No Maps for These Territories

---

Bill? Are you there?

Hello, I'm here.

I'm here in the backseat...

I think of a question on a lot of peoples' minds right now is simply:

what the hell is going on?

We're sort of on some kind of cusp

of change that I assume is technologically driven.

It's not legislated change...

What will be...

what will become of us, you and me?

It's just happening.

We're in...we're in something. We're in something here,

and it's...it's out of control.

Bill? Are you there?

Hello...

How might humans become post-human?

Technology based in its assumed... to be the result

of the advent of "functional nanotechnology,"

or of some sort of a synergism in...

in these various emerging...

all these different emerging technologies. We have...somehow...

if somehow there could be a synergism between

computation and genetic research

What might that mean?

Well, immortality, the end of economics...

functional nanotech would pretty much guarantee both of those

because there would be, you know, no reason to die

if you had sufficient nanotech to keep resetting

the little cellular clocks.

And, with even, even sort of half-assed nanotech,

you could make anything out of anything.

So, you could make gold bars out of McDonald's burgers,

and McDonald's burgers out of garbage.

And there'd be...there's no basis for this whole

thing that we've always done about value.

Anyone could have anything... anything they wanted at any time.

And everything, including human beings,

would be completely protean.

We could look and act like anything at all.

It's a compelling vision, but it's not just one that I'm able to get...

get my head around

There's no traction for me there. It's the point where

I really do belong to "The Old Order."

Well, I think what I'm most aware of

is...is the extent to which

people are unaware of

the extent to which they've been interpenetrated

and co-opted by their technology

And I take it for granted that I've... that I've been.

But I don't think most... I think most people...

I think a lot of people...

a lot of people today have as this sort of a

Rousseau-esque

idea that it's possible for humans to return to...

to "The Natural State." But, in fact, I think...it's it's not,

and if it were, they really wouldn't like it.

I mean, I'm immune to a number of really,

really terrible diseases

because I was inoculated against them as a child. That's technology.

I'm...I'm a male human in my 50's, and I still have most of my teeth.

That's technology.

I'm myopic, to the point of near-blindness, and yet I can see.

And that's tech...that's technology. It's too close to us to be very aware of it.

If we were suddenly...if we could be stripped of it

which we can't be, because it's actually altered our physical being

we'd be pretty unhappy, you know?

And we'd start... we'd start dying, big-time.

he strange thing it may be a byproduct of what I do for a living

but I probably worry less about "The Real Future" than the average person.

We've gotten to the point where in some ways, it's not knowable.

When I was a kid, we were told that it was.

That was when, you know,

when the Future with a capital "F" was a...

was very much a going concern in North America.

That was a part of our culture in the '50s, that the future was coming,

and it was going to be planned.

It was going to happen because grown-ups were making decisions.

My childhood, sort of, was split down the middle by the Cold War.

So there was one future that was very, very much the future of the Willy Ley Rockets,

Missiles and Space-Travel books.

And the other future was a sort of atomic wasteland.

I mean, it's very easy, it's amazingly easy for me to forget that

I lived most of my life

accepting that the world could quite literally,

and horribly, end any moment.

1... 2... 3... 4...

The only memory I have of a world prior

to media is of standing in a peanut field

on a farm in Tennessee, looking down the hill at a black,

1950s, sort of, late '40s panel truck, driving along the road.

One of the next earliest memories is of my father bringing home

this wooden, box-like thing, with a cloth grille on the front,

and a little round, circular television screen,

which, I believe, we had for some time prior

to there actually being any broadcast to...

to receive.

And then there was a test pattern.

I think the test pattern...

and the test pattern itself was only available briefly,

at scheduled times.

And people... neighbors, would come, and they would look at this

static, non-moving

pattern on the screen that...promised something.

And then television came.

It's funny... I walked out of the Matrix

last night and went to an ATM

and got some money out of my checking

account in Vancouver, without even using a credit card,

just using a bank courtesy card.

And the ATM in Santa Monica told me exactly how much money was remaining in..

.in my account in Vancouver. And just for a minute,

it struck me as miraculous

and kind of spooky

I had that kind of feeling of, you know, that kind of post-geographical feeling.

I think we've been growing a sort of prosthetic, extended

nervous system

for the last hundred years or so.

And it's really starting to take, you know?

It's...it's really, really starting to grow, now.

We're dealing with something that's...

that has penetrated virtually every...

every corner of the human universe, now.

It's increasingly difficult to find people

who have not been affected by media.

It's very difficult to find "non-mediated" human beings. Whereas,

in the 1920's, you could go back in the Appalachians and

record musicians who had never heard recorded music.

And I think that music, those early recordings,

sound fundamentally different.

Something very...something very different

was going on then. And something changed.

I remember once, I was very,

very struck by finding a diary entry,

finding a diary entry somewhere that...

a man had...a man had heard a Victrola for the first time.

An English clergyman had gone to a garden party, and he'd heard an Edison,

Victrola. And he'd come home and was just completely traumatized by it.

And he described it as being, you know...

he said that he had heard "A voice from Hell":

this "undead, hideous parody of the human voice,"

and that mankind was "doomed," and, "how could God let such things be?"

And he was, like, completely sincere.

I doubt if he would've had the same reaction, you know, the next time around.

But, you know, this diary entry caught him at exactly the...

on the cusp of the change.

We don't, you know...we don't find it extraordinary that

we can hear the voices of the dead whenever we wish to.

"Non-Mediated World" has become a lost country.

And I think that, in some very real way,

it's a country that we cannot find our way back to.

The mediated world is now THE WORLD.

We are that which perceives a mediated reality.

I don't think it's possible...I don't think it's possible to know what we've lost.

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes