In the valley of the vampires

Epizode Zero.

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I’M SLOWLY WORKING towards making a documentary about the internet and have been trying to think things through. So this is a sort of intro to my thinking on the subject — Episode Zero of Vampire Valley, if you will.

In these films or streams or documentaries or whatever you want to call them, I want to take a look at the history and politics and cultural power of the cybernetic communication system that now dominates our world. The internet is so expansive and so dominant in our lives that the story will naturally have to spread across time and space, both physical and cultural. But there will be a linear backbone that will connect it all — and it’ll begin in the Cold War and the Atomic Age and take us all the way to the Full Psycho Consumerist Spectacle that we all now inhabit and all the fantasies about AI gods and the extractionist economy that underpins it all.

The dominant narrative of our Information Age was 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. At the dawn of this age, media was awash in utopian proclamations. Utopian narratives were front and center in Silicon Valley’s expensive ads and marketing campaigns. The most celebrated talent in the industry was paid to this stuff out — like the 1984 Apple spot directed by Ridley Scott, an ad that cast Apple as our liberator from big government tyranny. It’s funny looking back on the director of Bladerunner working for what is in effect the real-life version of the Tyrell Corporation.

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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 these ideas were lowkey being pumped into the mainstream through television spots and programs.

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 exactly work out that way.

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I’VE WRITTEN ABOUT THE COUNTERINSURGENCY origins of the internet before — and I want that to be part of the story. And one of the things I want to explore in this film is how that history continues to play out today. 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.

It has made everything into a reality show, funneling all of our creative energies into the virtual realm. We are at the same time performers in this show and its spectators. The watched and the watchers. The consumer and producers. Even radical politics — politics that would seem to pose a threat to the status quo — have been sucked into it. Political participation has become just another subgenre of entertainment. Some people watch cooking shows, others watch horror films, others are into sports or the History Channel, and others follow the news and engage in endless political spats online — to cure their boredom, to pass the time, to feel smart, to feel emotion, to be titillated, to feel like they’re connected, like they are a part of something bigger than themselves. But always, we’re plugged in.

What’s interesting is that even the people who own these systems — who stand to benefit from them the most — have themselves swept up in it. They’re empowered by these systems and trapped by them. Just look at Elon Musk’s obsessive internet behavior.

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I wrote a book about how the internet began as a Pentagon project. It emerged in the 1960s and 1970s out of a desire to build computer systems that could collect and share intelligence, watch the world in real time, and study and analyze people and political movements — with the ultimate goal of predicting and preventing social upheaval.

Some American technocrats even dreamed of creating a sort of early warning radar for human societies: a networked computer system that watched for social and political threats and intercepted them in much the same way that traditional radar did for hostile aircraft.

When the internet was just being developed, many people in America had a sense of what was at stake. They understood that the internet was a tool of corporate and government power…that it would be used by massive bureaucracies to centralize control over society. But even the tiny bit of skepticism that existed was jettisoned when the realization that massive amounts of money could be made from this technology — and then everyone bought into the hype…began believing in their own advertising campaigns.

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Today the internet really has become the most powerful surveillance technology known to man. Everything we do is watched and recorded. What we see and read and hear is tailored to our specific tastes. Everything is algorithmically controlled by giant corporations, subtly influencing what we think and believe. But a new dimension has emerged that the military planners of 50 years ago did not really foresee.

And that’s…the Spectacle.

With the full commercialization of the internet, the technology’s ability to control and influence our lives has grown in power and maliciousness. The internet has evolved — or rather, it’s been engineered — to be a parasitic technology.

Driven by the structural forces of our hyper-consumerist society, the whole point of the internet now is to keep us trapped on the internet.

It’s a macabre system, a cybernetic vampire that has bound itself to us, flooding our minds with non-stop information, stimulating our emotions, keeping us entertained, angry, laughing, learning, or vegging out — whatever suits our needs at the moment it’s happening. The point is to keep us on the internet…to drain our time and life energy into perpetuating the consumerist-entertainment machine that now represents the totality of our society.

The Spectacle goes back to the first mass communications technologies — to newspapers and radio and then the television and film. With the internet, the Spectacle Society that Guy Debord first described has come into full maturity, adding billions of voices and billions of mirrors — all to better multiply the spectacle, to make it seem more real and authentic and organic, to reflect it back at us in billions of shards, enthralling us, making us participate, confusing us, trapping us…

It doesn’t even matter anymore if the content that the Spectacle injects into our minds is good or bad or helpful or distracting. It doesn’t matter if it’s a threat to the power or supports power or is just dumb entertainment. It all gets used in the same way in the end — it’s the end result that matters to the system. The whole point of it is to keep you locked into the Spectacle…to keep the parasitic relationship going at all costs. What the parasite doesn’t want is for you to realize that the parasite is there…that it is slowly draining your life away. So the parasite will serve us up whatever Spectacle we desire, as long as you keep yourselves plugged into this cybernetic vampire machine.

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I come across people all the time who can’t read anymore, who are revolted by screens, made sick by the internet, their minds overstimulated, groaning under the weight of news and stream and lives and shows and infinite content…And yet they still can’t log off. Few of us can. We’re all trapped. The effects of it are many — lassitude, anger, alienation, over-stimulation…and, in the end, total pacification. The internet saps of our time and energy. We’re unable to do anything in the real world. The Spectacle that the internet weaves for us has become more real than the real.

This isn’t the Matrix. We aren’t enslaved by vengeful robots and we’re not in a computer simulation. In a way it’s worse. This technology has enabled the simulation and the real physical world to be blended into one, confusing us…making us unsure of what is real and what is fantasy. And we did all this ourselves. People did it to other people. But there is a paradox, too. This technology was made by human hands and yet…it has also taken on a life of its own. The technology is now in control — the technology has created complex systems that have locked trapped every single one of us, regardless of our place in the hierarchy.

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WE STILL CALL IT SILICON VALLEY. It’s a term that goes back to the fact that Santa Clara Valley, just south of San Francisco, used to be the center of transistor and computer chip production, when the region was involved in advanced missile development. It was missiles that required these new smaller logic circuits to be developed — to calculate trajectories so the weapons hit their marks. But the metaphor has lost its power. It’s not the silicon chips that matter anymore to this global technological system and the overlapping complex of bureaucracies and organizations that sustain it. It’s about human beings now. The industry needs human beings to feed on. We’re the quarry and reason for its existence. And it’s not just us. The internet is also destroying the planet by gobbling up all available energy and resources…and it’s always hungry for more. It truly is a vampiric technology — physically and culturally. A vampiric technology created in a valley of vampires. It’s Vampire Valley.

I want to make this film not just to entertain or to enlighten. I want to poison your relationship with this technology. I want you to use your phone and laptop and tablet with fear and disgust. I want you to become aware of the parasitic force feeding on our lives and on our planet. This vampiric technology is stronger than any one of us. We have to band together…to unite if we are going to escape its grasp and chart a new way forward. But we also have an individual responsibility. We need to develop a gag reflex to this tech. We need to retch every time we come into contact with this sprawling machine. And, unfortunately, there is no other way top fight the vampire than to enter the Valley of the Vampires and to fight it, at least for a time, on the vampires’ own turf.

END TRANSMISSION

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