#53: Man Bites Reality
Fredric Jameson described the postmodern condition as "a perpetual barrage of immediacy from which all sheltering layers and intervening mediations have been removed." That assessment, published in 1991, became increasingly accurate over the following three decades. By now, the world has fulfilled Jameson's prophecy, which perfectly describes the experience of being online and particularly that of using Twitter, which is nothing if not a perpetual barrage of immediacy. The movement to quit websites like Twitter as a means of self care and sanity preservation has gained momentum (I tried it), but many of us find ourselves returning (I did) because, to get what Twitter offers, where else can we go? The "sheltering layers" to which Jameson referred—neighborhoods, communities, local institutions—had begun to atrophy well before the '90s and aren't any more robust now; we live increasing portions of our lives in a totally globalized space that is as fragile as it is volatile, an open ocean that mercilessly tosses each of us on our individual tiny rafts.
The broad response to that oceanic condition has been to retreat from the unsheltered global space that has enveloped us. Economically and politically, we all know, this attitude manifested itself in events like Brexit and the 2016 election. Culturally, the response has been more subtle—Venkat Rao characterized it as a "retreat inwards to smaller, more private realities." More group chats and messaging apps; less social media. Ian Bogost expressed a similar, surprising fondness for the shopping mall as a container for consumerism that confines shopping to a physical space we can actually leave ("at least the commerce stays inside them"). It's becoming increasingly obvious—and again, Twitter is the most visible example—that humans are poorly equipped for life in a global commons, even if we keep coming back for more.
Rao's assessment of this desire for retreat echoes another essay he wrote a few years ago, before our predicament was so apparent, about escapism and how we design our "escaped realities": Life is an extended departure from insular, isolated filter bubbles, and technology enables us to range farther than we otherwise would. Escapism is our default condition, and reality is where we end up when we "crash" out of it (even Jameson describes immediacy as something we need "shelter" from). The reason we find Twitter so stressful now is that it's a channel for mainlining a less filtered (if still highly distorted) version of reality, and when we log off we reassert our own biased perspective, or return control to whatever local filter bubble we inhabit offline. Rao concludes his essay with an observation about VR: "When your customer puts on that headset, he is not going to escape to a simpler reality than the one he already inhabits. He's going to crash out into a messier one." One question we'll have to answer in the near future is how much of that we can handle.
Reads:
Geoff Manaugh on Los Angeles' past and future role as "America's spaceport."
Corporate Memphis: A gallery depicting "the illustration style of choice in our tech dystopia"
Until next time,
Drew