Obligatory Pseudo-Academia

 Literature and Media Series Entry #8     “You want to change human thought? Human behaviour?” Raiden exclaimed.     “Of course. Anything can be quantified nowadays” the AI replied.     And then Facebook revealed that it was using people's personal data to manipulate their emotions . This being before the third-party-selling controversy.     The Social Dilemma ends with the critics trying to cobble together some optimism and suggest solutions. The only specific idea spoken is that by former Google consultant Joe Toscano: "We can tax data collection and processing...It gives them a fiscal reason to not acquire every piece of data on the planet." But their focus is mostly on the advertising side of things: depression in young screen-glued lip-pouters who can’t put their phones down thanks to content feeds that have been automatically designed to be addictive specifically for them. The political chasm appears secondary, exc...

 Literature and Media Series Entry #7     So far are we now from Rear Window ’s analogue, crime-fighting surveillance that the word is devoid of positivity in the 2020 Netflix drama-documentary The Social Dilemma . Anxiety has reached a boiling point, and, apart from the film’s hackneyed allegory of manipulative mini-men living in your phone, everything described is non-fiction. Surveillance has become capitalism, carried out by tracking cookies, followed with recommendations and capitalised on by advertisements, all designed to keep users (a customer moniker shared only with the drugs industry) on social media newsfeeds for as long as possible. The algorithms that sell and decide what people see have almost no human assistance – and, as the documentary points out, cannot tell the difference between real and fake news (unlike Kojima’s vision). Even the de-stabilisation of countries is available to purchase for a few million. “Bots” are no longer metal skeletons hunti...

 Literature and Media Series Entry #6 We were warned twenty years ago about the looming scenario we now find ourselves in: that people would withdraw from emotionally challenging ideology that conflicted with their own, creating ideaphobic ponds ocean-wide but puddle-deep, never invalidated. But because the amazingly pre-emptive warning came from an industry which, despite outselling film and music combined for years now , is not widely respected in academic discussion, it went largely unheeded. Fifteen years on and Jarett Kobek’s 2016 book, I Hate the Internet , questions whether we’ve made a mistake. Although technically a novel, it is made deliberately “bad” in an imitation of the internet’s “irrelevant and jagged presentation of content,” reading sometimes more like a collection of embittered aphorisms. Censorship is back to play – this time comically and overtly, though: the phrase “JIM’LL FIX IT” crops up repeatedly after swathes of black bars replace text on the page, in ref...

 Literature and Media Series Entry #5     In our eighth week we studied video game narratives and the unique ways they tell stories through interactivity and non-linearity. Most of the discourse surrounding game stories concerns how player choice can influence the content and/or pace. My prime example, however, lacks those qualities. It is a linear story with set events in a set order that always ends the same way. It seems dispraisingly simple on the surface, but through the power of ludonarrative harmony (when the gameplay compliments the story) its warning about today’s information polarity is more frightening than any book or film could make it. That game was Metal Gear Solid 2.     This game, released in 2001, has become a commentary darling of many online hipsters and edgemasters such as myself for having what has been frequently dubbed one of the most profound conversations in gaming . Before the game’s final battle, Raiden, the protagonist, i...

 Literature and Media Series Entry #4 The disaster of information control in this blog series has now begun. As Winston Smith is employed to  rewrite historical documents for The Party, later trained to ‘doublethink’ his reality into accordance with their authority, a dystopia is formed: one where Orwell’s fear about the fading of objective truth has been realised. But it is only this one scenario, and its scale, that are fictional. Such repression of memory has already been enacted: Stalin famously cut people from his photos in his ‘Great Purge’ – something that preceded Orwell’s writing and doubtlessly influenced him. But since then there have been other examples: French filmmakers were only recently unbanned from making films about The Algerian War (1954-62), even though Hollywood had long since gotten to work making films about Iraq. This is a less extreme example, more based on shame than autocracy, but the longevity of the taboo, and the fact that it persisted in touris...

 Literature and Media Series Entry #3 Remaining mid-20 th century for now, our next case-study is the over-quoted 1984 by George Orwell. Within posthumanism anxieties, my scope is on the nature of the forces controlling Oceania. In the book, a lengthy section is given to the words of Emmanuel Goldstein as Winston reads his manifesto for the revolution - 'The Brotherhood.” Goldstein insinuates that Big Brother is not even a real person, but merely an image of relatable humanity to elicit emotional connection from the people. What more powerful leader than one who does not even exist - ergo, cannot die - especially in a society where history is controlled every day, and so even age can be re-adjusted. This all makes the later twist that much more harrowing, when Winston finds that even that manifesto was written by the Party. When he asks O'Brien if The Brotherhood is real, he is told "you will never know."     But an accurate translation of that answer may be: “I ...

 Literature and Media Series Entry #2 Fourteen years on from courageous neighbour-peeping we’re plunging into posthumanism with Phillip K. Dick’s book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? A cultural theory, philosophy and all-round reason-for-staying-bug-eyed-and-awake-at-night, posthumanism concerns what comes next – literally meaning “after” or “beyond” what is human. Although not mutually exclusive, it has become almost inextricable from anxieties surrounding the advancement of technology, whether that be through artificial intelligence, artificial body parts or simply total human dependence. Dick explores the political-sociological dilemmas surrounding what makes us human – or machines human – or us in human. A great defining emphasis is placed on empathy by him. Simply put: if a machine becomes capable of displaying (and practising) empathy more than some humans, and we already witness some humans behaving as if devoid of empathy, then the lines become blurred.  ...

 Literature and Media Series Entry #1 As of 2019, the U.S has more C.C.T.V cameras installed per capita than any other nation. China follows closely behind with what they’ve named ‘Project Skynet’ (yes really, sharing a name with this Skynet) and the U.K is third. This would have taken time: surveillance has been a giant component of our lives even before the internet. My foray into technological existential anxiety and information control began innocently enough with Rear Window : Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 American thriller. Here, James Stewart’s utter DILF of a character busts a domestic murderer living across from him by spying from his window and sending his girlfriend over to retrieve evidence. This flick paints pre-sci-fi surveillance as a heroic and lawful thing – maybe that dastardly wife-killer would have gotten away with it were it not for a meddling journalist with a broken leg being bed-bound literally metres away from him with a pair of binoculars! How quaintly these ...

Classic Contemporary Relevance part 3: Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson So far I've talked solely about a woman's family being the more positive presence & influence. But what of the inverse being the case? What of religious repression of sexuality, for the sake of both family and community? Jeanette Winterson's 1985 novel Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit sees the protagonist, a teenage girl sharing the author's name Jeanette, growing up in a Pentecostal Evangelist community and discovering her lesbianism, which strains her relationship with her mother. Her newly discovered love for the other young woman in her life is eventually repressed for the sake of her family and community, which she eventually returns to even after moving away – despite still being branded a “sinner” by them.     Ironically the bleakest ending of the three texts might be the most comforting to a contemporary reader: Here any disturbing connotations of sexual freedom with s...

 Classic Contemporary Relevance part 2: Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market is another 19 th century poem that similarly touches on perceived dangers of perverse seduction, but this time through layers of allegory and from a female writer's perspective. One of two sisters, Laura, eats the fruits of tempting goblin merchant men, and then falls into body-withering yearning for more that seems to have her at death's door. The other sister, Lizzie, then confronts the goblins but refuses to eat with them, resulting in her abuse and assault which she takes stoically and returns to her sister dripping with fruit juices, sharing them to seemingly 'cure' Laura.    Rather than women being a richer man's thing to be lost to a zealous bachelor, this text focuses on the strength of sisterhood and warns of implied STDs and harmful obsession. A so-called piece of children's literature steeped in sexual imagery, Laura's deteriorating ...

 Classic Contemporary Relevance part 1: The Eve of St. Agnes by John Keats Self-indulgence, self-fulfilment and self-discipline. Within everyone there exists a struggle to balance these different cares. The former two for one's own sake; the latter often for someone or something else – an authoritarian institution, a restrictive family or a social stigma. This is especially true of women, who are always up against a set of values not entirely decided by women themselves: Accepted and unaccepted behaviours; forbidden and permitted relationships. It may be a comfort to note, then, that different aspects of this alternately inner and outer struggle have been written about from various perspectives over the recent decades and centuries, telling stories of balancing this great trinity of living – or failing to, as is arguably the case in the early 19 th century John Keats poem The Eve of St. Agnes . This story derives from the folk tale that virgin women would see a vision of their...