seekingferret: Two warning signs one above the other. 1) Falling Rocks. 2) Falling Rocs. (Default)
seekingferret ([personal profile] seekingferret) wrote 2018-08-15 06:47 pm (UTC)

What in Existenz still holds up well today?

I think that's a good question but not one that I am perhaps the best to answer, because I have heterodox opinions about the best ways to think about the encroachment of technology on human life. When people worry excessively about how technology is radically changing our brains, I tend to roll my eyes. Engineering problems have engineering solutions is my kind of mantra. I think of Existenz as textually interesting in its interest in stories within stories, and I delighted in adding an extra layer by way of Net Force, but I don't worry much about losing our sense of reality to virtual reality.

I think the things Existenz is worrying about in terms of technology imposing itself on bodies and brains is mostly stuff people are still worrying about, and the anxiety about corporations waging battles over who gets to control the technology that controls people still resonates, and particularly the way that that battle over who gets to control the technology IS ITSELF PART OF THE GAME is a clever and insightful idea. That resonates with the way we've been coopted so that people are, you know, Apple fanboys or whatever, cheering on the corporations that are using data to manipulate our lives.

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