Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [7]
Who Are Your Real Friends?
Decades later, in the age of personal computers and the internet, this distrust and anxiety has found new, technology-based roots that seem to control and restrict our social, economic and emotional lives. One example is the word “friends” and the meanings, associations, and obligations lately accrued to it. Friends now refers to persons one has never seen or talked to in person. They have instead posted a few kilobytes of data or a hyperlink to the public advertisements of ourselves that most of us (under a certain age, at least) create online. To maintain those advertisements and the desirable contacts and social opportunities they bring, we must in turn maintain certain schedules (lest your inbox overflow, or friends feel unwelcome or alienated by a late response), regularly purchase (or usually re-purchase) software (since you must have an up-to-date version), wait (for batteries to recharge, operating systems to load, downloads to complete), and remain ever vigilant about being tricked or impersonated by thieves in far away places who continually scrutinize computer networks and patiently wait (like a wolf outside your door) for a slip-up, a password or credit card number revealed, allowing them to intercept your electronic payments, empty your bank account, and ruin your credit rating—essential, after all, for your continued participation in the consumer economy—that is monitored, adjusted, and sold for profit to interested parties by three large corporations known as Experian, Equifax and Transunion.
Yet, despite these and other interlinked anxieties of our internet-age (spam, phishing, cyber-stalking, cyber-bullying, and so on), very few (myself included) are willing to renounce the internet, cell phones, satellite downloads and live without the computers, email, instant messaging, countless channels of television, online games and all the other fixtures we are accustomed to. It seems, just as Marcuse predicted, that we can see no viable alternatives to the efficient, technologically rational system of life we are caught up in.
Paranoid or not, we may already be androids. One of phenomenology’s basic insights is that the conscious self is connected to, shaped by, and possibly even constituted by, the intentionality and purposiveness of first person experience. We—our selves, our souls, our minds—do not exist independently of our bodies and our material experience in the world. Descartes, for instance, was wrong to reason as he did in his Meditations that “I exist” and then, subsequently, convince himself that the exterior world he saw around him was in fact real and that his senses could be trusted. Instead, the “I” that experiences the world is always embodied. Being, Heidegger insisted, must always be understood as “Beingin-the-world”; and for Merleau-Ponty, “the subject that I am, when taken concretely, is inseparable from this body and this world.”6
Our ever deepening dependence and engagement with the technologies of modern life, therefore, may lead to changes in our selves, to ourselves, that we might in fact reject or regret were we to understand them and see them for what they are. Like the people in Jamie Thrave’s video for “Just,” we might all collapse in shock or despair were we to face some truths about ourselves—truths that we never paid attention to, that no one ever talked about, even though they were obvious and in front of our faces all along. What would really hurt, of course, is realizing that that we’d done it to ourselves. By embracing and immersing ourselves in technology, we’d turned ourselves into machine-like and soulless androids.
Where Pink Floyd Ends and Radiohead Begins
Radiohead