In 1983 Donatella Baglivo filmed an interview with the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. It was an extensive interview that covered a number of subjects, and fortunately so as Tarkovsky was to die but three years later. About an hour into the piece Baglivo asks Tarkovsky what advice he had for young people, to which he responded with the following -

“I think I’d like to say only that they should learn to be alone and try to spend as much time as possible by themselves. I think one of the faults of young people today is that they try to come together around events that are noisy, almost aggressive at times. This desire to be together in order to not feel alone is an unfortunate symptom, in my opinion. Every person needs to learn from childhood how to spend time with oneself. That doesn’t mean he should be lonely, but that he shouldn’t grow bored with himself because people who grow bored in their own company seem to me in danger, from a self-esteem point of view.”

What immediately struck me upon hearing Tarkovsky’s words is how they contradicted not just the lyrics of The Beach Boys song I’d had on in the background (Don’t Worry, Baby), but also they seemed at odds with my overall instinctual grasp of the situation. After all, it’s not unfair to state that a recommendation that one spend adequate time alone in order to be comfortable with oneself is unexpected advice. What’s more interesting however is that looking around now, 40 years since Tarkovsky said these words, our culture has made it increasingly difficult to find the solitude he recommends at all. The latest advances in technology have filled even those moments when we are physically distanced from people with the constant sense that we have  a distracting amount of company. It would be no exaggeration to claim that it’s actually difficult to be by ourselves, nor do we feel like we want to, a situation that the psychologist and MIT social studies professor Sherry Turkle has suggested is more symptomatic of our loneliness than a cure for it. So as Tarkovsky suggests, perhaps despite our social pretensions we are all hiding from ourselves in plain sight.

Further exploration of this notion took me down a line of thinking which led me to quite unexpected conclusions both about what technology’s radical rewiring of our social interactions could mean for the future of our society, and the meanings of the words ‘god’ and ‘art’ to us now.

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Nine years before Tarkovsky conducted that interview, the philosopher of communication theory Marshall McLuhan posed the notion that -

“The most human thing about us is our technology.”

The statement certainly would explain the exponential spread of social-based technologies throughout our culture. These days connectivity runs like water from half of the holes in our immediate vicinity. We don’t just feel the urge to constantly update people with our state of being; we are developing an emotional dependency on the response it might glean. In fact research conducted this year by the Psychology Department at the University of Michigan suggested that -

“The more people used Facebook at one time point, the worse they felt the next; the more they used Facebook over two-weeks, the more their life satisfaction levels declined over time. Interacting with other people “directly” did not predict these negative outcomes.”

So could McLuhan in fact mean ‘mortal’, ‘imperfect’, or maybe just simply ‘revealing’ when he uses the word ‘human’?

A year or two back the comic and actress Sarah Silverman pondered aloud (on Twitter) that she felt that the existence of Twitter itself must have prevented many suicides. Joking or not, it’s something worth thinking about. On the one hand, the ability to reach out in the dark for validation when feeling very alone is something the internet has granted us in many new ways. On the other hand, like the Beach Boys’ song, contemporary culture is always reaching back to grab that hand, and might as well be mouthing the words, “if you knew how much I loved you, baby, nothing could go wrong with you.”

To quote Sherry Turkle from her 2012 TED talk Connected, but alone? -

“When I ask people “What’s wrong with having a conversation?” People say, “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with having a conversation. It takes place in real time and you can’t control what you’re going to say.” So that’s the bottom line. Texting, email, posting, all of these things let us present the self as we want to be.

Human relationships are rich and they’re messy and they’re demanding. And we clean them up with technology. And when we do, one of the things that can happen is that we sacrifice conversation for mere connection. We short-change ourselves. And over time, we seem to forget this, or we seem to stop caring.”

Given that a noticeable quantity of seemingly personal relationships are seen as part and parcel of public online engagements, it’s perhaps expected that businesses are now heartily involved in the matter and reward you as much as they can for keeping things that way. In so doing they augment our growing addiction to it. There are now very few websites, apps or social networking tools that one can use for work or pleasure that don’t enticingly suggest that you should share everything you do with your friends. This means that the line between staying in touch with friends and promoting products has also somewhat blurred in our minds, and has added further complexity to the psychology of the matter – an issue I will return to later.

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It’s easy to believe now that every passing decade represents the natural evolution of our greater understanding of the human condition. Thanks in part to the Dark Ages, it has taken us centuries to understand that different sexualities should be encouraged and that perhaps nationalism, religion, traditions, cultures, languages and money are all, whilst certainly instrumental in the growth of our civilization, in fact limiting factors in humankind’s rather precarious journey toward some kind of improbable universal harmony. One possible path to this harmony is via The Singularity that futurist Ray Kurzweil has championed -

“The Singularity is an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today—the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity.”

This is a concept which, as noted by Kurzweil in his 2005 book The Singularity is Near, could present the following conundrum-

“The Singularity will allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains … There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine.”

Like Marshall McLuhan, it’s easy to be awestruck at how technology is evolving in our hands and at the part it is playing in our self-discovery. After two decades of ideological transfusion, the Internet would appear to have become the new blood flowing through our various technological devices, and these all the more lifelike pet machines of ours are proving particularly well behaved in times of war and civic unrest. In the last few years Twitter has brought power to revolutionaries in Iran, Tunisia and Egypt, Julian Assange’s Wikileaks controversially pulled back veils on many levels of government deceit, and the 4chan forums have heralded the birth of Anonymous, an online, arguably peerless, headless political group of doubtless great influence – to name but a few instances.

Online, technology’s increased utility in times of strife and its inherent insistence that we all ‘stay in touch’ further contests Tarkovsky’s dictum. However in his defense again the Professor of Critical Theory at Toronto University, Mari Ruti, alludes to how we commonly and unfortunately mistake our projected ‘personality’ for what she calls our ‘singular self’. Not to be confused with Sigmund Freud’s Id and Ego, this is a point that bears closer scrutiny when thinking about the psychological side effects of social networking. PhD student Daniel Tutt paraphrases her forthcoming paper thusly -

“Your ‘personality’ is thus the most artificial self, constantly undergoing change and flux. It remains the primary zone by which the self-help discourse seeks to repair. What [they miss however is another] dimension to your self, the ‘singular self’.

Your singular self is the self touched by the real, what we might call your character. The singular self expresses something about your desire and its relation to your drives. The singular self is composed of the unsocialized elements of ones life. What makes life unique is our relation to this core of undeadness, which connects us to a sort of innate existential loneliness.

The singular self is the bruised self. That part of the self we are told we should keep at bay in self-help discourse, that part of the self that we mustn’t let out of its cage less we lose our power or it limits our advancement at work, etc.”

It’s amusingly coincidental that on the one hand you have Kurzweil arguing for a ‘singularity’ that is perhaps the ultimate ‘togetherness’ and on the other Ruti is arguing for a greater awareness of the ‘singular self’, which could so easily be buried by The Singularity. I say buried because if machine processors come to equal human brains and it becomes harder to differentiate between either as a result, what is stopping everything from being networked and our singular, bruised, imperfect human identities becoming a thing of the past? This soft, hidden ‘singular self’ is after all what makes us really us, rather than any fabricated personality built to help us hide within the walls of society.

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In June last year, the American blogger David Roberts delivered a TEDx talk, in which he outlined the current state of the planet Earth’s global warming situation in layman’s terms. He illustrated that, at best, we have around 150 more years left to live on this planet. Beyond that, unless the whole world changes its attitude to global warming and we make some severe changes to how we approach our daily consumer lifestyles, our grandchildren will see what some will describe as our judgement day. Not to mention our great grandchildren who, if not dead, will endure summer months consisting of hiding from a Sun that blisters their skin like it would vampires.

This horrifying thought brought my mind back to The Singularity, which Kurzweil’s projected timeline predicts will be upon us just 30 years from now. One thing we know for sure is that this prophesied acceleration of technology will grant us solutions we can’t remotely conceive of at present. However placing one’s hopes in such an unpredictable and potentially disruptive moment seems ludicrous and so we should proceed under the assumption that there will be no deus ex machina to save us. The great irony is that despite everything discussed earlier about the power of our social networks, the fact that we’ve gotten to this fateful moment in history proves that the likelihood of everyone coming to a consensus on the problem swiftly enough to change anything is implausible and likely impossible. Even though we talk to each other every day through one device or another, the fateful paradox is that we are rarely talking about things that could prevent a vast array of inevitable future disasters. Yes, we know from the examples above in Iran and Egypt that we will stop and react when people are dying, but the prevention of such things in the future appears to be impossible due to the inevitability of human greed, and an unfortunate default level of ignorance.

Perhaps this is because the term social-networking is actually a misnomer, when the reality is that it’s self-destruction disguised as self-promotion. The critical word there being ‘self.’ As Sherry Turkle put it, “we slip into thinking that always being connected is going to make us feel less alone. But we’re at risk, because actually it’s the opposite that’s true. If we’re not able to be alone, we’re going to be more lonely.”

We have created a tool to share and achieve common goals and it is turning us inward and preventing us from taking the time to see the bigger picture.

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In April of this year the American pop-star Justin Bieber visited holocaust victim Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam and left a message in the guest-book. The message read -

“Truly inspiring to be able to come here. Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber.”

As some well know, Beliebers are what Justin Bieber’s devout fans call themselves. The implication was that as much as a kid in his position could possibly relate to Ms. Frank’s strength, stamina and eventual plight in the face of unthinkably grim adversity, Bieber hoped that had they been acquainted that she might be an obsessive fan of his. Not a friend. Not even a ‘friend’ in the Facebook sense of the word. Just a fan. Someone who ‘likes’ him. Another screaming teenager who buys his records and subsidizes his further detachment from from reality. For even at 19 years old, Justin is aware that the best drugs just take you away from it all as painlessly as possible.

This statement is the perfect metaphor for the vicarious, disproportionately entitled world we live in today. Try as some might, you cannot entirely blame Justin Bieber for his behaviour. Those who have elevated him to the position he’s in by buying his products, those who talk about him in the press just to sell their product, and those who care to even bring his name up at a party: we’re all to blame. Just as we were all to blame for what happened to Michael Jackson. To look in awe at the terrible circumstances these idols of ours get themselves into is to look into a mirror. Justin Bieber was discovered on YouTube because enough of us ‘liked’ his videos more than anyone else’s.

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Whether consciously or not, there are some who are fighting this problem. There are some who are using these social environments that we’re all using to hide from reality, in order to achieve quite the opposite result.

On November 8th of last year, the English technologist and artist James Bridle created a new kind of account on the popular mobile application Instagram. Titling the account Dronestagram, he began to post photographs of locations on Google Maps that have recently been hit by military drone strikes. Below each photograph he posts any public data he can find about the strike in terms of location and the number and nature of the casualties. He continues to post these to this day whenever a new strike is made public.

Dronestagram’s bite-size encapsulations of secretive, multinational government warmongering pull people out of a world of cats, meals, sunsets and pretty girls and deliver a dose of global reality not even seen on the front pages of their newspapers. Furthermore it delivers an experience that perversely echoes that of the operators of these drones. Each one boxed away in Creech Air Force Base, north of Las Vegas in Nevada. Each one sitting in front of what amounts to little more than a shitty looking video game. Each one perhaps aware that there’s a bad ‘one armed bandit’ joke in there somewhere.

It makes you wonder at what point during our path towards The Singularity we will lose touch with Ruti’s singular self, and in the end who will be controlling whom. If the machines are simply an extension of us as McLuhan suggests, is The Singularity our only possible destiny? Could Tyler Durden from Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club be more right than he knew, when he stated that, “self-improvement is masturbation?”

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On Wednesday June 12th of this year, the American author David Guterson delivered a commencement speech to the graduates of Roosevelt High School in Seattle that upset a great deal of the students and parents in attendance. At different points they can be heard jeering and at one point a girl even lets out a fearful shriek. In the 20 or so minutes Guterson allows himself to deliver his message he cuts through the many levels of denial and deceit we face when finishing our schooling. He begs us to more deeply consider the choices we might make when trying to live a healthy and peaceful existence out there in the really real world. Here’s an excerpt -

“Our very sophisticated modern economy [...] knows that you are insecure about your appearance and in advertising it does everything it can to make you feel even worse about it, because if you feel worse about it, you will buy expensive clothing or pay a doctor to change your face. So in our society, not only do you have to be unhappy on that existential level that is just part and parcel of being human, you also have to be unhappy in ways designed for you by others [...] Add to this your natural anxiety about the future—your distress about what it means that we are developing smart drones and melting the polar ice cap—and happiness begins to feel, for a lot of us, impossible. So impossible that the rate of mental illness in America, of depression in particular, is higher than it has ever been. The world might seem full of possibility, and it is that way, but it is also a place where you can very quickly find yourself among the living dead—a being without the means for happiness.

Here is something you can do about it—or something you can do to get started. Take whatever handheld device you own out of your pocket or bag and set the alarm for 2 hours from now. When it makes whatever noise you have selected for it to make, ask yourself how often during the last 2 hours you were actually in charge of your thoughts. How often was your mind just rolling along like a pack of drunken monkeys, doing whatever it wants without you having anything to say about it? How often was it busy being bored, dissatisfied, critical of others, self-absorbed, insecure, self-hating, anxious, and/or afraid? How often were you genuinely happy? And exactly at the moment your alarm makes its noise, where was your mind and what was it doing? Because in the end your mind is the one thing you have going for you when it comes to happiness.”

Guterson is again zeroing in on our pocketed machines but additionally highlighting my earlier concern about commerce’s part in all of this. Weave in everybody’s desire to make a buck and you’ve put another brick in the wall of our desire to remain jacked into this technology every waking minute. Sherry Turkle ended her TED speech optimistically by insisting we find some kind of psychological balance: she suggested we compartmentalize our lives and habitats for machine and non-machine use. Guterson’s suggestion, that you use the machines themselves to pull you out of this proverbial Matrix, seems somewhat more devious in comparison. Either way, it would seem that for now the way out of this is certainly through.

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A few months before Guterson had stood at that podium, I had had an argument with two friends here in New York about the Kathryn Bigelow feature film Zero Dark 30. I was incensed by the nature in which I felt this film presented itself as fact, given the immediacy of the subject matter. Based on all we’d learned from the Wikileaks scandal it seemed incredibly unlikely that a film about a top secret US government military operation could be a factual account. Bigelow should have postponed the making of it until many years had passed and more details could be confirmed as truths, or at least considered an approach similar to Gus Van Sant’s treatment of the 1999 Columbine High School killings in his film Elephant.  The conclusion I therefore drew was that she did it very much as a reflection of her own ego as a female filmmaker (championing a story about a strong female lead in a major contemporary military debacle), and also, for the money. The whole argument reminded me of these remarks from the late filmmaker John Cassavetes -

“The cause of motion pictures should not be a dehumanizing one. Major companies are making pictures that are disgusting. They make anti-war movies but exploit it by making money on those anti-war pictures, by publicizing and selling them. People on screen are stripped naked and left there to die. The thinking is supposedly committed to a revolutionary spirit but lacks the depth of intentions necessary for such discussions. Audiences begin to accept this exploitation as part of their lives. They find themselves laughing at what isn’t funny, angered by what they don’t care about, and influenced and contaminated by hours of heartfelt, unmotivated propaganda.”

These sentiments, particularly those of the exploitative suggestion, tie strongly back to both what Tarkovsky and Guterson are saying and linger like a stench around the actions of those like Justin Bieber. A kid so unaware of the world around him, so fueled by his imagined value of people’s interest in him, that he felt superior to even those figures in history who stood for the level of freedom he enjoys how.

Speaking of exploitation, in May of this year Edward Snowden, infrastructure analyst at the US National Security Agency-contracted firm Booz Allen Hamilton, leaked details of several top-secret United States and British government mass surveillance programs to the press. Whilst the revelation was more ‘undeniable proof’ rather than any kind of surprise, it was still unnerving to have many of our darker suspicions confirmed. As constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead wrote just a week ago on the website for his civil liberties organization, The Rutherford Institute -

“Anything and everything you’ve ever said or done, from the trivial to the damning—phone calls, Facebook posts, Twitter tweets, Google searches, emails, bookstore and grocery purchases, bank statements, commuter toll records, etc.—will be tracked, collected, catalogued and analyzed by the UDC’s supercomputers and teams of government agents.

By sifting through the detritus of your once-private life, the government will come to its own conclusions about who you are, where you fit in, and how best to deal with you should the need arise. Indeed, we are all becoming data collected in government files. Whether or not the surveillance is undertaken for ‘innocent’ reasons, surveillance of all citizens, even the innocent sort, gradually poisons the soul of a nation. Surveillance limits personal options—denies freedom of choice—and increases the powers of those who are in a position to enjoy the fruits of this activity.

Whether he intended it or not, it well may be that Obama, moving into the home stretch and looking to establish a lasting “legacy” to characterize his time in office, is remembered as the president who put the final chains in place to imprison us in an electronic concentration camp from which there is no escape.”

This speaks almost entirely to Cassavetes exploitation fears and stands as a powerful omen in the face of our internet addictions. The imbalanced sense of entitlement that different classes of humanity exhibit will likely precipitate an inevitable fight for control; with this in mind, whatever The Singularity heralds, such a battle will deeply shape any eventual union between humans and their machines.

So what’s next? If learning to be comfortable in one’s own company is how to find a satisfactory level of inner peace, and saving our species requires leaping off a precipice of unimaginable  worldwide collaboration, what is our real goal with this thing we call the internet and why do its pretty flowers give us a false sense of happiness? What needs to happen next for us to be able to turn down the volume and hear our own thoughts as Tarkovsky asks, or is self-confidence no longer a tool we’ll need in this one possible future? Shouldn’t we be more comfortable in our own skins so that we can focus on those next to us falling to their knees in pain? Is The Singularity an answer to this or simply a possible fate that we’ve made for ourselves? The presence of such a concept certainly makes you begin to wonder what the universe is trying to tell us about the direction we are headed in.

Towards the end of the HBO television show Six Feet Under the protagonist Nate Fisher turns to his sister Claire and says “Stop listening to the static. Everything in the world is like this transmission, making its way across the dark. But everything – death, life, everything – it’s all completely suffused with static. You know? But if you listen to the static too much, it fucks you up.”

One thing is for sure, we’re all able to control one single thing more than anything else in this world, and that’s our minds – but we’re surrounded by voices telling us that that’s impossible. Before he died the stand-up comedian Bill Hicks used to end his performances with the following speech -

“The world is like a ride at an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it, you think it’s real because that’s how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round; it has thrills and chills and it’s very brightly colored and it’s very loud and it’s fun… for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time, and they begin to question: “Is this real, or is this just a ride?” And other people have remembered, and they come back to us, and they say, “Hey – don’t worry, don’t be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride.”

And we kill those people – “Shut him up! We have a lot invested in this ride – shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry! Look at my big bank account, and my family! This just has to be real!”

But it’s just a ride. And we always kill those good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok? Jesus – murdered; Martin Luther King – murdered; Malcolm X – murdered; Gandhi – murdered; John Lennon – murdered; Reagan – wounded …

But it doesn’t matter because: It’s just a ride. And we can change it anytime we want. It’s only a choice. No effort, no work, no job, no savings of money. A choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love, instead, see all of us as one. Here’s what we can do to change the world, right now, to a better ride: Take all that money that we spend on weapons and defense each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.”

I’ve listened to Mr. Hicks give that speech a hundred times but writing this essay seems to shed new light on its meaning, particularly when you realize what it could take to explore space together. If we only have 150 years left on this planet, it’s important that we start thinking about this, particularly when doing so may involve a truce with technology that we may never recover from – despite all our concerns for our individual state of mind, the loss of self that The Singularity heralds may actually be our only way off this planet.

To quote Cassavetes again -

“These days, everybody is supposed to be so intelligent: ‘Isn’t it terrible about Nixon getting elected?’ ‘Did you hear about the earthquake in Peru?’ And you’re supposed to have all the answers. But when it gets down to the nitty-gritty, like, ‘What is bugging you, mister? Why can’t you make it with your wife? Why do you lie awake all night staring at the ceiling? Why, why, why do you refuse to recognize you have problems and deal with them?’ The answer is that people have forgotten how to relate or respond. In this day of mass communications and instant communications, there is no communication between people. Instead it’s long-winded stories or hostile bits, or laughter. But nobody’s really laughing. It’s more an hysterical, joyless kind of sound. Translation: ‘I am here and I don’t know why.’”

It’s interesting to think that if we do find out why we are here, given the acceleration in our intelligence, scope and understanding that will likely come with The Singularity, it may well not be a concept we’ll enjoy as individuals. In this way you begin to realize not just that god is our answer to the question of why we are here, but that getting closer to god means we all may have to become one. Consequently you realize that we may evolve beyond the questions art seeks to address: representations and musings on the imperfect beauty of being one of many living individuals, not having all the answers and not knowing what is going to happen next. In this respect art may prove to be a fleeting concept in and of itself: a prelude to finding god.