Spike Lee’s 25th Hour was produced following the world trade center attacks of 2001. One scene that makes use of the mental climate surrounding the attacks is the conversation that takes place by a window overlooking ground zero. The resident of the apartment in question dismisses a concern about the dust from the towers being a health concern after a friend asks if he plans to move. This scene shows how the attacks made Americans, especially New Yorkers lose their sense of security. Seeing the view from that window shows the audience how close to home the tragedy is. Had the characters of the movie simply been across the street from home, they would have likely not survived to tell the tale of it.

The conversation takes place in a single shot, with the camera not moving for several minutes. It is night outside, and the details of the ruins below are only vaguely discernable. The viewer, who has likely not seen ground zero after the cleanup, is immediately intrigued by the sight and appalled. Once, there stood a building a few hundred feet up, and now only the foundation remains, a massive pointless block of concrete and steel below a dirty pit. We tend to think of things such as skylines as permanent, the labor of a generation past. Such an abrupt and disastrous change to the world’s most famous skyline is a shocking realization that there is only a fleeting permanence to the infrastructure of society.

Recently, I had the opportunity to work with my floormates in making a short movie for Delta Campus MovieFest. Our movie is a fun spin-off of the Grand Theft Auto series titled Grand Tech Auto.

My involvement with the project was behind the scenes: filming, editing, and filling in sound effects. I spent over 80 hours during the entire week working on the project, so it was a very defining factor in my life for a week. As the lack of sleep set in, I lost track of the time of day; mealtimes became confused with eachother, a record low amount of class was attended, and AM and PM became hopelessly meaningless. The moviemaking became an ever-present Thing That Needed to be Done. Time management was no longer a complicated issue. When there was time, I worked on the movie. The movie project was a hungry monster, capable of sucking away any arbitrarily large amount of time, never satiated. In a way, I found it comforting to have a single project that could simply be worked on. It was freedom to truly ignore all else and have only one goal. As I write this, with iMovie week safely passed, I have a dozen Things to Do in the back of my mind, clawing at eachother for attention. I long once more for a single Thing to Do that mercilessly defeats the others.

Making a movie is an interesting task. It combines artistic and problem-solving creativities with some amount of repetitive tasking and attention to detail. To complicate the issue, the iMovie software was simply not designed to handle the load that we threw at it – our movie project had over 500 individual video or audio items. A simple action that should have been instantaneous sometimes required a wait time of 20 seconds. Saving the project to disk became a 7-minute proposition. An observer, watching as I edited the movie likened the job to “movie editing by mail.” I wrote down my request, “slide this clip left by 12 frames,” packaged it, sent it off to iMovie, who, at its leisure, replied, “okay, now what?”

Grand Tech Auto is available here.

My father is the kind of person who will visit an attraction simply because it exists. Furthermore, a gigantic department store opening near our home qualifies as an attraction to him, so it was natural that he rallied the family to pay an obligatory visit to a new Super-Wal-Mart.

Upon entering the consumerist monstrosity, there was an immediate assault of suburban mayhem. Hundreds of shoppers clogged the aisles of what seemed to be a square mile of floorspace. Navigating the jungle of carts and boxes was quickly approaching impossible. Here there was an unwritten code of behavior, an exclusive group of Wal-Marters. I was not a Wal-Marter, and they knew this. In every direction, I could feel the harsh glare of true Wal-Marters cutting through my skull. Who was I to arrive at this flashy red megastore and challenge the shoppers’ actions? How dare I insinuate that there was more to life than pushing a red cart down red isles, buying red goods?

The shoppers were intense, driven. They forged onward through undoubted near-starvation to complete their critical shopping needs. Not draught nor pestilence nor meteor impact would stop them. Many of them took breaks from their shopping to refresh themselves with goods from the enclosed grocery store, a full supermarket all to itself, or the obligatory Starbucks.

My father became a monster. His goal of observing the pulsating throngs was quickly supplanted by a sudden, inexplicable need for things. He shopped. He shopped with the reckless abandon the Jack displayed in White Noise. Perhaps his purchases were necessary. Perhaps they were impulses. Perhaps, I feared, he had simply fallen into the peer pressure of the Wal-Marters, unable to endure outsider status any longer.

Jack’s comment that “we are the sum of our chemical impulses” is an exaggeration of real neuroscience. The line between the brain and the mind is a thin one, and science can now provide explanations for conditions such as depression and chronic anxiety partly rooted in chemical interactions. The idea that specific actions can be considered simply the product of the state of the brain is a stretch even for the fringe science of today. Nevertheless, the incorrect assumptions made in White Noise are fun, so we can still play with them.

Good and Evil disappears in this world because free will disappears. If the molecules in our brains determine how we act, and those molecules are just the products of the molecules that were there a minute ago, and so on, then individuals have no capacity for good and evil. Their actions could have been calculated the moment after the big bang, as everything thereafter was simply the course of nature.

For good, evil, thought, and free will to exist, there must be some level of process within the brain that can be influenced by the thoughts of the user. Indeed, the science that Jack is suggesting turns people into merely the users of their brains, rather than fully integrated beings.

Certainly, the illusion of free will exists, and must. If we assume for a moment that free will does not, then what merit lies in determination and effort? If my fate was sealed by the laws of physics ages ago, then I ca not possibly improve my future by studying for my economics test, can I? If people did not feel that they possessed free will, humanity would abandon all efforts, and civilization would rapidly decay. The ability to throw in the towel is then either proof of free will, or just another event dictated by endless chemical reactions. Johnny is a failure. I guess his molecules are just not where they should be.

Primary Source:

Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (1992)

Books:

Steven G. Jones, CyberSociety (1995). Ch. 7 by Nancy K Baym is about CMC
CyberSociety 2.0 (1998) also by Steven Jones – haven’t looked at yet.
K. Renninger and Wesley Shumar, Building Virtual Communities (2002). Haven’t looked at yet
Philip Agre and Douglas Schuler, Reinventing Technology (1997) – ch. 11 by John Coate is really good, have used it already.

Journal Articles:

“The Influence of Technology on the Initiation of Interpersonal Relationships” by Jeffery McQuillen – good general source, have used it.
“From Technocracy to Technoculture” by Jody Dean – very large, should have good stuff about technocrats vs ordinary people
“Para-Social Presence and Communication Capabilities of a Web Site” by Nanda Kumar and Izak Benbasat – haven’t read, suspectedly not very useful.
“Social Access to the Internet” by Erik Bucy – should also have information about technocracy.