Liberating truths concealed in crossed-wires and mixed messages

Philip K. Dick's Divine Interference by Erik Davis Originally posted on the nettime server in the mid-1990s: by rjon on Tue 10 Apr 2007 11:30 AM PDT Permanent Link

Just as William Blake condensed the coming horrors of industrialism into his image of "Satanic mills," Dick's Black Iron Prison imaginatively captured the "disciplinary apparatus" of power analyzed by historian Michel Foucault. Demonstrating that prisons, mental institutions, schools, and military establishments all share similar organizations of space and time, Foucault argued that a "technology of power" was distributed throughout social space, enmeshing human subjects at every turn. Foucault argued that liberal social reforms are only cosmetic brush-ups of an underlying mechanism of control. As Dick put it, "The Empire never ended."...

As Jean Baudrillard has argued into the ground, simulation rather than representation has become the defining characteristic of cultural signs and artifacts in our time. For Baudrillard, the objects of simulation transcends the binary opposition of "authentic" and "fake," "original" and "copy." The technological simulacrum creates its own reality, which Baudrillard calls the "hyperreal," a kind of ersatz parody of Plato's ideal world of forms. For example, when you download a printer driver from the Internet or record a CD onto digital tape, you do not "copy" the information so much as replicate a hyperreal object.

For Baudrillard, the power of simulation only further extends the reach of what Guy Debord castigated in the 1960s as "the society of the spectacle." The media have become a kind of orbiting genetic code that "mutates" the real into the hyperreal, thereby producing "social control by anticipation, simulation and programming."[11]Like Dick, Baudrillard saw Disneyland as the archetypal hyperreal environment, though perhaps the technophilic "Gulf War" we watched through the dark glass of CNN, with its smart bombs and virtual-reality pilot runs, should stand as the most delirious thrill ride yet offered by the new world order of simulation.

As an exhausted rationalist, Baudrillard simply abandoned himself to a morbid celebration of the pixel apocalypse, giving up any notion of resistance or transformation while ignoring the messy realities that gum up the works of all such grand intellectual scenarios. But Dick never gave up his commitment to the "authentically human," the "viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new." He also recognized that simulacra lie deep in our souls, and that we are not so far from the spiritual paradigms of the ancient world, with their camouflage spirits, talking images, and automata gods. And so Dick redeployed the gnostic struggle for authenticity and freedom within the hard-sell universe of simulation. The world is a prison not because of its materialitywhich was the opinion of the ancient Gnosticsbut because of the hidden orders of power and control it houses: the various corporate, political, and ideological archons herding us into increasingly compelling synthetic worlds...

By insisting on the liberating truths concealed in crossed-wires and mixed messages, Dick serves as a kind of spiritual godfather for media tricksters everywhere, from graffiti artists to video activists to hackers to hoaxers. In his prescient 1972 speech "The Android and the Human," Dick spoke glowingly about young phone phreaks like Captain Crunch, who built a blue-box that allowed him to make long distance calls for free. Anticipating the more frazzled edge of online libertarianism and the ethical ambiguities of hacker pranks and poachings, Dick went on to claim that in "a totalitarian society in which the state apparatus is all-powerful, the ethics most important for the survival of the true, human individual would be: Cheat, lie, evade, fake it, be elsewhere, forge documents, build improved electronic gadgets in your garage that'll outwit the gadgets used by the authorities."[16] Dick was no futurist...