In the days following the election, I kept seeing links to Web sites like www.sorryeverybody.com, which offered a photo of a bearded idiot holding up a piece of paper that apologized to the rest of the planet for the election of George W. Bush. I realize the person who designed this Web site was probably doing so to be clever, and I suspect his motivations were either (a) mostly good or (b) mostly self-serving. But all I could think when I saw it was, This is so pathetic. It’s like the guy on this Web site is actually afraid some anonymous stranger in Tokyo might not unconditionally love him (and for reasons that have nothing to do with either of them). Sometimes it seems like most of American culture has become a thirteen-year-old boy who wants to be popular so much and wants to go to the Snowball Dance so bad and is just so worried about his reputation among a bunch of self-interested classmates whose support is wholly dependent on how much candy he shares.
Now, I am not saying that I’m somehow happy when people in other countries blindly dislike America. It’s just that I’m not happy if they love us, either. I don’t think it matters. The kind of European who hates the United States in totality is exactly like the kind of American who hates Europe in totality; both people are unsophisticated, and their opinions aren’t valid. But our society will never get over this fear; there will always be people in this country who are devastated by the premise of foreigners hating Americans in a macro sense. And I’m starting to think that’s because too many Americans are dangerously obsessed with being liked.
We’re like a nation of Kevin Arnolds; being likable is the only thing that seems to matter to anyone. You see this everywhere. Parents don’t act like parents anymore, because they mainly want their kids to like them; they want their kids to see them as their two best friends. This is why modern kids act like animals. At some point, people confused being liked with being good. Those two qualities are not the same. It’s important to be a good person; it’s not important to be a well-liked person. It’s important to be a good country; it’s not important to be a well-liked country. And I realize there are problems with America, and I’m not necessarily sure if the United States is a good place or a bad place. But the reality behind those problems has no relationship to whether or not France (or Turkey, or Winnie Cooper) thinks we’re cool. They can like us, they can like us like us, or they can hate us. But that is their problem, not ours.
—Esquire, 2005
Q: How would your views about war, politics, and the role of the military change if all future conflicts were fought by armies of robots (that is to say, if all nations agreed to conduct wars exclusively with machines so that human casualties would be virtually nonexistent)?
ROBOTS
Like most middle-class white people who will never be shot at, I’m fascinated by the hyper-desperate, darkly realistic, paper-chasing world of postmodern hip-hop. I’ve learned a lot about life from watching MTV Jams; my understanding of the African American experience comes from street-hardened artists who have looked into the mouth of the lion and scoffed like soldiers. These are people like Shawn Carter (“Jay-Z”), Terius Gray (“Juvenile”), Nasir Jones (“Nas”), and Arturo Molina Jr. (“Frost”), who is technically Mexican American. And, to a lesser extent, Will Smith (“The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”).
Smith is an intriguing figure, sort of. Unlike his peers, Will Smith has eloquently evolved with the culture that spawned him. Though once merely peeved by his mother’s fashion directives (1988’s “Parents Just Don’t Understand”), he has grown into a mature artist who’s willing to confront America’s single greatest threat: killer robots.
This summer (2004), Smith will star in I, Robot, the cinematic interpretation of nine short stories by Isaac Asimov. When I was in the sixth grade, Asimov struck me as a profoundly compelling figure, prompting me to subscribe to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, a monthly publication I quit reading after the second installment. (The stories seemed a little implausible.) I did, however, unleash a stirring oral book report on I, Robot, a literary collection that was punctuated by Asimov’s now famous Three Rules of Robotics:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. Do not talk about Fight Club.
Now, I don’t think I’m giving anything away by telling you that the robots in I, Robot find a loophole to those principles, and they proceed to slowly fuck us over. This is a story that was written half a century ago. However, it paints a scenario we continue to fear. I, Robot was published in 1950, but writers (or at least muttonchopped Isaac) were already terrified about mankind’s bellicose relationship with technology. If we have learned only one thing from film, literature, and rock music, it is this: humans will eventually go to war against the machines. There is no way to avoid this. But you know what? If we somehow manage to lose this war, we really have no excuse. Because I can’t imagine any war we’ve spent more time worrying about.
The Terminator trilogy is about a war against the machines; so is The Matrix trilogy. So was Maximum Overdrive, although that movie also implied that robots enjoy the music of AC/DC. I don’t think the Radiohead album OK Computer was specifically about computers trying to kill us, but it certainly suggested that computers were not “okay.” 2001: A Space Odyssey employs elements of robot hysteria, as does the plotline to roughly 2,001 video games. I suspect Blade Runner might have also touched on this topic, but I honestly can’t remember any of the narrative details; I was too busy pretending it wasn’t terrible. There is even a Deutsch electronica band called Lights of Euphoria whose supposed masterpiece is an album titled Krieg gegen die Maschinen, which literally translates as, “War Against the Machines.” This means that even European techno fans are aware of this phenomenon, and those idiots generally aren’t aware of anything (except who in the room might be holding the ketamine).
I’m not sure how we all became convinced that machines intend to dominate us. As I type this very column, I can see my toaster, and I’ll be honest: I’m not nervous. As far as I can tell, it poses no threat. My relationship with my toaster is delicious, but completely one-sided. If I can be considered the Michael Jordan of My Apartment (and I think I can), my toaster is LaBradford Smith. I’m never concerned that my toaster will find a way to poison me, or that it will foster a false sense of security before electrocuting me in the shower, or that it will politically align itself with my microwave. My toaster does not want to conquer society. I even played “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” in my kitchen, just to see if my toaster would become self-aware and go for my jugular; its reaction was negligible. Machines have no grit.
It appears we’ve spent half a century preparing for a war against a potential foe who—thus far—has been nothing but civil to us; it’s almost like we’ve made a bunch of movies that warn about a coming conflict with the Netherlands. In fact, there isn’t even evidence that robots could kick our ass if they wanted to. In March, a clandestine military group called DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) challenged engineers to build a driverless vehicle that could traverse a 150-mile course in the Mojave Desert; the contest’s winner was promised a cash prize of $1 million. And you know who won? Nobody. Nobody’s robot SUV could make it farther than 7.4 miles. Even with the aid of a GPS, robots are pretty moronic. Why do we think they’ll be able to construct a matrix if they can’t even drive to Vegas?
I suspect all these dystopic “man versus machine” scenarios are grounded in the fact that technology is legitimately alienating; the rise of computers (and robots, and iPods, and nanomachines who hope to turn the world into sentient “gray goo”) has certainly made life easier, but they’ve also accelerated depression. Case in point: if this were 1904, you would not be reading this essay; you would be chopping wood or churning butter or watching one of your thirteen children perish from crib death. Your life would be horrible, but your li
fe would have purpose. It would have clarity. Machines allow humans the privilege of existential anxiety. Machines provide us with the extra time to worry about the status of our careers, and/or the context of our sexual relationships, and/or what it means to be alive. Unconsciously, we hate technology. We hate the way it replaces visceral experience with self-absorption. And the only way we can reconcile that hatred is by pretending machines hate us, too.
It is human nature to personify anything we don’t understand: God, animals, hurricanes, mountain ranges, jet skis, strippers, etc. We deal with inanimate objects by assigning them the human qualities we assume they might have if they were exactly us. Consequently, we want to think about machines as slaves, and we like to pretend those mechanized slaves will eventually attempt a hostile takeover.
The truth, of course, is that we are the slaves; the machines became our masters through a bloodless coup that began during the Industrial Revolution. (In fact, this is kind of what I, Robot is about, although I assume the Will Smith version will not make that clear.) By now, I think most Americans are aware of that reality; I think any smarter-than-average person already concedes that (a) we’ve lost control of technology, and (b) there’s nothing we can do about it. But that’s defeatist. Openly embracing that despair would make the process of living even darker than it already is; we’d all move to rural Montana and become Unabombers. We need to remain optimistic. And how do we do that? By preparing ourselves for a futuristic war against intelligent, man-hating cyborgs. As long as we dream of a war that has not yet happened, we are able to believe it’s a war we have not yet lost.
But perhaps I’m wrong about all this. Perhaps we humans are still in command, and perhaps there really will be a conventional robot war in the not-so-distant future. If so, let’s roll. I’m ready. My toaster will never be the boss of me. Get ready to make me some Pop-Tarts, bitch.
—Esquire, 2004
Q: Is there any widespread practice more futile than attempting to predict society’s future relationship with technology?
CHAOS
Let’s pretend we could end world hunger with drugs.
Let’s pretend someone invented a single, inexpensive pill that would make eating unnecessary forever. You swallow this pill once, and you’re never hungry again; you’d always remain your ideal weight, and you’d always be in perfect health. And let’s assume this pill could be manufactured anywhere (and by anyone), and it would be impossible to regulate or control. Nobody would ever again starve to death in Africa; nobody would ever need to spend money on groceries or slaughter livestock. All the problems that come with the acquisition and consumption of food would disappear.
This, it can be safely argued, would be positive for mankind.
But let’s add one caveat to this hypothetical: let’s say all this happened suddenly. Let’s say the worldwide distribution of this pill happened in the span of six weeks. For the next ten years, the world would be insane. Millions of farmers would be instantly unemployed. Anybody who makes a living by selling, moving, or preparing food would be obsolete. With no need for farmland, the real estate market would be completely reinvented overnight. Without the structure of meals, day-today activities would be drastically different, and it would take decades for this to normalize. In the long run, this evolution would be good for society—but society would not be prepared for the transition. No one has constructed a social framework for a foodless world, and the result would be chaos.
I bring this up because a similar thing is (probably) going to happen to the advertising industry.
Bob Garfield is the advertising critic for Ad Age and the co-host of NPR’s On the Media. He has begun to propagate a theory he’s (somewhat ominously) dubbing “The Chaos Scenario.” The concept is remarkably simple: Garfield basically looked at two trends that everyone recognizes and suddenly realized their combination was going to make the contemporary media implode.
“This scenario is—potentially—the most wonderful thing imaginable for media consumers in a democracy,” Garfield argues, “unless, of course, you’re actively in the marketing or media industry right now and you’re over the age of forty-five. Then you’re fucked big-time.”
Here are the bare bones of Garfield’s “Chaos Scenario” (which I may be oversimplifying, but—truth be told—that’s pretty much what I do for a living), based on two suppositions: The first supposition is that network television is in trouble (and there’s a lot of data to prove this). The population of the United States has increased by 30 million people during the past ten years, but the network audience has managed to decrease by 2 percent over that same span. In 1980, most Americans had three or four channels; now, many have three hundred. With the exception of the Super Bowl, it’s virtually impossible to stop people from changing the channel whenever they see a commercial. Moreover, a growing percentage of Americans now have TiVos and DVRs, and 70 percent of those consumers don’t watch commercials at all. All of this is making it less and less practical for advertisers to use TV as the way to reach people, especially since the cost of advertising on TV keeps increasing. In short, TV advertising is dying—and it’s dying rapidly.
The second supposition is that the advertising role currently played by TV will eventually be adopted by the Internet. Here again, everyone seems to agree that this is inevitable; the only problem is that no one knows how it will work. At the moment, Web advertising (at least to me) seems completely useless. I never pay attention to pop-up ads, and the notion of businesses sponsoring bloggers seems akin to lighting $100 bills on fire and feeding them to a newborn zonkey. Still, my assumption is that companies will eventually find a way to do this effectively. The Internet will replace TV—but that replacement will happen slowly.
In other words, we have one medium that’s collapsing posthaste, and its replacement medium is still under construction. So what happens during the gap in-between? What happens when people realize that advertising on TV is a waste of money, but there isn’t any clear alternative? According to Garfield, the answer is media chaos. And it’s coming fast.
“I’m thinking 2010,” he says. “There’s simply no capacity for the on-line world to represent all those old-world advertisers. TV is in trouble; newspapers and magazines are in trouble for similar reasons. This is a really good time to be in the billboard business.”
What you need to remember is that television only exists because of the commercials, and that’s always how it has been. Consciously, we all know this; unconsciously, we sort of convince ourselves otherwise. When we think about TV, we tend to think of TV shows; we think about programming. But if you think about TV as a semi-random collection of advertisements that are simply connected by constructed narratives, it starts to seem like a very dangerous business model. A show like Desperate Housewives is merely under-written by Tide and Dial soap and Target stores. Underwriting these increasingly expensive shows is earning companies less and less money. At some point in the very near future, companies will realize this business practice is not cost effective, so they’ll just stop underwriting everything. There won’t be anyone to pay for these shows, so there simply won’t be any programming.
This is when the aforementioned big-time fucking occurs.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Won’t everything just become pay-for-view? Won’t everything just be on-demand programming?” Possibly—but not right away. Maybe when everyone’s computer is also their television (or vice versa). But that system isn’t set up yet. And even if it could happen instantaneously, that would create a new problem: people want to know about Tide and Dial, and the companies who make them need a way to get consumers that information. The retail economy depends on it.
This is the chaos.
“But wait,” you may be saying to yourself. “What about product placement? Couldn’t the networks just combine advertising and programming into one animal? Isn’t that happening right now?” Well, sort of. Reality TV already relies on that convergence. Shows like The Apprenti
ce and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy are mostly high-end infomercials. There was an episode of Survivor: Palau where a tribe was “rewarded” with Citrus Flash Scope; there were myriad moments on the third season of Project Greenlight where weirdo director John Gulager swilled Stella Artois.
Garfield thinks this is proof that his theory is already in motion.
“Branded entertainment is step number one in chaos theory because audiences will go crazy,” he says. “People hate it when they recognize product placement. It’s strange: Americans will willingly give up huge elements of their civil liberties, but they won’t stand for the corruption of their Hollywood-produced crap.”
On this point I tend to disagree: I don’t think most people born after 1970 have an intense aversion to branded entertainment, and I don’t think people born after 1980 even notice. Personally, I’d accept more branding. Take Arrested Development, for example: Arrested Development is (arguably) the most sophisticated American sitcom ever produced; somewhat predictably, it looks like it will almost certainly be cancelled. This is because it doesn’t earn enough revenue through advertising. But what if the characters on Arrested Development spent the totality of every episode drinking Coca-Cola, and what if they periodically mentioned how refreshing Coke tasted? Or what if all the characters always wore Coca-Cola shirts for the entire program? What if Arrested Development became like stockcar racing, and everything not directly associated with the storyline featured a logo? Would I still watch it?
Chuck Klosterman on Film and Television Page 11