Are we really that scared of computers? Can’t we plug the holes in the ozone with them, if worse comes to worse? Yeah, you just smelt them and you get a nice svelte patchwork. By the way, do you know the next thing in reality television? Internal cameras. Cameras that capture the chemical reactions in your brain and translate those to visual imagery so we can see exactly what you’re thinking, dreaming, and daydreaming. Then there will be a perfect self-consciousness achieved, a self-consciousness so perfect and so paralyzing of all things except narcissism that all spontaneity will be gone except for a vanity so pure that selfies seem like early 20th century bathing suits and all those people in black and white advertisements devoid of grain or tone.
And you want to know the funny thing? We still can’t “know” ourselves. Even with all that self-awareness. Because the activity of self-awareness is somehow different from the process of insight and transcendence. Through simple self-awareness, you’re more trapped in self-consciousness than anything, especially if you continue to identify with what you see or the resultant next step from what you see. It’s like a human being thinking they can know the world through the lens of another creature and so forgetting that anything we know about what’s going on around us is in the context of human perceptual apparatus and cognition; so we remain human because we can’t remember that we’re human.
Now, would anyone watch this? No. Maybe at first. But people want magic from television, right? They want the effects of these people, or rather the images of people, on their lives to be more magical than to see and to know through seeing what in the fuck is happening…
What in the fuck is happening?
Is the future so bland or ambiguous and scary and the present so explosively captivating that we cannot distance ourselves from the sensation of its alluring and immediately gratifying touch?
There are exits.