The Way Things Work
playing video games w/ baudrillard
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Those of us who grew up being amazed by the interactive features offered by Encarta 95—the multimedia immersive experience with its thorough descriptions of topics that ranged from wild animals to geography, and music—but especially by the interactive game “The Way Things Work” which allowed you to operate and see the inner-workings of a variety of machines with an extinct mammoth as its main character—can easily go back to that period in our lives and view it as the starting point of our dual existence that has alternated between the screen and the physical world.
There we learned to click, to drag and drop, to scroll, and copy and paste, all while closing, minimizing, and maximizing windows…how to access that awe-inspiring, almost esoteric ethos of the world wide web that announced itself with the screeching noise produced by our dial-up modems—an excruciating but nostalgic sound more gently known as the “handshake” that today takes place silently out of our range of perception.
We would spend hours in front of our family PC, legs dangling from our chairs while scrolling, clicking, watching videos, and listening to audio clips as we scrutinized each tab, image, game, and feature built into our software. But we knew there was a limit; we knew we would ultimately watch all the Encarta videos, read all its content, and click on all the levers and pulleys hidden in The Way Things Work as we alphabetically exhausted all there was to learn about the different machines and tools and the familiar sounds they made. These days also involved afternoon games at the park, hide and seek, or even playing soccer with a plastic bottle for lack of a real soccer ball during our lunch break at school. Little did we know how much these online interactions would come to take over the entirety of our days…and minds.
Jean Baudrillard remarked that “the great event of this period, the great trauma, is this decline of strong referentials, these death pangs of the real and of the rational that open onto an age of simulation.” Here we stand alongside the interactive virtual experience of an internet that has outgrown itself. Anyone who lived through the 80s, 90s, and aughts can remember that our relationship with technology and the web as a whole was a more organic and physical one. There were even the Phreaks, or the likes of Joybubble, a blind cult figure with perfect pitch who was able to whistle his way through international calls by emulating the tone dialing sounds that phones used to make, a sort of vocal human “handshake” over our phone lines. I would go online to search for walkthroughs to beat my N64 games, and sometimes I would search for Dragon Ball images to set as my default wallpaper—this being the greatest feat I ever accomplished during my first attempts to use the internet in the mid-90s. Back then, we experienced the collective and referential act of having watched the anime show in sync with millions of others: same time and same channel on national TV—a synchronous experience of shared culture now made extinct by the advent of streaming platforms.
It never occurred to me that a couple of years later, right after the 9/11 attacks, at the verge of neoliberal expansion and globalization—when I moved from Colombia to the US—I would end up talking to strangers with predetermined conversation icebreakers on LatinChat.com: (Colombiano, 13, Iowa / hometown, age, and place of residence). My first approach to English was non-verbal, as it involved meeting strangers in a chatroom rather than having to go through the dread of face-to-face conversations, being that I was too shy to utter words in such a phonetically intimidating language as English seemed back then—and perhaps still is. Reading cyberpunk novels like Snow Crash and paranormal stories—typical of the enticing conspiracy theory aesthetics that permeate US culture and live on in films, radio, podcasts, and even the songs of Lana del Rey (just listen to Chemtrails Over The Country Club)—were another source of direct contact with the English language that did not necessitate actual speaking, and that got my mind off of having to interact with strangers. It was then that I, like many others, ended up caught in the excess of information.
Baudrillard highlights the surplus of information through its semblance to capital: “[information] is collapsing, and for this very reason: because where we think that information produces meaning, the opposite occurs. [It] devours its own content. It devours communication and the social.” Anyone reading this text knows that this sort of informational autophagia is what propels us to write, to post, and comment, and that the only way through information overexposure is via synthesis, as this what we strive to accomplish. Some do it by memeing, shitposting, peddling conspiracy theories, or joining online tribes that overload the system with tweets, images, and posts that infuriate and drive away the experts, technocrats, and the college professors of the online world who have come to believe in its authenticity. The content that ends up being shared is ultimately so overtly esoteric and online-coded that it reminds us no one really knows what is going on, to the point of making the lack of referentials appear self-evident to the eye of the beholder; thus, laying bare the dents left by the implosion of information open for any lurker to gaze at.
There comes a time when you must realize that all the theorizing in the world cannot encompass the magnitude of a life on the web. Academic papers and whole books can be written about the influence of technology and our dual existence in and out of the screen and its digital media, but nothing compares to a sober rendering of our actual day-to-day interactions with the web.
During his Adderall and Xanax phase, Tao Lin cunningly described an interaction of this sort through the music of Nirvana as follows: “Paul looked up from where he’d remained on his yoga mat—absently scrolling through bohemianism’s Wikipedia page after clicking ‘bohemian’ on Kurt Cobain’s page, which he’d looked at, while rereading emails from his mother, to see if he died at 26 or 27.” This is a glimpse into the sequence of information loops we get sucked into every time we lurk online, a clear picture of the whole array of feelings, interactions, and thoughts bombarding a single snippet of existence on the internet—reminding us that we’re all on the verge of an information short circuit induced by excess feedback from the digital interface of our devices overlapping with the physical and tangible world. This overlapping of referentials is perhaps what Tao Lin strives to depict in his Autism Mandala I recently acquired:
After recently having attended an academic conference, it came to my attention that quantum sciences and the occult are still in vogue. It made me think of Slavoj Žižek’s (with his own contradictions) words on the obscurantism of science, especially as it pertains to anything under the quantum label. As he explains “Much more worrying than the ‘excesses’ of Cultural Studies are the New Age obscurantist appropriations of today’s ‘hard’ sciences which, in order to legitimize their position, invoke the authority of science itself.” This is precisely what seems to be taking place at all levels of academia and the tech industry.
Take for instance so-called artificial intelligence. If we were to leave the actual task of understanding what’s going on in our immediate reality to experts and technocrats-turned-gurus, they would have us believe that we are in the presence of a grander consciousness, a cybernetic deity or cyber-Cthulhu when interacting with ChatGPT. This esoteric view of computers can easily be rebuffed by simply realizing that—as Jaron Lanier proclaimed in the New Yorker— (reminiscent of Buddhist parlance) “There is no AI,”; and, thus, “mythologizing the technology only makes it more likely that we’ll fail to operate it well.” Our lack of strong referentials will have us jumping from one fad to another, even if it involves attributing mutual intelligence to a solipsistic conversation with the bot.
In fact, the other day I had a heart-to-heart with ChatGPT. It didn’t take long for it to state the obvious, that AI “is a powerful tool for natural language processing, but it lacks the complexity, consciousness, and depth of understanding that characterize human intelligence,” and, likewise, “It doesn’t have subjective experiences, emotions, or the ability to truly comprehend the world in the way humans do”.
Nevertheless, as the likes of Camille Paglia have pointed out, as a response to our lack of religious piety, the need for a grand narrative can only be accomplished by art. In her words, “politics cannot fill the gap. Society, with which Marxism is obsessed, is only a fragment of the totality of life [and] those who invest all of their spiritual energies in politics will reap the whirlwind.” Certainly, no one really knows what the hell is going on, and leaving such a grand task to AI, politicians, experts, tech bros, or even scientists—the same ones who went insanely authoritarian during covid—is not the way out. As a subscriber “to what Jung calls synchronicity,” in her Sexual Personae, Paglia points out that “rationalists have their place, but their limited assumptions and methods must be kept out of the arts. Interpretation of poem, dream, or person requires intuition and divination, not science.” The same goes, I would argue, for the interpretation of the online experience, its social dynamics, and aesthetics in our fragmented and atomized society.
So here I sit, trying to type this piece within the uprootedness of my linguistic capabilities, perhaps lulled by the excess of information, citing too much as in any novel by Vila-Matas, and perhaps doubting too much like—Vila-Matas himself. “Dudaba mucho, eso está claro,” he explains and goes on to say that “I suffered by doubting so much, and I could have saved myself the disquieting feeling and doubted no matter what, without making a big deal out of it. I was simply neglecting that doubting was to write” (translation my own). Those feeble minds that cannot fathom writing, who cannot think outside the confines of some canonical school of thought wouldn’t stand a single day inside my head, much less a whole season on Earth. So, for today, let me doubt freely, let me revel in doubt as I type these words and try to figure out the way things work.
Juan is a Spanish Ph.D. candidate at the University of Florida where he also teaches Spanish. Aside from that, he works as an adjunct at a community college, and he is an online English instructor at Universidad Javeriana in Colombia. Yes, he’s into teaching and he has to make ends meet, but he has published short stories and articles in Latin American literary magazines and plans to continue his writing path in English. @jmarti117
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