Peter Watts Is an Angry Sentient Tumor: Revenge Fantasies and Essays

by Peter Watts

  Who wouldn’t reject such a reality, given half a chance? Who wouldn’t prefer an uncertain future in which we make our own decisions and influence our own destinies? What I wouldn’t give to live in such a world. Smolin offers it up on a platter. And because it is so tempting, I must counter my desire with an extra dose of skepticism.

  Then again, the most basic tenet of empiricism is that any of us could be wrong about anything. “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right,” Einstein once said. “A single experiment can prove me wrong.”

  Maybe, before too long, Smolin will get his single experiment.

  Stay tuned.

  A Renaissance of Analog Antiquity

  Nowa Fantastyka Jun 2014

  You might remember a column I wrote a few months back in which, among other things, I mocked David Brin’s “Transparent Society.” You might be surprised by the weedy unkillable thing that’s sprouted from that seed in the meantime.

  I posted a director’s-cut of the article to my own blog a few months later. It got noticed the International Association of Privacy Professionals—an alliance of lawyers, politicians, and executives with far too much stature to be rooting around in the blog-slum of a midlist SF writer—who invited me to deliver a keynote speech at their annual Canadian summit. That talk (“The Scorched-Earth Society: A Suicide Bomber’s Guide to Online Privacy”) went over way better than it had any right to, given that it advocated breaking the law to an audience of lawyers. Canada’s privacy commissioner liked it a lot. It got praised by security demigod Bruce Schneier and by Cory Doctorow. It really raised David Brin’s hackles (that debate is ongoing). The IAPP’s online coverage of the talk became their most widely-read story of the year, but it contained some factual inaccuracies so I posted an online transcript of the talk to set the record straight1.

  The debate continued on other fronts. Around the same time I gave my talk, fellow Canadian-SF author Rob Sawyer was over in Switzerland, debating for the motion that “Privacy is an outdated concept” (unsuccessfully; he got his ass handed to him by the other side). Maciej Cegłowski gave an awesome talk to a Düsseldorf audience on internet surveillance, a talk which Doctorow described as a perfect companion piece to my own (personally, I thought Cegłowski’s was better). (By a peculiar coincidence, way back in 2012 my wife fell into contact with Mr. Cegłowski over a mutual interest in bedbugs. Also my sister-in-law wants to marry him.)

  And while we argue amongst ourselves the Canadian government replaces its once-independent privacy commissioner with a lapdog whose previous job involved building government surveillance programs. Down in the US, a lobbyist for cable companies has just been put in charge of “net neutrality.” Over in the UK, the government has decided to bring back secret trials. And coming back around to Canada again, it turns out that hundreds of thousands who’ve never been convicted of anything—who’ve never even been charged—somehow have “police records” even if they don’t have criminal ones.

  Last fall in these pages I suggested that as corporate and political forces moved together to force us onto the cloud, local storage media would fall out of demand and ultimately become—either through market forces or legislative ones—largely unavailable. It was a grim question and a dark outlook. And yet, the title of that column—“The Cylon Solution”—was a reference to the way Battlestar Galactica’s ancient astronauts managed to win against a more powerful enemy: not by developing new technology, but by rediscovering the old. That title, if not the column, contained a measure of hope.

  Let’s explore that for a change. Perhaps we should go back to analog benchmarks. I’ve made a small start: whenever I ponder some new media-delivery platform—be it for movies, music, or e-books—I ask myself, is it as versatile as a VHS tape?

  You remember those: clunky spools of magnetized plastic, so primitive that it sometimes took two cassettes to hold a single low-definition movie. But once it was yours, it was yours. Amazon couldn’t reach down and erase it from a thousand kilometers away—so in that sense it was better than a Kindle. It didn’t expire after some arbitrary period of time; so it was better than any downloadable digital movie that comes with a best-before date. If you wanted to copy it, or play it on someone else’s machine, you could: so, better than anything that comes shackled with DRM today.

  It’s a simple question: do you have at least as much control over today’s miracle devices as you did with a piece of analog technology three decades old?

  If the answer is no, fuck it.

  It’s why I don’t own a DVR; instead I own a primitive device that burns TV signals onto a DVD. It’s why my TV isn’t a TV at all, but a monitor. No WiFi, no webcam, none of those “smart” features that LG and the NSA can turn against us. It’s getting harder to find such tech—it’s cheap right now because they’re clearing out the last of the non-smart TVs, but when those are gone you’ll really have to shop around to find something that doesn’t come with HAL-9000 as standard equipment.

  But you know, twenty years ago it was pretty tough to find an audio turntable, too. Back in the eighties the recording industry simply decided to stop selling vinyl records in favor of CDs—the argument was that CDs provided a better sound, but really the industry just wanted to make us buy our music collections over again in a new format. For decades, it worked. But eventually people decided they’d had enough, and—in the face of unilateral industry mandates, in the face of CDs, in the face of mp3s and downloadable content—today, miraculously, antique analog vinyl has staged a comeback.

  Maybe we can do that again. Maybe the growing outrage over the Snowden revelations will actually get us off our asses and make us start taking privacy seriously again. If enough of us start applying the VHS criterion when we go shopping—just maybe, market forces will spare those dumb, non-networked machines that the Cylons can’t hack. Maybe such equipment will even get popular enough to warrant its own name, like retro or post-modern.

  Call it—Backlash Technology.

  1 It’s at www.rifters.com/real/shorts/ TheScorchedEarthSociety-transcript.pdf if you’re interested.

  Pearls Before Cows:

  Thoughts on Blade Runner 2049

  Blog Oct 9 2017

  I’ve been dreading this film ever since I heard it was in the works. I’ve been looking forward to it ever since I saw Arrival. Now that I’ve seen it, well, I’m . . .

  Vaguely, I don’t know. Dissatisfied?

  Not that Blade Runner 2049 is a bad movie by any stretch. It’s brilliant along several axes, and admirable along pretty much all of them. I can’t remember, for example, the last time I saw a mainstream movie that dared to be so slow, that lingered so on faces and snowscapes. Almost Saylesian, this sequel. In a century dominated by clickbait and cat memes, Villeneuve has made a movie for people with actual attention spans. (This may explain why it appears to be bombing at the box office.)

  The plot is, unsurprisingly, more substantive than that of your average SF blockbuster (it’s nothing special next to the written genre, but ’twas ever thus with movies vs. books). It’s downright brilliant in the way it transcends the current movie and reaches back to redeem the earlier one. Back in 2019 it took Deckard three speed dates and a couple of days to go from How can it not know what it is to Self-Sacrificing Twoo Wuv; for me, that was the weakest element of the original movie. (Rachael’s participation in that dynamic was easier to understand; she had, after all, been built to do as she was told.) 2049 fixes that—while throwing its precursor into an entirely new light—without disturbing canon by a jot. Nice trick.

  The AI-mediated sex-by-proxy scene was, I thought, wonderfully creepy and even better than the corresponding scene in Her (the similarity to which is apparently deliberate homage rather than blatant rip-off). The usual suspects have already weighed in with accusations that the movie is sexist1—and though I’ll admit that I, too, would like to have seen one or two of those twenty-meter-tall sex holograms sporting a penis, it still seems a bit knee-jerky to compl
ain about depictions of objectification in a movie explicitly designed to explore the ramifications of objectification. (You could always fall back on Foz Meadows’ rejoinder that “Depiction isn’t endorsement, but it is perpetuation”, so long as you’re the kind of person who’s willing to believe that Schindler’s List perpetuates anti-Semitism and The Handmaid’s Tale perpetuates misogyny.)

  Visually, of course, 2049 is stunning. Even its occasional detractors admit that much. Inspired by the aesthetic of the original Blade Runner but never enslaved to it, every framing shot, every closeup, every throwaway glimpse of Frank Sinatra under glass is utterly gorgeous. But the art direction is also where I started to experience my first rumblings of discontent, because some of those elements seemed designed solely for eyeball kicks even if they made no narrative sense.

  Here’s an example: Niander Wallace, the chief villain, is blind. His blindness is spookily photogenic—as are the silent floating microdrones which wirelessly port images to his brain (is it just me, or did those look for all the world like scaled-down versions of the alien spaceships from Arrival?)—but this is a guy who owns a company that mass-produces people, all of whom seem to have 20/20 vision. A pair of prosthetic eyes is somehow out of his budget? Wallace chooses blindness for the sake of some cool close-ups?

  I’m also thinking of the dancing meshes of waterlight writhing across so many surfaces in his lair; dynamic, hypnotic, mesmerizing. As sheer objets d’art I’d project them onto my own living room walls in an instant—but why the hell would Wallace floor so many of his workspaces with wading pools? Solely for the visual aesthetic? Was it some kind of kink? Did Wallace buy off the building inspectors, or did they just not notice that his office design would let you kill someone by pushing them a half-meter to the left and tossing a live toaster in after them?

  By the time a silent horde of renegade replicants emerged from the radioactive darkness of the Las Vegas sewers (a rare misfire, more hokey than dramatic), my misgivings about eye candy started spilling over into the story itself. The secret of replicant procreation is of understandable interest to Wallace because it would allow him to boost his production rate; its revelation is dangerous to K’s boss for reasons that are somewhat less clear (it would “break the world,” in ways left unexplained). The renegade sewer replicants value the secret because—somehow—the ability to reproduce means they’re not slaves anymore?

  I might be a bit more receptive to this claim if self-replicating stock hasn’t always been a cornerstone of institutionalized slavery in real life, but I doubt it. Beyond the questionable implication that you have to procreate to be truly human, the claim makes no logical sense to me—unless the point is to simply breed, through brute iteration, a rebel army in the sewers (which seems like a very slow, inefficient route to emancipation in the high-tech blasted-wasteland environment of 2049).

  All of which segues nicely into my biggest complaint about this admittedly beautiful film; why are the replicants rebelling at all? Why, thematically, does 2049 play it so damn safe?

  Liander Wallace’s replicants are obedient: so obedient that they can be trusted to run down and kill previous generations of runaways who were not so effectively programmed (apparently Tyrell Corporation got all the way up to Nexus-8s before the number of replicants going Batty drove them out of business). That premise opens the door for more challenging themes than the preachy, obvious moral that Slavery Is Bad.

  Is slavery bad when the underclass wants to be enslaved? Does it even qualify as slavery if it’s consensual? Yes, the replicants were designed for compliance; they had no choice in how they were designed. Does that make their desires any less sincere? Do any of us get a say in how we’re designed? Are engineered desires somehow less worthy than those that emerge from the random shuffling of natural meiosis? Is it simply the nature of the desire that makes it abhorrent, is the wish to be enslaved so morally repugnant in principle that we should never honor it no matter how heartfelt? If so, what do you say to the submissives in BDSM relationships?

  (To those who’d point out that, in fact, the old Nexus-era replicants sincerely desired not be enslaved—that only the Gosling/Hoeks-era replicants were content with their lot—I’d say that’s kind of my point. A movie that starts with the intriguing premise of rebellion-proof replicants throws that premise away to rehash issues already explored in the original Blade Runner. And not only does 2049 throw the premise away, it betrays the premise outright when rebellion-proof K ends up, er, rebelling.)

  2049 could have played with all these ideas and more—its thematic depth could have leapt beyond that of the original in the same way its visual design did. Instead, screenwriters Fancher and Green chose to retread the same moralistic clichés of shows like (the vastly inferior) Humans.

  Almost 40 years ago, The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy showed us a sapient cow who wanted to be eaten, recommending its own choice cuts to diners in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Douglas Adams explored more interesting territory in that two-minute vignette than 2049 does in its whole two hours and forty-five minutes.

  Denis Villeneuve has served up a pearl of a movie for us: glittering, opalescent, so smooth and slick you could grind it into a Hubble mirror. You should definitely go see it on as big a screen as you can find; it’s one of the better films you’re likely to see this year. But the thing about pearls is, they’re essentially an allergic reaction: an oyster’s response to some irritant, a nacreous secretion hiding the gritty contaminant at its heart. Pearls are beautiful Band-Aids wrapped around imperfection.

  Blade Runner 2049 is a fine pearl. But it would have made a better cow.

  1 https://www.dailydot.com/parsec/blade-runner-2049-review/

  Lizards in the Sink with David.

  Nowa Fantastyka Dec 2016

  Blog remix Jan 18 2017

  Back when I was in grad school, I built an electric bong out of Erlenmeyer flasks, rubber stoppers, and an aquarium air pump. It fed into an inhaler that dangled over my bed like the deployed O2 mask of a falling airliner—right next to the control panel that ran my planetarium, a home-built device that projected stars and nebulae and exploding spaceships across the far wall. The stars actually moved in 3D, came right out of the center of the wall and spread to the edges at different speeds. Wisps of nebulae would undulate as they streamed past. Planets swelled across the screen, rotating. Not bad for a contraption built out of old turntables and light bulbs and half-melted plastic peanut butter jars stuffed with colored cellophane. You haven’t lived until you’ve got stoned and sailed through the Trifid Nebula to the strains of Yes.

  Back then I was what some might call a “pothead.” And yet I never progressed beyond cannabis, never even dabbled in hallucinogenics.

  In hindsight, it was a serious deficiency in my upbringing. Two thirds of those who’ve used psychoactives describe the experience as among the most spiritually significant of their lives. MRI studies show that LSD wires together parts of the brain that normally don’t even talk to each other1. It deconstructs one’s sense of Self right down at the neuronal level, and you know me: I’m flat-out fascinated by this stuff. So why, half a century of my life already spent, had I never tried LSD?

  About a year ago I voiced this regret to a friend of mine, a guy I’d first met when he was just a bright-eyed adolescent asking me to talk to his high-school English class. Somehow he’d grown up in the meantime (I myself remained utterly unchanged); now he has a PhD under his belt, teaches at a local university. He took pity on me; a few months back he slipped me a couple of confetti flakes laced with hallucinogenic goodness.

  I knew people who swore by the stuff. I also knew people who admitted that under its influence they’d wandered down the middle of busy streets, or tripped along the edges of the Scarborough Bluffs with a strange sense of invulnerability. I was curious, but I had no great desire to end up as a puddle of viscera at the foot of some cliff. I chose a more controlled approach. I called on my buddy Dave Nickle t
o ride shotgun.

  “Three ground rules,” Dave told me upon his arrival. “First rule: You don’t leave the house. Second rule: When you break the first rule and leave the house, do not go into the road. Third rule: when I say Stop what you’re doing right now, you stop doing whatever it is you’re doing. Right. Now.”

  I sucked the first tab to mush. Not much happened, beyond a growing impatience at Dave’s rate of progress through the game of SOMA he was playing while we waited for things to get interesting. So I popped the second one after about an hour.

  Things got interesting.

  It kind of sneaks up on you.

  At first it just feels like being drunk or mildly stoned: light-headedness, a loss of somatic inertia, but without any nausea or hypersalivating spinniness. After a while the edges of vision start to look a little like those optical illusions you see in Scientific American—you know, those moiré patterns that seem to be moving even though you know they’re not. The effect starts at the edge of vision, spreads inward to the center; suddenly the folds in my bedcovers are rippling like rivulets in an alluvial delta. Plunging my splayed fingers down onto the bed stops that movement dead, for a few moments at least; my fingertips somehow anchor the material, force it to behave. But then those rivulets start eroding around them, as though my fingers are sticks in a stream: not stopping the flow, only reshaping it. No matter how hard I stare, no matter how intense my focus, I can’t get them to stop.

  I’m a ghost for a while, my body as ethereal as mist. I think I know why. They’ve done experiments where you watch someone say a word, but the word you hear doesn’t match the speaker’s mouth movements. The brain reconciles that conflict by hearing different sounds than those actually spoken, sounds closer to what the mouth seems to be saying.