[Our sci fi films are like ads for future Apple products and propaganda for a reductionist view of the present, in which our end is inevitable, and the toys of the rich will become prettier and prettier while the rest of us drown in our own filth. In this letter from the editor I wanted to write about this sci fi present of ours. About the figures who fill it and what functions they serve, the places we’re going and the places that are taking us there, and most importantly about the one thing that is driving it all.]
I. Persons
There are certain persons who contain our fantasy—who, it seems, exist only to act as avatars for those who believe in them and the ideas they represent. Most obvious of course would be your standard everyday politician. In becoming public figures, they also become icons that can then spread in a meme-like way. Or Jesus. But Walt Disney also comes to mind.
You can die and come back to life. Drawings can walk and talk.
In a similar way, the moon landing captured the imagination of a generation. It gave the hope of a future as magnificent as anything written by Arthur C. Clarke or Isaac Asimov. Forty-odd years later, that promise seems like a sham, and there are many who believe it was a literal con put on by the powers that be to placate a very rude and disorderly public, but be that as it may, our world consists of an ever-expending network of concepts and people, and to understand one of these people or one of these concepts is to understand how it fits within the larger framework. In what ways are physics related to mysticism? How would we get from shamanism to Joyce in the greater world of images and ideas? Or from Manet to Stalin?
For there is a future that has been growing in recent years. One of the many sci fi presents that are all existing concurrently. This one in particular is one part the Matrix, one part China rising, and two parts ecological apocalypse overdrive. I want to discuss a few of the people that make up this matrix of rising power and ultimate and definitive collapse.
In a 1991 interview with the Academy of Achievement, Oprah Winfrey laid out her drive and her philosophy. The first question from the interviewer involved what she wanted to accomplish as a young child and her answer, “I had a vision, not of what I wanted to accomplish, but I knew that my current circumstances would change… I was four years old and I remember thinking, ‘My life won’t be like this. My life won’t be like this, it will be better.'” Later on, in the same interview, Ms. Winfrey goes on to say, “[M]y focus has never, ever for one minute been money.”
There’s a certain disconnect here. On the one hand, from age 4 she just knew, My life will be better, i.e. I will no longer live in such horrendous poverty, to then later state that money has never been her focus. These two ideas do not sit well with each other.
Which is not to say I believe Ms. Winfrey is lying. In this interview she comes off as very likable and to honestly be primarily concerned with helping others and in escaping what were some pretty terrible circumstances. What I think is, you take a drive to succeed and combine this with a very selfless persona, then you have the recipe for a seriously successful talk show host. She is such a marketable product specifically because, “I really do know that I am no better than anybody else… I think the moment you start thinking you are better than somebody else, you’ve lost sight of who you are. Because the truth of the matter is, we are all the same.” Which makes Ms. Winfrey the perfect poster-child for ersatz reality.
Increasingly, we want celebrities who are just like us. The Kardashians are an even better example, because Oprah Winfrey is still sort of impossibly good, but that certainly cannot be said for the Kardashian clan. Their success is unwarranted and that is the nature of their success. And ersatz reality?
What I mean by ersatz reality is this pervasive modern sense of realism, in which whatever happens to me is a result of my own doing, and if I were only a little bit better, or kinder, or smarter, then I would be like these other people who are basically like me, but just a little bit more—attractive, likable, funnier, what have you—and the larger reality of all the other people in the world, other living things, is hidden behind the audacious egos that drive these larger-than-life entertainment personalities.
Reality television replaces reality in the contemporary American televised universe, and China, in their efforts always and forever to appropriate and re-interpret western ideology to their own nefarious uses, have taken this idea and transformed it. Or I should say, certain executives at Hunan Television.
Hunan television is the only television station of the many hundreds on the Chinese tube that has evolved into something that is recognizably western. Other networks broadcast “Sino-Japanese War” miniseries’, or some Tang drama, and always terribly acted and terribly boring. Hunan television is like the Comedy Central of China. It breaks boundaries and has all the most popular shows, and it has what is arguably the most popular talk show in China, Happy Camp. (At the very least, most loved among the younger generation.) Happy Camp is a show in which four hosts swap witty banter with each other and their various celebrity guests.
I have logged many man-hours watching Happy Camp with my wife and what struck me about those four hosts/hostesses—two men, two women—is their ability not only to laugh at themselves but specifically to pander to obviously obnoxious people. I can clearly see that they are horrible, but my Chinese friends do not see this. Perhaps because they are primarily looking at the very funny hosts and hostesses, and are learning to love these obviously horrible people by associating them with this adorable foursome. Because He Jiong and Xie Na love them—who are so lovable themselves—then I should them as well. (Although, in General my Chinese National friends seem less likely to consider persons to be horrible who seem very obviously horrible to my American eyes. Which may have something to do with a general kindness, greater faith in others, or better indoctrination techniques. The word, Brainwash, is after all a borrow-word from the Chinese, Xinao (洗脑), a term coined by Mao.) Ersatz reality presents the current situation as an incontrovertible fact, and those who work within the confines it affords always end up working to maintain its insidious illusion of inevitability.
Oprah Winfrey knows she’s not better than anybody else, which the celebrities love, but she also would never know how to actually challenge the audience to think in a way that could lead to meaningful change. She only challenges them in the ways they expect to be challenged, and they also love her for challenging them in these very predictable ways.
So there is ersatz reality, and then there are those who pursue genuine fantasies. These are persons who want to make meaningful change, who are working to create a world they believe should happen. Whose whole purpose is to change the face of the world as we know it. Are they destined to fail brilliantly? Will they alter the fabric of everything? I am thinking specifically of Elon Musk.
Elon Musk made his fortune with Paypal, which hasn’t changed anything. However, he used that money to start myriad other ventures, all of which are forward-looking, visionary, and for the most part at the moment of this writing financial failures. SpaceX. Tessla Motors. SolarCity. Hyperloop. All of these are sci fi and future-looking. Spaceships? Electric cars? Solar power? Subsonic Air Travel???[1]
There are definitely people who want Elon Musk to be successful, because they also want his vision of the future to become a reality. Not unlike how president Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize as a result of being the kind of person people believed would do something deserving of a Nobel Peace Prize at some point in the future and then went on to become the sort of person who condones and orders drone strikes that result in numerous deaths of innocent bystanders. Or is this just another example of my smarmy I-told-you-so-ism?
Barack Obama, Elon Musk, and Oprah Winfrey are like the guardians of our dreams. When we go to sleep, they whisper comforting words in our ears about the possible future, or the do-able present. They are the minor saints we pray to when fretting over the ominous clouds of industry and the trash that is washing up on our very welcome mats.
II. Places
I came of age in the nineteen-nineties, which was both a time of great prosperity in America and also peopled by cynics who were all striving to out-cynic each other all the time, and everyone I knew took it as a matter of course that the end of the world was just around the corner. Looking back now, all this talk of the end of the world and cynical posturing seems only possible because no one took it seriously. Now, we see America slipping into chaos, and the world very visibly slipping into ecologically dangerous waters, and everyone smiles their fakest smiles and says, Hope can set you free. This Shawshank Redemption motto is perfect for Elon Musk.
He began SpaceX with the intention of one day using this company to realize his dream of bringing people into space. “Mars is the only place in the solar system where it’s possible for life to become multi-planetarian,” Musk said in an interview with Nightline in August of 2012. “We could make Mars like Earth… it’s more than our life raft, it’s like backing up the biosphere.”
Of course, Musk wouldn’t be the only one gunning for Mars. And of course his competition would be planning on funding it as reality television, wherein anyone can apply to go. Just send in your thirty bucks along with your application and you could be one of the lucky contestants chosen to live on Mars and have your life telecast to the Earthlings, or so say the people at Mars One. This is another form of the impossibly absurd undeniably real sci fi present—where the impossible is becoming very possible BECAUSE of it’s impossibility. Mars colonization? Nuclear annihilation? Eco-apocalypse? Just do it!
The end of the world is a state of mind, and even though we thought we knew all about the end of the world in the nineties, this state of mind didn’t really start to get going until 9/11 and a certain president who used 9/11 as an excuse to dramatically alter the make-up of our country. Then you started to hear about China. More and more about China. There was America’s economic collapse of 2009. And the cloud of pollution in China is growing. How long until it spreads across the ocean? More and more, rising American anxiety seems directly tied to the increasing influence of the Chinese Communist Party.
And these days, the general feeling in and around Beijing is that the game is up, and we are done, and it’s just a matter of time until everyone comes to realize this fact in the more picturesque suburbs of the world. Because not only are the clouds of pollution growing and could very well grow to fill the skies from one hemisphere to the next, but there is also a very real possibility of nuclear annihilation as a simple result of a basic misunderstanding of policy. How does this happen?
Ersatz reality is true at the societal as well as the personal level. We all, from president to postman, believe that the order as it stands, will be and must be. This is both an idealized reality and a separating reality, in which who I am is a distinct entity that is defined through purchasing choices. We prefer to think this way, because it is more comfortable to be separate than messily interconnected, but that which is comfortable should always be seen as the circumspect thing it is.
I would love to see advertisements in which the models have alarming rashes, or are vomiting all over their clothes, being beaten by other models, blood splattering the camera lens, or red-eyed and weeping while they stare the consumer directly in the eyes. I want these spreads to come to life, to be examples of something lost, some piece of the human puzzle gone the way of the triceratops. A dining set shown covered in crumpled take-out containers, empty packs of cigarettes, and some unsightly stain on the rug nearby. Bloomingdale’s jewelry photographed in puddles of ketchup, or lain in a jar of glistening mayonnaise, but then again, “In branding, as in magic, the effect is lost if the effort is visible” (Levine, 2003, p. 5).
And this fantasy of a distinct, personally realized, and incontrovertible present—in which the current political make-up is an eternal truth—has led to a growing policy disaster facing China and America in Southeast Asia. Specifically having to do with the Obama administration’s pivot to Asia, and China’s—in their efforts to curtail this from actually happening—push against their Asian neighbors, but how will this brash behavior supposedly keep America out of Asia?
The Obama administration are faced with two options when dealing with the growing friction between China and Japan, the Philippines, and Vietnam. Either pull out or make good on its promises of military assistance. The assumption in Beijing is that America would never risk war with China, its main trading partner in the region, to assist countries that can be of no or little use to it.[2] However, America’s response to this upping of the ante has been to strengthen claims to help China’s neighbors, with the assumption that China would be crazy to go to war with us, and so eventually must cede to our superior military and economic power. In short, these two superpowers are whimsically rambling towards war as a result of the assumption that, the other guy would never go to war with me.
In China, many government officials have already gotten ‘investment visas’, which is basically another way to say that they buy their citizenship in another country, a practice Canada just stopped recently and is being sued by a huge number of Chinese applicants for having stopped. Or have already immigrated their families while still making policy decisions as if they have a stake in the future of China. This sense of “not being of this place” is precisely the problem when it comes to dealing with potentially catastrophic futures. But isn’t that what each of us does every day?
Reality television, plans to colonize Mars, advertising in general. All these things create a disconnect between what we consider real and the lives we are living. We are living a non-real life, while Kim Kardashian is truly living. Like this. Our world may be slipping into an ironically-charged while also simultaneously very sincere ecological apocalypse that will very likely lead to the death of huge numbers of people, but we’re also, ha ha ha tee hee hee, going to colonize Mars like that kook Telon Musk says.
The invisible prison exists, but all the doors are open. The trick is finding them.
III. Things
There is the literal physical multiverse and then there is the virtual psychological multiverse. The one is the natural conclusion of string theory. The other is something that happens when I’m trying to make a decision. What if they’re the same place?
A lamp is also a flower or a sun. A billiard ball is a molecule. A photon is a physical representation of an objectless concept, or a conceptless object. In the branching paths of the mental imaging device I call me, an associative webwork of ideas and objects, of hypothetical people and a remembered past that is no different from our many possible futures—all of which is interconnected and exists as an actual place I enter and can explore, which I can modify and which modifies me and my behavior—there is a sense that all of this is actually outside of me, and I am taking part in a great play that I have very little or no control over. What if this play I have no control over isn’t taking place? What if the thing I have no control over is much larger than any play that was penned? What if, as I explore the multiverse within, I am exploring other versions of myself somewhere out there in the multiverse loaf without?
There is no need for any ghosts or spirits or souls in all of this. Only an “in” that is also an “out”. If you go far enough “in”, is it possible that you have gone “out”? Is it possible that everything is true? In the multiverse? Why not?
Neuroscientist Libet has famously proclaimed that, if “our consciously willed acts are fully determined by natural laws that govern the activities of nerve cells in the brain,” then free will is “illusory”, but he is looking only at electrical activity in the brain and the resulting action. His experiments do appear to prove that we make decisions before we are aware of them, but is this a definitive argument for determinism? Seems to me all Libet’s research proves is that we move through our days subconsciously. If you step back a few paces, you just might see how you bleed into the surrounding scenery.
Libet himself believed consciousness was a kind of field he described as a new fundamental “given” phenomenon in nature, which is different from other fundamental “givens”, like gravity or electromagnetism. Not a “ghost in the machine” but a “system produced by billions of nerve cell actions,” while also still “a non-physical phenomenon, like the subjective experience it represents.”
One of my favorite anecdotes of mathematical discovery is that of Poincaré, one evening, after having coffee—which he never did—sitting in a chair and watching as good ideas joined together as if he were watching couples at a local ballroom pairing up. This experience of the other within, of being separate from a process of discovery, is universal among writers, artists, mathematicians and scientists. Is it possible that Libet’s CMF—Conscious Mental Field Theory—is actually a multi-dimensional phenomenon that ties the various layers of the multiverse together, that consciousness is a place, and we all only inhabit the outlying suburbs of this metropolis?
Dogen introduced Soto Zen Buddhism to his countrymen, but when I read about Dogen and his re-interpretation of classic zen images like sky-flowers and the vines of entanglement, it’s something like a pinprick into another interpretation of the psyche that’s neither classically Eastern or classically Western, because Dogen was classically neither / nor—not unlike Kierkegaard’s famous cousin—but elaborated throughout his life an unfolding understanding that had first flowered when he was confronted with the traditional Mahayana doctrine of initial enlightenment (like an inverted version of St. Augustine’s original sin) as opposed to acquired enlightenment. Think of initial enlightenment like this: that these aspects of the world that we perceive as the lesser aspects to be sloughed off to achieve enlightenment are in actual fact part and parcel with a wider understanding, and furthermore that the very attempt to achieve enlightenment is the greatest delusion, which is why I choose to pray to our own homegrown psychedelic-brand guru’s—the LSD-inspired few who attempted to staple enlightenment to a new chemical crucifix.
Because everything is enlightenment—from Oprah Winfrey to Elon Musk to corporate reproductions of Manet to kitschy reproductions of busts of Stalin. Porn addiction is no different than exercise obsession which is also no different than total and complete spiritual devotion. Even when these things are so obviously so different from each other. This is the sort of thinking that led me to an understanding of the virtual multiverse as synonymous with the physical multiverse, and furthermore that fantasy is an actual place where different realities converge.
All of which may not seem very logical to the more analytically-minded of you out there, but I reason with my left hand. I reason with my eyes closed, because love cannot live in a logical system. Love has nothing to do with logic. Only people. And these people we pretend to be exist as physical manifestations of love. We are all multi-dimensional beings when we close our eyes, but when you close your eyes that last time, your solitude will become so absolute that not even you will be in it. This is not something I can prove. This is pure unadulterated faith, but there is a place where only faith can lead.
Rupert Sheldrake, paranormal biologist, takes Libet one step further: “Mental fields are rooted in brains, just as magnetic fields around magnets are rooted in the magnets themselves.” In short, what I experience as me is something that extends out, but this “out” could just as easily be out into another universe in the webbing of activity we call the present moment.
(A recent study showed that the brain functions in “up to eleven dimensions”, creating multi-dimensional “sandcastles” that appear and collapse and holes in space-time, but who cares about scientific studies when you have such a firm grasp of your ersatz reality already?)
If you look deep enough, you might just be able to see into the minds of those other people who you share a mind with. Or am I just messing with you?
—GBoyer
Chicago, 2013
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[1] Editor’s note. Since the publication of this article, Mr. Musk has gone on to become the richest man on the planet. He has also been declared a general all-around douche. Perhaps the two go hand in hand?
[2] Editor’s note. This article was written pre-Trump, and of course a lot has changed in US/Chinese relations since then.Libet
Gabriel Boyer has been making up stories about himself for as long as he can remember. There was never a time he was not fully seated in his various delusions. He continues to delude himself daily. His latest release is below. You can read more about him here.
