Pilgrim, Breakout!

In a portrait of the “meaning crisis” by way of exegesis of the zombie film genre, John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro, and Filip Miscevic relate the notion of Christian apocalypse to that of the film genre’s zombie apocalypse.

While it is crucial for us to have a grasp on the world, it is also crucial for the world to escape that grasp so that our mapping of reality can be recast and recaptured. The feeling that there is more to reality than what we know of it strengthens its integrity, and its independence from our subjectivity makes it more trustworthy. While it is necessary, as discussed above, to feel that the world is consistently intelligible, it is also necessary to have our sense of the world pulled periodically from underneath us. Insight emerges from the wreckage of this experience. It allows our perspective to reframe itself around a fuller appreciation of reality, like stepping out from behind a camera, or losing your footing only to regain it with more traction.

The traditional apocalypse is the religious microcosm of this perspectival shifting, but the zombie apocalypse bankrupts it. The world of the zombie decays but there is no revelation to redeem the fall. When the frame around reality is shattered, it is left asunder and never reformed… There is no cosmic insight that pulls back the veil on the working of reality.

First, to anticipate my own thesis, let’s notice the metaphor of a “frame,” suggesting media content. The invocation of a camera’s viewfinder hammers home the point. The consistent usage of the term “perspective,” as well, conforms with the 16^th-century widespread adoption of said technique of visual representation in the West following the invention of the Gutenberg press. So long as one’s theory-of-mind depends on supposing the cycle of fracturing and healing framings of the world, consideration of what constitutes the horizon, or the vanishing point of your “perspective” upon material reality seems all-important. Insight derives from the pushing forward through the vanishing point (the title of McLuhan’s collaboration with Harley Parker), like the cowboy riding off into the sunset for the duration of a film’s closing-credits crawl, toward an unknown and unknowable new frontier. “Breakdown as breakthrough,” as McLuhan coined it.

He gave very specific parameters and directions about where one ought to be riding, or breaking through, in katabasis and anabasis so as to continue to find insight—namely through the superficial layers of illusory media content down to their constitutive material forms as historical artifacts backwards through history to their invention. Admittedly this is easier said than done; things get pretty technical beneath the appearances of our environment of ubiquitous black-boxes, once hacked in to. But the plausible reasons I’ve managed to gather for the eschewal of this direction of insight is the subject of this writing.

Yes, modern technology has remained highly specialist and technical. But at least technical meaning is still meaning. In the meaning crisis symbolized by the zombie apocalypse, there is no there there to break through to at all.

More traditionally, this movement back and forth has been represented as the descent into, and return from, the underworld—katabasis and anabasis (think cathode and anode in electrical engineering). The relatively recent conversion of the totality of contemporary literary studies into the paradigms of “archetype” and “structure” leads to the unanimous conceptualization of this “journey” within so-called mythic terms of anthropological research.

Fortunately McLuhan received his English doctorate before the total transition of method in literary studies with methods of classifying stock narrative forms. He was more easily to recognize the, in our modern term, cognitive nature of katabasis and anabasis as applied in the development of an artists mode of perception. The appreciation of the means of acquiring and honing perception, essential for artist and critic alike, precedes all study of content. The relation of the mode of perception developed and employed by an artist within their creations is a direct reflection of, as we might say today, the sensory relation of their agency to their arena as embodied beings. The ego-centric foisting of a narrative or journey onto art and artists, with concomitant evaluations of ideology and biases or derivations of stock cliché and archetypal genre forms was, before roughly the 1960s, a secondary consideration in literary and art studies.

As I discussed in my recent presentation to the Free Software Foundation, the frames of the world are perhaps more aptly discussed, as material and cultural phenomena, as envelopes of artificial discontinuity. The computer stack presents the most obvious example—pre-compiled binaries sold as commodity software products create a nearly-impenetrable barrier, or envelope, between the user at the “top” of the computer stack and the material working of the physical parts at the bottom. A more commonly understood example might be the complete removal of all means of home-repair for devices. Affordances such as accessible screws, removable batteries, and available parts to order, envelop the product’s ostensible “owner” away from actually “pwning” or fixing their own device. The Free Software Foundations latest forays, alongside other organizations, into lobbying for Right To Repair legislation present real solutions to such artificial envelopment of human perception and relation to our worlds.

But what about when these envelopes are more than merely barriers of discontinuity—what about when they are worlds of their own?

The Ankou Struck Blind

This breaking of the world is termed in Vervaeke, Mastropeitro and Miscevic’s essay a domicide. We should first look at just what the term “world” means in this context, before considering the destruction of its coherency and the constructivist term “microworld,” as it evolved out of Seymour Papert’s application of Jean Piaget to computer programming and mathematical pedagogy.

The relationship between the zombie and the apocalypse is the obverse relation of the dynamical system that exists between an individual and the world she inhabits. This dynamical system is what the cultural theologian Brian Walsh, following anthropologist Clifford Geertz, calls a worldview. A worldview is two things simultaneously: (1) a model of the world and (2) a model for acting in that world. It turns the individual into an agent who acts, and it turns the world into an arena in which those actions make sense… Fit together, the agent and arena mutually make sense of one another, and ratify each other’s existence and intelligibility…

The worldview is the cultural analogue of an ecology. The attunement between agent and arena mirrors the Darwinian fittedness between an organism and its ecological niche. A fluid worldview is akin to a healthy and balanced ecology. Just as there is the possibility for an ecological crisis, there is also a possibility for a worldview crisis. The zombie apocalypse represents such a crisis.

The paper goes on to illustrate the nature of domicide, literally death of the home,—a term introduced by J. Douglas Porteous and Sandra E. Smith in 2001. Let us turn to P. Wyndham Lewis’ 1924 book The Art of Being Ruled for a slightly different rendering of the situation, still mirroring the ones given in the paper.

People ask nothing better than to be types—occupational types, social types, functional types of any sort. If you force them not to be, they are miserable, just as the savage grew miserable when the white man came and prevented him from living a life devoted to the forms and rituals he had made. And if so forced (by some interfering philanthropist or unintelligent reformer) to abandon some cliché, all men, whether white, yellow, or black, take the first opportunity to get their cliché back, or to find another. For in the mass people wish to be automata: they wish to be conventional: they hate you teaching them or forcing them into ‘freedom’: they wish to be obedient, hard-working machines, as near as possible—as near dead (feelingless and thoughtless) as they can get, without actually dying (167-168).

Here we see the meaning-crisis as it was formulated as an accident of the industrial revolution: not the zombie but the robot. Not apocalyptic, but rather purgatorial or in stasis and disposable. The domicide here, Lewis explained in his 1926 book The Art of Being Ruled, via analysis of Henri Bergson, Bertrand Russel, the Bishop Berkely, Arnold Spengler, James Joyce, and the entire Romantic artistic movement as it survives then, and today, within the world of commercial advertisements. It is the destruction of material space in exchange for the flux and flow of moments of time.

The disintegration of the world-picture of ‘common-sense’ effected by the introduction of private and subjective time-systems, by the breaking up of the composite space of the assembled senses into an independent space of touch, a space of sight, a visceral space, and so forth: the conversion of ‘the thing’ into a series of discrete apparitions—all this comprehensive and meticulous attack upon the very basis of ‘common-sense’ (the term used in philosophy for the ordered picture of the classical world, and equally the instinctive picture we inherit from untold generations of man) is as a spectacle impressive at first, no doubt, but it does not seem to bear the mark of a truth-telling or veridical passion, so much as a romantic and fanatical impulse of some description…

The ‘conception of matter’ (that is the non-organic theory of a constant dead environment for the processes of organic life) gives in all important respects identical results to those of a ‘revolutionary modern physics.’ From that point of view the whole argument is much ado about nothing. Where the great change occurs, or where it is sought to make it occur, is in our heads, only. It is our attitude to the external world that it is proposed to modify, not the external world itself, of ‘materialist’ practice, for that is impossible. It is art or metaphysics that is in question, rather than fact or natural science. In the external world itself there is no change.

The external world has been for several centuries of the modern era ordered and investigated upon the basis of the ‘material’ conception: it is upon calculations based upon that conception that we have arrived at all our verifiable knowledge of the external world. Far from blaming the men engaged in that work for not being metaphysicians, there is every reason to be thankful that they were not.

Insofar as the twentieth and twenty-first century have made up a period of creating machines which create machines, and thus the movement toward indirect creation within the material world and complimentary loss of human comprehension of how our machines work, Lewis’ reasons for thankfulness ought to be considered heavily. Most people who use computers every day do know know how they work. Every day their sense lie to them about the material make-up of their physical environment, by design. The objects they employ are ephemeral and closed, programmed via careful product testing and chemical composition to fall apart the day after the warranty expires.

What justification is there for the persuit of metaphysics when the mere nature of the mere physic is eroding every day, with the death of every expert in older computing and technology? Every specialism reports loss of knowledge through retirement and death, and the need to reverse-engineer and re-invent what was once common industry knowledge. Philosophical speculations made by people with only abstract low-level knowledge about chemstry or geology—often knowledge arrived at via computer simulation—but who are enveloped away from that world by their media, are worse than useless. Such speculation is counter-productive, because the magical thinking of the fictional worlds of high-level computer interfaces, film stories, etc. are unbounded imaginative spaces by their very nature! Media content does not die—it can be endlessly translated across forms. But mechanical devices can and do, and they form the buried bedrock atop which the new forms are built. To touch the world is to traverse those forms backward in time through their anonymous history. We will futher chase this line in the following section on Microworlds, but first let us consider deeper the relation between the zombie of today, and the robot of a century ago.

Lewis—and McLuhan when McLuhan was referencing the mechanical age preceding the electronic discarnate age—saw the environment as always at least recapturing the metamorphosing individual within the programmed, mechanical structures of robotics. Today people discuss and invoke the book Nineteen-Eighty-Four by George Orwell, and sport t-shirts and ball-caps reading “Make Orwell Fiction Again” and “Nineteen Eighty Four was not an Instruction Manual.” Well the books of Lewis predated and inspired Orwell, and as its very title makes clear, The Art of Being Ruled explicitly was an instruction manual. The lack of attention directed toward Lewis within these discussions has yet to be explained to me—the Nazi Heidegger is admitted into the fold before Lewis!

It seems to me that the symbol of the Zombie employed to describe the meaning crisis ought to be considered as a further development of the robot as the symbol of modernism beginning with the dawn of managed corporations and the “rationalization” movements of industry. The oft employed term was “cradle to grave” social engineering—perhaps the transition from robot to zombie results from the optimizations toward the cradle (c.f. Lewis’ 1930 book Doom of Youth) which have no useful programming to provide those who have crossed over to the the grave-half in their early-mid 30s. These areas of exploration of course comprise much of the bedrock of McLuhan’s media ecology.

The Turtle All The Way Down

I’ve noticed that problems of infinite regress and existential recursion only seem to occur to people who reify media content with more substance than they are worth. It seems an artefact of that terrible movement of semiotics and structuralism into the humanities, concomitant with cybernetics and information theory. In all such modes of though, computers and minds alike share a certain substance as content. Sometimes called propositions, or concepts, or signs or symbols or signifiers. Computers themselves, as the physical objects understood by electrical engineers are elided and buried in perception by consideration of their ability to mechanically process formal logic and mathematical models.

The term microworld was first formally defined by Seymour Papert at MIT in 1980 in his book Mindstorms, which lays out his pedagogical approach to computer programming and math via a programmable, electronic gadget called a turtle. By being relatable to children as a physical, embodied object, children can learn to think of themselves in space through programming it as a transitional object. Having studied under Piaget, Papert was quite consciously and deliberately fashioning something fun to play with which would, through increasing mastery, facilitate abstraction of general mathematical principles about the material world at large.

Having just seen Papert’s Turtle at the MIT Museum in Boston, I couldn’t help but think about how the clear plastic dome revealed the inner-workings of the machine—a strong symbol of transparancy which, to me, stands in stark opposition to the black-boxing of seemingly-magical tech.

The LOGO programming environment, which is the IDE with-which students program the turtle, form the “microworld” for mastery. The prefix micro-, however, somewhat obscures the fact that computer models have comprised, cybernetically, worlds (or arenas) within which people develop mastery for decades prior. And if we consider formal systems such as courts of law or markets, then logical systems have entrained people into symbiosis with systems for centuries before that (see again my talk at LibrePlanet 2023, the Free Software Foundations conference).

In Histories of Computing, Sean Mahoney writes

As Herbert Simon later pointed out, operations research was both old and new, with roots going back to Charles Babbage and Frederick W. Taylor. Its novelty lay precisely in its claim to provide “mathematical models” of business operations as a basis for rational decision making (pg 30).

and a little later, he writes

Computers also fit into the agenda of industrial engineering in the area of automation and control of production flow, which was given its twentieth-century shape by Henry Ford but which can arguably be traced back to Matthew Boulton and James Watt. Indeed, as just noted, it is here, rather than to the Analytical Engine, that one should be looking to place Charles Babbage in the history of computing (pg 62).

The application of “operations research” to the post-war economy created the modern business consultant business model. The OG OR teams in the ‘40s and ‘50s, however, were trained in the theaters of war, shaping the destiny of nations. The books of Stafford Beer, colleague and co-collaborator with all the big names of early cybernetics and cognitive science are illustrative of this. My point is that cybernetic models aim to be something like mirror-reflections of reality, or the dynamical, x-ray vision equivalent to an existing system as chemical photograph is an automatically delineated impression of light striking a material scene.

Somewhere along the line, this history stopped being included in the curriculum, or the widely-known story of our contemporary world. The word simulation overtook cybernetic model. Cyberspace was more a genre of literary fiction or an aesthetic for raves than a formal description of the imaginary space “inside” of a computer as represented by fictional high-level interfaces.

Seymour Papert took the high-level interface of the computer screen, and he directed it downward into a mechanical turtle which moved about in space. The actual underlying computer itself may have been elided, but at the very least he completed something of a computer stack, top to bottom, giving children a way into, down through, and out of the computer interface. The mastery of this stack, leading to complex robotic operations, created a microworld which facilitated transition, by abstraction, into understand a great deal of our physical world. In other words, his microworld was not a bottomless, infinite pit of infinite imagination.

Video Games in the Classroom

The term microworld became central to the constructivist field of pedagogy which arose following Papert’s coining of the term. Unfortunately, the up-scaling of the concept into a practical classroom practice destroyed the full-stack nature of Papert’s design. Of course, the educators rolling out constructivism and elaborating it in its many dedicated forums and publications appreciated the Piagetian origins. Consider this 1995 excerpt, which so-closely mirrors Vervaeke’s “Four Ps of knowing, ” the propositional, procedural, perspectival, and participatory.

If you think of KNOWEDGE as… Then you may tend to think of INSTRUCTION as…
– a quantity or packet of content waiting to be transmitted… a product to be delivered by a vehicle.
– a cognitive state as reflected in a person’s schemas and procedural skills…. set of instructional strategies aimed at changing an individual’s schemas.
– a person’s meanings constructed by interaction with one’s environment… a learner drawing on tools and resources within a rich environment.
– enculteration or adoption of a group’s ways of seeing and acting… participation in a community’s everyday activities.

The goal of constructivism was to make the classroom itself an embodied “microworld” for free-form education. The material elements of the carefully-curated classroom-as-microworld included

• Information banks. Information banks are sources or repositories of information. Examples would include textbooks, teachers, encyclopedias, videotapes, videodiscs, etc.

• Symbol pads. These are surfaces for the construction and manipulation of symbols and language. Examples include student notebooks, index cards, word processors, drawing programs, and database programs.

• Phenomenaria. Perkins defines phenomenaria as “areas” for presenting, observing, and manipulating phenomena (aquariums, SimCity, physics microworlds, etc.) Of course, SimCity is a simulation of real-world cities, and not the thing itself. The key idea is that aspects of the world are brought and made available to student inspection and exploration. To my understanding, phenomenaria are roughly parallel to instructional simulations. I like Perkins’s term because it emphasizes the instructional nature of the simulation (contrasted to non-instructional simulations intended for scientific or technical purposes).

• Construction kits. These are similar to phenomenaria, except they are less tied to natural phenomena. Construction kits are packaged collections of content components for assembly and manipulation. They may have no clear counterpart in the “real” world. Examples include Legos, learning logs, math-manipulation software such as the Geometric Supposer, or authoring tools such as HyperStudio.

• Task managers. In any learning environment, a function of control and supervision exists. Task managers are those elements of the environment that set tasks, provide guidance, feedback, and changes in direction. Task management is often assumed by the teacher, but in constructivist environments, students themselves assume much of this role. A variety of tools and documents support teachers and students in the management of tasks, including assignments within consultations, advisement sessions, strategic planning tools, textbooks, grading programs, assessment devices, devices for conveying rules and expectations, and computer-based instruction programs. Realistically, students and teachers need to negotiate the details of task management, with students assuming greater levels of independence wherever possible. In such cases, the teacher becomes a coach, advisor, and mentor to support student activities.

As we can see, the grounds of these “microworlds” would be the teachers lesson plan or school curriculum—something only the teacher knew. The actual material grounds—the computers and the factories producing tinker toys and the like, were not the domain to be entered into. They enveloped, artificially, the world which was supposed-to-be directed toward whatever the lesson was today. McLuhan’s focus on the origins of detective fiction in Edgar Allan Poe, and his suggestion of “the sleuth” are indicative here: a micro-world classroom is like a tampered crime-scene. The goal of the learner is to uncover whatever is behind, or beneath superficial appearances to get to the bottom. Piaget’s turtle exemplified such a bottom, such an escape back into the wider world—his “microworld” had an exit. Few teachers at scale can manage to so-totally control a classroom so-as to prevent students from getting underneath what was intended to be a barrier, or neutral envelope constraining the microworld.

No master criminal can rig a crime scene to evade the perspicuous perception of Sherlock Holmes, to lead him to their own predevised conclusions. Many video-game hacks involve “clipping” through walls and corners so-as to shortcut the spaces of a level. There is a perpetual arms-race between game developers and those cheaters who “hack” beneath the game, so as to rig it in their favour.

In my own personal experience, the educational value of computers in the classroom is for learning how to get into, and gain control over the school computer network. To get unlimited free printing by logging directly into the laser-printers web-interface and uploading PostScript files. To find and compile, from source, proof-of-concept software submitted in whitehat hack disclosure documents to decrypt the hashed password on remote desktop viewing software and take over whole labs of computers. To guess default passwords and log in as teachers. To find the local shares on computers which are not erased nightly, and thus can be used to permanently store files. To play ridiculous pranks on people. To steal the Windows registey keys for expensive software that I can then install at home without cost. That’s what I was learning to do in school. That’s what mastery of a microworld looks like—not whatever environment might be designed by most educators, given their resources. As embodied agents, we play and grow in relation to the actual arena, not the potemkin village facade of appearances contrived by anyone less than either an artistic genius at the small scale, or a very-well funded shaper of whole institutions at the large scale.

But again, as the world microworld originally suggested in its origins at the dawn of microcomputing, what about computer simulations and video games? And, today, what about computer networking-facilitated mass multi-media? First of all, the language we use today for these discussions is so horribly inadequate so-as to have driven me into severe, lasting bouts of depression—writings such as these serve to continue to provide meaning to my own experience witnessing society’s poverty of appreciation for what our material world is made of. But we must start there to get to the bottom of what I’m trying to get at.

Today we have reinvented the language yet again with the commercial media notions of “Augmented Reality Games” and whatnot, deriving from the newer generations of media scholarship coming out of MIT. The superhero genre’s mentioned in the zombie paper are a single instance of these “convergent media.” McLuhan, of course, had been deeply analyzing the super hero cults in the ’40s and ’50s, even featuring a fresh-faced young Stan Lee in his 1951 book Mechanical Bride. Without a through-line backward as I have attempted to sketch here, such history floats as a fragment in an ungrounded, post-modern limbo. There is no there there to break-through to. This is the cause of the meaning crisis—the failure to keep careful track of traditions of though, preserving continuity across the artificial discontinuities and envelopes. We need the sleuth to detect, by there carefully honed senses, the consiliance to destroy artificial envelopes of discontinuity in-our artificial, secular, engineered world of material while paying deference and respect to those natural ones which are the purview of the metaphysician.

My own work toward these ends began nine years ago, three years before I discovered McLuhan, with my rejection of the microworld theory as applied to video game criticism.

Video Games as the Classroom

A Play of Bodies: How We Percieve Videogames is a sublimely written, highly informative, wonderfully comprehensive and well-documented overview of the contemporary post-human theoretical groundings of video game criticism. I contend, as a witness, that it is the thorough rejection of the metaphysics underlying video game criticism, as an institutionalized discipline, which created the low-level rift in discourse online which has unmoored and discredited the old legacy-media world of television discourse and mainstream social-media, as well as mainstream institutions at large, to individuals today concerned about freedom of thought and speech, zombies, and “NPCs” or robots.

Brendan Keogh’s book, published in 2018, manages to squeeze the entire metaphysical pretense of video game theory into fewer than 200 pages. He builds upon the concept of videogames as microworlds, although deriving the term from a 1983 book by David Sudnow—no mention of Papert or computers pedagogy is mentioned. That’s the most curious thing about the book: the origins of video games seems to be very torturously constructed to avoid, as much as possible, entry into any other domain. Terms are reinvented and origins forged to avoid discussion of studies on Human-Computer-Interface, cybernetics, developmental psychology, or near any other relevant field. Video game history itself is, thus, something of a tightly-enveloped micro-world, in whose first page is emblazoned “In the beginning, there was Pong.” Computer keyboards are mentioned only as analogy to appreciating standard video game controller design.

Likewise, the approach to game criticism laid out by Keogh is written precisely to champion forms of analysis which oppose the predominant notion that games exist to be mastered. That they are systems to be learned. The entire constructivist impetus behind microworlds is cast as a masculine imperialist bias—only this attack is made indirectly in the curtailed microworld of video-game discourse. Video games needn’t always be complex worlds within which to develop skill and mastery in the masculine mode—they can also be passive experiences reflecting and celebrating more “feminine” experiences of lack of agency. I’ll agree to the point that video-game discourse is incomplete, and does a disservice by exclusively focusing on games as structures to master—certainly the more cinematic and aesthetic elements of games, alongside their moments of helplessness and fatedness, are central to the medium. But Keogh, following the lead of the entire field of video game discourse which broke into public focus in 2014, takes these arguments to absurd extremes.

These extremes take the form of totalitarian demands upon the gamer for a) taking the microworlds of indie video-games as the pedagogical creations they are designed to be, and b) appreciating them and respecting them wholly within the terms with which the creators intend. Furthermore, these demands are made in the terms of merger with the games as cybernetic systems, and the attenuation of proclivities to gain mastery over or detachment from the systems.

The cyborg embraces the hybridity, impurity, and ultimately partiality required for flesh to incorporate with the machine, and this embrace destabilizes the hegemonic dominance of those identifications that seek to transcend and dominate the machine (181).

This hegemony of belief that one’s own privately-purchased property, a computer which one is able to fix, program, and control, is explained to readers as an oppressive cultural construct.

Computer practices (and, by extension, discourses around video game play as a computer practice) were naturalized as the realm of the scientific and the mathematic, and thus they inherited those fields’ neoliberal and masculine values of control, mastery, and autonomy.

Video games are not, Keogh argues, subject to analysis as formal mathematical systems because of their material make-up as computer software, but rather as a social construct involving the historically male occupations of relevant fields in the middle 20^th century. It is these patriarchal sociocultural factors which explain why video gamers feel entitled to “get good” at video games, to internalize the rules and attempt “domination” of the system as an abstraction lifted from the experience. Instead, Keogh and company (to include his progenitors in the public discourse since the “death of gamers” in 2014) encourage the widespread appreciation and adoption of merging with the games and its environment, and going along for the ride as the game permits and allows it, passively and open to experience. Games unfairly derided as “walking simulators” by the hacker-class of gamers are, to the much needed new generation of cyborg-class gamers, means of sharing cultural knowledge and experience, to be valued for reasons other than the masculine virtues of “game-play” and “challenge” and “competition.”

Through A Play of Bodies as a summary book, contemporary video game criticism, which roots itself in feminist-theory and post-humanism, makes a compelling case for the efficacy of micro-worlds as self-contained arenas, within which various aspect of the self-as-agent might find training. Where criticism goes too far is in its totalitarian demand that the frames of these microworlds never be broken-out-of in any direction except those intended by the designers, such that the socio-cultural lessons intended to be taught are internalized uncritically by “players.” I have attempted to patch-in my own history of the unacknowledged traditions behind this perception of games.

The very original intention of the katabasis/anabasis cycle, or the Piagetian undermining of prior assumptions and models through embodied play, or the point of constructivist classroom pedagogy is undermined by demands that mastery and growth not take the form of actual relation to the material and embodied world. That it, instead, take the form of splicing into the virtual, simulated model or world as reality directly, and that play be replaced with textual appreciation and interpretation of phenomenology passively experienced.

There is a medium already which does what video game critics want, which is to encourage passive, vicarious identification with events beyond one’s ability to direct or control: it’s called cinema.

The Meaning Crisis as it Stands Today

The reason zombies resonate with many is something I had to do a great deal of thinking and reading and research in order to uncover for myself, because I don’t care for or appreciate the zombie genre at all, whatsoever. Nor have I ever cared much about hand-wringing over the sci-fi tropes of replicants or cylons or A.I.s as “alive.” At risk of sounding aloof, these questions are juvenile. That’s just how my early-childhood development shaped my predisposition, I guess.

On that note, I am immensely worried that everyone else seem so caught up in, and bowled over by the metaphysical import of these themes. If I were to go summarize my writings and works of the past nine years into a book with a theme focusing on a central symbol, it wouldn’t be the zombie. It’d be the computer as anything other than a mechanical, physical objects which exists wholly on the same material plane of actual reality as we do as embodied creatures. Everyone sees the computer as containing things other than the plastic and metals and minerals with which it is actually composed. That’s as crazy as looking at a bunch of paint splattered or brushed onto a piece of canvas and seeing a pipe, or an English countryside, or some Sicilian broad!

Jokes aside, the difference between a painting and a photograph is that a painting was mediated through a human’s sense of the world and then created by hand. A photograph, on the other hand, involves a mechanical and chemical process where the subject delineates its own form directly onto the film. Cybernetics, while working with models derived from the meticulous work of operations researchers to model the systems comprising war, industry, and finance, is moving toward the same level of automation and surveillance. The illusory content of the medium, be it the subject painted or the system being modelled/simulated, must not be naively identified with the thing itself. The map is not the territory, we’ve told ourselves time and time again. However, the means of disambiguiating the two, which is to notice that one is an imaginary non-thing existing within the configuration of a material medium—which is to say a splattering of paint, a fixation of photo-reactive chemicals, or the elaboration of layers and layers of abstractions transfixed within the inter-relations of billions of tiny transistor/capacitor circuits or flip-flops—while the other is most often a thing in our macroscopic physical universe. You know the macroscopic physical, human-scale universe within which the medium exists, but not the imaginary content of the medium. If you can’t see the medium for what it is, but you are involved every day with the content, then your arena for agency is enveloped away from reality. There is an artificial barrier keeping you, your body, and mind, blistered into a simulation through which you hope you are indirectly accessing reality.

This point is so blatantly obvious to me that I wonder every day why I need to try and explain it so much. If you don’t get that the written word is just scribbling on papyrus, or that paintings are just paint on a canvas, or that nearly our artificial world today derviecs from design within computer software, validating the post-modern concerns about how out-of-touch with the real we are, floating in groundless semiotics and endless mirror reflections in a desert of simulation, then it’s no friggin’ wonder you’re having a meaning crisis.

People seriously think it’s easier to move to the woods and begin living off the land than it is to learn computers. They think it’s easier to organize a third-party and compete with the established two-party system of the United States than it’d be to learn computers. That’d it’s be easier to found a new religion than it’d be to just learn how computers work. They’ll surrender to A.I. gods rather than just learn how computers work. Nobody understands McLuhan because nobody wants to learn what the zeitgeist, which is illusory media content, has shown them. They’d rather learn how fictional computers from made-up TV shows work than learn how computers work. They’d rather think about impossible scenarios involving robots with souls, and write books about philosophy premised on blockbuster films, than learn how computers work.

Meanwhile, the many, many people who are breaking away from the legacy media zeitgeists and the major institutions of the world—educational, governmental, bureaucratic, technical, medical, etc.—are growing radical with impatience. More importantly, each in their own individual, ideosyncratic, non-collectivist way. The major rift started, I personally observed, in 2014 when post-humanist ideology burst into the fore, declaring human agency and freedom a menace, and prescribing the decentering of selfhood out of the body, into the mediated collective.

A particularly naive passage in the paper by Vervaeke, Mastropietro and Miscevic illustrates my point.

In the west, we are realizing with divisive discomfort that our Judeo-Christian model of meaning, which occupied our teleological awareness for over a millenium, was unprepared for the post-scientific world into which it was ushered… It is as though we are struck suddenly with the realization that no one is watching us. There is no skyhook of appriasal for our performance. There is no superintendent to approve or disapprove of our actions. We have awoken to the task of being our own minders, responding to our own directive, drawing our own maps and writing our own rules.

You might compare that with the Lewis quote above, discussing how people hate freedom. But more directly—who the hell is the “we” in this sentence? We are creating A.I. gods and social credit systems and massive surveillance states which seek to model us inside and out. We are terrified of the power some humans are able to wield over others—the entire edifice of modern activism and social concern hinge on that conceit, on attempts to understand power. The God of Christianity ruled over that which was beyond human control—our problem is that we are relinquishing control, voluntarily, over that which might excerpt some agency over. We are surrendering control to those who would wield it, who are often the worst sort of people. We are rendering those people as gods, false ones. That is the fear underlying those breaking-away from the legacy-media zeitgeist and modern institutions. That is what underlays all the discourse which is derided as conspiracy theory and what-not. Ultimately, all these things rest on models, on simulations, on media in cybernetic feed-back with us, as individuals. The drive to escape these splicings of virtuality and actuality—these splicings which video game critics declared were all-important in 2014, tipping their hand as to what they think is the relation between simulation and reality, and the power of social control possible when such relation is maintained per their specifications—undergirds everything else.

One problem, among many of these splicings, is that containment within the envelopes is impossible, and so you end up with a brain blowing outward into the infinite fictional spaces of cyberspace, instead of “breaking through” down to the material ground of the medium. That’s what my 2019 paper for the Media Ecology Association was all about. I’ve been harping on this a long time, you see!

The controlled-total-environment of the behaviourist industrialist seeking to shape the perfect worker, leading to the totally-controlled simulacrum of existential nightmares, to the impossible dream of the perfect pedagogical constructivist classroom, to the video-game as “micro-world” are all the same damn thing rendered in different domains and different materialities. They are prisons—some temporary, such as school, some lifelong, such as school is for academics. To break the frame of these enclosed environments is to go down their historical and material origins, their Narrative order—back out onto the outside of their artificial walls, or envelopes. To reverse-engineer the black-boxes. To escape the content of the medium out to it’s material form. Once you’re an embodied being in material reality, then you can begin getting metaphysical. Not before.

The search for meaning in transcendent ideals is premature when the most mundane aspects of our lived reality are neglected and ignored and forgotten. What is this? What is that? Remember kindergarten, where most of the lessons were just naming things? The most complex thing in your immediate vicinity outside the natural realm of biology—the most complex human-made thing—is whatever computing device you’re reading this on. Can you enter it’s microworld, master it, and pop out the bottom, back into physical reality again? Can you go down the stack of it’s illusions to it’s ground, the same way you can do with a painting? No? Well then forget philosophy and start learning the basics. Meaning will come with time.