Flashback! To “Push…!”

Now I’ve seen it three times, and honestly I think I love it.

Isn’t that strange?

I was just so sure, you know, that it was something like Misfits Of Science writ large and sloppy…something cheap and tawdry and full of the awful hard light that suffuses (it seems) every singly little audiovisual thing with the slightest of science-fictional components these days. And the pushbutton feelings. Not that I don’t go to the movies in order to have my buttons pushed, you understand! I may be a bit different, but I’m not that different…but these are the wrong buttons, these things that I guess we can blame James Cameron for, or something. Action movies; they oppress me, bit by bit. On the whole, they seem to me to be devoid of positive feeling, lacking something I don’t-know-quite-what, that I’m always looking for. “Positive feeling”, though, it sounds absurd…what is that, anyway? What can I possibly mean? Surely I don’t mean just “happy endings”…

Well, no. I don’t. Although I certainly don’t disdain happy endings, and it bothers me excessively when filmmakers seem to…when they’ve written a happy-ending story and then don’t want it, it isn’t good enough for them, so they invent all these tortured methods of ineptly subverting that textual expectation. All in the name of making me feel something, but I don’t feel anything at all when a non-happy ending is tacked-on…no more than I feel when a happy one is tacked-on! And so both are “negative”; both have the odour of something made by committee, even if it’s only a committee of one. And it would be so convenient to be able to stop right there, and say I’ve sorted it out: blah blah something something true to the story, whatever story it is, but that won’t cover what it is to lack positive feeling, because what about the stories that get that part right and then still lack it? Have you seen Avatar? I swear, I tried to watch it, you know? But I couldn’t stay with it, it was so ridiculously, insultingly hollow. I watched more of Transformers 2 — no, really, I did! — and to this day am often caught wondering just how James Cameron managed to fuck up his magnum opus just so, so badly, that watching Transformers 2 was a more joyous experience for me by comparison. I mean, no one can accuse him of not having the love, can they? Of not having the vision?

But I guess it was the wrong kind of love…the wrong kind of vision. The hyperreal simulation was certainly a most extravagant metatextual device, but the different things to look at business that draws us to the movie theatre was somehow an itch not even the supreme attainment of the hyperreal could scratch: Avatar was just so damned boring, wasn’t it? Boring perfection. I was talking to someone not long ago about the boringness of perfection, with specific reference to Jim Lee and Geoff Johns — one a weirdly-driven renderer of some kind of ideal Batman splash page that dwells only inside his own head, with apparently very rigorous standards that are nonetheless unfathomable to me, and the other a crazy nitpicking completist with standards of plot-tidiness I can only assume are similar. All some weird bubble of Outsider Art, fooling the eye with the trappings of legitimacy? Steve Ditko and Dave Sim and even Alan Moore can’t match that stuff when it comes to outre, you know…they’re just mavericks, who drop into and out of public respectability according to what they’re working on, not full-blown extremists. Dave Sim may believe some crazy things about what the Bible says, but say this for him anyway: he’s concerned with what’s real, even if he gets it wrong. Because there is a certain standard of representation of things in Sim’s work, you know? Which imposes a certain set of beliefs in, approaches to, the adoption of form? Whereas Johns and Lee…

Well, it reminds me of something Werner Herzog said: that he couldn’t think of any film that the new 3D technology would be useful for. Except, possibly, a pornographic film. Which I thought was quite an interesting thing to say, because…hmm, yeah, wouldn’t that be just a terrifying art film? The terror of the hyperreal! Absolute widescreen super-clarity brought to a sex act! You can practically smell the lotion, in the brilliance of the Klieg lights you can see what attention porn stars pay to personal hygiene! All absolutely beyond clinical, thirty feet tall and coming at you…yes, that ought to terrify us: the living autopsy of sex. How we’d long for Jason to come along and inject a little assuaging fantasy into it by chopping up the partners in a ludicrously comic-booky way! But one must presume that in the world of hyperreal sex-on-film there can be no thought any longer of fantasies, our glorious Ludwig Van simply ruined forever…from now on even the sight of a soft-focus Susan Oliver or Yvonne Craig will drive us to the wastepaper basket in reflexive recollection of why we can no longer have such nice romantic things…

…Or maybe not, but anyway: is there any boredom more boring than the boredom of perfection? So for me Avatar was just the pushing of dead buttons, and I couldn’t stand the thing. Because there was no positive feeling to it at all! Though I still haven’t managed to define what that is, I know, and maybe I don’t really need to invoke it when I’m talking about a crummy militarized ripoff of “The Word For World Is Forest”? Ye gods, a militarized “Word For World”, and with VR sex in it too. This is Simpsons-parody stuff, obviously…there’s nowhere to go with any of that but down…

For God’s sake, who thinks of making Ursula LeGuin stories for gearheads, you know? Positive feeling?

It never even gets a chance, in Avatar!

But fortunately we aren’t really talking about Avatar.

But we’re talking about Push, instead.

So, I figure it ought to be axiomatic, that anything that looks like it was published by Eclipse Comics has got THRILL-POWER. Well, I say “Eclipse”, which of course was only one company among many that pursued what Tom Spurgeon calls the Third Way of Eighties superhero comics, but I can’t list all of them, can I? Anyway we will get back to this thrill-power thing in more detail in a minute, but the reason I bring it up is because damn if Push doesn’t look JUST LIKE something that fell out of Eclipse in the Eighties, you know? I actually had to check to see it hadn’t been made from a comic, something around the time of The Crow, perhaps…or Mage…or even Luther Arkwright…

And imagine my delight, to find out it hadn’t been! Though it should’ve been: since that passionate inkiness, that start-again freshness, is all over it. Those lessons learned in the alternative scene, that particular kind of framing of a shot — comics-style set-pieces, Welles by way of Kurosawa by way of Ditko by way of Talbot by way of Sim, if you’re of my vintage you can’t not notice it…all that stuff comes right up to you and pushes a pie in your face, and the pie is delicious. What this is, is a black-and-white comic of the Eighties finally printed with the colouring they could never afford, lovingly painted — no, lacquered — in amplified hue. Did I mention that I thought I was going to hate it? That I thought all those tricks of hard light were going to be present in it? I should’ve remembered to say something about love, which is that if you’ve got the right kind of it then even cliche can make you feel something…because it wasn’t the hard light this time, but the other thing, the ratcheted palette, you know that thing where they fuck with the colour-balances and make everything orange and blue? That’s an awful programmatic cliche too, along with the shaky-cam of Hollywood-verite that became so inescapable so suddenly in the late Nineties, was never used right, I think they even film Jeopardy! that way now…and the soundtrack, the soundtrack, the endless music-videoness of the soundtrack, as though the best thing the committee that thought the thing up could imagine was to get a music-video director to make their X-Men cash-in product…my God, so much is the same, here, as it is everywhere else…!

And yet somehow, it’s really beautiful.

My apologies for being all scattery here, it’s just that I really do have so much to say about Push, too much to ever say in a blog-post anyone will bother to read, so I have to jump from place to place, quickly point and say “see?”, and then hop off to another lilypad. Because it is all about seeing, as it’s all about that old “Eclipse” soul. It’s all a bit half-assed and derivative, it’s Scanners cut with Lost In Translation and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and The Tomorrow People…and Donnie Darko and X-Men, so it’s mod, it’s trad, it’s got all the mad cons and the retread cred, but it also has just something…something of my own little list of cult-classic movies, Dark Star and Sixteen Candles and Repo Man, things I could watch and watch and watch, because every time I watched them I found I could fall just a little deeper into their little worlds, get that much more absorbed into their texture, like becoming their wallpaper, becoming their character. I’ve never liked Chris Evans as much as I’ve liked him here, so much (perhaps) like me in the period of my twenties when I was cut loose in the demimonde. Because in the demimonde it’s all about origins, all the time: you barely know your own, and you don’t know anyone else’s, but origin swirls about you everywhere you go. Well, at Eclipse it was the same! Those breakaway Eighties artists who were still for some reason stuck on the superheroes, you know? And specifically on the intrigue of the superheroes as manifested primarily by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, made by them perhaps mostly by accident at first — that weird world of secret connectivity, subway tunnels of causation rumbling beneath the streets of apparent happenstance, the miracle of fantasy stories as disconnected as they were outrageous nevertheless being slowly knitted into a giant tapestry of extremely uneasy threads. The origin is always the most important thing, so important that you’ll notice they made a bestselling reprint book out of it, one of my top ten Christmas gifts ever…because to the comics readers who started around the time I did, the origin story was always the one you could never get, never find, only see in later versions done as summaries or flashbacks by later artists, the genuine article only hinted at, alluded to, seen through a prism and all that rot. So valuable, and I fancy the later Eighties renegades felt it deeply too: when in making up their own superhero mythos they successfully kept “origin” in some way always occluded, thus in some way always implicated, in their (importantly!) new stories.

And in Push, the same pattern is followed…and, interestingly at least to me, it isn’t a million miles away from James Cameron’s metatextual strategy in Avatar, except it’s got the one thing that movie hasn’t got!

A testimonial…!

Or, no…waitaminute…yes, that’s right, I’ve got it now…

A heart.

Chris Evans, bruised expatriate failure, is competent in every way except the one that counts…at home (if a little fucked-up) in his limbo, his island of stilts in no-man’s land, where the overlapping spheres of authority just don’t quite touch one another as they’re supposed to…youth, with plenty of time but no purpose, in a space where he can go unobserved for at least (if he is lucky) weeks at a time. Origin flows forth here, as a rising tide, as stormwater welling up from an underground lake, and we are ankle-deep in it already: so like it or not, it connects us all, though the fondest wish of youth is still to be free…

And then later on you find out that “being free” and “doing good” are really the same thing. Uh…

Spoilers?

Well, he does a really good job of conveying it, and he doesn’t even say much. “Hard light” would have him come to an onerous realization with a bowed head in a blue light, all suddenly self-knowing, but Push gives him an orange light and lets him do things he has to with no time to really think about them, much less make a confessional speech…and even less than much-less could he formulate one. Comics? It’s comics; because you know that one character who’s the girl? Dakota Fanning plays her here, somehow managing the nifty trick of fitting in perfectly with all the “guy from that show” character-actor faces…and such attractive faces they are, all of them! Some really major part of the credit must go to the casting, here, because the only person you see who looks like a movie star is the one person who’s kind of supposed to, the well-known noir Oracle visited by everyone from William Powell to Bob Hope to Harrison Ford to Keanu Reeves…and, sorry, that isn’t much of a spread, but I was going for a specific effect there? Which is going to fail, now, because I have not yet come all the way back around to THRILL-POWER…!

But never mind that now, though ol’ Ming-Na is framed just so Eclipse-like in her Oracle’s Den? There’s actually a longer movie here, one senses; or, should that be “a bigger story”? Some of what happens doesn’t really make sense, and interestingly (again: to me!) it’s in just those parts where blink-and-you’ll-miss-it-that-didn’t-add-up, that the action coheres into something you can care about. Well, was it not ever thus, with cult-classic movies? Did Brother From Another Planet never hand you a bag and say “hold this for me a minute, I just gotta talk to a guy”? At such moments is the audience truly involved, as they reason past the infelicities on their characters’ behalf. People rarely look right at the camera in this movie; everything is drenched in neon; if the building’s being shaded, she won’t be able to see it; anything with shrimp. Plate O’ Shrimp. The story has a happy ending, because it was always meant to, but there are still tortured steps because we’re missing ten minutes: ten minutes of explicated cause, for some of the odder necessary things that happen.

Ten minutes of origin.

It should have bothered me. There are so many movies that just needed that one line left in, for things to make sense, and it always bothers me, it bothers me, it bothers me when they leave it out anyway. But, those are movies in which the sensemaking is really the main thing: the perfect movies, that were not quite perfect. But, have you seen Avatar?

So maybe I’d better rethink this. Maybe a movie filled with cliches, basically composed of cliches, can’t really be about doing them “right”? After all, was not the thing I liked about Batman Begins and The Dark Knight that they weren’t afraid to make a virtue of inconsistency? The plot in Push is so familiar, you know…and the solution to the problem is familiar too, and it’s all familiar. I’ve seen this movie, this comic, before…and perhaps that’s the point. Have you ever watched Donnie Darko with the commentary track on?

“Uh…yeah, that’s another thing that was…uh, I mean originally there was a scene that explained all that, but we had that hard 98-minute limit and…uh…”

Fucking breaks your heart. Fucking breaks your heart, but consider this: Donnie Darko wasn’t all that shit-hot of a movie, honestly. The ideas that were left out were just boilerplate, I will go so far as to say laboured, SF ideas; the only really important things about it are a) the rabbit, and b) the girl riding up on her bike asking what’s going on. And the ability to be absorbed into that little world over and over again, and deeper each time (as I know many people are and have been) is probably in part down to — though it breaks your heart to hear the guy tell it, it really does! — its ultimately disheartening imperfection. Push doesn’t really suffer from as much of that, but there are enough vagueries to satisfy anyone if they care to search them out: part of it’s the setting, an aggressively non-specific Hong Kong that nevertheless looks specific as hell…all the places are intact, with all their marvellous specific gritty detail, but the sense is not, and actually the places are not either because they’re all covered in this weird wash. There is a bit where young Dakota Fanning gets drunk and talks about being “…power in my youth!” and it adds nothing at all, except it does. Hmm, I wonder how far back this thing stretches, this set of associations called up by her transgression? The bit about the 13 year-old wanting some booze is punched up a bit, as though the general principle of the rules being partly suspended in Hong Kong (though you never know how much you can count on that, or when it will work for you or against you!) is being accentuated…however it isn’t too much work to associate it with the idea of youth being a suspended state that pops up in…oh, that movie Rich Kids, maybe? The World Of Henry Orient, possibly? I don’t mean to suggest that every person who makes a movie or a comic is just so conscious of their own influences that they sit down and map them all out, you understand…I mean, probably most of these influences are just my own and no one else’s, but the thing is that I like it, and the movie frames and poses and shoots things in such a fortuitous way that it helps me to make those connections. Everything looks like something; most of the time I can’t figure out what it looks like. A while ago I was talking about how I became attracted to opera for its comic-like qualities: the production of mere tableaux, within which exposition takes place! It’s a tough trick to pull off, honestly. Because it really puts enormous pressure on the ability to deliver a performance, you know? Action movies, or the parts of movies that consist of action, are more like dance: not about tableaux, but instead about tableau’s opposite. But in those, although you can certainly fuck it all up if you don’t know what you’re doing, at least you don’t have the problem of action being decoupled from motion. But the tableaux, the tableaux, they all have to make action take place in the pose, right? And so it’s all about the quality of performance that happens when you’re stuck there.

In my opinion: some mighty good performances here. But!

Blink and you’ll miss them.

My God, how I wish now this had been an Eclipse comic, so I could haunt used bookstores and try to track it down. The missing origin. In a way it’s quite a simple thing, this evanescence of a thrill that we’re constantly seeking in all our switch-flipping and button-pushing — as I said, we go to the movies primarily to see things, to do the fine act of seeing, and so who wants to see the same thing all the time? There needs to be something in it that sings to us, and the only thing that sings is difference…mood, tone, staging, performance, a set of evoked associations, commentary, colour, sound, costumes…the glimmer of an idea, the shadow of a purpose. Remix culture is a powerful tool for the constellation of meaning, but (as I also said up above, or maybe just implied) it needs some sort of love to drive it. Without the love, it’s all just so many flashpots going off in sequence: as mere pyrotechnics is loosed upon the world. And thus though it’s pretty easy to specify what interests a person when they go to the movies, still all the parts and pieces can be in order and the thing can fail to intrigue anyway. Evanescence: it’s, like, a thing, y’know? Consider, for example, the little matter of THRILL-POWER that I promised I’d get back to: though I believe the term first arises at Martin Goodman’s Atlas Comics, and later becomes woven into the skin of 2000 A.D., if it means anything past a marketing line then it means the top fraction of a distillation process — what you get when you bring industrial pressures to bear on a bunch of talented and subversive artists, and set them to grinding out Product on the factory floor, slipping in jokes when the boss-man ain’t looking and winking at one another conspiratorially…as if there were any other way to wink. It isn’t the only kind of art, by any means; but it’s the only one that promises such a strange and nebulous quality of success. So thrill-power is really a dream, you know: a dream of value. But with a most peculiar inflection. “We can make something out of this”, or “this can be important, somehow”, are thoughts that (it seems to me) can’t help but lie at the back of the cave of industrial relations even if for most working people it’s only slumbering there — tell the truth in art, and you can change the world, even if the art is of a degraded or twisted kind. And, you can still collect your paycheque!

Because the suits will never know!

Wink wink. Alert readers may be dismayed to see a shadow of my preoccupation with the Sufis and the Grail and alchemy here, once again, but don’t worry I won’t plunge us into all that right now…I never do get all the way into it anyway, you see, because in the back of my head there is still a tiny undergraduate looking for a senses-shattering term paper topic, and he’s saving “Magic Is Green: Colour As Icon In Twentieth-Century Fiction” for himself…so suffice it to say that the promise of bringing something wonderful and artistically-significant and world-renewing out of the atmosphere of the sweatshop is a promise with an unusually intense odour of transcendence about it. BUT!

It doesn’t have to be the sweatshop, where it’s found. Take my useful catch-all stand-in “Eclipse”, for example: which had that same stuff, that same energy, but located in the spirit of competition with the sweatshop; rather than in the paradoxical glamour of the sweatshop itself, where you get away with stuff just like a rogueish movie hero whose spirit can’t be broken though they beat him. Well, okay, okay…and maybe that glamour’s real, and relatively uncomplicated, but you don’t have to live too long to realize it’s better to write the movie than to be a character in it? Especially a character who dies in the second act because he’s everybody’s favourite, and that’ll make the jaded punters feel something? Except it’ll really only make them more jaded, probably, and anyway life’s not a movie and surely there are some better endings to be had than just these old ones where everyone loses. There was a young fellow online recently who had the idea that there are some movies that are, uh, “tonal chimeras”, where there’s a slip-point in the movie’s middle: what the movie concludes as, is not what it began as. Much like any old youthful adventure of living? So what Lee and Kirby made at Marvel Comics, as it turned out (at least: for a while) was a thing that others could do as well, in co-ops or collectives that served their labour more faithfully…okay, and sometimes it stank, because the love wasn’t really there, or it was the “wrong kind” — a useful rule of thumb might be that the more it looked like Marvel or DC, the more purely spectacular it seemed, then the less respectable it was in other ways? — and no one’s saying that nobody got screwed over again just by tinier sweatshops this time, because obviously they did, but that promise, THAT PROMISE, when it was there could never be mistaken. So hard to put one’s finger on it! But then it’s always hard to put one’s finger on an aroma…

The aroma, in some sense, of reality. Positive feeling; maybe that’s all it is, in the end? Or, all it needs to be? I rather like the idea of life being like a “tonal chimera”, that starts as the seed-pod of one implied meaning and then ends up as quite another: like walnuts from the cherry tree, your old thermodynamic miracle. So many bad movies, that bail on their original conception, what they “want” to be in their soul! Loathsomely dismal endings to hopeful stories, panderingly curative endings to hard-nosed ones! Yet in art as in life, sometimes what you want from your adventure changes along the way. So, maybe that kid’s righter than he knows? Maybe this is the kernel of every good story, that the thing you want changes along the way? Maybe every movie is a “tonal chimera”?

I still don’t know what “positive feeling” is, sad to say; I’m currently entertaining the possibility that it’s nothing but the filmmaker having interests all his or her own, and influences all his or her own too. I don’t really know if James Cameron has interests and influences like that. I mean, that’s a terrible thing to say, of course he must, he’s a person after all? But I just mean, as a friend once pointed out to me, he only makes action movies?

Only makes action movies.

And the sickly thought occurs: what is it that a person does, when they only do one thing, to branch out once they start to get bored with it?

James Cameron Pour L’Homme.

People, it is probably only a matter of time…

But I had better stop hopping now. Hey, do me a favour and go watch Push, eh? I’d really like to know what you think of it.

Or what it makes you think of.

Or if I’m just crazy for liking it.

But here’s to positive feeling, eh?

Wherever she may lie, God bless her.

Interview With A Figment, Part VI

I enter the room, and sit down.

“Thank you for seeing me under such false pretenses,” I say.

And there is a long pause.

…

…

PETER DINKLAGE:  Well, you are definitely NOT from the Little Persons’ Association of British Columbia.

PLOK:  Uh…an old drinking buddy of mine was its VP, for a couple of years?

PETER DINKLAGE:  Yeah?  What years were those?

PLOK:  Uhmm…like somewhere around 1993?

PETER DINKLAGE: I am really not very happy about this, this is kind of…what’s the word?  BAD.

PLOK:  I apologize.

PETER DINKLAGE:  I’m really not sure I have any reason to accept your apology.  Let me ask you this — I mean, I know I’m inverting the regular roles of interviewer and interviewee here, I hope you don’t mind though?

PLOK:  Sure.

PETER DINKLAGE:  So let me ask you this:  are you a crazy person?

PLOK:  I’m not.

PETER DINKLAGE:  In my experience, though, a lot of crazy people don’t know they’re crazy people.  So why are you here?

PLOK:  I just have this one question,although it might sound like a bit of a…

PETER DINKLAGE:  (raises eyebrow)

PLOK:  …A, an, huh, an…untoward question, perhaps…

PETER DINKLAGE:  Is it about my sex life?

PLOK: …What?

PETER DINKLAGE:  A lot of crazy people want to know about my sex life.  Are you a crazy person who wants to know about my sex life?

PLOK:  What?  No!

PETER DINKLAGE:  Why, does the idea that I might have a sex life offend you?  Are you that sort of crazy person?

PLOK:  No, I…NO!!

PETER DINKLAGE:  “No”.

PLOK:  That’s right: NO.

PETER DINKLAGE:  Okay.  (leans back)  So what’s your untoward question?

PLOK:  Uh…

PETER DINKLAGE:  Oh, c’mon.  You see all these camerapeople, right?  And makeup people? I’m getting interviewed in like twenty minutes, I’ve literally got another five seconds to decide about you and that’s ALL.  And honestly I think I’ve been quite generous alrea…

PLOK:  …WHAT WAS IT LIKE PLAYING A DWARF ON “GAME OF THRONES”?!

PETER DINKLAGE:  …

PETER DINKLAGE:  …Are you fucking serious?

PLOK:  It’s a legitimate question, isn’t it?  You have to admit it’s a legitimate question.  An important question.  A question nobody’s asked, and nobody’s going to ask.  A question…(Dinklage goggles)..uh, I don’t suppose I could have a glass of water?…(Dinklage gestures to a bodyguard, who grabs me up out of my chair)…or if you have a handkerchief that would be good, it’s awfully hot in here?…(the bodyguard strongarms me to the door)…LOOK YOU AND I BOTH KNOW THAT EVEN GOOD LP ACTORS ALWAYS PLAY LP ROLES, FOR CHRIST’S SAKE, DON’T WE PETER?!  And the writers don’t know, and the directors don’t know, but you always have to bring your personal experience of dwarfism or whatever LP thing you’ve got to the role, because no one else will, and it’s an interesting problem for a serious actor, but fucking “Game Of Thrones” is set in this weird world where being a dwarf is totally different, there are all these power relations, the dwarf dude is born rich for one thing, so how do you draw on your experience to communicate the truth of that character, did you do research into LP people in the Middle Ages, do you feel it’s essentially a modern-day show with fantasy window-dressing so you can just lean back on your Shakespeare, or does it make you think about the architecture of the modern world in a new way or do you read up on Mozart or…?

PETER DINKLAGE:  Okay, let him go.

PLOK:  (ostentatiously dusts down)  Well.  So like I was saying, I’m NOT interested in your sex life;  I’m only interested in your acting process.

PETER DINKLAGE:  Wow, you are lucky I am nice.

PLOK:  Lucky, yeah;  that’s another thing I wanted to ask you about.  I don’t know what you’re like personally, but you sure play sharp characters a lot.  Do you think it’s…

PETER DINKLAGE:  Dude, I seriously cannot answer more than one question from you, okay?  You are asking me about my life experience, and honestly, I will not lie to you, there is a book forthcoming.  There is a book forthcoming.  You look like you’re about the same age as me, and you say you’ve got a friend who was the VP of a Little Persons’ Association?

PLOK:  Yeah…

PETER DINKLAGE:  So maybe you’ve thought about it a little…I guess you would’ve had to think about it just to ask your, huh, AMAZINGLY IN POOR TASTE QUESTION, so you probably know:  my career is like something I would’ve been made fun of for imagining myself in, when I was a kid.  And as fortunate as I’ve been we are not even there yet, as far as me getting to play Hamlet in a movie…you know?

PLOK:  Yes, sure…

PETER DINKLAGE:  Or even Macbeth.  But the time is coming.  This is like the presentation of African-Americans in movies, how it slowly changed.  You went from insanely superstitious human versions of (basically) Labrador Retrievers…

PLOK:  Er…

PETER DINKLAGE:  That is NOT for publication, damn you!  But the treatment of minorities, I have to tell you if you get to the status of “lovable pets” instead of “burnable wood” then you’ve got a potential step up in the future, as shitty as that sounds.  Start as a spaniel and eventually you can be Denzel, and kick ass intellectually, and be the boss, and have the boss’ problems, all from that lowliest position…but start as a diseased rat, you know, and see how far you get!  So right now my people are fighting to get into the living rooms of the nation, I would be a dwarf Redd Foxx if I thought it would help, but fortunately I’m in a position to play a dwarf James Garner, so I’ll take that jump and hope it sticks…and I’m just glad I don’t have to play a fucking dwarf Lassie.  The LP community, we have gone through this same sequence as black people in their long struggle, though not for the same reasons, but the black experience in America, that’s sometimes a mirror for us, and an inspiration.  An icebreaker for us:  people don’t even appreciate how the black experience in America has changed the white experience in America…as far as acting goes, I mean I might not be able to play Hamlet yet, but I sure as hell could play House, right?  But, what makes inroads for LP people?  How do we get to the point where I could play Hugh Laurie’s dramatic role?  You asked a question about sharpness before, that I would say is pretty perspicacious of you, because there’s a real key thing there about what access is, culturally…

PLOK:  Wait, wait.  You could play “House”, somehow, because of Denzel?

PETER DINKLAGE:  That’s correct.  Well…it’s just one man’s opinion, but…

PLOK:  How the hell does that work?

PETER DINKLAGE:  Like I said, my friend:  there is a book forthcoming.  But, not until the right fucking time, you know what I mean?

PLOK:  But…

PETER DINKLAGE:  BUT, this is all shit we can only say in private right now.  And, I say again, you can’t quote me.  I go and do volunteer things, I show up at community centers, I do videochat and I answer a lot of hand-written mail…I’m all over North America, I am supportive of my community, I’ve got frequent-flier miles like you wouldn’t believe, and pages and pages of speeches, I am the Taylor Swift, I am the fucking CELINE DION, of young people like me who want to do just anything, but the time is not right for non-LP gentlemen and ladies to hear what we say when we talk in confidence, and I need your agreement on this.  Don’t you think I would’ve talked about what it was like to play a dwarf in “Game Of Thrones”, if I thought even for a second that was something anybody would hear?  Modern corn-fed America isn’t ready to accept us yet, there’s a lot of prejudice, there’s a lot of violence…I want to be the Denzel, I only fucking wish I could be the Michael Jordan…or the Muhammad Ali…but somebody else will be that one day…fuck, I’m probably nothing more than the Al Jolson, really…

PLOK:  Er…I think that was Billy Barty, actually?  The Al Jolson?

PETER DINKLAGE:  Right, get him the fuck out of here, though, will you guys?  Don’t hurt him at all.  After all, the Paiutes say a crazy man’s a holy man…and we wouldn’t want to make God angry, would we?

PETER DINKLAGE:  (mutters) Make that fucker angry, who knows what kind of shit he’ll give you to deal with…

…

And then the door closes, and then I am escorted politely to the elevator.  I hit the street and turn to the beach and think…

“Oh SHIT!“

Now after all that I’m gonna be in trouble with Sarah too.

Google Update: The Lady Or The Tiger

Gratifyingly, there seems to be a small backlash brewing against the evil device from that Eighties And Nineties Movie…and a nice list of problems with them is pleasant reading here.

But today, getting out of bed to embark on various travels, the first thought that flitted through my mind was not why busfare costs so goddamn much now, but…

…How are people who get prescription lenses for their Borg Glasses going to fare, when they are made to take them off?  It’s a neat little trap, really;  if you come to my house wearing them, you won’t be wearing them for long, so you’d better hope to God you don’t need them to see, right?  Perhaps it is, again, like the Tale Of One Red Cent — Google feeling very comfortable offloading problems of etiquette and capability onto the poor saps who either a) buy their crap, or b) elect not to buy it.  If you get prescription lenses for these things then you’re the most captive of captive audiences:  having spent a very pretty penny indeed, just to be unable to do without them.  So then what is it that I am supposed to do, then, for my friends who are stuck with appliances that affect me when they wear them?  The only thing I can do, is make them into former friends…

…In an interestingly pointless restaging of the argument about freedom of choice we already have about almost everything:  chili dogs, cigarettes, parking spots, restaurant dumpsters. jaywalking, pet ownership, recycling, alcohol sales, vegetarianism, soft-drink consumption, bicycle paths and government spending…art, obscenity…breast-feeding on airplanes, and browsing in bookstores…the list goes ever on, but AT LEAST in the current moment we are spared such “debate” about prostheses, eh?

“Please take off your leg, if you’re going to come in here.”

“Hearing aids are not permitted in the theatre.”

“Before we can admit you, you’ll need a note from your orthodontist.”

“This building is a Wheelchair-Free Zone…”

It’s a funny thing, because we never think about it:  there’s a whole layer of technology we use and benefit from every single day, that is essentially passive.  Spectacles and shoes, you know?  And other Neutral Public Objects.  A whole other kind of Commons that we never consider, because we don’t have to;  a whole other set of technological tools and devices that we are free to mind our own business about.  You want to talk about infrastructure, well this is a very important kind of it…it’s easy to defend the publicly-owned neutrality of city sidewalks by taking a moment to mess up advertising that someone has power-washed into them, and thankfully there is no kind of skywriting that isn’t by its nature temporary:  for all the space around things that people own that is hotly contested and furiously argued-over, there is ten times or a hundred times or a thousand times the space around such things that it is not necessary to contest, or that is so easy to contest that antisocial opportunism can’t find a foothold there.  So, sure, behind this door you will either find the Lady or the Tiger, but all the other doors are just plain doors:  they go somewhere, and are for passing through.  They function, essentially, as doors.  You don’t have to notice them.

But behind every door, sooner or later — if Silicon Valley has its way — will lie either the Barcode or the Reader.  And can we sustain our lives, our everyday personal lives, if that becomes the new way things work?  Bad things happen when the spirit of capitalization hits the public investment in utilities, when infrastructure becomes commodified — the Enron COO dude didn’t set out to shut down hospitals, I am sure, but unfortunately for him he was only visionary enough to see what could be gained by profit-taking, and not what could be lost.  Sergei Brin sounds very comical indeed when he talks about how it makes him feel more of a Man not to have to carry around a phone in his pocket — if I had a bit more leisure at this exact moment I could churn out a couple thousand words about that Very Interesting assertion of his without breaking a sweat — hmm, and maybe I will, later:  I think it’s more interesting than has been noticed! — but what will happen if people start to feel like Real Man’s Men wearing Google Glass will not be so bloody comical.  Mad Emperor Sergei is kind of right, you see:

You will enjoy a feeling of power, if you wear these things.

Because, know it or not…you will enjoy the exercise of power by wearing them.

But if you are only about as visionary as that Enron guy, you probably won’t see that power relations always have the same character, regardless of what the technology looks like:  always stand for the same basic sort of choice.  And when you inject power relations into areas of life where they didn’t previously apply…

(Hey, and it actually turns out that you can make a great deal of money that way, you know?)

…Then every person becomes a door, behind which lies either fortune or disaster.

And you’ll have to open every goddamn one of them, just even when you go to the store to buy bananas.

Personally, I don’t like your chances.

Technology And The Void

It’s all Andrew‘s fault.

He has a blog, and people sometimes comment on it. And sometimes I think about the comments, and get an idea…and then sometimes it also occurs to me that Tom Bondurant is lurking out there somewhere, like Star Trek Rorschach…

And so for me it comes down to this, insofar as Star Trek goes: what enables people to make war anyway? Back in the days of Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock — in other words, back when Star Trek was a science-fiction show — technology might have been extreme but it also in some sense made its users brave: or at any rate forced them to be brave on occasion, because there were many things that technology could, self-evidently, not do. Every story really begins, in the insufficiency of their technology! Thus scarcity was everywhere, because even though everyone had enough to eat (sure, you ate orange pyramids and blue cubes, but you ate), they nevertheless lived very close indeed to the shadow-line of irretrievable disaster: because if there’s one thing extreme technology is ludicrously effective at, it’s taking you to its own limits…which of course are already way past your own. So one wrong move, one loose screw, and the ship is sunk! One tiny clerical error and you perish forever in the black of space! Well, and isn’t this also perfectly true in our own, arguably non-science-fictional world? Some form of scarcity was always at the root of the Cold War stories, just as it was at the root of the Man vs. Machine stories (hint: they were all man vs. machine stories); for strategic advantage is the scarcest thing there is, generally coeval with the evidence for human freedom.

But that was in the before-time, when the Void was comprehensible as mere space, and sometimes time.

Now, it’s different.

Consider Star Trek: The Next Generation, and its replicators. Don’t even bother with the holodecks or the transporters, though all express the same technological super-plenitude as variations on a theoretical theme: just focus on the replicators. Moving through space and time at superluminal speeds is just a minor marvel, compared to the great leap forward these so-quotidian gizmos represent. In the world of ST: TNG, the cornucopia has been pulled so very wide open that even the days of blue-cube food are gone: no one need want for anything, ever, no matter who or where they are. Limitless 3D printing at your fingertips; a Philosopher’s Stone. Yet is even this enough to make a utopia? Well…

We’ll come back to that in a minute. But for now: the focus. Those replicators can make anything a person needs, can supply them with anything they want. And every starfaring culture in the Star Trek universe has them, it’s absolutely trivial technology, it’s like everyone having a pair of shoes or a pair of pants, it’s nothing-at-all, it’s the air you breathe. So…

Why do they make war?

Or, more to the point, how can they make war? Everybody has everything. Every star-empire is loaded with planets, that are all quite sufficient to the requirements of human life. Throwaway planets: they waste some on prison colonies, waste others on nature preserves. Sanitoria. Brothels. They’re all under-inhabited by Earth standards, these worlds, and Earth itself is no different. There’s lots of elbow room. And the Klingons aren’t Mongolians anymore, neither are the Romulans all U-boat commanders; even the Cardassians have stopped being Space-Nazis, as the Bajorans have moved through being Space-Palestinians, to being Space-Jews, to being Space-Christians. The whole geopolitics-mirror thing isn’t supportable anymore, at all, to the point where after ST: TNG managed one more kick at the can with its Gorbachev episode, it had nowhere else to go. Geopolitics? They were lucky to get mere newspaper-headline topicality after a while — Vietnam vets, that one where Worf had breast implants, the highly-regrettable episode in which the Enterprise found itself pitted against — yes — the Planet of the Space-Retards…

…

What?

You think I made that up?

Oh, don’t you know I only wish I had, but never mind that now, because the name of the game is FOCUS. Why would anyone in the ST: TNG universe make war? What possible reason could they have for doing so? All the elbow room they could ever need, they have; all the material resources they could ever need, they’ve basically got too much of. If the Romulans and the Klingons ever shared a planet — and why wouldn’t they do so one day, except only for the fact that planets are in limitless supply — they would either not care about it, or they would be cool about it; for as much as is made of the appallingly minor cultural differences that any given Hollywood screenwriter can apparently steel himself to think up, it’s still no substitute for sublimated geopolitics and the even more sublimated racialism that animates it: the twin engines that drive SF wars successfully forward. TNG’s dry, schematic comprehension of “difference” is too distant and too easy, without the surge of blood and conscience behind it: its idealism just too darned ideal in its character, to be easily situated in the dangerous middle-ground where the rationale for conflict, both inner and outer, is grown. The old Star Trek traded rather heavily on both racist ideology and the seductive racialist pseudoscience that is its enabler, by pointing the stuff out specifically to argue against it: the Klingons weren’t fractious because it was built into their genes, the Romulans weren’t devious because they had a devious biological character, but these were institutional problems! And therefore problems that it was the business of individuals to struggle with: problems that only individuals could potentially overcome. But even as the New Trek took this principle even further, it watered it down most shamefully — even the Borg could be rehabilitated from their institutional conditions with relative ease, with nothing more than the sensitive application of a little Sense Of Wonder and some touchy-feely crap that (if you think about it) back in the 60s wasn’t even enough to liberate Mr. Spock…! So in the original Star Trek, there was never any guarantee that the individual would triumph over their institutional reality; but in its successor-series, there’s never any doubt…

Which is not necessarily the worst thing in the world, even though it makes for frankly lousy drama. I mean, it is a bit shameful to simply brush aside the main problematizing element of living in an institutional reality, but it isn’t the most terrible thing in the world to uphold the idea that individuals can triumph over their cultural backgrounds! So at least it isn’t cynical, say that for it anyway.

However it does mean that the idea of Klingons and Romulans living together in peace isn’t at all a crazy one, unless their warlike character is biologically-determined — which it isn’t — because their cultural differences are slight to say the least: we’re not even talking about Greeks and Turks here, it’s more like New Yorkers and Californians. Therefore, in answer to the question “why would such races make war”, given that we can only deal with what we’ve been given to reason on, we can only be justified in saying:

Because it doesn’t matter.

Which, if you think about it, makes a certain degree of sense. After all, how likely is it that the Federation, the Klingon and Romulan Empires, and every other two-bit temporary dominion that may exist, are constantly running over one another’s tracks? Space is BIIIIIIIG, even with warp-drive; the Federation, anyway, is constantly discovering unknown worlds. And so can the Klingons and Romulans be doing anything else?

How is it, that you can even begin to divide up a galaxy into Yours and Mine portions anyway?

Do you do it in big polygons?

How do you get people to agree on the big polygons?

How do you possibly arrange for the big polygons to be fought over, if they’re so big?

We’ll get back to that in a minute too, because just like the transporter and the holodeck and the replicators it’s just one principle that lies in the throat of these problems…and that’s exactly what is the problem…

…With space and time and scarcity, none of which really “exist” anymore in the Star Trek universe. A slight digression, if you would: if I were asked to think of an interesting-if-fannish Star Trek story, I’d probably offer the tale of the person who invented the Replicator Application, and smuggled it out to all the different star-travelling societies in a bid to put an end to their conflicts once and for all…and, parenthetically, I’d investigate the origins of the Transporter technology that it’s built on. Everybody has this: a technology that no less an authority than Gary Seven tells us is still in its infancy, and with that technology in hand it seems as though it wasn’t just steam-engine time for replicators somewhere between Kirk and Picard (I think that’s supposed to be about eighty years?), but it’s steam-engine time at the same time, all over the galaxy, even among peoples who don’t talk to one another and whose scientists don’t enjoy any intellectual commerce. So, given that either my notional tech-smuggler got the stuff out there, or that having the Transporter just automatically leads to the development of replicators in something of a tearing hurry, then if the tech-smuggler guy isn’t there the natural question simply falls back one more step: where’d they all get the Transporter from, then?

Uh…

Whoops!

FOCUS, of course…I’m forgetting my focus. Of course there are no “natural” questions to be asked in Star Trek, which is the major thing that fan-fic efforts of all stripes (even my own) carefully choose to forget…just like the Mirror Universe makes no sense unless the people in it are all just “evil”, right? Because it isn’t a divergent universe made of quantum branching, it’s just a philosophical postulate, a literary device. And therefore gussying it up with reasons only robs it of its simple, wonderful force. Sure, it could be a universe in which Khan and his eugenical supermen won, and that would explain a fair bit of the conceit in “scientific” terms — humans with extra aggression built into them would be something the rest of the galaxy’s races would be forced to adapt to (especially if they stumbled across a technological advantage like, oh I don’t know, a starship from the future), and even the logical Vulcans wouldn’t particularly care if their geopolitical situation was a nasty one because of that…would they? But then we’re back to biological determinism, the very explanation that Star Trek has always meant to repudiate, and even though you could force a dialectic here — the Mirror Universe is what we’d have if people were subject to a stricter biological determinism — it still isn’t as though the Mirror Universe really exists, but it’s still a literary device meant to operate on the setting and characters of Star Trek, and therefore it still must have the same point as it ever did…

To wit: that biological determinism is bunk wherever you may find it, even in hypothetical Opposite-Lands where the continuity of scientific/historical explanations is purposely (and purposefully!) overturned…and anyway even if it weren’t, surely the whole thing is still a bit beggared by Wall-E or McHugh or whatever the wet-lipped Borg kid’s name was, because if he can be deprogrammed just by looking at pictures of puppies or whatever, then why couldn’t anyone? And then, it seems to me, once we accept that then we are no longer talking about whole organisms being biologically-determined in a simple way, then rather we must be talking about conflict between different modules of biological determinism within organisms — everybody has a “good” part, everybody has a “bad” part, and the question is which one will dominate the whole organism’s behaviour — which means pretty soon we’d be back to where we are right now anyway, where “local” motivations may be in constant contention but the superordinate “global” consciousness this contention produces may also feed back into it, and play Solomon to all the selfish little modules that compose it. So you see, it’s kind of counterproductive to go to the “natural” questions of Star Trek, because all they do is eject you once again into the fact that nothing in Star Trek is naturally-occurring: there are merely things in it that it is about, and things in it that it isn’t about. Like how come all the different species all have the Transporter etc. etc…I mean if you wanted to solve that inconsistency I think you’d probably have to say something like “the Transporter is itself an application of the warp drive technology”, but then that assumes you see an inconsistency in the overall design of the Star Trek universe, and honestly if you’re seeing that I don’t believe you’re paying enough attention. Because the inconsistencies come after, you know?

It isn’t the original series that tells us Khan’s supertribe is innately hyperaggressive, after all!

But that’s just a contemporary innovation, more to do with flattering our current neomaterialist bias than with creating drama. Just as seeking an origin for the Transporter would take me back to the warp drive, and then the warp drive would take me back God-knows-where…because is the warp drive explained, either? No; it’s just axiomatic in the Star Trek universe that there is such a thing as “progress”, and that societies can be graded by what level of progress — what pre-existing level of progress, note! — that they’ve attained. So a “warp-class” civilization is also a “transporter-class” civilization, and above them are the “pure energy”-class civilizations and below them are the (ugh) Space-Retards who can’t be trusted with warp-class tech because they are not developmentally prepared to enter the galactic milieu…

…Where of course everyone is perfectly nice and peaceful, because they’re “smart”?

Except obviously they’re not, because that isn’t the kind of progress we’re supposed to be talking about. The original Star Trek universe is all about progress because it finds its conflict in “progress”: the question of “what will Man become?” always implicated in his technological capability…

…Under the shadow of the Bomb, of course, since that was the number one fixation and concern and anxiety of the times, and it was what made it all go. No mention of Space-Retards in the original series, because if they existed they were us…! But in a post-1989 world we got anxious about other things, didn’t we? Destabilization…chaos…a loss of meaning coincident with the loss of the rulebook…which is, perhaps, another way of saying: the loss of control…

But again, that is a thing we will get back to shortly. Because first we have to bring ourselves up from 1989 to now? Well, we don’t have to really, but it helps my little hack-job thesis if we do…because our primary concerns and fixations and anxieties have changed since then too, and that’s what explains the current problem — my current unease — with the device of the replicators in the Star Trek universe. Aha, the replicators, I bet you thought I’d forgotten all about them! But don’t worry, we haven’t gone off-topic yet…I’m just getting to where the problem lies, the problem that stayed subliminal to my awareness for all these years since ST: TNG went on the air, but which has now mysteriously become something I can think about, because the changing times have brought me up to it at last. Different concerns: you know, I was blathering a bit about this on Twitter (sadly, a service I shall soon have to leave forever), that the focus of our contemporary televisual dramas is on how character itself is the main threat to characters — tension arising out of the fact that self-actualization isn’t only complicated, but also something that inspires a kind of dread. Call it mind-control-in-reverse! Where there exists an inner, “true” personality under the skin of an outer “false” one…and the true one will get out, so how are you going to deal with it once it does? How will you keep the inner self from killing the outer one, as it must surely long to do? We’ve seen rather a lot of this kind of thing over the last couple of decades, and now we’re practically tripping over it…and it can be done well just as easily as it’s done poorly, and in a way it is (of course!) nothing new…any stroll through the Psychology section of your local bookstore will tell you that, and it isn’t like science-fiction writers haven’t long been obsessed with literalizing a “dual” character in their protagonists…but the accent is different these days. That dread, it’s something specific to the times. “What if the enemy is inside, what if I myself am the enemy?” It’s a communal nightmare we’ve explored a great deal in our fiction over a very long period of time, but post-1989 and post-2001 I think we must add:

“What if I myself, in my own authentic self, am the enemy?”

Because that’s the really modern kicker, isn’t it? Well beyond Freud and Jung and all of their self-help successors, that’s a new sort of paranoia for writers to grapple with, and not just SF writers either! Not too long ago, I mentioned in passing that the superhero always wins his or her four-colour fights because unlike the supervillain he or she is capable of honest self-expression…which is the only thing sufficient to creating the passage of time in such stories, and the reason they are not merely and entirely repetitive in character. But what if the self-expression isn’t good, in anything but a therapeutic sense?

What if the totalization of the Self, the integration of all its fractious bits, isn’t healthy for anyone?

And yet it still must be a Good, right?

I mean…can we really live without it being a Good? Can we? Or doesn’t that overturn something much more basic than the existence of Progress, and in a much more arbitrary way than any mirror-universe-where-people-are-bad-because-they’re-bad ever could?

…Okay, and so maybe I did lose focus there, a little. Well, so back to the replicators! Which are, like Khan’s inbuilt hyperaggression, a modern embroidery on Star Trek’s otherwise-clear historical thesis about how technology and humanity must interact…and like a lot of things in our real lives, it’s a minor logical convenience that conceals in its principle of operation a great potential for abuse — a potential, indeed, to unravel the very fabric it’s been embroidered onto. Whyever would the spacefaring races of Star Trek wish to make war, when they have so much space available to them that the very concept of “elbow room” ought not to be one they can grasp in the first place, because they have no need of it? Without any lack of resources, what logic can lie behind the adoption of the zero-sum expansionism they all seem so fanatically engaged in? During the Cold War there was a pretty solid subtextual reason for it all, but now the Cold War’s gone and the Singularity’s here instead, so there’s little to justify it all with: the Borg are the only antagonists that even make sense anymore as antagonists, aren’t they? And if you recall, the only reason they became antagonists in the first place…

…Is because Q wanted to scare Picard, which he did by catapulting the TNG crew into a far-flung region of space they couldn’t otherwise have reached. New space, you see, is the terror that Q brandished in front of the Enterprise senior staff…the terror of being linked into it, suddenly a part of it, in desperate need of processing it…and please don’t think it was accidental, that this was the face terror wore! Because, as I said up top a little ways…

Space no longer really “exists” for the Enterprise crew or any of their traditional antagonists, and neither does scarcity, within their little bubble of friendly, accessible trade-routes and space-lanes and diplomatic demarcations. Everything’s part of a plenum, a smooth and ultimately non-terrifying expanse within which all the rules are known and all the playing-fields are level, even if there is sometimes danger and not every single little thing has been thoroughly explored. Indeed the lack of a truly comprehensive exploration of the space-already-known is what preserves the plenum’s capacity to draw all interest to itself in the first place: as any writer may retroactively insert any amount of hidden, “archaeological” texture into it, and thus make sure the universe of Picard & Co. continues to sacrifice breadth, for depth. The bubble of lawfulness and pattern can be made so interesting, in other words, that they never think about the larger Void that enwraps their continuum (for that’s what it is!), the shield of uncrossable distance that separates them from the awful necessity of having to take new and more chaotic things on board in a hurry. And for this reason, to them, “space” is just another word for “context”…a context that Q’s action is intended to shake violently, and of course it does precisely that: Picard, so complacent when it comes to “final-frontier-ism”, has the frontier shoved in his face and must rapidly change his spots. But…

The fact remains that this injection of terrifying new space into the continuum is something brought about only by Q’s omnipotent and apparently peevish intervention; and really Picard is quite right to be complacent, given only that Q stays his omnipotent hand. Eventually the Federation would encounter the Borg, but in that “eventually” might they not increase their capabilities to the point where the Borg are not too discomposing to their context? Their insulating Void is nibbled away from the inward edge, so they never really see it: they only see the context it decomposes into, bit by bit, as a product and a meaning, as a product known as meaning..as a meaning worthy of being treated as “product”. And even when Q pulls that curtain away to shock them, they still do not really see it, or they see it only in a momentary flash, before — even in their terrifying state of unpreparedness! — they do after all beat the Borg, and gain the time they need to work out how to master them. For just one moment, all the windows to other possible versions of the continuum are thrown open, and the babble of terror breaks through! The Borg, as the principle of assimilation made literal, cannot themselves be assimilated!

The Borg, as Modernity’s ultimate skyscraper, cannot be modernized any further!

Cannot be de-modernized!

Because they are the logical conclusion, of a valid argument. However…

…It’s all only for a moment, before the brave Captain and his microcosmic crew manage to assert (admittedly, with more force) what they always assert: the value of the limited self, the self as a thing with boundaries and edges and the power to distinguish itself against the things it is not. The Borg claim that they’ll take the Federation’s distinctiveness and add it to their own, but they don’t actually show a whole lot of distinctiveness whether it’s their own or anyone else’s, and their ship founders on the old contradiction of Being and Becoming, until soon — very soon! — it sinks below the sea…

And then that’s that! And we’re back to Klingons and Romulans again, aren’t we? And the Void enwraps all, like a nice cozy blanket.

And yet they still make war. Even though there’s no reason for it. Because once again there is no space, there is no scarcity, there is nothing to go to war over…and therefore, somewhat paradoxically, my conclusion is that they’re making war over the scarcity of space. The scarcity of scarcity?

I admit it sounds just stupid at first blush. The scarcity of space as a casus belli? Well, how isn’t that a way of saying “elbow room”? Aha, but that isn’t quite how I mean it, just as the modern accent of the “enemy within” doesn’t mean, straightforwardly, the war between Id and Superego. Every culture in the ST: TNG universe wants to maintain its separation from all the others, its distinctiveness…for the very reason that the distinctiveness is slight. Just as they fight bitterly over territory, because their territory is actually in very little danger. They actually need nothing, so they are willing to contest anything and everything…because the only space that remains real, in all this wide galaxy, is the relatively small space that exists between warships when they’ve got a phaser lock on each other. Because it is the one remaining instance in which well-known and widely-used space can be reconstituted as Void: not a trade route, not an orbital path, not a medium of communication, not a medium of anything…not a “linked-in” part of the plenum, but a gap, a chasm. An emptiness. The planets are just excuses; the Empires are completely arbitrary in their scope. How do you get people to establish the frontiers of all those Big Polygons, and maintain them? The truth must be that you don’t even bother; the truth must be that you don’t even really care. The technology is godlike, fail-proof, self-maintaining. One person could fly a starship. Starships could be flown without people.

Starships, really, don’t necessarily need to be flown at all.

And if you wanted war, you could just model it mathematically.

But, as Captain Kirk might say, what would be the point? Consider what Kirk does in “A Taste Of Armageddon”, when confronted by the virtualization of war: he gives a big speech against biological determinism and then he destroys the enabling technology, thus bringing the scarcity of time and space back into the previously-computerized conflict and forcing the issue that had previously been so adroitly skated over. Kirk the Wrecker! Kirk the Doom-Bringer! But as impressively Alexandrian as his solution is, it still isn’t a solution that can be transported (pardon me) to the later developmental stage of his own milieu…not once those replicators have made the scene, creeping up on all the old justifications and stabbing them in the neck! Because it really is a utopian set-up, at that point, and the world simply won’t bend to give anyone a good reason to fight…

And so it becomes necessary to make one up. Because not just a taste, but a full banquet of Armageddon, is what’s on the menu here! When a perfect technological sufficiency removes all the old differences that used to matter — all the old distinctiveness wherein free actions were situated bleeds away, as utopia enforces that implacable logic which is all its own. So irresistible, so inevitable, that even wishing for peace is an exercise in futility!

Even wanting things is pointless!

And so scarcity itself becomes the most valuable thing there is. The flip side of adventure and possibility! The origin-point of drama and purpose! Oh, how they search for it — tirelessly, tirelessly, everywhere they go. Hunting the elusive Void, that separates objects from one another, in every tiny inch of space-that-is-not-space, space that connects rather than dividing. Chasing the bravery dragon in range-to-target reaches, hidden dimensions that need devious uncurling: hell, it’s a wonder they’re not all more bellicose, you know? For better a real and genuine final frontier — an real and genuine undiscovered country! — than a mere final resting-place. So the Void of an armed standoff (no matter how it gets resolved, although let’s face it in TNG it’s usually resolved without violence) is the escape-hatch, from oppressive utopia…the trapdoor to a higher and freer plane…

But, only because it all doesn’t really matter anymore? Otherwise, everything is all perfectly congealed into an impeccable stability?

Well…

Not really. Because does not the limitless cornucopia itself, betoken the presence of a sort of Void? Fights in space are all very well, but distinctly pre-replicator thinking…to the point where they may make the most sense, simply as psychological evasions: let’s not look at this new gaping hole in reality, that gets bigger every second, but let’s concentrate instead on the old one that’s getting harder and harder to find, harder and harder to squeeze into. If one is truly interested in final frontiers, then this is probably not really the way to go; in fact it seems to me that the only reason you would go that way, is if a final frontier was the very last thing you were interested in. Q knows it: the Federation is complacent as hell because it feels entitled to its complacency, it is willing to spend all its energies on complacency, and therefore that complacency is itself a very great existential danger. Because what is it, that the cornucopia can not provide?

Here’s where the Andrew part comes in. How can a society exercise control over the potential of its technology? All very well to talk about safety protocols, administered and enforced by computer, ringed around with the magic spells of access codes and command authority — one presumes that on board the Enterprise only Picard can order up high explosives from the replicators — but the problem with potential is that it’s…well, it’s potential, which means it’s all that which doesn’t currently exist as a known and charted list of possibilities. You don’t even need to reprogram the computer, to figure out how to replicate things you shouldn’t: the computer doesn’t know everything all by itself, right? So every superpower you haven’t thought of, that’s the superpower Wesley Crusher has when he’s sitting in his room with the replicator right there, even if the bottle containing the djinn has got a child-proof cap on it…

Or…

Hell, especially if it’s got a child-proof cap on it. Because if “potential” is your biggest worry, then guarding against all-that-isn’t-potential is like stacking sandbags in the wrong place: like stacking sandbags on a mountaintop, really. All the destructive stuff you know about, is stuff you’ve already got just lying around…isn’t it? So there’s no point asking the replicator to make you a phaser rifle or an antimatter bomb, when there’s already one sitting in a locker down the hall, protected by no more than a magic spell, a string of words spoken in a sufficiently deep voice, and if you’re already messing around with magic spells anyway then why bother to go down the hall? How trivial is technology you already know about, for heaven’s sake, in a world of such super-plenitude as this? Ashby and Godel look on and cluck their tongues at the reactionary urge — that urge made reactionary in the very moment of its conception! — to codify all in a great Principia, to enclose all in a great fence of Known Continuum wherein every action is subject to mitigation; knowing everyone should know better, but it’s just so easy, you know? So easy to think about the organism as an imaginary whole, instead of a thing with many synchronized parts that has a neat way of hanging together. Simple names are just so seductive, you see! They’re so readily put in order; they make everything so tidy. In my neck of the woods, now, that tidyness is best evidenced by statements like:

“I’m provisionally in favour of the Northern Gateway pipeline, so long as we’ve got the appropriate environmental protections in place.”

Where “appropriate environmental protections” means “magic formula of spoken words that will allow the oil to flow without people getting upset”, and NOT NECESSARILY ANYTHING OTHER THAN THAT…because of course there are no “appropriate environmental protections” in terms of actual instrumentalities, that will save our fisheries when (and not if!) a big spill comes, but somewhere out there is indeed a magic hypnotic spell that will allow the pipeline to built despite the inevitable disastrous consequences, if only someone can successfully locate the necessary “appropriateness” in linguistic space…

(Though more on “linguistic space” on some Later Day, and anyway as long as I have a body to be thrown in jail that pipeline will not be built…!)

…But on Star Trek, you find the tidyness coming out in theorems like “safety interlocks” and “modulation of the shield harmonics” and other assertions of postmodernity that are enlightening on the one hand, and occlusive on the other, but since you get to pick which is which you’re always in the money as far as stability is concerned…

Until, that is…you’re not.

So…

Yes, there is another Void, that technology addresses, and TNG-era Star Trek’s enormous (if subliminal, and maybe even subconscious) interest in it is precisely what makes it not exactly a science-fiction show as its illustrious predecessor was, but instead a curious hybrid of fiction and thought-experiment that is less about allegorical drama and more about the counterposition of philosophical theses…which is the very thing that leads me to think my aimless musings about its post-scarcity politics of Void might be considered legitimate, even though as a fiction it continues to have no “natural” questions in it that are available to be asked. Well, but perhaps there are such things as “unnatural” questions, whose asking may prove more fruitful? The TNG-era universe of Star Trek is pretty much not for me, I confess — I like my drama a bit more dramatic, if you know what I mean — but any show which is so much about the ordered arrangement of propositions in a hierarchy can’t help but appeal to the philosopher in me, whether or not I think any of its specific arguments are any good. I’ve often said that I think the best TNG-era shows must have been the ones about “how computers work” — your ship-in-a-bottle, your homing-pigeon android story — unless they were the ones about how an essentially dull and static status quo contains within it many overlapping ghosts of alternative meaning, shows that might have been building up a laminate of Star Treks we never saw, that all the TNG-era products exist on top of as a kind of conceptual sheen…

Which is to say: the other Void is the one we find in language.

Since that’s what latter-day Star Trek — in my view, anyway — is really about. Well, and in a world of godlike technology, isn’t the programming language of it all just…language? The things language can do, and not do; the limits that language can take you to, and what you can do without it when it drops you there, at the bleeding edge. It’s a bit embarrassing to admit it, but I can’t find the link right now to my own post on Star Trek’s most revealing moment: the Voyager episode containing the war in the Q Continuum. Aha, and right away you ought to be thinking “shit, so they have one too?!” Oh, indeed they do, indeed…as Janeway finds out when she is transported (sorry) there, to see it all looking exactly like the American Civil War, with muskets and manor houses and Q telling her “this is all just how your tiny mind interprets it, so the reality of it doesn’t drive you insane.” So someone shoots at Q as he stands near the mantelpiece, but instead of hitting him they hit a clock or something and they blow it to bits…because he ducks…and I think…

Well, what was the clock, then? That Janeway’s puny human mind merely “interpreted” as a clock on the mantel?

And what are the “bits“, that it was blown to?

And: what is “ducking“?

And when the Voyager crew arrive to rescue her, and escape the Q notice by hiding behind trees…

Well, and what the hell are the “trees“?

And what’s the “dirt” they get on their faces, and what is the “wood” that’s thrown into the “fire”, and the “bandages” that staunch the “blood” caused by “bullet holes”…and what’s “nightfall” and what’s “sunrise”, and on and on, and you’ll forgive me for repeating myself, but really I do no more than the episode itself because the principle really does go on and on and on…and all the while it is all about technology, and all the while it is all about the Void, and endlessly the Voyager’s crew traverses the edge of enlightenment and/or occlusion…as Q rants on metaphorically, about what you’re not seeing.

And what you will never see.

I mean…forget the Klingons and the Romulans, but why do the Q make war? You know? If there’s one territory we’re not in, anymore, it’s for sure the geopolitical…or allegorical…heck, I am not sure it’s even really the metaphorical, at all, at all…

For what metaphor can really stand to be stood for, by another metaphor? Is it possible to have a metaphor for a metaphor?

Back to Wesley Crusher standing in front of the replicator. Loss of meaning. It’s present at every stage of the TNG-era’s, uhrr…development, because meaning is a product of control, which is given by technology, which is held up by “progress”, but the edifice is not secure because it’s built entirely out of two-edged swords. And you can ignore that fact for a long time — if you work at it really hard and really desperately, even longer! — but eventually the knowledge of instability must seep in no matter what you do. Technology, designed to shelter you from the Void, can’t help but bring you closer to it at the same time, because every time it closes a door it also opens a window. The whole post-TNG world is constantly lurching towards the brink of collapse, of utter dissolution, of the desynchronization of its parts…and even exploration isn’t enough to keep blowing up the bubble. Only war, good old reactionary war, can keep you distracted from it all. Good old war, the reasonless thing! At least you can always count on it.

Until, that is…you can’t.

“Because it doesn’t matter”, I said, and you know what…it really doesn’t matter, does it? The Federation and the Klingons and the Romulans, they aren’t competitors but partners; they’re all in the same boat, and they’re almost the same people, and pretty soon they will be the same people, so in a way it already doesn’t matter, because if they’re almost the same and they’re getting more the same and soon they’ll be the same then we might as well just hurry up and say Sameness Has Arrived, even if no one is yet willing to see it. So who is going to war, that may be looked on as a poorly-formed question…the who doesn’t matter, because “who-ness” doesn’t need to be applied — when it’s the conflict that entrains the identities, not the identities that cause the conflict. It’s the Void that makes those technologies do what they do, which in turn places the fingers of individuals on the trigger, magically moving the people all into place so they may be contrasted with one another, though they may think it’s all their own idea. Just as it isn’t Wesley Crusher’s staring into the replicator that conceives the terrifying new technology of actualized potential, but the replicator that gazes also makes that thing happen. Has already made it happen. It will happen. And once it starts, it won’t stop.

And clearly it’s this, that concerns Q. Oh, very old stuff, none of it “original”, you know! But the accent is new.

Even if the words are the same, and the tune.

The Tale Of One Red Cent

Hey, remember when we all figured out that Sarah Palin really wasn’t the slightest bit interested in running for public office? That she just wanted to fleece credulous Tea Partiers by pretending to want to Save America?

This is kind of like that, but with the penny.

…So the Government of Canada decides to do away with the penny, and the way they do it is this: they just stop minting pennies. From now on, puchases that result in penny-sized change are to be rounded up or down to the nearest nickel, and both ways being reasonably equal in their occurrence it all evens out over time.

BUT. Here is where the overall philosophy of government held by the Party of Stephen Harper, the Parti Albertois, the Big Oil Party, gets thrown neatly into a nutshell for us: once they’ve stopped the minting of pennies, and established the guidelines for rounding up and down…

Then they book off for the day. And every organization with a cashier makes up its own policies about taking pennies and giving them back, every company takes a greater or lesser amount of time to revamp their POS systems, receipts sometimes say what’s happened to your money and sometimes they don’t, and everything is just left to cook down willy-nilly. The B.C. government liquor stores, so I’ve been told, intend to distribute pennies back to the public until the end of time; McDonald’s (it will surprise future anthropologists, but it doesn’t surprise us — since we know that McDonald’s restaurants have functioned as shadow public buildings for at least a decade now, as governments dispense with money for public housing and facilities and care) had their ducks all in a row months ago, fully ready to accept pennies as legal tender while also not redistributing them to their customers as change…

And between these two poles, every other imaginable approach, doubtless up to and including unscrupulous business-owners who suck a little free cash out of the rounding differential, by rounding one way but not the other. As well, I don’t know much about how credit card companies work, nor about who it is that makes and distributes POS terminals and systems, but I think in either case it’s a matter of scale that makes it so credit card and debit card transactions apparently must continue to be calculated to the penny…ha, no word yet on the chequing system previously known as the M1 money supply…thus necessitating a system in which there are (at least temporarily) two kingdoms of money, the virtual and the physical…

…And, you know, even though the convention is to purchase many items in one buying-action, and even though the convention is to pay in a single manner when one is paying…and even though in every single purchase the wiggle room only amounts to two pennies on either side, still if one were sufficiently enterprising one could easily wring ten bucks a week out of that differential, too, and with modern telegizmo tools one could even come close to automating the process…not that it really, really, really matters, but…

It shows a certain kind of pattern of intention, on the part of the government; and it shows it in an unusually down-to-earth and tangible way. As I’ve said before, this isn’t your father’s Tory party (meaning: if you’re my father it isn’t your Tory party), regardless of how many people in Southern Ontario or indeed my own family were fooled by the similar name…and the old Progressive Conservative party’s actually very great interest in governing just doesn’t line up at all with the carpetbaggers that Peter MacKay sold the name to, because this bunch is primarily interested in getting out of the business of government. They don’t want to regulate, and they don’t want to inspect; they don’t want to research and they don’t want to take advice, they just want to sell all the old stock in the family business and liquidate the place, because they’re not interested in running it anymore. Parliament itself doesn’t interest them; for them the rule of law is something you only have to respect when you can’t get around it. This last may seem like hyperbole on my part, but if you think about it for a minute it’s true: we’re talking about a government who doesn’t see the need to change laws that we all know they could change if they wanted to anyway, and no one could stop them, so why don’t they just act like they’ve already passed those changes, to save time? And then if there’s a big fuss they can always change them later. And: jeepers, no wonder they were our first government ever to be held in contempt of Parliament!

When it was just a simple matter of reciprocation, really.

All in the name of efficiency, at least that’s what they all claim. Ah, efficiency, efficiency…one can have so much of it that it isn’t even efficient anymore, did you know? Because it fails to create any effects: the pond of day-to-day government lying still, without a ripple being made or felt. Down in the States, there’s this curious new mutation of the filibuster, where nobody actually has to perform the filibuster, but only promise that they will — hence the sudden shock of Rand Paul actually bothering to mount one recently! — and no doubt Goldman Sachs is even now preparing to bundle up junk filibusters and sell them on at a Triple-A bond rating, and that’s pretty bad, but in Canada things are going exactly the opposite way, where the government doesn’t bother to dot the i and cross the t of legislative action itself anymore, simply because they could do it, so why should they bother with it? Well, if you wanted to lay it all at the feet of Harvard Business School you wouldn’t be completely off the target: because this is a climate in which (have you noticed?) every CBA negotiation begins with a lockout first…so unions never even get the opportunity to strike, you see?

I mean, who makes concessions to come back to the negotiating table, just to leave it again?

And then down the road the lockout is inevitably flywheeled, by presenting a loss of revenue on paper that justifies a newer and tougher round of negotiations, on and on, in an ever-shrinking circle. Not unlike a sphincter. And sure, in the long term this erodes your business’ economic foundations, but in the short term it makes money, and if the federal government doesn’t care about acting as an impartial arbiter — if, for example, it announces it is readying back-to-work legislation for unions who have not even taken a strike vote yet — then there’s nothing to stop the cycle. In my country, our long period of labour peace is finally going, going, and GONE, after about thirty years of being nibbled away at, and it isn’t because we’ve never had a government authoritarian enough to get rid of it ’til now, it’s because we’ve never had one that cared so little about whether it was there or not…

So whatever they’re for, they’re only for it on a strictly temporary basis; what’s more telling about them is what they are not for. Sure, they’ll give the Provinces money for administering health care, but once the money’s given that’s where their job ends…the principles of universality in the Canada Health Act are still there, but don’t ask the government to enforce them! And if you run an airline, you can apply the aircraft maintenance standards yourself…if you’re a food company, just mail us in the results of your own in-house inspections and we’ll definitely, definitely file them for you…and if you’re a mining company concerned about meeting the requirements of environmental regulation, well…

Hey, who’s in a better position to act as steward to the environment that the folks who are down there on the ground, am I right?

And so many more examples that I don’t think I could list them all, indeed the only way all these things are even capable of being done is by passing omnibus bills that embed all the preconditions for ‘em deep in the fine print of several thousand pages. You couldn’t even pass these things any other way! You’d be here all night.

All night!

Doing your, y’know, job.

So you just don’t do it; you leave it up to other people. Let them figure it out!

Let them put in the overtime on it!

And such is the general miasma of apathy in Canada, that they pretty much do. These matters are so abstract and nebulous, really: a lot of fancy legal words on paper. Who wants to bother interpreting them finely? Who wants the bother of linking up causes and effects that the government itself hasn’t bothered to connect? Ah, but the penny, the penny…that’s a different story.

Because you can see the penny!

And, now, you can get stuck with it. Down at the corner store, you’ve got a new job to do besides “buying shit” — you’re now a Cashier Supervisor, too. Think Harper or Flaherty stand there wondering if they’ve got the right change, wondering what this store’s policy is, wondering whether to ask? When they buy their coffee at the Starbucks, are they discomfited by how the person at the counter tells them something totally different from what the official Starbucks policy notice sitting at their elbow announces? It’s all doing better than “breaking even in the long term”, for them!

They get to knock off early!

And leave the penny-hassles to the little people.

Except, obviously, it isn’t really just the penny that we’re talking about, is it?

Look out, folks! The invisible hand of the market is in your pocket, know what I mean?

On A Dark Desert Highway

So, did you see this?

Ideological tech companies whose visionary founders were raised on a diet of SF cautionary tales and shabby reading comprehension skills are conspiring, Bloggers, to make me sound like a conspiracy nut about half the time I open my mouth. But from a camera that is always there, to a camera that is always on…

…Is quite a serious change, and so I’m forced to get quite serious about it. And I guess the first thing I really should say, just as preamble to the seriousness, is:

Forgive me, Joss Whedon. You were right, and I was wrong: Dollhouse was a really good show. Oh, not when it aired! But now the world has caught all the way up to it, you have been proved prescient indeed: right about the whorehouse and right about the phones and right about all the rest of it, and therefore not just a guy with an excellent, some would say “white-knuckled”, grasp of the fundamentals of screenwriting who enjoys putting pretty actresses in danger and lopping off the heads of fan-favourite characters, but a true and fully-fledged SF writer in the old classic style! A man of ideas!

Sir, I salute you!

But man, I wish I didn’t have to. You know? Hell, I bet you wish that too.

Man, does it ever suck to be us.

So here’s a little story, Bloggers, about the greatest land general in all of human history, the one-and-only Impossible Man, who could never be beaten…and how he was defeated anyway, despite that. Hey, write this one down in the book of boxing, I’m telling you! Because Hannibal simply conquered the hell out of everyplace he went, was a single man fit to go toe-to-toe with entire nations and whip them decisively — Hannibal could have conquered Spain if he’d wanted to, for heaven’s sake! — but he couldn’t conquer Rome, because Rome wasn’t a country so much as it was a machine. A soldiery machine, wherein children were given spears to play with instead of toys! Where if anyone was coming down your chimney, it must’ve been the Great God Mars! Like Disney movies, every seven years Rome cycled out one army and cycled in another, and sent them against Hannibal, and they died…but the new audiences just kept coming up, and up, and up, and eventually Hannibal was simply outlasted by them. “But most of all, the paymaster/ Loved to hear John Henry’s hammer ring, Lord Lord!” Loved to hear John Henry’s hammer ring, but in the end King Steam always wins, doesn’t he, and that was always the secret of Rome’s success: not organization per se, but the astonishing fecundity that organization — even fairly lousy organization, before Augustus — could put to use. In today’s TED-talk terms, they were just so awfully good at monetizing, you see; they just monetized and monetized all the live-long day, and Hannibal could crush armies and smash nations right enough, but he just couldn’t beat all those people! All those families, all that cottage industry turning out all those guys with gladii, all that decentralized military-agricultural activity, all that sheer bacterial growth! To stop it, he would’ve had to stoop from slaughtering armies to just plain killing people, killing them wherever he found them, finding all of them and killing each of them…and far be it from me to speculate on the reasons why, but since this was something he didn’t do then this (they all tell me) was the reason he lost. Or, more accurately: the reason he had to lose, having not done anything to neutralize Rome’s ability to put their breeding program on a war footing. He might still have won, if he’d obliterated the City itself — mastering its civil government as he mastered its military forces, he could’ve taken its ability to organize away from it, but I guess that just wasn’t how they used to operate in the old days. I don’t know; I am still reading about Hannibal, and Rome in general, and I don’t know a tenth of a hundredth of nothing about the subject — hey, I am pretty good on Augustus, though! — so I don’t know how to judge what Hannibal did wrong, but what Rome did right answers readily enough to some good ol’ textual analysis…because Rome, that first of modern countries, just plain outproduced Hannibal, didn’t they?

Today, Google must be hoping for a similar success. They just keep on pushing on that ownership/privacy envelope, don’t they? But they didn’t win against the courts when it came to publishing rights, and it’s hard for me to see how they can win against them in the nightmare scenario of privacy violation described by the link up above, and Google is very good at making money and drafting in a user-base…but are they as good at that, as Rome was at having little soldier-babies? A court ruling can do what Hannibal couldn’t: it can find everyone and require compliance from each person it finds. It can go door-to-door if it has to. It can — if necessary — cause Google Glass to vanish from the face of the Earth, and all its accumulated data, too. It can sack the City of Google and dismantle its entire system of organization, if it comes to that.

Though in my judgement it probably won’t come to that, but what it will certainly come to is a very large matter of money that surely — you’ve got to think! — Google stands to lose, because let me tell you in my country we are not going to be very forgiving about an American company absorbing ever-vaster stores of data on us, that are then made easily, even trivially available to an ever-more secretive and sinister U.S. federal government…and, I daresay we ain’t alone in that “not-forgiving” sentiment, and furthermore since the U.S. Trade Department is an indefatigable protector of America’s number one cultural export — “hardball”, if you’re wondering — it isn’t like we’re going to be able to ban Google Glass, so…

I foresee a lot of time spent in all kinds of different courtrooms, for Google: paying top dollar to lose, and you’ve got to think that the matter of rectification is not going to be a small or inexpensive one. Not that Google cares, about any of that. Google simply doesn’t care! Google wants to write new law, as though software engineers were the unacknowledged legislators of the world, and everybody’s in the syndicate so everybody has a share.

Stinkin’ utopians, am I right?

They’ll bury us all, if they get their way…

But fortunately it really does not look to me as if they will get it. What will happen to Google, when they finally overreach? They are overreaching right now, all around you, so it’s a good time to consider the matter of that fallout…can they survive the catastrophic collapse, that the successful pursuit of Google Glass seems to me to make inevitable? In all these books they misapprehend the meaning of, the forces of repression go down the same way, because their mistakes are already sown in the ground in the moment they begin to succeed…they simply don’t see it coming, because they simply won’t, but if you questioned them under hypnosis they’d probably allow as how they always knew, and indeed they had to know because it was the exact bargain that they made, and the rest was always all just bullshit. Can Google survive its own success?

You have to think that they’re not really, so to speak, planning on it. Which means “no”. So.

I wrote a story like this myself, once. Actually it was a TV show: nine scripts about the Canadian experience writ large across the stars, a Galactic Empire story with rebels and dictators and alien invaders and the whole box o’ wax, but because it was about Canada it was also (necessarily) about trade relations with the United States, and so I had to find a science-fictional device for representing the character of those relations. And, hey, I might’ve just as well called the device “Google Glass”, you know? Because it pretty much worked the same way! So maybe I am already one up on Google, because I’ve already imagined what their encounter with the wheel of fortune will end up looking like…not that I would’ve had to write anything about it to get that way, since I could’ve just read any old SF story of about the last seventy years or so that in any way treated on Galactic Empires, from Isaac Asimov to Iain M. Banks, but as it happens I did write something about it, and what I wrote described (because it was Canadian) how to deal with cultural and economic products you don’t want, when you can’t use tariffs or quotas to keep them out…

…And as it turns out, the method’s rather effective, but I won’t spoil it for you now, since I’m sure you’re going to see it all around you before too much more time passes. Behind Google stands America, with its unparalleled military might, but as someone pointed out on the Internet so long ago that I don’t even remember who it was, despite America’s massive military apparatus it’s no empire of the sword as Rome was…rather it’s an empire of the robe, an empire of trade, and the sword is there primarily to back up the robe’s access to markets. By which I mean, it is not the sword that expands the hegemony, and it isn’t the robe that flows in afterwards! But the robe itself is the instrument of hegemonic expansion…

And thus, even though behind Google stands America, Google is still vulnerable because, well, it’s standing in front. In a way, it’s a minor miracle they’ve lasted as long as they have, even though they’ve sure had a lot of help — well, but they sure needed it, too, because they’re much more a threat to American national security than Wikileaks is: all Wikileaks does is reveal secrets, after all, where Google changes the whole map of information, secrets and non-secrets alike. It’s actually a pretty destabilizing kind of project they’ve got going! The one-to-one map; the world knowledge depository. Everything, everywhere. Wars — many wars — have been fought over much less, you know? And even Apple can’t touch the nastiness of Google Glass — Apple only surveils you, but Google Glass makes you the surveiller of everybody else…!

And Hannibal, having learned his lesson, would perhaps see it: if you can’t actually keep up production, then you can’t overproduce anybody out of kicking your ass for you…even, and maybe even especially, if this has always totally worked for you in the past. So to me, the basic rundown is like this: roughly speaking, the more people there are who are doing something of value online in an unremunerated way, the more money all the various new-style tech companies make…the more blog-posts, the more tweets, the more useless-in-practice Yelp! reviews, the more likes and faves and uploads and downloads and links and clicks and God only knows what will be next, but the more everything that gets done the more little green George Washington soldiers you can raise on those informational acres. And it makes me wonder sometimes: is this really the entire key to a successful business, now? I mean, forget the talk about goods and services and retail mark-ups, is it not really that any given business is an equation of inputs with outputs, and only whatever you get to take in without cost at the front end, comes out the other as profit? Exxon likes oil because it doesn’t have to make it, it just has to get it…if it had to make it as well as get it, it would go do something else. Pave a rainforest, possibly. Whatever’s cheap, which is to say: whatever’s at least partly free.

Right?

So throw out your John Locke: the value isn’t in the labour that turns an empty field into a farm, the value’s in the fact that empty fields exist to be claimed as property by the addition of labour to them! And the less stuff that’s already owned by somebody else, the more potential profit there is in the world, and vice versa. Polonyi said it better than I can, but what the hell: market fundamentalism is useless utopianianism, because once you drop the hammer on the ground its potential energy is used-up. Resources are finite, and not everything under the sun can be rightly thought of as a commodity. People, for example, are not commodities: we can always make more, but we can always run out too, and anyway we cannot make there be more people than there actually are, at any given time. Which is, parenthetically, why we need decent social services provided by government, because without them a rise in unemployment equates to a die-back, and the cost of people goes up, and you can never get it back down. You know, once I had a class in school where the question was raised: how come when inflation started to hit the feudal lordlings of Europe (around the end of the 15th century, when more “free stuff” was found), they didn’t modernize? Why didn’t they build more aqueducts, more windmills? The answer that was given was one that still interests me today:

“Because the peasants wouldn’t build them.”

Well, for one thing they didn’t really have time, did they? But for another, it was simply not a thing they could be compelled to do. The feudal bargain, rather obviously unforgiving on the peasants themselves, proved also in rarer cases to be equally as unforgiving when it came to those who were intended to benefit from it. When it came to war, for example, it was the aristocratic class that had the duty to fight: the peasantry was what was being fought over, as attributes of the contested land. And, when it came to operating in a money economy (which is what you have, if anyone in your economy happens to be using money), it was the aristocratic class that was thrown into dire straits, while the “attributes of the land” continued to think exclusively about non-financial, non-virtual, “weather”.

We may have something much the same going on, these days: as I think I mentioned just a little while ago, we have a thing today — a most curious and remarkable thing! — called “neo-feudalism” (I know, I was shocked too), in which tech companies fight one another over profits proceeding from the unpaid work done by you and me, the “attributes of the Internet”. And doesn’t it also seem, these days, as though a good deal more than half of all the products and services out there are meant not so much to be useful things in themselves, but merely delivery systems, vehicles for Terms And Conditions? As though the real point of every new product is to provide yet another way to entangle its users legally with the interests of a large corporation?

“Facebook, n., a way to teach children how to click on buttons marked ‘I Agree’.”

Tied to the land, tied to the land and fought over, that’s what we are…but if neo-feudalism deserves its name, perhaps it is as doomed as its predecessor, and for the same reasons. I fancy I can see a certain circling of the wagons, myself, among the tech companies: some sort of inflation threatens, and they are desperately trying to avoid being tagged by it. What if “user-generated content” stops being free?

What if people stop using Facebook and Twitter?

What if the blogs go West?

Me, I’m hoping that this is exactly what’s going to happen. Again as I’ve said before, so much of the written web is run on a sort of loose adapatation of the publishing model, where opportunities for payment are scarce and competition for them is fierce…and quality is secondary…and it doesn’t actually have to be that way. Another loose adaptation of something else, the ubiquitous Terms And Conditions, don’t have to be the way they are, either. It’s a big Internet out there, after all…plenty of places to hide from Big Social…

And Big Data doesn’t necessarily have it any easier. You know I turned down a store card the other day, not for my usual reason of “fuck you” but instead because I suddenly couldn’t believe how much information they wanted, for their piddly discounts? My name, for heaven’s sake! Now what on earth do they think they need that for, and what makes them think they can get it so damn cheap? My address, good God! For what, for 20% off a box of Corn Flakes? “Store,” I thought, “you’re gonna have to do a lot better than that…”

Goodness gracious, I mean just the anonymized buying-habits stuff, that’s not enough for them! Ludicrous…

So it made me think, too, about what Google wants: which is EVERYTHING, right? They want everything. Their project is a Babel Tower, and it will never be finished…

Unless, that is: it is finished, by dint of nobody wanting to work on building it anymore.

But…will the end come soon enough? In a post-Enron, post-Goldman Sachs world, it isn’t like there’s much doubt anymore that the fondest wish of a large commercial enterprise is usually to short the stock of the society it lives in, and if the tech companies really are getting nervous then we might expect them to behave in increasingly aggressive ways: trying to get more unmonetized information, and more, and more, faster and faster to beat the closing bell. Remember what I said about the gross misapprehension of science fiction?

You know that movie from the Eighties and Nineties, about the dastardly computer company CEO’s Trojan Horse?

The one they just kept making and making?

Well, this is that movie; except it won’t do any good to Get The Disk To The Congressman or whatever…it won’t do any good to tell the New York Times…because the NYT already knows all about it, and the congressman’s on the payroll. About twenty years into the mass-market explosion of the World Wide Web no one really knows anything yet, except that if they were well-served by Phase Two (the bit where they figured out how to get their money) they’d rather not gamble on Phase Three (the bit where they might lose it), and so it’s the time of ring-fencing and end-running and the hearty Welcome To The Dollhouse, where of course you may check out any time you like. To go back to my oft-ridden hobby-horse about science fiction’s ironical indications (and, no foolin’: more on that soon), the Evil CEO’s Master Plan was never really about someone taking over, taking secret control of the universe with back-door access to all the power-plants and air-traffic control systems. Why, after all, would someone who’s a billionaire already need such a power? If everything’s going fine…

But, aha…what if everything’s not going fine?

We might consider what the threat actually is, in That Eighties And Nineties Movie About Computers. What will happen in that fictional world, if the bad guy wins? That it’s never stated is no accident: the bad guy may make some noises about an end to war and poverty, but he’s the bad guy, so it’s just noise. Often we get the hero saying something like “it’s too much power for one person to have”, but if the power’s never really used then what really can be the threat?

Well, just flip it over, folks…

…Because the nature of the threat is that the power will never be used!

Because when one person has it, then nobody else can do anything with it. That’s the slightly more antique pattern that the Eighties And Nineties Movie is really following, you see: the evil developer makes the music school into the condominium, and Old Man Potter gets hold of the Savings & Loan. Computers really have nothing to do with it; that’s why that old movie’s so ridiculous. It’s just about Big Business vs. the Commons.

Which is not quite like this movie here: where privacy, not power, is the thing at issue, so it isn’t the commons that’s under threat…!

But instead, naturally, it’s the individual. “Dude, I’m not gonna sit with you while you’re wearing those fucking Borg-glasses“, is what I plan to say to anyone I may meet who’s wearing them, and I invite you to do the same…because it’s all just too much power for no one to have, you know? Which, huh, if you think about it…

…Is a complaint that goes all the way back to the Romans.

And we all know what happened to them.

Flashback! To “The Time-Traveller’s Wife…!”

This will be a short one, but true.

None of my friends think this is funny.

…So I was flicking channels on the TV one day, and came across “The Time-Traveller’s Wife”, which was a bit more than half over by then.  Though I can’t fathom Rachel McAdams’ predilection for such stuff, I figured since she’s Canadian I might as well support the team and have a look…also I don’t hate Eric Bana, do I, because he played Bruce Banner in “Hulk” and also Watered-Down Khan in “Star Trek: Nemesis” or whatever it was.

So I turn the thing on, and it’s this awful tearjerking scene where their marriage (or whatever) is falling apart, because they’re experiencing things in a different order and IT’S A METAPHOR and honestly I already get this, I get all of it, one glance is enough to tell me what I need to know.  So I turn it off.  But then…

I can’t help wondering, you see, just how they suck people in to the narrative, to the point where what I just saw could be bearable.  Where do they begin?  They can’t start out with all this goopy stuff right away, can they?

So when it gets replayed around midnight, I decide to check out how it starts…and you know the beginning of it isn’t half-bad?

I can see why people would choose to get some popcorn and watch the rest?

But having already lived through the future of this movie, I know what’s coming, and decide to spare myself the pain of getting too involved with it.

…

That’s it.  That’s the joke.  But it really happened!

I think maybe someone OD’ed on some Alan Moore a bit, before making this thing…surely any experienced SF reader must’ve seen, after just a few minutes, the whole plan of it floating entire before their eyes, a crystalline time-solid?  Yes, Veidt killed Blake, and half New York…hold on, Laurie, I’m explaining it to Rorschach five minutes from now…anyway…

Uh…

…Happy Valentine’s Day?