Hating the Future I’m Creating

One of the interesting things about Jack Kerouac is that he didn't particularly like the world he created. There is no 60s counterculture, which he fairly despised, without On the Road. I read a few "rock books" last year, including an autobiography by Rolling Stones and Grateful Dead road manager Sam Cutler and a bio of Bob Dylan. One thing I learned was that On the Road was a seriously motivational force for each man. And it goes without saying that everything the Dead did grew out of the Beat counterculture. But Kerouac didn't care for it; and it must be said that at the street level, far below the artistic heights of the Dead and Dylan, there was a lot of mindlessness and depravity that was not attractive at all. Now, Kerouac's friend Alan Ginsberg served, much as he did for the Beat generation, as a cheerleader for Bob Dylan, as Dylan did represent a brilliant extension of what Kerouac, Ginzy, and Gregory Corso et al were up to. Curiously, Dylan found himself in Kerouac's shoes, having become mortified at being the father of protest and topical music, something he'd had enough of by 1964. 

Which is all prefatory to my main purpose here which is to admit that I'm "that guy," the one who dislikes the future that has helped to birth. No, not on a Dylan or Kerouac level, but as an active and willing participant in the universal practices that portend a world that I do not anticipate with anything like pleasure. The future in which natural "birth biology" is a quaint memory like rotary phones and switchboard operators. In which we are instead, transhuman, a hybrid of human and post-human. In which face to face, non-mediated relationships are considered crass. Where in fact all experience of the world is virtual. Where there is no such thing as privacy and the capitalists are in your head. Where the vast bio-diversity of life is replaced by the thin, desiccated totality of virtually-constructed digital environments.

Here are a couple of the ways I am complicit. At the most basic level, I am the beneficiary of bio-technology. Specifically, I take Humira for my immune disorder that manifests in ulcerative colitis and rheumatoid arthritis. Humira is a "biologic," made in part from living cells. So I have no ground to stand on when it comes to protesting a bio-engineered future of, say, of test-tube babies. Think of all the medical technology that has helped modern women get pregnant. Maybe they would never want to be part of birthing situations with no humans involved at all, but who are they -- we -- to object? Indeed, we are in the crude stages of transhumanism, but we are there nonetheless. Now, I have presented transhumanism as something distasteful, but I voluntarily engage in it. The truth is, though, that there are many, unlike myself, who actively celebrate it and advance it. I won't go so far as to say they are on the "right" side of history, but they do seem aligned with the way the wind is blowing.

There are so many other things one could discuss, not least the willingness with which we've moved our lives online, where bad faith communication rules, modes of addiction proliferate, and privacy is a nonstarter. But I think I'll just discuss the virtualization of entertainment, and by extension, experience itself. Think of it: when Spielberg and his partners named their film studio Dream Works, they understood the business they are in. All the makers of film and television invite us into a waking dream, one which is more real than reality sometimes. We cry with the characters, we feel bad for them or good for them. We invest a lot in people who are pretending to be someone else. We give ourselves over to them and to the experience. We are no longer inside ourselves. Do we seek these experiences because it's cleaner and less messy? Are we headed toward a future without emotional pain? Would art be able to produce and elevate emotion if we don't first experience it IRL?

Many who are wary of giving too much of ourselves to virtual visual experiences often praise reading as a superior, more subtle of virtual engagement. But is it so? We leave our bodies and enter into a world of the author's imagination. The thing that differentiates it, it is proposed, is that when reading we do the visualization; we are less under the command or direction of the one producing the art, and thus we retain more autonomy. And autonomy is the thing isn't it? Or, rather, it is the prospect losing of it, in myriad ways, that rubs us the wrong way when we look ahead. In some indigenous societies, such as the Lakota Sioux, the young person must go on a vision quest during which they do indeed get "out" of themselves, at least "out" of their normal conscious self. They are confronted by spirits and dive into different dimensions. But there is no force external to them that presents the spiritual information. 

Is that a better way to lose oneself? I think so. But will I be doing it anytime soon? Well, not to that extreme. But I do like to hike in the woods, where the "information" I engage with is not of man's making. And this is key. Nature reveals that the world fundamentally makes sense. It is not always pleasant and comforting, but neither is it malicious or underhanded. Which of course is a huge problem with "information" as we now know it and experience it. Let's just say that bad faith is nearly the norm now, whether it comes from those subliminally trying to get us to buy stuff we don't want or need or from those who practice the dark art of propaganda, which describes 90 percent of politically-related communication. This is why I'm a big fan of "talking back" at the screen, be it the computer or television, or even the printed word. For me, to watch a commercial without actively questioning it or dissecting it is like passively imbibing their selfishly-motivated representations. And so it is with our world as a whole, and especially that part of it called the "future." I go there willingly, but not without complaint. Hating the thing I'm creating helps me to not get swallowed whole.