unReal Quandry
We have fallen behind the times beneath the reign of constancy, leaving us looking and thinking a little right-of-the-box, but hoping to surface from the quarter ending crush of things-to-be-done long enough to note a thought or two thus far eluding us during our unscheduled hiatus. But for what it’s worth this is what we’ll look like if we manage to make it to the meeting on the other plane Monday.
However we must confess we find ourselves feeling more than a little ambivalent about our wan adventures in the digital fields of Second Life. It is virtually impossible not to call upon the uncanny to explain our experience although we are trying, because it really is after all not the wanness of our adventures there but the success with which they echo the wanness of our adventures everywhere else (if anything with greater transparency) quixotically pursuing our asymptotic approach to the Real that leaves us creeped out. People are nice enough most of the time though some have guns and like to use them in spite of signs directing otherwise, and the real trouble starts from the fact that the former turn out be as much (or more) of a problem than the latter. To wit: we have a hard time getting around once we leave Help Island—and please note, our initial trip was unceremoniously brought to an abrupt end by a timed logout for grid maintenance, which somehow banished us to a remote but densely populated sector of the mainland upon re-entry where we were mostly ignored for being a rube and our screen kept freezing due to the surplus of fantastic prims, so that our time in the womb was predictably enough cut short due to forces beyond our control—where the main activity seems to be avatars standing around with postures we can only describe as lifeless in small groups chatting one another up. Fair enough, we agree, except that watching our avatar join these groups and assume an equally lifeless stance among them, papery things spun from pixels searching for words in hopes of contact, for once, beyond mere verbs and things we exchange to be kept or discarded in an eerily vacuous world nonetheless cluttered up with stuff other avatars have made, we cannot escape the dread that this is, after all, really what life really looks like most of the time. And inside that dread lurks the dread that attends the thought we can’t stop thinking, thinking as we are of the inert bodies off somewhere in the rented rooms of real-time whose avatars seem to be having such a good time here in the virtual fields: they may not be us but we sure are them.
And this, shocking exactly no one, follows from the fact that while we find immensely intriguing and truly admire the sleek inversions of the thought behind Uploaded Mind’s terrific formulation “what must really be going on… is the human minds provide for the machines a cyberspace in which to interact socially,” and like even more the uncertainty of the referent by the time we hit the pronoun in “Machines need humans to provide a playground for their minds” muddying up just those waters in which we like to swim, we fear we are still stuck finding it all too easy, alas, to believe the idea of machines sucking energy from human bodies is anything but ludicrous:
“Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks… Capital asks no questions about the length of life of labour-power. What interests it is purely and simply the maximum of labour-power that can be set in motion in a working day… when [the worker’s] place can at once be supplied from foreign preserves, the duration of his life becomes a matter of less moment than its productiveness while it lasts.”
What we find truly uncanny, in other words, is the doubled result of seeing how truly ghost-like the apparitions our consensual hallucinations produce really appear once conjured as such; the flipside of which is the inescapability of the image of the battery fields of the Matrix, fueled by our imaginary encounter in the digital fields of Second Life with those life-like avatars of avatar-like people we assume are slumped over keyboards as we are, typing this. The attendant dread finds its origin of course in knowing that Marx’s remarks come from his account of why slavery is, from the point of view of Capital itself, not the most efficient means of vamping surplus value from otherwise valueless bodies, so that by the end of the nineteenth century it can (courtesy in part of that other Just War) be permitted to “die out,” as we say: “the unnatural extension of the working day, which capital necessarily strives for in its unmeasured drive for self-valorization, shortens the life of the individual worker, and therefore the duration of his labour-power, [so that] the forces used up have to be replaced more rapidly, and it will be more expensive to replace the labour-power, just as in the case of a machine, where the part of its value that has to be reproduced daily grows greater the more rapidly the machine is worn out.” Slavery is simply too expensive for capital to be very good at being capital, in other words, so we wind up with an eight hour working day and what is generally described as “decent” health care.[1] Which is, lucky for us, precisely the problem to which the battery fields of the Matrix provide a twenty-first century solution, where “living” is summarily drained from the equation of living-labour (variable capital) versus dead labour (constant capital) with frightening efficiency, the human body finally become nothing but value, where labor itself is reduced to elemental exchanges of chemical reactions for a few watts of power; as compensation for which we get a virtual playground that looks a lot like our world, plus flying and cool special effects.
So that what we find so eerie in the pleasantness of Second Life is, we suspect, identical with what puts the bleakness in the bleakness of the Matrices versions of the Real: by immersing us within virtual experiences of, and simultaneously distancing us from our own world, both lay bare the naked logic structuring our experience. (This is also to say we suspect more than a little our childhood’s preparation of us for just those male samurai/hacker fantasies The Matrix cashes in on, and our nascent adulthood’s preparation of us for skepticism towards spectacular fantasies on the order of Second Life, pretty much sum up our differing relations thereto in two words: nostalgia and farce.) And here we find ourselves curiously returning to Sherry Turkle’s distinction between “transparent algorithms” and “opaque simulations,” because whereas in the Matrix it is the transparent narrative investment in getting us to what is in Snow Crash truly named “The machine language of the world,” in Second Life it is the total graphical opacity of the interface itself that constantly reminds us that—however free our spectacular experience of the hallucination of freedom seems to be—our experience and its possibilities are nonetheless the products of algorithms we do not control. And so paradoxically, the greater the seeming freedom from the underlying Real—call it the body, call it economy—our experience acquires, the more viciously real the Real turns out be in naming the virtual the virtual.
And yet if that were all there were to it this too would finally seem just another iteration of the negative admitting what we all habitually admit we are habituated too: money makes the (virtual) world go round. What seems so compelling in this pairing, that is, is not merely the fact that the machined logic of the Matrix (like the “lattices of logic” in Neuromancer before it), as transparently allegorical of the situation of life under Capital as it turns out to be, and the logic whereby the machines making possible the experience of Second Life are made to disappear into the seemingly machine-less experience of being there as much as possible, turn out to be one and the same. It is rather the embodied synthesis of these two points of access, and the triangulated approach to the Real via equal and equally free access to both transparency and opacity that Snow Crash in its best moments seems to dream in the forms of Gargoyles, Ng, and Hiro Protagonist—a dream we’ve seen previously dreamt variously in the forms of Barney, Case, and Mr. Slippery—that seems to us what is most at stake in the archives of avatars and matters cyborg and cyber…
[1] Not for nothing do we who are more or less immune to its immiseration casually refer to wage-labor as wage-slavery: wage labor is, from this perspective, neither more nor less than slavery graduated to a form acceptable to and attuned to the laws of liberal bourgeois consciousness.
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