Review: Sneakers

Sometimes you notice an unexpected similarity between two very different works that you happen to consume around the same time; when I re-watched Sneakers recently, I had just finished reading Jeremy Rifkin's The End of Work, a once-controversial book from the mid-'90s concerning inevitable changes in the world's economies as a result of ever-more-efficient automation. (Short summary: most people will lose their jobs, and we have to move beyond the entire notion of jobs ASAP, or huge and enduring economic disaster will ensue.) I'm no economist and I rarely read this sort of thing, but the book was tough to put down in spite of its often encyclopedic feel—largely because I like to think about all the ways in which the world has changed since recent technologies came along. Rifkin only mentions the Internet once, yet his book, remarkably, isn't very dated at all. In much the same way, and for some of the same reasons, 1992's Sneakers isn't as dated as I feared it would prove to be when I re-watched it. I guess we have Wikileaks and Anonymous to thank for that—or maybe they have movies like this to thank for their own conception.

Map My Brain

I basically never pay more than the very slightest attention to the State of the Union address, but this time, something jumped out at me:

Obama to Back Brain Mapping (NYT)

The Obama administration is planning a decade-long scientific effort to examine the workings of the human brain and build a comprehensive map of its activity, seeking to do for the brain what the Human Genome Project did for genetics.

The project, which the administration has been looking to unveil as early as March, will include federal agencies, private foundations and teams of neuroscientists and nanoscientists in a concerted effort to advance the knowledge of the brain’s billions of neurons and gain greater insights into perception, actions and, ultimately, consciousness.

Mere Cyberocracy Is Loosed Upon the World

Let's take it as a given that we are currently living in, or very fast approaching, a "cyberpunk present"—a state of social and technological affairs predicted more or less accurately by the cyberpunk genre. (If you need evidence, consider such facts of our lives as the might of multinational tech companies in comparison to the traditional nation-state; reduced relevance of the electorate in historically democratic societies; surveillance that's effectively invisible and potentially ubiquitous; the world's leaders being basically unopposed in, and having no qualms about, using that surveillance in ways they alone determine to be appropriate; and the ragtag alliance of secretive, tech-expert rebels who hide on the 'Net and occasionally score massive coups against "the Machine" that give hope to the like-minded but fail to gain much attention from the general public.)

As far as I can tell, the only criterion for a "cyberpunk present" that we haven't yet met is widespread (or even niche) fusion of tech and the human body. It's coming, though—whether in the form of Google Goggles or elective surgical brain/body enhancement. And that's assuming pharmaceuticals and performance-enhancing substances don't already qualify.

So let's call the present the Early to Middle Cyber Age. To some degree, its cyberpunkish traits are owed to the cyberpunk authors themselves—they developed concepts and terms that inspired development of groups and technology that are parts of our lives now, even if the affectations, like black leather and mirrorshades, are dated. (To say nothing of the tech specifics. If you want a good laugh, watch the movie Hackers sometime.)

I Am, I Think (To No One There)

All truth is conditional, all knowledge mutable. It doesn't take a lot of reflection to arrive at these simple, yet significant, conclusions. Where you go from there is more complex.

Consider truth. I'll use an example inspired by a movie I saw recently. We can say it is a "truth" that humans have the capacity to directly inflict on one another suffering so monstrous as to defy description—but (the condition) in reality that capacity isn't realized except in unusual situations, e.g. extreme external social pressures or extreme internal mental disorder. We can say it is a "truth" that death is inevitable, but that too may only be because medical science hasn't advanced enough. Already, multiple research avenues toward medical immortality are beginning to yield fruit, and that doesn't even acknowledge the possibility of purely electronic means of death avoidance (brain uploading).

Now consider knowledge. Any day now, physicists or astronomers could make a discovery that overturns much of what we hypothesize about the universe, or even of the history of our own planet. Or, on the more mundane scale, that close friend or dear relative who you "know" could never do such a thing? You really never know. (As others will tell you after the fact.)

Are You Eatin' It, Or Is It Eatin' You?

Check out this great blog post about agency and, perhaps more important, our perceptions of it. Here's just one of its cool insights, something I'm definitely going to try during my next few deadline crises:

All of us are fighting distractions – web sites, noises, snacking, minor tasks, watching episodes of Bad Lipreading: – anything that momentarily seems more attractive than the task we are supposed to be working on. It is slightly paradoxical, but I have found that endowing these distractors with agency helps me to politely but firmly dismiss their attempts to grab my attention. Maybe it’s not so paradoxical – if resisting distractors requires willpower, it is not so fanciful to think that it is easier to resist an agent than an inanimate attractor, if only because we have lots of practice and techniques for opposing other agents.

A major theme in the piece—or at least, one I took away from it—is that we Earthlings have a truly dizzying multiplicity of different ways to misperceive reality, and what's worse, we can and often do develop emotional attachments to our particular flavor of delusion—and I posit that those attachments, and that multiplicity, are why any vision of universal human harmony is pure fantasy. (If it should ever be achieved, then those who achieve it would probably be posthumans, not humans.)

This in itself is no great revelation, but the various ways we frame agency are listed and dissected systematically in the post, to great effect. I always enjoy reading the ruminations of people who are much smarter than I am but whose perspectives and preoccupations are mostly similar to mine (in this case, the ongoing effort to reconcile the seeming stability of science with the obvious chaos of human nature).