In the valley of the vampires
Epizode Zero.
I’M SLOWLY WORKING towards making a documentary about the internet — well, actually, I am making it right now. Consider this the intro to the series — Episode Zero of Vampire Valley. And this as the rough outline of the video version that will come in a couple of days or maybe next week.
In these films or streams or documentaries or whatever you want to call them, I’ll be taking a look at the history and politics and cultural power of the cybernetic communication system that now dominates our world. I’m going to veer from discussing current events to history to political and cultural analysis in these episodes — tracing the emergence of this technology from the industrialization of the 19th century to the Cold War and the Atomic Age to the Full Psycho Consumerist Spectacle that we all now inhabit.
The dominant narrative of our Information Age is that computers and networked communication technologies were tools of political liberation and personal empowerment.
The people making these claims weren’t ever subtle about it. The media back then was awash in utopian proclamation. Utopian narratives were front and center in corporate propaganda — in their expensive ads and marketing campaigns. Top talent in the dream-making business was paid to churn it out. Like the 1984 Apple spot directed by Ridley Scott, an ad that cast Apple into our liberator from Big Government Tyranny. It’s funny looking back on the director of Bladerunner shilling for what is in effect the real-life version of the Tyrell Corporation. Can you imagine Philip K. Dick shilling for a computer company?
Poke around TV archives and you’ll find an endless stream of ads selling the internet as a utopian project — like this ad from MCI, the telecommunications outfit that helped privatize the internet in the early 1990s.
The internet was utopia. The abolition of everything that builds hierarchies and oppression. No race. No gender. No sickness. No bodies. Just pure minds floating above time and space, connecting directly. That’s liberation.
No one had heard of transhumanism or the singularity back then — but here you have these ideas being pumped into the mainstream.
Information is power. Information is liberation. That was the message. And with the internet, people were about to get information funneled to them on a scale never before experienced by the human mind.
The computer-internet revolution took off right at the end of the Cold War — at the exact moment that capitalism triumphed over socialism. And the timing, I think, is important. Because with this technology, American society could fully claim the mantle of human utopian progress.
I remember that time well.
I was born in the Soviet Union, in Leningrad. When I was a kid, the communist utopia had pretty much already collapsed. No one believed in it anymore. And the country was falling apart. I left with my family in 1989. We spent nearly a year in refugee camps in Europe…and we ended up here in San Francisco. In America, we were labelled political refugees fleeing a repressive regime.
I was told America was different. It was a beacon of human flourishing. And then in the mid-90s, there were these forces telling us that there was another utopia coming. The internet and the computer and American capitalism — they would bring into being everything that communism could not.
Well…It didn’t work out that way.
ONE OF THE THINGS I want to explore in this series is how the structural forces built into the internet have done the exact opposite of empowering us. The internet has pacified us. It has robbed us of our agency… taken away our ability to act in the world.
Those who have benefitted most from this technology — the ones that actually have been empowered — are the existing power structures of society. The massive corporations. The military apparatus. The internet has facilitated the concentration of economic and political power in a way that has never before been seen in the history of humanity.
One of the ways the internet has pacified us is by turning everything into entertainment.