A few million pixels just don’t buy the attention they used to…
A picture is worth a thousand words.
But how much is a thousand words with no pictures worth
Or a picture without any words?
And what’s the exchange rate between a printed image, an image on a screen, and an immersive-experience-of-images-beyond-images in the networked servers and individual terminals of somebody’s metaverse? And what about an image of augmented reality?
How about if it’s an image you’re tagged in? (And if you don’t like it?)
Or if that image can teach others something?
Or possesses the feeling that sharing it can teach others something?
The feeling that it can stop something. Or start something. And that you helped?
Meanwhile, what about the machine learning and AI behind the real time stream-of-existence nonstop pitch to the ‘plugged in’ ‘always on’ digital experiencers of the world? (Centering this discussion in the WEIRD world (western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic).
How much attention does that buy?
And is it possible to buy enough attention or control/own enough semio-capital in the semio-economy to effectively cease attention? That is, to control attention so thoroughly that it’s virtually and/or actually imperceptible—not unlike David Foster Wallace’s older fish declaring to the younger fish “This is water.” And not unlike Morpheus asking Neo early in the first installment of The Matrix “Do you think that’s really air you’re breathing?” while they’re both jacked into a virtual training program less complex but with the same underlying rules as the matrix, itself.
Part of the entire tale of the crisis of human civilization in The Matrix is a tale of semio-inflation. Forget about cocaine, amphetamines, and prozac, and consider the accelerated attention that occurs in a future with better biochemical and pharmaceutical interventions, and with technology that increasingly makes greater demands on our attention, but even more importantly extends and accelerates human attention by taking over most or almost all of the attention-taxing drudgery of day-to-day work. And then consider tech that goes even further—AI, ML, and beyond, developing capabilities to take over and in many cases surpass the cognitive work done by humans. Perhaps even work traditionally deemed explicitly human, humanistic (and/or within the purview of the humanities).
In the case of the story of The Matrix (as detailed in The Animatrix and elsewhere), the development of such tech led to the development of a parallel and generally deeply subordinate class of beings. The AIs, the Machines, of many shapes, sizes, functions, and form factors, humanoid and not, software and hardware. The buying power of a given symbol, the strength of affect in day-to-day life became so low, that is, the semio-inflation was so bad that it precipitated a war between biological and mechanical that led to a scorched sky, and ultimately the human body as a mostly-nonresistant power source in lieu of the sun. A merging of the biological and the mechanical that almost certainly the Architect and the Oracle from the films have laughed and argued about over the several iterations of the OS that is the matrix—not too much laughter or attention spared on it though; it is a semio-economic nightmare all around, after all.
Meanwhile, the entire expression of The Matrix as a set of films, games, and other media is a bizarre melding and reworking of aesthetic categories that could be described as zany, cute, and interesting. Certainly, in the mechanics of films’ human-to-battery economy is an alarming mixture of production, consumption, and circulation.
There’s an undeniable (to my taste and judgment) grim pastorality (cuteness) to the simplified human lifecycle, where the body is grown, serves a purpose, dies, and is fed back to future generations of bodies serving purposes. Meanwhile, inhabitants of the matrix are provided an opioid-like mere information in the form of the matrix, which mirrors a world that human consciousnesses, on average, can pay so much attention to that they don’t even pay attention to it; it’s where human-as-energy circulates, in an utterly substitutable standing reserve. And in the power structures of the matrix and their reverberant aesthetic categories, zaniness spans human and machine—appearing in freedom-fighting seekers like Trinity, Morpheus, and the messianic Neo, as well as the decision-making programs (softwares) of the whole damn system like the Oracle, the Architect, the Merovingian, and Agent Smith.
All of these aesthetic categories merge improbably and inevitably in the films themselves and in their overarching mythos of the films. The very thisness of human existence is simultaneously flattened and hyper-expanded—in the software world, where a freed mind can perform superhuman feats. And in the physical world, where the human body is either an energy source for a machine overlord (with obvious human genealogy), or is free and living deep within the earth in a city warmed by the planet’s core; and perhaps they are a soldier, making occasional forays into the sewer and communication tunnels of old cities in order to grow the base of human resistors to the software world they once escaped. Again, grim pastorality; a frightening, reality-challenging slapstick comedic under/overtone; and a basic communication of information, clad in bondage gear, DOS monochrome aesthetics, cyber punk and its corollary hovercraft punk.
Having considered and reconsidered The Matrix for approximately 20 years, and having written several of these little essays around it over the last few weeks, I find myself trying to draw myself toward the movies’ regularly repeated notion that we’ve already made our choices; our job now is to understand them…
I’m not sure how or what exactly, but there’s something about
•assessing culture as a larger whole by understanding aesthetic categories as things, durable beyond the material conditions of historical context and beyond a given field, genre, means, or mode of production..
•and the allegorical ripeness of the relation between zany-interesting-cute and production-circulation- consumption..
•and the flattening of these material and aesthetic categories that occurs with extreme upheaval of the negotiation of symbolic value against attention value (semio-inflation, and its entanglements with financial inflation)..
•and the evaluative inevitability and necessity of existing at the intersection of the material-capital and the semio-capital worlds,
•and the power that evaluative capacity can have in creating, illuminating, and building the stories about how our stories (and our things) are made, which can help us “get a handle on all the other things that are happening to us,”
•which in the Wachowskis’ Allegory of the Mainframe is how people get free of a system that’s almost perfectly invisible and without self-determination—
All of which feels, in terms of brands, simultaneously rich with opportunity and absolute fuckedness (at this moment, to me, with all my tastes and judgments). There’s some dialectical something happening there, but for now my imagination tries, so far, ineffectually to imagine through the sleep of sleeps after this, into the dreams that may come, and the dreams of those dreams.
In the meantime, may the friction of such tension points burn the bridges that one day light our way. And if anti-anti-Utopianism isn’t a strong enough slogan,
and Utopianism as a slogan does a lot of its energizing by leaving people out,
why not let’s try l’chaim, “to life!”?
Words mean things. Sometimes things mean words. Sometimes things mean things.
What is a thing worth without any meaning explaining it
What’s the most attention you’ve ever spent on a stick you found on your way to school?
Who did you tell? How did they react? Did you get anything for it?
Did you take the stick home?
Producer, circulator, consumer? All or none?
Just shut up and watch live the movie?
It may be beyond simply interesting, but idk, it’s still circulated as hell…
And there’s certainly something a little zany and a little cute there..
Producer-consumer. Ad hoc, on call circulator.
Yes, and, it remains to be seen,
but also
Hmm…
here we go continually (so far)…
