I don’t think I’ve ever been freaked out by a face that resides in the uncanny valley. Or maybe I haven’t seen a face that’s uncanny enough to freak me out. I dunno. The concept fascinates me, because everything you might find in, say, a Wikipedia article about the uncanny valley reads to me as a step towards constructing realities that are closer and closer to true, but the creators have failed in some fundamental way. Someone put a human face on a robot, but couldn’t get it to move like a human. Someone tried modeling a face in a 3D modeling program but it came out just a little too shiny. All of these, steps on the path of technological progress – and they’re preceded by ones that were more faltering, and followed by ones that are—or will be—more adept.
This isn’t to say I don’t get spooked by the uncanny at all, just that what I think is uncanny might be a bit different. It’s not the recreation or creation of false people that gets to me, it’s the way in which we’ve constructed various overlapping and sometimes conflicting realities for ourselves. Jacob Geller just put out a great video on Silent Hill 2 and the short-lived 2019 horror classic Devotion that touches on this a bit; definitely go give that a watch.
Cyberpunk 2077 was delayed this week, along with quite a few other notable games that were supposed to come out in the next couple months. Instead of coming out on April 16, CD Projekt Red pushed Cyberpunk’s release date back to September. And honestly? I’m kind of happy about it. Not totally – this pushback likely means more crunch for the folks making the game, not less – but we all have a few more months to prepare our totally solid and not at all cliche takes on what it means to live in a cyberpunk dystopia.
But hey, I’ll give you this one for free: does it not freak anyone else out that we live in a world where people – a lot of people – think Elon Musk is cool? Because I think about this way too much, and I feel like nobody else is saying anything about how weird this is. Everyone thought that the cyberpunk hellscape was going to look like a Moebius or Syd Mead painting with some graffiti slapped on it for good measure, and instead it just looks like a nerd posting about his waifu on Twitter while he’s supposed to be overseeing the construction of a fleet of commercial spaceships.
Really our reality is much more grim than anything any sci-fi writer could come up with. We’ve got maybe ten more years before climate change makes wide swathes of the planet uninhabitable for millions, if not billions, of people and the Folks In Charge don’t really have much of a plan to stymie the literal flood. Or fight the actual fires. I’d say that means it’s up to us as individuals, but did you know that people have been brought up on eco-terrorism charges for doing something as simple as picketing in front of corporate executives’ houses? Or in oil/natural gas company lobbies? So like, unless everyone’s ready to become the next Dan McGowan and I’m just well behind the curve on the plan (good security culture if true), that one list of the 100 top carbon emitter corporations is just gonna sit there, staring us in the face. Mocking us all while we fight amongst ourselves about fucking lightbulbs and video game consoles.
While it flays us alive, power makes a point of persuading us that we are flaying each other.
I didn’t write that. Belgian Situationist Raoul Vaneigem did in his book, The Revolution of Everyday Life. The quote has stuck with me since a friend of mine began putting it on propaganda art when we were both in high school, but the full passage it’s from is really interesting. And also very gory, so CW: human torture.
Another word about the rationales of Power. Suppose a tyrant took pleasure in throwing prisoners, who had been flayed alive, into a small cell; suppose that to hear their screams and see them scramble each time they brushed against one another amused him to no end, while prompting him to meditate on human nature and the curious behaviour of human beings. Suppose that at the same time and in the same country there were philosophers and wise men who explained to the worlds of science and art that suffering had to do with the collective life of human beings, with the inevitable presence of Others, with society as such—would we not be right to look upon these people as the tyrant’s henchmen? A brand of existentialism, by underwriting such claims, has killed two birds with one stone, paradoxically exposing not only the collusion of left intellectuals with Power, but also the crude trick whereby an inhuman social organization ascribes responsibility for its cruelty to its victims. A nineteenth-century commentator noted that ‘Throughout contemporary literature we find the tendency to regard individual suffering as a social evil and to make the organization of our society responsible for the misery and degradation of its members. This is a profoundly new idea: suffering is no longer treated as a matter of destiny.’ This ‘new’ and viable idea seems to have given startlingly little pause to certain respectable thinkers imbued with fatalism, as witness Sartre’s hell-is-other-people, Freud’s death instinct or Mao’s historical necessity. What is the difference, when all is said and done, between these doctrines and a stupid tag such as ‘It’s all just human nature’?
Hierarchical social organization is like a system of hoppers equipped with sharp blades. While it flays us alive, Power makes a point of persuading us that we are flaying each other. It must be granted that merely writing these words is to court a new fatalism; but I certainly intend in writing them that nobody should merely read them.
Raoul Vaneigem, “The Revolution of Everyday Life,” page 33
Every four years or so it seems like I get swept up in the self-imposed conundrum that anarchists deal with: “should you vote? Does it matter? Is voting even ethical if you hold anti-state ideology?” And like, honestly, it’s exhausting. The world anarchists want is both distant and extremely close at all times; we can see it through cracks in the facade but that facade is made out of bulletproof glass and titanium. Any cracks that do form are the result of centuries of wear on the material, and it’s exceedingly difficult to make any ourselves. So what’s the harm in voting? Honestly, with regard to the verb itself, none at all. And in different social contexts it holds different degrees of importance. For me, it’s a trivial task. For someone who was not let into the franchise until only a few decades ago, it’s not something you miss (unless you’re still being kept from it because the state has labeled you, forever, a felon). Some anarchists, though, view voting as being just as bad as signing to a major label.
I just… I’m real tired of that discussion. Vote or don’t. Understand why people might be upset if you loudly proclaim you don’t. Especially when voting might be a form of triage right now, a way to excise Donald Trump and his other explicitly fascist goons from power. But then… who do you vote for?
Electoral politics are often thought of as a game or a horse race. Something that cynical statisticians make bets on, not a) social constructs that we could all agree not to recognize the legitimacy of at any time or b) convergent events that do actually deeply effect us collectively. Everything candidates do is strategy; every smear is simply part of how the game is played. If you’re a fan of Donald Trump (why are you here) then all you really have to do, unless he’s primaried or the Senate fully impeaches him, is show up to the polls in November. Otherwise, you’re probably in the midst of Democratic (or, lol, Libertarian) primary hell.
“I think you called me a liar on national TV,” a mic’ed-up Sen. Elizabeth Warren said to Sen. Bernie Sanders after a recent primary debate. Another part of the game – someone told CNN that an alleged conversation between Sanders and Warren had concluded with the former telling the latter that a woman could not be president. “You know, let’s not do it right now. If you want to have that discussion, we’ll have that discussion,” Sanders said. “You called me a liar. You told me—all right, let’s not do it now.”
This exchange and the alleged preceding one documented in that day’s CNN report have both Warren supporters and Sanders supporters in an absolute uproar.
As power flays us alive, it convinces us we’re actually flaying each other. The game continues even as the conditions on the playing field get worse.
Okay, I know I said “games are not an escapist, blithely consumerist hobby,” but who am I kidding—of course they are. First and foremost video games are made to be affirmations of capitalism, they exist to justify themselves. We don’t need games. Certainly not in the form they take now. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have an effect on us. It doesn’t mean they’re not affecting. It doesn’t mean the people who make them don’t matter because honestly we’re all doing some bullshit purely to justify capitalism’s existence, and we should all be helping each other find a way to… I dunno… fuckin stop that.
But sooner or later the rope is going to run out. The worlds we’ve made for ourselves – the escapist hobbies we employ to not think about the stark hell we live in – will falter and cease. We’ll have fewer and fewer layers to peel back until it’s just ourselves, each other, and a dying worm of a socio-politico-economic system ready to be destroyed.
Maybe then I’ll get the willies over something in the uncanny valley.