1776 – A Glitch in the Matrix (documentary 2021 by Rodney Asher)

timespace coordinates: the holographic universe (or one of its beta versions)

One of this year’s most ambitious documentaries just out of Sundance. Definitely a must see. I will be drumming the same tune as other reviewers when saying that indeed it is gripping, courageous in its portrayal of inner/outer worlds, incredibly audacious in tackling the new mystagogue-gamer-philosopher-entrepreneur-shooter-zoomer-doomer-loner-continuum. After Room 237 we find Asher as disposed to accepts all the wildest theoretical and philosophical speculative claims at their face value. Nowadays, altough the experiential dump sounds hollow, the performative dumpster is there for everyone’s diving. From its most excessive (and consequently numb) the LIFE INTENSE: A modern Obsession (book by Tristan Garcia) to the “how does it feel to be a…”(fill in the dotted line with whatever lies at your heart) experience is omnipresent, defining almost what all the locked-in quarantined brains intensely dream about. How can we preserve what experience makes important to us in a world where everything of importance is transformed into an illusion and disqualified (dismissed as either folk psychology or irrational atavism filling up a growing listicle of cognitive fallacies etc)?

As easy as it is to acknowledged a truly post-cinematic drive (in the sense of how Steven Shaviro has coined and helped defined this new post-cinematic affect) overlapping and overflowing canonical cinema, jumping platforms as easily as exchanging genres, juggling low or high brow (William Blake, silent era Jesus movies, various hi rez action games, various real and crafty mutating glitches and uncanny 3D CGI scenes) is never an easy task. A torrential rain of multiple movie edits from various PKD-based Scifi’s or VR +false memory +replicant dreaming classics (Total Recall, Minority Report, Blade Runner) feed into a mental & cultural & pop theoretical swirl pool sucking everyone into The Matrix Gospel & Simulation Theory. A Glitch manifests tremendous amounts of leaky weird realism – at a time when reality turns out to be much weirder than ur run-of-the-mill safety valve fiction. Yet there is some major absence in the midst of this plenty. Please read so u can accuse me of higher expectations or being just a pedantic bore.

In spite of its eagerness to not ignore and to include, I find A Glitch in the Matrix lacks something important – especially when it comes so close to pointing out why Philip K Dick’s imaginary worlds are so important – insisting on their inherent mood, or the way they give us a feel of futures inaccessible and improbable or follow characters into closed private odd worlds we always get trapped into. Maybe because of all this, I find it peculiar that its grasp ends where it ends and its digital dragnet is pretty mono. Maybe mono is key to the movie – to actualize and show too much of the trappings of sporting a white, male, 40+ and hetero “dude” subjectivity. Shortly: too much effort, too much computing power to make us (presumably different others) feel how it feels to be an isolating-isolated, self-sufficient, solipsistic and fairly desperate funny-sad-scary Euro-American roleplayer (i wonder how does this – diverge or converge with what Adam Curtis tries to unwind again and again in his documentaries using other means & stylistic choices – this time our current emotional, atomized inner prison mental-block-freeze).

Also there is more to simulation theory during algo-capitalism than the risk of actually being in one. There is also the deep kind of theoretical affinity of such a theory including the holographic universe to larger trends towards higher abstraction and financialization. The “real subsumption” of labour under capital and disruptive strategies that seems to favor the 1% or at least the long hand of Big Tech. There is more to the whimsical affirmation of Elon Musk about the possibility that everybody living right now is part of a simulated world – and the proliferation of self-serving stsrtupedelusions actually proffered by actual CEOs and real bosses. There is a difference there. Thus, a simple A Glitch in the Matrix syllogism might mean that although some can afford computing power (and fossil fuel to burn) to run the simulation, everybody else can be dealt with in alt deleted terms or stay at the receiving end of just ‘poor data, let her/his itchy glitch stick permanently’. Something that post-cyberpunk already made clear (Noir by K W Jetter comes to mind): we still leave in a very patchy wetware world – where exploitation intensifies, and where the lack of coordinated public health measures have aggravated & incubated COVID-19. Where fixing and debugging is simply not an option for the needy & those who simply can’t afford.

Asher was always interested in fanboys, in paraeidolia, in intensely jarring otakus and fandom effects, in relating to a very peculiar type of obsessive individual and an inner worlds inhabitant that has stopped being just nerdilicious trivia hoarder & seeker. What is important is that he is not being judgmental, he is not trivializing, nor pathologizing, in fact non- neurotypicality (even if unmentioned) seems to be one of the strengths of the documentary. Another one is exposing this underlying fear of the moderns – as W James said once: their biggest fear is just the fear to be duped.

Yet when all is said and rendered and screenshot, I wonder about the much larger non-actualized virtual world out there, virtualities as sensed and explored by many Balkan, African, Asian, South American, hell Oceanian gamers, freaks, blerds, more ways that do not suffer from the same starting point or set & setting or how does that relate these (monads?!) to the specific situation over there. I understand the need to document a timeless time, our time, to document a timeless frozen place: the room you are in (which has a very precise shape, furniture, lightening even in games). I feel there is reason to expand focus and dwell more on the aesthetic choices (call them permanent mood boards) of how various geographic ‘otherings’, imaginings and cultural zones (say largely abandoned factories, farms etc from the disaffected, post-industrial Eastern Europe now used for Leningrad siege Lazer tag) or literally larger areas of the planet (the Global South) are and have been portrayed or simulated in present or future settings (just one example: the filter of dusty, dun, yellowish, burned look in movies and games playing in Iraq, South East Asia, etc). Outside of a Mexican -other, A Glitch in the Matrix has very few to show and that’s significant. A more truly globalized, wider realization of virtual cosmopolitics and “virtualisation” is severely needed imho.

Same issue I have with the (not only) philosophical temporal flattening – or peculiar insensivity for certain shifts (i repeat for a documentary that celebrates such sensitivity for how does it feel to be locked in). Ok, you will say philosophy is only tangential to the doc, but I think it is key, since various personal philosophies and self-made cosmologies are being recorded, corroded, animated, discussed and described in this documentary & taken very seriously. In fact I would even add – expanding on a pet idea i have been thinking and writing about since some years- what i call “scavenger cosmologies” is quite central to the whole monadic Matrix-worldview of the documentary. A Glitch in the Matrix is not under-theorized, it does not suffer from lack of theoretical positions. It basically cuts trough the whole history of Western (Greek & Judeo-Christian) philosophy, and cannot help itself but visit BIG commonplaces such as Plato’s Cave myth as ultimate source of the virtual and cinematic experience. Yet when it makes all these wider (if impossible to ignore) generalizations it looses I think touch with the feel and bumpiness of historical and temporal dimensions. In today’s philosohical jargon there’s also the question of how embracing ‘simulation theory’ stems out of a strong correlationist position in philosophy, that haunts so many successors of Kant from Hegel to postmodern thinkers. They all completly eliminate noumena – “relegating us inescapably to a world of phenomena tailored to our measure” (Steven Shaviro, Extreme Fabulations).

Ok, now u can say it is just a perfunctory info-tainment introductory level dive into mind matters. I say it is not, since it dwells with care & a lot of attention to these histories. Nevertheless, how such important things get transmitted, changed and how they differ from period to period gets lost. To take one example – how such platonic or historical neoplatonism got transmitted is left for others to ponder, but as some philosopher said, statues u can remake (simulate?) but antique minds u cannot. The Greeks of Renaissance are not the Greeks of the Golden Age of Pericles. The Greeks of Classicism are not the Greeks or Renaissance and so on. All these instances of virtualisation are time-based, suffering the modulation transmission noise and alteration ebbing towards different ends and forms of receptivity. Virtualisation is specific and has a pathway that has some relevance and importance. I would argue (with respect to Asher and the effort of his team as well as the various well-chosen guests invited to back up his vision) that Descartes 1600s story about the demon simulating and duping him differs from the group sit-in flickering lights of the (V-th c BP) cave myth fire in significant ways. I am not just trying to reintroduce some technological determinism here but only to see how such experiences might differ and make a difference. In Science and the Modern World (1925) which I reread recently, Whitehead makes a point to emphasize how this sensibility to thinking moods, expressions and subtle differences is a key advantage for philosophy (catching the particular flavor of thinking at a particular time juncture, a certain school take on a concept, of not loosing sight of how abstractions abstract from the where and whom). Lets just say that in Descartes’s case “experience” as such was virtualized (or disjointed or ‘bifurcated’) in a very modern way, completely detached from the outer or inclusive cavernous drama of Greek natural elemental forces, Promethean fires and looming shadows. As many point out – cartesian inner feeling is really an intensely privatized ‘illusion’ in a very peculiar way. In it we encounter a very particular divisive I (Decartes “I”) colored by very specific internal doubts, something that does not even have a larger inside or outside. His is own dissected interiority, as we understand it, colored by a jumble of qualia, of a disordered play of sensations: heat, coldness, of various sense inputs that can only be verified by consciousness – only by his cogito.

His involvement with physiological sciences (even if he mostly understood ghe body and head pneumatically in terms of physics: heart as a pump, pineal gland as pouch) where sense perception takes precedence is torn by a particular kind of perceptive inaccuracy reflected by his chosen enumeration. This is quite specific to Descartes in tandem with a rise of plethora of scientific evidence based now not on human perception and subjective verification but on ever more refined instruments & constant external testing of an objective world. Don’t want to get into more detail just making sure there’s no confusion here.

Also, as much as we need a tribute to PKD (Philip K Dick) his incredible inheritance and wild SF contributions still to be cherished, repeatedly filmed and enjoyed everywhere and all around, I again feel this focus (a hangover from the prophetic accolades, the drag of his celeb predictive powers?!) on his 1970s Cold War paranoia era multiverse takes precedence over how this might differ from other times and places. If we take PKD seriously and enjoy his multiverse hypothesis to the max – then where are some of the other Earths, authors or virtual believers that do not stick to the US or Euro-US Western block template? I ask where is for example Stanislaw Lem? A contemporary (and one might say one of his most ardent Eastern block admirers), Lem (otherwise a big skeptic of larger trends within US sci-fi) is also an explorer of various ‘other’ imaginary worlds, of brain-in-vat impossible isolation tanks and even Cold War Futurologic excess. It would have been so nice to contrast the Cold War MK Ultra LSD-tinged paranoia of PKD to the Lem diving into not just personal hells and broken paradises, larger sentient planetary oceans talk. We’re confronted today with SF literalists on every turn especially on the right (think Musk or Dugin or Fukuyama) that read SF movies or narratives like von Däniken. Gone is the Jamesonian or Suvinian critical discussion around epistemology, cultural logic of late capitalism, Utopia or Entfremdung FX. It’s almost like the academic fad of combining post structuralist theory with SF it’s been overtaken by the conspirative mind who sees only scripts and plans, no questions or variability. To me such literal SF readings are completly opposed to how Lem tried to comprehend futurality or alien intelligence, information bubbles, data overload, or even pokes fun at a bland and linear understanding of planetary consciousnesses.

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