Nomad Codes

non-linearity of the web, its simultaneously liberating and woozy sense that everything seems connected to everything else. Despite the best efforts of 3D-cyberspace builders, the “distance” between points online is entirely virtual. Once we can use our wireless PDAs, fancy cell phones, and other nomad computers to access this data-dense nonspace from anywhere in fleshland, that flattening all-at-onceness leaks into the world of trees and cafés and cathedrals. As the net becomes ubiquitous, the physical world becomes hollowed out in roughly the same way that collective social space is hollowed out by cell phones. It’s like wandering into a heavily touristed medieval city in Europe: the exotic spaces that initially seem to transport you beyond the fields you know turn out to house variations on the same global consumer themes. If deep travel implies wandering and wondering, which I suspect it does, then travel becomes impossible, or at least utterly transformed, when you are outfitted with a yellow pages, map, and guidebook in your palm.
    GPS and other location-based services add a new twist, offering at first what appears to be a return to specific locality: You are here. But the global reach and ubiquity of the network ultimately undermines that sense of specific location, supplanting “place” with “space”—the abstract space of information. When I accidentally contacted OnStar, I established a real-time connection between my body and the company’s virtual map of the material world, a connection that, in some fundamental way, brings those two worlds closer together. I was on the grid, and the sudden recognition of my individual capture by a satellite-based system of virtual control partly accounted for my little mise en abime . Because I did not consciously initiate the link, I directly experienced the fact that the safety and control we are offered through new technology generally comes with our incorporation into what Foucault might call a “disciplinary order.” The actual content of my uncanny moment was my own translation into a blinking red light in a system designed to, in some sense, remotely control my body.
    In other words, the real spookiness of my experience did not come from my schizophrenic encounter with a talking radio but from my close brush with cops. I won’t speculate about what would have happened had some of Skokie’s finest actually pulled my scruffy, ignorant ass over, nor how friendly they might have been had that ass been black. Nor will I bother you with another rant about privacy, fast-track toll systems, and the latest mark of the beast. There is a lot of debate about privacy in the information age, but much less discussion about the profound psychic unease that most of us feel, in our dreams if not in our waking worries. There is a peculiar wooze beneath our willingness to sacrifice anonymity on the technological altar of safety and convenience, and the wooze tastes like an almost drug-induced fear. And fear rarely just sits there: It motivates us, if not to act, then to act out. The psychic dis-ease unleashed by the technological erosion of privacy will not only continue to feed paranoid narratives but will cloud the transparency we demand in both our technologies and our political systems, because whatever local clarity we gain depends on a hyperdimensional grid whose depth, extent, and uses extends utterly beyond our ken.
    2001

MATRIXTER

    The most curious feature of Warner Bros’ official Matrix Web site is not the handful of jaw-dropping Animatrix clips, but the collection of high-quality philosophical essays by heavy hitters like Hubert Dreyfus, Colin McGinn and the cognitive science superstar David Chalmers. These essays, which hash out Descartes, Mahayana Buddhism and the proverbial “brain in the vat” problem, are all the evidence you need that the Wachowski brothers’ original 1999 film has vaulted into that curious category of Big Think mainstream sci-fi films—and that they want the “kickass” sequel to extend the beard-pulling.
    No one is surprised when filmmakers like Andrei Tarkovsky or Chris Marker or Stanley Kubrick use future shtick for metaphysical purposes, but it’s another thing for Hollywood action fare—designed to reap big bucks from the popcorn crowd—to create a space of inquiry into philosophical, political and spiritual questions, however “comic book” the frame. Movies like Blade Runner, Robocop, They Live, Minority