Neither Believing nor Disbelieving: Impossible Futures, Conspiracy Theories, Aliens, and More: Part IV

“Computers aren’t the thing. They are the thing that get’s you to the thing.” (Joe MacMillan - Halt and Catch Fire)

Speculations about the future don’t accurately predict the future as much as they reflect the collective mindset of the present.

Just think about how any book or movie from 50-100 years ago imagined our current age. In the pre-internet days, when I was a kid, depictions of the future focused on how far we would come in developing transportation. If people weren’t colonizing space, they were casually flying around in cars here on Earth. Flying cars. That was a big one. 

But then came the internet. Connection through this medium could get us anywhere exponentially faster than the hypothetical flying car - despite the fact that, during the early days of cyberspace and 56K dial-up modems, manifesting your average .jpeg image in a browser window moved at a pretty glacial pace (forget ever streaming video!). I know. I was there. And I was there. And I was there. And I was still there - until the photo finally loaded a couple of minutes later. 

So, contrary to past speculation, it was communication, rather than transportation, that took us into the future. But it wasn’t the flip-phone inspired by the old Star Trek communicator or laptops or even the technological aspect of the internet that would blow my mind about the future to come. 

It wasn’t about the stuff at all. 

I think that’s what most 20th century depictions of the future (2001: A Space Odyssey being one of the few exceptions) got wrong. Rather than simply focusing on technological innovation alone, a much more accurate prediction would have contemplated what our new inventions would do to our individual and collective minds. We all know our attention spans are probably a bit shorter these days, but since the attention span issue has already been beaten into the ground, that’s not what I’m interested in talking about here - maybe because my attention span has become too short to care. 

What’s compelling to me has more to do with the concept of reality tunnels I mentioned in the last installment of this topic. Since I’m in my own reality tunnel, it’s probably silly to make any grand sweeping statements about “people,” as a whole, but from my humble vantage point, it seems that we’ve gotten more primitive and more magical the further into our tunnels we go. Without going down a political rabbit hole, I think this applies as much to the left as to the right.

I don’t believe this is all bad. It’s pretty far out . . . I think. Then again, maybe it is bad. I don’t know. I’m completely stumped.

And I feel entirely unqualified to make any generalizations as I mentioned, earlier. I suspect that this feeling I have of not knowing which end is up is symptomatic of the fragmentation of any larger societal myth into several opposing and contradictory smaller myths that have grown in the explosive substrate of cyberspace. In other words, how much of the way I see the world is a projection of my personal algorithmically-informed mythology about the world and how much of it is an even modestly accurate assessment of the way things are on the larger world stage? While collective thought has been seemingly fragmented, the positive side to this is that we’re free to explore and compare orthodox and heterodox visions of our reality.

This is the type of thinking that has allowed different levels of engagement with conspiracy theories, the subject of UAPs and artificial (or emergent intelligence) gaining sentience. What’s interesting about all three of these subjects is that they are being discussed in various corners of the internet in both technical/material as well as esoteric and even quasi-religious terms. 

The future I was presented as a kid growing up in the 1980s was very secular - again, focused on technological/scientific development for good or ill - when in fact, contemporary culture (at least here in the US) has become very religious. I don’t mean that we’ve become more entrenched in the established religions, such as Christianity or Judaism. But if you look at the word religion In the purely etymological sense, it comes from the Latin word, religare, meaning “to bind.” And, with the help of our reality tunnels, we collectively seem more bound to the belief systems of our algorithm-directed micro-religions than ever. Or at least the fact that our neighbor may be bound by a vastly different set of beliefs than we are (remember the coffee shop analogy from Part III), makes both belief systems seem more exaggerated than they are when considered alone.

So as I’ve mentioned, most of the science fiction I was exposed to as a kid focused pretty exclusively on technological developments grounded in materialism. But it seems, at least from my perspective, our present has allowed cracks in the materialist hegemony resulting in aspects of some astral/mythical dimension to seep through. In the previous section of this topic, I discussed how the former concept of UFOs, which imagined highly advanced technological visitors from far away, has more recently broadened to include the possibility that these visitors might also come from another dimension or another time. I wonder if this speculation is a product of the internet, which doesn’t seem grounded in any material reality - or even any specific time. Are our brains being rewired to navigate the incorporeal and atemporal virtual reality of the internet? If so, our present might have become an impossible future for writers and artists of the past to imagine because they didn’t have the cognitive wiring to even conceive of of our present reality (or should I say, realities).

So far as I remember from decades old notions about the future, there was no particular focus on how identity politics would rearrange our understanding of one another. Neither did 20th century speculative futures imagine an ecosystem in which one person’s collection of vast amounts of information would be another person’s “government propaganda” or “pseudoscience.” Again, our collective sense of reality seems more fragmented than ever.

Perhaps Timothy Leary created the perfect analogy in the 1990s by dubbing the internet “The New LSD.” One thing that the new LSD and the original LSD (and for that matter, all psychedelics) have in common is a departure from consensus reality. In this digitally-psychedelic space, we each have our own curated experience of reality based on our mindset. At it’s best, this postmodern existence means that we are free to explore reality beyond any monolithic constructed narratives created by controlling authorities but at its worst, when these realities clash, it can be dangerous to have an opinion.

Speaking of dangerous . . . While 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) seems especially prescient with its cautionary message about the potential dangers of AI/emergent intelligence, there’s something even more powerfully prophetic about the film, I think. The final enigmatic chapter of the film “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite,” is an endless topic of debate among fans of the film because it’s never explicitly stated what the hell is going on. My take, in short, is that whatever is happening to David Bowman in this final section is inconceivable to his former self, that is, before he passed through the barrier. And as viewers, along for the ride, we share this confusion at something that is beyond our current operating system. The fact that this final section has such a big question mark over it is what makes this film so prophetic - because, what lies beyond is also beyond our ability to currently comprehend. The future is impossible, not because it can’t happen, but because it is impossible for us to comprehend in the present.

*******

Bonus Content: Listen (above) to an uncanny AI generated podcast that summarizes all four parts of “Neither Believing nor Disbelieving.” I don’t feel like our podcast “hosts” completely get this series, but the analysis is still fascinatingly weird and worth a listen.