A THEORY VORTEX

wikileaks, tron legacy, black holes in the electronic galaxies

2010-12-22T13:56:00.015-05:00

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: 21^st 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 16^th 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.”

Time magazine would agree, recently naming Mark Zuckerberg “Person of the Year” for creating Facebook, even though Wikipedia and WikiLeaks have created far more enlightenment with the network than Facebook. But, whoever knew enlightenment to be more important than entertainment for the masses and mainstream media? Five minutes of critical thinking reveals that Facebook is far less about social media than surveillance and celebrity media. Everyone gets to be a micro-celebrity, where each person performs self-surveillance while serving as their own paparazzi documenting and celebrating the trivia of their lives. It is hardly a revolution. As indicated in its name, Facebook is merely an app for the internet that caters to narcissism and celebrity, within a vast panopticon that enables corporate and government surveillance.

In TRON: Legacy, Flynn claims that he created a virtual universe more beautiful than he ever dreamt, but also a universe more dangerous than he imagined. Flynn says he built a beautiful utopia — “a system where all information is free and open.” The flaw, apparently, was the quest for total order and perfection. So, Flynn is trapped in cyberspace, where the Grid is ruled by his evil doppelganger, who leads a military-entertainment empire embraced by the masses. Borrowing visual ideas from Leni Riefenstahl’s 1934 Nazi propaganda film, Triumph of the Will, the film suggests that the dominant order is some kind of digital fascism and totalitarianism led by a charismatic leader.

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 20^th 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 16^th 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?

“GOING DARK”

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.

1. THE EVOLUTION OF “LIGHT”

Since at least the time of Plato, philosophers have associated “dark” with falsehood and ignorance, while “light” is associated with the pursuit of truth and enlightenment (Table 1, Column 1). This is illustrated by phrases and eras such as:

• “being in the dark” — having a lack of knowledge.

• “seeing the light of truth” — discovering or acquiring knowledge.

• “the Dark Ages” — the era often characterized as being dominated by ignorance and lack of knowledge of the empirical world.

• “the Enlightenment” — an era characterized by the growth of science and increasing knowledge of the empirical world, along with recognition of human rights.

A key origin of “light” as “truth” is likely to be Plato’s famed allegory of “the Cave” (1974, pp. 167-170). The allegory tells the story of several prisoners in a cave, chained to the ground in the darkness and facing a wall opposite the entry to the cave. The prisoners can only view shadows on the cave wall, shadows caused by people passing between the prisoners and the light outside the cave. One prisoner manages to break free and escape the cave to the light outside, which hurts his eyes at first, but remains the new and ultimate source of “truth.” When the prisoner returns to the cave to alert the other prisoners to the world of light outside, they are skeptical and choose to remain chained in the darkness, gazing at the shadows, the only “reality” they have known. Echoing across the millennia, Plato’s tale of shadows in the cave and the “light” outside has served as a metaphor for the discovery of truth and human enlightenment.

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:

A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non-space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data (Gibson 1984, p. 51).

Published in 1984, Neuromancer theorized a radically different universe of information control, much different than what George Orwell had imagined for the same year in Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the 1983 short story “Burning Chrome,” Gibson was even more poetic:

The matrix is an abstract representation of data. Legitimate programmers jack into their employers sector of the matrix and find themselves surrounded by bright geometries representing corporate data. Towers and fields of it ranged in the colorless non-space of the simulation matrix, the electronic consensus-hallucination that facilitates the handling and exchange of massive quantities of data. (…) the only stars are dense concentrations of information, and high above it all burn corporate galaxies and the cold spiral arms of military systems (Gibson 1986, pp. 169-170).

Cyberspace is where McLuhan’s electric light meets Tron’s endless horizons of radiant circuitry, which have combined to order the information society within the electronic galaxies. Not only did the science-fiction of Gibson anticipate the scholarly work of Manuel Castells in The Internet Galaxy (2001), but the vision of the “cold spiral arms of military systems” also seems rather prophetic.

In response to the events of September 11, the U.S. and Pentagon have made their ultimate goals very clear — “Total Information Awareness.” Within the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Information Awareness Office (IAO) was created to oversee the Total Information Awareness surveillance system, to be effected in a massive computer and electronic network functioning on a global scale. This ambition was clearly illustrated in 2002 with the controversial logo for the Information Awareness Office. (To see the image, just Google: Total Information Awareness).

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

Perhaps no recent scientific concept has exploded into the popular imagination like black holes, a term created barely four decades ago (Table 1, Column 2).

Though the term “black hole” appeared in 1967, the cosmology of black holes has its foundations in Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity (Greene 2003, pp. 53-84). In its most general sense, relativity shows that mass with sufficient gravity effects a curvature in the fabric of space-time. Visualize a bowling ball sitting on a sheet of foam rubber, thus creating a curved indention. Large masses act the same way, with gravity curving space and bending the light passing through the curvature. The larger the mass, the larger the curve, the greater the warping of space-time. Empirical roof of relativity came via a total solar eclipse in 1919, where photographs of distant stars revealed that the light waves had been curved by the gravity of the sun. In 1939, Robert Oppenheimer published an article suggesting that dying stars with sufficient mass collapse inward, generating a curvature in space so severe that the stars’ own light rays would bend inward, effectively sealing off the event of the star’s demise from any external observers (Hawking 2007, pp. 47-48).

For many physicists, the prospect of a gravitationally collapsed star with inward curving light seemed implausible. In 1963, however, John Wheeler announced that Oppenheimer had been correct; new electronic computers created simulations showing how dying stars would collapse inward. After Wheeler coined the term “black hole” (much more evocative than “gravitationally collapsed star”), the poetic name soon began to permeate popular culture.

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).

By the 1970s, Stephen Hawking used black holes to integrate relativity (macro cosmology) with quantum mechanics (micro cosmology) and thermodynamics (the science of energy), thus yielding insights into the big bang and the expansion and fate of the universe (1988, pp. 83-101). As poetically described by Hawking:

(T)he singularities produced by gravitational collapse occur only in places, like black holes, where they are decently hidden from outside view by an event horizon. Strictly, this is what is known as the weak cosmic censorship hypothesis (1988, p. 91).

Gravity’s efforts at cosmic censorship seems to be just less than 100% effective, for Hawking also showed that black holes are not completely black. The laws of quantum mechanics and thermodynamics predict pairs of “virtual particles” will exist at the event horizon, the surface of a black hole. Some particles will randomly avoid or escape the black hole, and will be detectable as radiation, now known as “Hawking radiation.” So, black holes are extremely dark, but not completely black or eternal (Hawking 2007, pp. 59-74).

It seems black holes range across the scales of the universe. Though black holes cannot be seen, their effects on nearby stars are visible, making it possible for astronomers to identify numerous black holes throughout the cosmos. As stars collapse into black holes, they may give off a shock wave in the form of a blast of bright light known as a “supernova.” On the other hand, some stars may collapse and simply disappear with no blast of light, which is called an “unnova.” In addition to the conventional stellar black hole, astronomers have identified supermassive black holes — comprised of the mass of millions or billions of stars — existing at the center of galaxies, including the Milky Way. Scientists now speculate that “micro black holes” might exist at the quantum level and may be temporarily created by the Large Hadron Collider (Greene 2008).

Black holes exist at the cutting edge of current topics in cosmology. It seems that black holes do not permit information to escape from the universe, as Hawking had once theorized. Information is not lost because when an object disappears into a black hole, the object’s information is simultaneously smeared across the surface of the event horizon, smeared because of the massive distortion of space-time. In other words, a black hole’s event horizon provides a two dimensional representation of the three dimensional world being distorted inside the black hole. This means black holes are holographic, as might be the entire universe (Susskind 2008: pp. 290-306).

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?

If the Enlightenment project sought to liberate individuals, with representation via the mass media and democratic politics, then it seems representation and entertainment are overtaking liberation and enlightenment, like a map overtaking the territory it supposed to represent. To be surveilled and represented as information is to exist and be “real” as patriot and citizen, while the real individual exists beyond the screens. The deeper message of total surveillance is not physical presence, but the representation of presence, to be observed and recorded in the databases. To have real presence would require that one not be there. In the future, perhaps the only way individuals can be real and free is to disappear, where existence as a private individual requires disappearance as a political subject. Maybe Mayer-Schonberger’s “Delete” will be extended into a form of resistance, as a way of “erasing” one’s self from the electronic galaxies. Isn’t that the very condition suggested by the cinematic exits from light?

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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hawking, dawkins, god, and nothingness

2010-09-06T15:03:00.009-04:00

Note: This the working draft of my Existential Espresso podcast (September 5, 2010) of the same title. This draft does not include all my spontaneous ad libs and has not been edited for perfect grammar or to remove its casual style and tone. I am posting this merely for those who are interested in accessing an online text version of the ideas in this podcast. This should not be considered a final draft or my complete thoughts on these topics. For that, you should refer to my books in the Theory Zero series, available in Amazon.

••••••••

With the fabulous weather in Philadelphia this morning, my neighborhood coffeehouses were a little too noisy, so I had to return to my loft. But, I am armed with my espresso and ready to get some neurons firing and I hope you are, too.

For me, my summer is over and the new semester has started. Over 15 years as a college professor. Hard to believe, the years are going by. As I mentioned in my previous podcast, about “Living in the Milky Way,” this summer I spent several weeks in the deserts of the Big Bend are in far west Texas and thoroughly enjoyed the vistas, the landscapes, the quiet, and the night skies. There, you realize you are living on a planet in the Milky Way. Now, it is back to life in the metropolis, the urban universe that let’s us pretend we are center of everything. Since the new semester has started:

I am happy to report that my new text-anthology is now in-print, as of two weeks ago. Just in time! Published by Cognella academic books, the text is called Media Environments. It combines movies and theory to critique the role of media in society. And, I put together a great roster of authors: Carl Sagan, Al Gore, Naomi Wolf, Susan Jacoby, Naomi Klein, Neil Postman, Jean Baudrillard, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and many others, including Stephen Hawking. So, that is very cool.

Part 1: The Issue

Speaking of Stephen Hawking, as some of you may know, Hawking's new book is due out in a few days and it is already generating much controversy in the science-religion debate. Entitled The Grand Design, the book apparently claims that recent breakthroughs in cosmology show that the universe does not need a God to explain its existence. Since this book is not out yet, I have not read it. According to the BBC site, Hawking’s book claims:

"That science can explain the Universe's origin without invoking God, instead arguing that the existence of gravity means the Universe can create itself from nothing."

Regarding the first part of that phrase, that science can explain the universe without reference to God, well, Stephen, that is not news to existentialists. Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential ontology accomplished a similar task in Being and Nothingness in the 1940s, most specifically pages 3-26. Famed atheist Ayn Rand modified and streamlined the same essential argument in her critique of religion in Atlas Shrugged in 1957. Others have made similar arguments.

As for the second part of the phrase, about the role of gravity in permitting the Universe to create something from nothing, I will wait and read the book. Gravity is surely a powerful key force in the cosmos, but I am highly skeptical of the claim of something coming from nothing. This is because it seems something is what makes nothing possible. As Sartre showed in Being and Nothingness, it is existence and consciousness that makes possible all nothingnesses. More on this in a few moments.

As you might expect, in response to Hawking’s new book, the apologists for theology are leaping to the defense of superstition as a guide for human existence in the cosmos. At the BBC web site, there are the usual simplistic defenses of religion against science, assertions that have been refuted by many writers in the past, most recently Sam Harris and others. At the CNN site, there was a story about Hawking's new book, with almost half of the text devoted to religious assertions presented as profound insights that supposedly refuted or negated Hawking.

Of course, the so-called science-religion debate is not really a debate, it is the science-superstition meme popularity contest. It is not a debate, because debate implies evidence from which human reason logically makes an argument. Since there is no evidence for a Creator, religious disputes can only be resolved through force, not persuasion, which is why religion causes wars and mass slaughter. Just read the news: “sectarian violence” is the Orwellian code name for religious war. The Terror War is, at root, a religious war.

There is no evidence for any grand Creator, only centuries of foundationless assertions, buttressed by reassurances that God has a mysterious plan for everything, including the promise of eternal life after death for those that choose myth and superstition over reason and science.

Must everything, especially our most profound ideas and insights and aspirations, be dumbed down by our mass media and pop culture to the level of Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Tea Party metaphysics? If so, then in the words of Apollo 13, “Houston, We Have a Problem.”

Speaking of Apollo, we can trace this dumbing down of the profound back to Apollo 8, when the astronauts read from Genesis to a billion people watching on TV back on Earth. The astronauts were reading creation myths while orbiting the moon through the genius of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton, and others, and broadcasting a quarter-million miles back to Earth through the discoveries of electromagnetism and television. The astronauts read from Genesis to supposedly give meaning to the accomplishment, while comforting the masses back on Earth. This was a great leap backward for the human mind and is the ground zero for the rise of fundamentalism, as I showed in my book Starry Skies Moving Away (available in Amazon). Should we be surprised that 50-60% of America is creationist! And, all religion and faith further undermine the respect for evidence and logic and reason throughout society, while reducing our most profound issues into stories, assertions, and mindless rants.

The metameme that is science has an expanding and evolving universe of evidence, provided by ever more powerful media technologies — the Hubble space telescope, various electron microscopes, WMAP space probe, COBE satellite, and many other space telescopes coming in the near future. These media technologies illustrate what I call the first law of media technologies — media technologies are not neutral, as they increase in power, they change our view of the cosmos, society, and our place in both. From Galileo’s telescope to the microscope to the microchip, this has proven true. Look at the effects of the printing press, the television, and the computer. The telescope may be the most important. And, powered by Moore’s Law, these media technologies are gathering ever more power, doubling in power every 18-24 months for the past 60 years and into the foreseeable future. This means our telescopes and computers will evermore evidence to provide ever deeper understanding of our strange and beautiful universe, at the micro and macro levels.

The Hubble space telescope is the most powerful eye humanity has. This electronic eye has peered across billions of light years of space-time, looking back billions of year into the early stages of the universe and galaxy formation. It has found black holes, furthering the work of Hawking and many others. Hubble has provided astonishing new insights into the number of galaxies in the universe. The Hubble Deep Field images revealed thousands of galaxies in a tiny dark spot in the night sky, which is one key reason why we know there are 100+ billion galaxies in the visible universe.

But, there is one thing this eye has not seen or discovered: any sign or evidence of a Creator. Or any evidence of a heaven with spirits in harmony with each other. Why deny what our most powerful eye shows … and what it knows? There is no Creator out there, anywhere, much less overlooking our little planet and advising us on who to have sex with at night. For that matter, go do your own experiment. Have some crazy sex beneath the starry skies at night and see what happens. It will be like looking through the Hubble telescope. You will have some great fun amidst the stars, but you will not get a message from any Creator.

Of course, fun sex does not falsify God, even beneath the stars. Evidence and media technology, however overwhelming and powerful, is not enough to make the total case for no Creator. Rigorous logical reasoning is equally important. Let me explain. This podcast will have three more parts. Part 2, some back story about recent events and pop culture. Part 3, a discussion showing that a Creator does exist and is an impossibility. Part 4, I will highlight a few issues about existential roles of media technology.

Part 2: Back Story

Before I discuss Hawking and Dawkins, I should make clear that I am not going to refute every argument or claim for a Creator. I am only going to discuss the ultimate one and show why a Creator, of any kind, is logically and existentially impossible. Thus, all theologies are false. And, before you bombard me with emails, read my books in Amazon and post your complaints there; my books can always use some controversy! The two books most relevant are Starry Skies Moving Away and Crashing Into the Vanishing Points. Covering art, science, film, architecture, and media theory, my books provide a broad, unique take on contemporary culture and religion is just one of the many topics I cover.

Of course, the past several decades have produced numerous writers and books that have shown the falsity, hypocrisy, and contradictions of all theologies, with much greater insight than Nietzsche’s famous 19^th century assertion that “God is dead.” Since 9/11, it has become clear that global superstitions seek to reverse the trajectories of modern secular culture in creating theological empires that return humanity to the past, to the supposedly glorious spiritual paradises of the premodern mind. Thus, there has been a recent spurt of atheist books, written by courageous writers willing to challenge the creationist dogma and the anti-intellectualism of the global media, especially in America. These include works of Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others. You can find them easily in Amazon or at your chain bookstore and in some independent bookstores.

I have been an existentialist, without the angst, since my early 20s. I was probably somewhat of an existentialist as a child and just did not know it. Anyway, I have long ignored the folly of superstition. That is until 9/11 and the Terror War, which, at its most essential level, is a religious war between two tribes of fundamentalists, both at war with the culture and secular values of the modern world. Glenn Beck’s rant at his rally perfectly illustrated this idea. According to CNN, Beck said:

"America today begins to turn back to God. For too long, this country has wandered in darkness."

Turn back to God or Allah, it does not matter. It is the same superstitious concept and both memes are false. The memes of the two religions are virtually identical, as I wrote in the text for Peter Granser’s art-photography book, Signs, published in Europe and America by Hatje Cantz and The Chicago Museum of Contemporary photography. The book, a collection of photos about neoconservative US culture, have been featured in numerous exhibitions around the world.

The best book that I read on the specific overall of a Creator is George Smith’s 1980 classic, Atheism: The Case Against God, which systematically dismantles all the key arguments offered for a Creator, despite the lack of evidence. And it is precisely because belief in the great Creator is buttressed by zero evidence, that logical reasoning must appear on the stage. It would help if there were some artists who would jump on stage to help promote sanity, but they seem too busy making movies about zombies, vampires, monsters, totalitarian computers, and end-of-the-world apocalypses. And, of course, the endless stream of movies about action heroes and people falling in and out of love. Other than Julia Sweeney’s monologue about Letting Go of God, and Bill Maher’s light-hearted, but hilarious film, Religulous, who else in the popular media and Hollywood is standing on the side of sanity?

For that matter, where are the hip business leaders of Silicon Valley. Very quiet. But, then, they have customers who they are afraid to offend and stockholders who be would upset if over 50% of their customers dropped their brand. After all, well over 50% of America is creationist and one presumes that their God and sacred texts would compel them to not use the products of a company led by an atheist who believes in evolution and the Big Bang.

And, where are my friends and colleagues on the Left? Most are very quiet on this issue, apparently content in their relativism, which, however well-intended, is naive. This is the apparent policy of The New York Times, which rarely challenges anything essential about any religion anywhere, except extremism. All beliefs are equally profound the Times seems to suggest, apparently oblivious to the idea that it is moderation, implied virtue, and uncritical toleration that makes extremism possible. Even Noam Chomsky did not single out religion or fundamentalism one of the century’s great challenges in his new book, Hopes and Prospects. Chomsky sees our challenge for the century to be merely “decent survival.” For Chomsky, the greatest threats to our survival are imperialism, ecological apocalypse and nuclear apocalypse, but apparently not the intellectual apocalypse that is fundamentalism, creationism, and superstition.

Regarding relativism, some values are relative to their context, but not all. The phrase “Everything is relative” is a self contradiction and makes sense only if it is excluded from what it claims; if everything is relative, that would include the statement itself, which then means some things can only be not relative.

The same can be said for uncertainty. To say there is no certainty is a contradiction in terms, for the statement itself makes a claim to certainty: there is no certainty. If one wants to claim they are uncertain of everything, including their belief in uncertainty, then they necessarily concede that certainties are possible. This is the flaw in pure skepticism and Bill Maher’s ontology of “doubt.”

So, we are given three existential choices in the popular media, religion or relativism or skepticism, with science and philosophy merely bystanders to the spectacle.

Of course, a short term global strategy has to be to cultivate peace among religious tribes. This especially necessary to prevent a nuclear detonation or exchange, as well as protect the human rights of women, children, and gays, all of whom are targeted for exploitation and domination by the theological rulers, which are usually patriarchies. But the only long term path is to promote cosmic sanity. And that means abandoning the premodern idea of a Creator of the cosmos.

Having reading three of Hawking's books, I always thought he was weak in how he addressed the God question or the Creator issue. Of course, most famously, he asserted at the end of The Theory of Everything that a unified theory of cosmology – the so-called theory of everything – might eventually allow us “to see the mind of God.” To me, this comment undermined the rest of the book, however witty his intent. Of course, Hawking might have meant that science will make us gods in our ability to understand the cosmos in ways unimaginable prior to modern science. In a profound way, he is right. But, we know that know that theologians would never take his phrase that way. It was the equivalent of saying that culmination of cosmology is to understand Genesis in the Bible. In effect, Hawking repeated the intellectual crash of Apollo 8.

If the theory of everything could allow us to see the mind of God, then why can’t the sacred texts – supposedly the word of God – allow us to understand the universe, as revealed by our media technologies? The sacred texts have nothing to say about the vast universe we now know exists, precisely because the texts came before science and telescopes and microscopes. Nothing to say on genetics, quantum mechanics, evolution, electromagnetism, relativity, black holes, galaxies, the big bang, and so on.

Scientists are great discoverers, but usually poor philosophers. This is not an attack on Hawking or Dawkins, for they are great scientists and writers. But, my point is that most scientists, in their passion for discovery, have not spent enough time thinking through the philosophical arguments and questions.

If Hawking has determined that recent discoveries and theories in cosmology reveal that God is not necessary for the existence of the universe, then he has merely re-stated what Sartre’s existentialist philosophy has known a long time.

Richard Dawkins is a great scientist and ardent defender of reason and sanity against the forces of superstition and human ignorance, i.e. fundamentalism and creationism. His views are often misrepresented or misunderstood by critics. Dawkins is correct that Darwin and evolution removes the need for a Creator because genetic evolution – replication, variation, and selection – will produce design without a grand plan, without a grand designer. Though scientists often quibble over specialized details, I think his books have proved this beyond any doubt. This summer I read his latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth. The last chapter is especially fabulous: a great treatment of the sublime beauty of evolution, as Darwin suggested in the last line of his famous book, Origin of the Species.

But, Dawkins, for all his biological and scientific genius, is wrong on one philosophical point, the most important point. In The God Delusion and in interviews, he allows the possibility (however slim) of a Creator, because he apparently thinks that the idea of a Creator cannot be disproved 100%. In other words, in the terms of the dominant philosophy of science methodology, the hypothesis of a Creator cannot be falsified with 100% certainty, a certainty derived from experimental testing and empirical evidence. Of course, Dawkins cleverly shows that one cannot falsify a flying spaghetti monster, either. But, while the falsification methodology, which came from Karl Popper, has much merit in the science lab, it is overlooks some key logical insights necessary to refute the meme of Creators of the cosmos.

Part 3: There is no Creator

To show that there is no Creator, I am going to combine the ideas of several thinkers into one brief and basic and irrefutable point. These include some of Aristotle’s metaphysics, Sartre’s ontology in Being and Nothingness, Rand’s views on God, and others.

Dawkins is correct when he asks why should the God hypothesis be exempt from critique and the requirements of verifiable evidence and logic, unlike the Gaia hypothesis, or evolution, or the big bang, all of which must face rigorous scrutiny in the academic world? As many philosophers and scientists have understood, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs and the burden of proof is on those who make the claims. The assertion of a Creator of the universe should qualify as an extraordinary claim, as is the claim that such a Creator has placed the faithful at the center of the universe, reads their minds, and has secured their collective and personal destinies. There is zero evidence for such claims.

Despite what is believed in churches, temples, and mosques, and assumed throughout popular culture (especially in the mass media and Hollywood movies), all of the arguments for gods and Creators have failed to meet the philosophical and evidentiary criteria associated with truth and human knowledge. There are endless myths, anecdotes, and torturous assumptions that claim the existence of deities and gods, but the ultimate empirical and intellectual foundation for proposing any Creator of the universe is flawed, illogical, and contradictory.

From an existentialist perspective, all the authority of theology and the sacred texts begins with an assertion about the existence of a God or Creator. It is Genesis 1, Verse 1. That is the essential point of debate, the foundation upon which stands the entire edifice of religion. That is why the theologians must attack Hawking.

Without convincing evidence and proof, theology and religion then possess no more spiritual or intellectual merit than any other premodern model of the world that seeks to explain the origin of the cosmos and destiny of humanity, absent any reference or understanding of modern science. It does matter if the theologian is Pope Benedict or Benny Hinn or Osama bin Laden. It is the same assertion.

Let’s get a two key terms straight to avoid confusion. Those terms are existence and Creator.

By existence, I mean everything that exists, the universe, the multiverse, bubble universes popping in and out of existence, or any other conception of the entirety of the cosmos. Existence is everything that has existed, past, present, and future. This is, in essence, Sartre’s meaning of existence.

The other term is Creator. By Creator, I mean any concept of Deity, God, Allah, Omnipotent Being, Master of the Universe, etc.

All theological arguments for a Creator necessarily claim, assume, or presuppose that the Creator is immaterial and was conscious when creating existence. There is no argument for a Creator that does not explicitly or inherently assume the Creator has no material form, was conscious, and aware of what it was doing. The Creator is pure consciousness. The lack of material form is essential to the role of faith, or believing without evidence. Supposedly, this lack of material form makes it impossible to falsify the existence of a Creator, yet it simultaneously opens the door for a fatal flaw … though that will hardly matter to the faithful followers.

Now here are the contradictions and flaws.

1. If the Creator was conscious and there was no existence or no universe, then what was the Creator conscious of — itself? Impossible. Recall, it is immaterial, it is pure consciousness (or spirituality).

2. A consciousness aware only of itself is an impossibility; a consciousness (of any kind) can only identify itself in relation to some existing thing, external to itself, of which it is conscious or aware.

3. A consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms. It is impossible for such to even exist. Before consciousness could even identify itself as being conscious, there must have been some existing thing to be conscious of, a thing external to consciousness and awareness.

In other words, existence necessarily precedes any form of consciousness. That’s it. There is no exit from that reality. That is why there is no Creator. So far as I know, this is the argument overlooked by Dawkins, Hawking, Hitchens, Carl Sagan, Bill Maher, and many other atheists, agnostics, or skeptics.

If someone wants to claim that a deity exists that is not perceivable, then what they are practicing is not consciousness, or awareness. They are believing a delusion.

Consciousness can only exist and function in relation to a physical existence, a physical universe of which it is aware, which explains why consciousness fits with evolutionary theory. Existence is everything that has ever existed, including consciousness and the universe, in whatever form(s). In relation to any kind of consciousness, existence must have always been prior in some form, however much existence has changed and evolved. Over the millennia, consciousness emerged from stardust to become alive and has adapted to the universe in becoming aware of existence.

This is a beautiful meme! It does not make me feel small or needing an explanation for existence of everything. Existence is the ground for all explanations. Existence was not created, nor was the universe. The big bang view of the universe is often imprecisely thought of as meaning that the universe was created, but that it is inaccurate. Actually, all we know, so far, is that the visible universe was a small region of space-time that massively expanded over 13.7 billion years into the visible universe and the vast realm of space-time that we know today. We do not know what caused this explosive expansion, but, as I explained earlier, we are certain it was not caused by a Creator.

So, what is the role of nothingness in these issues? Very important, while also illustrating the profound existential role of media technologies.

As Sartre explains in Being and Nothingness, existence is everything, the entirety of the universe. Existence precedes essence, existing prior to any Platonic forms or beliefs or consciousness or anything else. There are no things outside existence, including nothing.

In a nutshell, existence is the container for all empirical things, plus consciousness and nothingness. The universe is what it is, full of being. All living things have a lack, a state of incompleteness, forever seeking the fullness and completeness that motivates all action and thought. To have a lack or be incomplete is to not have something, or to have a nothing that needs to be filled with something. This is one key origin of nothing and nothingness. Here is the second. To be aware of any empirical thing, consciousness must not be that thing, much like seeing is separate from what is seen. Since all things are potential objects of consciousness, consciousness must be a non-thing, or a nothingness. Consciousness illuminates existence as it is … and as it is not … but could be, revealing nothingnesses to be filled. In sum, nothingness exists and we humans strive to improve or complete ourselves by filling nothingness with being. These nothingnesses are the discontinuities in a deterministic universe, the starting point for all human freedom and cultural possibility, collectively and individually, from past to present to future.

What does this mean for the Creator issue?

1. Since consciousness is a nothingness, it cannot be outside existence, thus eliminating the possibility for a Creator. So, now is the time to free our minds from myths and superstitions and confidently embrace the evolving scientific-existentialist view of the universe.

2. Nothing exists within existence; existence does not exist within nothing. The big bang universe is not filling up empty space; all space and time is within existence. Voids exist within existence, not the other way around. Surely, energy and matter are interchangeable, and the universe is strange. But can something literally come from nothing. Literally, the answer seems to be no. It is existence that makes possible nothing and nothingness.

Part 4: Media Technology and the Cosmos.

There is one sense that I agree with Glenn Beck (but not in the same meaning), in that Americans are “wandering in the darkness” … so is everyone on our planet.

Everyday, Spaceship Earth is hurtling through the darkness of the cosmic void, locked into the gravity of the sun and the Milky Way and being pulled along at 570,000 miles per hour. That’s right, 570,000 miles per hour, 24/7. Since Apollo 8, the masses have been able to see the true existential condition of our planet, viewing it in the famed Earthrise photo, where Earth was shown against the darkness, rising above the horizon of the moon. To believe in a Creator is an epic denial, as expressed by the Apollo 8 reading of Genesis.

We know we are not the center of the universe, a universe of 100s of billions of galaxies, each with 100s of billions of stars. And this universe is expanding, with vast voids and dark energy apparently driving the galaxies away from each other.

Every night, we avoid or evade these facts when our cities light up and the TVs and computers turn on. We have created artificial universes — our cities and cyberspace – where we can pretend we are the center of the universe. The media universe is a substitute universe, with hyperlinks placing us at the center; what else is the meaning of Facebook? A media universe for you, about you, starring you.

In contrast to wandering in cosmic darkness, we are also living in a time of bright lights, but it has nothing to do with our electrified cities or imaginary masters of the universe. Media technologies – in the form of ever more powerful telescopes, computers, and electronic screens – are revealing a universe of astonishing scale and beauty, with billions upon billions of radiant galaxies and stars. This is the brightest time in history for cosmology. We should embrace it.

We humans are not omniscient beings, so our methods of grasping existence have natural limits, but those limits are determined only by the nature of the cosmos and the nature of our consciousness, and our media technologies. Human knowledge is evolving and open ended. As the media technologies expand and increate in power, so to will our knowledge. Over time, some theories have been proven true, such as gravity, evolution, relativity, the big bang, and so on.. Other theories have been proven false, such as such as geocentrism, the flat Earth, and creationism. That theory and knowledge evolve with new evidence and new media technology is natural and need not imply utter relativism.

From the fact that no one person, institution, or nation can know everything, it does not follow that there must be a divine Creator, a cosmic spirit, intelligent designer, or any other supernatural entity. That we are not gods who know everything about the structure and evolution of the universe does not imply that the universe must have been “intelligently designed” by a god, Creator, or deity of any kind. Similarly, non-omniscience does not mean we have zero knowledge or zero certainty.

Knowledge should be thought of as contextual and evolutionary, not timeless or static, always open ended and subject to revision when presented with new evidence, new conditions, or new theories. If knowledge and certainty mean the total and complete grasp of an unchanging world or the entire universe, then we are left with the false alternatives of being either omniscient gods or ignorant fools. If certainty means omniscience, then we must certainly be forever blind. From the fact that we cannot know everything, it does not follow that we cannot understand anything — that we are not gods does not mean we are fools.

Final Thoughts

Now a few final thoughts on media technology and the cosmos. All the genius of Hawking is reliant upon the power of telescopes and computer technologies. Without the telescopes and computers, our knowledge of the cosmos would be tiny. But there is so much more going on with media and the cosmos and I want to touch upon a few points. The idea of “Media and Human Destiny” is my newest writing project and I have a great grad student working with me on the project, Agreen Wang, who you can hear on the Black Hole Media Theory podcast.

Marshall McLuhan viewed the electronic media as extensions of human consciousness and the central nervous system, resulting in a global network that functions as a “global nervous system” — technologies of perception deployed upon the world to map the world, but which also function to model and reorder the world. Television and movies are extensions of the camera and radio, which are extensions of the eye and spoken words, with words as an extension of human thought. Computers and cyberspace are extensions of the brain, consciousness, and memories. Satellites are also extensions. The Hubble telescope is a satellite extension of television, which is an extension of the eye, with all the data going into computers. Outer space is being stored in cyberspace.

Just think: With Hubble, we have extended our eyes into outer space, across billions of years of space and time, across vast voids of the cosmos. There is no sign or evidence of any Creator, only the cosmos evolving according to its own rules, which we are discovering.

If media are extensions of consciousness, and consciousness is a nothingness, then it follows that electronic media are nothingnesses — electronic nothingnesses extended from humans to fill a nothingness in existence and consciousness. A new laptop seems “empty” until put to use, with the gigabytes serving as a digital nothingness to be filled with images and information, the reflections of the world which provide the media content. No matter how much the media proliferate around the world, there will always be the sense of nothingness right next to the sense of being in the world, precisely because we have developed powerful media technology to mirror and model the world. The idea of being and nothingness existing, side-by-side, is implicit in the nature of digital technology — 1’s and 0’s, on and off, representation and non-representation, being and nothingness.

This means the Hubble space telescope and all the space probes are extensions of human consciousness and nothingness into outer space. Electronic and digital nothingnesses extended into space for the purpose of representing objects back to us on Earth. We have extended our consciousness throughout the solar system. We know now there is water on our moon, water and fog on Titan, one of Saturn’s moons. As of June 2010, NASA and JPL report there are 450+ exoplanets, meaning the number of planets outside our solar system, orbiting other stars. The number of planets will likely reach thousands and maybe millions, just in the Milky Way. What about the billions of galaxies?

Of course, where there is water and planets, there is a good possibility of life, with 450 planets and counting. After all, our solar system has eight planets, one with life and moons with water. The odds suggest we are surely not the only game in town.

And, consider this. The Voyager space probe has left the solar system, with the Pioneer probes to follow. And other space probes to follow. Not only have we encircled Earth within our electronic nervous system, we have encompassed the solar system within our electronic consciousness, within our electronic nothingnesses. Outer space within cyberspace; vast cosmic voids within vast digital voids, representations of something within nothingness.

As I said earlier, media technologies are not neutral; as they increase in power they change our view of the cosmos, our view of existence, social organization, and out place in society and the cosmos. The single most important challenge facing humanity is finding meaning and destiny in the big bang universe, as revealed by our media technologies. That’s it. All else is secondary — all ideologies, all worldviews, all politics and moralities, all dreams and delusions. Let’s not pretend this is a task for religion or theology. It is long past time we grew up and abandoned such childish stories. Let’s not pretend this is a task for science, alone, either. And, certainly not politics. The task requires the collective effort of art, science, and philosophy.

And, it is beautiful challenge, but it will be a lengthy task, one that I hope humans are willing to face. Our sanity and fate depends on it.

[i]

[ii]

Slugging Nothing reaches #1

2010-01-31T21:32:00.002-05:00

My book, Slugging Nothing, reached #1 in the Kindle "Criticism" section. And, it reached #2 in the "Aesthetics" section. Granted, these are niche markets, but it proves you can bypass the mainstream editorial systems to reach audiences with creative theory for critical thinkers.

The book is also available in high quality paperback.

1996 - 2010: The Evolution of Theory Vortex

2010-01-15T11:34:00.026-05:00

Over the past week, the most recent Existential Espresso podcast -- "Avatar, Star Trek, 2012, and the Future" -- streaked past 2000 downloads.

Begun in 2009, Existential Espresso is just the latest of my efforts to experiment with media in the dissemination of original ideas and theories, as illustrated by my Theory Zero book series (2008-2009) and my experimental film, Space Times Square (2007), both produced by my media collaborative called Theory Vortex Experiments.

Though they are not selling like the Da Vinci Code, the Theory Zero books continue to build a small, but growing readership. They are available in Amazon as

high quality paperback and as an ebook for Kindle; they are also available in Google for the forthcoming Sony ebook. Space Times Square has played in many festivals and galleries around the world can be viewed

at this website. In addition, Theory Vortex also produced the most original book about Fight Club, called Slugging Nothing (2009). This is the first book of the Cool Voids series, with more to come in the future.

Theory Vortex has its origins in the following four intellectual events, which were way ahead of the curve, either in their ideas and/or the use of media technologies. At the time, three of these events were understood as "cyber-symposiums" because they were streamed live over the internet, beginning in 1996! In case any readers are interested, here are the details of these pioneering events, including the event that led to my interview-debate with Anderson Cooper on CNN. And, check out the crazy promotional posters!

1996: CULTUREMORPH

This symposium was one of the earliest events ever "streamed" or webcast via the internet. The event was organized by David Sedman and myself during the Fall semester of 1996. Then, Sedman and I were profs at SMU in Dallas. David is still there, though I am now at Temple University in Philadelphia.

We received email feedback from viewers in Tokyo and Paris, which was radically novel proof (for that era) that we had a effected a global telecast with a computer and camera.

Think of it as YouTube for theorists, nine years before there was YouTube for everyone else!

Handling the webcast of the event was a Dallas firm called "audionet," which later became "broadcast.com" and made Mark Cuban a billionaire when he sold it to Yahoo (luckily) just prior to the dotcom bust of 2000.

Culturemorph was a multimedia symposium which explored the cultural transformations being wrought by the internet, genetics, nanotechnology, and chaos theory. The event featured five theorists, including the poet and philosopher Frederick Turner (author of The Culture of Hope and many other books), Susan Herring (The University of Texas at Arlington), Sedman, and Vacker.

Held on the SMU campus in Dallas, the live event was attended by approximately 200 people and viewed by an unknown number around the world via the webcast. Since many of the attendees were dressed in all-black cyber-hacker attire (three years before The Matrix), we realized that we had tapped into some kind of intellectual underground in Dallas. The audience was energetic and enthusiastic, surrounding the speakers after the event and posing many questions for well over an hour.

Because there was such limited hard-drive capacity at that time, this event was not stored in any computer and is gone forever. Unfortunately, the videotape of the event was of such poor quality it was not usable. But, we have a crazy poster to remember the event!

1997: VIRTUAL CITY

Following the success of Culturemorph in 1996, David Sedman and I organized another online event, this one dedicated to exploring the convergence of media and metropolis.

Due to last-minute technical problems, this event was not transmitted over the internet nor was it videotaped.

Panelists included Michael Benedikt (professor of architecture at The University of Texas at Austin and editor of Cyberspace: First Steps (MIT Press, 1992), Michael Cox (The Federal Reserve Bank), Laurie Kretchmar, Sedman, and myself.

The turnout was also rather slim, with fewer than a dozen attendees (excluding last-minute students attending for extra credit).

For reasons that remain unclear, this event never generated much interest or excitement in the media or community. In sum, this event was a low-buzz, low-tech dud! But, we have a crazy poster to remember the event!

1999: TRAJECTORY OF THE CANVAS

David Sedman and I created another online event, this time webcast via the internet with Yahoo!.

Held at the McKinney Avenue Contemporary, an avant-garde art space in Dallas, the event explored the implications of new technologies for the worlds of art and aesthetics.

Presenters included the poet and philosopher Frederick Turner (author of The Culture of Hope and many other books), Tim Sanders (author of Love is the Killer App), Mark Landson (leader of the string quartet Neo Camerata), who debuted his piece "Period 3," which was based on one of my essays. Sedman and myself also gave talks.

The event played to a standing room only crowd (100+) of artists, patrons, technology geeks, and various other people; another 850 tuned in live from around the world.

The success of the event reaffirmed what we learned with Culturemorph, that the internet will be the technology for global television produced by everybody. This was still six years before YouTube!

Because of that era's limited hard-drive capacities, this event was not stored in any computer. But, we have that crazy poster to remember the event!

2003: MAPPING THE MATRIX

I organized this multimedia symposium to "hack" The Matrix, on the very weekend of the release of the first sequel.

This event offered no novel technological aspects, but it did decide to hack a popular film, just for the intellectual fun of it! Later that day, I was interviewed about The Matrix and philosophy by Anderson Cooper on CNN International. A free transcript of the interview (more like an implicit debate) is available here.

Yes, the film is loved and loathed (especially by many critics and professors), but rather than merely revere or rant, the panelists hacked the many meanings of the film, illustrating why it tapped into the millennial cultural zeitgeist around the world.

Panelists also included William Irwin (professor of philosophy at King's College and editor of The Matrix and Philosophy (2003), one of the best-selling philosophy books of all-time), Read Mercer Schuchardt, editor of Taking the Red Pill (2003), and Elisa Durrette, former Futurist for FedEx Kinko's and now a future alienated grad student in the Ivy League and one of my coolest friends!

Held on the Temple University campus in Philadelphia on a Saturday afternoon, the event played to a standing room only crowd (125+); the audience was extremely diverse, ethnically and demographically, including teens and an 80-year-old hipster couple, who took many notes and dressed very much like Trinity and Neo ... or they were devotees of the Bauhaus school of fashion design.

The intellectual energy of the crowd was rather startling for a symposium on a college campus; all the panelists were quite impressed with the enthusiasm of the audience. During my presentation, an argument even broke out between two audience members over some of my interpretations of the film!

The end of the world, again

2010-01-07T12:35:00.003-05:00

To mark the end of the decade on the last day of the decade, the New York Times published an op-ed by Denis Dutton, a prominent academic philosopher from New Zealand. The op-ed was entitled: "It’s Always the End of the World as We Know It." The story tries to explain the recurrence of apocalyptic themes and visions in our contemporary culture.

As with "The Big Zero" op-ed (see my last blog post from 2009) published on December 27 in the New York Times, I can only say: "What too so long, Denis?" Again, I am glad to see theNew York Times kinda staying up with the deeper issues facing our civilization.

On the other hand, I have to frank here. Dutton makes several good points, but, overall, this op-ed is another example of the lightweight theorizing (from so-called qualified experts) that passes for critical thinking on the pages of the New York Times. I am sure Dutton is an excellent academic, but his analysis is so "mainstream" that it could have easily have been featured on Fox News and no one would give it a second thought.

For example, Dutton spends most of his ink on explaining Y2K and utterly misses the two most important points, the meaning of the zeros and its role as an event that masked other media events. This is covered in my book Zero Conditions and in my upcoming essay "The Zero Zero Decade," which is forthcoming in Useless magazine.

Regarding the recurring themes of apocalyptic scenarios, my books Crashing Into the Vanishing Points and Starry Skies Moving Away offers a much broader and more profound analysis.

Top Zeros of the Decade

2009-12-31T10:49:00.006-05:00

In the New York Times (December 27, 2009), Paul Krugman proclaimed this decade to be "The Big Zero." My comment: Paul, what took you so long?

As illustrated in my book Zero Conditions (2008), this decade has been filled with cultural zeros. Krugman's insightful essay perfectly illustrates the "zero" in the economic realm. But what of the many other zeros in our culture?

In January, 2010, my essay "The Zero Zero Decade" will be published in Useless, the edgy art and culture magazine sold in museums, galleries, and newsstands in Europe and New York. The essay is an adaptation from Zero Conditions. Useless is published by the artist Conrad Ventur, who has given permission to publish an abridged version of "The Zero Zero Decade" in this blog.

TOP ZEROS OF THE DECADE

[ adapted from Zero Conditions and "The Zero Zero Decade." ]

So, here we are, ten years into the new millennium, seeking to make sense of the decade of "the naughts," those years following 2000. These are the years in which the number of the year was preceded by double zeros. If we are looking for philosophical meaning in the decade of the naughts, then perhaps we should look at the "zero," that number that stands for naught and nothing and so much more.

Though zero is often associated with a lack or a nothing, the cultural meaning of zero is powerful and paradoxical. Zero is the first number in the real world, the nothingness from which we begin counting all things real and imaginary. Zero is the starting point for counting up and the end point for countdowns. Zero ends the countdowns for rockets to the starry skies, and ground zero is the detonation point for rockets with atomic bombs. The idea of zero as signaling nothingness or countdown is why it is usually associated with destruction and apocalypse.

When a zero appears at the end of a calendar year, such as 2010, it serves a powerful symbol demarking the passage of years, measured in decades. When three zeros appear, as in 2000, it is a symbol of the passage of centuries, measured in millennia. It is at such moments that the zeros suggest not only ends and apocalypses, but also beginnings and singularities, the possibilities of transformations yet to be realized. The three zeros of the year 2000 signaled the starting point or the singularity, the moment of nothingness between positive and negative, yesterday and tomorrow, countdown and blastoff. But, blast off into what kind of tomorrow?

THE COUNTDOWN TO 2000

By 1999, there were many clocks around the world counting down to 2000, yet the Millennium Clock at the Centre Pompidou had been the first clock of the countdown. For the existential nihilist Jean Baudrillard, the Millennium Clock suggested that modernity was running down, or out of time, becoming entropic in the exhaustion of all future possibilities — the project of modernity had become the "final illusion of history," for its vision of perpetual progress and industrial technology no longer existed as utopian models of the future in the West. As the end of the millennium approached, the ticking only seemed to accelerate, with the zeros increasing on the left side of the Clocks and eventually cascading in the final minutes and seconds to all zeros. There was climax and completion in the zeros, heralding not only the end of the millennium, but perhaps the end of the future, at least "the future" as we once imagined it.

1999

THE DOUBLE ZEROS OF Y2K

As the Millennium Clocks were ticking toward zero, a pair of zeros appeared on the digital horizon, the two zeros known as Y2K. The double zeros suggested a double-coding for Y2K, the nonevent that masked real events. The technological apocalypse was avoided with Y2K, thus masking the virtual apocalypse, where the territories of "reality" retreat beyond the proliferating maps of postmodern media the hyperreality of image and information, clones and copies, replicas and reproductions.

THE ZERO UNIVERSE OF THE MATRIX

The virtual apocalypse is the subject of The Matrix (1999), which depicted yet another war with the future, that hyperreal tomorrow existentially defined by the number zero.

In the beginning of the film, the title — THE MATRIX — emerges from the glowing green numbers cascading down a screen. More columns of cascading numbers follow. Slowly zooming in on a single digit — 0 — moviegoers were propelled through the zero, through the vanishing point, into a mediated realm of nothingness, the virtuality of "the matrix."

GETTING BACK TO ZERO IN FIGHT CLUB

The film opened with Durden holding a gun in the mouth of Jack, accompanied by the following prophetic lines from Durden: "Three minutes. This is it: ground zero." The film then flashes back to tell story of the rebellion, which began with brutal fistfights among gangs of GQ men in an underground network of "fight clubs." The movement expanded its scope and ambition to include detonating corporate sculpture and destroying the skyscrapers of credit card companies, all in the effort to fully erase credit card debt, to get us to go "back to zero." In the conclusion to the film, we return to "ground zero" to witness the implosion and collapse of several towering skyscrapers in cinematic imagery that was strikingly similar to the collapse of the Twin Towers two years later at Ground Zero in New York City.

2000

THE MILLENNIUM EXPERIENCE AT 0 degrees L

Functioning like a synthesis of world's fair and theme park, the Millennium Experience opened on December 31, 1999, and closed on December 31, 2000. Promotional literature described the zones as "windows to the future," with the Millennium Dome being "the most forward-looking place in the world to celebrate the year 2000 and our voyage into the next thousand years."

The largest dome in the world, the Millennium Dome was intended to be an architectural icon for celebrating the new millennium, symbolically situated on the Greenwich Peninsula at 0 degrees longitude on the prime meridian, which functions as the beginning and end point in the standardization of world time. Inside the Millennium Dome was the Millennium Experience, a series of "zones" designed to be educational and entertaining, each dedicated to some aspect of the human condition at the millennium. The most popular zone was the Body, where visitors walked inside a giant human body (the size of the Statue of Liberty) that featured a pumping heart, brain activities, and other bodily functions. The Mind depicted the functions and neural networks of the brain. The Home Planet offered a multimedia presentation about nature around the world, with an exterior made of TV screens showing various images of nature. Other zones included Work, Play, Money, Faith, Learning, and Journey (transportation), each experienced much like a theme park attraction.

After the Millennium Experience closed, the exhibits and everything inside were dismantled and sold via an auction — a fire sale of "the future." By the end of 2001, the Millennium Dome was an empty cavern, containing nothing more than dust and debris.

If the Millennium Dome was about the future, then it seems we have entered a disposable future, or an empty future, or perhaps a future dead on arrival. Perhaps this future is suggested by the fate of the Body, for which there were no bidders, apparently because the giant human form was too unwieldy or just plain useless.

After being dismembered, the Body was buried in a nearby hole. The only full-time resident of the Dome is already dead, the Body now decaying in its graveyard. The Body entered the future at 0 degrees L and was buried shortly after at 0 degrees L, at the beginning and end of world time.

2001

GROUND ZERO IN NEW YORK CITY

The World Trade Center was completed in 1973, and when Tower 2 was finished, it became the mirror of Tower 1, thus making the monoliths into icons for the copy, the clone, the replay of the event that had already occurred, the arrival at a destination already reached. The Twin Towers were like binary digits, the ones turned on, towering monoliths waiting for the countdown to Ground Zero. The people killed in the collapse of the Twin Towers were disintegrated and buried at a zero, not unlike the Body dismembered and buried at 0 degrees L near the Millennium Dome. Conceived like world's fairs to celebrate the future, the Millennium Dome and the Twin Towers both met unexpected fates — burials at two zeros, two funerals for a new future, now apparently dead on arrival. This was the future anticipated in the ground zero of Fight Club.

2002

THE ZERO UNIVERSE OF NAQOYQATSI

In Naqoyqatsi (2002), the third film of the "Qatsi" trilogy, Godfrey Reggio echoed The Matrix and Paul Virilio's post-9/11 critique, Ground Zero (2002), which theorized that reality had perhaps tipped "once and for all into electronic nothingness." After the title — NAQOYQATSI — is shown on the screen, a burst of stars accelerates toward us, expanding in all directions like the big bang universe.

A zero emerges from around the four sides of the screen and then recedes into the vanishing point, while the stars accelerate ever faster. The zero reemerges from behind the expanding stars, accompanied by a horizontal stream of ones and zeros that dissolve into exploding stars.

2003

GROUND ZERO IN LAS VEGAS

Disneyland and Las Vegas embody all the complexities of the postmodern hyperreal, where the real and fictional are no longer dualities but are digitized and cloned in an endless series of reprogramming and reproduction.

The events at Ground Zero in New York were strangely anticipated in Las Vegas, at the hotel "New York-New York." As with the Twin Towers, the hotel New York-New York signaled the double, the clone, the copy, the rise of the hyperreal. Opened in 1997, New York-New York is a vast simulation of various New York City icons — with a skyscraper skyline that features a half-size Statue of Liberty, forty-seven-story Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, Seagram Building, Grand Central Station, three-hundred-foot-long Brooklyn Bridge, and many others. Within New York╨New York, tourists can dine in Greenwich Village or stroll along Times Square and Broadway. However, visitors have never been able to view or visit the World Trade Center, for the Twin Towers were not included in the skyline of New York-New York.

Like a map prophesying the absence of territories, the future of New York City was presaged in the Xerox of New York-New York.

2004

ZERO-BRANES AND ZERO CURVATURE IN STRING THEORY

In his 2004 bestseller, The Fabric of the Cosmos, physicist Brian Greene explained string theory and state of the art theories about the physical nature of the universe. String theory posits that the smallest constituents of the universe are not particles of matter but loops of energy, in the form of submicroscopic strings, which are linked together like a complex web or membrane. The smallest of these loops are called "zero-branes," and, like strings on a guitar, the loops of energy vibrate to generate the matter of the universe. Though not yet empirically verified, the equations suggest the strings make up a sprawling cosmic fabric upon which exists the matter of the universe.

Propelling the universe apart are the expanding voids in between the galaxies, voids powered by the mysterious force of dark energy. These expanding voids are apparently spreading the universe toward a final state of zero density and "zero curvature," or toward a flat universe that will eventually disappear beyond all horizons. Greene likens the shape of the universe to a flat-screen TV and a hologram on a plastic card, where reality exists on a thin surface illuminated to reveal "the holographic illusions of daily life." If the Second Law of Thermodynamics and superstring theory are correct, then the ultimate trajectory of the universe is from infinite energy and density toward zero energy and zero density.

2005

COKE ZERO

Offering the promise of zero energy and zero density, Coke Zero may be the ultimate soft drink, the cosmic soft drink for a string theory universe. Introduced in 2005, Coke Zero's "zero formula" contains zero calories, zero carbohydrates, zero sugar, zero protein — apparently meaning that the drink offers nothing to increase energy and nothing to increase the density of body fat, though apparently it still contains caffeine for a quick hit. From Coke to Diet Coke to Coke Zero, the trajectory of the original Coca-Cola is to disappear, to have its flavor simulated and function emptied, to reach its vanishing point on the horizons of the global marketplace. Like a copy of a copy of a copy, Coke Zero is the soft-drink simulacrum.

GROUND ZERO IN NEW ORLEANS

Hurricane Katrina effected another "ground zero" in an American metropolis. The global village gazed upon the horrific images — the Superdome and skyscrapers towered above a swamp, survivors stranded on highway overpasses and rooftops, and much of the citizenry reduced to hunter-gatherer status, all while the utterly corrupt government illustrated its ignorance and incompetence. In one sense, this ground zero was a test run for the effects of global warming; in another sense, it is a test pattern for American hubris and ignorance.

Between 2001 and 2005, two of America's largest architectural structures — The Twin Towers and the Superdome (both completed in the 1970s) — were destroyed or severely damaged, suggesting a massive cultural reversal. The terrorists blew holes in the Twin Towers while Hurricane Katrina blew holes in the roof of the Superdome and the levees of New Orleans, the ground zeros of the apocalypse. This is the Fight Club future, where the postmodern future is engulfed by the premodern past and media spectacle encounters intelligent design.

2006

NYC AS A ZERO

On the five-year anniversary of September 11th, the New York Times published a special section called "Broken Ground: The Hole in the City's Heart." On the first page was a circular photograph of New York City with Ground Zero at the center of the image and the rest of the city and world warping away toward the vanishing points. Wittingly or unwittingly, the New York Times depicted New York City as a zero, for what else is a circle with a hole in it — especially a hole called Ground Zero — but the site and symbol for nothingness and some kind of singularity?

And, what has America done since 9/11? America's political leaders passed the PATRIOT Act, attacked Afghanistan and Iraq, tortured prisoners, betrayed the Constitution, flouted the Geneva Convention, watched a hurricane drown New Orleans, further bureaucratized the health care industry, considered zero interest rates for the Fed, and bailed out incompetent bankers on Wall Street, even though the economy tanked and stock market values are below the levels reached in 2000.

To top it off, government debt exceeded the digits on The National Debt Clock in Times Square and America now has a long-term debt moving toward 100 trillion dollars, or 1 followed by fourteen zeros!

CARBON ZERO TOMORROW

In the book and film An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore offered a warning and a plan to prevent the next ecological ground zero. Gore argues that humanity faces the moment of singularity for confronting global warming, which can only be reversed by a carbon zero tomorrow. Here the zero is the singularity, the endpoint for fossil fuel consumption and the starting point for a most optimistic ecological future.

2007

CARBON ZERO OR GLOBAL ZERO

In the year following An Inconvenient Truth, the zero appeared on a global scale, hovering above the clouds against a blue sky. On both sides of this zero was a capitol S, spelling out SOS, the famed letters signaling distress or emergency. The zero was the centerpiece of the logo for Live Earth, the 2007 global "concerts for a climate in crisis." Upon arriving at the Live Earth Web site, visitors viewed each S disappearing behind the O, the center of which was black. Beside the O were the words "Live Earth" and if one scrolled over the two words, "Live Earth" disappeared against the black background, leaving only the O, the circle that became a zero, signaling countdown to the ecological apocalypse or blastoff for a carbon zero tomorrow.

2008

GLOBAL ZERO NUCLEAR DISARMAMENT

In 2008, one hundred international leaders convened in Paris to launch the "Global Zero" campaign to combat the all-too-real threats of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism. The Global Zero campaign includes plans for deep reductions in the arsenals of Russia and the United States, to be accompanied by negotiations among the nuclear powers to eliminate all nuclear weapons. The leaders spanned political lines and included President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia and President Barack Obama of the United States, who both have declared their support for "a nuclear free world."

2009

POPULATION ZERO

At the end of the decade, the end of the world remains a popular theme, featuring a blockbuster film (Roland Emmerich's 2012) based on zero evidence and a hit TV series starring zero people.

Population zero, life after people, the end of humanity — these are the scenarios depicted in Life After People: The Series, which is airing on The History Channel. The TV series is based on Life After People: Population Zero, which aired on The History Channel in 2008. Not to be outdone, National Geographic Channel countered with Aftermath: Population Zero.

In a billion years, the only trace of human existence will not be on Earth, but on the moon, where the items from the moon landings will still be intact, along with the four-billion-year-old craters. And, the Voyager space probes will be gliding through the cosmic voids.

THE ZERO ZERO DECADE

So, here we are at the end of discussing "the zero zero decade." A decade into the new millennium and many people are preoccupied with the end of the world and end of the universe, from Al Gore to Roland Emmerich, fundamentalists to scientists, The History Channel to The National Geographic Channel. It seems humans can imagine the end of the world, but not an end to the things that might cause the end of the world — like war, exploitation, ignorance, superstition, willful delusion, and imaginary deities. Science and technology have hurtled into the new millennium, but it seems human culture and ideology is lagging far behind.

The patterns of zeros are more than a clever conceit or millennial numerology, for the zeros not only suggest dangerous cultural and intellectual trajectories, but also signal the moments of singularity for negative or positive cultural transformations. Many of the zeros suggest the entropy and exhaustion of modernity, that global culture shaped by the once-utopian trajectories of science and technology. Yet, some zeros suggest opportunities for the future, exemplified by the carbon zero tomorrow and Global Zero nuclear disarmament campaign.

The Cold War and its nuclear ground zero has been replaced by the Terror War and its new ground zero, which is an intellectual ground zero. This is the war that America and the West seem clueless on how to win. The Terror War is rooted in two wars, the war between two tribes of imperialist fundamentalists, Christians and Islamists, who are both at war with the perceived ills of modernity and postmodernity and seek to reverse culture in reasserting their deities as guides for destinies on Earth. This war cannot be won with new military strategy, new technology, or more relativism and toleration. The Terror War can only be won the same way the Cold War was won, by providing a better model living on planet Earth, a model that provides spiritual meaning for secular living in the modern world.

Perhaps the most profound effect of modernity was to remove humans from the center of the universe, to place us in our true location as passengers on Spaceship Earth, floating in a cosmos of hundreds of billions of galaxies, each with hundreds of billions of stars. Most humans dread or deny facing these cosmic conditions, which is a key reason they turn to religions and fundamentalisms with never-ending offers of deities that promise destinies in the heavens. Until artists, philosophers, and cosmologists show what the big bang and the fate of the universe means for humanity's raison d'etre and joie de vivre, there will always be a void in meaning for secular society on Spaceship Earth.

Cultural theory is confronting the zero conditions — ends, exhaustions, reversals, nothingnesses, voids, and singularities. The year 2000 and the first decade of the millennium arrived, but the future seems to be crashing into the world of yesterday. A decade into the millennium, it is ground zero for theory.

Liner Notes: Ergo's "Multitude, Solitude"

2009-12-16T22:46:00.005-05:00

Founded by Brett Sroka, Ergo is a very "cool" band and is producing some fascinating ambient music. Here is a link to their newest album, "Multitude, Solitude" (2009) and a recent review praising the album. Brett also created the fabulous score for my film, Space Times Square, which can be viewed at this site. Below are the liner notes I wrote for Ergo's new album.

MULTITUDE AND SOLITUDE IN THE MEDIA UNIVERSE

by Barry Vacker

Ergo is cool.

Drawing from the world of jazz, media theorist Marshall McLuhan explained that each media had tendencies toward being “hot” and “cool.” Hot media presented a dense flow of information, with light shining on the medium, such as books, newspapers, and films, with the photographic images shining on the movie screens. Cool media presented less information, with light shining through the screens, such as television and computers, each with pixelated images. Hot media extended information to us, cool media invited us into a world beyond the screen, which explains the seductiveness (and merger) of television and cyberspace.

Five decades after McLuhan’s hypothesis, we live in a mediated world flooded with information, At the end of 2008, there were 180 million websites with billions of web pages, 130 million blogs, 210 billion emails per day, 12 billion videos watched per month, hundreds of TV channels, and so on. And screens are growing larger and with increasing definition, such as LCD and plasma. In the desire to represent reality with ever greater detail, media have become the dominant form of “reality.” IPods and iTunes give people the sense solitude, of being isolated in their own reality, with their own music. Twitter and Facebook are less about social networking than multitudes of lonely people, lost in the big bang of an expanding media universe.

In age when all media and music are available on screens with light shining through, McLuhan’s hot-cool distinction is surely now harder to see. And, yet those are some of the very conditions intuited by Ergo.

We live in a world where the multitude are ever more informed, yet ever further from reality; they are ever more connected, ever less alone, yet ever more lonely, with ever less solitude. Against and within all these conditions, Ergo’s “Multitude, Solitude” represents the coolness of media and music. The songs have long, smooth single notes that are inviting and seductive in their suggestion of subjective solitude; there are spaces with a few sparse notes, containing gaps to be filled by our reflective capacities, not a temporal void to filled with text messages. When listening to Ergo, I sense music inviting me into a universe beyond the daily events, not in a silly mystical sense, but rather that very large universe that is home to our existence and ground for our humanity and understanding.

One might say that all ambient, atmospheric music achieves this effect, but that is mistaken. Ergo does something special that goes beyond mere minimalism. Ergo’s music often contains rising and falling patterns of simplicity and complexity, patterns that may be fractal, in the sense of melodic order within the (seemingly) random or chaotic notes. By combining the ancient with the modern, the trombone with synthesizer, the drum with computer, Ergo also embraces the roots of music, yet is not sentimental or claiming a faux authenticity. Ergo engages the past, yet enters the future.

Multitude, Solitude conveys a future of laconic existentialism, a world where the multitude may be mostly lost, but solitude and individuality can still be found in the voids of the universe, in the gaps in the information, in the nothingnesses between the notes.

Existential Espresso: the most popular podcast now exceeds 700+ downloads

2009-12-16T10:18:00.007-05:00

As one of the Theory Vortex projects, Existential Espresso continues to grow its audience. Here is today's post from the Existential Espresso blog:

Existential Espresso began with a simple concept: discuss ideas from an existentialist perspective while having an espresso and recording a podcast. Discussing ideas and drinking espresso are two of my favorite things. As an existentialist, I had no idea if anyone would listen, but I thought it would an interesting experiment to complement my experiments in theory and media: the film, Space Times Square, and the books, Zero Conditions, Crashing Into the Vanishing Points, Starry Skies Moving Away, and Slugging Nothing.

Since the launch in July, the Existential Espresso (EE) podcasts have continued to grow an audience, from zero to 700+ downloads for the most recent (December 6) and most popular podcast. In the grand media universe we all inhabit, the EE podcasts are mere fragments of digital stardust, barely visible in the bright glow of the billions of electronic galaxies. But, these podcasts are loaded with cosmic ideas about our culture and some intellectual travelers have discovered them -- I hope you continue your journey with the podcasts, whoever you are, wherever you are, whenever you are.

So, here is a big thanks to all the travelers, especially those who have forwarded the EE podcasts to friends and others via blogs and emails. Also, I want to offer thanks to Apple iTunes for the prominent display in the Philosophy section of their free podcasts. Steve Jobs, I guess you are still pretty cool, though I think you often overlook the deeper meaning of your famed "1984" Macintosh ad.

As of December 16, 2009, here are the three most popular podcasts from Existential Espresso:

1. The Zero Zero Decade, 700+ downloads

-- This is the most original discussion you will find about the meaning of the first decade of the millennium. This podcast explores the decade through the number zero and its amazing recurrence throughout the decade: Ground Zero, Coke Zero, Carbon Zero, and many others. Zero is a sign for countdown and blastoff ... and much, much more.

2. 9/11 and Nothingness, 650+ downloads

-- This is the most original analysis of 9/11 and its aftermath. Drawing from Sartre's three existential nothingnesses in Being and Nothingness, this podcast explores the meaning of 9/11 through the three nothingnesses that appeared on that fateful morning. First, there was the nothingness in the reality of NYC, perfectly expressed in the term Ground Zero. Second, there were the nothingnesses in consciousness, symbolized by the mouths ajar around the world. Third, there was the nothingness in the future; the Twin Towers were first and foremost skyscrapers of "the future," making their debut at the 1964 New York World's Fair, which was dedicated to the future of the space age and information age. It is revealing to see how these nothingnesses are now being filled ... and not filled.

3. Black Hole Media Theory, 525+ downloads

-- This podcast explores a new theory of resistance and representation for our 24/7, nonstop, all-everywhere, billion blog, multi-billion user, ever-expanding media universe. Drawing from media theory, cosmic science, and a string of films that share a strange pattern of exits from the electronic galaxies, this podcast presents a radical new twist on the "anarchist" scenario. In a media universe of total representation and surveillance, perhaps the only way postmodern or hypermodern humans can be real and free is to disappear, where existence as a private individual requires disappearance as a political subject. My thanks to Agreen Wang for joining me on this podcast and for her interest in black hole media theory. Of course, if this theory is plausible, then what can be said about the Existential Espresso podcasts?

Barry Vacker to discuss book at U-Mass

2009-10-14T15:39:00.003-04:00

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

2009-07-25T08:13:00.004-04:00

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

2009-07-20T14:14:00.013-04:00

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

2009-07-09T16:04:00.007-04:00

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

2009-07-02T17:07:00.013-04:00

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

2009-06-29T17:50:00.008-04:00

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

2009-06-27T06:37:00.011-04:00

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. (...)

Apollo 11's "giant leap" or Apollo 8's "Genesis" reading?

2009-06-23T06:54:00.005-04:00

From a Theory Vortex press release, dated June 23, 2009:

When NASA and the media celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 2009, they are certain to overlook a profound question. That question?

Which words spoken from the moon have proven more prophetic and powerful back on Earth: Neil Armstrong's "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" or William Anders' "In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth," from the famed Genesis reading of Apollo 8?

Here is the link to the full press release.

That question and others are explored in Starry Skies Moving Away.