Part 1: The Eyes Have it, Part II: Eye Can’t Believe It’s This Bad, Part III: Eye Robot
Ghost machine
Part 1: THE EYES HAVE IT
The 80s vector grid - on the side of vans, arcade games, and, of course, Tron - was the culmination of decades worth of technological development and anxiety rendered down to an empty optimism. The infinite grid vanishing into a horizon of a virtual and digital utopia. A tool for our collective liberation; a smarter future aided by preternatural intelligence.
Versions of the grid arrive in pop culture as early as 2001: a space odyssey, arguably the ur-text for artificial intelligence anxiety. From that point on all computer screens in sci fi have the grid in some form, most literally in Tron, as an alternate game dimension. Cliche as it is, the grid on our beloved trapper keepers of 80s would die in the Matrix, a spiritual successor to 2001: on a long enough timeline Hal will enslave us.
Part 2 - EYE CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S THIS BAD
In the 2021, the promise of the internet and AI is dead, replaced by empty spectacle by vapid charlatans like Elon Musk who uses the potential of tech as P.R. designed to raise another round of funding and secure deals from the military. For what? To burn money in space because it’s the most men of his ilk can imagine; another market for exploitation.
We must ask ourselves what Silicon Valley has done for us with all the data we unknowingly agreed to give away. In what material way has our lives changed? Is our healthcare better? Rent cheaper? Is our energy more efficient? Is water cleaner? Is our environment healthier? Do we work less?
The answer is resoundingly no. These monopolies of the internet have done nothing but damage our concepts of friendship, freedom, mental health, meaning and facilitated genocide, white supremacy and misogyny….and for what? To sell you shit. To sell you shit with the most accuracy. For a handful of ways to order food? For Uber to destroy the taxi market?
We have been house broken by constant dopamine hits, false promises and open fraud.
Part 3 - EYE ROBOT
So what do we do? We are all plugged in now. We are a captive audience and there is no going back. The yeoman farmer of the 1700s had a choice about being a part of the market and maybe the reactionary and fundamentally flawed “back to the land movement” of the 60s was the last gasp of escape.
But the hyper individualism exploited by the internet has no future.
The grid now is the triangulation of ads, surveillance and data that is paving the road to tech feudalism while we endlessly argue and reimagine the past because we have no vision of the future. The tech ghouls don’t need a vision of the future because they are living it, isolated from market consequences, throwing money into space and able to outrun the planet dying.
They have a vision for us; it’s being broken and depressed consumers living and working in a company town they own.
What is our vision?