Are we happy with our binary future?
Or is it just another brick in the wall? These industrial metaphors all kind of run together...
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Everything is digital now, and the Internet isn’t just as real as the real world, it’s hyper-real. The longer the quarantine drags on, the more activities that used to be very much rooted in the physical world—from business meetings to religious services to sex—have migrated into the virtual. The ease at which many people have made this transition is stunning. In a matter of weeks, millions of people have established virtual approximations of their daily life.
From a certain point of view, this is miraculous. People can continue to work out with their trainers, negotiate deals, and meet for drinks without ever stepping over the threshold. Yet there’s also a dark side to this rapid shift of life online. The companies that provide our digital lifelines, particularly those that do so for free—I’m especially looking at you Google, Facebook and Zoom—are vacuuming up tremendous amounts of data about us. This data can be used for good or ill and will definitely be used to sell you things or modify your behavior in other unseen ways.
Likewise, the digital has a tendency toward being culturally and intellectually impoverishing. Gone are the happenstance conversations with strangers in a bar or the moments of delight upon stumbling across a work of art. The Zoom happy hour lacks the ebb and flow of a real world gathering of friends. Rarely is it interrupted by spontaneity. Moments that would demand your attention in the physical world are easy to let slip past by muting a speaker or disabling video.
Another effect of the total shift to digital is sense of total accountability that it creates. There is a record of every key stroke and a need to justify every waking moment. If you never walk down the street for coffee, you can’t while away a quarter hour. Instead, the coffee pot is always only three steps away. And for many, when they inevitably need something from the outside world, it has become easier to lean on those less fortunate than ourselves—delivery people, gig workers and freelancers—to simply bring us what we need.
All of this is still new, but if this were the starting point of a dystopian novel, it would not take long before the wealthy of the world would cease to venture from their homes. Marriages would be arranged online, and the rich would subsist on vitamin D supplements and food brought to them by an impoverished underclass doomed to toil in the disease and danger filled streets. Financial pressures and lack of access to education would ensure the continued existence and replenishment of the outdoor laborers. The defining class separation would be between those blessed with a virtual existence and those for whom it was never an option.
This is not too far from our own present. The cashiers and FreshDirect workers who were already struggling to get by are now designated as essential workers. Becoming virtual was never a choice available to them. Hopefully we can tear down the digital class divide as easily as it has been erected.
Today’s Film: Ex Machina (2014)
Writer and Director Alex Garland is unique in his ability to transform the inner workings of modern technology and the philosophical quandaries that arise from it into high drama. The setup to Ex Machina is simple. Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) is a young programmer at a Facebook-like tech giant, who is summoned by the company’s founder, Nathan (Oscar Isaac) to assist him with a top secret project at his research compound deep in the wildness. Once he arrives and signs an unbreakable NDA, Caleb learns that he’s been brought-in to determine if Ava (Alicia Vikander), an android created by Nathan, has passed the Turing Test and become a self-aware AI.
From that point forward, Ex Machina ratchets up the tension continuously as Nathan pits Caleb and Ava against each other. The film poses fundamental questions about what it means to be intelligent or self aware and what obligations the creator has to the creation. The characters conceal their motivations from each other and continually seek to outflank the others against the stunning backdrop of the isolated research compound. Garland is a master of communicating complex ideas in a visual medium, and the cinematography and production design of Ex Machina are no exception. The lighting in the compound mirrors the energy of the characters. Glass, alcohol and water are all used to reflect and refract the building’s hidden corners and the concealed glances of the protagonists.
While the film is very much Garland’s vision, the cast elevates it from being a small science fiction picture to a gripping drama. The pairing of Gleeson and Isaac is supercharged, and sparks fly, even during the quietest moments in the film. (They played opposite each another once again during the most recent cycle of Star Wars films beginning in 2015). Vikander succeeds in seeming both coyly human and coldly machine simultaneously, while Sonoya Mizuno’s performance as Kyoko is filled with surprises. While nothing is perfect, Ex Machina is so carefully plotted and its characters so finely realized that it comes close. So close, in fact, that you may not be able to see the imperfections, no matter how closely you look.
Ex Machina is available to stream on Netflix.
Reading List:
Karsten Tüchsen Hansen, 89, and Inga Rasmussen, 85, are in love and not even borders closed for COVID-19 can keep them apart. They drive daily to drink schnapps at a folding table set up at a border crossing between Germany and Denmark. Hansen remarked to The Times that “love is the best thing in the world.”
Steve Carell and the team behind The Office have a new show coming to Netflix in May. It’s a comedy called Space Force, and it’s about… creating the new Space Force. Inverse has nice on set photos and some background on the show.
Benjamin Reeves is an award-winning screenwriter, journalist and media consultant based in Brooklyn, New York. Follow him on Twitter @bpreeves or write to him at breeves.writer@gmail.com.