Sunday, June 12, 2011

Sexuality and Singularity

As part of the Art & Tech class, I've read Slavoj Zizek's No Sex, Please, We're Post-Human! which touches on a wide variety of topics from the Turing test in relation to male/female conversations, Kurzweil'd theories of a biotech singularity, and the sexuality of the internet as a facet of perversion in our lives.
The full essay is available at http://www.lacan.com/nosex.htm, but to continue on a point I must quote most of a paragraph from the writing
...Even advocates of cyberspace warn us that we should not totally forget our body, that we should maintain our anchoring in the "real life" by returning, regularly, from our immersion in cyberspace to the intense experience of our body, from sex to jogging. We will never turn ourselves into virtual entities freely floating from one to another virtual universe: our "real life" body and its mortality is the ultimate horizon of our existence, the ultimate, innermost impossibility that underpins the immersion in all possible multiple virtual universes. Yet, at the same time, in cyberspace the body returns with a vengeance: in popular perception, "cyberspace IS hardcore pornography," i.e. hardcore pornography is perceived as the predominant use of cyberspace. The literal "enlightenment," the "lightness of being," the relief/alleviation we feel when we freely float in cyberspace (or, even more, in Virtual Reality), is not the experience of being bodyless, but the experience of possessing another - aetheric, virtual, weightless - body, a body which does not confine us to the inert materiality and finitude, an angelic spectral body, a body which can be artificially recreated and manipulated. Cyberspace thus designates a turn, a kind of "negation of negation," in the gradual progress towards the disembodying of our experience (first writing instead of the "living" speech, then press, then the mass media, then radio, then TV): in cyberspace, we return to the bodily immediacy, but to an uncanny, virtual immediacy...
What comes to mind about this thought of "internet sex" is something that has been brought up recently in recent news but something I don't want to delve into beyond what I need to. For those who don't know, someone (important) tweeted something (inappropriate) on the internet in the form of a picture. He got in trouble for it, sort-of admitted to it, then admitted to it when he couldn't deny it much more. Well, this guy is now seeking "rehabilitation" and counseling for his inappropriate use of the internet. He fell into the hole of hardcore internet "pornography" (where everything is pornographic and lewd; aside from being a place filled with actual pornographic images) and came to a point where the appropriateness of real life was removed from his being. He forgot that he lived in the real world, and made a decision on the internet that impacted everything about his real life.

(Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

 This brings up an interesting point. When an addiction to the internet warrant rehabilitation? I understand that this man's case is at one end of the scale - as he basically published lewd photos while in office - but people have been sent away for this because of playing too much WoW. If we're all moving towards a singularity where our bodies are combined with computers and we're all connected to a global/international/interplanetary network, who is going to go to rehab for an addiction to being on the internet? Is my addiction to car parts going to translate over to the bionet and get me in trouble there? Hell, are we even going to have cars? Maybe some of us can be built into cars. I don't know if I'd like that as a permanent thing, but I'm sure it's better than being shamed for putting my "manly silhouette" on the internet.
So as part of the singularity, who are you going to be? We're no longer going to be able to chose what we put on the neural network as we will all be thinking together. Where your head is and where you want your head to be is not only a major part of what you'll be when the singularity comes, but what you'll be in real life. Fill your head with thoughts of girls across the country and your life in "tweets"?
Well, that's what you'll get known for, Weiner.

1 comment:

  1. interesting argument. You pick up on the media control (big brother type of govt) and the replacement of the physical with the virtual. Slow down and expand both arguments;

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