This is the text of my Existential Espresso podcast, December 22, 2010.
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So, here we are, nearing the end of the first decade of the new millennium. And, it is clear that while much has changed in the decade, with regard to technology, it is equally clear that much of nothing has changed, with regard to ideology. In the past two weeks, the United States has attacked WikiLeaks for releasing the truth, Time magazine declared the founder of Facebook to be the “Person of the Year,” Newsweek magazine said the Religious Right believes America is destined to be “God’s Country” (and that’s a quote), and Disney released Tron: Legacy.
These past two weeks have shown that human culture works in such strange and beautiful and revealing ways, which is why I love the insights of chaos and complexity theory. Patterns that seem unconnected, reveal themselves in ways that are unpredictable, yet causal and synchronous, with singularities and strange attractors just waiting to emerge. So, it is with the events I mentioned. And, in that beauty is revealed some of the ugliness of human behavior on Spaceship Earth.
1. The U.S. government has attacked WikiLeaks for revealing truthful information, launching a full-on information war, unleashing a torrent of propaganda fully embraced by the American mainstream mass media. The whole spectacle has been utterly disgraceful and the U.S. ought to be embarrassed at such intellectual hypocrisy and the flouting of the First Amendment and undermining the principles of a democratic society. Emerging from within that democracy is a theocracy, but that is a topic for another day.
On Sunday, Vice-President Joe Biden labeled Julian Assange a “high-tech terrorist.” Evangelical presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, and others, have called for the execution and/or assassination of Julian Assange. And, the mainstream media utter hardly a complaint.
What unites liberal and conservative politicians so well? First, it is their apparent ignorance of constitutional law, the First Amendment, and clear Supreme Court precedent, particularly in the cases of New York Times v. United States in 1971 and Reno V. ACLU in 1997. The first ruling involved the famed Pentagon Papers, where the Court was clear on this matter: the government may not prevent the media from releasing information that reveals government lies, even during times of war. In Reno v ACLU, the Court was equally clear: the government may not censor ideas on the internet, which should function like a chaotic marketplace of ideas. To prosecute Assange or WikiLeaks would require overturning those rulings while making a mockery of the First Amendment.
The second reason that unites liberal and conservatives can only be described as the defense of military, corporate, and theocratic empire, all celebrated in the spectacle that is the mainstream media.
The Terror War is a battle inspired by premodern ideologies, fought with postmodern technologies, as illustrated by WikiLeaks and symbolized in TRON: Legacy.
2. At the very same time the U.S. is condemning and attacking WikiLeaks, the U.S. State Department announces the U.S. is hosting UNESCO’s World Press Freedom Day event in 2011. The theme for the event: 21st Century Media: New Frontiers, New Barriers. In the press release, the State Department declared: “We mark events such as World Press Freedom Day in the context of our enduring commitment to support and expand press freedom and the free flow of information in this digital age.” George Orwell’s doublethink is alive and well in America and the rest of the world — “we must protect our freedoms by giving up our liberties.”
3. And, to cap off the first decade of the new millennium, Disney releases TRON: Legacy, the sequel to the 1982 classic which foresaw the issues of intellectual freedom in a cyberspace ordered by computer code, where software programs dominated users. The film prophesied a future of information warfare, fought with computer code. In the sequel, Kevin Flynn (again played by Jeff Bridges) has become something akin to a Buddhist philosopher defending the beauty of free flowing information and open networks.
Is Julian Assange sort of a real life Kevin Flynn for our current era? It’s not a perfect match, but the visual philosophical ideas in TRON: Legacy correlate in meaningful ways to the world faced by WikiLeaks and the tactics of Julian Assange and the leaders of WikiLeaks. Please keep in mind, I am not suggesting that TRON: Legacy is a great film; but it is a stunningly beautiful film that confronts complex and profound ideas, but falters in its attempts to offer a coherent philosophical message about the meaning of what is happening in cyberspace, today. So, it has some good ideas and great visuals, which themselves are powerful, meaningful, and philosophically revealing.
CONNECTION TO MY FORTHCOMING PAPER (PROVIDES BELOW)
And, TRON: Legacy and the WikiLeaks controversy perfectly illustrate the ideas in a new paper I authored called: “Black Holes in the Electronic Galaxies: Metaphors for a New Resistance?” My co-author is Agreen Wang, a grad student at Temple University in Philadelphia, where I am a professor. The essay is supposed to appear in a forthcoming anthology entitled: The Unconnected: Social Justice, Participation and Engagement in the Information Society, edited by Jarice Hansen and Paul M.A. Baker and to be published in Europe in 2011 by Peter Lang Press.
In this paper, Agreen and I refer to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks as examples that illustrate and anticipate a strange future of technological resistance within a culture of total surveillance — a future of “black holes in the electronic galaxies.” In pointing toward such resistance and what it might look like, metaphorically and technologically, this paper charts several broad cultural patterns that juxtapose “light” with “dark” across the seemingly disparate realms of: 1) philosophy, 2) cosmology, 3) film, 4) media theory, and 5) media technologies. Did you know that over 1.9 million black holes have been identified in the internet? And the number is climbing every day! It is in the area of films that TRON: Legacy repeats a common theme. Here is a summary of the meaning of that pattern:
Spaceship Earth exists within a network of electronic galaxies in an expanding media universe, aglow with light, seemingly destined for total surveillance and total representation. Total light is generating conditions such that the trajectory of the enlightenment project has begun a strange reversal, where representation is resisted through disconnection and disappearance, in a self-chosen unconnection or in radical forms of privacy and encryption.
Now, this may seem counter to WikiLeaks releasing information in its efforts to make governments more open. After all, the WikiLeaks motto is: “We Open Governments.” But, the ways that WikiLeaks hides information is profoundly revealing, which is why their strategies, tactics, and quest for “total transparency” point toward the conditions described in our paper. This will take a bit of explaining, but I hope you will stay with me in this podcast. If you do, you will grasp radical new patterns, reversals in media resistance and cultural trajectories, while having a deeper understanding of the visual meaning of TRON: Legacy, the 16th film to illustrate these emerging new conditions. In fact, you will have a deeper understanding of numerous sci-fi films that illustrate “black holes” as metaphors for resistance.
TRON: LEGACY
In TRON: Legacy, we learn that Flynn has been trapped in cyberspace since 1989, which coincides with the explosion of the internet in global culture. Before disappearing into cyberspace, we learn he has authored a best-selling book entitled: The Digital Frontier: Mapping the Other Universe. He claims that “in there is our destiny.”
The doppelganger Flynn is leading the masses and their military machine in an assault on reality, with the goal of having the virtual world overtake the real world. As for the virtual world overtaking the real world, we see some really cool images illustrating this idea, with a globe of the world being mapped and overtaken with data. In this imagery, I am reminded of Jean Baudrillard’s idea that the media maps have overtaken the territories they once represented, to such an extent that the territories are no longer accessible and the media maps are generating territories unhinged from any underlying reality. And these images form a juxtaposition with the WikiLeaks logo, which features our planetary globe leaking into a virtual globe, all in the shape of an hour glass.
Similar images, two different meanings: The virtual as domination in TRON: Legacy; the virtual as liberation for WikiLeaks.
It is great that TRON: Legacy is defending free flowing information and open networks as utopian ideals. But, I would not call Disney a defender of that ideal. Disney is much closer to being like Encom, the company vilified in TRON: Legacy for seeking to profit by controlling the flow of its information. Does anyone think we will hear the head of Disney or any American corporation defending the virtue of open networks with regard to WikiLeaks? Because of government threats, Amazon and Apple have removed WikiLeaks from their networks. Doublethink is alive and well in Corporate America. Steve Jobs ought to be embarrassed, given what Apple once symbolized. Recall the 1984 Apple ad, about how Macintosh would overthrow Orwell’s Big Brother. Or the wonderful Apple ads in the 1990s, encouraging people to “think different.” Today, the only thinking we see is doublethinking, at least with regard to WikiLeaks. It’s disgusting.
In Tron Legacy, Flynn defends free and open networks, though with little coherent explanation. I think it is important to understand what it really means. The idea of free and open networks has its origins in a 1644 essay by John Milton, where he first theorized the virtue of free and open competition among ideas. In arguing against the licensing of the printing press in England, he captured the idea in a single, powerful phrase. Let me modify the phrase just a bit by putting the words into a more contemporary English.
“When the winds of doctrine are set loose on the playing field, let Truth and Falsehood grapple, for whoever knew Truth to put the worse in a free and open encounter.”
What this means and does not mean exists at the heart of an open and democratic society. It does not mean that Truth will always emerge in an open debate or dialogue. If it did, then tyranny, corruption, creationism, religion, superstition, and many other falsehoods would have disappeared a long time ago.
What Milton’s phrase does mean is the open dialogue and competition is the best way for Truth to emerge. In other words, Truth is not a wimp that needs protection from Falsehood. In fact, history has repeatedly shown that Falsehood needs protection from Truth — that is why you will see the politically powerful, the criminal, the cowardly, and the church repeatedly lining up to support censorship, secrecy, and suppression. They believe their Falsehoods need to be protected from Truth. It is modern democratic secular society that created and protects openness, not theology, superstition, or state socialism, for that matter.
Though trapped in cyberspace, the philosopher Flynn lives in futuristic pad that includes some of the coolest chairs of the 20th century, including the Eames Lounge Chair, designed by Charles and Ray Eames, and the Barcelona Chair, designed by Mies van der Rohe. Flynn contemplates nothingness while sitting on a glowing grid of a floor straight out of the strange hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. So, the room has a soft glow, perfect for contemplation. We also see various texts from Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and texts on Buddhism and philosophy. Flynn adopts a sort of Buddhist-existentialist take on his virtual fate, stating that he has removed himself from the equation and is content doing nothing while contemplating the sky and the Grid. What is provocative about Flynn’s glowing pad is that is located “off the Grid” in a secluded realm, hidden away, far removed across a vast realm of digital darkness. So, he has managed to exit the spectacle of the military-entertainment grid, though still existing in cyberspace.
So, yet again, we see the 16th film to show the existential hero being forced to exit the system of light, the mediated and networked system where electric and electronic light has become a force, not for enlightenment, but entertainment, distraction, and domination. In other words, a world much like most of America, today. Or at least a world sought by certain theocratic forces in America and elsewhere.
Below is the full text of the paper I mentioned, which is to be published next year in the anthology, The Unconnected: Social Justice, Participation and Engagement in the Information Society (Peter Lang, 2011, forthcoming).
BLACK HOLES IN THE ELECTRONIC GALAXIES: METAPHOR FOR RESISTANCE IN THE INFORMATION SOCIETY?
In September, 2010, United States law enforcement officials announced their intent to seek new regulations that will provide the legal and technological powers to “wiretap” the Internet. The first two paragraphs in the New York Times story perfectly summarize the issues:
Federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations for the Internet, arguing that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is “going dark” as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone.
Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order (Savage 2010).
Of course, these requests should not be surprising, given the evisceration of the Bill of Rights by the 2001 USA PATRIOT Act, the 1994 CALEA legislation which mandated that phone companies empower government eavesdropping in their digital phone systems, and the fact that the National Security Agency (NSA) has built massive eavesdropping systems within the United States since 2001. Among the many expanded programs and powers sought by the U.S. government, perhaps the most philosophically provocative is the “Going Dark Program,” which is operated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and includes a $9 million budget dedicated to enhancing its electronic surveillance capabilities. Apparently, “Going Dark” began in 2009 with a budget of $234 million to fund “the research and development of new tools, technical support and training initiatives” (Zetter 2010). For the purposes of this paper, the budgets and technologies of this program are much less important than the symbolism in the name of the program — “Going Dark.”
With the name Going Dark, the government has tapped into powerful symbolic imagery that may anticipate a strange future of technological resistance within a culture of total surveillance — a future of “black holes in the electronic galaxies.” In pointing toward such resistance and what it might look like, metaphorically and technologically, this paper will chart several broad cultural patterns that juxtapose “light” with “dark” across the seemingly disparate realms of: 1) philosophy, 2) cosmology, 3) film, 4) media theory, and 5) media technologies. These patterns are outlined in Table 1. Here is a summary of the meaning of that pattern:
The information society exists within a network of electronic galaxies in an expanding media universe, aglow with light, seemingly destined for total surveillance and total representation. Total light is generating conditions such that the trajectory of the enlightenment project has begun a strange reversal, where representation is resisted through disconnection and disappearance, in a self-chosen unconnection.
Of course, this may seem utterly strange or ridiculous to the empiricist scholar or pragmatic policy expert. Yet, these patterns are very real and to deny their existence and potential symbolic powers would be overlooking the complex cultural relations between art, science, technology, and interdisciplinary theory. Drawing from Plato, Marshall McLuhan, Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, and a host of scientists, filmmakers, and media theorists, this chapter will connect the cultural dots to reveal a powerful pattern — however strange — for further exploration.
For Frances Bacon, “light” was a condition for the birth of the modern utopia. In the famed 1626 essay, “New Atlantis,” Bacon envisioned an island-based utopia of science with the power to acquire knowledge from around the world. New Atlantis possessed “inter-knowledge” of world affairs and Houses of Light, in which light was multiplied to carry information around the world. As described in New Atlantis:
We represent also all multiplications of light, which we carry to great distances (…). We procure means of seeing objects far off; as in the heaven and remote places; and represent things near as far off, and things far off as near (...). We also represent all manner of reflections, refractions, and multiplications, of visual beams of objects (Bacon pp. 133-134).
It is no coincidence that Bacon was writing during the emergence of the Enlightenment. Preceding Marshall McLuhan by three centuries, Bacon seems to have anticipated the alteration of space-time to be effected by the electronic media and the spectacle of electric light. He also anticipated the conditions of surveillance, the power of seeing from afar through the magnification and amplification of light.
For McLuhan, electric light is “pure information,” a medium that is “totally radical, pervasive, and decentralized” (1964, pp. 23-25). McLuhan remarked that light was the only “medium without a message,” but it is not clear that claim holds up in 2011 and beyond. The global surveillance system relies on this existential and technological condition, using many of the different types of light waves. The typical surveillance camera relies on the band of light visible to the human eye, seen in the spectrum of colors (violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red). Deployed in airports and in many public or urban spaces, x-ray machines use light that travels in wavelengths less than the distance between atoms, much shorter than the spectrum visible to the human eye. Such shorter wavelengths exist in nature, but are created through the artifice of information technology. Ultraviolet and infrared waves are also being used in other surveillance technologies, such as satellites, night vision, body heat detection, and so on. Even the digital surveillance conducted via the Internet relies on the light of the perpetually glowing screens upon which data are assembled and displayed for human viewing and interpretation. Indeed, it seems electric and electronic light are becoming evermore pervasive. If there is a message for this medium, then it might be total surveillance and total representation.
Perhaps such pervasive light is, in existential terms, less about spectral truth than total spectacle. Guy Debord theorized the spectacle as the outcome and goal of the dominant mode of production, with the spectacle reigning supreme over the structures of society. The spectacle is more than the technological proliferation of images and commodities, for the spectacle is “a weltanschaung that has been actualized, translated into the material realm — a worldview transformed into an objective force” (Debord 1994, pp. 12-13). For Debord, the worldview of the spectacle is the logical progression of Western philosophy, which privileges sight in seeking to represent and understand social and natural phenomena. The effects of the spectacle are both subtle and profound, for the spectacle is not merely realizing philosophy, but rather the spectacle “philosophizes reality, and turns the material life of everyone into a universe of speculation” (Debord 1994, p. 17). Light has become less the path to enlightenment, than to entertainment, distraction, and simulation. Today, we see this phenomenon happening on a global scale, from simulated conquests in sports spectacles on TV, flat screen universes of Times Square, simulated cities in Las Vegas, and simulated friends, micro-celebrities, and self surveillance in Facebook. What else are the Super Bowl, Times Square, and Las Vegas other than microcosms of our 24/7 media environments culture, sites for spectacle and simulation in movie-set galaxies of blazing lights?
Inspired in-part by Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and Disney’s Tron (1982), science-fiction writer William Gibson coined the term “cyberspace” with reference to electronic cosmology, just as personal computers and electronic screens were effecting the massive expansion of the information society. In Neuromancer, Gibson described cyberspace as:
Under public criticism, the name was changed to “Terrorist Information Awareness” and then the program was apparently defunded by Congress. But others question if the program died or was merely relocated to other classified programs (Williams 2006). Given the ambition to wiretap the Internet, can we seriously doubt the U.S. government’s desire for total global surveillance? Such goals and trajectories were made clear in the logo for the IAO. Gazing down at Earth, the solitary eye is accompanied by Francis Bacon's phrase Scientia est Potentia — “knowledge is power.” The logo's meaning is clear: total global surveillance.
It should not be surprising that Sputnik and Apollo pointed the way toward planetary surveillance. Since the Soviet satellite orbited Earth in 1957 and American astronauts captured the “Earthrise” image in 1968, there has been nonstop technological and cultural imperative to place the entirety of Spaceship Earth within the expanding global media environments. There is a clear trajectory from Earthrise to Spaceship Earth to Google Earth.
From cave painting to cyberspace to outer space, the human drive for representation is visible wherever people seek to communicate and make meaning of the world. Throughout the course of human civilization, the lack of media representation for oppressed peoples or marginalized groups and individuals was an all too real struggle. History tells the story of state, church, and corporation — be it kings, monarchs, theologians, dictators, bureaucrats, corporate executives, or any other type of censor — seeking to suppress and eliminate that which brought to light their oppression and superstitions, crimes and corruption. In the twenty-first century, this struggle continues in many parts of the world (Chomsky 2010) and in the controversy surrounding the 2010 WikiLeaks reports on the Terror War.
Overcoming this struggle was the Enlightenment-inspired ambition of the First Amendment to the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution, however imperfect the amendment has been in practice and despite the federal and local governments never-ending attempts to override freedom of speech and press in the name of war, national security, social order, family values, religious beliefs, and so on. That freedom of expression is recognized as a human right by the United Nations attests to this Enlightenment ambition. The ultimate ground for the right to freedom of expression is the inherent human drive to represent the world and to see the world represented via art, language, and media, in all its forms.
The cultural trajectory toward total representation and planetary surveillance has evolved with the expansion of media technologies around the world, especially the global proliferation of satellites, cameras, computers, cell phones, databases, and the Internet, all powered by microprocessors and Moore’s Law (ever more miniaturization, decreasing costs, increasing technological powers). No wonder there are already 1.7 billion users on the Internet.
With such expanding media power, surveillance apparently will be performed by everyone on everyone and everything, especially self surveillance of their own personal lives. At least that is the mediated future projected by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell in their appropriately titled book, Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything (2009), where they show how the entirety of everyone’s lives, thoughts, and activities will be stored in microprocessors and accessible via the Internet. Maybe cell phones, Facebook, Twitter, and the Terror War merely offer early glimpses of a planetary culture moving toward total surveillance by its citizens in the dreams of total representation and nonstop personal expression.
Countering Total Recall is Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (2009), where Viktor Mayer-Schonberger argues that individuals should be able to “erase external memories” of past missteps and/or immature behaviors because society needs to realize that people grow and evolve over the course of their lives. Without some forgetting and forgiving, it will be impossible to “escape” the past.
Do not Total Recall and Delete point toward existential conditions of the future, no exit from total light versus the need to escape? Though you can’t tell a book by its cover, you can certainly see the artistic representation of an idea. The cover of Delete is comprised of a computer screen, with the word “Delete” in white on the black screen, a near-perfect visualization of information ready to be deleted, to disappear, to become a black hole in the electronic galaxies.
2. BLACK HOLES IN COSMOLOGY
When stars (with roughly three times the mass of the sun) burn up their fuel, they can enter a complete collapse, creating curvature in space so severe that nothing escapes its gravitational pull, not even light. A black hole apparently collapses to a point of near-infinite density and curvature. This is the point of singularity, the region of space-time where the laws of relativity breakdown. Though nothing can escape a black hole, anything can enter a black hole. The “event horizon” is the point of no return, the point where the attraction is so strong that the object will eventually be pulled to the center of the black hole and crushed into a subatomic string of particles. Once inside the event horizon, the edge of the horizon is defined by light rays hovering upon the horizon, but unable to escape (Greene 2003, pp. 79-81).
3. EXITS FROM “LIGHT” IN FILM
Marshall McLuhan viewed art as a potential “early warning system” for culture, capable of prefiguring cultural shifts and transformations. Artists function like “antennae,” offering intuitive perceptions of cultural change expressed through works of art. Perhaps the most notable example was between modern art and modern physics, as illustrated by Einstein’s discovery of relativity and Picasso’s relativistic perspectives in cubism and his famed 1907 painting, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (Miller 2001). If McLuhan and Miller are correct, then there would seem to be radical implications for specific artworks since the early 1960s — films that deal with exits from light precisely as black holes are emerging in popular culture.
In 1948, George Orwell foresaw the dark side of electronic surveillance in the 1948 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), which seems to have been inspired, in part, by Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1944 play, No Exit (1989), the dystopian tale of three people negotiating existence and meaning in conditions of total light, total surveillance, total representation. While Sartre and Orwell anticipated dystopian possibilities in realms of total light and electronic media, the first film to embrace an exit from light appeared in 1963, the same year in which John Wheeler announced computers had verified black holes.
The film was Roger Corman’s cult classic with the crazy title: X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes. Though Corman is a far less prestigious filmmaker than Jean-Luc Godard, Stanley Kubrick, and Steven Spielberg, X anticipated key ideas that later appeared in the films of these directors and many others. From Hollywood to independent, low budget to big budget, action film to art film, numerous filmmakers have projected a dystopian future in which the “hero” or “antihero” must exit from light in a culture of total surveillance and total representation, an exit from the light of a mediated universe (Table 1, Column 3).
In X, a scientist named Dr. Xavier creates eye drops that provide an ever increasing power of “X-ray vision” in hopes of improved surgeries and increased scientific insights in medicine, only to discover that an accelerating X-ray vision is more dystopian than utopian. The once famous scientist is reduced to wandering amidst Las Vegas, blinded by ever more intensifying light but further removed from reality. Eventually Xavier exits the world of total light by gouging his eyes out in the deserts near Las Vegas. In effect, Corman’s film counters Plato’s Cave, suggesting that the pursuit of total light would eventually lead to blindness. The dream of total representation is countered by disappearance.
In 1965, Godard’s Alphaville featured an anti-hero — named “Lemmy Caution” — who must exit a space age city of the future, a dystopian metropolis under complete computer surveillance. As Caution makes the exit, he is blasted with bright light, apparently from the computer (or maybe also symbolizing a blast of light from a Cold War nuclear bomb). Eventually, Lemmy and his companion, Natasha, escape via a car they drive down a lonely highway at night. In Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey, the astronaut Dave Bowman must exit the computer surveillance of the HAL 9000, the all-seeing, all-knowing computer. Dave eventually exits the nonstop ambient light of the spacecraft, facing his future as astral child in the darkness of deep space or an aging man amidst the glow of cyberspace (depending on how one chooses to interpret the controversial last one-third of the film).
Three decades after the astronaut’s exit in deep space, The Truman Show presents an exit from light to darkness that perfectly illustrates the metaphor of a black hole. In the film, Jim Carrey stars as Truman Burbank, an average person whose entire existence — unbeknownst to him — is lived inside a simulacrum of a pastoral beach town that is the backdrop for a nonstop television show. The entire city was inside a massive planetarium-like dome, upon which had been projected the sun and stars every day and night.
In the climax of the film, Truman tries to escape by manning a sailboat and setting out across the harbor of Seahaven, only to eventually crash into the outer wall of the dome (looking like the horizon of a blue sky). Dumbfounded, Truman steps onto a stairway and ascends to a door with a handle, upon which is a circle containing the word “EXIT.” The door opens to nothing but darkness. Staring into the dark, with his back to the television cameras, Truman is contemplating his fate when Christof (the creator of the show) whispers into his microphone: “Truman.” The whisper is heard by Truman and the global audience viewing on television. Truman turns around and gazes up at the sky. The following dialogue ensues:
Truman — Who are you?
Christof — I am the creator of television show that gives hope and joy and inspiration to millions.
Truman — Then, who am I?
Christof — You’re the star.
Truman — Was nothing real?
Christof — You were real. That is what made you so good to watch. Listen to me Truman. There is no more truth out there than there is in the world I created for you. The same lies, the same deceit. But, in my world, you have nothing to fear. (…) Talk to me. Say something.
(Truman remained silent)
Christof — Well, say something God dammit! You’re on television, live to the whole world!
Truman — Well, if I don’t see you: Good afternoon, good evening, and good night!
Truman then turns away from the camera, steps through the doorway and disappears into a realm of darkness, never to be seen again in the movie. In effect, Seahaven is an electronic Cave, though the bright light is used for illusion and the prisoner’s exit is into darkness. Truman is the existential “true man” of the information age, the prisoner inhabiting a mediated universe from which he felt he must exit. Finally, when informed he was “the star” of his universe, Truman exits into the darkness, into the void — becoming a black hole in the electronic galaxies.
4. “BLACK HOLES” IN MEDIA THEORY
The term “black hole” is used in metaphorical contexts in media theory, with the intended meaning generally referring to information that has disappeared, become unreachable, or is purposely hidden from access or purposely made inaccessible (Table 1, Column 4). Here are three examples.
In 1983, Jean Baudrillard argued that the masses and media effect a black hole through the implosion and absorption of all content and social meaning, while radiating out images in a culture of screens and signs without substance — “[T]he masses function as a black hole which inexorably inflects, bends and distorts all energy and light radiation approaching it: an implosive sphere, in which the curvature of spaces accelerates, in which all dimensions curve back on themselves and ‘involve’ to the point of annihilation, leaving in their stead only a sphere of potential engulfment” (1983, pp. 3-4, 9). For the masses viewing the spectacle on the screens, the two dimensional image represents the three dimensional reality warped by the media — holograms for hyperreality (Baudrillard 1994, pp. 105-110).
In 1996, David Edwards argued that the propaganda model of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman can be understood in terms of “black holes” that protect entrenched economic and social powers — “Chomsky and Herman seek to explain not only distorted reporting of events, but also massive media black holes into which ‘unsuitable’ truths fall out of sight” (Edwards 1996, p. 19). The recent massive expansion of the U.S. secrecy programs are attempts to create black holes that hide information that apparently reveal military deceit and war crimes (Greenwald, September 8, 2010).
In 1998, Manual Castells used the term “black hole” to refer to areas of socio-economic exclusion effected by informational capitalism and the digital divide — “These black holes concentrate in their density all the destructive forces that affects humanity from multiple sources,” such that “there is no escape from the pain and destruction inflicted on the human condition for those who, in one way or another, enter these social landscapes” (Castells 2001, p. 167). Castells believes that this exclusion can be marginalized in a way that actually improves the efficiency of the network — “They're not valuable as producers, consumers; in fact, if they would disappear, the logic of the overall system would improve. If you are outside the network, in other words, you don't even exist” (Ogilvy 1998).
5. “BLACK HOLES” IN MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES
The term “black hole” has also migrated from cosmology to technology, especially in relation to the growth of the Internet over the past twenty years (Table 1, Column 5). Here are three examples.
In 2007, computer scientists at the University of Washington designed the “Hubble” program to identify and map the “black holes” in the Internet. Named after the space telescope, the Hubble program uncovers “reachability problems” caused when one Internet address cannot reach another, even though the physical link is operational and the pathway was known to work before (Cox 2008). Apparently, the traffic “seems to simply disappear into a black hole” (Moskowitz 2008). According to the Hubble web site, the Hubble program “identified 1,971,375 black holes and reachability problems” between September 17, 2007 and, September 19, 2010.
In 2009, scientists in China and America created the first “desktop black hole,” effected by sixty concentric layers of special circuit board — made from materials used for “invisibility cloaks” — that absorb microwave radiation from all directions (Ananthaswamy 2009). In 2010, Apple made available a software application that allows users to clear sensitive information from their Macintosh with a single click. The application is called “Black Hole.”
CONCLUSION: REPRESENTATION, REVERSAL, AND RESISTANCE IN THE INFORMATION SOCIETY
So what do these patterns mean individually, collectively, and metaphorically?
1) Spaceship Earth exists within the electronic galaxies of the information society.
From Plato’s Cave to cyberspace, the extension of light has encircled the planet in the dream of total representation and total surveillance, where Spaceship Earth is to be ordered within ever more galaxies of information. That’s why the future of Spaceship Earth is to be under total surveillance by its passengers — governments and corporations, theologians and technologists, celebrities and citizens. This is not a utopian or futurist prophesy, merely an existential extrapolation of the dominant cultural and technological trends. How can this not be the mediated destiny for societies and citizens in the ever more connected global information society, given the emergence of phenomena such as Google Earth, Google Streetview, Youtube, Facebook, the blogosphere, hyperlocal journalism, weather satellites, spy satellites, the PATRIOT Act, IAO, and the Terror War? Combine the expanding technological powers with the longstanding cultural imperatives — political, commercial, ideological, theological, social, psychological, and personal — and it seems inevitable that life on Spaceship Earth is to be spinning within a 24/7, omnipresent, media universe of electronic galaxies. There will be no exit.
Total light serves two possible outcomes for global surveillance and total representation. First, total light and global surveillance express the panoptic powers first articulated by Jeremy Bentham, which was then extended to electronic media and “Big Brother” by George Orwell (1984), and extended throughout the “power” relations of modern culture by Michel Foucault (1995).
Second, total light liberates information to undermine authoritarianism, thus making possible the digital democracy of a “transparent society” (Brin 1999). In this view, total surveillance develops, but the power to serve authoritarianism is countered by the pervasive dispersal of surveillance technologies throughout society, made possible by the effects of Moore’s Law. The idea is that “the people” can watch the institutions that are watching them, such as corporations, governments, and theocracies. In the democratized surveillance of “the transparent society,” the panoptic powers extend in all directions, eliminating personal and institutional privacy in the proliferation of public information. Though it remains to be seen which of these outcomes will prevail, this view of social transparency seems naïve, so far, given the massive expansion of secrecy programs by the U.S. government during the Terror War (Greenwald, September 8, 2010).
2) Black holes offer a new metaphor for resistance to total surveillance.
3) The Enlightenment project may have entered a strange reversal.
Mirroring the rise of black holes in popular culture, there has been a striking pattern across five decades of film, wherein filmmakers project a potentially dystopian future in which exits from artificial light have been an existential theme. Perhaps these films suggest that the Enlightenment project has reached its climax and entered a reversal, where resistance may no longer be about representation and democracy, but rather non-representation and disappearance. Light has joined dark as a force for domination in the postmodern world, requiring an exit from light as a mode of resistance. In other words, survival for the hero or antihero requires escape from the world of total information and total spectacle. The many cinematic exits include: exits from natural light, exits from artificial light (in spacecrafts, futurist metropolises, theme parks), exits from computer surveillance, exits from networks, exits from media spectacles, and exits from mass society entranced with mass media.
McLuhan believed that each medium and technology simultaneously extends our senses and retrieves something previously lost. At the same time, each technology contains the genetic code of its own reversal, the point when the technology is pushed to its limit — overextended or “overheated” — and users lose the enthusiasm for its original functions and benefits (McLuhan 1964, pp. 33-40). Radio and the cell phone extended our voice and ears around the world, while retrieving town criers and oral traditions lost to print media. Television extends our eyes and ears around the planet, while retrieving cave paintings and campfire tales. Satellites extend our eyes and ears into space, while retrieving ecology and environmentalism.
When acoustic radio was pushed to the limit, it became audio visual television and reverted back to the visual image lost to print culture. The car extended mobility into the highway system, but its overextension created traffic jams and the effects of fossil fuels, thus triggering a reversal in a return to bicycle riding and pedestrian culture. Telescopes and space probes have extended our eyes and ears — and electronic light — around the planet and into deep space, across 13 billion light years, triggering a reversal that seeks to return humans to the center of the universe.
4) This chapter extends black hole media theory to include resistance and reversal.
There might be no better example of Baudrillard’s media black hole than the Earthrise image and the Apollo 8 television broadcast from the moon to a billion people back on Earth in December 1968. Precisely as Earthrise and Apollo 8 confirmed the profound insights of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton — Earth and its passengers are not at the center of the universe — the astronauts read from Genesis in the attempt to give the accomplishment philosophical meaning for those masses confronting the existential discoveries of the space age, revealed right before their eyes. In the text for Peter Granser’s art photography book about President Bush’s neoconservative Texas, Signs (which has been featured in numerous exhibits around the world), the author writes:
At the moment of humankind’s greatest scientific and technological accomplishment, secular and modern philosophy were utterly absent as the astronauts recited creation myths to the humans on Earth, precisely as one billion humans were united in their gaze into the cosmic voids of the expanding universe. 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 superstitions born of the premodern mind suggesting not scientific revolution, but spiritual devolution. As creation myths echoed down from the moon to Mission Control at the speed of light, the space age crashed in Texas (Vacker 2008: p. 7).
Traveling at the speed of light, the electronic information that should have revolutionized human thought about global civilization was not accelerating into the future, but was being warped deep into the past, with its existential meanings disappearing into a mediated black hole. Though Earthrise surely helped retrieve ecology and inspire the Gaia hypothesis, for billions of people the content and meaning of the information has been absorbed and neutralized, while the form is radiated as an image to circulate in the media networks.
The real meanings of Earthrise and Apollo 8 have largely disappeared into a black hole, where the space age is sucked into the stone age and Earthrise is little more than a hologram floating in the electronic galaxies of cyberspace. The same is true for the Pale Blue Dot and the Hubble Deep Field images as the telescope, computer, and space probe soak up natural light and extend electronic light to the very edge of the observable universe. The existential conditions revealed by our most advanced media technologies show we are a species living in the biosphere of a borderless planet orbiting one of 100 billions stars in our galaxy, itself one of hundreds of billions of galaxies, all in a vast cosmos of which we are not the center.
Since Apollo 8 and Earthrise allowed humans to personally and collectively see they are not the center of the universe, a massive McLuhan-like reversal has been underway. The technologies of the space age were greeted with global enthusiasm in the 1960s, yet the very meanings of the vast universe revealed by the technologies have been largely ignored precisely as the technologies pushed to the very limit all previous cosmologies, ideologies, and theologies. Humans had to rethink or reverse.
Since Apollo 8 and Earthrise, technology and theology have been on a nonstop mission of reversal, seeking return the masses to the center of the universe, be it mediated or material. In December 1968, hypertext made its public debut on computer screens, the very same time that sacred texts starred on television screens. Hypertext places users at the center of cyberspace, just as sacred texts place followers at the center of outer space. After all, Facebook and fundamentalism offer the same thing: they allow people to pretend they are the center of the universe. Hypertext or sacred text, technology and theology both now provide a sense of personal identity amidst global surveillance by data-mining corporations or deities promising destinies. Facebook users place themselves under surveillance in exchange for the power to represent themselves to themselves and their “friends,” to be a micro-celebrity, a star at the center of their personal media universe. Fundamentalists place themselves under “spiritual” surveillance in exchange for the power to save themselves and fellow followers, to be born again with a destiny at the center of their personal Creator’s universe.
The drive to be at center of the universe explains why the majority of the American populace has not accepted evolution, has little scientific knowledge (Mooney & Kirshenbaum 2009), has abandoned reason in cultural discourses (Jacoby 2008), and has elected born-again presidents who defend and expand the militaristic-theological-corporate empires, all of which are used to justify total global surveillance in the Terror War. For example, how else to explain the populist “ignorance chic” celebrated by Sarah Palin and the Tea Party (Dowd 2010). And this dumbed down media spectacle is happening despite nothing less than an explosion of scientific, biological, cognitive, and humanist knowledge since Apollo 8. In contrast to the supernova of expanding scientific knowledge, how can this growing cultural ignorance not be a supermassive cultural black hole in America, where the light of science and humanism is disappearing into the cognitive voids of ignorance and superstition among millions of people?
Of course, the problem is not merely America and its fundamentalists, for this is a global phenomena. War, terror, genocide, and superstition have spread around the planet, with fundamentalists and theologies of all kinds claiming their sacred texts place their empires and destinies at the center of their Creator’s universe. Such beliefs and the Terror War necessarily reflect the ignorance and denial toward the most powerful and profound empirical observations provided by our electronic media technologies — we are a species living in the biosphere of a borderless planet in a vast cosmos of which we are not the center (Vacker 2008).
How are social justice and civil liberty furthered by the black holes of ignorance and superstition now being globalized by the masses and mass media? How can this expanding black hole not signal a massive reversal in the technologies of electric light, an implosion of the information age and contraction of the space age, a retreat from the Enlightenment and the expanding knowledge necessary for building a global, secular, humanist civilization? Where is mass enlightenment in the information society?
So, what is an individual to do? How can an individual resist these forces in a civilized and non-violent manner? Participate in the simulacrum of “democracy” that is the two-party system? Lead a protest for a sound-bite on CNN? Write a book? Submit op-eds to the New York Times? Form a group in Facebook? Create a blog? Post a video in YouTube? Isn’t this exactly what the spectacle wants individuals to do?
5) “Black holes” have been created with information technologies and might be modes for future disappearance and resistance.
The films are artworks trying to imagine new modes of resistance. In countering the spectacle of total representation, the filmmakers suggest that persons should have the power or right to be not represented, the power to exit the scenes or disappear from the screens. There are two possible ways to effect a nonviolent nonrepresentation:
1) Reject all media and information technologies in a nonviolent Luddite resistance, choosing to quietly disconnect and disappear. Perhaps this is the “unnova” scenario.
2) Use cutting edge media and information technologies to effect a disappearance, however imperfect or impermanent it might be. Perhaps this is the “micro-black hole” or “desktop black hole” scenario.
The first scenario will momentarily seem attractive to casual Luddites who get frustrated with the spectacle’s inanities, the proliferating images, the information overload, or they just want to read a book in peace and quiet. The unnova scenario will be very attractive to serious Luddites, but either scenario will be less plausible over time in a future requiring total representation and no privacy.
The second scenario seems currently implausible, yet might be possible in the not-too-distant future. Some trends are moving in that direction. As listed in Table 1, the following information-related black holes have been created: artificial event horizons, fiber-optic black holes, and desktop black holes. Plus, scientists have slowed light to zero on a microchip and invented the blackest material ever. And, then are the wide ranging possibilities for quantum encryption and the discovery of inexplicable black holes on the Internet. Though no one knows how these technologies will play out, Moore’s Law will insure these kinds of technologies will be made more powerful, less expensive, and more accessible. This is another example of a McLuhan reversal, with extreme electric light pushing to the limits for individuals, only to effect a flip, a reversal into going dark, into the media technology of black holes. This is also a reversal or flip of Plato’s Cave.
To effect a black hole, individuals could deploy future media technology to make information disappear or inaccessible, to create a form of personal cosmic censorship within the electronic galaxies. Maybe the quantum encryption code would determine the artificial event horizon, that point at which no light or information can escape and the point beyond which the information cannot be seen or accessed, remaining unreachable for outside observers. Since black holes apparently have an inner surface of curved light, as if light were circling the interior of a ball, we can imagine personal black holes as a tiny sphere of privacy in the electronic galaxies. At the singularity in the black hole, normal relativity is replaced by quantum existence, a chaotic state where the person’s information, position, momentum, energy, and time are unknown. The personal black hole is the point of social singularity, the region in electronic space-time where the laws of state, church, and corporation break down.
Since black holes are not entirely black, we can imagine that any exit will produce virtual particles leaving traces on the electronic screens. Or maybe the personal data will be smeared across the event horizon, rendering any exit as a temporary void and distortion in a holographic universe. No exit will ever be complete, no unconnection will be possible.
We are living in a age of exponential power in media technologies. If these technologies are to empower (and not merely entertain) us in pursuing our individual and collective destinies, then these technologies should also provide the power to resist domination and exploitation. Though no one knows exactly how these ideas and technologies will play out, black hole resistance is becoming a reality. Such tactics are meeting fierce opposition in the Terror War, with the U.S. government concealing apparent war crimes in their black holes, while wiretapping the Internet and going supernova on the entire planet.
If there is an early example of these conclusions, then perhaps it is the recent case of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, the whistleblower web site which seeks to effect “total transparency” on a global scale (Khatchadourian 2010). In its most dramatic leak, WikiLeaks released hundreds of thousands of documents that apparently reveal the deceit, misinformation, war crimes, and human rights abuses hidden by the Pentagon and White House. While the U.S. would prefer the information remain hidden, WikiLeaks is bringing the information to light — the U.S. black hole is countered by the WikiLeaks supernova. Yet, to function successfully in accessing and releasing information provided by whistleblowers, Assange and WikiLeaks must deploy “state-of-the-art encryption” to keep the information hidden prior to release (Anderson & Assange 2010). Assange describes the WikiLeaks site as “an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking and public analysis” (Khatchadourian 2010). In effect, the documents are hidden in temporary black holes.
Naturally, the Pentagon denounced these leaks as “threats” to soldiers and American interests, while the mainstream media such as CNN and the New York Times smeared Assange’s reputation across the event horizons of the electronic screens (Greenwald, October 24, 2010). For fear of being arrested or assassinated, Assange is constantly “going dark” by having no fixed address, constantly switching cell phones, avoiding credit card transactions, and so on. Welcome to the future, where resistance to domination requires that individuals and organizations become or create black holes in the electronic galaxies — even if no unconnection is permanent and no exit is perfect.
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I rescued from cassette this talk that Marshall McLuhan gave at Johns Hopkins University in the mid 1970s. I have not found an audio file of this talk anywhere online. So far as I know it's an original contribution to the archive of McLuhan audio. Enjoy. Rare McLuhan Audio
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