Technology and us, an informal discussion

Plenty has been written about our interactions with technology, and how it affects our relationships and mannerisms. I write, not to reiterate what has been said, but to give account of my own experience. I believe it is human nature to dislike change, but for us  younger generations it's been a seamless introduction into the world of technology. We've grown extremely accustomed to it, to the point where forgetting one's phone at home feels like a great loss and huge inconvenience. Literature about the great changes technology has brought is from the point of view of those older generations, more often than not in a negative light. It isn't unfair to point out the negatives of any change, and to that I'd strongly argue that the positives far outweigh the negatives of our relationships with technology. In my case, the situation goes like this:

I grew up in Mexico. From a young age I was introduced to computers; my father was an IT technician, completely immersed in this emerging new world of computers. When my family moved to the U.S, the biggest challenge was, not the loss of friends or the loss of familiarity, but the loss of communication. Language was lost. But here in the U.S I began reading books, a long and immersive series that made me, my writing and my speech, eloquent and well-spoken. Though I had only been living in the U.S for  a year, I moved from a beginner "ESL" (English as a second language) class, to a Pre-AP advanced English class. I couldn't understand the slang and everyday speech of my fellow classmates, but I understood most of every writing I came across. This series I was reading was the beginning to my relationship with an online group of people that, to this day I still talk with and consider very close friends. It was a roleplay group, and we ALL had one thing in common; we loved to read the same book series.

Many of us lived in different continents, let alone states or countries. Our mother languages ranged from Chinese, Spanish and Dutch to Punjabi, Japanese and Russian. It was, and still is, a literate roleplay centered around the world that we're all familiar with, with our own characters, our backstories and our own writing.

The thing that struck me the hardest was how easily we accepted the relationship we had formed with each other. We'd never seen each other in person (though we'd have skype videocalls on Friday movie nights and knew the names of all each other's pets' names). We didn't bat an eye when we had to calculate for timezones for a site-wide meeting, we learned to do 3D modeling and texturing to make a private map online for our characters, learned HTML coding to make our websites better and communicated with each other at almost all times of the day, excited about how our characters would interact with each other. Our families would grow concerned that we were always glued to our computers, talking with these 'internet friends'. It seemed like, to them, our friends were almost imaginary. It was strange, to us, that they found this strange. It was natural to us- there was nothing imaginary about each other. To us, there was no difference between the friends we saw at school to the friends we saw online. One of the things that attracted me the most to this group was how transparent we were. Almost always, especially with other roleplaying groups, there tends to be a distinction between a person and their "avatar"- an idealized version of themselves. But in this roleplay we were either IC (In Character) or OOC (Out of character). We had many characters; old, young, dead, alive. When in character we committed faithfully to their personalities, lives and manners. But when outside of them we didn't feel the need to roleplay yet another character. We were happy to be ourselves, sometimes even more so than in the offline world.

All of these relationships that, for 6 years, I've formed, would've never been possible without the use of my laptop. It's a strange, yet (for us) a natural relationship.

A reading: Simulacrum and simulacra (Notes)

1.The desert of the real
The essay begins with a rather cryptic metaphor; that of the map and the territory. A map so detailed it lays down on the territory and as the empire whose the map belonged to falls to ruin and the territory becomes a desert, the map decays, becoming part of the territory. It isn't part of the desert, but it is perceived as. In our world, (a world of the hyperreal) the map becomes more important than the territory- it precedes it. It isn't the map that is decaying, it's reality! Our desert isn't the desert of the empire, but "the desert of the real" [the Matrix!]

2. Something Changed
But something about the relationship between the map and territory is gone; in present day, there isn't even a difference between the two. There used to be something that separated the two, now simulators make all the real "coincide with their simulations". Simulations are now hyperreal; more real than real. The simulation of the map can be reproduced over and over. The map and the territory don't coexist, mirror each other or create a contrast between real and abstract. The territory is taken, miniaturized and reproduced in mass. The original loses meaning. It doesn't have to be reproduced- now we can produce from copies, substitute the real with "a perfect descriptive machine that provides all the signs of the real", but that isn't even a copy of the real.

3. Something Threatening
There is something worse about simulation. It doesn't simply pretend to be the original. A person can pretend to be ill; they'd only be masking their health, they're not really ill. But simulating illness means presenting physical symptoms of illness, not just faking them. How can that be treated then? Modern medicine can only treat illnesses that are real, and psychology treats those that are not physical.

4. The simulation masks nothing at all.
There is something threatening about simulation; the threat that what it is simulating is not real, or there at all. Religion forbids for the reproduction or images of a deity. "l forbade any simulacrum in the temples because the divinity that breathes life into nature cannot be represented" The image of God is said to be unable to be represented. But it is, and those who go on a rage to destroy those images are afraid of a "destructive truth" that simulations of God represent nothing. "knowing also that it is dangerous to unmask images! since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them."

5. There are different types of simulations
Those that reflect the real, those that hide the real, those that hide that there is no real, and those that are just pure simulations. Didney Worl is eeeevil. It presents itself as imaginary to hide that outside of it is not reality, but more simulation ohhhhhh, all of the U.S and L.A is hyperreal. It makes you believe that childishness belongs inside of it and is absent outside, when in reality it exists everywhere. You're adults both inside and outside, and children both inside and outside of Disney world.

6. Watergate; the cynical version
Basically, watergate scandal and disneyland are the same... Watergate is just a way of rejuvenating moral and political principle by enunciating scandal and paying homage to the law. It succeeded in making itself a scandal, and masking the fact that there is no difference between facts and the denunciation of facts. Wow.

The Matrix; Contesting Reality

“Welcome, to the Desert of the Real" says Morpheus, quoting Jean Baudrillard's Simulacrum and Simulacra, a book seeking to examine the relationships among reality, symbols, and society involved in constructing an understanding of shared existence. A post-modern book about the decay of reality and it's replacement with simulated images- The idea of a copy without an original. Enter, The Matrix;  A movie about reflection, and perspective, truth and illusion.

"If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see," Explains Morpheus in the 'loading program' scene, "then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain." This is one of the big questions of the movie. Morpheus explains to Neo that what makes something real is the perception of it. If reality is subjective then what is the difference? This concept traces it's inspiration back to philosophy. In his Allegory of the Cave, Plato contends that a person born and raised (trapped their whole lives) in a cave, only able to see the wall in front of them, would regard the shadows they glimpse ahead of them as real, and would have no expectation of there being a world outside of the cave. Why would they? They've never known or seen anything else, not the merest idea. It's the basic idea of the Matrix, how do we know what real is, how do we define it? How do we know what our reality really is? In Plato's experiment, a prisoner taken outside of the cave would look out unto the world and be overwhelmed, his eyes having to adjust to sunlight for the first time. In Plato's Analysis of the Sun, the sun is a metaphor for "the nature of reality, and the truth concerning it". The solution to ignorance is enlightenment, and light itself is truth. Neo is trapped in a false reality created by a computer program in the same way that the chained prisoners in the cave are. Both of these revolve around the metaphysical question of what is and isn't real. So when Neo wakes up for the first time and sees reality he says "My eyes hurt," to which the answer is "Because you've never used them." There is a similarity in the way that both the prisoner and Neo must accept.

Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation:
Near the beginning of The Matrix Neo stashes his illegal software inside a hollowed-out copy of a book by French postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard titled Simulacra and Simulation. This is one of the principal inspirations behind the movie. "The entire concept of the Matrix films could be interpreted as a criticism of the unreal consumer culture we live in, a culture that may be distracting us from the reality that we are being exploited by someone or something, just as the machines exploit the humans in the Matrix for bioelectricity."  sim·u·la·crum: an image or representation of someone or something. an unsatisfactory imitation or substitute. The Matrix is a simulacra of life. "the Desert of the Real" is what people call the outside world- one completely different from the simulated world.

About Fight Club; Frustrations and Capitalism

Fight Club may seem to be a movie about punching. A closer look, however, will reveal an expression of frustration with American capitalist society. Go to college, now what? Get a job, now what? Get married, now what? Have kids, now what? "We are the middle children of history, raised by television to be believe that someday we'll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won't. And we're just learning this fact [...] so don't fuck with us."

Fight Club begins with a nameless narrator working a job to buy things he doesn't need- completing himself "one Ikea shelf at a time." It all comes to a stop when his apartment blows up. He's forced to live with one Tyler Durden in a crumbling mansion the complete opposite of what he's been living. From small, purposeful and orderly to dirty, disorganized, and wastefully big.

One small detail. Tyler Durden isn't real.

He's a figment of the narrator's insomniac mind- he's all the ways the narrator wishes he could be. A conjuring, able to do what the narrator is unable to. The narrator IS Tyler Durden; a man with a mission to destroy the false comforts of American society and consumer culture; a man who is tired of being emasculated and by capitalism, tired of being owned by his possessions. Dissatisfied, angry. "I see the strongest and the smartest men who have ever lived [...] and these men are pumping gas and waiting tables." These men will never be famous, will never be anything but waiters, trash collectors and convenience store workers. But that's what they're supposed to do. "Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don't need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don't really need." It's an empty, consumerist society. For the characters in Fight Club, this rationalized world is dehumanizing, and emasculating. It's an isolated, single-serving lifestyle. Everything is small and disposable, including the people the narrator meets.

"This is what all those people must've felt before I filed them as statistics in my reports" the narrator says, after experiencing a car crash for the first time and realizing his way of rationalizing people as statistics, not humans. Identity destroyed by modern life. One that has fractured the narrator into two very, very different people, one repressed and one freed. But Tyler and the narrator's underground Fight club turns docile, meek and consumerist men into a force of chaos and anarchy better known as Project Mayhem; Tyler Durden's mission and army, all home-grown from what began as a simple, innocent Fight Club to allow these men the expression of masculinity they were denied outside (copious amounts of manly man violence). "You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile." Through this speech, Tyler turns the dissatisfaction of his generation into a mantra, transforming it from disappointment into empowerment. "You're not how much money you've got in the bank. You're not your job. You're not your family, and you're not who you tell yourself." They're fighting back. Order is bad. Project Mayhem's ultimate goal—a return to a primitive lifestyle—would be the ultimate equalizer. Everyone would have to learn to survive based on their own merits.

Masculinity. What does it have to do with capitalism? It's the way Tyler sees it; consumerism is an assault on masculinity. The men in Fight Club feel degraded by their jobs- fearful that society will turn them into women. Bob is the physical embodiment of this; once a body builder, Bob looses his testicles to testicular cancer and as a result of hormone therapy grows "bitch tits" and is now is weak and goes to support clubs where he hugs other people and cries. Girly things. The culture surrounding this Lost Generation is very much influenced by absentee fathers. "We're a generation of men raised by women". The whole movie constantly addresses the fear and possibility of losing one's balls, both under Tyler's rule and under capitalist rule, perhaps suggesting that the same way Tyler and the narrator are two sides of the same coin, so is capitalism and anarchy,