Tag: Adam Curtis

My Answer to You Is: “Yes!”

Costar tells me, “Write them a note.”

I’m like that Byrds song, though: “Wasn’t Born to Follow.” So I reply contrapuntally, zigzagging among things I’m thankful for.

“This is Colossal. The plan is in effect,” spit Damon Locks & Rob Mazurek on “Yes!,” a track from their new album, New Future City Radio. One of several anthems of 2023. I listen intently, pausing and replaying the track at intervals to take in lyrics, trying to keep my fingers warm while seated in your kitchen.

“If you really break it down, the loss is immeasurable,” goes the message, arriving now as if for the first time as I write. What I hear in “colossal” is not so much an adjective as a proper noun: a utopian, Afrofuturist call-and-response remix of the AI from Colossus: The Forbin Project. Colossus made Colossal by those who reenter history from the future via psychedelic time machine and replace Spacewar with a chatbot.

“5-4-3-2-1. If you’re just joining us, this is New Future City Radio, broadcasting 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, from rooftops unknown, increasing the bandwidth, transmitting and receiving, sending signal. Because tomorrow is listening.”

The film opens with a seated US president speaking live on TV to the people of the world. State secrets, delicately poised, come undone.

“My friends. Fellow citizens of the world,” he begins. “As President of the United States of America, I can now tell you, the people of the entire world, that as of 3:00am EST, the defense of this nation—and with it, the defense of the free world—has been the responsibility of a machine. A system we call Colossus. Far more advanced than anything previously built. Capable of studying intelligence and data fed to it. And on the basis of those facts only, deciding if an attack is about to be launched upon us. If it did decide that an attack was imminent, Colossus would then act immediately, for it controls its own weapons, and can select and deliver whatever it considers appropriate. Colossus’ decisions are superior to any we humans could make, for it can absorb and process more knowledge than is remotely possible for the greatest genius that ever lived. And even more important than that, it has no emotions. Knows no fear, no hate, no envy. It cannot act in a sudden fit of temper. It cannot act at all, so long as there is no threat.”

Stewart Brand’s essay “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums” debuted in the pages of Rolling Stone magazine on December 7, 1972, two years after the launch of Colossus. Brand, former Prankster, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, views the prospect of “computers for the people” as “good news, maybe the best since psychedelics” (39). With appropriate consciousness and information, and access to the relevant tools, he suggests, we humans can reshape the world that we’ve made for ourselves into something socially and environmentally sustainable. “Where a few brilliantly stupid computers can wreak havoc,” he adds, assuming an audience familiar with the likes of HAL, AM, and Colossus, “a host of modest computers (and some brilliant ones) serving innumerable individual purposes, can be healthful, can repair havoc, feed life” (77).

Of course, it hasn’t played out that way—not yet. Instead, the situation has been more like the one Adam Curtis describes in the second episode of his BBC docuseries All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace. “The computer networks and the global systems that they had created, hadn’t distributed power,” noted Curtis from the vantage point of 2011. “They had just shifted it, and if anything, concentrated it in new forms.” And of course, that was more than a decade ago, well before the arrival of AGI.

DJs have been known to save lives. Ours, like an angel, delivers his message allegorically.

“For every move you make,” interjects the DJ, “they got three moves that negate anything you might have even thought of doing. See, I need 5000 rays from the sun, and two big magnifying glasses, to defeat your darkness. And right now, the electric company has shut off my power. I’m living in darkness. You living in darkness—but you don’t know it! It’s so dark out here, I can’t even see. And that’s the point: you can’t see, you won’t move. They got you where they want you: nowhere. Shrouded in confusion. Grasping at straws. When you’re living like this, you can’t envision lines of possibility.”

Sounds like where we’re at, no? That’s the crux of the matter of “capitalist realism”: neoliberal shock doctrine leaves the populace traumatized. Desire colonized, consciousness deflated. Those who can’t imagine the future can’t get there.

Enter our DJ. “This is where the plan kicks in,” he says. “You ask me if I can pour myself into a giant robot and swallow up this black hole and free the entire universe? My answer to you is: Yes! Yes, yes, yes, yes!”

Tuesday February 16, 2021

Dereliction of dung heap. Data-driven dumbwaiter at your service. Chronically correct I effect my own cause. Alpha Dog to Omega Man: can you read me? Justin Timberlake’s “What Goes Around…Comes Around” saddens me, so I head outdoors. I gather sticks. I stand among the trees, finding in the sky above me the crescent moon. The night’s songs are sad ones: Dolly Pardon’s “Jolene” and Regina Spektor’s “Fidelity.” And just this morning arrived the words of artist-friend Irving Bleak, speaking of owls as characters in world mythology. Characters in the lives of children. Guardians, protectors. I think of the Tesseract from Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. Owls appear as a ‘theme’ or ‘motif’ throughout the evening. For work, meanwhile, I’ve had to reconsider Freud. Prep for an upcoming lecture. “Aggressiveness was not created by property,” he asserts in Civilization and Its Discontents. “It reigned almost without limit in primitive times, when property was still very scanty, and it already shows itself in the nursery almost before property has given up its primal, anal form. […]. If we were to remove this factor…by allowing complete freedom of sexual life and thus abolishing the family, the germ-cell of civilization, we cannot, it is true, easily foresee what new paths the development of civilization could take; but one thing we can expect, and that is that this indestructible feature of human nature will follow it there” (61). Aggression is for Freud an “indestructible feature of human nature.” Do those of us with children know otherwise? Freud is a cultural chauvinist, a bourgeois moralist, a critic of communism and an apologist for capitalist imperialism. I think now of his critics: Left Freudians like Herbert Marcuse, but also the Italian Marxist Sebastiano Timpanaro. Most of all, though, I think of anticolonial theorist and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. How might we put Freud to radical use today amid Black Radical critiques of Western subjectivity and the rise of psychedelic science? I’m reminded of the opening remarks in Slavoj Žižek’s book The Ticklish Subject. “A spectre is haunting Western academia,” he writes, “the spectre of the Cartesian subject. Deconstructionists and Habermasians, cognitive scientists and Heideggerians, feminists and New Age obscurantists — all are united in their hostility to it.” Žižek himself, however, defends the subject — from these and other of its critics. Ever the provocateur. I’m teaching a gen-ed lit course. My task is to introduce Freud to students new to him. Let us establish the subject before we critique it. During breaks from Freud I watch the new Adam Curtis series Can’t Get You Out of My Head (2021) and read bits of Principia Discordia. In whatever book is finally written on acid’s arrival into history, there will be a chapter on Discordianism and Kerry Thornley, “Operation Mindfuck” figuring prominently therein. Colonization of the last free outpost, the human mind.

Sunday November 26, 2017

Possessed with identity, the Self — once like a hand, now like a street fighter — learns to dodge the effects of painful emotion on awareness and performance. To itself it murmurs, “You are special. The world is not twin to itself yet.” So begins a mantra I recite to myself in my sleep. If we observe our emotions, we can change them. Or at the very least, we can endure them with a mix of detachment and curiosity. Old trees serve as stations for rest and reflection along a way of sorrow. How sad it would be to live life without walks through allegorical gardens. Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream is one such garden. I burned right through it, couldn’t put it down. Psychedelic in the sense of two voices dialoguing in inner space. Electromagnetic signals. Fake worlds in their simplicity are reassuring. By clumsy political theater, life is overwhelmed by overpowering bureaucracy. While we doze, the money creeps in. History devolves into constructive ambiguity amidst demonic fury. A world where lies are perpetrated by actors who believe only in themselves. Occultists who exploit popular belief in the importance of ritual. People cooperate with the system, and the rest of us are screwed. The fear among the cooperators is that otherwise, shit would go psycho. Better, they think, to just retreat into an alternate reality. What are we to make, for instance, of that ancient document from the early days of Wired magazine, John Perry Barlow’s “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”? What, too, should we make of Adam Curtis’s use of it in the film HyperNormalisation? A script is being read to us, no? An attempt to capture imagination. Iron filings reform in response to magnetic fields. Perception management. Reality is made a thing one handles with codes, algorithms, numbers — for it is by money that they program minds.