Barry Vacker to discuss book at U-Mass

Barry Vacker has been invited to Jarice Hanson's graduate course on media theory at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, where he will screen his experimental documentary, Space Times Square (2007), and discuss his book, Crashing Into the Vanishing Points, which is one of the assigned texts for the course. Barry will visit the class on Monday, October 19.

Crashing Into the Vanishing Points is the second book in the "Theory Zero" series and is available in Amazon as a high-quality paperback and Kindle ebook.

existential expresso now in iTunes

Theory Vortex is happy to announce that Existential Espresso is now available in iTunes. Here is the link:

http://tinyurl.com/EEpodcasts

The triumph and crash of Apollo

This passage includes excerpts from Starry Skies Moving Away, my book about how humans have imagined utopia and destiny in relation to cosmology, and the all-too-real impact this has on society. This post is a small gesture of appreciation for Apollo 11 on the 40th anniversary of perhaps the greatest triumph in human history.

This passage is also the story of a scientific triumph met by a philosophical crash, situating Apollo 8 as the most important flight and as ground zero for the rebirth of fundamentalism and creationism. This is the crashed legacy of Apollo, the potential for a global culture of peace and enlightenment, but which, so far, has yet to be.

This is the story existing right before our eyes, yet never told by the media, the story of which most humans remain in denial. We are not the center of the universe and there is no Creator looking out for us.

From Starry Skies Moving Away:

The Space Age

Now well into the third millennium, it may be hard to fully understand the utopian spirit of the space age, when the infinite possibilities of humanity were symbolized in the quest to launch rockets into the starry skies. The idea of projecting people into outer space seemed like the natural trajectory for humanity and modernity. [...]

It is likely that humanity has never been more united or enthralled in pursuit of a single goal than it has in the launch of a spaceship destined to put humans on the moon. Throughout popular culture of the 1950s and 1960s, the dream of the space age was imagined as the next phase of human destiny, the natural evolution of scientific modernity on Earth and in the universe, with skyscrapers pointing toward the stars, satellites orbiting the global village, and spaceships rocketing through the solar system. [...]

A fan of Ian Fleming’s 007 novels, President John Kennedy was also enamored of the space age. The space age was central to his utopian vision of a “New Frontier” for America — ensuring equal rights for all citizens, eliminating poverty and prejudice, and promoting global peace and democratic freedom at the height of the cold war. In one of the great speeches of the twentieth century, which was given at Rice University in Houston, President Kennedy declared that America would put a human on the moon by the end of the decade:

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

To achieve this goal, President Kennedy committed America’s scientific and technological resources to the space age, seeking to defeat the Soviet Union in putting humans on the moon. In the speech, President Kennedy described Houston and Mission Control as becoming “the furthest outpost on the new frontier of science and space.”

President Kennedy’s metaphor was instructive, for it not only expressed the New Frontier ambitions, but also suggested this frontier would indeed be vast and pose new challenges for science and human knowledge, especially for our individual and collective comprehension of our role and fate in the universe. In the same speech, President Kennedy stated:

The vast stretches of the unknown and the unanswered and the unfinished still far outstrip our collective comprehension. . . . The growth of our science and education will be enriched by new knowledge of our universe and environment.

Echoing across the decades, much of President Kennedy’s speech remains relevant today, precisely because it speaks to the cosmic destiny inherent in the human condition — not only in the big bang universe, but also in the current age of ever more technological innovations, scientific discoveries, and expansions of cyberspace and the Internet, all of which make possible the viral explosions of information and enlightenment, ignorance and inquisition, science and superstition. [...]

Launched on December 21, 1968, Apollo 8 was celebrated around the world as a great human achievement, with the astronauts viewed as heroes by an awed humanity. The three astronauts were named “Men of the Year” by Time magazine, an honor not accorded the subsequently more famous Apollo 11 astronauts who walked on the moon.

History says the space race reached its cold war climax on July 20, 1969, when Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the moon’s surface, preceded by Armstrong’s famous line — “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” The achievement generated euphoric excitement in much of the world. Upon their return, the three Apollo 11 astronauts — Armstrong, Aldrin, and Michael Collins — were celebrated as heroes throughout much of the world. There were ticker-tape parades in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, followed by a forty-five-day “Great Leap” tour of twenty-five nations and visits with the usual assortment of prominent dignitaries. Since Apollo 11, there has been nowhere near the same amount of euphoria for any human accomplishment, except perhaps for midnight December 31, 1999, when humanity accomplished the mere feat of surviving into another new millennium.

Given the cultural conditions of the new millennium, something possibly more profound and prophetic happened seven months prior to the televised moonwalk of Apollo 11, something professed in the televised space-talk of Apollo 8. Apollo 8 was launched on December 21, 1968, with a plan for orbiting the moon ten times and conducting television broadcasts during the journey. En route to the moon, the astronauts conducted a television broadcast that included images of the Earth as seen from outer space. The black-and-white images were transmitted back to Mission Control in Houston, and then around the world via satellite. One billion television viewers gazed in awe at the totality of human origins and human destiny captured in a single instant, in a single moment, glowing on the black-and-white screens — Earth as a gray orb floating in the cosmic void.

On December 24, 1968, the space age reached a philosophical climax as Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders curved behind the moon for the first time and entered radio silence. When Apollo 8 disappeared behind the moon, the astronauts were truly alone, both cosmically and spiritually, as were the people listening on Earth. The thirty-six minutes of radio silence stretched across the fabric of space-time, across millennia past and future, for in the unbroken quiet existed the ultimate fate of humanity, the most radical existential condition facing every person on Earth. Collectively and individually, we are alone (so far as we know) in an indifferent universe, a universe that obeys the laws of its own being in its vast nothingnesses, the fabric of space-time containing all things as it expands in all directions and dimensions. In that radio silence held the destiny of modernity, where the space-age dreams were forced to confront space-age discoveries.

As Apollo 8 emerged from the dark side of the moon, the astronauts turned on the cameras to capture perhaps the most profound image in human history — the image of a blue-and-white Earth rising above the desolate horizon of the moon, floating alone against the dark cosmic void. The full-color Earthrise photo was much more striking than the televised gray images of Earth, and again forced humans to confront their true place in the cosmos.

On Christmas Eve, during the television broadcast from the moon, over one billion viewers tuned in to hear the Apollo 8 astronauts describe what they saw and felt:

Frank Borman: I know my impression is that it's a vast, lonely, forbidding-type existence, or expanse of nothing.

Jim Lovell: The vast loneliness up here of the moon is awe inspiring, and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth. The Earth from here is a grand oasis in the big vastness of space.

Bill Anders: The sky up here is also rather forbidding, foreboding expanse of blackness, with no stars visible when we're flying over the Moon in daylight.

In the images of Earth and moon amidst the cosmic void, the astronauts united humanity in the unavoidable task of contemplating our true existential place in the vast cosmos. In our postmillennial age of market segmentation and media fragmentation, it may be difficult to grasp the significance of that moment. As the astronauts spoke, one billion people were simultaneously watching the same images on television, all contemplating the same cosmic phenomena, as if television was permitting the universe to quietly and poetically address our most profound questions. That Christmas Eve in 1968, being and nothingness starred on prime-time television, the material universe and the media universe united in an astounding scientific, technological, and philosophical accomplishment, all before the eyes of the largest audience to witness an event in human history (up until that time).

As the Apollo 8 astronauts spoke to Earth from their lunar orbit, they were following trajectories determined by the computers at Mission Control, binary sequences coded in the clockwork cosmos of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. Centuries later, their clockwork cosmos was starring on the screens of global television. Also starring on television were the dreams of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, the early science-fiction prophets of technological society and space travel.

Yet, in the final moments of the Christmas Eve broadcast from Apollo 8, we see the simultaneous climax and crash of the space age. Television viewers gazed upon the lunar surface passing below the window of the Apollo 8 spacecraft, while knowing that Earth was nearby, quietly floating alone in space. At this pinnacle of philosophical and scientific modernity, with one billion people gazing into the cosmic void and confronting their cosmic destiny, the astronauts concluded the broadcast without any reference to science or technology, art or philosophy. Instead, in a leap backward that spanned the millennia, the astronauts concluded the broadcast by reading passages from Genesis in the Bible! Astronaut Bill Anders began the sermon with these words:

We are now approaching lunar sunrise, and for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you. In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth. And the Earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters, and God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light.

The other two astronauts continued with subsequent passages from Genesis before concluding with “Merry Christmas and God bless all of you — all of you on the good Earth.” The sermon from the moon surely had cold war implications, suggesting the God-fearing Americans had defeated the godless communists in winning the space race. But, the ultimate meaning of the space race and space age was not merely political, but was radically existential, the effect of which is still being felt in America and around the world.

Just think: at the moment of humankind’s greatest scientific and technological accomplishment, secular and modern philosophy were utterly absent. If the Apollo 11 moonwalk was a “giant leap for mankind,” then the Apollo 8 space-talk was a great leap backward for the human mind, with the creation myths born of the premodern mind suggesting not scientific revolution, but spiritual devolution. Oral myths echoing across the millennia, codified into sacred texts, were blindly repeated and transmitted from Apollo 8 to Earth. As those creationist signals came down from the moon to Mission Control at the speed of light, the space age crashed into the age of superstition and Newton’s clockwork cosmos crashed into Kant’s Copernican Revolution. It was as if Kant’s dream had come true, with science saving faith.

Four decades later and two decades following the cold war, the Apollo 8 reading of Genesis suggests something ideologically and intellectually disturbing. If there was a ground zero for secular and scientific modernity, a moment of intellectual apocalypse signaling the rise of creationism and fundamentalism, it was the Apollo 8 astronauts reading from the Bible as they coasted on scientific and technological genius at the very moment of humanity’s chance to grasp its place in the cosmos.

In that space sermon, we saw the irrelevance of modern philosophy, the abandonment of human reason, and the sheer failure of humanity at the moment when we had the utter freedom to confront being and nothingness, the nothingness in our minds (feeling awe, yet lacking meaning), and the nothingness of our future, our fate in the cosmos. Instead of new ideas, new theories, new possible meanings for human destiny, the nothingness of cosmic being was met by creationism. The nothingness and lack of meaning in human minds was filled with superstition; the nothingness of the future was filled with myths of the past.

Though the challenge of getting humans to the moon was met, President Kennedy’s other challenge has not been met by most Americans, or most of the world — the challenge facing our collective comprehension, the challenge to enrich ourselves with scientific explorations into the unknown, to embrace our new understandings and new knowledge of the universe. More than merely fulfilling the first step of the modern space age, Apollo 8’s trip around the moon and the images of the cosmic void introduced popular culture to the postmodern space age — the real space age of a vast and expanding universe, far more vast than anything previously imagined.

Of all the events in the 1960s, the journey and broadcast of Apollo 8 has left the greatest legacy in the new millennium, far more than the assassinations of President Kennedy and Martin Luther King, more than the Beatles or Woodstock, more than hippies or drugs, more than student uprisings and urban riots, more than the Tet Offensive and Vietnam, more than the “Summer of Love” in San Francisco or the strike of May, 1968, in Paris.

According to mainstream theory and history, Apollo 8 and the Genesis reading saved the violent year of 1968, uniting religions and comforting one billion people in a spiritual triumph for troubled times. Forty years after the Apollo 8 broadcasts, news media around the world recalled the event as a triumph of technology and the human spirit, culminating in the Genesis reading that has echoed across the decades. But was it a triumph, or crash of epic proportions?

On the cover of the April 16, 1968, issue of Time magazine there was but a single question: “Is God Dead?” Eight months later, the television images provided by Apollo 8 clearly answered: Yes! Indeed, modern science had pulled back the curtain on premodern mythology. Astronomy and technology trumped astrology and theology. Yet, the images of Apollo 8 failed to convince the astronauts of Apollo 8 (or one billion people), illustrating that the myth of God was still alive. Each of those people had one hundred billion neurons — a veritable Milky Way — in his or her own mind, yet a billion of these cognitive galaxies were closed to the expanding universe from which they emerged.

The Apollo 8 Christmas Eve sermon comforted the masses with the ultimate megachurch experience: the astronauts confronted the vast universe with another kind of “Mission Control,” a spiritual mission controller as the master of the universe. Such an answer to the question on the April 16 cover of Time is perhaps the deeper reason the astronauts were named “Men of the Year.” We really shouldn’t be surprised that the last issue of Time in 1969 featured a cover story asking a new question: “Is God Coming Back to Life?” The difference in the cover images of the two God issues is striking. The cover asking if God is dead had big red letters against a solid black background, while the cover asking if God was reborn featured blue and purple letters against a white background, with sun rays streaking through the page as if a sunrise was anticipated in the new decade. Should we be surprised that Jesus Christ Superstar returned to Earth in 1970, reborn as a rock star for the baby boomers, a stage star for the Broadway lights, a movie Messiah for the multiplexes and megachurches? Even in the new millennium, Jesus Christ is still a pop culture superstar, the supernova of superstition and spectacle.

The Apollo 8 broadcast was the greatest mind-body split in philosophical history, with the human mind retreating to the superstitious past while the human body was propelled into the scientific future, the future of total technology. Rather than seeing a human being united in mind and body confidently embracing its place in the cosmos, we see the once-modern human split between past and future, myth and science, zombie and robot. The zombie is religion, the body without a mind, once thought dead, but now reborn and stalking the world it despises and does not care to understand. The robot is the human machine without an autonomous mind, preprogrammed and utterly reliant on technology, walking around in a world it does not understand, nor care to understand. When zombie and robot merge via technology, the result is the clone, the power to be reborn forever, to be copied eternally, in a reality endlessly reproduced, the very conditions we see in the global merger of premodern myth and postmodern media culture.

The legacy of Apollo 8 is the mind-body split, the myth of God, the model of Gaia, and the media of computers and cyberspace, all set against the cosmic void. Though computers had been demonstrated at the 1962 World’s Fair, the world had seen nothing like the achievement of the NASA computers in guiding Apollo 8 to the moon and back. This digital achievement seemed more astonishing when it was shown against the cosmic void of deep space. The power of computers permeated popular consciousness around the world, with outer space giving birth to cyberspace. Yet, on television screens around the world, the cosmic void hinted at the truth of the big bang universe, the existential condition before which humanity’s existential spirituality collapsed into superstitions of gods and creation myths. In 1968, Apollo 8 orbited the moon, but it crashed into Spaceship Earth, that planet with an origin and destiny of which most humans remain in denial, that planet floating in the vast void of the cosmos.

Two Moonwalks: Neil's and Michael's

The world’s most famous moonwalk was not performed on the moon.

The world’s most famous moonwalk was performed on the stage by an entertainer, not on the moon by an astronaut. This was true even before the tragic passing of Michael Jackson, who long ago passed Neil Armstrong as the most famous moonwalker on planet Earth.

Berry Gordy, founder of Motown Records, eloquently expressed this idea at Michael’s memorial service: “From the first beat of 'Billie Jean' and the toss of that hat, I was mesmerized. But when he did his iconic moonwalk, I was shocked. It was magic. Michael Jackson went into orbit and never came down.”

With the upcoming 40^th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moonwalk, it might be useful to compare the two moonwalks and see what we can learn about the trajectory of American and global pop culture since 1969.

Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was the culmination of a decade-long race to the moon, pitting the former Soviet Union against the United States, the two superpowers of the Cold War. But the space race was more than a test of economic ideologies.

Neil’s moonwalk happened on the moon, the signature expression of the human desire to explore the ever-expanding universe. The moonwalk was a massive media event, televised back to Earth to approximately one billion people, the largest audience ever assembled (at that time). Astronauts were a generation’s most revered heroes.

Michael’s moonwalk happened on a stage, the signature expression of a celebrity supernova in the ever-expanding media universe. The moonwalk became a lasting media image, first televised in a 1983 NBC program celebrating the 25^th anniversary of Motown. Entertainers and celebrities are now a generation’s most revered heroes.

Neil’s moonwalk was the climax of the space age, that secular model of social destiny. Then, much of humanity saw its fate mapped upon the starry skies of outer space, a cosmic symbol of scientific understanding and technological accomplishment. Neil’s moonwalk was about progress, going forward, moving into the future. Remember, Neil’s moonwalk began with the famous line: “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Michael’s moonwalk occurred amidst the explosion of the non-stop information age, that postindustrial model of social destiny. In 1983, cable TV and personal computers were emerging to shape today’s non-stop, online, all-the-time, 24/7 media universe. Now, much of humanity, especially the youth, sees its destiny mapped upon the starry skies of cyberspace, less enlightened than entertained in a media world of endless movies, music, video games, sports highlights, news clips, and so on. After all, Michael’s moonwalk was during the hit song, “Billie Jean,” which began with the line: “She was more like a beauty queen from a movie scene…”

Hollywood has produced no feature movies about the Apollo 11 moonwalkers. Michael Jackson, however, was the star of Moonwalker and Francis Ford’ Coppola’s Captain EO, the latter of which played for almost a decade at the Disney theme parks and featured Michael as a space traveler. Michael’s memorial was broadcast on 18 networks in America, beamed to 200 nations, and streamed throughout cyberspace.

Neil’s moonwalk was a pinnacle moment for humanity’s confidence in science as a key to enlightenment and a shared understanding of the destiny of humanity and Earth in the cosmos. This was the culture of blastoff into a better tomorrow.

Rather than understand Earth and the universe, ever more people spend their time creating their places in the media universe, as evidenced by the sheer number of blogs, tweets, personal web sites, YouTube clips, and 10 billion photos in Facebook. This is the culture of upload and download a better video.

Michael’s moonwalk naturally came in the decade after the end of the space age and the Apollo landings on the moon. Humans went to the moon, looked around, and came back.

Perhaps it makes sense that Michael’s moonwalk famously gives the impression of taking steps forward, but always moving backward. Michael’s moonwalk dance began rising to fame at a time when America and the world began moving in two opposite directions. Since the early 1980’s, the rise of the 24/7 media universe has been paralleled by the rise of religious radicalism in its many forms. Humans now are being propelled forward by rapid technological evolution, while being propelled backward toward the anti-scientific worlds of creationism, fundamentalism, and evangelical presidents.

When President John F. Kennedy eloquently inspired America to land a human on the moon by the end of the 1960s, he also challenged us to further develop a scientific understanding of the our place in the cosmos as a by-product of space exploration. Forty years after Apollo 11, with the majority of Americans believing in a 10,000-year-old universe, we have to wonder if Kennedy’s challenge is being met.

As we mourn Michael’s passing and celebrate Neil’s walking on the moon, perhaps we should also pause to contemplate the two moonwalkers and their universes. As a culture, are we ready to blastoff in the real universe or merely download our destinies in the media universe?

Barry Vacker interviewed in Philadelphia CityPaper

Jimmy Viola of Philadelphia CityPaper interviewed Barry Vacker about his new Theory Zero book series .... and the social effects of the internet, the death of newspapers, Las Vegas and Ground Zero, Kindle and Coke Zero, LED screens as a substitute cosmos, America as a socialist theocracy, and the fate of human civilization, at least as Hollywood films it! Here is the link to the published interview.

Jimmy is a one very cool free-thinking journalist ... but even City Paper could not handle the entire dialogue. Below is the unedited Q&A. You might find the omissions interesting, especially the part about religion and science ... secular utopias .... or the meaning of Brad Pitt and Ed Norton shirtless and sweaty in Fight Club. Who can resist that!

1. Why is there an obsession with the theme of zeroes?

Obsession or observations? The zero theme emerged when I kept seeing "zero" appear in popular culture before and after the millennium. There were the many millennium clocks counting down to all zeros, toward the dreaded double zero of Y2K and the triple zero of 2000. And there was the digital zero in the Matrix and Fight Club. And Ground Zero, Coke Zero, carbon zero, and many others.

The hyper-literal reader might say the recurring zeros mean nothing. And they are right. Zero does mean nothing, and, in meaning nothing, it means much more.

Zero is a powerful number, signifying countdown or blastoff, the moment at the end or the beginning. But, end or beginning of what? Or is zero a void or a nothingness providing new cultural opportunities?

Zero Conditions explores the zeros and shows what they mean for postmillennial culture. For example, in the book, I discuss the ecological ground zero. We face ground zero with global warming. However, as you can see from the marketing hype, to the innovation, to the Obama priority, this ecological ground zero may be a starting point for something new in our culture.

On the other hand, we faced ground zero on September 11, and we are still in denial that the Terror War is a largely theological war. The Terror War has replaced the Cold War in the battle for global domination. Starbucks and Ikea are less a threat to civilization than those who would prefer the world be ruled under the “designer” logos of the cross and crescent moon.

We also have hit ground zero in our ability to reproduce the world as a copy, a clone. This is illustrated by Coke Zero, the soft drink simulacrum, and Las Vegas, the city as simulacrum. Strangely, the hotel New York-New York anticipated September 11 when it was built in 1997, for the Twin Towers were never included in the massive themed hotel. This is a case of the map anticipating the territory.

Since the publication of Zero Conditions, readers have identified many other examples of cultural “zeros,” listed at this link on the website for the books.

My books do not provide simplistic answers born of outmoded ideologies, nor do they encourage readers to “think like me.” I like to think of my works as critical theory for creative thinkers, clearing open new vistas for readers to think about the world they live in and the world they might want.

2. How would you define a vanishing point? Why are they important?

Vanishing points are important for understanding our apocalyptic culture in a new way. The stock market crash is not the only crash, it is just the cover story.

As Hollywood repeatedly shows us, we can envision the end of the world, but not the end of God or ghosts or wars. Every summer, filmgoers flock to see the end of the world in apocalyptic films. Humanity could vanish at any moment, but not superstitions or war. TV is much the same. This strange situation was perfectly expressed in the hit show Battlestar Gallactica. Humanity may die out, but not human ignorance, as if the two are not related.

If we can imagine the end of the world but not the end of God or ghosts, then the Enlightenment project and secular modernity are "crashing" into a vanishing point.

A vanishing point is a creative way to visualize the trajectory of modernity. The vanishing point signifies three existential ideas: the end of the world, the edge of the world, the rest of the world, all contained in a single point at the horizon. The trajectory of modernity was always toward the vanishing points, to create a new world, to remake the world in all directions. From the city centers, the mechanized metropolis extended in all directions, toward the vanishing points. Skyscrapers pointed toward the vanishing points in the skies, while highways and trains extended into the vanishing points. Jets and rockets disappeared into vanishing points in the skies or beyond horizons.

Over the past few decades, modernity can be seen crashing into five vanishing points, or five apocalypses, each denoted by a ground zero. Nuclear: with a ground zero at Trinity and Hiroshima. Virtual: with a ground zero at Tomorrowland, where the future is simulated as the past. Ecological: with a ground zero in the Gaia hypothesis and global warming. Secular: with a ground zero when Apollo 8 read from the Bible while orbiting the moon. Cosmic: with the ground zero being the big bang and the galaxies moving away upon all horizons. Science can even model the end of the universe!

3. "Crashing into Vanishing Points" is very critical of religious ideology. Can religion and science ever co-exist?

I am existentialist, minus the angst. There is far less evidence for God or Allah than UFOs or Bigfoot. In fact, there is zero evidence for any cosmic creator.

I view the above question as assuming a nonexistent equality between religion and science. Let's restate the question. Should superstition and science coexist as equally sane methods for understanding the universe, life on planet earth, and human destiny, collectively and individually? If the answer is no, then why should they coexist as guides for virtue, morality, or social organization?

Religion amounts to deities promising destinies. Humans need to grow up and realize the absurdity of believing that we are the center of the universe, with hundreds of billions of galaxies. There is no cosmic creator who cares about our collective and personal destinies.

We should elevate art and science to the center of our understanding the universe and derive philosophical meaning from what we discover, rather than believing in myths, fables, and superstitions. Let’s face it, scientists are often great discoverers, but generally lame philosophers. That is why interested theorists and artists should perform their intellectual tasks in deriving, discovering, and representing the values and meanings revealed via the scientific method and its evolving bodies of knowledge.

I say we celebrate our place in this strange and beautiful universe. We live on a planet orbiting a star on the fringe of the Milky Way, in an expanding universe of hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars. All existing amidst a sea of expanding voids, shoving the galaxies away from each other, destined to either disappear upon the horizons or converge back together. It is a beautiful picture. We should embrace it. Knowing this is no reason to feel insignificant, but rather is the starting point for truly human values, values that reflect the universe. To ignore this is to be forever lost amidst the cosmos.

We are the stardust that became conscious and we are desperately seeking meaning and models for living in this universe. We need new models for utopias, models for society and humanity that accept the big bang, vast voids, evolution, chaos and complexity, and so on. These bodies of knowledge may have radical implications for social organization and personal meaning. Utopian models that express the world in a unity of discovery and idealism, not the delusions of mere dreams and imaginary deities. But, the models are not in existence, as far as I know.

4. Why do you think there are still "flat earthers"-- people who fiercely cling to dogma--in spite of our technological advancements?

The same reason there are Urban Cowboys.

5. Where do you see media technology taking us in the future?

Media and culture together? It’s a tough decision: Blade Runner and Neuromancer(both depict recombinant techno-culture) meet Planet of the Apes (creationist culture) meets 2001: A Space Odyssey (Dave’s journey: where cyberspace merges with outer space in the cosmic void) meets The Truman Show (Disneyland a small town hyperreality) meets Fight Club (war with modern civilization).

6. Why is it important to consider the philosophical implications of media technology?

Let me answer that question by referring to the Amazon Kindle. Is the Kindle merely a cool way to access books? Perhaps true at one level. My books are in Kindle.

But, at a deeper level, the Kindle suggests the full merger of books and computers, print with electronic, real space with cyberspace.

Then we must ask if books and computers are merely neutral vessels carrying the far more important stuff: the content and messages. Or is the book itself more important? Did the book, mass-produced by the printing press, help bring about the modern industrial world and the very ideas of free speech and free press?

And, what are the computer and internet if not the complete merger of the printing press with all previous electronic media in a vast global network. Will this not change the organization of the world as we know it? The book and printing press did. Why should the internet be different, when it is far more powerful than the printing press? Computers and the internet have transformed global finance, but do not tell that to our policy makers, who seem to think we are living in 1930s industrial America.

So, most of our culture is dominated by superficial understandings of the effects of media technology, which lead to naive theories of social change and misguided political policies. We substitute technological proficiency for philosophical understanding.

7. What initially interested you in media theory and philosophy?

The realization that the fundamental changes I saw effected in the world by media technology were not what I was taught in grad school, nor what the two ruling political ideologies were saying, nor what the media experts were blathering about on TV and on editorial pages of newspapers. So, many years ago, I turned to McLuhan, Sartre, Baudrillard, chaos and complexity theory, and other ideas and thinkers.

8. How has media altered our perception of the world?

This can be explained by three reasons.

1. Media technologies are not neutral.

2. The medium is the message.

3. The survival imperative of information is not to represent the world, but to copy itself.

All of these are why the media map has overtaken the territory, reflecting the drive for humans to make copies, to clone the world in their own mental image.

1. Media technologies are not neutral. By this, I do not mean human bias. Rather, as media technologies expand in power, they change our view of the universe, our view of human potential, and how society should be organized.

One potent example is the telescope, especially the newest ones attached to powerful cameras and computers. Galileo and his telescope dislodged Earth from the center of the universe. Edwin Hubble used a telescope and photographic plates to discover the big bang and a very large universe. Now we know there are billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars. This discovery represents a radical evolution of our view of the universe, effected by scientists using media technologies. Humanity is grappling with the meaning of this discovery and religions are retreating from this reality, offering simplistic models of creation to counter the expanding universe.

2. McLuhan was correct when he said: "The medium is the message." He meant that the form of media technology has a greater impact on society than the messages carried. Society adapts to the patterns effected by the new technologies, precisely because they represent new and more powerful forms of perception.

For example, the printing press ushered in the modern industrial world, creating the first mass media and the first forms of mass production. Society reorganized along new lines, for better and sometimes for worse. Literacy become the expected norm, an issue that educators grapple with today.

Computers and the internet will exceed the impact of the printing press, precisely because the internet unites the printing press, television, movies, and all electronic media. We are only at the beginning of the restructuring of society and its institutions. By this, I am not referring to presidents using websites and Twitter. That is mostly superficial, especially if the policies indicate little insights into the potential of the internet beyond propaganda, fund-raising, and social control.

The death of many traditional newspapers is just one effect of television and the internet, one of many to come. It is no coincidence and that modern newspapers rose in concert with the nation-state. Is the nation-state in danger?

As illustrated by the internet and the global financial networks, electronic media make borders obsolete. Yet, around the world, nations are defending borders ever more fiercely.

Twitter and Facebook do illustrate the next step of the merger of celebrity and surveillance, which are two-sides of the same real-time, all-the-time media universe. Orwell underestimated the level of surveillance; there will be no single Big Brother, but lots of little brothers and many "friends" and "followers." Seems we are heading into a future with little privacy.

3. Information loves to copy itself, especially when it is produced by humans. Copying information is the first principle of life inside a cell and copying the world is the first goal of information for human knowledge.

That is why there are theme parks and Las Vegas, with its hotels that clone other cities. Like New York-New York and Paris, Las Vegas. At one level, Disneyland, Vegas, and Times Square are fantasy lands. But, the deeper truth is they are symbolic microcosms of our mediated universe, which has expanded so rapidly it now generates the territories most people inhabit. Most people in postindustrial societies spend most of their waking hours with media, usually in front of a screen, meaning that the media are the territories of their reality.

Civilization has been a struggle for knowledge, the battle between information about the world as we wish it were and how it actually is. Of course, this is reflected in the evolution of science, the evolution of human knowledge, the never ending struggle for freedom of expression, and so on.

The internet has the potential for enlightenment and ignorance, entertainment and inquisition. The internet is proving to be a place for far more copying than generating original information or knowledge. So, we are faced with the proliferation of the cloned mind, the mind that merely copies information, but understands little.

Random Soundbite:

Trying to understand the effects of the internet by siding with the left or right is like trying to understand the effects of the highway system by comparing Ford and GM.

8. What are the deeper philosophical overtones of Fight Club that continues to compell audiences, besides Brad Pitt and Ed Norton shirtless and sweaty?

Well, I am sure many women and some men cannot fight the sex club fantasies of sliding in between Brad and Ed, shirtless and shimmering, with their six-pack abs and sweaty bodies.

But, it seems most people think Tyler Durden is merely a bad-boy hipster rebelling against IKEA lifestyles as he heroically resists the corporate imperatives of the consumer society? Not exactly!

In the book and film, the "fight club" ideology is waging war against civilization, yearning for a rebirth of premodern culture amidst the ruins of the modern and postmodern worlds. Fight Club is where Luddites meet fundamentalism, where the Unabomber meets the Taliban, for the black-clad "space monkeys" are the noble savages of the non-information age, the next humans of the non-future, hoping to rule over what inevitably would become a real-life planet of the apes.

9. Tell me about Starry Skies? Where does it lead readers in your theory vortex series?

It is the "Theory Zero" series, published by Theory Vortex.

For millennia, humans have gazed at the stars and imagined that the patterns "out there" might shape the destinies "down here" on planet Earth. It is all very natural to think our fate is connected to the stars, because it is! Without the star we call the sun, we would soon perish.

But, with the rise of the modern metropolis, the starry skies have been replaced by electric lights, neon signs, TVs and computers, LED screens, and so on. Most humans are utterly disconnected from the cosmos, as their "cosmos" is almost entirely their city and anything glowing on the screens of the via the media. The only stars they care about are movie stars and celebrity figures.

Starry Skies Moving Away leads readers out of the fantasy that humans are at the center of the universe .... and the fantasy that some cosmic master is looking out for us in our infantile visions of premodern utopias, gardens of eden, and so on. If civilization is to survive and flourish, then it needs new models of utopia that realize we do NOT live in a "geocentric" universe, nor a "clockwork" universe, nor a soon-to-be-traversable universe of the "space age," nor merely the universe of "cyberspace." Rather we live in a cosmos of the big bang, an expanding universe of hundreds of billions of galaxies, thrust apart by vast voids, and this universe features the processes of evolution, chaos, complexity, (etc.) along with matter and massive voids, voids in the cosmos and in our atoms!

The book tracks the evolution of utopia and the evolution of how humans have imagined the starry skies, with many examples drawn from art, film, media, science, technology, etc. So far, there are no utopian models that mirror the big bang and the emerging fields of chaos, complexity, etc.

We need new utopian models that embrace these kinds of scientific ideas and are secular and eco-technological, not religious or authoritarian, which are quickly combining to be the American model of "the future" (that is past). America is fast becoming an authoritarian socialist theocracy, where everyone is supposed to be content to have their lives ordered by two gods -- church and state. It is strikingly pathetic.

But most chose to be perpetually amused and "enlightened" by the military-information-entertainment-theological-conspiracy-consumer-culture-war complex that dominates our government and society.

10. In what ways do you see people's obsessions with lights and stars in the digital age?

If there is an obsession among 90% of the population, it must be the stars of the media universe -- which is expanding exponentially. And everyone can be a star by expressing their right to free speech in Facebook and Twitter! Or by becoming a star on American Idol or by Dancing With the Stars. There are the "real" stars living in the real universe that matters to most people, the hyperreal universe.

11. What do you think of the state the news media today? How will people get their news with so many news papers failing?

The problems of the news media are not the cause, merely the effect. To survive, I am sure most newspapers will become some kind of multimedia firm, trying to making most of their revenues online, while reducing paper costs as much as possible.

But, the problems are the effect ... the effect of television, remote controls, lack of reading, declining attention spans, hypertext, text-messaging, info overload, and anti-intellectualism, etc.

And, you could say that if our lives are to be ordered by church and state, then why bother to read or think? Just tune in to Dancing with the Stars and American Idol. After all, the "truth" and everything you need to know is supposed be in a single book ... and government agencies are given deity-like powers that assume they are omniscient and have more insight than billions of people combined (re: the stock market crisis). So, why read or think?

Space Times Square to screen at conference in NYC

Space Times Square has been invited for a screening at the International Conference for the Institute of General Semantics, to be held at Fordham University in New York City (September 11-13). This academically prestigious conference is sponsored by the Media Ecology Association and several other NYC arts and scholarly organizations.

The film will be featured in its own session, with Barry Vacker introducing the film and fielding questions from scholars and filmgoers afterward. 

This conference marks the tenth juried or invited screening for Space Times Square (2007), which has screened on three continents. The international venues have ranged from film festivals to art galleries to academic conferences. For a complete list and many comments about the film, see the film website. 

the space age, moonwalks, and Michael Jackson

Excerpt from Barry Vacker's Starry Skies Moving Away (2009)

(...) The idea of the big bang universe, far more vast than anything previously imaginable, began to filter into popular culture in the 1950s, at the beginning of the space age and the suburban migration. Through the 1960s, the space age retained its utopian energies, until the intellectual crash with Apollo 8 and the increasing boredom among the masses after the moonwalk (as illustrated by the decreasing television audiences for each subsequent visit to the moon). Moonwalks became old news, returning to Earth as the famous dance by Michael Jackson, a superstar in the celebrity universe. Meanwhile, the size of the known universe kept increasing because astronomers could see farther with larger, more powerful telescopes. Human understanding of the universe was expanding along with the actual universe, yet it seemed utopian energies were disappearing from the starry skies. (...)