physically by an organic interdependence of forces of convergence and attraction. For de Chardin, energy constitutes the internal structure of beings and is both tangential and radial. Tangential energy is spiritual and internal, an energy that moves towards arrangement and unification. Radial energy is mechanical and external, moving towards maximum disorder in the form of inertia, repetition and death. Reality therefore is manifested by the juxtaposition and constant flux of the forces of order and chaos. Multiplicity is a manifestation of the forces of disorder, and it multiplicity is a theme that occurs again and again in 'A Scanner Darkly'.

A certain wistfulness can be discerned in Philip Dick's spiritual quest. Tormented himself by 'multiplicity', paranoia and a certain degree of schizophrenia, a vision of that sort of ultimate spiritual trust and acceptance always remained slightly out of reach.

There always has been a kinship between madness and genius, between spiritual vision and hallucination. Great courage is required by any one seeking to embrace the truth through exploration of 'other realities'. Philip K. Dick was plagued by his unquenchable hunger for the truth and his knowledge of his own mental instability.

In 'A Scanner Darkly', he wrote: 'strange how paranoia can link up with reality, now and then'. In another work, he noted that 'there's a relationship between the telepathic faculty and paranoia'. He himself pushed his vision across the boundaries constantly, seeking some ultimate truth.

The irony, of course, is that singularity of vision is associated in Philip Dick's works with the 'sheep mentality' of the masses. It is in multiplicity that the novelist revels, in multiplicity that the seeker finds the faint threads of light that lead ultimately to a vision of the Divine. Those who do not engage the forces of creative disorder, whether drug-induced or otherwise conjured into being, never can embark upon the ultimate quest. One may wish for the peace of the incurious on occasion, but the author as well as his creations never acknowledge any real value in the lifes of those who fail to take that first step towards the descent into hell, to move through the forces of disorder towards the light.

Amazingly, the cinematic version of 'A Scanner Darkly' manages to be both profound and darkly hilarious, touching upon Philip Dick's philosophy and visions in his own words. Richard Linklater worked closely under the auspices of the author's daughters and was determined to do justice to the original work and its devoted fans.

Visually, it is an incredibly rich tour de force of animation, with the quality of a classical comic book, thus attaining an almost mythic character. The methods by which the artists transformed real acting into animation are fascinating. The amount of time, energy and talent that was poured into the project is staggering.

The process of the creation of this film from traditional 'live' acting into animation is symbolic in a way of the association between reality and perception. Animation by its very nature is 'unreal' and yet, this particular film was founded, scene by scene, on real acting. Its transformation from live action to animation in a sense places it in another sphere of being. In animated form, it attains the quality of myth. Human actors become characters outlined and coloured by the hand of an artist or many artists. The perception of the viewer is altered by the choice to convert human enactments in the form of theatre into visual art in the form of animation.

The book is a classic and the film soon will be recognised as one as well I think, in the same way that Peter Jackson's cinematic rendition of 'Lord of the Rings' now forever will be connected to Tolkien's work. I had expected a rather facile if clever film at best but Linklater's 'A Scanner Darkly' is a masterpiece. It is unlike anything else I have seen. Like Philip Dick's own work, it cannot be categorised easily. It is neither science fiction nor political commentary. It is a profound exploration of the nature of reality.

The Red Planet in Splendour Rises

If viewed after midnight next week, a planet beloved of many science fiction writers will be visible near the moon in our sky.

Mars is currently midway between the zodiacal constellations of Taurus and Gemini. During this week, it will rise shortly before 11 p.m. (local time). It will be visible as it rises above the east-northeast horizon. At present it is the fifth brightest star in the heavens.

As it continues to approach our planet, Mars will increase in brightness. It will surpass Sirius by 9 December and, during the second half of December it will match Jupiter.

Next Wednesday next, or actually very early on Thursday morning, Mars will hover 7 degrees or so above and to the right of the waning sickle moon as they rise above the east-northeast horizon.

The 'Red Planet' will be yellow-orange in hue. Those familiar with Edgar Rice Burroughs and Philip K. Dick no doubt will be prompted to think of all the 'life forms' and 'civilisations' that were projected upon this mysterious planet.

The Predictions of Philip K. Dick

Like so many writers of science fiction, the visions of Philip K. Dick have proved prophetic again and again. The world of 'plastic' in terms of gated communities and credit cards was described in 'Through a Scanner Darkly'. Another story of his described a situation very much like that of Second Life.

In Dick's novel, 'The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch', published in 1965, overpopulation had forced expansion into space. As colonies like Mars were uninhabitable in natural terms, the 'homes' for the colonists were very austere and depressing, without gardens or any aesthetic improvements. Colonisation was not voluntary, but rather imposed on individuals by the U.N. A 'virtual world' was the only means by which many of the colonists remained sane. The novel was written long before personal computers were invented. Philip Dick used 'dollhouses' and miniature worlds as the medium, with interaction between the players enhanced by special drugs that allowed them to believe they had become the dolls or avatars, enjoying a superior existence only as long as the drug remained active. In 'Three Stigmata', it was the P.P. Layout Company that manufactured both the 'Perky Pat' and 'Walt' dolls as well as the illicit substance known as 'Cand-D' that operated to create a collective hallucinogenic experience for its users.

This is only a small part of the novel, but the concept has become part of our era in the form of 'Second Life'. Being able to use an avatar in a world in which each 'resident' can participate in creating, modifying, expanding as well as interacting with other residents in real time takes Philip Dick's concept to another level. Where 'Three Stigmata' described the 'Perky Pat' fantasy as a means of escape from a negative reality controlled by the sinister P.P. Layout Company for its own profit, 'Second Life' is a voluntary exploration by residents of other realities intended only to enrich the first life.

Philip Dick, like many writers of speculative or science fiction, used the genre as a vehicle for his own spiritual, social and philosophical concerns. The tale was rather depressing, in fact, like many of his works, with an underlying lesson as to the possible ultimate effect of overpopulation of this Earth. Drug use and abuse was another recurring topic in both his fiction and non-fiction. Like many artists and writers, Philip Dick was fascinated by drugs, especially those with 'reality-altering' potential, but he had very negative feelings about them as well. His own life was punctuated by personal catastrophes, acts of self-destruction and chronic depression. Despite that, he continued to maintain his faith in humanity and his incredible genius never was allowed to become dormant. He continued to write prolifically until his death.

The official site of Philip K. Dick is at:

http://www.philipkdick.com/

I believe he was one of the greatest thinkers of the latter half of the 20th century. His writing was extremely uneven, with flashes of great brilliance but much that could have been improved in technical terms. Despite this, he has emerged as a far greater writer historically than most and his fame will endure. Like many writers, he never was fully acknowledged by the world during his lifetime, and struggled with chronic poverty, exacerbated by his propensity to marry and divorce again and again.

Of his own vision in literature, Philip Dick wrote: 'I want to write about people I love, and put them into a fictional world spun out of my own mind, not the world we actually have, because the world we actually have does not meet my standards. Okay, so I should revise my standards; I'm out of step. I should yield to reality. I have never yielded to reality. That's what SF is all about. If you wish to yield to reality, go read Philip Roth; read the New York literary establishment mainstream bestselling writers….This is why I love SF. I love to read it; I love to write it. The SF writer sees not just possibilities but wild possibilities. It's not just 'What if' - it's 'My God; what if' - in frenzy and hysteria. The Martians are always coming.'

Of his faith in human potential, he wrote: 'I mean, after all; you have to consider we're only made out of dust. That's admittedly not much to go on and we shouldn't forget that. But even considering, I mean it's a sort of bad beginning, we're not doing too bad. So I personally have faith that even in this lousy situation we're faced with we can make it. You get me?'

Finally, I personally can identify with Philip Dick's own motivation in writing. He described the force that drove him as: 'I am a fictionalising philosopher, not a novelist; my novel & story-writing ability is employed as a means to formulate my perception. The core of my writing is not art but truth. Thus what I tell is the truth, yet I can do nothing to alleviate it, either by deed or explanation. Yet this seems somehow to help a certain kind of sensitive troubled person, for whom I speak. I think I understand the common ingredient in those whom my writing helps: they cannot or will not blunt their own intimations about the irrational, mysterious nature of reality, &, for them, my corpus is one long ratiocination regarding this inexplicable reality, an integration & presentation, analysis & response & personal history.'