With my concept of The Matrix
Conspiracy I put myself in the risk of being accused of being a paranoid
conspiracy theorist (see my article The Matrix Conspiracy). This is not the case. My concept is a theory of conspiracy
and not a conspiracy theory.
My main question is:
What
if it is the conspiracy theories (and their roots in the growing anti-intellectual
movement) which are a conspiracy? – see my article Anti-intellectualism
and Anti-science.
The concept of the Matrix
comes from mathematics, but is more popular known from the movie the Matrix,
which asks the question whether we might live in a computer simulation. In The Matrix though, there is also an evil
demon, or evil demons, namely the machines which keep the humans´ in tanks
linked to black cable wires that stimulates the virtual reality of the Matrix.
Doing this the machines can use the human bodies as batteries that supply the
machines with energy. This leads of course to questions of evil scientists, Sophists,
etc. It is the fascination of the virtual reality that deceives the humans.
My main critique of the matrix
conspiracy is that we in fact see powerful people who find it desirable to live
in a computer simulation, a virtual reality game of some sort, and therefore
paradoxically enough come to supports the machines in the movie, and put up
philosophies like Agent Smith could have done. This weirdness origins in the
so-called California Ideology, with a lot of computer worshippers called transhumanists
and singularitarians. These people are quite open about that they would like us
to melt together with machines and computers, and therewith solve all human
problems. The path towards this are, for example, through techniques such as
whole brain emulation and mind uploading (read a detailed analysis of this in
my Ebook Evolutionism
– The Red Thread in The Matrix Conspiracy.
It is far-streched? You would
never be in for this, would you? The consequence of evolutionism, and futurism,
is that the line between fact and fiction is getting more and more blurred. A
common trope in science fiction for decades is that the prospect of
transcending the current form may be positive, as in Arthur C. Clarke's
1953 novel Childhood's End, or negative, as in the film The
Matrix, with its barely disguised salvationist theme, or
the Terminator series of films, where humanity has
been essentially replaced by machine life. Change so radical elicits fear
and thus it is unsurprising that many of the portrayals of transhumanism in
popular culture are negative. The cyberpunk genre (foe example
Blade Runner) deals extensively with the theme of a transhumanist society gone
wrong.
Most people would probably
support that the prospect is negative. But this is not the view of The
Californian Ideology (The Silicon Valley futurism). They are following Arthur
C. Clarke. They are evolutionists and progressivists. Futurism as the ideology
of Silicon Valley sees transhumanism as positive.
On closer inspection, this
should not be surprising. Since transhumanism is ambitious about conquering
age-related illnesses (extropianism), death (immortalism), ecological damage
(technogaianism), gender
differences (postgenderism) and suffering
(abolitionism), a fictional world where this has already been achieved leaves a
story with few plot devices to exploit. Additionally, it could be hard for the
public to identify with flawless, post-human characters.
The fact is that Silicon Valley
is in progress with indoctrinating people into their ideology. It happens for
example by making people fascinated by virtual reality. And you are one of
them, right? How much time do you for example spend on Facebook daily? (besides
that you probably are aware that your children are spending too much time on
computer games). You have probably watched and agreed with dystopian movies
like Terminator and Blade Runner, but you probably haven´t realized, that
Facebook is the closest we come to a real existing Matrix Machine.
In the Popular Culture and
Philosophy series on Facebook, Trebor Scholz has written an article called Facebook as Playground and Factory,
where he gives an account of Facebook as a clever mix of playground and factory.
He asks:
“You
can´t look at what we are doing on Facebook without noticing something,
however. Do you see it? If you rent a room in an apartment then you first buy a
bed, a chair, a few things for the kitchen. You pay what you owe to the
landlady and then you cook, sleep, play, work, and invite others over to have a
party. You´re allowed to do all these things because you paid your bill. On
Facebook, the “free” services that we are consuming come at a price. All of our
actions produce value for Facebook and other companies (“third parties”).
Broadly speaking, labor markets have shifted to places where labor does not
look like labor at all.”
Our power of togetherness is
facilitated in exchange for letting operators – in this case, Facebook –
harness the “energy” from our casual interactions. In the midst of pleasure,
excitement, and possibilities of our togetherness, you and me and our networked
publics are being “worked.” We are becoming “social workers.” We are social and
we are working in the sense that we are producing economical value: both
speculative value (Scholz asks us to think: Tulip Mania of 1637, dot com crash,
Lehman brothers) and tangible value in terms of dollars in the bank.
As Tim O´Reilly says, “They
are participating without thinking that they participate. That´s where the
power comes.” Scholz claims that the “power” that O´Reilly refers to is “power”
in the sense of a “power plant”: energy that can be stored and harnessed.
Without much struggle, corporations turn a profit through activities that most
of us would never think of as “labor” or even work. The invisible labor that
follows our rituals of interactivity creates surplus value. Social
participation is the oil of the digital economy.
Scholz admits that it´s
counterintuitive to think about time spend on social networking services as
labor or wage theft. Sitting in front of our computers, staring at glowing
screens, engaging our brain, moving our computer mouse around, clicking, and
occasionally writing an update does not look or smell anything like the
industrial labor environment. It´s hard to pin down. But when we do even the
smallest of these things we are complicit in this “interactivity labor.” Our
bodies are placed in the working position before even noticing it. It´s not a
matter of opting in.
Nor is it a matter of opting
out. We all must admit that a big achievement of capitalism, really, is to make
workers believe that digital labor does not exist. But even when we realize we
are being “used,” that dawning awareness is often quickly superseded by the
experience of pleasure in the activities themselves. And we may not mind it
much. After all, being used is a lot different from being “duped,” right? It
looks like a fair deal: on the other hand, we´re constantly reminded that the
operator has tremendously operational costs – bandwidth is expensive, servers
need to be run, and developers won´t work without pay. And then, some want us
to believe that most mainstream operators don´t even make “real” money, which
is not entirely accurate.
Scholtz shows that we produce
economic value for Facebook in numerous ways, but for the sake of simplicity we
can break it down into a few basic categories: 1. Garnering attention for
advertisers; 2. Donating unpaid services and volunteer work; and 3. Offering complexes
of network data and digital traces to researchers and marketers. The first one
– attention to advertisers – is the one we are most familiar with from TV,
radio, and billboards. The second recalls good old-fashioned modes of
exploitation and expropriation, and the third takes us into the murky terrain
of total knowledge production. While far from unique to the commercial Social
Web, each of these modes of creating value has implications that are made more
acute and striking in this context.
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