The Devil Never Sleeps (25 page)
Read The Devil Never Sleeps Online
Authors: Andrei Codrescu
There is no disagreement on this: Human beings are unfinished. Theologians and Marxists can shake hands on this one. God has a plan, Marx had a plan. Those plans are called utopia: only
there
will human beings be completely finished. God's garden needs a lot of weeding and Marx's utopia proved to be Wal-Mart, but never mind: The utopian urge is there and it isn't going away.
there
will human beings be completely finished. God's garden needs a lot of weeding and Marx's utopia proved to be Wal-Mart, but never mind: The utopian urge is there and it isn't going away.
The new virtuality is a competitor. It competes not only with reality, that old virtuality, but with all those other utopias, as well.
Reality is scary. Rendering it innocuous underlies most of the contracts we keep trying to honor but which we did not write. Rendering reality unconscious is the job of most social virtualityâwhich works for Bill Gates.
And then there are those among usâamong whom I once found myselfâwho find virtuality satisfying because it seemingly multiplies and transforms identity to the limits of one's imagination. This was once a poetic desideratum: Human beings are so loathsome, splitting them up might make them less harmful. I think of Fernando Pessoa's “heteronyms,” for instance, or my own invented personae in early poems, and find them nowâlike abstract painting and underground cinemaâonly awkward forerunners of the huge industry of the imagination.
The constant calls for “creativity” and “content” now issuing from the ever-hungry maws of the new media are nothing less than calls for the drafting
of our entire society for the purposes of writing poetry or, if you prefer, formatting what's left of reality, for broadcast.
of our entire society for the purposes of writing poetry or, if you prefer, formatting what's left of reality, for broadcast.
Siegfried Gideon, in his classic book
Mechanization Takes Command,
described the gradual conquest of the world by mechanization and foresaw the abrupt end of the mechanical age. We can see that the virtual is taking command, but it's hard to foresee what lies beyond its imagined infinity.
Mechanization Takes Command,
described the gradual conquest of the world by mechanization and foresaw the abrupt end of the mechanical age. We can see that the virtual is taking command, but it's hard to foresee what lies beyond its imagined infinity.
There are also young people who like to use technology to an opposite means: to enhance the senses, to exacerbate physicality, to provoke whatever is most human and untechnological in themselves. To
imagine
as little as possible. Techno-raves and Ecstasy are two of these aids to superphysicality. What is
their
politics?
imagine
as little as possible. Techno-raves and Ecstasy are two of these aids to superphysicality. What is
their
politics?
Which brings me back the two MUDders I met in Seattle. The existence of the outside world scared them. And for good reason. At the world's largest shopping mall in Minneapolisâthe Mall of AmericaâI saw two other cultural studies scholars strapped into Virtual Reality gear. These two pudgy cybernauts had an amazing array of expressions on their faces as they dodged dangers, fought evil, and generally triumphed in heroic fashion over untold programming. Watching them at a distance of about two feet were three tough-looking Chicano hombres wearing gang colors and grinning like bobcats who'd come across two captive turkeys.
That scene gave me great hopeâthank god for the barbarians. We do miss the barbarians, don't we? Cavafy had it so right: “Now what's going to happen to us without the barbarians? / They were, those people, a kind of solution.”
16
16
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hy bother putting the V-chip in everyone's TV when you can put it directly into everybody's brain? It would be like a flu shot and afterward you'll never want to watch violence or sex again, you'll be going to church every Sunday and always looking on the sunny side of life. You'll be nice all day long and at night you'll sleep unless it's the time of the year when you must procreate. In fact, the V-chip could be programmed to get TV direct into the brain so you won't need a TV set anymore. The nice, violence- and sex-free shows will just pour in behind your eyebrows and entertain you from within. And the commercials won't even bother you because they'll go directly to your money and make you spend while you watch. No need to move at all. You can even vote out of the V-chip by just wiggling your toes, once for the Democrats, twice for the Republicans. The V-chip, which by now is an E or Everything-Chip, can also contain health information that will keep your cholesterol and blood pressure in check so that you can live forever and do as much good as you can while consuming as much as possible without any ill effects. And there will be a timer to remind you that it's time to put on deodorant. When your chip gets old you can choose to have it replaced or you can just fade away with the chipless masses of the Third World. The chipless people of the world will die sweaty in sinful cities by their hobo fires. These cities, full of temptation
and outlaws who've ripped the chip out of their heads, will eventually have to be eradicated. By contrast, the eternal suburb of the chip people will be just like heaven, all harp music and singing puppy dogs and malls as soft as a pillow, void of pain and art. All the cravings for violence and sex that the media woke in us will be collected for the government by private storage companies who will scrape them off your V-chips every month or so. They will be stored in big pools of a new strategic reserve to be released by the army if a new Hitler or something shows up. Thank you for the V-chip, Mr. President. Tomorrow will definitely be another day.
hy bother putting the V-chip in everyone's TV when you can put it directly into everybody's brain? It would be like a flu shot and afterward you'll never want to watch violence or sex again, you'll be going to church every Sunday and always looking on the sunny side of life. You'll be nice all day long and at night you'll sleep unless it's the time of the year when you must procreate. In fact, the V-chip could be programmed to get TV direct into the brain so you won't need a TV set anymore. The nice, violence- and sex-free shows will just pour in behind your eyebrows and entertain you from within. And the commercials won't even bother you because they'll go directly to your money and make you spend while you watch. No need to move at all. You can even vote out of the V-chip by just wiggling your toes, once for the Democrats, twice for the Republicans. The V-chip, which by now is an E or Everything-Chip, can also contain health information that will keep your cholesterol and blood pressure in check so that you can live forever and do as much good as you can while consuming as much as possible without any ill effects. And there will be a timer to remind you that it's time to put on deodorant. When your chip gets old you can choose to have it replaced or you can just fade away with the chipless masses of the Third World. The chipless people of the world will die sweaty in sinful cities by their hobo fires. These cities, full of temptation
and outlaws who've ripped the chip out of their heads, will eventually have to be eradicated. By contrast, the eternal suburb of the chip people will be just like heaven, all harp music and singing puppy dogs and malls as soft as a pillow, void of pain and art. All the cravings for violence and sex that the media woke in us will be collected for the government by private storage companies who will scrape them off your V-chips every month or so. They will be stored in big pools of a new strategic reserve to be released by the army if a new Hitler or something shows up. Thank you for the V-chip, Mr. President. Tomorrow will definitely be another day.
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lowly, slowly, without thinking, I've become addicted to America Online. There is only a difference of degree between AOL and all the other faceless corporations I'm addicted to, like AT&T, BellSouth, or Entergy. The difference is important, though: I submit blindly to those corporations because they provide what I think are “essential services.” Things like AOL are luxuries on their way to becoming “essential services.” When you are fully addicted to e-mail, you can bet it's an essential service. There was a time when electricity and telephone service were luxuries too, but they quickly became indispensible. In fact, there is very little that now presses down ubiquitously on our fin-de-millennium heads that is truly and completely indispensible. It's only that we are junkies, we can't do without them.
lowly, slowly, without thinking, I've become addicted to America Online. There is only a difference of degree between AOL and all the other faceless corporations I'm addicted to, like AT&T, BellSouth, or Entergy. The difference is important, though: I submit blindly to those corporations because they provide what I think are “essential services.” Things like AOL are luxuries on their way to becoming “essential services.” When you are fully addicted to e-mail, you can bet it's an essential service. There was a time when electricity and telephone service were luxuries too, but they quickly became indispensible. In fact, there is very little that now presses down ubiquitously on our fin-de-millennium heads that is truly and completely indispensible. It's only that we are junkies, we can't do without them.
For the most part, our providers of “essential services” function invisibly, like the gods, as long as they get their monthly sacrifices, but now and then one of these gods malfunctions or it freaks and then you find yourself in hell. In Voice Mail Hell. Trying to reach a human being on the telephone you have to wander for years in the electronic desert, and when you do you might as well speak to a machine. People in Voice Mail Hell have only first names and no fixed location. They could be next door or they could be in Alaska. In addition to having no idea who or where this person is, you cannot
even be sure what corporation this person works for. The name of a company tells you nothing about who owns it, what it does, what nation it considers home. The modern corp is a multi-tentacled organism, a rhizomatous creature without a center, or in English, an infinite potato. You can cut off one branch and the organism feels nothing. It sprouts another branch somewhere else. BancOne has recently sprouted hundreds of branch offices all over Louisiana, some of them located in buildings owned by banks that were swallowed overnight by BancOne. All of these branches are equal, they are commanded from some remote space reachable only by years of wandering in Cyber or Voice Mail Hell.
even be sure what corporation this person works for. The name of a company tells you nothing about who owns it, what it does, what nation it considers home. The modern corp is a multi-tentacled organism, a rhizomatous creature without a center, or in English, an infinite potato. You can cut off one branch and the organism feels nothing. It sprouts another branch somewhere else. BancOne has recently sprouted hundreds of branch offices all over Louisiana, some of them located in buildings owned by banks that were swallowed overnight by BancOne. All of these branches are equal, they are commanded from some remote space reachable only by years of wandering in Cyber or Voice Mail Hell.
AOL is a gateway to cyberspace, they bill the gates, so to speak, and, after you become used to it, you go through those gates fearlessly, as if they were the gates to your own house. Of course, you don't have to pay when you pass through the gates of your own house, or I hope you don't. Over the gates of your own house there is no inscription, or if there is, it's usually your name or something friendly like Villa Maris. The gates of AOL are more like the gates of hell, over which it says, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” And you do, abandon hope, that is, because you just wanna have cyber-fun.
I have accepted all of this with weary resignation. So when my address book disintegrated in AOL, I wanted to believe that it was an accident. I got a brand-new AOL program and I started all over again, calling all my friends and re-creating my address book. No sooner was I done than the address book self-destroyed again. This time, I suspected something structurally wrong in the very gut of the giant. The address book is vital: It is where you keep all your friends' cyber-addresses and where you go when you write someone. Losing your address book is tragic, it makes you feel alone in the world, just a flesh critter with no cyber-friends. It's an emergency.
I called AOL and wandered through Voice Mail Hell until Karl answered. He admitted that there had been a lot of calls about destroyed address books.
“What happened?” I cried out in despair.
“It corrupted,” said Karl sternly, as if that “it” had somehow been my fault.
“What do you mean âit'? It must be some flaw in AOL!”
Karl's voice really hardened now: “There is no flaw in AOL!” he answered officially, “It just corrupted, that's all. You have to destroy it and start over.”
I was sure now that Karl had something to hide. “What's your full name, Karl?”
“I don't have to give you my full name,” said AOL Karl.
“Where are you, Karl?”
“I cannot tell you this.”
“How does the AOL address book become corrupted?”
Karl hung up. The awful silence of Voice Mail Hell closed in on all sides.
I anxiously opened my program. It functioned. AOL had not (yet) avenged itself by cutting off my supply. I could live without my address book. I will make one on paper. And when they decide to destroy all my saved mail, I won't complain. Nor will I make much noise when they tell me how to vote. Or what to buy. Or when to eat. I can't. I need access. It's sad, but it's a done deal. I just wish they would all merge into a single entity, BellSouth, BancOne, AOL, Entergy, the whole evil overlord pantheon. That way, at least, we would all know that we are subjects of the Generic Company of America and would feel a lot less anxious. Bill the gates, but make it all one bill. That kind of merger is how the last monotheism got its start.
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ow that the mouse with glowing ears has arrived, the fashion body will become reality. Forget all those piercings and tattoosâthey only skimmed the surface. Now we can put firefly genes to work to make us glow-in-the dark fingers and belly buttons. We can put wolf genes to work to give us a bristle of wolf-hair down our backs. We can grow splendid lemur tails and, best of all, we can fulfill humanity's age-old dream: wings. Yes, a pair of sturdy owl wings planted firmly in our shoulder blades could lift us at long last from the skin of the earth and into the blue. Genetics has opened a way both into the past and into the future: We can now mix again with animals just like the Greek gods mixed with humans, but we won't have to do it the old-fashioned way by grabbing the beasts by their necks and subduing them. The minotaur and the demigod will line up for anesthesia not rumbling. Romulus and Remus can once more suckle their wolf-mother while shepherd boys can again regale their favorite sheep with their stories, because while their favorite sheep will look for all purposes like sheep, they will in fact be humans in sheep's bodies. Movie stars will grow their own fur coats with the help of mink genes, making the killing of minks unnecessary, and the fury of antifur activists moot. Of course, these movie stars will have to wear their furs all the time because gene mixes are permanent; they will have to live in Alaska where a permanent fur coat is good.
While Hollywood will surely move to Alaska, other parts of the U.S. will serve different gene mixes: Winged people will all live along the Continental Divide in order to better swoop down from peaks over valleys. Glowing people will live in New York and other tunneled, wormy metropolises. Wolf geners will dwell in the pack zones of the North. Insect-featured clickers will hang in Seattle and multiply in cyberspace. Thanks to the mouse with the glowing ears we now have a chance to reinvent our bodies, just as it seemed that we might have to leave them behind in order to gain cyberspace. But our flesh can now compete with the virtual flesh. Our reality can stand up to virtuality, clicking its feelers, flapping its wings, baring its fangs, rippling its fur, and glowing. Just when it seemed that Borg was the way to go, the genetic playground opened up. Cyberspace, look out, the Geners are here!
ow that the mouse with glowing ears has arrived, the fashion body will become reality. Forget all those piercings and tattoosâthey only skimmed the surface. Now we can put firefly genes to work to make us glow-in-the dark fingers and belly buttons. We can put wolf genes to work to give us a bristle of wolf-hair down our backs. We can grow splendid lemur tails and, best of all, we can fulfill humanity's age-old dream: wings. Yes, a pair of sturdy owl wings planted firmly in our shoulder blades could lift us at long last from the skin of the earth and into the blue. Genetics has opened a way both into the past and into the future: We can now mix again with animals just like the Greek gods mixed with humans, but we won't have to do it the old-fashioned way by grabbing the beasts by their necks and subduing them. The minotaur and the demigod will line up for anesthesia not rumbling. Romulus and Remus can once more suckle their wolf-mother while shepherd boys can again regale their favorite sheep with their stories, because while their favorite sheep will look for all purposes like sheep, they will in fact be humans in sheep's bodies. Movie stars will grow their own fur coats with the help of mink genes, making the killing of minks unnecessary, and the fury of antifur activists moot. Of course, these movie stars will have to wear their furs all the time because gene mixes are permanent; they will have to live in Alaska where a permanent fur coat is good.
While Hollywood will surely move to Alaska, other parts of the U.S. will serve different gene mixes: Winged people will all live along the Continental Divide in order to better swoop down from peaks over valleys. Glowing people will live in New York and other tunneled, wormy metropolises. Wolf geners will dwell in the pack zones of the North. Insect-featured clickers will hang in Seattle and multiply in cyberspace. Thanks to the mouse with the glowing ears we now have a chance to reinvent our bodies, just as it seemed that we might have to leave them behind in order to gain cyberspace. But our flesh can now compete with the virtual flesh. Our reality can stand up to virtuality, clicking its feelers, flapping its wings, baring its fangs, rippling its fur, and glowing. Just when it seemed that Borg was the way to go, the genetic playground opened up. Cyberspace, look out, the Geners are here!
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ou're in a foreign country, one of those little foreign countries just recently released from the damp basement of a dank and primitive past. Your hotel room with the soggy carpet and the tilting floor looks out onto an airshaft. Garbage flies regularly down and rats scurry at the bottom for indescribable scraps. The rotary phone doesn't work, and speaking into the lightbulb, which used to be the way to communicate in the damp old days, no longer pertains. The men who once sat patiently in a cement cubicle below your room listening breathlessly to your every breath have emigrated to a more technologically advanced country, yours let's say, in order to employ their gift for patient snooping in more rewarding ways. You are alone in your small room in this miserable damp small country at the far edge of nowhere, and there is no place to plug in your computer. There will be no phone calls, no e-mails, and certainly no snail mail for the duration of your stay, which, originally slated for one month, now looks more like an eternity.
ou're in a foreign country, one of those little foreign countries just recently released from the damp basement of a dank and primitive past. Your hotel room with the soggy carpet and the tilting floor looks out onto an airshaft. Garbage flies regularly down and rats scurry at the bottom for indescribable scraps. The rotary phone doesn't work, and speaking into the lightbulb, which used to be the way to communicate in the damp old days, no longer pertains. The men who once sat patiently in a cement cubicle below your room listening breathlessly to your every breath have emigrated to a more technologically advanced country, yours let's say, in order to employ their gift for patient snooping in more rewarding ways. You are alone in your small room in this miserable damp small country at the far edge of nowhere, and there is no place to plug in your computer. There will be no phone calls, no e-mails, and certainly no snail mail for the duration of your stay, which, originally slated for one month, now looks more like an eternity.
After the first wave of tech-withdrawal anxiety has subsided, you ask yourself: And why should I, of all people, be so connected to other people that I must suffer withdrawal anxiety? The obvious answer is that you are neither important nor irreplaceable. If you disconnect from all the plugged-in people you used to be connected to, the network will make only an infinitesimal
adjustment. No one will miss you. Your former plug-in mates will go on connecting with each other, barely noticing your absence. You realize then that the network is the most important thing. Anyone outside of it ceases to exist. You remember now, with some remorse, losing all your old epistolary friends for the simple reason that they wrote snail-mail letters, not e-mail. You dropped them into nonexistence, even though they were your oldest and best friends, because they were not plugged in. You pursued instead your newer, plugged-in acquintances, feeling as much at home as any chameleon. You are a technical parvenu.
adjustment. No one will miss you. Your former plug-in mates will go on connecting with each other, barely noticing your absence. You realize then that the network is the most important thing. Anyone outside of it ceases to exist. You remember now, with some remorse, losing all your old epistolary friends for the simple reason that they wrote snail-mail letters, not e-mail. You dropped them into nonexistence, even though they were your oldest and best friends, because they were not plugged in. You pursued instead your newer, plugged-in acquintances, feeling as much at home as any chameleon. You are a technical parvenu.
When you realize this, you stick your head down the dark airshaft and, dodging rancid cabbage, shout down: “Anybody home?” and suddenly hundreds of heads appear in the shaft windows looking at you and jabbering in some nonelectronic language. The whole Third World is at home, which is quite reassuring and, while they start throwing spoiled foodstuffs at you, you are comforted by their physical proximity. Your plug doesn't love you enough to hit you with something smelly and squishy.
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