Nomad Codes

swatted them until the light blinked out. However, I also seemed to have triggered the car phone I didn’t know I had, as the familiar drone of a dial tone came across the “entertainment system.” Not knowing how to turn off the phone, I simply turned the volume knob on the radio down, figuring that, in the absence of a dialed number, the phone would simply shut off after the “If you would like to make a call” lady had her say.
    I was feeling restless. Though the drive was short and I try to avoid switching on the radio simply to manage nervous energy, I turned up the volume dial and discovered the radio already on. I heard a droning male voice, which I assumed was another Christian preacher, although this guy sounded moralistic, boring, and white. Feeling displeased with myself for my inability to drive fifteen minutes without sonic distraction, I turned the volume knob down, still unsure about how to shut off the radio itself. But after a few moments, my restlessness got the better of me and I yanked the knob back up, enabling me to hear the following:
    “If you do not respond immediately, we will automatically dispatch a police vehicle to your location.”
    A spine-trembling beat. Hesitantly, though without logically processing the action, I said, “Are you talking to me?”
    “Yes.”
    “Ak!” I shuddered. “What’s going on?”
    “This is the OnStar advisor. You have activated the emergency system. It’s our policy to contact an emergency service if we don’t hear a response. Is everything OK?”
    “Yeah,” I said. “I’m in a rent-a-car. I didn’t know what I was doing. You freaked me out. Sorry.”
    “That’s OK. If you have any further questions, just press the blue OnStar button on your rearview mirror. Good night.”
    The radio stayed off the rest of the way.
    Now, you may pay more attention to car ads than I do, so you may already be hip to OnStar: an onboard, location-based information and safety service available for GM cars. OnStar pumps out a strong three-watt GPS signal which supposedly works even if your antenna gets ripped off. With this location info-streaming into their computers, OnStar advisors can give you real-time directions, tell you about nearby hotels and restaurants, or direct emergency services to your car if an airbag is deployed or if you happen to press that little button on the rearview mirror with a red cross on it (duh). Later this year, OnStar’s “Virtual Advisor” will also enable you to personalize a speech-activated flow of sports, stock, news, and weather data from the Internet—you know, kind of like the radio used to do.
    It was only later that I found out about OnStar’s GPS technology, their one million customers, and their ridiculous marketing tie-in with DC’s Batmobile (an ad campaign that forced them to include the following passage in their FAQ: “Q. Why can’t I buy the Batmobile? A. Batman and the Batmobile are used solely for advertising purposes and are not available through OnStar.”). But though this information explained what happened to me, it did not entirely eradicate the blast of the uncanny that my unwitting encounter with OnStar uncorked inside the confines of my rented Chevy. For a few seconds, I had entered Philip K. Dick land: my radio suddenly and pointedly spoke directly to me. Moreover, the voice knew exactly where I was—in Evanston, Illinois, heading east on Golf toward Skokie Boulevard. In a beat, reality seemed to fold inside out, the general became particular. This is what paranoid schizophrenics might feel like at the beginning of an episode.
    I suspect that most of us have had similar encounters with technology, especially over the last decade—moments when our media, for whatever reason, momentarily deliver us into some uncanny zone that lingers on the edge of the Real. Usually we sweep these experiences—strange radio static, surreal computer shenanigans, the snafu synchronicities of the cell phone—under the rug. But I don’t think we should so readily dismiss the feelings that accompany these experiences, because they have their own truths to tell. For as media increasingly colonize social reality, they scramble the space-time boundaries of the self. And this always feels a little weird.
    For the most part, we quickly assimilate these mutations in subjectivity. The human mind seems to naturally adjust itself to perceive its current reality as normal and mundane (and usually at least vaguely