“The entire world exists only in order to be televised,” Steven Shaviro writes in “Connected: what it means to live in the network society“.

“Today, we are inclined to see nearly everything in terms of connections and networks. The network is the computer, we like to say. We think that intelligence is a distributed, networked phenomenon. A rain forest is an ecological network, according to both popular and scientific opinion. And, as Paulina Borsook points out, the technolibertarians of Silicon Valley and Redmond tend to regard the capitalist economy as a natural, organic network, just like the rain forest (29ff). It’s almost too perfect a metaphor.

The high-tech industry gets to have things both ways. On one hand, the rain forest is a place of life-and-death, Darwinian struggle. This is the famous vision of nature “red in tooth and claw,” rape as the natural order of things, a warrant for cutthroat capitalist competition. On the other hand, and at the very same time, the rain forest is a complex, self-regulating ecosystem. It exhibits spontaneous, self-generated order. All its pieces fit seamlessly together, and each problem receives an optimal solution. Everything converges, as the New Economy evangelist Kevin Kelly puts it, into a universal, corporate “hive mind.”

The economy, like the rain forest, thus miraculously embodies both the New Age ideal of harmony and balance, and the workings of Adam Smith’s invisible hand. All is for the best, in this best of all possible worlds, as long as nobody intervenes to limit corporate power.

The economy as rain forest is a myth, in the precise sense defined by Lévi-Strauss:

“a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction (an impossible achievement if, as it happens, the contradiction is real)” (229).

Such is the soft fascism of the corporate network: it reconciles the conflicting imperatives of aggressive predation on one hand, and unquestioning obedience and conformity on the other.

Stop the World, I Want to Get Off

For Jeter, the problem is not how to get onto the network, but how to get off. This is far more difficult than it might seem. For instance, you will never get television out of your life simply by turning it off and throwing away your set. It will follow you anyway, because the entire world exists only in order to be televised. A similar logic applies to the Internet. In an increasingly networked world, escape is nearly impossible. No matter what position you seek to occupy, that position will be located somewhere on the network’s grid. No matter what words you utter, those words will have been anticipated somewhere in the chains of discourse. As Burroughs[1] reminds us, “To speak is to lie — To live is to collaborate —.” There is no place of indemnity that would somehow be free of these constraints.

Nonetheless, Burroughs continues, “there are degrees of lying collaboration and cowardice — … It is precisely a question of regulation —” (1992b, 7). You cannot opt out of the network entirely, but at the very least, you can try to be connected a little less. You can provide your own negative feedback. You can regulate your own contributions to the system that is regulating you.

What’s needed for this, no doubt, is a kind of ironically distanced, self-conscious asceticism. The insidious thing about electronic networks is that they are always there, whether you pay attention to them or not. Indeed, they assume, and even require, a kind of distracted inattention on your part. You can never directly confront the network, stare it straight in the eye. For it is always somewhere else from wherever you may be looking. But such enforced distraction can also be cultivated for its own sake. And in this way, perhaps, distraction might become a space in which to breathe.

Television

Marshall McLuhan famously argued that television is a cool medium (1994, 22–32 and 308–37). It does not try to shock and overwhelm us, the way that movies seen in theaters do. Rather, TV is laid back and low intensity. It’s not a visual medium, McLuhan says, so much as an aural-tactile one. The TV image “is not photo in any sense, but a ceaselessly forming contour of things limned by the scanning-finger… the image so formed has the quality of sculpture and icon, rather than of picture” (313).

In television, Michel Chion similarly points out, “sound, mainly the sound of speech, is always foremost,” and the image is just “something extra” (157–59). Voices provide continuity, while the images continually change. This is the opposite situation from film, which is anchored in the image. TV, unlike cinema, is intimate and close range. It is really just part of the furniture. Often we leave it on in the background, as we go about our daily chores. But even when we pay it close attention, it does not stupefy us and make us passive. To the contrary, it invites our participation. We channel surf, we make snide remarks, we yell back at the set. It’s silly to think that anyone is brainwashed by TV. It doesn’t constrain us, or perpetrate violence upon us.

Much more subtly and insidiously, TV draws us into discourse, absorbs us into the network. It colonizes us obliquely, by distraction. It allures us, willy-nilly, into getting connected. We may say of television what Foucault says more generally about postmodern power: it doesn’t constrain us or repress us, so much as “it incites, it induces, it seduces” (1983, 220). It persuades us or cajoles us into doing the work of policing ourselves. As Harrisch explains toward the end of Noir, the true purpose of the network is “the translation into reality of all those Foucauldian theories of self-surveillance. The brain watches itself and administers its own stimuli and rewards, with DynaZauber(*) as the beneficiary”. The Body and the Screen.

The Internet is even cooler than television. That is to say, it is even lower definition than TV and, consequently, even more involving. The World Wide Web offers possibilities so vast, and yet so tantalizingly incomplete, that I must get involved with it in depth. I am drawn in, I can’t help myself. This is why the Net is an interactive, many-to-many medium, whereas TV is only one-to-many. Television addresses my ears and eyes, but the Net solicits my entire body. Web surfing is a tactile, physical experience. In the first place, it requires the correct posture. I must sit upright, directly in front of the screen, without slouching, and with my arms horizontal and my hands engaged. I must also remain much closer to the screen than ever is the case with TV, close enough to read the small print and to watch the jerky video clips that run in postage-stamp-sized windows.

Meanwhile my fingers are running across the keyboard. My right hand keeps busy moving and clicking the mouse. In this way, the hand becomes an extension of the eye: I reach right into the screen and travel through its iconic, hyperlinked space. Cyberspace is what Deleuze and Guattari call a “haptic” space, as opposed to an optical one: a space of “pure connection,” accessible only to “closerange vision,” and having to be navigated “step by step…. One never sees from a distance in a space of this kind, nor does one see it from a distance” (1987, 492–93).

No panoramic view is possible, for the space is always folding, dividing, expanding, and contracting. Time is flexible on the Net as well; things happen at different speeds. Sometimes I must read and type extremely fast to keep up with rapid-fire chat room conversations. Other times I have to hold myself back as I wait for pages or files to download. What’s more, these multiple speeds, times, and spaces overlap. Enveloped in the network, I am continually being distracted. I can no longer concentrate on just one thing at a time. My body is pulled in several directions at once, dancing to many distinct rhythms. My attention fragments and multiplies as I shift among the many windows on my screen. Being online

Steven Shaviro is an American academic, philosopher, and cultural critic whose areas of interest include film theory, time, science fiction, panpsychism, capitalism, affect and subjectivity. He earned a B.A. in English in 1975, M.A. in English in 1978, and a Ph.D. in English in 1981, all from Yale University. From 1984 to 2004, he was a professor of English at the University of Washington,  and since 2004 teaches film, culture and English at Wayne State University, where he is the DeRoy Professor of English. — Wikipedia

__________

[1] William S. Borroughs

(*) DynaZauber is a fictional corporation featured in the novel “Noir” by K.W. Jeter. The story is set in a dystopian future where the protagonist, McNihil, is drawn into a complex investigation involving DynaZauber after a junior executive named William Travelt is found dead. The corporation is depicted as having dark secrets and advanced technology, including “prowlers,” which are computerized simulations that can roam the world like electronic ghosts¹².

Source: Conversation with Copilot, 10/16/2024
(1) Amazon.com: Noir eBook : Jeter, K. W.: Kindle Store. https://www.amazon.com/Noir-K-W-Jeter-ebook/dp/B006ITXPYK.
(2) Noir by K.W. Jeter | Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/575584.Noir.
(3) NOIR – Kirkus Reviews. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/kw-jeter/8440/.
(4) goodreads.com. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/575584.Noir.

~~~

The Rich People Who Seek to Beat Death

“…it is appointed for men to die once,

and after that comes judgment”— Hebrews 9:27

NYPost. Oct. 15, 2024: Anti-aging fanatic Bryan Johnson bragged his plasma is so squeaky clean that a medical staffer “couldn’t bring himself to throw it away” as the tech mogul revealed a new procedure he is using to remove toxins from his body.

Johnson, 47, who funnels $2 million a year into his quest for eternal youth, said on Monday he underwent a total plasma exchange that would take that fluid from his body and replace it with pure albumin, a protein found in a person’s blood plasma.

He noted the process is different from when he swapped blood with his teenage son, who he bizarrely called “blood boy,” last year. The blood exchange reportedly had no real benefits.

TPE removes all of my body’s plasma and replaces it with Albumin,” Johnson wrote on social media.

“The therapy objectives are to remove toxins from my body. The evidence is emergent.”

The exchange involves a patient’s blood passing through a machine where the filtered plasma is removed with reinfusion of red blood cells, in addition to a replacement fluid like plasma or albumin, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Johnson, who made his massive fortune in his 30s when he sold his payment processing company to eBay, said he completed a series of baseline measurements before going forward with the therapy that will involve six overall treatments.

He then claimed the procedure operator, who has been doing total plasma exchange for nine years, marveled that his plasma was “the cleanest he’s ever seen. By far….

Johnson has become a prominent face of the anti-aging movement, using his pot of money to follow an incredibly strict routine overseen by a team of doctors that includes daily exercise, a vegan diet and swallowing more than 100 daily supplements.  [NYPost]…. More on this poor fool here.

It’s not Just Tesla. Vehicles Amass Huge Troves of Possibly Sensitive Data. Elon Musk’s willingness to share information about the Cybertruck explosion has highlighted how much data cars collect — and left some drivers uneasy. Read it all…

+ Musk the Flip-Flopping Late Trump Supporter