A replicant has died. No, I mean, the actor Rutger Hauer has died. Will we ever be able to not think immediately about his final speech in the movie Blade Runner, a white dove in his hand, when he decides, against all odds, to save the life of Harrison Ford, to be good and kind - instead of being exactly what he has been designed for: a Killer.
I think Hauer was cast for the role because of his features: A white, blond athletic giant, something of the kind the Nazis have dreamed about - a superior Aryan master race having no scruples or ethical standards attached to them. A clone army of cold-blooded killers. His face is now synonymous with this unique character of a science fiction movie, that is so masterful and has so many levels of meaning and interpretation, it withstands time and it is a true classic, if there ever was one. In the film by Ridley Scott from 1982, so-called replicants, the creations of a technotycoon, named Dr Eldon Tyrell and his multi-planetary conglomerate, the Tyrell Corporation, look exactly like humans, indeed are even better looking; they have superior memory functions and are extremely intelligent; plus, they are physically superior to human beings, but they are not robots. They are rather genetically designed, perhaps something within reach now, regarding the CRISPR gene editing method. Are they ersatz humans? According to the definition of ersatz, replicants are in fact not real or genuine, they are made or used as a substitute for something (humans), but in the case of the replicants, they are not, as it would be typical for an ersatz product, of inferior quality. Replicants, like the one played by Rutger Hauer, are designed with the same kind of intelligence that we also find in Humans - but artificial. They progressively learn to acquire real feelings, emotions like love, and even empathy. As we all know, sometimes it is in vain when we look for these qualities in actual Human beings. So, replicants, like humans, gain autonomy by using (artificial or natural) intelligence, and that means, they could pose a security threat to those they were intended to serve; this feature led their developers to design them as fail-safe devices - by coding them genetically for a lifespan of four years. This is the planned obsolescence of replicants, who are supposedly „better“ than human beings, which is to say, less imperfect, less unpredictable. What is the consequence of this? Above all it points to an important aspect of what being human actually means. The first lesson of this is that being human does not -by default- mean, being intelligent. The second lesson is, that, whatever it is we are here for and whatever plans somebody has laid out for us - We always have a choice. We can choose to be good and kind and show empathy. Always. And the third lesson is a very simple one - if we know that we have to die, and we know that we want to live - It should be obvious that all the others around us would want that, too. All of us would want to be able one day to say our own version of the following monologue, delivered by Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner: „I’ve seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.“ R.I.P. Rutger Hauer
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Remember the movie „The Bourne Identity“ ? Matt Damon plays a brainwashed elite CIA special forces guy, whose identity and memory was erased. So he finds himself one day in a complete state of amnesia. The only way to find out who he is, is to look at his own body and his environment. Today, a museum in Florida claims that it has brought back the surrealist painter Salvador Dali back to life. You can talk to him, and he will offer to take a selfie with you. But wait, he died in 1989, didn't he? Still, he is just on the other side of the line, having face-time with you, just as any regular, alive fried of yours would do. Another recent example of a collective quest for identity can be found in the case known as ‘Maddie’. However, this case reverses the case of Jason Bourne in The Bourne Identity. Bourne is a body without an identity, while in the case of Maddie, there’s an identity without a body. Maddie is the nickname of the British girl Madeleine McCann who disappeared without trace when she was on holidays with her parents in Portugal’s Algarve. In the newspapers we have all been presented a photograph of her: she was four years old at the time of her disappearance; as the years go by, it becomes tricky to continue to be on the lookout for a girl with the depicted features on the snapshot. Maddie, assumed that she is still alive, would look different now, and Scotland Yard regularly issues (presents) an actualised, but nonetheless virtual image (not a photograph in the strict sense of the term), which is produced with the help of a so-called age progression computer software, using the same principles of forensic science used by the police to work out what missing children such as Madeleine McCann would look like today. Though these images may indeed be very helpful for police investigations, they remain mere assumptions of how Maddie could look like, since nobody is able to provide an accurate, actual photograph of her. Today, this technology is going mainstream with a new App, called „FaceApp“ and it is causing already major problems because it messes with the whole face recognition technology that has recently been installed in airports and other facilities where „identity“ is a major concern. These examples should illustrate the different qualities of (analog) representation and (digital) presentation. The question that is at the heart of these cases is a very pertinent one: How is an identity to be conceived and represented, when the very concept of „representation“ is under siege? Put simply, all identity must be conceived in the realm of the Real. Identity cannot be conceived in the realm of the Symbolic, so it can't be conceived in the Digital realm. This is an easy thing to say, but we are already so far down the foxhole of the symbolic that we take for real what we see. Our brains are designed that way. They are designed to compute a stable reality. Everything else would be pure psychosis. Surrealism, Paranoia, Madness. The ancients had their own way of knowing these things, long before digital technology. They used the Greek term „Symbolic“ to say that something real „throws“ a shadow, and in the case of the Symbolic, this cast refers to the real in a coherent way. Then, there is the "Hyper-bolic", the "Para-bolic", and of course, the „Dia-bolic“. Whenever you chose to look at „(re-) presentations“, you have to first find out, what kind of shadowplay you are dealing with. That is the difficult part, and digital makes it even more difficult. I think it is fair to say that until recently, media had been a domain of the state, then it became a private form of enterprise, but in both cases, we labeled it „Mass Media“.
Now, in large part because of the digital revolution and the internet, we are witnessing a shift from mass media to „Social Media“. This shift clearly spells out a major loss for some big players in the „Mass Media“ domain. First victims were the video rentals, now movie theaters and newspapers are dying, nobody uses CD’or DVD’s anymore, TV is losing ground, the public broadcasters can only survive because they are largely state funded. Right now, multiple streaming platforms like Netflix are all the rage, combined, of course, with social networks, like Facebook or Instagram. Mark Zuckerberg recently had to remind Congress that Facebook is not a media company: ‘I consider us to be a technology company’. But one has to add that while Facebook in public says it is not a publisher, in court, Sonal Mehta, a lawyer for Facebook, even drew comparison with traditional media: “The publisher discretion is a free speech right irrespective of what technological means is used. A newspaper has a publisher function whether they are doing it on their website, in a printed copy or through the news alerts.” So, in court, Facebook all of a sudden wanted protection for the right to free speech granted. Whenever there is a threat that a power loses its prerogative of definition and interpretation about the common ground of a society, it panics and spins out of control. All common ground, a prerequisite for solidarity and cohesion, could easily be constructed, when there was basically only one platform - state media - to show it’s mildly critical point of view on certain matters. In the Digital Habitat, common ground becomes a free flow of signs, made out of instrumental currents and cultural codes that are embedded in networks. In its extreme, there is a plethora of floating signifiers, that can stop anywhere at any time. Fake? Real? Fact? Opinion? Angle X , Pespective Y, Point of View Z ? It's like not passing the microphone around in a town hall meeting but having everybody talking into their own microphone at the same time. Yet, the overwhelming and downright intrusive omnipresence of the media seems to make it impossible to think any experience outside of the media. So, yes, Mr. Zuckerberg, mediatization is a procedure that is informed and determined largely through technology, but it is more than that. It is the fact that the technology you develop enables your company to determine what is being shown and what is not. You are not like, say, CISCO, producing routers and servers. It's not like the New York Times was claiming "We're just selling paper with ink on it!" Only those who have the technological means at their disposal can partake in any mediated (vulgo: public) discourse, and that makes you a media company. I think we have to clearly draw some parallels here with the firearms and guns industry. Can any company in this industry seriously claim that they are simply in the tech business? While the emergence of new media does not eliminate face-to-face communication, any non-mediated (immediate) interpersonal communication cannot be, however, what it was before. You can go to the next street corner and proclaim whatever you have to say, but this amounts to someone who would still use his fists in a fight against somebody holding a gun. Or, as some former guerrilla fighter once said in a German courtroom: "I may have the better arguments, but you, your honor, are the master of the microphones. You can turn them on and off as you please." That would be a fair description of the business Facebook and other social media companies are in. The business of hosting and moderating public debates. With 2.38 billion monthly active users. If we look at the Digital Habitat (let’s say it started with Tim Berners-Lee and the world wide web in 1989) from the same angle as the American settlers looked at the new continent stretching out before them (let’s say, we take the founding date of New York City in 1664 as a reference), then we could look at the Digital Habitat with the same mindset, which is perfectly encapsulated in this quote by the famous investor Charlie Munger, a white, old, wealthy male American. 95-year-old Munger had recently been asked if immigration has served as an engine of prosperity for the U.S. in its history, and he answered:
“We made it work in America. But we had a vacant continent to work on. That was easy. Vacant and rich in oil and minerals.” Munger is a billionaire, and he became one by exploiting this „vacant“ (he means, there were no people there, no cities, no infrastructure - except for some Native American tribes, but seemingly, they did not count as the legitimate owners of this continent, that was „rich“ in oil and minerals, but here, we have to assume that those who founded New York City in 1664 weren’t able to see the value of oil yet. Oil only became something of value with the invention of the combustion engine. No, the settlers in 1664 were basically interested in the new continent to serve as a colony to the British empire. The colony would provide „revenues“, that means, „return on investment“ in the form of returning ships that would bring back merchandise and tax „revenues“. Also, the settlers couldn’t possibly take on such a vast continent alone. They needed workers on the tobacco and cotton fields. Cheap labor. First slaves, then immigrants. When Charlie Munger says „We made it work in America“, he might as well have said: „We made slaves work in America“. When he says „We had a vacant continent to work on“, by „We“, he does not mean this cheap workforce, he means the settlers who became the owners of this vast continent. Anyways, by 1776 the settlers had made it across the new continent and San Francisco was founded, and, voilá, on the 4th of July in that very year, America declared independence. Not too far from San Francisco, beyond the village of Pescadero, on the waterfront, there was only a vast blue ocean, and to some of its inhabitants, like Gordon E. Moore, Steve Blank or Heinz von Foerster, it became a symbol for a new frontier. From this place onward, where can we go? The meaning of circularity could be experienced for the first time. The New World came to a geographical limit. Second time around, it had to be space. The earth, seen from space, the moon, now possibly mars. Circularity everywhere - so, why not build a new space, a space that is entirely based on circularity - on feedback loops, to be precise? Cyberspace. - Apple’s new headquarters, a one-hour drive from Pescadero, must be seen as the ultimate monument to circularity. The mindset of the „New World“ is now, in the 21st century, changing into a mindset of the old world, which means, it is a mindset that is against immigration because it is not „needed“ any longer. Now try to look at the Digital Habitat with that mindset. Is it a vacant continent? Are there „resources“, like oil and minerals, that are „up for grabs“ and can be used to create ROI for the Empire, meaning returning ships full of merchandise and tax revenues? Ask yourself quickly if there is anyone who could today refer to cyberspace and say: "We had a vacant continent to work on" ? In the words of Charlie Munger, it’s not easy anymore. It’s complex, to say the least, perhaps even „complicated“. LINE IN A NATURE IS NOT FOUND UNIT AND UNIVERSE ARE ROUND; IN VAIN PRODUCED, ALL RAYS RETURN EVIL WILL BLESS, AND ICE WILL BURN Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Uriel“ |
AuthorThomas Behrens Visual Communication is not only taking part in the digital transformation - actively and passively - he will also reflect on it. Hence the blog. Archives
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