Marshall McLuhan in Two Minutes: A Brief Animated Introduction to the 1960s Media Theorist Who Predicted Our Present

in Technology | March 17th, 2017

Mar­shall McLuhan, writes nov­el­ist and artist Dou­glas Cou­p­land, entered the zeit­geist in the 1960s as “a guru or as a vil­lain – as a har­bin­ger of the flow­er­ing of cul­ture, or of its death,” a “fud­dy-dud­dy fiftysome­thing Eng­lish lit pro­fes­sor from Toron­to” whose dis­tinc­tive research inter­ests and even more dis­tinc­tive habits of mind empow­ered him to come up with still-res­o­nant insights into the mod­ern media land­scape. He knew “that the point of much of tech­nol­o­gy, TV, for instance, was­n’t the con­tent of the shows you were watch­ing on it. Rather, what mat­tered was mere­ly the fact that you were watch­ing TV. The act of ana­lyz­ing the con­tent of TV – or of oth­er medi­ums – is either sen­ti­men­tal or it’s beside the point.” The medi­um, in oth­er words, is the mes­sage.

That best-known of McLuhan’s prophet­ic one-lin­ers (on which he expands in the ABC Radio Nation­al talk below) remains as true now as it was when it first appeared in his book Under­stand­ing Media: The Exten­sions of Man in 1964.

Cou­p­land empha­sizes that dif­fer­ent kinds of media, then as now, “force you to favor cer­tain parts of your brain over oth­ers,” which we denizens of the 21st cen­tu­ry know from inten­sive dai­ly expe­ri­ence: “that hour you spent on Face­book came at the expense of some oth­er way of using your brain, most like­ly TV view­ing or book-read­ing, though as books and TV recede, ever more web-medi­at­ed activ­i­ties will replace each oth­er to the point where we’ll have long for­got­ten what the pre-elec­tron­ic mind was to begin with.”

Cou­p­land once wrote a kind of biog­ra­phy of McLuhan that dis­tilled the thinker’s life, work, and cur­rent rel­e­vance into less than 250 pages, but the video at the top of the post, com­mis­sioned by Al Jazeera from ani­ma­tor Daniel Sav­age and nar­rat­ed by Hong Kong activist Alex Chow, does it in just over two min­utes. Chow reminds us that, even today, “if you don’t under­stand the medi­um, you don’t ful­ly under­stand the mes­sage,” look­ing back to the inven­tion of the print­ing press, and thus of mass media, and how its forms “changed our col­lec­tive expe­ri­ence. It informed our col­lec­tive iden­ti­ty, how we imag­ined our­selves.” In what McLuhan called the “elec­tric envi­ron­ment,” where “every­thing hap­pens at once. There’s no con­ti­nu­ity, there’s no con­nec­tion, there’s no fol­low-through. It’s just all now,” we will expe­ri­ence the end of secre­cy, and with it “the end of monop­o­lies of knowl­edge.”

55 years ago, McLuhan wrote that “the next medi­um, what­ev­er it is – it may be the exten­sion of con­scious­ness – will include tele­vi­sion as its con­tent, not as its envi­ron­ment. A com­put­er as a research and com­mu­ni­ca­tion instru­ment could enhance retrieval, obso­lesce mass library orga­ni­za­tion, retrieve the indi­vid­u­al’s ency­clo­pe­dic func­tion and flip it into a pri­vate line to speed­i­ly tai­lored data of a sal­able kind.” As we’ve since dis­cov­ered, these devel­op­ments have both their upsides and down­sides. But as Cou­p­land writes, con­sid­er that pas­sage seri­ous­ly and “see if it does­n’t give you a chill.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Vision­ary Thought of Mar­shall McLuhan, Intro­duced and Demys­ti­fied by Tom Wolfe

Mar­shall McLuhan, W.H. Auden & Buck­min­ster Fuller Debate the Virtues of Mod­ern Tech­nol­o­gy & Media (1971)

Mar­shall McLuhan on the Stu­pid­est Debate in the His­to­ry of Debat­ing (1976)

McLuhan Said “The Medi­um Is The Mes­sage”; Two Pieces Of Media Decode the Famous Phrase

Hear Mar­shall McLuhan’s The Medi­um is the Mas­sage (1967)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Every Front Page of The New York Times in Under a Minute: Watch the Evolution of “The Gray Lady” from 1852 to Present

in History, Media, Technology | March 17th, 2017

Buck­ling under infor­ma­tion over­load?

The long view can be sooth­ing, as film­mak­er Josh Beg­ley proves in just under a minute, above. The data artist reduced 165 years worth of chrono­log­i­cal­ly ordered New York Times front pages—every sin­gle one since 1852—to a grid of inky rec­tan­gles flash­ing past at light­ning speed.

You won’t be able to make out the head­lines as the front page news whips past to the some­what omi­nous strains of com­pos­er Philip Glass’ ”Dead Things.”

Instead the impres­sion is of watch­ing something—or someone—steadily bear­ing wit­ness.

Obvi­ous­ly, any rep­utable new source does more than sim­ply note the unfold­ing of events. Its read­ers look to it as a source of analy­sis and cri­tique, in addi­tion to well-researched fac­tu­al infor­ma­tion.

The Gray Lady, as the Times has long been known, has recent­ly weath­ered an uptick in slings and arrows from both the left and the right, yet her longevi­ty is not eas­i­ly dis­missed.

Blog­ger Jason Kot­tke watched the video with an eye toward some of the paper’s most notable design changes. His find­ings also remind us of some of the his­toric events to appear on the Times’ front page—Lincoln’s assas­si­na­tion, Nixon’s res­ig­na­tion, and the elec­tion of our first Black pres­i­dent, which it described as a “nation­al catharsis—a repu­di­a­tion of a his­tor­i­cal­ly unpop­u­lar Repub­li­can pres­i­dent and his eco­nom­ic and for­eign poli­cies.”

How many of the over 50,000 front pages fea­tured above were deemed per­son­al­ly sig­nif­i­cant enough to squir­rel away in a trunk or an attic?

Have dig­i­tal archives decreed that this prac­tice will soon gasp its last, along with the print media that inspired it?

What will we use to wrap our fish and line our bird cages?

Read the New York Times 2012 (non-front page) cov­er­age of Apple’s rejec­tion of Josh Begley’s Drone+ app here.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“Titan­ic Sink­ing; No Lives Lost” and Oth­er Ter­ri­bly Inac­cu­rate News Reports from April 15, 1912

The New York Times Makes 17,000 Tasty Recipes Avail­able Online: Japan­ese, Ital­ian, Thai & Much More

The New York Times’ First Pro­file of Hitler: His Anti-Semi­tism Is Not as “Gen­uine or Vio­lent” as It Sounds (1922)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and the­ater mak­er in New York City.  Her play Zam­boni Godot is play­ing at The Brick in Brook­lyn through tomor­row night. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Rock Band: Hear The Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” Played with Electromechanical Instruments That Make Music with Rocks

in Music, Technology | March 15th, 2017

From Neil Men­doza comes “Rock Band,” an amal­ga­ma­tion of “electro­mechan­i­cal instru­ments that make music with rocks by throw­ing them through the air, slap­ping them and mak­ing them vibrate.” Above, hear the band play one of my favorite Bea­t­les songs, “Here Comes the Sun.” There’s no Paul, John, George and Ringo here. Instead, you’ve got the fol­low­ing band mem­bers:

Pinger — fires small rocks at alu­mini­um keys using sole­noids.
Spin­ner — launch­es mag­net­ic rocks, Hematite, at pieces of mar­ble. Rocks are launched by spin­ning mag­nets using Applied Motion applied-motion.com step­per motors.
Slap­per — slaps rocks with fake leather.
Buzzer — vibrates the plunger of a sole­noid against a piece of mar­ble.

Accord­ing to Neil, “the whole project is con­trolled by a com­put­er run­ning a MIDI play­er writ­ten in open­Frame­works talk­ing to a Teen­sy. The machines were designed using Autodesk Fusion 360 and Autodesk Inven­tor.” You can find instruc­tions on how to build your own Pinger here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via The Kids Should See This

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See Japanese Musicians Play “Amazing Grace” with 273 Theremins Placed Inside Matryoshka Dolls–Then Learn How They Perform Their Magic

in Music, Technology | March 14th, 2017

In the arts, tech­nol­o­gy, or any oth­er realm, Japan­ese cul­ture encour­ages tak­ing one’s cho­sen pur­suits to the lim­its, even when their mate­r­i­al comes from oth­er cul­tures. We have here a par­tic­u­lar­ly notable exam­ple in the form of Man­darin Elec­tron, a musi­cal ensem­ble found­ed and led since 1999 by pio­neer Japan­ese theremin play­er Masa­mi Takeuchi. But its mem­bers (273 of whom set the theremin-ensem­ble Guin­ness World Record with the per­for­mance of “Amaz­ing Grace” above) don’t play quite the same touch­less, spooky-sound­ing instru­ment vin­tage elec­tron­ic music fans would rec­og­nize; instead, they mas­ter the Matry­omin, a theremin in the com­pact form of a tra­di­tion­al Russ­ian Matryosh­ka doll, con­ve­nient­ly designed “so as to dis­sem­i­nate theremin per­for­mance.”

The com­bi­na­tion isn’t quite as ran­dom as it sounds. Back in 2015 we post­ed about the his­to­ry of the theremin, which goes back to the work of a Russ­ian inven­tor named Léon Theremin. When he first devel­oped the instru­ment in 1919, he called it the Aether­phone, and in the 1920s demon­strat­ed it in Europe and the Unit­ed States.

In the decades there­after, Therem­in’s strange new musi­cal inven­tion cap­tured imag­i­na­tions all over the world, and last year Japan cel­e­brat­ed the inven­tor’s 120th Birth­day with a series of events called Theremin 120 — most of them some­how involv­ing Takeuchi. You can learn more about his his­to­ry with the theremin and its home­land from the video just above.

In a sense, Takeuchi, who moved to Rus­sia to study under Therem­in’s rel­a­tive and pupil Lydia Kavia, has real­ized the inven­tor’s orig­i­nal vision for his “instru­ment of a singing-voice kind.” Free­ing its sounds from their mid-2oth-cen­tu­ry West­ern asso­ci­a­tions — dri­ve-in hor­ror movies, nov­el­ty surf-rock — he has over­seen their trans­for­ma­tion into the ele­ments of an elec­tron­ic cho­rus. You can pur­chase your very own Man­darin Elec­tron-made Matry­omin (now on its third-gen­er­a­tion mod­el) and start learn­ing to play it with the video just above, but if its poten­tial still escapes you, have a look at Takeuchi and his ensem­ble’s exten­sive col­lec­tion of tour and media appear­ances. If the sound and sight of hun­dreds of peo­ple all tun­ing their Matryosh­ka-doll theremins at once does­n’t intrigue you, noth­ing could.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Beethoven’s Ode to Joy Played With 167 Theremins Placed Inside Matryosh­ka Dolls in Japan

Sovi­et Inven­tor Léon Theremin Shows Off the Theremin, the Ear­ly Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment That Could Be Played With­out Being Touched (1954)

Watch Jim­my Page Rock the Theremin, the Ear­ly Sovi­et Elec­tron­ic Instru­ment, in Some Hyp­not­ic Live Per­for­mances

“Some­where Over the Rain­bow” Played on a 1929 Theremin

Japan­ese Priest Tries to Revive Bud­dhism by Bring­ing Tech­no Music into the Tem­ple: Attend a Psy­che­del­ic 23-Minute Ser­vice

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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How 1940s Film Star Hedy Lamarr Helped Invent the Technology Behind Wi-Fi & Bluetooth During WWII

in Film, History, Technology | March 13th, 2017

A cer­tain ide­al of Amer­i­ca holds that an immi­grant who arrives in that land of oppor­tu­ni­ty can, with hard work and luck, com­plete­ly remake them­selves, even into an A‑list movie star or an inven­tor of hereto­fore unimag­ined new things. Hedy Lamarr, by this reck­on­ing, ranks among the ide­al Amer­i­cans: born Hed­wig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vien­na, she arrived in Hol­ly­wood in 1938 and reigned, under her new name grant­ed by movie mogul Louis B. May­er, as per­haps the most beau­ti­ful face on the sil­ver screen for the next dozen years.

A reluc­tant star since her ear­ly role in the scan­dalous Czech film Ekstase and in Amer­i­ca nev­er quite able to escape type­cast­ing as the mys­te­ri­ous, exot­ic beau­ty oppo­site a “real” actor, the bored Lamarr occu­pied her mind by turn­ing to inven­tion.

Work­ing away at her draft­ing table instead of mak­ing the night­ly Hol­ly­wood par­ty rounds, Lamarr came up with every­thing from dis­solv­ing soda tablets to improved traf­fic sig­nals and tis­sue box­es to a “skin-taut­ening tech­nique based on the prin­ci­ples of the accor­dion.”

But her place in the canon of Amer­i­can inven­tors rests on an idea that came out of a con­ver­sa­tion with com­pos­er George Antheil. Mar­ried back in Aus­tria to arms deal­er Friedrich Man­dl, she’d over­heard con­ver­sa­tions, accord­ing to her New York Times obit­u­ary, between her then-hus­band and many Nazi-high­er ups “who seemed to place great val­ue on cre­at­ing some sort of device that would per­mit the radio con­trol of air­borne tor­pe­does and reduce the dan­ger of jam­ming. She and Antheil got to dis­cussing all this. The idea, they decid­ed, was to defeat jam­ming efforts by send­ing syn­chro­nized radio sig­nals on var­i­ous wave­lengths to mis­siles, which could then be direct­ed to hit their mark.”

Lamarr filed this inge­nious patent for a “fre­quen­cy-hop­ping” com­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tem in 1942, but it raised no mil­i­tary inter­est until the Cuban Mis­sile Cri­sis twen­ty years lat­er, when the Navy start­ed using the tech­nol­o­gy on their ships. It evolved in the decades there­after, ulti­mate­ly becom­ing an indis­pens­able ele­ment of such tech­nolo­gies in wide­spread use today as wi-fi and Blue­tooth. Hav­ing signed her inven­tion over to the mil­i­tary, Lamarr nev­er made a dime from it her­self, but in 1996, four years before she died, she did receive the Elec­tron­ic Future Foun­da­tion’s Pio­neer Award. “It’s about time,” she said when she heard the news.

More recent­ly, his­to­ri­an Richard Rhodes told the sto­ry of Lamar­r’s invent­ing life in full with the book Hedy’s Fol­ly: The Life and Break­through Inven­tions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beau­ti­ful Woman in the World. “Hedy real­ized that what she came up with was impor­tant but I don’t think she knew how impor­tant it was going to be,” said her son Antho­ny Loder. “The def­i­n­i­tion of impor­tance is the more peo­ple that it affects over the longer peri­od of time. The longer this goes on and the more peo­ple it affects the more impor­tant she will be.” Lamarr her­self, in response to praise for her con­tri­bu­tion to com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nol­o­gy received in her life­time, explained it as mere­ly the result of fol­low­ing her instincts: “Improv­ing things comes nat­u­ral­ly to me.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch The Strange Woman, the 1946 Noir Film Star­ring Hedy Lamarr

Gus­tav Machatý’s Erotikon (1929) & Ekstase (1933): Cinema’s Ear­li­est Explo­rations of Women’s Sen­su­al­i­ty

Mark Twain’s Patent­ed Inven­tions for Bra Straps and Oth­er Every­day Items

Per­cus­sion­ist Mar­lon Bran­do Patent­ed His Inven­tion for Tun­ing Con­ga Drums

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Fiction of the Science: A Meditation on How Artists & Storytellers Can Advance Technology

in Art, Creativity, Sci Fi, Technology | March 13th, 2017

In ele­men­tary school, a play­ful teacher gave us an assign­ment. Every­one was to dream up some sort of amaz­ing inven­tion, then draw both a design and an adver­tise­ment for it.

It seemed most of my class­mates were primed for a future in which sneak­ers would come equipped with ful­ly oper­a­tional, built-in wings.

I suc­cumbed to peer pres­sure and turned in an ad show­ing a laugh­ing, air­borne boy, taunt­ing an earth­bound adult by dan­gling his be-winged sneak­er-clad foot just a few inch­es out of reach.

My Fleet Foot was award­ed a good grade, but I felt no pas­sion for it. The inven­tion that tru­ly cap­tured me was the one depict­ed in my favorite illus­tra­tion from Pat­apoufs et Fil­if­ers, the fun­ny French children’s book my father had passed down, about a war between fat and thin peo­ple. The thin char­ac­ters were indus­tri­ous and high­ly dri­ven, but the fat ones knew how to live, loung­ing in feath­er beds beside wall spig­ots dis­pens­ing hot choco­late.

Those spig­ots were—then and now—a tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ment I would love to see real­ized.

Robert Wong, are you lis­ten­ing?

In the Fic­tion of Sci­ence, the short film above, Wong, a graph­ic design­er and Google Cre­ative Lab’s VP, shows how sto­ry­telling can put the spurs to those with the train­ing and know-how to ush­er these wild-sound­ing advance­ments into the real world.

Case in point, the cell phone.

Mar­tin Coop­er, an engi­neer at Motoro­la, is wide­ly regard­ed as the father of the mobile phone, but when we take a broad­er view, the cell phone actu­al­ly has two dad­dies: Coop­er and Wah Ming Chang, the artist respon­si­ble for many of Star Trek’s icon­ic props, includ­ing the phas­er, the tri­corder and the com­mu­ni­ca­tor—a “portable trans­ceiv­er device in use by Starfleet crews since the mid-22nd cen­tu­ry.”

(Not sur­pris­ing­ly, Coop­er was a huge Star Trek fan.)

Touch screens and 3D fab­ri­ca­tions born of hand ges­tures are among the many cre­ative fic­tions that have quick­ly become real­i­ty as sci­ence and art inter­min­gle on movie sets and in the lab.

If you’re inspired to take an active part in this rev­o­lu­tion, Google Cre­ative Lab is cur­rent­ly tak­ing appli­ca­tions for The Five, a one-year paid pro­gram for five lucky inno­va­tors, drawn from a pool of artists, design­ers, film­mak­ers, devel­op­ers, and oth­er tal­ent­ed, mul­ti-dex­trous mak­ers.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pixar’s 22 Rules of Sto­ry­telling

Learn Python: A Free Online Course from Google

John Berg­er (RIP) and Susan Son­tag Take Us Inside the Art of Sto­ry­telling (1983)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and the­ater mak­er whose play Zam­boni Godot is play­ing in New York City through March 18. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Are We Living Inside a Computer Simulation?: An Introduction to the Mind-Boggling “Simulation Argument”

in Computer Science, Games, Philosophy, Technology | March 10th, 2017

The idea that we are liv­ing in a vast com­put­er sim­u­la­tion as hyper-sophis­ti­cat­ed sim­u­lat­ed char­ac­ters with lim­it­ed self-aware­ness sounds like the kind of thing that issues forth from stoned phi­los­o­phy majors in late night dorm room ses­sions. And no doubt it has, thou­sands of times over, espe­cial­ly after 1999, when The Matrix debuted and turned an amal­gam of Pla­to, Descartes, Berke­ley, and oth­er meta­physi­cians into a then-cut­ting-edge sci-fi kung fu flick.

But is it a ridicu­lous idea? The obvi­ous objec­tion that first aris­es is: how could we pos­si­bly ever know? Com­put­er sim­u­lat­ed char­ac­ters, after all, have no abil­i­ty to step beyond the con­fines of the worlds designed for them by pro­gram­mers, a lim­i­ta­tion illus­trat­ed when one reach­es a dead-end in a game and finds that, while there may be the image of a for­est or a field, the game design­ers have seen no need to actu­al­ly cre­ate the envi­ron­ment. Our char­ac­ter bumps up against the game’s edge stu­pid­ly, until we tog­gle the con­trols and move it back into the pre­scribed field of play.

But (fire up your bongs), does the char­ac­ter know it’s reached a dead end? And if the uni­verse is a sim­u­la­tion, who’s run­ning the damned thing? And why? Wel­come to “the sim­u­la­tion argu­ment,” a the­o­ry endorsed by philoso­pher and futur­ol­o­gist Nick Bostrom, Tes­la and Space X founder Elon Musk, and quite a few oth­er non-dorm-dwelling thinkers. “Many peo­ple have imag­ined this sce­nario over the years,” writes Joshua Roth­man at The New York­er, “usu­al­ly while high. But recent­ly, a num­ber of philoso­phers, futur­ists, sci­ence-fic­tion writ­ers, and technologists—people who share a near-reli­gious faith in tech­no­log­i­cal progress—have come to believe that the sim­u­la­tion argu­ment is not just plau­si­ble, but inescapable.”

Giv­en their qua­si-reli­gious bent, are these tech­nol­o­gists and futur­ists sim­ply replac­ing a cre­ator-god with a cre­ator-coder to flat­ter them­selves? Judge for your­self, first­ly per­haps by lis­ten­ing to Musk explain the con­cept in brief at a Recode Con­fer­ence above. (If you find your­self com­fort­ed by his answer, you may just be a game design­er.) Then, for a more sprawl­ing, pop-cul­tur­al dive into the sim­u­la­tion argu­ment, spend an hour with The Sim­u­la­tion Hypoth­e­sis at the top of the post, a doc­u­men­tary that—depending on the laws of your cur­rent place of residence—may or may not be enhanced by an edi­ble.

We might also ref­er­ence Bostrom’s 2003 arti­cle—or watch him describe his posi­tion in the video below. Bostrom spec­u­lates that we might be liv­ing in an “ances­tor sim­u­la­tion” run by an incred­i­bly advanced civ­i­liza­tion thou­sands of years in our future. Like Musk, writes Roth­man, he con­cludes that “we are far more like­ly to be liv­ing inside a sim­u­la­tion right now than to be liv­ing out­side of one.” The pos­si­bil­i­ty rais­es all sorts of dis­turb­ing ques­tions about the real­i­ty of choice, the moral mean­ing of our actions, and the nature of human iden­ti­ty. These are ques­tions philoso­phers (and Philip K. Dick) have always asked, but until recent­ly, they had lit­tle recourse to inde­pen­dent con­fir­ma­tion of their hypothe­ses. Now, as you’ll dis­cov­er in The Sim­u­la­tion Hypoth­e­sis, physi­cists have begun to dis­cov­er that “our uni­verse isn’t an objec­tive real­i­ty.”

It is indeed per­fect­ly plau­si­ble, giv­en the expo­nen­tial speed with which tech­nol­o­gy advances, that we will be able to run sim­u­la­tions with the same lev­el of sophis­ti­ca­tion as our real­i­ty in a mat­ter of a few gen­er­a­tions or less… pro­vid­ed we don’t destroy our­selves first or com­plete­ly lose inter­est. Which answers the ques­tion of who might be run­ning the pro­gram. As with the high­er beings in Inter­stel­lar who reach back to give the dying human species a hand, “there is,” writes Roth­man, “no sanc­ti­ty or holi­ness in the sim­u­la­tion argu­ment. The peo­ple out­side the sim­u­la­tion aren’t gods,” or even aliens, “they’re us.” Or some suf­fi­cient­ly evolved ver­sion, that is, whose tech­no­log­i­cal achieve­ments would like­ly seem to us like mag­ic.

The Sim­u­la­tion Hypoth­e­sis will be added to our list of Free Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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Kurt Vonnegut Gives a Sermon on the Foolishness of Nuclear Arms: It’s Timely Again (Cathedral of St. John the Divine, 1982)

in History, Politics, Technology, Theatre | February 27th, 2017

Image by Daniele Prati, via Flickr Com­mons

Many writ­ers recoil at the notion of dis­cussing where they get their ideas, but Kurt Von­negut spoke on the sub­ject will­ing­ly. “I get my ideas from dreams,” he announced ear­ly in one speech, adding, “the wildest dream I have had so far is about The New York­er mag­a­zine.” In this dream, “the mag­a­zine has pub­lished a three-part essay by Jonathan Schell which proves that life on Earth is about to end. I am sup­posed to go to the largest Goth­ic cathe­dral in the world, where all the peo­ple are wait­ing, and say some­thing won­der­ful — right before a hydro­gen bomb is dropped on the Empire State Build­ing.”

It stands to rea­son that a such a vivid, fright­en­ing, and some­how fun­ny sce­nario would unfold in the uncon­scious mind of a man who wrote such vivid, fright­en­ing, and some­how fun­ny nov­els. (Von­negut’s own inter­pre­ta­tion? “I con­sid­er myself an impor­tant writer, and I think The New York­er should be ashamed that it has nev­er pub­lished me.”) As it hap­pens, he did deliv­er these words in a cathe­dral, name­ly New York City’s Cathe­dral of St. John the Divine in the spring of 1982.

This was just months after Schel­l’s three-part essay “The Fate of the Earth” (all three parts of it still avail­able online) real­ly ran in The New York­er, and Cold War fears about the prob­a­bil­i­ty of a hydro­gen bomb real­ly drop­ping on Amer­i­ca ran high. Von­negut’s speech was one of a series of Sun­day ser­mons the Cathe­dral had lined up on the sub­ject of nuclear dis­ar­ma­ment, assem­bling the rest of the ros­ter from mil­i­tary, sci­en­tif­ic, and activist fields. The author of Cat’s Cra­dle, Slaugh­ter­house-Five, and Break­fast of Cham­pi­ons—fresh off a trip to the Gala­pa­gos Islands with the St. John the Divine’s Bish­op Paul Moore—presumably rep­re­sent­ed the realm of let­ters.

“At the time, NYPR Archives Direc­tor Andy Lanset cov­ered the Von­negut ser­mon as a vol­un­teer for the WNYC News Depart­ment,” wrote WNY­C’s William Rod­ney Allen in 2014 on the redis­cov­ery and post­ing of Lanset’s record­ing. (The same pub­lic radio sta­tion, inci­den­tal­ly, would fif­teen or so years lat­er com­mis­sion Von­negut for a series of reports from the after­life.) Now we can not only read but also hear Von­negut, in his own voice, try­ing to imag­ine aloud a series of “fates worse than death.” Why? Not sim­ply to indulge his famous sense of gal­lows humor, but in order to put the nuclear threat, and the anx­i­eties it gen­er­at­ed, into the prop­er con­text.

“I am sure you are sick and tired of hear­ing how all liv­ing things siz­zle and pop inside a radioac­tive fire­ball,” Von­negut says, going on to assure his audi­ence that “sci­en­tists, for all their cre­ativ­i­ty, will nev­er dis­cov­er a method for mak­ing peo­ple dead­er than dead. So if some of you are wor­ried about being hydro­gen-bombed, you are mere­ly fear­ing death. There is noth­ing new in that. If there weren’t any hydro­gen bombs, death would still be after you.”

In any event, despite hav­ing shuf­fled through sev­er­al can­di­dates (“Life with­out petro­le­um?”), Von­negut can come up with no fate believ­ably worse than death besides cru­ci­fix­ion. But giv­en that non-cru­ci­fied human beings near­ly always and every­where pre­fer life to death, per­haps “we might pray to be res­cued from our inven­tive­ness” which gave us the abil­i­ty to destroy all life on Earth. But “the inven­tive­ness which we so regret now may also be giv­ing us, along with the rock­ets and war­heads, the means to achieve what has hith­er­to been an impos­si­bil­i­ty, the uni­ty of mankind.”

Von­negut sees this promise main­ly in tele­vi­sion, whose ter­ri­bly real­is­tic sounds and images ensure that “the peo­ple of every indus­tri­al­ized nation are nau­se­at­ed by war by the time they are ten years old.” A vet­er­an of the Sec­ond World War, he him­self remem­bers a very dif­fer­ent time, back when “it used to be nec­es­sary for a young sol­dier to get into fight­ing before he became dis­il­lu­sioned about war,” back when “it was unusu­al for an Amer­i­can, or a per­son of any nation­al­i­ty, for that mat­ter, to know much about for­eign­ers.”

Even before the 1980s, “thanks to mod­ern com­mu­ni­ca­tions, we have seen sights and heard sounds from vir­tu­al­ly every square mile of the land mass on this plan­et,” and so “know for cer­tain that there are no poten­tial human ene­mies any­where who are any­thing but human beings almost exact­ly like our­selves. They need food. How amaz­ing. They love their chil­dren. How amaz­ing. They obey their lead­ers. How amaz­ing. They think like their neigh­bors. How amaz­ing.”

Mod­ern com­mu­ni­ca­tions have, of course, come aston­ish­ing­ly far in the 35 years since Von­negut’s Sun­day ser­mon, but our fears about nuclear anni­hi­la­tion have had a way of resur­fac­ing. In recent months, the Amer­i­can peo­ple have even heard talk of a rein­vig­o­rat­ed nuclear arms race from their new pres­i­dent, a man whose rise detrac­tors part­ly blame on mod­ern com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nol­o­gy — not a lack of it, but an excess.

“The glob­al vil­lage that was once the inter­net has been replaced by dig­i­tal islands of iso­la­tion that are drift­ing fur­ther apart each day,” writes Mostafa M. El-Bermawy in a Wired piece on the threat social-media “fil­ter bub­bles” pose to democ­ra­cy. “We need to remind our­selves that there are humans on the oth­er side of the screen who want to be heard and can think and feel like us while at the same time reach­ing dif­fer­ent con­clu­sions.” Recent devel­op­ments would prob­a­bly dis­ap­point Von­negut (not that they would sur­prise him), but he’d sure­ly get a kick, as he always did, out of the irony of it all.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kurt Von­negut: Where Do I Get My Ideas From? My Dis­gust with Civ­i­liza­tion

In 1988, Kurt Von­negut Writes a Let­ter to Peo­ple Liv­ing in 2088, Giv­ing 7 Pieces of Advice

22-Year-Old P.O.W. Kurt Von­negut Writes Home from World War II: “I’ll Be Damned If It Was Worth It”

Hear Kurt Von­negut Vis­it the After­life & Inter­view Dead His­tor­i­cal Fig­ures: Isaac New­ton, Adolf Hitler, Eugene Debs & More (Audio, 1998)

Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch Reads Kurt Vonnegut’s Incensed Let­ter to the High School That Burned Slaugh­ter­house-Five

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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