Simulacra- Log In, Dive Down, Get Lost

Non-fiction/ Sci-Friday

 Did you get Latest Gizmo? Have you downloaded Brand New App? You haven’t?! But it’s amaze-balls, my dude! It’ll completely suck away your will to live without it after about five minutes, like a blast of heroin straight to your brain stem, but you absolutely must get this thing right now, or your status in the world will immediately begin to decrease in ever-increasing, non-tangible increments, and everybody will judge you to be a knuckle dragging, backwards thinking troglodyte with either no money or discernment! GO GET IT NOW!

     Hyperbole aside, there’s no denying that the world has become a queer place indeed when it comes to what precisely we can do with our various advancing technologies. In my own lifetime, I’ve gone from using a plastic cradled button-dial telephone anchored in the living room, to a pocket-sized computer with more processing power than the original Houston space launch control room. I was frankly glad as a kid for my parents to make the switch from corded phone to cordless home phone when I was about nine, because it meant that my mother could no longer threaten to whip the ever-loving shit out of my backside with the cord if I did something stupid.

     Don’t worry, folks, she always had a big ol’ can of Beefaroni on hand to threaten my brothers and I with instead, she was hardly unarmed….

     And in terms of video games, I spent my earliest days of gaming trying not to crash into slower-moving F1 racers in “Pole Position” on the Atari 2600 and trying like hell to get the infinite lives glitch from World 3-1 of Super Mario Brothers to work in my favor. I never really did understand what those glitchy symbols meant in the between-levels screens… Anyhow, that was where I started, and look at where we are now, with some of the most hyper-realistic visual presentations imaginable being put before our eyes, games that have their own games within their coding, and universe-spanning narratives about marooned space cadets landing on fantasy-medieval style planets who run into magical girls with blue hair and an item creation system that can frankly decimate any plans you might have had on a Saturday afternoon instead of going and playing backyard football with the boys.

     Yes, I’m referencing Star Ocean 2 for those of you who have suspicions. I know, not exactly a recent title, but given that it was recently re-presented to us with a modern spit shine on current day systems, I figured it couldn’t hurt to make allusions to that particular masterpiece of the JRPG genre.

     I also reference that particular game because, despite its many fantasy trappings, it is, at heart, a sci-fi story, and that genre is the realm we’ll be transporting into for the remainder of this piece. I know, a bit of puffery here, nearly 500 words just to get us going, what am I doing?

Is It Real? Or Is It Memorex?

     If you’ve been alive as long as I have, since the early to mid-1980’s, you might remember television or newspaper and magazine advertisements for the Memorex brand blank video cassettes, upon which, with the use of a VCR, consumers could record televised programs for their own personal home use and catalogs. Their trademark line in these adverts was the title of this section- “It It Real? Or Is It Memorex?” This was supposed to imply that the video/audio fidelity of recordings played back on their particular brand of blank tape was vastly superior to those of their competitors in the market, but it also ties in here nicely with the concept of Simulacra in the sci-fi genre.

     When you think of simulacra, an oft-associated term that might come to mind is ‘simulation’, and for good reason; etymologically, they are closely tied together. A simulation is effectively a kind of pretend trial or trial run of a set of circumstances, with variables tested against based on predetermined values, in order to ‘test’ those circumstances in an effort to see what the most likely outcome of them taking place in reality might be. But in the realm of sci-fi, a simulation takes on a whole new meaning, one that most of you reading this will likely associate very quickly with “The Matrix”.  That’s perfectly normal at this juncture, especially if you were either a kid or a teenager when that film from the Wachowski brothers overtook the collective imaginations of the era.

     Yes, I said ‘brothers’. Sticking feathers in your butt does not make you a chicken, to quote Tyler Durden (who also made us all question our existence that same year of 1999). I’ll not dive any further into that particularly poisonous quagmire right now.

     But the notions of virtual and augmented reality have been around a goodly deal longer than that particular franchise, ladies and gentlemen. Several of the closely associated concepts in this arena also saw earlier implementation, and we are going to take a brief look at some of the mediums and properties that brought the whole concept of virtual space into our common parlance and understanding of the genre.

It Takes a Visual to Know a Visual

     Though Asimov’s tales of robots and cyborgs can be looked at as some of our earliest indications of a futurist worldview through his short stories and novels, it shouldn’t be lost on anyone that many of his and his colleagues’ finest daydreams back in the day ended up revolving around screens and imagery, and how one day, we would all be able to connect to one another, at a distance, through electronic screens. His concept of a telephone that could hook into a cathode ray tube display to allow for visual phone calls was little more than the stuff of fanciful idealism at its time, but nowadays, you can take pictures or video of your butt and share it, with a visual alteration filter, to millions of people online in a moment’s notice! There are people who even do precisely that for a living!

     I’m not about to bemoan the fact that this ‘career’ choice is not an option for me; nobody is going to pay to look at this pale, hairy Irish-American’s tractor trailer ass. I know my limitations, and I live within them with no delusions.

     But the point I’m driving at here is that, despite Asimov, Bradbury, and many other sci-fi pioneers’ greatest efforts in the written realm, it is thanks to the visual storytellers that we got our first collective, popularized understanding of what exactly VR or AR just might look like in the future. We got this look, by and large, thanks to the brilliance of Gene Roddenbury’s “Star Trek: The Next Generation”. In episode 11 of Season One, “The Long Goodbye”, we get a look at the Enterprise’s Holodec, a technological marvel of Augmented Reality that renders a limited physical space into a seemingly limitless world, artificially manipulated and designed to be able to recreate a user’s every great dream adventure or past time.

     Now, to be fair, many have made note that this idea had first been presented by the earlier “Star Trek: The Animated Series” episode dubbed “The Practical Joker”. In that cartoon, a rec room on the original Enterprise hosted holographic projectors that could be interacted with in a limited fashion, and that animated program aired a full 14 years prior to the TNG episode in question. In short, the Holodec wasn’t a one-hundred percent new concept for Trek.

     In 1995, thanks to the good folks working in animated storytelling out of Japan, we got our next concept of diving into altered or Augmented Reality with the presentation of “Ghost In the Shell”, a twisted cyberpunk tale that brought us replaceable cyber bodies, network ‘diving’, and the concept of hacking into another sentient, living being’s very mind itself. Horrifying stuff if followed to its logical conclusion, and yes, I’m looking at you, Neuralink! No thanks on the notion of being among the first wave of folks to get brain-chipped, I’ve read too many dystopian tales to want to be in the first wave of victims of that shit when the bugs haven’t all been worked out yet.

     1999, as mentioned before, really brought the whole ‘simulation’ idea into the foreground with “The Matrix”, and thanks to that film, we’ll never be entirely rid of the concept of bullet time, which is just an action film term for slow-motion, something that’s been around in the technical artistry of filmmaking for a long time already, but what better example of a postmodern move than to manipulate the language by inventing a new term for an old concept, thus confusing things ever more than necessary?

     We weren’t done yet, though. In a very ‘meta’ move, the next major example of a visual piece of work showing us the potential or concept of integrated virtual reality brings us once more back to the realm of anime, with 2002’s “.Hack” series. I bring up that this is very meta because, thanks to its popularity, and the core narrative concept itself, a series of games got made for the series, based on its very baseline notion- you, the player, must navigate your in-game avatar in an attempt to solve a mystery surrounding a popular role-playing game.

     Don’t run the wheel, my fellow hamsters, or you may fly off. Just, hold my hand, we’ll get through this.

     Where “Ghost in the Shell” looks into hacking another human being’s brain (human being a very loose term in a world full of androids, synthetics and cyborgs, I suppose), 2009’s “Gamer”, while not exactly standing too firmly in the VR or AR arena, does brush up against the concept with its own conceit, and a bizarre and horrifying one if I say so myself. In the world of the film, people are able to log in and play a game wherein they engage in various challenges through the use of the most realistic kind of in-game avatars one can imagine: other actual human beings. If a person finds themselves in desperate enough economic circumstances, they can sign themselves off to the company that runs the ‘game’, allowing themselves to be bodily employed as a player’s in-game avatar, which, as one might imagine, results in a spectacularly series of deranged behaviors from some players, who compel their ‘player characters’ to engage in some questionable acts. While the movie has been critically panned pretty much everywhere online, its underlying premise is one that, once more, puts me in mind of Neuralink, and what some folks might feel compelled to allow to happen to themselves if they were financially desperate enough, which is to effectively sell themselves into a lethal kind of slavery.

“The Book Was Better”

     I know plenty of folks who roll their eyes when they hear this phrase, but part of their scorn stems from the fact that it is, quite frankly, almost universally true, and they likely would prefer not to put in the effort of reading the original text. Thankfully, audiobooks are a thing, if they just genuinely don’t have the time to sit down with the book, and using the commute between home and work can help get them through.

     Anywho, no matter what medium the story ends up being presented in as the final product, the fact remains that its first incarnation was usually in the written format. Be it a television show, a film, or even a video game, someone sat down at some point and wrote out an outline, a story beat drop list, or a bullet point list in order to organize the production going forward. Or, as artists of the narrative stripe have done since time out of mind, they simply wrote the story thoroughly, and let that be the final product by itself.

     In 1982, author Rudy Rucker presented to the world of sci-fi a novel whose byline is perhaps among the most grim and utilitarian that one can come across, especially given the subject matter of the novel attached to it; “Preserve your software, because the rest is just meat.” His novel, “Software”, utilizes the concept of human beings literally uploading their consciousness to a ‘holding network’, where they briefly experience a kind of digital, virtual green room, until such time as a new ‘host body’, composed of an engineered, biological human makeup but with a ‘blank slate’ brain, is made ready for their consciousness to be downloaded into. The virtual green room portions of the story are minimally touched upon, but the notion is there, and it precedes the next entry in this listing, which his perhaps most commonly referred to by enthusiasts as the granddaddy of the cyberpunk sub-genre of sci-fi.

     Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I am referring there to 1984’s “Neuromancer”, by William Gibson. Gibson’s novel has an overall tone and perspective on network diving/virtual reality that could easily make one wonder if he was a fan of technology and its various advancements, or if he was a catastrophist trying to keep us all as a species from taking a fatal dose of forced evolution. The novel centers around a ‘console cowboy’ hacker, Henry Dorset Case, who has been punished for the crime of stealing from a former employer by being physiologically cut off from the virtual reality dataspace that most people access for networking, a space literally referred to as ‘the matrix’ within the book.

     Methinks the Wachowskis owe Mr. Gibson at the very least a case of beer….

     In the world of the book, which would ultimately end up being the starting entry of what became known as the ‘Sprawl Trilogy’ of novels, people often become addicted to diving into the matrix, because their real, tangible existence outside of that cyberspace is borderline intolerable. Most citizens live in a world of decay and squalor in the books, and leaving that behind, even for a little while, to enjoy a realm of entertainment and pleasantry provided by the matrix, is all that keeps many of them plodding through from day to day.

     The third and final example of the virtual reality/augmented reality concept in written form that I’d like to cite for this piece is actually a novel that I am currently reading, and one from an author who is, by and large, much more commonly associated with sci-fi’s sister genre of fantasy. Published in 1993, Piers Anthony’s “Killobyte” has nothing to do with his beloved Xanth realms, and everything to do with the concept of people loading themselves into VR games as a form of escapism, one that, in short enough order, turns murderous, as one of the network’s most active users starts killing people in real ‘meat space’ as a result of the game’s simulated thrills just not quite scratching that existential and psychotic itch. I haven’t finished the book yet, but I’m enjoying it thoroughly, and find myself amused that, in an era where the most advanced video games on the market were 2D sidescrollers on the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo, until December of that year, when the world of gaming would be turned on its head with the introduction of iD Software’s “Doom”, this little novel by Anthony would be letting readers in on a glimpse of what the future might hold some day in the video game space.

     Sort of amazing that we aren’t already there, right? But we’re getting closer all the time.

I Know This Isn’t Perfect

     I am well aware that I’m probably missing a cadre of examples in the sci-fi genre where these conceits are core to the stories presented for the audience. After all, I’ve only spent about two total hours digging up the references used within this piece to elucidate what I’m getting at. Yet I found myself thinking a little bit about the notion of simulacra in our media thanks to some cautionary writings from fellow scribes on Substack, and the connection I immediately made between “Killobyte” and “The Matrix” when I started reading that book a couple of weeks ago. ‘This has to go back farther,’ I thought, and the very next example that came to my mind without thinking about it was the Holodeck on Star Trek.

     Thank God I did a little more digging, or the notion that I was missing something would have driven me crazy. From my humble home here in southern Minnesota, I’d like to thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for stopping on in and giving this piece a read; I appreciate your precious time.