Streaming and Presentism

While I was reading for the other paper I am doing this semester, Time and the Moving Image, I came across the historian François Hartog and anthropologist Marc Augé who both explore the concept of “presentism”. The article, “Temporalities of Video” by Christine Ross, related this concept to issues of time and temporality in video art, but it immediately made me think of last week’s class about protocol and cloud computing. Ross outlines how Augé argues that architectural ruins allow you to experience a sense of the passage of time, and that our current society is unable to produce ruins. Our buildings and structures are made for the present, to be replaced. And Hartog argues that “the prevailing regime of historicity characteristic of our times” (Ross, 85) is presentism. Which is a turning of the present into the most important value, at the expense of a connection with the past and future.

Ross herself mentioned “information technologies” in passing, referring to their “logic of instantaneity and transparency” (85) as another form of blocking ruin-making. And I feel like this relates closely to cloud computing, where files, software, and even hardware is provided remotely, and only exactly when the user needs it. In particular one of the cloud’s methods of delivery, streaming, seems particularly redolent of “presentism”. You are not even accessing one file at a time, but receiving it byte by byte, for it to disappear again. Absolutely no ruins are left in this case, not even a single file on some forgotten external hard-drive. Since I have jumped ship on my previous essay topic, I’m hoping to explore this idea in my essay instead.

Forget the government, you should be watching out for me

Mark Andrejevic's reading was on an issue - "peer-to-peer surveillance" (212) - that I've admittedly only been really conscious of very recently. A couple of months ago the New Zealand Herald ran an article on a Brazilian "Boyfriend Tracker" app that caused a lot of controversy due to its allowance of "NSA-level spying on suspected cheaters" (thanks International Business Times). Of course everyone I know uses Facebook and Google to "spy on" others, for example a friend (who will remain nameless) recently showed me a shirtless photo of a boy she had a crush on from class, but didn't personally know. However it wasn't until every article on this app referenced the US's National Security Agency that I began thinking about this kind of surveillance alongside governmental and corporation surveillance.

 

I’ve always thought that the spy and the spyee were the important factor in deciding whether a kind of surveillance should be taken seriously (hence why I hadn’t considered googling a new friend a form of surveillance before), but the “boyfriend tracker” case reveals that the level of surveillance, what one has access to, is perhaps more important. Many of the features of this app don’t seem too troubling thanks to the fact one can already gain this kind of information about your boyfriend or girlfriend very easily, like obtaining a call history and text messages (check their phone while they’re in the bathroom, duh). But others, like turning on their phone to listen to their environment are apparently a step too far. It is factors like this which bring people to draw comparisons between individuals spying on people they know, and the government spying on civilians.

 

I’m having a hard time deciding how sinister peer-to-peer surveillance is, especially when my friend’s trophy of a photo of her shirtless crush is paired against the malevolent figure of governmental surveillance. But perhaps it needs to be considered more on a case-by-case basis, and not every private individual has the best of intentions.

Techno-Realist Science Fiction

I’ve been thinking generally about two of last week’s readings, Alexander Hall’s article on technological utopianism in culture and David Golumbia’s piece on cyberlibertarianism, and how they relate to representations of technology in contemporary science fiction film. In particular I’ve had this nagging thought that perhaps rather than easily being categorised as utopian or dystopian, as being technophobic or technopilic, contemporary science fiction films are more techno-realist (a term Luke introduced me to in last week’s class).

Traditionally, or at least following the nuclear attacks on Japan as Hall pointed out, films about technology have been overwhelmingly pessimistic. Hall’s article then argues that the general cultural mood is becoming more optimistic about technology and its future. But I feel like the overall trend of late (i.e. the last five years) is to have science fiction films that are not overtly pessimistic about technology (as is the tradition), but nor are they technophilic, with cyberlibertarian viewpoint. That is to say, they are complicated!

One film in particular that I’m considering writing about for my research assignment is Duncan Jones’ Moon (2009). Moon is very similar to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, it’s really an homage of sorts. But it is where Moon departs from the earlier film that reveals how general attitudes to the future of technology, and how humans factor in, are perhaps changing. Where in the original a human fights off a homicidal computer, in Moon *spoilers* the target of the homicidal computer is actually a cyborg. What Moon questions is not whether we, the humans, will be safe around future technology (one of the main issues that viewers took away from 2001: A Space Odyssey), but rather the ethics and morals surrounding posthumanism, from a cyborg’s point of view. Maybe Moon is part of a new breed of sci fi films, and so reflective of a new cultural attitude, which don’t naively present a perfect future, but don’t predict humanity’s doom either. It’s more techno-realist.