Erik Davis on 28 Feb 2001 02:39:59 -0000
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[Nettime-bold] Posthuman Condition 4
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Title: Posthuman Condition 4
The latest Feed
column:
Remote
Control
Erik Davis ponders wireless technology and the erosion of
place.
A COUPLE OF MONTHS AGO, after flying into Chicago on assignment, I
rented a car. Since it was on someone else's dime, I got a Chevy
Impala, a smooth ride with cool bubble curves and a dashboard that
glowed like the console of a shuttlecraft. Making my way from O'Hare
to the Doubletree Inn in Skokie, I turned on the radio, stumbling
across the city's peculiar "progressive rock" station KXRT
("like dungeons and dragons on your radio"). Styx's
"Come Sail Away" soon forced me to abandon ship. Then I
tuned into a Christian station, where I spent the next twenty minutes
listening to one of the most awesome sermons I have ever heard.
Between throaty bursts of songbird glossalalia worthy of Al Green, the
preacherman filled the rent-a-car with a powerful blend of joy and
dread. "My God, my God, I don't wanna die!" Indeed.
The next evening, I was returning from Evanston to my hotel. For some
reason, the car's interior light wouldn't shut off, and I fumbled for
the proper button. (Like many Americans, I challenge the interface
designers of cars -- not to mention software -- by not bothering to
figure out how anything works before I hit the road.) I noticed a
cluster of buttons lining the bottom of the rearview mirror.
Accordingly, I aimlessly swatted them until the light blinked out.
However, I also seemed to have triggered the car phone I didn't know I
had, as the familiar drone of a dial tone came across the
"entertainment system." Not knowing how to turn off the
phone, I simply turned the volume knob on the radio down, figuring
that, in the absence of a dialed number, the phone would simply shut
off after the "If you would like to make a call" lady had
her say. I remember feeling restless. Though the drive was short and I
try to avoid switching on the radio simply to manage nervous energy, I
turned up the volume dial and discovered the radio already on. I heard
a droning male voice, which I assumed was another Christian preacher,
although this guy sounded moralistic, boring, and white. Feeling
vaguely displeased with myself for my inability to drive fifteen
minutes without sonic distraction, I immediately turned the volume
knob down, still unsure about how to shut off the radio itself. But
after a few moments, my restlessness got the better of me and I yanked
the knob on, enabling me to hear the following:
"If you do not respond immediately, we will automatically
dispatch a police vehicle to your location."
A spine-trembling beat. Hesitantly, though without logically
processing the action, I said, "Are you talking to me?"
"Yes."
"Whoah!" I shuddered. "What's going on?"
"This is the OnStar advisor. You have activated the emergency
system. It's our policy to contact an emergency service if we don't
hear a response. Is everything OK?"
"Yeah," I said. "I'm in a rent-a-car. I didn't know what I
was doing. You freaked me out. Sorry."
"That's OK. If you have any further questions, just press the
blue OnStar button on your rearview mirror. Good night."
The radio stayed off the rest of the way.
NOW, YOU MAY PAY more attention to car ads than I do, so you may
already be hip to OnStar: an onboard, location-based information and
safety service available for GM cars. OnStar pumps out a strong
three-watt GPS signal which supposedly works even if your antenna gets
ripped off. With this location info-streaming into their computers,
OnStar advisors can give you real-time directions, tell you about
nearby hotels and restaurants, or direct emergency services to your
car if an airbag is deployed or if you happen to press that little
button on the rearview mirror with a red cross on it (duh).
Later this year, OnStar's "Virtual Advisor" will also enable
you to personalize a speech-activated flow of sports, stock, news, and
weather data from the Internet -- you know, kind of like the radio
used to do.
It was only later that I found out about OnStar's GPS technology,
their one million customers, and their ridiculous marketing tie-in
with DC's Bat Mobile (an ad campaign that forced them to include the
following passage in their FAQ: "Q. Why can't I buy the Bat
Mobile? A. Batman and the Bat Mobile are used solely for advertising
purposes and are not available through OnStar."). But though this
information explained what happened to me, it did not entirely
eradicate the blast of the uncanny that my unwitting encounter with
OnStar uncorked inside the confines of my rented Chevy. For a few
seconds, I had entered Philip K. Dick land: my radio suddenly and
pointedly spoke directly to me. Moreover, the voice knew exactly where
I was -- in Evanston, Illinois, heading east on Golf toward Skokie
Blvd. In a beat, reality seemed to fold inside out, the general became
particular. This is what paranoid schizophrenics might feel like at
the beginning of an episode.
I suspect
that most of us have had similar encounters with technology,
especially over the last decade -- moments when our media, for
whatever reason, momentarily deliver us into some uncanny zone that
lingers on the edge of the Real. Usually we sweep these experiences --
strange radio static, surreal computer shenanigans, the snafu
synchronicities of the cell phone -- under the rug. But I don't think
we should so readily dismiss the feelings that accompany these
experiences, because they have their own truths to tell. For as media
increasingly colonize social reality, they scramble the space-time
boundaries of the self. And this always feels a little weird.
Of course, we quickly assimilate these mutations in subjectivity. The
human mind seems to naturally adjust itself to perceive its current
reality as normal and mundane (and often vaguely dissatisfying, to
boot). Nowadays, we can hardly believe that our great-grandparents
experienced Ford jalopies as demonic speed machines, or that the
bodiless heads of the cinema screen triggered nausea. These
perceptions become normal, even though, in some basic sense, they are
not.
One reason that these uncanny experiences are important, then and now,
is that they speak to the conflicted and ambivalent feelings that
technology provokes -- feelings we usually bury beneath the quotidian
stage of getting and spending. In this sense, they are like the
symptoms in a dream, except that they arise in the midst of the
everyday. Even more importantly, though, they have the almost oracular
ability to reveal the new and often rather disturbing social realities
that are emerging beneath the veneer of business as usual. In this
sense, the technologically uncanny -- in both fiction and paranormal
"fact" -- is a gateway to the new mutations of the Real.
Consider the oft-noted resemblance between businessmen barking into
their cell phones and crazy homeless people talking to their invisible
companions. Late-night comics have already milked this one dry, but
what does it actually tell us? Wireless technology, by removing
physical connections, erases one of the last signs that our
communication technologies are material and not etheric. Though we
"know" that electromagnetic modulations of the spectrum are
no less material than waves of electrons cruising along a wire,
wireless nonetheless amplifies the experiential sense that we live and
move in a world of invisible intelligences, a magic world verging on
telepathy. Simply put, the more the physical apparatus
disappears, the more we are simply listening and responding to voices
in our heads.
I AM NOT SAYING that the mobile hordes of demon-haunted suits prove
that our society has gone insane. The world is subtler (and crazier)
than that. Instead, technology is colonizing zones of cultural
perception previously occupied by madmen, drug fiends, and religious
fanatics -- fringe dwellers who long ago found their own way to tune
into electronic media. Everyone knows that many schizos fear nefarious
mind-control microwaves, or tune into visionary messages through their
TVs and radios. But few of us recognize how old this phenomenon is and
how fundamental it is to the social phenomenology of electronic media.
Shortly after the telephone was introduced, for example, Thomas Watson
-- Bell's famous partner -- met a man who claimed that two New Yorkers
had connected his brain to a telephone circuit, and used this device
to give him various diabolical orders.
Unlike madmen, of course, cellular users are speaking to other people.
But even these legitimate signals have their own uncanny stories to
tell. Bad connections on copper lines were often noisy or faint;
satellite signals introduced delay. Now, because of cross-talk,
bounced signals, and who knows what, millions of people routinely hear
the voices of their friends and colleagues spliced and diced through
hideous Lovecraftian Cuisinarts of sound. Our cell phones have become
effects boxes worthy of the headiest dub or industrial music, and they
render our intimate communications trippy.
Once, I heard the distant voice of my friend Christy multiply into
scores of slightly off-beat sonic doppelgangers, so that the telephone
call sounded like a thousand Christys were talking to me at once. It
was one of the most psychedelic things I've ever heard. That is, until
my radio talked to me.
AS WITH SO
MANY TECHNOLOGIES, the penetration of wireless into global society
will be simultaneously convenient, weird, banal, and deeply
disturbing. We already accept the little antisocial wormholes that
cell phones open up in the midst of public space, a phenomenon that,
while further cranking up the knob on individualism, at least adds
another wrinkle to the boundaries that define our social interaction.
But the growth of wireless access to data may have a very different
effect, because it erodes the sense that the world we wander through
has any real variation at all.
Here's why. Societies have increasingly come to define reality -- or,
less philosophically, "the action" -- by media and
information flows. But the old days were very "lumpy" when
it came to the density and availability of cultural information,
because the city had more access than a cornfield. Nowadays, though,
universal wireless access to the Net makes our particular somewhere
feel like anywhere -- or even nowhere.
We are all familiar now with the non-linearity of the Web, its
simultaneously liberating and woozy sense that everything seems
connected to everything else. Despite the best efforts of
3D-cyberspace builders, the "distance" between points online
is entirely virtual. Once we can use our wireless PDAs, fancy cell
phones, and other nomad computers to access this data-dense nonspace
from anywhere in fleshland, that flattening all-at-once-ness leaks
into the world of trees and cafés and cathedrals. As the Net becomes
ubiquitous, the physical world becomes hollowed out in roughly the
same way that collective social space is hollowed out by cell phones.
It's like wandering into a heavily touristed medieval city in
Europe: the exotic spaces that initially seem to transport you beyond
the fields you know turn out to house variations on the same global
themes. If authentic travel implies wandering and wondering, which I
suspect it does, then travel becomes impossible with a digital yellow
pages, map, and guidebook in your palm.
GPS and other location-based services add a new twist, offering at
first what appears to be a return to specific locality: You are here.
But the global reach and ubiquity of the network ultimately undermines
that sense of specific location, supplanting "place" with
"space" -- the abstract space of information. When I
accidentally contacted OnStar, I established a real-time connection
between my body and the company's virtual map of the material world, a
connection that, in some fundamental way, brings those two worlds
closer together. I was on the grid, and the sudden recognition of my
individual capture by a satellite-based system of virtual control
partly accounted for my little mise-en-abime. Because I did not
consciously initiate the link, I directly experienced the fact that
the safety and control we are offered through new technology generally
comes with our incorporation into what Foucault might call a
"disciplinary order." The actual content of my uncanny
moment was my own translation into a blinking red light in a system
designed to, in some sense, remotely control my body.
In other words, the real spookiness of my experience did not come from
my schizophrenic encounter with a talking radio but from my close
brush with cops. I won't speculate about what would have happened had
some of Skokie's finest actually pulled my scruffy, ignorant ass over,
nor how friendly they might have been had that ass been black. Nor
will I bother you with another rant about privacy, fast-track toll
systems, and the latest mark of the beast. There is a lot of debate
about privacy in the information age, but much less discussion about
the profound psychic unease that most of us feel, in our dreams if not
in our waking worries. There is a peculiar wooze beneath our
willingness to sacrifice anonymity on the technological altar of
safety and convenience, and the wooze tastes like an almost
psychedelic fear. And fear rarely just sits there: It motivates us, if
not to act, then to act out. Paranoia will not disappear, either in
popular culture or politics. The psychic dis-ease unleashed by the
technological erosion of privacy will not only continue to feed
fictions but will cloud the transparency we demand in both our
technologies and our political systems, because whatever local clarity
we gain depends on a hyperdimensional grid whose depth, extent, and
uses exist beyond our ken.
Along
these lines, I feel compelled to mention the strangely underreported
fact that, thanks to the FCC, all U.S. cell phones will soon be
required to pack GPS units (or some equivalent tech) that will allow
their location to be fixed the moment that 911 is dialed. Obviously
this provision makes a certain sense, and it's clear that lives will
be saved. But I can't deny that this news didn't send a little New
World Order shudder down this particular spine -- even if the most
likely abusers are not some nascent info-Stassi, but the real trackers
of the digital age: marketeers. Because the FCC has also ruled that
wireless carriers, and not users, own GPS location data, and can
freely sell it to third parties. So the next time your
radio-cum-PDA-cum-cell phone talks to you out of the blue, it may want
to tell you about the great deal on Beanie Babies or Canon's 15 x 45
image-stabilized binoculars that awaits you two shops down to the
right. And if the consumer pigeonholing software is up to snuff, this
news may indeed whet your appetite, though the greater cost to our
sense of being in the world may be unreckonable. Happy hunting,
fellow-nomads.
End
--
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Erik Davis
figment@sirius.com +1-415-541-5016
vox
Contributing editor, Wired magazine
Book: http://www.levity.com/techgnosis
Articles, essays, and whatnot:
http://www.levity.com/figment