Decoupling Cyborg

Mission: live offline and rebuild realspace.

First attempt: noble.

The catch: Netflix.

My computer and television tell me that yesterday was a sunny day (this one on which I escaped the electronic feeds has been dismal by comparison--relentlessly cold, dark, and rainy).

What happened: The Blu-Ray player has a Wi-Fi dongle, and after figuring out my router was sensitive to UC/lc password entry--and the program on the tv screen offered UC/lc entry, I managed to hook into my Netflix account and request for a first over-the-Internet movie Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. 

The classic, like its director, has aged.  Pan Am provides flight service to the earth orbiting space station; calls home to earth at the picture-phone booth: about $1.75 for one or two minutes in film time. 

However, as may Kubrick's work and artistic reputation, 2001: A Space Odyssey too will stand always for a certain passage in the history of contemporary culture.  Where Kubrick's crime and life were marked by the unbridled licentiousness of the advent of leftward hedonism and the "helter skelter" of an anarchic and yet essentially fascist cult, this film in particular may stand always for the central revolutions of the age: the co-development of computers, complex organizations, asceptic technology management teams, and a suppression of primitive urges perhaps so effective that it would seem to take a partially sentient, wayward, and murderous computer, the HAL 9000, to reawaken them.

So in my effort to reduce my online footprint and related rounds (involving correspondence and posts) and to spend just a little afternoon prep time readying the theater-in-a-livingroom before getting in some fresh air, I chose the film most likely to characterize my solipsistic predicament perfectly, i.e., one involving, eventually, an astronaut alone on a spaceship run by a computer and on a collision course with a "far out" future culminating in the image of a fetus in a bubble gazing back on the earth.

Can anyone say "Google"?

I'm not in my own personal "starchild" phase (yet), but much of the science fiction depicted in the film, especially in the realm of computer-human interaction and dependence on computer-supported technologies rings true this day: I may not have a space-to-earth "picture phone", but I sure have e-mail and remote personal relationships.

An iPod would take care of the rest.

This morning, I tried reverting to old fashioned reading but perhaps chose too eclectic and literary a work for concentration: Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi.  After so many years of electronic distraction and infotainment, taking a day or a few for a philosophical book . . . fuggedaboudid.  Whatever the character of the experience of reading Hesse at 14, about the same age at which I probably saw Kubrick's film for the first time, reading the author's work a second time in my 50's seemed not what it must have been the first time through. 

I might even say the film was better than the book.

Or, as is the way with Electronic Attention Deficit Disorder (EADD), I have through cyberspace simply a broader and more constant palette of available intellectual occupations and preoccupations, especially as regards social, philosophical, and political scribbling and every manner of art experience and communication.

Still, it's time to lay off the Internet, for the communication-enabling servant has become too much the master.

Reference

IMDB: "2001: A Space Odyssey": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/

New Media Giants: 2001: A Space Odyssey Explained.  http://www.kubrick2001.com/

Rotten Tomatoes.  "2001: A Space Odyssey": http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1000085-2001_a_space_odyssey/

Wikipedia.  "2001: A Space Odyssey": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_(film)

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Comments

[Free Movies]

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